Month: July 2026

Amid the broader debate over artificial intelligence’s economic disruptions, the healthcare sector is quietly demonstrating some of the technology’s most concrete applications. Rather than the job losses feared in other industries, hospitals report AI augmenting physicians, streamlining routine tasks and accelerating innovation in ways that could improve outcomes while controlling costs.

At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, roughly 150 AI models are now in use. A tool called Record Time helps internists distill hundreds of pages of external medical records into searchable summaries, saving five to 30 minutes per patient, according to CNN.

“AI can step in and do a lot of the tedious work that very specialized doctors or medical professionals do to speed up that process – get to more accurate diagnoses, faster so you can treat more people,” Jason Droege, CEO of Scale AI, said.

Mayo is also testing AI for early pancreatic-cancer detection, potentially years ahead of conventional diagnosis, and for identifying atrial-fibrillation risks that could prevent strokes. The clinic partners with Microsoft and other firms to train models on its vast trove of patient data.

Radiology, once predicted to be AI’s first casualty, tells a similar story of augmentation rather than obsolescence – though the most-cited evidence comes from an interested party. A report from Build American AI – a nonprofit advocacy arm of Leading the Future, the $100 million pro-AI super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI executives – finds the U.S. radiologist workforce in Medicare-affiliated practices grew 17.3% between 2014 and 2023. At Mayo itself, the group says, the number of radiologists expanded 55% since 2016. The organization does not disclose its donors and lobbies for federal preemption of state AI rules, so the figures warrant independent checking against Medicare provider data.

Utah recently became the first state to allow an AI system from Doctronic to renew prescriptions for chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. In the pilot’s first five months, the AI recommended approval in 72% of cases, with physicians concurring 91% of the time; it escalated the rest when complications appeared, Forbes reports. The program targets established medications, maintains human oversight and bars controlled substances.

Tampa General Hospital estimates that an AI-enabled sepsis-detection system it built with Palantir has helped save 886 lives since August 2022, cutting early sepsis deaths by 68%. The figure is the hospital’s own assessment of a system developed with a commercial partner.

In drug development, AI’s impact may prove most transformative. A TD Cowen survey of biopharma leaders found executives expect the technology to compress preclinical costs and timelines by as much as 70%, powering in-silico modeling that simulates thousands of experiments rapidly, Axios reports. Respondents expect new drug programs to expand more than 10% in the coming years.

Yet inside the very institutions championing AI, opposition is already brewing.

Mayo Clinic’s former Director of Research Operations Traci Tamiko Eto sued the hospital earlier this month, alleging she was retaliated against for raising privacy and oversight concerns around some Mayo AI systems. Mayo Clinic spokesperson Andrea Kalmanovitz said the hospital doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation but underscored that it is “committed to the responsible development and deployment of AI, with privacy, security, transparency and compliance embedded throughout our processes.”

“Our research and clinical innovation are conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and we remain steadfast in upholding the trust patients place in us and respecting their privacy,” Kalmanovitz said in a statement.

A stomach parasite spread by feces on fresh produce has now sickened people in 41 states, federal health officials said – five days after the FDA pulled back the only lab test linking the outbreak to the lettuce it recalled.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said July 21 it has confirmed 4,173 domestic cases of cyclosporiasis since May 1 and is tracking more than 7,400 additional reported cases that labs have not yet confirmed. Many of those came from Michigan and Ohio. The agency has moved to weekly surveillance updates this year because of the increase over the same period in 2025.

The confirmed total is nearly four times the 1,180 cases the agency recorded during all of last season.

Forty-one states have reported cases, up from 34 four days earlier. Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Wyoming reported their first cases of the summer this week.

Those cases are not all one outbreak. The CDC says it is investigating multiple separate clusters this summer. The lettuce investigation is one of them, and it covers five states.

Of the confirmed patients nationally, 308 have been hospitalized and none have died. They ranged in age from 2 to 95. Fifty-six percent were female, and the median date of illness onset was June 26.

Taylor Farms, a California-based supplier, recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico on July 17 after investigators tied it to illnesses in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The lettuce was served at some Taco Bell locations. That cluster accounts for 1,644 reported illnesses and 94 hospitalizations.

Lettuce See About That

Two days after the recall, the FDA said a lettuce sample it had announced as testing positive for the parasite had not actually tested positive.

“During a quality check by our laboratory personnel, we did detect the false positive, and we did issue a correction,” Donald Prater, the agency’s acting deputy commissioner for food, told reporters on a call.

Prater said the recall stands.

“It’s important to note that the re-evaluation of the sample does not alter the data supporting the outbreak advisory that prompted the current voluntary recall,” he said. “FDA’s traceback investigation and the outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms location in central Mexico.”

The case against the lettuce now rests on shipping records and patient interviews. The CDC says 90 percent of the patients it interviewed in the five-state cluster reported eating iceberg lettuce. No sample of the recalled product has tested positive for the parasite.

That last point is less damning than it sounds. Cyclospora is among the hardest foodborne pathogens to catch in a sample. It cannot be grown in a laboratory – the parasite needs a human host to reproduce – so investigators cannot culture a suspected find to confirm it. It occurs in very small numbers, meaning samples must be enormous to detect anything. Its oocysts lodge in surface crevices that resist washing. Positive product samples are rare in Cyclospora investigations even when the source is eventually established.

Taylor Farms said July 20 that no Taylor Farms-branded products are involved in the recall, that it will not source iceberg lettuce from central Mexico “for the remainder of the growing season,” and that it is working with health officials.

State health departments are reporting far higher numbers than the CDC. Michigan counted 6,571 cases and 102 hospitalizations as of Monday. The Toledo-Lucas County Health Department in Ohio counted 2,149. The CDC does not include probable cases in its updates; many states do.

The federal count is also climbing on both sides of the ledger. A week ago the agency listed 1,645 confirmed cases and more than 5,100 awaiting analysis. The confirmed number rose by about 2,500. The unconfirmed number rose by about 2,300.

Cyclosporiasis symptoms include watery diarrhea, cramping, loss of appetite and fatigue. Symptoms typically begin about a week after exposure. The illness is treated with antibiotics.

Cases appear every summer. The CDC’s season runs through August 31.

Federal investigators have pulled a product off the shelves that no laboratory test has implicated, on the strength of shipping records and what sick people remember eating. With this parasite that may be the only call available. It also means that when the season closes on August 31, the case against the lettuce will rest roughly where it rests today – and the thousands of cases outside those five states will still be looking for a source.

A shitty situation all around…

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The federal government is pausing more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to two states, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is withholding more than $867 million from California and more than $200 million from Minnesota.

Advanced analytics, identified through financial investigation and artificial intelligence, identified suspicious activity and potential fraud, officials said.

“Every dollar the federal government allows to be lost to fraud, waste, and abuse is a dollar stolen from American patients and the American taxpayer. That’s money that should be going to legitimate health care,” Kennedy told a press conference in Washington.

He added later, “If those states want that money, they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, told The Epoch Times via email, “The Trump Administration is cutting more money in healthcare than they’ve prosecuted for fraud. The math doesn’t add up. They’re not punishing fraudsters, they’re punishing children, seniors, working families, and people with disabilities. This is about cutting healthcare for people they don’t care about in their campaign of retribution against Minnesota.”

Walz’s office said that he has been combating Medicaid fraud, including halting 745 payments since January.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said on X that California was being targeted for political reasons.

“We hate fraud. That’s not what this is. And we stand ready to collaborate with CMS in good faith efforts to combat fraud,” he wrote.

Medicaid is a federal health program. About 67 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid as of March. Medicaid is administered by states, which must follow federal requirements, and is funded by both the federal government and states.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the CMS administrator, told reporters on Tuesday that officials want the states to help the federal government make sure the funds are going to “real people with real problems getting real care.”

Among the problems identified, he said, was the federal government being charged for providers providing care for deceased people and providers billing for services provided more than a year prior.

He also said that California’s spending on support services for people at their homes increased 24 percent in recent years, which was about twice the average across the other states.

“If it smells like fraud, we’re not paying for it anymore,” Oz said.

