DOUBLE JEOPARDY = Damned if you Do or Don't!!

Imagine a town fair where three vendors control every stall, share the same cash register, and politely agree not to undercut one another while telling you it’s “market efficiency.”  Now imagine the town newspaper is owned by the same folks who run the stalls.  That’s not a dystopian parable — it’s the modern anatomy of consolidation in business and media, with real consequences for prices, competition, workers, and public knowledge. The Big Picture: “Consolidation” isn’t just a buzzword... Consolidation of business means fewer and larger firms — or, more subtly, a few asset managers and investors owning stakes across many competitors.  That’s the phenomenon sometimes called common ownership , and when the largest index-fund managers hold the top shares across competing firms, the incentives that sustain fierce competition can soften.  The effect isn’t narrowly theoretical: influential economic research finds measurable links between common ownership and reduced comp...

It's like the economy and the law are line dancing on a dance floor and the DJ keeps changing the music... Last week, the nation’s top bench pulled the rug out from under a major chunk of U.S. tariff policy — and the economy is politely, then not-so-politely, adjusting its dance moves.  The ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated wide-ranging tariffs imposed under emergency authority, forcing customs to reconsider what it’s allowed to collect and leaving the Treasury — and investors — to wonder who gets to keep the the money.  At the border, the gatekeeper agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection , announced it will stop collecting the struck-down tariffs, setting in motion a bureaucratic and accounting scramble about refunds and accounting.  Who’s smiling?   Potentially the importers who actually wrote the checks to Customs if refunds are given.  Who’s not?   Domestic producers who briefly enjoyed higher prices and a friendlier pro...

(Very disturbing when the Department of Homeland Security issues a memorandum like this) The Department of Homeland Security quietly handed law enforcement a memo that sounds like it was written by a paranoid sitcom writer with a chemistry degree: domestic partners are — allegedly — increasingly turning to chemical and biological toxins as their weapon of choice.  In plain English: beware the protein shake !... No, this is not the plot of a streaming true-crime documentary (though it could be).  It’s an intelligence note, dated in January 2026 and obtained by the news outlet ABC News, warning that poisons — from relatively ordinary household medicines to more exotic compounds sold on the darker corners of the internet — are being used in romantic entanglements that go sour.  DHS’s takeaway: these cases are weirdly slippery to detect because they can mimic ordinary illnesses and show symptoms only after it’s too late.   Talk about relationship goals gone wrong!! If ...

When protests boil over, the world watches the moment the first push becomes a shove — and sometimes a life is lost.  Marches, rallies, and street confrontations have always been a powerful way to demand change.  But they can also become flash-points for injuries, arrests, and unintended escalation.  There’s a different lever available: Personal Sanctions — targeted, financial pressure on the corporate engines that underwrite harmful policies.   A tool that each and every one of us can use, and when used in mass by groups the size of the crowds at protests on the streets of the United States, it could actually make a difference.  Redirecting crowds from confrontation to coordinated economic pressure is not retreat; it’s strategy.  It’s protest with a safety plan. Why We Protest in Public but Fund the Problem in Private Most people are willing to spend real money, real time, and real effort to protest.  They’ll drive hours, stand in there extreme hea...

If you thought AI data centers got their mojo from lots of coffee and venture-capital-funded smugness, think again: soon they might run on the retired stern glow of a decommissioned aircraft carrier.  Texas startup HGP Intelligent Energy has asked the U.S. Department of Energy for a loan guarantee to repurpose two retired U.S. Navy nuclear reactors and power an AI data center project at Oak Ridge — because nothing says “future of computing” like a second life for Cold War hardware..... The pitch is deliciously pragmatic. Bloomberg and other outlets report HGP wants to use two retired reactor plants to deliver roughly 450–520 megawatts of round-the-clock electricity — enough juice to keep racks humming and GPUs sweating while the nation argues whether “sentience” is a feature or a bug. The company frames this as faster and cheaper than building a brand-new reactor farm from scratch or waiting on the modular-nuclear trend led by tech giants who already love buying industrial-si...

If you thought 2025 was the year property taxes quietly stewed on the back burner, surprise: next year looks like a full-service tax buffet!  Lawmakers across the country have been wrestling with homeowners’ fury at ballooning property bills, and 2026 promises more drama — from carefully targeted exemptions to full-throated proposals to eliminate property taxes altogether.  Manish Bhatt of the Tax Foundation puts it bluntly:  “Property tax reform is going to continue to be an issue going into 2026 because it was largely not resolved in 2025 or in years prior, and taxpayers are still clamoring for relief.” Why the panic?  Home values shot up after the pandemic , and for many homeowners that translated into sticker shock on tax bills. National reporting finds property-tax payments have risen roughly 27–30% since 2019 in many places — enough to make the phrase “I’m upside-down” sound quaint... The legislative responses are, delightfully, all over the map. Here's a sl...