Let's consult the historical record to see what the Aztec society was up to when the Spanish conquered it. First, from Cortes: “They have a most horrid and abominable custom which truly ought to be punished and which until now we have seen in no other part, and this is that, whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of the idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as sacrifice. Some of us have seen this, and they say it is the most terrible and frightful thing they have ever witnessed… not one year passes in which they do not kill and sacrifice some fifty persons in each temple; and this is done and held as customary… not one year has passed… in which three or four thousand souls have not been sacrificed in this manner.” And now Bernal Diaz del Castillo: “The dismal drum of Huichilobos sounded again, accompanied by conches, horns and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and when we looked at the tall cue [temple] from which it came we saw our comrades who had been captured in Cortes’ defeat being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. When they had hauled them up to a small platform in front of the shrine where they kept their accursed idols we saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them; and they made them dance with a sort of fan in front of Huichilobos. Then after they had danced the papas [priests] laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them.” ... “Every day we saw sacrificed before us three, four or five Indians whose hearts were offered to the idols and their blood plastered on the walls, and their feet, arms and legs of the victims were cut off and eaten… Every wall of this chapel and the whole floor, had become almost black with human blood, and… the stench was worse than in a Spanish slaughter-house.” ... “When we arrived at the great market place, called Tlaltelolco, we were astounded at the number of people and the quantity of merchandise that it contained… Let us begin with the dealers in gold, silver, and precious stones, feathers, mantles, and embroidered goods. Then there were other wares consisting of Indian slaves both men and women; and I say that they bring as many of them to that great market for sale as the Portuguese bring negroes from Guinea…. They brought some of them tied to long poles by means of collars around their necks so they would not escape, and others left loose.” ~~ This is what the Spanish conquered in the name of Christendom - a Stone-Age society consumed with ritualistic human sacrifice, cannibalism and slavery.

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Nothing exposes Biden’s disdain for the forgotten working men & women of PA like campaigning with anti-fracking activist Lady Gaga. This desperate effort to drum up enthusiasm is actually a sharp stick in the eye for 600,000 Pennsylvanians who work in the fracking industry.

Been thinking a lot about the Clarity Act this week and honestly I think most people are still underestimating what is actually happening right now. As I'm typing this the Senate Banking Committee is holding the markup hearing in Dirksen 538. Tim Scott gavelled in at 10:30. This is the session that was supposed to happen in January and got pulled at the last second after Coinbase walked away over the stablecoin yield fight. Bitcoin already pushed above $81k on the open and the market is starting to wake up to what a committee passage actually signals. Warren came out swinging in her opening, calling it a bill "written by the crypto industry for the crypto industry" and pointing to that CoinDesk survey showing 1% of voters rank crypto as a top issue. Predictable. There are dozens of amendments queued up, most of them from Warren and Reed, and almost none of them are going to survive. Lummis called it the hardest piece of legislation she's ever worked on and the Republican majority looks whipped. If Scott has the votes lined up the way reporting suggests, the bill clears committee today and that is a very big deal. Here is why I keep banging this drum. For years the real blocker to institutional capital was never volatility or narrative. It was that legal and compliance teams at every major allocator could not get a straight answer on what crypto even is under US law. Security? Commodity? Both? Neither? Pension fund managers cannot sign off on an asset class living in regulatory limbo. Insurance regulators won't approve products without a statutory floor. Bank custody desks have been sitting on their hands for the same reason. Clarity fixes that. It draws an actual jurisdictional line between SEC and CFTC, defines what a digital commodity is, and finally builds a real compliance pathway for exchanges, brokers, and custodians. The 1:1 reserve mandate on stablecoins is exactly the hard rule traditional finance has been quietly begging for so they can stop treating this entire space like radioactive material. The piece that gets missed in all the X takes is this. Once allocation committees at the big shops get a green light, the money that flows in is not retail. It's pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth, corporate treasuries, RIAs, family offices, the entire long tail of capital that has been writing legal memos and waiting for cover for two years. You don't need much rotation from a pool that size for the impact to be enormous. Even one or two percent of addressable AUM is measured in the trillions. People keep asking why ETF flows have plateaued and why institutional adoption felt slower than expected. This is why. The plumbing didn't exist. Clarity builds the plumbing. XRP is the most obvious example sitting right in front of us. Trading around $1.37, stuck in a $1.35 to $1.45 box for weeks despite spot ETF inflows. The chart isn't broken, the legal classification is. Today's markup is the first real crack in that ceiling. Yes the conflict of interest fight is still unresolved. Yes the bill still needs to be merged with the Ag Committee version, then survive a floor vote where 60 yes votes means at least seven Democrats have to cross. Yes Washington can break anything on the way to a finish line. Lummis has been blunt that if we miss this May window the bill realistically slips to 2030 after the midterms. But the direction of travel is set, the White House is pushing for July 4, the banking lobby's last stand on the Tillis Alsobrooks compromise is losing, and in my view the market has not even started to price what a final signed bill actually does to the capital pipeline. Bullish doesn't really cover it. Today matters.