It can't possibly have been this easy. Right?

After the death of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian regime appointed an interim ayatollah to take temporary charge of the nation.

That may not have lasted long; reports that Alireza Arafi was killed shortly after his appointment have circulated, although they have not been confirmed yet.

Regardless, the constitution of the Islamic Republic requires the 88 mullahs on the "Assembly of Experts" to appoint Khamenei's permanent successor in a vote, which would normally take place in their Qom headquarters.

About that ...

The puzzle pieces are falling into place faster than the Deep State ever imagined. The case against the Clintons as a crime family, which I laid out in 2019 when I discussed their Deep State RICO conspiracy, has just been validated by fresh evidence.

John Solomon nails it with the “Clinton Corruption Files.” Irrefutable documents that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel sent to Congress in late 2025 confirm a “massive bribery operation” through the Clinton Foundation—specifically, foreign interest donations in exchange for State Department favors during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary.

Three FBI offices (New York, Washington, Little Rock) independently flagged pay-to-play, but Obama-era leadership obstructed the probes. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates (Obama’s No. 2 at DOJ) issued the kill order: “Shut it down.”

Whistleblowers reported buried evidence and blocked grand juries, while Russiagate was fast-tracked as the smokescreen.

This video sums up much of the new evidence…

How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support — and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed?

There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity.

The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory).

They begin insisting that a new existential threat requires immediate government intervention, novel legislation, ample funding, and public awareness of the impending danger.

So out of nowhere, the public is warned that the scorching planet will be inundated by rising seas in a mere decade.

Or that millions of transgender youth are our next civil rights frontier, given that they suffer in silence without political advocacy, new laws, programs, and the chance for “life-saving,” powerful hormonal treatments and radical sex-reassignment surgeries. Indeed, the travel time from an outlandish idea by the faculty lounge to liberal status quo is a mere few years.

Next, the media, hand-in-glove with academia, springs into action…

This story doesn't quite feature the gut-punch immediacy of Mexico's drug war escalating into a virtual civil war last week in and around Puerto Vallarta, but as a glimpse into the future, maybe it ought to send a chill or three down your spine.

According to a new Bloomberg story (paywalled, sorry), a weeks-long hacker campaign against the Mexican government culminated in January with a massive data theft of some of the federal government's most sensitive information.

"By the time it was over," Let's Data Science reported on Wednesday, "the attacker had stolen 150 gigabytes of sensitive data — including 195 million taxpayer records, voter registration files, government employee credentials, and civil registry data."

If you're thinking such a massive theft involved a team of hackers, years of planning involving a Stuxnet-like virus, or even physical access to Mexican government computer systems — think again.

The almost unprecedented hack was done by just one guy. Using Anthropic's Claude AI, despite all of Anthropic's safeguards against something exactly like this.

Summing up a report published Wednesday by Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security, Bloomberg wrote that some "unknown Claude user" simply made up "Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft."

[TTP:  Mike will be covering the SOTU in the HFR, so we won’t steal his thunder today. This news, ignored by the Legacy Media, should brighten your day. Please take a good look at this picture. As Beege would say, “Dawg!” Isn’t that a hoot?!]

The last time I wrote anything at length about the Panama Canal specifically was last April, so almost a year ago.

The new Trump administration had moved swiftly to reassert American influence in the region and engineered a pretty impressive about-face as far as the Panamanian government went, which had been in the middle of a Belt and Road Initiative build-up with the Chinese Communists.

All that came to a screeching halt.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth went down there with a couple of US Navy ships for some collaborative maneuvers, managed to back the Panamanians out of a recently extended port management agreement with Hong Kong-based firm CK Hutchinson subsidiary Panama Ports Company (PPC) , and into a multinational deal to sell the rights (among others) for the Panamanian Canal ports to Blackrock.

Heads exploded in Beijing…