When A Toll Isn't A Toll

By Benjamin Picton, senior market strategist at Rabobank

When A Toll Isn't A Toll

Yields on 10-year Treasuries finished last week up 11bps to 4.48% while yields on 10-year Bunds rose 8.5bps to 2.93%. Those higher borrowing costs came despite signs of weakening in the US jobs market, a weaker-than-expected prices paid figure on the ISM manufacturing index, and a surprisingly weak Eurozone CPI inflation report that follows in the wake of lower than expected inflation readings in the UK.

Market-based expectations of the future path of the Fed Funds rate finished the week a little lower than it started, with pricing of a future rate hike pushed out from October to December. 2-year Treasury yields fell by almost 4bps on Thursday after the payrolls report confirmed hiring in June was little better than half the expected figure.

This was still enough for the unemployment rate to tick down to 4.2% as a lower participation rate saw the labor force contract. Nevertheless, 2-year yields were higher across the week as sovereign curves bear-steepened.

Brent crude posted its first weekly gain in almost a month last week to see the front contract close up 0.18% at $72.12/bbl. The gains appear to have been short-lived as news of continued tanker flows through the Strait of Hormuz and a decision by OPEC+ over the weekend to ease production restrictions by 188,000 barrels/day from August steer the price action lower this morning. Announcements of increased production are all well and good, but when much of that production is occurring in the Persian Gulf or in Russia (where Ukrainian strikes against oil infrastructure are ongoing) the ability to actually ship the product to market will remain the critical limiting factor.

On that note, official figures show that Hormuz traffic is back to approximately 30% of pre-war levels, though this likely understates the true picture as many vessels are transiting dark (i.e. without their tracking systems on) to avoid the attentions of Iran’s IRGC. Bloomberg reports that six vessels transited the route closest to the Omani coastline under US auspices on Sunday without incident. That follows reports of up to eight vessels performing u-turns (with some later being redirected through the Iranian route) after attempting to transit close to Oman on Friday and Saturday.

Updated data from Kpler and Vortexa shows that crude exports from the UAE surged in June to exceed pre-war levels and approach record highs. The UAE’s recent decision to leave OPEC and OPEC+ is considered bearish over the longer term for energy prices as a diminished share of potential production is subject to non-market constraints.

On the other hand, Iran again indicated over the weekend that it will be instituting “service fees” on vessels transiting Hormuz through its territorial waters once the 60-day negotiating period kicked-off by the signing of the Iran-US memorandum of understanding expires. According to Iran’s ambassador to China a new fee regime is being designed in consultation with Oman and will include “special considerations” for China and other friendly nations in determining the level and type of fee applied. According to the ambassador, this is not a toll. This might prove be a convenient fiction for all parties given President Trump’s unyielding view that a permanent toll regime would not be acceptable after the 60-day negotiating period expires.

Critically, what this little titbit sets up is exactly the type of scenario we have been pointing towards for some time: the ‘oil market’ splitting into ‘oil markets’ with terms over pricing and access being determined by which geopolitical camp you happen to sit in, and a series of quid pro quos informing the deal that each party gets.

The prime movers here are the United States and China, with Iran having clearly chosen China and the UAE hitching its wagon to the US of A. An easy tell that this scenario is playing out will be pressure from Iran to have other Gulf producers accept a toll that isn’t a toll, and/or have their cargoes priced in CNY rather than USD. The USA, similarly, will pressure Gulf allies to price in Dollars and normalize relations with Israel to expand the Abraham Accords and have oil flow from east to west to cut out Iran entirely and demonstrate to China that Uncle Sam can step on the hose whenever he likes.

Europe and the balance of Asia are likely to be reduced to the role of spectators in these affairs. Highlighting the weakness of Europe’s current position in the Great Game, the Wall Street Journal carried a story last week on how the German Mittelstand is being decimated by state-backed Chinese competition, with the most energy-exposed sectors of the manufacturing economy faring particularly badly.

To a certain extent, the hollowing out of German industry at the hands of China mirrors the hollowing-out of British finance at the hands of the United States as more and more firms choose to list in New York in pursuit of higher multiples or are bought-up as value picks. This has elicited a response from the British Government in the form of the Mansion House compact aimed at encouraging pension funds to hold more British assets. If that fails, will the discussion then turn to capital controls under an Andy Burnham premiership?

Similarly, the rapid decline of the German Mittelstand will almost certainly elicit further protectionist measures from officials in Brussels who have just spent the last 18 months and more criticizing Washington for taking similar steps to protect American industry. In the absence of a hold-your-nose peace accord with Russia to reduce energy costs that will almost certainly not happen, what is Europe’s grand macro strategy to avoid being de-industrialised by China and vassalized by US energy and finance?

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 09:15

Porsche To Eliminate 4,000 Jobs In Germany: Report

Germany was once the industrial engine of Europe, but years of disastrous climate change policies, high energy costs, and left-wing economic mismanagement have battered its manufacturing base. This pressure has been roiling the country's auto industry, where struggling carmakers are restructuring operations through workforce reductions, production cuts, and capacity reductions.

Germany's top financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, reports that Porsche is preparing another round of deep job cuts at its main factories as the sports car maker grapples with weak demand.

The company is considering eliminating as many as 4,000 additional jobs at its Zuffenhausen plant, the outlet said, citing people familiar with the matter. These reductions would come on top of previously agreed cuts impacting 3,900 jobs.

Porsche's Zuffenhausen plant in Stuttgart is home to the brand's core sports car production lines, including the 911, 718, and Taycan.

Administration and management roles are expected to be reduced the most, while Porsche may also cut capacity at its Weissach development site by up to 30%.

Last month, Porsche CEO Michael Leiters said the company plans to produce at a lower capacity than the roughly 280,000 cars sold last year. He stated that the company must "make money with fewer cars."

Porsche's profit eroded further in the first quarter as the automaker faced mounting pressure from tariffs, geopolitical turmoil, and gaps in its model lineup. The emergence of Chinese EV giants like BYD and Chery in Europe is another troubling development for EU automakers.

Porsche is part of the Volkswagen Group, where the VW CEO recently warned that more than 100,000 jobs could be eliminated in a massive overhaul.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 09:00

Saylor's Strategy Sells 3,588 Bitcoin To Cover Preferred Dividends

Authored by Micah Zimmerman via Bitcoin Magazine.com,

Strategy sold 3,588 bitcoin for $216 million to fund dividends on its preferred securities, the company disclosed in a Form 8-K on July 6, 2026.

The sale marks the largest bitcoin disposal in the company’s history and its most direct admission that its dividend obligations now shape its treasury.

Chairman Michael Saylor posted about the transaction on social media. As of July 5, the company held 843,775 bitcoin in its reserves and $2.55 billion in cash. Saylor said the proceeds covered second-quarter dividends on four preferred instruments and the full June payment on a fifth.

The disclosed sale funded quarterly dividends on STRF, STRE, STRK, and STRD. It also covered the monthly dividend on STRC. Together these securities form the core of what Strategy calls its Digital Credit business.

Each instrument carries a distinct payout structure. STRF, the senior tier, pays a fixed 10% annual dividend on a $100 stated amount. STRE pays 10% a year on a €100 stated amount, denominated in euros. 

STRK pays 8% and converts to common stock if shares reach $1,000. STRD pays 10% but is not cumulative, giving the board room to skip a payment. 

STRC sits in the middle of the stack and pays a variable rate near 12%, reset to keep the security trading close to its $100 par. The board recently shifted STRC to semi-monthly payments.

None of the preferred securities is backed by the company’s bitcoin. Each holds only a claim on residual assets.

Why Strategy is selling

Strategy is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin. The company has built its treasury through repeated stock and debt offerings. Its bitcoin sits at a cost basis near $63.9 billion, or roughly $75,700 a coin.

That model created a growing cash bill. The preferred securities pay dividends in cash, not bitcoin. Strategy’s software business does not generate enough to cover them. 

Grayscale’s head of research, Zach Pandl, estimated the annual dividend load at $1.5 billion. When cash reserves run short, the company must raise more capital or sell coins.

For years Saylor pledged to never sell. That stance ended in late May 2026. Strategy sold 32 bitcoin for about $2.5 million, its first disposal since 2022, to fund preferred dividends. 

The move broke the pledge and drew wide attention. Saylor framed it as a signal of commitment to preferred holders rather than a retreat from bitcoin. “Our goal is to make STRC the best credit instrument in the world,” he said at the time.

The July sale dwarfs that first step. At 3,588 coins and $216 million, it is roughly a hundred times larger.

According to the company’s latest filing, Strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin between June 29 and July 5. About 1,363 Bitcoin were sold during the first two days of the program at an average price around $59,256, with another 2,225 Bitcoin sold over the following five days at $60,773.

Buying and selling at once

Strategy continues to accumulate even as it sells. After the May sale, the company bought 1,550 bitcoin for $101.3 million, nearly 50 times the size of the disposal. It made a $2 billion purchase in May and a $2.54 billion purchase in April. 

The pattern shows a firm that funds dividends from its stack while adding to it through fresh capital raises.

That approach depends on market access. Strategy can issue new preferred shares and common stock to raise cash. When those markets cooperate, the company avoids large sales. When they tighten, bitcoin becomes the source of funds. 

The July disposal suggests the second condition held during the quarter.

Last night, Saylor posted “Bitcoin is Digital Energy” on X, accompanied by Strategy’s orange-dot Bitcoin acquisition chart, prompting expectations that another SEC filing disclosing a new Bitcoin purchase is imminent. Traders have come to view these weekend posts as a recurring signal ahead of Strategy’s BTC accumulation announcements. This time, the announcement was about a bitcoin sale.

At the time of writing, Strategy shares are down 2% in premarket and bitcoin has dipped below $62,000.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 08:47

Citi Expects Oil To Sink To $60 As Hormuz Traffic Normalizes

Brent Crude prices could plunge to as low as $60 per barrel by the end of the year, according to the latest note from Citi's commodity research team which expects flows through the Strait of Hormuz to soon normalize and the US and Iran to reach a deal in the coming months.

"Fundamentals are rapidly reasserting themselves as Hormuz disruptions fade, with Brent back to the low $70s/bbl. While the US-Iran process remains fragile and disputes over Hormuz administration and transit fees persist, we expect the MOU to hold and turn into a deal over the coming months as incentives to de-escalate outweigh the alternative for the US, Iran, and much of the ME region. Shipping flows are normalizing, Chinese buyers remain absent, physical crude markets have weakened sharply, and inventories have drawn far less than expected," Citi’s Francesco Martoccia wrote in his latest note.

"We continue to recommend selling any summer rallies and forecast Brent reaching $60 to $65 a barrel by the turn of the year," Citi analysts said in the note (available to pro subs).

The investment bank has traditionally been one of the most bearish voices in the market, and especially now that it expects shipping through Hormuz to normalize now that the Strait is open again. Moreover, China’s crude buying remains weak, physical prices have crumbled due to the surge of prompt supply from the Middle East, while “inventories have drawn far less than expected,” Citi said.

Inventories, including in the United States, have crashed to multi-decade lows since the war began four months ago. Buying to refill depleted stockpiles could support oil prices going forward, more bullish analysts say. 

However, the coming global race to rebuild depleted oil inventories will not be enough to offset a massive glut that’s coming to the market next year, as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz appears to be headed toward normalization, Goldman Sachs said this week.

The investment bank expects the global oil surplus to be about 3 million barrels per day (bpd) next year, Samantha Dart, co-head of global commodities research at Goldman, told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Wednesday.

“We do expect a little over 1 million barrels a day just of SPR rebuilding globally, but still, that would leave us close to 2 million barrels a day of a surplus,” Dart added.

Other Wall Street banks have also started to predict a glut next year after the U.S. and Iran signed the MoU.

Morgan Stanley, for example, has slashed its oil price forecasts for the next 18 months as it expects the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to accelerate a new supply glut.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 05:45

The Three SHTF Scenarios That Could Change The World Faster Than Anyone Expects!

Authored by Madge Waggy,

For decades, the greatest threats to global stability were often imagined as distant possibilities—events reserved for history books, military simulations or the darkest years of the Cold War. Today, that assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. International defense spending has reached levels not seen in decades, armed conflicts continue to reshape regional security architectures, and governments across Europe, North America and Asia are investing heavily in civil defense, cybersecurity and the protection of critical infrastructure. These are not preparations made in anticipation of ordinary times, but responses to a world that has become measurably more volatile than it was only a few years ago.

History offers a sobering reminder that societies are rarely transformed by a single catastrophic event. More often, they are changed by a sequence of crises that appear unrelated until they begin reinforcing one another—geopolitical confrontation, economic instability, infrastructure failures and the gradual erosion of public confidence. Whether viewed through the lens of preparedness, national security or historical precedent, one conclusion remains remarkably consistent: the most consequential moments are often recognized only after they have already begun.

Top Three Unstoppable SHTF Scenarios

Three crises that could change everyday life faster than most people believe possible.

