How Much Money Should You Convert To A Roth Each Year?

Authored by Javier Simon via The Epoch Times,

A Roth conversion allows you to turn funds in a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA. As a result, you get to enjoy qualified tax-free withdrawals in retirement. And you avoid the required minimum distributions (RMDs) that may trigger major tax consequences for retirees.

Roth conversions can deliver major tax benefits, but knowing how much to convert is crucial. Jack_the_sparow/shutterstock

However, a Roth conversion can also set off surprise tax bombs if you convert a large enough amount. But if you convert too little, you could be letting substantial tax savings slip away.

Luckily, there's no maximum or minimum as to how much money you can convert to a Roth IRA.

So how much should you convert into a Roth IRA? Let's see what the experts say.

Convert Only Enough to Fill Lower Tax Brackets

The IRS treats the amount of money you convert into a Roth IRA as ordinary taxable income for the year in which you made the conversion.

So many financial advisers recommend you convert just enough to fill the marginal income tax bracket you're currently in without converting enough to push you into a higher one.

So let's see how you can do that step-by-step.

First, determine your taxable income for the year from all sources. This includes the following.

• Wages
• Social Security checks
• Pension payments
• Dividends and interest

Next, subtract your standard or itemized deductions. Most people take the standard deduction. In calculating how much of your social security income is taxable, the Social Security Administration has a website calculator that is highly useful.

Then, check to see the highest level of your current tax bracket and see how much room there's left before reaching the next highest one.

Now, let's crunch some numbers.

Suppose you're a 45-year-old individual with gross income for the year of $80,000 and you're filing single. Subtract the standard deduction of $16,100 to get $63,900 in taxable income. That puts you in the 22 percent tax bracket. The top level for that bracket is $105,700.

That means you have $41,800 to "fill" the 22 percent tax bracket before you spill into the 24 percent tax bracket.

So you can convert around $41,800 and stay in the 22 percent tax bracket, making it a potentially tax-efficient move.

But higher income individuals may need to tread a bit more lightly.

That's because Roth conversions could increase your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI). And if it's high enough, it could trigger major surcharges on your Medicare Part B and Part D premiums. These surcharges are called the Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount (IRMAA).

So you should be aware of key thresholds you may want to avoid crossing - especially if you're near or over age 65. That's the age when you begin qualifying for Medicare.

IRMAA Thresholds

The Social Security Administration (SSA) determines whether you owe IRMAA to your Medicare premiums by looking at your MAGI from two years prior.

You may face IRMAA in 2026 if your 2024 MAGI was greater than $109,000 as an individual filer or if it was larger than $218,000 for couples filing jointly.

So you may want to run the IRMAA thresholds against your total MAGI. This would include the Roth conversion amount.

If you're in the 24 percent tax bracket, which opens at $105,701 in income, you may have little room to convert before you cross the IRMAA thresholds.

But a Roth conversion could still make sense if the pros outweigh the cons. Think about how much tax-free withdrawals in retirement, the avoidance of RMDs, and protection from potential future tax rate increases may benefit you.

Pro Tip: Timing Matters

Some financial advisers recommend considering Roth conversions during the sweet spot or gap years. This is generally the time after you retire, but before you begin collecting Social Security checks and before RMDs kick in (age 73 or 75, depending on birth year).

In theory, you would be in your lowest tax bracket at this time and have strong control over how you manage your cash flow from existing accounts.

But there's more you should be aware of.

Understand the 5-Year Rule

The five-year rule is key to the mechanism of a Roth IRA. But here's what you need to know about this rule when it specifically comes to Roth conversions.

In order to withdraw converted funds and their earnings tax-and-penalty-free, you must meet the following criteria.

• Have had the Roth account for at least five years
• Be at least 59.5 years old

If you withdraw converted funds before five years have elapsed and you're under age 59.5, you will likely face a 10 percent penalty on any pre-tax assets that were converted as well as the earnings. Plus, you'd owe income taxes on those earnings.

The Bottom Line

The right amount to convert depends on a variety of personal factors. These include your income, your current and future tax situation, your Medicare situation and more.

And remember, Roth conversions could be most ideal when you'd be in a higher tax bracket in the future than the one you are in now.

But you can also strategically make Roth conversions over time. This is known as staggering conversions. Nonetheless, you must understand that every conversion has its own five-year rule.

As you can see, a Roth conversion can be as beneficial as it is complex. So it's important to discuss this strategy with a qualified tax professional before you move forward.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 22:10

The Massachusetts Abortion Law Could Backfire On Democrats

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey spent this week signing away one of the last hard limits on abortion in a state that already ranked among the most permissive in the country, and now even some of her own party's lawmakers think she went too far.

The Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act strips away the state's statutory ban on abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Physicians in the state can now perform abortions at any point in the pregnancy, based on their own professional judgment, with no gestational cutoff written into law. The measure also expands legal protections for providers, shielding them from consequences that once accompanied performing procedures deep into the third trimester. Critics have a simple way of describing what changed: abortion in Massachusetts is now legal up until the moment of birth.

The bill cleared the Massachusetts House 119-33 on July 22, and the vote broke down almost exactly the way you would expect in a legislature that Democrats control by an overwhelming margin. Almost exactly, but not quite. Nine House Democrats voted with Republicans against the bill, and several of them made clear that their objections went beyond politics.

Rep. Jeffrey Turco, a Winthrop Democrat, did not hold back.

"This new law represents an extremist and dangerous position," Turco told Fox News Digital.

He added that the law "allows abortion anytime, unrestricted, and in many cases, publicly funded until the moment of birth." Turco also complained about the process itself, saying the bill was "rushed through the legislative process in two weeks, without an opportunity for the public to weigh in." He called the result "out of step with the views of the average person in Massachusetts" and added, "The new law is barbaric."

Rep. Chris Markey raised a different kind of objection, one rooted less in outrage than in unease about where the law leaves physicians.

