I mean at some point you just have to laugh.

TPM last fall:

A friend mentioned to me over the weekend that he’d heard about Wall Streeters buying up the rights to tariff refunds from big corporate importers. So the idea is that a Wall Street firm goes to an importer and says, you’ve now paid $10 million in tariffs. I’ll pay you $2 million right now for the right to collect the refund if courts ever end up deciding the tariffs were illegal. My friend had also heard that one of the most aggressive buyers was Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm until recently headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by Lutnick’s sons. Twenty-something Brandon Lutnick, pictured above on the left in a 2016 photo, is the current chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. (He must be hella talented!)

Damn, I thought: That’s a hot story, crooked as the day is long. But I’m not sure how I or we would track it down without better finance world sources. Still, it was worth some quick googling. It turns out this is happening and Cantor’s role has already been reported. Wired and others reported this more than a month ago.

In mid-July, according to Wired, Cantor was buying up the rights to your potential tariff refund at between 20 and 30 cents per dollar. Needless to say, I bet that price has gone up a lot since last Friday’s federal appellate court upheld the lower court ruling that almost all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. So in paper terms Cantor has probably already made a ton of money on this.

Now, before going any further I want to make clear that in itself this transaction is fairly unremarkable. A huge amount of modern finance is about making bets on uncertain outcomes, bets which can be structured in various ways. It might be commodities futures. In this case, it’s the right to collect a refund that may never happen. The sale of debt — a ubiquitous feature of modern finance — is similar. Purchasing debt, whether it’s a government bond or your home mortgage, is fundamentally a bet on the likelihood of repayment. I don’t want to belabor the point, only to make clear that the transaction in concept is neither outlandish or suspect, at least no more than any other part of modern finance.

All that said, it’s hard to imagine anything more emblematic of the Trump Era than what is for all intents and purposes still the Commerce Secretary’s company (yes, yes, arms length hand off to his twenty-something sons) making bets on something Lutnick himself has significant influence over. Indeed, far more important than whatever influence Lutnick has over tariff policy is that significant visibility he has into the bet’s probable outcome.

Lutnick can’t be certain what’s in a judge’s mind any more than Trump can. But he’ll have lots of visibility into what the government’s lawyers think, how they rate their odds of success, what their arguments will be. On top of that, given the immense corruption of the current Supreme Court, I would say there’s at least a 50%-50% shot that Trump and thus Lutnick will gets signals from one or more of the justices about how the Court will rule. Any way you look at this it’s corrupt as hell. And on a more metaphoric level it typifies the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose rules that the billionaire class and their sub-billionaire toadies live by.

As somebody or the other said, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal.

Well to be fair it’s both.

Also too: The Meritocracy!

. . . this sums up well the cogency of the “policy debates” about Trump’s tariffs:

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digitaldiscipline:

derinthemadscientist:

insomniac-arrest:

movies about apocalypses: it’s every man for himself!! you can’t trust anyone, it’s a wasteland of solo travelers and sad families, we’re alone out here

humans irl: *pack bond with strangers*

*pack bond with large carnivores*

*pack bond with robots in space thousands of miles away*

Apocalypse preppers who fantasise about all our artificial rules and governments falling away in times of chaos seem to forget that we invented those rules and governments. Over and over. When you put humans near each other, they group up and make a society; that’s why those  governments exist. Do they think we magically stop doing that in dangerous situations? Because… we don’t.

hopepunk doesn’t have time for your racist doomsday hard-on, carl.

These days, it is easy to be pessimistic about palpable issues facing the world such as ocean plastic pollution. However, artist Solveig Egeland, distressed by the plastics frequently washing up along the shores of her hometown Fredrikstad, was determined to make a local difference. She began partnering with local children to build small cottages out of the waste. Eventually, her initiative culminated in the larger Håpets Katedral (Hope Cathedral), a unique art project meant to lead the way for much larger sustainability goals.

Although built in the style of a traditional Norwegian stave church and supported by the Church of Norway, Hope Cathedral is meant to be an inter-faith space for weddings and self-contemplation. Starting from a wooden frame, Its ceiling was filled in with rainbow-colored fishing crates found on local beaches. Although usually anchored in Fredrikstad, its location on a barge means that it is occasionally tugged to other ports as well.

Rare good news for the labor movement. In spite of Trump’s attacks on unions, or perhaps because of them, for the first time in years, labor union membership ticked up last year.

The share of American workers in unions edged up in 2025, the first rise in years despite the Trump administration’s attacks on federal government unions and the agency that enforces collective bargaining rights.

Union membership increased by a tenth of a percentage point to 10 percent last year, because of successes in union organizing and slower labor market growth.

About 14.7 million workers were union members in 2025, an increase of 410,000, according to data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the number of workers represented by unions rose to the highest level since 2009. That figure, which represents workers covered by union contracts generally, is higher than union membership numbers, because some workers opt out of membership in unionized workplaces, even though they receive the benefits of a union contract.

Last year’s union gains coincided with numerous actions by the Trump administration aimed at weakening organized labor’s power. President Donald Trump stripped millions of federal workers of their collective bargaining rights and canceled federal union contracts. He also fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board without cause, for the first time in the agency’s 90-year history. For most of the year, the board lacked a quorum necessary to consider cases alleging violations of the National Labor Relations Act.

