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While the statue looks decent enough from up front, the angle from behind is what's causing it to go viral for all the wrong reasons.

Dozens of dead animals were discovered after a large-scale excavation into the whereabouts of over 700 missing dogs by law enforcement took place in Northern California this week.

Héctor Bello, a defender for second division side Marítimo de La Guaira, shared in an Instagram post that his wife, Andrea, died in the devastating double earthquakes in Venezuela on Wednesday.

Debt Tsunami: The Alan Greenspan Legacy

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Alan Greenspan, Fed chair from 1987 to 2006, embodies a striking ideological shift from gold-standard advocate to architect of the modern easy-money, debt-fueled financial system. He has now died at the age of 100, and this marks a good time to assess his legacy and explain why it matters.

In the 1960s, as a young economist influenced by Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Greenspan strongly supported the gold standard. In his 1966 essay “Gold and Economic Freedom,” he argued that gold-backed money was essential for laissez-faire capitalism. It restrained governments from inflating the currency to fund welfare states or deficits, preventing the erosion of savings and the boom-bust cycles caused by fiat money manipulation. He viewed central banking and unbacked currency as tools for hidden wealth confiscation through inflation.

This essay is what endeared him to Rand personally. He became a valued member of her inner circle at a time when such circles of influence dominated the Manhattan scene. He won her confidence while his consulting firm was growing in influence. His clients were among the biggest players on Wall Street. His closeness to Rand and her circle contributed to the sense that they had at the time that Rand’s ideas were in ascendance, as her book sales only grew.

Once in power, however, Greenspan operated within the fiat system that he once criticized. He became known for discretionary, flexible monetary policy that prioritized short-term economic stability and growth over rigid rules.

Key elements included the “Greenspan Put.”

Markets came to expect the Fed to cut interest rates and inject liquidity during crises to cushion asset price declines. This started with the 1987 stock market crash (Black Monday), during which Greenspan quickly affirmed the Fed’s readiness to provide liquidity.

This was the beginning of what later became known as Quantitative Easing, or money printing, as the method to deal with market upheavals. It represented a wholesale repudiation of the policies of Paul Volcker from 1979 to 1982, the last time this country permitted an economic downturn to take its normal course rather than use artificial methods of stimulating demand. It was a test of the theory of the Austrian School, which argued that recessions serve a purpose of cleaning out malinvestments to prepare the ground for new prosperity.

The test worked to create the conditions of the 1980s boom. And yet at the same time, we saw measures of finance and banking deregulation that would empower new forms of credit finance that blurred the old distinctions between savings and checkable (liquid) deposits. It was this change that would end up fundamentally changing the operations of capitalism.

With sound money and a free market, the interest rate was a reflection of the savings rate. Investors would only borrow what was available, while savers were rewarded for their thrift with high interest rates. The rate of return for financial capital would tend toward an equilibrium identical to industrial output levels. That means that you are always better off saving than taking risks unless you have an eye toward entrepreneurial speculation. That was the balance: save, invest, grow.

Greenspan’s efforts turned the table over. The Fed embarked on a new experiment that would reward debt more than saving through one simple trick. He would push down rates to the point that saving paid less than investing in stocks, such that anyone could go into serviceable debt and invest and make more money with financial markets. Thus began what is called financialization. It overthrew the traditional workings of capitalism for a new calculation that stopped rewarding thrift and started rewarding leverage above all else.

Quite the achievement for a man who decades earlier had condemned this very system!

This strategy was repeated with responses to the 1998 LTCM/Russia crisis, the dot-com bust (2000–2001), and post-9/11. Investors priced in this implicit downside protection—like a put option—encouraging greater risk-taking, leverage, debt service, and wild speculation.

After the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11, the Fed under Greenspan cut the federal funds rate to a then-record low of roughly 1 percent in 2003–2004 and held it there. This created very cheap credit, fueling borrowing, leverage, and rising asset prices (especially housing). This directly inflated the mid-2000s housing bubble by making mortgages extraordinarily affordable and encouraging subprime lending.

The result was moral hazard and a wild culture of risk-taking at the expense of financial prudence. The combination of bailouts for markets (not necessarily individual firms) and low rates fostered the belief that the Fed would always “clean up” after bubbles.

This reduced the perceived downside of speculation, leading to higher leverage in finance, exotic mortgages, and a broader “debt finance” era in which credit expansion outpaced productive growth. Greenspan himself spoke of “irrational exuberance” in 1996 but didn’t act decisively to prick bubbles.

