Steve Villarreal

nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/… Cui bono? Hard to imagine a film with a more deceptive title, or a more disastrous legacy than this one. An Inconvenient Truth scared the hell out of millions of people. It predicted all kinds of climate-related catastrophes and polluted the minds of concerned citizens in countries all over the world with apocalyptic levels of fear and misunderstanding. It led to countless policies and regulations that wasted trillions of dollars, vilified the fossil fuel industry, and in the process, doomed millions of poor countries to another generation of “energy-poverty,” which is of course, no different than “poverty-poverty.” It gave us Greta Thunberg, and countless other misinformed activists who chained themselves to bridges, glued themselves to roads, and threw paint on priceless works of art in their misguided attempts to save the planet. It also won two Academy Awards and made Al Gore a very rich man. It seems obvious today that climate change is real, but that its impact on the planet has been wildly and irresponsibly overstated, primarily by people who have prospered from scaring us. It’s an old grift, but it always works, and I’m happy to share the attached article - an unsparing but very fair analysis of Al Gore's movie 20 years after it became the most profitable and influential environmental documentary ever produced. I thought the same thing last month when Paul Ehrlich died, and people finally began to acknowledge the false catastrophism that made him famous, thanks his bestselling horror story, The Population Bomb. It too, scared the hell out millions of people and caused a level of economic and psychological damage that’s simply incalculable. It also made Paul Ehrlich a rich man. Among other things, Ehrlich predicted that, by 1980, the average American lifespan would decline to just 42 years. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” Ehrlich wrote in 1969. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” he declared the following year. By 1971, Ehrlich was willing to “take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Roughly 100 to 200 million people, he assumed, would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989 in what he deemed “the Great Die-Off.” Paul Ehrlich was a distinguished evolutionary biologist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. He was also a highly respected environmentalist with all the proper credentials, and a media darling. (Johnny Carson alone had him on over a dozen times.) The Population Bomb was read by millions of people and reprinted no less than 20 times, making it one of the most consequential environmental books of the 20th century. And, just like An Inconvenient Truth, it was complete and total fiction. Opportunists like Gore and Ehrlich have always been with us and always will be. The most charitable thing we can say about them today is that they were wrong, but I’m not feeling charitable these days. I’m looking instead for the next grifter who wants to prosper by scaring me about the coming apocalypse, in whatever form it might take. And I’m asking myself a simple question, famously posed by Cicero a long time ago. “Cui bono?” Who benefits? It’s well and fine to caution America about the odds of another pandemic, or the impact of AI, or the effect of processed foods, or the addictive qualities of social media, or in my case, the consequences of failing to close our ever-widening skills gap. (It won't be the end of the world, simply the end of America.) But if those warnings come with Oscars and bestsellers and large piles of money, remember Cicero’s question. And heed the answer... PS. Here's the article, if the link doesn't get you there... Two decades have passed since Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, in May 2006, catapulting climate change into the global spotlight. The film, with its dramatic visuals and dire warnings, transformed the issue from a niche ecological concern into a front-page crisis. World leaders in rich countries began labeling it an “existential threat,” and it dominated international agendas. Gore’s message especially resonated with the elites who travel by private jet to attend global conferences, and it inspired a generation of influencers, activists, and policymakers. As we approach the film’s 20th anniversary, it’s a time to reflect on not just its impact but its accuracy. The film’s predictions of escalating catastrophes have largely failed to materialize, its policy prescriptions have fallen short, and the $16 trillion currently spent in pursuit of its vision has delivered scant benefits. An Inconvenient Truth encapsulates the past two decades of climate debate: heavy on emotion and costs, light on evidence and benefits. Let’s start with the film’s core narrative: that climate change is driving ever-worsening disasters. Gore painted a picture of a world besieged by floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, with humanity on the brink. The data tells a different story. Over the past century, as the global population quadrupled, deaths from climate-related disasters have plummeted. In the 1920s, an average of nearly half a million people died annually from such events. Today, that number is under 10,000 — a decline of more than 97 percent. This isn’t because disasters have vanished. It’s because wealthier, more resilient societies have adapted through better infrastructure, early warnings, and disaster management. Richer, smarter societies have made us dramatically safer, proving that adaptation and resilience work far better than alarmists suggest. Gore’s movie famously warned of vanishing polar bears, using poignant computer-generated images to suggest they were drowning because of melting ice. Again, reality is starkly different: Polar bear populations have increased from around 12,000 in the 1960s to more than 26,000 today, according to the best available evidence, including from the Polar Bear Specialist Group under the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The primary historical threat was overhunting, not climate change. While future warming poses risks, the apocalyptic narrative is undermined by the data. Hurricanes were another bogeyman. The film notably claimed that we would see more frequent and stronger storms; its poster cunningly showed a hurricane coming out of a smokestack. But global data from satellites actually show a slight decline in hurricane frequency since 1980. While Al Gore blamed Hurricane Katrina on climate change, just one year later, the U.S. began an unprecedentedly long streak of eleven years without major hurricane landfall. Indeed, the longest reliable data series for landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. has shown a decline since the year 1900, and major hurricanes are about as frequent as they were in the past. When adjusted for more people and more houses, the damages from U.S. hurricanes have declined, not increased. Wildfires follow a similar pattern. Media hype suggests a planet ablaze, but global burned area has decreased by 25 percent since 2001, according to NASA data. Each year, the reduction spares from the flames an area larger than Texas and California combined. In the U.S., while recent years have seen large fires, the 1930s Dust Bowl was five times worse. Fires are down everywhere else in the satellite era: They’re trending lower in Australia, Europe, and South America; Asia hit its third-lowest annual burned area, and Africa (the biggest burner by far) posted its all-time low in 2025. North America’s woes to a large extent stem from mismanagement: We’ve skipped the prescribed burns that lower long-term fire risk; a century of this fire suppression has built up undergrowth fuel and created tinderboxes. Yet this is spun as “climate change,” not policy failure. Even CO2 emissions from wildfires are plummeting. The year 2025 saw the lowest-ever-recorded emissions in the satellite era, down 3 gigatons from early-2000s levels — equivalent to wiping out the annual emissions of Brazil and Indonesia combined. This undercuts the core argument that rising global temperatures are supercharging fires and feedback loops of carbon release. This decline isn’t new; it’s a century-long pattern driven by human adaptation. People hate fires, so we prevent them. In the early 1900s, nearly 4 percent of global land burned yearly — two Indias’ worth. Today, it’s nearly halved, to 2.2 percent, sparing almost one India ablaze annually. Better land management, farming practices, and fire suppression have tamed blazes worldwide. Air pollution from fires follows suit. Globally, reduced burning means cleaner air. The risk of death from fire-related pollution has dropped significantly, likely saving tens of thousands of lives yearly, especially among vulnerable infants. Global fires are dramatically down, with lower emissions, pollution, and intensity — all facts that challenge the alarmism. In the wake of Gore’s film, media and activists have worked overtime to amplify every weather event as “unprecedented,” but the evidence shows that humanity is safer than ever from climate disasters. Climate change is real, but its impacts on extreme weather are dramatically overstated. Now consider the policy fallout. Gore’s call to action spurred trillions of dollars in spending to reduce emissions. Yet global fossil-fuel emissions have set records nearly every year since 2006, and they again set a record in 2025. Fossil fuels still dominate because countries want cheap and reliable power. In 2006, the world got 82.6 percent of