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Authored by Andrew Korybko,

He calmly acknowledged that it’s now more difficult for Russia to advance its foreign policy goals due to the US’ renewed attempt to dominate the global economy through coercion and force, but he still believes that BRICS will play a pivotal role in furthering the global systemic transition to multipolarity.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently gave an interview to TV BRICS about their namesake organization and its role in the global systemic transition.

He began by contextualizing the present moment in history as the interim period between the decline of US-led Western hegemony and the rise of multiple centers of power and influence.

These inverse trends have led to friction because “the West is losing its hegemony but keeps on clinging to the institutions set up to secure that hegemony”.

The US can no longer fairly compete within the ‘rules-based order’ shaped by none other than itself several generations ago so it’s resorting to “blatantly unfair methods” against its rivals, especially Russia.

This includes sanctioning its energy companies, weaponizing sanctions threats against its “major strategic partners” like India (whom Lavrov specified) “to restrict Russia’s trade, investment cooperation, and military-technical ties” with them, and opposing the creation of alternative platforms of any kind.

On that last point, Lavrov clarified that “We are not advocating for the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO to cease their existence” and that “President Putin has said on many occasions that we are not the ones refusing to use the dollar.

The United States under President Joe Biden did everything to make the dollar a weapon against those who are deemed objectionable.”

 BRICS, its proposed economic-financial tools, and other alternative platforms are only meant to complement existing ones and induce reform therein.

Russia’s top diplomat soberly acknowledged that “given the global war unleashed against us and the feverish attempts of the West to ‘punish’ all our partners by demanding that they stop trading with us and cooperating in the military-technical sphere, it is significantly harder to do our job and to provide maximally favourable conditions for internal development than it was, say, 10 or 15 years ago.”

He also mildly criticized Trump 2.0 for essentially continuing “Bidenism” despite its rhetoric to the contrary.

Far from respecting the ‘spirit of Anchorage’, which refers to the verbal agreements reached during that summit for resolving the Ukrainian Conflict and normalizing ties, “new sanctions are imposed, a ‘war’ against tankers in the open sea is being waged”, and more pressure placed on Russian partners like India. Lavrov then accused the US of trying to control the global energy industry in order “to dominate the global economy”, but if it relents, then Russia would be eager to explore mutually beneficial cooperation.

On that note, he concluded the interview by circling back to Russia’s vision of BRICS’ role in the global systemic transition, which he foresees “creating an architecture that will not be subject to the illegal actions of one or another player from the Western flank.”

BRICS will also play a role in Russia’s “Greater Eurasian Partnership”, which Lavrov suggested could lay the basis for a “common ‘canopy’” over the continent, with the innuendo being that Eurasia might one day have its own version of the AU or CELAC.

He didn’t say so, but the context implies that BRICS would then function as an alternative center of global governance for reforming the world order in order to make it more equitable, the goal of which would be advanced by assembling representatives from each continental organization to discuss viable pathways thereto within this ‘mini-UN’.

Through these means, Russia and the rest of the World Majority could continue furthering multipolar trends despite the newfound challenges posed by Trump 2.0.

Since 2019, U.S. household incomes have surged – rising from $68,700 to $83,730 nationally, a 21.9% increase in just five years.

But where you live matters a lot.

While some states tracked close to the national average, others saw incomes climb at nearly double the pace, driven by booming local industries and major investment.

States like Colorado posted outsized gains, while Georgia’s expanding EV industry brought billions in investment and rising paychecks.

The map, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows which states saw the fastest growth in median household income from 2019 to 2024, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Trends in Median Income by State

Below, we show the change in median household income for all 50 U.S. states and D.C. between 2019 and 2024 using nominal figures (not adjusted for inflation):