He said the bill "creates a very slippery slope" and "puts doctors in a very difficult ethical dilemma."

Markey argued the law conflicts with what most of his own constituents actually want.

"While many are pro-choice, you can still be pro-choice and see this law as going beyond the norms of acceptability." Rep. Dennis Gallagher, also a Democrat, said he simply saw no need for the law in the first place.

Healey's office defended the bill by pointing to what it described as an ongoing “assault” on reproductive rights nationwide since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

"I've heard heartbreaking stories from women and families who were preparing to welcome a healthy baby into their family, only to receive devastating news later in their pregnancy," Healey claimed, describing families who traveled long distances and paid out of pocket rather than relying on doctors they already trusted.

A 2024 poll by the Reproductive Equity Now Foundation found 66 percent of Massachusetts voters supported expanding abortion access after 24 weeks, with 34 percent opposed.

That number will get cited endlessly by supporters of the law. It also happens to describe one of the bluest electorates in America, which is exactly the problem Democrats elsewhere are about to run into.

National polling on abortion has never lined up neatly with the binary pro-life versus pro-choice framing that dominates cable news. Gallup has tracked the moral acceptability of abortion since the early 2000s, and its 2025 survey found 49 percent of Americans consider it morally acceptable, down from a record 54 percent in 2024. Gallup's Values and Beliefs poll from May of this year found 48 percent of Americans want abortion legal in all or most circumstances, split between 33 percent favoring all circumstances and 15 percent favoring most. Meanwhile, 49 percent want it to be illegal or legal only in a few circumstances, split between 17 percent favoring illegality and 32 percent favoring rare exceptions. That split has held steady on the broader question of legality since at least 2022.

Read those numbers together, and a pattern emerges. Most Americans lean pro-choice in the abstract, yet a majority still wants some boundaries. This instinct is a lot closer to Bill Clinton's old "safe, legal, and rare" formulation than to anything resembling abortion without limits. Massachusetts Democrats just passed a law that abandons limits entirely, and the timing of this is very inconvenient for them.

Democrats already face a midterm environment complicated by a socialist insurgency inside their own coalition, an ideology that polls poorly with the general electorate.

Layering abortion extremism on top of that gives Republicans a matching set of arguments heading into November: a party too far left on the economy and now demonstrably too far left on one of the few issues where most voters still want some compromise.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 21:35

A Tour Of America's Blue-topias

Authored by Spyridon Andrews via the Abstract Truth Substack,

I lived in Massachusetts for a number of years and even at one time owned a home there. The home was in a town called Cotuit, on the Cape, a small, pretty town that recalled the atmosphere of the television show Lost or the novel Lord of the Flies. There was an equivalent feeling of desolation and desperation and the strange notion that cannibal zombies ran the town. We determined that it was not the place we wanted to spend our free time, even though I have to say that the clam strips were delicious.

When I was a student, I lived in the Boston area, and that was a different feel, more of what we can find in our Blue American cities today. I have to say that Cambridge was ahead of its time. When I worked on the student janitorial crew, my boss, one of the wisest men in Boston—a dyed-in-the-wool Bruins, Red Sox, and Patriots fan and Vietnam vet—comforted me one day as we sat together on the steps in Radcliffe Yard. Bob said to me, “Donnie, the thing you need to know about this place is that it’s basically an insane asylum where the inmates would never think of leaving.” It is a fact of my life that the best advice I have ever received has not come from professors or academics, and certainly not lawyers, but working people.

As effed up as Massachusetts is, even I was stunned to see the spectacle of the governor signing what, in my view, amounts to infanticide into law while a bunch of cackling celebrants stood around her clapping. This finally even got a rise from the local Catholic bishops, not a frequent event because God forbid they should lose parishioners. Clearly, I have more fieldwork to do in Massachusetts to understand the delirious reaction of women to removing legal restrictions on aborting their own children at an advanced stage of pregnancy. But I suppose we can take solace in knowing that this lunacy—which was once largely confined to university campuses—is now active throughout the country, and especially in America’s major cities.

So, I think it is time we took a tour of some of our major cities and important organizations so we can show the fecundity of choices that we have in terms of where to live in the relevant blue states.

I believe that it’s only fitting that we begin in the “Big Apple,” where a thirty-something, self-declared democratic socialist with no experience running anything is currently mayor of the world’s leading financial center.

New York City

Mamdani’s rhetoric and positions have struck many people, including many Jews, as openly hostile to Israel and even antisemitic, so it only makes sense that Jewish people would line up to vote for him. I’ve written about this before, and we are always reminded of the heartwarming stories of German Jewish and Hungarian leaders urging Jews not to panic and to work together with the Nazis. But the difference is that the Jews who support Mamdani today have university degrees, so they know better. And just because they elect a guy who has been reluctant to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada”—a phrase many Jews understand as a call for violence—or the destruction of the Jewish state doesn’t mean he’s not a swell guy. He cares.

He caps this off nicely with a piss-poor understanding of economics. Since we have unlimited money—don’t we?—we can have fare-free buses and city-supported grocery stores because the government runs everything so efficiently, and frozen rents because I suppose we want to make it completely undesirable for developers to build new housing structures. But the best part is that Mamdani wants to finance all this with higher taxes on corporations and wealthy people who actually provide jobs and fuel the development of the city. He appears to be shocked by the fact that rich people might leave New York City and take their jobs and development plans elsewhere.

Mamdani’s dream city is rounded off by his history of supporting the “defund the police” movement. Of the many super-dumb ideas that American socialists and communists have put forward, this may be the dumbest. It is, in fact, so dumb that it has been repeated in blue cities like Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It is usually accompanied by dim-witted announcements from social scientists that there are “social causes” for crime and no real criminals, and then followed up with an appeal to shut down the jails.