Greenspan’s tenure coincided with (and helped enable) a structural shift toward higher public–private debt levels, financialization of the economy, and repeated asset bubbles. The housing bubble and 2008 crisis are the clearest examples—easy money post-dot-com contributed to over-leveraged households and banks. While he defended his actions (arguing that bubbles are hard to identify in real time and that low rates didn’t solely cause the housing issues), his policies masked rising systemic risks and set the United States on the course toward disaster.

In later years, Greenspan reflected on gold favorably (e.g., calling it the premier global currency and admitting in conversations with Ron Paul that the Fed tried to mimic gold-standard signals). He acknowledged the welfare state’s incompatibility with hard money but pragmatically worked within the system.

Fine talk, but look at how he walked. Greenspan’s successors at the Fed only intensified his apostasy, especially Ben Bernanke, who went one better and slammed rates to zero while protecting against inflationary consequences by filling up bank vaults with fake money. This created innumerable zombie institutions, even as the Fed held the overvalued fake assets on its books. It still does.

Bernanke was succeeded by Janet Yellen, who sought to dampen inflation worries in early 2021, just before depreciation sliced off one-third of the dollar’s purchasing power. This is not a stellar record for which Greenspan set the precedent.

The young Greenspan saw gold as a check on government and banker overreach. The elder Greenspan, wielding immense power at the Fed, used that power to smooth cycles, successfully for a while (low inflation, steady growth in the 1990s)—but at the cost of building a more fragile, debt-dependent financial architecture.

This “Greenspan era” mindset of activist central banking influenced successors like Bernanke (QE) and continues to shape today’s environment of high debt and low rates (until recently) and expectations of Fed rescues. It marked a decisive move away from sound-money principles toward managed fiat credit cycles.

We are still paying a huge price for this mismanagement. Greenspan is the perfect embodiment of the principle that your talk and your walk need to match, lest you become an instrument of hypocrisy and eventual disaster that undermines every intellectual conviction you once embraced.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 19:15

Federal prosecutors need to ditch their character attacks and focus on the evidence for his retrial, legal experts told The California Post.

Another opportunity is off the table for Brendan Sorsby.

Zaire was taken into custody on Sunday, and was released hours later after posting his $50,000 bond.

Zaire was taken into custody on Sunday, and was released hours later after posting his $50,000 bond.

Music and films are now largely digital-only - does the lack of a disc for GTA 6 mean gaming is going the same way?

Gavin McKenna won't shy away from the spotlight.

Spain World Cup star Lamine Yamal's girlfriend, Ines Garcia, is causing a stir with her outfit (or lack thereof) for Yamal's final group-stage game on June 26.

The company will operate under the name Exemplar Luxury Group.

New Zealand has been a frisky bunch in this World Cup.

"He shouldn't go away quietly," Trump said.

The NYPD carried out another Canal Street raid on Thursday — seizing a whopping $151 million worth of knockoff Rolexes, fake fragrances, bootleg Knicks jerseys and other phony goods peddled on the infamous strip. Cops swarmed the Lower Manhattan stretch as part of an ongoing crackdown against illegal vendors that cramp the sidewalks, leading to...

It’s no secret that there has been some tension between the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and Dalton Rushing. But could it be a bit overblown? Joe Maddon, Ohtani’s former manager, believes it is and called the disconnection between the two “a bad look.” “The solution to this is [to put] Shohei, Dalton in a room. Pitching...

Zaire Wade, the 24-year-old son of NBA legend Dwyane Wade, was arrested on June 21 in Los Angeles County, according to jail records.

Kenny Klein arrived in Queens with a big reputation. He was a Sports Information Hall of Famer, a Louisville legend. A man universally admired. 

Culture Of Grievance

Authored by George Brooks via AmericanThinker.com,

Every civilization develops a moral language - a set of virtues that it celebrates and vices that it condemns. For much of human history, societies lauded courage, resilience, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, and perseverance. The individual who overcame adversity was admired. The citizen who contributed more than he consumed was esteemed. To endure hardship without surrendering one’s dignity was considered noble.

Increasingly, however, modern Western society appears to have inverted this hierarchy.

Today, victimhood often functions as a form of social capital.

To claim injury is to acquire moral authority.

To assert oppression is frequently to gain status. Public discourse, particularly within academia, media, politics, and social media, often rewards not those who demonstrate resilience, but those who can most persuasively locate themselves within narratives of historical or contemporary disadvantage.

