Hollywood Director and Epstein Associate Accused of Sexual Misconduct Flies to China With Trump Aboard Air Force One
Charlie Nash
Wed, May 13, 2026
Brett Ratner, the Hollywood director and Jeffrey Epstein associate who was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, accompanied President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One this week as part of the president’s delegation to China.
Ratner flew to China as part of Trump’s delegation, alongside prominent CEOs, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, and Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick, according to reports.
The New York Post reported that Ratner would be scouting for locations for his upcoming Rush Hour 4 film as part of the trip.
Ratner was ousted from Hollywood in 2017 after multiple women, including actresses Natasha Henstridge and Olivia Munn, accused him of sexual misconduct. A former talent agency staffer has accused him of rape. Ratner has denied the allegations.
Late last year, the director was also found to have had a relationship with Epstein, the late child sex trafficker. In January, a photo of Ratner and Epstein cuddling two unknown women was released as part of the Epstein files.
Ratner returned to Hollywood this year as the director and producer of Melania – a documentary movie about First Lady Melania Trump, who was heavily involved in the film’s production.
The movie was praised by President Trump, who, like Ratner, was also previously a friend and associate of Epstein. Several current and former members of the Trump administration have been found to have had relationships with Epstein and his accomplice, convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, including Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick., Elon Musk, and Steve Bannon.
The post Hollywood Director and Epstein Associate Accused of Sexual Misconduct Flies to China With Trump Aboard Air Force One first appeared on Mediaite.
Nothing but the truth. Even if against me.
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Epstein Files' 'Wonderful-Secrets' Hero Flies with Trump to China
I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane..Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again
It's HIS country now. Not ours anymore.
Americans relocating permanently out of the US are those with brains, those who create jobs and businesses. Emma Lazarus's wretched refuse can't leave. Those who are leaving and renouncing their US citizenship can only be two types of people: Those with the means, i.e. those who have the money to do so, and who therefore have significant education and knowledge of the world; AND Democrat-leaning Americans who are sick at watching their country turned into a banana republic whose sole function is to serve a senile imbecile dick-tator propped up like a god by a huge bunch of illiterate inbred morons from the sticks.
We hear that billionnaires are punishing California's high cost of living and taxes by leaving the State. But they are unlikely to move to one of the backward, ignorant states of the south and the middle. They are more likely to move to Europe, Canada or Mexico.
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Record number of Americans are leaving the country and renouncing their citizenship for good, report says
Josh Marcus
Wed, May 13, 2026
Record number of Americans are leaving the country and renouncing their citizenship for good, report says
Americans appear to be leaving the U.S. at once-in-a-century levels, fleeing divisive politics and a cost of living crisis.
In 2025, the flow of Americans ditching the 50 states for good caused the first estimated net outward migration of the U.S. population in decades, something that likely hasn’t happened since the 1929 Great Depression.
“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed,” Jen Barnett, founder of the resettlement consultancy firm Expatsi, told The Wall Street Journal. “Now they’re ordinary people, like me.”
In 2024, Barnett joined in the trend, relocating to Yucatán, Mexico.
The U.S. government doesn’t officially track the number of Americans who’ve resettled abroad, so estimates of just how many people left can vary.
In 2025, net outward migration was between negative 10,000 and negative 295,000 people, Brookings estimates, forecasting a similar negative trend for 2026.
Others have pegged the outflow at around 150,000 people in 2025.
Before 2009, a typical year saw 200 to 400 people renounce their citizenship. By 2025, that figure was nearing 5,000, with more renunciations expected this year because fees to do so have dropped steeply.
Nearly all of the European Union’s 27 member states have seen record levels of Americans arriving to live and work there in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
Outside of Europe, Mexico is another popular destination.
Mexico is home to the largest concentration of U.S. expats, according to the State Department (Getty)
Approximately 1.6 million Americans live there, the State Department estimates, the largest overall concentration of American expats in the world.
Even more people are considering making the change.
A November 2025 Gallup poll found that one in five Americans would like to permanently move, double the figure from ten years earlier.
A variety of factors are driving the trend, according to the data, including political disagreements and affordability issues. Further, “golden visas” for foreign investors, remote work, and incentives for digital nomads all have opened new pathways for leaving the U.S.
In addition to driving Americans abroad, the lack of affordability in the U.S. economy is expected to be a major issue in the domestic midterm elections (AFP/Getty)
“For the better part of two centuries, the story of American migration ran in a single direction: inward,” Global Citizen Solutions, a citizenship advisory firm, wrote in a recent report on the trend. “The United States was the gravitational center of global human movement, the place people came to, not the place people left. That narrative is shifting.”
According to a February 2025 Harris poll, 68 percent of Americans considering leaving the U.S. cited unattainable home ownership and a sense they were “merely surviving instead of thriving.”
Meanwhile, 49 percent cited high living expenses and disagreements with the political situation in the U.S.
Within the U.S., another migration is underway, as high-cost states like California and Hawaii have lost population in recent years.
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Opinion
Let Trump build his vanity projects as a warning to everyone else | Opinion
Rex Huppke, USA TODAY
Wed, May 13, 2026
Inflation has surged to the highest level in three years, the cost of living is up and we’re stuck in a war with Iran. But don’t worry. President Donald Trump is busy painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue.
Hopefully, this new $13 million pool project doesn’t distract him from his now more than $1 billion White House ballroom project. Or from his $100 million Triumphal Arch project. Or from putting his face on U.S. currency and passports. And his name on buildings and airports.
That sounds like sarcasm, but I’ve settled into what may be a controversial opinion: Let Trump build his vanity projects. Let his Republican boot-smoochers etch “President Donald J. Trump” into marble facades and slap that moniker on whichever edifice or coin or government document they see fit.
Let his failed presidency remain a stain for generations to laugh at.
Let Trump paint the Reflecting Pool and build monuments to himself
You’re likely waiting for me to write something along the lines of, “And then, when the would-be/wannabe king is gone, we can rip the name down, burn the documents and sandblast the Donald J. Trump off every stone surface!”
But that’s not what I want. Not at all.
When Trump’s second term ends, assuming America makes it that far, I want his name and image and his every act of tone-deaf, unchecked narcissism left standing. I want the Reflecting Pool to stay a garish bright blue, like a Mar-a-Lago swimming pool on the National Mall.
I want his absurd ballroom to stand like an unsightly wart on the White House grounds. I want the Triumphal Arch, built when there was no triumph in sight, to loom as a toweringly obnoxious reminder of the dumb and egotistical man whom Americans – about 77 million of them when Trump won his second term – willfully invited into the People’s House.
The Trump era is not one Americans should ever forget
A statue of President Donald Trump at Trump National Doral Miami resort on April 30, 2026, in Florida.
Erasure of this period in American history would be too easy. It would let too many off the hook for a decision that, as I write this, is bankrupting farmers, putting U.S. troops in danger and depleting our military resources, pushing energy prices through the roof and driving income inequality to a 30-year high.
Trump rose to political power via cruelty, dishonesty and division. He legitimized bullying, eroded America’s standing on the world stage and sowed doubts about the very foundations of our democracy. He fomented a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol and then, defying all logic, came back four years later and conned a majority of Americans into giving him another term, promising a golden age of low prices and a vengeful end to an immigrant crime wave he concocted out of whole cloth.
Our country is now reaping what MAGA voters and a political media system hellbent on normalizing Trump sowed, and I’ll be damned if I want any of them – or anyone, for that matter – to forget the historically colossal decision.
They put a self-aggrandizing conman with zero regard for humanity into the most powerful position in the world. They should sit with that for decades to come.
