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Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:20:00 +0000 SpaceX In "Final Stages" Of Securing New Massive Rocket Launch Site In Louisiana
SpaceX In "Final Stages" Of Securing New Massive Rocket Launch Site In Louisiana
Several Louisiana media outlets report that Elon Musk's SpaceX is in the "final stages " of securing approximately 130,000 acres on Pec
Read more.....
SpaceX In "Final Stages" Of Securing New Massive Rocket Launch Site In Louisiana
Several Louisiana media outlets report that Elon Musk's SpaceX is in the "final stages " of securing approximately 130,000 acres on Pecan Island for a massive new spaceport to launch rockets into orbit.
The Times-Picayune reports a source with knowledge about the deal said SpaceX is poised to take control of roughly 130,000 acres at Pecan Island - more specifically, the coastal Vermilion Parish - as part of a settlement resolving long-running coastal lawsuits against ExxonMobil. Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement this month.
The outlet KPEL provided additional details:
Gov. Landry announced a settlement of the coastal lawsuits in June. Under that agreement, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, ExxonMobil is expected to turn over land it has owned in Vermilion Parish since the 1950s, property long leased out for hunting and fishing. The terms have not been made public.
SpaceX would then take control of the site, with provisions built in for coastal restoration and protection, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.
Landry has confirmed the coastal settlement but declined to discuss the SpaceX deal specifically, and Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois has offered no comment either. SpaceX hasn't named Louisiana directly, though the company acknowledged in a social media post that it's scouting new sites to expand Starship launch operations.
KPEL explained why Pecan Island best fits SpaceX's launch requirements:
Pecan Island has a permanent population of about 100 people along Louisiana Highway 82. Aerospace experts point to a handful of reasons that sparse setting appeals to SpaceX: deep-water access along the Intracoastal Waterway for barging in rocket hardware, a location roughly midway between the company's Texas and Florida facilities, and a local supply of natural gas. SpaceX has also told regulators it wants to launch up to a million low-Earth-orbit satellites in the coming years, a plan that will require more launch pads.
Everything Elon Musk blog Elon Chron's S.E. Robinson, Jr. wrote on X:
SPACEX: Louisiana State Senator Bob Hensgens, who represents Vermilion Parish, confirmed yesterday, ongoing talks between "a space exploration company" and Exxon-Mobil for the potential purchase of 136,000 acres south of Hwy La. 14, west of Intracoastal City, north/south of Pecan Island, extending to Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Cameron Parish.
The land is owned by Exxon-Mobil with surface rights managed by Vermilion Corporation. Hensgens could not name the space company, but stated he declined to sign a non-disclosure agreement for transparency purposes.
There is also talk about the possible construction of a coastal levee. The area is prone to hurricanes, so this would be a necessity.
More SpaceX news in today's ELON CHRON below!
If SpaceX secures the Pecan Island site, it would establish the company's second major Starship launch complex, alongside Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, where it already employs 3,400 people. SpaceX is the world's leading launch provider, beating out entire nation states, and continues to rapidly expand its rocket and AI-driven manufacturing capabilities.
A second SpaceX launch site in Louisiana would be transformative for the state. The project is expected to create thousands of construction jobs during the build-out; although only a fraction of the 130,000-acre site would be developed, the remainder would serve as a safety and environmental buffer. Once operational, the launch, manufacturing, engineering, and support workforce could number in the thousands, establishing a major new aerospace hub along the Gulf Coast.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 21:20 Close
Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:55:00 +0000 Capital One Cites Anti-Money Laundering Review Over Trump Organization Debanking Claims
Capital One Cites Anti-Money Laundering Review Over Trump Organization Debanking Claims
Capital One Cites Anti-Money Laundering Review Over Trump Organization Debanking Claims
Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times ,
Capital One asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, part of the Trump Organization, claiming that the bank's 2021 debanking of hundreds of Trump-linked accounts followed an internal anti-money laundering review and not the political discrimination the plaintiffs allege.
President Donald Trump prepares to board Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, N.J., on Aug. 2, 2026. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In a motion to dismiss filed on July 31 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida before Judge Roy Altman, Capital One said the accounts were terminated after a review by anti-money-laundering experts.
The filing said that "documents and Plaintiffs' own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs' accounts for anti-money laundering (AML) reasons."
"The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One's AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance," it added.
Capital One said in the filing that the Trump Organization's allegations of political pretext were "misguided" and "based on cherry-picked quotations unsupported by the full context" of documents submitted to the court.
It did not accuse the Trump Organization of money laundering.
The case, filed in 2025, focuses on Capital One's March 2021 decision to close deposit accounts held by the Trump Organization and related entities.
Capital One informed the Trump Organization in March 2021 that "hundreds" of its bank accounts would be closed by June 7, 2021, according to an original lawsuit filed by The Trump Organization and Eric Trump, the president's son, in Miami-Dade Circuit Court in March 2025.
The plaintiffs said they believed Capital One was harboring "unsubstantiated, woke" beliefs that "it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views," which they alleged motivated the bank to abruptly close the organizations' accounts.
At the time, Capital One told The Epoch Times that it "has not and does not close customer accounts for political reasons."
Capital One's recent filing said the rules governing the accounts allow it to "close any account in our sole discretion at any time for any or no reason."
Capital One's first attempt to dismiss the case, filed in May 2025, was withdrawn after the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint the following month.
Its second attempt succeeded in March this year, when a judge dismissed the case but gave the plaintiffs another chance to refile.
Capital One is now asking the court to dismiss the current complaint and said that the latest version "suffers from the same fundamental flaws as their prior two pleadings."
President Donald Trump also filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase in January over alleged debanking.
Alejandro Brito, the president's personal attorney, filed a $5 billion lawsuit on Jan. 22 in Miami's Florida state court on behalf of the president and his hospitality companies.
Following the January 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol, the largest bank in the United States shuttered the accounts of Trump and his related entities.
JPMorgan told The Epoch Times that the case "has no merit."
Trump signed an executive order in August 2025 to stop banks from denying people financial services because of their political or religious beliefs, a practice known as debanking.
According to a White House fact sheet, the executive order requires federal banking regulators to investigate whether banks have engaged in "politicized or unlawful debanking" and to issue penalties such as "fines or consent decrees."
The order also directs regulators to remove terms such as "reputational risk" from their guidance - language that has allegedly been used to justify debanking.
The Trump Organization and Capital One did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times' requests for comment.
Troy Myers, Andrew Moran, and Emel Akan contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 20:55 Close
Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:30:00 +0000 "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" Crushes Woke Odyssey Film At Box Office
"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" Crushes Woke Odyssey Film At Box Office
Hollywood pulled out all the stops for "The Odyssey" - They relied heavily on director Christopher Nolan's built-in and generally pretentious audience to drive earl
Read more.....
"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" Crushes Woke Odyssey Film At Box Office
Hollywood pulled out all the stops for "The Odyssey" - They relied heavily on director Christopher Nolan's built-in and generally pretentious audience to drive early box office revenues.
The hype machine was running non-stop for months before the release. The distributor's focused heavily on IMAX ticket sales, which cost more than double a normal theater ticket. They attempted to hide the woke content of the film from the public for as long as possible (an ancient Greek epic with no Greeks, featuring black, Asian, Hispanic and trans actors with a story that deconstructs the hero's journey of Odysseus, making him into a broken shell of a man. Historical inaccuracies and modernization are rampant in the movie.
