Portal Effect

[Portal Effect @Portal_Effect]

New requirement from future Presidents: boring memes, because it means they're working hard and doing good by citizens.

[Richard @ricwe123]

What most people already understand, even without the economic terminology, is that firms like BlackRock operate less like investors and more like modern feudal landlords.

They buy essential infrastructure,water networks, ports, energy grids, data centres, and other public necessities, often using vast amounts of borrowed money and paying prices that ordinary market participants cannot match.

Once the acquisition is complete, the debt is pushed onto the acquired company itself.

The result is simple: the public start paying.

Consumers repay that debt through higher water bills, rising energy prices, increased fees, and declining service quality.
The infrastructure becomes a real cash-extraction machine.
Profits flow upward to the shareholders and executives, while the financial burden flows downward to ordinary households.

When the model inevitably breaks down, the consequences are socialised. Communities are left with crumbling infrastructure, polluted rivers, and failing services.
Thames Water in the United Kingdom with a £14 billion debt mountain and repeated sewage scandals is a stark example of what happens when financial engineering takes precedence over public stewardship.

The executives who loaded the company with debt have already collected their bonuses.
The investors have already taken their returns.
And when the system finally reaches breaking point, taxpayers are expected to pick up the bill.

🔴Privatise the gains.
🔴Socialise the losses.

That is the business model......

[Saagar Enjeti @esaagar]

Almost every promise of modern technology has delivered the opposite result

- Social networking made historically less social
- Unlimited information made people much stupider
- Technology use during childhood has made children less advanced

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Ha'aretz reports that Hamas, through Qatar, conveyed immediately on Oct. 7 that they were willing to return all the civilian hostages for nothing -- their only ask was for a mediator to arrange the exchange and establish a connection to then negotiate the further release of the soldiers. Israel refused to talk or hear about it.

So Qatar reached out to Antony Blinken to let him know that Hamas was willing to release all the civilian hostages.

Blinken told Qatar he didn't want to hear it because "Israel is still under attack, and there's no one to talk to."

Blinken had the opportunity to free every single civilian hostage and de-escalate the situation. Instead he wanted war.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Four raw kidney beans will put an adult on the bathroom floor within three hours, and the slow cooker makes them five times worse.

The poison is phytohaemagglutinin. A lectin. The bean makes it so that anything eating it raw vomits the seed back out, which is exactly what happens: nausea within an hour, vomiting within three, then the other end, then a day in bed.

Raw red kidney beans carry 20,000 to 70,000 units of it. Properly boiled, 200 to 400. The difference is a hard boil for 10 minutes, and a hard boil is the one thing a slow cooker never does.

Cook the beans at 80 degrees for hours, the slow cooker's whole idea, and the toxin does not break down. It multiplies. Up to five times the raw dose, according to the FDA's own bug book, in a bean that looks cooked, tastes cooked and goes into a chilli that four people eat.

Britain logged 50 incidents between 1976 and 1989 and then stopped counting, because every one of them was the same story: a bag of dried beans, an overnight soak, a pot left on low, and a family ill by teatime.

The tin is safe because a factory boiled them for you, and the tin says ready to eat. The dried bag says soak and boil, in a font you need glasses for, under a picture of a farmhouse kitchen.

Nobody has ever needed to boil a steak for 10 minutes to stop it poisoning the table.

The bean is sold as the safe protein.

[Wu Tang is for the Children @WUTangKids]

Morons made a video to "celebrate workers" for Labor Day and instead of showing workers it’s just an automated manufacturing plant that replaced all the workers smh

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

I figured out what they are doing with the dollar. They are swapping it. Push the old one out, pull a new one in, and the new one hurts Americans and pays the elite every time it moves.

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Weaken the physical dollar abroad through Tariffs, Trade wars. Create so much friction that countries stop using the dollar in trade. They move to local currencies, gold, other systems. The dollar index drops 12.6 percent in one year. Steepest decline in thirty years. BRICS accelerates away from dollar reserves.

That part looks like incompetence but if there is one thing Scott Bessent is not, it's incompetent.

Step 2: Ban the government from making a digital dollar. Trump issued an Executive order in January 2025. No federal agency is allowed to build one, so the public option...the competition to a private one, is dead.

Step 3: Pass the GENIUS Act. The law that creates a legal framework for private companies to issue digital dollars instead. And here is the key, the law requires every stablecoin issuer to hold reserves in short-term US Treasury bills. Lutnick and Bo Hines wrote the GENIUS Act to benefit Tether.

Fun fact: Howard Lutnick's Canto Fitzgerald owns 5% of Tether and Bo Hines left shortly after the GENIUS Act was signed to be CEO of 21st Century, Canto Fitzgerald's crypto arm that Tether now owns.

That means every digital dollar that gets minted automatically creates one dollar of mandatory demand for government debt. Unlike normal investors, stablecoin issuers are price-inelastic, they buy Treasuries regardless of yield because the law says they have to. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive Treasury demand by 2030.

So you push the physical dollar out and countries stop buying Treasuries. Then you pull it back in through private digital dollars that are legally required to buy Treasuries instead.

Different dollar with the same control. Except now it is not a public system, it is a private one, and the private company at the center of it takes a cut on every dollar that moves. The private company is also incorporated in the BVI's so no regulator has jurisdiction.

