James Stanhope

Following news/commentary about Middle East and U.S. Healthcare. Retweets =/= endorsement. Please note that I do NOT honor requests for cash donations.

[Human☮🇺🇸🇺🇦🇺🇸🌊 @4HumanUnity]

🚨🚨🚨A standing ovation for the Washington Post, @wapo . 👏👏👏

You spent a full year investigating whether America's Director of National Intelligence, the woman with access to every classified secret this country has, was being directed by a cult leader who got busted for pyramid schemes in multiple countries.

And you held it until she resigned?

This same cult leader, Chris Butler, has his sect directly tied to QI Group (QNET), a Hong Kong-based company with operations across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

So the real question: Which countries now have access to our national intelligence? Which of our spy names are compromised?

And let's not forget, this is the same Tulsi Gabbard who used her position to do a coordinated hit job on Dr. Fauci, a man who spent his entire life saving Americans.

Imagine if this story dropped while she still had her hands on our nation's secrets.

Our press and mainstream media are failing us at every level.

https://t.co/XHlqQZnSNx

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

This is the stupidity we're talking about: She got an abortion after helping ban them. Blamed the democrats for the struggle she had to get one. And doesn't want interviews talking about it to be public.

[Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 @bayraktar_1love]

A large hole in the building of the Voronezh Semiconductor Devices Plant following what was most likely a Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG strike

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

From the 2023 cover story in the Atlantic, a reminder and a gift link:
https://t.co/4vBp9ph1O8

[Ford News @FordJohnathan5]

BREAKINGNEWS Trump lied by claiming the vandalism was done by a knife and the contractors aren't at fault. Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has 24 hour live feed. There is no evidence of any such claim. Trump should be held accountable for lying. 🚨

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

Russia's chief communist Zyuganov called for the confiscation of money held by Russians and businesses in banks in order to solve Russia's budget and economic problems.

"There are 67 trillion of your money sitting in banks today. 67 trillion from individuals and 63 trillion from businesses. That’s a total of 130 trillion. That’s three times the size of the state budget. It’s just sitting there, making the bankers richer." According to him, about 30 trillion rubles could be "immediately mobilized."

"That money isn't being invested in production or anything else - not even in victory. This problem can be solved quickly. If I were the president, I'd do it with a single decree. In wartime, he has the right to do so - he is the supreme commander-in-chief," he added.

[Eurasia Group @EurasiaGroup]

The most significant geopolitical risk that @ianbremmer is worried about?

Russia.

He explained why at the #USCanadaSummit, hosted by Eurasia Group and @RBC.

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

🚨BREAKING: A federal judge in Washington D.C. blocked DHS from using its citizenship database to remove voters from registration rolls, striking a significant blow against Donald Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to take control of federal elections. https://t.co/QDeJGIZF76

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

"There are difficult cases. This is not one of them."

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), Kennedy Center board member, files latest motion seeking permanent restoration of Kennedy Center name

"Pres. Kennedy’s name remains on the building. But the iconic letters are now obscured by a semi-permanent tarp, which appears to be Appellants’ effort to frustrate the restoration of the status quo"

"An act of petty defiance"

https://t.co/rVDjHLX6UG

[Margo Gontar 🔱 @MargoGontar]

Just saw a video of a Russian woman in Moscow crying on camera how they ‘just want to live in peace’ and ‘don’t want anyone to be at war’ or ‘for anyone to be killed’.

Wow. Really, b%tch? I also want to live in peace but your fkcng country has invaded mine,

[Полковник РВСН @Pravonapadenie]

Russia started plundering Mariupol, the largest Ukrainian city it has captured and still holds, while it was still burning. The process is leaving a massive paper trail. I spent a year poring over every occupation order and court ruling. This is the result https://t.co/bI8cQ7ebZ0

[Rep. Summer Lee @RepSummerLee]

The Pentagon is the only place in America where you can fail 8 audits in a row, admit you’ll fail the next few & still get handed more money than you asked for.

But let a family need help buying groceries and suddenly it’s a lecture about hard work, responsibility & bootstraps.

[Jake Pearson @JakePearson303]

Big Pharma makes billions pushing statins and blood pressure meds on men.

