🚨 BESSENT JUST SHUT THE DOOR Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent filed new IRS rules that stop illegal aliens from collecting refundable tax credits meant for Americans. No more free money for people who aren’t even supposed to be here. American taxpayers first. Period.

Landon Patterson (‘28 TX) out of the ‘pen to shut the door with 2 innings. FB worked 80-86 T87 w/ loose arm. Paired it with a short SL 75-79 that got s/m down in the zone, collected 3Ks in this outing. #SouthChamp# @PG_Uncommitted

SAUDI ARABIA SPENT 5 MONTHS BUILDING AN ESCAPE ROUTE FROM IRAN. THE HOUTHIS JUST CLOSED IT. When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia didn't panic. It rerouted oil 1,200 kilometers overland through the East-West Pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, sacrificing natural-gas-liquids revenue to push capacity from 5 million to 7 million barrels a day. It’s actually a genuine engineering and economic achievement, built in months, designed to make the kingdom's oil exports untouchable by Iran. This week, the Houthis put a spanner in the works. THE SQUEEZE On July 20, Yemen's Houthi movement declared a full naval blockade of Saudi Arabia and struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. By Friday, they hit the source directly: missiles and drones on Aramco's Jizan refinery, and a simultaneous strike on the Yanbu export terminal, the exact port the kingdom built its Hormuz workaround around. NASA's satellite fire-detection system confirmed multiple thermal anomalies at Jizan at 1:17am UTC. Brent crude broke back above $100 a barrel within hours. Here's the part that makes this more than another rocket over the Red Sea: every barrel Yanbu loads still has to exit through the Bab al-Mandeb strait to reach open water. Iran controls the door on one side of the peninsula. The Houthis, backed by Iran, now threaten the only other one. WHO SAYS WHAT Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree framed it as retaliation, not initiation, accusing Saudi of "escalation" after Saudi strikes on Hodeidah, and vowing to answer "escalation with escalation." Yemen's government says the Houthis are using the strait "to serve Iran's regional agenda and strengthen Tehran's negotiating position" The Houthis have a real grievance, a blockade Riyadh has enforced on Yemen for over a decade, and Iran has a real interest in every additional lever it can pull on Saudi Arabia while its own war with Washington grinds on. FLIP THE SEATS Picture the Saudi energy ministry official who spent five months and real money solving the Hormuz problem, converting NGL infrastructure, pushing throughput past design limits, briefing the world that the kingdom had insulated itself from Iranian leverage. Now picture that same person watching satellite footage of Yanbu-bound crude burning at the refinery gate, in a port they specifically chose because it wasn't supposed to be anyone's chokepoint. The lesson isn't that the pipeline was badly planned. It's that in a region with this many armed, motivated actors, there is no single fix. THE BIGGER PATTERN This isn't the tidy version of multipolarity, a single rising bloc calmly displacing a single declining hegemon. It's messier than that, and more honest: when no one power can fully guarantee the safety of the world's oil, the number of actors who can threaten it doesn't shrink to two. It grows. Iran doesn't need to personally close both routes. It just needs an ally willing to close the second one for its own reasons, at the moment that reinforces Iran's position most. The Unipolar Order is discovering it never had as many fronts covered as it thought. Saudi Arabia will likely find a third route eventually. The question worth sitting with is how long the kingdom, the world and the price of gas everywhere can survive the search.

LA Unified blocked all student access to AI on district devices this school year. 429,000 students. New York City did the same thing a day earlier, but only through grade 8. LA covered every grade. The strange part is nobody knew. It started at the beginning of the school year and wasn’t made public until Wednesday. Board member Kelly Gonez found out at the meeting. Before this, students 13 and over could use approved tools after a digital citizenship course. The interim CIO also said activity on personal devices can be tracked if the student is logged into a district account. Their committee doesn’t report back with an actual policy until the end of the school year. Education was supposed to be a huge market for these companies. The two biggest districts in America shut the door in the same week…

