Beware The AI Industrial Complex

By John deVadoss

What makes an industrial complex is frontier technology, with feedback loops powerful enough to steer both markets and public policy.

Economists describe five telltale traits: mutual dependency between state and suppliers; capital costs so high that only a few firms can play; standards written by insiders; external costs shifted to the public; and a strategic framing (“national security,” “global competitiveness”) that evades scrutiny.

By that definition, we are witnessing the construction of an AI industrial complex, and its socioeconomic wake is already visible.

The early externalities: Power and water

The International Energy Agency projects that, by 2030, global data‑center electricity demand will double to roughly 945 TWh — a trillion watts used per hour. That is about the annual consumption of Japan. Much of that growth is traceable to AI inference and training workloads. The strain is leaking into household bills.

• In Virginia, Dominion Energy has requested a $10.92/month fuel‑rate increase for the “typical” home customer, citing higher gas prices and PJM capacity charges driven in part by data‑center growth. The request is still pending.
• Prices in PJM’s latest capacity auction cleared 22 % higher than last year; the East Coast grid operator estimates that will add between 1.5%  and 5 % to retail bills beginning next summer.

Electricity is only half the story. Google’s environmental report shows its hyperscale facilities used nearly 6 billion gallons of fresh water in 2024, up 8 % year‑on‑year, a jump Google attributes largely to AI. The company says it “replenished” 64 % of that total, but the replenishment often happens far from the aquifers it drains. Out West, drought‑stressed cities respond by digging deeper municipal wells or raising water rates — expenses that never appear on a quarterly earnings call.

Labor and looming AI divide: Whither the middle class?

Generative AI in its first iteration targets the heart of the middle‑class office and clerical economy. Brookings finds more than 30 % of U.S. workers could see at least half of their tasks disrupted, with mid‑skill professional roles most exposed. Public anxiety is tracking the data: A 2024 Governance AI survey shows about half of Americans expect AI to widen income inequality, and two‑thirds want federal action to cushion job losses. The paradox: The same families paying higher utility bills may also face stagnant wages or displacement in the very sectors AI automates.

Access to front‑of‑the‑line models already carries a price tag — ChatGPT Plus costs $20 a month, and enterprise “Pro” tiers are tenfold higher. When homework help and job‑application prep migrate behind priority tokens, the complex threatens to hard‑code a two‑tier digital citizenship: seamless for those who can pay, throttled for those who cannot.

The new and irreparable digital divide will be between those who know how to work with AI and those who do not. Unlike the paternalistic and naive exhortations to learn to code, this is not about coding or even about software at all — this divide is about critical thinking, first-principles reasoning, and the ability to harness an emergent capability that can manifest both cloying sycophancy and Machiavellian deception.

The predictable response: UBI, with Big AI as the adjudicator

Inevitably, the drums will begin to beat across the nation for so-called universal basic income and its ilk; the state will have to devise economic mechanisms to address unemployment and the increasing replacement of both white and blue-collar jobs; but at what cost?

The social contract will have to be rewritten; AI will increasingly assume the roles of fact-checker, arbiter and judge; and Big AI will loom large in the enforcement and governance of this new contract, as the state is forced to reinvent itself. “Need more training data” is the cry, and intellectual property is collateral damage; we are witnessing the vestiges of the publishing industry attempting to make a quick buck as copyrights are being railroaded. History is written by winners, and it remains to be seen how the winning AI models and their trainers shape what will count as downstream history.

The American spirit owes its striking characteristic to the frontier — Americans have always shaped our environment and our tools, not the other way around. But we are at a critical juncture. Are we going to let AI shape our socioeconomic future? Are we about to voluntarily swap our frontier spirit for a gilded cage of our own making?

The first meaningful step in addressing this is the rolling back of the proposed moratorium on state and local AI laws in H.R.1 (aka the “Big Beautiful Bill”).

Considering the deep socio-economic impact of AI, it’s crucial that regulatory authority stays with local governments. A decentralized approach enables state-level experimentation, tailors oversight and risk management to local needs, and increases the likelihood of harnessing AI’s potential for the common good.

About the author: John deVadoss: is a former general manager at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond. He led architecture strategy for .NET, SOA and the early SaaS/Cloud initiatives at Microsoft.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 22:35

One Of The World's Oldest Asset Classes Just Hit Record Highs

Farmland is one of the oldest asset classes, rivaling precious metals in its ability to preserve generational wealth.

Unlike stocks or fiat currencies, farmland and cropland are tangible, finite, and highly productive. As the global population continues to grow and demand for healthier food intensifies, arable land per capita is shrinking due to urban sprawl and environmental degradation. This makes farmland not just a low-volatility store of value, but also a necessary hedge against rising global instability and inflationary pressures. 

The latest USDA Land Values 2025 Report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) reports a 4.3% increase in average farmland values, pushing prices to a record $4,350 per acre. This follows a 5% ($200) increase between 2023 and 2024 and marks the fifth straight year of gains in agricultural real estate. Cash rents for cropland also hit a new high, rising .60% to $161 per acre. 

Average Farm Real Estate Value – United States: 2011-2025

2025 Farm Real Estate Value by State

Average Cropland Value – United States: 2011-2025

2025 Cropland Value by State

Average Pasture Value – United States: 2011-2025

2025 Pasture Value by State

There's a reason billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are quietly buying up vast amounts of farmland: it's low-volatility and an asset that preserves and grows generational wealth. 

Hmm...

. . . 

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 22:10

Taibbi Obliterates Dean Of Columbia Journalism School In Open Letter

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

Letter to Bill Grueskin, former Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, on his recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review

Mr. Grueskin,

Regarding your August 1 article, “Knowing: Still Only Half the Battle,” which lauds Charlie Savage of the New York Times for having “dissected and eviscerated” Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims about corruption of intelligence in the Trump-Russia investigation:

You praised Savage’s article, “New Reports on Russian Interference Don’t Show What Trump Says They Do,” as an example of the work of an “experienced beat reporter” who can distill complex stories into a “coherent, compelling whole.” Your sub-headline stressed the importance of “showing receipts” in journalism, where “most people don’t follow stories very closely,” but “they can learn a lot when an experienced beat reporter helps them sort out what’s important and what’s chaff.”

Chaff.

Except — and you should know this because the Columbia Journalism Review published over 20,000 words on the subject in January 2023 — Savage and his colleagues at the Times have badly miscovered this story for nearly a decade, and continue to do so. The 2018 Pulitzer Prize the paper won on the topic along with the Washington Post will go down as the same kind of “disgrace” as its 1932 Pulitzer for Walter Duranty’s breathless coverage of Stalin’s Russia. In this case, the Times drifted so far from its traditional mission that it became an animating motive for Gabbard and other investigators in Donald Trump’s administration.

Witness FBI Director Kash Patel throwing down a gauntlet this weekend, right after your piece ran. He challenged media figures who called him a “liar” in 2018, when as an investigator in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) chaired by California’s Devin Nunes, he outed the Steele Dossier as “fictitious intelligence” used to deceive a federal judge and unlawfully spy on Trump’s campaign. Patel added, “Now I’m the FBI Director,” then hinted that he might release “more docs” so “we can see who is lying,” before ending with a reference to “bogus Pulitzers.

Kash Patel calls out the media

Is this normal FBI Director behavior? Would Louis Freeh or William Webster call out a newspaper in such a personal way? Probably not. Would most Times readers even know what Patel is talking about? Also probably not, because the paper has consistently responded to criticism by doing what you did in “Knowing: Still Only Half the Battle”: casually dismiss allegations as “false conspiracies” and “chaff,” things educated people may safely ignore, in favor of the wheat in papers like the Times.

That attitude only works if the facts are on your side. On this story, they aren’t, and it’s not close. About those “receipts” you praised:

As you note, Savage decried “overheated and attention-grabbing claims” made by Trump’s “top officials,” who “accused Mr. Obama of treason and “made criminal referrals” about national security officials under Mr. Obama. Savage may rightly call claims of “treason” overheated, since nothing released yet comes close to meeting the legal definition (though the Times and some of those same “national security officials” similarly overreached when they invoked the word at the beginning of Trump’s first term). There are reports today of the case going to a grand jury, but it’s true we don’t know yet how compelling any criminal evidence might be. Still, Savage added an unsupported line:

The administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

It’s a small detail, but characteristic of what the Times has become. An experienced beat reporter would know the administration has been investigating Russiagate since Trump’s inauguration, that Patel referenced a discovery in this investigation on the Joe Rogan Experience on June 6th, and that CIA Director John Ratcliffe kicked off the recent releases with a report on the Trump-Russia probe that came out on July 2, before the much-criticized Epstein announcement by Pam Bondi’s Justice Department on July 7th.

There is no fact anywhere to support the idea that recent Russiagate releases are an attempt to “distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.” It’s merely something that sounds right to Times readers, probably because it’s been a talking point hammered by Democratic Party politicians like Arizona’s Mark Kelly (“I think they do not want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein”), Connecticut’s Jim Himes (“A transparent effort to distract from… refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files”), even a spokesperson for former President Barack Obama, Patrick Rodenbush (“These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction”). Since when is it good practice for a paper like the Times to present partisan talking points as facts?

Savage went on to bristle at Tulsi Gabbard’s recent release of a report prepared by Patel’s team in 2017-2018, about the construction of a January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluding Russia and Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Donald Trump, for whom he developed a “clear preference.” The HPSCI report dovetailed with Ratcliffe’s report in showing dissent within the team that put together this critical Assessment.

While Ratcliffe showed that then-CIA Director John Brennan overrode the written objections of his own Deputy Director of Analysis and the judgments of two of his top Russia experts in using a piece of paid opposition research originating from the Clinton campaign, the Steele dossier, the HPSCI report showed “CIA officer judgments” objecting to the three other key pieces of evidence as containing “substandard information.” The HPSCI report also described how two senior CIA analysts confronted Brennan about the flaws of the Steele dossier, and he replied, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

Your experienced beat writer deigned to describe these and other damning details as “messy,” then dismissed them. One of the key pieces of “evidence” was a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence” Brennan himself was told by a supposedly well-placed Russian source eventually “exfiltrated” to Virginia. The fragmentary line, “whose victory Putin was counting on,” turned out to be the only evidence bolstering the notion that Putin specifically wanted to help Donald Trump.

