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When Bloomberg first caught Phia - the AI "personal shopping assistant" co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe Gates and climate-activist-turned-founder Sophia Kianni - claiming affiliate commissions on sales it had nothing to do with, the company's ham-fisted damage control was a Silicon Valley classic: an unfortunate software bug, discovered "within the last 24 hours" - and of course it was 'fixed immediately.' 

Except that's total bullshit. 

According to a follow-up investigation published Tuesday, they knew about it for at least seven months - and Gates along with other execs were actively pushing for its use, according to internal Slack messages and people familiar with the matter.

According to the report, an internal dashboard screenshot shows the automatic cookie-dropping behavior was a named feature flag that could be toggled remotely - independent researcher Ben Edelman identified it in Phia's own code as enable_coupon_auto_drop. It was reportedly switched on December 10 and switched off July 7 - which happens to be the day Bloomberg first reached out for comment. Two people familiar with the matter confirmed the toggle meant the feature was live. So after seven months, the "bug" was magically cured the moment a reporter shot off an email. 

The Bug = The Business

A Phia data scientist estimated in a July 7 Slack message that cookie stuffing accounted for roughly 51% of the gross merchandise value the company claimed credit for in June, per Bloomberg. An internal revenue chart reportedly tells the same story: when the features went dark in early July, average daily revenue collapsed from about $80,000 to somewhere between $10,000 and $28,000.

The company disputes the math - a spokesperson called the 51% figure a preliminary analysis built on flawed methodology, and says the revenue cliff also reflects Phia voluntarily shutting down most of its monetization at the same time. Except - when switching off the "bug" vaporizes the majority of your revenue, that's the business. 

The receipts

For readers unfamiliar with the affiliate marketing underworld: publishers earn commissions by dropping a tracking cookie when a shopper intentionally interacts with them - clicking a referral link, applying a coupon. Dropping cookies without user interaction is called cookie stuffing, it's prohibited by essentially every affiliate network contract, and it works by hijacking credit (and commission) from whoever actually drove the sale.

Per Bloomberg, here's what the founders were doing while their future PR statement about a 24-hour-old bug was still unwritten:

• December 18: Gates, worried that Etsy commissions were coming in light, pressed developers on Slack to confirm that automatic cookie-drops were live across every site offering a coupon - so the company would monetize all merchandise value flowing through checkout. When an engineer confirmed cookies were being set even when shoppers never touched a coupon, she reportedly reiterated that every transaction should be captured regardless. (Phia's explanation: she was concerned a broken pop-up meant users weren't seeing coupons, which would also depress attribution. Noted.)
• October through July: a feature internally dubbed "passive trigger" reportedly re-dropped a Phia cookie every two hours on any top-1,000 website where the user had ever interacted with the extension - potentially steamrolling other publishers' legitimate referrals along the way. Bloomberg says its review of Phia's historical source code confirmed the features existed.
• A second feature, also per Bloomberg, reportedly set a cookie if a shopper clicked anywhere on the page after Phia's pop-up appeared - including while trying to close it.
• Kianni, after a colleague warned that dropping cookies on dismiss events violates Google's Chrome extension policy, reportedly floated the idea of claiming users had been trying to open the extension and simply reversing charges if anyone complained - before cheering the team on to keep the cookies dropping by whatever means available. (A spokesperson says that particular feature was never implemented or launched.)

Oh, and the Slack exchanges in question? Per two people familiar with the matter, they're no longer visible to Phia employees. Memory-holed, as it were.

Ben Edelman - the advertising consultant who has spent 20 years dismantling deceptive marketing schemes - reviewed Phia's source code and merchant data, corroborated Bloomberg's findings, and described a multipart effort engineered to inflate Phia's revenue while delivering nothing to merchants. His suggestion that the founders should have spent more time reading their contracts and less time building tricks is about as polite as this gets. Phia declined to comment on his analysis.

Sound familiar?