I am the Head of Latency at Trump Media, and my job is simple to describe. When the President types something that moves the market, I make sure the firms that pay us receive it a few hundred milliseconds before the push notification reaches the people who elected him. That is the product. People keep hunting for the complicated part. There isn't one. Let me give you the shape of the company first, because it explains me. Last year we booked $3.6 million in revenue and lost around $400 million earning it, roughly $111 of loss for every $1 that came in the door. You do not hire a Head of Latency when the business works. You hire one when you are a $2 billion company whose only functioning asset is one man's phone, and somebody at the strategy meeting finally says the quiet part into the microphone: the posts move the market, so let us sell the posts. Understand what the asset is. It is one man, typing. When he posts, the tape moves, and we can prove it to the decimal, because the feed ships with an archive back to 2022 so a quant can measure exactly how much each Truth has moved a given stock. The signal has a beta now. We are past guessing. We have watched a single post add $4 trillion to the S&P in one afternoon and $500 billion to crypto before lunch, and we have the backtest, and the backtest is what we sell. So here is the tier structure, and I would like you to find yourself in it. The President's posts are free. Anyone can read them, 12.9 million people do, one push notification late. That is the free tier. The free tier is the slow tier. Above it sits the tier that pays, reportedly as much as $100,000 a month, or $60,000 on a 3-year plan, per the number the Financial Times printed, which I could not possibly confirm. Everyone gets the words for free. What the money buys is the head start. The speech that sets your tariff and your gas price and your rent reaches the desk shorting your retirement account before it reaches you, and both of those deliveries are perfectly legal, and only one of them is fast. We know the exact morning the product was born. A single post before the market opened, and by the closing bell the tape had swung about $4 trillion. Nobody in my department calls that a scandal. We call it the demo. It is the slide at the front of the deck. It is the reason the customers signed before we had launched. There is a darker version of my job, and it does not come with a sales team. One morning this spring somebody placed about $580 million on oil roughly 15 minutes before the President posted about Iran, the price fell their way, and a federal regulator is now going desk to desk trying to learn who that somebody was. I could not tell you. Nobody can yet. But I will be fair to them, professionally. That person was doing my job without a contract, without a filing, without a press release. We are the ones who send an invoice. I am required to be precise about the ethics, so here is the script. This is faster access to a post that is already public. Nobody sees a Truth before the world does. Wall Street has always sold the milliseconds. A firm once spent $300 million to tunnel a straighter line through a mountain range and save 3 milliseconds, because a millisecond on that street is worth about $75 million, so no one here blinks at billing for one. We changed a single variable. The signal used to come from an anonymous order book. Now it comes from the government, and roughly 41% of what we charge for it returns to a revocable trust whose sole trustee is the President's son and whose sole beneficiary is the President. He posts the thing. We sell the speed of the thing. The money comes home to the man who posted it. I have drawn that loop on a whiteboard in four directions and it closes every time, cleanly, and a clean loop is what we mean in this building when we say the word integration. You should know the play has a history, because the history is the whole tell. A data company once sold traders a 2-second edge on a government number, then sold a richer tier that beat the 2-second tier by another 5 milliseconds, and a regulator asked them to stop, and they stopped. The newswires ran their own version until they were made to quit. Somebody even gave the practice a name. Every one of those got shut down while the market-moving words still belonged to a university or a company. We are the first to run it when the words belong to the head of state, and so far no one has asked us to stop. And we filed. The whole product is disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission under the heading Fair Disclosure. Read that heading twice. The fastest way to buy unfair speed is timestamped and public in a document whose name is Fair Disclosure. Our confession is Exhibit 99.1. The mission statement three paragraphs down says we exist to give the people their voices back, and we do. We give their voices to the desk, at a discount, in milliseconds, 24/7, archived to 2022. A reporter called to ask about all of this. We did not respond. We are very fast on the feed and very slow on the phone, and both of those are the product. So this is the arrangement, in full, and I have stopped pretending it is anything else. The President speaks. The market moves. The firms that paid his company to hear him a half-second sooner place the trade. The money finds its way back to the President. And the citizens the words were spoken to stand on the free tier, phones in their hands, reading their own President a few hundred milliseconds late, which is precisely as late as we have priced them to be. The posts are free. They have always been free. The only thing we ever sold you was your place in the line to hear them.

