by:  The Macro Butler via zerohedge.com

Confidence comes from the Latin ‘Confidere’, to trust fully. Its cousin credere, to believe, gave us credit, creditor and credibility, which tells you everything: finance is theology with spreadsheets. A credit is a belief with a maturity date. A creditor is a believer with a lawyer. A currency is a belief that went to the printers.

Confidence is not optimism, which is a mood, nor hope, which is a wish. It is the bet that the rules will still be the rules when the game ends. The farmer plants because he expects to be the one harvesting. The saver deposits because he expects the bank, the currency and the courts to outlive his balance. The entrepreneur signs a ten-year lease on the touching assumption that the tax code in year ten will still recognise him.

Three quirks explain the rest.

• It is collective. A dollar is worth something not because I believe in it, but because I believe you do, and you believe the next fellow does. Economists call this a coordination equilibrium. The Macro Butler calls it a rumour everybody has agreed to keep repeating.
• It is asymmetric. A bank needs a century to build a reputation and an afternoon to lose it. Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback, and no minister has yet managed to renegotiate the transport.
• It is invisible until it is gone. Nobody admires the plumbing until the water stops. We hand our card to strangers, board aircraft built by people we will never meet, and accept a number on a screen as thirty years of work. Only when the bridge sways does anyone ask the engineer what was holding it up.

Eric Deters has released the 16 minute phone call from Greece where Kimberly Guilfoyle is accused of accepting up to $3 million in bribes, doing cocaine, and (allegedly) leaking government information to China. This is absolutely wild. https://t.co/0QOy3Glx6D

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) October 17, 2026

Judge Jed Rakoff ruled on September 25, 2026, that the plaintiff’s main claim can proceed under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The decision denies FirstBank’s bid to dismiss that count and keeps the case in the Southern District of New York for discovery. The order also let a New York City gender-motivated-violence claim go forward. The judge dismissed a separate obstruction theory, narrowing the case but leaving the central participation claim intact at this early stage.

The complaint, as described in reports, alleges FirstBank provided banking services linked to Jeffrey Epstein and his network from at least 1998 through 2020. Reporting states the bank maintained more than 30 accounts tied to Epstein, his firms, and associates. American Banker reported that a $10.9 million transfer flowed into an account held by Ghislaine Maxwell at FirstBank, a concrete transaction that will likely draw scrutiny in discovery. These are allegations, not proven facts, but the court found them legally sufficient to test.

Vaccination before 1 year of age was associated with increased odds of developmental delays (OR = 2.18, 95% CI 1.47–3.24), asthma (OR = 4.49, 95% CI 2.04–9.88) and ear infections (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.63–2.78). In a quartile analysis, subjects were grouped by number of vaccine doses received in the first year of life. Higher odds ratios were observed in Quartiles 3 and 4 (where more vaccine doses were received) for all four health conditions considered, as compared to Quartile 1. In a temporal analysis, developmental delays showed a linear increase as the age cut-offs increased from 6 to 12 to 18 to 24 months of age (ORs = 1.95, 2.18, 2.92 and 3.51, respectively). Slightly higher ORs were also observed for all four health conditions when time permitted for a diagnosis was extended from ⩾ 3 years of age to ⩾ 5 years of age.

Remember when they said to “Trust the science?” Artificial intelligence finds that a quarter million cancer research papers have been faked A 2026 study trained an AI on 2,202 cancer papers that had been identified as fake. It then applied this model to look into 2.65 million original cancer research papers published between 1999 and 2024. It flagged 261,245 papers as fake - Over 178,000 flagged papers had Chinese institutional affiliations - Roughly 36% of Chinese cancer research output in the dataset - Iran was next at around 20% This is a major problem because this can mean the medical community amplifies completely fake research and findings “Every fabricated study sitting in a real journal is competing for attention with studies actually pointing towards a legit cure, which means the more fake noise there is, the longer it takes for the real breakthroughs to surface. And somewhere in that pile, maybe a real cure is buried under a fake AI-generated one.” No doctors have gone to jail for this (I checked)

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) October 15, 2026

Washington owes $40.33 trillion. It went up $2.41 trillion in one year, about $6.6 billion a day. I wrote down who we owe it to and what it costs every household. Is the debt a scam on all of us? https://t.co/WI8LJ6dYKP

— Shadow Sentinel (@ShadowSentinel) October 16, 2026

Those who wonder how low scientific integrity can go at the UK Met Office must continue to wonder. Surely by now it would have withdrawn its 2018 UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) report when it used only a RCP8.5 computer pathway to suggest UK summer temperatures could rise 5.1°C by 2070. Preferably with the fulsome apology for all the harm and concern caused after the IPCC ruled the notorious pathway was “implausible”. No chance. In fact, it seems to be doubling down.