It should. This is the Honey playbook - the same last-click attribution hijacking that blew up in PayPal's face in late 2024 and spawned a wave of class actions and a creator revolt. The difference is that Honey's scandal was reconstructed from the outside. Phia's, per Bloomberg, comes with the founders' own fingerprints on the toggle. And cookie stuffing isn't some novel gray area: a decade ago, in the infamous eBay affiliate cases, it ended in federal wire-fraud pleas.

The fallout is already rolling. Affiliate network Impact.com suspended Phia from its marketplace after Bloomberg's first story and is reallocating unpaid commissions attributed to the startup since June 20. Phia has begun repaying retailers - and with the timeline now stretching back to at least December rather than July, that refund bill is unlikely to shrink. Nike, Gap and Nordstrom, all reportedly among the affected merchants, did not respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment.

One question the piece leaves hanging: Phia announced a $35 million Series A led by Notable Capital on January 27, at a $185 million valuation - roughly seven weeks after the auto-drop toggle reportedly went live, and weeks after that December Slack thread. The launch announcement touted, among other things, a 40% increase in monetized GMV. The growth metrics were, evidently, impressive. It's just that, if Bloomberg's reporting holds, a meaningful chunk of that growth may have belonged to somebody else.

Phia, for its part, says all misattribution features were removed on July 7, that it is reviewing every transaction and issuing reversals to brand partners, and that it is hiring a head of compliance - a role whose necessity apparently revealed itself the same day Bloomberg's phone number did. The company adds that it remains focused on giving users the best possible shopping experience, including its new digital closet feature.

But sure. It was a bug.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome - lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster - helped give birth to the socialists.

But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the "system." Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and DOJ, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.

By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants - without audits, English proficiency, health checks, or the ability to support themselves.

Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years and another five million illegal aliens. And perhaps America would have gone from 50 million foreign-born residents to 60 million, or about 18 percent of the population.

In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal - and most ideal - state and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28 percent of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.

Today, 50 percent of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45 percent of California's current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.

So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives - or is born to immigrant parents - with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left, but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.

It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America - only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.

If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K-12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.

Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely - as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests - and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.

Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation.

In fact, its racialist war on standards only magnified its dilemmas. The SAT had once informed admissions officers not only about applicants' qualifications but also whether admitted students could do the work once enrolled.

But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements, and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.

So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework. But again, racialism is never a solution to problems. Instead, it is a catalyst that fuels them - as we have seen with the new notion that plagiarism is not an actionable offense when the culprit can plead victim status, whether a former president of Harvard or a current professor at Cambridge. But there are ancient laws and norms that insist intellectual theft is a crime and should be punished, not rewarded or ignored.

Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing, and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.

The Left likewise pushed for lower physical standards for the military's ground-combat brigades so that women, on average far less strong than their male counterparts, could join elite units. Again, the same ignorance and arrogance were evident. Physical standards were based on a century of combat experience in which morale, group discipline, and unit success rested on ensuring that all soldiers achieved a common level of physical strength and endurance.

This neo-Marxist-driven demand to mandate equality - albeit now substituting racial and gender consciousness for class consciousness - requires the destruction of established traditions, laws, and norms. The radical Left's key agendas - defunding the police, destroying the border, granting mass amnesties to illegal aliens, subsidizing wind and solar energy while waging a war on fossil fuels, and expanding racial essentialism in hiring and admissions - have never won more than 30 to 40 percent support among the general public. Yet the solution was not to ask why, and then to reflect, reboot, and recalibrate in order to discover how the Left had lost public support.

Instead, the solution was to alter or destroy the system that had denied them power.

So communists, socialists, and radical Democrats prefer moving the goalposts. When equality of opportunity was largely achieved, next they demanded a mandated equality of outcome.

With the ascendancy of a large, affluent middle class, the Left, in its eternal search for a victimized class, pivoted and replaced class oppression with racial victimization.

And when there were not yet enough victimized minorities to guarantee a majority constituency of the aggrieved, the Left redefined the victimized to include anyone who was not a white heterosexual male, regardless of income and privilege.

