Good Morning

I told Members of the European Parliament that Africa is emerging as a launchpad for Russian influence operations targeting Europe. Drawing on years of reporting on disinfo campaigns, I presented evidence of Russian networks in Africa now actively targeting elections in Europe.

I’m actually playing in the game- Wemby needs someone to pass him the ball.

This is another example of the where things are. Rich get everything, we’re left to watch from the outside. This needs to change. There is enough for everyone. We need to tax the rich everywhere.

If Bernie’s Social Security bill is signed into law, Social Security would be solvent for 75 years, benefits would go up by $2,400, 91% of Americans would not pay a penny more in taxes, and the wealthy would finally pay their fair share by scrapping the cap on all taxable income.

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here. I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money. That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island. You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands. "We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated." What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike. Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary. What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period. In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability. And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong. A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking. A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit. The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy? Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone. That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis. Which is exactly where Albania stands. Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it. And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real. Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly. The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all. And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen! I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard. That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

Under Trump, the Forest Service is gutting labs that cost ONE DOLLAR in rent so they can cram scientists into a Fort Collins office that costs taxpayers a million a year. As reported by NPR, Trump's 2027 budget zeroes out Forest Service research entirely. Three hundred and nine million dollars, gone. Fifty-seven of the agency's seventy-seven research stations are on the chopping block. These are the forests generations of Americans have hiked, hunted, camped, and prayed in. Sacred ground for almost anyone who's ever stepped outside in this country. And the "efficiency" pitch? A scam. The research station in Hilo, Hawaii sits on 30,000 acres the federal government rents for a one-time fee of ONE DOLLAR, locked in until 2067. The Michigan Tech lease? One dollar paid in 1963, free ever since. Another site costs the agency $600 a month for two rooms. The destination they want everyone shipped to in Fort Collins runs taxpayers a million a year. Read that again. They're closing dollar leases to expand a million-dollar lease. Scientists in Baltimore have spent years planting white oak saplings that need three decades to mature. You can't FedEx a forest to Colorado. You can't manage a Hawaiian ecosystem from a cubicle in Utah. Researchers told NPR they'll quit before they relocate. Which is the point. Meanwhile, Trump has openly pledged to ramp up logging on federal land. Gut the scientists who document the damage, and there's nobody left to sound the alarm when ancient forests get clear-cut for profit. These are the people who tell us when wildfire season turns deadly. Who track invasive beetles eating through pine. Who teach cities how to recycle dead trees instead of dumping them in landfills. You don't dismantle the world's largest forestry research network because you're worried about a maintenance bill. You dismantle it because somebody plans to take a chainsaw to what the public owns and doesn't want a paper trail. The forests don't belong to Tom Schultz. They don't belong to Trump. They belong to every American who has ever stood quiet under a hundred-year-old tree and understood, for one second, that some things are not for sale. Defend them now, or explain it to your grandkids later.

Hey .@elonmusk it’s been a year. Care to elaborate?

Can we get 500 people to reply "Russia is a terrorist state"? We need to remind everyone daily that Russia is a terrorist state and Putin is a wanted war criminal.

@HunterBiden, could you help spread the word of recovery? I'm 26 years hero!n-free and 15 years sober. My struggle to get and stay clean was difficult, but I'm here to tell the tale and documented it here: dub.sh/NewYorkRecoveryDays

This photo/screenshot will live in infamy.

Why would you visit Dubai when you can visit a village in Tuscany?

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Former BlackRock fund manager Ed Dowd on the AI bubble "pop" "we're at maximum AI hype right now" "they're [punching] out three IPOs, SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI" "a lot of these companies... [are] not going to go away" "[But] OpenAI may go to zero and Anthropic may go to zero, [and] their assets will be bought up for pennies on the dollar" This clip of Dowd (@DowdEdward), a former BlackRock fund manager and co-founder of Phinance Technologies, is taken from an interview with Greg Hunter (@USAWatchdog) posted to Rumble on May 29, 2026. ----------------Partial transcription of clip--------------- "What it means is eventually all this CapEx spending stops because the credit markets and I suspect— we're at maximum AI hype right now because they're trying to punch out three IPOs, SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. And these guys are not making enough money to justify the amount of CapEx they're doing. "The other thing that I think is going to potentially blow up the AI bubble is they don't have enough power to plug in all this CapEx into. "So they're announcing all this CapEx, they're pre-buying equipment and chips but they can't plug it into the power grid. We just don't have enough power to justify all these data center buildouts. The constraining factor is power. "And look, there's a disconnect. I think Wall Street is less focused on the public outrage that's going on that you can see happening all across the country. People are protesting these data centers. College, students are booing commencement speakers that talk about AI. "There seems to be a very, very large anti AI sentiment going on out there which will muck up the works and slow down the data center buildouts politically. "And if you slow down the capex build out, the valuations of all these companies go a lot lower because they rely on you know, exponential growth and when the growth doesn't show up at these valuations they'll pop... "And look a lot of these companies that are doing the AI, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, they're not going to go away. They'll just cut back their CapEx. They won't go bankrupt but their valuations and their earnings will go lower as they write off all these mal investments. So it's not like a lot of companies are going to go bankrupt. I mean, OpenAI may go to zero and Anthropic may go to zero, but their assets will be bought up for pennies on the dollar."

First it was MIT and McKinsey. Now Bain finds that returns to corporate AI investments are disappointing.

We are breaking the trust between the people and the financial system to benefit a few banks and the most racist man in the universe. Wall Street is a dead letter. It must be totally reformed. Everyone involved in enabling this Nazi is a corrupt, bloodthirsty greedmonster.

in/adjacent to the financial markets for 45 years, and what is happening today makes 1987, 2002, 2020 look like happy days. What’s going to happen in the next five months will be the stuff of history. The 21st Century Depression is here. Buckle up, write it down.

Her daughter wanted to make a TikTok recipe for dinner for the family. She made creamy lemon chicken with mashed potatoes and broccoli. She said her daughter did a great job the food was delicious. Now listen to what her daughter tells her as she is handing her a plate. 🤣🤣🤣🤣