An Atlanta elementary school teacher has created a designated “fart corner” where students can pass gas without leaving class or interrupting lessons, according to NBC.

Second grade teacher Candy Sydney Browning calls the area the “gas station,” while the specific spot is known as the “gusty winds area.” Students can quietly get up, walk to the corner, take care of business and return to their seats without asking permission.

Sydney Browning came up with the idea after noticing that bathroom trips and students reacting to classmates passing gas were taking time away from lessons. She had already started encouraging students to use the restroom before lessons so they would not need to leave as often. Passing gas, however, created another distraction. Students would point fingers, move away from one another and announce who they thought was responsible.

Rather than treating it as something embarrassing, Sydney Browning wanted students to understand that passing gas is simply a normal bodily function. “It’s normal,” she told them. “But you have to excuse yourself.” Creating a specific area gave students a discreet way to do that without stopping the lesson.

They do not need to raise their hands or ask for permission, which means Sydney Browning can continue teaching while the student briefly steps away.

NBC writes that the idea soon became a normal part of classroom life. Sydney Browning said the first student to use the station attracted a few smiles and curious looks from classmates. However, no one pointed fingers or made fun of him, and eventually students stopped paying attention altogether.

“It just became a norm,” she told TODAY. She said the station has become so ordinary that she sometimes forgets it is even there. 

After Browning shared the setup on TikTok, the unusual classroom rule received widespread attention. Thousands of viewers reacted to the idea, with some praising it as a clever way to normalize bodily functions while keeping students focused. Several teachers said they wanted to introduce similar areas in their own classrooms, while others shared that they already had their own versions of a designated fart area.

Not everyone was convinced. Some commenters worried that students who use the corner frequently could feel embarrassed or become targets for teasing. Others questioned whether children could really ignore a classmate walking across the room specifically to pass gas. Sydney Browning believes making the practice routine is exactly what prevents it from becoming a bigger issue. When adults and students stop treating it as something shocking or funny, it becomes less interesting.

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com,

President Donald Trump’s investment accounts sold between $500,000 and $1 million of ExxonMobil stock on April 7, the same day Trump announced a ceasefire in the Iran war and hours before Exxon shares opened 6.5% lower, according to financial disclosures reviewed by CBS News.

Exxon closed at $163.91 on April 7 before Trump announced the ceasefire that evening and opened at $153.52 the following morning. The transaction was one of hundreds of thousands of dollars in purchases and sales involving Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and other oil and gas companies during the first half of 2026, according to filings with the Office of Government Ethics as reported by CBS News. 

Those trades continued through a war that sent oil prices sharply higher and delivered some of the strongest earnings for U.S. oil majors since 2022. ExxonMobil and Chevron ultimately earned a combined $26.5 billion in the second quarter as the Iran war and disruption to oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz drove crude prices and refining margins sharply higher. Exxon reported $14.5 billion in net income, more than double its year-earlier profit and its best result in four years, while Chevron reported record net income of $12.2 billion, nearly five times its year-earlier result. Trump subsequently accused the companies of making “too much money” and demanded that they cut fuel prices.

CBS reported that Trump’s accounts executed roughly 3,600 stock and securities trades worth between $212 million and $695 million during the first quarter alone. Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee estimate that his oil and gas holdings increased in value from between $13 million and $46 million at the start of the year to between $17 million and $61 million by mid-August. The estimate does not include trades made during 2026.

The White House said Trump does not direct the trades. Spokesman Davis Ingle told CBS that the portfolio is managed independently by third-party financial institutions using computer-based model portfolios and that Trump and his family cannot influence when securities are bought or sold.

Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust, and federal law does not prohibit presidents from owning or trading individual stocks. His energy holdings remain a small portion of a fortune Forbes estimates at more than $6 billion.

Moody’s Ratings downgraded Democrat-led Baltimore City’s bond rating this week, highlighting a rapidly deteriorating financial situation as declining reserves, depleted utility funds, and mounting borrowing costs strain the crime-ridden metro area best known for the hit HBO series The Wire.

Local outlet Fox Baltimore reports that the ratings agency lowered Baltimore’s rating from Aa2 to Aa3, citing “declining fund balance and cash levels across all government operations,” with much of the deterioration concentrated in utility and internal-service funds.

Moody’s explained that the city’s finances have weakened since the COVID-19 pandemic, despite efforts and forecasts aimed at stabilizing reserves. The new Aa3 rating remains investment grade, but the downgrade suggests that the municipal bond market will demand a higher rate when lending to the city.

In a statement, the ratings agency said the downgrade “reflects the trend of declining fund balance and cash levels across all government operations, largely concentrated in the utility and internal service funds.”

Economist Anirban Basu warned that the city’s financial position is deteriorating and that this is “not great news.”

“This is a city now with over $4 billion in outstanding bonds, outstanding debt in that form,” said Basu. “And the decline in the bond rating from Aa2 to Aa3 simply means that when the city goes to float its next set of bonds, it’s going to pay more interest or higher interest rates on those bonds, which makes financing infrastructure and other city expenditures more expensive.”

Basu continued, “A lot of our fiscal concerns, including how much we want to spend on education, how much we need to spend on infrastructure, and the fact that other city funds have also been downgraded, including the water, sewer, and internal service funds, have been downgraded recently.”

Related:

• Downtown Baltimore CRE Crash Signals Deeper Fiscal Crisis Ahead

Fox Baltimore stopped short of addressing a much deeper structural problem: Baltimore has seen a massive exodus of residents, losing more than 70,000 residents, or about 11% of its population, over the past two decades. 

That population collapse (back to 100-year lows) has eroded the city’s tax base while leaving fewer residents to support its debt, infrastructure, and public-service obligations, making the city widely unaffordable for many of the productive residents, hence the population exodus. 

Related:

• Welcome To Baltimore: Chaos, Gunfire, And Roaming Youth Mobs Transform Bar District Into Warzone

Years of progressive policy experiments, elevated violent crime, and left-wing governance in City Hall have transformed the city into an epic fiscal mess and, by some standards, a failed city.