And when the people finally tired of the Leftists' totalitarian social engineering, the Left sought to change the system by radically altering the way Americans vote, the manner in which government is formed and functions, and, finally, the very demography of America.

The common denominator? Human nature revolts at forced statism, coercive redistribution, and government-mandated equality of results. It instead yearns for liberty and freedom.

No matter how much deception, camouflage, or brainwashing is employed, statism, socialism, and communism can never sustain public support. Throughout history, the Left has therefore begun by changing the rules and altering the demography - if not initially through changes to election rules, bureaucratic fiat, and biased court orders, then eventually through sheer violence.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008.

The Diamond Standard Index, tracked on Bloomberg under the ticker DIAMINDX, tumbled to new record lows during the first half of August as a surge in affordable lab-grown stones eroded the scarcity premium underpinning natural diamond prices.

"Technological progress in growing diamonds in labs has been amazing. It's no surprise most engagement rings are now using lab diamonds," X user Crémieux said.

Technological progress in growing diamonds in labs has been amazing.

It's no surprise most engagement rings are now using lab diamonds. https://t.co/MZ4zWVlQNq pic.twitter.com/fH1lFYD3Ih

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) August 8, 2026

X user Saul Sadka warned that the diamond downturn will likely persist for years as lab-grown stones flood the market:

Expect the collapse in diamond prices to accelerate substantially over the next few years. The natural-diamond market is shrinking in both size and value and circling the drain following the commoditization of its product by modern technology. The same thing happened to pearls 100 years ago, but it will be much worse for diamonds: they will become a signal of bad taste rather than wealth, just as pearls went from high society to a matronly cliché within 50 years.

I have been telling friends in the diamond industry to find a new line of work for ten years. It was clearly only a matter of time before lab-grown diamonds became a mass-market commodity, sold at some small premium over production costs, which would themselves continue to plummet.

Since they are identical to natural diamonds, and buyers actually have multiple reasons to choose them instead, including no "blood diamonds" and supposedly greater environmental friendliness, most buyers will not care.

Attempts to differentiate the products using $20,000 machines will not help: they are indistinguishable in real life.

There was always going to be some multiple that people would be willing to pay for "natural" over "lab," but it did not really matter whether that multiple was 2× or 10×. Once lab-grown diamonds can be made for next to nothing, even ten times next to nothing is still very little. People will pay more, perhaps much more, for an identical product because of its backstory, but not infinitely more.

The reason natural-diamond prices have held up reasonably well over the past four years, "only" falling by around 50% in real terms, has more to do with supply cutbacks. Production has been reduced by about 20% over that period, from 120 million to 98 million carats, in a desperate attempt to support prices as the natural and lab-grown markets diverge. If production returned to its previous level, prices would fall even faster.

But it is going to get much, much worse. A trip to Miami will explain why: people who look like gangsters walk around wearing enormous tennis bracelets that would have cost a million dollars 20 years ago but can now be purchased for the price of a used Rolex.

Diamonds are going to become a sign of tackiness, as, frankly, they always should have been, rather than class or exclusivity. And then the game will be up for everyone in the diamond industry.

Expect the collapse in diamond prices to accelerate substantially over the next few years. The natural-diamond market is shrinking in both size and value and circling the drain following the commoditisation of its product by modern technology. The same thing happened to pearls… https://t.co/XdHRsgSp6h pic.twitter.com/c0zHoUqi2L

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 9, 2026

Sadka continued in a series of follow-up tweets:

One of the biggest problems for hopes of a residual natural-diamond industry is that diamonds ARE, in fact, FOREVER. At some point, the market will shrink to the point where the secondhand supply, fed by the estates of Boomers as they fall off this mortal coil, will provide sufficient supply to make any mining or polishing uneconomic.

One of the biggest problems for hopes of a residual natural diamond industry is that diamonds ARE, in fact, FOREVER. At some point, the market will shrink to the point where second-hand supply, fed by the estates of Boomers as they fall off this mortal coil, will provide… pic.twitter.com/VkOhukpH5I

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 10, 2026

This would have been true 30 years ago, and it would have been a big blow to the Israeli economy, but it's not true anymore. The industry once accounted for up to 3% of Israeli GDP, but it's now under 0.2%. Sorry, Turkey.