Dan Brillman, director of Medicaid, said during the briefing that the Trump administration is still withholding an additional $259 million from Minnesota and $1.3 billion from California that officials said they were pausing earlier in the year.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, vice chairman of the White House’s Anti-Fraud Task Force, said on Tuesday that the administration is also focused on sending people who commit fraud to jail, pointing to how federal prosecutors in June said they’ve charged 455 people, including 90 doctors and other medical professionals with licenses, with participating in health care fraud and opioid abuse operations.

Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations,

For much of its five-decade history, the Colorado Energy Office was a small department with a handful of employees who supported practical, cost-saving energy conservation measures. From 2010 to 2022, records show, the office received an average of $7 million per year from the U.S. Department of Energy.

All that changed after the Biden administration and Congress approved hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending to provide “a more equitable, low-carbon, and clean energy economy.” In fiscal year 2024, Colorado’s state energy office was slated to receive $157.5 million from the energy department, along with another $156 million from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Biden team’s defeat in the 2024 election didn’t stop the gusher, either, as an additional $60 million in funding was allocated after voters elected Trump and his promise to halt the spending.

A RealClearInvestigations search of government data shows that the Colorado Energy Office was just one of many agencies and groups across the country that received exponential increases in federal grants during Biden’s last two years as part of the unprecedented attempt to refashion federal agencies into the finance engines that would transform the U.S. energy sector to a renewable, Net Zero future.

The Treasury Department’s database suggests that after Congress passed the unprecedented funding to fight climate change, it looked for outfits that could disperse that money at the state and local level. In response, it turned to many organizations in the public and private sector with no track record for handling such vast sums, as well as state energy offices and agencies.

“Biden-era climate policy sometimes prioritized sending money out the door first, and worrying about logistics and oversight second,” said Jeremy Portnoy, an investigator with OpenTheBooks who seeks to make all government spending public. “Money went to groups that were receiving grants larger than they had the capability to manage.”

Although they represent only a sliver of Biden-era spending on green energy, the sudden promise of $9.5 billion in awards to state and county energy programs beginning in FY2024 and the Trump administration efforts to claw back some of that money highlight how shifts in White House policies can make long-term planning hard, especially regarding partisan policy issues.

In response to Trump’s efforts to halt much of the spending, a coalition of 13 Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in February seeking to have all the approved grant money dispensed. They argued the Trump administration unfairly targeted states controlled by Democrats, and that without the money those states’ “ambitious climate goals” may not be reached.

“Since the first day of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, his Administration set out to reverse and undermine the historic energy and infrastructure funding measures enacted by Congress in the preceding years,” according to the lawsuit. “Its true purpose was to give the Administration thin bureaucratic cover to eliminate congressionally established energy and infrastructure programs and rescind their funding, for no other reason than a fundamental disagreement with the programs’ policy underpinnings.”

The legal challenges have scored some successes; last month the Energy Department agreed to reinstate 11 grants, although the largest of them remain in limbo.

Three Huge Beneficiaries

While most states received some portion of the climate splurge, RCI’s analysis focused on three of the biggest beneficiaries: Colorado, California, and New York, which were poised to receive more than $1 billion.

Like the Colorado Energy Office, the New York Energy Research and Development Institute and the California Energy Commission were started as energy conservation initiatives in the 1970s when the U.S. was reeling from the oil embargo shock, and the economy’s blood seemed dependent on the wills of foreign actors. In more recent decades, all three have also focused on renewable energy, with a special emphasis on social justice equity. Today, the New York institute has nearly 500 employees with an average salary of $127,220, while the California Commission enjoys regulatory powers over siting energy plants and sets state energy policies.

In addition to state funding and, in New York and California, money from ratepayers, these three state agencies routinely received federal grants for relatively small amounts, according to the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov.

But then Biden’s Investment Infrastructure and Jobs Act and his Inflation Reduction Act kicked in, and the Energy Department began to approve enormous sums for the state agencies. The grant bonanza went on for roughly 18 months beginning in 2023 and was capped by a post-election frenzy in December 2024 and January 2025, records show. Suddenly, the three Democratic state agencies were receiving grants 10 or more times bigger than anything they had gotten previously.

An RCI review of the FY2024 data showed both the unprecedented size of the grants and the rapidity with which they were greenlit:

• The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority got an average of $5.2 million a year in Energy Department grants from 2015 to 2021. In 2024, however, it was slated to receive $335.38 million. Even after Trump’s 2024 election, $30 million was approved in three grants.
• The Colorado Energy Office averaged $6.7 million from 2015 to 2021. Its 2024 grant haul was on top of almost $60 million in fiscal year 2023, and post-2024 election grants to the office were for nearly another $60 million.
• The California Energy Commission averaged $3.1 million for the seven years between 2015 and 2021, a figure that increased by more than a hundred-fold in 2024. After the 2024 election, another $630.5 million grant was approved, one of seven post-election grants.

And the grants came in rapid procession, records show. In California’s case, there were four grants totaling $1.4 billion in the last six months of the 2024 calendar year, while the Energy Department and the EPA combined to greenlight more than $400 million in July and August of that year.

The Treasury Department has rarely disbursed these grants in full. Unlocking that money is the main goal of a February lawsuit brought by the attorneys general. And, as RCI previously reported, totals on usaspending.gov do not always match those from other agencies, reflecting the complexity and scale of federal spending.

But the extraordinary amounts and compressed timeline reflect a blizzard of approved spending that the inspectors general of the respective federal agencies warned would make effective oversight of the money nearly impossible.

Nebulous & Questionable

The grants were designed to pay for tasks such as improving the resilience of the grid in the face of disasters or the integration of renewable energy into the grid, or for reducing methane emissions. Yet another purpose was for programs such as home weatherization, a federal operation dogged by allegations of fraud and shoddy work, as RCI reported in 2022.

Some of the biggest grants were for nebulous-sounding work. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act was the source of funding “to provide initial guidance for the planning, administration or technical assistance for future distributions of formula awards through the home energy rebate programs.”

Such “initial guidance” would not come cheaply. The Colorado Energy Office was set to get two separate $70 million awards for such work, records show, while the California Energy Commission would get $580 million for the same task and the New York energy institute more than $310 million.

The weatherization of low-income households began with the Obama administration’s 2009 spending bill, and it got a big boost under President Biden. For example, two grants, for $70 million each, were earmarked for the Colorado Energy Office’s weatherization projects in fiscal year 2024, records show.

As with other stories RCI has done on Biden’s climate change spending, the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment. But current White House officials maintain that the grant binge ended during President Trump’s second term.

“While the Biden administration threw taxpayer dollars at Green New Scam ideological pet projects, the Trump administration is focused on reshoring critical supply chains and safeguarding our national and economic security – all while ensuring the best bargain for taxpayers in every deal,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told RCI.

The Colorado Energy Office declined comment, and NYSERDA did not respond to RCI’s questions about the grants.

The California Energy Commission, on the other hand, said much of the grant money was tied to formula spending, such as “clean energy retrofits” in residential homes.

“California is meeting growing electricity demand by rapidly building out affordable clean energy infrastructure, increasing grid resilience and transmission capacity, and electrifying new and existing buildings with energy efficient appliances that help lower energy bills,” a Commission spokesperson told RCI. “Federal grant funding is critical for California and other states to quickly meet growing energy demand and to do it in the smartest way possible – with clean renewable electricity.”

There was one FY2024 grant to the CEC specifically labeled as “formula;” however, an $11.7 million grant was fully disbursed by Treasury.

New Priorities

In the grand scheme of federal spending, the amounts may not seem huge. They are dwarfed, for instance, in comparison to the grants Washington has made for interstate highways.

“Biden wanted to jumpstart the green energy economy so it’s not surprising to me a couple of billion dollars were spent,” said John Joseph Wallis, an economics professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in public finance. “They just decided to make that a priority, and there are hundreds of examples of that kind of thing over the last century.”

But as the renewable energy grants began to flow, inspectors general at the Energy Department and the EPA warned the unprecedented amounts would make oversight next to impossible.

