My wife's college friend Naoko spent three years in Kansas as an agricultural researcher. She came home with 3,000 photos. Four of them are the Grand Canyon. Two thousand one hundred are handwritten signs. I asked her why. "In Japan, signs tell you what you can't do. No parking. No entry. No food. No talking. In America, people take a piece of cardboard and a marker, and they write something kind to a stranger they will never meet. Then they tape it to a mailbox. I couldn't stop taking pictures." She let me go through them. These are her favorites, with her notes. "FRESH EGGS $3. HONOR SYSTEM. CASH BOX BELOW." (Ohio. No camera. No lock. There was $46 in the box. I counted. I put in $5 and felt watched by God.) "LOST CAT. His name is Moose. He is fat and mean. We love him. Please call." (I did not find Moose. I think about Moose often.) "FREE FIREWOOD. STAY WARM." (Vermont. Two words from a stranger. In Japan, a sign has never once told me to stay warm.) "CH__CH. WHAT'S MISSING? U R." (I read it three times. Then I understood. Then I went in.) "SNOW SHOVELING. FREE FOR SENIORS AND VETERANS. CALL TYLER (AGE 13)." (Tyler is 13. Tyler is in business. Tyler is not making any money. Tyler is a great businessman.) "SLOW DOWN. GRANDKIDS PLAYING. GRANDMA HAS YOUR LICENSE PLATE." (I drove 9 miles per hour. Grandma was on the porch. She waved. I do not think it was a friendly wave.) "WELCOME HOME DADDY. 287 DAYS." (Painted on a bedsheet, hanging from a garage in Kansas. Three different handwritings. One of them very small. I don't know this family. I pulled over and cried for a man I will never meet.) "FREE COFFEE FOR TRUCKERS. YOU KEEP THIS COUNTRY RUNNING." (A rest stop in Iowa. Two old men behind a folding table. One of them told me I was not a trucker. Then he gave me coffee anyway.) "CAN'T AFFORD TO WASH YOUR CLOTHES? ASK FOR LINDA. NO QUESTIONS." (A laundromat in Missouri. I didn't need Linda. I just stood there and loved her for a minute.) And then there's one photo that isn't very good. It's dark. It's blurry. She took it with shaking hands. A paper taped to the door of a closed gas station on a two-lane road in western Kansas. "CLOSED. IF YOU'RE STUCK, CALL EARL. I'M JUST UP THE ROAD." It was 11:40 at night. Naoko had a flat tire. No signal for most of the drive. One bar, right there by the door. She called. Earl was 81. He came in his truck in slippers and a bathrobe. His wife June came too, because, as Earl explained, "She don't let me go out at night alone anymore." Earl changed the tire with a flashlight in his mouth. June sat in the truck with the heater running, poured coffee from a thermos, and handed it through the window. "You're shaking, honey. Drink this." When it was done, Naoko tried to give him money. He wouldn't touch it. She said, "In Japan, I could never repay something like this." Earl said, "Then don't." "Just leave your porch light on for somebody." Naoko has been back in Japan for two years. In front of her house, there is a wooden box. Every week she fills it with tangerines from her garden. On the box is a handwritten sign, in Japanese and English. "FREE. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED." The first week, nobody touched it. The neighbors thought it was a trap. The second week, an old man took two and left a note. "Thank you." The third week, someone she has never met left a bag of persimmons. It has been two years. That box has never once been empty. America, the world watches your news and thinks it knows you. It doesn't. You're not in the headlines. You're on a piece of cardboard. In marker. Taped to a mailbox. Leaning on a fence post in the rain. "Stay warm." "Take what you need." "I'm just up the road." If you've been wondering where your country went, it didn't go anywhere. Go for a drive. It's still taped to the mailboxes.

