Authored by James Howard Kunstler,
The Earth Moves Just a Bit“Operation Epic Fury was the loud one. Operation Economic Fury is the quiet one. . . . While the carriers were on television, Treasury was doing the actual demolition.”
- Jesús Enrique Rosas on X
Expect a consequential week.
The Persian Gulf remains closed and colossal oil slicks leak out of Kharg Island while Iran blusters and stomps its feet. No one can even try to buy its oil anymore, not even China. The sanctions are too onerous. Iran’s wells must be shut in now. Imagine how the production chiefs out in the oil fields are howling at their insane IRGC overseers.
Iran has no economy left operating. Iran’s domestic security force, the Basij (Sâzmân-e Basij-e Mostaz’afin, or “Mobilization of the Oppressed”) is strangling anyone who expresses discontent in the streets, not a good look for a regime that can’t survive without the pretense of popular support.
Late Sunday, the US President rejected the Tehran’s latest conditions for peace out of hand.
They are trying to jerk the whole world around, even while they whirl around the drain. Despite what you read in The New York Times — Iran’s US-based chief cheerleader — it is probably a matter of days now before capitulation. The ball is in America’s court this morning, a real hanging lob shot. The return is apt to be hard. Of course, whatever official utterances come out of Iran, you must discount by about 99.9-percent. For now, there is nothing but the morning fog of suspense.
But strange doings are a’foot elsewhere.
You might have noticed that the UK’s labor government got drubbed in local elections, losing nearly 1,500 council seats, a humiliating repudiation. It’s a matter of days before PM Keir Starmer will have to hang it up. His possible replacements are utterly unknown to Americans — Angela Rayner, a former Deputy PM, Energy Secretary Ed Milliband, Health Sec’y Wes Streeting — and any of them is just a place-holder for the election’s main winner Nigel Farage of the Reform Party, which exists wholly outside the age-old British political transect of Labour / Tories.
The Labour Party, you see, is lately as loathsome in the altogether to British voters as its current avatar, Sir Keir (Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, KCB), whose latest act was to extend social welfare benefits to the additional wives of poly-marital Muslims. Way to go! Why not just travel the island empire from town-to-town and slap every indigenous Briton in the face? And the Tories (putative Conservatives), well, just fuggeddabowdem. Sir Keir’s Tory predecessor as PM, Rishi Sunak, screwed the pooch for his party into the next twenty years allowing net Third World migration to hit record highs while the kingdom crumbled.
The way it works over there, Sir Keir or whoever takes over from him, asks King Charles to dissolve Parliament, and you get a sudden national election short of Parliament’s regular five-year term. And so, sometime in the months ahead, Nigel Farage will become Prime Minister and things will change-up bigly in Britain. Mr. Farage will have to contend, among other things, with Donald Trump’s dismantling of whatever was left of Britain’s stealth neo-colonial command of global finance through the British banking system. The question really is: can Farage arrest his country’s sickening slide into becoming an Islamic caliphate, with all the Third World bells and whistles? Can he possibly even start shipping the most recent arrivals back to where they came from? Can he do what Mr. Trump is attempting in the USA and turn the UK back to an economy based on the actual production of goods rather than financial finaglery?
Oddly, as the old Mother Country rejects the Globalist tool, Keir Starmer, Canadian PM Mark Carney attempts to highjack the Globalist baton for the rest of Anglosphere remnant of the old empire. And also, in case you didn’t notice just days ago, King Charles’s attempt to kiss up to Mr. Trump, despite all the mutual flattery and gala ceremony, was a failure for the King of England. That is to say, he did not succeed in getting Mr. Trump to back off even a little bit from reducing the Crown’s imperious control over world affairs.
Former President Obama tries shadow foreign policy with Canadian PM Carney
And so, in the background, you see former president Barack Obama skulk into Ottawa to plot around all those developments with Canadian PM Carney, who is positioning himself to operate as the British Empire’s shadow PM-in-absentia — like the Pope in Avignon during the tumultuous 1300s.
That is, Carney, former head of the Bank of England, is electing himself to oppose Nigel Farage, with the stealth assistance of America’s shadow leader of the Democratic Party, Mr. Obama, who actually represents the Islamic-Marxist chimeric alliance that Globalism has become.
Why is Barack Obama not subject to violation of the Logan Act for this?
Alas for that shifty operation, the Democratic Party in America is now way back on its heels after the double punch of flubbing its Virginia redistricting gambit and then the SCOTUS decision against racial gerrymandering that will cull dozens of racially-engineered Democratic districts out of the US House of Representatives.
Out the window is the Democrats’ scheme to impeach both Mr. Trump and Veep Vance in 2027 so as to install Hakeem Jeffries in the White House.
Yeah, really.
That was their plan. . . suddenly up in a vapor.
And the DOJ’s prosecutions of the Party’s multitudinous grifters and color revolutionists has barely even begun. My Gawd, they are sinking really fast now.
And mid-week, it’s off to China for Mr. Trump to meet Uncle Xi.
How badly do they want their oil supplies switched back on? And what are they prepared to do, to make that happen?
Buckle up for a wild week.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 16:20Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,
He’s a judicial pimp who pragmatically defends the Establishment’s bottom line.
I do not like Chief Justice John Roberts. I think his loyalties lie more with defending the entrenched powers of the political Establishment than with defending the Constitution of the United States. I find his jurisprudence squishy. Although his decisions could be described as advancing, more often than not, conservative viewpoints, Roberts does not seem to have a consistent philosophy guiding his opinions.
Roberts is a pragmatist. He surveys the mood of the country and considers how the rest of the members of the Court will vote on any case, and he chooses a position that he feels will best preserve the institutional longevity of the Judicial Branch. Roberts is, in other words, more interested in maintaining the power of the branch that he embodies than in making tough, but correct, decisions.