“The EPA’s inspector general Sean O’Donnell warned Congress that money would be lost to fraud and waste if the EPA went ahead with its plan to spend billions in Inflation Reduction Act funds in a short timeframe, but the money was funneled out anyway,” Portnoy said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has made several moves to reorient the Department toward Trump’s policy goal of increasing affordable and abundant energy, a shift the administration in a first-day executive order labeled “unleashing American energy,” and Wright’s Department calls the “Energy Dominance Financing Program.”

Over the past year and a half, the administration has slashed away at what it considers Biden’s fanciful push toward a Net Zero future. Within two months it had put together a so-called “kill list” of recent renewable energy initiatives, and last October, the administration canceled $7.6 billion in Biden-era energy grants, with White House budget director Russell Vought saying the money had been designed to “fuel the Left’s climate agenda.”

Wright told a House committee last month that politics were not behind cuts at Energy, but the February lawsuit insists that they were, pointing to the hit list drawn up by the Department in 2025. “The list was intended to further the Administration’s goal of eliminating renewable-energy programs created by Congress through the duly-enacted 2021 IIJA and the 2022 IRA – programs the Administration derisively calls the ‘Green New Scam,'” the lawsuit alleged. It’s not clear how many of the grants that were approved in Biden’s final year are tied to that lawsuit, although the California Energy Commission said its major grants are not.

The suit makes various arguments as to why this money should still be spent. Chief among them is that the money flows out of statutes duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. And in some cases it also says that without these huge infusions of federal funds, some states will not be able to hit ambitious targets they set to combat global warming.

Leftist environmental groups have calculated the difference between the closure of renewable energy projects in the Biden and Trump administrations, according to a New York Times column in May. Their figures show Biden “canceled, closed or downsized” 25 such projects worth $3.5 billion in 2023 and 2024, while last year, Trump’s first back in office, saw 61 such projects crimped or shuttered with a value of $34.76 billion.

But Larry Behrens, spokesman for the conservative Power The Future energy advocacy group, said there is no reason taxpayers should finance coastal states’ efforts to shift their economies from traditional energy sources to renewables.

“Working families in Louisiana, Florida, or Ohio should not be forced to bankroll the out-of-touch climate goals for politicians in New York, California, or Illinois,” he said. “Every one of these grants should be scrutinized for fraud so taxpayers will stop being treated like an unlimited ATM for the green agenda.”

The threat environment facing individuals under U.S. Secret Service protection, including President Trump, is the highest the agency has ever recorded, a senior official said during a background briefing with reporters, according to CNBC.

“What we’re seeing now is something I’ve never seen before,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of a public briefing.

The Secret Service has logged roughly 10,000 cases involving threats against government officials, including Supreme Court justices, so far in 2026 – a 40% increase from the same period a year earlier.

“They’re increasing in volume and complexity,” the official warned. The agency has also recorded a tenfold increase in mental-health commitments of individuals suspected of threatening protectees.

The remarks landed a week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a House subcommittee that threats against her and her colleagues on the Court have risen sharply.

Why They’re Briefing Now

The timing is not incidental. The briefing came ahead of Friday’s rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, which Trump is expected to attend.

It needed rescheduling because of what happened at the last one. In April, a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun and knives stormed a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton during the dinner, with the president in attendance, before being apprehended. Cole Tomas Allen now faces charges of attempting to assassinate the president.

That was not an isolated event. On May 4, a man was wounded in a firefight with Secret Service personnel near the Washington Monument. Three weeks later, on May 23, a gunman approached the White House while Trump was inside the residence, drew a firearm and discharged multiple rounds before being fatally shot by agents. In February, Secret Service and local police shot and killed a man armed with a shotgun who had breached a secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago.

Four incidents in six months, at four separate protected sites. That is the ledger behind the 40% figure.

The Butler Problem

The current alarm builds on two assassination attempts in 2024. On July 13 of that year, gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing attendee Corey Comperatore and seriously wounding two others.

An Office of Inspector General report found that the Secret Service missed more than 100 radio transmissions from local law enforcement about a suspicious individual – now believed to be Crooks – armed with a rangefinder and rifle. Agents failed to relay critical warnings, establish proper joint communications, or secure the rooftop vantage point.

Those findings describe a catastrophic operational breakdown. They do not describe complicity, and the OIG made no such finding. But for the family of the man who died there, the distinction has offered cold comfort.

Comperatore’s widow, Helen Comperatore, made headlines last week when she suggested the attempt on Trump’s life was “an inside job.”

“I believe he was working with somebody,” she told NewsNation. “I believe it was an inside job, inside the government somewhere.” No investigation has produced evidence supporting that claim, and the agency has attributed the failures to breakdowns in communication and planning.

Two months after Butler, a Secret Service officer fired at another gunman, Ryan Routh, who had concealed himself in shrubbery near the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh was convicted in Florida federal court last September of attempting to assassinate the president, among other charges, and is serving a life sentence.

The Problem Above The Perimeter

The concern growing fastest inside the agency is one that walks past every countermeasure it has spent a century building. Drones approach from outside conventional security perimeters and cannot be screened, wanded, or turned away at a checkpoint.

The scale is no longer theoretical. The FBI said this week it seized more than 700 illegal drones and detected roughly 1,600 in total across the eleven U.S. stadiums hosting World Cup matches – venues holding tens of thousands of people at a time.

Secret Service Director Sean Curran has said the agency is examining “kinetic solutions – something that we haven’t done before,” and has pushed its technology division to move faster. The OIG’s Butler review separately faulted the agency’s counter-drone training and preparedness, a gap it has since worked to close.

The Foreign File

More recently, Israel shared intelligence with the U.S. indicating a fresh Iranian plot to assassinate Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal. Iran has for years publicly vowed retaliation for the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, and the ongoing war has sharpened concern about foreign actors targeting the president.

Authored by Jon Fleetwood via JonFleetwood.com,

In 2018, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed building a portable computer system allegedly capable of determining whether a person had been exposed to biological or chemical threats – including weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their precursors.

Even with no physical evidence.

DARPA outlined the proposal in Broad Agency Announcement HR001118S0023 for a program known as ECHO (Epigenetic CHaracterization and Observation).

DARPA proposed accomplishing this by comparing purported changes inside the person’s own biology against a government-built reference library and algorithmically identifying both the alleged threat and when the exposure supposedly occurred.

Viewed alongside DARPA’s broader pandemic-era research portfolio, the proposal also raises a larger question explored by this publication’s In Silico Theory: as governments increasingly replace direct observation with computational models, reference libraries, and algorithmic determinations, where does objective evidence end and computer-generated conclusions begin?

It also raises an immediate practical question.

If an algorithm operating on a government-controlled reference library determines that someone was exposed to a dangerous biological or chemical threat without physical evidence, what meaningful mechanism exists for independently verifying – or successfully challenging – that determination?

SAM.gov search results associated with DARPA solicitation HR001118S0023 identify at least $53.8 million in awards, including a $49.2 million contract awarded to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a $4.5 million contract awarded to Arizona State University.

The Core Capability

Rather than searching for the biological or chemical agent itself, ECHO proposed “identifying” alleged long-lasting biological signatures left behind after an exposure.

DARPA described the objective:

“utilize an individual’s epigenome to reveal their history of exposure to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and WMD precursors.”

The solicitation explains why DARPA believed this was possible:

“the epigenome is persistent and detectable even when physical evidence has been erased.”

That sentence is arguably the centerpiece of the entire program.

The proposed system was designed to continue generating exposure determinations long after the original biological or chemical material was no longer available for direct examination.

Epigenetics is the study of purported chemical modifications associated with DNA that researchers say can change in response to biological and environmental influences without altering a person’s genetic code.

A Government-Built Exposure Library

To accomplish that objective, DARPA instructed performers to create what it called the ECHO Signature Panel (ESP) – a centralized library containing purported epigenetic signatures associated with specific exposures.

Contractors were required to generate signatures for a minimum of 21 exposure conditions, including mandatory biological threat agents and additional chemical, radiological, explosive, and related materials.

Future unknown samples would then be compared against that growing reference panel.

DARPA explained the process:

“The developed algorithms will need to compare an unknown exposure against the ESP to identify the specific exposure, and when the individual was exposed.”

In other words, the proposed system would not simply measure biology.

