Aggregator

Carson Benge forged quite a relationship with the right field fence Saturday.

Stetson Bennett delivered his strongest statement yet in the Rams’ backup quarterback battle, outplaying rookie Ty Simpson in a 34-0 win over the Saints.

Visualizing Every US State's Economy Matched To A Country

America’s largest state economies rank alongside some of the biggest economies in the world. Even further down the list, many individual states produce hundreds of billions of dollars in economic output each year.

This map, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, pairs each U.S. state with the country closest to it in nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025, using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the IMF’s World Economic Outlook.

The Big Four State Economies

At $4.3 trillion, California would rank among the world’s five largest economies if it were an independent country. Its closest match on the map is the United Kingdom.

Texas, meanwhile, has a $2.9 trillion economy, putting it closest to Russia. Both are major energy powerhouses, particularly in oil and gas.

The table below lists U.S. states alongside their closest country equivalents in nominal GDP terms.

State2025 Nominal GDP (billions $)Approx. Country Equivalent Alabama341🇵🇪 Peru Alaska75🇦🇿 Azerbaijan Arizona598🇦🇹 Austria Arkansas198🇲🇦 Morocco California4251🇬🇧 United Kingdom Colorado584🇹🇭 Thailand Connecticut376🇮🇷 Iran Delaware117🇬🇭 Ghana District of Columbia193🇺🇦 Ukraine Florida1835🇦🇺 Australia Georgia925🇹🇼 Taiwan Hawaii125🇬🇹 Guatemala Idaho136🇰🇪 Kenya Illinois1202🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia Indiana545🇳🇴 Norway Iowa277🇬🇷 Greece Kansas241🇭🇺 Hungary Kentucky307🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Louisiana340🇫🇮 Finland Maine103🇨🇷 Costa Rica Maryland568🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates Massachusetts820🇹🇼 Taiwan Michigan730🇧🇪 Belgium Minnesota531🇻🇳 Vietnam Mississippi165🇰🇼 Kuwait Missouri468🇩🇰 Denmark Montana82🇲🇲 Myanmar Nebraska198🇺🇦 Ukraine Nevada281🇩🇿 Algeria New Hampshire126🇩🇴 Dominican Republic New Jersey887🇹🇼 Taiwan New Mexico153🇸🇰 Slovakia New York2468🇨🇦 Canada North Carolina894🇹🇼 Taiwan North Dakota82🇸🇮 Slovenia Ohio967🇵🇱 Poland Oklahoma274🇳🇿 New Zealand Oregon343🇵🇹 Portugal Pennsylvania1056🇨🇭 Switzerland Rhode Island84🇺🇾 Uruguay South Carolina379🇨🇿 Czech Republic South Dakota81🇹🇲 Turkmenistan Tennessee590🇸🇬 Singapore Texas2904🇷🇺 Russia Utah316🇫🇮 Finland Vermont48🇧🇭 Bahrain Virginia798🇧🇪 Belgium Washington895🇹🇼 Taiwan West Virginia109🇪🇹 Ethiopia Wisconsin473🇲🇾 Malaysia Wyoming53🇿🇼 Zimbabwe 🇺🇸 U.S.30762🇨🇳🇩🇪🇯🇵 China, Germany, Japan

New York’s $2.5 trillion economy is roughly the same size as Canada’s GDP. Meanwhile, Florida’s $1.8 trillion economy is closest to Australia, the largest economy in Oceania.

Together, these four states would each qualify for the Group of 20 (G20) if they were independent countries.

State-to-Country GDP Matches

Further down the list, Illinois has a $1.2 trillion GDP that is roughly the same size as Saudi Arabia’s, though its economy is far more diversified. Pennsylvania follows at $1.1 trillion, placing it closest to Switzerland.

Taiwan is the closest country match for four states: Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington.

The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., has a nearly $200 billion GDP, putting it closest to Ukraine. Nebraska is also similar in economic size.