On October 1, 2020, one day before the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed charges against BitMEX  and its four key executives, Samuel Reed, co-founder and CTO of BitMEX，was taken into custody in Massachusetts and would be presented before a federal court in Massachusetts. On April 6, 2021, Arthur Hayes landed at an airport in Honolulu, where he surrendered to federal agents on the tarmac. In August 2021, BitMEX itself reached a civil settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, agreeing to pay $100 million in civil penalties. According to individuals familiar with the matter, all defendants initially pleaded not guilty in the criminal proceedings. However, between February and March 2022, BitMEX’s three co-founders each changed their pleas and agreed to plead guilty. Arthur Hayes pleaded guilty in February 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act and related AML requirements, and agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine.  In May 2022, he was sentenced by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York @SDNYnews to six months of home detention followed by two years of probation. The same court also ordered the other two BitMEX co-founders to each pay $10 million in penalties. Benjamin Delo was sentenced to 30 months of probation without home detention, while Samuel Reed received 18 months of probation. In late 2021, Gregory Dwyer agreed to be extradited from Bermuda to the United States. On August 9, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Gregory Dwyer, BitMEX’s Head of Business Development, had also pleaded guilty in the criminal case. He admitted to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an AML program at BitMEX. Under the terms of his plea agreement, he agreed to pay a separate $150,000 criminal fine. Dwyer was subsequently sentenced to one year of probation. In total, BitMEX-related penalties amounted to approximately $130 million. Following the enforcement actions by U.S. authorities, both Arthur Hayes and BitMEX suffered significant reputational and operational setbacks. In the years that followed, Hayes increasingly repositioned himself as a high-profile commentator in the crypto space, frequently promoting speculative projects and leveraging his industry influence and social media presence to attract retail investors. @TheJusticeDept @CFTC  @USDOJ_Intl   @bitmex @CryptoHayes  @bendelo  @STRML_ @BitMEX_Ethan @Crypto_slutz @r_polansky @sudhu_aru @BitMEX_sandisam @business @markets @BloombergAsia @Reuters @watcherguru @zachxbt @insiderwire  @WhalePanda @Tintinx2021 @yq_acc @RichardPtardio @JamesWynnReal @muphasamc @huskyXBT @JSeyff @0xcryptosam @degeneratenews @crypto_condom

Five years ago today, an ISIS-K suicide bomber attacked Abbey Gate during the evacuation from Kabul, murdering 13 American service members and approximately 160 Afghan civilians. We remember our fallen 13: Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, USMC Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, USMC Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, USMC Cpl. Hunter Lopez, USMC Cpl. Daegan W. Page, USMC Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, USMC Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, USMC Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, USMC Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, USMC Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, USMC Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, USMC Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Maxton W. Soviak, USN Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, U.S. Army America must always remember the names of these heroes. But remembrance also demands accountability. Last year, under President Trump’s leadership, this FBI—working alongside DOJ, CIA, and our international partners—apprehended and brought back Mohammad Sharifullah, an ISIS-K operative and key player in the attack. A federal jury has since convicted him of participating in a nine-year conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS-K. Five years later, our promise remains unchanged: We will remember the fallen. We will stand with their families. We will hunt those responsible—no matter where they hide or how long it takes. -DKP 🇺🇸

Arthur Hayes @CryptoHayes was born in Detroit, USA, in 1985. He later moved with his parents to Buffalo, New York, where he attended the Nichols School—a private preparatory school located in the city. In 2004, Hayes began his undergraduate studies at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His notable alumni peers include @realDonaldTrump , @elonmusk,  @WarrenBuffett  and others. Subsequently, Justin Sun @justinsun enrolled in a master's program in Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, thereby fulfilling his aspiration to become an alumnus alongside the aforementioned figures. In 2008, following his graduation from the Wharton School, Hayes joined the trading division at Deutsche Bank (Hong Kong), marking the beginning of his career as a derivatives trading specialist. In 2011, Hayes moved to the derivatives trading division at Citi (Hong Kong). In 2014, Arthur Hayes co-founded BitMEX alongside Ben Delo and Samuel Reed, focusing primarily on the trading of crypto asset derivatives. Ben Peter Delo @bendelo   is a co-founder and co-owner of BitMEX. And during the relevant Period , he has been the Chief Operating Officer of BitMEX.  He is a U.K. citizen and graduated from Worcester College, Oxford University in 2005 with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. He has never been registered with the Commission in any capacity.  After graduating, Ben joined IBM as a software engineer. Later, he developed high-frequency trading systems for the hedge fund GSA Capital and JPMorgan Chase. Samuel Reed @STRML_ borned in1990， is a co-founder and co-owner of BitMEX, and describes himself as Chief Technology Officer of BitMEX.  