its total energy (not just electricity) from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Annual fossil-fuel consumption rose 26 percent between then and 2023, the last year with global data. Even though renewables had also grown spectacularly, the world was still overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels delivering 81.1 percent of global energy. On current trends, it will take until the year 2708 to reach zero. Gore explicitly claimed that the solutions to climate change were already at hand — especially solar and wind. Implementing these technologies swiftly and decisively, he said, required only sufficient political will from especially rich nations. This missed the fact that solar and wind are still not cheap and that much of the non-rich world has leaned even more into fossil fuels. Although solar and wind technologies have become dramatically cheaper in recent years, they remain fundamentally intermittent: They generate power only when the sun shines or the wind blows, not satisfying demand around the clock. Modern societies require reliable, 24/7 electricity, which means any heavy reliance on renewables necessitates substantial backup systems — typically fossil-fuel plants (like natural gas) that can ramp up quickly to fill the gaps during extended periods of low generation. People think that batteries can play a large role, but almost everywhere, we have battery backup for just tens of minutes, whereas weeks or months would be needed — which would entail a prohibitive cost. The result is that citizens and economies end up paying nearly twice. While we save on fossil-fuel costs, we have to pay once for the renewables themselves (including their installation, grid integration, and subsidies) and again for the reliable backup infrastructure that will keep the lights on. Studies examining real-world grids in places such as China, Germany, and Texas show that, after properly accounting for these backup costs, the true all-in price of solar and wind power often turns out to be significantly higher than claimed — sometimes twice as expensive as coal, and many times more than fossil fuels when reliability is factored in. We’re constantly bombarded with the narrative that solar and wind are the cheapest energy sources around — an idea that Gore did much to sell. But look at the real-world data: As nations ramp up their share of these intermittent renewables, electricity prices soar. Countries such as Denmark and Germany, for instance, get more than 40 percent of their power from solar and wind, but they face electricity costs double or triple those in China or the U.S., which use these renewables far less. And it turns out that even China, which is often rumored to be going green, is really overwhelmingly fossil-fuel-based. The solar panels and wind turbines China sells the rest of the world are mostly made with fossil fuels. An Inconvenient Truth’s naïve framing — that we already possess affordable, scalable solutions and merely lack the resolve to deploy them — ignored these practical engineering and economic realities. Estimates vary, but climate policies since 2006 have cost more than $16 trillion globally, including subsidies, regulations, and infrastructure. In the U.S. alone, the Inflation Reduction Act poured hundreds of billions into green tech. Yet emissions climb because the rich world’s efforts ignore the developing world’s realities. Here’s the crux: An Inconvenient Truth focused on what rich countries should do: cut emissions drastically. But rich nations (OECD countries) will account for only about 13 percent of remaining 21st-century emissions. Emerging giants including China, India, and Africa drive the rest. Even if all rich countries achieved net-zero by mid-century, it would avert less than 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100, using the U.N. climate panel’s own model. That’s negligible. This missing sense of proportion from Al Gore continues to stoke climate agitation, with activists happily glueing themselves to roads and vandalizing paintings in the U.S. and Europe, blaming Western countries for not reducing their carbon footprint enough. Meanwhile, the agitators ignore the real elephants in the room. As other global challenges — poverty, disease, education — demand attention, the costs of climate policy must be weighed. The best economic evidence suggests that unmitigated warming might shave 2–3 percent off global GDP by 2100. That’s not trivial, but context matters: Under baseline growth, the average person’s income globally would rise 450 percent by this century’s end; taking into account the impact of climate change, it would feel as if that person would be “only” 435 percent richer. We’re talking about being vastly richer, just slightly less so. Current net-zero policies, however, are fantastically expensive with minimal benefits. One set of analyses pegs global net-zero costs at $27 trillion annually across the 21st century, yielding just $4.5 trillion in annual avoided damages. That means for every dollar spent on today’s climate policies, we waste over 80 cents. Where Gore’s movie failed most was in neglecting to make the case for smarter approaches. Instead of panic-driven mandates, we need to prioritize innovation. R&D into green tech — better batteries, advanced nuclear, carbon capture — could slash costs, making a transition affordable or even desirable for all. Adaptation saves lives cheaply: seawalls, drought-resistant crops, early warnings. And finally, development lifts billions out of poverty, building resilience. If we’re actually going to tackle climate change, we will need to pivot from Gore’s alarmist playbook to evidence-based strategies that deliver results. Central to this is ramping up innovation through green research and development. History shows that humanity solves big problems not by rationing or banning but by inventing breakthroughs. We didn’t end air pollution by banning cars; we innovated the catalytic converter. Hunger wasn’t curbed by telling people to eat less; it was the Green Revolution — developing and spreading high-yield crop varieties alongside modern inputs like synthetic fertilizers, irrigation, and improved farming techniques — that dramatically boosted harvests and helped feed billions. But governments have neglected climate R&D for decades. In the 1980s, rich countries spent nearly 8 cents per $100 of GDP on low-carbon tech. Today, it’s less than 4 cents. Nations promised to double this in 2015 but fell far short. Economists, including Nobel laureates, estimate that boosting global green R&D to $100 billion annually — still far less than the $2.3 trillion spent on green energy last year — could make future decarbonization cheap enough for everyone, including the developing world. This would accelerate advancements in fission, fusion, advanced geothermal, and efficient storage, outpacing the costly rollout of current, inefficient renewables. Adaptation must complement innovation, as it’s often the most cost-effective way to build resilience and save lives and livelihoods. We’re already adapting successfully, which is why wildfire deaths are down; flood deaths have likewise plummeted with adaptation and warnings. In low-lying nations such as Bangladesh, cyclone mortality has fallen sharply with shelters and better forecasts: from the global record death toll of more than 300,000 in 1970 to fewer than 200 dead per year since 2008. Investing in resilient infrastructure — such as the Netherlands’ seawalls, which protect against rises far beyond current projections, or adaptations like drought-resistant seeds — could avert damages at a fraction of mitigation costs. Adaptation gets just a fraction of climate funding, overshadowed by a drive for cuts in emissions that yield tiny temperature benefits. Finally, we need to prioritize development to build inherent resilience. Poverty is the real killer in disasters: A hurricane hitting rich Florida causes economic damage but few deaths, while the same hurricane hitting poor Haiti will kill hundreds and devastate the economy. Lifting billions out of poverty through education, health, and economic growth creates societies that can withstand warming. Much more important, such advances also create huge humanitarian and quality-of-life benefits. In Africa and Asia, where emissions will surge, affordable energy fuels this progress; forcing expensive green energy will stall progress. Gore’s vision ignored all these factors; 20 years later, it’s time to embrace them. Climate policy must ultimately serve people, especially the billions facing poverty, hunger, and preventable disease. Green policies can help a tiny bit, though they come at a huge cost, but the greatest threats to human welfare remain those immediate killers. We should allocate our limited resources in proportion to how effectively they can mitigate suffering — tackling malaria, malnutrition, and lack of access to basic energy first, while advancing clean innovations that make reliable power affordable for everyone. This shift in focus, particularly in the world’s poorest places, will create far more resilient societies than rigid emissions targets alone ever could. Two decades on, An Inconvenient Truth reminds us that claiming to care about the planet and future generations is not enough. Alarmism has cost trillions but achieved little. We need to embrace the evidence: Climate change is a challenge, not a catastrophe. And there are cost-effective solutions such as innovation, adaptation, and development, even if they are not as morally satisfying as the exhortations in Gore’s movie.