This would have been true 30 years ago, it would have been a big blow to the Israeli economy, but it's not true anymore. They once were up to 3% of Israeli GDP, but its not under 0.2%.

Sorry Turkey. pic.twitter.com/pORcoY4GcK

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 10, 2026

There might be some limited residual market at the high end, but my guess is that there will be enough supply from Boomers as they "check out" to glut that demand without any need for miners or cutters, etc.

There might be some limited residual market at the high end, but my guess is that there will be enough supply from the boomers as they "check out" to glut that demand without any need for miners or cutters etc.

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 10, 2026

To sum up: natural diamonds face a structural, rather than cyclical, collapse. If you're in the market for an engagement ring and hoping it will serve as some store of value, you might be out of luck because lab-grown stones are destroying the scarcity premium, while a potential wave of secondhand supply from aging Baby Boomers could pressure the market even further. 

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on Monday largely dismissed Minnesota’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, the 1972 law that bars sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and activities.

U.S. District Chief Judge Eric Tostrud of the District of Minnesota ruled that most of the state’s claims fell short.

Minnesota had argued that the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the 10th Amendment by determining that the state’s policies allowing transgender students to compete on sports teams and use facilities consistent with their gender identity breached federal law. Tostrud determined that the administration’s findings and related letters to the state to enforce Title IX did not constitute final agency action that could be challenged under the Administrative Procedure Act. The findings and letters themselves, he wrote, imposed “no legal injury on Minnesota.”

He also referenced a June Supreme Court decision upholding state bans on male athletes in female sports. While the high court did not rule on whether states or schools may allow such participation, the judge said its determination that “sex” in Title IX refers to biological sex offers “at least some support” for the administration’s reading of the statute.

Part of Lawsuit Still Standing

The orders also outlined penalties for federally funded entities that allow male athletes to compete in women’s sports. The administration used the threats of withholding federal education funding to press school districts to end policies allowing students to act based on their gender identity.

Tostrud left intact Minnesota’s challenge tied to the potential loss of roughly $2.9 billion in federal funding, finding that it presented a concrete injury for the court to consider.

The judge noted that the funding issue was a separate issue from challenging the interpretation of Title IX, as the state did not have “sufficiently clear notice” of Title IX’s prohibition on transgender women and girls at the time it accepted the federal funding.

Minnesota stands as the only state to sue President Donald Trump and his administration over his executive orders this term defining sex as binary.

The Justice Department’s enforcement action against the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League for violating Title IX by allowing males to compete against and access intimate spaces designated for females remains pending.

The Minnesota Attorney General’s office has defended the state’s longstanding policies as consistent with the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity. The state has maintained that executive orders and agency findings cannot override state law or rewrite Title IX without proper process.

A Marine veteran who had been held in Russian prisons since his arrest in January 2022 has been released back to US custody, reportedly after a consistent pressure campaign from Trump administration officials and global advocacy groups.

32-year old Robert Gilman, a former US Marine and English teacher imprisoned in Russia, is said to have received direct pardon from President Vladimir Putin based on humanitarian reasons, given reports say Gilman's health has been rapidly deteriorating. Soon after Gilman's arrest he was slapped with an steep eight-year prison sentence for allegedly kicking a police officer while drunk, followed by an alleged assault on a prison official, according to court records.

Gilman had actually following his jailing owned up to the attacks on prison staff - but claimed self-defense and that he was provoked and responding to insults.

Gilman's family as well as advocacy groups say he was wrongfully detained on false charges, and further that was held as a bargaining chip for future possible prisoner swap with Washington. Here's how one such US non-profit organization characterized his arrest:

Robert is a Marine Corps veteran, who was traveling in Russia when he fell sick on a train. Instead of medical help, he was taken to a police station. He fell into a cycle of charges, which began with a case that was dismissed, a second that was without evidence, and a third for assault of a police officer where even the police officer says he should not be charged.

