The exciting return of college football turned tragic in Iowa City last weekend after a band member collapsed in the heat and suffered catastrophic brain injury.

The hometown University of Iowa Hawkeyes were set to take on the Huskies of Northern Illinois on Saturday in the first matchup of the 2026 season for both teams.

‘Music was the language of his soul.’

Temperatures reached a scorching 94 degrees, and the Hawkeye marching band announced that they would “forgo” the halftime performance on account of the heat.

At about this time, Derek Phillips, a third-year student at Iowa and a member of the marching band, suddenly collapsed.

In a post on Instagram, Phillips’ family confirmed that he suffered “sudden cardiac arrest” that resulted in “severe” brain damage. As a result, the family “made the heartbreaking decision to remove life support.”

According to the Daily Iowan, life support was removed Monday.

RELATED: 5 wounded, including 3 students, in shooting near University of Iowa; police release photos of persons of interest

Matthew Holst/Getty Images

“Derek brought so much light, humor, and kindness into this world,” the family statement said. “He was a phenomenal musician — whether he was playing jazz, singing his heart out, or marching under the lights, music was the language of his soul.”

The statement added that Phillips is “comfortable, surrounded by family, and enveloped in the music he loved so much.”

The family requested users who knew Phillips to post memories of their time with him, and many friends and former bandmates responded graciously.

“He made me laugh so much, definitely an unforgettable person,” wrote one user.

“Derek was one of the kindest individuals I have ever met. I am going to miss you so much man,” said another.

“Derek was one of the first people that I talked to during auditions, and being able to joke with him throughout the season were some of the highlights of my summer,” wrote yet another user.

The Hawkeyes, who were favored by 31.5 points, ultimately trounced the Huskies, 40-0.

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​College football, University of iowa, Politics 

The debate surrounding Lindsay Clancy has become about far more than one criminal case. While prosecutors argue that Clancy intentionally killed her three children, many supporters have rallied around the Massachusetts mother as a victim of mental illness, postpartum struggles, and impossible expectations placed on women.

While the supportive response from such a large number of women has confused Americans, Dre Baldwin believes he has the answer as to why it’s happening.

“Lindsay Clancy is to overwhelmed mothers what O.J. Simpson was to the angry black person in 1995,” Baldwin tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Fearless.”

“People didn’t identify with O.J. Simpson because they thought O.J. didn’t kill Nicole and Ron Goldman,” he explains. “They identified with O.J. Simpson because they were angry black people who felt like America as an institution and the police as an institution had been terrorizing black people.”

Like Clancy has become a symbol for postpartum mothers, “O.J. was a symbol for some get-back for black Americans.”

“That’s why people celebrated when he got found not guilty,” Baldwin says.

“It’s the same thing that a lot of women, mothers who see themselves as overwhelmed housewives who are doing too much, and this is not the role that was supposed to be for them,” he continues. “And they just feel themselves being overwhelmed through all the challenges of motherhood and being a wife and taking care of a home.”

While Baldwin doesn’t believe these moms would ever actually murder someone, let alone their children, he does believe that Clancy is being propped up as a “symbol of ‘somebody is finally seeing this.’”

“And if it means a woman beating a murder charge, then so be it. The same way that people looked at people celebrating O.J. with incredulity back then, 30 years ago, is the same way that many people are looking at this Lindsay Clancy case and her supporters today,” he adds.

Whitlock couldn’t agree more, commenting, “That’s a brilliant take.”

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​Dre baldwin, Jason whitlock, Lindsay clancy, Mental illness, Motherhood, Oj simpson, Postpartum, Women, Blazetv show 

The New York Times’ reporting on AI is like its reporting in general: partisan, erroneous, sensationalist, and misleading in the extreme.

The tone is apocalyptic, characterizing AI as an imminent threat, much like the Times’ characterization of Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Worse still is the wokeness of it all, the politicization of AI, in which everything — including the survival of the United States — depends on the wisdom and selflessness of the anointed.