He died at 30 because he gave his only chance at life to a child he didn’t even know. His name was Giuseppe Girolamo — a young drummer from Southern Italy who had been living his dream, playing music on the Costa Concordia. On the night of January 13, 2012, the massive cruise ship was slicing through the calm Tyrrhenian Sea like a floating palace of lights. Glasses were clinking, music was playing, and thousands of passengers were celebrating. Then came the sickening sound of metal tearing against rocks near Isola del Giglio. In seconds, celebration turned to chaos. The lights went out. The deck began to tilt at a terrifying angle. Panic swept through the ship as the order to abandon ship was finally given. People pushed and shouted, desperate to reach the lifeboats. Giuseppe had a designated spot on one of those boats. As a member of the crew, his place was reserved. But as he reached the evacuation point, he saw a terrified mother, Antonella, holding her young daughter. The lifeboat was already full. There was no room left for them. Without hesitation, Giuseppe stepped back. He looked at the mother and child and calmly said, “Get in, please.” He gave up his seat — his only guaranteed chance of survival — so they could live. Giuseppe could not swim. As the lifeboat pulled away from the listing hull, he stood alone on the tilting deck, watching them disappear into the darkness. While the world later focused on the captain’s desertion and the chaos that followed, Giuseppe’s quiet act of courage became a beacon of light in one of the darkest maritime disasters of our time. It took months for divers to recover his body from the wreckage of the Costa Concordia. But his legacy was already sealed in the lives of the mother and daughter who made it home safely because of him. In a night defined by fear and self-preservation, one young man chose humanity over survival. Giuseppe Girolamo didn’t just play rhythm on that ship. He became the heartbeat of what it truly means to be brave. Rest in peace, Giuseppe. Your final song was the most powerful one of all. Share this if you believe stories like this deserve to be remembered.