[Mariska den Eelden 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @eeldenden]

Polish citizens just created a new "Civic Order for the Future" and will award it to President Zelensky. It represents the many Poles who hate Nawrocki. He won with a razor-thin margin, boosted by a Russo-American effort to divide Europe

[Vasyl Myroshnychenko @AmbVasyl]

Russia's brazen attack on the freedom of navigation in the Black Sea. It requires strong and principled responses from the international community and the International Maritime Organisation.

[Rob Lee @RALee85]

“The entire city is now effectively in a "grey zone", no longer controlled by anyone, Ukrainian soldiers have told the BBC.

‘They get into areas behind our backs and in urban conditions it's extremely difficult to push them out,’ says a Ukrainian drone pilot who operates in that area and prefers to remain anonymous…

‘Since we devote little time to [searching and targeting] enemy pilots, they can freely operate, detect our positions and we are forced to roll back. This is how the frontline moves,’ he explains.

The Ukrainian officer whose unit is operating in the city maintains the pace of the Russian advance is very slow: ‘Sometimes they move 100m [109yds] a day. Sometimes they even crawl to reach the next building.’”
@abdujalil
https://t.co/ihZAQXKiAA

[Lies Or Liars @Liesorliars]

THE STRATEGIST

Jeffrey Epstein was directing Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation defence through Steve Bannon.

This was September 30 2018. The Senate judiciary committee hearing had concluded 2 days earlier. Christine Blasey Ford had testified. The FBI investigation had been ordered. The confirmation vote was days away.

Epstein sent this.

"tell burke they should make sure they ask ford about her medications, what type and for how long. my guess is that katz won't let her answer"

Bill Burck was Kavanaugh's personal attorney. Rachel Katz was Christine Blasey Ford's attorney. Epstein knew both names. He knew the procedural dynamics. He was feeding cross examination strategy to Bannon to relay directly to the defence team.

In the same exchange Epstein had already sent Bannon research links on medications that cause memory loss and academic papers on false memories in social anxiety disorder.

A convicted sex offender. Directing the confirmation strategy of a Supreme Court Justice. Through the former Chief Strategist of the White House.

Source: DOJ Epstein Files Transparency Act release. Jmail iMessage Archive. steve-bannon thread. Message 1220. September 30 2018.

[Jay Nordlinger @jaynordlinger]

A general point about education, if I may: It's unfair to expect our public schools to be better than our culture at large. The better our culture -- the more dignified, the more elevated, the more decent -- the better the schools. When the culture decays, so do the schools.

[Jamie Walters, CAIA @JWalters314]

Both Mike Johnson and Amy Coney Barrett emerged from the same Louisiana / Christian-right / leadership-pipeline ecosystem that later fed into conservative legal power.

Barrett’s lane was:

Catholic charismatic family formation → Notre Dame → originalist legal academy → ADF / Blackstone / Federalist Society orbit → Supreme Court.

Johnson’s lane was different but adjacent:

Evangelical / Baptist constitutionalism → anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ legal advocacy → Christian law-school project → Congress → Speaker of the House.

The same broad pattern appears with Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley.

This is not best understood as a foreign penetration network. It is a domestic American elite-formation system. It uses religion to discipline moral imagination, law to convert ideology into doctrine, tax-advantaged nonprofit money to build institutions, and political appointments to place reliable operators inside the state.

That makes the network domestic, not foreign — but not merely “grassroots.” It is better understood as a domestic elite project: religious media, churches, legal fellowships, donor-advised funds, judicial pipelines, think tanks, and dark-money operations all reinforcing one another over decades.

Amy Coney Barrett’s father, Michael Coney, is especially important to this analysis. His documented role was not merely religious. It was also embedded in the U.S. Gulf / Shell Oil / American Petroleum Institute legal-regulatory world.

E&E News reported that Michael Coney joined Shell Oil in 1978, when Barrett was about six years old and Jimmy Carter was president. He worked on offshore drilling legal issues in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1985, he joined API’s Subcommittee on Exploration and Production Law and twice served as its chair over the next two decades. His own St. Catherine of Siena parish biography says most of his legal career was spent with Shell in New Orleans, with a promotion and transfer to Shell’s Houston office before returning to New Orleans.