Tourists will one day learn about and laugh at Trump's arrogance
So let Trump erect, print and distribute these unmerited honors to himself. And keep letting Republicans watch as it happens.
When a tour bus rides under the Triumphal Arch years from now, I want the guide to explain which president decided it would be a good idea, and how much taxpayer money was dished out to build it while a sizable swath of the populace struggled to afford ground beef.
Trump’s earlier estimates for the ballroom began at $200 million when it was announced in July, rose to $250 million in September and then to $300 million in October. The ballroom will be financed by private donations, Trump said.
President Donald Trump released a new rendering of the East Wing on Truth Social Feb. 3, 2026. Trump said the price of his new White House ballroom has risen again to $400 million − double the initial estimate.
Every day, people visit Washington, DC, and view the Lincoln Memorial and learn what an important leader the country had in Abraham Lincoln. They visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and understand how the civil rights icon made the world a better place. They see the names etched into the walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and recognize those who made true sacrifices for this country.
I want future visitors to also see the outlandish giant ballroom attached to the White House like an ornate Costco and learn about a president who made no sacrifice for this country, but lavishly spent its money while the cost of living soared.
Keep the Trump name on the now-shuttered Kennedy Center
Workers react to journalists watching the installation of President Donald Trump's name on the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on Dec. 19, 2025. The sign on the building now reads “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
I want them to see the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and learn that a living president came along and had the gall to put his name ahead of the name of a beloved former president who was assassinated. They’ll learn how Trump decided to shut the center down for two years for “renovations,” and how that was really to hide the embarrassment of artists canceling performances once Trump’s name was put on the building.
They’ll see the “American flag blue” Reflecting Pool and read about how brutally and rightfully Trump was mocked for his bizarre focus on aesthetics and gold fixtures and gold statues of himself.
That’s as it should be. The desire to tear down and do away with every trace of Trump will one day soon be palpable. I get it. I’ll feel it too.
But it would be the wrong move.
I want Trump voters to have daily reminders of the mistake they made
The fact that this unhinged snake-oil salesman was elected president of the United States on two occasions is not something any American should ever forget. Trump happened, and the consequences to our democracy, to our national unity, to our image around the world have been incalculable.
Once we move past the cruelty and incompetence, nothing could serve as a better reminder of this American blunder than a tacky, bright-blue Reflecting Pool in our nation’s capital. Or tourist groups breaking out in boos when Trump’s name is brought up. Or some prominent buildings that carry that same cringe-inducing name. Standing reminders of how easily the masses can be fooled, and how dangerous it would be to ever let that happen again.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.
Iran War/Oil Boom: Nepotistic Corruption in the Trump Out House
The White House warned staff not to abuse insider info. Then $1.7 billion changed hands 1 hour before an Iran war reveal
Chase Kell
Tue, May 12, 2026
KENT NISHIMURA/Getty Images
Weeks after the White House sent an email to staffers warning them against using confidential information to place trades on financial markets, more questionable oil market activity is raising suspicions.
Well-timed oil bets that seemed to be able to predict the future started making headlines in March. Using prediction market platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi, prescient bettors were able to capitalize on fluctuating oil prices just before President Trump made major announcements on the war in Iran.
But it's not just oil bets that are winning big. In April, an American soldier was arrested on accusations that he leveraged classified information to make bets on the operation that captured former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Trump later told reporters that he's "not happy with any of that stuff."
Suspicions of insider trading were heightened even further on May 6, when $1.7 billion worth of oil contracts changed hands just an hour before a report from Axios sent oil prices tumbling.
More suspicious bets
As MarketWatch reports, trading in U.S. crude futures spiked on May 6 just before Axios published a report that America and Iran could be closing in on a deal to end the war (1).
Axios' report (2) — which was published at around 4:50 a.m. Eastern time — caused West Texas Intermediate oil futures to fall 7%. Meanwhile, roughly 17,300 oil contracts with an estimated value of nearly $2 billion had already been traded.
MarketWatch spoke with several oil-market experts who believe the suspicious activity could be an indication that someone with advanced knowledge of a potential end to the war was trading ahead of Axios' report.
"All federal employees are subject to government ethics guidelines that prohibit the use of nonpublic information for financial benefit," Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, shared with MarketWatch. "However, any implication that Administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Bloomberg reported in April that The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating these suspicious oil futures trades and their suspected connection to Trump's announcements on the Iran war (3). And while a CFTC representative told MarketWatch that the agency can't confirm or deny such an investigation, the Department of Justice has reportedly opened its own probe into the matter (4).
As the DOJ began investigating these controversial oil price bets, Trump shared his distaste for prediction markets with reporters.
"I was never much in favor of it," Trump said from the Oval Office, according to the New York Times (5). "I don't like it conceptually. It is what it is."
The president's family, however, is heavily invested in the prediction market industry. In fact, Trump Media & Technology Group recently announced it would be launching its own prediction market platform called Truth Predict (6).
Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son and a director of Truth Social, has also invested in Polymarket and serves as an unpaid advisor to the platform. He serves as an advisor to Kalshi as well.
With this arrangement, the president's prediction market comments seem to clash directly with his family's current business endeavors. And while he says that he doesn't favor prediction markets at all, in 2025, the Trump administration reportedly backed away from enforcing oversight measures against Polymarket (7).
"Presidential statements used to be the gold standard, but this is not true for President Trump," Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, told the NYT (5). "What he does is more important than what he says. I don't think his comments will bother the prediction markets in the least."
Article sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
MarketWatch (1); Axios (2); Bloomberg (3); The Independent (4); The New York Times (5),(7); Blockworks (6)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: The White House warned staff not to abuse insider info. Then $1.7 billion changed hands 1 hour before an Iran war reveal
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
[Updated]: Thanks to the Great Moron: World Cup is a non-Event
The piece below claims that international sports events like the World Cup always fall short, and that the impending disaster of a World Cup taking place across three countries, the US, Mexico and Canada, is almost certain to happen because of Donald Dumb's vulgar and demeanning posture vis-a-vis Canada and Mexico.
The real reasons why FIFA is sounding the alarm is because people around the world do not like the arrogance, xenophobia and racism of Trump's US.
Gasoline is expensive and so are flight tickets and game tickets.
People are angry at the sublime Trump asskisser, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who awarded the senile Moron a 'Peass' Prize.
People worldwide are angry at the Iran war launched by the Imbecile-in-Chief on behalf of a war criminal like ultra-orthodox Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu who is personally responsible for the GAZA genocide.
Potential visitors from what Trump called "shithole" countries are banned from obtaining visas and even if granted visas, they will not attend for fear of being abused, mistreated, bullied, maltreated, brutalized and potentially killed by Trump's two militias, ICE-GESTAPO and U.S. CBP.
Even visitors from "non-Shithole" (supposedly friendly) countries are wary of an aggressive US customs that might land them in jail for no reason whatsoever under the racist white supremacist policies by Stephen Miller, the sinister Zionist "advisor" of the Great Moron.
Regular Canadian and Mexican travel to the US over the summer season has dropped by nearly 60% this year compared to pre-Trump years.
Penny-pinching avaricious Trump is less likely to support hosting states' federal contributions to their budgets for the FIFA events, so economic disaster is looming.
There are questions about many teams' refusal to play on US soil, so FIFA had to re-engineer its schedules to have teams play uniquely on Canadian or Mexican soil.
The aggressive and heavily armed racist white supremacist organizations that Trump has enabled are perceived as dangerous and inimical to foreign travelers and visitors, so people will probably skip this World Cup because it is not worth the headaches of having to deal with these violent neo-Nazi groups.
So, it is not only economic drivers that are already failing this World Cup; it is the nasty and unfriendly America of Trump. Obviously Trump would love the financial windfall - he worships money - but without the "damn foreigners". But this dumbass idiot doesn't understand what makes America REALLY GREAT.
