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Aaron Judge was back in the visiting dugout at Citizens Bank Park on Sunday night and had a front-row seat to an 11-4 loss to the Phillies.

Maybe the Yankees, who still can tell you what he did in Game 1 of the 1996 World Series, and the Mets can blame one of their own for Andruw Jones.

At least three people were killed.

China's Two-Front Squeeze On America's AI Build-Out

Authored by Sean Tseng via The Epoch Times,

In early May, the head of an American chipmaker told investors his company was running short of a material most people have never heard of. A week later, he was on a plane to China alongside President Donald Trump, hoping to pry loose the export licenses his factories needed.

People view an AI data center at the SK networks stand during the MWC (Mobile World Congress), the world's biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona on March 3, 2025. Manaure Quintero/AFP via Getty Images

The company was Coherent, the executive was chief executive Jim Anderson, and the material was indium phosphide, a compound that turns electricity directly into laser light.

Anderson went in part to press China over the delays it had placed on shipments of the material, according to Reuters, citing three people familiar with the matter. Without indium phosphide, the warehouse-sized computer facilities behind America's push into artificial intelligence cannot move data between chips fast enough to keep up. China, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, produces about 70 percent of the world's supply.

That bottleneck is one half of a broader squeeze on America's AI build-out. On the material front, China has restricted exports of indium phosphide and other critical minerals, raising prices and stretching timelines.

On the information front, OpenAI and several lawmakers say operatives in China have tried to turn the American public against data centers.

Experts studying both fronts told The Epoch Times that the effort has done little so far - but it reveals how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) competes when it is behind.

The Material Behind the Machines

Stephen Xia, a former People's Liberation Army (PLA) engineer who has been following the development of AI technology, said the AI contest cannot be separated from the materials that underpin it.

"AI competition is an integrated contest across algorithms, data, talent, and computing power, and it is tied to supply chains for chips, electricity, data centers, and critical minerals," he told The Epoch Times. If the CCP chokes off rare minerals, he said, it would "at the very least slow the pace at which the United States expands its high-end chips and data centers."

Indium phosphide is one of those materials. Data centers are buildings packed with servers, and as the AI systems running on them grow, the chips inside need to exchange information faster than copper wiring can carry it.

So the industry is shifting to light, sending data as laser pulses through fiber-optic cable, and indium phosphide is the standard material for the tiny lasers that feed it.

China began restricting its export in February 2025, and prices have moved sharply since: a six-inch wafer now costs about $5,000, up roughly 250 percent, industry sources told Reuters in June.

One major supplier, Lumentum, is sold out through 2028. The world's second-largest maker of the wafers, AXT, produces most of them inside China, where its export permits have been delayed.

Mark Smith, a 45-year veteran of the mining industry who formerly ran the rare-earths producer Molycorp and is now the CEO of the company behind a planned critical-minerals mine in Nebraska, NioCorp Developments, said China's grip on indium is real but not absolute.

"It's not 100 percent," he told The Epoch Times. "If we take a look at all the bits and pieces that make up the supply chain, it's probably greater than 70 percent." A few other producers exist, he said, but "it's nowhere near enough to take care of what's going to be the demand for these AI chips."

Even so, he said, indium is a milder case than some rare earth elements "where we have basically 100 percent controlled by China."

Both Smith and Xia cautioned against overstating what the CCP's restriction on these critical minerals can do.

The controls "only affect the speed and cost of data-center expansion," Xia said. "They cannot exert a decisive impact on the U.S. AI industry."

The reason, he said, is that the United States holds the higher-value ground in the competition - the advanced chips and the software - while the CCP leans more heavily on American technology, from high-end graphics chips to the software used to design semiconductors.

In an all-out fight, Xia said, the CCP "would suffer the greater losses," which is why, in his view, "even if the CCP had the means to cut off raw-material supplies, it would not dare to act unilaterally."

Smith also described the standoff from China's side. When Beijing restricts a material, importers panic - but China also needs to sell. "China needs the technology the United States has for these AI chips, and yet the United States needs the indium to make those AI chips," he said.