Critical websites also froze the audience ratings above 95% by rejecting most negative reviews.
Despite all of this, The Odyssey's early box office was not impressive compared to most blockbuster movies. It didn't even break the top 60 movies for opening weekend revenues (adjusted for inflation). The political left rushed onto social media to declare victory, claiming that "Get Woke, Go Broke is over".
Then, Spider Man: Brand New Day opened and ate The Odyssey's lunch, showing how a real blockbuster is supposed to perform.
For its opening weekend, Spider Man raked in $927 million worldwide - Compare that to The Odyssey's $264 million global box office for the first weekend. Spider Man crushed The Odyssey without trying. Spider Man is projected to make around $2.5 billion in the next few weeks while Nolan's movie is struggling to hit $1 billion. If Nolan had made a non-woke movie, maybe he would have had better numbers.
The Odyssey's theater take sounds like a success, despite being easily surpassed by Spider Man. However, with all the bluster over the film's "woke triumph", leftists are avoiding an inconvenient truth: The Odyssey has yet to make a single penny in raw profit.
Nolan's woke translation has brought in $911 million after three weeks, but it needs around $950 million just to break even. This is accounting for marketing costs, theaters taking their 50% cut, and Nolan taking his own 20% cut of revenues as part of his contract. Will the Odyssey break even? Probably, but Universal Studios will be straining to make any meaningful profit from the production.
Nolan will be laughing all the way to the bank, but distributors will not be as fortunate. Spider Man has already surpassed the break even point and made a profit.
In the end, The Odyssey will represent nothing more than a woke vanity project for a director who is fading in talent. Nolan says he may be taking several years away from the business after Odyssey, which means Hollywood expended all its ammunition on one last stand.
The Hollywood model has long been to force progressive content on audiences while ignoring public pleas for less propaganda. In the minds of the elites, the masses must be conditioned over time to accept wokeness. They believe that if they saturate the market for long enough, movie-goers will eventually capitulate and accept woke as the new normal. This has not happened.
Instead, nearly every woke movie and streaming series has failed, losing the industry billions in cumulative production costs. Studios have been forced in the past couple of years to return to less political messaging and more classic entertainment.
The Odyssey is a defiant rebellion, specifically designed as a vehicle to revitalize the Hollywood argument in favor of woke content. Yet, compared to non-woke movies, the profit margin is looking dismal.
The political left never learns, they only double down on failure and convince themselves that their own propaganda is reality. Even if one considers The Odyssey a "success" for making it's money back, how many woke movies can Christopher Nolan possibly direct? One every few years? No other director has a similar simp audience to lean on.
Meaning, The Odyssey is likely the last gasp, the death rattle of far-left content gaining any momentum in theaters for years to come. One woke movie breaking even does not make up for hundreds of box office disasters.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 20:30 Close
Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:05:00 +0000 The Pentagon's Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care
The Pentagon's Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care
The Pentagon's Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care
Authored by Jay Rogers via RealClearDefense ,
Sen. Jon Ossoff released a report on July 8 documenting lead exposure in a newborn, mold-related emergency room visits, and a cockroach infestation living inside a family's oven, all in privatized military housing at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. Read it and you'd think it was written in 2022. It wasn't. That's the scandal: the Pentagon outsourced a duty of care to private landlords and never enforced the contracts meant to keep it intact.
I've spent thirty years in institutional investment management and now serve as an expert witness in fiduciary litigation. The pattern is one I recognize immediately: an institution hands a core obligation to a private operator, collects a fee for oversight it doesn't actually perform, and treats the delegation itself as if it discharged the duty. It didn't. Outsourcing a duty of care doesn't outsource the duty.
Congress created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative in 1996 to fix decrepit on-base housing without loading the capital cost onto the Pentagon's books. Private companies would own, renovate, and maintain the homes under leases running as long as fifty years, with servicemembers' Basic Allowance for Housing flowing straight to the landlord as rent. The Pentagon would keep oversight, backed by incentive fees for good performance and penalties for bad. On paper, a clean alignment of interests. In practice, a guaranteed revenue stream with an oversight function nobody actually staffed.
Fort Stewart's housing has been run by Balfour Beatty Communities since the base was privatized. In December 2021, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to one count of major fraud against the United States, agreeing to pay more than $65 million in criminal fines, restitution, and a related civil settlement. The company's employees falsified maintenance records and destroyed resident comment cards between 2013 and 2019 to fraudulently collect incentive fees they hadn't earned. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the fraud was "a consequence of BBC's broken corporate culture" that put profit ahead of servicemembers' welfare.
Four months later, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the conduct hadn't stopped. Its bipartisan staff report on the mistreatment of military families in privatized housing documented that Balfour's post-2019 behavior mirrored the misconduct behind its guilty plea; in the same period the company was under active federal investigation. A company can plead guilty to defrauding the government over housing conditions and keep collecting Basic Allowance for Housing checks from the families living in the homes it failed.
Fast-forward to this month. Fort Stewart is still Balfour Beatty's. Fort Benning's housing is run by a different company, the Michaels Organization's Villages of Benning . Ossoff's report found nearly identical failures at both: mold, lead, cover-ups, families told their complaints were handled when they weren't. That detail should stop anyone from treating this as one bad company. Two operators, two installations, the same pattern. The failure sits in the oversight structure, not the logo on the leasing office.
The government's own auditors have said as much. In an April 2023 report , the Government Accountability Office made 19 recommendations to improve DOD's oversight of privatized housing , including a priority recommendation that the Pentagon set clear, consistent, department-wide home inspection standards, after finding that comparable maintenance problems were getting graded differently depending on who held the clipboard. As of GAO's most recent public status update, that priority recommendation was still open, with DOD not expecting signed guidance until mid-2025 at the earliest. Congress had to legislate the fix GAO had already recommended.
This is the same structural failure I've written about previously in public pension governance, wearing a uniform instead of a suit. A pension trustee who delegates asset management to an outside manager doesn't delegate away fiduciary responsibility for the outcome; the law is explicit that the duty stays with the trustee. The Pentagon's relationship with its housing contractors works the same way as a matter of principle , even though the enforcement mechanism is a lease rather than ERISA. Both share the same defect: an incentive-fee structure that pays out on paperwork instead of results, and an oversight office too thin to catch the difference until a senator's staff does the job for it.
That fix is now in the books. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act , signed in December, directs the Secretary of War to establish a standard inspection and audit program for privatized and government-owned housing using independent, qualified inspectors, and separately tightens the rules on when a housing company may close a maintenance work order. Falsified paperwork closed BBC's work orders and inflated its bonuses for six years before anyone with subpoena power looked at the underlying data; an inspector who doesn't answer to the landlord closes that loophole.
Whether the law works depends on what determines whether any oversight regime works: whether a breach costs the party responsible for it. Balfour Beatty's $65 million penalty amounted to roughly one percent of the $6 billion in military housing assets the company reported managing at the time of its plea. A one-percent toll on a six-year fraud scheme is a minor cost of doing business, not a deterrent. If the penalty barely registers against the portfolio, the next audit will look exactly like the last one. Congress wrote the inspection program. It still has to write the consequence.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 20:05 Close
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:40:00 +0000 The Kospi Made South Korean President Lee Jae Myung; It May Yet Unmake Him...
