The Morning Sixpack - September 3, 2025

Trump’s $5B crypto haul, Navy war on Venezuela, activists track ICE, Beavis & Butt-Head return—chaos, comedy & conflict on a typical Trump Wednesday.

First off, Trump is alive and seemingly as well as he’s been lately. Without makeup, the dude is just shitty-looking…

Investors Push 30-Year Treasury Yields Back Toward 5%

The 30-year Treasury yield just touched the edge of 5%, and Wall Street isn’t exactly rushing to bankroll Washington’s spending spree.

For the first time since July, long-term borrowing costs hit 4.999% before backing off slightly. The move echoed global sell-offs in the UK and Japan, where yields climbed to levels not seen in decades. Translation: Investors everywhere are saying “pay us more” to governments with ballooning debts.

“The signal is quite clear that there is still at these levels no appetite for the long end,” said Ella Hoxha of Newton Investment Management. That’s finance-speak for: The government’s credit card bill is ugly and lenders aren’t lining up.

Here at home, it’s the Trump administration’s tax cuts, tariffs, and spending plans fueling investor nerves. Traders are comfortable buying short-dated Treasuries tied to Fed rate cuts, but they want extra compensation to park money for 30 years. BlackRock strategists called it “an unusual situation reflecting investors’ wishes for more compensation to hold long-term bonds.”

The divergence is striking—30-year yields climbing while 2- and 5-year notes ease. It hasn’t happened like this in over two decades. Markets are now looking to jobs data, factory orders, and payroll reports later this week for a potential circuit breaker. Until then, Uncle Sam better be ready to pony up.

Source: Yahoo Finance

When a 30-year loan to the U.S. government is treated like lending beer money to your cousin who never pays you back, you know the vibes aren’t good.

Hey, at least the yield curve isn’t inverted like when it is whenever we barrel into a recession!

Trump Family Rakes in $5 Billion on Day One of Crypto Gamble

Donald Trump once called Bitcoin “a scam,” but now his family’s own token just handed them a paper fortune of $5 billion.

The debut of WLFI, the Trump-branded coin from World Liberty Financial, turned into a windfall overnight as the token finally became tradable. Founders’ holdings are still “locked”—meaning they can’t cash out yet—but the market value now makes this coin the family’s crown jewel asset.

It’s a hard pivot for Trump, who not long ago wanted nothing to do with crypto. As one headline dryly noted, the man who mocked Bitcoin now grins for the cameras holding a pen that signed America’s stablecoin framework. Cue government watchdogs and Democrats crying foul, warning of conflicts of interest and insider dealing. As they should.

The irony here is rich: A self-proclaimed crypto skeptic now positioned to profit off the very system he trashed. As the Wall Street Journal reported, WLFI’s trading debut essentially minted billions for the Trump family on paper, instantly reshaping their financial empire.

Critics aren’t buying the spin. “The risks are clear when political families get directly entangled in regulated markets,” one ethics expert warned. (NOTE: As far as I know, cryptocurrencies aren’t regulated much, if at all.)

But hey, when has that ever stopped Trumpworld from turning regulation into revenue?

Source: Semafor

From ‘crypto is a scam’ to ‘crypto is our biggest payday yet.’ That’s not a reversal—that’s a masterclass in shameless rebranding.

GOP Senators Torch Trump’s $5B ‘Pocket Rescission’—And Warn It Could Trigger a Shutdown

Trump’s $5 billion “pocket rescission” is nuking his own spending deal and pushing Washington toward a Sept. 30 shutdown.

Senate Republicans are not loving this play. Sen. Mike Rounds says the maneuver hands Democrats an easy excuse to bail on a bipartisan funding bill—exactly how you stumble into a shutdown. GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski went further, blasting the end-run as “unlawful” and reminding everyone that “Congress alone bears the constitutional responsibility for funding our government,” adding that OMB’s “unilateral actions…risk throwing the entire process into chaos.”

Process matters—especially when you’re clawing back money already appropriated. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito wants rescissions done the normal way and admits a court may have to rule on legality. Sen. Susan Collins called any rescission without Congress “a clear violation of the law.” Sen. Kevin Cramer flagged the separation-of-powers problem and questioned whether this is worth burning political capital right before the fiscal deadline.

Even GOP leadership is tapping the brakes on the method. Sen. John Thune said plenty of Republicans could support the underlying cuts to State and USAID, but not via a pocket rescission. He wants regular-order appropriations in public, not backroom “four corners” deals—while Democrats (Schumer and Jeffries) say they’ll tank any partisan bill and are already tying shutdown odds to Trump’s rescission gambit.

History isn’t helping the White House. Sen. Chuck Grassley noted GAO once blessed a Carter-era version in 1977 before reversing itself—so now it’s “up in the air.”

Meanwhile, Senator Dick Durbin is telling Republicans to join Democrats to swat this down: If Congress won’t defend its own purse strings, it’s basically cosigning executive fiat on the budget. My read: If you want spending cuts, do the work in daylight—don’t try to repo the cash at midnight. But Trump is a wannabe mobster conman, so that’s not how he rolls.

Source: The Hill

If the plan is “own the libs” by shutting down the government, congrats—you’re also owning the bond market, the agencies, and your own negotiating leverage.

