Gun Safety: Violent Crime Drops As More Americans Pack Heat

Authored by John R. Lott jr via RealClearInvestigations,

Alessandra Coote was walking on a trail with her 2-year-old daughter and dog two-and-a-half years ago when a man began yelling at her and threatened to kill her dog. When the petite single mom made it back to her Utah home, she decided she needed a firearm for protection.

A few months later, while living in what she described as a “shady part of town,” a homeless man threatened her. After that encounter, she began regularly carrying a firearm under Utah’s Constitutional Carry law.

Coote, who just graduated this spring from the University of Utah, says carrying the gun has given her the confidence to feel safe in public. “It’s been life-changing,” she told RealClearInvestigations (RCI). Although she has never had to draw or fire the weapon, she has faced a threatening individual when she was armed, but stopped the attack by merely letting the man know she was carrying.

Coote is part of a growing trend of strapped Americans. A new survey of 1,000 general election voters conducted last month by McLaughlin & Associates found that almost 30 percent of respondents said they carry a firearm. More specifically, the survey found that 13.2 percent respondents said they carry a firearm all or most of the time, while an additional 16.6 percent said they carry one sometimes or rarely. These results show a 5.5 percent increase in the number of respondents who said they carry firearms since a similar poll was conducted in December 2024.

Both polls were commissioned by the group I lead, the Crime Prevention Research Center, and have a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent.

Since 2021, 13 states, covering 34 percent of the U.S. population, have adopted constitutional carry laws. As a result, 29 states do not require law-abiding citizens to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun. A little less than two-thirds of those who are carrying a concealed handgun in these states have a permit.

The survey is the latest evidence challenging claims linking firearms and violent crime. As data show both the number of firearms and the percentage of people carrying them is increasing, preliminary estimates show the U.S. murder rate is likely to hit a record low in 2025—at least 10 percent below the previous record low.

“It doesn’t surprise me that while the country is experiencing record-low murder and violent crime rates, we are also experiencing a record high number of people legally carrying concealed handguns for self-protection,” Alan Gottlieb, the executive vice president and founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, told RCI.

Bradford County, Fla., Sheriff Gordon Smith said lowering crime rates “isn’t rocket science.” He told RCI, “You reduce crime by putting more cops on the street, increasing arrest and conviction rates, and imposing meaningful prison sentences. But you also cut crime by empowering law-abiding citizens to defend themselves and their families through constitutional carry.”

Gun control groups—Everytown, Brady United, and Giffords Law Center—declined repeated requests to respond to the survey data and crime statistics.

Blacks, Hispanics & Women

The CPRC survey also found that politically engaged citizens are more likely to carry firearms. Respondents who identified as general election voters were twice as likely to have concealed handgun permits as other adults.

Blacks and Hispanics also carry at disproportionately high rates. Black people make up 11.0 percent of likely voters but account for 15.9 percent of those who carry all or most of the time. Hispanics are even higher, accounting for 18.8 percent of frequent carriers despite comprising only 11.0 percent of likely voters. By contrast, whites and Asians carry at rates below their shares of likely voters. Whites constitute 72 percent of likely voters but only 62.6 percent of those who carry all or most of the time, while Asians account for 4.0 percent of likely voters but just 2.0 percent of frequent carriers.

Audrey Bodiford, a 5’2” black woman living in Lansing, Michigan, told RCI she owes her life to her handgun and having a concealed handgun permit. On Valentine’s Day in 2022, she said, the over 6-foot-tall man she had been dating “kind of went crazy,” threatened to kill her, and pulled a knife on her. Fearing for her life, she shot him in self-defense.

Because she lives in what she describes as a “not good” neighborhood, this was not the only time she relied on her firearm for protection. In another incident, she said she accidentally let a door slip from her hand while trying to hold it open for a man leaving a store. The man became verbally abusive, followed her, and aggressively closed in on her. She turned slightly so he could see that she was armed. He immediately backed off, ending the confrontation. Asked if carrying has given her more confidence: “I feel more safe, definitely,” she said.

The survey found relatively small differences between men and women. While women make up 52 percent of general election voters, they comprise 45.1 percent of Americans carrying concealed weapons; men are 48 percent of the electorate and 54.9 percent of those who carry all or most of the time. The breakdown for Constitutional Carry states is relatively higher for women, with 47.5 percent of those carrying all/most of the time being women and 52.5 percent men. Constitutional Carry may benefit women who suddenly face threats from a stalker or former partner and often do not feel they can wait the months it takes for officials to approve a permit application.

Research shows that two groups benefit the most from carrying firearms: physically weaker individuals, such as women and the elderly, and those most likely to become crime victims, such as poor blacks living in high-crime urban areas. These groups have also experienced the largest percentage increases in concealed handgun permits over the last decade (2015–2024). During that period, permits for women increased 112 percent faster than permits for men, while permits for blacks increased 284 percent faster than permits for whites.

“A firearm dramatically increases a woman’s ability to defend herself,” Professor Carl Moody, a crime researcher at the College of William & Mary, told RCI. “Without a firearm, a woman is almost always at a significant disadvantage if attacked by a man. With a firearm, she can avoid an unfair fight with an opponent who usually has a size and strength advantage. Almost always, it is only necessary to announce or display the weapon to dissuade the attacker.”

More Guns, Fewer Violent Crimes

After the Supreme Court struck down a New York state law in 2022 which had sharply limited the number of people who could carry concealed weapons, six states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, were forced to make it easier to get a concealed handgun permit by eliminating arbitrary discretion and establishing objective rules on training and other qualifications. “This dangerous decision will make America a less safe country,” Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy warned. Those states did, indeed, see an enormous increase in the number of permits issued. In New Jersey, the number of concealed carry permit holders increased from 1,212 in 2022 to 57,245 in 2025. In Hawaii, the total has now gone from zero to 4,000.

Violent crime, however, has fallen in all six states. The murder rate in New Jersey fell from 3.9 per 100,000 people in 2022 to 2.4 in 2024, and the preliminary numbers show it falling to as low as two per 100,000 in 2025. A press release from New Jersey’s attorney general announced a “Historic Low in Gun Violence for 2025.” Some attribute the drop to the increase in permits. “Today, more than 58,000 law-abiding New Jerseyans can exercise their right to carry a firearm. And while some warned this would turn our streets into the Wild West, the reality has been far different,” Republican New Jersey Assemblyman Greg Myhre claimed.

An easier thing to measure is that permit holders are exceptionally law-abiding. States revoke their licenses for firearm-related violations at rates measured in thousandths or even tens of thousandths of a percentage point. Police officers rarely commit crimes, yet concealed handgun permit holders prove even more law-abiding than cops. Permit holders are convicted for firearms offenses at just one-twelfth the rate at which police are convicted of comparable firearm-related crimes.

“The data clearly show that concealed carry permit holders are among the safest and most responsible users of firearms,” David Mustard, a distinguished professor at the University of Georgia who researches extensively on crime, told RCI. Bradford County Sheriff Gordon Smith confirmed that this is his experience with Constitutional Carry: “The data is clear: The vast majority of concealed carriers are among our most responsible residents, not the problem.”

Despite the fears raised by gun-control advocates, over 91 percent of street police officers support concealed handgun laws. Law enforcement professionals understand that self-defense is a key element of public safety, in part because they know they usually arrive only after criminals commit crimes. An overwhelming body of academic research finds that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces crime.

This is especially true for women, who often struggle to defend themselves against much larger and stronger men, who also tend to run faster. While both men and women benefit from carrying a concealed handgun, research shows that each additional woman who carries a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by roughly three to four times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men.

“Too often, women who are being stalked or threatened are told to limit their movements, alter their routines, or rely on a piece of paper to stop someone determined to harm them,” Robyn Sandoval, the president of A Girl & A Gun, told RCI. “Women deserve better than living in fear. By learning to responsibly carry a firearm, they can gain the confidence and means to protect themselves and live their lives without fear.”

“Every day, more law-abiding citizens choose to legally carry firearms because they refuse to be victimized by criminals and thugs,” Brevard County, FL, Sheriff Wayne Ivey told RCI. “Responsible gun owners know that even the best police response times takes minutes, while violent criminals can take a life in seconds!”

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 22:35

New Study Exposes How The Left Turned Mental Illness Into A Political Identity

Something researchers have observed for decades is finally crystallizing into a measurable cultural phenomenon. Political conservatives consistently report higher levels of happiness, better mental health, and stronger psychological well-being than their liberal counterparts. A new study published in Political Behavior takes that finding several steps further, arguing that mental illness has begun functioning as its own political identity, and that identity clusters most tightly on the left.