Brennan’s own team objected to the fragment’s use because “five people read it five ways,” because the top source was passing on information of unknown origin, and because Brennan’s methods of conveying the intelligence were suspect. The report was not “formally disseminated” or put in writing; Brennan briefed the group and President Obama orally. The HPSCI investigators summarized complaints of the ICA’s authors:

By briefing the information orally, however, DCIA could have tailored his message to different officials, unconstrained by a consistent record copу.

Savage conveyed many of the details just related: that the intelligence faced objections from report authors, that the report failed to notice this key piece of evidence was “disputed,” that analysts didn’t know what the line meant or “who specifically the mole had heard that from,” and that Ratcliffe concluded the report incorrectly described the key judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump warranted “high confidence,” a designation that requires multiple sources, when “only one source explicitly and directly backed that finding.”

So yes, Savage agreed, the sole piece of evidence on which the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump was thirdhand, rejected intelligence of disputed meaning that was also incorrectly labeled as warranting “high confidence.” There is a but passage coming, but it’s worth pausing to note what Savage conceded about the evidentiary basis for countless New York Times stories, including an A1 bombshell put together online on December 9th, 2016, hours after Barack Obama ordered the writing of the new Assessment. In the next day’s print edition, it was headlined: “Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump, U.S. Says.”

The lede from that piece:

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

The Times trumpeted “high confidence” for years, only calling attention to the dissent by the NSA and other CIA analysts when Brennan himself wrote about it in his book, Undaunted, in October of 2020. (The CIA Director had time to write a book before the Times zeroed in on this key detail!) That years-too-late story was called, “Brennan Rebuffed Requests to Lower Confidence in Key Russia Finding.”

As for the use of the Steele dossier in the ICA, the salient fact for any editor attempting objectivity would be that this crude intelligence forgery — later demolished as “rumor,” “speculation,” and “hearsay” in a report by Obama-appointed Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who noted the FBI found “zero” corroboration for its claims — was employed at all in such an impactful report. Not according to Savage, who appeared laser-focused on setting up a legal defense against perjury charges for Brennan, writing about how the newly disclosed material “complicates” Brennan’s Congressional testimony:

Mr. Brennan has publicly said the Steele dossier material was not incorporated or used in the assessment itself because of the C.I.A.’s concerns. In 2017, he told Congress that the dossier “was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.”

The newly disclosed material complicates that narrative. For one, it showed that Mr. Brennan internally defended appending a summary of the dossier to the assessment after C.I.A. analysts resisted the compromise, too… For another, the material has revealed that the classified version of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the annex. It did so in a fourth bullet point under the judgment that Mr. Putin aspired to help Mr. Trump’s chances of winning.

“For additional reporting on Russian plans and intentions, please see Annex A: Additional Reporting from an F.B.I. Source on Russian Influence Efforts,” the bullet point said… Mr. Trump’s allies have argued that this sentence means the information from the Steele dossier was incorporated into the assessment itself.

The great New York Times is reduced to arguing an absurd semantic point, that material included in an “annex” to a report can properly be described as having not been used “in any way” as a “basis” for that same report.

Savage’s other effort in this article is to defend against charges that the CIA used discarded, unclear, unverifiable evidence to secure a “high confidence” judgment by conceding all of the above, but noting that the NSA properly ascribed to the claim “moderate confidence,” which in the intelligence world means something between “not really” and “definitely maybe.”

That is what you described as Savage having “dissected and eviscerated” allegations that Obama and his deputies ginned up “false conspiracies” around the 2016 election.

As a reminder, these “false conspiracies” are the same stories a hyperventilating Times rode all the way to a Pulitzer Prize. How shameful was that Pulitzer? Take one of the winning entries: “Unlikely Source Propelled Russian Meddling Inquiry,” from December 30, 2017. That bombshell report by Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, about the ostensible origin story of the Trump-Russia investigation, opened in dramatic fashion:

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Obviously, you’re a former Journalism School Dean and I’m not, but I wouldn’t have thought you could win a Pulitzer Prize writing a lede with no attributions in which all the new facts are wrong. The assertion that the young Trump aide Papadopoulos spoke of “dirt” or “thousands of emails” was eventually blown up by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat mentioned. From the report by Special Counsel John Durham, who noted that Downer said in interviews there was “no mention” of these headline details, and that Papadopoulos simply said “the Russians have information”:

No one deconstructed this story more thoroughly than Jeff Gerth in the same Columbia Journalism Review. Gerth noted that the Times omitted to include public denials by the ostensible source of the “dirt,” a mysterious Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud. Gerth also noted that the lead investigator of “Crossfire Hurricane,” Peter Strzok, told him “There never was a case opened on the Trump campaign—it was opened to identify whoever might have received the Russian offer.” The Russian offer in question was actually a Maltese offer, which the Maltese person denied offering (Mifsud told the FBI he “did not make any offers or proffer any information to Papadopoulos”), and which Downer denied hearing.

Incidentally, Savage in 2023 would link to this prizewinning story, which he described as being about “an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails.” By then there was no one left still claiming to have said or heard anything about “advance knowledge” of releasing hacked emails. As noted in this space a few days ago, the Times in the piece you praised rewrote a passage about the Downer story without mentioning the name “Papadopoulos,” or “dirt,” or “emails,” or “advance knowledge,” saying only that the Trump campaign “had received outreach from Russia and knew what it would do.”

All the juicy headline details from this and other big Times Trump-Russia stories have been wiped away by time. Take the worst story the Times wrote about this topic, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” It wasn’t a Pulitzer entry, but it was “almost entirely wrong,” as Comey agreed in testimony that year. The Times was nonetheless so excited about its non-scoop that, as Gerth recounted, it hired a Showtime crew to film them faceplanting the editorial process for a documentary called The Fourth Estate. “Are we sure we’re not feeding a conspiracy,” reporter Mark Mazzetti asked, with “recurring themes of contacts?” No, and it was “the biggest story in years,” triumphant editor Dean Baquet chirped.

It was the biggest story in years, but because it was wrong and embarrassing, not the other reason. Still, your Columbia Journalism Review found the scene dazzling:

The film shows that the “daily miracle” of the Times is an enormous undertaking.

The “daily miracle.” That’s not at all a fatuous, self-congratulating or grandiose sentiment! Thank goodness it’s others who serve up “chaff” and “false conspiracies.” With respect, isn’t it time someone at the Times stepped outside the bubble, and took a hard look back?

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 21:45

Arson Attack Hits ICE Field Office In Washington State Amid Dangerous Rhetoric From Democrats

Over the weekend, a federal building housing an ICE field office in Yakima, Washington, was firebombed, yet another violent flashpoint amid the Democratic Party’s unrelenting and dangerous anti-ICE rhetoric. Assaults on ICE agents have skyrocketed by 830%, as Democrats and their dark-money billionaire-funded NGO networks shield criminal illegal aliens from deportations.

Homeland Security provided color of what exactly happened: 

On Saturday, a cowardly rioter threw a rock through a window of a building that ICE has a sub-office in. Additionally, a small fire was set at the back of the building. Local authorities are investigating this has an act of arson. There have been no injuries reported at this time and the investigation is ongoing. It is unclear if our brave ICE law enforcement were the targets of these violent acts.

From comparisons to the modern-day Nazi gestapo to glorifying rioters, the violent rhetoric of sanctuary politicians is beyond the pale. Our ICE law enforcement is now facing an 830% increase in assaults against them. Secretary Noem has been clear: Anyone who seeks to harm law enforcement officers will be found and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

On Saturday, a cowardly rioter threw a rock through a window of a building that ICE has a sub-office in. Additionally, a small fire was set at the back of the building. Local authorities are investigating this has an act of arson. There have been no injuries reported at this time… pic.twitter.com/55MB6Y7idr

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 5, 2025

Democrats are pushing anti-ICE rhetoric.

ICE officers put their lives on the line every day while removing illegal aliens from our communities.

Democrats must stop their dangerous, anti-ICE rhetoric before someone gets hurt—or killed. pic.twitter.com/qvm8YLISbG

— House Homeland GOP (@HomelandGOP) July 10, 2025

The attacks...

Ventura County, Calif. — Mexican nationalists and open border extremists have mobilized to attack federal agents to try to stop their raid on a drug farm suspected of being run by illegal foreign nationals. pic.twitter.com/sh699HbyPE

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) July 10, 2025

 

A 27-year-old man opened fire at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, injuring two officers and a Border Patrol employee, authorities reported. Federal agents returned fire at the suspect, identified as Ryan Louis Mosqueda, who was armed with a rifle and wearing a… pic.twitter.com/lIjWdCZzw4

— Mayra Flores (@MayraFlores4TX) July 7, 2025

Portland (July 28) — Antifa try to attack federal agents when they attempt to make an arrest of two riot suspects outside the ICE facility.

Video by @KatieDaviscourt:
pic.twitter.com/VUoBSELApm

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) July 29, 2025

Suspects still on the loose. Officers responded with gunfire as a safety measure. Illegal suspects fled — massive response air & ground…still at large.
Assaults on Ice agents up 830% pic.twitter.com/G1y0ygSXVv

— April Color (@ColorApril) August 1, 2025

. . . 

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 21:20

Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.

Wednesday:
• At 7:00 AM ET, The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) will release the results for the mortgage purchase applications index.

Trump Accumulates Wins On Supreme Court's Emergency Docket - Key Takeaways

Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump’s ambitious agenda has been met with order after order from lower courts temporarily blocking him. Many of those have been lifted by the Supreme Court, handing Trump several wins and raising questions about how lower courts have been handling his cases.

These decisions have mostly come on what’s known as the “emergency” or “shadow docket,” a set of more urgent appeals that the Supreme Court often decides without oral argument.

The Supreme Court sometimes issues a ruling without explanation in these cases.

The resulting decisions—at least 21 in Trump’s second administration—have prompted varying alliances and opinions that reflect apparent frustration among the justices.

Here are some takeaways from Trump’s battles at the Supreme Court during the 2024-2025 term.

Trump’s Winning Streak

The administration has been remarkably successful at the high court, obtaining relief in 14 of the 18 appeals that have been ruled on by the justices.

So far, the Supreme Court has allowed Trump to block spending across multiple departments, remove high-ranking bureaucrats and probationary employees, and move forward with immigration enforcement measures.