 

1. Nobody Notices the Beginning

 

One of the biggest misconceptions about large-scale disasters is that they begin with a single dramatic event. Movies have trained us to expect sirens, mushroom clouds and emergency broadcasts interrupting television programming. Reality has been far less theatrical. Most crises begin quietly, almost anonymously, disguised as temporary inconveniences that appear manageable until they suddenly aren’t.

Think back to the first weeks of 2020. News reports about an unfamiliar virus circulated for weeks before most people paid attention. Outside a handful of specialists, almost nobody seriously believed that international travel would stop, businesses would close overnight or supermarket shelves would be stripped bare by ordinary shoppers. Looking back now, it’s easy to say the warning signs were obvious. At the time, they blended into the constant flow of headlines competing for attention every single day. That pattern has repeated itself throughout history. Major disruptions rarely arrive without warning; they arrive surrounded by so much background noise that almost nobody recognizes them until hindsight turns scattered events into an obvious timeline.

The reason this matters is that the international situation entering the second half of the decade feels unusually crowded with risks that, taken individually, don’t necessarily point toward catastrophe. The war in Ukraine continues to reshape European security policy. Military spending has increased across much of NATO, while countries that had spent decades reducing their armed forces are now expanding recruitment and rebuilding stockpiles of ammunition. In Asia, naval activity around Taiwan has become more frequent, North Korea continues to invest in its missile program, and governments throughout the Pacific are preparing contingency plans that would have sounded alarmist only a few years ago. None of those developments automatically lead to global conflict, but together they create an environment where a single mistake could carry consequences well beyond the region where it begins.

Military planners have long argued that modern wars are less likely to start with a formal declaration than with a sequence of rapidly escalating incidents. A cyberattack disables part of a communications network. Intelligence services detect unusual military movements that may—or may not—be routine exercises. Satellite images are interpreted differently by opposing governments, each convinced the other is preparing to move first. Political leaders are then forced to make decisions in real time while operating with incomplete information, knowing that waiting too long carries risks, but acting too quickly may trigger the very crisis they hope to avoid. History contains numerous examples of conflicts that expanded not because every participant wanted war, but because every participant believed the other side had already decided that war was unavoidable.

2. The Black Sky Event

Few people spend much time thinking about the electrical grid. It is one of those systems that exists almost entirely in the background, quietly supporting modern life without demanding much attention from the people who depend upon it every single day. Flip a switch, and the lights come on. Open a banking application, and a payment is processed within seconds. Order groceries online, and thousands of decisions involving warehouses, logistics companies, transportation hubs and inventory management systems unfold without ever becoming visible to the customer. The greatest achievement of modern infrastructure may not be its scale, but its ability to disappear into everyday life. Only when one part of the system stops working does the extraordinary complexity behind ordinary routines become impossible to ignore.

That complexity has become increasingly difficult to overlook during the past several years. Governments have invested heavily in strengthening electrical networks, protecting telecommunications infrastructure and improving cybersecurity across both public and private sectors. The motivation is not difficult to understand. Modern economies rely upon systems that exchange enormous amounts of information every second, balancing electricity demand, coordinating transportation schedules and synchronizing financial transactions with remarkable precision. A disruption affecting one network rarely remains confined to a single location. Even relatively localized failures can create unexpected consequences elsewhere, not because the systems are fragile by design, but because they have become deeply interconnected through decades of technological progress.

The idea behind what preparedness communities have often described as a “Black Sky” event does not begin with a spectacular disaster. Instead, it unfolds gradually, almost quietly, in a manner that resembles the opening stages of previous crises. A regional outage lasts longer than utility companies initially expected. Mobile networks become unreliable across several metropolitan areas. Electronic payment terminals begin experiencing intermittent interruptions, forcing businesses to accept only cash while technicians investigate the source of the problem. Distribution centers report delays after software responsible for routing deliveries starts producing inconsistent data. None of these developments appears catastrophic on its own. Each can be explained individually. Together, however, they begin creating a pattern that attracts far more attention than any isolated incident would have received only days earlier.

Early Developments

1. Electrical disruptions spread beyond the area where they first appeared.

2. Communications become increasingly inconsistent rather than failing completely.

3. Retail supply chains begin experiencing delivery delays.

4. Financial institutions introduce temporary safeguards while investigating technical anomalies.

5. Emergency services activate contingency procedures designed for prolonged infrastructure failures.

What makes the situation increasingly difficult to interpret is the speed at which uncertainty travels. Modern societies produce an extraordinary volume of information every hour, yet during periods of disruption the demand for answers almost always exceeds the supply of verified facts. News organizations rely upon official briefings that evolve as new information becomes available. Independent analysts compare satellite imagery, transportation data and publicly available infrastructure reports, frequently arriving at different conclusions. Social media platforms amplify eyewitness accounts from thousands of locations simultaneously, mixing accurate observations with misunderstandings, speculation and deliberate misinformation until distinguishing one from another becomes a challenge in itself.

History suggests that confidence can become as important as physical infrastructure during moments of uncertainty. Supermarkets rarely maintain weeks of inventory because modern logistics have made constant replenishment far more efficient than long-term storage. Fuel stations depend upon scheduled deliveries arriving with remarkable consistency. Pharmacies receive regular shipments that reflect predictable patterns of demand. Hospitals coordinate supplies through sophisticated procurement systems designed around uninterrupted transportation. Under ordinary circumstances, these arrangements represent one of the greatest strengths of the global economy. During periods of sustained disruption, however, even modest delays can begin affecting sectors that appear unrelated at first glance.

As reports continue emerging from different regions, attention gradually shifts away from the original outages toward the broader question of resilience. Engineers focus on restoring damaged infrastructure, while government agencies attempt to coordinate information across multiple jurisdictions. Businesses activate continuity plans that had existed largely on paper until circumstances required their implementation. Some organizations transition smoothly to backup systems, while others discover that contingency measures designed years earlier no longer reflect the complexity of present-day operations. Every hour brings incremental progress in some areas and unexpected setbacks in others, creating an environment where optimism and concern coexist in equal measure.

Rather than producing immediate panic, the first noticeable change appears in everyday routines. Families begin purchasing additional bottled water, batteries and shelf-stable food—not necessarily because they expect the worst, but because recent experience has demonstrated how quickly normal purchasing habits can change during periods of uncertainty. Hardware stores report increased demand for portable generators and emergency lighting. Local governments remind residents to review preparedness plans originally developed for severe weather events. These individual decisions seem reasonable when viewed independently, yet together they begin reshaping daily life in subtle but unmistakable ways.

By the time officials announce that restoration efforts may require considerably longer than originally anticipated, the conversation has already expanded beyond electricity itself. The real question is no longer whether power will eventually return, but how a society built upon continuous connectivity adapts when continuity can no longer be taken for granted. That question, more than any technical explanation or engineering report, becomes the defining theme of the weeks that follow.

3. The Hidden Variable

Every crisis begins with a tangible problem. A military confrontation unfolds along a border. A cyberattack disrupts essential services. A financial shock sends markets into turmoil. These events dominate headlines because they can be measured, mapped and documented. They leave behind damaged infrastructure, economic losses and political consequences that analysts can examine long after the immediate emergency has passed.

The more difficult question is what happens after those measurable events begin influencing something far less visible.

History suggests that societies rarely unravel because of a single catastrophe. More often, they are tested by uncertainty itself. Information becomes fragmented, official statements evolve as new facts emerge, and competing interpretations race across television broadcasts, podcasts and social media platforms faster than any government can realistically respond. Within hours, millions of people may be looking at the same event while reaching entirely different conclusions about what has actually happened.

The modern information environment has transformed that process in unprecedented ways. During previous generations, news traveled through a relatively small number of newspapers, radio stations and television networks. Today, virtually anyone can publish photographs, videos or eyewitness accounts that reach a global audience within minutes. This democratization of information has created extraordinary opportunities for transparency, but it has also made distinguishing reliable reporting from incomplete or manipulated content considerably more difficult.

In an environment already strained by military tensions, infrastructure disruptions and economic uncertainty, information itself begins behaving like another critical resource. Accurate reporting becomes increasingly valuable precisely because it is competing against an overwhelming volume of conflicting claims. Every delay in communication creates space for speculation. Every contradictory statement encourages further debate. Every unanswered question generates dozens of possible explanations before investigators have even completed their initial assessments.

This gradual erosion of certainty produces consequences that extend well beyond politics. Financial markets react not only to events themselves but also to expectations about what may happen next. Businesses postpone investments when reliable forecasts become difficult to produce. Consumers delay major purchases, employers slow hiring decisions and international companies reconsider expansion plans while waiting for greater clarity. None of these individual decisions appears dramatic in isolation. Collectively, however, they can reshape economic activity far more effectively than a single headline ever could.

The same pattern has appeared repeatedly throughout modern history. Economic crises have often been accelerated by collapsing confidence rather than disappearing resources. Banking systems depend upon trust that deposits will remain accessible. Supply chains depend upon confidence that contractual obligations will be fulfilled. Democracies depend upon public acceptance that institutions remain capable of resolving disputes peacefully, even during periods of extraordinary disagreement. Once confidence begins deteriorating, restoring it often proves considerably more difficult than repairing damaged infrastructure or rebuilding physical assets.

Signals That Often Accompany Periods of Heightened Uncertainty

1. Rapidly changing official guidance as new information becomes available.
2. Increased market volatility driven by expectations rather than confirmed developments.
3. Growing dependence on unofficial sources for real-time updates.
4. Sudden shifts in consumer behavior despite stable underlying supply.
5. Expanding public debate over which institutions remain the most reliable.

One of the defining characteristics of the digital age is that every major event now unfolds simultaneously across multiple realities. The physical event occurs first. Within minutes it is interpreted by journalists, government agencies, financial analysts, independent researchers and millions of ordinary citizens, each bringing different assumptions and priorities. By the end of the day, the public conversation may no longer revolve around the original event itself, but around competing explanations of what it means and what should happen next.

This phenomenon has introduced a challenge that previous generations rarely faced on such a scale. The speed of communication has increased exponentially, while the speed of verification has not. Satellite imagery requires analysis. Intelligence assessments require corroboration. Infrastructure failures require technical investigation. Financial data requires careful interpretation. Reliable conclusions almost always arrive more slowly than speculation, creating an unavoidable gap between public demand for immediate answers and the time required to produce them responsibly.

For emergency planners, that gap represents one of the most significant challenges of modern crisis management. Restoring electricity, reopening transportation corridors or stabilizing financial systems remains essential, but maintaining public confidence increasingly depends upon something equally important: clear, consistent and credible communication. Without it, even temporary disruptions can appear far larger than they actually are, while isolated incidents may be interpreted as evidence of broader systemic failures.

Perhaps that is the lesson connecting all three scenarios explored throughout this article. Military escalation, infrastructure disruption and institutional uncertainty are often discussed as separate risks, each belonging to different areas of expertise. In reality, modern societies have become so interconnected that developments in one domain inevitably influence the others. A geopolitical confrontation affects energy markets. Energy disruptions influence industrial production. Economic uncertainty shapes political decision-making. Information networks amplify every stage of the process, compressing days of public reaction into hours.

Whether future crises resemble past events or take entirely new forms, one principle remains remarkably consistent. The resilience of a society depends not only upon the strength of its military, the sophistication of its technology or the size of its economy, but also upon its ability to adapt when certainty becomes scarce. Throughout history, civilizations have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to recover from disasters that once appeared overwhelming. The greatest advantage has rarely been perfect preparation or flawless prediction. More often, it has been the willingness to remain adaptable, cooperate across institutions and communities, and make informed decisions despite incomplete information.

In an era defined by accelerating technological change and increasingly interconnected systems, that may prove to be the most valuable form of resilience of all.

The Common Thread

Looking back through history, it is remarkable how often major crises are remembered for the moment they reached public consciousness rather than the moment they actually began. The headlines that define an era usually arrive only after months, and sometimes years, of developments that seemed disconnected while they were unfolding. Economic downturns are rarely caused by a single trading day. Wars seldom begin with one isolated incident. Even technological revolutions tend to emerge gradually before suddenly appearing inevitable in retrospect. The same pattern can be found across countless historical events, where the decisive turning point often becomes obvious only after enough individual pieces have fallen into place.

That observation forms the common thread connecting every scenario explored throughout this article. Although military conflict, infrastructure disruption and institutional uncertainty appear to belong to different worlds, they are ultimately linked by the same underlying reality: modern civilization functions as an interconnected system. Decisions made in one capital influence financial markets on another continent. A disruption affecting a single shipping route alters manufacturing schedules thousands of kilometers away. Political uncertainty reshapes investment, while economic instability influences diplomacy, defense planning and public confidence. Each development interacts with countless others, creating consequences that are often impossible to predict from any single event alone.