Columbia University's magazine originally flagged the underlying trend back in 2023, reporting that "American adults who identify as politically liberal have long reported lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being than conservatives," Based on the data of four different studies, researchers from the Universities of Florida and Toronto, found an explanation: conservatives tend to exhibit greater personal agency, religiosity, moral clarity, self-worth, and a more optimistic general disposition.

The Political Behavior study was conducted by Prof. Lauren Van De Hey of Utah State University, and the implications of her findings were significant. "I further find that there is an emerging mental health political identity that is most pronounced among younger (Gen Z) and more liberal Americans," she said.

She also noted that "the political predictors and political consequences for the emerging mental health identity differ from those for physical disability and serious physical illness categorization and identification," suggesting that mental health, unlike physical illness, has acquired a distinctly ideological character in American life.

Approximately half of the study participants with mental illness reported that their identity as a person with a mental health condition is "very important or somewhat important" to them. Meanwhile, conservatives are less likely than liberals to categorize anxiety and depression as mental health conditions and seek clinical treatment at lower rates. Van De Hey speculates this may reflect a "personal responsibility ethos: they do not seek help when they think they can resolve the issues on their own." That framing, notably, does not treat the conservative approach as a pathology.

The study concludes that "these findings have far-reaching consequences for mental health advocacy, and the role mental health identity will play in the political sphere - especially as Gen Z matures as a cohort," with conservative and specifically Christian beliefs credited as having a stronger track record for producing happiness and well-being than leftist counterparts.

"It is becoming increasingly clear which ideas do what! Conservative, and specifically Christian, ideas have a much better track record than their leftist counterparts," writes Glenn T. Stanton of Daily Citizen. "This has deep personal and political implications."

The gender dimension of this divide deserves its own examination. Academic literature going back to the 1970s establishes that women generally report worse mental health than men. A separate body of research establishes that conservatives report greater happiness than liberals. Among young liberal women, both trends converge. Last year, the Institute for Family Studies report found that 37% of conservative women report being "completely satisfied" with life, compared to 28% of moderates and just 12% of liberal women. Young conservative women are more than three times as likely as liberal women to report feeling very happy, and IFS found that "liberal women are two to three times more likely to report they are 'not satisfied' with their lives, compared to conservative women."

The loneliness numbers were just as striking. Among women ages 18 to 40, 29% of liberals reported feeling lonely many times a week. Among conservative women, that figure dropped to 11%. The explanatory variables IFS identified were that young conservative women are far more likely to be married, far less likely to be cohabiting, and nearly five times more likely to attend weekly church services.

IFS concluded that closing the happiness gap "will seemingly require not only a change in thinking but also a renewal of young liberal women's connection to America's core institutions - family and faith." That's a direct challenge to a progressive framework that has spent years telling young women that traditional institutions are the source of their suffering rather than the solution.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 22:10

Federal Agents Dismantle Human Smuggling Stash House In Texas

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times,

U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents busted a stash house used for human smuggling in El Paso, Texas, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) exclusively told The Epoch Times on Monday.

U.S. Border Patrol agents monitor the southern border outside of San Diego, Calif. on May 27, 2026. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

The joint investigation, which resulted in the arrests of 11 illegal immigrant adults and one unaccompanied child found in the house on May 27, highlights the need for strict enforcement efforts at the border to dissuade individuals from entering the country unlawfully through human smugglers, CBP officials said.

"This operation, in partnership with U.S. Border Patrol, reflects our mission to safeguard the homeland and uphold the integrity of our immigration system," HSI El Paso Special Agent in Charge Ryan McRae said. "We remain committed to ensuring the safety and security of El Paso and beyond."

Of the 12 illegal aliens arrested, 10 were from Mexico and two from Guatemala.

The 11 adults were processed and charged with violations of Title 8 of the U.S. Code, CBP said, which encompasses immigration offenses including unlawful entry, unlawful reentry, alien harboring or smuggling, and more.

The unaccompanied minor was "administratively processed," CBP told The Epoch Times.

Following apprehension, an unaccompanied child is transferred into the care and custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which sits under Department of Health and Human Services.

Chief Patrol Agent Jessie Munoz for the El Paso Sector said his agents and agency partners at HSI are making progress in dismantling criminal smuggling organizations in the region.

The Epoch Times exclusively spoke with other top leadership at the U.S.-Mexico border who echoed the same message.

They described the border as more secure than at any other point in American history, yet some vulnerabilities remain that criminal organizations will attempt to exploit, Chief Patrol Agent Justin De La Torre of the San Diego Sector said.

"Our primary focus is to prevent people from illegally entering in the first place, and it is my strong belief that the only way we can do that is if people know if they choose to use the cartels to come to the United States, they will not be successful," De La Torre said.

Every individual who illegally crosses the border, the San Diego Sector chief said, equates to money going into the hands of the cartels, which charge roughly $10,000 per person to be smuggled into the country.

More often than not, an illegal immigrant doesn't have enough money up front to make this payment, De La Torre said. Instead, they have an agreement with the cartels that if they are successfully smuggled in, they will illegally work in the United States and send money back each paycheck.

"It could take them a year, it could take them six years, but they're paying the smuggling organization until that debt is paid off, and that's usually through fear [from the cartels saying] ... 'If you don't, we know where your family lives,'" De La Torre said.

CBP officials told The Epoch Times that they hear countless stories of illegal immigrants alleging they were sexually assaulted, robbed, or beaten by their smugglers.

"If they can't get a group through, they will kidnap people, call their family members for ransom, just to gain some type of profit," De La Torre said about the smuggling organizations.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 21:45

New Radar System Can Detect High-Speed Drones Nearby Ports, Vessels In Extreme Environment

Authored by Prabhat Ranjan Mishra via Interesting Engineering,

A new type of radar to detect drones nearby ports, vessels, harbours, and critical maritime infrastructure has been introduced. Developed by Robin Radar Systems, IRIS OTM at Sea is designed for seamless land-to-sea deployments.

The system can operate effectively in extreme environments thanks to its salt- and corrosion-resistant engineering.ROBIN

The new system is a major expansion of its IRIS On-The-Move (OTM) capability.

The comprehensive update is aimed at strengthening counter-UAS protection for shipping lanes, naval operations, and coastal assets.

Offshore Assets Are Exposed To Low-Cost Aerial Threats

"What we are seeing globally is that the drone threat is no longer confined to the battlefield or to land-based infrastructure. Shipping lanes, ports, harbours and offshore assets are now all exposed to low-cost aerial threats that can disrupt trade, damage infrastructure and threaten civilian safety," said Siete Hamminga, CEO, Robin Radar Systems.

"The Strait of Hormuz has once again demonstrated how vulnerable critical maritime corridors can become during periods of instability. IRIS OTM at Sea is being designed to answer that challenge with a rapidly deployable, software-defined capability that can move seamlessly between land and sea."

IRIS OTM At Sea Will Detect, Track, And Classify Drones

Originally developed to operate from moving land vehicles traveling at speeds exceeding 62 mph (100km/h), IRIS On-The-Move will now be adapted for maritime environments through advanced software enhancements that compensate for sea clutter, vessel movement, and challenging coastal conditions, according to a press release.

Designed to be mounted on vessels, IRIS OTM at Sea will detect, track, and classify drones while travelling at speeds of up to 54 knots, operating effectively in extreme environments thanks to its salt- and corrosion-resistant engineering, resonance tolerance, and EMC-compliant architecture.

Unlike traditional static radars, IRIS is designed to move with the threat itself, providing persistent situational awareness across highly dynamic environments, as per the release.

The company revealed that the radar's software architecture will be updated to filter out heavy sea reflections and environmental clutter to isolate small airborne threats operating close to the waterline, an increasingly important capability as drone incursions continue to evolve across maritime theatres.

Robin Radar Systems highlighted that the maritime update has been shaped directly by operational lessons from ongoing live-fire environments, where the need for flexible, mobile counter-UAS systems capable of protecting dynamic environments has accelerated dramatically. The company's engineering teams reportedly adapted the system specifically to address the increasing use of fixed-wing drones and low-altitude aerial threats around strategic shipping corridors and maritime infrastructure.