Perhaps his biggest victory came in June when the justices ruled against the use of nationwide injunctions. Such orders have blocked many of Trump’s policies on a nationwide basis, rather than just for the parties before the court.

But Trump’s victories so far have been relatively limited, usually scoring temporary relief from lower court orders while the justices refrained from making final decisions on the legality of Trump’s policies.

“The merits of most challenges to Administration policies did not reach the Court so we have no clear sense of how much of the President’s agenda it will sustain,” Georgetown University Law Professor David Super told The Epoch Times.

In at least a handful of cases, the justices ruled against Trump.

For example, they said in May that Trump had provided inadequate due process for individuals subject to deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. A majority of the justices temporarily halted deportations on two occasions while leaving unresolved meatier questions about whether Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was valid.

That decision—and another effectively forcing the disbursement of foreign aid—drew some heavy criticism from Justice Samuel Alito.

“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” he asked in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch in March.

“The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise,” he added, noting that he was “stunned.”

Lower Courts’ Authority

Alito’s comment was one of many questioning the authority of lower courts in blocking the president’s policies.

Much of the administration’s arguments in court have focused on whether federal district judges have authority to even hear particular cases or second-guess the administration’s judgments.

Trump’s mass firings, for example, have brought into focus how much Congress can limit his ability to fire employees. That’s particularly true for high-ranking bureaucrats, whose positions Congress may have attempted to insulate by saying they cannot be fired without cause.

A long list of officials have already sued, providing cases for the Supreme Court to weigh in on a nearly century-old precedent on the president’s removal power. While the Supreme Court initially refused Trump’s request to fire a watchdog within the government, it temporarily allowed other removals of labor board officials and those on a consumer safety commission.

While the ruling on nationwide injunctions limited courts’ authority, many other questions remain unanswered—including how litigants might obtain nationwide relief through other legal tools.

Besides that question, the Supreme Court could grapple more deeply with whether disputes with federal employees must go through an administrative process before reaching federal courts.

Another question is whether challenges to Trump’s funding cuts should be brought in those courts rather than in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. A law known as the Tucker Act grants the Court of Claims jurisdiction over contract disputes, but some federal judges have said the administration is misapplying this law.

In April, a majority of the Supreme Court seemed to side with the Trump administration when it removed a lower court’s block on Trump’s attempt to freeze millions in Education Department grants.

While they didn’t offer a final opinion on lower courts’ jurisdiction, an unsigned majority opinion seemed to favor the president’s view. “The Government is likely to succeed in showing the District Court lacked jurisdiction to order the payment of money,” the “per curiam,” or unsigned opinion, read.

Moving Too Quickly?

Not everyone was on board with that opinion. Besides Chief Justice John Roberts, the three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—said they would have ruled differently.

In that case and others, the dissents featured similar concerns from both conservative and liberal justices.

Kagan worried that the court was moving too quickly on the education grants and failed to thoroughly consider the issue.

“The risk of error increases when this Court decides cases—as here—with barebones briefing, no argument, and scarce time for reflection,” she said, before suggesting the court created “new law” on the emergency docket.

Sotomayor later quoted that portion of Kagan’s opinion when she dissented from the court’s decision to remove blocks on Trump’s Alien Enemies Act deportations in April.

The administration’s deportations under the 18th-century law have sparked four decisions from the court this past term. In one decision, justices said the administration had to facilitate the return of one of the men deported to El Salvador.

In a separate case, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Trump’s deportations for a group of detainees in Texas before that group or class had been certified in a lower court. In class action lawsuits, a court has to certify the class of plaintiffs before the action can proceed.

A dissent written by Alito and Thomas had strong words for this aspect of the decision and others.

“In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order,” the dissent, authored by Alito, read.

The opinions in these cases have been brief, often leaving questions about how lower courts should view particular legal issues.

At an event for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Kagan said in July that the court “should be cautious” about acting on the emergency docket and cited issues like a lack of briefing.

“The orders themselves don’t tell anybody anything about why we’ve done what we’ve done,” she said. “I think there are some things you can pretty well guess, but there are lots of other things … where you can’t,” she said.

According to media outlets, Kavanaugh defended shorter orders at an event in Missouri on July 31. “There can be a risk, in writing the opinion, of a lock-in effect, of making a snap judgment and putting it in writing, in a written opinion that’s not going to reflect the final view,” he said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 20:55

Brazil's Lula Defiant: 'I Will Not Call Trump, Am Not Afraid'

President Trump has sent a message to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva saying the Brazilian leader could "call him anytime" to discuss the trade dispute centered on the country's treatment of ex-leader Jair Bolsonaro.

Lula has defiantly responded Tuesday with the statement, "I will not call Trump because he does not want to talk." He further asserted that nobody gives him lessons in negotiations.

Speaking during an event held in Brasilia, he made clear: "I don’t want people to think I am afraid of Donald Trump" and that "the US president had no right to announced the tariffs on Brazil the way he did" - especially as they make no sense.

Via AFP

Additional vehement complaints about the US position, at a moment a record-setting 50% tariff has taken effect for many Brazilian goods entering the US, are as follows via Bloomberg:

• US attacks on instant payment system Pix are unjustified, we cannot be penalized for developing a free and efficient system, said Lula
• The allegations about the Pix payment system, regulation of digital platforms and deforestation are unreasonable “Pix is a national heritage and an international reference for public and digital infrastructure. I would like President Trump to try out Pix in the US.”
• Brazil never left the negotiation table Political and electoral interests cannot contaminate commercial relations
• Critical minerals belong to Brazil and will not be explored by other nations

The Trump administration is demanding that charges against Bolsonaro, stemming from his rejection of the election results which brought Lula back to power, be dropped. 

However, the government has emphasized the independence of the judiciary. A week ago the US slapped sanctions on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

But regional analyst Bruna Santos of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington DC, has explained that dropping the charges against Bolsonaro is simply not going to happen.

"The ask for Lula was undoable," he was quoted in the Associated Press as saying. "In the long run, you are leaving a scar on the relationship between the two largest democracies in the hemisphere."

‘I’m NOT going to call Trump to negotiate’ – Lula

Brazilian Prez. says Trump has no interest in talking

He also reveals what he’ll be saying to Putin, Xi, and Modi pic.twitter.com/GCUlnsvviA

— RT (@RT_com) August 5, 2025

As of Monday Bolsonaro has been ordered under house arrest, with the federal top court citing violations related to stoking resentment via social media and public messaging. For now at least, it looks like the government is backing down, despite the damage to trade relations and future economic pain.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 20:30

Lott: Another Armed Civilian Saves The Day

Authored by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClearPolitics,

Over the last few days, Americans have witnessed two attacks that ended very differently.

A stabbing at a Michigan Walmart on Saturday was stopped by an armed man, a Marine veteran, who went to the shooting range but “forgot to take his pistol off his hip.” The New York Times, Associated Press, Washington Post, NPR, NBC News, BBC, and many others completely ignored the gun used to stop the attack. But an eyewitness described how others who had tried to stop the attacker were stabbed, but it took the Marine with a gun to stop the attack. The attack was stopped several minutes before the first responders were able to arrive. One thought is that this hero might get some coverage in the legacy media simply because he is black and the attacker is white.

This case was far from unusual. Between January 2021 and December 2024, concealed handgun permit holders stopped 37 attacks that police said would have turned into mass public shootings if not for their intervention. But they rarely get national news attention.

Unfortunately, after Monday’s attack in New York City, Democrats drew the wrong conclusion. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) responded by calling for a federal assault weapon ban and blaming the tragedy on the absence of such a law.

Their gun control laws ensure that there won’t be any armed civilians there to save the day. The murderer who killed four people broke numerous gun control laws – he openly carried a rifle that was already illegal to possess or carry in the state. New York State and New York City prohibit open carry of loaded long guns in public and ban so-called assault weapons, such as an ARâ??15 style rifle. Even concealed carry permits do not authorize openly carrying a rifle in public. 

Meanwhile, the law-abiding victims were defenseless, disarmed by the city’s strict regulations. There are currently only about 6,000 active concealed handgun permits in a city with almost 7 million adults, so less than 1% of adults. And carrying a permitted concealed handgun is extremely difficult as there is a very long list of places where you are banned from carrying (e.g., public transportation such as subways, any places that serve alcohol, Times Square, government buildings and educational facilities, and public gatherings). The total costs for getting the permit run about $770 (for fees to the New York Police Department and the required course).

The problem is simple: Someone intent on murdering four people won’t be deterred by extra gun control penalties. Even if the killer had survived, he would have already been facing four life sentences, which makes adding a few more years meaningless. For attackers who expect to die during the assault – as most mass public shooters do – those laws carry no weight at all.

But for law-abiding citizens, the consequences are severe. Violating these laws could turn them into felons and upend their entire lives. The laws meant to stop criminals end up disarming the innocent instead.

These murderers take advantage of the laws that ensure they will be the only ones with weapons. Again and again, diaries and manifestos of mass public shooters show a disturbing pattern: They deliberately choose locations where they know their victims can’t fight back due to restrictive gun laws. While it remains unknown whether this particular killer made such a calculation, his actions align with a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly in other cases. It isn’t too surprising that 92% of mass public shootings occur in places where guns are banned.

Two of the four people murdered in the New York City attack were security guards, but people don't appreciate what an extremely difficult job uniformed police have in stopping these active shooting attacks. “A deputy in uniform has a difficult job in stopping these attacks,” said Sheriff Kurt Hoffman in Sarasota County, Florida. “These terrorists have strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can be readily identified as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, ‘Shoot me first.’ My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.”

In fact, even though civilians stop more of these active shooting attacks, 19 police officers were killed in these attacks versus two civilians with permitted concealed handguns. And surveys of academics who have published peer-reviewed empirical research on firearms show that criminologists and economists strongly support letting people carry concealed handguns in order to stop mass public shootings.

While politicians rush to call for new laws after each tragedy, they often ignore the basic reality that killers intent on murder are attracted to attack in places with strict gun control. Instead, those laws disarm only the potential victims, leaving them vulnerable and defenseless.