Perhaps that is why periods of rapid change have always been so difficult to recognize while they are happening. Human beings naturally interpret new developments through the lens of previous experience. Temporary shortages are expected to remain temporary. Political disagreements are assumed to follow familiar patterns. Technical failures are treated as isolated problems waiting for engineers to solve them. Most of the time, those assumptions prove correct. Societies recover, institutions adapt and ordinary life gradually resumes. It is precisely because this pattern has repeated so often that genuinely transformative moments are frequently underestimated during their earliest stages.

Preparedness, therefore, has never been solely about stockpiling supplies or anticipating worst-case scenarios. At its core, preparedness has always reflected something far broader: the ability to adapt when familiar assumptions no longer apply. History consistently rewards flexibility over certainty. Communities that cooperate tend to recover more quickly than those divided by distrust. Organizations capable of adjusting to rapidly changing conditions often outperform those relying exclusively on rigid plans. Individuals who remain informed without becoming overwhelmed are generally better positioned than those driven entirely by optimism or fear.

One lesson emerges repeatedly from past crises. Information matters, but judgment matters even more. During periods of uncertainty, headlines compete for attention, opinions multiply and speculation often spreads faster than verified facts. The challenge is not simply finding more information, but learning how to evaluate it carefully, recognizing the difference between immediate reactions and longer-term trends. Decisions made under pressure rarely benefit from panic, yet they also suffer when obvious warning signs are ignored. Maintaining that balance has always been one of the defining characteristics of resilient societies.

The world entering the second half of this decade is neither uniquely dangerous nor uniquely secure. It is, however, more interconnected than at any previous point in history. Advances in technology, communication and global trade have delivered extraordinary prosperity and unprecedented convenience, while simultaneously creating new forms of dependency that earlier generations never experienced. That duality is likely to define many of the challenges ahead. Every innovation that strengthens society also introduces new questions about resilience, complexity and the unintended consequences of living in a world where events on one side of the planet can influence daily life on the other within hours.

For that reason, the value of examining scenarios such as those presented here lies less in predicting the future than in appreciating how quickly circumstances can change when multiple systems interact. History has repeatedly demonstrated that resilience is rarely built in the middle of a crisis. It is developed beforehand through planning, cooperation, investment in reliable institutions and an informed public capable of responding thoughtfully when conditions become uncertain.

No one can predict precisely what the next defining global crisis will look like. It may resemble challenges experienced before, or it may emerge from directions that currently receive little attention. What history suggests with remarkable consistency is that the first signs are seldom recognized for what they are. They appear as isolated headlines, temporary inconveniences or regional developments that seem unlikely to affect anyone beyond their immediate surroundings. Only later, when enough connections become visible, does the larger picture begin to emerge.

And perhaps that is the most enduring lesson of all. The greatest challenges are not always the ones that arrive with the loudest warning. More often, they begin quietly, almost unnoticed, hidden within the ordinary rhythm of everyday life until the moment that rhythm changes—and the world realizes it has already entered a new chapter.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 05:00

World Cup Fans Drive Spending Surge In These US Host Cities

Bank of America has released new aggregated credit and debit card data showing that the World Cup is already driving a noticeable increase in retail spending activity across the tournament's 11 U.S. host cities.

According to BofA analyst Aditya Bhave, brick-and-mortar spending at restaurants and bars in host cities rose 5.3% year over year in the three weeks ending June 27, outpacing the 3.8% gain seen across the rest of the U.S.

Bhave noted that other forms of brick-and-mortar retail spending also accelerated in host cities, suggesting the tournament is providing a real-time boost for local restaurants, bars, and retailers.

Boston and Miami were exceptions, with restaurant and bar spending remaining flat and other retail spending slowing. Bhave said both cities hosted Scotland group-stage games and suggested that a heavy inflow of Scottish fans may have crowded out local spending.

Bhave noted that the data likely understates the full impact of the World Cup because it captures only spending by BofA customers.

Professional subscribers can read more notes on consumer here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 04:15

LEGO Faces Backlash Over Pride-Themed Content Aimed At Kids

Via American Greatness,

The Denmark-based toy company LEGO is facing criticism after promoting Pride-themed content on social media and its website. Parents accused the company of introducing LGBT themes to a brand primarily marketed to children.

Although LEGO produces some building sets for adults, the company markets most of its products to children. Many young consumers follow the brand on social media.

In a recent Instagram post, LEGO celebrated Pride Month with the caption, “Pride moments built, brick by brick. Swipe to see more of our LEGO colleagues’ stories.”

LEGO goes all out for lgbtq pride

This is a toy brand for children!!

They just posted this video promoting gay marriage and marching in Pride parades.

THIS is what they’re pushing on kids.

Absolutely disgusting! @LEGO_Group

Parents, BEWARE! pic.twitter.com/TzqIN7V7eM

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 1, 2026

The accompanying slideshow featured LEGO minifigures recounting coming-out experiences, including one character attending a Pride parade and another depicting a male character proposing to his boyfriend.

Parents and social media users criticized the post, with several calling for a boycott of the company.

“LEGO is now openly pushing Pride parades, gay marriage, and rainbow ideology straight at children,” one commenter wrote on X.

“This isn’t ‘inclusion.’ It’s sexualizing childhood and grooming the next generation with adult themes.”

LEGO is now openly pushing Pride parades, gay marriage, and rainbow ideology straight at children.

This isn’t “inclusion.” It’s sexualizing childhood and grooming the next generation with adult themes.

Parents are waking up. Boycott time. Companies that target kids with this…

— ThePolarBear (@UnluckyIrishman) July 2, 2026

The commenter added, “Parents are waking up. Boycott time. Companies that target kids with this stuff deserve to lose customers… keep this garbage away from our children.”

In 2021, LEGO released a set titled “Everyone Is Awesome,” featuring 11 faceless minifigures displayed in the colors of the Progress Pride flag. The company labeled the set for ages 18 and older.

According to the information provided, the set’s designer, Matthew Ashton, said it was created with children in mind and reflected his own experience of coming out as a teenager.

“Children are our role models and they welcome everyone, no matter their background. Something we should all be aspiring to,” Ashton said.

“If I had been given this set by somebody at that point in my life, it would have been such a relief to know that somebody had my back. To know that I had somebody there to say ‘I love you, I believe in you. I’ll always be here for you.’ So, in a way, this set is not just for the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s for all of the allies — parents, siblings, friends, schoolmates, colleagues, etc. — out there as well.”

The company also promoted a Pride Month activity on its official website on June 1.

“It’s time to paint the town red, orange, yellow, green… basically a whole rainbow of color! That’s right, it’s Pride Month, and we’re celebrating the best way we know how: with LEGO® bricks!” the activity description states.

The page encouraged participants to create Pride-themed LEGO builds, stating, “This year, we want you to celebrate what makes you—and everyone you love—quite frankly, AWESOME.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 03:30

Soaring Imports Push India's Crude Stocks To Near 1-Year High

India’s strategic and commercial crude oil inventories have jumped to a nearly one-year high as the world’s third-largest crude oil buyer boosted its imports to a record high in June, OilPrice reported.

As at the end of June, India’s crude oil stocks held in strategic, commercial, and refinery storage had increased to 104 million barrels, up from 90.5 million barrels at the end of April, according to data from commodity intelligence provider Kpler cited by Indian outlet Economic Times. Before the Iran war began, India held 107 million in crude oil inventories as of the end of February—the highest end-month level for the previous 12 months.

The war depleted inventories in March and April, before Indian refiners started raising imports from Russia and turn to Venezuela—both sources of supply that doesn’t need to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

By June, stocks were recovering and nearing the level from before the Iran war.

India imported a record high level of 5 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in June, more than half of which - 2.6 million bpd - from Russia, thanks to the U.S. waiver (now expired) on sales of Russian oil already loaded on tankers.

Yet, India wants to lower its crude import bill, protect public finances, and become more resilient to supply shocks such as the Middle East conflict that crippled supply from the Strait of Hormuz. That’s why it is looking to boost energy security by diversifying import sources and expanding its strategic storage.

Currently, India’s underground Strategic Petroleum Reserve storage has a total capacity of 5.33 million metric tons of crude oil, equal to only 39 million barrels of crude oil, or eight days’ worth of India’s oil consumption.

India’s storage of just about a week of its roughly 5 million bpd of consumption, is well below the SPRs of many other large oil consumers, which exposes New Delhi’s vulnerability to sudden supply shocks.

Separately, in response to media reports that India is flipping Russian oil imports by exporting its products back to Russia, India’s Oil Minister, Hardeep Singh Puri, said that the country's refiners are not directly exporting any refined petroleum products to fuel-starved Russia, although some supplies from traders are likely reaching Russia.

Reports emerged earlier this week that Russia had started importing fuel from India by sea in a bid to ease the fuel shortages triggered by Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries. In an exclusive Reuters report, industry sources revealed that an initial shipment of at least 60,000 metric tons (510,000 barrels) of gasoline has been dispatched from India via two tankers destined for Russian ports.

Hours after the report surfaced, India’s oil minister insisted that Indian refiners aren’t directly selling fuel to Russia.

“Indian companies are not selling fuels to Russia,” Puri said at a media briefing, but acknowledged that it is “possible that Indian-origin refined fuel is sold to Russia via traders.”

Gasoline from Indian refiner Nayara Energy, in which Russia’s top oil firm Rosneft holds a 49% stake, has been sold to Russia via traders, sources with direct knowledge of the deals told Reuters on Thursday. So it is likely that India-produced fuels are now reaching Russia via traders, as Moscow scrambles to alleviate a major fuel supply crisis.

Ukraine’s intensified drone strikes in recent months have now knocked offline an estimated 30% of Russia’s oil refining capacity. During peak summer demand, Russian refining throughput has sunk to a two-decade low.

In a rare public admission at the end of June, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that Russia faces fuel shortages and a fuel crisis that needs further government intervention to solve.

The fuel shortages that emerged in some regions in May have now reached the capital city Moscow, too, after Ukrainian strikes last month hit and sent Moscow’s Kapotnya refinery offline. The refinery is unlikely to resume fuel production before 2027 after suffering extensive structural damage from multiple strikes by Ukraine’s long-range drones, industry sources told Reuters last month.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 02:45

More Defense Spending, More Climate Redistribution: The EU Spins A $2.2 Trillion Wealth Transfer Machine

Submitted By Thomas Kolbe

Negotiations over the European Commission's next seven-year budget are entering their decisive phase. Should Ursula von der Leyen and her allies succeed with their plans, Germany will once again shoulder a substantial financial burden. By now, however, Germans have become accustomed to that reality.

Across the world, public debt levels are approaching dangerous flood marks. The global economy is effectively drowning in debt, with total public liabilities now exceeding 95% of global GDP. It is therefore only a matter of time before bond markets bring the debt party to an end, pushing interest rates—and with them debt-servicing costs—to levels governments can no longer afford. Such a reckoning would merely represent the logical consequence of political irresponsibility, contempt for taxpayers, and the megalomania of a political culture that continues expanding government on an ever-growing mountain of debt.

A four-decade bull market in sovereign bonds, characterized by steadily declining yields, came to an end roughly four years ago. Since then, interest rates have been rising as investors gradually lose confidence in both the political direction of Western governments and the relentless expansion of the administrative state. A turning point is approaching. Fiscal austerity is standing at the gates of an era defined by political extravagance.

For politicians like Ursula von der Leyen, however, austerity would amount to admitting that decades of debt-financed government expansion have led into a dead end. Few things are more alien to modern political elites than acknowledging failure. This is particularly true within Brussels, where the bureaucratic establishment and the ideological foundations of the European project remain firmly convinced that they are building a supranational European state on the right side of history.

Unsurprisingly, austerity is nowhere to be found in Brussels.

Instead, negotiations over the next seven-year EU budget are underway. The European Commission has floated a financial framework worth approximately €2 trillion. Funding for Ukraine-related military expenditures, broader European rearmament, and the enormous subsidy complex underpinning the Green Deal are all expected to come from higher member-state contributions and newly issued common debt. In doing so, Brussels continues to strengthen both its political authority and its influence over national governments.

Germany currently finances roughly one-quarter of the EU budget. Under the proposed framework, German taxpayers would ultimately contribute around €500 billion over the entire budget period. Last year alone Germany paid approximately €30 billion into the EU budget while receiving roughly €13 billion back, primarily in the form of agricultural subsidies and the ever-expanding subsidy machinery supporting Europe's green industrial policies and interventionist economic model.

Yet even a €2 trillion budget - already representing a leap into fiscal fantasy given the severe economic damage inflicted by years of excessive European regulation - is apparently no longer sufficient for Brussels.

Discussions are now underway to increase the budget by another €200 billion.

Leading the charge, unsurprisingly, is the European Commission itself: an insatiable bureaucracy working relentlessly to establish independent sources of taxation. Customs revenues, proceeds from emissions trading, plastic taxes—the imagination of Brussels appears limitless. At the same time, direct financial demands on member states continue expanding almost automatically, with ever-higher budget contributions treated as political routine despite growing conservative resistance across Europe.