Authored by Blaise Malley via Responsible Statecraft,

On paper, Alexander Vindman’s loss in last week’s Florida Democratic Senate was a shocking upset. After all, Vindman had a 16-to-1 fundraising advantage and far more national name recognition than the winner – progressive state Rep. Angie Nixon.

But the results reflect more than one poorly-run campaign. Vindman is one of the most prominent faces of a bygone political era known as “Russia-gate” – a period which Democratic voters appear ready to leave behind.

Just a few years ago, the idea of Vindman losing a Democratic primary would have been hard to imagine. The former director for European affairs on the National Security Council had emerged from Donald Trump’s first term as one of the most celebrated stars of the anti-Trump “Resistance” due to his role in the 2019 impeachment hearings. As contemporary profiles in major media outlets noted, he became, in the eyes of his supporters, a “patriotic truth-teller,” who was unafraid to confront power.

One Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), told him during the hearings that he and his family represented “the very best of America.” During a 2020 Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire, future President Joe Biden interrupted the proceedings to ask the audience to “stand up and clap for Vindman.”

Vindman’s rise and fall offers a window into a broader shift within the Democratic Party. During Trump’s first term, opposition to the president elevated officials (think Gen.Mark Milley, ex-CIA Director John Brennan, and Robert Mueller, the former FBI director the former FBI director tasked with investigating the links between Trump and Russia) and helped turn the foreign-policy establishment and elements of national security state into pillars of the liberal resistance. Meanwhile, Democratic-led investigations attempted to prove Trump colluded with Russia to win his 2016 election. That blossomed into ongoing narratives about his skullduggery and deference to President Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine and democracy. “Russia-gate” helped to bridge two enemies – Trump and Putin – for a winning political tool.

Now, as that strategy has lost its appeal, its decline is creating space for Democrats more willing to challenge the hawkish foreign-policy consensus that flourished alongside it.

And Vindman is hardly the only Resistance-era figure to fall out of favor with Democratic voters. His loss followed those of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), the majority counsel in the impeachment inquiry that grew out of Vindman’s report, as well as other members closely linked to various efforts to remove Trump from office, including Krishnamoorthi – who ran for Senate – Al Green (D-Texas), and Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) Republican-turned-anti-Trump activist George Conway, meanwhile, finished a distant fourth in a New York City Democratic House primary.

A Ukrainian-born Army officer, Vindman was serving on the NSC when he listened in on a phone call in which Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son or face losing U.S. military aid.

That call triggered Trump’s first impeachment, and Vindman became one of the key witnesses during the House’s inquiry. He parlayed that appearance into liberal political celebrity. His memoir, “Here, Right Matters,” became a bestseller, and he appeared on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” His brother, Eugene, also a former NSC staffer, was elected to the House of Representatives in 2024.

“Vindman and others like him were characters in the early Trump 1.0 saga,” in which “the national security state was the hero that was going to save the country from the corruption and the illegalities of the Trump presidency,” Elizabeth Beavers, a professor at Delaware Law School and former national security public interest lobbyist, told Responsible Statecraft. “We see that idea not resonating with voters so much anymore.”

Vindman had slipped easily into the role on the Russia-gate stage, which was already lit and primed when he got there. It started with the 2016 election. Beavers points out that during Trump’s first term, Russia became less a discrete foreign-policy question than an all-purpose explanation for Trump himself. It was a way of understanding his rise without confronting it. Russia, she said, became “almost like a Disney villain.”

Turns out that the very reason Vindman succeeded in those heady days is likely – at least partly – to blame for why he and others lost their primaries. Their democracies vs. autocracies (read: Russia) foreign policy is not salient with the voters anymore. Another country is, however.

On Israel, Vindman has previously described himself as a strong supporter of the U.S.-Israel alliance but said that no American ally should get a “free pass.” When the House voted on an amendment that would have cut $3.3 billion in aid to Israel, Vindman gave an unclear answer on how he would have voted, saying he was a believer in “the security of the state of Israel as a generational partner of the U.S.” but was opposed to a “Netanyahu administration that has undermined a two-state solution.” Nixon, his opponent, drew a clear contrast on this issue, saying she would have voted for the amendment and accused Vindman of avoiding answering questions about Israel.

Vindman’s entire political identity was largely built around the issue of Russia and Ukraine, however. In a 2025 interview, he declared that Israel’s success in degrading its regional adversaries, notably Iran, was “all a ripple effect off of Russia-Ukraine.”

Shortly after he left the NSC, Vindman told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that the American president “should be considered to be a useful idiot,” and “an unwitting agent of Putin.” In a 2025 book, he criticized U.S. policy – and what he sees as foreign-policy realists in particular – for being too accommodating toward Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Vindman unfortunately displays a woefully inadequate grasp of that which he tries to impugn: at no point does he demonstrate anything more than a cursory understanding of realist approaches to the issues he tries to elucidate,” the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos wrote in a review of the book in RS.

“Vindman represents a post-Cold War neoconservative view of America’s role in the world that has never enjoyed a firm grip on reality, but is especially unmoored from the challenges America faces today,” Episkopos told RS after the primary. “He stands as one of the most prolific standard bearers of the Russia-gate era, a credential that may have once earned him a prominent place in politics. Yet the public debate has moved on from the ill-conceived notion that Moscow lurks behind every major problem the country faces.”

Vindman’s trajectory illustrates how the politics of the Resistance intersected with foreign policy. The fight over Trump and Russia elevated a figure who championed a more confrontational approach toward Moscow.

“Neocons secured a foothold in the liberal establishment which will be difficult, though not impossible, to excise,” Eoin Higgins recently wrote in the Intercept. “And the Democratic leadership was able to put off actually offering voters tangible policy that would improve their lives for a decade by focusing on delusional fantasies – a strategy that’s now coming back to bite them at the ballot box.”

Though these views were not a leading cause of Vindman’s defeat, the consequences of his loss offer a window into whether the party’s future could offer a new kind of politics.

Democrats tended to treat Trump as an aberration from an otherwise sound American order, and to see the officials and institutions he attacked as the country’s best defense against him. “The resistance liberals argued that Trump is not normal, he’s not American, we must restore normality,” Stephen Wertheim, a historian of U.S. foreign policy and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told RS. “The other approach was: Trump is something that comes from this country … judge him on the results.” That second camp, Wertheim added, “does seem to be on the ascent.”

