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After being one of the best performers during summer league, Arthur Kaluma is being rewarded with a roster spot on the Lakers.

Freddy Peralta received an ovation before he took the mound Monday night, and the volume of cheers only increased as he began throwing pitches.

A night later, both Jazz Chisholm Jr. and the supporting cast around him did less sucking, more feasting on the Pirates’ pitching.

Is China Sabotaging America's Data Centers?

Authored by Lipton Matthews via American Greatness,

China is the one foreign power with both the resources and the strategic incentive to shape American technology.

Washington’s preoccupation with foreign influence has become almost reflexive, though curiously selective in its targets. Some lawmakers have built entire political identities around scrutinizing the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. Similarly, journalists trace Qatari money through American think tanks, and analysts fervently scrutinize Gulf investment in universities and sports franchises. Yet China, the one foreign power with both the resources and the strategic incentive to shape American technology and energy policy, occupies a curiously small share of this scrutiny. Given the evidence now available, that imbalance deserves correction.

Neville Roy Singham makes for an instructive starting point. Having sold his software consulting firm for hundreds of millions of dollars, Singham relocated to Shanghai, where he now works from an office shared with a Chinese media company whose stated mission is promoting Beijing’s narratives to foreign audiences. From that base, he has directed substantial funding toward a cluster of American nonprofits, including The People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, and BreakThrough News, whose output consistently aligns with the positions of the Chinese government on major geopolitical questions. A visitor to his office once documented a banner reading “Always Follow the Party,” a detail that leaves little room for ambiguity about the network’s orientation.

What transforms this from an unusual biography into a matter of genuine political consequence is the organization that carries this network’s influence into American civic life. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) openly calls for the replacement of the American government through revolutionary means rather than electoral politics, and its senior leadership is drawn almost entirely from the executives who run Singham’s nonprofits. 

The party’s 2024 presidential nominee, Claudia de la Cruz, co-founded The People’s Forum. Her running mate directs one of Singham’s grantmaking bodies. Separately, the editor of BreakThrough News sits on the party’s central committee. This is not a loose ideological affinity between separate organizations. It is the same leadership operating under different institutional names.

That leadership has directed considerable energy toward one particular front, the American buildout of AI infrastructure. Across 21 documented campaigns in 14 states, the party has served as either the lead organizer or a significant participant in efforts that produced 10 local moratoriums, one permanent ban, and billions of dollars in delayed or canceled data-center investment. In Charlotte, party organizers ran a sustained door-to-door campaign ahead of a unanimous council vote to pause new data-center construction. In Prince George’s County, they trained residents to pressure local officials and helped build a petition that gathered 20,000 signatures before the county moved to halt permitting.

It would be a mistake to characterize the underlying opposition as manufactured. Concerns about water consumption and rising electricity costs are genuine and widely shared. But real grievances offer convenient cover, and an organization with documented financial ties to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-aligned network has positioned itself at the center of that anger while disclosing almost nothing about its own funding, since it maintains no registered nonprofit status and files no public financial statements for its general operations.

This pattern of quiet institutional penetration is not confined to street-level activism. It reaches into the universities that train the next generation of American policymakers. Tax filings obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that Energy Foundation China, a nonprofit led by former Chinese government officials, sent $1.2 million to Harvard University and four campuses within the University of California system in 2024, nearly double what it had given the year before. The group’s chief executive previously served as a senior Chinese government climate negotiator, and the chairman of its board once worked as a director for China’s national legislature.

Its own staff roster reads like a directory of former Chinese state officials, including a one-time senior figure at the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau and a former manager of overseas infrastructure projects for a subsidiary of a state-run industrial conglomerate. One watchdog group described the organization bluntly as nothing more than an influence operation of the CCP.

The funding pattern is telling in its own right. Since 2020, the group has funneled more than $15 million into American universities and nonprofits while spending over $200 million domestically in China, a ratio that undercuts its public claim to be a nonpartisan charity focused solely on emissions reduction. Its money has also flowed to advocacy organizations that shape federal energy regulation directly, including a Washington research group that champions electric vehicle mandates and a Colorado think tank behind efforts to restrict gas stoves. Taken together, the strategy looks less like philanthropy and more like an attempt to steer American energy policy toward technologies that China already dominates, a shift that would deepen rather than reduce American dependence on Chinese manufacturing.

