IDon’tKnowOn3rd

The true, the good, the beautiful. Seek truth with the mind. Seek goodness with the will. Seek and contemplate beauty with the heart and imagination.

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

109. Hotels and motels — +2.6%
110. Physicians’ services — +2.4%
111. Residential telephone services — +2.4%
112. Sauces and gravies — +2.4%
113. Breakfast sausage — +2.3%
114. Movies, theaters and concerts — +2.3%
115. College tuition and fees — +2.2%
116. Admission to sporting events — +2.1%
117. Cookies — +2.0%
118. Snacks — +1.9%
119. Baby food and formula — +1.8%
120. Eyeglasses and eye care — +1.8%
121. Peanut butter — +1.8%
122. Wine away from home — +1.8%
123. Whiskey at home — +1.7%
124. Food at employee sites and schools — +1.6%
125. Fresh biscuits, rolls and muffins — +1.6%
126. Ham — +1.6%
127. Pet food and treats — +1.3%
128. Fees for lessons/instruction — +1.3%
129. Educational books and supplies — +1.2%
130. Frozen vegetables — +1.2%
131. Parking and other fees — +1.2%
132. Living-room/kitchen/dining-room furniture — +1.1%
133. New cars — +1.1%
134. Stationery and gift wrap — +1.1%
135. Photographers/photo processing — +0.9%
136. Household paper products — +0.8%
137. Other appliances — +0.8%
138. Lunchmeats — +0.8%
139. Pork chops — +0.7%
140. Tires — +0.7%
141. Bananas — +0.6%
142. New trucks — +0.5%
143. Other pork roasts/steaks/ribs — +0.5%
144. Sugar and sugar substitutes — +0.5%
145. Distilled spirits at home — +0.2%
146. Prepared salads — +0.2%

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

Price Increases, July 2025 to July 2026 (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

