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The Coward's Bargain Authored by Josh Stylman via The Brownstone Institute, Everyone’s Afraid to Speak Someone our family has known forever recently told my sister that they’ve been reading my Substack and that if they wrote the things I write, people would call them crazy. I got a kick out of that—not because it’s untrue, but because it reveals something darker about where we’ve ended up as a society. Most people are terrified of being themselves in public. My sister’s response made me laugh: “People do call him crazy. He simply doesn’t care.” The funniest part is that I don’t even write the craziest stuff I research—just the stuff I can back up with sources and/or my own personal observations. I always try to stay rooted in logic, reason, and facts, though—I’m clear when I’m speculating and when I’m not. This same guy has sent me dozens of private messages over the last 4 or 5 years challenging me on stuff I share online. I’ll respond with source material or common sense, and then—crickets. He disappears. If I say something he doesn’t want to hear, he vanishes like a child covering his ears. Over the last few years, I’ve been proven right about most of what we’ve argued about, and he’s been wrong. But it doesn’t matter—he’s got the memory of a gnat and the pattern never changes. But he’d never make that challenge publicly, never risk being seen engaging with my arguments where others might witness the conversation. This kind of private curiosity paired with public silence is everywhere—people will engage with dangerous ideas in private but never risk being associated with them publicly. It’s part of that reflexive “That can’t be true” mindset that shuts down inquiry before it can even begin. But he’s not alone. We’ve created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they’re confessing crimes. I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son’s football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall’s Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: “You know, I’m a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point.” Here’s a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he’s afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts. After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I’d said it. When the company didn’t want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What’s maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t. Another person told me that they agreed with me but wished they were “more successful like me” so they could afford to speak out. They had “too much to lose.” The preposterousness of this is staggering. Everyone who spoke out during Covid sacrificed—financially, reputationally, socially. I sacrificed plenty myself. But I’m no victim. Far from it. Since I was a young man, I’ve never measured achievement by finance or status—my benchmark for being a so-called successful person was owning my own time. Ironically, getting myself canceled was actually a springboard to that. For the first time in my life, I felt I’d achieved time ownership. Whatever I’ve achieved came from being raised by loving parents, working hard, and having the spine to follow convictions rationally. Those attributes, coupled with some great fortune, are the reason for whatever success I’ve had—they’re not the reason I can speak now. Maybe this person should do some inward searching about why they’re not more established. Maybe it’s not about status at all. Maybe it’s about integrity. This is the adult world we’ve built—one where courage is so rare that people mistake it for privilege, where speaking your mind is seen as a luxury only the privileged can afford, rather than a fundamental requirement for actually becoming established. And this is the world we’re handing to our children. We Built the Surveillance State for Them I remember twenty years ago, my best friend’s wife (who’s also a dear friend) was about to hire someone when she decided to check the candidate’s Facebook first. The woman had posted: “Meeting the whores at [company name]”—referring to my friend and her coworkers. My friend immediately withdrew the offer. I remember thinking this was absolutely terrible judgment on the candidate’s part; however, it was dangerous territory we were entering: the notion of living completely in public, where every casual comment becomes permanent evidence. Now that danger has metastasized into something unrecognizable. We’ve created a world where every stupid thing a fifteen-year-old says gets archived forever. Not just on their own phones, but screenshot and saved by peers who don’t understand they’re building permanent files on each other—even on platforms like Snapchat that promise everything disappears. We’ve eliminated the possibility of a private adolescence—and adolescence is supposed to be private, messy, experimental. It’s the laboratory where you figure out who you are by trying on terrible ideas and throwing them away. But laboratories require the freedom to fail safely. What we’ve built instead is a system where every failed experiment becomes evidence in some future trial. Think about the dumbest thing you believed at sixteen. The most embarrassing thing you said at thirteen. Now imagine that moment preserved in high definition, timestamped, and searchable. Imagine it surfacing when you’re 35 and running for school board, or just trying to move past who you used to be. If there was a record of everything I did when I was sixteen, I would have been unemployable. Come to think of it, I’m way older than that now and I’m unemployable anyway—but the truth still stands. My generation might have been the last to fully enjoy an analog existence as children. We got to be stupid privately, to experiment with ideas without permanent consequences, to grow up without every mistake being archived for future use against us. I remember teachers threatening us with our “permanent record.” We laughed—some mysterious file that would follow us forever? Turns out they were just early. Now we’ve built those records and handed the recording devices to children. Companies like Palantir have turned this surveillance into a sophisticated business model. We’re asking children to have adult judgment about consequences they can’t possibly understand. A thirteen-year-old posting something stupid isn’t thinking about college applications or future careers. They’re thinking about right now, today, this moment—which is exactly how thirteen-year-olds are supposed to think. But we’ve built systems that treat childhood immaturity as a prosecutable offense. The psychological toll is staggering. Imagine being fourteen and knowing that anything you say might be used against you by people you haven’t met yet, for reasons you can’t anticipate, at some unknown point in the future. That’s not adolescence—that’s a police state built out of smartphones and social media. The result is a generation that’s either paralyzed by self-consciousness or completely reckless because they figure they’re already screwed. Some retreat into careful blandness, crafting personas so sanitized they might as well be corporate spokespeople for their own lives. Others go scorched earth—if everything’s recorded anyway, why hold back? As my friend Mark likes to say, there’s Andrew Tate and then there’s a bunch of incels—meaning the young men either become performatively brash and ridiculous, or they retreat entirely. The young women seem to either drift toward fearful conformity or embrace monetized exposure on platforms like OnlyFans. We’ve managed to channel an entire generation’s rebellion into the very systems designed to exploit them. The Covid Conformity Test This is how totalitarian thinking takes root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship. When a venture capitalist whispers his concerns about immigration policy like he’s confessing to a thought crime. When successful professionals agree with dissenting views privately but would never defend them publicly. When speaking obvious truths becomes an act of courage rather than basic citizenship. George Orwell understood this perfectly. In 1984, the Party’s greatest achievement wasn’t forcing people to say things they didn’t believe—it was making them afraid to believe things they weren’t supposed to say. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” O’Brien explains to Winston. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.” But the real genius was making citizens complicit in their own oppression, turning everyone into both prisoner and guard. History shows us how this works in practice. The Stasi in East Germany didn’t just rely on secret police—they turned ordinary citizens into informants. By some estimates, one in seven East Germans was reporting on their neighbors, friends, even family members. The state didn’t need to watch everyone; they got people to watch each other. But the Stasi had limitations: they could recruit informants, but they couldn’t monitor everyone simultaneously, and they couldn’t instantly broadcast transgressions to entire communities for real-time judgment. Social media solved both problems. Now we have total surveillance capability—every comment, photo, like, and share automatically recorded and searchable. We have instant mass distribution—one screenshot reaching thousands in minutes. We have volunteer enforcement—people eagerly participating in calling out “wrongthink” because it feels righteous. And we have permanent records—unlike Stasi files locked in archives, digital mistakes follow you forever. The psychological impact is exponentially worse because Stasi informants at least had to make a conscious choice to report someone. Now the reporting happens automatically—the infrastructure is always listening, always recording, always ready to be weaponized by anyone with a grudge or a cause. We saw this machinery in full operation during Covid. Remember how quickly “two weeks to flatten the curve” became orthodoxy? How questioning lockdowns, mask mandates, or vaccine efficacy wasn’t just wrong—it was dangerous? How saying “maybe we should consider the trade-offs of closing schools” could get you labeled a grandma-killer? The speed at which dissent became heresy was breathtaking. History has shown us that governments can be terrible to citizens. The hardest pill to swallow was the horizontal policing. Your neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family members became the enforcement mechanism. People didn’t just comply; they competed—virtue-signaling their way into a collective delusion where asking basic questions about cost-benefit analysis became evidence of moral deficiency. Neighbors called police on neighbors for having too many people over. People photographed “violations” and posted them online for mass judgment. And the most insidious part? The people doing the policing genuinely believed they were the good guys. They thought they were protecting society from dangerous misinformation, not realizing they had become the misinformation—that they were actively suppressing the kind of open inquiry that’s supposed to be the foundation of both science and democracy. The Ministry of Truth didn’t need to rewrite history in real time. Facebook and Twitter did it for them, memory-holing inconvenient posts and banning users who dared to share pre-approved scientific studies that happened to reach unapproved conclusions. The Party didn’t need to control the past—they just needed to control what you were allowed to remember about it. This wasn’t an accident or an overreaction. This was a stress test of how quickly a free society could be transformed into something unrecognizable, and we failed spectacularly. Anyone who actually followed the science understood that the only pandemic was one of cowardice. Worse, most people didn’t even notice we were being tested. They thought they were just “following the science”—never mind that the data kept changing to match the politics, or that questioning anything had somehow become heretical. The beautiful thing about this system is that it’s self-sustaining. Once you’ve participated in the mob mentality, once you’ve policed your neighbors and canceled your friends and stayed silent when you should have spoken up, you become invested in maintaining the fiction that you were right all along. Admitting you were wrong isn’t just embarrassing—it’s an admission that you participated in something monstrous. So instead, you double down. You disappear when confronted with inconvenient facts. Raising Prisoners And this brings us back to the children. They’re watching all of this. But more than that—they’re growing up inside this surveillance infrastructure from birth. The Stasi’s victims at least had some years of normal psychological development before the surveillance state kicked in. These kids never get that. They’re born into a world where every thought might be public, every mistake permanent, every unpopular opinion potentially life-destroying. The psychological impact is devastating. Research shows that children who grow up under constant surveillance—even well-meaning parental surveillance—show higher rates of anxiety, depression, and what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” They never develop internal locus of control because they never get to make real choices with real consequences. But this goes far deeper than helicopter parenting. The ability to hold unpopular opinions, to think through problems independently, to risk being wrong—these aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re core to psychological maturity. When you eliminate those possibilities, you don’t just get more compliant people; you get people who literally can’t think for themselves anymore. They outsource their judgment to the crowd because they never developed their own. We’re creating a generation of psychological cripples—people who are practiced at reading social cues and adjusting their thoughts accordingly, but who have never learned to form independent judgments. People who mistake consensus for truth and popularity for virtue. People who have been so thoroughly trained to avoid wrong-think that they’ve either lost—or never developed—the capacity for original thought entirely. But here’s what’s most disturbing: the kids are learning this behavior from us. They’re watching adults who whisper their real thoughts, who agree privately but stay silent publicly, who confuse strategic silence with wisdom. They’re learning that authenticity is dangerous, that having real convictions is a luxury they can’t afford. They’re learning that truth is negotiable, that principles are disposable, and that the most important skill in life is reading the room and adjusting your thoughts accordingly. The feedback loop is complete: adults model cowardice, children learn that genuine expression is risky, and everyone becomes practiced at self-censorship rather than self-examination. We’ve created a society where the Overton window isn’t just narrow—it’s actively policed by people who are terrified of stepping outside it, even when they privately disagree with its boundaries. This is the architecture of soft totalitarianism. Just the constant, gnawing fear that saying the