The glorious 2026 summer in the UK was just too good a chance for the state-funded meteorologist not to promote weather for the Net Zero cause. “Embarrassingly duped by activists,” was science journalist Matt Ridley’s recent comment, and who can dispute his opinion. In late June, the Met Office produced a short clip showing how it imagined a weather forecast would look in 2056.

The broadcast was said to use a “plausible scenario” showing temperatures reaching 45°C in 30 years’ time, along with nine consecutive days where 40°C was recorded somewhere in England. Not bad going considering the only time the temperature has edged over 40°C in England was in July 2022 alongside the runway at RAF Coningsby when it seems Typhoon jets were landing. “This scenario is not a forecast of a specific event, but a scientifically plausible illustration designed to help us understand how risks could change as the climate warms,” informed the Met Office. By using Met Office climate projections…  “it is a stark realisation to see the maximum temperature reach 45°C”, added the operation’s Chief Scientist Professor Stephen Belcher.

What Israel has done, is doing, to Gaza has not sprung ex nihilo from October 7.

Genocide is not a situational counter-response to aggression. It’s a coming-out event of sorts.

Differently put: There are no legitimate antecedents to genocide. Genocide is not a “war crime” to which a set of mitigating or exculpating legal defenses can attach.

Genocide is a stand-alone indefensible crime—“the blackest of all crimes”—for which there are no extenuating circumstances and to which no traditional legal defenses attach.

Ethnocide, depopulation, domicide and daily mass murder can never be explained away or exculpated using argument from law, ethics or history.

Nineteen days from today the American electorate will decide the fate of Trump’s presidency by whether they return a Republican Congress or a Democrat one. The fate of the United States will turn on whether Republicans or Democrats control the House and Senate by a couple of votes. Such a small difference will make a huge difference.

The Democrats are evolving into an ideological party that is anti-white, anti-family, anti-traditional values, and anti-Constitution. The Democrats are committed to immigrants as their open borders policy and efforts to block ICE deportations show. They are committed to legalizing sexual perversions, with the last remaining one, pedophilia, being renamed “minor directed persons” and edging its way toward acceptance. They are committed to limiting freedom of expression of those they oppose by terming it “hate speech,” but their own hateful accusations are merely “holding white people accountable for racism” and men for misogyny and abuse of women. When Starbucks announced a ban on hiring men, and Gillette and Bud Light ran anti-male ads, the Democrats did not consider it hate speech. Any woman no matter how promiscuous can bring a rape charge and the male is instantly guilty. But say something unflattering about a black or a Jew and all hell breaks loose.

I’ve had this article sitting in storage waiting for the right moment to publish it. Tonight, Mario Nawfal hosted a debate on Iran that featured Robert Barnes and Matt Tardio. Matt put out so much disinformation and falsities that I believe now is the time to set the record straight about what happened to the JCPOA. I was tempted to attach the prefix, “RE” to Matt’s last name but decided not to go down the ad hominem path. Instead, let’s just deal with the facts.

On May 8, 2018, Donald Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement that Iran had signed with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China three years earlier. He reimposed every sanction the deal had lifted and then piled on more under a policy he called “maximum pressure.” Iran had not violated the agreement. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which had inspectors at every Iranian nuclear site, had certified again and again that Iran was keeping its side of the bargain.

Most people in Washington expected Tehran to respond in kind: throw out the inspectors, restart the centrifuges and race for the bomb. Some in the administration hoped it would, because that would have justified the next step. Iran did the opposite. For a full year it continued to abide by every limit in the agreement, keeping its enrichment at 3.67%, its stockpile under 300 kilograms and its doors open to the IAEA. Understanding why tells you a great deal about how Iran’s leaders actually think, and it undercuts the caricature of a reckless regime that dominates American commentary.

President Donald Trump, seeing the success of the U.S. Navy’s operation in the Strait of Hormuz in blocking most of Iran’s imports and oil exports while restoring some of the non-Iranian oil trade through the strait, evidently does not regard the conflict with Iran as stalemated.

The current situation regarding the flow of oil and distribution of economic pain is actually more complicated and does not constitute a one-sided U.S. advantage, but Trump clearly believes that continuing to squeeze Iran through measures such as a naval blockade — an act of war — will increase U.S. leverage and yield a better result.

