Authored by Rex Wilderstrom via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

While countering Beijing’s influence in the Pacific was chief among the reasons given by FBI Director Kash Patel when he opened the agency’s new office in Wellington last week, both he and New Zealand’s security ministers also spoke of rising transnational crime affecting the region.

In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in Wellington described the purpose of the new office as working “to investigate and disrupt a wide range of threats and criminal activities, including terrorism, cybercrime and fraud, organised crime and money laundering, child exploitation, and foreign intelligence threats.”

The latest seizure of drugs and weapons in the region bears out the reality of that threat. Comgend Polynésie Française—the national police force of French Polynesia—has announced that it has seized a “historic” quantity of drugs with a total street value of €331 million (US$382.66 million) from a yacht caught in the Marquesas Islands, about 1,400 kilometres north of Tahiti.

After towing it to Pape’ete, the capital of Tahiti, and dismantling it, over 700 kilograms of drugs were found concealed in the boat’s structure. In total, 1,646.8 kilograms of cocaine and 232.4 kilograms of methamphetamine were seized from the boat.

They also discovered 11 Glock semi‑automatic pistols and 24 magazines.

Shipment Believed to be Bound For Australia

The yacht was believed to have left Mexico and to be headed to Australia via Tonga. The three men onboard, a German skipper and two Dutch nationals, remain in custody, local Public Prosecutor Solène Belaouar said in a statement on Aug. 2.

The head of French Polynesia’s Customs Department, Serge Puccetti, told local media the shipment was not destined for French Polynesia.

He said French authorities regularly share intelligence with law enforcement agencies in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

Echoing Patel’s warning, he said the Pacific is now a major transit area between narcotic production in South America and users in Australia, which has emerged as a major market, as well as to New Zealand and Asia.

Organised crime syndicates from Southeast Asia are also using the Pacific Islands, including Papua New Guinea, as transit points to ship opium-based drugs and methamphetamines to the U.S. market.

Smugglers were now using all kinds of transport modes: air, sea, onboard containers, and sailboats, Puccetti said. “On each of these vectors, we are vigilant,” he said.

New Caledonia’s Divisional Head of Customs, Hervé Matho, told local media, “In terms of cocaine consumption, the U.S. market is now saturated. That’s why traffickers are searching for new markets, [in] Europe and, in the Pacific region, Australia and New Zealand.”

Representative John James, a Republican from Michigan, penned a blistering letter to Canadian leaders, warning their out-of-control wildfires are “poisoning the air and threatening the health of millions across Michigan and the Midwest.”

Now, that toxic smoke is pouring into the Northeast, and soon, into New York City. Just when many thought Justin Trudeau’s leadership was disastrous, the beginning of the globalist Mark Carney era suggests things can and will likely get even worse.

Canada is experiencing its second-worst wildfire season on record. Government data shows 4,00 wildfires have been recorded so far this year.

“Despite the clear public health crisis, Canadian officials have shown alarming disregard,” Rep. James wrote in a press release, informing his constituents about the letter he fired off to Canadian leaders, urging immediate action to contain the growing wildfire crisis that is poisoning America’s air. 

If Canada’s globalist ‘green’ leaders actually cared about the planet, they would have practiced proper forest management. But they didn’t, and they failed miserably. Rep. James noted that the 2023 wildfire season in Canada was equivalent to “running over 500 million cars for a full year.”

At the moment, smoke from 740 Canadian wildfires is spreading south and degrading air quality over a massive stretch of North America. New York City is under air-quality alerts…

“This lack of urgency undermines decades of cross-border cooperation and damages the U.S.—Canada relationship,” Rep. James said. 

The bigger question is whether these forest fires are truly natural … or part of a broader form of hybrid warfare.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

Donald Trump’s far-ranging counter-revolution, to quote the old Star Trek mission statement, seeks “To boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Because no conservative president has dared to question the last 70 years of progressive cultural, social, economic, and political dominance, all traditional wisdom, all our renowned “experts,” and all the self-described “authorities” have no real credibility in their mostly flawed analyses and wrong prognoses.

Read what our legacy media predicted in March for this summer’s economy, or in January for the future of the border, or what would happen should the U.S. Air Force enter Iranian airspace.

Take the border.

“Comprehensive immigration reform” (a euphemism for rolling amnesties and a still-open border) was the establishment’s answer to 10,000 foreign nationals storming the border during peak surges of the Biden administration.