The Kospi Made South Korean President Lee Jae Myung; It May Yet Unmake Him...
There is a particular cruelty in the timing. When the Kospi began its final, cratering descent in late July, President Lee Jae Myung was
Read more.....
The Kospi Made South Korean President Lee Jae Myung; It May Yet Unmake Him...
There is a particular cruelty in the timing. When the Kospi began its final, cratering descent in late July, President Lee Jae Myung was roughly 11,000 miles away , midway through an 11-day diplomatic tour of South America, watching from hotel suites as the index he had made the totem of his presidency collapsed. His finance minister apologized to lawmakers. The heads of both financial regulators cancelled their holidays as retail investors laid funeral wreaths at the gates of the National Assembly in Yeouido.
Near the main gate of the National Assembly in Yeouido, Seoul, there are condolence flowers installed calling for the delisting of single-stock leveraged ETFs. (Photo: Yonhap News)
From its record close of 9,114.55 on June 22, the benchmark fell into the 5,600s by July 30 - a peak-to-trough drawdown of roughly 39 percent on a closing basis, erasing more than $2 trillion in market value in under six weeks. Trading was halted four times during the month, a record run of circuit-breaker suspensions for a tool that was barely used before this year.
Then, on Friday, after an emergency late-night meeting of the country's top financial authorities produced a package of curbs on leveraged products, the index ripped 17.91 percent higher to close at 6,595.45 - the largest single-day gain in its history . SK Hynix hit its 30 percent daily limit. Samsung gained 27 percent. On Monday it gave back 5.12 percent, closing at 6,257.45.
Some retail traders have vowed not to step back in.
Samsung fell 8.76 percent, SK Hynix 8.79 percent . Foreign and institutional investors sold a net 2.84 trillion won and 1.95 trillion won of shares respectively. Retail investors bought a net 4.65 trillion won - stepping in front of the same train, four days after the government had promised to protect them from it.
Also on Monday, Realmeter published a weekly tracker putting Lee's approval at 45.9 percent, the lowest of his presidency, with disapproval at 50.5 percent - crossing the majority threshold for the first time. The fieldwork matters here: 2,508 respondents surveyed from July 27 to 31, with a margin of error of two points. The poll closed on the day of the record rally and captured none of Monday's reversal. Realmeter attributed the third consecutive weekly decline to the market rout and to a parallel controversy over whether a constitutional amendment might let a sitting president seek reelection.
The same pollster had Lee at 59.7 percent in May, against 35.7 percent disapproving. A net positive margin of twenty-four points has become a net negative of nearly five - a swing of some twenty-eight points in under three months. Realmeter runs lower than its peers; Gallup had him at 51 percent in late June, the National Barometer Survey at 53 percent on July 30. But all three recorded lows for his presidency, and all three were falling.
The problem of ownership
Presidents survive bad markets all the time, but this debacle is Lee's to own - after running in 2025 on a campaign drive the Kospi past 5,000 - an unusual promise for a head of state, and one he blew past in January. He is a former day trader, a fact his opponents recite with relish. He urged Koreans to move their savings out of Seoul property and into equities. In June, with the index sagging below 8,000, he told reporters the retreat was temporary and Korean shares remained undervalued. His policy chief, Kim Yong-beom, predicted Korea would become a top-three equity market by capitalization within three years.
And then there are the ETFs.
The sixteen single-stock leveraged and inverse funds tracking Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix launched on May 27, roughly a week before the June local elections - instruments that use derivatives and debt to double a stock's daily move, sold to professionals almost everywhere else in the world. Retail investors poured about 78 trillion won ($54.2 billion) into Kospi shares across May and June. As we noted , three SK Hynix vehicles alone held over $23 billion at the peak - more than 2.5 times average daily turnover in the underlying shares. Assets across the complex went from under $10 billion at the start of 2026 to more than $50 billion in June, then down to roughly $16 billion by late July.
The combined weight of the two chipmakers in the Kospi rose from 51.06 percent on May 26, the day before listing, to 55.17 percent by July 10. Their share of total market trading value went from roughly 30 percent to 44 percent. A market that was already a two-stock bet became a two-stock bet with a gamma engine bolted on.
The opposition's charge is not that Lee failed to prevent a crash. It is that his office built the machine that produced one. "It was pushed through at an extraordinary pace," said Park Soo-young, a People Power Party member of the National Assembly's Strategy and Finance Committee, arguing that such speed was inconceivable without direction from the presidential office. The PPP is now demanding Kim Yong-beom's dismissal and a full parliamentary investigation. Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol, pressed by lawmakers on whether he would resign, said it would be irresponsible to speculate while markets were still unstable.
That is the language of a government buying time with subordinates. It usually works. It works less well when the paper trail leads upward.
The arithmetic says he is safe
South Korean impeachment requires 200 votes in a 300-seat National Assembly, followed by Constitutional Court confirmation. Lee's Democratic Party holds 179 seats. Removing him would require his own party to supply twenty-one executioners - and the DP has no incentive to hand the presidency back to a PPP that lost the June local elections nationwide, capturing only Seoul's mayoralty as consolation. There is no national election until April 2028. Lee's term runs to 2030. He is fourteen months in.
The market case for calm is similarly strong. Even at Monday's close the Kospi sits at roughly double its 52-week low, and Bloomberg had it up more than 50 percent on the year as of Friday's close, the best performance among the world's biggest economies. The fundamentals underneath are not the problem : SK Hynix posted record second-quarter revenue of 79.3 trillion won, up 257 percent year on year, at a 76 percent operating margin. Samsung's preliminary operating profit for the period rose nineteenfold to about 89.4 trillion won. Korean semiconductor exports in June came in at $44.8 billion, up 199.5 percent. Morgan Stanley upgraded Korea to overweight on the back of the leverage unwind. Lale Akoner of eToro, who called the episode a textbook collision of a crowded trade and leverage, was careful to add that it should not be read as a collapse of the AI investment case.
Both chipmakers fell hard anyway, on the days they reported those numbers. That is the tell: this is a positioning event, not an earnings event . Positioning events resolve.
On the numbers, Lee is in no danger whatsoever.
THAT SAID...
South Korea has impeached two presidents in the last decade . Park Geun-hye in 2016. Yoon Suk Yeol in December 2024, which is the only reason Lee holds the office at all. Whatever the threshold once meant as a norm, it now means considerably less. What changed in both cases was not the seat count on day one - it was ruling-party lawmakers deciding the president had become a heavier liability than the opposition.
Three things could shift that calculation.
The first is the scale of household damage , which is no longer hypothetical. By July 13 , more than 1.2 million leveraged retail accounts had triggered margin calls, with an estimated 320,000 to 360,000 fully liquidated by brokers - some left owing money. Korea Investment & Securities reported that nearly half of its 880,000 clients holding Samsung were underwater, and nearly 70 percent of its 408,000 SK Hynix investors. The KODEX SK Hynix leveraged product is down more than 80 percent from its June peak. This is not a story about speculators. In a country of 52 million, it is a story about a constituency.