It would compare an individual’s biological patterns against a government-built reference library and output a determination regarding both the nature and timing of an alleged exposure.

The Computer Makes The Determination

The solicitation envisioned an almost completely automated process.

DARPA required:

“no human intervention between the time the sample is introduced and results pertinent to exposure and timing is provided.”

Insert the sample.

Run the algorithms.

Receive the determination.

The individual would not be interpreting raw laboratory findings.

The system itself would produce the conclusion.

When The Person Becomes The Evidence

Traditional forensic investigations often rely on recovering the biological or chemical agent itself.

ECHO proposed something different.

According to the solicitation, the system was intended to continue identifying exposure after the physical evidence had been erased by relying instead on computational comparison against stored biological signatures.

That architecture raises an obvious question.

If the original biological or chemical material no longer exists, and the determination instead comes from an algorithm comparing an individual’s biology against a government-controlled reference library, how would an ordinary person independently verify – or meaningfully challenge – that conclusion?

Could the system be weaponized or used fraudulently?

The document itself does not answer that question.

Instead, it focuses on improving the speed, automation, and reliability of the computational determination.

DARPA Anticipated Attempts To Defeat The System

One small line buried within the solicitation is especially revealing.

Among the categories requiring special handling, DARPA listed:

“Potential procedure to evade ECHO Signature Panel identification.”

The agency was not merely interested in creating exposure signatures.

It was already contemplating how those signatures – and the identification system built around them – might be circumvented.

Bottom Line

Much of the discussion surrounding ECHO focuses on epigenetics.

That risks obscuring what the solicitation actually proposed.

At its core, ECHO described a government-built computational system designed to determine whether an individual had been exposed to specified biological or chemical threats by comparing representations of that person’s biology against a centralized signature library – even after the underlying physical evidence was gone.

Whether such a system could perform as intended is a separate scientific question.

The more immediate journalistic question is what follows if such algorithmic determinations are relied upon in military, intelligence, public-health, or legal settings.

When there is no physical evidence and the conclusion rests on a proprietary reference library and algorithmic comparison, what avenues exist for independent verification or meaningful challenge?

What happens to the person after the algorithm determines they’ve been exposed?

And if those algorithmic determinations are ever used to justify quarantine, criminal investigation, military action, employment decisions, travel restrictions, or other government action, what protections exist for the person the computer has already declared was exposed?

Follow Jon Fleetwood on Instagram and X, and subscribe at JonFleetwood.com. (h/t Modernity.news)

Submitted by blueapples on X via ashesofacacia.substack.com,

After watching The Odyssey (don’t worry, I pirated it), all I can say is that the hatred it fomented was ultimately to its benefit. It caused a reactionary response that amplified the hype surrounding the movie, with the hate-posting ultimately serving as free publicity. It needed it because the movie was extraordinarily mediocre. A solid 4/10, and that’s only largely because the source material innately provides such a compelling story.

As someone whose heritage is Greek, I completely understood that outrage. Hearing people complain about “cultural appropriation” when the foundation of Western civilization is built on my own culture always comes across as absurdly ironic to me. Every time I hear some liberal NPC bitching about cultural appropriation, I always wait for them to bring up voting to ask them how engaging in democracy isn’t an act of cultural appropriation, which they of course just respond to by defaulting to some empty platitude they’ve been programmed to say.

Nevertheless, the rage-posting over the movie became really tiresome to me. It’s Hollywood. What would you expect? If you’re going to look at a commercially driven film from Christopher Nolan as if it should be the paragon of artistic integrity, then you really only have yourself to blame. There is an abundance of amazing film out there, past, present, and future. Art, whether it’s film, music, or any other medium, needs to be something that is a catalyst for self-exploration; it should be sought out by an audience, not served to them. Depending on an industry to curate that experience is about as rational as depending on CNN or Fox News to deliver you the truth in their news coverage. All the same people complaining about “woke” movies are ultimately assimilating into the paradigm that promotes them. They’ll be the first to watch Citizen Vigilante or some empty movie marketed to the right wing for the same commercial motives and laud it despite it being awful and the only value of the film triggering their confirmation bias.

Having said that, people critical of the casting in Nolan’s The Odyssey were entirely merited in their vitriol. The virtual signaling done by the casting decisions is made clearer as the film plays out. Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra are really just used to show off Lupita Nyong’o being black. It’s clear their characters weren’t sought out by Nolan to play a particularly important part rather than being plot devices, which makes it hard to believe there was any real imperative to casting her on the basis of her ability as an actress. What makes that even more obvious is that each of those characters play incredibly important and compelling roles in Homer’s epic poem, with much more focus being on Helen, of course. Helen is minimized far more than Clytemnestra, which is incredible considering she’s the impetus of the Trojan War itself.

Then there’s Elliot Page as Sinon. This is perhaps the most obvious example of forced casting, as Sinon is not a character in Homer’s epic poem. Instead, Sinon is depicted as the Greek spy who tricks the Trojans into bringing the Trojan Horse into the city of Troy in Virgil’s The Aeneid. There was really no reason to have Sinon other than for the plot device Nolan utilizes him as later in the film. The addition of Sinon is the second biggest departure from the source material as far as the plot of the story is concerned, other than the ending which Nolan rewrites to name Telemachus as king and have Odysseus and Penelope exiled from Ithaca for breaking the Greek law of xenia, or hospitality, which is for some reason called the Law of Zeus rather than the Law of Hestia, but I digress. Nolan has worked with Page in the past, when she was the secondary lead in the woefully awful 2010 science fiction movie Inception, so there is an element of familiarity behind the casting, but the publicity behind casting someone transgender comes across as the motive behind the casting more than anything else.

La escena de Elliot Page que me quedé esperando de La Odisea pic.twitter.com/xR7p6S3Z9h

— Njord (@VikingoArtico) July 18, 2026

The flaws in the casting don’t just have to do with the apparent DEI initiative behind many of the choices, though. The acting was woeful other than Anne Hathaway and John Leguizamo. Even their contributions to the film aren’t acted out with any sense of nuance. Their performances are largely just amplified by being juxtaposed against very stunted and hollow acting displayed by the rest of the cast.

That sense of emptiness isn’t exclusive to the acting. As is the case in all Christopher Nolan films, there was an overarching sterility behind the whole thing that made it very hard to invest in any of the characters or storylines, which says a lot considering it’s The Odyssey. Odysseus bidding farewell to Argos is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in any work of literature ever, yet it came across as obligatory and, due to the gravity it plays in the plot, made for a very anticlimactic ending.

The special effects have been lauded, and I really have no idea why. I get why not defaulting to CGI is something people admire, but it comes across as performative when the practical effects aren’t great. That is kind of a perfect distillation of the movie. Again — all hype, no substance.

One thing I was particularly interested in was how the gods were going to be handled. Their role in the Homeric epics was entirely absent from the 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film Troy, which I would recommend watching the director’s cut of instead of this trash from Nolan.

Athena is the focal point of the gods’ role in The Odyssey, but there’s no real sense of mystique behind how Nolan presents that. Matt Damon just talks to Zendaya, and then there’s a pan or cut, and it’s like, “Whoa, she’s gone!!!!” Only he can see her!!!! Crazy!!!!” which really is a sham considering how integrating the gods with natural phenomena would have been a great way to exercise special or practical effects. The absence of that is especially apparent when Odysseus finally returns home to Ithaca. In Homer’s epic, Athena clouds the island in a mist so that Odysseus can be hidden from his enemies. In the scene from the Nolan movie, there is a mist on the shores, but there’s very little done to illustrate the role Athena plays in creating it, other than her just being there. She doesn’t manifest from the mist, disappear into it, or have any connection that would connect her divinity to it. It’s ultimately just a perfect summation of how Zendaya plays the part of the goddess: she’s just there.

Odysseus’ long-awaited return to Ithaca in Book 13 of The Odyssey is also when Homer describes one of the most esoteric and mystical elements of the epic poem: the Cave of the Nymphs (no, not the one Jeffrey Epstein’s brother named his property management company after). The symbolism of the Cave of the Nymphs in The Odyssey is the perfect illustration of the scale of the poem and what it and Homer mean to Greek culture. Homer was far beyond a poet; he was viewed as a completely transcendent figure bordering on divinity himself. His followers viewed his works as much as works of theology as they were poetry.