U.S. Navy Strike Escalates Trump’s Standoff With Venezuela

Trump says the U.S. Navy just blew up a Venezuelan drug boat, killing 11 people, and the stakes with Maduro keep getting higher.

During an Oval Office event, Trump boasted that “we literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat.”

Minutes later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the operation as a “lethal strike” against a vessel run by a “designated narco-terrorist organization.” Trump followed up with a Truth Social post calling the dead “terrorists” tied to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, even dropping an “unclassified” video of a Navy missile tearing through a speedboat.

This strike comes on the heels of the U.S. deploying the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group to Venezuela’s doorstep, part of a $50 million bounty-fueled campaign painting Nicolás Maduro as a cartel boss. Maduro fired back by declaring “maximum preparedness” and parading 4.5 million militia members on state TV, pledging that “no empire will touch the sacred soil of Venezuela.”

Maduro’s January reelection was already deemed fraudulent by much of the world, but he’s using Washington’s aggression as fuel to rally citizens and sympathetic foreign allies. Former U.S. Ambassador James Story told NPR the policy looks incoherent—on one hand Washington is saber-rattling, on the other it’s greenlighting Chevron to keep pumping Venezuelan oil.

We’ve seen this movie before. Trump’s first-term gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean accomplished little. The difference now is the rhetoric has escalated to cartel-hunting with live fire, and that’s a dangerous road when you’re dealing with a regime that thrives on casting itself as the victim of U.S. imperialism.

Source: NPR

If the plan is to fight narcos with Navy destroyers, someone should remind Trump that speedboats multiply faster than press releases—and Maduro isn’t exactly short on propaganda fuel.

This also sounds a lot like… WAR.

Activists Are Tracking ICE in Real Time—And Trump’s Team Wants Them Prosecuted

Before sunrise in Los Angeles, activists tail ICE convoys and broadcast their movements online, turning federal raids into community alerts.

Francisco “Chavo” Romero and his crew camp outside an ICE staging area near Terminal Island almost every morning, following agents’ vehicles and blasting their locations on social media. In Austin, a tech worker’s ICE-tracking app has racked up over a million users. On Long Island, another group built a local version that pings residents before raids hit. For immigration advocates, this is about defending families. For the Trump administration, it’s obstruction.

“Interfering with federal law enforcement is a crime,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, who warned that anyone using apps to help migrants evade ICE “will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.” But legal experts told Reuters the Constitution mostly protects these actions, since public surveillance and recording of officers in open spaces is long-established precedent.

Some conservatives argue there’s a difference between Waze-style police warnings, which encourage drivers to slow down, and ICE-tracking apps, which may encourage lawbreaking. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she’s coordinating with DOJ to pursue prosecutions, while Attorney General Pam Bondi has already warned ICEBlock’s founder to “watch out.”

The app’s creator, Joshua Aaron, dismissed it as hot air: “You can’t limit what people can see with their own eyes.”

Meanwhile, ICEBlock’s success has come with personal costs—Aaron’s wife lost her DOJ job for owning a stake in the company. And yet more apps keep popping up: 23-year-old Ahmad Perez, son of immigrants, built one for Long Island that now has 80,000 users. “We all want criminals out of our streets,” Perez said. “But what we’re seeing now is innocent families, sometimes U.S. citizens, being detained and expedited out of the country like it’s a FedEx package.”

Source: Reuters

When ICE raids feel like Amazon Prime deliveries, it’s no wonder activists are building apps to track the trucks. Welcome to 2025, where civic resistance has push notifications.

Beavis and Butt-Head Are Back—And Dumber, Older, and Weirdly Wiser

Season 3 of the Beavis and Butt-Head revival proves once again that two idiots can tell us more about our culture than a panel of experts ever could.

The new season, premiering Wednesday on Comedy Central, keeps the boys faithful to their original chaos—slapstick disasters, boneheaded schemes, and social commentary that’s somehow both clueless and cutting. One standout episode finds Beavis stuck in yoga pants, proving the show still excels at turning physical pain into comedy gold.

Mike Judge’s magic trick is making their idiocy feel fresh. Whether they’re roasting Post Malone, riffing on YouTube fight videos, or bumbling into conversations about privilege, the duo remains hilariously destructive. “With minimal resources, we’ve been able to confront, challenge, and expose… stuff that sucks,” could almost be their motto—if they could spell it.

The biggest revelation continues to be their alternate-universe selves: Middle-aged Beavis and Butt-Head. Old Butt-Head still smokes (naturally), they gripe about adulting, misunderstand AI, and somehow satirize dad jokes better than actual dads. Watching them misinterpret 2025’s obsessions—social media likes, AI, or even yoga—is both ridiculous and uncomfortably accurate.

Judge hasn’t sanded off their edges. The mom jokes cut deeper, the video commentary hits harder, and their obliviousness has aged into something resembling wisdom. Beavis and Butt-Head aren’t just nostalgia—they’re funhouse mirrors for a world that deserves to be mocked.

Source: UPI

Only in 2025 would the most insightful take on AI come from two guys who still think TP for their bunghole is a legitimate life priority.

This makes me happy.