wrong thing—or even thinking it too loudly—will result in social death. The beauty of this system is that it makes everyone complicit. Everyone has something to lose, so everyone stays quiet. Everyone remembers what happened to the last person who spoke up, so nobody wants to be next. The technology doesn’t just enable this tyranny; it makes it psychologically inevitable. When the infrastructure punishes independent thinking before it can fully form, you get psychological arrested development on a mass scale. It’s already baked into education and employment through DEI and ESG. Wait till it’s baked into the monetary system. Maybe they’re just connecting us to the Borg anyway? We’re passing this pathology down to our children like a genetic disorder. Except this disorder isn’t inherited—it’s enforced. And unlike genetic disorders, this one serves a purpose: it creates a population that’s easy to control, easy to manipulate, easy to lead around by the nose as long as you control the social rewards and punishments. The Price of Truth I don’t share my opinions because I “get away with it”—I don’t get away with anything. I’ve paid socially, professionally, and even financially. But I do it anyway because the alternative is spiritual death. The alternative is becoming someone who messages critics privately but never takes a public stand, someone who’s perpetually annoyed by others’ courage but never exercises their own. The difference isn’t ability or privilege. It’s willingness. I’m open-minded and open-hearted. I can be convinced of anything—but show me, don’t tell me. I’m willing to be wrong, willing to change my mind when new information comes to light or I gain a different perspective on an idea, willing to defend ideas I believe in even when it’s uncomfortable. There are a lot of us right now realizing that something isn’t right—that we’ve been lied to about everything. We’re trying to make sense of what we’re seeing, asking uncomfortable questions, connecting dots that don’t want to be connected. When we call that out, the last thing we need is people who haven’t done the work standing in our way, carrying water for the establishment forces that are manipulating them. Most people could do the same thing if they chose to—they just don’t choose to because they’ve been trained to see conviction as dangerous and conformity as safe. A 2020 Cato Institute survey found that 62% of Americans say the political climate prevents them from sharing their political beliefs because others might find them offensive. Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%), and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share. When adults who lived through Covid saw what happens when groupthink becomes gospel—how quickly independent thought gets labeled dangerous, how thoroughly dissent gets suppressed—many responded not by becoming more committed to free expression, but by becoming more careful about what they express. They learned the wrong lesson. What we’re creating is a society where authenticity has become a radical act, where courage is so rare it looks like privilege. We’re raising children who learn that being yourself is dangerous, that having real opinions carries unlimited downside risk. They’re not just careful about what they say—they’re careful about what they think. This doesn’t create better people. It creates more fearful people. People who mistake surveillance for safety, conformity for virtue, and silence for wisdom. People who’ve forgotten that the point of having thoughts is sometimes to share them, that the point of having convictions is sometimes to defend them. The solution isn’t to abandon technology or retreat into digital monasteries. But we need to create spaces—legal, social, psychological—where both kids and adults can fail safely. Where mistakes don’t become permanent tattoos. Where changing your mind is seen as growth rather than hypocrisy. Where having convictions is valued over having clean records. Most importantly, we need adults who are willing to model courage instead of strategic silence—who understand that the price of speaking up is usually less than the price of staying quiet. In a world where everyone’s afraid to say what they think, the honest voice doesn’t just stand out—it stands up. Because right now, we’re not just living in fear—we’re teaching our children that fear is the price of participation in society. And a society built on fear isn’t a society at all. It’s just a more comfortable prison, one where the guards are ourselves and the keys are our own convictions, which we’ve learned to keep safely locked away. Whether it’s experimental medicine or the masters of war lying again to drag us into what might become World War III—it’s PSYOP season—it’s never been more important that people find their conviction, use their voice, and become a force for good. If you’re still scared to push back against war propaganda, still getting swept up in manufactured outrage cycles, still choosing your principles based on which team is in power—then you may have learned absolutely nothing from the last few years. These days, friends are starting to confide in me that maybe I was right about the mRNA vaccines not working. I don’t gloat—in fact, I appreciate the openness. But my standard reply is that they’re four years late to the story. They’ll know they’ve caught up when they realize the world is run by a bunch of satanic pedophiles. And yeah, I used to think that sounded crazy too. Republished from the author’s Substack Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 22:35

Florida Gov. DeSantis Announces Tax Holiday On Guns  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) rolled out the "Second Amendment" tax holiday earlier this year, offering sales tax relief on firearms, ammunition, and related gear. The tax holiday officially begins on September 8. The initiative arrives as the U.S. gun industry has slumped into a downturn after the pandemic-era buying frenzy; in other words, the industry is just normalizing.  Gov. DeSantis announced earlier today that the tax holiday on firearms and related items will run from September 8 to December 31. He also confirmed the tax break will extend to a wide range of outdoor gear, including fishing equipment, bowhunting supplies, and other recreational items. Calculated savings amount to more than $8 million for gun buyers.  🚨 BREAKING: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announces 2ND AMENDMENT TAX HOLIDAY for this year. SEPT 8th to DEC 31st, tax free! Firearms, ammunition, accoutrement, and more pic.twitter.com/jWQ81OY38T — USCCA (@USCCA) June 30, 2025 The firearms industry is likely celebrating the upcoming tax holiday, as it's expected to spur much-needed demand. This comes at a time when the U.S. gun market has languished in recent years. Just weeks ago, Smith & Wesson Brands warned investors to brace for yet another year of disappointing results. A common proxy for firearm demand is the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). A NICS check is conducted every time someone purchases a gun from a federally licensed dealer. While not all checks represent sales—some are for permits, renewals, or private transfers depending on state laws—NICS data still provides a snapshot of overall gun demand.  Seasonality data via Bloomberg shows NICS falling back to a 15-year trend line after robust gun demand from the pandemic era. Historically, firearm demand also tends to soften when a Republican is in the White House, reducing urgency among core gun-buying demographics.  Florida's current sales tax rate is 6%, which means that Floridians would save around $543 on something like a Barrett M82A1 29" 50 BMG — enough to buy 140 rounds of 50 cal.  The perfect reaction to 50cal pic.twitter.com/HSke2ZjLd1 — Firearm Videos (@firearmvideos) June 28, 2025 . . .    Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 21:20

