Amir Cyrus

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

Wow, Iran's state TV accidentally told the truth.

A pro-regime woman admitted on their own broadcast, the second Khamenei died, Iranians ran into the streets to celebrate. Not mourn. Celebrate.

That's why they cut the internet.
That's why they staged a 5-day fake funeral. The regime needed to control the narrative.

And they wonder why they hate me. I found the mainstream media that finally put a microphone in front of Iranians who don't cry for butchers.

[The Iran Watcher 🇮🇷 @TheIranWatcher]

🚨 A heartbreaking encounter that became a hallmark of the Islamic Republic’s psychological cruelty: a leftist activist, his religious mother, and a regime that used her as a pawn.

In 1981, Mahmoud Tarigholeslami, an Iranian left-wing political activist, was arrested during the Islamic Republic’s brutal purge of opposition groups.

Like many leftists, he had opposed the Shah and helped create the revolutionary climate that brought the clerical regime to power.

But once the Islamic Republic consolidated control, it turned on many of the same leftist revolutionaries who had helped overthrow the monarchy.

Before his execution, the regime arranged what Mahmoud believed was a private final meeting with his mother.

Crying and desperate, he pleaded with her, believing she had come to save his life.

What he did not know was that the Islamic Republic had secretly installed cameras. His deeply religious mother had been deceived into believing that if she persuaded him to repent, his life would be spared.

It was all a lie.

Mahmoud Tarigholeslami was executed by firing squad shortly afterward.

His mother later suffered a nervous breakdown.

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly aired this footage on state television to glorify ideological loyalty over family, intimidate political prisoners, and teach that devotion to the regime must come before one’s own child.

It remains one of the clearest examples of how the Islamic Republic weaponized family, faith, and grief as instruments of propaganda and repression.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Interesting.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

so "companion humanoids" are starting to become a thing in China.

one of them just pulled in 13,000 orders on its first day of sales.

(for context Unitree, the biggest humanoid robot maker in the world, shipped around 5,500 humanoids in all of 2025. this robot just booked more than double that in 24 hours.)

it's called the U1, built by UBTech in Shenzhen, the first humanoid robot company to ever go public.

most humanoids are built for factories and warehouses, but this one was built for keeping people company.

and the whole design follows from that job.

it comes as a 6-foot man or a 5'6" woman. the skin is silicone, stretched over 88 motorized joints, enough to reproduce about 90% of human movement.

the speed matters as much as the range. when you talk, the face reacts in under 20 milliseconds, faster than a blink. any slower and the reactions would start to feel fake.

the AI underneath was trained to read emotion. UBTech says it recognizes more than 20 emotional states with over 90% accuracy, so it adjusts to how you're actually feeling.

there's no wake word either. you talk, it answers, the same way a conversation with a person works.

and it remembers. your routines, your stories, how your week went. the longer you live with it, the better it knows you. everything it learns stays stored on the robot, nothing gets sent to the cloud.

the demand comes from a real problem.

China has 118 million empty-nest seniors, parents whose kids grew up and moved away.

another 90 million adults live completely alone.

for a huge share of the country, there's nobody home to talk to.

the U1 was built to fill exactly that gap. a presence in the house that talks back, reads your mood, remembers your life.

and the custom orders push it further. UBTech will scan a real person's face, clone their voice, build the robot to match.

so a family can order one that looks and sounds like someone who died (remember that black mirror episode btw??)

however, none of it is fully there yet...

> top models cost over $135,000.
> the battery only runs 2 to 4 hours, which UBTech admits is just where full-size humanoids are today.

they're also donating 100 units this year to seniors living alone and kids separated from their parents.

loneliness is becoming a market. and the Chinese are buying like crazy.

i'm curious to see if this would catch on as easily in the West?

[Iran International English @IranIntl_En]

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday Iran's rulers have killed 54,000 protesters, saying demonstrators could not topple the government "because they're dead" and accusing the press of failing to report the killings.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: Tokenized equities saw a record $3.4 billion in volume for the month of June.

This marks +279% month-over-month growth and +1,400% year-over-year growth.

The growth was primarily driven by SpaceX's record IPO and surging demand for 24/7 trading.

Furthermore, the Solana network now accounts for over 90% of volume traded in these assets.

A substantial amount of this volume growth has been driven by Jupiter, the largest onchain platform in the world, which has seen MoM volume growth of +56%, with ~60% of tokenized equity volume happening during off hours and weekends.