Rank	State	Change in Median Household Income 2019-2024	Median Household Income 2019	Median Household Income 2024
1	Colorado	46.9%	$72,500	$106,500
2	Georgia	43.4%	$56,630	$81,210
3	Maine	36.3%	$66,550	$90,730
4	Montana	36.1%	$60,190	$81,920
5	Tennessee	34.0%	$56,630	$75,860
6	Rhode Island	31.6%	$70,150	$92,290
7	Massachusetts	29.9%	$87,710	$113,900
8	Florida	29.6%	$58,370	$75,630
9	Iowa	29.4%	$66,050	$85,480
10	Missouri	29.4%	$60,600	$78,390
11	California	28.8%	$78,100	$100,600
12	New Hampshire	28.7%	$86,900	$111,800
13	North Dakota	25.8%	$70,030	$88,080
14	Mississippi	25.0%	$44,790	$55,980
15	Ohio	24.5%	$64,660	$80,520
16	South Dakota	24.3%	$64,260	$79,850
17	Michigan	23.9%	$64,120	$79,460
18	South Carolina	23.8%	$62,030	$76,780
19	Idaho	23.7%	$65,990	$81,650
20	Utah	23.0%	$84,520	$104,000
21	Wisconsin	22.6%	$67,350	$82,560
22	New York	20.8%	$71,850	$86,830
23	Texas	20.8%	$67,440	$81,490
24	Wyoming	20.8%	$65,130	$78,680
25	New Mexico	20.8%	$53,110	$64,140
26	Oregon	20.5%	$74,410	$89,700
27	Virginia	20.2%	$81,310	$97,720
28	Kansas	19.9%	$73,150	$87,690
29	Arizona	19.9%	$70,670	$84,700
30	Arkansas	18.9%	$54,540	$64,840
31	Washington	18.3%	$82,450	$97,500
32	New Jersey	18.0%	$87,730	$103,500
33	Nebraska	17.9%	$73,070	$86,140
34	West Virginia	17.6%	$53,710	$63,150
35	Louisiana	17.5%	$51,710	$60,740
36	Alabama	16.7%	$56,200	$65,560
37	Alaska	16.4%	$78,390	$91,260
38	Kentucky	16.4%	$55,660	$64,790
39	Delaware	15.7%	$74,190	$85,860
40	Indiana	15.0%	$66,690	$76,710
41	Maryland	14.8%	$95,570	$109,700
42	Vermont	14.7%	$74,310	$85,260
43	Connecticut	13.7%	$87,290	$99,240
44	Nevada	13.7%	$70,910	$80,590
45	Pennsylvania	13.4%	$70,580	$80,060
46	Minnesota	13.4%	$81,430	$92,350
47	Illinois	13.2%	$74,400	$84,210
48	District of Columbia	12.6%	$93,110	$104,800
49	Hawaii	11.6%	$88,010	$98,240
50	Oklahoma	9.9%	$59,400	$65,310
51	North Carolina	9.9%	$61,160	$67,220

Colorado’s thriving tech industry helped push median income up 46.9%, the fastest rise across states.

With $165,606 in average earnings across the sector in 2023, Colorado ranked sixth-highest nationally. From software to renewable energy, employment growth has expanded by double- or even triple-digit percentages across various roles since 2018.

Georgia ranks in a close second, with median incomes climbing 43.4%. In particular, the EV and aerospace sectors are playing a key role in job creation. Since 2018, the state has seen $27.3 billion in investment across EV, aerospace, and battery manufacturers including Rivian and SK Battery America.

Maine, meanwhile, saw wages rise 36.3%. In 2024, wages across the tech sector saw the steepest jump of 11.4% while those in the construction sector saw strong gains of 8.5%. Other factors, such as its older population and tight labor market, have further boosted wages.

Falling near the middle of the pack were New York and Texas, each with wage gains of 20.8% between 2019 and 2024.

By contrast, North Carolina and Oklahoma saw only 9.9% cumulative wage growth, the weakest performance nationwide. Median household income in both states remains well below the U.S. average and still trails pre-pandemic levels.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on average hourly earnings by state in 2025.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

The Politics Of Institutionalized Predation.

“I become stronger as you become weaker, I absorb strength as yours flows into me. I become capable of this because I do not experience your pain, I don’t care about your loss, and I feel no regret about using, abusing, and devouring you.”
— Page 63, An Age For Lucifer

Consider the following:

“This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable. I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them. A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.“
— Robert C Tucker, An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality & The Quest for Godhood

The book in question was Robert C Tucker’s “An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality and the Quest For Godhood“. I first wrote about it in a Bombthrower piece: The WEF Isn’t a Cabal, It’s A Cult, and I can’t remember how I came into possession of it in the first place. I remember owning it for years and never reading it, because frankly, it scared me.

At first I thought it was some kind of manual for psychopathy – how to rise above your self-limiting human emotions to attain power and fame (even Godhood?) through the energetic predation of those around you.

But once I found out that its author wasn’t some High Priest of the Left Hand Path, but rather, a former counsellor and director of COMA, the Council On Mind Abuse, based in Canada – it started to take on a different light.

COMA worked with “adult survivors and child victims of ritual abuse“, and Tucker spent much of his adult life interviewing Satanists and Luciferians (yes, there is a distinction, as Tucker would elucidate in this book).

The Winged God Lucifer, with a human child on his knee…

It was an anthropological study, born out of a thought experiment:

What if all the ritualistic abuse we are seeing isn’t random criminality but an expression of an overarching, organizing principle that viewed mere humans as psychic fodder, to be devoured for the benefit of those in the know?