"We both kind of need each other - just in different ways, but for the same application." He expects that mutual need to force a degree of cooperation, at least until the United States can build its own supply, which for a mine like his takes about three years.

For now, China's leverage has held. When Washington and Beijing reached a trade truce in November 2025, China agreed to ease its controls on gallium, germanium, and antimony - but not on indium phosphide, which remained restricted into June 2026.

And where exports have resumed, Smith said, China still blocks anything tied to defense. NioCorp learned this firsthand. After it announced a Pentagon-funded partnership with Lockheed Martin in October to develop a scandium alloy for fighter aircraft, the company found it could no longer buy scandium from China, and an attempted workaround through another firm was denied. "So it's real," Smith said.

The Campaign to Turn the Public

The clearest evidence of the CCP's efforts on the second front came from OpenAI, which uncovered a China-based influence operation because the people behind it were using its chatbot to write their material.

In a June report, the company said it banned two clusters of accounts it traced to China. One, which it named the "Data Center Bandwagon," produced comments and comic strips claiming that data centers were driving up families' electricity bills; a second targeted U.S. tariffs.

OpenAI said the operators used ChatGPT through tools that hid their location, wrote their instructions in simplified Chinese, and most likely worked for a private China-based firm serving provincial government clients. It also said the direct Chinese effort reached almost no one.

That account rang familiar to Ethan Tu, the founder of Taiwan AI Labs, a Taipei-based nonprofit that uses artificial intelligence to expose coordinated influence operations and has documented Beijing's campaigns targeting Taiwan's elections.

Tu, a former principal development manager in Microsoft's AI and Research Group who worked on its Cortana assistant, told The Epoch Times that OpenAI's findings matched his own team's research.

The energy sector, he said, is a recurring target of Chinese and Russian influence work "from Taiwan to the United States to Europe," and U.S. data centers are the latest version of that.

He pointed to one detail OpenAI disclosed: the operators' written instructions told the chatbot to feature President Donald Trump but never to mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

"They're forbidden from mentioning their own boss," Tu said, "but Trump is fair game to attack." Because the disclosure came from the maker of the tool, which can see where accounts are based and their actions, he said it "carries a great deal of credibility."

Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who co-leads the school's Media Forensics Hub and has spent years studying foreign influence campaigns, said he trusted OpenAI's attribution and described the CCP as "very aggressive" in its attempts to shape opinion abroad.

Beijing pours resources into controlling how the world sees China, he told The Epoch Times, and works hardest to bury narratives that make it look bad, including by harassing Chinese diaspora communities.

On the use of AI to run fake accounts, Linvill said China was "still experimenting." For now, he said, "they aren't very good yet. But they are getting better."

Washington Sounds the Alarm

Officials in Washington have made broader claims. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an audience at a policy discussion hosted by Breitbart News in May that state efforts to ban AI data centers are "not organic and local," and that "some of this is foreign-source dark money coming in."

Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to examine foreign influence campaigns about the build-out, and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, said his investigators had traced Chinese money to U.S. nonprofits organizing the protests and pressed the Treasury Department to revoke their tax-exempt status.

The groups most often named sit within a network funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman who lives in Shanghai and, according to a 2023 New York Times investigation, finances left-wing/Marxist-oriented 501(c)(3) organizations around the world that echo the CCP's positions.

They include the anti-war group CODEPINK, The People's Forum, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, which are all under congressional scrutiny.

The three Singham-linked groups did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Other groups behind opposition voices describe motives closer to home. Residents "want to feel heard in decisions that will impact their lives for decades to come," said Elizabeth Hutchings, communications manager of Alliance for a Better Utah, which has fought a major data-center project in that state and denies any foreign hand in its work. The group's core concern, she told The Epoch Times, is "a lack of transparency" from the government.

The experts who study these campaigns warn against mistaking foreign manipulation for the source of the backlash.

Taipei-based Tu put it most plainly: the manipulation is real, and so is the grievance it feeds on. The claim the bots push - that data centers compete with households for power and can raise electricity bills - is "actually true," he said, and opposition to data centers "genuinely exists," in Taiwan as much as the United States.

But there's a danger that once people become aware of manipulation campaigns targeting public opinion, they dismiss any and all grievances as manufactured, Tu warned. "When people object and you label all of it cognitive warfare, I think that oversimplifies the issue," he said.