This is not to suggest that oppression does not exist. It plainly does. Human beings have always oppressed one another. History is replete with examples of slavery, discrimination, persecution, exploitation, and injustice. Serious societies acknowledge these realities honestly.

Yet acknowledging injustice and organizing one’s entire social order around grievance are two very different enterprises.

The modern culture of grievance is distinguished not merely by its concern for injustice, but by its tendency to elevate grievance itself into an identity.

In such a framework, suffering confers legitimacy. Personal agency is often deemphasized in favor of structural explanations. Individual responsibility, once considered indispensable to human flourishing, is increasingly treated as secondary to historical narratives of power and oppression.

Why?

Part of the answer lies in incentives.

Human beings respond to incentives whether they exist in economics, politics, or culture. If a society rewards certain forms of behavior with status, attention, influence, institutional support, or financial gain, those behaviors predictably proliferate.

Social media has accelerated this process dramatically.

Platforms built upon visibility and engagement naturally privilege outrage, conflict, and emotional intensity. Claims of victimization generate attention. Attention generates followers. Followers generate influence. Influence often generates money, prestige, and institutional power.

Grievance, in the digital age, has become monetizable.

The entrepreneur of outrage need not solve problems; indeed, solving problems may threaten his relevance. A permanent sense of crisis sustains audiences, donations, speaking engagements, media appearances, and political mobilization. The incentive, therefore, is often not reconciliation but perpetuation.

A grievance resolved is a constituency diminished.

This dynamic extends beyond social media influencers. Entire political movements, activist organizations, and institutional bureaucracies can become dependent upon the continued existence—or perceived existence—of oppression. The maintenance of moral urgency becomes essential to organizational survival.

Consequently, there exists a temptation to expand definitions continually, to discover ever more subtle forms of harm, and to reinterpret ordinary human conflicts through increasingly elaborate frameworks of oppression.

Disagreement becomes violence.

Words become trauma.

Discomfort becomes harm.

Failure becomes victimization.

Ordinary interpersonal conflict becomes evidence of systemic injustice.

The danger is not merely conceptual confusion. The danger is cultural infantilization.

Human flourishing requires the cultivation of resilience. Every person encounters disappointment, rejection, unfairness, betrayal, and suffering. These experiences, while painful, are intrinsic to the human condition. A society that teaches individuals to interpret every adversity primarily through the lens of oppression risks producing citizens less capable of confronting life’s inevitable hardships.

Stoic philosophers understood this long ago. We possess limited control over external events but considerable influence over our responses to them. While circumstances matter, human beings are not merely passive products of circumstance.

Agency matters.

Responsibility matters.

Character matters.

Indeed, one of the greatest achievements of liberal democracy has been its insistence that individuals cannot be reduced solely to categories of race, sex, class, religion, or ancestry. The individual person possesses moral dignity independent of group identity.

Identity politics, by contrast, often risks reversing this principle. Individuals increasingly come to be understood primarily as representatives of groups rather than as unique persons. Social and political questions are filtered through collective identities, historical grievances, and competing claims of disadvantage.

Such a framework can foster tribalism rather than solidarity.

Citizens cease to view one another primarily as neighbors, fellow countrymen, or participants in a shared civic enterprise. Instead, society fragments into competing constituencies, each seeking recognition, resources, status, or moral legitimacy.

The social fabric frays.

This does not mean historical injustices should be ignored. Quite the contrary. Mature societies remember their histories precisely so they may avoid repeating them. But memory should serve wisdom, not resentment. Justice should seek restoration where possible, not the perpetual cultivation of grievance.

A healthy society balances compassion with responsibility.

It extends assistance to those genuinely in need while simultaneously affirming human agency. It recognizes injustice without encouraging dependency upon victimhood as an identity. It acknowledges suffering while celebrating resilience.

Most importantly, it teaches that adversity, though often unfair, need not define a life.

The culture of grievance offers a seductive promise: that our struggles can be explained entirely by external forces and that moral virtue inheres in suffering itself. But this promise ultimately diminishes human beings. It encourages people to locate power everywhere except within themselves.

Civilizations do not thrive when victimhood becomes aspirational.

They thrive when individuals are encouraged to confront hardship with courage, responsibility, discipline, and hope.

The task of a free society is not to deny suffering.

It is to produce citizens capable of transcending it.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 18:25

Caleb Wilson is a confident rookie.