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Has Iran Learned the North Korea Lesson: Nukes Are Essential To Deter the US?

Arms control advocates contend that by attacking Iran in the name of preventing the emergence of a “rogue” nuclear state, the United States may have “taken a sledgehammer” to the entire nuclear nonproliferation regime.  Iran could be one of the first technologically capable powers to confirm that fear.  The clerical regime has indicated that the country may withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.  Such a move would eliminate any official monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear research and nuclear fuel enrichment.  North Korea took a similar step in 2003, and the move clearly facilitated the growth of Pyongyang’s embryonic nuclear-weapons program.

Foreign policy experts and members of the news media also note that Washington’s responses to the nuclear threat that North Korea, on the one hand, and Iran, on the other, allegedly pose to regional and world peace are diverging more sharply than ever before. The United States and its Israeli ally are now waging a major air war against Iran – supposedly to prevent that country from weaponizing its nuclear program.  Their stance toward North Korea is far more subdued.  Although U.S. leaders continue to officially demand that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) commit to adopting a non-nuclear status and relinquish the weapons that it has already built, that demand is widely regarded throughout the international system as ineffectual posturing.  Even more significant, neither the United States nor an ally is taking any military action against the DPRK.

The contrast between Washington’s caution in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea and the flagrant U.S. coercion of Iran, which possesses no such weapons, could hardly be more striking. It has not gone unnoticed.  Pyongyang’s successful defiance of the United States regarding the nuclear issue could well produce an important lesson for Iran’s leaders.  Pyongyang has covertly built a small arsenal of approximately 50 nuclear warheads and an increasingly sophisticated fleet of ballistic missiles to deliver them.  U.S. and other leaders now treat North Korea with caution and restraint, however grudgingly.  Conversely, an Iran without nuclear weapons is being pounded severely.  Iranian leaders would be obtuse not to at least try to acquire (through construction or purchase) a modest deterrent similar to North Korea’s.

Until President Donald Trump’s first administration, Washington sought to prevent through diplomacy either Pyongyang or Tehran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program.  That approach apparently achieved some success with respect to Iran in 2015 when the clerical regime signed a multilateral agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which placed restrictions on its nuclear program to ensure that it remained peaceful.  The document also contained provisions for frequent and intrusive UN inspections.  Trump, however, rescinded U.S. approval of that agreement in May 2018, dismissing it as “a bad deal.”  Thereafter, Israeli officials and their American supporters have repeatedly warned that Tehran was just months or perhaps even weeks away from building a nuclear arsenal.  There has never been compelling evidence supporting those allegations, but such warnings had become ever-present during the months leading up to the current war.

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Democrat Senator and Swalwell BFF Ruben Gallego Partied All Night in Colombia Club Despite Credible Threat to His Life

Democrat Senator Ruben Gallego partied all night at a Bogotá, Colombia club despite a credible threat to his life.

Gallego is currently under review after GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna alerted Senate Majority Leader John Thune to his potential sexual misconduct after Eric Swalwell resigned from Congress.

Gallego and Swalwell were very close friends; however, the Democrat Senator distanced himself from Swalwell amid allegations of sexual assault.

Last Tuesday, after a fifth Swalwell accuser came forward at a press conference in Beverly Hills and accused the California Democrat of violently raping her at a West Hollywood hotel in 2018, Gallego threw Swalwell under the bus.

“Eric Swalwell lied to all of us. He lies to the most powerful people in this country. And they trusted him,” Gallego told reporters last week.

A reporter asked Gallego if he was in the hotel room and sitting next to Swalwell on the bed in the leaked video.

Martin Shkreli and Jack Posobiec released videos of Swalwell sitting on a bed with a sex worker. A man who resembles Gallego is briefly seen sitting on the bed.

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Elon Musk Reveals COVID Vaccine Injury After Former Pfizer Official Admits Shots Likely Killed Tens of Thousands in Germany

In an X post that went viral Sunday, Elon Musk said he “felt like I was dying” and almost went to the hospital after taking his second COVID-19 vaccine.

Musk was responding to an X post about how Dr. Helmut Sterz, Pfizer’s former chief toxicologist, admitted last month during a German COVID-19 Inquiry that an estimated 60,000 people have died in Germany from Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty.

According to Sterz, the Paul Ehrlich Institute, Germany’s regulatory and research institute for vaccines and biomedicines, has received 2,133 reports of death following Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

He said, “These spontaneous reports likely have a high number of unreported cases due to underreporting. The true number is therefore much higher.”

“In the U.S., it is assumed that there is an underreporting factor of 30 by which the registered cases would have to be multiplied. For Germany, this would correspond to 60,000 deaths from the vaccination,” Sterz said.