The U.S. Economy in the World

Overall, the U.S. has a $30.8 trillion national GDP, roughly equal to the combined output of China, Germany, and Japan, the world’s next three largest economies.

That national scale helps explain why individual states can match the economic output of major countries around the world.

To learn more about the future prospects of the world’s largest economy, check out What’s Next for the U.S. Economy? on Voronoi.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/22/2026 - 22:45

Critics have blasted the measure as a way to intimidate people “trying to shine light on bad behavior.”

Giants coach John Harbaugh praised rookie kicker Dominic Zvada after he hit 43- and 38-yard field goals in a 26-3 preseason win over the Dolphins.

Randy Mastro relishes a good legal fight — and Mayor Mamdani is providing plenty of opportunities to mix it up.

Only Los Angeles could spend billions fighting homelessness, watch tents swallow sidewalks and parks, and then decide the city has been too aggressive keeping people from camping. That is what the Los Angeles City Council did this week. By a 10-3 vote, council members stripped anti-camping protections from a dozen locations. Parks. A senior center....

Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs as the tech giant sharpens its focus on AI and updates its Siri digital assistant. Roughly 100 of the eliminated positions are tied to the Vision Pro team. Another 100 hit groups working on Siri and the Intelligent Systems Experience team, the division focused on bringing generative AI...

Tricia Rowan, 47, said she will "not stop until justice is served" after her daughter, Alexis, 27, was brutally attacked by an ex-con last week.

Murgatroyd previously called the cross-country move "the best decision" for her young family in an emotional YouTube vlog.

Murgatroyd previously called the cross-country move "the best decision" for her young family in an emotional YouTube vlog.

"Why would Los Angeles pour money into restoring public spaces only to watch conditions deteriorate again?”

When The Rule Of Law Fails

Authored by Madge Waggy,

What follows emerges from seventeen months of examination into procedural collapses, constitutional erosions, and institutional betrayals that have accelerated beyond the capacity of conventional reportage to capture. Sources include former jurists who resigned rather than participate in predetermined outcomes, law enforcement officials who documented unlawful commands, and archival materials that reveal pattern precedents for contemporary ruptures. We present this analysis not to provoke despair, but to examine the anatomy of dissolution while recognition might still permit response. The reader is advised that the trajectory described has proceeded beyond the point where electoral mechanisms offer remedy, and that preparation for post-constitutional conditions constitutes rational response to empirical observation.

The Fracturing: When Marble Crumbles Beneath Velvet

Observe the edifice. Not the facade of columned grandeur that photographs well for tourist brochures, but the load-bearing structures that sustain civic order. The mortar between stones has been leaching for decades, replaced with expedient compounds that harden briefly then powder under pressure. What appears solid to casual inspection reveals, upon closer examination, the honeycombed fragility of termite-gnawed timber.

The rule of law - that abstraction upon which millions have wagered their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor - has not been abolished. Far more insidiously, it has been instrumentalized. Transformed from constraint upon power into weapon wielded by power. The distinction matters. Abolition would provoke resistance. Instrumentalization induces learned helplessness, the conditioned response of laboratory animals who no longer attempt escape because previous attempts have been punished.

Consider the mechanism. Statutes remain on codified pages. Precedents still fill bound volumes. Theatrical performances of judicial process continue in robed solemnity. But the outcomes - the actual distribution of force, property, liberty - now proceed according to criteria that cannot be publicly acknowledged without unraveling the legitimacy upon which enforcement depends. The law has become Schrodinger’s cat: simultaneously alive and dead, its state determined only upon observation, and then retroactively justified through reasoning so tortured it would extract confessions from stone.

Heavy stillness pervades courthouse corridors where verdicts arrive prepackaged. Muffled air absorbs the footsteps of attorneys who have learned that vigorous advocacy risks bar sanctions, that certain defendants cannot be acquitted regardless of evidence, that particular prosecutions must proceed regardless of merit. Where once adversarial collision generated truth through friction, now choreographed collusion produces predetermined outcomes with the mechanical inevitability of assembly-line fabrication.