Should the von der Leyen Commission succeed in making this fiscal leap, Germany's annual contribution to financing the European project would rise from roughly €30 billion today to approximately €78.6 billion.

For taxpayers, the implications are profound. An entirely new layer of government—complete with its own bureaucracy and increasingly its own taxation powers—has gradually positioned itself above existing national institutions. Since the joint borrowing undertaken during the pandemic and the issuance of the massive NextGenerationEU bonds, Brussels has steadily transformed itself into an independent borrower on international capital markets.

Officially, the German government still opposes granting the European Commission broader taxation powers and objects to dramatically expanding the EU budget. Yet all indications suggest that Berlin will ultimately shift the fiscal burden to Brussels itself, paving the way for larger common bond issuance—or some comparable mechanism—to finance the growing central apparatus.

Beginning in 2028, repayment of the €750 billion NextGenerationEU debt will commence. Those obligations, spread over subsequent years, must eventually be repaid to investors. Since these resources simply do not exist, Europe's capitals will almost certainly reach the same conclusion: refinance the liabilities through continuous new bond issuance, effectively burying what remains of the European Union's original prohibition against common sovereign debt.

In many respects, the transformation of Europe's financing structure resembles a financial evolution toward a European superstate. Ultimately, common liability for Brussels' debts appears virtually inevitable. The political and institutional path back has largely disappeared.

For German taxpayers, this strategy amounts to little more than witnessing another familiar fiscal shell game.

Brussels will almost certainly continue creating new revenue streams through customs duties, emissions trading, plastic taxes, and whatever additional levies policymakers may devise.

The remaining financing gap will inevitably be covered through Eurobonds issued on capital markets.

Such policies carry significant inflationary risks, as additional sovereign borrowing expands the money supply and places upward pressure on prices. At the same time, government borrowing increasingly crowds private investment out of credit markets, raising financing costs for productive businesses while strengthening the role of the public sector.

The consequences are already becoming visible. Europe's downward spiral of declining prosperity is accelerating. It is a tragic process of economic deterioration—one that is increasingly likely to culminate in a major sovereign debt crisis.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 02:00

The Unfinished Revolution: When Rights Become Privileges

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

- Thomas Jefferson

What exactly are Americans celebrating this Fourth of July?

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all people possess inalienable rights, we now live under a government that increasingly behaves as though rights belong to the government to distribute, restrict and revoke as it sees fit.

Freedom has become conditional.

Equal justice under law has become selective.

Constitutional rights have become political bargaining chips.

Government now claims the authority to decide which religious beliefs deserve accommodation and which may be excluded—a clear violation of the First Amendment’s warning against both establishing a religion and favoring or disfavoring one religion over another.

It insists that some speakers deserve constitutional protection while others may be censored, surveilled or punished—a violation of the right to free speech.

It proclaims itself the defender of unborn life while dismantling programs that protect the health and welfare of children already born.

It welcomes some immigrants with extraordinary speed while denying others the full measure of due process promised by the Constitution.

It pays lip service to equality under law while dismantling programs designed to ensure equal opportunity and root out discrimination.

It invokes the sanctity of children while narrowing which children may claim the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

It insists that no one is above the law while expanding presidential immunity and removing many of the traditional checks on executive power.

None of these contradictions exists in isolation.

Together they reveal a dangerous shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state.

Rights that the Declaration of Independence described as inalienable are increasingly treated as permissions—granted when convenient, withheld when inconvenient, and interpreted according to political priorities rather than constitutional principle.

That is not merely bad policy.

It is a repudiation of the American Revolution, because the Revolution began with one radical claim: freedom is our birthright.

To listen to those in power, however, freedom is a privilege reserved for a select few: the politically favored, the ideologically acceptable, the obedient, the compliant, the useful.

The Declaration of Independence advanced a very different idea: that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

That was the real revolution.

America’s founders may have disagreed—often grievously and hypocritically—about who qualified as “the people,” but they were united in one essential conviction: our rights do not come from government.

The government exists to serve us.

Government exists to safeguard and protect our inalienable rights—not ration them, redefine them or revoke them.

That distinction matters.

Once government is allowed to decide whose rights count, rights cease to be rights at all.

They become privileges.

And privileges can always be revoked.

For 250 years, Americans have treated the Declaration of Independence as the nation's birth certificate, but the Declaration was never merely a birth certificate—it was a warning label.

It was written by people who understood that freedom is fragile, power is relentless, and no generation remains free simply because an earlier generation fought for liberty.

The Declaration was not a celebration of government.

It was an indictment of government.

It catalogued the abuses of a ruler who had placed himself above the law, treated the people as subjects rather than sovereigns, undermined representative government, obstructed justice, maintained standing armies, imposed surveillance, abused power and waged war against the very people he claimed to govern.

The names have changed. The machinery has changed. The technology has changed.

The danger has not.

That is why the Constitution matters.

The Constitution translated the warnings of the Declaration into law.

Through separated powers, checks and balances, federalism, and a Bill of Rights, the founders sought to bind government down with what Thomas Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution.”

James Madison understood that the greatest threat to liberty would not come from a foreign king but from our own government if left unchecked.

“If men were angels,” Madison famously observed, “no government would be necessary.”

Because those entrusted with power are not angels, the Constitution—especially the Bill of Rights—was designed to restrain it.

The Constitution assumes that power will seek to expand. That is why it divides power. That is why it checks power.

That is why it places certain freedoms beyond the reach of government majorities, executive decrees, judicial maneuvering and political convenience.

Yet those constitutional restraints are increasingly being loosened—not by formal amendment, but by precedent, emergency powers, executive practice, bureaucratic discretion and public indifference.

The warnings are no longer theoretical.

Even the judiciary has increasingly become part of that transformation.

Rather than serving as a reliable constitutional brake on concentrated power, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly removed barriers that once restrained the executive branch: presidential immunity, limits on nationwide injunctions, and expanded presidential power to fire independent agency officials.

Each decision may be explained on its own legal reasoning. Together they tell a larger constitutional story: the presidency grows stronger, while the people’s ability to restrain it grows weaker.

In Trump v. United States, the Court declared that presidents enjoy sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, placing many exercises of executive power beyond the reach of laws that govern every other citizen.

In Trump v. CASA, the Court curtailed the power of lower federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions, making it more difficult to halt unconstitutional executive actions before they take effect across the country.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court expanded presidential control over supposedly independent agencies by strengthening the president’s power to remove agency officials.

Even where the Court has reaffirmed constitutional protections—as it did in rejecting the Trump administration’s attempt to undermine birthright citizenship—it has still left intact a dangerous constitutional reality: executive overreach can move faster than meaningful accountability.

The founders would have recognized this danger immediately. They had just fought a revolution against concentrated executive power.

Tyranny today may no longer look like King George III, but it is no less dangerous when it arrives wrapped in the language of national security, public safety, emergency management, border control, religious liberty, law and order, governmental efficiency and executive necessity.

It promises protection while steadily expanding surveillance, policing, executive discretion and bureaucratic control. It wraps itself in flags. It quotes Scripture. It invokes patriotism. It salutes the troops.

It speaks the language of freedom while making freedom conditional on obedience.

Thomas Jefferson would have recognized the pattern.

If Jefferson were drafting the Declaration of Independence today, the list of grievances would look strikingly familiar.

Instead of protesting quartered soldiers, he would likely protest militarized police forces equipped like occupying armies.

Instead of denouncing general warrants, he would condemn dragnet surveillance, geofence searches, facial recognition technology and warrantless tracking capable of monitoring millions of innocent people.

Instead of objecting to arbitrary searches of homes and papers, he would confront a government that can peer into our phones, financial records, online communications, travel histories and biometric data with astonishing ease.

Instead of warning against standing armies, he would question a permanent national security apparatus that wages endless wars abroad while steadily importing the tactics of war into policing at home.

Instead of protesting taxation without representation, he might challenge an administrative state that increasingly governs through executive orders, emergency declarations and unelected bureaucracies insulated from meaningful public accountability.

Instead of condemning the obstruction of justice, he would confront a system in which courts too often defer to power, Congress too often abdicates its authority, and presidents increasingly insist they may act first and answer later—if they answer at all.

Instead of accusing a distant monarch of placing himself above the law, he would confront a constitutional system in which the presidency has become imperial, the bureaucracy has become unaccountable, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, and the citizen has been reduced to a suspect, a data point, a taxpayer, a voter, a consumer and, too often, a pawn.

The machinery of power has grown unimaginably more sophisticated, but the central question remains exactly the same: who governs—the people or the government itself?

This is why the Fourth of July matters.

It was never intended as a celebration of government power. It is a celebration of liberty and self-government—the moment ordinary people declared that no ruler, no legislature, no court and no army should ever become too powerful to challenge.

That is precisely the principle now being tested.

Nowhere has this inversion of constitutional government been more visible than under the Trump administration, where rights increasingly appear to depend not on constitutional principle but on political identity, ideological conformity and executive preference.

The danger is not simply that government power is expanding. It is that government is claiming the authority to decide who possesses constitutional rights and who does not.

Freedom of speech, but only for those whose speech government approves. Religious liberty, but only for the beliefs those in power favor. Due process, but only for the people government considers worthy. Equal protection, but only for the politically acceptable. Citizenship, but only for the babies government chooses to recognize. Accountability, but only for ordinary citizens and not for presidents cloaked in immunity.

This is how constitutional government is hollowed out.

Not all at once.

Not always with tanks in the streets.

Not always with a formal suspension of the Constitution.

Liberty rarely vanishes in one dramatic act. It recedes gradually—emergency by emergency, exception by exception, court ruling by court ruling, executive order by executive order, crisis by crisis.

It disappears when due process becomes optional, habeas corpus is treated as expendable, speech is chilled, surveillance becomes routine, government secrecy expands, religious freedom becomes selective, citizenship becomes negotiable, oversight bodies can be fired at will, and executive power grows while meaningful accountability contracts.

It disappears when “we the people” grow so accustomed to fusion centers, surveillance cameras, geofence warrants, AI-assisted policing, militarized SWAT raids, civil asset forfeiture, government watchlists, facial recognition systems, warrantless tracking, endless wars, executive decrees and perpetual states of emergency that constitutional government becomes little more than a ceremonial ideal.

The most dangerous lie of the modern police state is not that government possesses extraordinary powers—it is that those powers are necessary, permanent and beyond question.

Every emergency becomes justification for another exception. Every crisis becomes an opportunity to normalize another expansion of authority. Temporary measures become permanent institutions.

Extraordinary powers become ordinary tools of government. And while the machinery of control expands, the machinery of distraction conspires to keep us from focusing on the government’s self-serving corruption, power grabs and abuses.

Authoritarian regimes require a populace that is too distracted—by spectacle, by outrage, by entertainment, by partisan tribalism, by endless political theater, by what the Romans called bread and circuses, by what we might call militainment—to get outraged enough to do something about the theft of their liberties.

When so-called representatives of the people celebrate power more than liberty, spectacle more than substance, and obedience more than accountability, that is not patriotism. It is conditioning.

The founders understood the danger of that conditioning. They distrusted concentrated power, feared standing armies, insisted on constitutional restraint and placed sovereignty not in rulers but in the people.

They pledged allegiance not to personalities, parties or power, but to enduring ideals and principles.

The founders did not create freedom.

What they created was a constitutional framework designed to preserve it.

Whether that framework survives depends upon whether the American people continue using it.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the most important question is not whether the nation survived.

The real question is whether the principles that inspired the Revolution have survived as well.

Have we preserved the belief that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed? Have we preserved the conviction that no one is above the law? Have we preserved the understanding that liberty requires eternal vigilance?

Or have we quietly accepted the idea that rights exist only at the pleasure of those in power?

If we truly wish to honor the spirit of 1776, we must restore the constitutional restraints that made liberty possible in the first place.

Bind the government, including the president, down with the chains of the Constitution.

James Madison understood that written constitutions alone cannot preserve liberty.

Rights written on paper become little more than “parchment barriers” unless the people insist that those limits be honored.

The Constitution cannot defend itself. Neither can freedom.

That was the lesson of independence.

It remains the warning of our time.

The unfinished work of the American Revolution was never about building a stronger government. It was about preserving a free people capable of restraining their government.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Jefferson wrote that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

He did not write that governments derive their powers from fear. Or emergency. Or efficiency. Or surveillance. Or military strength. Or presidential immunity. Or partisan loyalty.

He wrote that governments exist to secure rights that already belong to the people.

The generation of 1776 pledged “their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor” because they understood that liberty would never preserve itself.

Our generation is unlikely to be asked to sign another Declaration of Independence.

But we are being asked something just as consequential: whether we will preserve the constitutional safeguards entrusted to us or quietly surrender them for the promise of security, efficiency and political victory.

Every generation inherits the Revolution unfinished.

Every generation must decide whether to continue its work—or abandon it.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, freedom does not defend itself.

Thus, the question before us is no longer whether America has reached its 250th birthday. The question is whether Americans still believe what made that birthday worth celebrating in the first place.