Sterz told the German commissioners that Pfizer’s post-marketing report mentioned 1,200 suspected deaths within just two months of the shot’s approval.

“At that point, Comirnaty should have been withdrawn from the market,” Sterz said.

Pfizer skipped key safety studies due to ‘time constraints’

Sterz also testified that “due to time constraints,” Pfizer didn’t conduct vital safety checks on its COVID-19 vaccine before rolling it out to the public. For instance, the vaccine maker skipped carcinogenicity studies that would have examined whether the shots had cancer-causing properties.

Pfizer also failed to study the vaccine’s impact on pregnancy.

Sterz called for a new and independent scientific review of the COVID-19 vaccines’ long-term effects. “We need proper independent safety studies to understand what really happened. Without full transparency, people will not trust the conclusions,” he said, according to GB News.

He said the high number of negative side effects associated with the vaccines warrants pausing them, and other vaccines that use similar technology, until independent studies show they are safe.

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Somali Jihadist and Ilhan Omar’s Donor Gets Slap-on-the-Wrist Sentence — 8.5 Years for Plotting to Join ISIS, Praising New Orleans Massacre That Killed 14 Americans

In yet another damning example of how radical Islamic terror infiltrates America under decades of failed open-border and refugee resettlement policies pushed by Democrats, a 23-year-old Somali migrant-turned-naturalized citizen from Minneapolis was sentenced yesterday to a mere 102 months, that’s just 8.5 years, in federal prison for actively trying to join ISIS and cheering the savage New Orleans jihad attack that slaughtered 14 innocent Americans.

U.S. District Judge Donovan W. Frank, appointed by Bill Clinton, handed down the sentence to Abdisatar Ahmed Hassan on Tuesday in Minnesota federal court, along with 15 years of supervised release.

Hassan pleaded guilty last September to one count of attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.

Federal Election Commission records show Hassan made contributions to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign committee, which operates in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District. In the same community, Hassan lived and promoted ISIS propaganda.

By December 2024, Hassan was all-in. He quit his job, drained his savings, bought a one-way ticket to Somalia, and posted: “I will become ISIS straight away.”

FBI surveillance caught him trying to board a flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on December 13. Turned away for lacking proper documents, he simply rebooked and tried again on December 29. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped him in Chicago, where they discovered his birth certificate, naturalization certificate, and high school diploma in his bag.

During questioning, Hassan admitted his support for ISIS, rejected democracy, and declared America’s justice system “terrorism.”

Undeterred after being blocked from reaching the caliphate, Hassan doubled down once back in Minnesota. He praised the January 1, 2025, ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in New Orleans, where a jihadist mowed down 14 Americans and injured dozens more, calling the killer a “Muhaajid” and “the legend that killed the Americans.”

In late February 2025, he filmed his own ISIS propaganda videos: driving at night with a homemade black ISIS flag in one hand and an open long-bladed buck knife on his lap. When the FBI arrested him on February 27, agents found the same knife on his person and the ISIS flag in his vehicle.

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6 Ways to Spot the Modern-Day Redcoats in our Midst

We’re surrounded by redcoats.

They might not be part of King George’s military, but their mindset, what they support and what they’re willing to impose, is everywhere. The founders didn’t just fight an army. They fought a long, bloody war to secede from a system built on a set of views they considered as a fate worse than death.

Here are 6 ways to spot a redcoat without ever seeing a uniform.

LOYALTY

The quickest way to spot a redcoat is one question: where does their loyalty lie?

Loyalty to a single person isn’t patriotism. It’s a complete rejection of the American Revolution. Decades before the War for Independence, Samuel Adams already warned again allegiance to one individual.

“It is a very great Mistake to imagine that the Object of Loyalty is the Authority and Interest of one individual Man, however dignified by the Applause or enriched by the Success of Popular Actions”

Adams knew this as a student of history: loyalty to one man leads to tyranny.

“This has led Millions into such a degree of Dependance and Submission that they have at length found themselves oblig’d to homage the Instruments of their Ruin, at the very Time they were at Work to effect it.”

John Adams saw the same kind of end game for those who bend the knee to a political party, and flat out refused to do it.

“I would quarrel with both parties, and with every individual of each, before I would subjugate my understanding, or prostitute my tongue or pen to either.”

Some founders, like Noah Webster, saw party-loyalty as the most dangerous of all.

“nothing is more dangerous to the cause of truth and liberty than a party-spirit.”

Loyalty to a person, a party, or even a nation: that’s a redcoat. The American view? According to Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson: it’s loyalty to liberty.