None of Roberts’ rulings better exemplifies this pragmatic, amoral approach to jurisprudence than his 2012 decision to save Obamacare by redefining the individual insurance mandate as a tax, rather than as a penalty. During oral arguments, the Obama administration barely addressed the possibility that the mandate could be seen as a tax. Democrats did not want to admit that nationalizing health insurance would increase costs for Americans, and the word “tax” certainly implies that prices will rise (which they did).
President Obama had been haranguing the Court for over a year that should it strike down his signature welfare legislation putting the federal government in control of American medicine, the decision would be disastrous for the American people and render the Court illegitimate. Roberts lives in the D.C. bubble. All his friends live in the D.C. bubble. The Democrat-controlled corporate news media reflect the prevailing opinions of those who live within the D.C. bubble. So Chief Justice Roberts chose to avoid leftist backlash (and to protect the Establishment’s sizable financial investments in government-controlled, socialized medicine) by aligning himself with Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.
Obama celebrated Roberts’ valuable assist: “The highest court in the land has now spoken,” the president gloated. It is worth noting that similarly squishy jurist Justice Anthony Kennedy (a man whom Democrats succeeded in elevating to the Court after scuttling President Reagan’s original nomination of Robert Bork and then his replacement nomination of Douglas Ginsburg) actually joined the conservative members of the Court in a dissent that would have invalidated Obamacare in its entirety. Because Roberts joined the four leftist members of the Court in protecting Obama’s government takeover of the medical profession, healthcare is substantially more expensive and provides substantially worse treatment today.
Roberts’ constitutionally illiterate and philosophically unsound Obamacare opinion permitted a nefarious government-corporate power axis to take hold that has killed private practices across the country, made every medical doctor a de facto government employee, replaced medical science with government-regulated treatments, and inserted a government bureaucrat inside every examination room. But Roberts did preserve his standing in the D.C. bubble, maximize the profits of large insurance companies, bankrupt rural hospitals, increase the investment portfolio-generated wealth of insider-trading members of Congress, eliminate small practices that prioritized patient care, and let labor unions off the hook for healthcare obligations that they owed to their members. Furthermore, an entire generation of young leftists — too ignorant to know that President Obama and his fellow Democrats are responsible for the horrible state of healthcare in the United States today — openly celebrate the assassination of health insurance company executives walking down the street.
When the issue of Obamacare’s unconstitutionality came before the Roberts Court, the chief justice could have saved the country from all the harm that has come from forcing another illegitimate government power grab upon the American people. But that would have taken guts, wisdom, and principle. Roberts has none of those virtues. He’s a judicial pimp who pragmatically defends the Establishment’s bottom line. The medical profession in America is worse off and American patients are poorer and less healthy because of Roberts’ cowardice.
What I find particularly galling about the chief justice, however, is that he demands to be respected as some kind of impartial and inherently righteous judicial priest. If he could admit that he lacks a jurisprudential backbone and primarily represents the interests of the Establishment Blob in D.C., I would grant him some small measure of respect for being self-aware enough to understand that he is little more than a swampy, Leviathan-controlled, gelatinous judge whose opinions can be molded into whatever D.C.’s “elites” need. But Roberts is not honest enough to do that. Instead, he pretends to be above venal politics and struts around in his priestly robes as if he represents a branch of government too holy to be tainted by the inherently corrupting influence of power.
Although Roberts never said anything when Obama and his Democrat goons were threatening the Court before its damaging Obamacare decision, the chief justice jumped into action in 2018 to reprimand President Trump during his first term. Trump had publicly excoriated a 9th Circuit judge for usurping constitutional powers vested to the president of the United States. In doing so, Trump called the judicial tyrant “an Obama judge.” Well, that rather anodyne remark threw Chief Justice Roberts into a “Why, I never” tizzy, and the Judicial Branch’s limp caretaker found his way to a member of the Democrat-controlled press in order to correct the president’s errant thinking: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
Uhhh…sure, Chief Justice Gumby. Why would a grown man feel compelled to tell such a blatant lie? The whole country knows that judges come with certain ideological proclivities that influence their decisions on the bench. While Republican presidents have repeatedly stumbled into nominating raging leftists (among them, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice David Souter) to the Supreme Court, nobody has any doubt that federal judges are chosen for their perceived philosophical bent.
This problem exists only because federal judges have proved incapable of performing their jobs with self-restraint. In the past, Roberts has correctly defined the Judiciary’s obligations: “Our role is very clear. We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States and ensure that the political branches act within them.” But that’s not how most judges act! Instead of interpreting the Constitution, federal judges rewrite the Constitution. Instead of interpreting laws written by Congress, federal judges rewrite those laws into laws of their own. For Roberts to pretend that federal judges have not spent the last century imposing their will upon the American people makes him richly deserving of Queen Gertrude’s quip: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Eight years later, Lady Roberts is still protesting! In a speech last week in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the chief justice claimed that judges are not “political actors.” (Tell that to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose opinions sound as if they were written by teenaged Marxists with dog-eared copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals!) Roberts lamented how too many Americans “think we’re making policy decisions.” (Perhaps that’s because too many judges are, in fact, making policy decisions!) The chief justice also insisted that it is “not appropriate” for Americans to criticize individual judges.
Well, perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should convince his federal judges to stop behaving as partisan hacks! Rather than permitting, through his silence, individual judges to usurp the powers of the president of the United States, perhaps Roberts should call those tyrannical judges out by name. If he wants the Judicial Branch to be perceived as “independent” and “nonpartisan,” then he should insist that judges exercise constitutional self-restraint!
But he won’t do that. Because Roberts has opinions but no spine.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/11/2026 - 15:40