The second is the Democratic Party's own convention - though here the case has to be made against the present data rather than with it. In a companion Realmeter survey, DP support rose 3.8 points last week to 45.1 percent, while the PPP fell 2.9 points to 37.7 percent. The party is gaining as its president falls, and that is precisely the configuration under which lawmakers stay loyal. What changes it is the calendar. Song Young-gil, competing for the leadership, has already said the presidential office's policy line needs thorough re-examination. Whoever wins runs the party into the 2028 general election - the contest that determines whether the DP ever reaches the two-thirds majority it has coveted. A party polling ahead of the opposition has no reason to move against its own president. A party leader who concludes that Lee's name on the ballot costs seats is the beginning of a lame-duck presidency , and Korean presidents are traditionally devoured by their own side, not by the opposition.
The third is the constitutional amendment, and this is where Lee has already, almost certainly, lost something irretrievable . Placing a two-term, four-year presidency at the top of a 123-item agenda was the signature legacy project. Article 128(2) bars the sitting president from benefiting, so this was never about his own reelection; it was about being the president who rewrote the 1987 constitution. Amendment requires 200 votes and a national referendum, meaning PPP cooperation. Speaker Cho Jeong-sik has floated 2027 as the window - and his suggestion that voters should decide whether an incumbent may seek another term is, on Realmeter's own reading, one of the two forces currently dragging Lee's numbers down. The legacy project has become a liability before it has become a bill. A president polling below 50 percent, with two trillion dollars of household wealth destroyed on his ledger and a parliamentary investigation pending, has no leverage to extract twenty-one opposition votes for anything.
What losing the job actually looks like
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung attends an agreement-signing event at Villa Doria Pamphili in Rome, Italy, June 12, 2026. REUTERS/Remo Casilli/File Photo
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 19:40 Close
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:15:00 +0000 "I No Longer Trust Anyone..."
"I No Longer Trust Anyone..."
"I No Longer Trust Anyone..."
Authored by Todd Hayen via Off-Guardian.org,
Sad, but true. Since the Covid fiasco, I’ve seen the true nature of people - or at least the nature they were willing to show once the fear got turned up and the herd started moving.
Most of them are still firmly under the sheep banner, content to graze wherever they’re told.
A small handful stand under the “critical thinker” banner. Those are the ones I still trust.
The sheepies? I don’t trust them anymore. Did I ever, really? I thought I did, back when I was younger and still believed most people were basically decent when the chips were down. Turns out that was optimistic.
Lately this loss of trust has had me thinking about the American Wild West. Not the Hollywood version—the real one.
Back then, almost every man who wanted to stay alive carried a revolver on his hip. It wasn’t for show. You never knew when some mean-eyed bastard might decide your horse, your money, or your life was worth more to him than it was to you.
The sensible ones stayed ready. They watched people . They didn’t assume good intentions just because someone smiled and said howdy. Trust was something you earned slowly, usually after a man had proven he wouldn’t sell you out the first time it became convenient.
So, did folks in that dusty, hard country go around trusting their neighbours? Hell no. You bet your boots they didn’t. And the ones who did—the tenderfoots who rode into town believing everybody was basically good underneath—usually got fleeced, shot, or both. The sheep of that era didn’t last long.
I keep coming back to that because it feels uncomfortably close to where we are now. The difference is the wolves don’t need to hide behind a bandana anymore. They wear white coats, or sit in glass offices, or smile at you from a television screen while they tell you what you need to do for your own good.
And the sheep-types? They didn’t just follow along during Covid. A lot of them became enthusiastic enforcers.
They reported neighbours for having too many people over for dinner. They cut off family members who wouldn’t take the shot. They posted smug little memes about how the unvaccinated were selfish and stupid while their own kids were losing years of school and their elderly parents were dying alone in nursing homes. They did it with a clear conscience, because the authorities had given them permission to be cruel.
That’s the part that still sticks in my throat. Not the government lying—governments always lie when it suits them. Not even Big Pharma doing what Big Pharma does—make scads of money and not giving a crap who suffers for it. It was the ordinary people, the ones I used to think were mostly harmless, who turned out to be so willing to turn on anyone who stepped out of line.
The masked Karens. The vaccine passport enthusiasts. The ones who genuinely seemed to enjoy punishing others for non-compliance. I saw longtime friends and even family members do things I would have sworn they were incapable of. And they did it without a second thought. That’s what really got to me—not the betrayal itself, but how easily it came to them. How little it seemed to cost them.
The rest of us were the ones who kept their powder dry. We asked questions when the story kept changing. We noticed the bodies didn’t match the narrative. We refused to pretend that “following the science” meant following whatever the people who owned the science told us to do.
For that, we got called dangerous, selfish, and—my personal favourite—grandma killers. The irony was almost funny if you had a dark enough sense of humour. The real danger was coming from the people screaming the loudest about keeping everyone safe.
I don’t know if this loss of trust is permanent. Maybe it softens over time. But right now, it feels pretty solid. I still have my circle. Those are the people I can still talk to without wondering whether the conversation is going to end up on some government list or get repeated at the next family gathering as evidence of how crazy I’ve become. With them I can lower my guard a little. We’ve got each other’s backs. That counts for something in a world where most people will throw you under the bus the moment the authorities give them a good enough reason.
Everyone else?
I’ll be polite. I’ll make small talk. I’ll even hold the damn door. But I’m not handing over trust again just because someone seems nice or shares my politics or went to the same school. That ship sailed somewhere around 2021, and I don’t see it coming back into port anytime soon. Once you’ve watched people you cared about turn into informants and punishers, it changes how you move through the world. You don’t go back to the old way of seeing things. You can’t.
Maybe that’s the real lesson buried in all this mess. The Wild West never actually ended. The outlaws just got better costumes and much better PR. And the sheep-types learned to police each other instead of waiting for the sheriff. The thinkers are still here, though—eyes open, hands near the metaphorical holster, not particularly interested in pretending everything is fine just to make other people comfortable.
All this has seemed to calm down a bit. But don’t kid yourself. It is still there. That’s the hard part now; you can’t tell who from who. But you know it is there. There are still occasional masks, a tell-tale sign the murmuring sheep-mind is still bubbling underneath. We don’t have to be mean to strangers; we can still love our fellow human beings no matter how lost they may be, but we must be wary, and not automatically expect a helping hand if needed.
So yeah. I no longer trust anyone the way I used to. And I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing. It’s clarifying, at least.
You find out who’s really with you when the pressure is on. And you find out who was only ever along for the ride until it got inconvenient. The ones who stayed? Those are my people now. The rest can go graze somewhere else.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 19:15 Close
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:25:00 +0000 Children's Hospitals To Begin Offering Restorative Care For Detransitioners
Children's Hospitals To Begin Offering Restorative Care For Detransitioners
Children's Hospitals To Begin Offering Restorative Care For Detransitioners
Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times ,
When Texas Children's Hospital's "detransition clinic" opens in Houston, it will become the first facility of its kind, giving patients who regret life-altering procedures a chance at restorative care .
