Aggregator

This is wheely insane.

The franchise shared the heartbreaking news of Cristina Ulbrich’s death in a statement, remembering her as a devoted member of the Falcons family.

Loved ones launched a GoFundMe to cover funeral costs, describing him as having a “humble spirit” and “contagious smile.”

Das: The End Of American Greatness?

Authored by Satyajit Das via New India Exporess,

A U-turn for the US in its 250th birthday

America’s claim to singularity rested on plentiful resources, cheap labour, govt largesse and military edge. With all of the factors fraying, it needs a hard look at the mirror

As the United States of America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence, it is useful to reflect on the nation’s ascent. History and geography foremost. A virgin territory for European colonisers provided a fresh start escaping the encumbrances, distinctions, hatreds and internecine wars of the Old World. It is a continent protected by two, as President Donald Trump puts it, “beautiful” oceans. Other than the revolution for independence, war of 1812, the civil war and the Mexican-American war, it has largely avoided major warfare on the mainland.

Today, it happens to be the third-largest continent blessed with fertile soil, plentiful freshwater, forests and mineral deposits including iron ore, coal and oil—most of it obtained cheaply by forcibly dispossessing and exterminating indigenous owners. The drive and ambitions of generations of immigrants with little were central to development.

In the 20th century, it attracted talent from other countries across disciplines. Foreigners are central to US industry and science. Today, more than half of Silicon Valley’s technology workers are foreign-born and trained overseas at the cost of their native countries. Agriculture, hospitality and construction benefit from cheap immigrant labour, particularly for physically demanding, repetitive or menial jobs. Abundant resources facilitate a strong agricultural and industrial base, which underpins its military power.

America’s free enterprise ethos is overstated. Public investment on infrastructure, education and research, such as funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are important. The Internet and Google’s search engine were partially supported by government funds. American industry benefitted from tariff protection.

Low wages are central. Many G20 countries have significantly higher minimum wages than the US level of $7.25 per hour (higher in some states). America’s Gini Coefficient—a measure of inequality—is higher than many comparable economies. America’s ‘get-rich’ and ‘everybody-can-be-a-winner’ culture is central to acceptance of these discrepancies. American tolerance for failure is significant. F Scott Fitzgerald was wrong believing "there are no second acts in American lives”. For most entrepreneurs, bankruptcy is conveniently a rite of passage.

The US dollar’s status as a reserve currency in the post-war monetary order allows American businesses to minimise currency risk, heavy government borrowing to finance large budget and current account deficits while boosting US financial markets. Strong protection of rights and good governance, historically, gave confidence to domestic and foreign actors.

These advantages have diminished over time.  America faces resource constraints. Agricultural output is affected by declining soil quality, the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and climate change effects on rainfall, wildfires and temperature. Monocultural farming practices have increased exposure to disease. Forests have been overharvested. Many raw material reserves are now reaching the end of their economic lives. The US’s oil reserves may last for roughly 50 years, depending on consumption and new discoveries. Their expected life, excluding shale oil, may be less than 10 years.

Deindustrialisation and outsourcing of production have substantially reduced its industrial base. Business largely provides services or focuses on branding, marketing, advertising and selling other’s products rather than on manufacture. Tesla views itself as a technology firm, recycling a product first considered by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. It has fallen behind Chinese firm’s like BYD. Industrial giants, like GE and Boeing, are in decline. Important innovation hubs like Bell Labs and PARC are less influential.

This has been accompanied by loss of skilled workers. Despite being skewed by the results from expensive private schools, US students ranked 28th and 12th out of 37 OECD member countries in mathematics and science respectively, below major industrial peers. Favoured careers for American children include influencers, online content creators or professional athletes. America trains fewer engineers than Russia despite a population almost two and a half times larger. The decline of interest in STEM careers has meant growing reliance on foreign expertise in key areas. In the words of Russian physicist Sergei Kapitsa: “Mathematics is what Russian professors teach Chinese students in American universities.” 

America’s military, reliant on expensive high-tech weaponry, has repeatedly failed against patient opponents skilled in cheap asymmetric warfare willing to endure long campaigns of attrition and losses. Societal dysfunction is evidenced by deaths of despair, the rise in mortality rates from suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol-related deaths linked to social and economic factors.  

Restoring American greatness requires addressing these trends. Instead, the Trump administration is accelerating and entrenching them.  It is fomenting societal divisions for short-term political gain. Homeland and border security is now a vehicle for xenophobia, racism, vilification and legal mistreatment of foreigners, some of whom are legal residents. This immigration phobia is counterproductive given American dependence on foreign skills and cheap labour. The US is now a less favoured destination for global talent with scientists, engineers and researchers seeking opportunities elsewhere.