Trump always has viewed the world as a zero-sum game. Whether the subject is military conflict, trade agreements, or real estate deals, he regards most outcomes as having a winner and a loser. He also never admits a mistake and certainly will not do so publicly regarding the current war. Thus the conflict continues as a search for something Trump can claim as a “win.”

As election day nears, two new polls show the Iran war has emerged as one of the most important issues shaping voters’ midterm decisions.

National polls from Fox News and The Associated Press-NORC place the war behind only the economy-related issues, government corruption, and health care among voters’ top four concerns.

Significantly, the Iran war has surpassed immigration and crime, two issues on which President Donald Trump performed particularly well in 2024, among voters’ top concerns. In the 2024 campaign, pre- and post-election polling showed those issues as ranking higher as a priority for voters than foreign policy.

The Fox News survey showed 75% of respondents were either “extremely” (42%) or “very” (33%) concerned about the war in Iran. According to the AP-NORC poll, 62% of registered voters named the war as one of the most important issues, and a further 31% said it was “an important issue, but not one of the most important.”

The US military has drawn up new strike plans against Iran that include potentially using the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” according to a report from CNN.

The MOAB is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal and has been used only once before in a strike on a village in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province in 2017. The US said the strike killed dozens of ISIS-K fighters, and the now-defunct US-backed Afghan government said no civilians were killed because they evacuated due to the ISIS occupation. But since returning, the residents have dealt with environmental effects and the damage from the attack, which destroyed about 30 civilian homes.

The MOAB is about 30 feet long, and due to its size, it must be dropped from a C-130 cargo aircraft close to the intended target, meaning that any MOAB strike on Iran would be vulnerable to Iranian air defenses.

Webmaster Addition: 

More than 70 House Democrats on Tuesday sought answers and accountability from the Pentagon regarding a likely US strike on a September wedding gathering in southern Iran that killed five civilians – all women and children – and wounded over 70 others.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), and Jason Crow (D-Colo.) led 74 lawmakers in demanding an explanation for the September 1 bombing in Kuhestak and details of what the Trump administration is doing to protect Iranian civilians.

“We demand urgent answers regarding the United States’ role in this strike, why the strike proceeded given the clear risk of significant civilian harm, and what steps the [US Department of Defense] is taking to prevent further civilian casualties in Iran,” the lawmakers wrote.

Saudi Arabia’s cabinet said the Houthi group would “bear the consequences” for attacks on airports, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and vital economic sites. The cabinet linked the warning to the kingdom’s security and to freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. Saudi officials have faced a grim week. Reuters reported people killed and dozens wounded after strikes on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh and on facilities at Abha airport in the southwest. The warning signals a tougher stance.

Saudi media echoed the cabinet, calling Houthi operations “recurrent, heinous attacks” that target civilians and economic infrastructure. The message framed the Houthi campaign as terrorism that would not go unanswered. Government language stressed both sovereignty and safety for travelers and pilgrims. Officials highlighted risk to airports and to navigation lanes that serve global trade. The cabinet’s wording set a clear red line and a public promise of accountability for future attacks.

The spectacle of public executions. Deadly military strikes on foreign countries. Innocent civilian lives lost to war. Aggressive ICE raids. Government officials accused of using their powers to intimidate political opponents. Public office increasingly entangled with private financial interests.  Government leaders who glorify violence, spew hatred, stir up racial prejudice, provoke civil unrest, and stoke discontent.

This is what it looks like when a nation loses its way.

When cruelty is mistaken for courage, vengeance for justice, and the taking of human life for a demonstration of strength.

When government officials tell you not to believe your own eyes and ears about the state of the world around you, when they insist that the truth is a lie and the lie is truth, you’ve stumbled into a dystopian reality in which, as John Lennon rightly concluded, the government is “being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

When so-called Christians and self-professed defenders of morality insist that we must accept the lesser of two evils based on exaggerated fears of what might happen if their political opponents gain power, rather than confront the abuses unfolding before our eyes, remember this: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Webmaster Addition: Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.

Posted by Tyler Durden:  Authored by Madge Waggy via MadgeWaggy.blogspot.com,

Just after the morning deliveries and before the first customers, a supermarket looks both ordinary and slightly deceptive. The lights are on, the coolers hum, and the shelves hold exactly what they held last week. Strawberries show up in February, lettuce comes from ground that was desert two generations ago, and on the same shelf beef raised across three states sits beside bread baked from grain cut a thousand miles away. Someone pushing a cart through the whole store can finish the errand without once wondering how any of it got there.

That is part of why the American food supply is so easy to take for granted. Nobody praises the trucking fleets, the cold storage, the seed suppliers, or the packing houses, because a thing that rarely fails stops being noticed. Two or three generations have grown up treating food the way they treat running water: as a fact of the world, unremarkable and about as interesting.

