The Commoner

Friday, September 25, 2026

Sup, freaks.

What are we doing here? An Arlington prosecutor explained how her office changed charges to help people keep DACA. Anarcho-tyranny: demoralize the native population while the character of the country is forced to change. Then Howell on commodities, Europe's AI gap and the financing behind the American buildout.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Marty's Bent: Are we still a nation? Arlington, anarcho-tyranny, and the replacement of a people.
• Michael Howell on commodities and growth, plus a fresh look at Treasury cash and bank reserves.
• Europe's AI participation gap and the financing question hanging over American compute commitments.
• Shielded Bitcoin research, a ZEUS update follow-up and today's bitcoin data snapshot.

Marty's Bent

Are We Still a Nation?

What are we doing here? Are we a nation? If we are, why is a prosecutor trying to protect an immigration benefit when deciding how to resolve a DUI case? The people driving on those roads should be able to expect that their safety comes before an official's desire to preserve someone's DACA eligibility.

Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, the Commonwealth's Attorney for Arlington County and the City of Falls Church, described the practice under oath in her July 16 deposition. The House Judiciary Committee discussed it in a report released this week. On page 89, she recalled fewer than ten cases in which her office considered how someone could renew DACA while being held accountable. Sometimes that included jail followed by “a lateral shift to a different charge.” Asked whether the concern was that DACA protection would not be renewed, she answered, “Correct. Yes.”

Read that again. Keeping DACA was part of the calculation. The federal rule specifically singles out a qualifying DUI conviction, regardless of the sentence. Change the offense of conviction and you can change the immigration consequences. She said the original charge remained on the record and the misdemeanor level stayed the same. The office was still seeking punishment, but it was also trying to keep the conviction from interfering with DACA renewal.

DACA defers removal. It does not grant citizenship or lawful immigration status. Keeping it in place should not be a local prosecutor's project. There is nothing compassionate about asking the public to accept a charging decision shaped around an immigration outcome the prosecutor prefers.

Anarcho-tyranny looks like this. The state expects people to respect its authority while its own officials work around consequences they don't like. The same office asking the public to trust its judgment is describing how it used that judgment to preserve an immigration benefit.

Watch what that does to a native population. You raise your kids to believe that the law applies to everyone, that doing the right thing matters, and that the people running the courts are there to apply the law fairly. How are you supposed to explain this to them? A country has a culture with a structure and a sanctity to it. Officials erode both when they make a preferred immigration outcome an objective of a criminal case.

The great replacement is not a theory. It is a reality. The people in power who want to replace the native population will brute-force the change. In Arlington, that meant considering how to resolve a DUI so DACA could be renewed. Don't call it compassion. It is evil. It is egregiously tyrannical.

We do have a nation. The people who grew up here, and those who came here legally to build a life, have every reason to demand that the government take its laws seriously. Arlington's prosecutor should be concerned with the conduct in front of her. Keeping someone eligible for DACA should not be her project.

SIGNAL

Howell is taking the commodity boom seriously

Michael Howell's latest letter is worth your time. He argues that weaker financial liquidity can coexist with stronger activity in the real economy as investment and demand for commodities pick up. He also acknowledges underestimating earnings growth and credits AI investment with helping extend the expansion.

This fits the question we've been asking about our own expectations. There is real spending and building happening. Rising commodity prices can reflect that demand while also making the next project more expensive. Howell is watching the energy and financing constraints that could eventually interrupt the cycle. How much more expensive can energy and financing get before that building slows down?

Europe needs to make it easier to build

Patrick Collison shared a set of charts on European entrepreneurship and technology that prompted Robert Sterling's warning about Europe's AI future. One plots payment volume for AI businesses on Stripe, grouped by headquarters in the US or EU. The US line pulls far ahead. The gap among Stripe's customers is striking.

Sterling worries that spending will increasingly flow to American AI providers. European businesses can benefit from those tools, too. I'd still want my country to be a place where people build and own them. If European businesses are going to spend more on AI, Europe should want more of those companies being built at home.

The compute commitments still have to pay off

Groundbreaker's modeled AI payment schedules raise a question for the buildout: can customers fund their commitments as the capacity arrives? Signing a multiyear contract and earning enough from the capacity to pay for it are very different things.

There is already money changing hands. In June, Oracle disclosed $75 billion in prepaid and customer-supplied hardware associated with large AI contracts. As more capacity arrives, revenue has to grow, investors have to keep funding customers, or commitments may need to change. America can lead the buildout and still produce some very bad investments along the way.

A new proposal for shielded bitcoin transfers

Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin published Shielded Bitcoin yesterday, proposing private transfers without changing bitcoin's consensus rules. The design uses encrypted notes and zero-knowledge proofs, with protocol data published on bitcoin and a separate system reconstructing the shielded state.

The paper leaves peg-in and peg-out, how value enters and leaves the system, outside its scope. How would users move their bitcoin in and out, and whom would they have to trust? Those questions matter if this research is going to become something people can use to keep their financial lives private.

Treasury cash climbs as bank reserves fall

The Fed's latest H.4.1 release gives us a concrete funding-system development to follow alongside Howell's argument. In the week ended September 23, the Treasury's average cash balance rose about $100 billion to $977 billion. Average bank reserves fell about $84 billion to $2.93 trillion.

When money moves into Treasury's account at the Fed, it can pull reserves out of the banking system until the government spends it back out. Other balance-sheet movements affect the result as well. After yesterday's look at yields and bond volatility, watch how much cash the government holds at the Fed and how much remains available to banks.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Retrieved September 25, 2026, 11:53 a.m. ET. Kraken last trade and mempool.space network readings are retrieval-time observations. Fear & Greed is dated 2026-09-25 UTC. Bitcoin Lab MVRV, realized price and SOPR are daily observations dated September 24 UTC.

Sources: Kraken for last-trade price; mempool.space for network estimates; Alternative.me for daily sentiment; Bitcoin Lab for MVRV, realized price and SOPR. Sats per dollar is calculated as 100,000,000 divided by the Kraken price. MVRV compares market capitalization with realized capitalization. Realized price is realized capitalization divided by circulating supply. SOPR compares spent-output value at spending with value at creation; above 1 indicates aggregate realized profit. Bitcoin Lab values are reported as supplied, not calculated from the live Kraken price.

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See you on Monday,

Marty

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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