These large events orchestrated by big companies have one objective and only one: How to fleece stupid fans (who find kicking a ball an exercise of nationalistic fervor) of their money. People sort of accepted this begnin agreement of sorts. But Trump's adding insult to injury by humiliating people at consulates and airports because of their origin and skin color is the final nail in the coffin of any feeling of sympathy for the US under Trump.
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U.S. hotels are calling the World Cup a ‘non-event’ and 80% warn bookings are falling short of expectations, report finds
Sasha Rogelberg
Updated Tue, May 12, 2026
Last year, FIFA president Gianni Infantino hailed the upcoming World Cup as the equivalent of “104 Super Bowls,” quantifying just how big the sport known as football worldwide is—or, at least in comparison to America’s football version. With the average Super Bowl getting 125.6 million views annually, Infantino expects the World Cup to attract the equivalent viewership of three Super Bowls a day for all 39 days of the competition. FIFA predicts games would touch six billion viewers globally, and expects the influx of travelers and tourism will help contribute to a projected $30.5 billion economic windfall for the three host countries of the U.S, Mexico and Canada.
The U.S. hospitality industry, however, is skeptical of the event’s money-making promises.
Of more than 200 hotels surveyed across the 11 U.S. host cities, nearly 80% said hotel bookings are tracking below initial forecasts, a new report from the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) found. Though FIFA data shows more than five million tickets have already been booked for the event, “indicators suggest the anticipated economic lift may fall short of expectations,” the report said.
Most respondents noted trouble with overseas visitors obtaining visas, in addition to other geopolitical challenges, as the primary factors slowing down travel demand. Other U.S. hotels said FIFA created “an artificial early demand signal” with an overcommitment to hotel blocks. In March, FIFA exercised an opt-out clause in its contract and cancelled thousands of hotel rooms in all 16 of the World Cup host cities, including Philadelphia and Dallas, to accommodate shifting demand.
According to a FIFA spokesperson, the organization’s accommodations team worked closely with hotels to adjust room blocks, including on rates and room types.
“All room releases were conducted in line with contractually agreed timelines with hotel partners—a standard practice for an event of this scale,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. “In many cases, room releases were made ahead of established deadlines to further accommodate requests from hotels.”
The hotels surveyed—in the cities of Kansas City, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—blamed low international demand, with some saying booking pace was trending below even typical summer expectations. The remaining five host cities are spread out between Canada and Mexico, comprised of Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey in Mexico and Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. This year is the first time since 2002 that a World Cup has been hosted by multiple countries, and may be among the most politically charged one yet following a year of high tensions after the U.S. imposed tariffs globally, including on its co-bidders. All of this combined, the hotels say, makes the World Cup a little more than a blip on the map.
“Many respondents describe the tournament as a ‘non-event’ in these cities,” the report said.
Unique challenges for the 2026 World Cup
Total expenditures for the World Cup—including from host cities, FIFA, investors, and tourists—will likely top $13.9 billion, FIFA estimates. The U.S. alone is expected to spend more than $11 billion to host the event. However, analysts have cast doubt on FIFA’s ability to deliver on its economic promises. An Oxford Economists report published last month predicted “some GDP growth” as a result of the games over the summer, but only temporary job gains in the leisure and hospitality sectors.
Just a few weeks away, the first match will kick off on June 11. The tournament coincides with a period of tumultuous travel some warn could hamper attendance. People already have travel wariness thanks to the Iran war, now entering its second month, which led to a de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz and has left oil prices elevated above pre-war levels.
Last month, Goldman Sachs warned Europe’s jet fuel supplies could fall below its key 23-day shortage threshold—though carriers including the Swiss International Air Lines say they have enough supply for flights through the end of June. Still, the average price of a transcontinental flight rose from $167 in late February to $414 in mid-March, according to a Deutsche Bank analysis.
The costs of attending the World Cup stateside go beyond just airfare. Tickets for many of the matches top $1,000. And that’s on the lower end: The World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19 costs nearly $33,000. NJ Transit, which originally had a round-trip ticket package from New York City to MetLife Stadium for $150, lowered it to $105 last week following public backlash over the massive price hike. On average, tickets from New York Penn Station to the stadium are typically $13 for the 45 minute train ride.
The FIFA spokesperson said tickets have been released at various price categories, including a minimum of 1,000 tickets at $60 each for each match, including the final.
Though Infantino said the steep ticket costs were a product of “market rates” in the U.S., where the entertainment economy is so developed, even President Donald Trump admitted the tickets were too expensive.
“I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest,” Trump told The New York Post last week.
That’s in addition to some soccer fans’ decision to snub the U.S. during the World Cup. In January, 170,000 people in the Netherlands signed a petition calling on the Dutch national team to boycott the event following the Trump administration’s threats to take over Greenland. The Dutch cabinet rejected the boycott.
Lisa Delpy Neirotti, director of the Sport Management Program at the George Washington University, said while politics may be a factor to consider, soccer fans will be more swayed by ticket and travel prices than anything else.
“The geopolitical issues are a very small piece of it,” she told Fortune.
Why global sporting events usually fall short
Exorbitant costs and logistical barriers are certainly a drag for soccer fans looking to attend the
World Cup, Delpy Neirotti said, but international sporting events have a history of setting unrealistically high economic aspirations.
“Everybody wants to hear big numbers, right?” she said. “That gets everybody excited. That gets everybody to buy in.”
Part of those unrealistic expectations may come from the events’ propensity to spend beyond initial projections. A 2024 University of Oxford study found the previous three summer Olympic Games (prior to Paris’ in 2024, where researchers did not collect data) exceeded budgets by 185% as a result of immense security requirements and infrastructure demands. The 1976 Olympic Summer Games in Montreal cost $1.5 billion more than its project’s $124 million budget, and it took taxpayers about 30 years to pay off the 10-digit debt.
That’s not the case for all international games. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar contributed nearly 1% of the country’s GDP, though the event was more likely to attract out-of-country tourists given the country’s smaller population. Its small size also meant a stronger concentration of venues, which made it easier for attendees to view multiple matches in one trip.
Delpy Neirotti does not expect an economic disaster from this year’s World Cup, but does warn that expectations should be tempered. There’s a likelihood that as most tickets become available, more soccer fans will book last-minute trips to give the hospitality and tourism sector a boost.
“It does bring economic impact, but it may not bring the impact that the report said,” Delpy Neirotti concluded. “You get all this hype, and then it kind of falls short. So then people are disappointed, but they still should be happy with it.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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[Update May 13]
Why So Many World Cup Tickets Remain Unsold One Month Out
Mon, May 11, 2026
Only a month remains until the World Cup descends upon the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, and thousands of tickets remain unsold, listed at extremely high prices.
Prices are starting to fall—barely—but FIFA will need a more dramatic drop in costs if it wants to fill stadiums, experts tell Front Office Sports.
FIFA opened its alleged final “last minute” sales window on April 1, saying it would stay open through the tournament. This would be the first time that any member of the public could access tickets straight from FIFA without needing to be selected at random, or go through a federation or special offer.
But FIFA didn’t put up all remaining tickets on April 1. The global governing body made some tickets available that day, but said at the time that “tickets will continue to be released on a rolling basis,” and it has continued slowly releasing more inventory as the tournament gets closer.
Sometimes, FIFA announces its releases, as the global governing body did for two drops on April 22 and May 7. The official announcement came two days before the April 22 drop and one day before the May 7 window. In these cases, fans wait for hours in the virtual queue, and when they finally get access to view tickets, they find prices that are higher than they want to pay, or experience glitches and error messages.