The Inversion: How Protection Became Predation

Examine the metamorphosis of institutions whose founding purpose was circumscription of state violence. Police forces established to apprehend actual predators now function as extraction mechanisms, their revenue-generation priorities transforming citizens into quarry. Courts erected to adjudicate disputes now operate as processing facilities, their dockets clogged with statutory violations that lack injured parties, their calendars dominated by plea arrangements that obviate evidentiary examination. Legislatures convened to express popular will now manufacture complexity so impenetrable that compliance becomes impossible, thereby manufacturing the criminality that justifies expansion.

The inversion is nearly complete. The FBI - originally chartered to investigate interstate criminality - now devotes substantial resources to manufacturing terrorism through entrapment of vulnerable individuals, then publicizing these manufactured plots as justification for expanded surveillance. The IRS - created to fund legitimate governance - now functions as political enforcement arm, its audit selections targeting ideological opponents with statistical improbability that defies random explanation. The regulatory apparatus - ostensibly protecting consumers - now serves as barrier to entry for competitors of established conglomerates, its compliance costs crushing small enterprise while manageable for entities that can afford dedicated compliance departments.

Each institution, examined individually, displays symptoms of capture. Examined collectively, they reveal systemic transformation. The heavy stillness of bureaucratic inertia now serves not popular interest but consolidated power. The muffled air of administrative process now muffles dissent rather than amplifying resolution. Where footsteps once dissolved into the marble floors of public buildings as citizens approached for redress, now those same footsteps echo ominously as warnings to others who might seek similar remedy.

The Dissolution: Precedents of Collapse

Historical memory - when not actively suppressed - offers instruction. Rome’s transition from republic to imperium did not occur through single coup but through incremental usurpations, each justified by emergency, each ratified by senatorial acquiescence, each establishing precedent for subsequent expansion. The Weimar Republic’s dissolution proceeded through “legal” mechanisms: emergency decrees, enabling acts, judicial appointments that transformed interpretation rather than overturning text. The Soviet Union’s constitutional guarantees - extensive on paper - provided no protection against party-state fusion that rendered law irrelevant to power.

American exceptionalism - the comforting delusion that geography or founding documents confer immunity to these patterns - has prevented recognition of their local manifestation. But the patterns are unmistakable to unprejudiced observation. Executive orders that bypass legislative process. Judicial opinions that discover meanings in constitutional text invisible to centuries of prior readers. Administrative regulations that carry criminal penalties despite absent legislative authorization. Each instance, defended as isolated necessity, contributes to cumulative precedent that transforms limited government into unlimited discretion.

The weathered limestone arches of Monticello and Independence Hall - physical remnants of founding generation aspirations - now frame populations whose understanding of those aspirations has been systematically eroded through educational institutions that treat constitutional limitations as obstacles to be overcome rather than protections to be preserved. The brutalist concrete contours of contemporary government buildings - deliberately imposing, alienating, inhuman - materialize the relationship between state and citizen that has replaced the founding vision: not service but domination, not representation but management, not consent but submission.

The Documentation: Evidence Accumulating in Shadows

Paper trails exist for those willing to excavate. Memoranda from intelligence agencies acknowledging warrantless surveillance of domestic communications. Emails between regulatory officials and regulated entities arranging enforcement forbearance in exchange for political contributions. Testimony from inspectors general describing evidence destruction and witness intimidation. Each document, individually, might be dismissed as aberration. Collectively, they constitute pattern.

Pattern recognition requires connecting dots that institutional gatekeepers insist remain separate. The prosecutor who declines to charge politically connected defendants while pursuing vindictive prosecutions of ideological opponents. The judge who grants injunctions against executive action when initiated by one party while denying identical relief when sought by another. The agency that expedites permits for favored projects while interminably delaying competitors through “environmental review” that never concludes. The dots connect into constellations that map the actual distribution of power, regardless of formal organizational charts.