Preserving that birthright is our responsibility.

The Constitution is not self-enforcing.

Courts will not always protect liberty. Congress will not always defend its authority. Presidents will rarely surrender power voluntarily.

Which leaves only one remaining guardian of constitutional government: We the people.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 23:20

Trump: 'Netanyahu Knows Who The Boss Is' After Phone Call

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could meet as early as next week after the US leader returns from the annual NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.

That's what Trump told Axios on Saturday after a Friday phone call, wherein the Israeli PM congratulated the American leader on the 250th Independence Day of the United States. Trump said something very interesting in the wake of the call: "We get along very good. [Netanyahu] knows who the boss is," he told Axios.

via Reuters

US-Israel relations have been deeply strained of late, given deep Israeli reluctance on the US-Iran MoU signing, as well as the US-mediated ceasefire in Lebanon.

Israel fears that the end result to a hasty peace could be a nuclear-armed Iran, and some Israeli leaders have gone so far as to say military action must not stop until there's true regime change.

"During their conversation, the Prime Minister said that the United States is a guarantor of global freedom, and that Israel greatly values the close relationship between the two nations. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump agreed to meet soon in the United States," Netanyahu's office said of the Saturday call.

On the issue of controversy over the US-Israel relationship and the push to launch Operation Epic Fury, Axios provides the following:

• "Many of Trump's closest advisers think that Bibi was wrong about everything," a U.S. official said.
• Trump lashed out at Netanyahu over Israel's escalation in Lebanon in a phone call last month, calling the prime minister "crazy" and accusing him of ingratitude.
• The tensions have deepened a broader Republican schism over Israel and the war, with MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson accusing Trump of being beholden to Netanyahu.

Indeed there seems of late a concerted White House effort to dispel this narrative. It seems that Trump is at least now more conscientious about it, given he's publicly seeking to assure Americans that Bibi "knows who the boss is."

A prior Trump-Bibi call in June didn't go so well. At that time reports based on US officials indicated that President Trump ripped into Netanyahu, cussing at him and the president essentially 'steamrolled' him - angry over breaking the Lebanon truce and demanding that Israel's military not attack Beirut.

Trump is said to have told Netanyahu "you’re fucking crazy’" while demanding Lebanon truce: "I’m saving your ass," he also reportedly said. Israeli officials have sought to downplay these negative reports...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed reports of a growing rift with U.S. President Donald Trump, calling their relationship “excellent.”

Speaking to Fox News, Netanyahu said the two have occasional “tactical disagreements,” but added, “In 99% of cases we see eye…

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) July 5, 2026

Since then, the US has essentially forced Israel to acknowledge the Lebanon ceasefire - though it should be noted that the IDF occupation has been allowed to continue in southern Lebanon - and direct exchanges of missile fire between Tehran and Tel Aviv has been silenced.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 22:45

Charlie Kirk Assassination Case Heads For Key Hearing

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times,

After months of wrangling, the case of Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin, Tyler James Robinson, is now headed toward its first major legal threshold.

Tyler Robinson, accused of killing conservative commentator Charlie Kirk last year, appears during a hearing in Utah's Fourth District Court in Provo, Utah, on Dec. 11, 2025. Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP, Pool

Robinson, 23, is accused of fatally shooting Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of the conservative Turning Point USA youth movement, while Kirk spoke at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, 2025.

During a four-day proceeding set to begin on July 6 in a Utah courtroom, prosecutors must reveal some of the evidence they have against Robinson.

This preliminary hearing requires the evidence to pass two key tests. And the judge overseeing the case has set strict rules for people who will be attending, including news crews.

Here is what to expect, based on general legal principles, Utah law, and rulings from Utah Fourth District Court Judge Tony Graf Jr.

Why The Hearing Matters

Not all U.S. criminal courts use a preliminary hearing to put evidence through an initial screening, but Utah courts do.

The hearing is like a "mini trial," which comes with advantages and disadvantages for both sides in a criminal case.

Prosecutors have already shared much evidence with Robinson's lawyers, as criminal law requires. But this hearing requires them to show their cards more specifically.

That will give defense lawyers a chance to poke holes in some of the evidence that prosecutors have against Robinson.

However, prosecutors have a wild card in their favor. At this hearing, they may present some evidence that would not be allowed during a trial.

In Utah, that evidence includes "reliable hearsay" testimony - statements that a witness heard someone else make. Usually, hearsay is forbidden, and witnesses must testify only about what they personally stated or observed.

The law requires prosecutors to present enough evidence to persuade Graf that they have "probable cause." That consists of two parts: First, they must provide sufficient proof that a reasonable person could conclude that the alleged crimes happened. Second, that evidence must show that the accused probably committed those offenses.

Open To The Public, With Restrictions

Members of the public and news reporters are allowed to attend the preliminary hearing, the judge ruled on June 1, despite objections from Robinson's lawyers. They wanted to close all or part of the hearing.

Instead, access will be granted, subject to limited seating and strict rules, the judge said. He gave a lengthy explanation of the rules on June 26.

The rules are necessary, he said, to ensure everyone's "safety and well-being" and to preserve fair trial rights for Robinson, as well as for Kirk's widow, Erika Kirk.

No one - except specified people - will be allowed to bring electronic devices to Graf's courtroom in Provo, Utah; he is also banning the devices from the entire fourth floor of that building, outside his courtroom.

People who are exempt from that rule include attorneys and their support staff, as well as media personnel who receive Graf's approval.

"In addition, every person who will be in attendance will be afforded the dignity and respect due to them," Graf said.

He cited an order he issued on Sept. 24, 2025, regarding courtroom decorum.

"All spectators shall be quiet, civil, and orderly," Graf said. "Spectators shall not engage in any distracting, disruptive, provocative, disrespectful, uncivil, or threatening behavior of any kind."

Further, he is forbidding attendees from making any gestures, including shaking or nodding heads to signal disagreement or agreement with statements.

No one is allowed "to wear or display pins, buttons, signs, clothing, or photographs expressing support for or against any person," Graf said.

"The court respectfully asks all persons seeking admission to conduct themselves in an orderly and respectful manner while court staff and security personnel carry out their responsibilities, including security screening and the assignment of wristbands for entry into the hearing," he said.

What Could Happen Next?

Because probable cause is considered a low bar to clear, it is rare for a case to fail at the preliminary hearing stage.

But if that does happen, the case probably would continue after a delay. Prosecutors would be allowed to add more evidence and refile the charges.

Most preliminary hearings end with the case being "bound over" for trial.

At trial, the standard of proof that prosecutors must meet is the highest in the criminal justice system. It is "beyond a reasonable doubt."

This standard requires "more certainty than any other burden of proof in law," according to Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute.

Beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean beyond all imaginary doubt. It means that the judge or jury is "firmly convinced" that the defendant committed the alleged crimes.

If Robinson is convicted as charged, he could face the death penalty.

Graf on June 26 rejected defense lawyers' request to remove the death penalty as an option. However, he found prosecutors in contempt because they made statements about being able to clear the "reasonable doubt" hurdle.

To remedy that violation of his order prohibiting such an out-of-court statement, the judge said he will work with attorneys on both sides.

They will put together an extra detailed jury selection questionnaire, and a larger pool of potential jurors might need to be summoned, Graf said.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 22:10

On 250th Anniversary, A Look Back At Gun Ownership In America

Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times,

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees what may be the most uniquely American of all rights. Those 27 words have inspired millions of words in thousands of debates over the Amendment's meaning and what, if any, limits may apply.

"The Shot Heard 'Round the World," 2009, by Domenick D'Andrea. Public Domain

There is no question that firearms played a pivotal role in the birth and growth of the United States of America.

From the Pilgrims' matchlock muskets and the six shooters carried by cowboys, to the modern semiautomatic rifles wielded by Korean business owners in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, guns are an integral part of American culture.

The right to keep and bear arms is unique, says Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow with Advancing American Freedom and Second Amendment scholar.

"It's an incredibly short list [of countries that recognize the right to own guns], and there are none of them have anything in theory or practice that is what I would say [is] a true equivalent of the American right to keep and bear arms," Swearer told The Epoch Times.

Based on sales data, permit applications, background checks and other factors, there are an estimated 400 million to 500 million firearms in civilian hands in the United States, according to the Sixguns Fraternity. This is an average of two firearms for every person over age 18.

Yet, while America celebrates 250 years as a society that honors the individual right to keep and bear arms, gun ownership remains one of the nation's most divisive issues.

Gun control groups did not respond to emails seeking comment for this article, but many have posted their concerns online. Gun control advocates say violence intervention strategies, strict gun control - including bans - and tighter regulation of the firearms industry are elements of common-sense gun laws.

They point to high-profile stories of mass shootings, school shootings, and violent crime involving firearms.

"The gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 26 times higher than that of other developed countries, but research shows that common-sense public safety laws can reduce gun violence and save lives," Everytown for Gun Safety, states on its website.

The group, along with others, say gunshots are the number one cause of death for American children.

The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control reports that the top cause of death for children between 1- and 17-years-old are "unintentional injuries." Matthew Garnett with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, defines unintentional injury as, deaths from fatal injuries that were "unintended, unplanned, and did not occur on purpose."

"Unintentional injury deaths include a wide array of mechanisms, with the four most common being: poisoning, motor vehicle crashes, drowning, and falls," Garnett wrote.

Second Amendment activists say gun control policies harm law abiding citizens rather than criminals. They say the data presented by gun control organizations are cherry-picked or manipulated to get the desired result.

Gun Owners of America says Everytown skews its data on children killed by firearms because it includes 18- and 19-year-olds. Generally, most data involving children only includes children aged 1 to 17, while 18- and 19-year-olds are considered adults.

Public safety has always played a role in American gun legislation, says Robert J. Spitzer, professor emeritus at the State University of New York, College at Cortland.

This includes laws on where and how guns could be carried, who could own them, and which arms are protected by the Second Amendment.

Spitzer has written extensively on the Second Amendment. In a 2017 article published by Duke University, "Gun Law History in the United States and Second Amendment Rights," he describes gun laws from pre-Revolutionary times to the modern day.

He contends that while America has a "wild west" reputation, it has also worked to tame that reputation. Spitzer wrote that "stand-your-ground" laws, the unlicensed carry of firearms, allowing those younger than 21 to legally carry a gun in public, and similar policies, do not align with America's tradition of gun regulation.

"[These] laws are not a return to the past. They are a refutation of America's past, and a determined march away from America's gun regulation tradition," Spitzer wrote. "And these changes have nothing to do with improving safety or security in society, but everything to do with politics."

So, what did the founders have to say? How did they view guns and their impact on public safety? And what route have the courts taken in trying to answer those questions?

Founding View Of Guns

The founders appear to have considered the ability to defend oneself a responsibility as much as a right. As Englishmen and lawyers, they studied English Common Law. Most of them were familiar with the "Commentaries on the Laws of England," by Sir William Blackstone.

Blackstone was an English jurist and legal scholar. His commentaries are considered an authoritative text when it comes to English law.

In the first chapter, Blackstone outlines the process for relief when a person's rights are violated or they are violently attacked. The first avenue is the court and the law, according to Blackstone. If that fails, the next step is a petition to the King and Parliament, and "lastly to the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense."

The right to be armed for self-defense underpinned legal arguments John Adams, Founding Father and second U.S. president, made when defending British soldiers charged with murder in the 1770 "Boston Massacre." His argument, voiced before there was a second amendment, informs his, and other founders', world view on the matter.

On March 5, 1770, a group of colonists was berating a British soldier guarding the Customs House in Boston. British Army Capt. Thomas Preston brought a squad of seven soldiers to support the lone guard.

As the situation grew tense, one of the soldiers fired his musket. Thinking the order to fire had been given, the others followed suit. Three colonists, including a black sailor named Crispus Attucks, were killed immediately. Two others died later.

Adams, Josiah Quincy Jr., and Robert Auchmuty, Jr., represented Preston in court. Adams argued that the soldiers had every reason to believe they were in danger.

"Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defence, not for offence, that distinction is material and must be attended to," Adams stated.

Preston was acquitted of his murder charges.

Civilian gun ownership is necessary for a "well-regulated militia," according to Stephen Halbrook, a Fairfax, Virginia-based attorney and senior fellow with the Independent Institute.

"It was considered a duty," Halbrook told The Epoch Times.

Halbrook pointed out that the first settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, almost failed partly because of conflict with Indians who were hostile to the colonists.

"You had a responsibility ... to have arms in your home and basically to carry them around with you. After the Constitution comes into being in 1792 the federal militia laws ... required, that every able-bodied white male citizen would have to provide arms for himself and enroll in the militia, and to go when called to duty," Halbrook said.

This was outlined by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 29. Hamilton explained that the militia consists of armed residents prepared to defend themselves and their communities.

According to Hamilton, "well-regulated" means the members will "acquire the degree of proficiency in military functions which would be essential to their usefulness." While Hamilton called on the federal government to support the militias, he stressed that they would operate under local authority.

