🚨 There it is… In a rare moment of honesty, The Atlantic’s David Brooks admitted something that should be a crime—and proves exactly why President Trump banned certain media outlets. “Starting in 2015, we in the Main Stream Media learned that if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up— it became the business model. And we get to go to sometimes off the record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say over the last two years, when you were at a dinner with Democrat politicians, there was distance between the journalists and democrats. They’re politicians, it’s our job to keep some distance. In my view, in many of the places I’ve been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is the problem for the media. We have to establish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover, these are not people we root for. We’re not supposed to be spin doctors for them…” rumble.com/v7ga4ba-the-atlan…

🛢️🌍 The countries with the most refining capacity spent this week deciding who gets their fuel. 🇨🇳 China has 18.1% of global refining capacity. 🇺🇸 The US has 17.5%. 🇷🇺 Russia has 6.5%. Together that's 42% of the world's refineries. Look at what each of them did this week: 🇺🇸 The White House put a diesel export ban on the table, with a 90-day blanket ban among the options. Washington then told 🇫🇷France and 🇩🇪Germany to release their diesel stocks or face that ban. 🇪🇺 The G7 agreed to release up to 100M barrels of oil and diesel over 4 months. 🇺🇸 A day later Trump took the ban off the table: "Europe has a lot of diesel and they're going to be making a major world contribution... we're not going to be doing the export ban." 🇨🇳 China paused fuel exports for October, and PetroChina cancelled gasoline and jet cargoes. 🇷🇺 Russia extended its diesel export ban. Now look at who is at the bottom of the chart. 🇩🇪 Germany has 1.9% of global refining capacity, 🇮🇹 Italy 1.6% and 🇪🇸 Spain 1.5%. Europe can't refine its way out of a shortage. It has to buy finished fuel from the countries at the top of this list, and those countries just showed they'll hold barrels back when it suits them. That's the mechanism behind the week. Refining capacity has become bargaining power. Whoever owns the refineries decides whether fuel gets exported, and on what terms. Read headline by headline, it looks like noise. Read together, it points one way: fuel security is now foreign policy, and Europe is the buyer with the least leverage. The open question: the G7 release buys four months. What does Europe use when the next exporter turns off the tap? themerchantsnews.substack.co…

Lebanese 🇱🇧 journalist and author Brigitte Gabriel: “When I was born, Beirut was considered the ‘Paris of the Middle East.’ Today, Paris is considered the Beirut of Europe.”

ft.com/content/8869caf9-3cd1… @RanaForoohar: “Like the Great Game of the 19th century, the U.S.–China conflict today is both economic and political, geographic and virtual, a battle over territorial spheres of influence, but also broader systems dominance.” China’s strategy is to get there first, pursuing a modern forward strategy, gaining control over physical and virtual chokepoints, and seizing advantage in the ports, supply chains, resources, technologies, and standards that will define the next era of competition. #Kipling #NewGreatGame #PolarSilkRoad . #Chokepoints . .