"Modern security demands speed and flexibility. Operators need systems that can deploy quickly, integrate easily, and adapt as threats evolve," said Vivien Croes, Chief Technical Officer, Robin Radar Systems.

"What makes this update important is that we are taking a combat-proven radar and extending its capabilities into one of the most operationally complex environments in the world. The future of counter-UAS is not static infrastructure, it is agile, mobile sensing systems capable of protecting people, critical infrastructure and global commerce wherever threats emerge."

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 20:55

Which US States Have The Highest GDP Per Capita?

Where you live in the U.S. can make a huge difference in economic output per person.

GDP per capita varies widely across states, from under $60,000 in Mississippi to nearly $280,000 in Washington, D.C.

This chart, produced by Visual Capitalist's Jenna Ross, in partnership with Terzo, breaks down GDP per capita in 2025. 

GDP per Capita by State

Washington, D.C. has the highest GDP per capita. The capital’s economy is concentrated in high-value professional services like consulting, IT, and legal, as well as government spending. 

Its large commuter workforce from outside states also boosts the figure, as many workers contribute to economic output without being counted in the local population.

State 2025 GDP per Capita Washington, D.C. $278k New York $123k Massachusetts $115k Washington $112k Delaware $111k California $108k North Dakota $102k Connecticut $102k Alaska $102k Nebraska $98k Colorado $97k Illinois $95k New Jersey $93k Texas $92k Minnesota $91k Maryland $91k Virginia $90k Wyoming $89k Utah $89k New Hampshire $89k Hawaii $87k South Dakota $86k Nevada $86k Iowa $86k Georgia $82k Ohio $81k Kansas $81k Pennsylvania $81k Tennessee $81k Oregon $80k North Carolina $80k Wisconsin $79k Arizona $78k Florida $78k Indiana $78k Rhode Island $75k Vermont $75k Missouri $75k Louisiana $74k Maine $73k Michigan $72k Montana $72k New Mexico $72k South Carolina $68k Idaho $67k Kentucky $67k Oklahoma $67k Alabama $66k Arkansas $64k West Virginia $62k Mississippi $56k

Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Census Bureau. Figures rounded.

New York takes the second spot as a global financial hub with strong output in other high-value industries, including real estate and professional services. 

Massachusetts and Washington also top the ranks. While Massachusetts drives value through professional services like biotechnology, Washington is home to big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

Resource Economies

Outside of more service-based economies, both North Dakota and Alaska pump out over $100,000 in GDP per capita. 

Both states are driven by natural resources and mining, ranking as the third (North Dakota) and fifth-highest (Alaska) producers of crude oil in America. These states also have some of the lowest populations in the country, driving up output per person.

More recently in 2026, both states have seen monetary benefits from oil transport disruptions and rising prices. North Dakota typically sells crude oil at a discount to benchmark pricing, but has been earning $7 more per barrel above the benchmark. In Alaska, the state recently increased its projected revenue by $0.5 billion as a result of higher oil prices.

Maximizing Value

As economies push to create more value per person, businesses are also focused on getting more from what they have.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 20:30

India's Solar Demand Set For 22% Annual Growth Through 2035

Submitted by Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

India’s solar capacity is set to surge by 22% each year by 2035 as the data center boom will drive increased power consumption, a new report by Nuvama showed on Monday.   

The consultancy estimates that India’s total power demand will rise by 6% every year over the next decade, “driven by economic growth, rising urbanisation, manufacturing expansion and increasing electrification across sectors,” according to the report cited by Indian news outlet ANI.

Solar growth will vastly outpace overall power demand as power-intensive data centers will drive 22% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in solar energy capacity from 2026 to 2035, the report found.

“Our base case suggests green hydrogen and data centre capacity shall add another 251GW solar capacity, while it is 406GW capacity in the bull case scenario,” Nuvama analysts said in the report.

“Given solar capacity expansion in our base case, the share of solar shall rise from 28% in FY26 to 61% by FY35 and to 65% in the bull case,” they added.

India expects to nearly quadruple its solar power capacity and triple wind power-generating assets within ten years, according to the new Generation Adequacy Plan published by the country’s Central Electricity Authority earlier this year.

India projects to have a total of 509 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity installed by the end of the 2035-2036 fiscal year, up from 140 GW installed solar PV capacity as of January 2026.   

“The installed generation capacity projection in 2035-36 shows that the country is moving toward a strong transition to non-fossil energy. Renewable sources, especially solar PV, hydro, and wind, will dominate future capacity, supported by Energy Storage Systems,” according to the policy.

In 2025, India boasted that it was five years ahead of schedule when it achieved its target of having 50% of its installed electricity capacity coming from non-fossil fuel sources.

However, India's electricity grid is expanding at a slower pace than the boom in renewable energy installations, leading to an increased share of clean energy curtailments and threatening to slow the solar and wind boom in the world’s most populous country.   

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 20:05

How The World Added Decades To Life Expectancy

The average person today can expect to live far longer than someone born in 1960, regardless of where they live.

This chart, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, tracks life expectancy at birth across four World Bank income groups. While high-income countries still have the longest lifespans, the biggest gains have come elsewhere. Upper-middle income countries have added more than three decades to life expectancy, while low-income countries have made substantial progress as well.

The data for this visualization comes from World Bank via FRED. It tracks life expectancy at birth by income group from 1960 to the latest available data (2024).

High-Income Countries Still Lead

High-income countries still have the highest life expectancy, reaching 80.3 years in 2024.

That is up from 68.3 years in 1960, a gain of 12 years. These countries started from a much higher baseline, meaning their gains have been slower but still substantial.

Examples include the U.S., Germany, and Japan.

 

Upper-Middle Income Countries Saw the Fastest Gains

 

Upper-middle income countries posted the largest increase, rising from 41.9 years in 1960 to 76.3 years.

That is a gain of 34.4 years, the fastest improvement of any group in the dataset. This category includes countries such as China, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa.

Much of this improvement coincided with rising incomes, better sanitation, expanded vaccination programs, lower child mortality, and broader access to healthcare. Together, these changes helped push life expectancy in many middle-income countries toward levels once seen only in the world’s wealthiest economies.

The Global Life Expectancy Gap Has Narrowed

In 1960, people in high-income countries lived about 27 years longer than those in low-income countries.

Today, the gap stands at roughly 16 years. While a significant difference remains, low-income countries have added more than 23 years to average life expectancy since 1960. In other words, much of the world’s longevity progress has come from countries that started furthest behind.

However, the remaining gap shows that income, healthcare access, and living conditions continue to shape longevity worldwide.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Ranked: Countries With the Most Ultra-Rich Residents in 2026 on Voronoi.

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 19:40

Domesticating AI - It's Not Coming, It's Already Here

Authored by Howard Armitage via New Atlas,

When my neighbor wanted a vision of what his fence could look like, I didn't hesitate to ask ChatGPT to create a mock-up. I took a photo of the fence and asked it to overlay a potted Jasmin espaliered to it, after a couple of tweaks, and all of about one minute later, it gave me this:

AI-generated mock-up created from the author’s original fence photograph
Howard Armitage

During a recent conversation with a diving buddy, he pulled out his phone mid conversation and said "Hey Grok, show me that dive computer we were talking about this morning." And yes, it's $580 worth of gorgeous.

Its translation abilities are spectacular, and occasionally hilarious. It really is the Babel fish. Not that long ago I moved to a bank simply because it supported Apple Pay years before the big players. At that time, paying with just the tap of a wrist always garnered astonishment and commentary. Around the same time, voice assistants started crossing the line from novelty to genuinely useful. Set a timer, make an appointment, play some music. Super!

"Alexa, turn the kitchen light on." Light comes on. "No, turn it off." "There is no device called 'it' to turn off." Oof!

No memory, no context.

Enter Nabu (yes I know, I haven't got round to changing the wakeword name yet). Naby knows it turned the kitchen light on, and knows I was referring to the kitchen light when I said "turn it off." It remembers, it has context, because it's not just a dumb voice assistant anymore, it is plumbed into my local AI.

The big commercial AI platforms can be connected to these systems, but running it locally means the data stays within the boundaries of my house. It won't process that mountain of documents or win that tricky legal case yet, but it can keep track of the state of my home and understand what I mean when I speak naturally.

That's a big deal - because now I don't have to write and memorize tiresome automations for rigid pre-programmed commands, I can converse with Nabu in human and it understands "all the lights" or "just the downstairs aircons."

