USA - The employment numbers are screaming that we have a major crisis on our hands. The employment numbers for the month of August were just released, and they are horrible. Sadly, they have now been horrible for several months in a row, and many economists are warning that conditions will get even worse during the months ahead. Other than during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, we haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Recession. If you have a job that you value, hold on to it very tightly, and if you are currently looking for work try to find something as soon as you can before competition for jobs becomes even more intense. Each month, the US economy must add about 150,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth. According to the BLS, the US economy only added 22,000 new jobs during the month of August…

FRANCE - As if France did not have enough problems in the real world, now her fake version of it is in turmoil: there is a clairvoyance crisis. As The Times reported last week: “The French authorities are under pressure to regulate… after claims by the National Institute of Divinatory Arts that three quarters of the country’s 100,000 or so fortune-tellers are incompetent and dishonest." Yes, the nation’s respectable charlatans are appalled by the decline in standards, caused by the proliferation of online fortune-telling. The institute’s chairman, Youcef Sissaoui, said most fortune-tellers in France “are only trained to defraud people” and estimated that at best 5 per cent of them were “honest and really competent”. What the astrologer never does is to suggest the client has the slightest possibility of moral failings. It is all in THE LANGUAGE OF FLATTERY AND REASSURANCE.

MIDDLE EAST - Most in the West don’t know much about Islam, and what they know is often incorrect. But what about the 72 virgins? Are they real? Do Muslim men believe that after death, they will be rewarded with 72 virgins? The question needs to be addressed, because it has been suggested that there was an incorrect translation, and the men are getting raisins, not virgins. And, perhaps out of envy or jealousy, some claim the virgins are old, ugly, and in constant PMS. So what’s the truth about the 72 virgins? Muhammad had between 80 and 200 followers. In Medina, conditions were initially so bleak that the survival of Islam was uncertain.

UK - In an essay published all of 25 years ago, long before the term “woke” entered everyday usage, the great conservative writer Theodore Dalrymple supplied a succinct analysis of what was then known as POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. PC, he explained, works by “forcing [people] to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question… Without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.” The main reason that woke propaganda exerts such influence over our society is that, even though most people know it’s nonsense, all too many of them go along with it, because they’re scared of what might happen to them if they don’t. So, instead of saying what they think, they say what they think they should think.

USA - A major eruption of just one of the Earth’s supervolcanoes would have the potential to produce a long-term “volcanic winter” and a horrifying global famine in which hundreds of millions of people would die. So should we be alarmed that several of those supervolcanoes appear to be waking up simultaneously? There are many in the scientific community that are deeply concerned that all of this seismic activity may be building up to some sort of a crescendo, but so far most people in the general population are not paying attention to the warnings. Scientists tell us that there are 20 supervolcanoes on our planet, and one of the largest is right here in the United States. A full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano could literally bury almost the entire nation in volcanic ash and absolutely destroy US food production. Meanwhile, we are being warned that a supervolcano that is located in northern Nevada appears to be “awakening”… On the other side of the world, the Campi Flegrei supervolcano in southern Italy has been shaking like crazy this year… On top of everything else, we are being told that the New Madrid Seismic Zone “is overdue for a major seismic event”…

USA - Nobody can deny that the US economy deteriorated dramatically during the four years that Joe Biden was in the White House. In fact, it was probably the biggest reason why the Democrats lost control of the White House. The American people were desperate for change, because economic conditions had become extremely painful. Of course the Biden years were just one chapter in America’s long-term economic decline. Debt levels have been exploding and our standard of living has been deteriorating for a very long time, but there was hope that conditions would start to improve in 2025.

UK - The Government has only three choices to fix the financial crisis: cut, borrow or tax. We’re broke. And this time it is serious. This week the UK’s benchmark debt costs hit a 27-year high. It matters more because we’re not the same as we were the last time borrowing got this expensive. When our 30-year government bond yields soared to 5.72 per cent today, it wasn’t just another financial market blip. It was the bond market, the measured consideration of the people who lend us money, sending us a very clear message: they’re getting worried about how we are going to pay them back.