John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 20:05

Sydney Sweeney, Justin Bieber Ignite Early Innings Of Cultural Reversal With Badass Guns 

Just days after Sydney Sweeney hit the range with Taran Tactical for close-quarters handgun drills, and a week after she flaunted her all-American 'assets' in a now-iconic American Eagle ad that triggered liberal tears across the Western world. Justin Bieber took to X, posting photos of himself exercising his Second Amendment rights. Once the poster child of pop music and typical Hollywood, Bieber is now projecting strength in a sweeping cultural shift among youngsters that's only gaining momentum in the Trump era, with the Overton Window positioned center-right. 

Do you think @sydney_sweeney has great SPLITS? Sydney shreds @TaranTactical ! @_Americaneagle @TetianaGaidar @chrysti_ane @megants @SydneySweeneyHD pic.twitter.com/heyd5tml29

— Taran Tactical (@TaranTactical) August 1, 2025

Let's take a step back and understand what's transpired in recent weeks:

• Nike Averts' Bud Light' Moment With Pro-Family Ad Pivot

• Sydney Sweeney's Breasts Spark American Eagle Meme Stock Frenzy

• Nike And American Eagle Confirm The Overton Window Shift

• Watch: Sydney Sweeney Goes 'John Wick-Style' With Handgun

And now, Justin Bieber. Just days after Sweeney's Taran Tactical shooting drill video went absolutely viral, Bieber, who has 108 million followers on X, posted photos of himself shooting guns, racking up 35 million views in just 24 hours. 

pic.twitter.com/ZmhXr1PH8g

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) August 3, 2025

Perhaps we're witnessing the early innings of a dramatic archetypal shift among the younger generation, with Sweeney and Bieber offering early glimpses of the change. This shift is a welcoming development, arriving as the Fourth Turning is set to conclude by the end of this decade or in the early 2030s, according to Neil Howe. With the Overton Window now positioned center-right, others will likely follow their lead.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 19:40

Democrats Pledge A Gerrymander War

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Democrats are struggling to convince the public that they are outraged that there is gerrymandering afoot in Texas.

It is no easy task, particularly after Texas Democrats selected Illinois as their sanctuary state, a state considered the most gerrymandered in the country.

Trump received 45 percent of the vote in the state, but Republicans have only 14 percent of the congressional seats.

Even the New York Times admitted that gerrymandering has favored Democrats across the nation.

However, the winner of the Claude Rains award must be Marc Elias, who has expressed disgust over the notion of gerrymandering despite the fact that his group was denounced by courts for outrageous gerrymandering efforts.

The origin of the term was based on re-districting associated with Elbridge Gerry, a Founding Father, vice president, and governor of Massachusetts. He signed off on a district designed to guarantee a seat for the precursor of today’s Democratic Party. The district resembled a salamander, so the Boston Gazette deemed it the “Gerry-mander.”

That effort pales in comparison to what was done in Illinois to deny Republicans a fair share of congressional seats. This is the Illinois map:

The 13th congressional district stretches from East St. Louis to Springfield, 90 miles away. It then takes a sharp turn east to grab Decatur and Champaign. This monstrosity was approved by Democrats who are now insisting that they will respond to Texas with a gerrymander war, as if they were political pacifists until a few days ago.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker portrayed his party as the victim of conniving pols and pledged to respond in kind. Yet, it was Pritzker who approved the redistricting that guaranteed that, while Republicans represent almost half of the voters, they will receive less than twenty percent of the congressional seats.

The same is true in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom is also pledging to retaliate despite previously engaging in rampant gerrymandering.  Republicans constituted roughly 40 percent of the congressional vote in 2024 but received only about 17 percent of the House seats. Across the country in 17 blue states, the Dems won 56.7 percent of the popular House vote but secured 143 of the 185 House seats — 77.7 percent.

New York has achieved that same enhanced democratic representations despite the fact that Trump received 45 percent of the vote. Republicans are confined to a small handful of districts.

I have long opposed gerrymandering by both parties. However, the claims of disgust and outrage by Democrats border on the comical.

(MSNBC/via YouTube)

That brings us to Marc Elias, who is again trying to raise clients and donations off the outrage.

Elias has not only been sanctioned in past litigation, but past courts have also criticized his group. In Maryland,  Elias filed in support of an abusive gerrymandering of the election districts that a court found violated not only Maryland law but the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses. The court found that the map pushed by Elias “subverts the will of those governed.”

Elias is currently looking at a likely demand for testimony in the new grand jury investigation into the Russian conspiracy. He featured prominently in the filings of Special Counsel John Durham. It was Elias who made the key funding available to Fusion GPS, which in turn enlisted Steele to produce his now discredited dossier on Trump and his campaign.

During the campaign, reporters did ask about the possible connection to the campaign, but Clinton campaign officials denied any involvement. Weeks after the election, journalists discovered that the Clinton campaign hid payments for the Steele dossier as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to Perkins Coie.

New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said at the time that Elias denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”

It was not just reporters who asked the Clinton campaign about its role in the Steele dossier. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, was questioned by Congress and categorically denied any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who reportedly said nothing to correct the misleading information given to Congress.

With the likes of Marc Elias leading the cause against gerrymandering, the Democrats have reached a level of hypocrisy that knows no equal.

For the public, this growing war should support a movement to put an end to gerrymandering by all parties. Politicians will then have to look to voters, not maps to maintain their power.

This gerrymander war proves the view of Carl von Clausewitz that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 19:15

12-Year Cattle Cycle Bottoms: Tyson CEO Predicts Rebuild Phase Beginning Next Year

Ground beef prices are at record highs, while the U.S. cattle and calf herd has fallen to its lowest level in 50 years. Understanding these dynamics, we've been carefully watching for a cyclical low in the 12-year herd cycle, a bottom that now appears to have been reached. 

New comments from Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King during Monday's earnings call point to a long-awaited herd rebuilding cycle set to begin "in earnest" next year, though any meaningful supply recovery likely won't materialize until 2028.

King told analysts that one of the first emerging signs that a rebuilding cycle nears is that ranchers are starting to retain heifers for breeding operations. 

"We're poised to capitalize on tremendous opportunity ahead of us," the CEO said, adding, "Cattle availability should improve in the coming years."

America has slid into a beef supply crisis, pushing retail ground beef prices above $6 per pound. Years of herd reduction, driven mainly through elevated inflation, high feed costs, and adverse weather across the cattle belt, have shrunk the nation's herd to its smallest size since the early 1970s.

This has severely impacted processor profits, with Tyson's beef division posting a $151 million loss in Q3, its seventh consecutive quarterly loss. 

In June, Goldman analysts Leah Jordan and Eli Thompson signaled that the 12-year cattle herd cycle has likely reached a cyclical low, suggesting a rebuilding phase may be approaching. However, any eventual recovery is unlikely to be a sharp "V" and will more likely take the shape of a prolonged "U".

"We also believe the cyclical low in beef profitability is creating an attractive entry point for patient investors in Buy-rated TSN," the analysts noted.

The key takeaway is that beef prices are likely to continue rising, driving further demand substitution toward chicken. While the upcoming herd rebuilding phase is a welcome development, it will take years to play out. Only once the recovery is well underway will beef prices peak and begin to reverse meaningfully.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 18:50

Supreme Court Killed Universal Injunctions In Name Only

Authored by Benjamin Weingarten via RealClearInvestigations,

On June 27, the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump what he hailed as a “GIANT WIN,” finding that lower courts had “likely” overstepped in ordering universal injunctions blocking many of the president’s policies.

While the Court’s 6-3 opinion in Trump v. CASA appeared to disarm Trump’s opponents of perhaps their most potent legal weapon, his adversaries had other ideas.

In the weeks since, Trump’s challengers have seized on the ruling’s openings – especially the use of class-action suits in which a handful of plaintiffs may allege harm and seek relief on behalf of all similarly situated parties – to continue leveraging lower court judges to block the president’s orders. 

Norm Eisen, one of the architects of a so-called “rule of law and shock and awe” strategy to blanket the administration with dozens of lawsuits, quickly helped bring a case before New Hampshire’s district court. The suit aimed to enjoin the president’s ban on birthright citizenship not only with respect to five named plaintiffs, but for “a nationwide class of all other persons similarly situated.”

On July 3, the district court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in that case, over the Trump administration’s objections. Other plaintiffs prevailed in a separate case in the D.C. District Court challenging the president’s crackdown on asylum claims at the southern border. 

Scholars on both sides of the universal injunctions issue agree that CASA’s impact may be limited. 

Stanford Law Professor Mila Sohoni, a supporter of universal injunctions, wrote in CASA’s aftermath that “the court may have in the end accomplished little beyond handing the executive branch a litigation victory.”

Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, who has opposed universal injunctions in congressional testimony, told RealClearInvestigations, “I’m not sure how much CASA will actually check the ability of lower courts to halt presidential policies.”

By refusing to foreclose class actions and several other paths to nationwide or universal relief, many scholars argue, the Supreme Court has set itself up to preside over future battles over the limits to these remedies – perhaps expanding its power relative to the executive branch. As a result, they anticipate that the court’s ruling may be the beginning of a war between the executive and judiciary rather than its culmination.

Class Action Workaround

Under the pre-CASA regime, challengers to presidential action needed only to secure a single favorable ruling from one of hundreds of district court judges anywhere to block administration policies everywhere – leaving key initiatives stalled, sometimes for months or years, pending litigation often not resolved until the Supreme Court had its say. 

Supporters of universal injunctions argued that they were necessary to protect plaintiffs and the public at large from irreparable harm while challenges to allegedly illegal policies slowly wound their way through the courts. Critics countered that such relief represented an unprecedented and illegitimate expansion of the lower courts’ authority, hampering the democratically elected president from carrying out his duties. 

Democrats and Republicans alike, who have at times each decried universal injunctions and alleged politicization in the judiciary among judges who issued them, also lamented that such injunctions incentivized forum shopping: Plaintiffs strategically file suit in likely sympathetic courts to combat disfavored presidential policies nationwide. 

An earlier RCI analysis of 350 cases brought against the second Trump administration through June 11, 2025, found that plaintiffs brought 80% of those cases before just 11 of the nation’s 91 district courts, almost all of them located in areas dominated by Democrats and presided over by Democratic nominees.

While the Supreme Court ruled that universal injunctions were inconsistent with both law and legal tradition, the court’s majority highlighted and left open several possible avenues through which lower courts could thwart executive action by granting universal relief or its equivalent – and open the judiciary to potential charges of politicization.