Illustration by The Epoch Times, Zereshk/CC BY-SA 3.0
The facility, which has yet to announce an opening date, is part of an agreement with state and federal authorities to halt "gender-affirming care" at children's hospitals while offering help to those who transitioned medically.
A 10-page settlement term sheet, recently obtained by The Epoch Times through an open records request to the Texas attorney general's office, showed that services at the clinic will focus on multidisciplinary care.
Services are to include endocrinology, surgery, fertility counseling, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and speech pathology, among others.
In May and June, the Department of Justice (DOJ), along with the attorneys general of Texas and Ohio, secured settlements with large hospitals over allegations of fraudulent insurance billing practices related to "gender-affirming care" for children .
The hospitals denied wrongdoing in their billing practices or standards of care.
These agreements require the hospitals not only to cease transitioning procedures, but also to offer discounted or free restorative medical care to detransitioners.
Attorneys representing detransitioners and their clients praised the efforts of the DOJ and the states to assist those suffering from the consequences of life-altering medical changes.
Detransitioners are those who stopped or reversed a medical gender transition they started earlier in life.
'They Deserve Specialized Care'
Mark Trammell, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, which represents several detransitioners, including Chloe Cole, told The Epoch Times that restorative care for detransitioners was an important step.
"The creation of these clinics is a recognition that detransitioners are real, their experiences matter, and they deserve specialized care," Trammell said in a text message.
Cole, who drew national attention after speaking out against subjecting children to gender-reassignment procedures such as hormones and surgeries, told The Epoch Times that healthcare for detransitioners was a long-needed win.
"The opening of Texas's detransition clinic and the funding being put into care for those of us who need it most will transform a sorely neglected area of healthcare," Cole said.
Cole, who was 15 when she received hormones and a double mastectomy that changed her life forever, said via text that it took five years to find medical professionals to help her.
When she decided to seek help, medical providers referred her back to the gender clinic that refused to address her needs, she said.
In Texas, attorney Josh Payne, founding partner of Campbell Miller Payne, which represents detransitioners, including Soren Aldaco, agreed that establishing a restorative care clinic was needed.
"Many detransitioners need specialized care for the rest of their lives to cope with the damage of lost body parts and the ability to function normally," Payne told The Epoch Times in an email.
"Some detransitioners may not want to return to health centers that harmed them in the first place. Hospitals like Texas Children's should establish a fund for victims to defray the costs of lifelong care and compensate them directly for their injuries."
Aldaco, a detransitioner whose fight to continue her medical malpractice lawsuit put her in the spotlight, won her appeal before the Texas Supreme Court on June 26.
By a unanimous decision, the Texas court reversed the dismissal of her lawsuit, ruling that the statute of limitations had not expired, meaning her medical malpractice case against her former therapist could proceed.
The statute of limitations for medical malpractice suits is two years in many cases, which is a major hurdle for many detransitioners.
Aldaco was 19 when she had her breasts removed.
"If you're a 13-year-old on puberty blockers, you might not realize you're infertile until you're 26 and you just got married, and you're trying to have kids," she told The Epoch Times in a February interview.
Aldaco's story is like those of many others who spent years "transitioning" as teenagers, only to change their minds later in life.
First-of-its-Kind Clinic
Under an agreement reached on May 15, Texas Children's Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in the country, is set to create the nation's first detransition clinic .
In an email to The Epoch Times, the hospital declined to confirm an opening date or comment about the facility's future operation.
The Houston-based hospital will establish the detransition clinic to provide medical care to patients who received gender transitioning procedures through age 21, and obstetric-gynecology care for those over age 21, according to documents.
Additionally, the hospital will provide clinic services at no cost to patients for a period of five years.
Texas Children's will create and maintain an easily accessible landing page on its website describing the available services. The facility will be listed on the hospital's donation website, and the funds will support free detransitioning services beyond the initial five years of operation.
Also, the hospital will amend its bylaws to ensure swift dismissal for any physician who violates the state's prohibition on medical interventions aimed at transitioning minors.
The hospital will pay more than $10 million in damages and civil penalties to Texas and the federal government to resolve a three-year federal and state investigation into the hospital's alleged improper billing practices to the state's Medicaid program to transition children, according to a press release by the Texas attorney general from May.
Texas Children's agreed to permanently fire and revoke privileges for five "woke" doctors who performed harmful medical procedures on Texans, according to the release.
The hospital said in a May press release that it had agreed to a settlement "to protect [its] resources from endless and costly litigation."
"This settlement will allow us to redirect those precious resources to focus on the life-saving care and groundbreaking discoveries of our exceptional clinicians and scientists," the release said.
According to the Texas attorney general, Texas Children's billed Texas Medicaid for "unallowable and illegal 'gender-transition' interventions, including by using false diagnosis codes."
Nonetheless, the DOJ commended the hospital for its cooperation during the investigation and its commitment to providing care for detransitioners.
Prestigious Clinic Agreement
On June 5, the DOJ announced that the Cleveland Clinic, a renowned medical institution in Ohio, had reached a similar settlement with the federal government and the state.
The agreement requires the clinic to provide restorative care to detransitioners and prohibits the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries for minors for the next 20 years .
Like in Texas, the clinic was under investigation for allegedly falsifying billing to cover transgender procedures for minors. The Cleveland Clinic denied any wrongdoing, according to the government agreement.
As part of the settlement, the clinic will pay $308,000 in penalties and provide $2 million in restorative care for detransitioners who face financial barriers to such services.
The Department of Justice in Washington on Feb. 21, 2026. ?In May and June, the Justice Department, along with the attorneys general of Texas and Ohio, secured settlements with large hospitals over allegations of fraudulent insurance billing practices related to “gender-affirming care” for children. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 18:25 Close
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:20:00 +0000 China's AI Knife Fight: DeepSeek's New Model Runs 100x Cheaper Than Anthropic's Flagship
China's AI Knife Fight: DeepSeek's New Model Runs 100x Cheaper Than Anthropic's Flagship
The price of artificial intelligence just printed a new low. DeepSeek's V4-Flash, officially released Friday, costs roughly Read more.....
China's AI Knife Fight: DeepSeek's New Model Runs 100x Cheaper Than Anthropic's Flagship
The price of artificial intelligence just printed a new low. DeepSeek's V4-Flash, officially released Friday, costs roughly three cents to run through a standard battery of benchmark tests , according to San Francisco research firm Artificial Analysis . Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 costs 86 cents ; OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, $1.86 ; and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, the industry's top-scoring model, $3.15 . In realized terms, the Chinese model is more than 100 times cheaper to run than the American flagship, according to Reuters .
Sarah Rogers / MITTR | Photo Getty
V4-Flash is the cheapest well-known model in the world , and by a wide margin. The figure is even more striking because of a detail buried in the firm's write-up: V4-Flash is unusually verbose. It consumes tokens heavily and still lands at three cents. The per-token price is doing all the work.
The same firm supplies the caveat. V4-Flash scores 50 out of 100 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index , a composite of nine benchmarks spanning coding, reasoning, and workplace tasks. That ties Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash and puts it one point behind Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 and Zhipu's GLM-5.2. Moonshot's Kimi K3 scores 57, while Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5, along with OpenAI's GPT-5.6, score at least nine points higher .