He is a U.S. citizen and has resided in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Boston, Massachusetts during the Relevant Period.  Samuel graduated from Washington & Lee University with a degree in Computer Science and was served as CTO of two technology companies: Tixelated and Global Brand Solutions of Hong Kong. During the Relevant Period, Reed has held his ownership interest in the BitMEX entities through a Wisconsin limited liability company that maintains bank accounts at banks in the United States, and owns property in the U.S. Reed has never been registered with the Commission in any capacity. Hayes, Delo, and Reed have shared responsibility for various aspects of the  BitMEX business. At a high level, Delo has been responsible for building and overseeing the BitMEX trading engine, Reed has been responsible for building and overseeing the BitMEX website, API and order entry system, and Hayes has been responsible for strategic decisions, business development, marketing, and management of the BitMEX enterprise.  @TheJusticeDept @CFTC  @USDOJ_Intl   @bitmex @BitMEX_Ethan @Crypto_slutz @r_polansky @sudhu_aru @BitMEX_sandisam @business @markets @BloombergAsia @Reuters @watcherguru @zachxbt @insiderwire @WhalePanda @Tintinx2021 @yq_acc @RichardPtardio @JamesWynnReal @muphasamc @huskyXBT @JSeyff @0xcryptosam @degeneratenews @crypto_condom

It’s worth briefly revisiting the rather legendary story behind UTStarcom and SoftBank China Venture Capital. Hong Lu, born on November 3, 1954, is a Chinese American entrepreneur. His family traces its roots to Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province，China.. He was born in Taiwan, Province of China and moved to Japan at the age of six. After graduating from Tokyo Metropolitan Jonan High School, Lu went on to study civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was two years senior to Masa Son @masason After graduating, Hong Lu joined Masa Son’s startup, Mspeech System Inc, whose core business was selling portable voice translation devices.  In March 1982, Son returned to Japan to recover from an illness. Before leaving, he sold his U.S. company Unison World to Lu. For a time, Unison maintained a close partnership with Kyocera, the company founded by Inamori Kazuo. In 1986, the two companies formed a joint venture called Kyocera Unison and attempted to take it public. The plan ultimately fell through, and Lu exited the venture. In 1990, Lu made his first exploratory trip to mainland China. A year later, in 1991, Lu teamed up with his Berkeley classmate and Masa Son’s former Chinese tutor, Charles Xue @xuemanzi8848， along with Son himself. Together they acquired Zhejiang Yutong, a company originally founded by Peter Wang(Zuguang) , reorganizing it and renaming it Unitech Telecom (UT). That same year, Wu Ying , then working at AT&T Bell Labs, partnered with Chauncey Shey to launch Starcom in New Jersey. The company initially operated as a technology consulting firm, essentially providing engineering talent as outsourced services. Among the temporary engineers they hired was Bill Huang(Xiaoqing ), who at the time was doing R&D at Racal Telecom in the UK. In 1994, Bill Huang(Xiaoqing ) joined Unitech Telecom. On October 6, 1995, Unitech Telecom and Starcom merged in a 50–50 deal to form UTStarcom. Just two weeks later, on October 19, the company secured $30 million in funding from SoftBank. On March 5, 1996, UTStarcom China was established. By 1999, after several rounds of major investment totaling roughly $160 million, Masa Son became chairman of UTStarcom, increasing his stake to 51%. On March 3, 2000, UTStarcom successfully went public on the NASDAQ. In 2001, Charles Xue exited the company, cashing out roughly $150 million. Later that same year following the IPO, Masa Son committed $90 million, while Hong  Lu，Chauncey Shey, and others contributed $10 million, forming the first fund for SoftBank China Venture Capital (SBCVC). Brilliance of Berkeley，and with that , the wheels of fate have begun to turn.

President Donald Trump eased 50% tariffs on a group of Canadian imports just days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, providing potential relief to businesses in states heavily dependent on cross-border trade. The White House exempted certain plywood, paper products, machinery, refrigeration equipment, packaging materials and fresh and dried seaweed from the tariffs beginning Oct. 30. At the same time, the administration added other Canadian products to the 50% tariff list, including carpets, paints, shampoos, cocoa powder, air conditioners, chest freezers, canoes and other goods. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is facing a competitive reelection race, welcomed the exemptions. She said Maine farmers and producers rely on Canadian equipment and packaging that can be difficult or significantly more expensive to replace. Democratic challenger Troy Jackson criticized the broader trade policy, arguing that the tariffs have increased costs for Maine residents and businesses. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) characterized the timing as an attempt to help Collins politically ahead of the election. The administration has not said the changes were made for electoral reasons. Trump originally imposed 50% tariffs on about $20 billion of Canadian imports in August after trade negotiations broke down. Canada responded with tariffs ranging from 15% to 50% on roughly $20 billion of U.S. goods. The trade dispute is also creating political pressure in other states with strong economic ties to Canada, including Michigan and Kansas, where lawmakers have pushed the administration for exemptions affecting local industries.

Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. These reporters — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic. However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories. Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world. Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion” and accused it of “barbaric crimes.” Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct. The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished. I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today. Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits. Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas. For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600!). Muslim princes in the tenth century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time. Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna. In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life. The Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran. For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph. Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy. He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: the confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it. In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence. Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force. It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world. Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up. Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.” Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition. Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity. The anti-intellectualism of Islamism—the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind. The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims. Korea issued 260,000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10,000 in total, with 8,000 of these coming from a single nation—Saudi Arabia—which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306,855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs. According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations. The global average was forty-one. Among the 1,800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals. Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10,481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four. A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.” Contrast the Arabs’ dismal record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics. Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2% of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists—all living in Western democracies—have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science. About 26% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews. Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive. “Since Islam subdued them [in Medina],” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates.” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated. Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews,” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society.” And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is more than a theoretical aspiration. In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1,000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105,000. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred. The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The massive influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker. A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7, 2023. Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being. Islamism’s merger of politics and religion has robbed Islam of its intellectual vigor and doomed most Muslim populations to living in stifling tyrannies with little freedom to elucidate their thoughts and speech or fulfill their creative potential. Those countries are predictably stagnant, unable to evolve in the modern world. The dark shadow of fundamentalism over scholarship and progress has proven toxic to the Muslims’ transition to modernity. The very civilization that practiced tolerance and celebrated pluralism and dialogue, filled a thousand libraries with its books, gave the world observatories and universities, and stunning innovations in science, has become closed, aggrieved, and violent, and averse to reason, curiosity, freedom of inquiry, and scholarship. All 22 Arab nations in the Mideast and North Africa are autocratic dictatorships. Almost all are apartheid states that legally restrict the rights of minorities. Gays in many of the nations are put to death. Under sharia law, women have little more rights than cattle. They live stunted lives behind veiled faces, enduring systematic servitude, legalized domestic violence, child marriage, chattel slavery, and public stoning for adultery, which is legal for their husbands. In September 2021, the Taliban made it illegal for girls to attend school after age 12. The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue law forbids women from speaking aloud in public. If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for society, look no further than Gaza. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinians have received over 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. (See Clawson 2002.) Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza squandered its share on bombs, weapons, extravagant salaries for its billionaire kingpins, and a billion-dollar bunker and tunnel system built for its warriors—but off-limits to its citizens. Gaza remains a stunted and stagnant, impoverished society under tyrannical oppression, with no free speech or other basic freedoms. Hamas governs through force, including brutal crackdowns on discourse, public executions of dissenters and collaborators, tight controls on humanitarian aid distribution, and onerous taxes on almost every activity. No elections have occurred since Hamas took over in 2007. Instead of building a nation, Hamas has transformed Gaza into a death cult wallowing in victimhood, nursing aggrievements, addicted to violence, resentments, and yearning for a seventh-century miasma. Hamas nurses Palestinian infants from birth on genocidal hatred of ALL Jews—not just Zionists—and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Hamas shows its contempt for the Palestinian people by deploying them as child soldiers and