This is made apparent by the exegetical treatise of lines 102 to 112 in Book 13 of The Odyssey, in which Homer describes the cave, On the Cave of the Nymphs, written by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry (who inspired the imagery of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life). In his treatise, Porphyry navigates the symbolism and metaphysical significance of the cave, penning one of the most profound and longest-lasting analyses of The Odyssey ever written. While it would be too much to expect Nolan to echo the wisdom of Porphyry, the oversight of that opportunity just goes to show how surface level his understanding of the story is and how much that comes across on screen.

One of my favorite YouTube Channels, Let’s Talk Religion, recently did an incredible examination of the allegory of the Cave of the Nymphs from The Odyssey that is worth a watch much more than Nolan’s movie.

In the end, it’s Christopher Nolan. He’s a movie maker, not a film maker (sans maybe Memento). He’s what a friend of mine calls “a cable movie director.” You get a blockbuster that plays to the greatest common denominator of people; that obviously was done by someone who is technically apt and very experienced when it comes to directing. What his interpretation of The Odyssey lacks is the emotional resonance that can only be achieved when a movie is able to communicate its heart and soul to an audience. That shortcoming is the perfect way to describe the movie given how its production completely disregarded the cultural and spiritual gravity that the epic poem has to the Hellenic people.

While I think much of that was purposeful and worth maligning the film for, I also question whether someone like Christopher Nolan has the capacity to have that kind of empathy enough to actually follow through on it. Nolan has described himself as being the most important person on the set of his productions because he serves as “the representative of the audience,” a completely disingenuous display of humility meant to serve as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. In the end, that is his undoing in terms of how his vision falls short of directors who are rightfully revered as auteurs. Nolan’s vision is one of pragmatism, viewed through the lens of the masses but put in the hands of a director who can achieve it. It is his vision, but that perspective makes him fall very short of being a visionary. While filmmakers bring their pictures to life, he brings his to the market, which is why the box office is what his legacy rests upon. The Odyssey is just another chapter in the annals of his filmography that will be remembered for quantitative achievements like its box office receipts rather than anything qualitative that is rooted in artistic merit.

TL;DR: The Odyssey gets a 4/10 from me. It wasn’t bad, but in some ways, the worst thing you can say about a film is that it’s “meh.”

After a dismal two years of weakening demand, falling sales, and damage to its brand by Elon Musk’s political activities, Tesla’s road to recovery remains mixed on the heels of an impressive delivery report.

While earnings fell 18% compared to Q2 2025 to 33c a share (well below expectations of 51c) with higher AI spending and R&D weighing on profitability; the silver lining was that Revenue came in at $28.2 billion, which was 28% higher than last year (well above expectations of $26.4 billion).

The company said it hit $100 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue for the first time in history in the second quarter, and earned $1.11 billion in net income in the quarter.

The company said its first-generation production lines for Optimus Bot are being installed in anticipation of production in 2026, with the company saying production will happen “soon.”

The Cybercab is listed as in production, an improvement from the company saying it expected volume production “this year” last quarter.

Tesla said the vehicle began production in the quarter.

The Tesla Semi is listed as “commissioning” and the company said it remains on track for volume production this year.

“We are focused on maximum capacity utilization at our factories,” the company said.

Despite the glorious robotic (and Robotaxi and AI compute) future ahead, Tesla remains a car company. And in the second quarter, it sold an impressive 480,126 vehicles, about a 25 percent increase compared to the second quarter of 2025.

Tesla’s automotive gross margins were 16.3% in the second quarter, up from 15% in Q2 2025, but down from 19.2% in Q1 of this year.

Active FSD subscriptions hit 1.48 million in the second quarter, up 56% year-over-year and up from the 1.28 million reported in the first quarter.

Additionally, Tesla said that they have more than doubled their onsite compute in Texas (in terms of MW of compute) during the first half of 2026. Cortex 2 supports the development of both vehicle and humanoid robot autonomy software and will ramp further over the rest of the year to ensure we have sufficient compute resources.

Tesla spent $5.8 billion in capital expenditures in the second quarter, bringing the first half’s total to about $8.28 billion. Though capex ramped over the past three months, it’s still not on track to meet the $25 billion in 2026 outlays Musk forecast in April.

Energy storage returned to being a revenue driver, with revenue increasing 13% year-over-year after slipping in the first quarter.

Tesla deployed 13.5 gigawatt hours of storage in 2Q, up more than 50% from the prior three months (as data centers are driving demand for batteries, which can help regulate power flows and speed up connections to the grid).

David Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, said:

“Tesla’s earnings tonight highlight a core tension between short-term financial realities and an ambitious long-term AI vision. While recent delivery rebounds demonstrate steady vehicle volume, heavy margin pressure from global price cuts and massive capital expenditure – projected at over $25 billion this year for AI compute, chips, and infrastructure – are squeezing free cash flow.”

“Ultimately, Tesla is asking investors to fund an aggressive infrastructure cycle: if its pivot into autonomous fleets and physical AI succeeds, the long-term upside is massive, but any regulatory or technological delays leave the stock vulnerable if judged solely on its core automotive margins.”

Nevertheless, the earnings miss is weighing on Tesla shares after hours, testing three-month lows ahead of the Tesla earnings conference call, with Musk at the helm, set to start about 1730ET.

Investor focus likely will be on robotaxis, Optimus robots, capital spending and CEO Elon Musk.

The company said it has “never been more optimistic about the future.”

As we wrote in our GOOGL preview, according to UBS and JPM analysts, the market would be watching two things above all else when Alphabet became the first hyperscaler to report earnings after the close today: capex guidance and monetization language, as “the debate has shifted from “how big is capex” to “who proves monetization and returns.” And yet, in light of the massive expectations for capex growth, the company was facing “downside risk” it it disappointed the buyside bars which were $100BN higher ($350-$375BN) than the median sellside estimate of $250BN. 

So what did GOOGL just report for fiscal second quarter moments ago? Well, Alphabet reported Q2 cloud revenues that surpassed Wall Street’s expectations but slightly missed on sales tied to its search-engine business, threatening to fuel concerns about its heavy spending on artificial intelligence. 

The Google parent also said cloud sales totaled $24.77 billion for the quarter ended June 30, a jump of 82% over the same period last year. That was better than the $22.46 billion that analysts expected, but well short of some buyside whisper bogeys. Sales from search advertising generated $63.27 billion, just below estimates for $63.28 billion. 

Here are the details: 

• Revenue ex-TAC $103.62 billion, +27% y/y, beating estimate $101.07 billion 
• Revenue $119.80 billion, +24% y/y, beating estimate $117.02 billion
  • Google Services revenue $94.54 billion, +15% y/y, beating estimate $94.32 billion
  • Google advertising revenue $81.63 billion, +14% y/y, beating estimate $81.12 billion
  • Google Search & Other Revenue $63.27 billion, +17% y/y, missing estimate $63.28 billion, and in line with the buyside bar of 17% growth. 
  • YouTube ads revenue $11.06 billion, +13% y/y, beating estimate $10.81 billion
  • Google Network Revenue $7.30 billion, -0.7% y/y, beating estimate $7.13 billion
  • Google Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices Revenue $12.91 billion, +15% y/y, missing estimate $13.06 billion
  • Google Cloud revenue $24.77 billion, +82% y/y, beating estimate $22.46 billion
  • Other Bets revenue $382 million, +2.4% y/y, missing estimate $402.2 million
  • Hedging gains $106 million, beating estimate $75.7 million
     
• Total TAC $16.18 billion, +10% y/y, higher than estimate $16.24 billion
• Operating income $40.77 billion, +30% y/y, beating estimate $40.55 billion
  • Google Services operating income $39.54 billion, +20% y/y, missing estimate $40.23 billion
  • Google Cloud operating income $8.81 billion vs. $2.83 billion y/y, beating estimate $6.91 billion
  • Other Bets operating loss $1.80 billion vs. loss $1.25 billion y/y, beating estimate loss $1.72 billion
  • Alphabet-level activities operating loss $5.79 billion vs. loss $3.37 billion y/y, estimate loss $4.81 billion
• Operating margin 34% vs. 32% y/y, estimate 34.7%
• Capital expenditure $44.92 billion vs. $22.45 billion y/y, just a bit higher than the estimate $44.15 billion; the real question is what will the company hint at 2027 capex. 