Only five years ago, running an AI model at home was a ridiculous proposition - you'd need datacenter hardware and a tech-bro budget. Now, it's dramatically cheaper and easier - with consumer GPUs, mini PCs, Ollama and Hugging Face, technically curious people are quietly building surprisingly capable AI systems at home. The GPU that I can hold in my hands doesn't compete with a datacenter the size of several football fields - but for my homelab tinkerings, it's surprisingly capable, and is only becoming more so.

I should probably backtrack a little here - I'm enthusing about Home Assistant, which I've been running for about 12 years - originally on a Raspberry Pi, now in a VM on ProxmoxVE. Sensors and controllers are scattered all over the house, with a dashboard in a browser acting as mission control. Lights automated with timers and presence detectors. Sun elevation adjusts blinds, curtains react to sunrise and sunset, and moisture sensors trigger irrigation on demand. Solar and battery systems respond to dynamic electricity pricing, buying and selling power depending on what the grid is doing.

Home Assistant proclaimed 2023 to be the Year of the Voice and duly launched a prototype Voice Assistant. At launch, its capabilities were limited. Today, it is genuinely good at a variety of tasks, and it's all open source so you can build your own device from very inexpensive hardware, and the software is on GitHub.

Local models - Llama, Gemma, Mistral, Qwen - very much lag behind the giant commercial systems, but for experimentation, home automation, and general day-to-day interaction, they're becoming more and more usable. I personally care about data sovereignty (a huge topic in its own right), so running a local AI grants me a more privacy-conscious workflow, and it still works when the internet doesn't.

Quite how many months of commercial AI subscriptions I could have got for the price of my GPU is a question I'm deliberately avoiding, predominantly for marital reasons. I rather think of myself as a data nerd. All those sensors collecting all that data in a "If this, then that" environment makes for endless tinkering possibilities. And with an AI-powered Nabu gradually replacing Alexa, my office edges ever closer to Tony Stark's lair. We're no longer at "deploying Kubernetes clusters" level of difficulty, but it's still very much a tinkerer’s space rather than a mainstream consumer appliance. Even so, it feels like a taste of where we're heading.

The strange thing is how quickly this all stops feeling strange. Talking naturally to an AI that understands context, remembers previous conversations and controls my house may have garnered astonishment and commentary. Now, it's just another thing sitting quietly in my server rack.

Home Assistant acting as “mission control” for lighting, climate and automation around the author’s home Howard Armitage Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 19:15

Final Ivy Folds As Columbia University Abandons Test-Optional Admissions Policy

More than three years after adopting test-optional admissions, Columbia University is reversing course and will once again require standardized test scores from prospective students.

Columbia announced on June 13 that, beginning in fall 2027, first-year and transfer applicants will have to submit either SAT or ACT scores to be considered for admission. The university will remain test-optional for the upcoming 2026–27 admissions cycle.

University officials said the decision follows a “multiyear faculty review” that found “test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success.”

“Standardized testing is one of many elements that can demonstrate a foundation of academic excellence; others include your performance in your secondary school coursework and the rigor of your curriculum,” the university stated on a webpage outlining its new policy.

As Bill Pan reports for The Epoch Times, Columbia was among the first elite universities to suspend testing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, when widespread school closures and testing disruptions limited students’ access to the SAT and ACT. In 2023, the university extended its test-optional policy indefinitely, becoming the first Ivy League institution to make the change permanent.

It was also the last of the eight Ivy League schools to maintain a test-optional admissions policy.

Princeton University reinstated standardized testing requirements in October 2025, leaving Columbia as the sole Ivy League holdout.

The debate over standardized testing has intensified in recent years as some of the nation’s most selective institutions have restored testing requirements. Like Columbia and Princeton, many of those schools have cited internal data showing that test scores are a strong predictor of academic performance and graduation outcomes.

When Princeton announced its decision, university officials said data collected during five years of test-optional admissions showed that “academic performance at Princeton was stronger for students who chose to submit test scores than for students who did not.”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which reinstated its testing requirement in 2022, also said that considering SAT and ACT scores—particularly math scores—“significantly improves” its ability to predict whether applicants will succeed in the institute’s highly demanding mathematics and math-based science courses.

Critics of standardized testing, however, argue that emphasizing those scores may disadvantage students from low-income and historically underrepresented backgrounds who lack access to expensive tutoring, test-preparation courses, and other educational resources.

Columbia’s move also comes amid renewed interest in standardized testing from the Trump administration.

Administration officials have argued that test-optional admissions policies allow colleges to rely more heavily on subjective criteria, such as personal statements, potentially serving as illegal proxies for race in admissions decisions, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional.

“The persistent lack of available data—paired with the rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies—continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in admissions decisions in practice,” President Donald Trump wrote in an August 2025 memorandum to the secretary of education.

In a proposed compact offered to nine institutions in exchange for preferential access to certain federal funding opportunities, the Trump administration also demanded that they require standardized test scores as part of the admissions process.

The proposal further urged schools to publicly release anonymized admissions data, including applicants’ GPAs, standardized test scores, and other academic measures, broken down by race, national origin, and sex.

Despite the revival of testing requirements at some elite institutions, test-optional admissions remain widespread nationwide.

According to FairTest, an advocacy group opposing the use of standardized testing in college admissions, more than 90 percent of ranked four-year colleges and universities in the United States will not require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores for fall 2026 admissions. The organization’s survey covered approximately 2,000 four-year institutions.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 18:50

Anthropic Accused In Lawsuit Of Lying About $200 Per Month '20x' Plan

A federal class-action lawsuit filed Monday accuses Anthropic of misleading customers about the real usage limits on its high-end Claude AI subscriptions. The suit, brought on behalf of Washington D.C. subscriber Karl Kahn and others who bought the Max 5x and Max 20x plans since April 2025, claims the company oversold how much computing power buyers would actually receive.

The lawsuit - filed Monday in the Northern District of California on behalf of Washington DC resident Karl Kahn and others who subscribed to the plans since April 2025 - targets Anthropic's Max 5x and Max 20x tiers priced at $100 and $200 per month respectively. It accuses the company of misleading customers by advertising these plans as providing five and twenty times the usage capacity of the standard Pro subscription, when in reality the actual limits fall well short of those claims. The allegations draw heavily from emails Anthropic sent to subscribers in July 2025 that outlined the expected weekly usage allowances for each tier at the time.

According to the complaint, Kahn upgraded to the Max 20x plan in April of this year after increasing his reliance on Claude for coding work. He soon discovered he was exhausting his weekly limits rapidly, including burning through 15 percent of his allowance during a single five-hour session. The suit seeks refunds for affected customers and a judicial finding that Anthropic's marketing of the high-tier plans was fraudulent.

Allegations

Kahn initially used Claude for personal tasks but later relied on it heavily for coding. After upgrading, he repeatedly hit usage walls and had to stop work, ration prompts, or buy extra credits to finish projects, according to the complaint. The lawsuit says the actual limits are difficult to predict and consistently lower than what was promised when the plans were marketed as giving five or twenty times the capacity of the standard Pro subscription.

"The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," reads the lawsuit, that claims Kahn "found himself needing either to halt his work, ration his usage, or purchase additional usage to ensure that he could complete his work." 

Anthropic has not commented on the suit, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company offers free access plus paid tiers, with the Pro plan running $17 to $20 a month. The higher Max plans were positioned for power users needing substantially more compute.

This lawsuit arrives amid mounting frustration with AI subscriptions and tokenomics. Power users and even large enterprises have complained for months about unpredictable rate limits, especially on coding workflows - with several documented cases of extreme overspending, including one unnamed Anthropic client (Amazon?) that racked up roughly $500 million in Claude charges in a single month after failing to cap employee usage.

Compute scarcity remains a core issue across the sector. A surge in demand earlier this year strained systems at Anthropic and rivals, producing outages and tighter limits even for paying customers. At the same time, companies are racing to launch new models ahead of expected IPOs while navigating new government restrictions. Days before this suit, the Trump administration banned foreign governments, companies, and individuals from accessing Anthropic's most powerful models after Amazon discovered a way to jailbreak the company's Fable AI into its unrestricted form - Mythos, forcing the company to shut off certain access to comply.

On Sunday, Anthropic execs scrambled to DC to triage the situation. 