Much of the institutionalist case against Trump rested on the related premise that he was abandoning America’s forward-leaning role in the world. His second term has undercut that argument. Trump has launched strikes on Iran, sent troops into Venezuela, and threatened military adventurism elsewhere. Those who said that Trump would retreat from the world stage now have a harder time explaining why the U.S. alone can be trusted to lead on it.

Democratic voters have already demonstrated a willingness this cycle to challenge the party’s status quo on certain foreign-policy issues, most notably U.S. support for Israel. A series of House candidates in New York and Colorado, as well as Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, have won primaries this summer that centered their skepticism of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Whether this momentum extends to a broader reckoning on foreign policy is a bigger question.

That opportunity comes after nearly a decade in which the party’s central strategies and messaging for opposing Trump did not keep him from returning to office. Beavers argues that Democrats have a chance to campaign forcefully on a foreign policy that “completely turns away” from the militarism of both the party’s establishment and Trump.

“The lane is wide open for them,” she said.

A rapidly expanding dammed lake above a Nepal-Tibet flood zone poses a severe new threat to Gyirong Port, where hundreds of people remain unaccounted for following an initial catastrophic surge.

Formed by mudslides near the junction of two rivers, the blockage sits about 11 miles upstream of Rasuwagadhi and has created a 27-acre lake, according to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA). China’s Ministry of Water Resources estimated on Aug. 27 that the lake currently holds roughly 2 million cubic meters (528 million gallons) of water. Fueled by incoming rain, it is expected to absorb another 3 million cubic meters (793 million gallons) over the next three days.

The situation is increasingly precarious. The ministry warned that the lake is already overflowing and faces a high risk of a sudden release that could once again inundate Gyirong Port and communities downstream. Drone reconnaissance conducted by fire and rescue personnel – and reported by the state-run Xinhua News Agency on Aug. 27 – confirmed the danger, revealing that the lake’s surface continues to expand with water levels visibly higher than the day before.

In response to the mounting threat, Nepalese authorities have urged all residents, travelers, and rescue personnel along the Bhote Koshi River corridor to completely avoid riverbanks and other high-risk zones.

This secondary crisis emerges as the toll from the first flood continues to rise.

🚨🚨🚨#China alerts new barrier lake forms at #Nepal rivers confluence, posing high breach risk over next 3 days.

A significant barrier lake has formed near the confluence of the Chhochen Khola and Purepu Tsangpo rivers in Nepal, with its water volume estimated at 2 million… pic.twitter.com/XtMiX3YUvs

— Shen Shiwei 沈诗伟 (@shen_shiwei) August 27, 2026

An Aug. 27 update from the NDRRMA confirmed that 359 bodies have been recovered in Nepal, with another 910 individuals still out of contact. Meanwhile, across the border, the Gyirong disaster command reported three confirmed deaths and 558 people missing in Tibet – including 260 foreign nationals – as of 8 a.m. on Aug. 27.

As the Epoch Times notes, the new lake is still rising…

The new lake formed in debris left by the disaster near the confluence of the Cuojian River and Purepuqiang Zangbo, upstream of Gyirong Port.

Nepal’deki sel felaketinin nasıl meydana geldiğini gösteren bir simülasyon:

Himalayalar’da bir buzul kütlesinin koparak vadiye düşmesiyle buz, kaya ve toprak nehir yatağına sürüklendi. Oluşan devasa su ve moloz dalgası, kısa sürede nehir yatağı boyunca ilerleyerek önüne çıkan… pic.twitter.com/UtVuJvonR3

— Odak TV (@OdakTV1) August 26, 2026

Chinese authorities on Aug. 27 found that the broader landslide area had not expanded, but the lake surface continued to grow.

Water was already passing over the natural barrier rather than remaining contained behind it. Authorities described the condition as overflowing, not a full breach.

Natural dams are formed suddenly from loose rock, soil, and other debris rather than engineered materials.

According to National Cheng Kung University resource-engineering professor Huang Jing-sheng, water penetrating such debris can increase internal water pressure and reduce the friction helping hold the blockage together.

Historical records compiled by Taiwan’s Agriculture Ministry identify erosion from water flowing over the top as one common failure mechanism for natural dams.

The agency cautions that historical cases cannot predict how a particular lake will behave.

New Hazard Complicates Access

The dammed lake sits above an area already heavily damaged by the first flood.

The edge of the debris flow was located about 1.6 miles from Gyirong Port, with deposits approaching 5 feet thick in places, Xinhua reported.

An engineering team was using drones and 3D laser scanners to survey the blockage and measure its shape, surrounding rock, and water flow, according to Chinese rescue authorities, who said the upstream threat had to be addressed before crews could safely clear the large debris field closer to the port.

On the Nepal side, the new danger extends directly into the rescue corridor.

The NDRRMA and Nepal’s hydrology authorities urged residents, travelers, and rescue personnel along the lower Bhotekoshi to remain away from riverbanks and other exposed areas.

That warning is tied to the newly formed lake, not the initial flood surge.

More Water Forecast

China’s National Meteorological Center continued to forecast additional rainfall around Gyirong through Aug. 29.

Gyirong Port was expected to see light rain overnight on Aug. 27 and into Aug. 28, with moderate rain at times.

Rain was forecast to intensify on Aug. 29, with light to moderate rain and periods of moderate to heavy rain.

Along the corridor from Gyirong Port toward Nepal, the China Meteorological Administration’s public weather service forecast moderate to heavy rain on Aug. 27, moderate rain on Aug. 28, and moderate to heavy rain again on Aug. 29, with possible thunderstorms, strong winds, and hail.

A Chinese Water Ministry hydrological assessment put inflow into the lake at about 15 cubic meters per second (4,000 gallons per second) and said the volume was still increasing.

Based on the rainfall forecast, the ministry estimated that the lake could receive another 3 million cubic meters (793 million gallons) of water over the next three days.

