Tuesday, July 7, 2026
US military aircraft seen over Persian Gulf after US strikes on Iran
More than a dozen US military aircraft were seen on flight tracking data over the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman early on Wednesday, hours after the United States announced strikes against Iranian targets, CNN reported on Tuesday.
The aircraft included at least 12 US Air Force refueling planes, a US Navy P-8 Poseidon intelligence and reconnaissance aircraft, and a UAE Air Force refueling plane, according to the report.
Lessons From Ayn Rand And Objectivism
It was way back in 1974 that I was on college vacation in Florida, sitting on a beach reading Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. It's a book about an innovative, creative architect who has to fight mediocrity (and more) to see his visions realized. There's a loose parallel to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, which is why Fallingwater has always held a special place in my heart. There was a moment on the beach when I looked across the water and was struck by an intense insight: *This* is what psychology should be all about. Not just treating illness and solving problems, but helping people find "the hero in your soul". From this perspective, the goal is to live a visionary life of values, purpose, and meaning. The best way to sustain the fire of a heroic life is to stay connected to the greatness in others. The best relationships inspire and a true positive psychology leverages that connection.
Wealth--in all its forms--is not a vision; it is the consequence of realizing a great vision. When we pursue trading for wealth and without a vision, is it any wonder that we stumble blindly through markets? The important question for any trader/entrepreneur is, "What is your Fallingwater?". What is the vision you're pursuing that will guide your innovation and your success? If you're not doing something uniquely, you'll never achieve unique and distinctive returns. You'll copy what the gurus tell you, you'll pursue one funded trading possibility after another, and your fire will "go out, spark by irreplaceable spark...in lonely frustration for the life you deserved".
True passion comes from purpose and true purpose expresses a vision of what is and what is possible. What you see uniquely and distinctively is your vision and in its pursuit lies your heroism and your key to a meaningful life. No guru will tell you that. They want you to follow them, not your own vision. When you discover something new and promising in markets and you feel the excitement of possibility, you know you're on your heroic path.
Brett Steenbarger, Ph.D
Push For A Robotic Workforce: Chris Murphy Introduces Bill For Massive Minimum Wage Hike
by Jonathan Turley via jonathanturley.org,
Sen. Chris Murphy has finally found a constituency that truly gets him. Robots and automated systems around the country likely whirled and beeped with approval as he introduced the Senate version of the Living Wage for All Act. At a time when workers are being replaced at record numbers due to the cheaper labor of automated systems and AI programs, Murphy moved to price out millions of more workers by increasing their costs.
The bill would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $25 per hour - a 245 percent increase - over 12 years. The far-left senator is following the lead of states like California, where Democrats dramatically cut jobs through such wage increases.
Murphy went on NBC to insist that he is "not a democratic socialist" but then attacked capitalism:
"[T]he Democratic Party has been historically way too timid in taking on corporate power. I think we have to understand that people do not believe that this version of capitalism has worked. And frankly, it hasn't worked. ... This version of capitalism isn't working. Now, I make the argument in the book that we should embrace, you know, what I call a common good capitalism."
He then added:
"And by the way, we can afford it. It's not like we can't pay a $25 minimum wage; we just choose not to because we've become okay with dozens and dozens of people in this country making hundreds of billions of dollars."
It is not clear who the "we" is. While securing a law degree, Murphy has never run a business and has spent his life as a politician, spending other people's money.
I previously wrote about wage hikes and the predictable loss of jobs that followed.
Democratic politicians from New York to California are pushing for a $30 minimum hourly wage for workers. Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and Democratic legislators in California herald their mandatory increases as providing a "living wage" for workers. In Los Angeles, a law requires hourly wages in the hotel and airport industries to rise by $2.50 each year until they reach $30 in 2028.
There is no question that workers are struggling with the high cost of living in California. But blindly raising taxes and minimum wages will exacerbate these problems, not eliminate them.