The influence operators' real skill, he said, is blowing issues out of proportion - taking "a scattered case here and there" of genuine resentment and engineering it "into what looks like a full-blown social phenomenon."

Linvill said the data-center fight was plainly homegrown. "This debate real Americans are already very interested in having," he said, adding that China "may be trying to amplify the conversation, but I'm not sure why they need to bother."

Stoking divisive issues inside a rival's population, he noted, is "influence 101." And opposition to America's data center build-out is no fringe phenomenon: research group Data Center Watch has counted blocks or delays from local opposition to at least 75 data center projects, worth some $130 billion, in the first quarter of 2026 - mostly over concerns about electricity prices, water use, and noise.

Linvill said China's homegrown Data Center Bandwagon campaign "had no meaningful effect whatsoever" and that this was typical of China, which he said was better at suppressing unwelcome stories than amplifying them.

Xia similarly said Beijing's direct sway over American opinion was "very limited" and unlikely to "fundamentally alter the strategic direction" of the U.S. build-out.

It was the first time that China has tried to directly influence public opinion. In 2022, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant uncovered a Chinese operation that posed as worried local residents to stir opposition to American and Australian rare-earth projects, warning of radioactive contamination and calling for protests. That effort, too, gained little traction.

For Tu, the issue at hand is rarely the real target. Most of the influence operations his team tracks support no single party or position; their aim, he said, is to push democratic argument toward the extremes until "there's no room left for a neutral, objective third party," and to wear down public trust in institutions - courts, the press, elected leaders.

The end state, he said, is a creeping belief that "democracy is really just chaos, no better than China."

The Deeper Contest

For Xia, the more important competition is the one underneath the supply chains. In AI generally, he said, the CCP still trails the United States, and in military AI, the gap is wider - but the threat is pushing the U.S. military to move faster.

The real divide, he said, is moral.

American military AI is built around what is called a "human-in-the-loop," meaning a person must approve any decision by an autonomous weapon to take a life.

The CCP, Xia said, "has no moral bottom line in its AI applications" and gives no clear account of what human control, if any, oversees its autonomous weapons - one reason the United States has pushed for international rules on such systems.

The two militaries, he said, could end up developing AI in entirely different directions.

But the CCP's path, Xia said, may not be sustainable. Military AI freed of moral limits "would first bring lethal risk to its own developers," he said, "so this path is unlikely to prove workable."

A worker conducts testing in a Coherent manufacturing facility where lasers are developed for transmitting data among chips, which could decrease power use by AI systems, in Sherman, Texas, on June 16, 2026. Data centers are switching to light, transitioning from copper to fiber optics as AI systems grow. Jeffrey McWhorter/AP Photo Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 23:20

"I feel very lucky," David Cifaldi recalled. "A couple inches the other way, and this would be a different story."

The Mets bullpen spared Freddy Peralta’s blushes Sunday as it produced five scoreless innings to silence the Dodgers down the stretch.

The roller-coaster start last year was fitting for Matias Maccelli.

On most nights lately, pitching has kept the Yankees in the game long enough for a struggling lineup to muster a run or two.

US Military Forced To Let Some Iranian Projectiles Through Its Defenses: NBC

Some US lawmakers have begun to complain that American troops stationed in the Middle East have become sitting ducks and are in a highly dangerous situation with Iranian ballistic missiles increasingly reaching their marks. This is especially in the wake of the four US troop deaths earlier this month.

The Iranian attacks particularly on US bases in Jordan have been especially fierce of late. Also there are ongoing concerns of dwindling anti-air defense missiles in the Gulf and the region. Fresh weekend NBC news reporting has highlighted these growing problems, and has gone so far as to say that US commanders are having to ration Patriot missiles.

The Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, Jordan, which has come under attack of late. via X/The Week

"U.S. military commanders have been picking and choosing which Iranian missiles and explosive-packed drones to intercept and are allowing some attacks through their defenses, amid an effort to preserve the Pentagon’s diminishing supply of weapons that block projectiles from reaching their targets," two senior U.S. officials were cited as saying in the NBC report.