“our attachment to no Nation upon earth should supplant our attachment to liberty.”

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Virginia Democrat Says He Understands Rural America Because He Grew Up Watching the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’

A Democrat state senator in Virginia named Lamont Bagby recently said that he understands rural America because he grew up watching TV shows like the Dukes of Hazard and the Waltons.

Does this line of thinking apply to other TV shows? Does watching Law & Order make one qualified to be a cop or a district attorney?

It’s fun to imagine how the liberal media would treat this if it was said by a conservative Republican.

The Daily Caller reported:

Democrat Says He Understands Rural America Because He Watched Classic Shows Like ‘Waltons,’ ‘Dukes Of Hazzard’

Democratic Virginia state Sen. Lamont Bagby claimed Thursday that watching “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Waltons” as a child taught him about rural America.

A judge in Tazewell County, Virginia, declared Virginia’s redistricting referendum that passed with just 51.5% of the vote Tuesday was unconstitutional, citing both procedural violations and ruling that the state’s Democratically-controlled Legislature exceeded its authority. Bagby, who represents parts of Henrico County and the state capital, Richmond, argued during a floor debate on the referendum that he understood rural Virginians because he had watched classic TV shows depicting rural culture.

“And listen, I almost took issue with the other side saying that we don’t understand [rural America],” Bagby said during the floor debate. “But I grew up watching ‘The Waltons,’ I grew up with Opie [the son of a sheriff played by Andy Griffith], I even watched the ‘Dukes of Hazzard.’ I think I know a little bit about rural America.”

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MHRA study on covid vaccine injuries: The numbers buried inside it deserved rather more attention

One in seven. That is the proportion of people in the MHRA’s own actively recruited surveillance cohort who reported a medically serious adverse reaction following covid vaccination. Over half reported at least one reaction of any kind. The data were collected between 2020 and 2022. They were not published until September 2025, and only then because Cheryl Grainger, through a Freedom of Information  (“FoI”) request and subsequent Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) appeal, forced it out.

The paper that eventually appeared, in the journal Drug Safety, was not written as a safety paper. It was written as a description of the digital platform used to collect the data – a methods paper published five months after Dame June Raine left as chief executive, nearly three years after the data were locked. The actual adverse reaction rates are reported but not analysed. The one stratification that could determine whether those rates are real was not performed.

The numbers buried inside it deserved rather more attention.

What the Data Show

The Yellow Card Vaccine Monitor (“YCVM”) was the MHRA’s premium data source. It was one of four pillars of its covid vaccine safety surveillance strategy. Unlike the passive Yellow Card scheme, where people report voluntarily and sporadically, the YCVM actively recruited people and followed them up at set intervals. The MHRA itself described it as a tool to “rapidly detect, confirm, characterise and quantify new risks.”

Of the 30,281 individuals who reported receiving a vaccination, 15,764 (52.1%) reported at least one adverse reaction. 4,134 (13.7%) reported a reaction classified as medically serious under the MedDRA system. This is a regulatory classification that includes events deemed medically significant by an internal MHRA panel and is broader than the lay meaning of “serious,” but not a trivial threshold. It encompasses hospitalisation, disability, life-threatening outcomes and death, but also other events judged clinically important.

However, the 13.7% might include people who volunteered for the monitor becausethey had been injured. The MHRA did not exclude people signing up afterthey had their vaccine.

The key question is how representative this cohort was. Any voluntary cohort, even an actively recruited one, may over-represent people who experienced problems. Other active surveillance systems internationally have reported lower rates, though none has been free of similar methodological limitations. The true rate is unknown – which is precisely the problem.

The YCVM was meant to be designed to quantify risk in a way passive surveillance could not because of reporting bias. However, the key simple analysis to enable interpretation was not done. The question is not whether 13.7% is the true rate of serious harm. The question is why the MHRA did not do the work to find out what the true rate is.

The Cohort It Did Not Analyse

The paper reports 35.6% registered before vaccination and 47.5% after. A further group registered on the same day, but the paper does not quantify it. Even allowing for this, the categories as presented account for only 83.1% of the cohort, leaving 16.9%, over 5,000 people, unclassified. The paper does not explain the gap.

The pre-vaccination and same-day registrants are the key group. They signed up before or at the point of vaccination, not in response to a bad reaction. Their data is substantially less vulnerable to post-event selection bias, which is the main challenge to the headline figures. The criticism that people with bad reactions were more motivated to register does not apply to them. They were already in the system.