In his talks with Satanists and sociopaths Tucker repeatedly detected a whiff of something, he never put a name to it, but referred to it as “the thing that points beyond itself”.

COMA eventually went bankrupt, being on the receiving end of relentless lawfare from the Church of Scientology. Tucker died of a heart attack in Mexico in 2003.

In my original Bombthrower piece, I picked up the thread on “The Thing That Points Beyond Itself”, positing the very real, not metaphorical, existence of larger, transpersonal entities such as egregores, morphogenic fields, Vadim Zeland’s “Pendulums”, memetics and mass thought forms in general.

The WEF Isn’t A Cabal. It’s a cult

As the world tries to wrap its head around the millions of new and partially unredacted Epstein documents, it becomes very difficult to unsee the dynamics of what has been revealed to be playing out at the highest echelons of institutional power, for decades at least.

The Thing That Points Beyond Itself

An egregore isn’t an analogy or mythical. It’s what a shared belief system becomes when it fuses with incentives and institutions and starts behaving like an organism. It recruits, it feeds, it protects itself. The Epstein network isn’t the egregore. It’s one of its organs.

As the names keep dropping, it’s hard not to get a sense that absolutely anybody who had achieved fame, influence, power or renown was mixed up in an organized cabal of depravity and moral turpitude.

It feels like every TED Talk you ever nodded in agreement to, every Grammy award-winning singer you vibed to, every politician you voted for, and every business leader whose companies you bought shares in, they were all laughing behind your back, because it was a Big Club and you ain’t in it.

The Club is in the global domination game, and its accoutrements include fraud, racketeering, blackmail, and ritualized abuse of women and children.

FedEx: “when you absolutely, positively need a wall-sized mural of infant massacre for a ritual happening Wednesday at 2pm”

But what is weird about The Club is the seeming preponderance of pedophiles and sexual predators. Doesn’t anybody nice ever rise into positions of authority?

The Club has to be impelled by something, be it an incentive structure or dynamic that attracts both sociopaths and easily manipulable bunglers.

But it goes beyond that.

The Falsification of Hanlon’s Razor

Hanlon’s Razor used to be the bedrock of my thinking. It’s a derivation of Occam’s Razor. Loosely stated, it advises us:

“Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.”

When you look at the types of people ensconced in government, bureaucracy, and academia, this fits. Nowhere in the private sector could you find such a monotonous array of one-dimensional apparatchiks. Any enterprise run by such institutionalized mediocrity would have zero competitive edge and go bankrupt.

However, what I should also have taken to heart, more than I did, was something James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg observed over twenty years ago in their seminal work The Sovereign Individual:

“Too little attention has been paid to the fact that electoral politics lures disordered, Messianic personalities into positions of power.”

My base case used to be that the political class were, by definition, failures and rejects. They washed out of the private sector, then drifted into statecraft out of necessity.

I thought that belief in a vast, overarching conspiracy of powerful elites who controlled everything was Loserthink. It ingrained a sense of helplessness in the believer, which made them ambivalent and docile.

Now I realize that I’m the loser – at least in the eyes of everyone in The Club, because there is now no doubt, except to the willfully ignorant – that The Club exists, and the entire political ruling class, the corporate oligarchs, the TED-class influencers and CNN talking heads and panelist experts, are all in it.

Seeing now that The Club exists, and whatever is behind it pulls the levers of power, narrative, and money itself, doesn’t make me feel helpless after all.

It makes me angry. As it likely does for a lot of people.

But The Club is driven by something, that sits behind it.

Not much Podesta in the Epstein files, but lots, and lots of pizza

What’s Behind the Three-M’s?

In numerous writings I have said that the main affliction facing humanity today was what I privately term the “3M’s of Elite Insularism”, those in the The Club are Malthusian, misanthropic, and Marxists.

But I now suspect those are mere symptoms of how The Thing That Points Beyond Itself presents, and that thing is…

In Gore Vidal’s 1954 novel Messiah, a Death Cult named “Caveism” sweeps the Western world in under 36 months.

A Luciferian Death Cult

Throughout his book, the term Tucker uses to refer to his posited predatory spirituality is Luciferianism, and he said that it

“reinforces and encourages four basic energies — devouring, possession, violence and disguise — which in turn, assist the Luciferian to transform consciousness, animate hidden potential, and ultimately attain godhood.”

Devouring is the core process – it is the act of ingesting various types of energy for oneself, whether it be wealth, property or life energy itself – it’s all fair game to the elites in The Club, because they view it all as theirs by divine right.