But no president had ever simultaneously:

1) pressured Mexico to close its borders and patrol ours,

2) announced a plan to complete a border wall along the entire US-Mexico boundary,

3) stopped catch-and-release,

4) ceased refugee applications after illegally entering the U.S.,

5) introduced policies encouraging voluntary self-deportation, and

6) prevented all illegal entries at the border.

The result is that we do not know the full effects of these combined border policies.

So far, one million foreign nationals have lost jobs, and 2 million Americans have gained them since Trump’s inauguration. How much money will be saved in local, state, and federal entitlements if illegal immigrants return home?

How much trauma and costs will be avoided if 500,000 criminal aliens are deported?

How many serious and lethal hit-and-run accidents will be prevented?

To what degree will the idea of citizenship be reenergized once it is not reduced to the equivalency of mere residence?

How many emergency rooms will have more space for U.S. citizens?

No one knows, but the consequences could be enormous.

The U.S. has never applied so many tariffs in so many ways upon so many goods from so many countries. As a result, economists have sworn since March that we are headed to a recession, stock collapse, stagflation, and high unemployment.

But do they really know the profit margins of our mercantile importers, who tariff our goods but expect easy entry for their exports to the U.S.?

Can importers pay a 15% tariff, still make a handsome profit, and not raise costs excessively on the U.S. consumer? If trade surpluses do not matter and tariffs hurt those who implement them, why do sophisticated Europeans, adroit Japanese, and smart Chinese prefer surpluses and tariffs to our deficits and zero or low tariffs? Are they on to something?

Do moderate tariffs encourage rather than retard American enterprise, on the theory that it will not be undercut by dumping and exchange manipulation and can also compete with far cheaper energy and transportation costs?

No one really knows these answers because the U.S. has never tried the current policy in quite the present way before.

We do know that the radical free trade and asymmetrical tariffs of the last half-century empowered China to world power status with a dangerous military and hollowed out the U.S. industrial interior.

Is the $2 trillion budget deficit, as predicted, set in stone? Will the national debt only grow to unsustainable levels? However, federal agencies have never announced annual cuts of nearly $200 billion—along with a ten percent reduction in the budget deficit.

Never has the government promised to deregulate and fast-track permits for construction, energy development, and manufacturing from 2-3 years to mere months. What will the financial results be?

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggests that $15 trillion in new foreign investments are now promised. If accurate, what will such influxes do to employment? To federal revenues? To the economy in general?

Is it possible that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could be right that $300 billion in federal income will come from new tariffs—if true, that might reduce the deficit by another 15 percent?

What is the effect on the economy of cheaper energy costs when production is slated to rise without draining the strategic petroleum reserve on the eve of elections?

No one has ever questioned universities before so systematically.

We do know that student loan debt has spiraled to $1.7 trillion. Graduation rates have dropped to about 50-60 percent of those who enroll. The average student now takes six—not four—years to graduate. Today’s graduates, by all accounts, leave universities with fewer analytical skills, less language fluency, and reduced general knowledge than in past decades. Faculties have never been more weaponized, with 90-95 percent reportedly holding progressive views.

If universities are taxed on their endowments, will that not force them to reconsider their efforts to maintain their non-profit status?

Will 15 percent limits on overhead charges on federal grants force researchers to watch their budgets and universities to curb their bloated administrative legions?

What is so wrong with curbing the tuition gouging and profiteering off foreign students, and limiting their numbers to ensure access to underserved, deserving Americans?

Will the end of segregated dorms, safe spaces, and “affinity” graduations lead to more integration and assimilation than do the current tribal fixations on race and ethnicity? Historically, does tribalism or assimilation best serve a nation?

Will meritocratic admissions improve student skills, rewarding those who study hard and encouraging those who do not to emulate those who do? Will minorities who are admitted under meritocratic criteria be seen as more or less qualified?

Are far fewer administrators, more emphasis on instruction and less on politics, and more students from the heartland and fewer from communist China or the illiberal Middle East such bad things?

In the last 50 years, affirmative action transmogrified into DEI racial separatism, chauvinism, and a system of reparatory spoils, played and manipulated by grifters, opportunists, and fakers, from Elizabeth Warren-style phonies and Jussie Smollett-like con artists to opportunists like Zohran Mamdani who game the system.

Has any chauvinistic multiracial democracy—like Brazil or India—or any multiethnic or multireligious confederation—such as Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, or Iraq—ever succeeded by prioritizing caste, race, religious sectarianism, or ethnic tribalism?

Can any top-down imposed policy ever be successful when 70 percent of the electorate opposes it?