Here is what the company’s explosively growing capex looks like now:

Some other notable highlights from the report: 

• Number of employees 198,933, +6.3% y/y, estimate 195,527
• Gemini App MAUs 950 million
• Google Cloud backlog $514 billion
• Gain on equity securities of $99.03 billion

Commenting on the quarter, CEO Sundar Pichai said that “our popular AI features are driving Search query growth” although many would counter that GOOGL’s popular AI features were popular 9 months ago and users havelong since moved on to other platforms. He added that “Google Cloud saw a meaningful acceleration in growth as revenues increased 82% to $24.8 billion, led by an increase in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) across enterprise AI Solutions and enterprise AI Infrastructure, as well as core GCP services.”

The company also said that Gemini models now process 22 billion API tokens per minute: “We are seeing strong demand for our security solutions, and our new Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber delivers highly cost- efficient performance at the frontier.”

Amusingly, the company said that it still hasn’t sold any shares under ATM program, a program which otherwise would be reserved to C-grade meme stonks desperate for liquidity. Come to think of it, if GOOGL plans on unveiling some insane capex number like $400BN or so for 2027, it will absolutely be desperate for liquidity in just a few months. 

Alphabet is the first major US hyperscaler to report earnings this season, offering an early glimpse of what’s to come. The tech sector has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to data centers and other AI offerings, but has yet to show any measurable returns for the trillions it plans on spending on commodities like GPUs and extremely overpriced memory chips. Google is set to spend more than ever on capital expenditures this year to compete in the AI race, and investors have been waiting to see whether that spending is driving new growth or ultimately weighing on profitability. And it appears that investors are starting to get cold feet waiting for the ROI and margin inflection point (which according to Goldman’s agentic propaganda report was supposed to take place this past quarter… it didn’t).

The lukewarm results threaten to intensify investor scrutiny of Alphabet’s AI spending, which is projected to reach record highs in 2026. Wall Street has been scouring for evidence that the company’s massive investments are generating new growth rather than weighing on profits. As the first major US technology company to report earnings this season, Alphabet’s results also stand to shape expectations for a sector that has collectively committed hundreds of billions of dollars to AI infrastructure. 

Alphabet shares slipped about 1% in after-hours trading Wednesday, after earlier swining to wider losses and modest gains. The stock closed at $342.09 per share in New York, and is essentially unchanged since early February.

The tepid share reaction despite the cloud beat, which offsets the search miss, reflects concerns over what the company will say about future capex and into 2027. During its last earnings call, management said they expect it to “significantly increase” over 2026; if they do the same this time, the market may not be very pleased as the ROI is still lacking. 

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Bruning Platform blog,

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” – Thomas Paine – The American Crisis

“At worst, should at least one desperate country resort to WMDs, the outcome of a great-power war could prove to be even more devastating than that of a civil war. The toll could be almost unimaginable – with multiple cities destroyed, many millions killed, and many tens of millions displaced – all perhaps triggered by some ill-fated combination of the wrong leader making the wrong choice at the wrong time.” – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here

My previous two articles about this Fourth Turning: Prophets, Nomads and a Fourth Turning Accelerating Towards a Bloody Climax in April 2025 and War Phase of This Fourth Turning Has Arrived in July 2025 were progressively more pessimistic about the course of coming events, and things have proceeded along a precarious path towards our own rendezvous with destiny/tragedy. We are closing in on the 18th anniversary of the start of this Crisis epoch in September. The previous Great Depression/WWII Fourth Turning came to its climactic bloody conclusion after seventeen years, but this period of upheaval and disorder looks like it will extend into the early 2030s, just as Strauss & Howe predicted.

After rereading the prior two articles, I was shocked at how drastically the world has transformed in the space of one year and how the chief facilitator for driving events – Donald Trump – has hugely reversed his stated positions from the outset of his presidency. During the first 18 months of his 2nd term in office, Trump has done the exact opposite of what he promised and gone to war with the people most responsible for getting him elected: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, among others. The question is whether this was always his plan, or has he been coerced/bribed by Israel using Epstein file revelations.

At first, I was cautiously optimistic Trump had learned some hard lessons from his first term personnel debacles and the Deep State conspiracy to derail his presidency, along with the provable stealing of the 2020 election through mail-in ballot fraud, rigged voting machines, and judicial interference, resulting in the insertion of a dementia ridden basement dummy as a Potemkin president.

Trump staffed his new administration with what appeared to be loyalists, committed to revealing the truth about the Russiagate conspiracy, the 2020 stolen election, the Epstein files, FBI/CIA coup participants, the Soros/Biden/Clinton/Obama purposeful initiation and funding of the 3rd world invasion of our country to steal elections and initiate economic collapse, USAID as the funder of NGOs committed to destroying our society, the J6 Committee malfeasance, and the massive government fraud in all welfare programs at the Federal and State levels.

With Musk’s DOGE revelations and promises of $2 trillion in savings, the early months of Trump’s presidency seemed promising. He fulfilled his guarantee to shut the border and stopped the hordes of low IQ 3rd world dirtbags from invading our country and overwhelming our social welfare system. With much fanfare (and TV commercials), Kristi Noem began deporting thousands of illegals on a daily basis. Pam Bondi and Kash Patel declared they had all the Epstein files and would be releasing them in their criminal entirety.

But right-wing influencers were given binders with no new Epstein revelations in a February White House PR event. Something started to smell fishy. Trump acted like a Middle East peacemaker, with rhetoric about ending the Gaza genocide and turning it into resort for his wealthy cronies. He held multiple talks with Putin and Zelensky. It looked like ending the Ukraine war and delivering peace on earth might be his legacy.

By June, Trump’s presidency began to unravel, and he started reneging on his promises, having a major falling out with Musk over his Big Beautiful Bloated Bill, and began his infatuation with his Boss Bibi, who told him what to do and when to do it. Trump’s bombast about reducing the national debt and balancing the budget was put to the test with his first budget bill.

In my previous article I had stated it would require tremendous courage on the part of Trump and his congressional majority to institute the billions in DOGE cuts, as it is only government waste, Fed debt creation, and consumers spending money they don’t have on shit they don’t need at 20% interest provided by the Wall Street cabal, that keeps this U.S. Titanic of debt economy afloat. Cutting government spending would guarantee a recession. As expected, cowardly politicians, bought off by special interests, and driven by re-election desires, had no interest in cutting a dime of government spending.

Trump made no effort to reduce the spending earmarked in the Big Beautiful Bill, going along with the continued death march of debt creation. Prior to the bill, the 10-Year CBO forecast was for the national debt to increase by $21 trillion, so essentially accelerating towards fiscal disaster. Trump’s BBB added another $5 trillion to that farcical figure, not exactly “cutting” the budget. The national debt has gone from $36.2 trillion to $39.5 trillion in the first 1.5 years of Trump’s reign of debt.

With the uniparty in agreement, $2 trillion annual deficits are locked in until the debt Ponzi implodes. The MAGA army of maff challenged NPCs obediently applauded for Trump’s 5D chess genius. Musk realized his entire DOGE effort was nothing more than window dressing for Trump to get elected. They had a very public clash, with nasty personal attacks, and a miffed and misled Musk revealed why Trump was not allowing the Epstein files to be released.

This was the first crack in the MAGA narrative dam, while setting in motion the future of full catastrophic collapse over the remainder of his term. His fiscal promises of $2,000 DOGE rebates, $2,000 Tariff rebates, lower inflation, and manufacturing plants and jobs returning to America (we’ve lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump’s inauguration), have proven to be fake news. After ICE killed a couple of protestors, Trump basically threw in the towel and said he wasn’t going to deport the millions of illegal immigrant criminals. Somebody has to pick the lettuce and do the housework of the Epstein class.