Boston

But let’s continue our tour and mosey on up the East Coast to the city of Boston. The socialist mayor, Michelle Wu, has called for the abolition of ICE, a mantra repeated in many blue states and cities, and does not seem all that concerned about drug trafficking and human trafficking associated with illegal immigration. After all, she needs every last vote to stay in power. Logically, she has supported noncitizens voting in local elections, along with many similar lunatics in the Boston City Council. She is also a big backer of rent control, something the state eliminated in 1994. But bad ideas, like cockroaches, don’t go away, and she seems determined to employ fallacious economic theory in the laboratory she calls Boston.

But before we leave Boston, we should say a word about the Massachusetts governor. Governor Maura Healey has now signed legislation removing the state’s previous set of specified conditions for abortion after twenty-four weeks and replacing them with the “best medical judgment” of the physician. The law no longer supplies a clear gestational boundary of its own. Not being stupid, let’s understand that this makes it possible to forum-shop for a doctor willing to supply the necessary medical judgment to terminate a pregnancy very late in the process. In Rome and Sparta, they were courageous enough to call this infanticide. Here we refer to this as “health care.” Although I’m not sure that unborn children, if they could express an opinion, would agree with that assessment. And I’m not sure that female unborn children would find this as liberating for women as Governor Healey does.

Seattle

Let’s continue our journey and take a 3,000-mile journey across the country and visit Seattle’s Mayor Katie Wilson. Mayor Katie is hardly an economic success story, but then that doesn’t matter if you are a socialist. One of the controversies during the campaign involved financial assistance from her parents, including more than $10,000 in campaign-related childcare expenses that were not properly reported, for which her campaign paid a fine. But this fits nicely with all the other socialists living in their parents’ basements. In America these days, it’s not necessary to have a job, know anything about American history or the Constitution, or even believe there is such a thing as right or wrong in order to vote. Katie tapped heavily into this voter base in winning her election.

Katie has also demonstrated a command of economics sufficient to out-Mamdani Mamdani. When she was confronted with the very real scenario of wealthy people leaving Washington because of the state’s aggressive taxation proposals, she famously said, “Bye.” This is the same woman who left college in her final year six weeks before final exams because she wanted to “burn a bridge to the conventional professional world.” Now, if she had perhaps crossed the bridge, she would have seen that even socialist utopian projects like the ones dancing in her head require tax revenue. And tax revenue comes from people who make money—some of whom are millionaires. She is a perfect fit for Seattle, whose residents have gone out of their way to turn one of America’s most beautiful cities into a trash heap.

Katie didn’t just talk the talk; she also walked the walk. She campaigned on a citywide capital-gains tax designed to target wealthy residents. All of her favorite programs—subsidized transit and universal childcare—need to be paid for, and so she expected to be able to ask wealthy residents for money the same way she asked Mom and Dad. It never occurred to her that these are not her parents and they don’t have to stay around Seattle and give her money.

Katie has also fallen in line with the sanctuary-city rhetoric of not distinguishing between American citizens and people who are here illegally and making use of our resources. She has courageously directed her law-enforcement authorities not to cooperate with ICE, because why would you ever want to alienate future voters? Illegal gangs, drug and human trafficking be damned.

Chicago

But we really need to go to the Midwest to enjoy the full panoply of socialist woke delights. In one sense, we have to hand it to Chicago’s Brandon Johnson in that he not only stuck around for final exams but went on to get a master’s degree from Aurora University. The bad news is that he taught social studies and not economics. This was obvious from his support for reviving a “head tax” per employee on large businesses as part of his effort to close the enormous budget gap in Chicago. Brandon helped create that budget gap by spending outrageous sums of money on newly arrived migrants, to the detriment of actual legal residents. This created waves of outrage amongst residents who were not even receiving basic services. So, perhaps being contrite over destroying the economic infrastructure of the city, he felt that he could offer a solution by chasing businesses out of the city. Like other socialist geniuses, he made it his goal to bleed high-income earners and businesses to fund his sanctuary-city resistance.

Well, he may not have wanted to do much about drug and human trafficking carried out by Central American gangs, but at least he made up for it by reducing portions of the police budget and calling for the abolition of ICE. See how smart that is? Brandon’s rhetoric about white people and “white supremacy” has also been inflammatory. He does not consider this to be much of a problem in a city where white people happen to live, because he seems to see them mostly as an endless tax base to fund his permanent revolution.

Brandon doesn’t seem to have won over the nonwhite voters either. Polls have placed his approval rating between 23 and 30 percent, and one survey found that fewer than one in seven voters wanted him to run for reelection. He has accomplished nearly the impossible in making himself even less popular than his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, currently of Harvard University.

Los Angeles

I would be remiss if I did not include my hometown mayor, Los Angeles’ Karen Bass, in this whirlwind tour. Karen, after deploying the usual defund-the-police rhetoric, actually discovered that police do play an important function in restoring order, and her later budgets called for hiring more of them. But she has displayed the same fiscal prowess as her fellow blue mayors and governors. Her budget shortfall is only about $1 billion. In her first couple of years, Los Angeles spent billions on programs to combat homelessness. Homelessness didn’t meaningfully improve, the money disappeared into a network of agencies and contractors, and questions were buried. But Mayor Bass has a distinction that her fellow progressive mayors do not share. On her watch, her own city burned down.

Mayor Bass has a tremendous record of placing incompetent wokesters into key positions. The Santa Ynez Reservoir serving Pacific Palisades was empty and offline when the fire began, and hydrants lost pressure during the emergency. Her fire-prevention leadership included committed wokesters who seemed to make up in woke rhetoric what they lacked in practical preparation. Her fire chief was on camera after the Pacific Palisades Fire had eaten half of the oceanfront communities, complaining about not having resources. One of the fire chief’s senior officials had previously made strange comments suggesting that someone needing rescue might object to being carried out of a fire by a woman who looked like her. But this was better than Mayor Karen, who was in Ghana at a presidential inauguration. And she was better than Governor Brylcreem, who had taken to disappearing altogether—when he wasn’t falsely assuring residents that he was working with President Trump to resolve the problem.