civilian shields, and placing rocket launchers and ammo dumps in schools and hospitals. Hamas’s greatest strengths are its propaganda operation and its willingness to impose unlimited pain on its own population to achieve its ideological goals. Islamist governments like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah distract their populations from their misery by blaming the myriad social ills and the predictable government failures on scapegoats: Jews, Zionists, and America. They’ll have us believe that all their derelictions are the result of the evil Zionists, the “Little Satan” Israel, and the “Great Satan,” the U.S. And just as victimhood is paralyzing to personal growth, it deprives Islamist nations of national success by robbing its practitioners of agency. Islamism’s cult of victimhood and its coterminous abolition of self-criticism have stagnated global Islam and locked it in hatred, violence, brooding resentment, and isolationism. Referring to the Arab world, Fouad Ajami described this as “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity.” Contrast Gaza’s failures with the successes of its closest neighbor, Israel, a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors, that blossomed into an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower. Jews took one of the few places in the Mideast with no oil, gas, or other resources, and despite being surrounded by enemies, they nevertheless turned the barren landscape into a vibrant, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs vote as they please; worship according to their convictions; serve beside each other in the judiciary, the army, and political leadership; and enjoy equal rights. Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv. As the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values. And Israel is merely a nugget among the bounties bestowed by Jews on Western civilization. There is no ethnic or religious group that has contributed more than Jews to the welfare of humanity or to the advancement of liberal democracy. Jewish traditions of ethics and thinking have shaped Western civilization and global progress through foundational moral concepts, including our monotheistic Christian belief system with its roots in Judaism, milestone scientific breakthroughs, medical innovation, and innumerable cultural achievements in art, literature, education, health, and entertainment. Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking. An abbreviated list would include medical advances like the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin), chemotherapy and immunology (Paul Ehrlich), streptomycin and the age of antibiotics (Selman Waksman), penicillin (Ernest Chain), pacemakers (Paul Zoll), and blood typing (Karl Landsteiner). In sciences, a short list of Jewish luminaries would include Albert Einstein (theory of relativity), Niels Bohr (quantum mechanics), and Paul Berg (first recombinant DNA molecule). Jewish contributions to business and technology include Google (Sergey Brin), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Intel (Andrew Grove), and Dell Technologies (Michael Dell). Jews virtually created the American entertainment industry, including founding six of the eight major Hollywood studios responsible for 75% of the classic Golden Age movies. They also revolutionized laughter. A 1978 TIME magazine survey found that 80% of professional comedians were Jewish. The major figures of twentieth-century Western thought—Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx—were all Jewish. Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose twenty-five percent of America’s most generous givers. They are overrepresented on lists of secular organizations that benefit human rights, social security, higher education, personal freedom, and constitutional rights. They represent 14% of doctors and 29% of psychiatrists. Their contributions to America’s global economic leadership include Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard. In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude? Now, here are some things that Jews don’t do: suicide bombings, rape gangs, beheading people, killing gay people, aspiring to kill all non-Muslims, forcing young girls to wed older men, lynching women for wearing makeup or showing hair, female mutilation, religious dictatorship, Christian genocide, polygamy, rioting and burning down cities, applying the death penalty for leaving Islam, cooking babies in ovens, hijacking airliners (and driving them into buildings), bombing buses and crowded restaurants, disfiguring girls with acid for failing to wear the hijab, operating modern slave markets where hereditary Black slaves are bought and sold by Arabs, advocating global jihad, and committing 90% of the terrorist acts globally. These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence. This comparison begs the question, “Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists? The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain. Looking at Islamism’s track record, seven nations with substantial Muslim populations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Russia—have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, branding it as a terrorist organization. Kenya and Argentina have also banned the Brotherhood for fear of its impacts on their societies. The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics. In 2004, the FBI discovered the U.S. Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism,” “entryism,” or “Da’awa.” In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists. This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt. After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his. A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police. Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations. Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization. A 20,000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents El-Sayed's two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U.S. to Islamify and destroy our democracy. That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood. Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely!” he said unconvincingly. He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives. El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only. Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.

