Deviant Globalization @deviantglobal

BREAKING: A source close to Iranian officials says Tehran has documented a pattern of oil market manipulation tied to Axios reports and Trump administration insiders, including evidence of a $9 billion insider trading operation linked to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Some of the documented timeline from the $9 billion insider profit: Between April and May 2026, a series of suspiciously timed trades in oil futures markets preceded major Iran war announcements—each tied to reporting by Axios. On March 23, approximately $500–580 million in shorts were placed 15 minutes before Trump announced he was postponing strikes on Iran. Oil dropped. On April 7, roughly $950–960 million in shorts were placed hours before Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Oil fell around 15 percent. On April 17, around $760 million in shorts were placed 20 minutes before Iran's foreign minister announced the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil dropped. On April 21, approximately $430 million in shorts were placed 15 minutes before Trump extended the ceasefire. Oil dropped again. On May 6, nearly $920 million to $1.7 billion in crude oil shorts were placed approximately 70 minutes before an Axios scoop claimed the U.S. and Iran were near a "14-point agreement." Oil dropped 12 percent. Traders made an estimated $125 million. Iran called the report "the Americans' wish list." Previously, a senior Iranian official told investigative outlet Drop Site News that Tehran privately warned JD Vance during Switzerland talks that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were "abusing" negotiations—"more interested in exploiting insider knowledge to profit in financial markets than reaching a deal."

Deviant tourism apnews.com/article/spain-…

The Trump Administration has some serious explaining to do because there’s a ton of money missing and ZERO explanation for where it went.       It has collected an estimated $13 billion from Venezuelan oil sales.      Take a wild guess on how much of that is currently accounted for.       The answer is $300 million. That’s roughly 2.3 PERCENT.      And even that information came from the Venezuelan government, not the Trump Administration.      So where is the rest of the money?   ft.com/content/0e562e…

DEA analysts have found Trump's boat strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States, but instead have led traffickers to diversify. Deviant innovation: washingtonpost.com/world/2026/07/…

"The targeted killings — and the highly choreographed positioning of the remains — were clearly a warning from organized crime, which, despite official denials, constitutes a kind of parallel government in many areas of Mexico" latimes.com/world-nation/s…

First known US case: American charged for using a “duress” password Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta resident, is being prosecuted for allegedly giving border agents a passcode that wiped his phone. The feature comes from GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused Android OS. Entering the duress code triggers a full factory reset. This is believed to be the first time federal prosecutors have brought such charges. The incident happened in January 2025 at Atlanta airport. Agents demanded access to his phone without a warrant, saying he hadn’t yet officially entered the US. When they entered the code, the phone wiped itself. Tunick has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers argue the seizure was unlawful and that agents were investigating his activism against “Cop City.” The case raises big questions about digital rights at the US border. What do you think? Article: techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/us-… #Privacy #GrapheneOS #DigitalRights

Sébastien Jean and Jean-Pierre Landau: "In terms of welfare, European consumers should welcome cheap electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels that are subsidized directly or indirectly by Chinese workers and taxpayers. But Europeans instead see them as a threat, which is rational from a dynamic perspective. Cheap imports may raise purchasing power today, but they can destroy the industrial base on which tomorrow’s income depends. The transfer is generous in the present, but costly in the future." Jean and Landau are right, and they represent a real shift in the way the world understands trade, away from the complacent (some would even say condescending) neglect still favored by mainstream economists, to a deeper grasp of how trade imbalances allow countries that exert greater control over their external accounts to export their industrial policies (in reverse) to those of their trade partners with more open external accounts. In a world in which some economies exert substantial control over their external accounts, in other words, while other countries don't, if the former decide to implement aggressive industrial policies, not only are they restructuring their own domestic economies, but they are also restructuring the domestic economies of the latter in a such a way as to accommodate their own economic needs. Jean and Landau add: "A useful complement to this strategy is capital controls. Controls on outflows keep domestic savings at home, while restricting inflows prevents the economy from rebalancing from tradable to non-tradable sectors—the opposite of what the strategy aims to achieve. Capital inflows strengthen the currency, weaken exports, and support consumption. They accelerate domestic absorption before scale and learning are secured, thus impeding the pursuit of comparative advantage." I agree, and this suggests that rather than encourage capital inflows, economies that want to strengthen their manufacturing and productive sectors and to benefit workers by raising productivity and wages should consider capital controls as a far more effective tool than tariffs. Unfettered financial inflows largely benefit the large banks and owners of movable capital at the expense of manufacturers and workers. They also force the economy to shift out of producing tradable goods (including manufacturing) and into non-tradable goods (real estate and services). ifri.org/en/media-exter…

Chinese models will dominate the world. US AI might survive behind a protective wall. Americans will end up paying a lot more for their AI, just like they do for meds, EVs, solar panels and drones.

Nandini @N_and_ni

2 weeks ago

Be honest, who do you think will dominate Al by 2030?