In other instances, the inventory fluctuates without an official announcement. On Monday, some ticket categories had appeared, disappeared, or changed prices from last week’s official drop.
In both cases, FIFA is drip-feeding tickets to a tournament that is already seeing unprecedented demand.
“It’s revenue maximization from FIFA,” Kieran Maguire, author and podcast cohost of The Price of Football, tells FOS. “I think FIFA have abandoned the traditional soccer fan and they’re pursuing a strategy of making as much money as they can, so are therefore creating artificial scarcity in the market by having small drops of tickets.”
Thousands of tickets remain unsold. The issue isn’t a lack of interest—FIFA said in January it received more than 500 million ticket requests—or a lack of inventory. Plenty of fans are interested in buying tickets, and plenty of tickets are still available for them.
FIFA’s problem is that demand does not exist at the prices that are being listed, ticketing expert Jim McCarthy tells FOS. “It would not be hard to sell this tournament, sell every single ticket of this tournament, but the prices are aggressive,” McCarthy says.
When FOS participated in the official ticket drops on April 22 and May 7, the virtual queue took several hours each time. Once inside, the April 22 drop was riddled with error messages, allowing only two match selections amid the warnings before inadvertently returning to the queue. On May 7, the system allowed more selections—FOS observed high prices for host nations and a ticket to the final listed at nearly $33,000—before again reverting to the line.
FIFA did not respond to questions about its strategy or whether it would lower prices in the future, nor did it confirm whether it had released more tickets on Monday.
Will FIFA Lower Prices?
On the secondary market, prices for group-stage matches are already coming down. But on FIFA’s primary platform, prices largely remain stubbornly high.
FIFA is using dynamic pricing for the World Cup as it did at last summer’s Club World Cup. Those prices eventually plummeted to nearly nothing; FIFA offered $4 tickets to see Lionel Messi in Miami and free tickets in Seattle.
The Record
There are some signs of ticket prices dipping, although not to levels that would make them widely affordable.
For the U.S. opener against Paraguay in Los Angeles on June 11, the prices for the highest-tier tickets, Front Categories 1 and 2, fell from $4,105 and $2,330 last week to $3,420 and $2,135, respectively, by Monday. For the U.S. against Australia in Seattle, FIFA added four Category 2 seats for $570. And after listing a Front Category 1 ticket to the final last week for nearly $33,000, FIFA had two tickets in that tier for $10,990 each on Monday.
With one month until the tournament, FIFA still has thousands of tickets available. For the U.S.-Paraguay opener, 10 sections each still showed an inventory of more than 100 available tickets on Monday. But FIFA is still keeping prices for those seats high. In one section alone, FIFA had more than 250 Category 1 tickets listed for $2,735 each.
McCarthy compares the phenomenon to the concert industry’s “Blue Dot Fever,” a recent trend of artists canceling tours due to lagging ticket sales, with a name that alludes to blue dots that appear on Ticketmaster’s website to represent unsold seats. He names Jennifer Lopez trying to model her tour off Taylor Swift as an example.
“She could have a very successful tour, but not in that way,” McCarthy says. “There’s a disconnect between the actual level of demand, both in terms of quantity and price, and what she put out as a product.”
Some of the prices are less costly. The Jordan-Algeria match in Northern California had a get-in price of $140 on Monday, while Germany against Côte d’Ivoire in Toronto had a cheapest ticket of $285.
But many group-stage matches still cost several hundred or even thousands of dollars.
On Monday, $380 was a common get-in price for many matches including Czechia–South Africa, Curaçao–Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria-Austria, Turkey-Paraguay, and Qatar-Swizterland. For tournament favorites like Spain, England, and the Netherlands, FIFA had a get-in price of more than $1,000 for some group-stage matches.
Last week, FIFA president Gianni Infantino defended the high ticket prices, saying “we have to apply market rates” and 25% of group-stage matches cost less than $300, which he said was cheaper than a college football game. But Maguire pushes back on that idea.
“For many countries who have qualified for the tournament, they are not wealthy, their GDP is relatively low,” Maguire says. “To therefore be treated as, ‘Well, because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we’re FIFA and we’re going to scalp you, and then blame it upon America,’ I think is incredibly harsh.”
The post Why So Many World Cup Tickets Remain Unsold One Month Out appeared first on Front Office Sports.
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Monday, May 11, 2026
How Long do Colonial Rapes of Indigenous Nations Last? A Brief Overview
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This is how colonial empires civilize the conquered natives
Though Rome existed during the middle of the first millennium BC, the Romans ruled an empire all around the Mediterranean (Mare nostrum = our sea) from 27 BC to AD 476 in the West, and continued in the East as the Greek Byzantine Empire until 1453. Where are the Romans and their empire today? In the trashbin of history. They were kicked out and their empire dismantled by German tribes of the time whom they refer to as "barbarians".
The Arab Muslim Moors invaded and took Spain and southern France. They settled in their "Andalus" colony and stayed nearly 800 years (711 AD until the fall of Granada in 1492). They pilfered the country of its resources and waged many wars agaisnt the indigenous Spaniards, but then they were kicked out.
The Europeans, led by the French, invaded and conquered Palestine between 1095 and 1291.
The French colonial creeps conquered Algeria (among other north African countries). They settled in their "Algérie Française" and stayed 130 years (1830 until 1962). They pilfered the country of its resources and committed racist massacres against the indigenous Algerians, but then they were kicked out.
The British colonial crooks invaded India (beginning in 1608) and traded and settled in what they called the "British Raj", which was the period of direct British rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 until 1947. But then they were kicked out after pilfering the resources of the country.
The Germans first arrived in Namibia in 1884, when the territory was declared a protectorate of the German Empire, known as "German South West Africa". They massacred and pilfered, but luckily not for long. They left Namibia after World War I in 1915, when their colony was captured by Allied forces.
The Dutch colonized South Africa by establishing a trading colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. They slowly expanded into a larger colony as Dutch farmers, known as Boers, began massacring and displacing indigenous African communities. But the crooked British got jealous so they captured the Cape Colony in 1795 and finalized its seizure in 1806. The British are sticky colonial bastards. White apartheid South Africa did not gain independence from the UK until 1931 and finally got rid of white European rule in 1994.
Vietnam, China, and many other countries had to fight to kick their European colonizers out.
The colonizers ALWAYS claimed to be bringing civilization to the "savages".
Yet, rarely have invading colonizers succeeded in permanently controlling their conquered victims and causing an actual GREAT REPLACEMENT of one population by another. When this did happen in history, it is usually because the numbers of invading thugs and thieves overwhelmed the local population in numbers and settlements, in massacres and ethnic cleansing campaigns.
One example that comes to mind of a partially successful Great Replacement is the Turkic invasion of southeastern Europe. It was partially successful because they arrived in great numbers that outnumbered the indigenous populations. Turcomans began invading Europe in the late 13th century. They became known as Ottomans (after the name of their Sultan Osman) and their expansion and seizure of formely Greek-Byzantine-Eastern Roman territories culminated with their conquest of Constantinople (whose name they butchered into today's Istanbul) in 1453. They reached Vienna but were repelled by a Polish king. Ultimately, they began retreating from Southeastern europe, leaving behind them Islamized regions like Kosovo, Bosnia, Albania, though they failed at islamizing Greece. Eventually, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 led to the creation of modern-day Turkey over what were Greek, Armenian and Kurdish territories. In other words, they were kicked out from most of the territories they had conquered during 600 years of occupation, except Anatolia and Western Thrace which constitute most of today's Turkey. Is this an instance of a partial success of a Great Replacement of indigenous peoples by a foreign invader? Perhaps. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of a Greek re-invasion and reconquest at some point in the future.