A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY. Here's a full recap: 1. Palantir $PLTR named Nebius $NBIS its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner, announcing a strategic partnership to integrate Nebius compute and inference endpoints directly inside Palantir’s enterprise perimeter. The integration will allow eligible Palantir commercial customers to run open AI models on Nebius infrastructure, continuously adapt them using proprietary company data, and maintain control over their compute, models, and data. The companies also plan to bring new AI compute capacity online faster, including modular data-center deployments in locations where power is already available. Palantir CEO Alex Karp said, “Nebius’ compute infrastructure powers your ability to run your own AI models under conditions you control. Our ontology and their infrastructure will undergird the sovereignty our partners are demanding.” Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh added that the partnership will help commercial clients run optimized open models on trusted infrastructure while maintaining control over their data and models. 2. The EU and Canada are reportedly set to announce a major “all-encompassing” partnership spanning trade and security after President Trump’s latest tariffs, according to Bloomberg. The goal is to build a new alliance that helps offset global power politics dominated by the U.S. and China. The partnership is expected to be announced on September 16, with Canada and the EU reportedly aiming to get “as close as legally possible” short of EU membership. Canada has also become the first country outside the EU to join the bloc’s $175B military procurement fund, underscoring how quickly trade tensions are pushing allies toward deeper economic and defense cooperation. 3. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF $IBIT has attracted $3.7B of inflows so far this quarter, putting it on pace for its largest quarterly intake since Q3 2025. The fund has already added $459.8M in September inflows, following $3.0B in August, its biggest monthly inflow since October 2025. As a result, $IBIT AUM has climbed to $62.6B, near its highest level since mid-May. Since the start of July, the fund’s AUM has increased by $19.6B, or 46%, showing renewed institutional and retail demand for Bitcoin exposure through ETFs. 4. OpenAI CFO said at the Goldman Sachs conference that the consumer business is accelerating, with July revenue up 20% MoM. The enterprise business grew even faster, with July revenue up 32% MoM. OpenAI’s revenue mix is now roughly 50/50 between enterprise and consumer, showing that growth is broadening beyond ChatGPT subscriptions and into business adoption. 5. Schwab retail activity in August shows investors selling the software rip and buying the semiconductor dip. The top retail buys were $SPCX, $MU, $NVDA, $INTC, and $GOOGL, while the top sells were $NOW, $ADBE, $MSFT, $PLTR, and $ORCL. The shift points to more active portfolio management from retail investors, with money rotating out of crowded software winners and into AI, chips, and compute-related names after pullbacks. 6. Copper prices on the LME have surged to a record $14,533/ton, now up 47% over the last 12 months. The move is being driven by tight supply and rising demand from data centers, renewable energy, and power grids. Expectations that President Trump could expand tariffs to refined copper imports have also pushed U.S. Comex prices above global prices, creating an incentive for traders to ship hundreds of thousands of tons of copper into the U.S. to capture the price spread. As a result, global stockpiles are becoming increasingly concentrated in the U.S., draining LME inventories to critically low levels and leaving less readily available copper for buyers elsewhere. 7. Meta $META launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can take actions across apps and the web, including sending emails, booking travel, filling out forms, and making purchases with user approval. Muse runs on Meta’s new Muse Secure VM, giving each user a dedicated cloud environment with a separate Sentinel agent that reviews actions before they reach the internet. The agent can continue working after the app is closed, remember user preferences, and proactively move longer-term tasks forward. Meta is also integrating Stripe Link for checkout, with Shop Pay and 1Password support coming later. 8. IREN $IREN said its 2 GW Sweetwater Hub has been conditionally included as base load in ERCOT Batch Zero. Sweetwater 1 accounts for 1.4 GW and Sweetwater 2 for 600 MW, both part of IREN’s broader 5 GW+ global data-center development pipeline. At Sweetwater 1, the high-voltage substation is already energized, with 300 MW of gross data-center capacity under construction and targeted for delivery in Q4 2027. IREN also said additional large-scale projects across its development pipeline have been included in Batch Zero, though ERCOT classifications remain conditional and subject to further approvals. 9. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $TSLA with 2.4M contracts, $NVDA with 2.2M contracts, $INTC with 1.3M contracts, $SPCX with 847K contracts, $AAPL with 689K contracts, $MU with 673K contracts, $AMD with 615K contracts, $META with 568K contracts, $AMZN with 524K contracts, and $CRWV with 477K contracts. 10. The U.S. government is backing Rigetti $RGTI and D-Wave $QBTS with up to $200M for quantum computing R&D. Rigetti signed a definitive $100M agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce to address key scaling bottlenecks in superconducting quantum systems, including cryogenics, readout electronics, and high-connectivity chip fabrication. D-Wave separately finalized access to up to $100M to advance its annealing and gate-model platforms, including work on a 100,000-qubit annealing system and a 10,000-qubit gate-model system targeting 100 logical qubits. As part of the funding, the Commerce Department will receive minority, non-controlling equity stakes in both companies. 