"Reserving to the states respectively the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress," Hamilton wrote.

The federal government has a militia law, 10 U.S. Code § 246 - Militia: Composition and Classes, as do 45 states.

The federal law states that the unorganized militia is made up of all able-bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45 who are not members of the National Guard or Naval Militia, and females who are members of the National Guard and Naval Militia.

Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and West Virginia do not have established militias. Twenty-two states have active militias, though Connecticut's militia is ceremonial. The rest of the state militias are inactive unless they are called to service.

Self-Defense

Swearer said that America has drifted away from the original intent of the militias. But there have been militia-style actions.

During the 1992 Los Angeles riots that erupted after four police officers were acquitted of charges stemming from the March 3, 1991, beating of Rodney King, several Korean business and property owners took up arms to defend their homes and businesses.

As the riots spread into the area known as Koreatown, many business owners and residents noticed that police were standing by, watching. So, the Korean residents armed themselves, got on their roofs, and held off the rioters. They became known as the "Rooftop Koreans."

"It is arguably a militia usage. It's that same understanding of the people protecting themselves when the government fails to protect them," Swearer said.

It was hardly the first time Americans armed themselves to defend their property. The United States was born in armed conflict.

Halbrook said that around the time of the Boston Massacre, the first gun control laws were passed. As Spitzer noted in his article, many of the laws were focused on public safety.

Firearms regulations from this era covered brandishing firearms, bans on certain types of weapons, carry restrictions, dueling, hunting, inspection of gun manufacturing facilities, and storage requirements, and the responsible discharge of firearms, among others.

There were also laws on who could possess guns. Halbrook said the main objective was to prevent certain groups from being armed.

For example, in his article, Spitzer points out that in 1619 the first General Assembly made it illegal to sell guns, powder, or shot, to Indians. A person convicted under the law faced hanging.

As part of a law requiring church attendance, the General Assembly included language requiring that "all such as bear arms shall bring their pieces, swords, powder and shot." Though not specified in the law, the likely reason for this requirement is to defend the colonists gathered in the church.

These early gun prohibitions were not focused as much on the guns as who could carry them. And, like the colonial governments, America has prohibitions on who can keep and bear arms.

Today, as in those early days, the United States prevents felons, the mentally ill, and others who could be considered dangerous to society from legally owning firearms. This was upheld in the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court case, Lewis v. U.S.

In that case, the court ruled that under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, "the fact of a felony conviction imposes firearm disability until the conviction is vacated or the felon is relieved of his disability by some affirmative action," such as having his rights legally restored.

This legal concept was affirmed in the June 2024 decision in United States v. Rahimi, when the court ruled that disarming people deemed by a court to be dangerous aligns with the Second Amendment.

According to the court record, Zackey Rahimi, of Arlington, Texas, abused his girlfriend. Subsequently, she won a domestic violence restraining order against him. Rahimi was disarmed under 18 USC 922 (g) (8), the federal law that bars people under such an order from possessing or purchasing firearms.

After agreeing to the order, he assaulted another woman and was involved in at least five shootings. His firearms were confiscated because of the restraining order. Rahimi appealed the confiscation to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which found the law unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court reversed that.

"Since the Founding, the Nation's firearm laws have included regulations to stop individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms," the decision states. "As applied to the facts here, Section 922(g)(8) fits within this tradition."

In a subsequent case, United States v. Hemani, the court in June 2026 rejected the idea that the federal government could automatically strip someone of their right to bear arms based on the mere fact that they took drugs. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch indicated more consideration was needed over whether the individual had lost their capacity to reason.

Gentleman's Honor

Halford said it wasn't until the early 19th Century that the first laws resembling modern gun control were passed. He said that in 1813 Kentucky and Louisiana passed laws prohibiting the concealed carry of weapons, including knives and other weapons.

He pointed out that the first such laws were passed in the South, but it was years before northern states passed similar laws. Halbrook said the new law had more to do with the concept of a Southern gentleman's honor.

"In Kentucky ... you had the code of dueling ... and it would be ungentlemanly to carry an arm concealed," Halbrook said. "It was kind of a macho thing ... only a person with bad intentions would hide [his weapons]."

Prohibitions based on politics, race, and similar factors did not fare well with the judicial system.

In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court found that slaves were not citizens and did not have Constitutional rights, including Second Amendment rights.

"It cannot be believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included in the word citizens ... to keep and carry arms wherever they went," the decision reads in part.

In 1865, the Freedman's Bureau was established to ensure that freed slaves enjoyed the same civil rights as other Americans, including their Second Amendment rights. Though there were subsequent attempts to deny black Americans their civil rights, the court has generally ruled those laws unconstitutional.

In the following decades, a variety of gun laws were passed with the objective of promoting safety or preventing crime. Three of the most notable are the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986.

The National Firearms Act was a response to organized crime in the 1920s and 1930s. The law designated some weapons as dangerous or unusual. These included fully automatic machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and silencers.

Backers of the law knew it was doomed as a gun-control measure. So, it was passed as Congress exercising its taxing authority. But, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) website, the tax was a secondary purpose.

"Its underlying purpose was to curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in [National Firearms Act] firearms," the website states.

Only Federal Firearms License holders who pay a $200 tax can deal in National Firearms Act items. The tax, which remained $200 until last year when it was reduced to $0, was meant to inhibit ownership of National Firearms Act items.

The Gun Control Act corrected the constitutional problems in the National Firearms Act.

In 1968, the Supreme Court found in Haynes v. United States that forcing a person to register a National Firearms Act item, then prosecuting that person using information from the registration process violated the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination.

In 1986, the Firearm Owners' Protection Act was enacted. It added to the definition of "silencer" combinations of parts, and any part to make a silencer to the list of National Firearms Act items. It also prohibited the transfer or ownership of machine guns except for state and law enforcement agencies, and machine guns lawfully owned prior to May 19, 1986.

But in the 2000s, three landmark decisions was issued that turned the gun debate upside down.

Supreme Court Returns To History

Prior to 2008, the courts used a two-step "means test" to determine if a gun law was constitutional. Under this method, courts considered whether a law would obtain a favorable objective - such as crime reduction - even if it did not strictly align with the text of the Second Amendment.

It was accepted that a law might infringe on the right, but that could be acceptable if the end result outweighed the degree of restriction.

In its June 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen the court said the two-step approach was excessive.

By a 6-3 vote, the court concluded that the standard for applying the Second Amendment was determining whether the gun control policy was consistent with the nation's history and tradition. The court also found that New York State's licensing scheme, along with prohibitions on carrying guns in public, were unconstitutional.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said any gun control law must align with the Second Amendment's language and have a "historical analog" from the time of the Amendment's ratification to pass constitutional muster.

This meant that if the law covered the activity listed in the amendment, specifically keeping and bear arms, it was unconstitutional unless a similar law existed around the time of the amendment's ratification.

The Bruen decision shook the gun debate and will impact Second Amendment cases for years to come. Two other Supreme Court rulings helped set the stage for the landmark decision.

In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the high court ruled that the Washington's prohibition on handguns, and requirements that privately owned guns be kept unloaded under lock and key, violated the Second Amendment.

In Heller, the court found that the Amendment protects an individual right to carry firearms for protection, which the District's law made all but impossible.

Then on June 28, 2010, the Supreme court ruled 5-4, in MacDonald v. Chicago, that the Second Amendment applied to state and local governments, as well as to the federal government.

Post-Bruen Developments

After Bruen, some states with strict gun laws, including New York, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Rhode Island, and others doubled down passing so-called "Bruen response laws."

Hawaii implemented a law prohibiting firearms on all private property open to the public unless the property owner gives express permission to gun owners to carry on their property.

The Supreme Court recently struck down that law in Wolford v. Lopez, ruling that it placed an undue burden on licensed gun owners.

Rhode Island, Virginia, and Illinois banned certain semiautomatic firearms, so-called assault weapons. New York and California instituted background checks for ammunition purchases in 2023.

As she announced the ammunition background check law, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said her state was dedicated to promoting gun safety.

"We know this has nothing to do with lawful gun owners, nothing to do with them at all. These are people who have been convicted of felonies or other categories of people that should be prohibited from firearms and ammunition," she said.

At the time, President Joe Biden was in the White House and had successfully implemented much of his agenda to increase firearms regulation. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which included funding for violence intervention programs as well as stronger gun control laws, was enacted in 2022.

Biden opened an Office of Gun Violence Prevention in the White House. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was taking a much tougher stand on regulating firearms manufacturers and dealers through its zero-tolerance policy, and he was making strides toward implementing universal background checks.

Gun rights advocates, on the other hand, have been energized by the Supreme Court decisions, as well as what they consider to be a pro-Second Amendment president in Donald Trump.

Trump is currently 18 months into his second term. He closed the office in the White House, dismantled almost all of Biden's gun control programs and opened a Second Amendment office in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.

Gun rights activists said there is more to be done. They are calling for the repeal of the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act, the shutdown of the ATF, and the destruction of billions of gun sales records, which they say the agency is using to build an illegal registry.

The ATF denies it has such a registry.

The experts say that, like all the other constitutional rights, the Second Amendment will continue to be examined and possibly limited or expanded.

Halbrook offered advice for gun owners that could be applied to either side of the debate.

"They have to pay attention to politics, they have to vote, they have to support candidates who are going to be on their side, and they have to vote against those who are against them," Halbrook said.

The second amendment is spelled on a U.S. flag in a gun store in Rio Rico, Santa Cruz County, Ariz., on Sept. 17, 2025. Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 21:00

South Korea Plans Investment Fund From Chip Tax Revenue

At a time when chip and memory companies are disproportionately receiving the benefits of hundreds of billions in capex, and a growing number of politicians are consider ways to socialize these outsized gains, Yonhap News reported that South Korea plans to create an investment fund using tax revenue from its burgeoning semiconductor industry to finance long-term economic growth.

In a senior-level meeting of the government and the ruling party, presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik said the additional revenue from the country’s chip industry should be invested for future growth, the news agency reported.

“By launching the fund with the extra tax revenue, we aim to make bold investments for the future, including supporting the three mega projects, creating future growth engines, addressing K-shaped polarization, and supporting housing, startups and jobs for those in their 20s and 30s,” Kang said.

South Korea recently unveiled its three mega projects initiative, which involves significant investment in semiconductors, physical AI and data centers.

Investments of at least 1,350 trillion won ($880 billion) from companies including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will be made, as the government looks to strengthen the country’s long-term competitiveness and position itself as an AI powerhouse.

Samsung Group and SK Group said they plan to build two chipmaking plants apiece in the southwest for a total of 800 trillion won, to rapidly expand production capacity to meet increasing demand. South Korea also announced 550 trillion won of investment from companies including internet leader Naver Corp. to build 8.4 gigawatts of AI data-center capacity by 2029.

The country aims to double its memory production capacity within five years and secure world-class manufacturing capabilities to pull far ahead of competing nations, the industry ministry said in a statement. South Korea must move faster than its global rivals to secure leadership in chips, data centers and physical AI, President Lee Jae Myung said at a briefing where he called the Samsung and SK Hynix leaders “national heroes.” 

Kang said the mega projects will help create new growth engines to determine the country’s future over the next 20 to 30 years, Yonhap added.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 20:58

Nvidia Supplier Hon Hai Sales Beat As Continued AI Demand Offsets Consumer Electronics Decline

Nvidia’s server assembly partner Hon Hai Precision Industry reported a bigger-than-expected 40% jump in quarterly sales and said AI demand is growing further, according to Bloomberg. 

Hon Hai’s revenue grew to NT$2.51 trillion ($79 billion) in the three months to June, beating the average of analyst estimates of NT$2.37 trillion. Demand for AI-related products drove sales, compensating for a slight decline in demand from consumer electronics and computing products, where soaring memory prices have resulted in widespread demand destruction.

Shipments of AI racks are expected to maintain their momentum in the current quarter, while demand for information and communications technology products is entering peak season, the company said in a statement Sunday quoted by Bloomberg. Overall operations are expected to grow both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year.

Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn, has established itself as a key AI hardware player by assembling servers that house Nvidia accelerators. This comes as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft are setting aside about $725 billion for AI spending this year, a total which Goldman believes could rise as high as $1.4 trillion in 2027, even as warnings abound about overcapacity and questions about how to monetize the technology grow louder.

In March, the Taiwanese company projected strong sales growth in 2026, fueled by sustained AI momentum. It derives a significant chunk of sales from assembling Apple’s iPhones and MacBooks and is in a position to benefit from any positive reception for the latest iPhone 17 product family, although in light of the upcoming price hikes across Apple products it remains to be seen what consumer reception will be for the higher-priced products.