“Luciferians believe that core identity can be devoured only when it is broken like an egg or nutshell. Once broken, the victim’s identity yields powerful energies. “

Page 71.

(Serious adrenechrome vibes…)

The elites, The Club, view themselves as a kind of breakaway civilization – but not in the sense that I have been calling The Great Bifurcation for years. My sense of that was a split into separate streams of humanity, a la the Eloi and Morlocks posited in The Time Machine, by that irascible communist H.G. Wells.

But The Club isn’t splitting off from the mass of humanity, they’re using the masses as fuel for stage separation like a booster rocket. Ready to jettison our spent husks as our psychic energy is consumed to propel them into the stars and Godhood itself.

For the rest of us to go along with this, we have to submit to this and want to provide ourselves as energetic fuel to be consumed by our betters.

This involves the promotion of what Tucker calls “Self-Annihilating Traditions” and we see it in various forms of psychic driving and mass influence operations that induce an intellectual and instinctive lethargy at both the individual and mass levels:

“The actual experience of being devoured emotionally, cognitively, or spiritually usually occurs gradually over time. The devouring itself is never obvious to the victim; if it was, then defenses would be mobilized.”

Any suffering the victims do experience is attributed to other causes – I think of them as “institutional scapegoats”.

“Suicidal Empathy” is phrase that has arisen from those skeptical of the value prop of allowing oneself to be psychically, economically and even physically devoured to the benefit of The Club, ostensibly in service to the higher calling of the collective.

We have to be conditioned to desire an end to our own existence as a moral imperative unto itself – hence the relentless climate crisis, mankind-as-a-cancer narrative, the institutionalization of euthanasia, abortion and the incentivizing of medical pseudo-science that induces violent psychosis on a mass scale.

Like the Anti-Life Equation posited in DC Comics New Gods series, most humans have to be conditioned to want to die.

DC Comics: New Gods #6 (1972), written and illustrated by Jack Kirby

…so that the “capstone class”, as I’ve called them in the past, can use us as booster fuel into godhood.

Tucker’s book was tabled as a thought experiment, and that’s where it sat for me, until now.

When you map the model onto the world we actually inhabit the point ceases to be that some new predator-class spirituality might emerge.

It is here now, and the point is that we inhabit a system that is optimized for it.

Class structure, now and future

Somewhere along the line, a prototype evolved inside the species, and learned to prey on its own kind. As I outlined in another (very long) piece, this has likely been going on for a long, long time.

(That piece happened to mention Clinton Foundation insider Ira Magaziner, his role shaping the governance regime of the Internet, and his presence in the Epstein black book; the latest Epstein file dump shows, despite protestations that no relationship existed, that Magaziner and Epstein were indeed in contact beyond the stated claims. Ira is still CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. His son is congressman Seth Magaziner, D-RI).

Back to The Club: over the centuries, they’ve built a social and spiritual architecture that normalizes the predation, and advances it – taking special efforts to co-opt anything that appears that could challenge it. Tucker called it “predatory spirituality.” We have other names. The behaviour is the same.

And where would such a class (The Club) take up residence, if they were real?

They would not live at the margins, nor burrow into the powerless underclass.

The Club would move inexorably toward the apex. They would infiltrate the institutions that confer immunity, walk the corridors of power where favours become law.
They would acquire control of the media organs where spin defines reality, and they would reside above the law, where consequences are for other people, the little people.

Predatory spirituality takes up residence where power emanates, because that is where it can feed without being seen, or at the very least with immunity.

Civil War, SplinterNet and Guillotines
(a.k.a. where we are headed…)

Epstein is not important because he was uniquely depraved. He is important because he is the icon, the symbol that points beyond itself.

The machinations of his network give us a glimpse of the operating system. It’s a case study in how leverage, ritual, and institutional protection intertwine. Once you accept that, the question is no longer “How could this happen?” The question becomes “How long has this been going on?” and “Who or what hasn’t been corrupted by it?”

In the follow-up piece, I’m going to widen the lens. Because when institutional legitimacy breaks down, alternative structures step into the vacuum.

Despite what The Club would want for the rabble, when it comes right down to it, people actually don’t want to be psychically, economically and spiritually devoured for the benefit of an insular, overlord class.

For years I have written the age of centralization and the linear geometry of the Industrial Age was heading toward collapse. It was, and still is, too early to tell what comes next – but whatever it is, owing the emerging architecture of the Network Age, it won’t be a top-down hierarchy, lorded over by (Luciferian) priests of the temple.

Whenever people ask me for a succinct descriptor of what I see coming, my answer was and remains: Snow Crash.