Heavy stillness settles upon archives where these documents molder, their FOIA requests buried under procedural delay, their whistleblower origins punished through professional destruction, their contents dismissed by media organs that function as stenographers for power rather than interrogators of it. Muffled air chokes the corridors where investigators once pursued corruption regardless of partisan affiliation, before such pursuit became itself career-limiting. Where footsteps once dissolved into purposeful stride toward accountability, now they falter, hesitate, retreat.

The Mechanism: How Legitimacy Dissolves Without Announcement

Governments do not typically announce their own termination. They demonstrate it through behavior that renders their own rules optional, their own constraints ignorable, their own legitimacy claims farcical. The demonstration accumulates gradually, each instance building upon predecessors, until the accumulation reaches critical mass where recognition becomes unavoidable.

That mass approaches. Consider: the executive who declares emergencies that do not exist, then exercises powers that emergencies justify. The legislature that delegates its lawmaking authority to unelected administrators, then expresses outrage at administrative outcomes while retaining delegation. The judiciary that discovers rights invisible to constitutional text while ignoring rights explicitly enumerated. The law enforcement that enforces against disfavored groups while ignoring identical conduct by favored groups. The taxation that extracts for purposes never authorized, through mechanisms never legislated, from targets never represented.

Each instance, individually, might be rationalized. Collectively, they announce that the rules apply only to those who lack power to exempt themselves. And once that announcement becomes unmistakable - once the population recognizes that compliance is for suckers, that the system is rigged, that the game is fixed - the final dissolution accelerates. Not through revolution but through withdrawal. The productive cease producing. The cooperative cease cooperating. The law-abiding cease abiding. The social fabric - already threadbare - shreds entirely.

The Precipice: Recognition and Its Consequences

Those who recognize pattern face unenviable choice. Vocal acknowledgment risks targeting. Silent acquiescence enables continuation. Preparation without announcement offers only partial protection, and that protection temporary. The heavy stillness that pervades recognition is not peaceful contemplation but coiled tension, the muffled air of suppressed violence that precedes rupture.

Historical precedent suggests that governmental dissolution - when it arrives - proceeds rapidly once initiated. Not gradually, but catastrophically. The institutions that seemed permanent reveal their contingency. The protections that seemed guaranteed prove illusory. The authorities that commanded respect command only fear, then not even that. The weathered limestone arches crumble. The brutalist concrete contours crack. Where footsteps once dissolved into ordered procession, now they stampede toward exits that prove too narrow, too few, too late.

Preparation for such moments requires more than material stockpiling. It requires psychological adjustment to conditions where legal recourse no longer exists, where institutional protection has evaporated, where self-reliance becomes not virtue but necessity. The adjustment is painful for generations conditioned to believe that authority exists to serve them, that systems function to protect them, that rules apply equally to powerful and powerless.

That belief - already strained to breaking - will not survive the next phase. The recognition that it was always belief rather than fact, always hope rather than observation, always delusion rather than reality, constitutes the final trauma that precedes either submission or resistance. The choice between those outcomes is being made now, in countless individual decisions that aggregate into civilizational trajectory, even as the heavy stillness persists, the muffled air thickens, and footsteps dissolve not into purpose but into paralysis.

The warning has been issued. The pattern has been documented. The precipice has been reached. What follows is not prediction but observation: the rule of law has failed. The government that claimed its protection has ended, not with announcement, but with demonstration. Recognition of that ending - now unavoidable - constitutes the beginning of whatever comes next.

This article was originally published on MadgeWaggy.blogspot.com. h/t Lew Rockwell

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/22/2026 - 22:10

At the beginning of Saturday’s game, Tarik Skubal suffered his worst inning as a member of the Dodgers. By the end of the team’s eventual 4-3 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates, however, the marquee trade deadline acquisition had rebounded for perhaps his best start with the club. “When you get punched in the mouth early...

The Liberty, playing on national television and in front of a sold-out crowd, held off a late Fever push to win 109-102 on Saturday night.