The obvious analytical step is to separate these registrants and compare their Adverse Drug Reaction (“ADR”) rates to those who registered afterwards. If the prospective cohort shows substantially lower rates, the selection bias interpretation is supported and you would want to say so. If the rates are similar, the overall figures are validated and you would want to say that too. If the rates are lower, then that is the rate that is of interest and should be published. In any case, the comparison is critical and should have been presented.

The MHRA did not present the comparison. In a 21-page paper with 13 tables, this stratification – the single most important analysis for interpreting the headline findings – does not appear. I have submitted an FoI request for this data.

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SAY WHAT? Los Angeles Proposes New TAX to Pay to Fix Street Lights Broken by Copper Wire Thieves

The city of Los Angeles has a major street light problem. Thousands of the lights are out because thieves strip them of copper wire which they then turn around and sell for cash.

To deal with this problem and fix the lights, the city government is proposing a new TAX on the law abiding citizens who did not steal the copper wire. Can you even believe this?

The city wants to punish the people who didn’t ruin the street lights and make them pay to fix it. Unreal.

FOX 11 in Los Angeles reports:

Los Angeles voters to weigh fee increase for streetlight repairs amid copper theft concerns

A citywide plan to replace thousands of broken streetlights across Los Angeles could come with a cost increase for property owners under a proposed Proposition 218 assessment.

Mayor Karen Bass is urging voters to approve the measure, which would raise property-owner fees by an estimated 120% to help fund a $125 million program aimed at replacing more than 200,000 streetlights citywide. City officials say the current system generates roughly $45 million and has not been significantly updated since the 1990s, when Proposition 218 was adopted by California voters to require property-owner approval for new or increased local assessments.

Under the law, the city cannot raise streetlighting fees without a majority vote from affected property owners, a process that has kept much of the funding system largely unchanged for decades.

Ballots are expected to be mailed this week.

Across Los Angeles, officials say copper theft continues to worsen infrastructure problems, with thieves stripping wire from underground fiber lines and disabling streetlights in neighborhoods across the city. More than 32,000 streetlight repair requests remain pending.

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National Parental Rights Group Founder: Homeschooling ‘One Of The Last Remaining Spaces Where Parents Maintain Full Autonomy Over Children’s Education

Connecticut Democrats’ attempt to gain control of homeschooling reveals a desire to “force homeschoolers into alignment with the same ideological materials and standardized assessments that have already sparked controversy in government schools,” Sheri Few, founder and president of United States Parents Involved in Education, wrote in an op-ed at The Hill last week.

The national parental rights leader observed that Connecticut’s HB 5468 represents “a troubling pattern emerging whereby government agencies fail in their most basic responsibilities and lawmakers find someone else to blame.”

Few referred to state Democrats’ attempt to regulate homeschooling after their own government systems failed to attend to “repeated warnings in tragic child-abuse cases.”

“It is hard not to see this as a political sleight of hand,” she asserted. “A crisis exposes government negligence, yet instead of holding those agencies accountable, lawmakers pivot to regulate an entirely unrelated group.”

Rather than celebrate the Connecticut parents who choose to homeschool, sacrificing, for their children, their time and perhaps an opportunity for additional employment income, Democrat lawmakers want to require them to notify the government of their curriculum and be subjected to screening by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the Department of Education.

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The Dollar Lifeline in War – Currency Swaps

I have said for years that people misunderstand the global monetary system. It is not driven by trade balances. It is driven by capital flows and access to dollar liquidity. The discussion of a currency swap between the United States and the United Arab Emirates shows how the system actually works under stress.

The United States is now considering a currency swap with the UAE as tensions around Iran rise. This is not about trade policy. It is about liquidity. When uncertainty increases, capital begins to move. Countries need dollars to stabilize their financial systems and maintain confidence.

Currency swaps are often presented as technical tools. In reality, they are lifelines. They allow a foreign central bank to access U.S. dollars directly. This bypasses stressed markets and helps prevent a liquidity crisis that could trigger capital flight.

This is exactly what happens during geopolitical conflict. The Iran situation has raised concerns about the Strait of Hormuz. That region is critical for global energy flows. When energy is threatened, markets react immediately. Currency volatility rises and capital seeks safety.

The UAE is a strong economy, but it is still exposed. Its currency is pegged to the U.S. dollar, meaning it must maintain sufficient dollar reserves to function properly. When global stress increases, even strong economies seek direct dollar access. That is why a swap line becomes important.

There is also a geopolitical layer. Currency swaps are tools of influence. When the United States provides dollar liquidity, it reinforces alignment. If access is restricted, countries look for alternatives. That can include increasing use of other currencies like the Chinese yuan. The UAE has stated it would consider using the yuan if the U.S. denies them the opportunity to swap, but the issue has become polarizing.

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