Now, please compare all of these colonizing enterprises with the divine Israel, born out of Yahweh's thigh like Venus and incepted by virtue of primitive Bronze Age writings - known as the Torah or Old Testament. The numbers of conquering Zionists is pathetically small (6 million?) compared to the 400 million Muslim Arabs that surround them. Give them 100, 200, 300 ...let's be generous with 800 years... Will they still be there? What chance do they have, really? No amount of technology, deceptive propaganda and sophisticated wizradry can compensate for the demographic disadvantage and the historical precedents.
Modern Zionsts claim they are descendants of the biblical Hebrews-Israelites, which is an abysmally false premise. Modern-day Zionists are relatively recent eastern European converts to the religion of Judaism and have no historical or genetic connection with the Hebrews. Their claims to Palestine are as absurd as, say, Muslim indonesians (Buddhists before converting to Islam) claiming property deeds to Mecca because they are Muslims! Granted that the Israelite Hebrews ruled Palestine for some 300 years under David and Solomon, but then other nations conquered it from them (Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, etc.). This bonkers "return" of the Zionists to Palestine is like the return of the Pink Panther - a farce of history that was enabled by favorable "colonial" circumstances. Once the circumstances change - and they are bound to change - the Zionists will have to leave like all the conquering colonizing bastards before them were kicked out of the places they colonized. They don't belong to the Near East any more than the British belonged to India or China, or that the Arabs belonged to Spain.
Inverse Robin Hood: Trump Steals from the Poor to Give the Rich
Oil company tycoons are his buddies. Elite billionnaires who lick his stinking cankled feet in gratitude while attending his disgusting "ballroom" gatherings where they lavish praise on the generally dozing old geezer, the Great Moron.
Trump has butchered social services and programs that help the middle class and the poor; he has dismissed tens of thousands of civil servants who make the government work; the money he says he saved goes to his wealthy elite friends, among whom the oil companies. Who benefits from government services? Not his billionnaires friends.
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Opinion
Trump’s crooked ‘art of the deal’ with Big Oil
William S. Becker, opinion contributor
Mon, May 11, 2026
The American people have seen several big oil scandals over the last century. We have survived Teapot Dome, the collapse of Enron, windfall profiteering during the 1970s oil crisis, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon and more. But President Trump’s deal with Big Oil is the most corrupt in our history. Its cost pervades everything from household budgets to public health, national security, the climate, and the future.
During his first term and now in his second, Trump has delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in favors to the industry, including tax breaks and subsidies, access to more federal land and waters, a major rollback of environmental regulations, the suppression of competition from clean energy technologies, access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, and of course the very profitable Iran war. No one has stopped him.
This arrangement is clearly unethical, if not illegal. That became obvious in April 2024 when candidate Trump offered the oil industry a deal, telling its executives that if they gave $1 billion to his campaign, he would deliver their wish list when he recaptured the White House.
He has been delivering ever since.
The deal betrays the middle- and lower-income voters who helped elect him. By cutting important social programs and safety nets to pay for the oil industry’s tax breaks and subsidies and by raising consumer prices, Trump’s energy policies are transferring wealth from American families to one of the world’s most powerful industries.
Oil companies ended up providing nearly $100 million to Trump’s campaign organization and affiliated political action committees, not counting dark-money contributions. They also gave nearly $12 million to Trump’s inauguration and have continued contributing millions more to Trump’s PAC since he took office.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued making promises. Last July, his One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave oil and gas more than $70 billion in new and expanded tax subsidies through 2034, along with $250 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans. This was on top of his 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which gave 17 oil and gas companies a combined $25 billion in one-time benefits, along with a permanent 40 percent reduction in their tax bills.
Nine oil companies reaped at least $1 billion in immediate tax savings. To pay for these windfalls, families got “the largest cuts to basic needs programs in U.S. history.”
In 2022, during the Biden presidency, the Inflation Reduction Act had provided incentives for electric vehicles that would have spared families from today’s rising gasoline prices. The bill’s incentives for solar and wind power, the cheapest ways to generate electricity, would have helped mitigate rising electric rates. But in 2025, Trump’s beautiful budget bill terminated many of these incentives.
Now, utilities will generate up to 60 percent less clean energy through 2035, and other industries will pay up to $11 billion more for power in 2035, costs that will inevitably pass on to electric consumers.
Last August, the Trump administration canceled nearly $680 million in funding for offshore wind projects. Trump is now using about $2 billion in tax dollars to pay power companies to abandon offshore wind projects and invest instead in fossil fuels.
Fossil-fuel pollution causes more than 91,000 premature deaths in America each year, plus hundreds of thousands of illnesses. according to the non-profit Stockholm Environment Institute. Yet the Trump administration is doing the oil industry another favor with at least 145 actions to weaken or rescind environmental rules.
Climate instability caused by fossil fuel pollution costs families in some regions over $1,000 annually due to higher prices for energy, food, insurance, property damage and medical care. Billion-dollar disasters, which drive up the government’s need for tax revenues, cost the equivalent of $1,500 per person in 2023 and 2024.
By the end of April, the Iran war cost taxpayers at least $25 billion. Some analysts estimate it could cost them $1 trillion. The war has resulted in thousands of deaths, including those of 13 U.S. soldiers. Hundreds of GIs have been wounded. It has triggered the worst global energy crisis in history.
Meanwhile, the 100 biggest oil companies earned more than $30 million in windfall profits every hour during the war’s first month. If oil prices remain elevated, they are expected to rake in $234 billion in extra profits by the end of this year.
Political candidates always make promises, but Trump’s seemed to involve a clear quid pro quo. Trump solicited the $1 billion one month after he became the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee. Trump’s April 2024 deal with oil executives seemed illegal on its face. It is a felony to solicit or receive anything of value after one is officially informed that he or she will be nominated for public office.
But what is unethical may not be illegal under the U.S. Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence. As a law expert explained, “Unless Trump wrote on a napkin during the meeting an exact amount of money he wanted deposited in a specific campaign vehicle in exchange for a specific policy goal, there’s little chance it would violate bribery laws as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court.”
What is indisputable is that Trump’s relationship with the carbon cartel is like an oil spill spreading through the environment, the economy, consumer prices, the tax burden, and the future. It will take an entirely new Congress to stop the spill and begin the cleanup.
Reckoning Time for the Zionists
The Zionist war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is taking stock of his country's standing around the world as a result of the genocide he is perpetrating against the Palestinians.
The US is virtually the only country worldwide that still blindly suports the apartheid racist Zionist colony in Palestine. But this is changing rapidly. The advent of the Internet and social media have opened the hidden archives and disseminated the facts of the giant ethnic cleansing carried out by illegal European (and later American) migrants and settlers less than 100 years ago in historic Palestine. The so-called Israel's war of independence was a large-scale campaign of terrorism against the indigenous Palestinian population by Zionist terror squads (Irgun, Haganah, Stern Gang, Lehi...), enabled by a hypocritical British mandate that had promised the Zionists a piece of Palestine in exchange for money to fund its war effort. Palestine did not belong to the British for them to sell it like they did. So, as the illegal hordes of Zionists descended on the beaches of Palestine, the British crooks pretended to fight them off but in reality were letting them in through the back door.
The truth about the rape of Palestine, on whose remains the artificial state of Israel was created by Zionist terrorists out of nothing, is now known. The monopoly over information, that the Zionists had secured out of their own guilty tormentors and antisemitic Western mass murderers, is now gone. Fictionalized stories of poor refugees fleeing antisemitic Europe to Palestine - e.g. Leon Uris's Exodus or Cecil B. de Mille's movies - were simply propaganda destined to camouflage the rape of Palestine under a veneer of respectability in which the indigenous victim (Palestine) who owned the land was portrayed as a savage tormentor of the invading killers and rapists (the Zionists). Just like with Trump, every accusation the Zionists leveled against the indigenous Palestinians should be read as a confession: Israel is the only colonial rapist of a third world country in history that constantly claims to be the victim of, and needs protection against, its own raped victim.