Quantum Meets AI: Morgan Stanley Maps Out Next Tech Frontier It's widely accepted that quantum computing remains a long-term bet, with meaningful commercialization unlikely before the 2030s—if not later. Investor enthusiasm plunged sharply in early January after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang remarked that "very useful" quantum computers are still years away. Since then, however, quantum computing stocks (IonQ, Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, and Quantum Computing) have soared, adding billions of dollars in market capitalization.  Morgan Stanley's latest report, "Quantum Computing – How Will It Impact AI?", offers one of the most comprehensive overviews to date, mapping out the evolving quantum landscape and its growing convergence with the artificial intelligence boom. A team of analysts led by Shawn Kim told clients that quantum computing is entering a new era, marked by breakthroughs such as Microsoft's 'Majorana 1' and Google's 'Willow' chips, which promise to outperform today's supercomputers. They noted that these advances could accelerate AI development by enabling solutions to problems currently beyond the reach of classical computing. Rather than replacing classical systems, quantum computing is expected to serve as a powerful accelerator, enhancing AI's capabilities, particularly in finance, logistics, pharmaceuticals, and energy. While practical applications remain in the early stages, cloud-based access from big tech is making quantum tools increasingly accessible. Although widespread commercialization is still years away, early investments in the quantum AI ecosystem have already begun, and growing speculation over the industry's long-term potential has sent related stocks soaring. Here's how the analysts frame the broader outlook for the quantum computing industry to clients:  A Quantum leap beyond the Silicon Age. Microsoft' Majorana 1' or Google 'Willow' quantum chips were launched earlier this year, representing a paradigm shift in the ability to harness the laws of quantum mechanics to perform calculations orders of magnitude faster than today's supercomputers. This could lead to faster breakthroughs in AI that are currently beyond the reach of classical computing, transforming how we approach complex problems, develop intelligent systems, and make predictions with a level of accuracy and speed that was previously impossible. A powerful synergy – augmenting AI capabilities. We view a merging of the speed of quantum computing with the learning power of AI as a partnership rather than a competition with classical computing. Quantum chips are designed to work as quantum accelerators alongside AI systems to unlock entirely new capabilities that can amplify AI's potential beyond the reach of classical computing. The two technologies have very different strengths and therefore lend themselves to different use cases with AI excelling at creativity, language and video processing, while quantum computing is more suited for tackling complex problems that are beyond the capabilities of classical algorithms. There will be no shortage of commercial applications. Quantum computing has become more accessible as big tech companies are now offering services via their cloud services, narrowing the gap between theory and practical implementation with the potential to reshape many industries such as finance, pharmaceuticals, logistics and energy by solving complex AI problems much faster than classical computers. Most real-world uses are relatively small today and still in development, but the future looks promising. Preparing for a quantum AI future. The practical applications and integration of quantum computing into AI systems are still in the early stages of development, but much like in the early days of semiconductors, early investments in successful quantum companies and their ecosystems will likely yield substantial returns. An important question remains around the commercial timeline, although many early leaders are computing incumbents and some start-ups. The analysts outlined the rationale behind publishing this report to clients: Why we're writing this report: Following our first deep dive into quantum computing nearly five years ago ( The New Processing Paradigms, 19 July 2020 ), we wanted to take stock of the many moving pieces in the sector after several tech giants released new quantum chips earlier this year. Hyperscalers such as Google (Willow), Microsoft (Majorana1), IBM and Amazon (Ocelot) are all investing in the rapidly evolving quantum race. Some of them are partnering with quantum computer companies and some are doing it in-house. In this report we focus on quantum developments and how they could impact AI in three domains – computing, metrology, and communication – in terms of commercial use cases. As the quantum computing market continues to evolve, staying informed about advances, commercial applications, and regulatory developments will be essential for making sound investment decisions in this emerging sector. Provided more insight into quantum computing's impacts on AI: Quantum computing allows AI to think much faster by introducing non-deterministic and probabilistic elements that allow for more intuitive reasoning vs. current AI that is largely a sophisticated pattern recognition machine. By leveraging quantum superposition, entanglement, and interference, new quantum AI models offer the potential for significant reductions in both computational cost and energy consumption. As quantum computing develops, its integration with AI has the potential to unlock entirely new approaches that are more efficient, enable significantly better accuracy, and hence better performance. AI tools like ChatGPT have already made a profound impact on society, but a critical limitation is the need for computational behemoths using classical large language models (LLMs) that are expensive to train. With fewer parameters required, quantum models could make AI more sustainable, tackling one of the biggest challenges facing the industry today. Quantum computers have been around for decades, but mostly as experimental models in research institutions and technology companies. Unlike classical computing models, which are binary representations of electrical switches (transistors), quantum computers measure states of subatomic particles using qubits (quantum bits). Quantum computers are still not powerful enough today to do anything commercially viable in AI, due the sensitivity of quantum systems to noise and error. A lot of effort is being made to overcome hurdles, however, industry experts and hyperscale cloud providers predict the timeline for practical commercial applications of quantum computers may only be five years out. Quantum computing. Quantum computers store and process quantum data as opposed to binary data. Unlike current AI systems, which rely on GPU (graphics processing unit) or ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips, quantum computers harness technologies such as superconducting circuits, trapped ions and neutral atoms in highly isolated environments to protect their fragile processing. The main challenge lies in scaling and improving the hardware to fully exploit the potential of quantum computing, which has a number of important uses in computing fields including optimization, power