finance.yahoo.com/economy/articl… In today’s episode of "Mike Rowe Says the Same Thing He's Been Saying for the Last Eighteen Years Because People are Finally Paying Attention to Him," I submit for your consideration an article that just appeared on MoneyWise, which I'm pleased to say accurately distills a previous interview I did for The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, but was too busy to share at the time because I've been preoccupied saying the same thing I've been saying for the last eighteen years because people are finally paying attention to me... As always, I encourage you to share these little mentions in the mainstream media. Not only because it's personally gratifying to be vindicated after all these years, but because I'm providing this helpful link to mikeroweworks.org/scholarship, where ten million dollars in scholarship funds have been set aside to help train the next generation of skilled workers, (assuming we can find them.) The APPLY button is big and red and hard to miss. I'm also told by the people I employ to tell me things, that every time I share an article like this, a healthy number of concerned citizens are inspired to donate to my foundation. This of course, is the reason we're able to award so many work ethic scholarships in the first place, and a fine way to replenish the coffers. Donate at mikeroweworks.org/donate/ The DONATE button is big and red and hard to miss.

What if America is already far richer than anyone in the swamp is allowed to admit? What if the real drag on the Republic isn’t taxes, isn’t debt, isn’t even the deficit, it’s Europe? What if NATO was never a mutual defense pact, but a 75-year subscription America forgot to cancel? What if “burden sharing” is the most expensive euphemism in the English language? What if the City of London cabal is draining our banks? What if the advice from globalists is terrible advice that’s costing us big? What if every European basing agreement, every forward-deployed brigade, every Ramstein runway, every Aviano hangar, every Souda Bay pier is a tax American workers pay so Berlin can run a welfare state and Paris can run a 35-hour week? What if foreign aid to Europe isn’t aid, it’s tribute, flowing the wrong way? What if transporting the vast majority of trade on European owned ships costs more than we realize? What if the NGO archipelago in Brussels, Geneva, and The Hague is just a money-laundering loop where US taxpayer dollars get rinsed through a “civil society” conference and returned as lectures about our democracy? What if the UN isn’t a parliament of man, it’s a Manhattan timeshare with diplomatic plates, an accounting black hole, and a Human Rights Council chaired by people who’d jail you for tweeting this? What if “the rules-based international order” was always code for: Americans build it, Americans pay for it, Americans bleed for it, and Europeans grade it? What if $36 trillion in debt looks a lot smaller the second you stop underwriting a continent that sneers at you in three languages? What if you zeroed out the Europe line, the NATO line, the UN line, the NGO line, and woke up tomorrow in a country with the fiscal headroom to rebuild every shipyard, every foundry, every rail line, and every Navy hull we’ve let rot since the Cold War ended? What if American tourists went to American cathedrals, American opera, American museums, American cities instead. I’m not saying I believe all of it. I’m saying maybe, just maybe, we could pay down all our debt and wouldn’t have to pay taxes at all if we cut Europe loose.

Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.” “But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, and unequal treatment under the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence.”

One line from Thomas Sowell completely rewired how Konstantin Kisin sees the world: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Kisin says we’ve lost the ability to think like this. We treat every big issue — climate change, the NHS, COVID lockdowns, free speech — as if it has a perfect fix. But every policy, every choice, comes with real costs. Locking down might save some lives but costs others. More free speech means some people will get offended. Trying to “solve” complex problems usually just moves the pain around. The brutal truth? Most of our loud political shouting matches are childish because they pretend one side can magically eliminate problems that are eternal. Once you internalize “no solutions, only trade-offs,” a lot of the noise starts sounding ridiculous. What’s a trade-off you’ve had to accept recently — in politics, health, career, or relationships — that made you realise there really are no pure wins?

Happy Easter my friends, and to the one who gives me the inspiration and ability to document your creation.

