Central Banking: The Scourge Of Civilization Authored by George Ford Smith via Mises Institute, Apple builds and sells iPhones. I happen to own one of the older models, for the same reason I own a last-legs older model car. What if Apple could skip the build part and sell only the phone? The money saved would be an enormous boost to its bottom line. And if Apple passed the savings onto customers I could conceivably afford to […]

World’s Largest Refiner Says China’s Oil Demand “Very Likely Peaked Last Year” One of the most understated stories of 2026, and the reason why oil (and gas) aren’t trading at persistently nosebleed levels (ignore diesel for the time being), has been China’s unexpectedly weak oil demand. And while there has been much speculation surrounding the reason for this chronically weak oil demand, ranging from an accelerated – and offsetting […]

DOJ To Deploy 1,000 Election Monitors For Midterms The Justice Department is preparing to send a record 1,000 federal monitors to polling places for the 2026 midterms, the largest deployment of its kind in the agency’s history. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs the Civil Rights Division, gave the number to Bloomberg last week and the figure alone tells you how central “election integrity” has become to this […]

Japan Power Prices Surge To Highest Since 2023 By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com Japan’s nationwide day-ahead electricity price soared by 20% in one week to settle on Monday at the highest level since January 2023, as gas supply disruptions from the Middle East and an intense heatwave pushed up prices and consumption.   The day-ahead power price in Japan has jumped to $0.16 (25.18 Japanese yen) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) on […]

Inside China’s Humanoid Robot Boom: What BofA Analysts Saw On The Ground In Beijing China put its humanoid robotics industry on full display last week with a series of technological, commercial, and capital-markets milestones. Beijing first hosted the 2026 World Robot Conference, followed by the five-day World Humanoid Robot Games, while Unitree capped the week with a blockbuster IPO. Bank of America analyst Ming Hsun Lee attended […]

Michigan’s Energy Abundance Is On The Ballot Authored by Samantha Fillmore via RealClearEnergy, It is indisputable that energy is the lifeblood of every civilization. We are reminded of that truth daily at the gas pumps and when it’s time to recharge the latest iPhone. Another indisputable truth is that the availability and affordability of energy are as delicate as the fiber-optic cables that supply our homes with Wi-Fi. We are […]

Your Tax Dollars At Work: San Fran Shelter Workers Accused Of Hiding Cop Shooter Two employees at a San Francisco homeless shelter funded through city contracts have been arrested for allegedly helping a suspected cop shooter hide from police, according to the New York Post. The case stems from a May 31 confrontation near the Bay Bridge involving 36-year-old Norris Reed III. Authorities say what began as an attempted traffic stop […]

“Operation Economic Outcast” Begins: Bessent Warns Countries Helping Iran Face Expulsion From Dollar System Summary Bessent Unveils “Operation Economic Outcast” Against Iran  Pakistan enters diplomatic push: Pakistan’s army chief reportedly traveled to Tehran after Trump urged him to help reopen Iran talks. Iran threatens new tanker action: Tehran blacklisted 45 vessels and warned of further Hormuz attacks. US readies […]

Massachusetts Citizenship Rule At Center Of Alleged Voter-Impersonation Case Authored by Arthur Zhang via The Epoch Times, After federal prosecutors charged a Chinese man for registering to vote and casting a ballot under his former landlord’s name, experts are questioning Massachusetts’ verification processes. A voter fills out his midterm-election ballot in Boston City Hall on Nov. 8, 2022. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images […]

TotalEnergies CEO Reveals Cost To Move A Supertanker Through Hormuz The crisis-driven dislocation across Gulf oil markets has positioned French energy giant TotalEnergies SE as an early mover, capitalizing on heavily discounted Persian Gulf crude priced at $50 to $60 a barrel and moving it through the highly contested Strait of Hormuz. CEO Patrick Pouyanné revealed at the Norwegian energy conference on Monday that transiting the […]

Regulation: Protecting Incumbents And Suppressing Competition Authored by Hal Snarr via Mises Institute, A previous article attributed widespread airline service failures not to individual carriers but to government interventions sold as consumer protections. Through a web of intricate regulations and controls, the state restricts entry, grants shared monopoly privileges to approved carriers, and creates what Rothbard calls a […]

US Scraps September Korea Marine Drills In Wake Of Iran War Strain Fresh on the heels of President Trump controversially ordering scaled-down US-South Korea military drills last week, there are emerging reports of more canceled plans for joint exercises. South Korean and American force were going to hold large-scale maritime drills focused on amphibious landing exercises in September, but Seoul has said the Pentagon had to back out […]