We’ve already gone full Snow Crash. pic.twitter.com/KJjgRI6snQ

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) February 11, 2026

As the collapse in institutional legitimacy accelerates, non-state groupings will step into the vacuum and provide the functional scaffolding that civil governments are no longer willing, or able to provide.

Sometimes they look like protection rackets. Sometimes they look like special economic zones, franchise sovereignties or city-states.

Sometimes they look like cartels with drones. Sometimes they look like transnational corporations with private intelligence services.

The end result is the same. Fragmentation. Competing authorities. SplinterNets (and consensus reality shattered).

That’s where this leads.

Epilogue

My next piece explores a strange new social construct about to enter into competition with other established sovereignties. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable. I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on game theory and simple incentives: a new class of irregular sovereigns will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to oppose Luciferian predation. Another assumption then follows: these factions will evolve gradually and incrementally from largely compromised nation states, just as we apparently evolved from previous obsolete governance structures. A further assumption suggests that these groups have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as guerrillas with advanced methods of resiliency and new forms of communications and asymmetric tactics designed to support and advance their insurgency.

Watch this space.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list to get the next instalment, follow me on X, we’re also getting ready to relaunch Ready.ca – a boot camp for politically homeless Canadians (and others). 

Authored by Joakim Book via The Mises Institute,

With all eyes on the winter storm raging through America last month, a silent hero was working in the background to keep the lights on.

And I don’t primarily mean the emergency workers or the teams of electricians, foresters, and engineers that keep the power lines up and ice-free; these guys operate very much in the foreground, the public well aware of their critical work.

Before and during winter storms, the electricity supply becomes strained and household demand spikes—think space heaters, heat pumps requiring more juice, more lights turned on, and the natural gas system requiring more electricity for ordinary functions.

In Econ101 lingo, the grid is hit with a simultaneous leftward shift in supply and rightward shift in demand, explaining why electricity prices and natural gas prices shot up in recent days.

Most people think of electricity (or “energy” more broadly) as a static resource, at civilization’s disposal and always available at the literal flick of a switch.

That’s true for gasoline in a car tank, liquid and stable when unused.

Electricity, rather, is a constant flow where the push of a button either redirects it from elsewhere or informs the generators or reactors to produce more, or idly spinning back-up turbines to re-engage.

Some countries, like my home Iceland, use aluminum smelters as this electrical grid backstop, a rapacious consumer that could use more or less electricity to run the Hall-Héroult process—dissolving aluminum oxide in molten cryolite—faster or slower.

Some four-fifths of all electricity generated in the (electrically-isolated) island country is used for metal production, filling the gap between renewable production (dispatchable hydro and constant geothermal) and variable demand, always able to give back power to the grid when necessary.

The Texas grid, for instance, doesn’t have a vast aluminum industry backstopping its industry and millions of households.

How, then, does the state and its grid operator ERCOT source the additional gigawatts on a whim, electricity being an on-demand, always-clearing, flow resource?

You might think “more generation,” which to some extent is true: In a natural gas or hydroelectric plant, you turn up the dial; with excess wind turbines running idle, you can order them to re-engage. But in a grid like Texas’s that has outsourced so much of its electricity to nature (solar and wind), you also need other mechanisms for dealing with peak demands or winter storms; it’s too late to start building new generation a week before the storm lands.

While some media outlets have pointed to Texas having “nearly 10 times as much battery capacity on the grid” now compared to the devastating storm five years ago, the missing component is the arrival of Bitcoin miners, able and willing to shut off on short notice; from the grid’s point of view, miners are functionally the same as massive, spread-out batteries.

In the last four years or so, the US’s role in global Bitcoin mining has increased considerably, fueled in part by the China exodus and accommodating policies in, for example, Texas and Tennessee. Federally, too, the current administration has famously (and mostly rhetorically since the statement doesn’t make any sense), said it wants the remaining Bitcoin “to be mined in America.”

Ordinarily, Bitcoin miners run electricity through a barebones computer to generate bitcoin. Most of the industrial-scale ones engage in demand-response programs that—when ordered by the grid (and reimbursed accordingly)—will shut off their machines and thus return the electricity flow back to the grid. This is akin to the grid taking out electricity supply insurance; like a battery, but less duplicative or wasteful. In contrast, backup power like unengaged wind turbines or topped-up battery facilities are expensive, overbuilt, and economically inefficient. By having a sizable number of Bitcoin miners around, you can effectively outsource this backup function to an always-on, always-hungry consumer like Bitcoin miners.

Even though Bitcoin miners only consume a few percentage points of ERCOT’s grid generation, they’re the most flexible percentages—able and willing to give it all back to the grid at a moment’s notice.