efficiency, and machine learning. Quantum computers are also known for their potential to carry out 'Shor's Algorithm', which can be used to factorize large numbers to decrypt data transmissions. Quantum communication (transfer of quantum 'signals'). Quantum communication takes advantage of properties unique to the physics of quantum mechanics, opening new paradigms for communication that cannot be realized by classical (non-quantum) communication. Quantum communication could enhance AI's ability to process and share real-time data across distributed networks, and provide ultra-secure data transmission. Distributed quantum computers and quantum sensors are interconnected with a quantum communication network in the quantum equivalent of the classical internet. Quantum metrology and sensing. This uses the physical properties of quantum systems – photons and atoms – to set standards for units of measurement in science and industry, as well as for engineering other high-precision technologies. Enhanced imaging and sensing technologies from quantum sensors, combined with AI, could achieve breakthroughs in areas such as autonomous systems, medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring. Use cases include quantum imaging or quantum radar that compromise stealth technology. It is also the only known way to detect dark matter and energy. Before readers get too excited about quantum stocks, the analysts note: "Quantum is still very much in its infancy."  Perhaps most intriguing, the analysts frame the quantum race as a split between the West and the East.  Here are the key players to watch in the space: IBM – Most advanced ecosystem, aiming for 200+ logical qubits and commercialization by 2029. Microsoft – Game-changing topological qubit architecture. Google – "Willow" chip achieved major error-correction milestones. Amazon – "Ocelot" chip; working on bosonic error correction. IonQ, Rigetti, Quantinuum – Specialized quantum startups with wide-ranging partnerships. Pure Play & Big Tech Stocks  And now to the part that matters most for investors: the timeline for commercialization. According to the analysts:  What's the timing? The consensus quantum computing timeline suggests meaningful commercial applications emerging around 2029-30, with more advanced utility-scale quantum computing expected in the early to mid-2030s. The timing for quantum computing commercialization varies across different milestones, with several key timeframes emerging from industry experts and companies in the field. There are coordinated efforts from companies and governments to make quantum work and still primarily in the research and development phase. Many experts believe the chance of Q- day happening before 2030 is over 50%. Businesses are taking it seriously, pouring billions into preparation and will likely to begin to derive value well before via cloud offerings that are already available today for basic quantum computations. Current state (2025): Quantum computing is still primarily in the research and development phase. Companies like Rigetti are working on scaling their systems, with plans to reach 100+ qubits by the end of 2025 with targeted improvements in error rates. Commercial applications (2029-2030): Multiple sources indicate that meaningful commercial applications of quantum computing are expected in approximately 4-5 years from now: Cryptographic threats (2030): A cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer capable of breaking common public key schemes such as RSA or ECC is expected by 2030. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has set 2030 as the timeline for implementing quantum-secure algorithms and deprecating currently used cryptographic methods. The Roadmap Read the rest of Morgan Stanley's deep quantum computing dive—available here for pro subs.  Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 20:30

Protesters Outraged As Trump Expected To Visit 'Alligator Alcatraz' In Florida America has the best alligators in the world, big beautiful alligators, perfect for stopping dangerous illegal immigrants from escaping detention until they can be processed and deported.  At least, Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security think so.  Others, however, are not so enamored with the idea of 'Alligator Alcatraz' being constructed in the middle of Florida's swamplands. A legal and environmental firestorm is growing around Florida’s controversial migrant detention center under construction at the remote Dade‑Collier airstrip deep in the Everglades.  Any illegals trying to escape the facility would have to face hundreds of National Guard soldiers as well as miles upon miles of snake and alligator infested waters before they reached civilization, essentially ensuring they stay in place until they are removed from the US. Critics call the idea a "cruel spectacle" while proponents are cheering its ingenuity.  A variety of activist groups are already swarming sites near the center in protest, some arguing that the facility threatens the environmental balance of the Everglades and others asserting that it violates Miccosukee and Seminole tribal land. The conflict over the land goes back to 1968, when authorities in Dade County, now known as Miami-Dade County, began building the Big Cypress Jetport on land the Miccosukees used for ceremonial practices. The Dade County Port Authority referred to the project as the “world’s largest airport,” with six runways designed to handle large jets.  The airport became a flashpoint, but in 1969, a coalition if tribesmen and conservationists persuaded Florida Gov. Claude R. Kirk Jr. that the airport would damage the Everglades. He ordered construction be stopped. One runway, approximately 10,000 feet in length, was left behind as a training ground for pilots. The current battle highlights a common tactic used by progressives - The exploitation of environmental sentiments as a tool to undermine unrelated conservative projects and policies.  One lawsuit, filed by Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, alleges that federal and state agencies have violated laws that, in part, require evaluating potential environmental impacts before such a project can move forward. Clearly the effort is driven less by environmentalism and more by a desire to thwart deportations of illegals by any means available, but it's unlikely that the preservation angle will work for activists this time. Tribal leaders are outraged by the construction of the site, claiming they can trace their rights to the "sacred land" back thousands of years.  Of course, they have no rights to the land today, and this is all that really matters. President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem are expected to visit the site this week and the center it set to go into operations in July.  Florida officials, including Governor Ron DeSantis and AG James Uthmeier, defend the project as an efficient processing center.  Coming soon! pic.twitter.com/v3DCJsrDwV — Homeland Security (@DHSgov) June 28, 2025 "There will be some very dangerous criminal aliens that get processed through here," DeSantis told FOX News. "But if, for some reason, someone would be able to get out, where are you gonna go? You gonna dodge alligators for 50 miles to try to get to... no, it’s not gonna happen. So this is basically as secure as it gets."  The state says the site will cost about $450 million a year to operate. That cost, according to officials, will be reimbursed by FEMA At bottom, Alligator Alcatraz is going to open and there's not much that progressives can do to stop it.  Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 19:40