Bass had plenty of warnings and can be blamed for presiding over a government that was catastrophically unprepared for it. The empty reservoir, loss of hydrant pressure, inadequate pre-deployment, and later controversy over the after-action report all belong to the government she led. It may be hyperbole to say she burned her own city down. But, in the eyes of many who lost their homes, it doesn’t seem like it.

Like all her pals on the blue team, Mayor Karen is also soft on crime, anti-ICE, and, as a bonus, seemingly anti-fire prevention. This is hardly surprising given her history on the radical Left and her work in her youth with a pro-Castro organization. Like her socialist and communist pals, she is also an unwavering supporter of abortion, earning a 100 percent score from NARAL Pro-Choice America. So, we need to ask, if we burn the homes down of all the wealthy residents, chase all of the Hollywood studios out of Los Angeles, and make it unreasonable for anyone with a business to stay or relocate to Los Angeles, where are you going to get your tax revenue? And she seems to also want to take care of the next generation by joining in the effort that has resulted in nearly 1/3 of Generation Z disappearing through abortion.

As we take our tour of American hellholes, we cannot help but think of Margaret Thatcher’s words: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Between scaring off job providers and denying any rights to unborn children, there is not going to be a lot of money—or many people—around to fund the Leftist utopias of the future. Some of these Leftists may even have to do the unthinkable and get real jobs working construction, digging holes, building shelters, and growing crops, rather than dictating to the rest of us how we should live our lives. But for the moment, as they celebrate chaos in the streets and cheer on infanticide, this is their shining moment. Let them enjoy it, because it won’t last much longer.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 21:00

Trump: 9 Months At Sea For USS Lincoln 'Not Nearly Long Enough'

President Trump shrugged off mounting concerns over the welfare of 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Lincoln on Friday, denying that family members were worried and telling reporters that nine months at sea was "not nearly long enough." His remarks came on the same day that he promised an audience that he would declare the Strait of Hormuz a US territory, and that higher gas prices were a small price to pay so that a "very evil country" wouldn't obtain "a nuclear weapon."

The media's questioning of the US commander-in-chief was prompted by concerns raised by family members of sailors aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, who say their loved ones are suffering from low morale from being stuck on the ship so long, and that they're enduring moldy showers, rationing of food, and a lack of basic hygiene supplies like toothpaste, deodorant and soap. One woman says her son told her the food situation has been so bad at times that a meal consists of only a half-cup of rice and two tortillas. Things are so bad that there are reports that at least two crew members have recently attempted to kill themselves by leaping off the towering deck of the ship, which has been participating in the US-Israeli war on Iran. 

Hegseth rejects reports of worsening conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, including a sailor going overboard and declining crew mental health, calling the reports “completely misrepresented.” pic.twitter.com/JicN9bkoBQ

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) August 13, 2026

As he was about to leave Washington for a rally in New York, a reporter started to frame a question by noting that family members were concerned about what was happening to the crew of the Lincoln. "No, they're not," interrupted Trump, contradicting the fact that many have raised their worries in a town hall with Navy Secretary Hung Cao attended by some 200 family members, and with the media. 

"That ship is moving right now -- well, very shortly -- and it's being replaced with another very similar ship," Trump continued, referring to the USS George Washington. When the reporter asked if the deployments were going on too long, Trump replied, "No, no, no -- not nearly long enough." 

President Trump says the USS Lincoln deployment is "not nearly long enough." pic.twitter.com/E8jqBQCFmv

— CSPAN (@cspan) August 14, 2026

The Lincoln departed its San Diego base on Nov. 21, 2025, on what was supposed to be a seven-month deployment. That deployment is now in its ninth month, but what's far more remarkable is that the Lincoln went more than 200 days without a port call. Typically, a carrier crew might expect a port call every 30 to 45 days, with each break spanning around 3 to 5 days. On Friday, the New York Times reported that problems resupplying the Lincoln and other ships were due in large part to Iran's prompt destruction of a major logistics hub at America's Navy base in Bahrain soon after the country was attacked in the middle of ongoing negotiations.  

Later, addressing a rally in Garden City on New York's Long Island, Trump claimed that the nearly six-month-old war on Iran has been a great success. "After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated — pretty soon, I'll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States," Trump said, eliciting cheers from a crowd dominated by police, firefighters and other first responders. The event  was part of the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman. 

No doubt wary of the war's potential effect on the upcoming midterms, Trump also asked the audience to be patient with higher prices for gas and diesel, saying that, just before he joined Israel in starting a war on Iran, gas prices were only $1.85 a gallon. "For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you're doing it so that a very evil country...[cannot have] a nuclear weapon." Starting in 2007 and repeatedly up to the February 28 start of the war, the US intelligence community assessed that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. "I'll never apologize, I did the right thing," he told the crowd. 

no but you just might be sorry https://t.co/7pb7RJ3Pvg

— Kelley B. Vlahos (@KelleyBVlahos) August 15, 2026

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 20:25

Are China's Surveillance Exports Turning Nations Into Digital Dictatorships?

Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times,

Is Beijing hoping to turn other authoritarian societies into digital Chinas?

China’s rise as the world’s leading exporter of surveillance technology is yielding some disturbing results. Beijing’s surveillance export packages comprise an entire technological architecture that can give governments an unprecedented ability to see, identify, and track their populations.

Those technologies include cameras, artificial intelligence, telecommunications networks, cloud computing, facial recognition, license-plate recognition, and centralized command systems. Many mid-sized countries are becoming or are already customers.

Turning Other Nations Into ‘Little Chinas’

Turkey is an important case study.