Reliability, though, is not the same as resilience, and the two are easy to confuse because the difference only appears when something goes wrong. A farm can still bring in a decent harvest during a dry year, until that dry year coincides with expensive fertilizer, a thin labor crew, and a delayed shipment. Shelves can stay full while carrying fewer brands at higher prices. The country is not running out of food. What it may be running out of is the cushion that once let a bad season pass without anyone noticing.

This article rests on three kinds of claims, and it is worth keeping them apart. First come the demonstrated problems: measured facts about the age of farmers, the drawdown of aquifers, the concentration of meatpacking, the cost of inputs, the price of food. Then comes an interpretation, which is mine and can be argued with: the suggestion that these separate trends, taken together, are eroding the system's ability to absorb a shock. Last come scenarios, which are conditional rather than predictive, describing what could happen over the next decade or two if several pressures arrive at once and little changes. The text will say which is which as it goes.

Millions along the East Coast could face pounding surf and coastal flooding as forecast models suggest a powerful hybrid storm could develop offshore. 

Initial coastal hazards are expected from North Carolina to Florida this weekend into early next week, even if no storm develops.

A powerful weather system is forecast to sweep from the Midwest to the East Coast on Friday, pushing a cold front toward the Atlantic by Saturday morning and bringing rain, gusty winds and falling temperatures.

If that front stalls near the Southeast coast, a storm could form offshore and linger over the Gulf Stream, drawing heat and moisture from its warm waters.

Abdul-Rahman al-Nashash, 11, holds onto the edge of a chair and pushes his left leg into a plastic prosthetic that doesn’t fit him anymore. The bone that was cut two years ago has kept growing inside, and it presses painfully against his skin.

His doctors told him to stop wearing it. He wears it anyway, every morning, pulling the straps tight and rolling his pants down so no one sees the plastic before he takes his first step. He bites his lip when it hurts and holds his shoulders straight so no one can tell he is limping.

“He forces himself to wear it,” his mother said, “just so no one knows he has a disability.”

Before the genocide, al-Nashash played for a local soccer club, and he would chase the ball across a dirt field until the sun went down. He is the eldest son in his family, and he was the one his mother leaned on at home. When she needed water, he was the one who ran to carry the heavy gallon of water, and he never got tired. Now, he is not able.

A line of trucks rounded the bend toward Port Newark-Elizabeth on October 3, 2025. Inside the trailers were combat boots and weapons components — including 61 tons of forging rings used for military jets — bound for Israel via a Maersk vessel departing that morning.

But before the truckers could enter the port and the Maersk Sentosa could be loaded, 100 activists organized under the banner “Port of Elizabeth Movement” (POEM) sprang into action.

“It was ass o’clock in the morning. The sun was far from up. It was pitch black. Everyone was tired. Someone yelled, ‘Go, go, go, go!'” said Danny Creamer, who was later arrested at the POEM action.

A recent study left scientists shocked and horrified, but now, they’re sounding the alarm. A study conducted just last year hoped to reveal the cause of America’s catastrophic fertility crisis and revealed that 100% of American men have microplastics in their testicles.

And sperm counts have already been falling for decades.

No wonder there’s a birthrate crisis in America.

And it’s not just men who are affected, These microplastics have even been found in placentas, ovaries and can even transfer into breast milk when concentrations are high.

When

 21/10/2026    

 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

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Join us on Weds 21 October to protest at Elbit Systems’ facilities in Bristol and Shenstone. Demand a comprehensive two-way arms embargo on Israel now.

Bristol: Assemble at 11am at Elbit Systems, 38 Bolingbroke Way, Bristol, BS34 6FE.

Shenstone: Assemble at 11am UAV Engines Ltd, Lynn Lane, Shenstone, WS14 0EA.

What’s a girl to do in the unfortunate scenario in which she finds herself down in the polls mere weeks before election night?

When, as a Congressional candidate, you’re up against a wall in October, any political consultant worth his/her/zher salt will offer the same sage, time-tested advice:

“When in doubt, pull out [a rape fantasy from your ass].”

Progressives love a good “survivor” story.

In May 2019, a few months after Omar arrived in Congress, her staff contacted the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.

They wanted her birth year changed from 1981 to 1982.

The library's director confirmed it in writing.

According to the director's May 24, 2019 email, Omar's congressional staff informed library staff that "her birth year was incorrect."

That 1981 date – October 4, 1981 – sat on her official Minnesota House biography through her entire time in the state legislature.

Outlets including the BBC published the same date.