Pour comprendre ce qui se passe, il faut revenir trente-cinq ans en arrière. Le mur tombe. L'Occident pense avoir gagné l'Histoire. Fukuyama annonce la fin des conflits idéologiques, et une génération de dirigeants européens en tire une conclusion folle : les nations, les frontières, les cultures, tout ça appartient au passé. L'avenir, c'est un grand marché sans visage, géré par des experts, des traités et des commissions que personne n'a élus. Maastricht en 1992. L'euro. La désindustrialisation assumée, parce qu'on peut tout produire en Chine et que les usines sont ringardes. L'immigration de masse érigée en politique, sans jamais demander l'avis des peuples. Et quand les peuples disent non, comme en 2005 au référendum sur la Constitution européenne, on passe outre et on fait voter la même chose par le Parlement trois ans plus tard. Pendant ce temps, dans les universités, une autre machine tourne. Une idéologie qui enseigne aux enfants que leur civilisation est coupable, que leur histoire est une honte, que le mérite est une oppression et que l'ordre est une violence. Elle sort des campus, elle colonise les médias, les administrations, les grandes entreprises. C'est ce qu'Elon appelle le woke mind virus. Le résultat, on l'a sous les yeux. Une classe dirigeante hors sol qui parle à Davos et ne sait plus parler à Lorient. Un État obèse qui prélève tout et ne protège plus rien. Une dette qui explose. Des services publics qui s'effondrent. Et une partie de la jeunesse qui filme en rigolant un pompier en train de brûler. Voilà l'aboutissement du projet globaliste. Et maintenant, trois issues. La première, c'est 1984. Le système sent qu'il perd le contrôle, alors il serre la vis. Identité numérique obligatoire, monnaie numérique de banque centrale, censure des réseaux au nom de la lutte contre la désinformation, surveillance algorithmique de chaque échange. On ne règle aucun problème de fond, on interdit simplement d'en parler. C'est la voie que Bruxelles prépare déjà avec le DSA. Un ordre sans liberté. La deuxième, c'est la libanisation. Le système n'arrive même plus à contrôler. L'État se retire morceau par morceau. Des quartiers entiers passent sous d'autres lois. Les hôpitaux ferment, la police ne vient plus, l'électricité devient incertaine, les communautés s'arment et se replient sur elles-mêmes. Le pays ne meurt pas d'un coup, il se fragmente. Le Liban était la Suisse du Moyen-Orient. Il a suffi de quelques années. La troisième, c'est le rebond. Le retour de l'ordre. L'Union européenne telle qu'on la connaît se disloque, les nations reprennent leur souveraineté, et vient le temps des comptes. Un Nuremberg du communisme et de tous ceux qui ont mené ce continent dans le mur en toute connaissance de cause. Et je pense que cette troisième voie est de loin la plus probable. Pour une raison simple que personne ne veut voir. La France est une puissance nucléaire. Elle a des sous-marins lanceurs d'engins, près de trois cents têtes, un siège permanent au Conseil de sécurité de l'ONU. Jamais les États-Unis ne laisseront un arsenal pareil tomber dans les mains du chaos intégral. Jamais. Washington peut tolérer une France faible, une France arrogante, une France qui donne des leçons. Il ne tolérera jamais une France libanisée avec la bombe. Ce qui veut dire que le scénario du chaos total a un plafond. Il y a un point au-delà duquel la plus grande puissance du monde interviendra, d'une manière ou d'une autre, pour que l'ordre revienne. Et l'Amérique d'aujourd'hui n'est plus celle d'Obama. C'est celle qui a décidé de détruire le woke mind virus. Avec Elon, qui réussit tout ce qu'il entreprend. Les fusées réutilisables, les voitures électriques, Starlink, le rachat de Twitter que tout le monde disait impossible. Il ne parle pas, il exécute. En face, qu'est-ce qu'il y a ? De la fausse intelligence. L'apparence de l'intelligence. Macron en est l'incarnation parfaite : un produit de communication. Retirez-lui ses conseillers, ses éléments de langage, ses mises en scène, et il ne reste personne. Mettez-le devant un tableau blanc avec un vrai problème à résoudre, il ne saurait même pas par où commencer. Un système entier dirigé par des gens qui savent paraître, et plus aucun qui sait faire. Ce système tient sur l'illusion. Et les illusions finissent toujours par tomber. Alors oui, j'ai de l'espoir. Je crois que toute cette fraude va s'effondrer. Et je crois que juste après, viendra une renaissance. Celle des bâtisseurs, des ingénieurs, des entrepreneurs, des gens qui se lèvent le matin pour construire. Ceux qui font, pas ceux qui paraissent. L'Europe s'est déjà relevée de ses cendres. Après Rome, après la peste, après deux guerres mondiales. Elle le refera. Et cette fois, on sera là pour la reconstruire.