Tokenized asset growth is exploding.

[ARPA-H @ARPA_H]

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[Navid Mohebbi نوید محبی @navidmohebbi]

If you want to know how the regime brought attendees to Khamenei’s not-so-impressive funeral, this explains how. The majority of Iranians live below the poverty line, and the regime distributes free bananas and potatoes to bring people in.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Strategy has sold 3,588 $BTC for $216 million to fund dividends on our Digital Credit securities. As of 7/5/2026, we hodl ₿843,775 in our BTC Reserves and $2.55 billion in our USD Reserves. https://t.co/Cssgz29Psj

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

An Israeli minister just confirmed the best-kept secret of this war, and then said one thing that changes everything. During the fighting, Israeli soldiers stood on Arab soil, crewing an Iron Dome battery, shooting down Iranian missiles aimed at an Arab monarchy. Asked directly if Israel sent the UAE its shield, Minister Miri Regev answered, "That's right." Then she added five words. "The Emirates are helping us."

Weigh what that buries. For almost 75 years the Middle East ran on one fault line, Arab against Israeli. The Iron Dome was built to stop rockets fired at Israel by Arab militias.

Iron Dome's first actual operational deployment outside Israel or America, ever, was in defense of an Arab capital.

And Israel's own minister just described it not as a rescue, but as a solid "partnership". The Emirates are helping us. Present tense. Both directions. Listen carefully!!

The scale explains the need. Iran fired some 550 ballistic and cruise missiles and more than 2,200 drones at the UAE, by its own defense ministry's count the most targeted country in the region, more than Israel itself.

Abu Dhabi of course needed a "shield". The only proven solid one that worked battle-tested flew in from Jerusalem, crewed by Israeli soldiers on Emirati ground while the missiles fell.

And Israel chose when to say it. The UAE has never confirmed a word of this. It flies with the Blue Angels in public and stays silent on the Israeli battery in its desert.

Israel held the secret while it was tactical and revealed it during Khamenei's funeral week, the moment it became a message.

Which answers the question over Tehran. Why did no Gulf king stand at Khamenei's coffin? Because when his missiles came for the Gulf, the hands that stopped them were Israeli.

The 75-year war ended quietly, on a radar screen over Abu Dhabi.

[Reza Pahlavi @PahlaviReza]

To the foreign representatives in Tehran to mourn Iran’s deceased dictator, Ali Khamenei: Iran is not mourning him.

Iran is mourning more than 40,000 sons and daughters slaughtered on January 8 and 9 by Khamenei, Ghalibaf, and their machinery of repression.

The regime is spending vast amounts of the Iranian people's wealth to stage this propaganda spectacle, yet not a single democratic leader attended.

What you see today is not a nation in grief for its ruler. It is a nation filled with righteous anger, and that anger and heroic bravery will bring down what remains of this criminal regime.

[Hedgeye @Hedgeye]

America is running out of places to gather:

Bars and clubs per capita have fallen over 60% since the late 1970s, and since 2001 a fifth of movie theaters have shut their doors.

Over the past two decades, the country has lost roughly 2,000 golf courses and 7,000 bars and nightclubs.

Catching live music now costs a pretty penny: top-tour concert tickets averaged $134 last year, up +42% from 2019.

So Americans stay in. Nearly 80% see friends and family less than three times a week.

Read that again.

America has traded their community for their couch.

[Marc Benioff @Benioff]

Happy 250 America! ❤️🇺🇸

[Brad Gerstner @altcap]

250 years old & still Day 1. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. LFG. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🚀🚀🚀 @TrumpAccounts

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

This video went viral on Iranian social media;

Ghalibaf and Araghchi, regime’s top negotiators with America standing over the coffin of their Supreme Leader, killed by America.

The negotiation table just got a lot more awkward.

Let me get this straight.

Khamenei's funeral guest list is basically the world's most wanted list, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas proxies and a few irrelevant presidents nobody's heard of.

China, Russia, Turkey, the "allies" sent nobody meaningful.

Even his own family including his son, Mojtaba didn't dare to show up.

[Hon. Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC]

My official statement on the budget, as read in chambers this evening, before I was muted:

"I’ve been a member of this city council going on five years now. And I’ve voted yes on the budget every year so far. All of them had problems. All of them contained things I didn’t like or agree with. But I’m not here to demand perfection, I’m here to work with what we have — within reason.

Unfortunately, this year is very different. And I must vote no.