None of this activity occurs in isolation from the digital sphere. OpenAI’s own security researchers recently disclosed that they banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts operating from China, likely tied to a private firm serving provincial government clients, whose purpose was to generate social media content blaming data centers and artificial intelligence for rising household electricity bills. This material was not crudely fabricated. It was crafted to blend seamlessly with legitimate reporting on regional power pricing, complete with matching hashtags intended to blend inauthentic commentary into an authentic public conversation.

A related cluster pursued a parallel objective, producing cartoons critical of American tariff policy while explicitly instructing the model to depict only President Trump and to exclude any images of Xi Jinping, ensuring that blame for economic tension landed on a single, familiar target. This same network has been linked to accounts spreading false claims that ChatGPT user data had been compromised, an apparent attempt to erode public confidence in a leading American AI company, a tactic that closely resembles earlier Chinese campaigns against Western firms working to reduce dependence on Chinese rare earth supply chains. It is worth pausing on one particular irony here. These operators chose to use an American AI system to generate propaganda undermining trust in American AI, rather than relying on any of China’s own domestic models.

Three separate strands of evidence now point toward the same conclusion from three different directions.

• One traces institutional funding, nonprofit leadership, and political organizing through American civic institutions.

• Another traces academic grants flowing quietly into Harvard and the University of California from an organization run by former Chinese officials.

• A third traces synthetic content, banned accounts, and coordinated amplification through American social media platforms.

All three converge on a single strategic objective: eroding public confidence in the infrastructure, institutions, and companies that underpin America’s position in energy and artificial intelligence.

None of this justifies treating every data-center protester, university researcher, or critic of AI policy as an unwitting instrument of foreign interference.

The vast majority of them are not.

But when a Shanghai-based financier’s nonprofit network, a revolutionary political party sharing its leadership, a Beijing-linked climate group funding elite American universities, and a state-linked propaganda operation all converge on adjacent fronts within the same narrow window of time, that convergence constitutes a pattern rather than a coincidence.

It is a pattern that has, so far, received far less attention than it warrants and one that deserves a far more prominent place in America’s ongoing conversation about who is trying to shape its politics from abroad.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/20/2026 - 22:35

Marin County Sheriff’s deputies arrested newly sworn-in Sausalito City Manager Elaine Forbes just days ago on suspicion of felony burglary at the Sausalito Yacht Harbor. Cops responded to a noise complaint and allegedly found Forbes aboard a 75-foot yacht she did not own.

A rather unremarkable play erupted in the eighth inning of the Yankees' game against the Pirates as both benches cleared.

Trea Turner taketh … then giveth … then giveth … then taketh again.

Social media influencer Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, talked to Sean Hannity on his podcast about the purpose of "looksmaxxing" despite growing health concerns as the viral trend has grown in popularity.

From fans discovering America, Victoria Beckham's non-reaction, anything Erling Haaland, cute animals and Lionel Messi's DeNiro nod, here are the best viral moments from the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

National Guard Deployment To DC Will Continue Until Trump's Term Ends

A new extension of the National Guard’s deployment to Washington will keep guardsmen in the nation’s capital until President Donald Trump’s term ends in more than two years.

The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the mission for which National Guard troops were deployed will continue until Jan. 20, 2029, or until the president terminates it.

The extension would allow National Guard members to remain in Washington until the next president is inaugurated, unless Trump ends the deployment early.

The deployment was previously scheduled to expire at the end of 2026.

As Timothy Fudd details below for The Epoch Times, Trump first deployed the National Guard to Washington in August 2025. He said the capital was “under siege from violent crime” and suggested that Washington’s local government had “lost control of public order and safety.”

“It is my duty to our citizens and Federal workers to secure the safety and the peaceful functioning of our Nation, the Federal Government, and our city,” Trump said in a presidential memorandum.

As of July 8, the task force said 5,148 guardsmen had been assigned to Washington. The War Department previously confirmed that about half of the National Guard members currently deployed in Washington had been sent to the capital to support operations during the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.