The over-hyped free-enterprise system has given way to control by wealthy insiders buying influence by their campaign contributions. The dollar’s supremacy is under threat from seizure of foreign assets, tariffs, secondary sanctions, expulsion from the dollar payment system and the risk of a constructive default by a forced exchange of US government bonds for less valuable securities. 

The rule of law is threatened by arbitrary rule using erratic Presidential fiat, disregard for court orders and weaponising an increasingly partisan Department of Justice and judiciary to attack adversaries. Unilateral claims on assets, like Ukraine’s minerals and energy plants, Venezuelan oil, TikTok, the Panama Canal and Greenland, which can then presumably be redistributed to the administration’s favoured lickspittles, undermine protection for property rights and will discourage foreign investors.

American society is now unstable. Some divisions, like those along racial lines, income and wealth, are familiar. A new element is resentment of an intellectual elite and experts captured by Pat Buchanan: “… it is blue-collar Americans whose jobs are lost when trade barriers fall, working-class kids who bleed and die in Mogadishu… the best and brightest tend to escape the worst consequences of the policies they promote… This may explain … why… the best and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists…” Consensus is nearly impossible. The chance of some form of civil war is now non-trivial. 

Rather than greatness, the US is transitioning to a failed First-World kleptocracy with high tariffs, unsustainable debt, budget deficits, oligarchy, corruption and societal dysfunction. For those seeking parallels, the reigns of Idi Amin in Uganda and Mobutu Sese Soku in Zaire offer helpful guides.

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

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/30/2026 - 21:45

The question of whether Gianni Infantino can sell off part of the World Cup to private equity has now morphed into a question of his own survival.

Billions of dollars are being poured into a new wave of AI technology. But will it pay off?

South Lake Tahoe millionaires are being offered cash incentives to give up their second homes in the vacation place for a year in order to increase affordable housing for local workers, but there’s a catch.

Call it circumstance, call it dire traits, call it whatever you want. According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the 49ers and Deebo Samuel have agreed to a one-year contract worth $7 million. Injuries to current San Francisco wide receivers Ricky Pearsall and Christian Kirk prompted the club to turn back the clock to...

This week the Eagles made Jalen Carter the highest paid defensive lineman in NFL history. His new deal, details not yet fully known, will be enormous, the latest insanity. 

Declan Driscoll's hilarious AWOL attempt was caught on the family's security cameras and has since gone viral on TikTok, amassing close to 3 million views since the boy's mother, Hannah Driscoll, posted it on July 18.

A Dozen Red States Join Trump's SCOTUS Vote-By-Mail Shadow-Docket Push

The Supreme Court fight over President Trump's mail-in voting order picked up reinforcements this week: twelve Republican-led states, with Alabama at the front, filed Tuesday in support of the administration's emergency application, and the procedural clock now compresses the whole dispute into roughly the next two weeks - with the midterms 96 days out.

As we detailed Tuesday, the administration went to the high court Monday seeking to lift the injunction blocking Executive Order 14399 - the March directive ordering DHS and the Social Security Administration to compile citizenship-verified voter lists and instructing the Postal Service to restrict delivery of mail ballots to people on them - after the 1st Circuit upheld the block on Saturday in a 2-1 decision declaring that "state and local officials are responsible for administering federal elections." The new development, per SCOTUSblog's Amy Howe, is the twelve-state filing urging the justices to pause the 1st Circuit's order while litigation continues - and the argument it leads with is the one most likely to get a stay granted: a live circuit split. The states point to two recent D.C. Circuit rulings on the very same executive order, one of which, they say, "held that it is too early to challenge the EO," and the other of which reinstated the order on that same basis.

Courts Split

The 1st Circuit blocked the order across the 23 Democratic-led states (plus DC) that sued in Massachusetts, reasoning that election officials there are already diverting resources and buying ballot envelopes to comply with a directive that may be unlawful. The D.C. Circuit, looking at the same order, lifted a broader injunction against the Postal Service rule - leaving open, as CNBC noted, the possibility that USPS could implement the restrictions in the 27 states that never sued. Two appellate courts, one executive order, opposite bottom lines, an election on the calendar: that is the fact pattern emergency relief was invented for, and the red states are making sure the justices cannot miss it.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer called it "an intra-branch directive from the president to his subordinates" that of its own force changes nothing in any state, per CNN - while simultaneously warning, per The Hill's account of the application, that agencies would need to begin implementation as soon as early-to-mid August for anything to take effect by November, given state timelines for voter-roll verification and absentee ballot processing. Both things can be true, but the second one sets the real deadline: if the Court has not acted within days of receiving the states' response, the order is functionally dead for this cycle no matter who eventually wins the merits.