Can any government that institutionalizes bias and preferences succeed while ignoring class in favor of race—without ever clearly defining which racial criteria justify the entire spoils system, or why?

In our postmodern 21st-century system, no one knows exactly what will happen when race becomes incidental rather than essential. But we do know from history where we were headed under the current aberrant system.

Abroad, in the last 30 years, NATO was voluntarily hollowed out—largely praised in the abstract by European grandees and shorted and ignored in the concrete by Euro budget technocrats. Yet since the days of the Cold War, NATO members had not met their defense expenditure promises.

Now, most NATO members have met those commitments. Frontline NATO states like Sweden, Finland, and Poland are far better armed and prepared than legacy Western members like Belgium, Spain, or Italy. If there follows a rearmed and recommitted NATO, will not the world become a safer place?

We were told for a half-century to steer clear of Iran, the supposed unhinged, lethal bully of the Middle East. Their henchmen blew up barracks and embassies, took and executed hostages, and sowed terror throughout the Middle East with their killer surrogates Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

But Iran had never really fought, much less won a war, since it pleaded with Saddam Hussein for an armistice from the catastrophic Iran-Iraq conflict.

What will be the effect on the Middle East with a currently impotent Iran, an inert Hezbollah, and a subterranean Hamas in hiding? More importantly, what is the current regional role of Iran without a nuclear program, air defenses, a navy, or expeditionary terrorist forces? Again, no one knows.

Finally, we have never seen anything quite so radical as the new Democratic Party, at least not since the McGovern blowout of 1972. In its 24/7, 360-degree fixation on hating Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda, rarely has a party embraced signature policies that are so despised by the American people. As a result, we have no idea what the result will be other than a national implosion at the polls.

Why would any political party embrace open borders, the influx of 12 million illegal aliens, 600 sanctuary cities, biological men dominating women’s sports, dismantling the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries, prosecutors who release rather than indict and convict violent criminals, defunding the police, tribal fixations and racial spoils systems in defiance of the Supreme Court, the terrorists of Hamas over democratic Israel, and overt campus anti-Semitism?

We are in the middle of a counter-revolution, whose fate will likely be decided in 15 months by the midterm elections and the status of the late 2026 economy.

Structural changes across the economy, culture, and politics of the country are underway. Our bicoastal experts and authorities are mostly predicting a multifaceted systems failure—without explaining why or how.

Yet the only constant in their predictions is that when and if they prove wrong, they will not pivot, correct, or apologize, but simply move on to their next flawed prognosis, fortified by their titles and letters after their names—but otherwise little else.

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are spearheading New America Acquisition I Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) targeting a $300 million initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, according to a securities filing reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The SPAC seeks to acquire businesses with a combined enterprise value of at least $700 million, prioritizing the revitalization of U.S. manufacturing and the strengthening of domestic supply chains.

The filing highlights New America’s strategy to target companies that “play a pivotal role in rejuvenating domestic manufacturing, fostering innovation ecosystems, and securing critical supply chains.” The venture will be led by Kevin McGurn, a seasoned technology executive, with Kyle Wool serving as an adviser. The offering is underwritten by investment banks D. Boral Capital and Dominari Securities, the latter a subsidiary of the firm where Wool holds a leadership role.

This marks the Trump brothers’ latest foray into the SPAC market, building on prior ventures. Last year, Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, went public via a SPAC merger. More recently, GrabAGun, an online firearms retailer backed by 1789 Capital—where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner—also completed a SPAC deal.

The move aligns with President Donald Trump’s “America First” policies, which emphasize reshoring critical supply chains from China to enhance U.S. economic and national security. The administration has implemented sweeping tariffs, including a 10% baseline on imports from all countries and rates up to 125% on Chinese goods, to make foreign products costlier and encourage domestic production. These measures, enacted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, aim to address trade imbalances and bolster U.S. manufacturing.

In May, U.S. and Chinese negotiators reached a 90-day tariff truce in Geneva, easing trade tensions. The agreement reduced U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from 145% to 30% and China’s duties from 125% to 10%, providing temporary relief to businesses navigating global trade disruptions.

The tariff policies have drawn support from U.S. industries, particularly steel. Nucor Corp., a leading steel producer, endorsed the measures.

“Nucor strongly commends the actions taken today by President Trump to reimpose tariffs on all steel imports,” said Leon Topalian, president and CEO of Nucor Corp. “America’s national security depends on a robust and healthy American steel industry, which continues to be harmed by massive global steel overcapacity and the resulting surge of illegally dumped and subsidized imports from around the world.