“Bitcoin miners provide a flexible load in a way no other industrial use case can,” remarks Ella Hough for Cornell University on the Texas power grid. Riot Platforms—a Texas-based Bitcoin miner—reported curtailment credits of roughly 15 percent of its electricity cost in 2024.

Note that these payments are not subsidies, like so much in the green energy sector, but payments for specific services rendered: think of participating in demand-response programs like an insurance contract. The unique difference for a miner compared to any other user of electricity, AI or other data centers included, is that they’re untroubled by turning off—in fact, most mining facilities schedule specific maintenance or repairs during curtailment times. In exchange for a fee—or technically, a discount on their total electricity bill—their operations can be shut down (and turned on later) without operational loss.

When I explored these topics in an article for The Daily Economy two years ago, I wrote:

The reason that the grid is strained during a cold snap is the same reason power users place a very high value on their electricity use. The supply gets squeezed precisely at the time consumer demand becomes price inelastic, with heating and lighting homes becoming next to infinitely valuable in a pickle.

The hashrate – the amount of computing power operating on the Bitcoin blockchain at any given time – dropped by about a third in recent days, explained largely by the hundreds of etahash (a measure of Bitcoin mining output) of Bitcoin mining capacity participating in such demand-response programs.

Seeing the hashrate estimator on my home-miner device show hashrate around 650 EH/s rather than 1,150 EH/s a few days before was stunning and illustrative: Every bit of electricity that previously powered the Bitcoin network was instead redirected to power space heaters and light and urgently needed additional machinery in storm-affected areas.

Wins all around: The remaining miners on the Bitcoin network temporarily earn higher rewards from less competition (though blocks came in somewhat slower), the miners receive lucrative curtailment credits, and consumers have more electricity at their disposal.

It is the ultimate electricity consumer of last resort, in ordinary times grateful for every watt assigned to it, yet happy to immediately surrender it when there’s more valuable usage elsewhere—functionally being outbid by millions of households in need of extra power. Bitcoin miners are the opposite, happy to absorb any and all excess, stranded, overbuilt energy—and then give it all back when the grid needs it the most.

Magic internet money Bitcoin may be, but its positive spill-over effects on electricity grids around the world might be even more important than the asset itself. Stress-tests like the storm that engulfed most of the eastern and southern US in January show the power of that institutional backup.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

This month, the anniversary of the California Gold Rush came and passed with little mention … for good reason. When James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill, millions traveled great distances to seek their fortune in the “Golden State.”

Now, 178 years later, California has engineered an inverse Gold Rush, virtually chasing wealth from the state. Rather than covered wagons going West, there is a line of U-Hauls going anywhere other than California.

From boondoggle projects to reparations, California politicians continue to rack up new spending projects despite a soaring deficit and shrinking tax base.

Rather than exercise a modicum of fiscal restraint, Democrats are pushing through a tax that takes five percent of the wealth of any billionaires left in the state.

I have long criticized the tax as perfectly moronic for a state with the highest tax burden and one of the highest flight rates of top taxpayers.

In my new book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss the reversal of fortunes in California and other blue states as politicians unleash new “eat the rich” campaigns before the midterm elections.

The problem, of course, is that billionaires are mobile, as is their wealth. Liberals expect billionaires to stay put in a type of voluntary canned hunt.  They are not. Billionaires are joining the growing exodus from the state, taking their companies, investments, and jobs with them.

The latest billionaire to be chased off may be Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is reportedly heading for Florida.

The growing departures have triggered outrage among many on the left, who are in disbelief that billionaires will just not stand still to be fleeced.

Former New York Magazine editor Kara Swisher captured that rage in a recent posting, declaring “you made…all your money in California, you ungrateful piece of s***, you could figure out a way to pay more taxes, and we deserve the taxes from you, given you made your wealth here . . . so why don’t we just do shock and awe at this point, because you don’t seem to be availing yourself to thinking that you owe your state something more.”

By some estimates, California has already cost over a trillion dollars in lost investments and business. That is no small achievement.

Here’s a mind teaser: How can you burn a trillion dollars (which would create a stack some 67,866 miles high) without taking years and destroying the environment?

California politicians have a solution: Have people take it out of the state in a reverse gold rush.

In addition to saying that they want to grab 5 percent of the wealth of these billionaires, California Democrats are planning to base wealth calculations on the voting shares of corporate executives. Often, particularly with start-ups, entrepreneurs have greater voting shares than actual ownership. However, they will be taxed as if voting shares amounted to actual wealth.

In other words, California is moving to nuke the entrepreneurs who created the Silicon Valley boom.