Metropolitan Police Department crime statistics from Jan. 1 to July 17 showed that homicides have dropped by 38 percent compared with the same period last year. Additionally, robberies have decreased by 18 percent, motor vehicle thefts by 53 percent, and property crimes by 23 percent.

While total crime is down 20 percent from last year, the number of assaults with a dangerous weapon has increased by 45 percent. Total violent crime has also increased by 1 percent from last year.

During an address at Washington’s Meridian Hill Park on July 2, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth credited National Guard members serving in support of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force for what he described as a “staggering” crime drop in Washington.

Speaking to more than 500 National Guard members, Hegseth said, “You’re not from Washington, most of you, but this is your capital, and you believe in this 250th year that it should be safe and it should be secure for every single citizen that lives here and every single citizen that comes to visit.”

Air Force Gen. Steven Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, also credited National Guard members for saving more than 235 lives, providing more than 530 medical assists, and restoring children to their families 27 times.

While Hegseth said crime has “dropped in staggering amounts” with the task force’s support, some local government officials have criticized the deployment of National Guard members to Washington.

“Taxpayers are paying more than a million dollars a day to have them walk around,” City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said in April.

He added that “the presence of armed soldiers on American streets is not a good look.”

The Congressional Budget Office previously released a report suggesting that the continued deployment of National Guard members in Washington could cost $55 million a month, based on an estimate of 2,950 guardsmen.

Following Trump’s order for National Guard members to support law enforcement operations in Washington, two National Guard members were shot in the city last fall. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom died from her injuries, while Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe was badly injured.

The suspected shooter was later identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national. Lakanwal was charged with 17 counts, including first-degree murder, in a superseding indictment in June. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/20/2026 - 22:10

One step forward, three steps back. That just about sums up how California's public sector unions, which represent state and local government employees, are trying to undo the only progress that's been made on pension reform in a generation.

A young girl in Southern California was bit by a rattlesnake as she went outside to grab an Amazon package.

The MLB Trade Deadline is rapidly approaching, and the San Diego Padres need to figure out what they will do with relief pitcher Mason Miller. According to USA Today baseball insider Bob Nightengale, the Padres will move Miller at the deadline and compared it to what they did with Juan Soto. “I think they’re gonna...

Maybe you would’ve had to be familiar with a Scotsman named Josh Kerr, who has been obsessively stalking the record, which stood since July 7, 1999.

The 2026 Bills — cue the old joke about how they are the only NFL team with a New York address — are the football version of the 2025-26 Knicks.

The False Choice Facing American Agriculture

Authored by Mollie Engelhart via The Epoch Times,

This week, I was talking with one of my neighbors, a good man who raises hay and runs a cow-calf operation. As we discussed different approaches to grazing and pasture management, he laughed and called some of my ideas "fantastical fairy tales." We both laughed.

A farmer moves cattle from one pasture to another at a farm outside Swoope, Va., in 2024. Jeff Louderback/The Epoch Times

We've known each other long enough that neither of us took offense. The truth is, some days even my husband thinks my ideas sound like fairy tales. Still, those conversations stay with me because I believe my greatest talent isn't that I'm always right. Far from it.

My greatest talent is observing the world as honestly as I can and trying to make sense of it. Sometimes, those observations lead me to ideas that seem strange at first. Sometimes, they prove me wrong. Every now and then, they point toward something worth trying.

When I look across my neighbor's ranch, I don't see someone doing everything wrong. I see someone working incredibly hard within a system he knows well. I also see possibilities. I see a ranch that could support more cattle through planned, holistic grazing. I see more diverse forage creating healthier soils, reducing fertilizer needs, and making the pasture more resilient during both drought and heavy rain. I see a business that could become more profitable by relying less on purchased inputs and letting the land do more of the work.

Would every one of those ideas succeed? I honestly don't know. Nature has a way of humbling anyone who thinks they've figured everything out. But if we're unwilling to ask the question, we'll never discover the answer.

That conversation reminded me of the political debate surrounding agriculture today. Increasingly, we're told we have to choose between two competing goals. Either we support farmers making a living, or we support healthy, nutrient-dense food. One side talks almost exclusively about production and profitability. The other talks almost exclusively about health and sustainability. As if those two goals are somehow incompatible.