This is why Americans are the deadliest fighters on earth. I met a priest yesterday who just got accepted to chaplain school in Newport. I asked him the obvious question: Marines or Navy? Navy, he said. His face fell a little. He told me he could never be a Marine because every Marine is a rifleman, and as a priest he can’t carry a weapon. He’s hoping to get assigned to a Marine unit anyway. All chaplains are Navy officers, so that’s the only door in. I laughed. I feel a little bad about that. Then I explained to him what “Devil Doc” means. The Marine Corps doesn’t have medics. They use Navy Corpsmen. I told him: when you get out to the fleet, find a Marine sergeant with a couple of Purple Hearts and tell him Devil Docs “aren’t real Marines.” Be prepared to duck. Marines are violently particular about who gets to wear their uniform. Navy Corpsmen and Navy chaplains who have eaten dirt alongside them in combat qualify. Full stop. My dad was Air Force. Not even Navy. I remember going to VFW halls with him as a kid. Someone would ask him what service, he’d say Air Force, and the room would chuckle a little. Then they’d find out he was a medic, and the air in the room changed. Something close to reverence. Dad hated being honored. He had one line he used to deflect it: “I didn’t do much. Save your praise for my cousin the PJ.” That always broke the ice. PJs are the Air Force special operators who go into hell to pull downed pilots out. They will take casualties and are prepared to die to rescue a single pilot or crewman. The math doesn’t math out. Why would any combat force take multiple casualties to rescue one air force jet jockey? What the padre is about to learn is that the military has a hierarchy that has nothing to do with rank, and nothing to do with the service stitched on your chest. Have you deployed? Have you seen combat? In every firefight there are men who move toward the guns and men who hang back. And when the guy at the tip of the spear is pinned down, bleeding, with rounds cracking past his head, there is exactly one word he screams into the radio. “Medic.” Here is the catch, and it is the whole reason America fights the way America fights. That Marine is willing to push forward into fire BECAUSE he knows the Corpsman is coming. He knows the medevac birds will land in the hot LZ. He knows the Devil Doc will drag him out by his plate carrier if it comes to that. And, if the medic can’t help, if he has what Dad called “injuries incompatible with life,” he knows that chaplain will crawl on his belly to administer last rights and deliver him to heaven. The F-15 pilot punching out over enemy territory knows the same thing. He knows the PJs will move heaven and earth to reach him, and turn whatever is shooting at him into a smoking crater of hell on earth on the way in. This is the quiet math underneath American violence. Our warriors are the fiercest on earth not because they are more aggressive, not just because they are better trained, or better equipped, though they are all of those things. They are the fiercest because they know, in their bones, that when they key the mic and call for help, help is coming in hot. Take that away, and you don’t have the U.S. military anymore. You have a security force.

One of the most powerful videos you’ll ever see. (Hint: you can’t detest Democrats enough)

The one poem a young man should read above all others is: "If' From Rudyard Kipling "If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two imposters just the same If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the will which says to them: "Hold on!" If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!"

Four companies control 85% of all beef processed in the United States. In 1980, that number was 36%. Tyson. JBS. Cargill. National Beef. Beef prices rose 12-19% over the past year. The ranchers who raise the cattle didn't see any of it. In the 1980s, ranchers received roughly 60 cents of every dollar consumers spent on beef. Today they receive 37 cents. The difference went to the four companies in the middle. The Department of Justice investigated. They found that a data analytics company called Agri Stats was collecting and sharing nonpublic pricing, production, and cost information between the major processors. Competitors who are supposed to be competing on price were sharing the data they use to set prices. The DOJ called it price fixing. The chicken industry settled first. Tyson and other processors paid $221.5 million for conspiring to fix chicken prices. Pork processors settled for $110 million. McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, and other major buyers filed their own lawsuits alleging they were overcharged by billions. Beef investigations are ongoing. The ranchers are getting squeezed from both sides. Input costs for feed, fuel, and labor are rising. The prices processors pay for cattle are suppressed by concentrated buying power. The margin for independent ranchers has compressed to the point where thousands of small operations have shut down over the past decade. Meanwhile, Tyson alone generated $53 billion in revenue last year. The food supply chain is one of the most investable monopoly structures in the economy. Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) sits at the top of the agricultural supply chain. They process the grain that feeds the cattle. Revenue exceeds $85 billion. They operate at a scale no competitor can replicate. Regardless of who wins the beef price-fixing litigation, ADM supplies all of them. Deere & Company (DE) manufactures the equipment that every farm in America depends on. Revenue exceeded $51 billion. The precision agriculture division is growing fastest, selling GPS-guided tractors, automated planters, and data analytics subscriptions that farmers increasingly cannot operate without. Deere's installed base creates recurring software revenue on top of equipment sales. For exposure to the protein transition, Darling Ingredients (DAR) converts animal waste and byproducts into renewable diesel, collagen, and specialty ingredients. They're the recycling layer of the meat industry. Revenue exceeds $6 billion. They operate the largest rendering network in North America. The four companies that control beef processing are unlikely to be broken up. The fines they pay are fractions of their revenue. The investment thesis isn't that the monopoly gets fixed. It's that you own the infrastructure the monopoly depends on. I'm hosting a once in a lifetime webinar where I go over the exact things I know as a former banker and world class investor. 100% free to join. Sign up with the link in my comments.