First among them is a class action lawsuit. In theory, class actions should make it harder for parties to pursue and judges to unilaterally issue broad injunctions that block an executive order. In a class action suit, sometimes diverse and large groups of plaintiffs must coordinate their case, creating practical challenges. The New Hampshire case brought with the help of Eisen’s Democracy Defenders Fund showed, however, that determined challengers can create classes quickly, using just a few people to represent a far larger number of individuals. 

Perhaps the bigger hurdle for plaintiffs seeking to bring a class action suit is that they must satisfy several requirements to achieve certification and advance their case. Judges determine whether to certify a class by looking to four factors under federal Rule 23: Among other things, plaintiffs must demonstrate the need to bring such a suit on behalf of a group; that their arguments are representative of those in the group; and that they will faithfully represent the unnamed parties comprising the group. Rule 23 often requires significant briefing and analysis. If a judge certifies a class, the defendants can immediately appeal, at further time and cost.

Despite this seemingly higher threshold for challengers to presidential policies, Justice Samuel Alito cautioned in a CASA concurrence, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, that lower courts could render the decision moot should they take a too-lax approach to class actions and liberally permit the creation of universal classes. 

While acknowledging that Rule 23 “may permit the certification of nationwide classes in some discrete scenarios,” Alito counseled that lower courts be “scrupulous” in adhering to the rule’s “rigors,” including conducting a robust class certification analysis. “Otherwise,” Alito warned, “the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief….’”

Trump Thwarted Again

Just five days after the CASA decision, one judge seemed to vindicate Alito – at least in the eyes of the Trump administration. On July 2, D.C. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss certified a class consisting not just of the 13 people and three nonprofit groups that brought the suit, but of everyone who is or will be subject to Trump’s first-day proclamation prohibiting southern border crossers from seeking asylum, in an opinion finding that policy to be unlawful and unconstitutional.

Following the D.C. decision, Chad Mizelle, chief of staff for Attorney General Pam Bondi, tweeted: “The ink is barely dry on SCOTUS’s decision striking down universal injunctions, yet rogue district judges are continuing with business as usual – issuing universal injunctions under the guise of ‘class actions’ that cover anyone and everyone in the world. SCOTUS must end the #judicialcoup.”

The administration has appealed Judge Moss’ ruling.

Plaintiffs have used class actions to stymie the Trump administration in several other cases, including those involving the deportation of immigrants and disclosure of information regarding January 6 investigators.

University of Chicago Law Professor Samuel Bray, a prominent critic of universal injunctions, cited widely by the Supreme Court’s CASA majority, told RCI that “The existing class action standards can be difficult when bringing a class action for damages, but they are easy to meet when the suit is challenging a government action or policy that applies to the whole class in the same way.”

UCLA Law Professor David Marcus, who supported universal injunctions, agrees, writing that “Courts overwhelmingly favor class certification in cases for injunctive relief against government defendants.” He conducted a study of several hundred district court decisions in “public interest cases” from 2011-2020, finding that around 75% proved favorable to plaintiffs.

Georgetown University’s Stephen Vladeck, who has testified before Congress in favor of universal injunctions, says that ultimately a proliferation of nationwide class action suits will lead to challenges before the Supreme Court. If a majority is “generally sympathetic to such relief,” that will “somewhat reduce the implications of” the CASA decision.

“But if the Court is also going to look askance at nationwide class actions,” Vladeck argues, “then…[CASA] could be catastrophic for the ability of lower courts, at least, to halt executive branch lawlessness on a broad-enough basis to make a difference.”

Other Path to Universal Relief

Justices on both sides of the CASA decision identified several workarounds for plaintiffs seeking to broadly halt presidential policies – workarounds owing either to the narrowness of the courts’ ruling, or lower courts’ potential lack of fastidiousness to it.

Justice Alito, in a concurrence joined by Justice Thomas, highlighted the court’s silence on states’ ability to claim third-party standing and thereby bring suits on behalf of all of their residents in pursuit of unduly broad injunctions. Alito cautioned that should courts not engage in “rigorous and evenhanded enforcement of third-party-standing limitations,” it will undermine CASA “as a practical matter.”

Justice Thomas, in a concurrence joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, expressed concern that judges might misinterpret the Supreme Court’s guidance that courts may issue remedies affording “complete relief” to once again pursue universal injunctions. Thomas emphasized that judges may provide “complete relief between the parties” before them – but that this “is not synonymous with ‘universal relief.’” 

Stanford’s Sohoni noted that the court “conspicuously fail[ed] to assert that the complete relief principle does not justify a universal injunction for the plaintiff states in” the birthright citizenship case.

On July 23, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling, in one of the birthright citizenship cases brought by several states consolidated in CASA, that a universal injunction “is necessary to give the States complete relief on their claims.”

Finally, the court identified a fourth potential loophole in a footnote to the majority opinion. “Nothing we say today resolves the distinct question whether the Administrative Procedure Act authorizes federal courts to vacate federal agency action,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote, under which courts may “hold unlawful and set aside agency action.”

This remedy, known as vacatur, has been used to challenge and invalidate agency rules and regulations. In the asylum case over which Judge Moss is presiding, the plaintiffs challenged the policy under the Administrative Procedures Act, and Moss vacated the agency guidance implementing the policy accordingly.

“We have a crisis of result-oriented judging in this country,” Jesse Panuccio, who previously served as the number three Justice Department official during the first Trump administration, told RCI.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “it’s probably fair to predict that those judges who…thought they had the inherent power to govern the whole nation from their courtrooms” pre-CASA would continue to operate cavalierly going forward.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) told RCI that “lower courts should heed Justice Alito’s warning not to ‘award relief to broadly defined classes.’” Grassley has introduced a bill, the Judicial Relief Clarification Act, that he said “would also ensure that vacatur is not used as an end-run around the prohibition on universal injunctions.”

Rep. Darrell Issa of the House Judiciary Committee, drafter of legislation to curtail universal injunction that passed in the lower chamber prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, told RCI that he “share[s] Justice Alito’s concerns, which may prove not only precise, but prescient.”

These statements come as lower court judges have, in recent weeks, defied Supreme Court rulings and issued orders demanding the Trump administration defy Congress by paying out certain funds in contravention of the just-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill” – without explanation or allowing the administration to respond.

When asked whether he saw any checks on lower court overreach post-CASA, Rep. Issa said, “We are moving forward with our legislative solutions – the best kind of meaningful check.”

In the meantime, the Supreme Court has been playing whack-a-mole with lower courts. In response to perceived defiance of its jurisprudence in a recent case concerning the president’s power to remove independent agency leaders, Chief Justice John Roberts saw fit to emphasize – in siding with the Trump administration and overturning the lower courts – that the Supremes’ precedent “squarely control[s].”

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 18:25

Border Encounters, Apprehensions Hit Record Low In July: Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said preliminary data from July 2025 show that for the third time this year, the agency set record lows for nationwide encounters and single-day border apprehensions.

There were 24,630 nationwide encounters with illegal immigrants in July, the lowest on record, down 2.4 percent from June and nearly 90 percent lower than the monthly average under the previous administration, the agency said on Aug. 1.

Border Patrol apprehensions hit 6,177 individuals in July, breaking June’s all-time low.

Daily apprehensions averaged just 148 per day.

Last July, during the Biden administration, the average apprehension rate was 152 individuals every two hours.

“History made, again. The numbers don’t lie—this is the most secure the border has ever been,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said. 

“President Trump didn’t just manage the crisis—he obliterated it. No more excuses. No more releases. We’ve put the cartels on defense and taken our border back.”

On July 20, the country recorded its lowest single-day apprehension numbers in history, with 88 at the Southwest border and 116 nationwide.

Along the southwest border, authorities reported 4,598 apprehensions for the entire month of July, which is lower than the daily average under the Biden administration, DHS said.

As Naveen Athrappully reports for The Epoch Times, the Trump administration’s stringent measures against the influx of illegal immigrants have come under criticism from some immigration organizations.

Last month, advocacy group American Immigration Council released a report alleging that the administration’s immigration policy “strikes at the foundation of American democracy,” according to a July 23 statement from the group.

It said the Trump administration has effectively ended asylum at the southern border, demolished the refugee program, boosted funding for immigrant detention, and jammed legal immigration pathways via processing freezes, large fee increases, and opaque barriers.

“This isn’t just a hardline immigration agenda,” said Nayna Gupta, the organization’s policy director.

“It’s a wholesale effort to use immigrants and the U.S. immigration system to attack core tenets of our democracy and exercise unchecked executive power to realign the American government around exclusion and fear.”

Last month, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) announced legislation designed to “expand a pathway to lawful permanent residency” for millions of noncitizens who have been living in the United States for a long time.

Accusing the Trump administration of “cruel scapegoating of hardworking immigrants and fearmongering of California communities,” Padilla said in a July 25 statement from his office that “there’s a better path forward.”

According to data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), nationwide encounters of illegal immigrants between February and June, the first five full months of the Trump presidency, stood at 141,550 individuals, down from nearly 1.2 million in the same period last year.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (C) rides a four-wheeler during a tour along the Nogales border wall at the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales, Ariz., on March 15, 2025. Alex Brandon/AFP via Getty Images

Falling Crime Rates

In a July 28 statement, the agency said violent crime in American cities has declined as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removes the “worst of the worst” criminal illegal immigrants from the country.

DHS cited a July 2025 report from the think tank Council for Criminal Justice, which revealed that homicide rates across 30 cities declined by 17 percent in the first half of 2025 from the same period last year.

Aggravated assaults fell by 10 percent, gun assaults by 21 percent, robbery by 20 percent, sexual assaults by 10 percent, and carjackings by 24 percent, the report said.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, our law enforcement is working at lightning speed to remove violent criminal illegal aliens from the U.S. Every single day we are arresting gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and violent predators,” Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said.

“70 percent of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens who have been convicted or charged with a crime. These arrests and deportations of criminal illegal aliens are having real impact on public safety.”

On July 29, Noem announced a series of nationwide ads promoting the CBP Home App that encourages illegal immigrants to self-deport from the United States back to their home nations.

“The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now, and self deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” Noem said. “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 18:00

'1619 Project' Is Brazen Deception In The Service Of Statism

Authored by George Leaf via TheDailyEconomy.org,

It is useful to have frequent reminders that people often resort to deception to peddle their beliefs.