A typical Russian Government tactic is getting Americans into their system, and pile on various unfounded charges to keep them there. This is Robert’s story, and they continue to put him in conditions that set him up for further charges that further politicize his case. Beyond this, the profile of the case against Robert appears eerily familiar to the Trevor Reed case, where a former Marine unexpectedly blacked out and was charged with punching a police officer, suggesting this may all have been staged.

So there does seem to be an admission that Gilman indeed acted violently toward law enforcement officials. The whole situation might be a politicized case, but it's also the reality that Americans sometimes do stupid and drunken criminal acts abroad. 

According to more on the context of the American citizen's release:

Gilman’s sudden release comes after his family and the hostage advocacy group Global Reach had appealed to Moscow for his release, warning that he was “near death” following months of alleged torture in Russian prison. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also said to have raised Gilman’s imprisonment with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in the Philippines last month.

The family and some US officials are alleging that the former Marine was tortured while in Russian prisons, including being subject to mind-altering drug injections:

And according to Reuters:

But Eric Lebson, chief strategy ?officer of Global Reach, an advocacy group representing Gilman's family, told Reuters last week that Gilman was moved in late ?June from the prison hospital to the psychiatric ward of a civilian emergency hospital in ?a catatonic-like state assessed as a "dissociative stupor."

The U.S. officials said Gilman on Tuesday was on a State Department plane ?carrying him from Russia to Washington Dulles Airport.

BREAKING: U.S. Marine veteran Robert Gilman, a Lowell native detained in Russia since 2022, has been released after advocates raised dire concerns about his health. pic.twitter.com/njUt3OQt5D

— WCVB-TV Boston (@WCVB) August 11, 2026

However, concerning his current state of health while being transferred back to America, there is this line in Reuters: "All ?things considered he seems to be in good shape," an unnamed US official said.

It is as yet unclear if a prisoner swap will emerged, but so far there's been no word of any Russians being released from US custody. There may have as yet been other undisclosed incentives that Moscow was responding to.

Trump quickly took to social media...

?? GREAT NEWS: President Trump just secured the release of American Robert Gilman from a Russian prison. The former U.S. Marine is coming home tonight. Russia agreed to free him with no exchange required. This is another major win for bringing Americans home. Welcome back to… pic.twitter.com/kutNhNN2H2

— Commentary Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) August 11, 2026

Vessel traffic at the Strait of Hormuz continues to decline as last week’s hopes of negotiations of a U.S.-Iran deal began to fade, yet again.

As OilPrice notes, on Monday, only six commodity vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz in either direction, down from 11 ships in the latest 10-day average, according to shipping data from Kpler cited by Reuters on Tuesday. Four commodity vessels moved inbound into the Persian Gulf via the Strait and two others exited outbound, the data showed.

Bloomberg data reveal a similar picture, only instead of 2 ships exiting, Bloomberg has only 1, bringing the total Monday commercial crossings to 5.

The inbound movement of commodity ships included two empty product tankers, while a small LNG carrier and a tanker shipping residual fuel exited the Persian Gulf with energy products en route to buyers.

At Bab el-Mandeb, the chokepoint between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, traffic remained unchanged on Monday compared to the 10-day average of about 24 vessels transiting the area.

Traffic at the Strait of Hormuz has slumped to the lowest in more than two months as security concerns have intensified with recent attacks on ships and persistent threats to shipping in the region.

After a brief respite between the middle of June and early July, when traffic at Hormuz rose with the tentative opening of the chokepoint as part of the now-dead U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, traffic of all vessels, including commodity carriers, plunged to a two-month low as of the end of July.

The security situation has deteriorated in the past two weeks, with Iran determined to exert control over vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz and the Iran-aligned Houthis threatening Saudi-linked shipments in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

Traffic at Hormuz needs to recover to nearly pre-war levels of around 80 to 100 ships per day just to stabilize energy markets, Bank of America warned earlier this week. Only around 5 to 10 ships per day are currently passing through the Strait of Hormuz, compared with roughly 140 before the war, Francisco Blanch, Bank of America’s head of commodities and derivatives research, told CNBC on Monday.

