“A far-right Catholic sect’s plan to ordain its own bishops on the first day of July has placed it on a collision course with the Vatican – posing a possible crisis for Pope Leo a little over a year into his papacy, and straining the Roman Catholic church’s already fraught relationship with rightwing and traditionalist Catholics in the US and elsewhere. Founded in Switzerland in 1970 to oppose liberalizing reforms in the Catholic church, the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) has gained significant followings in the US, France, Argentina and other countries. … Under Catholic canon law, ordaining bishops without the Vatican’s authorization is grounds for immediate excommunication. So far, both sides in the game of brinkmanship are refusing to blink. The Guardian contacted the Holy See and the SSPX for comment but neither responded.” (06/25/26)
“Daniel Andrews (Local Market) discusses his social networking app that unites consumers w/ local businesses to discover healthy, homemade, organic products.” (06/25/26)
“Facebook in 2011 was already a centralized platform owned by a single company. What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful. By 2025, everyone had figured it out.” (06/25/26)
“There is an aesthetic and romantic tradition, a very old strand of thought predating socialism, and going back through Ruskin and Morris to Romantic-era reactions against industrialization. It simply finds modernity ugly, hurried, and spiritually depleting. Smallholding, craft, and seasonal eating have a genuine appeal to people who feel that modern life has lost something. This is not quite an argument, it is a sensibility which should not be dismissed. There are real questions about meaning and community in industrial modernity, but it tends to romanticize pre-industrial poverty selectively. Institutional capture has boosted the degrowth movement because much of its language now comes from NGOs, international bodies, and academic departments that have strong incentives to find crises requiring their management.” (06/25/26)
“The Federal Reserve’s primary price gauge rose at its highest level since 2023, reinforcing the central bank’s recent tough talk on inflation. Excluding food and energy, the personal consumption expenditures price index showed a 3.4% annual rate after rising 0.3% for the month, both in line with Dow Jones consensus. The core reading was the highest since October 2023. … Even with the elevated inflation levels, consumer spending for the month came in stronger than expected.” (06/25/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Sergio Martínez
“A central bank wields a peculiar kind of power. It holds a monopoly over money, and money runs through nearly every transaction we make. Because of that reach, a monetary mistake travels through credit markets, housing, banks, pension funds, and the budgets of millions of people who never had a say in the policy. That is the right place to begin a reflection on Alan Greenspan, who died on June 22, 2026, at the age of 100. His was a mixed legacy. Here was a man who understood the power of markets, and who nonetheless turned on those markets when they soured, blaming private excess for a crisis his own institution had helped make possible.” (06/25/26)