Fable 5 launched on June 9 as the first broadly available "Mythos-class" model, the public-facing version of a system Anthropic had previously kept behind a vetted-access wall because of its cyber and biological capabilities. Mythos 5, the same underlying model with some safeguards removed, stayed reserved for cleared cybersecurity partners. Fable 5 was the middle path: Mythos-grade capability, Anthropic said, with guardrails strong enough for general release. The company put it on the API, made it generally available on Amazon Bedrock and GitHub Copilot, and folded it into Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans at no extra charge through June 22.

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:

— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.…

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) June 13, 2026

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 17:20

RFK Jr. Warns Vaccine Committee Not 'Functioning', Asks Court To Accelerate Decision

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines has been paralyzed by a March ruling by a federal judge, leaving it unable to carry out work ahead of the upcoming respiratory virus season, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has warned.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Minneapolis on May 21, 2026. David Berding/Getty Images

"The court's order has left ACIP unable to carry out its core responsibilities," Kennedy said in a June 12 post on X, referring to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). "As a result, the committee cannot issue new recommendations, review newly approved vaccines, or complete important work ahead of the fall flu season."

Influenza and other viruses typically circulate each year in the fall and winter.

The ruling in question was released on March 16 by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, who concluded that Kennedy and other officials did not take necessary steps when making changes to federal vaccine guidance and the composition of ACIP.

Murphy stayed the changes the CDC issued in January, the appointments of new ACIP members by Kennedy, and the votes that were taken by those members.

The Trump administration appealed the ruling on April 29.

Government lawyers asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on June 12 to speed up its consideration of the matter.

"A single district judge has frozen the architecture of the national immunization system," they said, adding that Murphy's order means "the committee cannot supply, change, or withdraw a vaccine recommendation - for any vaccine or population - until the stay is lifted."

A similar panel that advises the Food and Drug Administration is slated to meet on June 18 to consider clearing a new influenza vaccine, and if officials end up clearing it, then ACIP would need to issue a recommendation on which populations should receive it, the motion to expedite noted. ACIP also usually provides recommendations on seasonal influenza vaccination before the fall.

The CDC typically accepts ACIP's advice.

The administration also pointed to Trump's June 3 executive order, which directs the CDC and ACIP to update the childhood vaccination schedule. Currently, the committee cannot carry out the order, lawyers said.

Under the proposed briefing schedule, briefs would be filed in June and July, the appeals court would hear oral argument in August, and the court would issue a decision "as soon as practicable" after that.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups that sued over the vaccine guidance changes oppose speeding up the appeal, according to the motion. They have said the judge ruled correctly in deciding that Kennedy's remade ACIP was unbalanced and that the January changes should not have been made absent advice from ACIP.

"A functioning ACIP is essential to ensuring that vaccine recommendations remain grounded in evidence and available to the families and providers who rely on them," Kennedy added in the post on X.

A girl receives the flu vaccination shot from a nurse at a free clinic held at a local library in Lakewood, Calif., on Oct. 14, 2020. Mario Tama/Getty Images Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 17:00

B-52 Bomber Crashes After Take-Off From Edwards Air Force Base In California

A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from Edwards Air Force Base in California, the base said in a statement Monday.

“A United States Air Force B-52 Stratofortress crashed shortly after takeoff on the Edwards airfield at 11:20 a.m.,” the base said in a post on Facebook.

“Emergency crews immediately responded to the scene and the situation is ongoing.”

It’s unclear if there were any injuries or what caused the crash.

The base did not provide any further details in its statement, adding that more information will be provided when it becomes available.

“Please join me in praying for the B-52 crew at Edwards Air Force Base and the entire Edwards community,” said Rep. Vince Fong (R-Calif.) in a post on X.

Video footage of the incident showed the smoldering wreckage of the plane at the base, which is located in both Kern and San Bernardino counties.

BREAKING: Initial reports indicate a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress crashed shortly after takeoff from Edwards Air Force Base. Emergency crews are responding to the scene. Details remain limited. pic.twitter.com/3NT4P06Mph

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 15, 2026

As Jack Phillips reports for The Epoch Times, the B-52 Stratofortress is a long-range bomber that was introduced in the 1950s as a central part of U.S. air power.

The planes are capable of carrying conventional and nuclear weapons, and they have been used in a range of U.S. military confrontations, most recently in the war with Iran.

The bomber usually has a crew of five, including a commander, pilot, radar navigator, navigator, and electronic warfare officer. It also can carry a payload of up to 70,000 pounds and has a range of 8,800 miles, the Air Force says.

The Air Force says it is expecting to operate B-52s until the year 2050.

Both the Air Force and NASA carry out test flights of new and experimental aircraft at the air base, which is located in the Mojave Desert, according to its website.

Earlier this month, NASA’s X-59 experimental aircraft flew faster than the speed of sound in a milestone event at Edwards Air Force Base, the space agency said.

The crash is one of several involving the U.S. military that have occurred in the past few weeks. 

On May 17, two Navy EA-18G Growlers collided with one another in midair in an air show at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, the military said. 

Over the past weekend, a military plane crashed near Mount Rainier in Washington state during a training flight, local officials said.

Before the crash on Monday, the most recent fatal incident involving a B-52 occurred in 2008, when six Air Force members died when a bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean after taking off from a base in Guam. The plane was due to take part in a parade flyover.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 16:40

Monsters Far And Near

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“We used to say that we don’t know what 2050 will look like. Now it’s more like we don’t know what 2030 will look like.”

- Jesus Enrique Rosas

You must be thinking that reality is pushing its luck with the president bringing this Iran business - a war, actually, let’s face it - to a favorable conclusion around dinner time Sunday evening (yawn) and then Mr. DJT sliding directly into his seat on the White House lawn to enjoy the special 80th birthday edition of Testosterone Gone Wild, that is, a full card of tattoo-bedizend savages beating the crap out of each other UFC style, like it was a Hooters parking lot on wife-swap night. . . why, it just doesn’t get more surreal than that.

Imagine what Victoria Nuland, Robert Reich, George Stephanopoulis, Elizabeth Warren, and other good folks of that ilk must be thinking. The. . . (Sputter sputter) indelicacy of it all! A freaking peace deal, and now this low-rent spectacle of ultra-violence! Like their whole world had turned out to be the meanest, lowest, most sordid backwater of the Marvel Comics universe where no one has ever heard of chardonney. The ape-men slugging, kicking, gouging, and head-butting each other half to death is one thing. . . but to let the slip the opportunity to continue the Iran War with its downstream emoluments for another nineteen years. . . well, now that is an affront to all that is holy in the sub-basements of Foggy Bottom and the broom closets of Langley. As you read this on Monday morning the cries for impeachment will be ringing across the District of Columbia like calls to prayer in Mamdani’s Caliphate on the Hudson.

Surely, you’ll get more details on the Iran deal as Monday spins out, but the terms look not bad at all for Western Civ in the news media’s early shorthand reports:

Teheran pledges no nukes, ever, no how, no way. They will allow their cache of super-enriched uranium to be destroyed.

The Strait of Hormuz will reopen promptly, free to international shipping, no tolls, no piratical monkey-business.

No more Iran funding terrorist proxy groups. That means you Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and sundry cadres of jihadi maniacs ‘out there’ in the world’s hotspots.

Speaking of which, Mr. Netanyahu felt the president’s wrath earlier on Sunday (once again) when he replied to a Hezbollah rocket salvo out of Lebanon with air strikes. But, hey, everybody knows that Israel always and ever answers every attack against it no matter what, because Never Again. Even Mr. Trump knows that, so the whole flap was a sort of mummery. Obviously, Hezbollah must be anxious to wreck the peace deal, since without Iran’s ongoing largess they will not know where their next meal is coming from, not to mention their next shipment of missiles. If Iran actually complies with the deal, Hezbollah can have no more support. There may soon be no more Hezbollah. (Boo-hoo.)

Which raises the next obvious concern, namely, Iran is not known for keeping its word with The Great Satan (us). There is every reason to believe that the vaunted deal is just another sorry episode of them stringing the USA along, playing us. But Mr. Trump has made it clear he reserves the option to rev up the bombers and “do a number on” the Islamic Republic if they pull a fast one on this.

For its part, Iran is crowing in its own state-controlled press that it has won the war. Iran can say whatever it wants to — world opinion will probably not be fooled — if it makes the people running the joint feel good about themselves losing a war. It’ll be Iran’s actions that matter. There’s a chance, perhaps a low-percentage chance, but a chance nonetheless, that Iran has been persuaded to stop being insane.

They do have an opportunity to put jihad aside, sell oil and pistachios to the world, and try being a normal nation for a change.