A recent report by researchers at the University of California-Santa Cruz found evidence of precisely what many economists had warned about in the state's mandatory wage floors. Stephen Owen, an economics lecturer, explained that they found "a plethora of negative outcomes, such as higher menu prices for consumers, reductions in employee working hours, widespread elimination of overtime, and loss of benefits for employees."
In other words, faced with mandated higher labor costs, businesses shrank their labor forces and raised their prices.
None of this is a surprise. Yet even amid such findings, Democrats are doubling down. They believe that because they claim to be the champions of the working class, it does not matter how many people they put out of work.
It is not just workers feeling the brunt of such economically ill-considered measures. In California, a two-person meal can run about $30 due to higher labor costs being passed on to consumers. It is only a matter of time before robots replace these workers.
What is ironic is that the Democrats are hitting the most vulnerable members of the labor force with these minimum wage increases. In my book, "Rage and the Republic," I discussed not only the economic changes unfolding due to AI and robotics but also the expected political miscalculations that are most likely to fuel job losses and wasteful spending. This is one of them.
As discussed in the book, certain industries are already likely to convert to automation due to increasing labor costs:
"For any wealth-maximizing, rational actor in the marketplace, the choice is obvious and inescapable. There is little reason for a restaurant to employ workers to make Happy Meals when they can be done by robotics without healthcare, wage issues, or scheduling conflicts. The very premise of McDonald's is to produce the same meals in the exactly the same way from restaurant to restaurant. That is precisely what robotics do. They will make fries in exactly the same fashion over and over again without variation."
Faced with this threat to the labor force, Murphy and others are moving to do the one thing to accelerate and expand the job losses by increasing the cost of human labor.
Ironically, giving the advantage to the robotic workforce could still work in favor of the growing socialist movement in the party. With more workers out of jobs, more will look to the government for support and a guaranteed income. That will further increase the role of the state. Of course, to expand what Zohran Mamdani called "the warmth of collectivism," millions of human workers will have to be put out in the cold as an overpriced labor force. Citizens will then become what I have called a "kept population," which could have a disastrous impact on the role of citizens in our unique Republic.
What is clear is that Murphy will prove to be the greatest friend a robot has ever had in Congress.
US says strikes hit 80 Iran targets
United States Central Command (CENTCOM) said the new wave of strikes on Iran has hit more than 80 sites.
The military reported targeting air defenses, command hubs, radar stations, missile systems and dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) boats operating in and near the Strait of Hormuz. It reiterated the strikes were made in response to Iran's attacks on three commercial vessels in Hormuz, an action the US claims "violated the ceasefire and threatened freedom of navigation in the international corridor."
CENTCOM concluded by saying its "forces remain postured and prepared to hold Iran accountable when the agreement is not adhered to or obeyed."
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/US-says-strikes-hit-80-Iran-targets/66651149
What Makes A Person Become A Communist?
by Francis Menton
This year’s primary season features the rapid ascent within the Democratic Party of the faction going by the name “Democratic Socialists of America.” Despite the gratuitous co-opting of the label “Democratic,” it is by no means clear that the DSA faction would continue open elections once they had achieved enough power to end them. Instead, the DSA adopts the hardest of hard-line socialist positions on every issue.
I previously reported in my June 24 post that the DSA candidates in New York had accomplished nearly a clean sweep of all the Democratic Party congressional and state legislative primaries in which they had participated. Since then, a DSA candidate has knocked out a 15-term incumbent progressive Democrat in a safe Democratic district in Colorado. And The Washington Examiner reports on June 25 that DSA candidates have succeeded in some 30 down-ballot primary races in “Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah, Maryland,” as well as New York.