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency involved.” – Ludwig von Mises

“The financial history of the last century shows a steady increase in the amount of public indebtedness. Nobody believes that the states will eternally drag the burden of these interest payments. It is obvious that sooner or later all these debts will be liquidated in some way or other, but certainly not by payment of interest and principal according to the terms of the contract.” – Ludwig von Mises

Anyone living in the real world of commuting to a job, buying groceries, paying rent, filling up their gas tank, paying utility bills, paying property taxes, and generally trying to live an honest hard working life with a couple weeks of vacation per year, knows they are being fed a load of bullshit by the Trumps, Bessents and Warshs of the world. They are spinning false narratives, faking the economic statistics, lying to you about how dire our economic situation is, and above all, spending and printing fiat at hypersonic speed in a desperate attempt to give the appearance of normalcy, when in reality we are living through the most abnormal, corrupt, degenerate, dangerous period in history.

This normalcy bias is employed by the vast majority of dumbed down, I-gadget addicted, debt enslaved, mRNA jabbed, zombie-like consumers, as they shuffle through their daily existence believing the propaganda shoveled at them 24/7 on the boob tube and their social media accounts, by billionaire oligarchs, corrupt politicians, captured media talking heads, and the invisible government pulling the strings to manipulate their thoughts, decisions, and false beliefs. As a born cynical skeptic, I no longer believe anyone or anything. I’m real fun at parties.

As our national debt surpassed $40 trillion last week and has been accelerating at a rate of $13.4 billion per day (annualized rate of $4.9 trillion) since July 1, the only analogy I can make is the final scene of Thelma & Louise when they purposely drive off a cliff into the Grand Canyon, rather than face the consequences of their actions. But, in my daily existence, the people at the gym, drugstore, and grocery store seem happily oblivious to the extreme danger we currently face as citizens of a dying empire, intent on going out with a bang. We are accelerating towards an economic meltdown, inflationary financial collapse, and possibly global war, and no one seems to care or acknowledge reality.

It’s almost as if the 270 million sheep, who allowed themselves to be injected with a Big Pharma toxic gene altering poison, with little critical thinking skills to begin with, have been rendered deaf, dumb and blind to the machinations of their overlords as we spiral towards collapse. It seems only 5% to 10% of the population have the proper critical thinking skills, distrust of the government, ability to do math, comprehension to understand history, and courage to tell the truth and act rationally, in an irrational, perverted, debased world, built on debt, delusions, and denial. It makes me sick to my stomach observing the cowardice, corruption, and degradation of the pedophile elites who wield the power in our society, leading the sheep to slaughter and the world towards catastrophic ruin.

The government continues to propagandize the masses with their massaged, manipulated and made up statistics showing a steadily growing economy, relatively low inflation, and historically low unemployment. Trump and his lying minions consistently point to the stock market at all-time highs as proof everything  is great. It is great for Trump’s family of insider trading grifters, his billionaire banking buddies, the congressional scum sucking snakes becoming multi-millionaires on a $175,000 salary, and all the toadies in the media pretending this everything bubble isn’t due to printing $3 trillion per year as the only crutch for this Potemkin village of debt, created by our Deep State overlords and their highly paid apparatchiks.

Even though the propaganda outlets: CNBC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, among others, are compensated gloriously by Big Pharma, Big Banks, the Military Industrial Complex, and Big Corps, to lie, obfuscate and mislead the masses, one only needs the most basic of math skills and understanding to see what is really happening in this country. Is it a sign of a strong vibrant economy when credit card delinquencies are at a 15 year high, student loan delinquencies are at a 6 year high, and auto loan delinquencies are at an all-time high? And this is before the real pain of a recession takes hold. This chart reveals immense pressure on average Americans who don’t have the benefit of insider trading tips from Trump.

Hysterically, mouthpiece for the Wall Street cabal, Bloomberg declares the all-time low in the savings rate is because the masses are making a killing in the stock market, so they no longer need to save. In reality, the average American household, making $83,000 per year, is only saving 2.7% per year because their government is spending over $7 trillion per year, while the Federal Reserve is printing trillions and conducting stealth QE, creating a massive inflationary headwind.The cumulative inflation over the last 10 years, even using the massively massaged CPI, is 39%. In reality, it is up well over 60%. Average worker pay has risen by only 45%.

Only in a warped, debt saturated, consuming society would this be seen as normal. In a normal, healthy economy which produces more than it consumes, the savings rate would be 10%, like it was from the 1950s into the 1990s. People are not saving because there is nothing left to save. When credit card debt sits near an all-time high of $1.26 trillion and the average person has a $6,600 revolving balance accruing at 22% interest, the savings rate makes sense. The average American is deeply in debt and barely surviving.

Among the vast plethora of phony government statistics, the unemployment rate is one of the most manipulated fake data points in history. It has no relation to the real 25% unemployment during the Great Depression. The current reported unemployment rate of 4.1% is a bad joke, completely falsified through the manipulation of the labor force figure by government drones at the BLS.

Only a triple jabbed, BLM supporting, Fauci fan believes the labor participation rate is currently at the same level as it was in 1974, before the overlords initiated the destruction of traditional families by forcing women into the workforce in mass through inflation, feminist falsehoods, and non-stop propaganda about girl power. They have purposely under-reported the actual civilian labor force to drive down the unemployment rate. The labor participation rate is far above the reported 61.4%.

At the turn of the century the labor participation rate was 67.5%. It drifted slowly down to 66% before the Federal Reserve/Wall Street cabal created great financial crisis. This is where faking it until making it went into high gear. The Boomer retirement false narrative was used as the participation rate plunged to 62.5%, far greater than the Boomer retirement pace.  Millions simultaneously became disabled and began collecting Social Security. The labor participation rate actually increased to 63.3% just before the Covid scamdemic was rolled out in early 2020. If you analyze the actual numbers, the ridiculousness of their manipulation model reveals the falseness of their numbers to mislead the masses about the strength of our economy.

• In January 2000, the working age population was 209 million, with 141 million in the work force. Today, the working age population is 275 million, with only 169 million supposedly in the work force. The population is up 66 million (+32%), while the workforce increased by a minuscule 18 million (+20%). There are now 106 million working age Americans supposedly willingly not working. This is untrue. Millions would be working if there were decent paying jobs to be had.