Renewables are the key to preventing resource scarcity, argue European leaders, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, whose bestselling book Abundance became one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2025 and launched a political movement dedicated to what Klein calls “a politics of plenty.” The logic is straightforward and appealing. Solar panel costs have fallen more than 90% since 2010. Wind power costs have dropped by 70%. Battery storage prices have collapsed. If governments would simply clear the regulatory obstacles to building solar farms, wind turbines, and transmission lines, the abundance argument goes, clean energy would flow so abundantly that fossil fuel dependence would become a choice rather than a necessity. “The miracles of solar and wind and battery power,” Klein told the Long Now Foundation, “have given us the only shot we have to avoid catastrophic climate change.” But if renewables could prevent resource scarcity, then the world would not be in the midst of what the International Energy Agency’s Executive Director Fatih Birol called “the greatest global energy security challenge in history,” with global supply losses now totaling 12 million barrels per day, compared to about 5 million during each of the 1973 and 1979 crises. The United Kingdom is receiving its last shipment of jet fuel from the Middle East with nothing behind it. Australia saw over 500 gas stations run dry. And South Korea is considering driving restrictions for the first time since 1991. “In April,” warned Birol, “there is nothing.” It is true that solar and batteries have made enormous progress. Solar electricity costs roughly 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour at the point of generation, cheaper than any fossil fuel in most locations. Battery costs have fallen below $115 per kilowatt-hour. China produces more solar panels than the rest of the world combined. But the world has installed more than 1,600 gigawatts of solar capacity and over 1,000 gigawatts of wind, and still we are in crisis. Global green energy investment was $2.3 trillion in 2025 alone. And yet when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, none of that capacity mattered, because solar panels do not produce jet fuel, diesel, ammonia, or the petrochemical feedstocks that underpin modern civilization. Electricity accounts for roughly 20% of final energy consumption worldwide. The other 80%, the part that moves ships, flies planes, heats buildings, and makes fertilizer, runs overwhelmingly on oil and gas. Solar and wind cannot substitute for these fuels at any price, because the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons exceeds batteries by a factor of 40 to 80 by weight. Klein and Thompson, to their credit, also support some forms of nuclear power. Abundance opens with a vision of cities powered by “clean (nuclear) and renewable (wind and solar) energy sources.” They lament America’s nuclear stagnation compared to France’s successful buildout. Klein has said that he supports advancing nuclear power alongside renewables. But, the new nuclear power plants that Klein and Thompson support do not exist. The “small modular reactors” that populate the abundance fantasy have not produced a single commercial kilowatt-hour of electricity. NuScale, the most advanced American SMR developer, canceled its flagship project in 2023 after costs doubled. No SMR has received a commercial operating license anywhere in the world. The first commercially operating SMR, if all goes well, may produce power in the early 2030s, but SMR developers have for years said that their reactors are just a few years away. Scaling to a meaningful share of global energy supply would take decades, as opposed to building conventional nuclear plants, which Japan and China have shown they can build in just two years, so long as they are standardized and the same construction crews are used. Democrats, progressives, environmental groups, and left-wing parties across Europe diverted hundreds of billions of dollars over the last two decades from developing the new oil and gas production, pipelines, refineries, and LNG terminals needed to make energy cheap and abundant. California’s aggressive climate mandates drove residential electricity prices to 34 cents per kilowatt-hour, nearly double the national average, while the state simultaneously blocked new natural gas infrastructure. And global investment in oil and gas exploration and production peaked at roughly $780 billion in 2014 and fell to approximately $350 billion by 2020, a decline driven by deliberate policy choices to restrict fossil fuel development. The European Union’s Green Deal, America’s Inflation Reduction Act, and climate policies across the developed world channeled subsidies toward solar and wind while imposing carbon taxes, windfall levies, and permitting restrictions on fossil fuel projects. The UK’s Energy Profits Levy, introduced in 2022, discouraged investment in the North Sea at precisely the moment when more domestic production was needed. The UK Labor government then banned new exploration licenses in November 2025. Germany’s Energiewende spent over €500 billion on renewables while shutting down its nuclear plants, leaving the country dependent on Russian gas and then, after the Ukraine war, on LNG that must now compete with Asian buyers for cargoes that can no longer transit Hormuz. And the UK has lost a third of its refineries in the last 18 months, meaning that even if crude oil arrived tomorrow, the country lacks the capacity to refine it into the jet fuel, diesel, and heating oil its citizens need. The only energy abundance solution that works at the scale of civilization right now is piped natural gas and oil. A pipeline delivers energy continuously, at near-zero marginal cost per unit delivered, with no exposure to shipping chokepoints, insurance markets, or geopolitical disruption. A ton of natural gas moved through a pipeline costs a fraction of what the same gas costs when liquefied, shipped by tanker across an ocean, and regasified at a terminal. The logical endpoint is a world powered by natural gas delivered through continental pipeline networks, eventually transitioning to hydrogen produced from natural gas and nuclear power. America built pipelines while Europe and Asia built LNG dependency. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which has ramped from 770,000 barrels per day to 2.9 million since the war began, is the emergency proof of concept. If the Gulf states had built sufficient pipeline capacity to bypass Hormuz before the war, the crisis would be a fraction of its current severity. So why do so many on the Left continue to preach renewables as the solution to a crisis that renewables manifestly cannot solve?... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video! x.com/shellenberger/…

We won't stop REPOSTING this clip until everyone who let the criminal walk free is IN PRISON. This is 22-year-old Logan Federico's dad. WATCH as he BLASTS Democrats in Congress. This, after his daughter was dragged from bed, forced on her knees, and executed... ...by a man arrested 39 TIMES with 25 FELONIES!!! It's time to start holding judges and DA's accountable for things like this. REPOST this absolutely everywhere and amplify his voice! #thinblueline #lawenforcement