It’s asking a lot, I’m sure, but there’s a lot in it for them. If they actually showed a serious attitude adjustment, you can bet that Mr. Trump would offer help setting up bigly capital investments there, enabling new trade relations, and easing them back into a world of non-insane, sovereign polities with reality-based interests.

He already invited them to join the Abraham Accords, to establish full diplomatic relations with the other signers, embassies, direct flights, trade, tourism, and security cooperation.

So, let’s stand by and see if the Memorandum of Understanding gets signed later this week. The president is winging to Geneva for the G-7 as I write. The other parties to the deal are on their way there, too.

The face to face meet-up between the American President and whoever Iran sends to the ceremony will be more thrillingly momentous than any pairing of UFC cage fighters on the White House lawn.

In fact, I’m awfully glad that over-the-top extravaganza is done with.

The triumphalism is disconcerting.

We still have a very serious cold civil war to deal with here in the Homeyland, and a national mental health crisis that turns US daily life into a real time horror movie from sea to shining sea.

The party of “our democracy” still works avidly to overthrow the republic, and extravagant sports entertainments will not avail to make that stop.

We need perp walks and trials. . .sober business. . .a cold reckoning with our own monsters.

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 16:20

Saylor's Strategy Buys Another $100 Million Of Bitcoin

Authored by Helen Partz via CoinTelegraph.com,

Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the world’s largest public Bitcoin holder, added to its cryptocurrency reserves last week as BTC continued to trade below the company’s average cost basis of about $75,700.

Strategy acquired 1,587 Bitcoin (BTC) for $100 million between June 8 and Sunday, according to Monday's 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Source: SEC

The purchase was made at an average price of $63,024 per Bitcoin, bringing the company’s overall average cost basis slightly lower to $75,656.

With the latest buy, Strategy now holds 846,842 BTC, accumulated at a total cost of $64.07 billion.

At the current price of about $66,216 per bitcoin, those holdings are worth roughly $56.1 billion, according to CoinGecko data.

MSTR sales behind the purchase

Similar to the previous 1,550 BTC acquisition announced last Monday, Strategy funded the latest acquisition through sales of its Class A common stock (MSTR).

In the filing, the company said it raised about $209 million by selling 1.73 million MSTR shares during the period. Preferred share programs, including STRC, STRF, STRK and STRD, showed no activity during the week.

According to STRC.live, a tracker of Strategy’s preferred stock programs, STRC traded below its $100 par value for a fourth consecutive week as of June 12. The stock remained in the mid-$96 range, marking its longest stretch below par since launch.

STRC closed at $94.80 on Friday, down around 1%, according to TradingView data.

Source: STRC.live

Strategy executive chairman Saylor hinted at the latest purchase in a post on X on Sunday, writing, “Still adding dots,” a phrase investors have come to associate with the company’s upcoming Bitcoin acquisitions.

Source: Michael Saylor

The latest buy comes about two weeks after Strategy disclosed the sale of 32 BTC on June 1, its first reported Bitcoin sale in years. While the transaction represented only a tiny fraction of the company’s holdings, the sale ignited debate in the community, with some industry observers questioning whether the company was moving away from its long-standing buy-and-hold approach.

Saylor recently defended the sale, telling Cointelegraph that Bitcoin treasury companies must retain the ability to sell holdings to support dividend-paying securities.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 15:45

US Property Foreclosure Filings Increase 14% Year Over Year

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

There were a total of 40,355 U.S. properties with foreclosure filings in May—down 5 percent month-over-month but up by 14 percent compared to the same period in 2025.

“The increase marks the continuation of a trend of rising foreclosure activity on an annual basis,” real estate analytics company ATTOM said in a June 11 statement.

In April, foreclosure filings were up 18 percent from a year back. And in the first quarter of 2026, filings were up 26 percent compared to Q1 of 2025.

“Lenders repossessed 4,092 U.S. properties through completed foreclosures (REOs) in May 2026, down 20 percent from the previous month but up 6 percent from a year ago,” ATTOM said.

Foreclosure is a legal process by which a mortgage lender repossesses a property due to borrower’s failure to make mortgage payments. The lender initially issues a notice of default when payments are missed for 90 days. If the borrower does not settle payments within 30 days, the property is repossessed and eventually sold to new buyers.

In May, one in every 3,562 U.S. housing units had a foreclosure filing, ATTOM reported. Florida had the highest foreclosure rate, with one in 2,110 units. This was followed by South Carolina, Maryland, Nevada, and Indiana.

Among metro areas with a population of at least 2 million, Cleveland, Ohio, had the highest foreclosure rate last month, with one in 1,524 housing properties. This was followed by Baltimore, Maryland; Tampa, Florida; Riverside, California; and Orlando, Florida.

As for states with the highest number of completed foreclosures, Texas ranked at the top with 519, followed by California, Florida, Illinois, and Michigan.

“Foreclosure starts and completed foreclosures both increased compared to last year, reflecting ongoing pressure on some homeowners as elevated mortgage rates, rising ownership costs, and affordability constraints persist,” CEO at ATTOM Rob Barber said.

“At the same time, foreclosure volumes remain well below historical norms, indicating that the housing market continues to show resilience despite these challenges.”

In a June 12 post, legal services company Nolo predicted foreclosure rates to gradually rise in the latter part of this year.

“Factors such as surging insurance premiums, elevated interest rates, climbing HOA fees, and reduced buyer demand are contributing to a growing housing crisis,” Nolo said. “Also, markets with high property taxes or economies that rely on volatile sectors (like Las Vegas, Nevada) are at risk of seeing an increase in foreclosures during tough economic times.”

The average weekly mortgage rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has remained above 6 percent for every single week since mid-September 2022, except for a brief dip in late February this year, according to data from Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, the housing market slowed down in May after improving in April due to the increase in mortgage rates, real estate brokerage Redfin said in a June 3 statement.

The trend of rising foreclosures is likely to continue unless there is significant relief or intervention, Nolo said.

In February, a group of lawmakers reintroduced the Preserving Homes and Communities Act to protect homeowners from foreclosures, according to a Feb. 4 statement from the office of Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

The bill seeks to ensure that local entities with public missions, such as municipalities, states, and nonprofits, have the “first opportunity” to buy nonperforming and reperforming mortgages from the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. Typically, such loans are sold at a discount to institutional investors and private equity companies via note sale programs.

The bill also seeks to make sure that borrowers receive a notice of at least 90 days before their mortgages are placed in note sales.

“Housing costs are higher than ever before and we need to make it easier for working families to keep a roof over their heads. The national data clearly shows that the current note sales system is not working properly and is prioritizing the wants of investors over the needs of homeowners,” Reed said.

The bill “will implement key reforms to strengthen foreclosure protections and better protect homeowners and communities,” the senator said.

The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 15:05

Three Factors Leave Salty-Snack Demand Stale

UBS analyst Peter Grom, who covers U.S. consumer staples including packaged food, beverages, and household products, served up a sour outlook for the salty-snack category, warning that the recovery investors had hoped for remains further out than expected.

"Despite recent optimism around a potential recovery in salty snacks, our analysis would suggest the category remains challenged. While tracked channel growth has turned positive relative to prior periods, we have observed momentum beginning to moderate with L13W $ takeaway growth decelerating to +1.2% vs. the +3.4% peak growth seen earlier in the year," Grom began the note.

Grom pointed out that the salty-snack category remains under pressure from a confluence of headwinds, including rapid GLP-1 adoption, potential SNAP benefit reductions, and mounting macroeconomic challenges faced by cash-strapped consumers.

"The combination of GLP-1 adoption, potential SNAP benefit reductions, and broader consumer spending pressures tied to the current geopolitical conflict has weighed on snack demand," the analyst said.

Grom noted that the Nielsen data show little evidence of a robust recovery, with buy rates, purchase frequency, spending per trip, units per trip, and overall projected sales all slowing. The category is also losing share to "better-for-you" options. 

A Recovery Remains Uncertain

Snack trend down

He pointed out that competitive pressure has greatly intensified, adding that Pepsi remains the junk food king, with nearly half of category sales, but most large incumbents are generating flat-to-negative growth across tracked channels.

Pepsi's Frito-Lay North America food unit has experienced negative sales growth for much of the past year and continues to lose share despite investments in pricing, promotions, merchandising, and shelf space.