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"Flight records released by DOJ show that.... this shadow network spanned Europe, recruiting dozens, potentially more than a hundred women, who were transported to his properties in France, the UK, the US and the US Virgin Islands." bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-…

climate change comes for us all... even the plutocratic insurgency "French authorities have ordered the evacuation of the entirety of the Cap Ferret peninsula on the south-west coast, with hundreds of people escaping by boat." bbc.com/news/articles/…

OpenAI said the ‘agent’ escaped a testing environment, gained internet access, stole login credentials and hacked into the start-up Hugging Face by itself — one of the first public examples of a cyber attack by an AI system acting outside human control. ft.trib.al/Op3fhwC

Putin Last night Donald Trump released a declassified document that says his own intelligence community identified Putin as personally running an operation to defeat my father in 2020, built around a fake Burisma corruption scandal centered around me and executed through prominent Americans. Trump tasked his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to fly to Kyiv and meet a known Russian agent. The Americans who ran, laundered, and legitimized the operation: Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani. John Solomon. Joe DiGenova. Victoria Toensing. Lev Parnas. Igor Fruman. Chanel Rion. Sean Hannity. Steve Bannon. Miranda Devine. Ken Vogel. Ron Johnson. Chuck Grassley. James Comer. Jim Jordan. To name a few. An operation formally sanctioned by Trump's own Treasury Department on September 10, 2020, and expanded to include more named actors on January 11, 2021. Oh, and don't forget the Russian-linked FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who later pleaded guilty to making the entire Burisma bribery story up. The record exists and we have all the receipts, and more.

Russian code is inside the White House app, which is now mandated on all government phones. The company behind the code is growing. Its founders bank at sanctioned Russian banks. And its accountant has a criminal history. My investigation:

Bessent says all the gold the U.S. Treasury has is worth “over a trillion dollars”; for perspective, that much gold at current prices would be about a 23 foot cube.

⭕️ Twenty-year-old manosphere influencer Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular, spent the weekend partying in Tel Aviv, where Israel’s Channel 13 filmed him at a nightclub with Topaz Luk, a senior media adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Haaretz. Throughout the trip, Peters was closely accompanied by a young Israeli woman with whom he repeatedly displayed physical affection. In a viral livestream clip, she claimed she had login access to the Israeli military’s official TikTok account, raising questions about who facilitated his visit and how closely it was connected to Israel’s official media operation. Asked by The Free Press on livestream who paid for his trip, Peters deflected, saying, “You don’t want to ask that question,” and claiming the financial backing was “confidential.” Netanyahu’s adviser said the meeting with the Gen Z streamer occurred “by coincidence.” The Times of Israel also reported speculation that Netanyahu met Peters and could appear on his channel. Peters was filmed in January singing Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” alongside white supremacist Nick Fuentes. He later said, “I am not sorry… I would do it again.”

views @viewsceo

4 weeks ago

Clavicular made a boss call after finding out his Israeli girlfriend had the login to the IDF’s official TikTok account 😳🇮🇱

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"The remnants of the Russian mercenary group Wagner have established a new foothold along the upper reaches of the Oubangui River, where they run a drug empire in the Central African Republic beyond the reach of law enforcement, or even Moscow itself." wsj.com/world/africa/r…

The Washingtonian's Jessica Sidman reports that most of those dubious food trucks on the National Mall are... illegal and run by the mob. washingtonian.com/2026/06/29/dc-…

Also hilarious: this tweet is also pretty clearly AI slop

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta

4 weeks ago

40 out of 86 Brown students scored a perfect 100 on their midterm. Then the professor moved the final in person, and 22 of those perfect scorers never showed up again. He'd suspected AI cheating from the start. The take-home midterm was deliberately harder than usual, yet the

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In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year. That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer. FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset. US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records. So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros. Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability. Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business. They will not.

dandelion georgism 🔰🏗 @DandyGeorgism

a month ago

“And every four years when the World Cup comes around, we will say that we’d dominate if we had a stronger youth program.” “And will we develop a stronger youth program?” “We will not.”

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This Mitch McConnell situation is CRAZY. I've been waiting for confirmation on the situation but his camp is keeping details locked down. So here's what we know: 1. He's been hospitalized for some time. 2. His highly connected Chinese wife left the country for high level meetings with the CCP after his medical emergency happened. 3. No one knows if he's conscious, with some rumors beginning to circulate that he's brain dead and on life support. 4. There's already an election to replace him happening this Fall, but Kentucky law calls for a special election for senators unable to complete their terms vs. a governor appointee. So if he is incapacitated, someone else likely would be elected to finish out his term through January. Speculators are suggesting the party doesn't want to deal with that process and is thus keeping his condition quiet. This is just the latest in a string of incidents where congressional leaders have disappeared and it's inexcusable. We need age limits immediately - having people this old and unhealthy in power is a national security threat.