That said - V4-Flash kicks massive ass at routine tasks, but the frontier models still own the heavy lifting. In difficult, multi-step agentic work, small reliability gaps at each step compound into enormous end-to-end differences. Essentially that's the current state of play for frontier pricing. But for the routine volume that makes up most production traffic - summarization, boilerplate code, and back-office automation - V4-Flash is where it's at.
Chinese Knife Fight
V4-Flash's 3-cent print is the fourth shot in an 18-day barrage : China's AI labs are cutting each other for domestic share, and the fallout is repricing the model market everywhere else. On July 16, Moonshot shipped Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that promptly took the number-one slot on Arena's Frontend Code leaderboard from Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. On July 19, Alibaba rushed a preview of Qwen3.8-Max onto the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. There was no pricing, no model card, and its claim of ranking "second only to Fable 5" rested on Alibaba's internal evaluations .
On July 27, Moonshot answered by open-sourcing K3's full weights, the largest open-weight release in history. DeepSeek shipped V4-Flash on July 31. Then on August 3 - Monday, the same morning the Reuters story ran - Alibaba took Qwen3.8-Max to general availability : 2.4 trillion total parameters, 95 billion active parameters, a one-million-token context window , and flat pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with no long-context surcharge.
Qwen's release promptly landed at No. 4 on the Frontend Code Arena with 1,668 points - one point behind Claude Opus 5 at high effort, eight behind Kimi K3, and ahead of both Fable 5 at 1,630 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 1,620. Of the five models Arena identifies on the cost-performance Pareto frontier, four are Chinese : Kimi K3, Qwen3.8-Max, GLM-5.2, and V4-Flash. The lone American entry, Opus 5, occupies the expensive tip, defended by 37 Elo points.
Alibaba's own benchmark table is more candid. Qwen3.8-Max edges Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 on Terminal-Bench, 86.6 to 84.6, while trailing badly on hard repository engineering: it scores 67.7 on SWE-bench Pro against Fable 5's 80.0 . The preference-judged coding moat is gone. The deep-engineering moat remains intact - for now.
All of this raises a more basic question: who is paying for three-cent inference?
Until this spring, DeepSeek had never taken outside money. Founder Liang Wenfeng bankrolled the company through his quant fund, High-Flyer. In late May, DeepSeek closed its first external round - more than 50 billion yuan, or roughly $7.4 billion, at a valuation above $50 billion - as first reported by The Information.
The round's structure is unusual. Commercial investors, reportedly led by Tencent and CATL , bought into a limited partnership controlled by Liang, with no voting rights and a five-year lockup. Exactly one party received direct equity and a vote: China's state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund . Within weeks, DeepSeek was in talks for a follow-on round at roughly $71 billion, with proceeds earmarked for data centers and chips.
Add the 75% API discount the company made permanent earlier this year, and the arrangement begins to resemble industrial policy conducted through an API: state-privileged capital underwriting below-cost tokens to capture global share. It is working: in June, DeepSeek accounted for nearly 23% of the tens of trillions of tokens flowing through Vercel's enterprise AI gateway, compared with Anthropic's 32% .
Meanwhile...
As we (and now Wall Street) have been noting , the Token Expenditure Index - a usage-weighted average of what the market pays per million tokens, blended across frontier APIs and open-weight platforms - peaked above 2.0 in May after nearly doubling from its December launch, and is now slip sliding lower .
Strategist Andreas Steno Larsen called it the one everyone should be watching , warning that sustained weakness in token pricing would end the memory, hardware, and data-center trades for this cycle . The index last printed 1.3394, roughly a third below its May high. Bloomberg flagged the rollover in early July as evidence that AI vendors were losing pricing power with increasingly cost-sensitive customers; Silicon Data's own commentary interpreted it as usage drifting back toward open-weight models.
Also relevant - the pushback to data centers amid a capex boom running north of $700 billion. As we reported last month, from the nationwide July 18 protests organized by Tea Party veteran Amy Kremer's Humans First to the widening fracture inside the Republican coalition over land, water, and power - domestic politics has entered the chat , something Beijing doesn't have to deal with - so now they've got a three-cent benchmark financed on terms no Western lab can match . Through open-weight releases, it is also portable onto American silicon, where US inference providers will happily serve Chinese models at commodity margins . Export controls cannot contain a set of weights on the torrent.
The model to watch is V4-Pro, the heavier system DeepSeek has confirmed without naming a release date. Flash at three cents pressures the budget tiers at OpenAI and Google. If Pro lands anywhere near frontier scores at DeepSeek prices, the last 37 Elo points - and the frontier premium that OpenAI and Anthropic both charge to underwrite the buildout - will be directly in play.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 18:20 Close
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:00:00 +0000 'They Are United': California Democrats Move Forward With 5% Billionaire Tax
'They Are United': California Democrats Move Forward With 5% Billionaire Tax
In a development that will stun absolutely no one, the California Democratic Party's roughly 380-member executive board gathered at a wate
Read more.....
'They Are United': California Democrats Move Forward With 5% Billionaire Tax
In a development that will stun absolutely no one, the California Democratic Party's roughly 380-member executive board gathered at a waterside Sheraton in San Diego this weekend and voted to endorse Proposition 40 - a "one-time" 5% levy on the net worth of the state's roughly 200 billionaires - clearing the 60% supermajority required for the party's official blessing, three months before voters render judgment on November 3.
A large banner is seen at a campaign event for a proposed "billionaire tax" in Los Angeles on Feb. 18, 2026. | Jae C. Hong/AP
If it passes - California residents on January 1, 2026 whose net worth is $1 billion or more on December 31, 2026, will owe Sacramento a nickel on every dollar . Directly held real estate is largely excluded - which means the drafters carved out the one asset class that cannot board a Gulfstream. The measure originated with a major healthcare union, the Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), which claims it would raise $100 billion to offset what it calls deep healthcare funding cuts under the Trump administration. Progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, have cheered it on. SEIU says it will raise about $100 billion , mostly to backfill federal healthcare cuts , with some crumbs earmarked for education and food assistance.
The arithmetic: $100 billion at a 5% rate assumes roughly $2 trillion in billionaire net worth sitting obediently in Atherton and Bel Air through year-end, marked to market and liquid enough to cut nine- and ten-figure checks to the Franchise Tax Board.
“I strongly support the grassroots effort in California to impose a 5% wealth tax on 200 billionaires worth $2 trillion, ” Sanders said of the tax. “This is a model that should be emulated around the country, which is why I will soon be introducing a national wealth tax on billionaires.”
The weekend itself was democracy at its most catered. The union threw a hospitality suite and handed out hats and T-shirts celebrating the confiscation of other people's balance sheets, while the "No on Prop 40" campaign - whose ranks include the California Medical Association (yes, the doctors oppose the measure written to fund them, calling a one-shot levy a flawed answer to a recurring hole), though its real bankroll is one Google co-founder, of whom more below - reportedly picked up around $7,000 in hotel rooms and travel for select board members via a hired consulting shop. Both sides whipped votes like the leveraged proxy fight it effectively was.
Afterward, the union's president declared that the endorsement settles the question of Democratic unity on the measure. Sure - minus the sitting Democratic governor, the party's own candidate to replace him, the California Teachers Association, and the state's firefighters . When even the teachers' union calls a tax too much, that tells you something.