To be clear, Turkey has not yet become a Chinese-style surveillance state. Its political system and institutions remain different from China’s. That said, Chinese technology companies have established a significant presence in Turkey’s digital infrastructure, and they’re not shy about it. In fact, Huawei has explicitly marketed its AI-powered CCTV and “Safe City,” i.e. surveillance technologies, in the Turkish market.

It’s no mystery that China wants to sell as much merchandise to as many trading partners as possible. But is it also possible that China wants as many partners as possible to use and become dependent upon its surveillance technology so that their societies turn into “little Chinas” by deploying Smart City tech?

AI Camera Surveillance

The first building block is the camera.

Chinese companies such as Hikvision and Dahua have become global leaders in video-surveillance equipment. Meanwhile, Huawei has developed AI-powered cameras capable of performing sophisticated image recognition and analysis. CSIS notes that Chinese firms can provide technologies ranging from cameras to AI analytics and centralized deployment.

Huawei’s AI-enabled technology is in Turkey, using cameras with embedded AI chips and deep learning capabilities to perform recognition and identification while feeding information into cloud-based big-data systems. Such systems could operate across enormous numbers of cameras.

That represents a fundamental shift in surveillance capability for nations such as Turkey. A conventional camera records what happened. An AI camera can begin answering who, when, where, and what.

A screen shows visitors being filmed by AI (Artificial Intelligence) security cameras with facial recognition technology at the 14th China International Exhibition on Public Safety and Security at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing on Oct. 24, 2018. Nicolas Asfouri /AFP via Getty Images

The difference is enormous.

‘Smart Cities’ Can Become Surveillance Networks

The second technological piece is the smart-city platform.

Huawei’s smart-city operation combines 5G, artificial intelligence, Internet-of-Things devices, cloud computing, and big-data analytics. The company describes an integrated “digital brain” capable of connecting multiple government functions and data sources.

None of those technologies is inherently authoritarian.

Smart traffic systems, energy management, and connected public services are all examples of how technology can make cities more efficient.

The problem begins when these systems become interconnected with security databases.

A camera produces an image. A telecommunications network produces location and communications data. A smart-city sensor produces movement information. AI can combine those streams instantly.

The result is no longer simply a collection of cameras. It’s an urban information and surveillance system.

This technology isn’t new, but the worry is about its widespread adoption. CSIS has documented Huawei “Safe City” agreements involving CCTV, intelligent video surveillance, facial and license-plate recognition, crowd monitoring, command centers, and other security technologies in dozens of countries over the years.

Huawei’s Digital Footprint

Another factor is telecommunications. Amplifying on the Turkish case, Huawei has operated in Turkey (and other nations) for decades and has established a substantial local research and technology presence. Employing roughly 1,500 people in the country and operating an R&D center in Istanbul, Huawei has its own people running the technology, providing additional opportunity for data gathering.

That matters because telecommunications infrastructure is the nervous system of the modern surveillance state. It’s a powerful technological information loop where cameras and sensors collect information, telephones generate it, networks transfer it, cloud systems store and analyze it, while AI interprets it.

The more deeply those systems become integrated, the greater the potential for governments to build a comprehensive picture of their citizens.

Huawei’s smart-city model explicitly combines those technologies.

Scalable Surveillance Technology

Why do governments buy it?

The answer is not necessarily ideology, although that may be part of it, but it is often simple economics.

China’s surveillance companies can offer governments a complete technological package at competitive prices. Huawei’s Safe City partners are disproportionately middle-income countries, noting that affordability and commercial promises can be important drivers of adoption.

That alone gives Beijing an enormous commercial opportunity. Why build surveillance infrastructure from scratch when you can just buy it off the shelf?

What’s more, such systems may well help illegitimate governments remain in power. But also, once a country has invested heavily in a particular technological ecosystem, replacing it can become expensive.

A woman stands at the booth of Huawei featuring 5G technology at the PT Expo in Beijing on Sept. 28, 2018. Reuters

CSIS has warned that countries adopting Huawei equipment could become effectively “locked in” through high replacement costs, while Chinese companies gain market share and establish technical standards.

That doesn’t mean that Huawei’s clients aren’t authoritarian regimes, many are.

Data as Strategic Assets

Another consequential factor is data.

China’s surveillance exports potentially provide Beijing with more than equipment sales. They can help Chinese companies expand their technological standards, gain experience in foreign markets, and deepen commercial relationships.

The strategic concern is that if Chinese companies become the suppliers of the world’s cameras, networks, cloud systems, and AI platforms, they would become deeply embedded in the digital infrastructure of other nations.

That creates influence even without direct access to every byte of data.

What Does it Mean?

Turkey, among others, is therefore a warning sign—not necessarily because it is becoming China, but because it demonstrates how surveillance capabilities can enter a country through ordinary commercial infrastructure.

Thus, the struggle between China and the West is increasingly a contest over technological models adopted by a growing number of nations.

China’s model emphasizes scale, integration, and centralized control.

Western democracies generally place greater emphasis on privacy, transparency, and legal restrictions, although Western governments also use facial recognition, AI surveillance, and other monitoring technologies.

The Chinese advantage is that Beijing’s companies can offer much of the infrastructure as a package. That makes the technology easy to export and, once deployed, difficult and expensive to replace.

The United States and the West, therefore, face a challenge that goes beyond Huawei, Hikvision, or Dahua. They must compete with an entire technological ecosystem.

The real question is not necessarily whether every Chinese camera is secretly spying on foreign citizens. But rather, it’s whether countries like Turkey and many others with a growing exposure to China’s digital infrastructure could become digital dictatorships because of it.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 19:50

Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Judges?

Authored by Matthew Andersson via AmericanThinker.com,

There is growing interest in whether an “ai” or, artificial intelligence judge can make better rulings than a human one.  

This is understandable as many legal decisions are either wrong or flawed in some critical way.  