1. Fuel oil — +39.1%
2. Other motor fuels — +30.7%
3. Airline fares — +25.5%
4. Regular gasoline — +25.3%
5. Midgrade gasoline — +23.0%
6. Premium gasoline — +21.5%
7. Computer software and accessories — +21.2%
8. Instant coffee — +15.8%
9. Jewelry — +15.2%
10. Uncooked beef roasts — +13.5%
11. Video/video-game subscriptions and rentals — +13.4%
12. Postage — +13.3%
13. Sewing machines, fabric and supplies — +12.9%
14. Tomatoes — +12.8%
15. Delivery services — +12.6%
16. Gardening and lawncare services — +12.3%
17. Apples — +11.1%
18. Watches — +10.6%
19. Dishes and flatware — +10.4%
20. Other video equipment — +10.0%
21. Home health care — +9.7%
22. Candy and chewing gum — +9.6%
23. Uncooked beef steaks — +9.6%
24. Roasted coffee — +9.4%
25. Video discs and other media — +9.2%
26. Ground beef — +9.0%
27. Turkey and other uncooked poultry — +8.4%
28. Recorded music and music subscriptions — +8.0%
29. Fresh fish and seafood — +7.8%
30. Frozen fish and seafood — +7.8%
31. Lettuce — +7.5%
32. Cigarettes — +7.3%
33. Motor vehicle maintenance/servicing — +7.3%
34. Intracity transportation — +7.0%
35. Apparel services other than dry cleaning — +6.6%
36. Vehicle parts/equipment other than tires — +6.6%
37. Nonelectric cookware/tableware — +6.4%
38. Frankfurters — +6.3%
39. Rice — +6.2%
40. Men’s underwear/nightwear/swimwear/accessories — +6.2%
41. Motor vehicle repair — +6.2%
42. Shelf-stable fish and seafood — +6.1%
43. Fresh whole milk — +6.0%
44. Newspapers and magazines — +6.0%
45. Outpatient hospital services — +5.8%
46. Other uncooked beef and veal — +5.6%
47. Sports vehicles including bicycles — +5.6%
48. Vehicle accessories other than tires — +5.5%
49. Salt, seasonings and spices — +5.4%
50. Girls’ apparel — +5.3%
51. Laundry and dry-cleaning services — +5.3%
52. Women’s suits and separates — +5.2%
53. Inpatient hospital services — +5.2%
54. Dental services — +5.1%
55. Pet services — +5.1%
56. Other fresh vegetables — +5.0%
57. Water and sewerage maintenance — +5.0%
58. Other fresh fruits — +4.8%
59. Fresh milk other than whole — +4.8%
60. Renters/household insurance — +4.8%
61. Indoor plants and flowers — +4.7%
62. Other condiments — +4.7%
63. Other tobacco products — +4.7%
64. Veterinarian services — +4.7%
65. Window coverings — +4.6%
66. Women’s footwear — +4.5%
67. Crackers and related bread products — +4.5%
68. Fresh cakes and cupcakes — +4.4%
69. Haircuts and other personal-care services — +4.4%
70. Motor oil, coolant and fluids — +4.3%
71. Utility piped gas — +4.3%
72. Electricity — +4.2%
73. Men’s pants and shorts — +4.2%
74. Nursing homes/adult day services — +4.2%
75. Breakfast cereal — +4.1%
76. Tax preparation/accounting fees — +4.1%
77. Canned fruit — +4.0%
78. Toys — +4.0%
79. White bread — +4.0%
80. Computers, peripherals and smart-home assistants — +3.9%
81. Garbage/trash collection — +3.9%
82. Citrus fruit — +3.8%
83. Musical instruments and accessories — +3.8%
84. Women’s underwear/nightwear/swimwear/accessories — +3.8%
85. Men’s shirts and sweaters — +3.6%
86. Motor vehicle body work — +3.6%
87. Distilled spirits away from home — +3.6%
88. Internet service — +3.5%
89. Parking fees and tolls — +3.5%
90. Vehicle registration/license fees — +3.5%
91. Tools, hardware and supplies — +3.5%
92. Potatoes — +3.4%
93. Elementary/high-school tuition and fees — +3.4%
94. Day care and preschool — +3.4%
95. Hair/dental/shaving personal-care products — +3.4%
96. Limited-service meals — +3.3%
97. Beer away from home — +3.2%
98. Canned vegetables — +3.2%
99. Household cleaning products — +3.2%
100. Nonfrozen juices and drinks — +3.2%
101. Rent of primary residence — +2.9%
102. Sports equipment — +2.9%
103. Men’s footwear — +2.8%
104. Soups — +2.8%
105. Beer at home — +2.8%
106. Cable/satellite/live-streaming TV — +2.8%
107. Food from vending machines/mobile vendors — +2.6%
108. Fresh sweet rolls, coffeecakes and doughnuts — +2.6%

[IDon’tKnowOn3rd @idontknowon3rd]

@atrupar @TheRickWilson @Google From Gemini:

Google’s choice to sync immediately with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names reflects a calculation that prioritizing political safety over geographical truth is the most pragmatic business decision.

[DemClips @Dem_Clips]

BREAKING: Pete Buttigieg slams Republicans for a political record they know is awful.

[NathanSATX @nybergATX]

@atrupar Arsonist gets caught burning a house down. Fire Marshall wants to inspect for faulty wiring.

[EJ Dionne @EJDionne]

“Against Canada, Trump is fighting a trade war that very few Americans support, under leadership that most Americans reject, to achieve results that virtually all Americans would dismiss as pointless if not crazy.”
V-good analysis @davidfrum @TheAtlantic

https://t.co/RDUcf7s6Et

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

When did it become normalized for the President of the United States to threaten to "bomb the shit out of" our allies—our *allies*—without that immediately leading to a serious conversation about whether he's mentally fit to serve as president

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

I'm speaking so bluntly because it's far too late in the lifespan of the United States of America to do anything else

[Maine @TheMaineWonk]

In less than 2 years these clowns:

- Renamed Department of Defense the Department of War.

- Burned through 70% of munitions and a near $1 trillion budget.

- “Ended” 8 made up wars and lost the 1 war they actually started

A national fucking disgrace.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Wolf: What hasn’t been discussed publicly, to my knowledge, is the fact that, in my opinion, President Trump committed a crime in negotiating the settlement agreement in this case and it’s possible that Mr. Blanche would be found to be a co-conspirator in that crime. Let me try to explain…

Congress enacted a statute that makes it illegal for the president or the vice president to directly or indirectly request the initiation or termination of a tax investigation. There’s a potential five-year prison term for violating that statute.