The book The 1619 Project Myth by Phillip W. Magness is highly valuable in that regard, as it devastates the historical accuracy of “The 1619 Project” published by The New York Times. 

That long magazine piece was the brainchild of one of its writers, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who used it to make her breathtaking claim that the true date of America’s founding was not 1776, but rather 1619, the year when the first slaves were landed in North America.

Why say that?

The answer is that, like so many “progressives,” Nikole Hannah-Jones wants to undermine the idea that the United States was founded to increase the people’s freedom and replace it with the notion that the nation’s founding was rooted in slavery and oppression. The American Revolution was fought, in her telling, to preserve slavery, which the colonists feared was going to be ended by the British government. Moreover, she and several of her co-authors maintained, the effects of slavery are still with us. What better way to get people to think of America as a terrible nation that’s in need of radical (or revolutionary) transformation?

Almost immediately after its publication, “The 1619 Project” came under fire from scholars (and not just those on the political right) who found its claims to be unsupported, implausible, and misleading. Among the first was economic historian Phillip W. Magness, now a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute. He wrote several critical essays about different aspects of the Project, which he compiled into a book in 2020. Now, with more time to reflect on the issues and respond to recent spin-offs from the Project, he has put out a new version. It’s a demolition job of the first magnitude.

Magness writes, “Each new permutation of Hannah-Jones’s work has veered more heavily into political advocacy, taking greater liberties with evidence in the process.” But, faced with a mountain of counter-argument, the New York Times has only made one carefully hidden concession about the doubtful claims in it, while Hannah-Jones and her major contributing author, Professor Matthew Desmond, avoid serious confrontations with those who criticize their work and resort to ad hominem attacks.

The book is more than a point-by-point refutation of the claims in the Project. In it, readers also learn a lot about the history of capitalism in America that they probably would not find anywhere else. Here’s just one example.

While Hannah-Jones and her collaborators want to make people believe that slavery and capitalism were somehow in league in early America, that’s the opposite of the truth.

Magness recounts the story of the Tappan brothers of New York City. They were successful merchants who opposed slavery. In 1834, they invited Rev. Samuel Cornish, a black American and abolitionist, to their Sunday worship service. That led to a mob attack on their business and homes, as pro-slavery New Yorkers called their gesture of solidarity an invitation to a slave revolt. Between mob violence and a boycott against them, the Tappans were nearly ruined. But, just when all seemed lost, Lewis Tappan came up with a brilliant plan to revive his business by offering to deal on credit with trusted associates in the abolitionist movement. The result was the New York Mercantile Agency, the forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet. Capitalism and slavery were friends? Nothing could be further from the truth.

Or consider the thesis, advanced by Prof. Desmond, that the American economy was extremely dependent on cotton produced by slavery — so dependent that it was really the driving force behind the nation’s early growth. Magness demonstrates that his claim is not remotely supported by the evidence, then turns the tables by informing the readers that one of the foremost advocates of slavery in antebellum America was one George Fitzhugh, who ranted against the ideas of Adam Smith and other free-market advocates. Fitzhugh declared that the South “must throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co. in the fire.”

In short, the philosophy of capitalism was utterly incompatible with slavery, and the pro-slavery crowd knew it. Of course, you will hear none of that from Hannah-Jones or her supporters.

Another revealing spin-off from the 1619 Project is how it affected the American Historical Association (AHA).

The president of the AHA, James Sweet, had the temerity to cast doubt on the truthfulness of the claims in a tweet, writing, “As journalism, it is powerful and effective, but is it history?” 

Sweet quickly learned that one is not permitted to ask questions about something so important to the left as this. Magness writes, “Incensed at even the mildest suggestion that politicization was undermining the integrity of historical scholarship, the activist wing of the history profession showed up at the AHA’s thread and began demanding Sweet’s cancellation.” So great was the uproar that Sweet felt the need to issue a groveling apology for having “caused harm” with his tweet. The activists did not bother to engage with Sweet and defend the 1619 Project — they just wanted to see him punished for his apostasy.

If there was ever the slightest doubt as to the political purpose of the 1619 Project, it was erased when Hannah-Jones, in the subsequent Hulu TV series based upon it, called for the nation to pay reparations for slavery. That idea has long been dismissed by scholars of all races as unjust and economically ruinous. Nevertheless, she blithely stated that reparations were needed to atone for our racist past and, to explain how we could pay for the trillions it would cost, told viewers that the government can afford anything it wants just by printing enough money. How do we know that? Because a few crank economists who subscribe to Modern Monetary Theory say so. Thus, the 1619 Project combines false history with ludicrous economics to promote the statist agenda.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the American education establishment has been eager to embrace the 1619 Project and bring its materials into school and college classrooms. The leftists who say that the Project is just about teaching students some neglected aspects of American history are simply lying — the materials in it are deceptive rather than informative. 

Magness’s book will be of use to parents or officials who don’t want students to be indoctrinated with propaganda meant to sow hatred for the country and mislead students about capitalism.

The next time you hear anything positive about the 1619 Project, reach for Magness’s excellent book.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 17:40

Shocking, Record Explosion In Student Loan Delinquencies Marks The Start Of Next Debt Crisis

Total household debt rose by $185 billion in the second quarter of 2025, a 1% rise from Q1 2025. Balances now stand at $18.39 trillion and have increased by $4.24 trillion since the end of 2019, just before the pandemic recession.

Before is a snapshot of the latest Q2 data, courtesy of the NY Fed:

Balances

• Mortgage balances grew by $131 billion during the second quarter of 2025 and totaled $12.94 trillion at the end of June.
• Balances on home equity lines of credit (HELOC) rose by $9 billion, the thirteenth consecutive quarterly increase. There is now $411 billion in outstanding HELOC balances, $94 billion above the low reached in the first quarter of 2022.
• Credit card balances rose by $27 billion during the second quarter and now total $1.21 trillion outstanding and are 5.87% above the level a year ago.
• Auto loan balances rose by $13 billion, and now stand at $1.66 trillion.
• Other balances, which include retail cards  and consumer finance loans, were roughly unchanged at $540 billion.
• Student loan balances edged up by $7 billion and now stand at $1.64 trillion.
• In total, non-housing balances increased by $45 billion, a 0.9% increase from 2025Q1. 

Originations

• Mortgage originations increased slightly, with $458 billion newly originated in Q2.
• There were $188 billion in new auto loans and leases during Q2, an increase from the $166 billion observed in the first quarter of 2025.
• Aggregate limits on credit cards continued to rise, with a $78 billion (1.5%) uptick in the second quarter.
• Home equity lines of credit (HELOC) limits rose by $18 billion, continuing the growth in HELOC limits that began in 2022

Credit Quality

• Credit quality of newly originated loans was mixed: The credit scores of newly originated auto loans decreased, as the median score for auto loan originations decreased by 6 points.
• There was an improvement in the credit quality of mortgages, as the median score of newly originated mortgage loans increased by 5 points and the tenth percentile score increased by 13 points.

• About 53,000 individuals had new foreclosure notations on their credit reports, a decline from the previous quarter

All of the above is more or less as expected: yes, the US consumer is drowning in (ever more) debt, but that's hardly a surprise: since life for middle class Americans is now largely unaffordable, most Americans have no choice but to take on even more debt. 

There was, however, one big shock, and it had to do with the trillions in student debt in general, and the end of the repayment moratorium in particular (see "Trump Admin Begins Collecting On Student Loans In Default").

As the NY Fed notes, aggregate delinquency rates "remained elevated in the second quarter of 2025" which is putting it mildly. As of the end of June, 4.4% of outstanding debt was in some stage of delinquency, which is 0.1% higher than the first quarter.

And while transition into early delinquency held steady for nearly all debt types; the exception was for student loans, which saw another uptick in the rate at which balances went from current to delinquent due to the resumption of reporting of delinquent student loans on credit reports after a nearly 5-year pause due to the pandemic.

Student loan delinquencies have been on the rise since the beginning of the year, after the government ended Biden's years-long payment freeze. 

As the charts below show, transition rates into serious delinquency, defined as 90 or more days past due, were largely stable for auto loans and credit cards (although both were elevated compared to previous years), edged up slightly for mortgages and HELOCs ... and absolutely exploded higher for student loans, as the share of student-loan debt entering serious delinquency was 12.9%, the highest in 21 years of data!

In fact, as one can clearly see there has never been such a catastrophic deterioration in student loan in US history across borrowers of virtually all ages, but especially those 50 and over!

The record surge in delinquencies suggests American households, especially those with student loans, are facing increasing financial distress this year amid high interest rates and a slowdown in hiring. Recent data showed consumer spending fell in the first six months of 2025, even before tariffs started to boost prices.

While transitions into delinquency is the start of the bankruptcy pipeline, the end is also getting busier, and about 131.000 consumers had a bankruptcy notation added to their credit reports in Q2, an increase from the previous quarter. Expect this number to explode once all those student loan delinquencies transition to defaults in a few months at which point the student loan crisis becomes front and center. 

The dramatic deterioration will be another factor forcing the Fed to cut rates in September. Last week, Fed chair Jerome Powell said of delinquency rates, “Essentially, you have a consumer that’s in good shape and is spending,” though admittedly “not at a rapid rate.” Actually, turns out the consumer - when it comes to student loans - is now broker than ever.

In a briefing with reporters, New York Fed researchers said student-loan delinquencies would likely continue to rise, eventually returning to pre-pandemic levels. Between late 2012 and early 2020, the share of student debt that was seriously delinquent ranged between 10.7% and 11.8%.

“This quarter’s flow of household debt into serious delinquency was mixed across debt types, with credit card and auto loans holding steady, student loans continuing to rise and mortgages edging up slightly,” Joelle Scally, an economic policy adviser at the New York Fed, said in a press release, underplaying the clearly catastrophic surge in student loan delinquencies, and soon, defaults which will result in tens of millions of consumers suddenly finding themselves carved out from the US consumer economy just as the student loan crisis goes front and center. 

Full New York Fed Household Credit slideshow can be found here.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 17:20

DARPA's Theory Of Mind Warfare

Authored by Matt Smith via InternationalMan.com,

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has an initiative called the Theory of Mind program. This effort is designed to give national security decision-makers the ability to model, simulate, and ultimately anticipate the intentions and behaviors of adversaries using a combination of advanced algorithms and human expertise.