Gavin Newsom - a man who never met a revenue stream he didn't like until it threatened his 2028 ambitions - has suddenly discovered the Laffer curve, warning that the state's largest taxpayers might simply leave.
After the measure qualified in June, he and his allies leaned on the union to pull it. The union's counteroffers tell you everything about the shelf life of "one-time": days before the June 25 withdrawal deadline, it publicly offered to swap the 5% levy for a 2% version Newsom would push through the Legislature - he passed - and, per the LA Times , union chief Dave Regan separately offered in private negotiations to pull the measure outright in exchange for help securing union contracts at several medical facilities - a demand he denies making. The temporary tax was, from birth, a down payment. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna cheer from the sidelines - neither of whom, we note, will be writing a check. Newsom, for his part, now stumps for a federal wealth tax - one billionaires can't dodge by moving - which concedes the entire case against this one.
In May, one of the co-authors of California’s controversial tax appeared to suggest that the levy could extend beyond a single imposition. Marxist economics professor Emmanuel Saez, who hails from France, made the comment during a heated debate against economist Arthur Laffer at the University of California, Berkeley
VIDEO
“I don’t think it’s going to be a one-time tax. Because you can’t surprise billionaires more than once,” Saez said . "Even then, maybe some of them were expecting something like this. So, it’s going to be a debate about this time, you know, a permanent wealth tax at a low rate that’s going to last for a number of years.”
How These Taxes Usually End
Do these people ever learn? Recall New Jersey circa 2016, when a single hedge fund manager's change of address to Florida had Trenton's budget officials publicly sweating over the state's revenue forecast - one guy, one moving truck, one fiscal panic. Recall Illinois' richest resident, Ken Griffin, packing his entire firm off from Chicago to Miami in 2022, taking what was reportedly the state's largest individual tax bill with him. Recall the Pacific Northwest's most famous ex-resident developing a sudden fondness for South Florida in 2023, mere months after Washington's shiny new capital gains tax survived its court challenge - and then unloading billions in stock from the comfort of a state that taxes none of it. Recall the world's richest man decamping California for Texas in 2020, with his companies trailing behind like ducklings.
And it's not just an American genre. Norway hiked its wealth tax in 2022 and promptly watched a procession of its wealthiest citizens establish residency in Switzerland . France ran the grand experiment for decades, bleeding tens of thousands of millionaires across its borders, until Macron finally euthanized the ISF - preserving, in the ultimate irony, a wealth tax on real estate alone, the one thing that couldn't flee. Prop 40's drafters studied that lesson and inverted it: exempt the immovable, tax the mobile.
California, of course, has been talking itself into this outcome for years - the 2023 wealth-tax bill with its infamous reach-back provisions for former residents died in committee, but the memo was received loud and clear in Austin, Miami, and Incline Village. The state lost a congressional seat after the 2020 census for the first time in its history , net domestic outmigration has been running for years, and the top 1% already supply north of 40% of state income tax collections. The geese aren't just laying the golden eggs; they're carrying the farm.
About that Incline Village entry: Sergey Brin decamped to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe last year - safely ahead of the January 1 snapshot - and has since pumped roughly $82 million into the No side's war chest , a committee called Building a Better California that has raised north of $118 million from fewer than a dozen donors, with Peter Thiel dropping a separate $3 million on the California Business Roundtable, the lobby anchoring the institutional opposition. Nor did Brin leave alone: at least six billionaires got out before the residency date locked, clipping an estimated $27 billion off the projected haul before a single ballot was printed. Every anecdote in the genre now has a live, hometown edition - the man whose fortune was minted in Mountain View is bankrolling the fight against a California tax he has already arranged not to owe.
The trap already snapped shut: because residency was fixed on January 1, 2026, leaving now won't dodge this levy if it passes - that trap closed eight months ago . What leaving now does is guarantee you're not around for the sequel. So expect a December blizzard of trust restructurings, charitable pledges, and valuation disputes over illiquid private stakes, followed by a constitutional bar brawl that keeps white-shoe litigators billing well into the 2030s. Collecting 5% of a private company position from a founder newly domiciled in Texas will be a spectacle.
Polling shows a strong majority of California Democrats on board and a narrower majority of the overall electorate - which is to say, this thing can absolutely pass. The No campaign calls the measure "bad for our budget, bad for our economy and bad for our future."
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 18:00 Close
Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:50:00 +0000 Trump Says Iran Faces 'Decapitation' If It Doesn't Sign A 'Good' Deal
Trump Says Iran Faces 'Decapitation' If It Doesn't Sign A 'Good' Deal
Summary
Trump says Iran faces 'decapitation' if it doesn't agree to a deal.
Trump says Gulf allies halted planne
Read more.....
Trump Says Iran Faces 'Decapitation' If It Doesn't Sign A 'Good' Deal
Summary
Trump says Iran faces 'decapitation' if it doesn't agree to a deal.
Trump says Gulf allies halted planned US strikes in favor of diplomacy.
Iran says Hormuz talks with Oman are progressing , but US actions remain the obstacle.
Oil prices still falling on optimism over Hormuz negotiations & uptick in transit.
Tehran is betting it can outlast Trump by raising the costs of confrontation.
Will the U.S. invade Iran before 2027?
Yes 21% · No 80%View full market & trade on Polymarket * * *
Trump Speaks to Reporters, Addresses Iran (non)Talks
President Trump has told reporters in the Oval Office that the Iran conflict is "working out very well" and that this is Tehran's "last chance to sign a good document" .
"I ?think we're going to maybe get ?something, but I want to give ?them every last chance before decapitation ," he said , reiterating a threat to launch a major ?attack on Iran.
On Hormuz, he said:
“It has to be [free], I am not going to let them charge. If anybody is going to charge, we will charge, we are the ones … with a total control,” he said. “We have a thing called a blockade … No, no, there is not going to be charging. We are not talking about charging at all. There won’t be charging.”
On engaging Iran in talks even while the Iranians themselves insist they will not participate in any new talks:
When we talk we say 'we're talking', if we're not talking, when you ask me, 'no we're not talking', I'll say it. But we are talking right now, we're talking, and we're talking at the request of Iran, backed by Saudi Arabia, backed by UAE, and backed by Qatar in particular, but others also, many countries called, many-the leaders of many, I'm friendly with a lot of them--This is a last chance, this is not something-if it doesn't happen, this is a last chance for them to sign a... good document.
Curiously, Trump is again insisting that when Iran says talks are off, they are lying...
Trump: Looking for Solution 'Caused' by Iran
President Trump on Monday issued a new Truth Social, perhaps trying to explain his latest weekend TACO move, accusing Iran's leadership of being "unbelievably duplicitous," claiming Tehran privately sought and sheduled talks while publicly insisting it is only dealing with Oman . He asserted that the Strait of Hormuz is already "completely controlled by the United States Navy" through what he called the "United States Wall of Steel," adding that "nothing gets through to Iran" unless Washington allows it. Trump also insisted discussions toward a resolution are underway despite Iranian denials, while reiterating his bottom line: "IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!"