Even in the context of our dysfunctional city government, this year’s budget represents a complete departure from reality, spending more money than we’ve ever spent — precisely when we can least afford it.

We have never seen a larger single-year increase in spending in the history of this city. Requiring not only new taxes from Albany, but pension deferrals and an eight billion dollar bailout from the Governor. And even still, the revenue projections are optimistic at best.

This isn’t a ‘balanced budget’ — it’s budget by bailout. A ticking time bomb.

And it’s the beginning of a fiscal death spiral that our current leadership will not be able to pull us out of, because they lack both the experience and the seriousness to do so.

What will we do next year? And the year after?

The only responsible way for our city to spend more is to grow the economy. New businesses, new private economic development, major investment. That’s how you grow an economy, and get more money into the city budget.

But we’re doing the opposite. Deliberately chasing away everything our city needs to sustain our spending with childish political attacks on very people we need most.

Our tax base is isn’t growing. It’s leaving.

The middle class, the financial sector, and businesses of all sizes are choosing to go elsewhere. And they’re being replaced with low-income foreigners and transplants who require significant subsidies just to survive here.

We’re trading investment banks and small businesses for delivery app drivers on welfare, and nonprofit workers whose paychecks ultimately come from government spending. That isn’t growth.

And when ordinary New Yorkers complain, they’re told to shut up and leave if they don’t like it. And that’s exactly what many are doing.

This is obviously unsustainable. But nobody in this chamber really seems to care.

And what are we getting for our money? We already spend more in real dollars AND per capita on everything from schools to housing to healthcare than anyone else in the country.

We can’t even build a public bathroom for less than three million dollars.

Why would anyone believe that shoveling even MORE money into this broken system will improve anything?

It won’t. I guarantee that we’ll all be sitting here again a year from now, with the exact same problems, listening to the exact same lectures about how the city needs even MORE money, AGAIN.

At what point do we, as a City Council, start to demand results before we allow more spending? When do we demand accountability?

The answer seems to be never. Because this spending isn’t really meant to fix anything. It’s meant to keep the machine going, keep the money flowing into the special interests and nonprofits and the political allies of the Mayor, with no real consideration for anything else.

I realize a lot of people don’t want to hear this, but we are a municipal government, not a sociology experiment or a political slush fund or the United Nations.

We are here keep the lights on, keep the water running, pave the roads, and put criminals in jail. That’s it. And we would be very well advised to get back to basics. Because we’re failing on nearly every count, other than our peerless ability to hand out free money.

Shame on this Council for pretending this budget is anything other than a disaster. I know that my single vote ultimately doesn’t matter here, but nonetheless I won’t put my name on it. I respectfully vote no."

[Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente]

78 degrees??? Welcome to communism people! Hope you enjoy!

[@jason @Jason]

It’s about to get very strange folks.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Miracles.

[Ida Turan 🇮🇷 ایده توران @iranidaturan]

Let me remind you why these recent arrests in Iraq matter and how they connect to the MoU:

The Islamic regime’s primary method of bypassing sanctions and selling its oil to China was to blend Iranian crude with Iraqi oil, export it as “Iraqi” crude, and then launder the money through Dubai.

Along the way, they paid substantial bribes to Iraqis and Emiritis.

If you look closely at the walls of many Iraqi officials’ offices, you’ll often see portraits of Khamenei and Soleimani hanging there, Iraqi officials were clearly on the payroll, receiving good money for their services as facilitators.

During the conflict, U.S. Economic Fury operations run by @SecScottBessent , particularly after the regime’s attacks on targets in the UAE, prompted the Emiratis to cooperate in closing these money-laundering loopholes.

The Iraqis, being far more deeply compromised, were slower to move. It took sustained American pressure to finally push Baghdad past its fears and hesitation to act against these networks.

This is important because under the MoU, oil sanctions on the regime were eased on the explicit condition that sales would be transparent and traceable. Yet the regime has every incentive to return to its old invisible channels to generate untraceable cash (funds it can freely divert to terrorism and proxy militias).

That’s precisely why these loopholes are being aggressively shut down: to force the regime into legal, monitorable oil sales and prevent it from funding destabilizing activities with dirty money.

Unfortunately, many of those who were most vocal against the MoU suffer from a rather closed and limited mindset. They assumed @POTUS , Bassent, Rubio and @jaredkushner were naive or incompetent, unwilling to accept that these officials understood exactly what game they were playing and what mechanisms they were trying to constrain.