Donald Trump would not have immunity from criminal prosecution for violating that statute in this case because he filed this lawsuit in his personal capacity. Therefore, negotiating the settlement was not an official act for which he has immunity as president.

So, in this case, he was negotiating essentially with himself. As Judge Williams said in Trump v. IRS—a case in which I’m one of the 35 plaintiffs who, through excellent lawyers, persuaded the court to reopen the case and find that this was not a genuine case—it wasn’t a real case or controversy that was legitimately in federal court. It was a collusive case brought for an improper purpose: to get a personal benefit for President Trump, his family, and his allies.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

These books will give you a better education than almost any school curriculum in the West today.

In our academic system, you can go from Pre-K to PhD without reading a word of Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, or Milton.

We set up the Athenaeum Book Club to fight back. If schools and universities won't teach the Great Books, we must form our own reading circles. These are some of the texts we've read together, or will cover soon.

Join our reading group to study the great works in dialogue with others.

We are just starting The Brothers Karamazov.

If you've been on the fence about joining our group, now's the time. You do NOT want to miss this.

We're reading Brothers K. over the next 6 weeks. The next discussion is on August 18th.

Take out a paid subscription if you'd like to support us and join the discussions directly — it makes a huge difference to the time and resources we can dedicate.

You'll get:

- Live book club discussions (biweekly)
- Access to our incredible community chat
- Essays to guide you through the Great Books
- All past recordings, essays, and podcasts
- Ability to vote on what we read next

https://t.co/efQaicNvay

See you inside!

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

.@JamesTalarico: 50 years ago, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell circulated a memo around DC — a blueprint for how corporations could amass political power, reverse the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, and rig the system for themselves.

The Powell memo outlined a strategy. Unite corporate special interests, privilege corporate perspectives in the media, appoint sympathetic judges to the court, and buy politicians in both political parties.

And it worked. Republicans and some Democrats sold the false gospel of trickle-down economics. Trickle-down economics is not a theory, it is theft.

Since the late 1970s, mega donors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties. And then those politicians turned around and rigged the economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense.

We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

The rest of your natural life—and then some.

That's how long we'll be cleaning up the mess of Trump and MAGAism.

The nation as it was before is lost. It won't return. What we seek to save now isn't what used to be.

It'll be something else altogether. It'll be what we make it.

[Culture Explorer @CultureExploreX]

Fairy Tales Teach Adults What Facts Alone Cannot

Chesterton famously observed:

“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”

Most people think fairy tales exist to entertain children.

G.K. Chesterton believed they exist to educate adults.

In The Ethics of Elfland, one of the greatest chapters in Orthodoxy, Chesterton makes a surprising claim. Fairy tales prepare us to understand reality better than many modern philosophies because they begin with wonder instead of explanation.

Children don’t wake up expecting the sun to rise. They delight that it does.

Adults often do the opposite. We become so accustomed to the world that we stop noticing how extraordinary it is. The sunrise becomes routine. A tree becomes ordinary. The changing seasons become background noise. We explain everything and appreciate very little.

Chesterton thought this was a profound mistake.

Science can describe why leaves change color or how gravity works. Those explanations are valuable. But they do not answer a deeper question: why should a universe capable of beauty, order, and life exist at all?

That question begins with wonder.

Chesterton argues that we confuse consistency with necessity. The sun has risen every morning of our lives, but that does not make it less remarkable. Habit slowly convinces us that the world’s greatest miracles are simply normal.

Fairy tales resist that temptation.

In them, the world is full of rules, meaning, danger, and possibility. A promise matters, courage matters, and choices have consequences. The hero succeeds because he lives within an order greater than himself.

Reality works much the same way.

Music requires harmony just like language requires grammar. Friendships require trust. Freedom flourishes within limits.

Perhaps that is why fairy tales endure long after childhood. They remind us that the world deserves gratitude before it demands explanation.

Chesterton believed philosophy begins with the same question that fills a child with awe.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

The people who never stop asking that question never truly outgrow wonder.

https://t.co/Hc731pNBLa

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

.@realDonaldTrump still has absolutely no idea what he was trying to do, how he was going to do it, why he wasn't able to do it, or what he's going to do next to try to fix what he has no idea he broke.

He's a delusional, crackbrained, and deranged moron.