Netanyahu's war in Gaza and in the region, and his extremist ultra-orthodox criminals who are ethnically cleansing what remains of Palestine, have shown the world, as if in a retrospective flashback, what actually happened between the 1920s and the 1940s in Palestine. And Netanyahu has now reckoned with this awakening by younger generations of westerners who have been raised inside intellectual Zionist gulags (Hollywood, media, books, newspapers, Holocaust lectures, courses, documentaries, museums...). He admits that the deteriorating support for Israel in the United States, especially among the younger generation that no longer sources its information from traditional Zionist mouthpieces, "correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media." As heir to the biggest propaganda con job of our time - the Zionist narrative - he has the gall to blame several countries for manipulating social media in a way that "hurt us badly". The Internet and social media have democratized information. No one, not even the Zionist propaganda experts, controls the information and the historical archives any longer.
Israel's aura is no longer. The world now see the Zionists, who heretofore had elevated themselves and their Israel exclusively into the status of victims of Western antisemitism, as colonial racists, butchers and criminals who do not value the human life of others. The pseudo-victim suddently shed its disguise and revealed itself as one of the most brutal and inhumane torturer, inbued by a Bronze Age supremacy ideology (the Chosen People) carried into our time via the trash of self-glorifiying biblical accounts by nomadic Arabian desert tribes that, truth be told over and over again. gained their first foothold in Palestine in yet another giant ethnic cleansing of Canaanite Palestine. You can read all about it in the old testament-torah where Yahweh (the Jewish god) instructed Moses and Joshua to massacre every man, woman, child and animal of the Canaanite Palestinians that hadn't done anything to them, except that Yahweh - like the British crooks of the 20th century - had gratuitously promised them other people's land, the land of Palestine.
Netanyahu's admissions include the corollary of the above change in narrative, namely that the midterm elections in the US this coming November look like a landslide against the MAGA-GOP-Republican poodles of the Zionists. It is sadly gratifying that it took the Gaza genocide and the advent of the moron-on-the-Zionist-leash Donald Trump for the world to understant the incestuous relationship between the US and Israel. Hence, Netanyahu says he wants to wean his criminal colony off American support because he can no longer rely on the traditionally dumb American electorate to believe the lies of the MAGA radical white supremacist right and elect his poodles to Congress. In its dumb stubborn teenage mindset of a country, the US is always behind in evolving with the rest of the world, but November 2026 could the watershed that begins to uncouple the dog walker's leash from the dog itself.
Netanyahu feels the urgency of his debacle by proxy: "I don't want to wait for the next Congress" to begin separating Israel from its breastfeeding American mother.
And now to make the story laughable - listen to this - Netanyahu wants to replace US financial and military support with support from the Arab Gulf Sunni Muslim fundamentalists who have been exporting their Islam, mosques, madrassas and terrorism to the West over the past several decades, including no less the 9-11 attacks against the US, d" countries.
And you have the MAGA-GOP morons from Texas fighting off the windmill of Muslim Sharia Law (by imposing their own Christian Sharia Law, a.k.a "Biblical law") while hailing their alliance with the masters of "Koranic Law".
Imagine the logical absurdity of extremist ultra-religious terrorist Zionist Jews in bed with their Muslim alter egos, the extremist ultra-religious terrorist Sunni Islamists. Come to think of it: it does make sense.
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Netanyahu wants to wean Israel off US military support, he tells CBS
By Jonathan Stempel
Mon, May 11, 2026
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a ceremony commemorating Israel’s Remembrance Day for fallen soldiers, or Yom HaZikaron, at the Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem April 21, 2026. ILIA YEFIMOVICH/Pool via REUTERS
May 10 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes to wean Israel off U.S. military support within a decade as his country pushes to strengthen ties with Gulf states, he said in an interview that aired on Sunday.
"I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have," Netanyahu told CBS News' "60 Minutes" program.
Netanyahu said Israel receives about $3.8 billion of U.S. military aid a year. The U.S. has agreed to provide a total of $38 billion in military aid to Israel from 2018 to 2028.
But it is "absolutely" the right time to possibly reset the U.S.-Israeli financial relationship, Netanyahu said.
"I don't want to wait for the next Congress," he told CBS. "I want to start now."
Israel has long had bipartisan consensus within the U.S. Congress for military aid, but support from lawmakers and the public has frayed since the outbreak of war in Gaza in October 2023.
Sixty percent of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, and 59% had little or no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs, according to a Pew survey conducted in March. Both percentages were up seven percentage points from a year earlier.
Netanyahu said deteriorating support for Israel in the United States "correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media."
He said several countries, which he did not identify, have "basically manipulated" social media in a way that "hurt us badly," though he personally did not believe in censorship.
Support for U.S. President Donald Trump, a close ally of Netanyahu, has also ebbed since the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran on February 28.
The war has led to higher gasoline prices, which contributed to U.S. inflation rising on an annualized basis in March to the highest level since May 2023.
A significant factor behind higher fuel prices has been Iran's throttling of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of the world's oil normally passes.
Only after the war began did Israeli planners recognize Iran's ability to close the strait, Netanyahu said. "It took a while for them to understand how big that risk is, which they understand now," he said.
In the "60 Minutes" interview, Netanyahu declined to discuss Israel's military plans or timetable in Iran, but he addressed the potential ramifications if Iran's leadership changed.
"If this regime is indeed weakened or possibly toppled, I think it's the end of Hezbollah, it's the end of Hamas, it's probably the end of the Houthis, because the whole scaffolding of the terrorist proxy network that Iran built collapses," Netanyahu said.
Asked if it were possible to topple the Iranian regime, Netanyahu said: "Is it possible? Yes. Is it guaranteed? No."
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Sergio Non, Paul Simao and Lincoln Feast.)
Sunday, May 10, 2026
The Stuff that Fills MAGA Moron Brains Exposed by Lauren Boebert
They think that a piece of garbage written by ignorant stinking Arabian desert nomads some 3,000 years ago is the ultimate reference to all human behavior. They can't think of anything else. Their brains are stultified by it. Just like Muslims who take another piece of trash, also written by Arabian desert camel-stinking nomads some 1,400 years ago, for the only reference to modern-day living.
That is how fundamentalists, extremists, ultra-religious barbarians, fanatic dogmatists see the world: From the lens of ignorant illiterate primitive humans whose knowledge of this world was so limited that they resorted to fantasies and myths that were, obviously, custom-tailored to their own self-serving arrogance, vanity, conceit, narcissism, cockiness and self-centerdness. Because of their slavemaster, the human brain, most humans actually believe they are, individually, the center of the universe and that whoever/whatever is behind this universe of ours had them personally in mind. Our brain fools us into believing this shit because it is only concerned about our survival, not the truth.
We are in the 21st century. We no longer are in the 3d or 4th millennium BC. We understand our world much much better than these barbarians of the Arabian desert from thousands of years ago. Yet, billions of morons around the world, brainwashed from childhood into religious bullshit, continue to take these primitive Stone and Bronze Age parchments literally. They can't let go of the illusions, the fabrications and the myths that, though they might have contributed to our survival, are absolute fiction and fables.
Despite the slow advent of reason and science over the past few centuries that has transformed human civilization, we still have barbarian refuseniks who are stuck in the religious mindset of preferring lies to facts, fabrications to evidence, and myths to the truth. Indeed, Trump and his Christian nationalist MAGA morons have resurrected this tendency and granted their own barbarian mindset a sort of respectability.