This is an astounding revelation if true, constituting an admission that American bases and host countries are much less protected than previously thought.

"Military commanders have opted not to expend munitions if they determine an Iranian projectile won't hit American forces, significantly damage critical U.S. facilities or threaten allies in the region, the officials said," NBC continues. "The strategy has been in place since the early days of the war."

While on the one hand it would make sense to not try and intercept a projectile that's clearly headed far off course into the distant desert, the host governments are likely to be alarmed at these instances of US military defenses in effect standing down.

But the report also highlights that this strategy has actually resulted in Iranian hits on US bases, in instances where those bases are said to be abandoned: 

The result of the strategy, the sources said, is that some Iranian attacks make impact, particularly those that are on track to miss their intended targets, inflict minimal damage by striking an abandoned building or hit areas where there are no U.S. troops.

The U.S. officials said there also have been times when the U.S. military has allowed some Iranian missiles and drones to strike U.S. bases as long as Americans are not present. That is a departure from past practice, the sources said, where typically drones or missiles that threaten to hit bases would be shot down.

Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) previously found that during the opening weeks of Operation Epic Fury the Pentagon burned through almost 50% of its Patriot missiles, more than half of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems - designed to counter short, medium, and intermediate-range threats - and over 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) during the Iran air and missile campaign.

MOMENT Houthis SHOOT DOWN ‘Turkish-made Saudi drone’

Barefoot Yemenis POSE next to BURNING WRECKAGE of $20 MILLION+ drone pic.twitter.com/lxdFczSOhB

— RT (@RT_com) July 26, 2026

US interceptors have from the start of the war been working in overdrive trying to protect sensitive Gulf facilities and bases, as dozens of inbound Iranian drones and missiles were a daily thing back in March into early April, before the tenuous ceasefire took effect. But the last couple weeks have seen a return to a high intensity air war over the region after the ceasefire broke down.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 22:45

“He [Crump] said UCN told 'us' Nolan was fully clothed-not true. We have never spoken with Crump, and we certainly didn’t tell the parents anything like that,” the United Cajun Navy said.

The restaurant is the first to open under a development agreement the companies announced in April 2025.

Fabien Frankel’s eventful two-and-a-half season run on HOTD ends to sad notes drawn on a cello.

Jeff Kent’s day in Cooperstown finally came Sunday.

Designer Matthew Taylor says the Spirit of '76 exhibition celebrates ordinary citizens who did extraordinary things

The Panthers are being investigated by the NFL Players Association after linebacker Nic Scourton suffered a season-ending ACL tear.

He won the 3M Open by three strokes Sunday in only his third start as a professional, holding off Scottie Scheffler.

The Hinge Of History That Was 2020

Via The Brownstone Institute,

“Shocking 105 million Americans are not working – more than during Covid or the Great Recession,” blared the New York Post. 

Finally that’s something. 

The graph alone tells the story. You thought that having the government forcibly send millions of people into lethargy and sloth, bankrupting millions of smaller businesses, slicing and dicing workers into essential and nonessential, would be devastating for labor force participation. It’s actually worse now than in the depths of the lockdowns, and 10.8 million more than were out of the labor force in 2019, for a total of 105 million. 

The growing crisis of labor drop outs since 2020 hits men more substantially than women: Woman not working up 10.9%; Men not working up 13.6%; Overall number not working up by 11.19%.

The labor force participation rate reveals the trends, not as grim as the lockdown days but still trending downwards – the opposite of what should be happening. 

The topic is still taboo – but the longer time goes on, the more scholars and people will mark the Covid lockdowns as a grave turning point in the history of our times. We are now at enough distance to see this clearly in ways we could not. More than that, it was frequently denied. 

Today it is undeniable. We have enough real-world data to point to the lockdowns and forced injections as a decisive desideratum of decivilization. 

It’s not just the aggregate data that is sounding alarms. We have a generational shift in the works, as noted by journalistic conventions that conveniently leave out causality. “Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work,” writes Emi Nietfeld.