But at least we are getting hundreds of electricity and water sucking surveillance centers disguised as data centers, along with hundreds of thousands of flock cameras, violating our 4th Amendment rights 24 hours a day on behalf of the surveillance state. All of Trump’s treachery since June of 2025 appears to be related to the Epstein files and Israel controlling Trump through blackmail, related to his appearance in those files. After railing for years about the Epstein files cover-up, Trump suddenly had no interest in releasing anything. It was suddenly a Democratic hoax. Only a guilty person would make such a dramatic turnabout.

The stonewalling was overcome by Thomas Massie’s Epstein Files Transparency Act, introduced in July 2025, requiring un-redacted files by the FBI to be released. Trump immediately went to war against Massie, utilizing his Israeli billionaire donors, led by Miriam Adelson, to spend over $30 million to defeat him in his primary. Not supporting Zionist genocides, undeclared wars on behalf of Israel and the military industrial complex, $2 trillion deficits, the surveillance state, and child raping billionaires, make you an enemy of the Trump controlled state. After declaring no new wars during his campaign, Trump allowed Bibi to lure him into spending billions to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities during their 12-day war in June 2025.

The bloviator in chief, and his low IQ Fox News Secretary of Defense declared Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions dead. The White House website was unequivocal in declaring complete and total obliteration of Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb ambitions. Trump saved the world from the imminent nuclear attack on Israel by Iran, just as Bibi had been warning for the last 20 years. This declaration of obliteration happened just over a year ago. What happened between June of 2025 and February of 2026 to change the narrative back to Iran weeks away from having a nuclear bomb? Was Trump lying in June or in February? Since 75% of everything he says is lies, it’s a tough nut to crack.

Despite Trump’s obvious abandonment of his MAGA campaign pledges within several months of ascending to power, CPI was 2.7% by December 2025, GDP was 2% for 2025 despite a government shutdown, mortgage rates had dropped to 6%, oil was $57 a barrel and most people were paying less than $3 a gallon for gas, Trump and Putin met in Alaska and it looked like the Ukraine War might wind down, but this proved to just be a phony interlude in this Fourth Turning Crisis cycle of catastrophe. As soon as the calendar flipped the page to 2026, Trump decided to light the fuse on this global tinderbox of regional animosity, religious hatred, and battle for currency dominance, military supremacy, and control of global oil supplies.

After blowing up dozens of speedboats, 1,300 miles from the U.S. mainland, supposedly trafficking drugs from Venezuela, Trump decided to kidnap the sitting president of Venezuela on January 3, based on laughable drug trafficking charges, considering the CIA has trafficked more drugs into the U.S. than any organization in history. Trump openly admitted he was taking control of Venezuela’s oil. There are a lot of bad dictators/presidents in the world, but you will only be taken out if you don’t have nukes and you are sitting on top of the world’s largest oil reserve. Trump was promising $2 a gallon gasoline, now that he controlled Venezuela as a vassal state.

The best laid plans don’t always pan out, as oil rose from $57 per barrel on January 3 to $67 per barrel on February 27, the day before Trump launched a shameful decapitation surprise attack on Iran while Bibi’s two Israeli agent envoys (Witkoff, Kushner) pretended to be negotiating a deal, taking out most of their political and military leadership. He actually thought he could pull off another Maduro three day conflict, but stated publicly on March 1 it would last 4 or 5 weeks. I wonder if he ever watched Get Smart in his younger days, because his estimate has proven to be slightly optimistic as we approach month 5 of a conflict showing only signs of growing wider and more deadly.

As we slog through this increasingly chaotic Fourth Turning, I’m always aware of Strauss and Howe’s warning about what could befall the world during this crisis.

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

In case you haven’t noticed, Trump’s promise of $2 a gallon gas might be a little optimistic. By mid-April oil reached $119 per barrel, over 100% more than at the start of the year. Here in PA. I paid $2.89 per gallon on the day before Trump’s war of choice on behalf of Israel, and within two months was paying $4.79 per gallon. Through a combination of draining our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a 43 year low, Scott Bessent and his Wall Street cronies manipulating the derivatives market to suppress the price of oil, Trump making false statements on Truth Social about imminent agreements, and the fake MOU which would never be honored, they were able to maneuver the price of oil back to $68 per barrel, despite the 20% ongoing reduction in global oil flow.

The MOU was never going to be honored by the U.S. The purpose was to buy time to re-arm and move more troops to the Middle East. Smoke, mirrors, and draining our “emergency” reserves in order to preserve the appearance of normality and strength is a pitiful way to run an empire. Trump’s true measure of success is how rich he can make his billionaire cronies by driving the stock market to new heights, no matter the impact on average “non-billionaire” Americans.

Front running his own Truth Social posts and stock purchases is just icing on the cake for the most corrupt president in U.S. history. He and his family reaped (pillaged?) billions peddling worthless meme coins, while the fleeced MAGA NPCs lost 99% of their “investments”. It was readily apparent Trump insiders were using insider knowledge to bet on polymarket or derivatives market to either go long or short in the oil and stock markets based on his future Truth Social posts, making billions in the process.

Shockingly, no one has been investigated or arrested. How does Trump find time to do president stuff when he is making 58 stock trades per day? Mussolini was the modern-day representative of merging the state with business to form a fascist ruling structure. Trump makes Benito looks like a minor leaguer, sinking $27 billion of our tax dollars into public corporations, while his sons create companies which are awarded billions in government contracts. Trump has personally invested in at least 20 public companies and then made positive Truth Social posts about them, driving their stock prices higher. This is blatant corruption and stock market manipulation, but the willfully ignorant masses are too distracted by electronic bread and circuses to be bothered. Free market capitalism is dead, but crony corporate fascism is alive and thriving. It’s good to be in the top .01%, or friends and family of Trump.

Everyone knows Iran was not close to producing a nuclear bomb, as seventeen government agencies told Trump prior to his surprise attack on Iran, at the behest of Bibi. The bullshit narrative about the Iranian government murdering 30,000, then 40,000, then 100,000, and now 52,000 protestors was also provably false. Trump admitted the protests were enabled by Mossad and the CIA. Netanyahu has been declaring Iran two weeks away from a nuclear bomb for thirty years. If we had really obliterated their secret nuclear sites in June 2025, like Trump and Hegseth declared, how could they again be two weeks away from a nuclear bomb?

Everything about this war on Iran is based on lies, mistruths, and propaganda, as the true motive is to further Netanyahu’s Greater Israel project of taking Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, while defanging Iran and Turkey. Netanyahu convinced Trump it would be a cakewalk, or more likely, threatened Trump with revelations from the Epstein files. The assassination of Charlie Kirk for beginning to reveal the truth about Israeli control of the U.S. government and genocide in Gaza was also a warning shot across Trump’s bow. Now Bibi is declaring Turkey a threat to Israel’s grand plan. If there is a more despicable human being on the planet than Netanyahu, I can’t think of one.

When you are in a $39 trillion hole and already digging $2 trillion deeper on an annual basis, maybe you shouldn’t start a war costing $1 billion per day, with a current price tag of over $100 billion. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the long-term impact. Experts at Harvard University warn factoring in munitions replenishment, base repairs across the Middle East, and lifetime veterans’ care could push the long-term price tag well past $1 trillion. In addition, the drastic increase in fuel prices, overall inflation, and interest costs will total approximately $135 billion on an annual basis, or $1,000 per household.

According to Trump, it’s a small price to pay for Israel, since they control our president and congress. While you choose between food, fuel or medicine, trying to survive another month, at least Trump, his family of grifters, his billionaire child raping cronies, the Wall Street cabal, and the AIPAC funded multi-millionaires in congress, are doing just fine.

Despite being a bombastic, narcissistic, egomaniacal self-promoter, I can’t believe he was naïve enough to believe the bullshit about Iran being weeks away from attacking Israel with a nuclear weapon. He had already declared Iran’s nuclear facilities obliterated and promised his MAGA minions no new wars. So, it seems inexplicable for him to willingly start World War III, knowing it would reignite inflation and cause tremendous hardship upon the average Americans who voted for him. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is he started this conflagration unwillingly.