But human evolution operates like a giant ship at sea. Any U-turn she needs to make will take a very long orbit to complete and a lot of time. Our reliance on evidence-based facts is slowly creeping into our world despite the fierce opposition by conservative cro-magnons and unevolved members of the subspecies homo stultus. Those recalcitrant to evolution and change prefer the false but comfortable safety of believing crap, because they are too stupid and lazy to think hard about difficult questions. Some of them - most MAGA leadership - know they are promoting horseshit to their followers, but that is the only way they have to keep them chained into ignorance and into voting for them.
It's been done to death. Since antiquity, there were philosophers and scientists who understood that religions are a plague to humans, and hard as they tried to convince their contemporaries otherwise, the malevolent conservatives continue to hold sway over an ignorant base that cannot, under any circumstance, comprehend the facts. It was a crime punishable by death for someone, say around the 1300s in Europe, to read and write. The Church saw in learning and knowledge a Satan-devised tool to undermine the Church. They were right, except for the Satan part.
Here is a bimboesque MAGA dimwit explaining to us one Bronze Age biblical bullshit (angels) with another but more modern bullshit (aliens). Neither angels, nor aliens, exist. But this is the human brain's cerebral cortex fooling us into believing this garbage because it rejects the evidence otherwise. As long as numskull conservatives continue to plague humanity with their fossilized ideas, the battle between barbarity and civilization will continue in up and down cycles. But the long term trend is comforting in that it favors logic, reason, and evidence over stupidity, fantasies and myths.
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Lauren Boebert Makes Bizarre Biblical Claim About Aliens
Just in time for President Donald Trump’s release of the UFO files, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert has declared that aliens from outer space are actually “fallen angels,” like Satan.
That means if any intelligent life is found on or from other planets, they are, in Boebert’s mind, hellfire demons.
It’s “always been something in my mind to say, ‘Well, how can we be the only ones?’ Like, God’s not going to stop creating just with us,” she said in a video recorded in a car and first reported by Right Wing Watch.
But she doesn’t believe it’s a good thing because any other intelligent beings in the cosmos besides humans are probably evil.
“The more I look into this, the more I see the Old Testament and what was told to us there, of fallen angels, and Nephilim,” she added excitedly. Nephilim are mysterious beings described in the Bible as powerful giants whose eventual wickedness prompted God to send the Great Flood to purge the Earth of the wicked.
Outer space aliens are not friendly “Marvin the Martian kind of thing,” Boebert emphasized.
This is “in the Bible,” and there’s “nothing that says that fallen angels, that Nephilim just disappeared. And so I believe that this could be an aspect of it,” Boebert added, apparently referring to the released classified UFO files.
“I do believe that this is more spiritual and, if you really want to go there, demonic,” she added.
Boebert’s vision echoes the perspective of Vice President JD Vance, who declared in March that he also believes extraterrestrials in UFOs are actually “demons” rather than visitors from other planets. Bizarrely, he claimed that the “aliens” are part of the “devil’s great trick… to convince people that he never existed.”
“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons, but that’s a longer discussion,” he said on the Benny Show podcast.
Saturday, May 9, 2026
Another TACO: He's Re-admitting Immigrant Scientists and Doctors
Not enough US-born American citizens go to medical school or science and engineering. These poorly educated American never get the basic education and thinking skills from their high schools, and so never qualify for higher education in science and technology. The majority are anyway too dumb or too lazy for this sort of demanding careers in scientific research, engineering and other high tech career paths.
Which exposes the stupidity of the MAGA universe and Trump who choose to ignore the fact that their country is the leading contender in these areas BECAUSE of all the smart and hard working foreign-born scientists, doctors, engineers and such who have been immigrating to the US since the 1940s, propelling the US ahead of all other countries. From the standpoint of racist Zionist Stephen Miller, skin color is the first criterion to admit people into the country. If you're a drunkard white imbecile taxi driver from Ireland, you're welcome. But if you're a dark-skinned PhD in Nuclear Physics from Sri Lanka, you're rejected.
It's a dilemma that these MAGA criminals do understand. They know that it is immigration that has made this country great, not the dumb inbred white assh--es from Appalachia or Georgia or Arkansas or Tennessee or Texas. But they don't want the skin color of the country to continue turning tan because of the influx of darkies from all over the globe.
So now, after nearly two years of persecuting immigrants (Green card holders, H-1B visa holders, PhD students...), the country is sliding backward in science and technology, and the professional unions, syndicates and associations are begging the jerks in the Whout House to start re-admitting skilled and smart immigrants because their dumb MAGA "base" can't furnish the supply of intelligence needed to keep the country ahead of the Chinese, the Europeans and the Japanese. The dumb MAGA "base" of peasants and neanderthal rednecks is in fact jealous of these smart immigrants and is more interested in such barbaric endeavors as storming Congress to steal an election, being saved by Jesus, or joining Erika Kirk's mindless Turning-Stomach-USA organization, or buying more and more guns and storing canned food in the backwoods in preparation for Armageddon, or any such numskulling Hollywood-worthy trash.
Again, one more time, Trump goes TACO. He has decided now to listen to his imploring buddies in the medical and insurance Mafia, now starving for doctors because of the Great Moron's ban on importing skilled physicians from shithole countries.
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US lifts hold on immigration applications for doctors but leaves others waiting
Associated Press
Sat, May 9, 2026
Dr. Faysal Alghoula is a pulmonary and critical care physician whose path to practicing medicine in the US spans multiple countries and years of training. - Michele Abercrombie/CNN
Libyan Dr. Faysal Alghoula must renew his green card to continue caring for roughly 1,000 patients in southwestern Indiana, but hasn’t been able to since the Trump administration stopped reviewing applications for people from several dozen countries it deemed high-risk.
Alghoula’s current visa will expire in September if his application is denied.
But last week, the administration quietly made an exemption for medical doctors with pending visa or green card applications, possibly allowing Alghoula’s case to move forward. It’s a move physicians organizations and immigration attorneys had sought for months, citing widespread shortages and a high proportion of foreign-trained doctors, who disproportionately work in underserved areas, according to the National Library of Medicine.
The lack of doctors is top of mind for Alghoula, a pulmonologist and Intensive Care Unit doctor who serves a mostly rural population spanning parts of Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.
“It is about four to five months wait to get the pulmonologist here,” he said.
Still, applicants and immigration attorneys say its unclear how big a difference the exemption will make. The change means doctors can have their cases reviewed, but it doesn’t guarantee their green cards or visas will be renewed. It is also unclear whether U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will be able to process those applications in time to meet immigration deadlines like Alghoula’s — especially as many doctors with pending applications still haven’t heard any updates from the federal government directly since the announcement was first made.
This photo provided by Dr. Faysal Alghoula shows him performing robotic bronchoscopy to diagnose lung cancer at his clinic in Evansville, Indiana, in 2024. - Faysal Alghoula/AP
Alghoula said he doesn’t trust the administration will approve him due to numerous stories about immigrants being detained at appointments to renew their paperwork like the one he has next month.
“I’m still scared to go to my interview,” said Alghoula, who has lived in the U.S. since 2016. That uncertainty intensified on Friday when he learned that his interview, scheduled for early June, had been canceled without any explanation. He said he doesn’t know what that means for his application.
Meanwhile, the pause remains in affect for thousands of others including researchers and entrepreneurs from 39 countries including Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela. While they’re on hold, many can’t legally work, get health insurance or a driver’s license. If they leave the U.S., they won’t be let back in.