A student-athlete turned in a 146-word essay about Rosa Parks — one paragraph, riddled with errors, no sources — and got an A-minus. That single paper helped expose the biggest academic fraud in NCAA history. For 18 years, from 1993 to 2011, a department secretary named Deborah Crowder ran fake courses at the University of North Carolina. @UNC The classes never met. There was no syllabus and no professor. Students turned in one paper per semester. Crowder admitted she never read them. She skimmed introductions and handed out A’s. UNC’s academic counselors steered athletes into these courses each semester, specifying what grades each player needed. Athletes made up 47% of enrollments despite being just 4% of the student body. Rashad McCants, a star on UNC’s 2005 championship team, told ESPN he made the Dean’s List without attending a single class. Ten of fifteen players on that title team were enrolled in paper courses. When whistleblower Mary Willingham revealed that 60% of athletes read at a 4th-to-8th grade level, UNC attacked her publicly and fans sent death threats. She was forced to resign. In October 2014, a 136-page investigation confirmed the scope: 188 fake classes, 3,100 students, 18 years of fraud. And the punishment? In October 2017, the NCAA ruled there were no significant violations. Zero penalties. No vacated wins. No postseason bans. @UNC calls themselves a bastion of academia. How incredibly pathetic.

I am the VP of Workforce Economics at Oracle. We are worth $420 billion. On Tuesday, we sent 30,000 employees a termination email at 6 AM. Not 9. Not business hours. Six in the morning. They woke up to the word "eliminated." The email came from "Oracle Leadership." Not a manager. Not a name. Oracle Leadership. It said: "We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made." By the time they read the word "grateful," their access to email, files, and Slack had already been revoked. The gratitude was the last Oracle communication they received. We did not eliminate the roles. We eliminated the salaries. In the same fiscal year, we filed 3,126 H-1B petitions to hire foreign workers. 436 this year alone. The roles are identical. The pay is not. An H-1B software engineer earns $87,000. The domestic median for the same work is $106,000. Eighty-three percent of H-1B workers are classified at entry-level wages for senior positions. The industry calls this a skills gap. It is a pay cut that requires a passport. The visa is tied to the employer. If the worker leaves, they lose their legal right to remain in the country. If they negotiate, they risk the same. If they organize, the sponsor declines to renew. That is retention. Our revenue this quarter is $17.2 billion. Up 22%. Net income up 95%. We have $553 billion in committed future contracts. Up 325%. These are not the numbers of a company that needs to lay anyone off. We took a $2.1 billion restructuring charge. That is the cost of the gratitude. It frees up $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. That cash services $156 billion in AI data centers we are building. Starting 2028, OpenAI pays us $82 million per day. Larry Ellison is worth $189 billion. He pledged $51 billion in Oracle shares as collateral for the Stargate AI venture. Announced at the White House. The stock rose 4% on Tuesday. The day of the 6 AM emails. Wall Street did not see 30,000 people. They saw the margin. Amazon laid off 30,000 since October. Filed thousands of H-1B petitions in the same window. This is not one company. This is the operating model. Fire the salary. Keep the role. Fill it with someone whose legal right to remain in the country depends on your continued sponsorship. Pay them less. They will not complain. They cannot. One employee's father worked at Oracle for 20 years. No phone call. No meeting. An email at 6 AM and a locked laptop. The role is still open. The people we fired are free. The people we hired are not.

Want to know how the Costco Multi-Vendor Mailer (MVM) works? Long post upcoming! In 2015 we grew a chocolate biz from zero to $50M on the back of Costco (and this promo). Each month members get a booklet in the mail showing the product & discount (pic). Each MVM runs for ~1 mo and has a strict start/end date. MVMs provide insane volume. $10-15M (100+ truck loads) of a single product. They move the needle for anyone, but can revolutionize (or break if you don’t deliver) a smaller company. Getting an MVM is extremely difficult. Costco US is split into 8 regions. Each region has a buying group who oversees each department. We were in D12 (Candy/Snack). Regions buy autonomously, which is why product in Costco can vary tremendously across the country. But MVMs are national promos. (similar regional promos exist but I’m ignoring that for the sake of this post). To be approved for an MVM, you must win a majority vote across the 8 Buyers. They’re essentially voting on whether or not you’ll clear their internal MVM sales threshold. It used to be ~$10M in D12, but that was a while ago so I’m sure today’s number is bigger. The internal politics of Costco are both fascinating and complex. You need a Buyer to champion your item (this means you’re already successful in that Buyer’s region) and convince other Buyers to vote for it. Most people don’t understand how this game works which is why, among other reasons, they struggle selling to Costco. Landing an MVM as a small biz is a “we’re fishing for a great white shark but omg we caught it now what” moment. It’s terrifying. You have to deliver 100+ truckloads of product in a (often very) short timeline. It’s a high stakes needle threading. You need to execute flawlessly *and* hope your product sells like crazy. If all goes to plan getting another MVM is pretty easy. If it doesn’t there’s no second chance. Truly make or break. This is why MVMs are mostly “incumbent” items. It’s lower risk for Buyers to vote for known entities. The economics are also scary if you don’t know what you’re doing. The member discount is funded by the manufacturer, not Costco. It’s a brilliant setup for Costco. They enable massive volume in exchange for drastically better pricing for their members (the foundational premise of their entire biz). There’s not another retailer on the planet who can touch the value of MVM prices. Costco’s margin is usually in the mid to high teens. A manufacturers margin (selling to Costco at full price) is usually ~30-50%. If the manufacturer is funding a 30%+ discount, this doesn’t leave much (if any) meat on the bone. Especially given the manufacturer also funds product demos, allowances for markdowns, spoils, etc. But here’s the trick. Costco will bring MVM items in ~1 month ahead of the promo going live to ensure all clubs are fully stocked. So you get a decent amount of time selling at full price. The % of volume sold at full price vs MVM discount price is often *the* metric which determines how profitable (or unprofitable) an MVM is. If you nail it the outcome is magical. You can leverage the volume to get much better pricing w your co-man. Costco pays you in 5-10 days. You pay your co-man in 30 days. You’ve now created a monster positive cash conversion cycle which can fund all your growth (what we did). I could write 100 pages on the nuances of Costco, but this post is already long enough so I’ll stop here. If you see a smaller brand you like in a Costco MVM, I promise they’re freaking the hell out. So please buy their product. Ideally at full price before the promo starts.