It didn’t take long for people online to notice the Hollywood star lurking in the background.

A tour bus carrying the rock band Buckcherry was involved in a fatal crash on a highway in South Carolina early Friday morning, reports said. No one in the band was hurt, but a person who had stopped on the highway and gotten out of their car was reportedly killed, FOX Carolina said “Tragically, authorities have...

The band was traveling from its most recent performance at the Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina.

Many, including Bills star Josh Allen, were upset about exactly how the news of Ed Oliver's 2-year-old son's tragic death came out.

Inside America's Drone Arms Race: What Industry Experts See Ahead Of Procurement Supercycle

Our coverage of America's Group 1 to Group 3 drone industry has centered on Unusual Machines and Ondas, two companies positioned to reap the benefits from what could become a historic procurement cycle next year. The catalyst is the Department of War's Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, which is preparing to direct $55 billion toward autonomous systems. If that spending materializes as planned, companies offering NDAA-compliant drones and drone components, scalable manufacturing capacity, and field-ready platforms should be best positioned to capture the coming flood of orders.

For more clarity on the drone space, Canaccord Genuity recently hosted the "Drone Dominion" panel, which included executives from AeroVironment, Leonardo DRS, Unusual Machines, Codan Tactical Communications, and Juno Industries.

"The panel opened with a consensus that drone warfare has shifted from individual aircraft for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications to massed, expendable strike systems with growing remote autonomy," Austin Moeller, Canaccord Genuity's senior aerospace and defense technology equity-research analyst, wrote in a note Thursday.

Moeller's summary of the panel discussion provides investors with a useful framework for understanding the drone space and identifying the companies best positioned to benefit from a potential procurement supercycle, as demand for Group 1 to Group 3 drones, counter-UAS systems, and domestically sourced NDAA-compliant parts is poised to accelerate.

Drone dominion

We hosted management of Leonardo DRS (DRS), AeroVironment (AVAV), Unusual Machines (UMAC), Codan DTC, and Juno Industries at the 46th Annual Canaccord Genuity Growth Conference in Boston for a Drone/C-UAS panel discussion. Our panel included Leonardo DRS CEO John Baylouny, AeroVironment COO Dr. Robert Smith, Unusual Machines COO Drew Camden, Codan Tactical Communications President and Executive General Manager Paul Sangster, and former Canadian Minister of National Defense and Juno Industries Executive Chairman, Harjit Sajjan. The panel discussed how drone warfare has evolved from being primarily an ISR platform to widespread adoption as autonomous and expendable/attritable tactical and one-way attack systems, along with the corresponding urgent need for counter-UAS layered air defenses, secure supply chains, and integrated battlefield C2 systems and AI edge compute.

The panel opened with a consensus that drone warfare has shifted from individual aircraft for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications to massed, expendable strike systems with growing remote autonomy. John Baylouny stated that drones are now weapons that must make sense of the battlefield, and Harjit Sajjan emphasized that integrating sensors into battle management systems to enable fusion/processing of data is central to making those strike capabilities practical and useful. The panel agreed this transition changes not only platform design but also how forces employ drones; for instance, moving from a handful of high-end assets to large numbers of lower-cost munitions used en masse (swarms) to saturate and overwhelm air defenses and targets. This dynamic forces the industry to prioritize rapid iteration and high-volume manufacturing, modular payloads, and mission-tailored autonomy so systems can be adopted and modified quickly as tactics and countermeasures evolve in the field.

The panel agreed that battlefield advantage now depends on resilient, secure command-and-control (C2) networks that connect drones, sensors, weapons platforms, and operators into rapid decision-making workflows. Paul Sangster explained that today's battlefield is far more networked, requiring secure mesh communications that tie drones, sensors, and vehicles into rapid decision loops. Dr. Rob Smith and the others noted that the tactical advantage now comes from how quickly collected sensor data can be communicated to warfighters and platforms and acted upon, which has elevated architecture, encryption, and waveform design to operational-level priorities. The panel emphasized that interoperability is a prerequisite for scaling effective multi-platform operations. Speakers warned that contested-spectrum environments and adversary cyber-attack tactics could quickly degrade the benefits of massed drone operations unless resilience and redundancy are built into C2 designs.