Authored by Lance Christensen via The Epoch Times,

In July, as America turned 250, a reactor the size of a minivan went critical in the red-rock desert of Emery County, Utah.

The company that built it, Valar Atomics, isn’t a Utah company at all. It’s based in El Segundo, California, in the shadow of the aerospace giants that once made Southern California the undisputed capital of American engineering.

But when President Donald Trump challenged American industry to bring a new nuclear reactor to life by Independence Day, Valar didn’t build its test site in California. It built it in Utah. That single fact says more about where these two states are headed than any think tank report could.

I have deep roots in my birthplace of Utah and a considered love for California, the state I have chosen to call home.

So, without picking a winner, we need to ask which state will actually do the work of building the next 50 years of American abundance, and why one of them keeps getting in its own way.

The Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence with the vision of building something more expansive than the servitude they endured for hundreds of years.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” doesn’t happen by accident but can be possible only when a people reject the “multitude of New Offices, and … swarms of Officers [that] harrass [sic] our people, and eat out their substance.”

The men and women of the 18th-century revolution were dedicated to turning scarcity into abundance through sheer, sustained will and effort that would make its way westward in the mid-19th century without anyone’s permission.

As destinations for those migrations, Utah and California would asymmetrically benefit from these ambitious renegades over the years as they tamed the hostile landscapes of sagebrush, salt flats, and mountains.

My fourth-great-grandfather, Alexander Beckstead, was among the first to dig irrigation canals in Utah and construct blacksmith shops in the barren Great Salt Lake Valley. My wife’s family left Prussia to settle the Central Valley south of Sacramento as the unpredictable inland sea wreaked havoc on farms and cities.

Sam Brannan, the man who sailed from New York into sleepy Yerba Buena with 200 other Mormon ocean pioneers and announced the gold discovery on the streets of San Francisco, refused to make the trek eastward to the Great Salt Lake. He believed California’s beauty, resources, and location made it the better place to build, and he created town sites across the state and amassed a fortune that made him California’s first millionaire before dying in poverty.

Yet Brigham Young rejected the allure of California and, looking over the Wasatch Front, proclaimed, “This is the right place,” trusting that the desert would eventually “blossom as the rose.” And it has, with affluence oozing out of every corner of the state.

Although Utah’s population is a smaller portion of California’s post-World War II boom, it is currently blowing California’s deserts in Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Central Valley out of the water and doing so despite Brannan’s failed hustle a century and a half ago.

Young’s executive successor, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, has spent this anniversary year arguing that the Founders’ “pursuit of happiness” was never about comfort. It was about character, self-mastery, purpose, and the discipline to build something larger than oneself. It is a high standard the state keeps reaching for.

In California, by contrast, it appears that the spirit of Eureka is lost, and there is less interest in the unglamorous work of actually building success.

That gap is largely political, not geological, resulting in a broken permitting and licensing structure. California’s sun, wind, water, energy, brainpower, and burgeoning artificial intelligence industry are no longer capable of producing some of the biggest innovations in the world as industries are drawn to other places with better regulatory environments.

My colleague Ed Ring has spent years documenting how California’s energy rules were designed for an era of managed scarcity, not abundance.

Ho Nieh, the current chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, likes to say the country needs more power plants, not more PowerPoints. Utah took that injunction seriously and got a working reactor in less than a year.

California, home to the very engineers who designed it, seems unconcerned that Utah is eating our lunch while allowing the decline of its aging nuclear infrastructure.

California does not need to imitate Utah, but she needs to return to the instincts that once defined this state as the destination for every adventurer. The legislature needs to pass predictable, consistent regulation instead of duct-taping rules that shift to the whims of progressive activists every legislative session.