But like many electronics manufacturers, Hon Hai faces a shortage of memory chips used in a wide range of products from smartphones to PCs and servers. Executives have said the crunch should not significantly impact demand for premium handset and computer products the company makes for major customers.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 20:34

Iran To Grant China, 'Friendly' Countries 'Special Consideration' On Hormuz Fees

Via The Cradle

Iran's ambassador to China stated on Saturday that the Islamic Republic would impose service fees on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, but that China and other "friendly" countries would be granted "special considerations."

During a speech at the World Peace Forum in Beijing on Saturday, Iranian Ambassador Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli affirmed that Iran was working in "collaboration and cooperation" with Oman on "new arrangements" for the strait.

via Associated Press

Ships passing through Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world's oil exports moved before the US-Israeli war on Iran, must travel along Iranian territory to the north and Omani territory to the south.

"As a country where the Hormuz is part of its territorial waters, we will definitely charge service fees," Fazli said. However, the fee would not be a "toll," he added, as tolls are considered illegal under international maritime law. Instead, the fees would be for security and administration.

"These new arrangements will be concerning guaranteeing the security of passage through the Straits of Hormuz, supervision of the passage of the vessels … and also guaranteeing and dealing with the environmental consequences of the massive number of ships," he stated.

Iran's NourNews agency quoted the ambassador as saying that "special considerations" would be applied to China and other friendly nations when determining the level and type of service fees charged for their vessels.

Beijing began importing large amounts of Iranian crude in the early 1990s as China industrialized and sought new energy sources to shift away from coal.

Beijing's purchases typically account for roughly 90 percent of Iran's oil exports, providing tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue that support Iran's government and military. To bypass US economic sanctions, much of the oil is transported using trans-shipment hubs and a shadow tanker fleet to obscure its origins.

The Strait of Hormuz was closed by Iran after the US and Israel launched an unprovoked war on the Islamic Republic on February 28.

In April, as energy prices soared, the US responded by imposing a naval blockade on Iran's southern ports to attempt to halt Iranian oil exports.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by Iran and the United States on June 15 to halt hostilities stipulated that commercial ships would be allowed to transit through the Strait of Hormuz free of charge for 60 days. Fazli added that new arrangements regarding Hormuz would be made in cooperation with Oman.

Last month, Oman proposed that ships transit the strait via a new southern route close to its coast and a new northern route along Iran's coast, while the central route through the strait is de-mined. Omani officials worked with the UN's International Maritime Organization (IMO) to develop the plans.

However, Iran rejected plans for the southern route, which would have been overseen by the US, saying it would violate Clause 5 of the MoU.

On Thursday, Iranian forces attacked a Singaporean ship attempting to pass through the southern Omani route, causing the IMO to abandon the effort.

The last 24 hours in the Strait of Hormuz are a doozy.

At the start of the clip, you will see many of the vessels that were going through the Oman route take the Iran route instead.

Now there's something I should probably point out. In the last week or so, US escorts through… pic.twitter.com/rK1iKRtrYm

— HFI Research (@HFI_Research) July 5, 2026

On Friday, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced Iran and Oman had reached an agreement on the joint management and regulation of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. 

Tehran has repeatedly vowed that the strait will not return to its pre-war status despite an illegal US blockade on its ports and attempts to undermine Iranian control of the waterway. 

"Hormuz is defined under Iran's command, not CENTCOM," Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister and top negotiator Kazem Gharibabadi said in a statement on July 2nd.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 19:50

OPEC+ Approves Another Oil Output Increase As Hormuz Exports Start To Recover

OPEC+ agreed a further increase in output targets from August, the group said in a statement on Sunday, ‌adding to global supply at a time when oil prices are falling due to the gradual reopening of the Strait of Hormuz for oil exports. 

Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman adjust production and reaffirm commitment to market stability

Read Press Release▶️https://t.co/dyMd6A6Fpj

— OPEC (@OPECSecretariat) July 5, 2026

The oil-producing cartel, which recently lost the UAE as a core member, agreed during an online meeting to increase quotas by 188,000 barrels per day from August, on top of similar increases for June and July. That said, the producers reserved the right to increase, pause, or reverse the phase-out, including the November 2023 cuts already unwound. Furthermore, every country that overproduced since January 2024 still has to fully compensate for it, tracked monthly by the JMMC. 

The seven ​core members of OPEC+, which groups OPEC and allied producers including Russia, have hiked their output quotas from April through July ​by almost 800,000 bpd. Yet the increase has remained largely on paper because of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, ⁠which closed the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic for some of the most important OPEC+ members, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and ​Iraq.

According to Reuters, OPEC+ output fell to 33.13 million bpd in May, according to OPEC data, from 42.77 million bpd in February. It began ​to recover in June thanks to U.S. efforts to help the UAE and other OPEC+ nations export more oil, but is still below pre-war levels.

Despite persisting supply disruptions, oil prices have returned to pre-war levels, pressured by sharply lower Chinese imports, higher exports from non-Middle East producers, and a record global strategic stock release coordinated ​by the International Energy Agency.

"The group of seven kept unwinding their production cuts as widely expected," UBS analyst Giovanni Staunovo said. "The near-term focus ​will remain on how many tankers will manage to cross the Strait of Hormuz and how quickly demand and Chinese crude imports recover."

A memorandum of understanding ‌between Washington ⁠and Tehran to end the war, which has been breached on several occasions but is still holding, has also helped convince traders that supply will ultimately return to normal levels.

Brent crude prices traded near $72 per barrel on Friday, down from recent peaks of more than $120 per barrel and back to levels traded just before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

Besides agreeing production targets, OPEC+ is also facing other challenges after the United Arab Emirates left ​the group and Iraq signaled it wants ​higher quotas.

OPEC+ includes 21 members ⁠including Iran, but in recent years only the seven nations - and the UAE until its departure - have been involved in monthly production management. Those seven producers, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan and Oman, are ​boosting output as part of the phased rollback of a 1.65 million bpd supply cut agreed ​in 2023, when ⁠the group still included the UAE.

In a stunning twist, the UAE quit the alliance in late April because it wanted to align its capacity more closely with its production, free of production restraints imposed by the group. From August, taking into account the UAE's exit from May 1, the seven core members will still ⁠have about ​379,000 bpd of the original cut to return to the market, according to ​Reuters calculations.

With the August increase now decided, they will have fully unwound the 2023 cut if they make one more hike of around the same size for September at ​their next meeting on August 2.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 16:55

The Biggest Problem With AI Today

By Christopher Penn, of Almost Timely News

What’s the biggest problem in AI today? Is it cost, with token budgets being blown out of the water by agentic AI? Is it sustainability, with AI consuming electricity and fresh water? Is it ethics, with tech companies cramming AI into everything?

I think it’s deeper than that. Those are all symptoms of a much deeper-rooted problem: nobody’s making decisions.

Or more correctly, we’ve abdicated far too much of our executive function to AI. We’ve surrendered our thinking. 

Let’s dig in.

Part 1: Where This Issue Came From

On Friday afternoon, I was mulling over what I wanted to cover in this week’s issue. It’s a holiday weekend here in the USA, so not as many folks will be reading, and that’s okay. (I appreciate that YOU are) And I’ve covered a ton recently:

• How to improve advertising with AI
• Why listicles may cause more harm than good
• Setting up private, local models
• How AI detection works
• AI for GEO mental models
• AI for retail GEO
• 18 ways to save token budgets
• How to make AI write better

So on a whim, I set up a NotebookLM with the last 180 days of conversations from over 40 different subreddits, like r/marketing, r/chatgpt, etc. - everything around marketing, business, and AI. I connected it to Claude Code with the NotebookLM command line tool (the most token—efficient way for Claude to talk to NotebookLM), and then put all of my 2026 newsletters year to date into an input folder.

I asked Claude to compare what I’ve written about thus far this year with what folks are finding their hardest problems are with AI. Claude spit out a list of 10 major things derived from over 800,000 words of foaming at the mouth on Reddit that it thought might be good newsletter topics:

• AI Visibility challenges
• Agentic oversight is degrading
• AI deployment is broken
• 40-60% of company budget is wasted on the wrong models
• AI is a rental
• AI sycophancy is screwing up synthetic focus groups
• AI detectors don’t work
• AI is hollowing out corporations and no one’s hiring junior staff
• People measure AI by tokenmaxxing
• Marketers are basically unpaid labor for AI companies training data

Claude was REALLY pushing for me to write about how measurement is broken in marketing and AI today, and I might do that at some point, but that’s not what I see when I look at this laundry list. Yes, there are measurement issues in many of them, data issues in many of them, but... measurement being broken is the symptom of what I said earlier - we’ve abdicated executive function.

For those who aren’t analytics nerds, you know that measurement is a trailing indicator. It’s not a leading indicator.

Part 2: Executive Function Recap

As a reminder, I bucket executive function into four categories that I call PODS:

• Plan: you think about achieving something in the future and make a plan to get there from here
• Organize: you take what you have and try to make sense of it
• Decide: you take what you have and make decisions about it
• Solve: you solve the problems you have

Yes, there is more nuance to executive function than this, but this handy, short list is an easy way to see what our brains are doing. That’s critical thinking, one of the worst-named practices we have.

Why? Because critical thinking isn’t about being critical, per se. It’s about metacognition - the definition of which is thinking about thinking. When you’re thinking about how you think, you open the door to improvements, to growth.

Thinking about thinking means asking questions and reflecting - is this the best way to do something? How could I do this better? How could I derive more enjoyment from this thing I’m doing? It’s not criticizing yourself as much as it is recognizing what you’re doing and whether it’s working or not.

When you’re planning, organizing, deciding, and solving, you’re inherently thinking about thinking. Every time you plan, every time you bring order to chaos, you have to check in with your own brain to see if what you’re doing is moving you closer to the goal posts.

Executive function is one of the things that defines our sentience as living creatures. Every sentient creature from a mouse to us does these tasks. You’ve read or heard stories about crows fashioning tools from wire to solve problems, you’ve watched dogs and cats make decisions and plan. I’ve watched my own cat measure optically whether or not she can make a particular jump.

Properly prompted, today’s AI tools are superb at executive functions as well. Given the right frameworks, harnesses, and data, they can plan, organize, decide, and solve better than we can at most language-based tasks.

And therein lies the actual problem.

Part 3: The Tale of the Tape

Let’s look at each of the 10 topics Claude suggested to see the threads that connect them.

AI Visibility challenges: when you read the verbatims of what people are saying about AI visibility measurement, you can tell they’re pretty much making it up. This is especially true of software vendors that are offering and peddling solutions that have very little grounding in reality - and yet, stakeholders eat this stuff up because they’d rather have certainty about a wrong number than accept uncertainty or no number at all. they are not thinking about their thinking.

Agentic oversight is degrading: the commenters on Reddit focused on the fact that as agents get more sophisticated, it’s harder and harder to follow along to see what they’re doing. So we just hit OK all the time - if we’re even thinking about a human in the loop. We’ve forfeit our authority here. In fact, some AI tools have this built in as a feature. Claude calls it dangerously skip permissions. Qwen calls it YOLO mode.

AI deployment is broken: here, the discussion is about stakeholders telling their stakeholders that the organization has deployed AI without any sense of the impact that it’s had. One poster cited a statistic that 29% of companies see significant ROI from AI, even though individual employees are claiming 5x productivity increases. The math doesn’t math. Here, people don’t want to think and reflect about what deployment even means. Katie’s been writing a lot about this in the Trust Insights newsletter the last few weeks. At its heart, we are confusing using AI with getting results out of AI.

40-60% of budget is wasted: here, folks are talking about how everyone just accepts the default model in AI tools, which is typically the most expensive one. Claude, for example, defaults to Opus 4.8, which is a much more expensive model than Sonnet 5 or Haiku 4.5. We’re not thinking. We’re not making decisions about cost trade-offs versus effectiveness. Another person pointed out that this is by design to create habits. It’s about habit formation for the most expensive models so that when the subsidization of today’s AI ends, we are accustomed to using the most expensive models. This is brain hijacking in a way.

AI is a rental: in this particular topic, the discussion centers around what you actually own in AI, which is very little if you are using today’s closed weights frontier models. Particularly Anthropic’s on-again, off-again rollout of Fable 5, thanks to U.S. export controls, was a wake-up call to the entire industry that you don’t own anything in SaaS, any more than you own music in Spotify or own videos in Netflix - but people think they do.

Sycophancy in focus groups: even though we have good academic research showing that properly prompted AI models can emulate human purchase intent with about 90% accuracy, the level of sycophancy in AI models steers them towards confirmation bias in most situations. This is especially true of synthetic focus groups; when people use AI to simulate consumer intent, what they’re really doing is reinforcing their own biases most of the time. There’s no reflection or questioning the AI output.

AI detectors don’t work: A perpetual favorite topic of mine. This thread of conversation revolved around how companies are using AI detectors to identify the use of AI in situations where it’s not appropriate, without recognizing that the detectors themselves are also broken. In testing I did 3 weeks ago now, AI detectors falsely flagged human outputs 1 out of 7 times. No one is thinking and reflecting enough about who’s watching the watchers.