ISRAEL - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put on hold a controversial plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, after receiving sharp warnings from both regional allies and Western nations. The issue was slated for a ministerial discussion on Thursday but has been replaced by a session focused on the mounting security challenges in the area. The Jerusalem Post reported that defense officials will caution ministers that the West Bank “could erupt instantly” as momentum builds at the United Nations for several Western countries to recognize a Palestinian state later this month. The decision follows a stern warning from the United Arab Emirates to both Israel and President Trump that annexing the West Bank would threaten the Abraham Accords, signed nearly five years ago as a cornerstone of Israel’s normalization with Arab states. Emirati special envoy Lana Nusseibeh told The Times of Israel that annexation would be a “red line” for Abu Dhabi, foreclosing peace efforts and “the idea of regional integration.”

MIDDLE EAST - US President Donald Trump called for Hamas to "IMMEDIATELY give back all 20 hostages" in a Wednesday post on Truth Social. "Not 2 or 5 or 7!" he added. If Hamas does this, then "things will change rapidly," he added, concluding, "IT WILL END!" Trump notably only referred to the 20 hostages presumed to be alive, rather than the total 48 hostages held in captivity. In a direct message to the US president, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said: "This nightmare cannot end for our nation until ALL 48 hostages are accounted for - both those who survived and those who were brutally murdered during these 700 days of hell." They reiterated their demand for Trump to make every effort to ensure that all 48 hostages held in captivity are returned to Israel.

ISRAEL - The Hostage Families Forum on Friday staged “an emergency call” calling for the release of the remaining 48 hostages held in Gaza as Israel marks 700 days since October 7, 2023. Representatives from the forum stood dressed in yellow, spelling out “S.O.S,” along with an hourglass representing the time running out for the hostages. “700 days since they were abducted, and we are with them,” the forum wrote on X/Twitter on Thursday night. “Government of Israel - the excuses are over! A deal must be made now, before it's too late.”

HOLLAND - Global sea levels have not continued to rise at the rates predicted by many scientists — and there is no evidence that climate change has contributed to any such acceleration, a new first-of-its-kind study has claimed. The research found that the average sea level rise in 2020 was only around 1.5mm per year, or 6 inches per century, according to the paper’s authors, Dutch engineering consultant Hessel Voortman and independent researcher Rob de Vos. “This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media,” Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger. Voortman was shocked that no researcher before had performed an analysis of real-world local data.

MIDDLE EAST - A very dangerous geopolitical chess match is playing out right in front of our eyes. As I discussed yesterday, France and Saudi Arabia will co-chair “the Conference on the Two-State Solution” at the United Nations on September 22nd. The goal of this conference is to create an unstoppable wave of international momentum toward the creation of a Palestinian state. Israeli officials are very upset about this conference, and they are considering annexing large portions of the West Bank in response. If that happens, Israel’s Islamic neighbors will go absolutely berserk and a catastrophic war could break out in the Middle East. So let us hope that cooler heads prevail, because we are rapidly approaching a point of no return. This is something that could POTENTIALLY UNITE ALL OF THE SURROUNDING NATIONS. So what would Israel do if it was suddenly confronted with a military threat from a large Islamic coalition? It appears that this thing could spiral out of control very easily.

USA - The #1 issue for the financial system today is whether bonds rally from here, or continue to break down. If bonds rally, then the financial system continues to chug along despite the egregious levels of debt. But if Treasuries break down from here, then the secular bull market in bonds is DEFINITIVELY over and we are heading towards a debt crisis. Central banks are fully aware of this situation and have been taking steps to prepare for what’s coming.

CHINA - The latest gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Tianjin looks at first like another summit – handshakes, family portraits, scripted statements. But the meeting on August 31–September 1 is more than diplomatic theater: it is another marker of the end of the unipolar era dominated by the United States, and the rise of a multipolar system centered on Asia, Eurasia, and the Global South. At the table were Chinese President Xi Jinping, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – together representing more than a third of humanity and 3 of the largest countries on Earth. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin was less about formal speeches than about symbolism. It signalled that the unipolar world has ended. From development banks to energy corridors to parades of missiles, a new multipolar order is taking shape – and it no longer asks for Western permission.

USA - Besides the harm the transgender ideology does to individuals, leaving boys being less than boys and girls less than girls after “treatment,” the lost families and lives, the multiple mass killers that have come from that lifestyle, there is a “threat” to public safety, and “as such, it should be outlawed and eradicated from public life.” That’s according to an article by John Daniel Davidson, a book author and writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, the New York Post and more.