So who are these people calling themselves “Democratic Socialists”? I’ve spent some time researching the biographies of these successful candidates. Remarkably, there is a pattern that repeats time after time, with only slight variations. Your budding Communist ideologue comes from a family that has recently achieved modest or even substantial (but not extreme) success in the free market economy; and then a member of the next generation goes away to school at some “elite” institution, often on scholarship, studying some subject where leftist orthodoxy is pervasive (African Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology are typical examples). The scion then either remains in school indefinitely, or leaves school but disdains the private economy and dabbles in political organizing or other left-wing not-for-profit endeavors. Combine this sort of background with a sense of entitlement, and the result is a bitter, angry, resentful young person, with no understanding of the blessings of freedom or of the private economy, completely ignorant of human history and convinced that the socialist/communist program will quickly lead to utopia.
Let’s take a few examples.
Zohran Mamdani. His family arrived from Uganda (of all places) via South Africa when young Zohran was seven. The father became a professor of left-wing claptrap at Columbia, while the mother became a relatively successful film director. In other words, Zohran is nothing close to “working class.” Young Zohran then went away to fancy Bowdoin in Maine, where he majored in “Africana Studies.” He then spent around a decade without ever having a real job, dabbling in political campaigns, “organizing,” pretending to be a rapper, and claiming to be “oppressed.”
Darializa Avila Chevalier. After graduating near the top of her high school class in Florida, Ms. Avila Chevalier got a scholarship to Columbia in 2014, where she repaid the generosity of her sponsors by joining the anti-Semitic Students for Justice in Palestine, and the co-founding Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Twelve years later, Avila Chevalier continues to be a “graduate student” in Sociology at CUNY. Although she claims to have spent at least some time as an “investigator” for a public defender organization, almost everything in her Wikipedia biography consists of organizing and leading protests of one sort or another, and it appears that her lifestyle has been supported for the last twelve years mostly to entirely by scholarships and fellowships (likely taxpayer-funded).
Melat Kiros. This is the 29 year old woman who just won the Democratic primary for the Colorado congressional seat covering Denver. Her family immigrated from Ethiopia when she was an infant. According to her campaign website, her father went to pharmacy school in the U.S., so presumably is a pharmacist now. Kiros went to private colleges (Washington College in Maryland) and law school (Notre Dame). She landed a job at elite Sidley & Austin in New York, and then promptly got herself fired in 2023 for writing an anti-Israel screed. She has spent the last three years as a graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver.
Mamdani, Avila Chevalier, and Kiros (and the other DSA candidates) follow in well-worn footsteps of many famous predecessors — all of whom seem to have very similar biographies. Consider:
Pol Pot. I wrote a post about this guy back in 2021. From that post:
Pol Pot (birth name: Saloth Sar) was born in 1925 to a relatively wealthy farming family (Kiernan: “In later years the family would have been ‘class enemies.’”) with some 30 acres of land and six buffalo. One of Sar’s cousins was a dancer in the royal palace, and became one of the King’s principal wives; then one of his sisters moved into the palace and also became a royal consort. By the age of six, Sar too had moved into the royal palace, and after that was sent to top French colonial schools of the time. In his early twenties, they sent him off for further education in Paris. Big mistake. That’s where he took up the trendy Communism of the day. What later became the Khmer Rouge inner circle — in addition to Pol Pot, it was the Thiounn brothers, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Son Sen — were all his pals from his days as a student in Paris.
Lenin. Although Lenin’s paternal grandfather had been impoverished, his father was a striver who (according to Wikipedia) worked himself up to Director of Public Schools for a Russian province, and got himself awarded a hereditary title of nobility! Lenin went off to Kazan University, where he promptly began associating with the radicals of the time.
Karl Marx. The story of Karl Marx, creator of Communism, is no different. He was the son of a prosperous lawyer, Heinrich Marx, but had a huge sense of entitlement and was angry and resentful that he should have to work to make a living. Here is a famous quote from a letter that Marx’s father wrote to him in November 1837:
"Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes?
Really, it’s hard to say it better than Heinrich Marx said it. These “socialists” are a crop of spoiled and ignorant losers who “quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages.” At the moment, that seems to be the key to electoral success in primaries within the Democratic Party. Let’s only hope that it does not translate to general election success.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2026-7-6-how-does-a-person-become-a-communist