AI is hollowing out companies: I really liked this quote from the agency owners subreddit:

“What’s strange is nobody decided this. There was no meeting where we discussed this. We automated one annoying task, then another, and one day the job had hollowed out from the inside.“

This erosion of tasks is all about a lack of cognition, a lack of reflection, a lack of a plan. No one’s making decisions - just leaving it up to the machines, a bit more each day.

Tokenmaxxing: this was reflecting on Meta’s most recent news story in which they were on track to spend several billion dollars in AI tokens because they measured AI productivity based on token spend, the dumbest possible way to measure AI.

Marketers as unpaid trainers: this was a whole bunch of ranting about how marketers are effectively unpaid trainers for AI platforms. The more content we produce, the more AI has to train on while simultaneously competing for the tasks we’re paid to do. Here, the thread was about how the average marketer isn’t thinking or reflecting about their relationship to AI.

And this laundry list of 10 items isn’t everything, not by a long shot. Think about how else people use AI without thinking, without thinking about their thinking. Go on LinkedIn and look at the endless streams of comment-bots all paraphrasing the same template over and over again. Look at the workslop flooding your inbox, read the reports your agencies send you that are clearly copy paste jobs.

When we put aside the direction that Claude wanted to nudge this issue of the newsletter, it becomes pretty apparent that it’s really about how much we think about thinking. How self-aware are we? How well and accurately do we perceive our relationship with AI?

Most of all, do we see the amount of executive function we’ve ceded to AI?

Part 4: The Antidote

“Nobody decided this” is haunting me. When you hand off executive functions to AI, who is making the decisions? No one. There’s no one accountable for a decision because the machine is making it for us. Whether it’s building a PowerPoint deck, assembling a report for a client, creating content for a newsletter, when the machine does it, there’s no accountability and there’s no decision making on our part other than approving it.

And this leads to a bunch of bad outcomes, everything from job loss to dissatisfaction with your own work. You know, when you use AI to offload a task, that you didn’t do the work - and you take no pride in it, any more than you’d take pride in the work that a contractor did on your behalf.

Think about this in the context of parents. Go to any parent’s house and you’ll likely see art that the kids made when they were young. The art is generally, objectively, pretty bad. But the parent values it not because of the quality of the art, but because of the level of effort made by the child. They take pride in their child’s efforts, and the child takes pride in what they did in their efforts. For good or ill, when people use AI, they themselves feel like they haven’t made an effort, and the person on the receiving end also feels like they didn’t make an effort.

Sometimes, you don’t even understand the work if you’ve outsourced it. You present it to your stakeholders, and the first question they ask that isn’t in the prepared materials leads to panic city because you can’t answer it, like buying a cake at the store instead of baking it yourself and then having someone ask if a specific allergen is in it. And you’re left scrambling, looking for the label to see what’s actually in the cake.

So my suggested antidote is this: for every task that matters, always start with someting you lead, and force the machines to educate you.

For example, when I compile monthly reports for Trust Insights clients, I turn on my voice recorder and I review the data myself. I talk out loud what I see, what I think, what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense, and then I have AI transcribe it. After the transcription is complete, I ask AI to review it and show me what I missed. I ask it to ask me questions, to record more information, to fish more information from me.

I also ask it, especially around anything in my subject matter expertise, to find me resources to learn and read about its recommendations. Recently, I was asking it to choose from a catalog I’d prepared of over 1,000 different analytical techniques, and it chose an interesting ensemble of 3 techniques, one of which I didn’t know well. So I had it teach me that, so that instead of me passively accepting its recommendations, I learned something. I got better as a professional. I grew my subject matter expertise.

If you think about it, this is not only rational from the perspective of delivering great quality work, it’s also rational from the perspective of my value. If I’m nothing more than a copy paste drone, a meat-based interface to an LLM, then why does my company need me? Why would my clients pay for me when they could just pay to ask ChatGPT or Claude the exact same things?

What they’re paying for is my expertise, my skills not only at using the technology, but the specific lens I direct it with, and the perspective that only I can bring. And if I’m using AI to constantly improve that expertise, to improve that domain knowledge, then they should keep paying for me.

Outside my subject matter expertise, I start with deep research, using AI tools to gather information and then having them create a synthesis. Once I’ve got that, then I have it create a checklist of what constitutes quality in the domain I’m working in. Finally, I sit down with the creations and I read and learn for myself. I have AI make infographics or podcast summaries to learn the domain so that I can connect it to my expertise.

Agentic AI - tools like Claude Code, OpenCode, etc. - are phenomenal researchers, far better than the web-based deep research tools folks have become accustomed to in the past couple of years. When you use a research agent, it has a lot more latitude to gather up sources, to take the time to write down notes and observations, and to synthesize conclusions from the data it has. If you use something like the Trust Insights CASINO research framework, you’ll get some amazing results from the tools that tend to have fewer hallucinations than their web-based counterparts.

Then with that research data in hand, you use it to become a better professional within your domain. You use it to level yourself up. You use it to add to your insights instead of substitute for your insights.

Part 5: Wrapping Up

The biggest problem in AI today is the delegation of our executive function to machines. Whether it’s accountability (machines have none), deskilling, or dissatisfaction with our work, the moment we forfeit executive function is the moment when AI becomes more problem than solution.

We can boil it all down to a simple set of questions:

1. Does the use of AI make the output better?

2. Does the use of AI make me better?

If the answer isn’t yes to BOTH, then you’re not using it well.

Properly used, AI is one of the greatest professional development tools ever created.

Improperly used, it’s one of the most destructive forces your career has ever known, because the moment you offload a task to AI, your own skills at that task get rusty.

And once something becomes rusty enough, it’s cheaper and easier to replace it.

More in the Almost Timely Newsletter

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Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 16:20

Japan Bankruptcies Surge To All-Time High As A Result Of Plunging Yen

In recent months one of the more frequent questions in FX trading has been the relentless collapse in the yen, which recently sank below a 40 year low despite rate differentials stubbornly headed in the opposite direction, and is increasingly flirting with levels which on previous occasions always prompted BOJ intervention.

Among the reasons cited for the chronic weakness of the Japanese currency have been the following three:

1. Real short-term rates in Japan are negative, which is why Ueda has been slow to hike
2. There is a growing perception that Japan's PM Takaichi doesn't want a higher rates or a stronger yen.  A weak yen certainly helps big JP firms profits (while hurting households) so there is a clear weak yen constituency inside the LDP. Japanese financial institutions are also short the yen generally
3. JP financial institutions (notably lifer insurers) see the upfront cost of hedging (the nominal ST rate differential) and have made a mint on unhedged fx assets, and they have been reluctant to change their position just because the yen looks exceptionally undervalued.

Effectively a feedback loop has emerged, whereby the weaker yen leads to an even weaker yen, and despite token resistance by the BOJ - the latest long overdue rate hike being an example - the market clearly anticipates further weakness in the currency, and is pushing it to new lows.

However, a limit to the yen's weakness is now emerging, and it goes to the growing damage on the country's households noted in point 2 above.

As Bloomberg reports, Japan’s weak currency caused the most bankruptcies for the first half of a year since 2022, underscoring the growing economic costs of the currency’s slump. 

Forty-five firms failed from January to June for that reason, up more than 30% from a year earlier, according to a report by Tokyo Shoko Research published last Wednesday. The figure was the highest since 2022, when the data firm started counting companies that specifically cite currency weakness in filing for bankruptcy.

The findings suggest the smaller firms that employ most of Japan’s workers are finding it increasingly difficult to withstand the yen’s prolonged weakness, casting a shadow over the nation’s economy, even as large-cap exporters benefit. 

The data also strengthen the case for continued interest-rate hikes from the Bank of Japan. While higher borrowing costs alone would typically push more firms toward insolvency, closing the gap with US rates could help support the yen.

The yen has steadily weakened against the dollar in recent years as US interest rates climbed to combat pandemic-era inflation while Japanese rates were negative to break free of deflation. While the rate differential has since narrowed, a rally in the dollar and high oil prices from the war in Iran are pressuring the yen.  

The yen hit a new 40 year low of 162 per dollar on Thursday, before rising higher amid some speculation that Japan's financial authorities may finally seek to rein it in. While the weaker currency has boosted exporters’ earnings, it has also driven up import costs, squeezing profit margins across a broad range of import-dependent industries, and has also helped sustain the worst inflation in Japan's recent history.  

The conflict in the Middle East has also drastically boosted costs. A price index for raw materials and merchandise purchases among a broad range of smaller firms surged in the second quarter, according to a survey by the Organization for Small & Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation. The Bank of Japan’s producer price index has also jumped in recent months.

Tokyo Shoko Research’s report showed bankruptcies were particularly concentrated in the wholesale sector. One example was Tokyo-based Merry Time Foods, an importer of crab, shrimp and tuna from other parts of Asia. The company went bankrupt in May, citing deteriorating profitability due to the weak yen and political instability in its supplier countries.

The research firm said in the report that currency-related bankruptcies are likely to remain elevated for some time, particularly among wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers with limited pricing power.

According to Bloomberg, the strain has been acute for small- and mid-sized businesses, who are more affected by higher borrowing costs than their larger counterparts. They’re also contending with mounting wage hike pressures amid persistent labor shortages. Smaller firms often have limited ability to pass higher costs onto customers due to intense competition.

“The weak yen is one contributing factor,” said Yoshihiro Sakata, manager at Tokyo Shoko Research. “Combined with inflation and rising labor costs, it is creating a cumulative burden on businesses.”

Another source of pressure on smaller businesses may be foreign-exchange hedging, including the use of so-called reverse knockout options, according to Yuji Saito, executive adviser at SBI FXTrade. Such products are widely sold by regional banks as structured hedging products, particularly to small and regional importers seeking to minimize upfront option premiums.

Once the exchange rate reaches a preset knockout level, the option expires and the hedge ceases to provide protection. Companies needing dollars must then either purchase them in the spot market, enter into a new hedge - often at less favorable levels - or leave themselves exposed to further currency moves.

“The weaker the yen gets, the more importers roll into increasingly risky option structures,” Saito said. “Once the knockout level is breached, they are forced to buy dollars in the spot market, creating a negative spiral that puts even more downward pressure on the yen."

Analysts estimate that remaining reverse knockout levels are clustered between 163 and 170 yen per dollar, territory that many firms didn’t think the currency would reach as intervention from the central bank would likely be forthcoming due to the adverse economic impact of such unprecedented currency collapse.

“The number of knockouts could increase if the yen weakens further,” said Hiroyuki Machida, director of Japan FX and commodities sales at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group. “The situation is becoming significant for companies that are unable to pass on higher costs.”

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 15:45

Russia's Buffer Zone On Ukrainian Border 'Expanding' As Result Of Worsening Drone Attacks: Kremlin

Russia has announced that one key measure that will be taken in response to Ukraine's ramped-up drone attacks on Russian territory, including last month's major strikes on the Moscow area, is the significant expansion of the border 'buffer zone' between the waring countries.

"A security buffer zone on the Russian-Ukrainian border is conditioned by the aggressive nature of the Kiev regime and the Russian military is engaged in this process systematically reaching the appropriate progress," presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday.

Source: Kremlin/Reuters

In essence this is the Kremlin saying that Russian forces plan to permanently take over territory deeper into Ukraine.

"Based on the aggressive nature of the Kiev regime and in order to insure the safety of our citizens, we are setting up a security zone, or the so-called, buffer zone," Peskov continued. "This buffer zone is being created systematically. We do register significant results regarding the terms of our troops’ advancing."

"There area should be no in no one doubts that it would will be serve to extend the necessary area ensuring our security," he added.

"Our troops are advancing," Peskov continued. "No one here should have any doubt that our military is proceeding systematically, and we are seeing concrete results."

He cited the taking of Konstantinovka: "This is a milestone, it is the most important step towards taking the common fortified area of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk," he claimed according to TASS.

President Putin has of late been taking steps to strongly signal he's committed as ever to completing the war aims of Russia's 'special military operation' - despite reports of nationwide fuel shortages, and also a full-blown gasoline supply crisis in Crimea.

The Kremlin released footage on Friday evening of the 73-year old Russian leader visiting an auxiliary command post to meet with the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces.

Putin wore a military uniform, which Russian state sources described as a sign of his resolve to "finish off the terrorist neo-Nazi vermin".

English-language RT's response: "...seems to desire for that security zone to begin on the Polish border."

Putin: "The more strikes the enemy attempts to carry out on our civilian facilities, the larger the security zone we will have to create in adjacent territories."

Sadly, the current Kiev regime seems to desire for that security zone to begin on the Polish border.…

— Chikhi Cato (@KatoHus56872326) July 4, 2026

The scene appeared aimed primarily at the West, which has been questioning Moscow's resolve due to the now frequent Ukrainian drone hits on sensitive energy infrastructure.

President Trump has also lately appeared to pivot back to wanting the resolve the Ukraine conflict, while still seeking permanent offramp regarding to the Iran war crisis.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 14:35