Counter-UAS defenses being layered and multi-modal were stressed by the panel. Mr. Baylouny described systems combining radar, IR identification, and multiple effectors (e.g., DRS' Sgt. Stout Stryker air artillery Mission Equipment Package). Dr. Smith outlined a layered approach beginning with Radio Frequency (RF) detection and Electronic Warfare (EW) at standoff ranges, then lasers for cost-effective engagement within line-of-sight, and kinetic interceptors when necessary. Speakers emphasized mobility and integrated C2 so that different defeat mechanisms can be applied as threats evolve, reflecting a pragmatic view that no single technology will defeat every class of drone. As a result, the defense tech market is making investments in software/AI platforms, sensors (radar, RF, EO, IR/thermal), directed energy, and affordable kinetic interceptors to create adaptable defense mechanisms for various defensive scenarios for both point-defense and on-the-move.

Drew Camden and Rob Smith argued that expanding domestic production capacity requires predictable govt. demand and long-term procurement commitments. Manufacturers depend on these factors so that they can invest in facilities, automation, and long-term supplier relationships.

They stated that US systems will likely differ in capability from mass-produced foreign drones (Ukrainian drones are using Chinese Raspberry Pis and motors, for example) and that programs like Drone Dominance must create steady, multi-year volume procurement plans such as IDIQs/OTAs to make rapid scaling feasible without stopping and restarting fragile supply chains. Firms are already redirecting R&D and IRAD into domestic tooling and manufacturing readiness to shorten the timeline from prototype to fielded production and advance-purchasing materials inventory for when multi-year contracts are in place, and demand is present. In practice, policymakers must align procurement, financing, and industrial policy to reduce production ramp-up time, reduce lead times for critical components, and stabilize the supply chain.

Speakers raised concerns about deep supply chain and security/espionage concerns. The panel discussed challenges in removing Chinese-made components and subcomponents, as well as securing rare earth materials, noting that compliance requires tracing multiple layers down the supply chain. Many A&D primes have found Chinese materials or components as they investigate deeper into their supply chains. Mr. Sajjan cautioned against focusing on a single supplier or country and urged comprehensive evaluation with trusted national agencies, while Mr. Baylouny described efforts internally to look five or six layers deep to discover where materials and components truly originate from. Mr. Camden explained his company's strategy of bringing parts, and eventually, chips and motors onshore. He added that while Unusual Machines had initially been sourcing drone motors from China, the company is now doing its own winding with machines in a similar production process to Chinese drone company T-MOTOR. Dr. Smith emphasized the importance of firmware screening, cyber red-teaming, and holistic assurance practices. Addressing these challenges will require sustained funding, clearer regulatory standards (e.g., NDAA and ITAR), and closer public-private partnerships to create resilience and chain of custody among supply chains.

Finally, the panel emphasized that training and acquisition practices must be reformed to keep pace with evolving drone tactics and technologies. Mr. Baylouny argued that the old "design, build, and buy thousands" government PoR model is too slow and called for experiment-driven acquisition. Mr. Sajjan highlighted the importance of close user-developer feedback so deployed troops can refine and optimize systems with their designers for real-world missions. Mr. Camden pointed to improvised civilian and government innovations seen in Ukraine as evidence that militaries must be able to adapt new concepts and strategies quickly. Dr. Smith reinforced that predictable demand signals will also enable investment in the training, sustainment, and industrial pipelines needed to scale manufacturing capabilities. To turn technological advances into enduring operational advantage, the panel concluded that reforms across procurement and training must move forward along with technical, military, and industrial initiatives.

Our mid-June initiation report, "How To Profit From the Asymmetric Warfare Boom" ... 

... first identified the leading public and private companies positioned across the drone and counter-drone space.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/22/2026 - 21:35