Consumer protection, monopoly, economic opportunity, enforcement of existing law, the Constitution — about these things, the Times is silent.

Call it a sign of the times, or a sign that the Times is in decline, because when the supposed newspaper of record soft-pedals the work of rationalists and effective altruists, the result is propaganda with a corporate caption.

That the Times not only “skews left” but skews its coverage in favor of specific policies, that it champions export controls on technology, and that it portrays Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as a champion of AI safety are reasons the paper reads like a rag with a games section.

Safety is the watchword of the Times’ emphasis on control. All other issues, such as liberty, opportunity, privacy, and democracy, are irrelevant. Or so the Times would have us believe. But first we must believe that AI is a doomsday device, that it is more destructive than the hydrogen bomb and cleaner than the neutron bomb, that it can end mankind not with a bang but a whimper.

Such is the reasoning of rationalists and effective altruists, whose views the Times legitimates.

Whatever else these views are, they are not politically neutral. But because the Times puts “safety” first, and thus sacrifices liberty on the altar of security, there is no room for criticism.

Consumer protection, monopoly, economic opportunity, enforcement of existing law, the Constitution — about these things, the Times is silent. So is Anthropic, which is no accident.

The two, the Times and Anthropic, would use export controls to stifle competition, not promote it. The two would restrict the sale of Nvidia chips to China. Never mind that China continues to buy these chips through intermediaries or on the gray market. Put aside, too, the fact that export controls only serve to goad China into subsidizing the manufacture of its own chips. Or that companies like DeepSeek and Huawei have their own chip ambitions.

RELATED: How to renew American scientific research

BSIP/UIG/Getty Images

Chatham House similarly concludes that hardware export controls alone will not stop China’s advancements in AI. If the controls were effective, policymakers would not have to continually redraw them: banning this or that chip, policing third-country affiliates, responding to smuggling networks, only to authorize new sales anyway. The result is not a technological blockade but a prolonged game of whack-a-mole, which encourages China to be more self-reliant at our expense.

Consider, too, the expense of having the Bureau of Industry and Security involved in this issue in the first place.

Like most government agencies, BIS has a reputation for dysfunction, little productivity, and low morale. Perhaps the New York Times should do a series of stories on BIS instead. Or maybe the paper should stop printing nonsense about “AI safety,” as the term is a catchall for more regulation and higher prices.

A newspaper committed to rigorous journalism would interrogate the interests served by these narratives, confront the failures and contradictions embedded in them, and give serious attention to workers, consumers, civil liberties, democratic accountability, and America’s capacity to out-innovate its rivals.

Instead the Times too frequently amplifies the assumptions of the powerful leftist institutions and woke agendas it should be challenging.

​Anthropic, New york times, Propaganda, Constitution, Ai, China, Nvidia, Woke, Opinion & analysis 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has cultivated a network of social media influencers to amplify his policies online, and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is warning that it follows a pattern seen in failing socialist movements throughout history.

“I regret to inform you … that the Muslim commie mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has been rolling out his next phase of this communist takeover plan. And you now, I’m just going to predict it’s not going to go well,” Gonzales says.

Mamdani has begun implementing his city-run grocery stores, which Gonzales notes will “effectively run real grocery stores out of business.”

“He’s like, ‘We’re pricing everything lower.’ Real grocery stores can’t do that. It’s only the government. It’s only the government that when they’re playing with someone else’s money, when they’re playing with your money, they can do things like that,” she says.

“And then once you’ve got that, once you’ve got that government control, well, a real communist wants to control the way that people think. And so as we’ve seen time and time again in all these other communist countries, they have to control the airwaves,” she continues.

And Mamdani, Gonzales says, “has done this quite masterfully.”

“He’s turning up the communist propaganda machine,” she explains, noting that the Columbia Journalist Review first exposed Mamdani for recruiting “a bunch of TikTokers and social media influencers to get his message out.”

“They created this Signal group, and the Signal group gets all the talking points from the socialist overlords,” she says.