U.S. officials say that no novel negotiations are scheduled with Iran despite Trump's statements, maintaining that ongoing talks are limited to indirect discussions via mediators involving envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. - CBS
Trump is increasingly letting his frustration and 'exasperation' go public. This seems to only confirm that indeed there are no talks taking place at this point. The US president continues to insist that the whole crisis was "caused" by the Iranians "for decades" but that it is the US now looking for a "solution" - but Iran won't play ball , after apparently 'begging' for talks...
We're only 5 months in ... one wonders what the narrative will be with the US still bogged down in Hormuz by November :
Trump Claimed Talks Set For Monday Afternoon, Tehran Balks
President Trump now says new talks with Iran will begin Monday afternoon after he called off a planned "massive attack" - following high level Saudi intervention, and also likely White House advisors and Pentagon leadership failing to agree on a strategic vision.
"The Saudis expressed concern and asked for clarity about the plan of action," one US official told Axios over the weekend, with another saying that crown prince Mohammed bin Salman urged Trump to de-escalate and refrain from launching the strikes. Trump aknowledged all of this to reporters aboard Air Force One while returning from Bedminster, New Jersey, to Joint Base Andrews. He claimed the canceled attack would have been "the biggest attack since World War II" and could have been "disastrous" for Iran.
"I was asked to by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, by Qatar, and by Iran to hold off strikes," Trump said. "It would have been a massive attack." He added: "When the allies asked to call it off, you gotta say, Well, let's see."
"I asked the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, 'What would you rather have us do?'" Trump said. "He said, 'We would prefer a deal rather than an attack.'" And more: "Allies think there is a deal," Trump explained. "There is a deal on Hormuz, and it will be a deal on the nuclear."
Iran says No Negotiations Happening
Iranian officials said there are currently no negotiations with the United States and that Tehran is not planning to send or host any delegations "these days."
However, Iran has confirmed that it is deep into negotiations over managing the Strait of Hormuz with Oman, and that it desires to get more ships moving through the vital transit waterway. According to Bloomberg on Monday :
Iran suggested negotiations to get more ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz are making progress , after President Donald Trump called off what he said was a major attack on the Islamic Republic.
Oil fell on Monday, with Brent crude down about 4.5% to just over $83 a barrel, after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said discussions between Tehran and Oman over management of the strait are in the final stages.
While Tehran officials acknowledged that negotiations with Oman are ongoing and that progress has been made toward securing a temporary passage through the Strait of Hormuz, they stressed that reaching an agreement with Oman alone would not be enough to reopen the waterway, warning that the situation will remain unchanged as long as US "aggression" continues .
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei conveyed also that China is concerned about "the escalation of conflict and insecurity in the region" and is working to prevent the situation from worsening. He described that there is no new mediator involved in contacts with Washington, with Pakistan and Qatar continuing to carry out that role.
On the broader conflict, Baghaei argued that the US-Israeli war on Iran is not merely a war against one country, but "a war against the entire region." He laid out that Iran once again rejected attempts to tie developments in Yemen to the conflict with Iran, calling such claims "a form of evasion of responsibility."
"We currently do not have negotiations with America," and Iran had no plans to host foreign delegations or send negotiators abroad in the coming days, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters.
Iranians 'Won't Bend' - Reuters Analyst Points Out
Meanwhile, the on-again, off-again style of escalation and de-escalation pattern we are witnessing is likely only helping Tehran's side in terms of leverage, as the conflict grinds on and potentially becomes more politically costly for the White House.
Referring to the Iranians, Reuters writes in new analysis, "They see an opportunity in what they regard as President Donald Trump's reluctance to become deeply entangled ?in another Middle East conflict ahead of November's midterm elections."
"The Iranians...believe that by widening the war and increasing the pressure, he will eventually give in," a Gulf source is cited in the report as saying. "Trump thinks he can hit the Iranians hard and bring them to the negotiating table, but they won't bend." That much should be obvious by now, as Trump Tacos once again.
According to more from Reuters: "Iran is betting it can outlast Washington by turning the Middle East's trade routes, shipping lanes and energy infrastructure into pressure points that steadily raise the cost of confrontation, according to Gulf officials and analysts."
Who can outlast? This is currently month #6 of the war...
via ABC7
"Rather than seeking a ?decisive military victory, Tehran is pursuing a strategy of calibrated escalation aimed at widening the conflict without triggering full-scale war," the report continues. But that much should have been obvious and anticipated from week one of the war, and clearly the US side underestimated things.
More Latest Developments
via Newsquawk
US President Trump said the US is locked and loaded and ready to go against Iran, but they “have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal have been agreed to. This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat. Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL.”
In further comments, US President Trump said the Iran attack would have been a massive one if not paused, adding there's a deal on Hormuz and there will be a deal on denuclearisation. He added that he was asked very strongly by Iran to hold off the attack. On negotiations, he said they will begin tomorrow afternoon.
US CENTCOM was reported on Friday to have prepared a large-scale operation in the form of a decisive two-week bombing campaign should President Trump choose escalation to break the deadlock in the Middle East, according to The Hill reports, citing sources.
US Central Command intelligence official wrote in an email that they are seeking new and unconventional ways to increase pressure on and punish Iran, according to an internal message circulated among military analysts, according to CNN
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson said negotiations with Oman are progressing, with the two sides holding constructive talks on a new framework and exchanging maps over the past seven to eight days for review, IRNA reported.
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Baghaei said Iran is working with Oman to establish a temporary security corridor in the Strait of Hormuz, adding that Tehran is not currently in dialogue with the US and is holding talks with Oman on the waterway. Baghaei added that issues with the US should be addressed at a later stage and that there are no plans to receive a US delegation or send an Iranian delegation in the coming days.
Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi told a cabinet meeting on Sunday that the negotiations with Oman to manage shipping through the Strait of Hormuz “were in the final stages”, according to FT. It was separately reported that Araghchi held phone calls with Saudi, Pakistan and Iraqi counterparts and exchanged views on the latest developments in the region, while he warned on Saturday against any adventurous action by the US and stressed Iran's readiness to respond decisively to any aggression.
Iranian lawmaker Qashqawi said there are no discussions with the US or talks on the nuclear issue, adding that US sanctions amount to war; lasting peace can only be pursued once the military, economic and media conflict ends, SNN reported.
Iran’s Mehr News Agency rejected US President Trump’s claim that he halted attacks at the request of Iran and Middle East countries, while it called it “a new lie” and emphasised that Iran’s forces are on full alert.
UKMTO said on Saturday it received a report of an incident 21 nautical miles northeast of Oman's Khasab, where the master of the tanker saw a large splash and explosion in close proximity to the vessel, although no damage to the vessel was reported.
Israel told the White House it has significant security concerns over a proposed Hamas disarmament agreement, saying intelligence suggests Hamas intends to rebuild its military capabilities rather than genuinely disarm. Israel added that it will not withdraw from most of Gaza until Hamas has fully completed the disarmament process.
Palestinian civil defence said Israeli drone and airstrikes hit multiple locations across the Gaza Strip, killing at least 18 people, including two women and four children, with residential apartments, tents sheltering displaced people and civilian areas among the reported targets.
Kpler shipping data showed 18 vessels passed through the Bab al-Mandeb on Sunday, compared to the 27 vessels on Saturday.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/03/2026 - 17:50 Close