At its core, the program aims to:

• Build algorithmic models that “decompose” adversary strategies into elemental behaviors.

• Use massive data—signals intelligence, open-source information, even social media—to create high-fidelity “avatars” of enemy decision-makers.

• Simulate possible responses to a range of U.S. and allied actions, exploring which ones best deter, incentivize, or nudge adversaries toward preferred outcomes.

• Integrate insights from psychological profiling and machine learning to continually update these models as real-world conditions shift.

The promise is profound: a system that doesn’t just predict what an adversary might do, but actively guides policymakers toward courses of action that shape the adversary’s decision calculus—minimizing escalation and maximizing U.S. strategic advantage.

DARPA’s Theory of Mind program fundamentally changes how conflicts are managed. Decision-makers can run gaming scenarios at unprecedented detail and speed, customizing incentives or deterrents tailored to both cultural and individual psychologies. Risks of unintended escalation might be sharply reduced, while opportunities to “push the line” without crossing it become clearer.

Theory of Mind Warfare Turned on the American Public in 2020

The same tools originally designed for military use were later deployed against the American (and global) public in 2020

AI-powered behavioral analytics, inspired by military-grade “theory of mind” models, were strategically employed during the COVID-19 pandemic to not just inform but actively shape public perception, sentiment, and compliance—creating a continuous feedback loop between government actions and public psychology. These systems quietly moved the world’s response from reactive to adaptive, fundamentally influencing how populations experienced and responded to the scamdemic.

How These Systems Shaped Public Minds

1. Real-Time Sentiment Analysis and Information Targeting AI-powered platforms actively monitored social media, news, and digital conversations to track shifts in public mood, anxieties, and resistance to emerging health policies. These tools analyzed tone, emotional context, and response patterns following government announcements, often providing immediate feedback to policymakers on how their messaging was being received.

2. Tailored Messaging and Adaptive Communication Insights from these platforms allowed authorities to:

• Refine government communication strategies

• Push “approved” narratives to counter “misinformation”

• Adjust messaging in real time to allay public fears, address misconceptions, or reinforce confidence in health measures such as lockdowns or vaccines

Remember this…

3. Behavioral Nudges and Targeted Interventions. Governments, aided by behavioral insights teams and AI analysts, designed “nudge” interventions—such as targeted text reminders, default scheduling of vaccine appointments, and personalized risk feedback—to increase uptake of desired behaviors. Rapid A/B testing determined which messages or policy tweaks worked best for specific populations.

4. Feedback Loops for Policy Calibration. Behavioral and sentiment data were continuously fed back into policy decision-making. If public adherence waned or opposition spiked (visible through sentiment tracking), messaging and interventions could be swiftly recalibrated to regain support or mitigate disinformation spikes.

5. Data-Driven Misinformation Management. AI-driven platforms scanned for and flagged viral misinformation. Rapid response teams could then deploy counter-messaging or media campaigns—often through the same platforms—using knowledge of which narratives resonated with hesitant demographics.

Covid Was Just the Beginning: The Theory of Mind at Work in Recent Theaters of War

Given the ambition of such strategic modeling, it’s worth asking whether this kind of “hyper-rational,” AI-enabled approach helps explain what we’ve seen in several recent, high-stakes military theaters.

The Pager Attack and Decapitation of Hezbollah’s Leadership

What Happened: In September 2024, thousands of pagers distributed to Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria exploded nearly simultaneously. The devices, covertly manufactured and seeded by Israel through a shell company, had been rigged with miniature explosives. The result: dozens killed or wounded—mostly Hezbollah operatives, but also some civilians—crippling the group’s command structure and sowing panic throughout its ranks.

Fit with Theory of Mind: This operation demonstrates the power of deep adversary modeling. Israeli intelligence anticipated Hezbollah would switch to “low-tech” communications to evade modern surveillance. By predicting both the technological pivot and its psychological underpinnings, Israel was able to seed and trigger a devastating attack at a moment of maximum vulnerability—an almost textbook application of an algorithmic Theory of Mind approach. It wasn’t just about killing leaders; it was about destabilizing the group’s sense of security, disrupting its decision-making networks, and shaping its strategies long-term.

Israel’s Operation Red Wedding & Operation Narnia: The 2025 Strikes on Iran

What Happened: The Israeli attack that kicked off the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025 stands as one of the most dramatic and meticulously orchestrated military operations in recent Middle East history. This surprise assault was codenamed Operation Red Wedding (targeting Iran’s top military leadership) and Operation Narnia (targeting nuclear scientists), both designed to deliver a strategic shock to Iran’s command, control, and nuclear capabilities.

In the early hours of June 13, 2025, Israel launched intensive airstrikes and covert operations inside Iran. Leveraging deep intelligence penetration, Israeli operatives lured over 30 of Iran’s top military leaders—including Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force—into a fortified underground bunker in Tehran, where they were killed with precision strikes. Simultaneously, Israeli forces targeted Iran’s nuclear program by assassinating at least nine senior nuclear scientists and striking several critical sites. The initial waves consisted of over 200 strike sorties and more than 330 munitions used against nearly 100 high-priority targets, decapitating Iran’s military leadership and significantly damaging its nuclear infrastructure.

The aftermath included at least 1,100 Iranian dead (over 30 senior commanders and 11 nuclear scientists), thousands wounded, massive damage to nuclear and missile facilities, and extensive civilian displacement. The algo must have hiccupped, because Iran didn’t collapse, they fought back.

Iran’s retaliation included over 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 suicide drones fired at Israel, bringing about a wide regional escalation, but the AI system gained control over the situation likely directing US involvement and ultimately stopping short of all-out open war.

Fit with Theory of Mind: This operation reflects detailed adversary modeling and scenario simulation. Israel orchestrated a complex deception to gather Iranian leadership, carefully timed simultaneous strikes, and targeted high-value assets. The approach failed to correctly anticipate Iranian responses, but sought to degrade capabilities and leveraged psychological impact to magnify the strategic effect.

This was an operation not only of military power, but of insight into adversary psychology and escalation management—embodying the goals and tools of Theory of Mind-style strategy. The decapitation plan failed, but the AI driven system kept working on the problem until a satisfactory resolution was achieved, “The Twelve Day War” was over.

Operation Spiderweb: Ukraine’s Drone Assault on Russia’s Bomber Fleet

What Happened: Operation Spiderweb was an unprecedented Ukrainian covert operation that dramatically changed modern warfare by targeting Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. On June 1, 2025, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) launched the largest drone attack of the war against Russian airbases deep inside Russian territory—reaching as far as Siberia. Over 18 months, Ukrainian operatives smuggled 117 FPV (first-person view) drones into Russia, hiding them atop trucks near key airfields, where they were remotely activated for the attack.

Targets included airbases at Belaya, Dyagilevo, Ivanovo Severny, Olenya, and Ukrainka. At least 41 Russian military aircraft—Tu-160, Tu-95, Tu-22M bombers, and A-50 Airborne Early Warning aircraft—were claimed damaged or destroyed. The strikes severely impacted about one-third of Russia’s cruise missile carrier fleet and forced Moscow to disperse its remaining bombers, exposing a previously assumed safe strategic asset and dealing a psychological and operational blow to Russia.

Fit with Theory of Mind: Operation Spiderweb exemplified adversary modeling and calculated escalation management. Ukrainian planners anticipated the psychological, strategic, and logistical ramifications of attacking these high-value targets—carefully avoiding nuclear escalation. By choosing the fleet’s means of launch (aircraft and support assets) rather than command centers or nuclear warheads, the operation demonstrated deep understanding of Russian red lines and risk thresholds. This is precisely the kind of strategic, “mind-reading” planning that DARPA’s Theory of Mind program envisions: leveraging intelligence and simulation to shape adversary perceptions, limit escalation, and achieve operational surprise.

The events in Lebanon, Iran, Russia, and in our own countries suggest that today’s “gray zone” warfare is increasingly being shaped by decision-makers armed with unprecedented, algorithmic insight into adversary psychology and strategy—the very vision that DARPA’s Theory of Mind program is bringing to the fore.

These are not just wars of bombs and bullets, but of information, perception, and calculated influence—run through a cybernetic loop of prediction, adaptation, and real-time feedback.

This Is What Modern Warfare Looks Like

The United States and its allies have clearly adopted the new “Theory of Mind” model of warfare not merely as a technological leap, but as a strategic necessity. No kinetic action could have moved the American public the way the covid psychological operations did. And in the conflict with Russia, traditional methods of waging war could easily result in total nuclear war. In other cases, our conventional systems alone don’t provide us with the technological supremacy they once did.

The US is seeking supremacy elsewhere – algorithmic adversary modeling, predictive analytics, and adaptive scenario simulation to anticipate, shape, and, if necessary, outmaneuver opponents in political and military “gray zones” as well as open conflict.

Theory of Mind Warfare Advantages

• Pace & Complexity: Modern battlefields blend information, cyber, economic, and kinetic operations. AI-driven systems offer an edge in parsing this complexity and accelerating the decision loop, enabling more adaptive and precise responses—far faster than traditional command structures alone can manage.

• Red Line Management: As conflicts brush up against escalation thresholds (nuclear, regional, or domestic-political), decision-makers must test boundaries without inadvertently crossing them. Predictive tools allow strategists to simulate outcomes, calibrate messaging, and “push the line” while minimizing catastrophic missteps.

• Deterrence & Shaping: The aim is less about destruction and more about influencing adversaries’ perceptions, decision timelines, and threat assessments—using information dominance and rapid feedback to keep the upper hand.

• War? What War?: Perhaps best of all, Theory of the Mind warfare leaves the adversary in a state of uncertainty. If Americans knew FOR SURE we were under attack and BY WHOM during the Covid hysteria, how would we have responded? Even Russia, despite red lines being crossed repeatedly, still considers itself not at war.

The New Weapons of Warfare

We are seeing the emergence of military ecosystems where software platforms like those developed by Palantir and defense partners serve as digital backbones for the DARPA “theory of mind” concept.

The company leading this new weapons system revolution is Palantir. Their Maven system has been deployed by the IDF and is known to have been used in Gaza. In all likelihood, it was used in Lebanon and Iran as well.