I reject that premise entirely.

I know regenerative farmers who produce incredible food but struggle to pay the bills. Some days I count myself among them. I also know conventional farmers who have built profitable businesses that have supported their families for generations.

At the same time, I know regenerative farmers whose operations are thriving because they've reduced input costs, improved their land's productivity, and built businesses around healthier soil.

I also know conventional farmers who are struggling under debt, rising fertilizer prices, volatile markets, and shrinking margins. The labels don't explain success or failure nearly as well as people want them to.

Maybe we're asking the wrong question. Instead of arguing over which system is better, why aren't we asking what the best farmers are doing? What can profitable farmers teach those who are struggling? What can farmers producing healthier, more nutrient-dense food teach everyone else? Why do politics and the media insist these ideas belong on opposite teams when they could be working together?

I've watched this play out on my own ranch. For years, my uncle cared for our pigs, but recently, he admitted that age had caught up with him and the physical demands were becoming too much. My husband stepped in, and before changing anything, we visited other hog farmers, asked questions, and looked at different management systems. Some of the ideas seemed unnecessary. Others challenged habits that had been in place for years. We decided to try them anyway.

We built larger paddocks, gave the pigs more pasture, and changed the way we managed their feed. The pigs are gaining the same weight on the same land while using roughly half as much feed. We didn't discover a miracle ration. We changed the management. Sometimes there's a real cost to being stuck in our ways.

I've seen the same lesson with our cattle. We've always rotated our cows, but I struggled to convince my husband that moving them multiple times throughout the day would make enough difference to justify the effort.

Then, a young man who had come to live with us as a teenager challenged both of us. He has become one of the most committed, hardest-working regenerative farmers I know. He reads grazing magazines, studies successful ranchers from around the country, and is constantly looking for better ways to steward the land.

He believed our cattle would benefit from more frequent moves, and my husband was willing to experiment. Instead of creating dozens of tiny paddocks, he found a practical compromise. He still builds a larger paddock, then simply moves one strand of wire forward 20 or 25 feet at a time throughout the day. The cattle naturally follow the fresh forage, the pasture receives more recovery time, and the improvement has been obvious enough that neither of us questions whether the extra effort is worthwhile.

My husband didn't change his mind because I won an argument. He changed his mind because the land made the argument for me.

That's how agriculture has always advanced. Farmers observe. They experiment. They borrow good ideas from neighbors. They keep what works and abandon what doesn't. The best farmers I've met aren't loyal to a label. They're loyal to learning.

Unfortunately, our political system often rewards the opposite. Agriculture, like healthcare, energy, and many other industries, has become deeply intertwined with government and powerful financial interests. Companies that sell seed, fertilizer, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and feed all have every right to advocate for their businesses.

But when those industries become deeply connected to the policymakers who write the rules, the conversation tends to narrow. The question stops being, "What produces the healthiest soil, the healthiest people, and the most resilient farms?" and becomes, "How do we protect the system we've already built?"

That partnership between government and large industry wasn't something ordinary Americans voted for, yet it increasingly shapes the choices placed before farmers and consumers alike.

None of this means every conventional practice is wrong or every regenerative practice is right. It means we should be deeply suspicious whenever politics tells us we must choose between two goals that can clearly coexist.

Healthy food and profitable farms are not opposing ideas. Across this country, there are farmers proving every day that both are possible. Instead of asking which side should win, perhaps we should spend more time learning from the people who are already getting both right.

Maybe my neighbor will always think some of my ideas sound like fairy tales. That's okay. If I've learned anything from farming, it's that today's fairy tale has a funny way of becoming tomorrow's common practice. The greatest resource on any farm isn't the land, the livestock, or the equipment. It's a farmer who's still willing to ask, "What if there's a better way?"

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/20/2026 - 21:45

Cops said the three fiends approached the 32-year-old victim getting some shut-eye on a southbound 4 train near Union Square around 3:30 a.m. Friday. 

Lionel Messi's wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, shared a powerful message in the wake of Argentina's World Cup loss while questions about Messi's potential retirement swirl.

This is just the latest in a string of gross bathroom-related issues at concerts this summer.

This is just the latest in a string of gross bathroom-related issues at concerts this summer.