Supreme Court Backs Trump’s Mail-In Ballot Overhaul The Supreme Court sided with President Trump over his plan to use the Postal Service to impose broad new restrictions on the distribution of mail ballots. Over the dissent of the court’s three liberal judges, SCOTUS’ ruling means that the Trump administration can move forward with a proposal for DHS to compile state-specific lists of people it believes are eligible to vote in […]

DEI Refuses To Die Authored by Kenin M. Spivak via RealClearPolitics, Although the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and civil rights laws dating back to 1866 prohibit nearly all racial preferences, most Americans oppose these preferences, and Donald Trump was elected vowing to eliminate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) – progressives won’t give up. Their race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional […]

Iryna Zarutska’s Family Sues City Of Charlotte Over Fatal Rail Stabbing, Claims Inadequate Security The family of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was fatally stabbed on a North Carolina light rail train last year, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Charlotte and a private security firm. A sreenshot from footage showing the moments before a Ukrainian refugee was stabbed to death on a light rail […]

Our World ‘Is Coming Apart Now… In Astounding Ways’ Authored by James Howard Kunstler, Cookery For All “We’re only cooked if we accept it.” – Blaine Holt on “X” They don’t call economics the dismal science for nothing. It has been noted – since Thomas Carlyle minted the term in 1849 (objecting to the emancipation of black slaves on Britain’s colonial sugar plantations as a harm to productivity) – that […]

Federal Appeals Court Rules In Favor Of James O’Keefe Over Undercover Reporting Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times, A U.S. appeals court has entered a judgment in favor of James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, and a Project Veritas reporter. A split panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit judges said on Aug. 21 that a district court judge had erroneously kept in place $130,000 in […]

Iran Airs Video Claiming Barron Trump Being Spied On, Offers $10 Million Bounty On His Head Update(1900ET): While it was largely Israeli media’s Ch.14 which first called attention to the “Where to kill Barron Trump” clip, the short video does appear to be a creation of Iranian state media. It is indeed authentic. It is currently featured at the Tehran-based Tebyan Cultural Institute’s official Persian-language homepage. The […]

“I Hope It Gives A Really Good Lesson Going Forward”: ‘Pollster’ Prakash’s License To Lie Authored by Jonathan Turley via Jonathan Turley, In this political season, there is one question that needs no poll: Rahil Prakash is a liar. The other thing we know is that he will likely get away with spreading fake polling results. Lies can be protected speech under the First Amendment and, while Prakash would not likely want to take a […]

The Great Walkback: Sam Altman Admits He Was Wrong On AI’s Economic Timeline For three years, Sam Altman has pitched the imminent, wholesale disruption of the global economy. This week, staring down the barrel of an IPO – based on a business model that’s actively being ‘wholesale disrupted’ by China – the OpenAI chief executive quietly admitted he got the timing wrong. Appearing on David Senra’s Founders podcast, Altman conceded […]

Gold: From DC’s “Enemy” To Its Last Hope? Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold, As headlines from the Iranian “conflict” continue to leave the world guessing as to what, if any, military, political and financial solutions lie ahead, we can at least know this much: The approaching autumn looks a bit scary. A Market Fall in the Fall? The macro setting for our collective transition from summer to fall in 2026 is […]

Nvidia Informs Hyperscalers About Incoming Price Hikes As Memory Costs Soar The AI infrastructure buildout boom could soon enter another inflationary wave.  Nvidia’s largest hyperscaler customers face sharply higher costs next year, with Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems expected to jump in price as surging memory costs ripple through the chip stacks. Bloomberg cited sources familiar with Nvidia’s new pricing regime, […]

Mole Men Return? Weird Manhattan Manhole Crew Spotted At 4AM Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News, The manhole people are back. Early Saturday morning, just after 4 a.m., a group was filmed exiting a manhole in Manhattan. The footage, captured and shared by independent New York photographer Viral News NYC, shows the individuals climbing out of the street in the dead of night once again. The manhole people are back . […]

Russia Scrambles To Restore Fuel Supplies As Refineries Resume Operations By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com Amid the ongoing fuel crisis in Russia, authorities are rushing to ease concerns that the shortages are worsening. Russia has been suffering from a gasoline and diesel crunch since the spring, when Ukraine intensified its drone attacks at Russian refineries, aiming to cripple fuel supply to the front lines and to the […]

Jet-Fuel Price Shock Hits Airlines As Raymond James Cuts Estimate Across Coverage, Warns Of JetBlue Bankruptcy Risk As we’ve told readers, and as former Goldman commodities guru Jeff Currie explained last week, the energy crisis is not necessarily in Brent or WTI supplies, but in refined-product markets, given the diesel crack spread’s jump above $100 a barrel last week. Early Monday, the spread was trading around $94. The […]