If this is AI slop, the slop is getting ridiculously realistic Made with seedance 2.5 Prompt: Create a 30-second, 1080p ultra-realistic personal home-video showing an ordinary summer evening in the life of a young Japanese woman. No reference image. MAIN SUBJECT Young Japanese woman in her early 20s, naturally pretty, realistic skin texture, minimal makeup, soft and cheerful personality. Shoulder-length dark brown hair worn down with a simple clip pinning back one side, a few loose strands framing her face. Wearing an oversized light-yellow short-sleeve shirt, denim shorts, white canvas sneakers and a thin gold anklet. Maintain the same face, hairstyle, clothing, body proportions and overall appearance throughout the entire video. SETTING A quiet older residential neighborhood in Kyoto during a warm summer evening. Narrow paved streets, low wooden houses, hanging laundry, vending machines, telephone poles, tangled overhead wires, a small corner convenience store, a shrine gate visible in the distance, cicadas humming in the trees, and long tree shadows stretching across the road. Everything should feel lived-in, ordinary and peaceful. No tourist attractions, advertisements, recognizable brands or commercial activity. CAMERA / VISUAL AESTHETIC Raw personal footage casually recorded by a friend on an early-2000s consumer DV camcorder. Strong handheld shake, imperfect framing, autofocus hunting, exposure shifts, occasional motion blur, faded colors, soft digital detail, mild noise, accidental zooms and natural camera imperfections. No stabilization, drone footage, gimbal movement, dramatic lighting or polished commercial cinematography. — OUTSIDE THE HOUSE She steps outside holding a small paper fan. She slides the door shut, glances at her reflection in a window, and looks toward the camera with a shy laugh. A warm evening breeze rustles the nearby wind chimes as she starts walking down the street. — CONVENIENCE STORE STOP She reaches the small corner store and buys a popsicle. She steps outside, unwraps it, takes her first bite and scrunches her face happily at the taste. She notices her friend filming and waves the popsicle toward the camera with a grin before taking another bite. — WALKING HOME She continues down the quiet street while eating. A small dog tied outside a shop barks softly and wags its tail. She kneels down and gently scratches behind its ears. The dog's owner calls it back and she stands, giggling as she walks on. — SMALL ACCIDENT She walks past a low hanging laundry line when a stray sheet brushes against her head. She stops, startled, then realizes what happened and bursts out laughing. She pats down her hair while her friend zooms clumsily toward her face. She looks directly into the camera and says: "Mou, yamete!" ("Come on, stop it!") — QUIET MOMENT She reaches a small stone step near a shrine gate and sits down for a moment. She finishes the popsicle while watching fireflies begin to flicker faintly near the bushes. A gentle breeze moves her hair. She tucks a loose strand behind her ear and looks around peacefully. — FINAL MOMENT She stands up and continues walking home. After a few steps, she turns back toward the camera with a soft playful smile and says: "Hayaku kite." ("Come on, hurry up.") She keeps walking down the dim lane as the streetlights flicker on, while the camera follows behind. She disappears around the corner and the recording abruptly cuts to black. AUDIO Natural location sound only: cicadas, wind chimes, footsteps, distant bicycle bells, a vending machine hum, sliding doors, rustling laundry, faint conversations and subtle camera-handling noise. No music. No narration. No artificial sound effects. Only the two spoken lines specified above. FINAL FEEL The entire video should feel like a forgotten summer recording from the early 2000s. Warm, gentle, casual, slightly playful, intimate and nostalgic. No dramatic events, no exaggerated acting, no model poses and no polished cinematic shots. The realism should come from ordinary surroundings, natural expressions, small accidents, realistic environmental movement and imperfect camcorder operation.

This might be a case when all the cockroaches were let into the trap before the door slammed shut $HG_F But remember, the wedge spells only a correction, not necessarily THE top