“Many of our trading partners have taken advantage of our open market for far too long and have intentionally circumvented our trade laws or allowed other bad actors to transship illegally dumped and subsidized steel,” Topalian added. “The President’s actions will help level the playing field for American steel producers and the more than 24,000 men and women who work in our industry.”

Last week’s widely reported underwater earthquake off the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula (on July 30) resulted in a tsunami which appears to have impacted the Rybachiy naval base, newly published satellite images show.

Crucially the Rybachiy base is Russia’s primary hub for nuclear submarines in the Pacific, and so was bound to feel some level of impact from an earthquake measuring 8.8 in magnitude which erupted just 140km away.

International reports say that when the earthquake struck, two Yasen-class nuclear-powered attack submarines were observed docked at the base – and in the path of the tsunami; however, there’s as yet no evidence of damage to the vessels themselves. Watch the visual comparison below:

Instead, some of the base infrastructure has been observed as suffering damage, according to satellite imagery analysis featured in The Telegraph.

“A section of one pier has bent away from its original position, possibly indicating that it was detached from its moorings, images taken by the Umbra Space satellite on Thursday morning have revealed,” the report says.

“It does not appear that a submarine was moored alongside at the time of impact and experts said damage to the structure alone would have little military significance,” it adds, before concluding: “However, questions were raised about whether the tsunami caused any further harm to the base, which was thought to have been hit within 15 minutes of the earthquake.”

The before and after satellite images featured by The Telegraph:

In the aftermath last week, pictures and videos widely circulated online showing significant damage to buildings and other infrastructure, amid flooding, at various locations in Kamchatka, particularly at Pacific ports and harbors.

Adding to worries about the area, the Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano on the peninsula had also erupted.

Images showed that tsunami waves flooded an area in Severo-Kurilsk, Sakhalin Region, Russia:

According to The War Zone, “Russia has been moving in recent years to replace all of its remaining Soviet-era Delta class SSBNs with Borei types. The Delta III class submarine Ryazan, also known by its hull number K-44, appears to still be present at Rybachiy based on available satellite imagery, but whether it is actually operational or not is unclear.”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“It was a coup, and I’m using that term literally … One egregious felony after another.”

– Stephen Miller

America is tired of being driven insane, of having absurdities crammed into our collective consciousness. Reality is an agreement about what is going on in the world. That act of faith requires such an agreement be based on what is demonstrably true. Without it, society dissolves into chaos and failure.

The RussiaGate psychodrama is about an agreement based on lies. It started with Hillary Clinton’s desperate ploy to save her foundering 2016 election campaign. Her emails somehow got sent to Wikileaks, a radical news org dedicated to revealing government secrets, implicating misconduct. It was easy to declare the Russians did it, by hacking — when it was much more likely, in fact, proven by a forensic audit, that a Clinton campaign insider downloaded the info on a thumb drive, perhaps one Seth Rich, found murdered on a DC sidewalk soon thereafter.

Every lie after that met the kind of skepticism among the public that generates heat, controversy, scandal, and fire. Hillary managed to enlist President Barack Obama and his executive agencies into her project, and the party apparatus with it, because the Clinton Victory Fund had paid the DNC’s debts and took over its management.

Soon, the Russia collusion project grew into a gigantic scaffold of flaming lies. The big newspapers and the TV news networks bought the story, and came along for the ride. They were all sure Hillary would win the 2016 election. All the heat and fire would get flushed away. The polls all said so. The agencies and the parties would pick up and go on as before, run the show, make careers, get wealthy, be important!

They miscalculated. They lost. But they decided to keep building the scaffold of lies in order to protect themselves from the danger it represented — because they lived in that scaffold, it was the party’s house.

And the scaffold of lies needed massive fortification.

The house that the party lived in had to be protected at all costs, or they would all be cast out, homeless, a whole party on street, lost, broke, ruined, dying, like the pitiful tweakers bent over out on Kensington Avenue in Philly, in every Democrat-run city, really.

And so, they undermined the winner of the election at every turn, worked furiously to drive him from office, made a plague happen, subverted the 2020 election, and spent four years under a fake president jamming absurdities into the public arena, turning it into a freak show, one drag-queen story hour after another, from sea to shining sea. All to defeat the return of a public consensus about reality based on what is demonstrably true — starting with the fact that there are men and there are women, and that the primary interaction between them keeps society going by producing offspring.

This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic — the res publica, in Latin, the public thing — in the nation’s history.

And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.

The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel.

What will it take to get their attention?

Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials?

And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events?

Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? 

Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.

You knew this was coming, right?

Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure.

There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage.

The institutions themselves are under new management, and they show every sign of returning to regular operation, doing what they were designed to do in the first place: deliver a truthful account of what has happened and determine a just consequence for the people who made it happen.

It’s going to happen, and then we can rebuild a coherent public consensus about what is really real, who we really are, and where we go from here.

Authored by Kevin Downey Jr via PJMedia.com,

Former Democratic Party presidential hopeful and current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is giving the CIA an enema, and she’s putting the hose where it is most needed: in the sketchy, unofficial offices of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s not-so-secret department dedicated to propaganda.

The CIA has been bribing/threatening/installing journalists to do their bidding since the beginning of the Cold War. It is believed they had/have roughly 400 journalists, news reporters, and publishers throughout the world, writing what the CIA tells them to write.

In the mid-1970s, Operation Mockingbird was exposed by the Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho). The committee found that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and various other alphabet agencies were illegally bugging, wiretapping, and harassing people, even Americans, the most notable of whom was Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Church Committee slapped the CIA on the wrist and told them to end Operation Mockingbird, but, exasperatingly, the committee didn’t provide any oversight to make sure that Mockingbird was dead. According to the Church Committee Report on Foreign and Military Intelligence of 1976 (page 455), Mockingbird thrives to this day.

Watch Robert Kennedy, Jr. explain how some of the fake news crims, including Rolling Stone and Vox, are nothing more than CIA-run rumor mills.

So that leads us to where we are now.

Tulsi Gabbard believes Operation Mockingbird isn’t merely still alive and kicking, but that  it’s being used to slander President Trump. 9In my opinion, it is also being used to spread globalist codswallop.) Even better, Gabbard is dedicated to tearing it down.

SCARY: Tulsi Gabbard CONFIRMS That ‘Operation Mockingbird’ is STILL Ongoing inside the CIA and she is actively trying to Shut it Down.

Tulsi says Deep State intel agents are still actively colluding with left-wing media outlets to attack President Trump from within:

“There are… pic.twitter.com/CZWMERFsa3

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 31, 2025

What you’re about to see is not comedy. It’s tragically cringeworthy propaganda being progenerated by a globalist shill who needs to be drummed out of the comedy community forever.

Welcome to late-night brainwashing, courtesy of, I believe, Operation Mockingbird:

Watch former CIA Director John Brennan squirm like a worm under the magnifying glass of the Trump administration’s take-down of swamp wigglers like himself:

🚨BREAKING: Former CIA Director John Brennan confirmed @DNIGabbard‘s claim that Operation Mockingbird remains active.

He stuttered after realizing what he just said.

“Intelligence really undergirds a lot of the political efforts underway…” pic.twitter.com/xG9NLbXmja

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) August 1, 2025

DNI Gabbard claims she is dedicated to ending the unofficial “Operation Mockingbird.” I can’t be more giddy.

I suspect there are no hallway signs at the Pentagon stating “Operation Mockingbird Offices This Way,” and thus stabbing the problem in its heart may prove difficult.

Operation Mockingbird is likely why your hirsute thing-in-law believes Trump said to take “horse pills” to beat COVID, which came from a bat salad, and so many other lies we’ve seen pushed by the media.

Operation Mockingbird gave us all of this flapdoodle: pic.twitter.com/KzmE9CaG1F

— The Kevin Downey, Jr. Show Mon- Fri. 9-11 am EST! (@KDJRadioShow) August 3, 2025

I believe the darker threat isn’t fake news, but the seemingly unquenchable thirst for more of the same. Killing Operation Mockingbird is integral, but teaching leftoids they’ve been lied to for decades is the true challenge.

Watch this video, and the meaning of the name “Operation Mockingbird” will become terrifyingly clear:

The “stripper index” – an anecdotal measurement that connects economic health with spending on adult entertainment – appears unable to predict Bitcoin’s price.

Only indicator that actually matters: if this breaks support, recession guaranteed pic.twitter.com/BgNlUv0grZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 8, 2025

As CoinTelegraph reports, Kodi Rose (guessing here, but that’s probably not her real name), a self-described “dollar stripper” and adult content creator, alluded to these frontline insights in a recent viral TikTok video, saying she believes the economy is already in a recession as fewer customers are asking where they can “hit the slopes,” a social code for cocaine.

The digital equivalent of exotic dancers is adult content creators, and OnlyFans dominates the space. On the platform, users subscribe to creators and tip for extras.