“Gen Z-ers are often accused of shrugging off work — in fact, they say so themselves — and who can blame them? They’ve watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble. Now, they’re entering what’s widely called the worst job market in years. Almost half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The cost of living has soared; buying a house feels impossible. Who knows where we’ll live anyway once the Earth is uninhabitable. One viral meme captured the prevailing sentiment that ‘basically nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.’”

There are many factors at work here including tight labor markets, forced retirements, and self-reported injury. There has been a sharp rise in disabilities post-2020, reaching 38 million. So-called “long Covid” continues to get the blame despite mass forced distribution of a dangerous experimental shot. 

We’ve witnessed historic declines in student reading proficiency, as 12th-grade reading scores hit their lowest level since tracking began (1992), with only 35% proficient (down from 37% in 2019). Elementary-grade reading has also dropped sharply, the largest declines in decades, worsened by prolonged school closures and remote learning. 

Broader proficiency gaps appear in incoming college students, with reports of 14% of US college students testing at or below a 10-year-old’s reading level. This aligns with K-12 pandemic losses compounding into higher education, hence pervasive ignorance despite high graduation rates. 

Overdose fatalities surged dramatically post-2020, with annual deaths often exceeding 100,000 in recent years — a major contributor to excess mortality. Isolation, economic stress, and disrupted treatment access during lockdowns amplified the crisis. 

Researchers report nothing but confusion as to why “excess deaths in the United States kept rising even after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.5 million in 2022 and 2023 that would have been prevented had US death rates matched those of peer countries.” 

Younger adults, minorities, essential workers, and caregivers reported disproportionately worse mental health, with elevated depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation during/after lockdowns. Social isolation directly correlated with higher distress levels in surveys.

Meanwhile, there is no end to the discovery of strange anomalies always attributed to long Covid but which are more likely due to the unmentionable injectable countermeasure. For example, one study found surprising cognitive issues such as an inability to retrieve words and their close substitution which fillers. What immediately comes to mind is the sudden ubiquity of slop language: like, you know, literally, going forward, well, to be honest, and so on to the point of unintelligibility, all massively worsened since 2020. 

Total fertility is experiencing a historic decline in the US, accelerating dramatically since 2020. 

So much for demographics. Let’s talk economics. 

JP Morgan reports that 40-45 percent of small businesses closed temporarily while government stimulus only delayed permanent closure for millions. New firms started out of necessity – old jobs could not be recovered – but with a much higher failure rate. This has led to business consolidation as new firms are a falling percentage of total firms. 

Inflation since 2020 has eroded 27% of purchasing power in official data and 37% in alternative measures. 

The causal connection is rather obvious: some $8 trillion in new printed money. The result: a third or more of purchasing power was stolen from the public. 

This in turn has driven down the savings rates to a low of 3%, falling after boom via stimulus payments. 

The Covid period put on hyperdrive a tendency that had been in place for decades, a Fed-forced low interest rate that rewarded leverage, punished savings, and gamed a high return on rising valuations in financials. The savers were the chumps while indebted speculators made the high returns. This flipping of the entire logic of capitalist production has now been institutionalized to the point of addiction. Any stepping away from this balancing act risks default and a crack up. 

The indebtedness affects not only individuals but the US government too. The year 2020 was a fundamental shift. 

There are so many other inchoate changes that are hard to quantify. You see it in the social interactions of the lockdown generation, its lack of focus and attention, its awkwardness on basic functioning and decorum, its surreptitious and routine duplicity, and its outlook toward the future. 

The lockdowns and all that followed were a cruel attack on civilized life. They instigated a collapse of public trust in everything: academia, medicine, public health, government, media, tech, and all the legacy leaders of society. The fallout will continue far into the future. 

Isn’t it about time that the elites who constructed these policies at least own up to what they did?

Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) efforts to compel honesty from Anthony Fauci, and Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) indefatigable efforts to chronicle shot harm (they knew the risks), are both deeply honorable.

But they are only the beginning of necessary efforts and they only cover two of the million questions that remain.

There must be truth, there must be accountability, and there must be justice. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 22:10

The vanity of Anthony Fauci will be his undoing.

Alys Rivers knows what Aemond wants... and it's dragon eggs.

"The power dynamics now are really clashing because he's being styled king, yet he's still in squire-ly garments."