Immigrants unable to work or see family
The Trump administration decided last year to stop reviewing green card and visa applications for people from a list of countries deemed high-risk and this year stopped reviewing visa applications for citizens of more than 75 countries over concerns they would seek public assistance. The moves came amid the U.S. government’s broader crackdown on immigrants.
The pause followed the shooting of two National Guard troops by an Afghan citizen, which the administration said highlighted “what a lack of screening, vetting, and prioritizing expedient adjudications can do to the American people.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration officials, didn’t answer questions about the pause or recent changes to exempt physicians but said in an email it wants to ensure applicants are properly screened after determining the prior administration failed to do so.
“There are lots of bans and lots of pauses that are happening right now,” said Greg Siskind, an immigration attorney based in Memphis, Tennessee. “It is all about making life miserable for people who are here legally so they will choose other countries.”
It isn’t clear how many doctors have been affected by the pause, according to a spokesperson for the American Academy of Family Physicians, who said several doctors have reached out to the organization asking for help.
Dr. Zahra Shokri Varniab came to the United States three years ago to conduct radiology research. - Jeff Chiu/AP
Some doctors have already been denied
Before the exemption, many immigrants filed federal lawsuits demanding the government issue decisions on their cases.
One of them was Iranian Dr. Zahra Shokri Varniab, who came to the United States three years ago to conduct radiology research. She was waiting for a green card to attend a residency program but her application got stuck in the pause. She filed a lawsuit demanding an answer to her application and a federal judge ordered immigration officials to review her case.
They did — and denied her. The 33-year-old doctor said she believes it was in retaliation for her lawsuit.
“I feel completely confused,” Shokri Varniab said.
In court filings, U.S. government lawyers wrote that Shokri Varniab’s application contained inconsistencies about whether she plans to become a practicing doctor or researcher. She said she plans to do both.
She said the exemption doesn’t appear to apply to her since her case was decided but is seeking relief in court.
Immigration policy compounding war abroad
Immigrants who hold prestigious jobs in science and technology said they currently can’t work due to the pause because they’re waiting on employment authorization documents. Some said they are running out of money for rent and groceries and worry their careers could be thwarted if they’re forced to leave the country.
Those from Iran are especially worried about returning home during the ongoing war with U.S. and Israeli forces. They said they can’t regularly reach family due to the Iranian government’s internet blackout or count on them for financial support.
Kaveh Javanshirjavid came to the United States from Iran seven years ago to study for his doctorate in agriculture. He was supposed to start a lab job in January but needs employment authorization and his application is on hold.
The 41-year-old said he’s borrowing from friends to pay rent and relying on his wife’s doctorate stipend for basic necessities. But he doesn’t know how long that will last because she’s also Iranian and will need work authorization to get a job after graduating this summer.
“The whole of my life is on hold,” he said.
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Will Donald Dumb Use the President's "Doomsday Book"?
Notwithstanding the facts of his atavistic stupidity and his diminuendo slide into a demented form of senility, the jackass in the Whout House has at his disposal a "book" you'll read about below.
Basically, he has two options within the timeframe of 2026 - 2028: He either steps down or is dismissed by an impeachment and fades into the horizon and let someone sane run the country, or (based on previous conduct as in 2021) cause all kinds of troubles and send the country spiraling into chaos and anarchy by taking actions that pre-empt his exit from office: Martial law, emergency powers, claim voting fraud, use all the criminals he has seeded in various state and federal positions to scuttle, cheat, impede and declare democracy is dead.
His age somehow makes one think he's no longer up to "sanely" causing trouble, although if his dementia takes over he could lose all inhibitions of propriety, law, norms and ethics and become like a mad bull in the arena. But the more likely scenario would be, given that Donald Dumb is an absolute idiot who is easily manipulated by "sane" criminals around him (Stephen Miller, Benjamin Netanyahu, Lady Lindsey Graham....), these "advisors" would play the same role as Gríma Wormtongue with his nefarious hold on King Théoden of
Rohan in The Lord of the Rings. Think about it: Trump launched his war on Iran because Netanyahu convinced him to: Presidents of several administrations before Trump, republicans and democrats alike, rejected Netanyahu's 30-year long nagging quest to have the Americans bomb Iran. Trump is like the village idiot who is dragged into mischief by the village kids.
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Ex-Trump Official Sounds Alarm on ‘Doomsday’ Plan White House Can Exploit
Josh Fiallo
Fri, May 8, 2026
Nathan Howard / REUTERS(Nathan Howard)
A former official from Donald Trump’s first term is sounding the alarm about a so-called “Doomsday Book” that could deliver the president unprecedented power if he acts upon it.
Miles Taylor, who resigned as Homeland Security’s chief of staff in 2019, writes that the White House has a secret catalog of pre-drafted executive orders that, if enacted, would allow Trump to do “extraordinary things” like effectively invoking martial law.
The book dates back to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, which developed so-called PEADs (Presidential Emergency Action Documents) and gathered them into a single instructional book—only to be opened in an extreme scenario such as a nuclear attack on Washington.
The manual was written amid the Cold War, with the understanding that it should be opened only in an emergency that threatened the future of the United States. However, Taylor writes for The i Paper that there is real fear in Washington that Trump may misuse these executive orders.
The Brennan Center for Justice revealed in 2024 that the secret PEADS would grant a president the power to detain civilians, suspend communications, censor the press, establish military areas, and freeze or seize property—all with the stroke of a pen.
Taylor said that Trump “did not fully understand the powers he possessed” in his first term, referring to the secret book. He added that “some of those who did understand were terrified he might use those authorities.”
“One such official, who once held the keys to the Doomsday Book, warned me back then that if Trump returned to office, he feared those powers being turned not outward at America’s enemies but inward at citizens,” Taylor said. “He imagined federal forces ringing polling places in opposition states, intimidation dressed up as election security, and the architecture of homeland defense aimed at the homeland itself.”
Now, Taylor writes that MAGA 2.0 has already laid the groundwork for the White House to use these emergency powers to oppose this year’s midterm elections, which are expected to be a GOP bloodbath.
“All the instruments required to execute it are now in place,” he said. “The detention capacity is being built. The legal framework exists. The targeting doctrine exists. The classified emergency orders still allegedly exist. The man who would sign them has told us, on the record, that nothing but his own morality stands in the way.”
Taylor is not the first to warn about Trump’s potential use of PEADS. Daily Beast columnist Eleanor Clift did the same last month, pointing out that Stephen Miller is the White House counsel overseeing the process by which PEADs could be instated.
“That alone should be sufficient warning of what’s possible,” she wrote.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has been the architect of President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown in MAGA 2.0. / Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
The White House did not respond to an email seeking comment about the Doomsday Book and Taylor’s concerns.
Taylor says a civic organization he runs is now speaking with lawmakers in Washington to inform them about the emergency orders and how to combat a possible Trump power grab should he act on them.
“These are scenarios almost none of them have imagined, let alone planned for,” he writes. “Yet I consider them to be more plausible than ever. And they must be proactive in preparing to challenge—in court—abuses of power that might be designed to keep the president’s party in power and to keep him, in his mind, away from the threat of impeachment.”
The president’s obsession with the limits of his power has only made Taylor even more worried that he will abuse it through the executive orders in the Doomsday Book.
Trump said in January, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
A week prior, he said of the limits of his power: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”
Trump’s posts on Truth Social have grown particularly unhinged in recent months as he contends there should be fewer checks on his power. Perhaps the 79-year-old’s most chilling remark came in August.
“I have the right to do anything I want to do,” Trump said. “I’m the President of the United States of America.”
With executive orders already lined up, Taylor writes that it is time to take the threat of Trump abusing the pre-written, “doomsday” executive orders a reality.