Where Can You Order A Robotaxi? Self-driving cars - in real-world applications as of now limited to robotaxis - are simultaneously very real but also scary to many people as technological and ethical implications around the subject are plentiful. As Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, last week, Tesla launched its first small-scale robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, but other than announced used safety drivers. U.S. competitor Waymo, which already operated in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, added Atlanta to its robotaxi portfolio on Tuesday. You will find more infographics at Statista In Chinese cities, it is already somewhat more normal to be able to board a robotaxi as several operators are vying for dominance and have expanded fleets. Apollo Go by Chinese tech company Baidu, one of the larger operators, currently has as many as 1,000 robotaxis on the road in Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and several more. A handful of companies are operating public trials and services in the cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. Smaller cities are also being included by some companies and they are often where they launched their first trial services to test in smaller environments with less traffic. While initial trials were often free and even on an application basis, new low fare structures for robotaxis in China have already ruffled feathers with taxi drivers. While Chinese company WeRide is already operating in Abu Dhabi and is conducting non-public tests in San Jose in the United States, Apollo Go has announced plans to expand to Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Many current robotaxis are limited to specific areas, times of day or distances and might have a remote safety operator, who under Chinese law can look after as many as three taxis. Some operations in China also include on-board safety drivers, which are present but are not needed for any specific maneuvers of the vehicle. A 2023 accidents in San Francisco where a Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian as it failed to carry out an emergency stop has led to parent GM to abandon the project in 2024. A Las Vegas service by Motional was suspended in May of last year. Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 18:50

Disney Hit With More Layoffs As Latest Woke Projects Bomb Hard It would seem that Disney still hasn't learned its lesson when it comes to DEI in entertainment.  The company which just initiated a series of layoffs of hundreds of employees at the beginning in June is now getting rid of at least 2% of staffers in its product and technology division. The staff cuts are only part of an ongoing trend over the past few years as Disney's profits at the box office tumble into the abyss.  Only ten years ago the company dominated theaters and television, but it is now reeling from an endless string of embarrassing failures. The company's latest entertainment bungles include the Pixar film Elio, about a Mexican-Domincan boy obsessed with space travel who is accidentally taken by aliens to the "Communiverse", an intergalactic socialist Utopia where all the species of the universe get together and work out their problems.  Continuing with their messaging that minority characters are infallible no matter what they do, Pixar writes Elio as a spoiled thief who seems to get whatever he wants.  His background as an orphan living with his aunt is meant to invoke sympathy from the audience, but the effort falls flat. "It was important for our art team to kind of design the world of space, to design the 'communiverse' to be this colorful, welcoming, diverse place, this aspirational place where aliens of all shapes and sizes and colors can come and live together," said director Domee Shi. "And when Elio first lands, he just feels like this is home and he wants to stay."  The creators and voice actors on the movie hyped up the minority representation of Elio as if they are still living in 2018.  Zoe Saldaña, the voice of Aunt Olga, shared a personal message at the premiere of Elio in reference to the Mexican representation in the film as well as the ongoing immigration raids in Los Angeles:  "I do believe that the future of America are Latinos, and people of color...I just think that as long as we keep being who we are and coming from a place of love and dignity and hard work we will win." Critics also mention the movie's noticeable lack of animation quality, further cementing allegations that Disney has fired most of its seasoned animators and replaced them with cheaper and less knowledgeable artists.  Elio imploded at theaters.  With a budget of over $300 million the animated flick is expected to lose around $150 million and is the worst performing film ever released by Pixar.  On the streaming front, Disney+ has released their long delayed Marvel series Ironheart, a superhero story featuring woke representation including multiple insufferable trans actors and a black, female ghetto version of Iron Man who is somehow smarter than Tony Stark.  She gets a free ride through college but complains constantly about her circumstances, helps fellow university students cheat on their exams in exchange for cash and steals regularly in order to get what she thinks she's entitled to.  A typical DEI character with no moral compass and zero likability.  Disney keeps its streaming stats a closely guarded secret and Nielson stats don't come out for a month, but Ironheart is currently being pummeled in audience reviews and third-party ratings companies show audience numbers in the gutter. In the film industry projects are often released many years after initial production is launched.  This is why it's a big mistake to inject the political messaging of the current day into movies and television, as movements can fail, disappear or change direction before the content is available to audiences.  Ironheart is so dated by its politics that it feels like a time portal back to the early days of the Biden era; an era almost everyone hates.  The smart move would have been to shelve the product and never release it. The sheer size of Disney's operations allow it to financially weather a number of failed projects, but it's a bad sign that the company is currently relying more on its theme park revenues and less on its film and streaming divisions.  After sinking every franchise it owns with woke messaging, including Star Wars, Marvel, Dr. Who, etc., it's unlikely that Disney will recover anytime soon from its endless box office defeats. Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 18:00