Turns out the stripper index doesn’t really work for Bitcoin. A 57-month revenue analysis of one mid-tier OnlyFans creator shows a negative correlation with Bitcoin’s price, despite the two moving in the same direction more than half the time.

To understand whether creators’ income holds any predictive value for Bitcoin, Cointelegraph spoke to veterans in the adult entertainment industry who’ve weathered both its ups and downs alongside crypto’s hype cycles.

Bitcoin followed OnlyFans model’s earnings 55% of the time

The stripper index is backed by the assumption that consumers will cut down on non-essential spending during economic downturns.

“Sex work is considered a ‘non-essential’ service — it’s entertainment, a luxury. Therefore, it’s one of the first expenses people cut when their financial situation becomes uncertain or they anticipate economic instability,” Catherine De Noire, an OnlyFans creator and brothel manager, told Cointelegraph. 

Alana Nguyen, who performs on OnlyFans under the stage name “Nerdy Dancing,” shared her monthly earnings with Cointelegraph since moving online after the 2020 pandemic shut down of the physical world, including strip clubs. So far, she hasn’t noticed any clear correlation between crypto prices and subscriber behavior.

“Even if there are global economic conditions affecting overall spending, I don’t think crypto prices correlate strongly with my earnings,” Nguyen told Cointelegraph.

A Pearson correlation coefficient of -0.335 over 57 months suggests a moderately negative linear relationship between Nguyen’s earnings and Bitcoin’s price.

A 10-month rolling Pearson correlation between Nguyen’s earnings and Bitcoin’s price showed considerable volatility over time. The highest correlation was observed in the 10-month period ending July 2021, which were the first months of Nguyen’s business. 

Out of 48 total calculations, the rolling correlation coefficient was evenly split, with 24 positive and 24 negative values, suggesting the relationship between Nguyen’s earnings and Bitcoin’s price fluctuated without a consistent pattern. The rolling correlation rarely went above 0.5 or below -0.5, indicating low correlation.

In a separate measurement, Cointelegraph analyzed whether or not Nguyen’s earnings rose when Bitcoin’s monthly average rose compared to the previous month and when her revenue dropped as Bitcoin dropped. In this measurement, the two moved toward the same direction almost half the time, with 55% accuracy over 57 months.

“I’ve always thought concepts like the stripper index are only useful in terms of aggregate spending. Even in the strip club, my earnings aren’t necessarily tied to how the club is doing overall. It’s more about my personal selling ability that day — whether regulars come in or I get lucky with a big spender,” Nguyen said.

OnlyFans is notorious for opaque financial reporting. One website, OnlyGuider, claims to have analyzed the transaction behavior of over 1 million subscribers and found that the top 0.1% of creators earn the majority of the platform’s revenue.

According to data from OnlyGuider shared with Cointelegraph, the top 0.1% of creators earned $2,035,331 in April 2025, when Bitcoin’s average price was $94,207. As Bitcoin prices continued to rise in May and June, earnings for the top 0.1% also increased, reaching $2,038,972 in May and $2,052,502 in June.

Bitcoin’s relationship with OnlyFans and adult entertainment

Crypto was once seen as an alternative tool for facilitating payments to adult content creators. Pornhub, one of the industry’s largest platforms, began accepting cryptocurrency as early as 2018. OnlyFans, however, has taken a different path and does not offer crypto as a payment method.

“Crypto payments are not very popular in our brothel. Most clients prefer cash because it leaves no trace. Only a very small number of the women working with us accept crypto payments, and even then, the total number of transactions per year is extremely low,” De Noire said. 

“We haven’t noticed any significant change in spending behavior that corresponds with crypto fluctuations. Whether Bitcoin or Ethereum is performing well or not doesn’t seem to have a direct effect on how much our clients are willing to spend,” she added.

Erotic film star Allie Eve Knox has stronger ties to the crypto community as an advocate for integrating cryptocurrency into the adult industry and through her involvement with SpankChain, which launched initiatives like SpankPay, a crypto payment option for adult creators that has since been discontinued. 

Knox, who offers her content on several platforms, including OnlyFans, agreed that the price of Bitcoin doesn’t appear to have a meaningful impact on her earnings.

“Anytime crypto hits an all-time high, our traffic actually slows,” Knox told Cointelegraph.

“People want to see the biggest number in their account and screenshot it. It’s not typical for them to go passing out money to get their wanks.”

Knox has been in the adult entertainment industry for 11 years and says she’s experienced 36 account closures over her career — from bank accounts to Cash App and PayPal. Crypto offered an alternative way to accept payments, but ironically, she claims she was de-banked even by crypto platforms.