We need public officials to plan for both baseload power and the demand spikes an AI-driven economy will throw at the grid. We need a culture that rewards the people willing to meet our mountains instead of celebrating those who are content to rope them off. We need to refuse the doom-laced climate rhetoric that treats every power plant as an enemy rather than a tool.

Two deserts, two centuries, two paths. Only one of these states is currently spawning nuclear reactors. The other one is still capable of it, if we can find the political will to pursue an abundance agenda with the seriousness and discipline required to build and sustain it.

Ahead of tomorrow's CPI report (which will come in tame thanks to continued housing disinflation), moments ago the US Treasury sold its first refunding auction, which came in very strong, stopping through the When Issued, and with above par metrics.

Pricing at a high yield of 4.291%, up from 4.179% in July and the highest since Feb 2025, the auction stopped through the When Issued 4.296% by 0.5bps, the 2nd consecutive through auction.

The bid to cover rose to 2.712, up from 2.600 and the highest since November; it was obviously well above the six-auction average of 2.606.

The internals were also solid, with Indirects awarded 64.24%, down slightly from 67.50% last month but in line with the recent average of 3.729%. And with Directs awarded 24.0%, well above the average of 21.7%, Dealers were left holding just 11.7%, one of the lowest Dealers this year. 

Overall, this was a rock solid auction, and it should eliminate any concerns that the bond market (at least) is worried about tomorrow's CPI print (as in coming in much hotter than expected).

The new government in Damascus has tried to press Moscow to return to Syria the former longtime President Bashar al-Assad. He's reportedly lived in a posh area of the Russian capital, under heavy security, since he was ousted in December 2024 and forced to flee.

Perhaps realizing they will never apprehend him, a Syrian court under the new hardline Sunni Hayat Tahrir al-Sham government has on Tuesday sentenced the former ruler to death after a trial in absentia, convicting him of war crimes and atrocities during the prior 14-years of internal war which overtook the country.

Judge Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan in Damascus convicted Assad for crimes including "premeditated murder, the intentional killing of more than one person, the intentional killing of children under 15 years... torture, torture leading to death, and deprivation of liberty on multiple occasions -- classified as crimes against humanity and war crimes."

"He is therefore sentenced to death," the court ruled. Other former high ranking officials in the Assad government are expected to be brought before the courts on similar charges. Many of them, including clerics and generals, are currently held in Syrian detention.

Some of these officials have been listed in AFP reporting: "The court also sentenced six former military and security officials in absentia to death including Assad's brother Maher, who ran the army's elite Fourth Division and also fled the country," AFP wrote.

"Those convicted included former defense minister Fahd al-Freij and Louay al-Ali, who headed military intelligence in Daraa province in 2011," the report noted.

The quasi-secular Syrian Ba'ath Party and Assad family had ruled Syria going back to 1970. This came about in the context of a permanent state of war with Israel, and particularly over the Golan Heights, as well as a long-running conflict with radical jihadist factions from within.

Prior to Assad family rule, Syria had suffered some dozen coups and changes of leadership, with many of these involving US and UK intelligence plots.

When there were signs of anti-Assad unrest in early 2011, the United States once again ramped up its covert intervention in Syria, pouring weapons and support into so-called 'moderate rebels' who went on to form the core of Syrian al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Meanwhile, meet the new Syrian government's top diplomatic point man to Washington, who previously kidnapped Americans as an AQ operative...

My interview with the Syrian chargé d'affaires to the US back when he was a member of Jabhat al-Nusra. pic.twitter.com/g0NSaH1WUp

— Lindsey Snell (@LindseySnell) July 28, 2026

Facing a Western and Gulf armed Sunni insurgency, the Assad government sought to put down the proxy war in brutal fashion. But ultimately after many years of covert and economic war, the West won out, and from this emerged Syrian al-Qaeda founder (Nusra Front/HTS) Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

He is now the self-declared President Ahmed al-Sharaa, and the West and Gulf nations have embraced him and his Sunni-dominant government as their 'friend' and puppet.

As for Assad, there have been recent rumors and reports the and his family have traveled abroad at times, making secretive visits to the Gulf region.