Emmanuel Saez, the U.C. Berkeley economist who helped design the tax, insists that they may not want to stay, but they will still be tapped. They are planning to trap the wealthy fleeing the state retroactively: “The tax is based on residence as of Jan. 1, 2026, sharply limiting their ability to flee the state to avoid paying. Despite billionaires’ threats to leave, I think extremely few will have been able to change residence by Jan. 1, given the complexity of doing so.”

The effort to retroactively impose such a tax is legally controversial and will face years of challenges. In my view, this is unconstitutional, but admittedly it is a murky area.

Regardless of the outcome, a wealth tax will affect a wide range of other wealthy taxpayers. If Democrats can get a retroactive wealth tax to be upheld, it is doubtful that they will stop with billionaires. Why should other top taxpayers stick around to find out where the next cull will fall in the tax brackets?

Recently, Gavin Newsom boasted, “California isn’t just keeping pace with the world — we’re setting the pace.” That is undeniably true if the measure is the record number of U-Hauls fleeing the state — more than any other state. Indeed, the only thing harder to find than a wealthy taxpayer in California appears to be a U-Haul.

According to U-Haul’s data, the state is again leading blue states in the exodus. The Washington Post noted recently that “California came in last. Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey rounded out the bottom five. Of the bottom 10, seven voted blue in the last election.” Conversely, “nine of the top 10 growth states voted red in the last presidential election,” with Texas again leading the growth states.

The Post put it succinctly, “People want to live in pro-growth, low-tax states, while the biggest losers tend to be places with big governments and high taxes.”

The problem is that, while the economics are horrific, the politics remain irresistible.

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, recently mocked billionaires rushing to escape the state. Laughing at his own constituents, Khanna quipped, “I will miss them very much.”

You will not be alone as California becomes known as the La Brea Tar Pit of taxation.

They are on the verge of converting the state motto from “Eureka” to “Welcome to Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

The SAVE America Act squeaked through the House this week by five votes.

The final tally was 218-213, with Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas standing as the lone Democrat to cross party lines. 

On Friday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) gave Republicans their 50th vote late Friday afternoon, telling Maine Wire the revised bill strikes an appropriate balance between election security and voter access. 

“The law is clear that in this country only American citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. In addition, having people provide an ID at the polls, just as they have to do before boarding an airplane, checking into a hotel, or buying an alcoholic beverage, is a simple reform that will improve the security of our federal elections and will help give people more confidence in the results,” she told Maine Wire.

“Requiring voters to produce passports or birth certificates on Election Day — as opposed to just a state-issued ID — would have placed an unnecessary burden on the voters. That provision is no longer in the bill, and dropping this requirement was key to getting my support.”

With Will Collins on board, Republicans have enough support to pass the bill even without additional backing, with Vice President JD Vance ready to break any tie.

Unfortunately, 50 votes only get the GOP so far. The legislation still lacks the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has made clear the bill is “dead on arrival.” 

And Collins herself opposes scrapping the filibuster to ram the measure through.

“I oppose eliminating the legislative filibuster,” Collins said.

“The filibuster is an important protection for the rights of the minority party, that requires Senators to work together in the best interest of the country. Removing that protection would, for example, allow a future Congress controlled by Democrats to pass provisions on anything they want — DC Statehood, open borders, or packing the Supreme Court — with just a simple majority of Senators.”

President Trump, however, is promising that requiring a photo ID to vote will get done with or without Congress.

In a post on Truth Social, he accused Democrats of opposing Voter ID and citizenship verification because “they want to continue to cheat in Elections.”

He said this “was not what our Founders desired” and promised to present an “irrefutable” legal argument on the issue soon. \

Trump vowed that “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not,” and stated that Americans demand “Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel.”

Trump also slammed Democrats as “horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS” for opposing Voter I.D., claiming they “boldly laugh in the backrooms” while opposing it.

He called the lack of Voter I.D. “even crazier, and more ridiculous, than Men playing in Women’s Sports, Open Borders, or Transgender for Everyone.”

Trump urged Republicans to make it “a CAN’T MISS FOR RE-ELECTION IN THE MIDTERMS, AND BEYOND,” noting that “Even Democrat Voters agree, 85%, that there should be Voter I.D.”

He called Democratic leaders “Crooked Losers like Schumer and Jeffries,” who label it “racist,” and promised to present legal arguments for action via an Executive Order.

Trump warned that if Democrats regain power, they will “PACK THE COURT with a total of 21 Supreme Court Justices” and warned the country “will never be the same if they allow these demented and evil people to knowingly, and happily, destroy it.”