So this looks less like foreign intelligence penetration and more like American resource-capital formation.

Religion, fossil capital, and law can be mutually reinforcing. The religious network provides moral discipline and legitimacy. The legal network translates ideology into doctrine. The corporate-energy network supplies a political-economic interest structure: deregulation, limited liability, federal preemption, anti-administrative-state jurisprudence, and hostility toward environmental litigation.

This is part of a broader American elite network that produces state actors by shaping ideology long before those actors become justices, speakers, senators, judges, agency heads, or presidential advisers.

It does not require foreign control.

It requires domestic capital, tax-advantaged institutions, religious discipline, legal credentialing, and patient placement.

That is the real machinery.

American oligarchs avoid taxes, shelter assets, route money through foundations and nonprofits, and then convince W-2 workers — the people paying income taxes, Social Security taxes, and Medicare taxes every paycheck — that any serious tax on dynastic wealth would be impossible, radical, or un-American.

Meanwhile, those same elite families gift wealth with little or no tax, inherit appreciated assets with enormous tax advantages, use legal structures to minimize taxation, and weaponize nonprofits, churches, think tanks, and advocacy groups to shape ideology while preserving their own wealth.

The savings captured through tax avoidance do not simply sit still. They are converted into political power.

They become campaign money.

They become judicial pipelines.

They become law-school programs.

They become media networks.

They become think tanks.

They become litigation shops.

They become congressional majorities.

They become Supreme Court seats.

The oligarchs avoid taxes, then use the captured savings to ensure they are represented in Congress, the courts, the executive branch, and the administrative state.

Stop letting America’s oligarchs convince you that a wealth tax is impossible.

Stop letting them convince you that taxing dynastic wealth is un-American.

What is actually un-American is a system where W-2 workers fund the state while oligarchs use tax-advantaged wealth to capture it.

[Aric Chen @aricchen]

181,000 drones. Four months. Made in Taiwan. Bound for Ukraine. Beijing's UAV monopoly — the supply chain the CCP spent two decades building to coerce democracies — just hit a wall, and almost nobody outside Taipei and Kyiv has noticed.

Russia's war on Ukraine is now in its fifth year, and the lesson is reshaping the Indo-Pacific: the side that out-produces drones, out-fights. The CCP knows this. It dominates global UAV manufacturing and has tightened export controls to choke democracies it dislikes. Taiwan and Ukraine just answered.

In the first four months of 2026, Taiwan exported over 181,000 drones, nearly 20 times the volume of the same period a year earlier. Officially the shipments route through Poland and the Czech Republic. Unofficially, most are headed for the Ukrainian front line. Taipei's pitch is blunt: become the Asian hub for "non-red" UAVs and components — drones free of Chinese materials, free of CCP leverage. Taiwan's semiconductor and electronics ecosystem, the same base that produced TSMC, is now being mobilized into flight controllers, batteries, motors, and airframes for democracies under fire.

Bohdan Diorditsa, chief international alliances officer at Ukrainian drone maker Vyriy, told The Guardian Taiwan is "100% a valuable partner." Snake Island Institute analyst Artur Savchii points to lithium-ion cells and high-end electronics as the spaces where Taiwan can simply replace China. The Lviv IT Cluster, with over 300 companies and 100,000 tech professionals, has opened exploratory talks with Taiwan's external trade body on ICT, semiconductors, and defense technology.

The strategic logic stretches well beyond the trade ledger. Adm. Samuel Paparo, who commands US Pacific Command, has openly described turning the Taiwan Strait into an "unmanned hellscape" to deny Beijing a fait accompli. Hudson Institute naval analyst Bryan Clark argues drones can plug the island-chain defense gap stretching from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Taipei's own target: 100,000 drones a month by 2030. That isn't the ceiling. It's the floor.

Taipei calls it the "drone shield." It's also something larger: the first real democratic UAV alliance, forged under fire, engineered to break the supply-chain chokehold the CCP has weaponized for years.

Watch the hands, not the headlines. The next war is being deterred in factories from Lviv to Taichung.

ACI — Aric Chen | Insights