Partisan politics and “lawfare" also continue to corrupt the legal system to a degree that has undermined its fundamental credibility, including public trust.

No one knows better than President Trump who was maliciously prosecuted as a civilian. 

Down in the trial courts where legal arguments start, many of the facts of a case get ignored by the court, or never get a fair hearing because they are denied on technical grounds, or from favoritism, or corruption.  

Critical facts are also not discovered or recognized due to human error, or lack of relevant subject competence.

When a case then gets bumped up to an appeal, the appellate courts are even more removed from facts. They may reverse on procedural mistakes, or if a particular statute or law was thought to be seriously misinterpreted, but appellate courts are notorious for affirming lower court rulings because sending a case back to the trial court implicates their judicial colleagues and hurts their record.

In law school, the judges, moreover, were originally trained almost entirely by reference to these abstract appellate cases, and usually don’t get their hands dirty on the nitty gritty of trial court facts.  

This is a mistake, and often produces judges with a sense of the law as a separate, rarified intellectual exercise.  This also lets personal bias creep into their method of thinking because bias can hide behind obscure law language that often appears little more than a legal “magic spell.”  

The term “legal reasoning” is an old concept, but it comes with costs: it rests on interpretations of prior rulings, or precedent — and the majority of those have problems.  The errors therefore keep compounding. Those errors are rarely caught by subsequent judges who assume the facts are settled.   

But another factor that is slowly bringing the use of AI into the legal system, involves the widespread corruption, and human abuse, of the law itself.  Partisan judges can rule based on political party allegiance, and sometimes without recognizing it. That’s how the human mind works.  AI doesn’t. 

The term “lawfare” also didn’t come out of thin air: it is the human manipulation of the normal legal system by lawyers or prosecutors who bring malicious charges, and then rely on judges who are not difficult to persuade.  That is partly because most judges have limited if any experience in business, technology and even work: they came out of law school, went straight into law or worked as law clerks, and their entire frame of reference is the internal culture of the system they are in. The charges have all the appearances of legal formalities that they are used to, so they get processed as if they were legitimate. 

Judges are also under pressure to manually process their caseloads, consisting of mountains of paperwork that clog up the system, most of which is never carefully studied, or read. Their own careers, and retirement interests, can short-circuit their willingness to think hard about the arguments before them. Judges are also risk-averse, especially when cases and facts may be controversial. AI doesn’t worry about controversy.

Law professor and federal appellate judge, Frank Easterbrook, in his increasingly criticized ruling in Klaassen, is an example. It concerned Indiana University student appeal over constitutional violations of their medical privacy. The court ruled against them by relying on an antiquated, irrelevant case from the year 1906. The court used “precedent” not to reason, but to simply process a decision, and ignored medical evidence, political facts, and law itself. At the time, judges were “all in” on the Dr. Fauci fraud, which was also reinforced by institutions including the CDC and NIH, which made any doubts, in their minds, beyond the necessity of critical thinking. 

What would an AI judge have ruled?  It would have been more capable, theoretically, of making a massive sweep, and test, of statistical data concerning documented COVID medical risk, the chemical analysis of vaccines, the regulatory lapses, and corporate profit accounting, including from medical providers.  

The constitutional law interpretations of the First Amendment, and the Establishment Clause of religious rights, were also clear, but ignored by the court. Judges on the bench, and in the Bar, can be motivated to protect their own closed system: legal precedent, even if utterly irrelevant to new facts, is a method of reinforcing that system.  AI has no culture to protect. 

Some elite law schools, such as the University of Chicago, are claiming that they are providing a “template for law schools around the world” by the way AI is simply added into their curriculum.  In some cases they are providing public presentations that report on how AI compares with human judges in case decisions. Their larger teaching posture, however, is that AI is just an elective, and creates no underlying disruption to the traditional law degree. It is still business as usual.  They're likely wrong.

What schools like UChicago are really representing, is an AI policy for the ABA law school system, asserting their legacy institutional domain over technology which threatens to replace them.  Apparently, doing things the way they’ve always been done is their template for the future. 

The entire legal system from schools to firms to courts, don’t have a firm grasp on what the larger AI strategic implications are. Few are acquainted with, or understand, the AI data centers that are being built across the U.S.  The number of such centers already reaches into the thousands. 

So, what are they for?  

Some observers point to them as being modern high-tech replacements of an older industrial, mechanical system, and a “21st century” infrastructure backbone in a new vision of the future.  Certainly in logistics, commercial order fulfillment, customer data, government records and other uses, it is powerful.  But there’s much more to it: networked data centers that blanket the country, represent a strategy to replace many human systems. 

In law, this strategy is seductive, especially if you look back on the way the DNC and its progressive donors abused the legal system by human intervention and political corruption -- and got away with it.  Illegally changing voting rules under pandemic pretext is an example. The targeting of a former U.S. president with malicious prosecution, fully enabled by corrupt judges, is another prominent example, and a powerful rationale for current legal system modification.

The federal courts operate under congressional authority, and Congress can remove them.  That, combined with the use of AI threatens the status quo. AI can more efficiently find and gather facts, while filtering or exposing legal mistakes and procedural irregularities, including tracking the affiliations and records of judges.

AI also puts legal education on trial, and may signal significant changes.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 18:40

"Won't Be Short-Lived": JPMorgan Warns Next Global Food Crisis Could Erupt Next Year

JPMorgan is the latest institutional research desk to warn that the next global food crisis may already be taking shape, driven by what its analysts describe as the "Five Ws": War, Weather, Warehousing, Water, and Waste.

In a new report titled Food Security Is National Security: A Compounding Storm, a team led by London-based senior global economist Nora Szentivanyi warned that disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz and the emergence of a potentially historic El Niño could weaken crop yields, constrain agricultural production, and keep food inflation elevated through the first half of 2027.