Trump previously signed an executive order attempting to impose proof-of-citizenship requirements on federal voter registration forms.

That effort crashed into multiple legal challenges and has been systematically dismantled by the courts.

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

At least three vessels sanctioned by the United States have arrived in recent weeks at the demolition hub of Alang on India’s west coast, following a record 15 dark fleet tankers sent to these scrapyards last year, as the business rebounds despite concerns about dealing with sanctioned ships.  

The Woodchip, built in 1993 and sanctioned by the U.S. in 2021 under one of its previous names, is the third tanker to have arrived at Alang in less than a month, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing vessel-tracking data, agent reports, and sources with knowledge of the deals.  

The arrivals reflect changes to the shape of the fleet that ferries sanctioned or sensitive crude around the world, as more aged vessels begin to edge toward retirement at a time of plentiful supply, and US officials embrace Venezuelan crude – ultimately reducing the number needed to serve a trade previously off-limits. According to shipbroker Braemar Plc, some 128 dark tankers once served Caracas exports.

The total number of the U.S.-sanctioned tankers that have arrived at India’s Alang so far this year already accounts for 20% of the 15 vessels of the dark fleet welcomed in 2025, according to Bloomberg’s analysis.  

Dark fleet tankers are much older than legit vessels and could pose environmental threats if left to service sanctioned oil deliveries for too long. 

The increase in tracked arrivals at India’s scrapyards signals that some of the oldest ships of the global shadow fleet are now finally being retired. 

Moreover, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela and the now legit Venezuelan oil sales under U.S. control have reduced the number of vessels needed to haul sanctioned oil. 

The U.S. took control of Venezuela’s oil sales in early January and authorized two of the world’s biggest independent traders, Vitol and Trafigura, to market the crude to buyers in the U.S., Europe, India, and China.  

Before the U.S. ousting of Nicolas Maduro, about 128 tankers of the dark fleet served the oil exports of Venezuela, per data from shipbroker Braemar Plc cited by Bloomberg.  

Previously, most Venezuelan exports were going to China, as they were under U.S. sanctions, and used sanctioned vessels to deliver crude mostly to the independent refiners, the so-called teapots, in the province of Shandong. 

AI-driven equity disruption was everywhere this past week, spreading like wildfire beyond software into insurance, commercial real estate, financials, shipping, wealth management, and likely many more industries in the coming trading sessions.

One industry in the crosshairs of AI disruption is Hollywood. Some of the publicly traded studios include The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, Sony Group Corporation, Netflix, Lionsgate, and others.

On Friday, Axios reported that the Walt Disney Company sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging that the Chinese tech firm has been infringing on its films to develop Seedance 2.0 without compensation.

Disney’s outside attorney, David Singer, wrote a letter to ByteDance global general counsel John Rogovin, accusing the AI company of “pre-packaging its Seedance service with a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.”

“Over Disney’s well-publicized objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney’s characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters. ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable,” Singer said.

He added, “We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg, which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days.”

It’s not just ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 that has spooked Hollywood studios.

A growing wave of video-generation models suggests that Hollywood’s moat is crumbling, and its control of the media game is nearing its end.

AI VIDEO WARS JUST GOT REAL

Seedance 2.0
Kling 3.0
Sora 2
Veo 3.1

Compared in single-prompt romance scene.

Who’s winning 2026 filmmaking?

pic.twitter.com/hrh8nNbG1U

— 0xMarioNawfal (@RoundtableSpace) February 10, 2026

“Authorities should use every legal tool at their disposal to stop this wholesale theft,” the Human Artistry Campaign – a coalition that includes dozens of creative groups such as SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America – said in a statement on Friday.

Seedance 2.0 model …

Seedance 2.0

Prompt: Sum up the AI discourse in a meme – make sure it’s retarded and gets 50 likes. pic.twitter.com/09yPdo3Tjy

— Charles Curran (@charliebcurran) February 14, 2026

Absolutely insane.

Seedance 2 is able to recreate full scenes from Breaking Bad.

We are officially cooked.https://t.co/1mrmjLXI3e pic.twitter.com/CggLHH8R6Q

— Mark Gadala-Maria (@markgadala) February 11, 2026

Seedance 2 is already making full cinematic short films.

Time is running out on Hollywood…pic.twitter.com/VjTdnsCeHd

— Mark Gadala-Maria (@markgadala) February 12, 2026

Billion dollar movie in just one prompt

Seriously, what the hell is going on with Seedance 2.0 pic.twitter.com/yTBlThLhBv

— Random AI (@Random_AI000) February 11, 2026

Hollywood is living on borrowed time. The next big AI disruption trade could be studios.