At first, Jean-Pierre did not understand. He watched the evening news, paid his taxes, voted responsibly and believed what respectable people told him. 1. France needed immigration because the economy needed workers. 2. Diversity was an opportunity. 3. Public services were under pressure because they lacked funding. 4. Disorder at school was caused by inequality. 5. Crime statistics required context. 6. Anyone who connected these things too quickly was probably an extremist. Then his children started coming home from school saying they could barely hear the teacher. Half the lesson was spent restoring order. Teachers changed constantly. Some simply disappeared for weeks. Jean-Pierre complained once, politely. The administration explained that the situation was “challenging” and that the school was developing an “inclusive pedagogical response.” Jean-Pierre went home reassured. There were professionals dealing with it. His neighbourhood changed too. Shops closed. Others appeared. Groups of men occupied the same corners every evening. His wife stopped taking one street after dark. Jean-Pierre noticed all of this, but he had also learned that noticing patterns was dangerous. So every event remained an isolated event. One closed shop meant nothing. One assault meant nothing. Ten incidents meant ten unrelated incidents. Only a racist would connect dots. Then his daughter was sexually assaulted by a man who had recently arrived in France. Jean-Pierre was devastated. But almost immediately he began policing his own thoughts. The attacker was an individual. Of course. One must never generalise. The television explained that exploiting such crimes politically was irresponsible. A minister warned against “stigmatisation.” Jean-Pierre found himself nodding through tears. What had happened to his daughter was monstrous, but the truly frightening possibility, apparently, was that somebody somewhere might vote for the wrong party because of it. Nothing changed. His son’s school became worse. His daughter stopped going out alone. His wife wanted to move. The police were exhausted. The teachers were exhausted. The hospitals were exhausted. Jean-Pierre was exhausted. Yet every explanation he had been given required him to believe that each deterioration was temporary, accidental, exaggerated or caused by something entirely unrelated to the deterioration immediately beside it. And whenever somebody proposed that perhaps the country had made serious mistakes — about migration, authority, education, policing, integration, punishment or borders — Jean-Pierre knew the correct answer. “Careful. That sounds like the far right.” So he remained reasonable. He remained moderate. He remained informed. He remained completely incapable of drawing a conclusion from his own life. So at first, Jean-Pierre did not understand. And he still does not understand.

🇺🇸 🇮🇷 CRUDE OIL VS REFINED FUEL - TWO DIFFERENT THINGS! Here's the part of the oil story nobody is explaining. Crude oil is back to prewar levels through the Strait of Hormuz. But the fuel, the actual diesel and gasoline, is not. Refined shipments out of there are down to 677,000 barrels a day, from 3.6 million before the war. Why the gap? Because you can reroute a barrel of crude, but you can't reroute a refinery. Crude gets piped and shuttled around Iran. Fuel has to be made at a plant, and those plants took damage in the war. Ukraine is pounding Russia's refineries too, so the whole world is short on diesel. And here is where it hits home. Since 2020 America shut down 11 refineries. We can pump the crude, but we have been closing the very plants that turn it into fuel! That is why diesel is at record highs. It is not a crude problem. It is a refining problem. We do not just need to pump our own oil. We need to refine our own fuel!

Natural gas at Waha, the pricing hub of West Texas, traded below zero for 90 days in a row this year. Producers paid buyers to take it, since the Permian Basin made more gas than its pipelines could carry. Most of that gas comes up with the oil, so the wells keep producing it at any price. Waha prices were below zero on 99 days by mid-June, against 49 in all of 2024. The Hugh Brinson pipeline started on June 13, and the price turned positive three days later.

French President Macron: A key factor in European competitiveness was very cheap gas coming from Russia. That ended in 2022. But our great export market was China. That is over too. Europe now has a trade deficit with China. Today, every day, we lose €1 billion in trade with China. Two years ago, several countries were still net exporters. Germany, for example, remained a net exporter to China until 2025. That is over — even for Germany.

French 10-year bond yields are the highest relative to similarly-dated German bunds since the European debt crisis 14 years ago. France's borrowing costs have risen above those of Italy and Greece, with the nation facing one of the biggest fiscal deficits in the EU.

BREAKING: New York City must scrap its rollout of a tax on high-end second homes and start over, a judge ruled, per NYT