11. Uber $UBER President and COO Andrew Macdonald purchased 70,000 shares for roughly $5.3M. Macdonald is one of Uber’s longest-tenured executives, making the insider buy notable given his deep knowledge of the business, operations, and long-term strategy. 12. U.S. data center construction spending surged 57% YoY in July to a record annualized rate of $75B, following a 46% YoY increase in June and marking the fastest growth since mid-2025. Since the start of 2021, data center construction spending has soared by $66B, or 717%. Since the end of 2023 alone, spending has risen by $51B. Over that same period, all other private construction spending — including housing, shopping centers, and offices — has declined by $120B, showing how dramatically AI infrastructure is diverging from the rest of the construction market. WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan sat down with CNBC’s Jim Cramer to talk about Apple; Intel 14A rivaling TSMC's top chip production technology; Shortages of CPUs and substrates; and the state of Intel's turnaround. How to know when Intel signs Apple or other foundry customers: Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan: “Over time, the IP will be ready so we can serve some of these customers. I think the best indication, when you see I increase my capex, I’m putting money to buy equipment, that means I have real customers. That’s the discipline I have.” Intel 14A manufacturing process and EMIB-T advanced packaging: Intel CEO: “(A14) is 1.4nm, this is the most advanced. To be candid with you, in 2028 we will have risk production. 2029 will be volume production. It will be the same time as TSMC. So that is a major, major breakthrough, and I’m so excited. And we already have multiple customers engaged with us, and we have 0.5 PDK available.” Taking advantage of TSMC’s CoWoS shortage Intel CEO: “Our technology is called EMIB-T, this is the next generation of advanced packaging. We really have the best technology and now we are making sure we can bring it into volume production with reliable yield so the customer can count on us.” CEO: “You know, CoWoS…(TSMC) ran out of capacity, so in a way we’ve become in the unique position to support that and that’s something we are very excited (about).” Shortages of CPUs and Substrates CEO on the CPU shortage: “I’ll give you one example. I had one customer say Lip Bu, we gave you the forecast for this year, but we want to increase 3x, and I say I cannot do it overnight but give me a few quarters and I will catch up. So, I think this demand is not short term, it’s the next couple of years. It’s a great opportunity.” CEO: “Right now, as I mentioned, CPU is in high demand. And that’s good for me. I cannot even ship enough to the customer. It used to be the CPU to GPU ratio for training was 1-to-8. And now, because of inference and agentic AI, and more agents you have to manage, and orchestration, and reinforced learning, CPU is actually better, so that becomes 1-to-4 and 1-to-1 and some people even talk about 4-to1, and so that’s a huge opportunity to me to drive the CPU....” CEO on Substrates: “A couple of customers have prepaid for substrates, because the substrate supply chain is very tight – so I need to put up the money to secure this material…(and it shows) the commitment to me – so that’s very exciting.” Intel’s Turnaround CEO: “We used to have leadership in data center, and over the years we lost it…We made some big mistakes,” he said, adding he’s brought back some talent to refocus the product lines and that “Coral Rapids will have multi-threading, and will come out very strong.” CEO: “When I took over, the 18A yield was not good, so I had to ask some of the ecosystem partners to help me look at the data, see how to improve. The best practice is to see 7% or 8% yield improvement per month, and now I’m seeing it.” CEO: “The other part is supposed to be the yield performance, defect density, you know at the end of the year to see the target. Now I see that even before the end of the year – so that is very big encouragement for me and also that’s why Panther Lake can be shipped in volume now. And now some customers knock on my door and say Lip Bu, now we hear you are making great progress, can you now open up to outside customers? So that is very exciting. It’s a lot of hard work, it’s a lot of teamwork, it’s a lot of talent I’ve brought on board.” CEO: “In the past we made a lot of mistakes and now we correct the mistake and we’ve simplified the roadmap. By the way, from Day 1 I came on board as the CEO, I have all the engineers report to me so I have an understanding, hear from the customer, and know where are the mistakes.” Cramer: “They didn’t report to the previous CEO?” CEO: “No. And in a way, they had too many silos, too many people reporting…So I decided, the best thing is to really understand where the problem is, so I can focus on the engineering, how to redesign, simplify the product and then get the real killer products out.” Cramer asks about China, Taiwan and the importance of US manufacturing: CEO: “I was very glad for President Trump understanding the strategic importance for the United States to have (chip manufacturing supply chain) and their support is so valuable to me – it’s so critical for the country to have the technology, R&D development, manufacturing in the United States. That’s why I came back in, as a U.S. citizen – as a calling – to do that.” CEO: “From time to time I update President Trump and also (Sec.) Howard Lutnick and they are big supporters of me and we are delighted to have their support.” Going forward: CEO: “I recruited some key talent…and now, by the end of June, I will have my team, what I consider my team, so that we can work on the next 5-years, 10-years, how to become a different company. I call it the New Intel, work at the speed of light, work as a team to progress forward.” $INTC $TSM #Samsung# $UMC $GFS #semiconductors#