Despite the attacks on federal government unions, union membership in the public sector grew in 2025 and continued to be about five times higher than the private sector, at 32.9 percent. That boost came, in part, from a rise in union membership in the federal government, as tens of thousands of civil servants joined unions amid attacks on their jobs from the Trump administration.

Two quick points. First, of course the workforce is a lot bigger today than in 2009, but it’s still good news to set total worker representation highs like this. Second, we’ve seen workers respond to anti-union attacks before by flocking to their unions. My own union for example, which was pretty sclerotic when I arrived here in 2011, only had actual membership in the 50s before the Janus case put public sector unions at risk. The idea for the anti-union people in Janus is that a national right-to-work (which really means right to leech off actual members) policy for all public sector unions would mean people would leave those unions since the union would still have to represent them, member or not, thus weakening the union. But what actually happened is that unions responded by actually organizing their members internally. My own union’s membership rate is now in the high 70s. Trump’s attacks on higher education in the last year raised that from the low 70s. Sometimes, people finally do get it through their skulls why unions matter. And it helps if the unions themselves actually do the work of organizing.

So good news, let’s keep it going.

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The recent smear campaign spearheaded by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) against His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew reinforces how the Kremlin and Moscow Patriarchate march in lockstep, weaponizing religion for geopolitical purposes while slandering the first among equals of the Orthodox Church.

By attempting to label the Ecumenical Patriarch as an “Antichrist in a cassock,” the actions of Russian authorities serve to highlight the extent to which the Moscow Patriarchate is used as an arm of state power and disinformation.

For example, European security services and political analysts have documented this unholy alliance: in parts of Northern and Eastern Europe, ecclesiastical buildings and related religious organizations have been strategically positioned near critical infrastructure and transport routes serving as cover for Russian intelligence.

On the outskirts of the strategically important city of Västerås in Sweden, the Russians have constructed a church structure that has raised significant concerns among local authorities about its true purpose and intelligence gathering capabilities.

The irony of Russian intelligence accusing the Church of Constantinople of being influenced by Western powers or a tool of foreign actors is limitless, especially considering the fusion of state and religious structures in that country.

The outburst by Russian officials is not a new phenomenon but the continuation—and escalation—of an unrelenting effort to undermine the Ecumenical Patriarchate; it is also further confirmation that for the Kremlin, Orthodoxy is yet another battlefield of information warfare. Many years ago, I detailed this trend, exposing “How Russia’s Information Warfare Targets the Church of Constantinople.”

In recent years, such nefarious tactics replete with “imaginative scenarios, fake news, insults and fabricated information…” as aptly described in the Phanar’s response to the SVR statement, have become increasingly sophisticated, targeting new converts and seekers exploring the Orthodox faith through online platforms.

Russia‑aligned voices attempt to correlate Constantinople as being manipulated by Western forces, while simultaneously elevating the Moscow Patriarchate as the only guardian of true Orthodoxy.

Notwithstanding the attacks and continued disinformation campaign, the on-the-ground reality paints a different picture. In many European countries, governments, clergy, and faithful are pushing back and slowly disentangling themselves from the Moscow Patriarchate.

For example, the government of Lithuania has formally recognized a new Exarchate under Constantinople following a 2023 visit by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to Vilnius and subsequent high-ranking engagements.

In Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, security services in those countries have launched investigations into whether the Moscow Patriarchate’s operations threaten democratic order, with Bulgaria expelling Russian-linked clergy who were working to shape political processes in favor of Kremlin interests.

Similarly, in 2024, the government of Estonia refused a residency permit extension for the local metropolitan under Moscow, citing threats to national security.

In many Russian dioceses, clergymen who refuse to endorse Moscow’s military aggression—or worse, speak out against it—are removed from their posts and often punished, with some seeking canonical refuge under the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

These examples show that it is not only Ukraine that is moving to curb or eliminate Moscow’s influence, but a broader coalition of nations who recognize the risks of a Kremlin-Moscow Patriarchate alliance infiltrating their societies.

Against this backdrop, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is not acting as a geopolitical rival, but exercising its responsibilities in line with its canonical prerogatives as conferred upon it by the Ecumenical Councils.

Moscow, by contrast, has repeatedly rejected conciliar and canonical mechanisms when they do not align with its interests, unilaterally breaking communion, boycotting pan-Orthodox gatherings—such as the 2016 Holy and Great Council in Crete—and insisting on a model of primacy rooted in political weight rather than in canonical order.

Orthodoxy finds itself at a crossroads between two contrasting visions. On one side stands Constantinople that, despite ongoing slander, seeks to serve as a unifying and pastoral center, open to dialogue and committed to the freedom of local churches within the canonical tradition. On the other stands a church‑state complex increasingly described—including by a leading Russian hierarch in Moldova—as suffering from “institutional bankruptcy.”

The more Russia’s intelligence services attempt to paint Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as “mired in mortal sin,” the clearer this contrast becomes. The recent attacks are prompting many believers, clergy, and governments to ask which vision is faithful to Orthodoxy and free from state control.

In that sense, the campaign against the Ecumenical Patriarchate and His All-Holiness is a backhanded acknowledgment—and reminder—of their enduring moral leadership and spiritual authority. While Moscow deploys the language of intelligence services and propaganda slogans, the Phanar continues its quiet work, responding with the silence of prayer and the word of truth, confident that spiritual freedom, not secret service intrigue, is the true foundation of the Church and an authentic ecclesial life.

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