I wana test a theory Retweet for $KAS Like for $BTC

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel figured out how to grow five different psychedelic drugs inside a single tobacco leaf. One of those compounds normally comes from a toad in the Sonoran Desert, a species that's being poached toward collapse for the substance it makes behind its eyes. The paper dropped this week in Science Advances. The team took 9 genes from mushrooms, jungle plants, and the toad, and stitched them into a tobacco relative that grows fast and already stockpiles tryptophan, the building block all five drugs are assembled from. Within a week, the leaves were producing DMT (the active compound in ayahuasca), psilocybin and psilocin (the compounds in magic mushrooms), and bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT (the ones from the toad). That toad is called Incilius alvarius. It's the only known vertebrate on earth that makes 5-MeO-DMT. People catch them, squeeze the glands on their skin, dry the secretion, and smoke it. Conservationists tracking the species say the numbers aren't looking good. The last formal population assessment was in 2004. When the enzyme responsible for the toad compound wasn't pulling its weight, the team used AlphaFold3 (Google's AI for predicting protein 3D structures) to spot the problem. One targeted mutation. Production jumped 40x. I think the cleverest part of this paper is a detail that won't make most headlines. The genetic changes are temporary on purpose. Foreign DNA stays in the leaves, never passes to seeds, pollen, or the next generation. Aharoni, the lead researcher, said the quiet part out loud: if these modifications were permanent, people would start trying to buy seeds that grow Schedule I substances in their yard. The same technique works on tomatoes, potatoes, and corn. They picked tobacco because nobody eats it. This is the same lab that figured out how peyote makes mescaline in 2024. Peyote takes over a decade to mature in the wild and is being overharvested toward extinction. The clinical demand is catching up. In February, a trial at Imperial College London published in Nature Medicine gave 34 depression patients who hadn't responded to other treatments a single IV dose of DMT. Within one week, 44% improved. 6% on placebo. Some stayed in remission six months later. The psychedelic experience lasted about 25 minutes. A psilocybin session runs around 5 hours, which is one reason scaling psychedelic therapy to real clinic economics has been so hard. Real limits though. When the plant produces all five drugs at once, the yields drop because the pathways are all pulling from the same pool of raw material. There's no extraction or purification process yet. And another scientist not involved in the work said microbes in industrial tanks will probably be cheaper at scale. The Weizmann team wasn't trying to build a production line. They were proving it could be done. "The industry can decide what's more commercially viable," Aharoni said.

Most hospitals don't know their costs. Things I've asked for that made them roll their eyes : A BOM for surgeries P&L for each insurance carrier P&L for Medicaid or Medicare business Why do they need consultants for everything. Why doesn't their CSuite know how to do any of it Why do they use GPOs when prices are insane Why do they work with carriers that underpay, late pay, deny everything, waste docs time with denial committees run by 97 yr old pediatricians. Why do they make no effort to sell direct to employers (excluding those on costpluswellness.com to avoid all the carrier abuse , and avoid being sub prime lenders for patient OOP Why do they abuse 340b Why do facilities fees exist Why do they abuse site neutrality Why do they abuse patients with charge master based bills Why do they not push for standard contract templates to reduce admin. Why do they accept so many different ins plans Anyone want to add more And for context, remember I think the biggest insurance companies are worse

Apple accidentally built the world's largest hearing aid company. AirPods Pro 2 got FDA clearance as a clinical-grade over-the-counter hearing aid in September 2024. The average American pays $4,700 for a pair of prescription hearing aids. AirPods Pro cost $249. That's a 95% price reduction for mild to moderate hearing loss, which covers roughly 30 million American adults. But the price gap isn't even the real story. The real story is the stigma math. Nearly 1 in 5 adults over 40 believe society judges people who wear hearing aids. The average person waits 4 years after noticing hearing loss before doing anything about it. A 78-year-old man threw away his hearing aids, popped in AirPods, and his niece didn't even register it as a medical device. That's the product working exactly as designed. The hearing aid industry spent decades engineering smaller, more invisible devices to reduce stigma. Apple solved the problem from the opposite direction: make everyone wear something in their ears first, then add the medical function later. By the time the FDA cleared the software update, a billion people were already wearing the hardware. The clinical study that earned the clearance enrolled 118 people. Self-fitted AirPods matched professionally fitted devices on perceived benefit, amplification, and speech comprehension scores. The audiologist appointment, the $200 fitting fee, the three follow-up visits bundled into that $4,700 price tag: optional. Every hearing aid company spent the last century trying to make their product disappear. Apple made theirs a status symbol and added hearing restoration as a software update.