The Decline And Fall Of Our So-Called Degreed Experts Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness, The first six months of the Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes. Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the PhDs employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral. Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself. They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity. So, the result of Trump’s foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation—or rather a return to stagflation—and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined. Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly “crashed” stock market reached historic highs. Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs? Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump’s jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits? Were Trump’s art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate rather than punitive tariffs? Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely? Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border. We were told for four years that only “comprehensive immigration reform” would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws. When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong? Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages. Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry. Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation—again to wide ridicule from immigration “experts.” But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home “voluntarily”—if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home? Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran’s nuclear sites was a fool’s errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons. In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A twenty-five-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration. As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced? Why would Russia—bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties—wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients? Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran’s destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements? As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran’s side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis? Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy? As far as the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class? Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action. Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb. Was Trump really going to “blow up”, “destroy” or “cripple” NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to twenty-three nations meeting their two percent of GDP defense spending promises? Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump’s past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Putin did not invade during Trump’s first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn’t NATO agree to rearm to five percent, and appreciate Trump’s efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war? Why were our “scientific” pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males competing in women’s sports, and open borders first born and nurtured? Answer: the university, and higher education in general. The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the “51 intelligence authorities” who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was “likely” cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden’s multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors’ past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama’s two beachfront multimillion-dollar estates. Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Donald Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 “walls are closing in” and “bombshell” indictments. So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions? One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50-percent-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid anti-Semitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies. The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90–95 percent left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not. Two, Donald Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments—if they in any small way helped Trump. Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. PhD programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise. The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become. But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting. Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators, and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter worthlessness. Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 17:00

Stay Sane! Authored by James Howard Kunstler, "Betting against Donald Trump is usually a bad idea." - Insurrection Barbie on "X" What apparently riles the credentialed political Left — the “gay / race communists” in the apt new phrase — more than anything, is that most of the country has opted to not be insane. This follows a decade-long attempt to drive the country insane, of course, to believe in things that are patently untrue and absurd, and to utilize falsehood and absurdity to garishly destroy the nation. So, it fits that Donald Trump, the uber-realist of political game-playing, pushes what remains of the Democratic Party into a rapture of impotent rage. They’ve got nothing left but the empty acting-out of lunatics in an asylum of their own making. The wrathful grass-widows choking on their chardonnay in Martha’s Vineyard, the furious nose-rings steaming under their keffiyehs in the summer heat, the “Transtifas” storming police lines with their ridiculous umbrellas, the doddering Boomer-hippies reenacting the festive protest marches of 1968, minus a single coherent principle, the wigged-out congresspersons storming the ICE detention centers, the Covid vaccine victims duped into multiple organ failure (their hearts and brains especially), the “allies” of every loser group from Bangor to Brentwood in a frenzy of baffled grievance — these poor, lost wretches so far gone that even the likes of David Axelrod, James Carville, and Frank Luntz can’t stand to be associated with them anymore, is all the Democrats have left in their manure-stuffed donkey stable. The abiding mystery remains: what exactly set in motion this fantastic cascade of political madness, especially among the highly educated demographic. The seemingly obvious answer is higher education itself, infested since the 1960s with Marxist zealots, sexual malcontents, and resentment-filled diversity hires. And while that has surely played its part, it doesn’t sufficiently explain the ugly dynamic. Another explanation runs toward a plot by international “oligarchical” corruptniks to corner all the goodies of the world and either turn the rest of us into their slaves, or just kill us off — and to do it in such a way as to rub it in our faces, so as to provide the corruptniks with some mirthful entertainment as they go about their dastardly business. For instance, the recent weekend wedding of Huma Abedin and Alex Soros on the very day that the moiling minions whom they sponsor held their nationwide “No Kings” rallies inn the streets. Huma, the bride, you recall, was Hillary Clinton’s sidekick back in Hillary’s glory days, especially the time of her glorious and inevitable rise (her regal “turn”) to occupy the White House, thwarted inconceivably by the preposterous showman, Mr. Trump. Hillary, you also might recall, left the White House broke-ass-broke in 2001 only to agglomerate a stupendous multi-hundred-million-dollar fortune working as a US Senator and then Secretary of State (salaries $170,000 and $260,600 respectively). That is, Hillary acquired her great fortune in about the same way that the royalty-of-old acquired theirs — by grift and theft. And Huma, former wife of disgraced congressman and convicted Internet pervert Anthony Weiner, is now wed to decade-younger financial royalist Alex Soros, son of George, who made the bulk of his fortune (estimated $7.2-billion) shorting the British pound sterling in 1992 and went on to found a vast array of NGOs and so-called philanthropies (the Open Society Foundations) that specialize in influencing elections worldwide, conducting regime-change campaigns, and lately financing seditious movements within the United States. Heir-apparent Alex is reported to have taken over the day-to-day operations of that network — but, we must have no kings, you understand. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has actually tried, against all odds and endless threats, to represent the interests of common US citizens, that is, most of us, the non-royal, and to navigate the collective consciousness of this human mass away from the long-creeping, imposed insanity. He was blind-sided and sandbagged by enemies in his naïve first term. But Trump has returned — after an astonishing exhibition of spiteful incompetence by his adversaries — much-chastened by previous failure and injury with a far-better crew, much better-prepared with a program for redeeming a spavined economy, reinstating common sense in the daily life of the nation (i.e., resistance to absurd propositions), and reform of a dangerous rogue bureaucracy. The remnant Left is reeling now, most recently from last week’s SCOTUS decision foreclosing the universal injunction nonsense sponsored by Norm Eisen and Mary McCord’s lawfare corps. That campaign, which raged for five months, might prove to be their last gasp. You know, though, that they are plotting another round of election fraud for the 2026 midterms. But it looks like their previous frauds are on the verge of being uncovered — finally, after years of evasion and no help from a treasonous news media — and there’s a fair chance that they can’t pull off more fraud next time. Passage of a proof-of-citizenship law for national elections could seal that deal. But first, the massive hurdle of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Whatever its virtues and defects, it must be gotten over for this larger effort of a journey back to civilizational sanity to continue. Hazards lurk at every turn. The awesome national debt hangs ominously over the whole enterprise and might sink it yet. Certain players in Europe steer deeper into their own insanity and look more and more like true enemies of the USA — far more than Russia does now — and then there is China: powerful, still rising, plotting cunningly. Plenty of travail awaits, but we’ll be better able to get through it with our minds right and our aim true. Aim to stay sane. Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 16:20

Social Media: The Biggest Threat To Teens' Mental Health? In 2010, Mashable declared June 30 as Social Media Day, intended to celebrate the impact of social media on communication, connection and culture. Originally launched to recognize the positive impact that platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X) or Instagram have on human interaction around the world, we’re marking the occasion by acknowledging some of the downsides of social media’s unstoppable rise over the past two decades. Specifically, we’re looking at its impact on children and teens, whose lives have changed fundamentally since social media platforms became ubiquitous. As Statista's Felix Richter reports, according to a survey of U.S. teens conducted by the Pew Research Center in the fall of 2024, 48 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 now say that social media has a mostly negative effect on people of their age, up from just 32 percent two years earlier. You will find more infographics at Statista Only 11 percent of teenagers in the U.S. now describe the impact of social media as mostly positive, with mental health a key concern for both teens and their parents. 55 percent of surveyed parents said that they’re extremely or very concerned about the mental health of teenagers these days, while 35 percent of teens said the same about their own generation. When asked to name the single biggest threat to their own/their children’s mental health, teens and parents were both most likely to name social media as the one thing that impacts teens’ mental health most negatively. While 44 percent of parents saw social media as the number one threat to their children’s mental wellbeing, 22 percent of teenagers said the same, with bullying and outside pressure/expectations also high on their minds. “They live in a fake world of social media that limits them as human beings, distancing them from their family,” one concerned mother said about today’s teenagers, while a teenage boy said that constantly being exposed to other people’s opinions on social media was a big problem for his generation and that overuse of social media appeared to be the main cause of depression among people of his age. Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 15:45

Trump Pivots To Pressuring Israel For New Ceasefire Deal In Gaza "MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!" President Trump wrote on social media early Sunday, pivoting from a month dominated by large-scale Iran strikes to seeking more peace and stability in the long-running Israel-Palestine conflict. Naturally, the Palestinian side remains doubtful that any real progress will be made, given especially that the Netanyahu government has repeatedly refused to steer away from its primary war aims in the Gaza Strip of utterly destroying Hamas, and ensuring it can never come back to lead. Ron Dermer, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to travel to Washington this week for discussions on a possible ceasefire, also amid reports that the Israeli leader himself will soon be hosted in the White House.  President Trump was quoted in The Washington Post last Friday as saying, "I just spoke with some of the people involved. It’s a terrible situation that’s going on in Gaza … We think within the next week we’re going to get a ceasefire." Following this, Netanyahu held a secretive meeting with his security Cabinet on Sunday as pressure builds to re-enter negotiations with Hamas. "They promised to stop the war if the hostages were released," one Palestinian resident, Abdel Hadi Al-Hour, was quoted in The Associated Press as saying. "But the war never stopped." Ceasefire negotiations have not gotten anywhere largely over the question of whether a truce should bring an end to the war entirely. This is as Hamas insists on a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza in exchange for the release of all hostages; however, Israel has consistently demanded that all Hamas militants disarm and leave the Strip completely. These are non-starters for both sides at this point, even if their respective populations put pressure on leadership to achieve a deal which would bring relief from war. Israeli warplanes have continued pounding various areas of Gaza, including more Monday airstrikes on Gaza City. Al Jazeera details the latest as follows: Israel has launched dozens of air strikes across Gaza with northern Gaza City in its crosshairs after the military issued forced evacuation threats, raising fears of an intensified ground assault. Israeli forces killed at least 80 Palestinians in Gaza since dawn with dozens wounded including in an attack on Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah. Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid urged an end to the war, saying there was “no longer any benefit” for Israel to continue. Egypt’s foreign minister says his country is working on a new Gaza deal that includes a 60-day ceasefire in exchange for the release of some Israeli captives. Palestinian sources have said that over 56,000 Gazans have been killed since the war began, with an additional more than 133,000 wounded.  And the Israeli side has tallied some 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7 attacks, with more than 200 taken captive after that. Possibly less than 20 living hostages remain, based on prior indications given by Israeli sources. Tyler Durden Mon, 06/30/2025 - 14:25