"Successive shocks since COVID have compounded, eroding food production capacity and keeping food price pressures elevated into 2027," Szentivanyi said, warning that "this is not a short-lived shock; it has reduced the likelihood of near-term disinflation, and the food inflation cycle is likely to exert pressure through 1H27."

She expects global food inflation to accelerate from 2.8% in the first half of 2026 to 5% in the first half of next year.

The warning comes despite a modest improvement in hunger statistics. About 645 million people faced hunger in 2025, down roughly 43 million from 2022. Yet 2.1 billion people, or 25.8% of the global population, still experienced moderate or severe food insecurity.

Szentivanyi outlined the most immediate vulnerability: fertilizer. She noted, "Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and the coming super El Niño are adding to fertilizer and food price pressures." 

She said that "crop and price effects are still building and agricultural impacts lag the oceanic peak by 6 to 12 months."

Szentivanyi warned that this year's energy shock could roughly double the inflationary impact of a super El Niño, lifting global food CPI by about 1.5 percentage points, compared with the historical .7-point increase. Food inflation is projected to reach a 5% annualized rate in the first half of 2027, adding .6 percentage points to headline inflation and slowing full-year disinflation by .3 points.

"Exposure is concentrated in South and Southeast Asia, including rice, sugar, and coffee; West Africa, including cocoa; and parts of East and Southern Africa," the analyst said, adding, "EM bears the brunt of El Niño. The largest food inflation responses are concentrated in EM Asia and Latin America, where weather-sensitive agriculture plays a larger role in economic activity, and food carries a higher weight in consumption baskets. India, Colombia, Indonesia, Brazil, Taiwan, and Korea emerge as among the most sensitive economies"”

Furthermore, China has been stockpiling food, fertilizer, energy, and industrial metals. While the West has strategic oil reserves (quickly draining to offset the loss of Gulf supplies), it lacks a meaningful fertilizer buffer. With the Hormuz chokepoint still disrupted, crop conditions deteriorating, and export controls spreading, Szentivanyi suggests that the next inflation shock may emerge not at the gas pump, as seen earlier this year, but potentially in the grocery aisle next year.

Szentivanyi's note should not be surprising to readers, as we've cited numerous institutional desks, including Goldman, HSBC (read here), and others, warning of mounting food inflation risks that could materialize from the confluence of drivers mentioned above.

This comes as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's global food price index climbed to a three-year high in July.

Bank of America analyst Robert Ohmes recently warned that another food price spike could arrive in supermarkets this fall. He said that grocery inflation "may be on the way," citing a blended index of wages, diesel, and commodity costs.

For readers, reducing exposure to increasingly fragile food supply chains may require building some resilience in the backyard. That could mean putting unused space to work with chickens, a garden, or both. While this year's growing season has largely passed its peak, now is the time to plan for next spring. Establishing relationships with nearby ranchers, farmers, and local food producers can also provide an alternative supply network when national distribution networks come under pressure.

Professional subscribers can read more on El Niño, Food Supply, and other critical topics at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 18:05

Fauci In Hiding As ABC Censorship Bombshell Explodes

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Dr. Anthony Fauci just refused a private transcribed interview with Sen. Ron Johnson's subcommittee. The same week, a former ABC News correspondent revealed that the network gutted a 2021 Wuhan lab leak investigation after the script was sent to Fauci for review.

The pattern is unmistakable. Stonewall. Censor. Invoke privilege. Repeat.

On Friday, Fauci's attorney notified Sen. Ron Johnson that the former NIAID director would not appear for a closed-door, transcribed interview as part of the ongoing investigation into the failed COVID response.

? WTF?! Dr. Fauci has just REFUSED to show up for a private transcribed interview with Sen. Ron Johnson as part of his investigation

Subpoena and CONTEMPT, ASAP!

Haul the traitor in and charge him if he doesn't comply.

JOHNSON: "Apparently, he has a lot to hide. Since Fauci... pic.twitter.com/FLxU7wEQOM

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 15, 2026

Johnson laid it out plainly:

"Dr. Fauci's attorney has just notified us that Fauci refuses to appear for a private transcribed interview. The American people deserve answers to legitimate questions regarding our miserably failed response to COVID-19. Some of those questions can only be answered by Dr. Fauci. He arrogantly once stated that he was 'very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee. I have nothing to hide.' Apparently, he has a lot to hide. Since Fauci refuses to talk about his role and decisions related to COVID-19, my Subcommittee will continue to obtain his records and request to speak with key individuals that he worked with. We will explore our legal options before deciding our next steps."

This comes days after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt for his July 29 performance, where he invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 112 times.

Fauci's lawyer responded to Johnson's request by claiming any effort to compel his appearance would "impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes."

The AP reported the decline, noting it followed the partisan contempt vote and the earlier hearing in which Fauci repeatedly declined to answer questions about pandemic decisions, origins, and funding.

The contempt referral is already heading toward the Justice Department. Sen. Rand Paul has argued the Biden preemptive pardon removed any legitimate basis for the Fifth Amendment claims, leaving Fauci with no shield against answering.

While Fauci ducks the Senate, a separate bombshell landed from inside the media machine that once amplified him.

Former ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran, speaking on The Fifth Column podcast, described what happened to his early 2021 Nightline investigation into the COVID lab-leak theory.

Moran said the piece examined evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had received Chinese military funding - something the lab's "Bat Lady" Shi Zhengli had denied. He and his team laid out the arguments.

Then the review hit.

"The day it was supposed to air, it gets 'reviewed.' It comes back to me...I was told: FAUCI," Moran stated.

He added that he was "absolutely livid," cursing in the booth as the final product arrived "incomprehensible," loaded with caveats and legalized language that stripped the original work of meaning.

"I've never watched that story [again] and I never want to. Because it wasn't mine, and most importantly, because it was incomprehensible."

He was told the script had gone to lawyers, standards - and Fauci.