• There are 1 million less people employed today than one year ago, but amazingly the BLS drones want you to believe the unemployment rate dropped from 4.3% to 4.1%. Meanwhile, 2.8 million people must have made millions on AI stocks, laying bets on Draft Kings, or getting insider tips from the White House. They did not leave the labor force. They are unemployed.

• The BLS fantasy statisticians actually pretend you are not in the labor force if you give up looking due to not being able to land a job.  We are to believe that with 275 million able bodied adults, 162 million are employed, with 28 million working part-time, 9 million working multiple jobs, 16 million “self-employed” and 22 million pretending to work in government offices and funded by taxpayers.

The labor participation rate, at a minimum, should be 63%, with a more realistic level of 65%. This would put the actual unemployment rate at between 6.7% and 9.9%. Anyone who isn’t brain fogged from the jab knows the unemployment rate is closer to 10% than 4%. Does default rates near highs and the savings rate at lows jive with a 10% unemployment rate or a 4% unemployment rate?

The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity created a realistic measure of true unemployment which  includes not only people who are unemployed and looking for a job, but also those who are involuntarily working part-time and who are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26,000 annually before taxes. This “functional unemployment rate” is currently 24.9%, which jives nicely with the Great Depression level of 25%.

The 4% unemployment rate is as believable as the 3.4% CPI reported by the BLS drones, when everyone knows inflation is raging at 8% to 10%. Proof of the government faking these numbers is so blatant when they try to convince you health insurance costs have dropped by 33% in the last four years. Meanwhile, the median 2026 premium increase across all “Affordable” Care Act health insurance plans was 20%, and insurance companies have requested a median premium increase of 14% for 2027.

The world is cyclical in nature and human beings have a tendency to make the same mistakes over and over. Warsh and his central banker co-conspirators can talk tough about inflation, but it has been above their 2% target for the last 65 months, and they are doing the opposite of what would be needed to drive inflation to the 2% level. In fact, with the fiscal mismanagement of the country’s finances, waging wars across the globe, and nothing but $2 trillion to $3 trillion annual deficits for eternity, the bond market is ignoring the lies of Warsh and Bessent and dictating the path of long-term interest rates. It is very likely we will experience a replay of the late 1970s and early 1980s, except our debt is $40 trillion today versus $900 billion in 1980. Warsh is no Volker, and doesn’t have the balls to do what would be required.

The facade is crumbling and the bond market is going to hold the profligate politicians and the Wall Street owned central bankers accountable for what they have done. Their job has been to enrich the oligarchs and impoverish the peasants, and they accomplished their mission, pushing the country into an abyss with no hope of recovery. The 30 year Treasury just reached the 2007 peak at 5.27%, but in 2007 rates were headed lower and the national debt was less than $9 trillion. Today, rates are headed higher and the debt is $40 trillion and headed much higher. It’s a recipe for disaster.

The falsehoods and fabrications are running hot and heavy as we accelerate on the road to perdition towards a catastrophic denouement. Trump, Bessent, the Wall Street cabal, and their mouthpiece media (Axios, Fox, CNBC, etc.) are desperate to make you believe the Strait of Hormuz is open, oil is flowing freely, the impact on prices is minimal, and Iran is on the brink of collapse. Grand announcements about more sanctions, after we have had non-stop sanctions for 47 years against Iran, is comical. Bessent, the sodomite, thinks his bloviating bullshit and threats can move the markets in the direction he chooses. Look at the results, so far.

Barak Ravid, the CIA/Mossad Israeli plant at Axios, and Trump’s chief propaganda mouthpiece, dutifully reported the lies about 40 tankers exiting the Strait of Hormuz Friday night, with his source as unnamed “U.S. Officials”. This was then followed up with fake headlines declaring a 400% increase in traffic through the Strait, designed to drive the price of oil lower. All lies. Neutral sources, using satellite imagery, show very little traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Does this look like “traffic exploding by 400%”. They keep talking and the oil tanks keep emptying. When the reality overwhelms the false narratives, the price of oil will explode.

It seems both Biden and Trump do not understand the definition of STRATEGIC. They have both drained the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve totaling 327 million barrels during their terms for the sole reason of winning elections by artificially lowering the price of oil. The reserve is now at the same level as it was in 1982, when U.S. oil consumption was 15.3 million barrels per day, versus 20.6 million barrels per day now.

Even worse, Trump isn’t using the reserve in the U.S. He is selling it to foreign countries. That doesn’t sound too strategic to me, but this is the same guy who is going to import toxic Argentinian beef to undercut U.S. ranchers in order to win the 2026 mid-term elections. The SPR, stored in salt caves, is reaching levels where it can’t be effectively pumped. We have just over a month before the true bottom.

As Bessent ramps up his lying campaign to keep bond yields from reflecting the reality of our current and future economic quagmire, Kevin Warsh, the self proclaimed inflation fighting hawk, continues to flap his gums, while actually contributing to the inflationary fiasco. If a Federal Reserve chairman really wanted to squash inflation he would be raising short-term rates, reducing the Fed’s balance sheet, and using his influence with Wall Street banks to make it more difficult to lend money to consumers and the AI bubble corporations.

Warsh is trapped because if he does what he should do, the AI/Data Center financing circle jerk will implode and crash the stock market, making his Wall Street owners and Trump very angry. So instead he is actually exercising QE by expanding his balance sheet by $224 billion, while not raising short-term rates, and funding the $3 trillion deficit, the Iran/Ukraine war, and the AI bubble. Fed chairmen will always choose printing to pulling away the punch-bowl while the party is roaring. The rich get richer and the middle class is buried under a tsunami of relentless never ending inflation.

Kurt Altrichter explains just how easy the Fed and their owners are acting when it comes to credit, as we enter the crash zone. Everyone is going to keep dancing until the music stops, just as they were doing in 2007.

“Bloomberg’s index of how easy it is to raise money across stocks, credit, and rates just closed at the easiest level in its 35-year history, looser than 2021 and looser than the dot-com peak. This is the liquidity holding stocks, gold, and credit near records all at once. Conditions this loose have never lasted. When they tighten, the most leveraged trades, AI and credit, unwind first.”