“I showed a Showtime documentary crew how I could display my Coinbase QR code on camera, and viewers could pay me in Bitcoin or Ether. The day after it aired, Coinbase shut my account down.”

Modern payment options — whether crypto or digital banking — make transactions easier for both consumers and businesses. However, electronic methods still draw scrutiny from banks when used by sex workers. In brothels, clients often prefer cash, sometimes even leaving mid-session to withdraw money from an ATM, De Noire said.

“As an OnlyFans creator, however, I notice something a little bit similar. My subscribers generally have no issue using credit cards and trust the platform. Yet many of them still ask if they can pay via Bitcoin or other alternative methods,” she said.

“Since OF doesn’t allow payments outside the platform, I haven’t pursued this further, but it’s clear that even online clients are looking for more privacy and control over the data they share with financial institutions.”

Bitcoin’s honeymoon with OnlyFans models has passed

Web3 and adult content had their “good old days,” according to Knox, who says the non-fungible token (NFT) boom of 2021 opened up new income streams and gave creators more options to reach fans and spend their crypto earnings.

“Now, if a customer doesn’t already hold crypto, they have to move money from their bank, wait for it to clear into a wallet, maybe convert it, send it to a model, wait for confirmation and only then do they get the content,” she said.

Creators are also facing increasing barriers worldwide. Recently, China launched a nationwide crackdown on OnlyFans, while Sweden, a nation that’s politically and culturally very different from China, has imposed restrictions on purchasing adult content.

De Noire cited sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to point out that in today’s society, consumers aren’t just trying to survive, but they prioritize enjoyment.

“When you see a lot of non-essential services like massages, fancy coffee, wellness retreats or even sex work being used regularly, it’s a sign that the society has enough money going around,” De Noire said.

While cryptocurrency was once hailed as a promising payment solution for adult content creators facing financial censorship, the reality is more complex. Despite pockets of overlap, such as simultaneous rises in Bitcoin prices and earnings among top OnlyFans creators, adult entertainers and their earnings have shown little correlation with Bitcoin’s price trends. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

It is official. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting finally accepted death over balance.

This week, the CPB announced that, with the withdrawal of federal funding, it would cease operations by September 30, 2025: “Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations.”

The autopsy for the CPB, however, will put this cause of death as a self-inflicted blow.

For almost 60 years, Republican Presidents and conservative politicians have complained about the overwhelming liberal bias at the CPB and its supported programs, particularly National Public Radio (NPR). For most of those years, the CPB could shrug off the complaints. The Democrats controlled one or both houses (or at least the White House). With the political left solidly behind the CPB, the corporation refused to carry out even modest reforms. It simply gave the stiff arm to every conservative effort to bring its programming back to the middle of the political spectrum.

Even in the face of a GOP-controlled Congress and a Republican president, the CPB was defiant in denying any bias. It suggested that decades of complaints from the right were nothing more than the fevered imagination of far-right activists.

For the record, I was not calling for the termination of funding of the CPB, which I thought could still be forced to reform itself. What I opposed was the continuation of funding for NPR as a state-subsidized media outlet. It was not the pronounced bias of NPR that I felt justified termination. This country should preserve a wall of separation between the government and the media, a view that even a former NPR CEO acknowledged recently as legitimate.

CPB is different. It funded a broader array of programming and could easily correct its course. For decades, all the CPB had to do is refocus on programming to appeal to the greatest cross section of the population and to decline to fund media programs like NPR that became more strident and partisan by the year. It seemed that the CPB was trapped within its own echo chambered existence.

On the left, the CPB was the hero institution standing up to social and political reactionaries. That is what CPB officials heard at cocktail parties and conferences. They heard little from the public outside of their core, narrow constituency. For individual administrators and board members, their status and success were tied to the very bias that was alienating most of America.

For them, the choice was clear between neutrality and nonexistence: they grabbed a hemlock-filled, NPR pledge mug and drank deeply.

They are not the only figures choosing death over social dishonor. Efforts to restore balance and neutrality at the Washington Post has led to a virtual revolt. Even after CEO William Lewis told staff that the newspaper was gushing readers and revenue, the staff refused to yield. He could not have put it more bluntly, telling them, “People are not reading your stuff.” In other words, they were writing for each other as readers were fleeing to other sources of news.

You would think that Washington Post writers would recognize that, if they wanted to be journalists, they would have to return to more neutral and objective reporting. It does not work that way. Many of these editors and writers had secured their very positions in rejecting neutrality and embracing advocacy journalism. By their own previously stated standards, a return to traditional journalism would be capitulation and cowardice. Thus, they would rather see the Post go insolvent than independent.