It's just that simple.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I watched Trump’s speech at the Correspondents’ Dinner last night.
It’s hard to articulate how sad it made me.

Sad and embarrassed and exhausted.

Here is the thing about a man who is a joke. He can’t tell one.

People think humor is a talent. It isn’t. It’s a capacity. To make someone laugh you have to be able to laugh at yourself, and to laugh at yourself you have to step outside of yourself and see what everyone else sees. For one second you have to be just another person in the room.

Most people can do this by the time they are nine years old.

He has never once managed it. Not in fifty years of cameras. Not for a second.

That is not a quirk. It is a symptom. The muscle that lets you tell a joke is the same one that lets you feel what another person feels. A man who cannot survive being laughed at cannot imagine being anyone but himself. He will only ever be generous when it is photographed. He will only ever be kind when it is filmed.

There is a name for it.

So he stood up there and did what he always does. He hit down. He made jokes about people’s weight. He made jokes about their intelligence. He made jokes about how women look. He read out the names of people he doesn’t like, and mocked them. Always mocking. And when no one laughed he blamed his speech writers.

The cruelty dressed as humor has worn so thin.

And for the 30% of you still in the cult who will inevitably call me a crackhead and blame it all on my Dad, all I can say is please, for the love of God, open your eyes. Wake the fuck up. Have some dignity. Have some pride.

Joe Biden wasn’t standing at that podium last night. Donald Trump was.

And at the end of it he put on a red hat that said Trump 2028 and told the room he was running again. No one laughed because everyone knows he has no intention of leaving.

Just another joke at our expense.

[Rosemary Kelanic @RKelanic]

(WSJ gift link) Again, the world finds out weeks later that the Iran War has already escalated more than publicly acknowledged.

Bahrain and Kuwait conducted airstrikes on Iran earlier this month — timeline very vague.

Direct belligerents now include:
1) U.S.
2) Israel
3) Iran
4) Saudi Arabia
5) UAE
6) Bahrain
7) Kuwait

Not to mention Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Not a good sign.

Trump’s “excursion” in Iran has already turned into a regional conflagration. This was never the White House plan on February 28th. The whole thing was supposed to be over in a weekend, with a new regime in Iran, before oil markets even noticed.

Now President Trump is talking about “massive” escalation.

If this is what “an excursion” brought us, what will “massive” escalation do?

It will cost U.S. lives, ruin the region, spike oil prices, further harm the global economy, and enmesh the US *even more* in Mideast dysfunction.

All because the president won’t suck it up and let Iran impose $1/barrel tolls through Hormuz.

It’s embarrassing for Trump, but Hormuz tolls are the lesser evil, by far.

Iran has already suffered $300 billion in direct damage from U.S. airstrikes. Even if it collects $50 billion/yr in tolls (a high-end estimate), it would take 6 years for Iran to break even.

In 6 years, we can make a lot of progress de-risking from oil and building Hormuz bypass pipelines. When Iran finally breaks even, Hormuz would matter much less.

Pragmatism needs to win out, and the sooner the better. Let Iran have the strait.

Arguably, it’s also the most “America First” option.

If Trump escalates, he is risking U.S. lives and treasure to prevent the ENTIRE WORLD from paying tolls. That means he’d be using U.S. military force to provide the global public good of free access through the Strait instead of paid access.

Should the U.S. taxpayer pay these costs so everyone else gets toll-free Hormuz access, even though they free-rided?

“America First” would say no.

(Yes, I realize this whole mess is the US’s fault and it’s maddening for Trump to walk away having caused it. But since massive escalation won’t work to reopen the strait anyhow, it’s actually in the world’s best interest for the U.S. to walk away now, rather than months from now, after a devastating war that has kept Hormuz closed for the duration. Trying to thread a lot of needles here.)
https://t.co/huMoMGySnA

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

A reminder that these are Nuremberg-level crimes. A war of aggression against a country that didn’t attack you. A deliberate premeditated attack on civilian targets. A goal to punish a foreign populace to feel ‘pain’ and not choose targets based on proportionality and with discrimination.

[IDon’tKnowOn3rd @idontknowon3rd]

World Cup Fans Broke Down After Seeing the America Nobody Told Them About https://t.co/Z5l2kb7JGD via @YouTube