The easiest financial conditions in history always leads to bubbles. We are in the midst of so many bubbles simultaneously, it is just a matter of time before the needle comes along and pops them quicker than an athlete collapsing from myocarditis after a Pfizer death jab. The stock market is now more overvalued than it was at the 1929 top and the 2000 dot-com top. Jim Cramer and his fellow boobs and bimbos on CNBC will never warn their non-thinking day trader audience about the imminent collapse of this debt driven bubble. There is a reason Berkshire Hathaway was sitting on $400 billion of cash in the first quarter. The market is 50% more overvalued than it was in 2008 before the last Fed induced financial crash. Winter is coming.

One year ago there was very little talk of data centers or AI, as the climate change and DEI narratives were still being regurgitated by the legacy media and the woke social media arms of our beloved overlord Epstein class. Suddenly, in 2026 the “need” for thousands of ginormous power sucking, aquafer draining surveillance centers (aka data centers) was essential to the future of our country, even though we seem to be functioning fine without these nature destroying monstrosities. One moment Bill Gates and his ilk are telling us cow farts are destroying the planet, the next moment these surveillance centers using more electricity and water than exists in some states are perfectly fine and essential.

And the dumbed down masses don’t even question the demands of these globalist billionaire totalitarians who have already killed millions with their covid jab genocide. These data centers do not benefit the average person in any way. The narratives are false. The electricity to power them doesn’t exist. The water to cool them does not exist. The entire AI scam bubble is exactly like the internet dot-com bubble. The bloated defense budget of nearly $1 trillion is about to be surpassed by the capital spending (all financed with debt) of just four companies: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. It’s a race to win the AI war. But it will result in another financial debacle, with the Magnificent 7 and those financing this bubble begging for a bailout. And they will be bailed out at your expense.

With Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, Flock, among many others loaning each other money to buy each other’s products and recording it as revenue, you should be getting an Enron/Worldcom vibe. The IPOs are coming hot and heavy, enriching the hucksters at the top, but once the financing fraud unravels, the stocks will collapse, bankruptcies will follow, and billions of square feet of rotting data center skeletons will be left in communities across the land.

It’s always a good idea to see what the corporate executives of the biggest corporations are doing, versus the narratives they are spinning on CNBC. With corporate profits at all-time highs and the stock market marching relentlessly higher, for some reason the corporate executives who know the truth about their companies sold $77 billion of their stock, a 20 year high (excluding covid). That is surely a sign of good times ahead. Right? Previous peaks in insider selling proceeded market tops and the crashes that followed.

It’s good to be the kings. These corporate insiders didn’t get into the top 1% by being dumb. The top 1% wealthiest households surpassed the wealth of the entire middle class in 2023 and have continued their acceleration upward, as they own most of the stocks and real estate in the U.S., which has appreciated rapidly since 2023. It’s funny how the middle class started losing the battle after the great financial crisis and their free-fall has not abated. When the Fed, Wall Street, Epstein class and the DC swamp all conspire against the middle class to enrich themselves through monetary and fiscal corruption, the ground work for revolution has been laid. Once this debt saturated shitshow implodes and the middle class is left holding the bag again, fireworks should commence.

You know you’ve crossed the Rubicon economically when interest on the national debt has surpassed our humongous war budget, and you need to issue more debt to pay the interest. With annual interest already exceeding $1.24 trillion and headed towards $1.4 trillion next year, you can understand Bessent’s spasmodic gyrations in keeping rates from exploding higher, as they should. If the 10 year Treasury was 6% and 30 year Treasury was 8%, where they would be in a free non-manipulated market, interest on the debt would be closer to $2 trillion per year and it would be game over for this declining empire of debt.

I’ve painted a dark picture, but it is a true picture based on unequivocal facts, not some nonsense narrative spun by liars, thieves, and pedophiles. When you see the Chinese central bank add 60 tons of gold in the 1st six months of the year, bringing their three year accumulation to 14 million troy ounces, along with central banks across the globe increasing their gold holdings, you can discern there is trouble brewing and countries are positioning themselves to survive whatever conflagration the American empire ignites during its ongoing death throes. Bessent’s economic warfare against China, Russia, and dozens of other countries across the globe will only add gasoline to the fire consuming this crumbling empire.

When you step back and observe the insanity consuming our world, you have to ask yourself whether this is really due to mind numbing stupidity and incompetence on the part of our leaders or due to a master plan by the new world order satanist pedophiles to purposely destroy western civilization and its financial underpinnings, which had allowed a vast proportion of the planet to rise out of poverty into the middle class. I do believe the globalist oligarchs are evil, arrogant, narcissistic, and diabolically power hungry, but I don’t believe they stupid and incompetent.

Therefore, I must conclude every seemingly preposterous act by our hand picked puppet politicians, their bureaucrat apparatchiks (Cabinet, FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ), Wall Street financiers, central bankers, activist judges, and global organizations like the WHO, WEF, NATO, UN, and thousands of NGOs controlled by billionaires and surveillance state organizations, are part of the plan to depopulate the planet, impoverish the survivors, create a totalitarian electronic surveillance state, and control the peasants through CBDCs, mandated digital IDs, and social credit scores, which will restrict your opinions, movement, and ability to make a living and feed yourself.

When you grasp the almost incomprehensible malevolence of their end game, you begin to understand the seemingly insane choices being made on our behalf by those pulling the strings of our political, financial, and social institutions. The developed nations of the world have cumulatively added $100 trillion of debt since 2020, even as the demographics of their countries are incapable of servicing that debt. To exacerbate this recklessness, they all simultaneously flooded their countries with third world savages in order to overwhelm their social welfare systems and tear apart the social fabric of their societies.

The planned and coordinated covid plandemic, which successfully forced 70% of the global population to be injected with a toxic, gene altering, cancer and myocaditis causing death potion, has accomplished more than our overlords could ever imagine. It proved Huxley’s supposition that the slaves would come to love their servitude. Even as turbo cancers, heart attacks, and other issues created by the spike protein damaging their bodies, the vaxxed refuse to believe they were poisoned by their own government and medical establishment. The vaxxers still worship Fauci, even though his own texts and emails prove him to be a mass murderer. This phase of the depopulation agenda is underway and will ultimately eliminate hundreds of millions from the gene pool.