That takes us back to the CPB. The announcement of cessation was met with a chorus of wails and laments on the left. Yet, these are the same people who preferred this option to reforming the CPB to serve the greatest number of Americans.

NPR made the same choice. A few years ago, it was given the opportunity to select a new CEO who would represent a serious, centrist leadership for the failing news organization. Instead, the board doubled down on that very bias and selected Katherine Maher, who had a long history of inflammatory political attacks on conservatives and was the very embodiment of activism.

As late as a few months ago, CPB could have come forward with real reforms. Instead, PBS President Paula Kerger threatened legal action if Congress had the temerity to refuse to fund her organization. At the same time, she did nothing to distance herself from NPR, which was dragging down CPB like an anchor. Even as NPR’s Katherine Maher imploded before Congress, Kerger refused to budge.

The irony is that NPR is likely to survive in reduced form, appealing to a shrinking audience of predominantly white, affluent, liberal listeners in major cities.

Conversely, CPB is laying off its entire staff in a righteous, indignant huff. None of these people needed to lose their jobs if their leadership served their organization by listening to views beyond their own insular circle of enablers. The demise of the CPB now stands as the most impressive and unnecessary act of self-termination since the appearance of Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad:

In what should come as a surprise to nobody, ‘relatively simple’ AI bots set loose in simulations designed to mimic real-world stock and bond exchanges don’t just compete for returns; they collude to fix prices, hoard profits, and box out human traders, according to a trio of researchers from Wharton and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. 

As Bloomberg reports;

In simulations designed to mimic real-world markets, trading agents powered by artificial intelligence formed price-fixing cartels — without explicit instruction. Even with relatively simple programming, the bots chose to collude when left to their own devices, raising fresh alarms for market watchdogs.

Put another way, AI bots don’t need to be evil — or even particularly smart — to rig the market. Left alone, they’ll learn it themselves. 

According to Itay Goldstein, one of the researchers and a finance professor at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania, “You can get these fairly simple-minded AI algorithms to collude … It looks very pervasive, either when the market is very noisy or when the market is not noisy.”

The phenomenon suggests that AI agents pose a challenge that regulators have yet to confront – with the trio’s research having already drawn attention from both regulators and asset managers. They have been invited to preset their findings at a seminar, while some quant firms – unnamed by Winston Dou (Goldstein’s Wharton colleague) – expressing interest in clear regulatory guidelines and rules for AI-powered algorithmic trading execution.

“They worry that it’s not their intention,” said Dou. “But regulators can come to them and say: ‘You’re doing something wrong.’”

According to the report, academics are increasingly researching how generative AI and reinforcement learning might reshape Wall Street – with a recent Coalition Greenwich survey showing that 15% of buy-side traders are already using AI in their execution workflows, and another 25% planning to follow in the next year. 

That said, the Wharton paper doesn’t claim AI collusion is currently happening in the real world – and takes no position whether humans are up to similar things. The researchers created a hypothetical trading environment with a range of simulated participants spanning mutual funds to market makers, along with noise-generating, meme-chasing retail investors. They then unleashed their AI bots and studied the outcomes. 

In several of the simulated markets, the AI agents began cooperating rather than competing, effectively forming cartels that shared profits and discouraged defection. When prices reflected clear, fundamental information, the bots kept a low profile, avoiding moves that might disrupt the collective gain.

In noisier markets, they settled into the same cooperative routines and stopped searching for better strategies. The researchers called this effect “artificial stupidity”: a tendency for the bots to quit trying new ideas, locking into profit-sharing patterns simply because they worked well enough. -Bloomberg

“For humans, it’s hard to coordinate on being dumb because we have egos,” said Dou. “But machines are like ‘as long as the figures are profitable, we can choose to coordinate on being dumb.’”

To assess exactly how much collusion was going on, the researchers created a metric called “collusion capacity” that compares the AI traders’ collective profits to those they could make when competition is either non-existent or rampant, with zero denoting no collusion, and one indicating a perfect cartel. The bots consistently scored above 0.5 in both low-noise or high-noise markets, suggesting the need for new regulatory thinking that will focus on behavioral outcomes vs. communication or intent. 

“While restricting algorithmic complexity or memory capacity may help deter price-trigger AI collusion, such measures can inadvertently exacerbate over-pruning bias,” the researchers wrote. “As a result, well-intentioned constraints may unintentionally undermine market efficiency.“

h/t Capital.news