After Attorney General Pam Bondi released an initial batch of files in February 2025 showing Trump on flight logs, Trump began dismissing further file requests as a Democratic “hoax” and began stonewalling further releases. But his nemesis Thomas Massie embarrassed him by pushing through the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The pressure from survivor testimonials and bipartisan congressional coercion forced his hand and he signed the bill.

The partial release of heavily redacted files revealed horrific evidence of rape, torture, pedophilia, child sacrifice, trafficking, bribery, and an ultra-rich Epstein class of deviants running this world. Trump’s minions at the DOJ and FBI have since declared this case closed, with no arrests, no naming of any loathsome pedophiles, and most importantly no further Trump revelations.

Since Epstein, who didn’t kill himself, was a Mossad agent, there is a high likelihood any perverted or criminal behavior on the part of Trump throughout his playboy life is documented and captured on film, in the possession of Netanyahu. Trump has spent 2026 raging, pillaging, bombing, and performing on the world stage as a court jester in Netanyahu’s game of thrones. His actions and words grow more desperate and unhinged by the day.

As a Prophet generation leader, along with Putin, Xi, and Netanyahu, he will continue to be a catalyst for setting in motion events which will lead to much bloodshed, chaos, death, financial collapse, and end of the American empire. A toxic mixture of vanity, pomposity, privilege, anger, advanced age, and narcissistic personality disorder, is a bad combination in a world leader capable of blowing up the world. Desperate people do desperate things, and Trump’s recent pronouncements appear desperate.

The linear thinking dupes, who choose to not understand the cyclical nature of history, were lulled into think the MOU signed by Iran and Trump on June 17 would deescalate the war and lead to peace in our time. That is not how Fourth Turnings are resolved. They intensify until all-out war, with millions of deaths, decides the true winners and losers. There are no compromise solutions during a Fourth Turning.

The 14 points in the MOU were essentially the U.S. admitting strategic defeat, which is what has happened. Trump tried to spin it as an American victory, but only his most adoring MAGA NPCs (who probably believed the Q bullshit during his 1st term) believed his lies. The MOU wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, and full-scale war, with the Strait of Hormuz essentially closed, has been raging for the last ten days. Trump has trapped himself in an unwinnable war of attrition, with no accessible escape hatch.

On February 27 the Strait of Hormuz was open, oil was $67 per barrel, all U.S. bases in the Middle East were functional, inflation was trending lower, interest rates were trending lower, the global economy was functioning smoothly, the SPR had 415 million barrels of oil, we hadn’t spent $113 billion we don’t have, and Trump wasn’t Bibi’s bitch, yet.

Today, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, oil is $86 a barrel and heading higher, we’ve drained 110 million barrels of oil from the SPR (lowest level since 1983), every U.S. military base in the Gulf has been damaged or obliterated (tens of billions in damage), inflation hit 4%, the 10 year Treasury at 4.64% is the highest of Trump’s presidency, we continue to spend $1 billion per day on an unwinnable war (with a $1 trillion long-term price tag), the global economy is in shambles, with famine and economic depression now baked into the cake Trump has baked. Iran, with the help of Russia, China, Iraq, Yemen and other allies in the region are accurately targeting U.S. bases and troops, resulting in mass casualties, which Hegseth covers up. Satellite pictures don’t lie, unless the U.S. government coerces satellite companies to not show the truth.

“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

I have an uneasy feeling Strauss & Howe’s haunting warning from nearly forty years ago is currently playing out in real time. We are already in the midst of World War III, but the masses are too dumbed down by their government school indoctrination; too distracted by their Igadgets, betting apps, likes & followers on their social media, and going further into debt trying to appear successful; too brainwashed by propaganda; and too apathetic to care, as their country and the world accelerate towards debasement and total ruin.

Propping up this Potemkin empire by sinking $5 billion per day further into debt, while utilizing financial derivatives schemes to elevate the stock market and suppress the oil and gold markets, and initiating an AI surveillance gulag state through the construction of hundreds of surveillance centers and tracking our every movement through their Flock cameras, appears to be a desperate last ditch effort by the Deep State billionaire globalist Agenda 2030 overlords to retain their power, control, and wealth. If it takes World War III and the deaths of billions to achieve their goal, so be it, in their warped world view.

Most people are trapped in their normalcy bias, minimizing the threats steamrolling directly towards them, while delaying the necessary logical steps they should be taking to prepare. I’m reminded of the outbreak of World War II when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, with Great Britain and France declaring war on Germany two days later. Then virtually nothing happened for the next nine months. The people in London, Paris and Berlin acted as if life would go on normally, with no consequences from the declarations of war. People in the U.S. observed this odd European dispute from a distance, still trying to emerge from their Great Depression.

Their normalcy bias was shattered by a blitzkrieg, nightly bombings, Barbarossa, and Pearl Harbor. Over 65 million would die. I believe Matt Bracken’s observations about this being an energy world war, extending from Kiev to Hormuz, with a likelihood of it expanding into Europe, Turkey, and Taiwan, as the three numbskulls running France, Germany, and Britain are willing to go to war against Russia to distract their populace from their decisions to encourage hordes of 3rd world dreck to destroy their countries from within.

The Great Reset Epstein class see World War III as an opportunity, just as they saw the Covid Plandemic as an opportunity to further their new world order plan of depopulation, CBDCs, 15-minute gulags, 24-hour surveillance, and social credit scoring to keep the peasants controlled, subservient, and neutered. Freedom, liberty, and living without restrictions are not in their master plan. Thus far, Putin has acted the most statesmanlike among the Prophet generation world leaders, but with the EU/NATO/Trump increasingly deadly provocations in waging a proxy war on behalf of Zelensky, have pushed him to his limit.

Make no mistake, this proxy war would not be ongoing without U.S. munitions and satellite targeting. Putin is also being pressured by hawks within his country to take more drastic measures against the EU psychopaths in suits trying to destroy Russia. His attacks on Kiev have become more frequent and more deadly. If his NATO enemies push him too far, he may directly attack within the EU, then all hell would break loose.

Trump has increased attacks on Iran infrastructure and is being pushed by his lying neo-con Israeli handlers to nuke an underground mountain fortress where Israel claims Iran is reconstituting their nuclear program. More Israeli lies. If a nuke is utilized, then Russia and China may be forced to actively intervene on Iran’s side.

When someone starts acting as desperate and deranged as Trump has been behaving lately, the citizens of this country, and the world, should be fearful and worried what kind of reckless irrational act an 80-year-old vain egomaniac could make to set in motion worldwide destruction. It’s like the world is at the mercy of a crazed monkey trapped in a room full of dynamite, lighting matches. With a true psychopath like Netanyahu pulling his strings, expect an enormous false flag event to trigger the final phase of this Fourth Turning.

We have already entered this Fourth Turning’s global war, and the average American has no clue. As Thomas Paine declared, this is no time for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. The apathetic, ignorant, dumbed down masses, who have been propagandized into believing their government and sedated with drugs, toxic foodstuff, and electronic baubles, will be violently shaken from their self-induced stupor, once their comfortable lives are shattered by economic, financial, and social collapse of a tyrannical system designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

There are evil men ruling this world. These oligarchal billionaire globalist psychopaths treat you like parasites that must be extinguished for their plans to succeed. They appear to be invincible, but they are few and we are many. As darkness descends upon our world, many trials and tribulations await, as there is no voting our way out of this crisis. It will require force of arms.

“The seasons of time offer no guarantees. For modern societies, no less than for all forms of life, transformative change is discontinuous. For what seems an eternity, history goes nowhere – and then it suddenly flings us forward across some vast chaos that defies any mortal effort to plan our way there. The Fourth Turning will try our souls – and the saecular rhythm tells us that much will depend on how we face up to that trial. The saeculum does not reveal whether the story will have a happy ending, but it does tell us how and when our choices will make a difference.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

King George and his empire seemed invincible in 1776 during the first American Fourth Turning, when Paine compared tyranny to hell. The remainder of this Fourth Turning will try our souls, but our fortitude and courage will matter, along with the choices we make.  Conquering tyranny will be bloody and require good men to do bad things, but will make our triumph glorious, on par with Washington’s victory over the British empire. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.