When Russia and Ukraine were about to conclude a peace agreement in March 2022, Boris Johnson was sent to Zelensky by his globalist controllers in order to insure the war would continue and expand. Four and a half years later, the US/NATO continue to wage their proxy war against Russia in an effort to weaken Putin, drive the price of oil and natural gas higher, exacerbate the global food crisis, and goad Putin into starting WW3.

The U.S. sneak attack of Iran, under the false pretenses of an imminent development of nuclear bomb by Iran, on behalf of Israel (because they have incriminating info on Trump from the Epstein files), has accomplished the feat of creating a global economic catastrophe, with soaring oil prices, and shortages of fertilizer, natural gas, diesel, and rare earth minerals necessary to produce the technology needed to run our world.

When you see Trump and his minions sanctioning the world, while threatening tariffs, kidnapping presidents, manipulating the oil, stock, and bond markets, you come to the realization Trump has been installed to initiate the global collapse, which they believe will usher in the final solution for the pesky peasants consuming too much of the world’s resources.

Once the economic and financial collapse wipes out the remaining wealth of the middle class, the masses will be clamoring to be saved by their overlords, who will “generously” provide their CBDC “solution” to the collapse they purposely created. The collapse is baked into this cake made of debt and there is no avoiding the disastrous outcome. They will solidify their stranglehold on the global wealth, increase their control over resources, and force the masses into their techno-gulag.

If you don’t sense the extreme acceleration towards this dark dystopian future, then you aren’t paying attention, are trapped in your cognitive dissonance, or are one of the highly paid henchmen promoting the new world order headed our way.

The almost desperate roll-out of thousands of data surveillance centers is because their techno-gulag world will require almost unthinkable data processing power to track every person on the planet; record our movements, spending, social media interactions, and conversations; and dole out punishment (disabling your auto, disabling your credit cards, freezing your bank accounts) to the dissidents (formerly known as conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers). The rapid roll-out of flock cameras across the country is a key component of their techno-gulag plan. They want to have the technology in place before the financial collapse. It’s a race to the finish.

Knowing we are in the final phase of this Fourth Turning should have given me an idea of how bad it would get, but the realization of how malicious, immoral, and satanic the Epstein pedophile class is proving to be, is stunning to behold. We are in the midst of an existential battle against diabolical evil for the future of humanity. Losing will mean an end to the freedoms and way of life we have experienced for 250 years.

Sixty years ago Carroll Quigley revealed the invisible hands controlling the system, and now they are pulling out all the stops in implementing their plan to make sure we own nothing and they own it all. We are experiencing the tragedy. Hope won’t be enough to win against such a determined enemy.

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank…sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.” ― Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, 1966

If you want a future for you children and grandchildren, you will need to step up now and do whatever you can to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of their data centers. Good luck and Godspeed.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith has rejected the idea of slapping export taxes on crude oil exports to the United States in retaliation for the Trump administration’s tariff salvo against Ottawa, saying they would be damaging to Canada.

“Although I understand the need to respond strongly to these tariffs, I cannot think of a more disastrous policy decision than cutting off or taxing Alberta’s oil to the United States,” Smith said as quoted by Global News, adding that the move would trigger a disproportionate tariff response from the United States that could hurt the Canadian economy.

“It would not only extinguish the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Albertans, it would economically hobble our friends and neighbors in other provinces to the east,” she said, warning of millions of jobs getting lost as a result of the tariff war.

Alberta exports about 4 million barrels of crude oil daily to the United States. Last year, the total value of these exports stood at about $80 billion. Trump has so far not threatened tariffs on crude oil coming from Canada but, according to Smith, this could change if Canada itself decides to use oil exports as a weapon in the tariff war.

As for the possibility of threatening the U.S. with a suspension of oil exports, Smith suggested this would be an even worse idea. “The United States would, of course, respond and cut off all gasoline and diesel from their refineries to Ontario and Quebec, right as we turn into fall and winter,” she told media.

Smith also said the U.S. could replace Canadian crude with crude from Venezuela, as a result of which Alberta would in turn lose its biggest oil buyer. This may be theoretically true, but with Venezuela’s oil production at barely above 1 million barrels daily and not all of that going to U.S. refineries, such a replacement is quite unlikely in the medium term.

The US Army’s Project Janus, which we detailed at length back in November, has selected its initial batch of reactor developers to bring advanced nuclear energy to Army installations to ensure resilient and ready power. 

BREAKING: The first fully operational commercial nuclear microreactor will be deployed at a U.S. Army installation in 2028.

To achieve this, the Army has awarded a combined $2.2 Billion to five competing commercial companies.

— Jeff Waksman (@Waksman84) August 26, 2026

The program is looking to move reactor developers through their first-of-a-kind and second-of-a-kind designs at breakneck speeds with the goal of “bending metal as quickly as possible”.

The following companies have been selected to participate under Project Janus:

• Antares Nuclear
• BWXT Advanced Technologies
• General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems
• Radiant Industries
• Westinghouse Government Services

The nuclear industry has suffered from decades of atrophy with little to no new nuclear construction to incentivize the manufacturing industry to invest in supply lines to support the build-out of a new national nuclear program. Project Janus looks to assist with revitalizing the commercial nuclear industry while also benefiting by harnessing the reliability of nuclear energy to enhance the abilities of the armed forces. 

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy, and Environment, Dr. Jeff Waksman, who is also a program lead for Project Janus, has remarked in recent interviews that reactor developers will be constructing and operating their reactors on various Army installations across the U.S. and will be compensated for the achievement of various milestones related to successful construction and operation of their reactor designs. 

$2.2 billion has been set aside by the Army and the Department of War Innovation Unit for milestone-based awards. Project Janus is aiming for their first operational reactor by September 2028.

Dr. Waksman has also provided estimates in multiple interviews for the price expected to be paid by the Army for power purchase agreements, with prices as high as $0.20-$0.30 per kilowatt hour. This price will vary greatly depending on location and use case. 

In addition to receiving milestone awards, reactor developers also have the opportunity to move through a faster regulatory pathway than the traditional NRC pathway, similar to how a lot of the developers have been moving through the DOE pathway under the Reactor Pilot Program. 