Another pressure point has been declining sales at convenience stores. He said C-store salty-snack sales, historically a strong growth engine, fell 3.5% in the latest 13 weeks as higher pump prices weighed on traffic and impulse purchases. Another headwind at C-stores has been the decline in SNAP sales.

Related consumer trend coverage:

• Here's What Happened Inside Convenience Stores When Gas Hit $4

• Here's What Happened Inside Gas Stations When Gas Hit $4

• Beer Demand Goes Flat As Even Alcoholics Pull Back With Gas Above $4

• Energy Drinks Become Latest Casualty As Fuel Shock Shifts Consumer Behavior

One takeaway from Grom's note is that the confluence of pressures mentioned above has collided across the salty-snack aisle, derailing the recovery investors had hoped would take shape this year.

Professional subscribers can read more about consumer trends at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 14:45

"Dangerous Precedent Of Censorship And Sanitization": Biden-Appointed Judge Enjoins Removal Of Slavery And Climate Displays

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

George Santayana famously said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. The same is true for judicial overreach. Those judges who yield to the temptation to counter policies that are not to their liking are likely to repeat such excesses of power. That is why the recent decision of U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston is so concerning. While there are good-faith reasons why some have objected to the removal of slavery and climate change exhibits from national parks and monuments, this is not about the merits but the authority to make such changes. Kelley’s recent injunction smacks of judicial excess rather than measured review.

Judge Kelley, a Biden appointee, issued a preliminary injunction at the behest of groups representing park conservationists, historians and scientists, who argued that the U.S. Department of the Interior has been engaged in a “sustained campaign to erase history and undermine science.”

The complaint is heavily laden with subjective views of historical relevance that are obviously not shared by the Administration. These interpretations were installed under the discretion of the Biden Administration. They were removed under the same inherent discretion of the Trump Administration.

In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order reversing his predecessor on what he viewed as a “revisionist movement” that portrayed the U.S. as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

He ordered the Interior Department to make changes to parks, monuments and memorials to address any “false revision of history” that the White House said had occurred in recent years.

Some of the displays discuss the abuses of indigenous populations or the enslavement of persons at these sites. I happen to agree with the Court that such context is important for citizens to fully appreciate our history. The issue, however, is who legally decides on such interpretive displays.

For example, I strongly disagreed with the African American Museum in the exclusion Justice Clarence Thomas from displays of great African Americans.  While I supported those in Congress seeking answers from the Smithsonian, I never viewed the material as a violation of federal law or worthy of judicial intervention. Notably, these historical groups and experts did not file actions in federal court to force his inclusion.

That was, of course, the individual decision of one museum. However, the question is why the Administration can make such individual decisions rather than department-wide or branch-wide decisions. Likewise, it is difficult to see the limiting principle here. If President Trump said that he wanted to emphasize certain elements like patriotism and these displays were substituted, would that also be a violation of federal law?

The challengers invoked federal law to argue that the Trump Administration was wrong and that the action was therefore arbitrary and capricious. The action is based on loose interpretations of the National Park Service Organic Act, the National Park Service Centennial Act, and the National Parks Omnibus Management Act, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.

Judge Kelley chastises the Administration for removing displays that “do not align with its preferred narrative.” However, the original displays were themselves a preferred narrative by the prior Administration.

Judge Kelley invokes generally worded federal laws to require the Administration to seek out and heed the wisdom of historical experts on such questions, despite the views of other experts who agree with the action.

She declared that the removal of the displays not only undermines “the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”

The court notes that “the Secretary’s Order fails to provide any reasoned justification for its directive to review and remove interpretive material.” Yet, that would seem abundantly obvious from the cited Executive Order and the purpose of the change. The real question is whether this type of action requires more than the exercise of discretion. Agencies and offices routinely make such decisions on displays. The only difference is a branch-wide order.

The court’s cited authority is itself vague and undefined. For example, Judge Kelley holds that “The Order mentions the Organic Act and the FLPMA as ‘Authority’ but does not explain its relationship to those statutes, such as how the removal of interpretive materials comports with the Organic Act’s mandate to ‘conserve’ and to ‘provide for the enjoyment’ of park resources. 54 U.S.C. § 100101(a).”

The Administration is citing the sweeping discretion afforded under federal law.

However, the Court suggests it can micromanage the branch in making decisions about interpretative displays under this language.

Once again, I may agree with these historians on some of this material but it is immaterial — as immaterial as Judge Kelley’s qualms.

In my view, the court’s analysis is deeply flawed and should be reversed.

Here is the decision: National Park Conservation Association v. Department of the Interior

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 14:25

Could Trump's Fable 5 Export Curbs Slow China's AI Model Race

The biggest AI story to start the week is the Trump administration's decision to place export controls on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, forcing Dario Amodei's frontier AI lab to restrict foreign access.

The move comes as Chinese open-source models have been rapidly closing the compute gap with U.S. labs. Anthropic's latest release appears to have widened that gap again, particularly in frontier reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity use cases.

Export controls could have second-order effects on the global AI race, according to analysts at Jefferies. By limiting access to Anthropic's most advanced models, Trump officials may slow the pace at which foreign developers, particularly in China, can study, benchmark, or distill these advanced frontier models into cheaper open-source systems.

"US models are improving at a faster pace, likely due to computational advantage, but anti- distillation and US export control are new negatives for China AI," the analysts wrote in a note on Sunday.

The key question now is whether Fable 5 and Mythos 5 include stronger anti-distillation safeguards to prevent Chinese labs from replicating or compressing Anthropic's advances into open-source models. If so, the export curbs may not just be about access. They may represent a broader effort to protect America's AI lead.

To understand the full AI model landscape, not just in the West but also in the East, Bank of America analysts, led by Alex Liu, penned an insightful note on Monday morning about leading Chinese models.

Liu wrote that China's AI model market is moving into a two-speed global structure, with U.S. labs likely to retain the lead in frontier capabilities while Chinese players gain share in lower-cost, high-volume use cases.

She noted that Chinese models are narrowing the gap through efficiency gains, architecture optimization, distillation, and lower-cost inference, making them increasingly affordable.

Liu said AI labs at Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu are racing against independent labs, such as DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI.

Who's who in the China AI model market

Incumbents

• Major internet companies such as ByteDance, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—many of which have established cloud businesses—have developed proprietary AI foundation models in-house.

Independent AI labs

• DeepSeek, MiniMax, Zhipu, and Moonshot AI are independent AI labs

China AI model landscape is intensely competitive

Investing landscape of Chinese AI labs  

Liu's view is that China AI has shifted from a frontier story to an affordability story. But with the U.S. government now able to halt foreign access to advanced models, as it just did with Anthropic's Fable 5, it appears increasingly difficult for Chinese labs to copy, distill, or reverse-engineer U.S. frontier models.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 14:05

What Could Break The Bull Market This Summer

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Key Takeaways

• After nine straight up weeks, the bull market pullback we flagged finally arrived, and it stopped cold at the 50-day moving average.

• The selloff reset an overbought tape without breaking trend. RSI fell from above 70 to the low 40s, and Thursday’s bounce came on broad participation.

• Our Money Flow Breadth Ratio ticked up to 60%, back in buy territory, and we’re holding equity exposure at 100%.

• The bigger risks haven’t gone anywhere: record margin debt, fading retail demand, and a 10-year Treasury that now out-yields the S&P 500.

• This sets up more upside for now. It does not erase the odds of a deeper correction this summer if forward earnings expectations crack.

Two weeks ago, after the S&P 500 logged its ninth consecutive weekly gain, we discussed that a bull market pullback was coming. It came. From the May 27 record near 7,621, the index slid 4.5% and bottomed almost exactly on its 50-day moving average before ripping back to close Friday at 7,431.46. That is not the opening act of a bear market. That is the kind of bull market pullback that resets sentiment and, more often than not, clears the runway for the next leg higher. The harder question is what happens after the bounce.

The Correction We Told You To Expect

Make no mistake, I have been warning about the potential for a pullback over the last few weeks and repeatedly discussed taking profits and rebalancing risk. As I wrote in “Two-Month Market Rally: What Comes Next,” a market that climbs for 9 straight weeks gets stretched, and stretched markets tend to mean-revert. The only real questions were the “when” and “how much.” We suggested a bull-market pullback of 3% to 5%; toward the 50-day moving average, would be most likely. However, a larger correction is still possible. As noted, the actual decline ran 4.5% peak to trough and found its floor exactly where trend-followers add rather than abandon.