Looking Forward

The challengers - the California-led coalition of 23 states and DC - must respond by 4 pm Monday, August 3, to both the government's application and the twelve states' supporting request. The application lands first with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency matters from the 1st Circuit, though the full Court customarily votes when an administration brings the request. This is, per CNN, only the administration's third emergency appeal of the year after filing nearly 30 last year - the administration's 35th overall, by The Hill's count - a slowed cadence that makes the ones it does file read as the priorities.

Whether a president can direct federal agencies to build a national eligible-voter list and condition mail-ballot delivery on it, or whether that intrudes on election machinery the Constitution leaves to the states - will not be resolved on this timeline. What gets resolved in the next two weeks is simply whether the order operates in November, and in which states, and the answer may well arrive via a one-paragraph shadow-docket order with no reasoning attached. Ninety-six days out, with 23 states running one set of mail-ballot rules and 27 potentially running another, the map itself is becoming the story...

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/30/2026 - 21:20

Giants head coach Jim Harbaugh already can see Andrew Thomas and Abdul Carter making each other even better.

The Lake Washington School District is reviewing a viral video of nurse Kelsey Ballin celebrating the death of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk.

Despite being let go in ESPN's recent layoffs, Karl Ravech will still call select baseball games and the Little League World Series this summer.

The Mets and Clay Holmes aren’t engaged in contract negotiations, so he’ll almost surely go in trade.

The Dodgers play a great offense, but defense could ultimately lead them to make a winning bid for Skubal.

Why Americans Soured On Higher Education

Authored by Viktor Joecks via The Epoch Times,

Even colleges can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Just 38 percent of Americans have high confidence in higher education, according to a new Gallup poll. That’s down from 57 percent in 2015. Gallup found the three main reasons for this lack of confidence are political agenda, cost and not preparing students for a future career.

This is a stunning—and much-needed—fall from grace.

Many schools and politicians spent decades pushing ever more kids into college. Sen. Bernie Sanders even sponsored the “College for All Act.” It was endorsed by numerous left-wing groups, including the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association.

These voices assured high school students that higher education was a virtual guarantee of financial security. You’ve likely heard some version of this factoid. College graduates earn $1 million more than non-graduates during their careers.

This effort certainly convinced more people to attend college. In 1974, just under 48 percent of high school graduates attended college. That number topped 70 percent in 2009. In 2014, it was 68.4 percent.

But for many, the promised financial benefits didn’t materialize—even as tuition soared. More than 9.5 million student loan borrowers are currently in default, according to a recent AP analysis. That includes a 4.2-million-borrower jump from April 2025 to March 2026. One of the reasons for the sudden jump appears to be the end of the COVID-era payment pause. Borrowers go into default if they don’t make a payment for nine months.

Universities once introduced students to the great ideas and authors of Western Civilization. Now, many professors emphasize America’s sins, not her greatness.

Debate once flourished on college campuses. Now, colleges routinely allow students to shout down speakers who believe men aren’t women or harass Jewish students.

Further, elite universities routinely discriminate against white and Asian applicants.

Would-be students have noticed.

In 2024, college attendance was under 63 percent among high school graduates. The drop-off has been especially pronounced among male students.

A decline in college enrollment has led to a wave of college closures. In the 2013-14 school year, there were more than 7,200 postsecondary institutions accepting federal financial aid. In the 2024-25 school year, there were 5,760. That’s a 20 percent decrease.

This doesn’t mean UNLV or Stanford are on the verge of bankruptcy. Many of the closed schools were technical schools that offered certificates, not four-year degrees. But hundreds of degree-granting institutions, especially in the Northeast, have closed too. America’s declining birth rate is another daunting problem for many struggling institutions.

Now, colleges face a new challenge—students using AI to cheat. Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano recently demonstrated how widespread this problem is. For one economics class, he let his class of 86 take home the midterm. The average score was 96 percent. In past classes, the average midterm score had been between 65 and 80 percent.

Since he suspected many of his students used AI to cheat, he changed the final to an in-class exam. Twenty-seven students either dropped the class or didn’t take the final. The average score was 48.5 percent. Two students who scored 100 percent on the midterm scored a zero on the final. The data suggested only a handful of students didn’t use AI on the midterm.

Put this all together.

College is ridiculously expensive, saddling many students with loans they’ll spend decades struggling to repay. Colleges shelter students from authors like Shakespeare and competing ideas. They practice racial discrimination in admissions. And now, students can get A’s by outsourcing their thinking to ChatGPT. Even propped up by government subsidies, that’s not a great sales pitch.

Here’s the irony. The ongoing college collapse is driven by knowledge, not ignorance.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/30/2026 - 20:55

John Harbaugh brought a uniform fashion statement from Baltimore to the Giants.

The San Francisco 49ers are looking to assist Christian McCaffrey by any means necessary.

UEFA threatens to boycott FIFA over Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell World Cup stakes to private equity, putting upcoming tournaments at risk.