This will enable companies to demonstrate the operation of their design to investors and potential commercial offtakers. There has also been discussion of the potential for offtake agreements from the military bases for the first and second-of-a-kind reactors that are built under the program.

Now, on to important matters… 

On Thursday, US President Donald J. Trump renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, a move he’s been teasing in recent days on Truth Social – including writing that America doesn’t “expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer” amid an ongoing trade spat with Canada. 

On Tuesday, Trump posted an image of the lake with ‘Lake Ontario’ crossed out and ‘Lake America’ above it – with an American flag on the Canadian side.

“The United States is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario,” Trump wrote in the EO, adding “The Lake will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping America’s future and the global economy. In recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that the Lake officially be renamed as Lake America.” 

The order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) within 30 days, and requires all federal government references to the lake refer to it as “Lake America.” 

Approximately 47% of the lake lies within the US. 

New Jersey officials are weighing a plan that would allow homeowners to use batteries as emergency energy backups and a way to earn extra money. Under the proposal, storage systems installed at customers’ homes could join a virtual power plant program, helping the grid when electricity demand surges and paying participants for taking part.

On July 15, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities issued a straw proposal for a two-year, technology-neutral VPP. The state’s electric distribution companies would oversee it, and it would need to launch no later than July 1, 2027 Utility Dive reported.

In its transitional form, the Cool Down notes that the program would cover customer-sited batteries as well as other distributed energy resources. Officials are also looking ahead to a market-based, open-access VPP tariff for 2029 and beyond. Where rules allow, participants could combine payments for local grid services with wholesale market revenue from PJM Interconnection.

For NJ residents curious what a battery setup could look like for your own home, it may be worth exploring EnergySage’s free tools to compare home battery storage options and get competitive installation estimates. EnergySage has teamed up with the electrification brand Qmerit to guarantee you get the best price on home battery storage solutions. Those who want a small-scale backup option, Pila is worth checking out. Its plug-and-play batteries are priced at a fraction of what whole-home backup systems cost.

For homeowners, battery storage is one of the best tools for riding out blackouts because it can keep critical equipment such as lights, refrigerators, medical devices, and internet service operating when grid power fails.

Batteries can also trim power bills by saving solar energy or low-cost electricity for use later, and they can help households move closer to off-grid living or rely less on their utilities.

As opposed to large power plants, VPPs let utilities and grid operators draw on many smaller devices at the same time. That can ease pressure on a grid during peak-demand periods and reduce pollution derived from fossil-fuel-based plants.

The BPU said any program should be guided by principles including fair design, technology-neutral rules, equal access for aggregators, and coordination among programs so participants are not compensated twice for the same service, Utility Dive reported.

The straw proposal carries out a directive in Executive Order No. 2, which Gov. Mikie Sherrill issued in January. It called for a VPP program to be created within 180 days and pushed for broader participation by distributed energy resources in the PJM Interconnection capacity market. At a July 30 stakeholder meeting, Tim Fagan, manager for planning and evaluation at Public Service Enterprise Group New Jersey, said the utility is developing a VPP offer that would include an upfront incentive of roughly $5,000 for an 8-kilowatt residential battery.

Participants could cover the remaining installation cost through an on-bill repayment program if they agree to allow a battery to discharge during peak-shaving events, Utility Dive reported.

Andrew Bayne, manager for energy efficiency programs at Pepco Holdings, said Delmarva Power’s Delaware “bring your own battery” pilot is providing participants with an estimated $1,080 per year in performance payments sent by direct deposit instead of bill credits.

Such programs are examining how often batteries can be dispatched, which compensation level is enough to keep customers enrolled, and how straightforward the signup process must be for household participation.

Bayne said utilities still need to know whether “that juice [is] worth the squeeze for the customer — is that $1,000 a year worth it? … These devices behave differently when you call upon them.”

In the latest update, UtilityDive reports that eligible customers of Atlantic City Electric, Jersey Central Power & Light, Public Service Electric & Gas and Rockland Electric could receive up to $200/kW per year over a 10-year term to dispatch energy stored in small-scale batteries during periods of grid stress under the procurement proposed last week by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

The proposal targets up to 150 MW of behind-the-meter energy storage capacity that can reliably discharge during dispatch events called by the four electric distribution companies, which will administer capacity enrolled in their service territories. The BPU will host a virtual stakeholder meeting on Sept. 3 to solicit feedback.

The procurement is the first capacity block of the second phase of the Garden State Energy Storage Program, a statutory framework that requires New Jersey to deploy 2 GW of bulk and distributed energy storage capacity by 2030. The BPU is halfway to meeting that goal after procuring a combined 1 GW of transmission-connected storage in the program’s two-block first phase earlier this year.

In a statement, BPU President Ben Hertz-Shargel tied the Aug. 17 proposal to an executive order signed by Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill shortly after taking office on Jan. 20. It directed the BPU to issue solicitations for new solar and storage capacity and to begin developing a virtual power plant program open to third-party energy suppliers.

“The Garden State Energy Storage Program advances Governor Sherrill’s Executive Order No. 2 by growing energy storage deployments in-state to meet growing energy demand while improving affordability and resilience,” Hertz-Shargel said.

Residential and small commercial batteries would be eligible to participate in a temporary, technology-neutral VPP program that will begin next year and run for two years before transitioning into a market-based, open-access VPP tariff in 2029, the BPU said last month in a separate straw proposal. 

The BPU refers to the capacity discussed in last week’s straw proposal as “Distributed Storage Capacity Block 1.” Its primary objective is to reduce peak demand on New Jersey’s electric distribution system through coordinated discharge, which “will help avoid future capacity obligations and system costs, thereby accruing savings to all residential customers,” according to the straw proposal.

The proposal envisions the four electric distribution companies calling dispatch events to mitigate local congestion, distribution-level thermal constraints and other abnormal grid conditions. The BPU said it looked at similar programs in other states and conducted its own gap analysis to arrive at the $200/kW maximum annual incentive, which it said factors in “the private resilience value of residential energy storage systems.”

“This decision reflects [BPU staff’s] assessment that many consumers have some willingness to pay for resilience and thus do not require an incentive high enough to render the net cost of battery back-up power [to] zero,” the BPU said.