? BOMBSHELL: It was just exposed that ABC CENSORED the COVID Wuhan lab leak report in 2021 because Dr. Fauci told them not to publish it

Terry Moran: "The day it was supposed to air, it gets 'reviewed.' It comes back to me...I was told: FAUCI."

ABC is COMPLICIT, and Fauci... pic.twitter.com/ZhO8eOuLcm

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 15, 2026

This was not a conservative activist speaking. Moran is a longtime network journalist. His account directly undercuts years of media insistence that questions about the lab were fringe conspiracy theories while Fauci and allies worked to shut them down.

These latest refusals and revelations sit atop a mountain of prior evidence already documented.

Secret texts recovered from Fauci's government iPhone showed him privately warning in January 2021 that the second COVID vaccine dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester" because of cytokine storms and fever. Publicly, he and other officials pushed the shots for pregnant women with no such caveats.

Emails previously released by Sen. Rand Paul showed Fauci instructing then-NIH Director Francis Collins to "read it, then destroy it" - language Paul has called a violation of federal records law.

At the July 29 hearing itself, Fauci offered an opening statement accusing Paul of an "unhinged obsession," then refused nearly every substantive question.

CNN legal analysts noted that the 112 Fifth Amendment pleas likely made his position worse, given the pardon removed criminal jeopardy and left him exposed to contempt.

The American people watched schools shuttered, businesses destroyed, and dissent crushed while the same officials privately fretted about risks they would not acknowledge publicly.

Now the central figure in that response continues to refuse basic questions under oath or in transcribed interviews, and a network reporter has confirmed that even internal journalistic work was routed through him for approval.

Johnson's subcommittee says it will keep pursuing records and other witnesses. The contempt referral sits with the Justice Department. The lab-leak story that was sanitized in 2021 is no longer radioactive. Accountability is no longer optional.

Fauci had years of unmatched power and media deference. That time is over.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 17:30

More Than Half Of Gen Z Investors Have Moved Money Into Sports Bets

A growing share of young Americans is folding sports gambling into their long-term financial plans, according to new research from the investment platform Betterment.

In an online survey of 1,000 U.S. retail investors conducted in late March and early April and released this week, 52% of Gen Z investors said they had shifted money originally set aside for stocks or other investments into sports wagers over the past year. Only about one-third of Gen Z participants reported no involvement in sports betting at all, compared with 63% across all age groups in the survey.

26% of Gen Z respondents - those born between 1997 and 2007 - said they view sports betting as a deliberate, ongoing part of their wealth strategy. That figure drops sharply with age: 14% of millennials, 6% of Gen X, and just 1% of baby boomers reported the same outlook.

Of those Gen Z respondents, roughly 11% described betting as an investment strategy aimed at high returns, while 15% treated it as a short-term way to raise cash.

The betting numbers sit inside a broader shift in where young investors get their information. Social media is now Gen Z's most commonly cited source for financial news, rising from 45% in 2024 to 60% this year - nearly three times the 21% who cite a financial advisor.

The findings highlight how the rapid growth of legal sports gambling and prediction markets is competing for the same discretionary dollars that once flowed into retirement accounts and brokerage portfolios. The state-regulated sports betting industry in the United States has expanded into a nearly $17 billion business in recent years. Prediction markets have also surged; Robinhood Markets, long known for democratizing stock trading, added them to its app in 2025 and has called the segment its fastest-growing business line ever.

Betterment Chief Executive Officer Sarah Levy warned that the trend carries risks. "When a prediction market or sportsbook starts to feel like a retirement strategy, we have a problem," she said in a statement. "These products are designed to keep people seeking the next quick score, not to help them build toward the next decade. Younger investors deserve access to the tools and information that meet them where they are, but the industry also has a responsibility to be clear about the difference between participating in a trend and building lasting wealth."

Robert Kosciuk, a 32-year-old from Huntington, New York, illustrates the shift - maintaining a Robinhood account for stocks but devoting more energy this year to betting, Bloomberg reports. He says he approaches sports wagers with the same discipline he applies to investing: researching outcomes carefully, avoiding emotional decisions, and limiting most bets to $100. He acknowledges the activity is gambling but believes he manages it more thoughtfully than casual players. So far this year he has earned roughly $2,500, enough to cover a vacation he attributes in part to successful bets on the Carolina Hurricanes.

Industry representatives push back on the idea that betting should be treated as investing. Joe Maloney, president of the Sports Betting Alliance - whose members include FanDuel, DraftKings, Fanatics Betting & Gaming, bet365, and betMGM - told Bloomberg that sports wagering is entertainment, not a wealth-building strategy. Adults who choose to bet, he added, should do so responsibly within a fixed entertainment budget and never with money needed for savings or essentials.

Broader economic pressures may be amplifying the appeal of high-risk options. Eighty percent of Gen Z respondents who already use or are considering speculative investments said concerns about falling behind financially played a role, according to a Northwestern Mutual study of 4,357 adults conducted by the Harris Poll in January. As homeownership grows more difficult and everyday costs rise, some younger adults are turning to sports betting, prediction markets, and crypto in hopes of accelerating progress toward their goals.

The Betterment survey also examined how investors make decisions. 56% percent said they rely primarily on their own research and judgment - more than any other single source. That self-reliance increased with age, rising from 40% among Gen Z respondents to 69% among baby boomers. About one in three participants reported trusting artificial intelligence for financial advice. Of those, 53% said AI had prompted a decision they would not otherwise have made, including 48% of all Gen Z respondents. Gen Z investors were eight times more likely than baby boomers to say they were comfortable using AI for long-term financial planning - 41% against 5%.

The survey polled 1,000 U.S. retail investors between March 27 and April 3, split evenly across four generations, meaning each generational figure rests on roughly 250 respondents. Participants were recruited through an incentivized online panel and were required to hold at least one investment outside a 401(k).

Tyler Durden Sat, 08/15/2026 - 16:55