Palantir’s Maven integrates satellite imagery, geolocation, communications intercepts, and other sensor data into a unified analysis platform. It enables real-time adversary modeling, target selection, and campaign simulation—crucially, using AI to predict responses and ripple effects well beyond the immediate area of operations.

During the PLANDEMIC Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry platforms were vital in integrating demographic, health, and behavioral data for agencies like the CDC, providing not only epidemiological tracking but also feedback on the public’s response to evolving guidelines and restrictions.

Since Trump came into office, the DoD doubled its contract with Palantir to nearly $1.3b. ICE signed a deal with Palantir to develop a real-time platform for tracking migrants inside the US. Palantir also signed deals with DHS, Social Security Administration, and the IRS to centralize data platforms and expand Palantir Foundry’s use.

Where’s this all going?

And most important, Are we still the adversary?

*  *  *

As DARPA’s “Theory of Mind” warfare quietly shapes the global battlefield—and even the public consciousness—it’s clear we’ve entered a new era where perception is the primary terrain and algorithmic influence is the weapon of choice. Whether it’s drones over Russia, digital nudges during pandemics, or psychological pressure campaigns at home, the future is no longer about brute force—it’s about control of the narrative, and control of your decisions. If you understand what that truly means… you know this isn’t just a military shift. It’s a signal. One that tells us the systems designed to outmaneuver foreign adversaries are now being repurposed to manage you. So the question is: Will you be modeled, or will you opt out of the model?

Doug Casey has been warning about this convergence of war, finance, and control for decades. His Crisis Investing service is not just about protecting your capital—it’s about reclaiming your autonomy in a world being reprogrammed around you. Click here now to subscribe to Doug Casey’s full Crisis Investing and discover how to prepare, protect, and profit—before the next simulation begins.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 17:00

Never-Before-Seen Photos Inside Jeffrey Epstein's Creepy Mansion

The New York Times published never-before-seen photos from inside Jeffrey Epstein's erie seven-story Upper East Side townhouse on Tuesday, revealing surveillance cameras placed in bedrooms and a first edition of "Lolita" prominently displayed throughout the New York City mansion.

Among the bizarre scenes is a macabre sculpture of a woman in a bridal gown dangling from a rope greeting visitors in the entryway, alongside dozens of framed fake eyeballs in a display that raises serious questions about what really went on behind closed doors.

A copy of “Lolita,” the 1955 novel where a deviant repeatedly rapes a 12-year-old girl with whom he has become obsessed, was also spotted in an office.

Among Epstein’s possessions was a first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita” — in which the main character rapes a 12-year-old girl with whom he has become obsessed. SDNY

However, the most eyebrow-raising photo is a $1 bill bearing a handwritten note from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

"I was wrong!" Gates appeared to have scrawled on the note.

Epstein's residence was also adorned with framed photographs featuring prominent figures such as Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Pope John Paul II, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and others, according to the Times.

Another flight up, on the third floor, was Mr. Epstein’s sanctum — a suite that included his bedroom, the mansion’s infamous massage room and a cluster of bathrooms.

More via the Times:

As a gift for Jeffrey Epstein’s 63rd birthday, friends sent letters in tribute to the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender. Several shared a common theme: recounting the dinner gatherings that Mr. Epstein regularly hosted at his palatial townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, and his wife noted the great diversity of guests. “There is no limit to your curiosity,” they wrote in their message, which was compiled with others in January 2016. “You are like a closed book to many of them but you know everything about everyone.”

The media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman suggested ingredients for a meal that would reflect the culture of the mansion: a simple salad and whatever else “would enhance Jeffrey’s sexual performance.”

And the director Woody Allen described how the dinners reminded him of Dracula’s castle, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place.”

The freshly published photos have slowly emerged over the years as part of the mountain of evidence that came to light when Epstein was finally arrested in 2019 on child sex-trafficking charges.

The photos are the latest development in the ongoing Epstein saga, which continues to generate controversy after the Department of Justice and the FBI released a joint memo last month claiming that an "exhaustive review" of evidence from Epstein's death definitively ruled out murder.

"After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019," the memo reads.

The agencies also denied the existence of a "client list" tied to Epstein, directly contradicting earlier remarks by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi had previously suggested on Fox News that such a list was "sitting on my desk" for review, igniting speculation about Epstein's possible blackmailing of globalist elites.

A photo from 2011 shows (from left) James Staley, Lawrence Summers, Epstein, Bill Gates and Boris Nikolic at the late pedophile’s Manhattan home.

Trump has repeatedly sought to dismiss the scandal, accusing Democrats of fabricating a hoax around Epstein to thwart his agenda.

Additionally, new questions have emerged about surveillance footage from the night before Epstein's death. An unidentified orange object seen in the surveillance video near the jail cell of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on the evening before his death has prompted a flurry of questions from forensic experts. The pixelated shape, first witnessed by CBS News, is seen shifting towards Epstein's cell block at the Metropolitan Correctional Center around 10:40 p.m.

The object was a corrections officer "carrying linen or inmate clothing," according to federal investigators. However, experts told CBS News that it could in fact be an inmate wearing a jumpsuit. "Based on the limited video, it's more likely a person in an [orange] uniform," Conor McCourt, forensic video expert, said in a statement. "To say that there's no way that someone could get to that, the stairs up to his room, without being seen is false," Jim Safford, another forensic expert, told the news network.

Epstein was discovered deceased in his cell on August 10, 2019. An official autopsy, corroborated by a joint investigation from the Department of Justice and FBI, concluded that the disgraced financier died by suicide through hanging.

Epstein’s home office featured a taxidermied tiger.

In a statement to CBS News, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General said the footage does not change its conclusion on Epstein's death.

"Our comprehensive assessment of the circumstances over the weeks, days, and hours before Epstein's death included the effects of the longstanding, chronic staffing crisis in the [Bureau of Prisons] and the BOP's failure to provide and maintain quality camera coverage within its facilities," the statement to the outlet read.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 16:40

Taibbi: No Doubt Left... Russiagate Was A Cover-Up

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release...

It was a cover-up.

The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time. It even has multiple names thanks to its peculiar chronology. From 2016 until April 2019 — while Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations that would topple Donald Trump — it was generally known as the Trump-Russia scandal. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments, attention began to be cast on the scandal’s fraudulent construction, how it was propped up by political spying, illegal leaks, and WMD-style intelligence fakery. Trump and others began to call it Spygate or the Russia hoax, but the name that stuck was Russiagate.

Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do, after a month of disclosures, capped yesterday by the release of an explosive (and inexplicably long-classified) annex to the report of Special Counsel John Durham. Finally, it seems, we can explain how the idea that Donald Trump was “gaffing his way toward treason” through a secret love affair (really!) with Vladimir Putin and extensive “ties” or “links” with Russia suddenly became The Biggest Story in the World in the summer of 2016.

“THE KISS”: Media outlets were promoting the “love story” as early as March 2016

It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.

Now, we know. With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes.

One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.

I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge.

Now, there’s no doubt.

Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple...

...

These people just can’t stop lying. The whole thing is one endless lie, the reason for which is now clear.

Hillary Clinton got in trouble being dumb, tried to save herself by doing something dumber, and all of American officialdom backed the play. That’s it.

A last period of denials awaits, but they’ll fizzle like the rest, after which not much will be left but blunt truth — and hopefully, consequences.

Subscribers can read Matt's full, and brilliant, note here...

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 16:20

From Cotality (formerly CoreLogic): US home price insights — August 2025

The end of the 2025 spring homebuyers season ended softly, with slower price growth dominating the narrative and potentially opening the door to more buyers.

• Year-over-year price growth dipped to 1.7% in June 2025 and is now well below the rate of inflation and signals that real prices may be becoming slightly more affordable.

• Seasonal increases in home prices continue to be weak, up 0.1% compared to the month before, which is the slowest June monthly increase since 2008.

• West Virginia saw prices rise 5.5% year-over-year, entering the top 5 states with the highest home price growth. The full list includes Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Illinois, all of which continue to record more than triple the national rate of price growth.

• Florida, Texas, Montana, and Washington, D.C. reported negative home price growth.
emphasis added

This graph from Cotality shows the Top 10 coolest markets.
The list is dominated by Florida and Texas.  According to Cotality, the highest risk markets are all in Florida.
House prices are under pressure with more inventory and sluggish sales.

Waste Of The Day: Senate Furniture Is Missing

Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations,

Topline: Over the last decade, more than half the Senate office furniture purchased have some unanswered question attached to them - including where the furniture is located.

The Architect of the Capitol’s Senate Furniture Program “needs significant improvements,” and its “processes for acquiring, safeguarding, transferring, and disposing of furniture are inefficient and ineffective,” according to a new audit from the Architect of the Capitol’s inspector general.

Key facts: The Architect is responsible for maintaining the buildings and grounds on Capitol Hill, but it typically only buys furniture for Senate office buildings.

The office bought 29,603 pieces of furniture from 2014 to 2024, costing taxpayers $22.6 million. “A minimum” of 13,159 pieces of furniture (51%) have "erroneous information,” according to the audit. Some mistakes are minor — an incorrect tag number or description — but others are much larger, including that no one knows where the furniture is, how much it cost, or both.

First, auditors randomly selected a piece of furniture listed in the Architect’s computer catalog, but staffers were unable to locate it. The only clue showing the furniture’s location was a handwritten note from 2012, but the furniture was not actually at that location.

Next, the auditors randomly selected another piece of furniture. Architect staffers were able to find this one, but not any documents showing its cost — they had been lost in a flood.

Finally, auditors allowed Architect staffers to choose the piece of furniture that would be reviewed by the inspector general. Still, auditors found five issues with the hand-selected piece of furniture, including forms with missing signatures and conflicting dollar costs on different documents.

Overall, auditors reviewed 138 pieces of furniture but were unable to locate 71 of them. 

The Architect leases building space to store extra furniture, but the buildings are poorly maintained and are sometimes unusable, according to the audit.

The Architect is also buying too many items. There are “several dozen” microwaves in storage to eventually replace the current microwaves, but the extras may be “obsolete” before they are needed.

Staffers have also been leaving furniture unattended in hallways, which will make it harder to prevent theft, according to the audit.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Summary: After the federal government’s $3.3 billion spending spree on furniture during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s no wonder officials are having trouble keeping track of it all.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/05/2025 - 15:40