That company is Tether. $183 billion in dollars running through it, $13 billion in profit last year. It has never passed an audit. Co-founded by Jeffrey Epstein's crypto advisor. Reserves custodied by the Lutnick's family firm. Protected by a law that was championed from inside the White House by a man who quit one month after it passed and became the company's CEO.

Scott Bessent said that stablecoin firms could buy up to $1 trillion in government debt. The European Central Bank warned this "effectively outsources parts of the national debt to the crypto sector."

So in turn, our dollar gets weaker, our groceries cost more, our 401k buys less, and every time that happens, demand for the private digital dollar goes up. They get richer and we absorb the cost.

That is the trade, and the people who set it up are the ones collecting on both sides.

Full investigation is on my Substack. Link in bio.

[Portal Effect @Portal_Effect]

@juleshorn01 You should try the shanghai hospital exercise

[Don Pettit @astro_Pettit]

I have spent 23 years documenting the global LED transition of city lighting from space.

Across my 4 missions to the ISS, I have photographed every major city on Earth, building a data set of the gradual replacement of sodium vapor lighting with LEDs.

The warmer, yellow-orange of gas discharge lamps has been phased out worldwide to multi-colored LEDs, citing energy savings and environmental reasons.

Widespread adoption has markedly changed the way our cities look from orbit, and as many have pointed out, how they feel to those on the ground!

Here is a collection of the most striking before-and-after photos I have observed:

[Wyatt Wagner @WyattOWagner]

Clip from a documentary about the Evangelicals who send Israel $129,000,000 annually. It was almost shown on PBS but lobbyists got it banned from the air. In this clip, they make Christian kids bring in their piggy banks to empty the change to donate to Israel.
https://t.co/FLl0edi5ea

[Portal Effect @Portal_Effect]

@RepThomasMassie It's genuinely incredible that the view of passing 900 pieces of legislation is somehow producing small government.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

The U.S. House will be in session only 4 full days from July 24th to November 8th.

That’s 100 paid days off versus 4 full workings days plus 4 travel (half) days.

Meanwhile TRUMP says YOU have too many holidays.

[Dominic Michael Tripi @DMichaelTripi]

NEW: Former US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll reportedly met with Trump to inform him that the Iran war was making it impossible to achieve foreign-policy goals, Trump talked exclusively about his ballroom in response, causing Driscoll to resign believing the admin was “doomed.”

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The protoganist of his very fine short film is the unholy love child of Asmongold and Catturd.

[Scott Horton @scotthortonshow]

Know your enemy.

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

And we aren’t supposed to call them Nazis…

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

It's amazing how quickly they got huge numbers of people to recite the comical view that Iran has been at war with the US for 47 years (and, I guess, every American president forgot to mention this fact, including Trump 1)

In the 1980s, the Reagan WH sold highly sophisticated missiles and other weapons to Iran in order to illegally fund the contras in Nicaragua after Congress banned that funding. If Iran really were at war with the US in the 1980s, it means Reagan officials are guilty of the worst possible treason: arming America's enemies in a time of war.

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

Trump is of course a liar about using Venezuelan heavy crude oil to refill the SPR.

The SPR has strict quality requirements such as a maximum of 1.99% sulfur content. Venezuelan oil is 5.7% sulfur, which is considered insanely "sour." It also happens to be highly acidic which would eat away at the storage cave walls, likely causing cave-ins and collapse.

There are other requirements, too, such as API gravity. Venezuelan oil doesn't qualify. If you pour it in, you can never get it back out. Too sludgy. It basically just becomes a giant "tar cave" of sludge that's unpumpable.

So once again, Trump is lying about the whole thing. There's much more to this story, too, such as the fact that the 65 billion barrels of oil can't possibly be tapped without at least A FULL DECADE of infrastructure investment in Venezuela, and at least $100 billion in investment funds, plus you have to find all the experts around the world who know how to do these things and somehow entice them to move to what is effectively a war zone where local resistance groups will be targeting them constantly.

So nope, your gas prices aren't going to get any better tomorrow. It's all just smoke and mirrors. As usual.

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

No, we won't. Not directly. VZ oil is the wrong grade. US salt caverns take light sweet and medium sour. VZ is heavy.

[NoLimit @NoLimitGains]

The median new home has gone from $18,000 in 1963 to $413,595 today. That’s 23x.

Median household income over the same stretch went from about $6,200 to $80,000. That’s 12.9x.

Homes went up nearly twice as fast as the money people earn.

In 1963 a new home cost 2.9 times median income. Now it’s 5.2 times.

NAHB’s 2026 numbers put it plainly. 88.2 million households, 65% of the country, can’t afford a median-priced new home at a 6% mortgage. You need $121,674 of income to qualify. More than half of American households earn under $80,000.

Here’s the part nobody talks about. A $1,000 increase in the price of that median home prices out another 156,405 households.

One thousand dollars. On a $413,000 house.

It works the other way too. A quarter-point drop in mortgage rates, from 6.25% to 6%, prices 1.42 million households back into the market.

That’s how tight the margin is. The entire affordability question now sits on a rounding error.

In 39 states over 65% of households are priced out. In San Jose it’s 86%.