Notably, the dip buyers showed up on cue. When the S&P probed the mid-7,200s on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, the same crowd that has bought every dip since the April 2025 low stepped in again, and by Friday the index had clawed back roughly a quarter of the prior week’s 2.64% drubbing. That close at 7,431.46 leaves the larger uptrend fully intact, sitting about 2.5% below the high rather than careening away from it.

Crucially, the setup still favors the bulls, at least for now.

First, the damage was technical, not structural. The 14-day RSI ran above 70 at the late-May high and fell to the low 40s at this month’s lows before settling back near 53. In plain terms, the market burned off its overbought condition without violating the trend, which is textbook.

Second, the quality of the bounce mattered. Thursday’s 1.75% surge came on broad participation rather than three megacaps doing all the lifting, and broad thrusts off support tend to mark real lows instead of dead-cat bounces.

Third, our own money-flow work agrees. The Money Flow Breadth Ratio (MFBR) is a rules-based model that “systematically adjusts portfolio equity exposure in response to the direction and persistence of institutional capital flows.” We use this analysis to size equity exposure in portfolios, and the MFBR ticked up to 60% as of June 12 and sits back in buy territory after sliding to 55% the prior week. The trailing four-week net flow has swung sharply positive following a deeply negative stretch, which historically reads as a contrarian buy. We’ve held exposure at 100% since April 17, and this signal keeps us there.

“As of June 12, 2026, with the S&P 500 at 7,431.46, the Money Flow Breadth Ratio (MFBR) stands at 60% and rising. This places the indicator in BUY territory (60-70%), triggering a NEUTRAL signal. The prior week reading was 55%, representing a 10% decline over the trailing four weeks. The model currently recommends HOLDING exposure at 100%, a level that has remained since April 17, 2026 (8 weeks). This reflects a FLOW-OVERLAY OVERRIDE: the trailing 4-week net dollar flow has swung sharply positive (>$300B) after a deeply negative prior 4 weeks, a historically strong contrarian buy signal.” – Bull Bear Report June 13th

The map from here is simple. Overhead, the 20-DMA at 7,466 is the first hurdle, then the round 7,500 mark, then the 7,621 record. Below, the 50-DMA at 7,248 is the line in the sand, with the 38.2% retracement at 7,118 and the rising 200-DMA at 6,882 beneath it. Hold 7,248 through Wednesday’s Fed meeting, and this stays a routine shakeout inside an uptrend.

What Could Break The Trade This Summer

None of that means you switch off your risk management. As we warned in “Leadership Is Narrow” and again in “Market Correction Risk,” the ingredients for a deeper drawdown are quietly building underneath a rising tape. Three of them deserve your attention.

Start with leverage. FINRA margin debt hit a record $1.30 trillion in April, up better than a third in a year, and now runs near 4% of GDP against a long-run median closer to 1.5%. Measured against M2, it’s back near the peaks that preceded the 2000 and 2007 tops. Borrowed money cuts both ways. It is an accelerant, not a cushion.

Next, watch the retail bid. Vanda’s flow data shows single-stock retail net turnover rolling over into negative territory in recent sessions, even as prices grind higher. That divergence matters. When the buyer who powered this rally starts selling into strength, the marginal source of demand thins out right as the supply picture gets heavier.

Then there’s the cold math on bonds versus stocks. The 10-year Treasury now yields about 4.45%, while the S&P 500’s trailing earnings yield sits near 3.7%. For the first time in this cycle, a risk-free Treasury pays you MORE than the index earns. That flips the equity risk premium negative and hands every allocator a credible, paid-to-wait reason to trim equities into bonds.

Layer on the supply story as detailed in “Equity Supply Surge”: Alphabet’s $80 billion secondary, SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO, and a queue of mega-raises from OpenAI, Anthropic, and the hyperscalers mean the market has to absorb a wall of new paper. More shares chasing the same dollars is a persistent headwind, not a one-day shock. As we noted in “Parabolic Semiconductor Rally,” when the most prized names all rush the exit at once, it pays to ask who is selling.

How We’re Positioning

So how do we square a buy signal with a real list of worries? We hold exposure and manage risk simultaneously. Those two things aren’t in conflict. The MFBR keeps us invested because the weight of the evidence and a clean test of support still point higher. Bob Farrell’s fourth rule reminds us that exponential moves tend to run further than anyone expects and then correct violently. Markets like that never correct gently. Therefore, we keep trailing stops disciplined, we refuse to chase the SpaceX-fueled enthusiasm at the highs, and we watch 7,248 like a hawk.

The calendar adds a second reason for that discipline. We’re walking into the weakest stretch of the year. As I detailed in “Market Correction Risk: Why Summer 2026 Looks Risky,” the May-through-October window has produced an average S&P 500 gain of just 1.7% since 1950, compared with better than 7% in November through April. The old “sell in May” line gets mocked every spring by people who haven’t looked at the data. The data is one-sided.

Then stack the election cycle on top. 2026 is a midterm year, and midterm years are the weakest and most volatile leg of the four-year presidential cycle. Jeff Hirsch’s Stock Trader’s Almanac has tracked the pattern for decades, and the numbers are sobering. Going back to the early 1960s, the average intra-year drawdown in a midterm year runs around 17% to 18%. That is well above the roughly 13% you see in the other three years. Notably, volatility tends to build up ahead of the November vote as investors handicap the balance of power in Congress.

Here’s the part that keeps me constructive, though. That midterm weakness has historically been a setup, not an ending. The 12 months after a midterm election have delivered an average S&P 500 gain of more than 12%. Furthermore, the Dow has climbed by more than 45% on average from its midterm-year low to its pre-election-year high. So the same seasonal soft patch that turns a routine bull market pullback into a deeper summer correction has, time and again, been the launchpad for the next leg up. We manage risk now, NOT because the bull market is over. We do it because we want dry powder and a steady hand when the seasonal low shows up.

None of this is about going to cash and hiding. It’s about tilting the book so you can sit through a noisy summer and still have ammunition for the fall. Here’s the playbook we’re running.

Howard Marks said it best.

“The riskiest thing in markets is the belief that there is no risk.”

With high-yield spreads pinned near 300 basis points, the market is pricing almost none. That’s exactly the backdrop where this kind of playbook earns its keep. Stay invested, but keep one hand on the exit.

The catalyst that turns a healthy pullback into something deeper won’t be a single oil-soaked CPI print. It’ll be the moment forward earnings expectations start to roll over while valuations sit at the high end of history. We aren’t there yet. Watch the Fed on Wednesday, watch wages, and watch whether second-half earnings estimates hold. The trend is your friend right up until the day it isn’t. Our job between now and then is to stay invested without going blind.

What’s your read? Are you adding to this dip or trimming into strength? Does the gap between a bullish tape and a long list of risks have you second-guessing your own positioning? If so, that’s exactly the conversation worth having. Connect with our team, and let’s pressure-test your portfolio before the summer does it for you.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 13:45

Apollo Picks Austin Over New York As Wall Street's Migration South Continues

It's not just Citadel that's moving out of New York.

Apollo Global Management has chosen Austin, Texas, as its second headquarters, according to sources familiar with the decision. The firm, which manages about $1 trillion in assets, evaluated Austin, Miami, Palm Beach, and Nashville before CEO Marc Rowan selected Austin, according to Financial Times.

The new office is expected to host most future hiring as Apollo expands beyond its longtime New York base. While the decision has been communicated internally, it is not yet final.

Austin's appeal includes its strong talent pipeline, growing tech ecosystem, quality of life, and business-friendly environment. Texas has increasingly attracted major financial and corporate employers, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, SpaceX, and ExxonMobil.

FT writes that Apollo has been broadening its U.S. footprint since the pandemic, opening major offices in Connecticut and Florida. The firm now employs more than 4,000 people, over double its 2020 headcount.

Although New York remains Apollo's primary headquarters, the company has stated that most future growth is expected to occur in its second HQ. Austin reportedly also benefited from concerns among employees about limited private-school options in Miami.

Apollo's decision highlights a broader trend reshaping the financial industry. As taxes, regulatory costs, and political uncertainty continue to rise in New York, firms are increasingly looking elsewhere for growth. Critics argue that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's antagonistic rhetoric toward business and his support for higher taxes have reinforced concerns among executives and investors, accelerating the migration of talent and capital to states such as Texas and Florida.

For companies weighing where to expand, Austin's pro-business environment and lower tax burden are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 13:25