The group receives talking points and clips they’re instructed to use in their posts.

“America is fighting for its life right now. Meanwhile, New York City is just living in Zohran Mamdani’s Disney Channel movie, ‘Mayor of Uncontrollable Joy.’ I’m not like jealous or anything though,” one TikTok influencer said in a video.

“Luckily Republicans are freaking out because there are mini-Mamdani’s popping up all over the country,” she said.

“You deserve hope-core everywhere, not just New York,” she added.

“These people are getting paid for it,” Gonzales says.

And according to an expose from the New York Post, it’s getting funded by the taxpayers.

“The taxpayers are paying for good messaging and PR for their mayor. Now, money is always bad to these communists. You hear about all this dark money: ‘dark money, evil billionaires, evil trillionaire, Elon Musk.’ It’s always bad unless you can use other people’s cash to push your communist agenda,” Gonzales says.

“And by the way, this is not like a small amount of money that we’re talking about. Some of these people are getting paid up to $20,000 to do this,” she adds.

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​New york city, Zohran mamdani, Influencers, Social media, Communism, Taxpayers, Grocery stores, Blazetv show 

The attorney for Lindsay Clancy is begging the most powerful man on the planet to intercede on behalf of his client.

On Friday, Judge William Sullivan of Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts declared a mistrial in Clancy’s case after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict about whether to hold her criminally responsible in the deaths of her three children. Her defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, did not deny that she strangled the three children but argued that she acted out of postpartum psychosis and overmedication rather than criminal malice.

‘Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what she’s been through.’

The case has captivated the nation, and even President Donald Trump weighed in on it. “She did a horrible, horrible thing. Can’t be worse,” he said shortly after the mistrial was declared, adding that there will be a “price to pay.”

“It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something.”

During the trial, Reddington described Clancy as “one heck of a mother” who “loved her children.” Outside of court, he claimed that “she’s very concerned about women’s rights” and “the fact that women are pretty much marginalized.”

Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz has not yet announced whether the case will be retried.

RELATED: Gloria Steinem is gone. Lindsay Clancy is still here.

On Tuesday, Reddington appeared with George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” and indicated that he might be willing to entertain a plea deal:

I’m willing to listen to Tim. I’ve known Tim for 30 years. He’s a very hard-charging prosecutor, a conservative gentleman. I hope, however, after sitting through this trial and seeing the evidence that was presented from the government as well as from the defense that he would revisit that issue and hopefully would be able to work something out that would be acceptable to both sides.

Reddington also called upon Trump to step in and “pardon” Lindsay Clancy:

I’d like to say that perhaps Donald Trump, who felt compelled to speak out about this case, may very well, Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon.

It is unclear how Trump might be able to pardon Clancy, even if she is convicted.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts charged Clancy, not the federal government. If Cruz decides to retry the case or reach a plea deal, it will still be a state case and not a federal one, so all pardoning powers will rest with the governor of Massachusetts.

Blaze News reached out to the White House and to the office of Gov. Maura Healey (D) for comment.

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​Donald trump, Good morning america, Lindsay clancy, Massachusetts, Politics 

Apple Maps has come a long way since it replaced Google Maps on iOS in 2012. Detailed roads, precise directions, and a visually pleasing interface are just some of the perks you can expect. Unfortunately, Apple decided that its navigation app needed the worst feature found in Google Maps, and there’s no way to turn it off.

When Apple ditched Google Maps for its own app on iOS 6 (yes, 6, which launched in 2012), it was a complete mess. Roads were missing, directions were inaccurate, and the satellite view showed jagged and misshapen spans of highway. Ditching Google for its own map service was one of the worst decisions executed under Tim Cook’s new leadership.

‘Mobile ads suck.’

However, instead of throwing in the towel, the company spent years improving the mess it made. The result was a surprisingly complete navigation system that addressed all previous issues and turned Maps into a reliable road companion that works as you’d expect. In fact, once the bugs were stomped out, Apple Maps became a cleaner and prettier alternative to Google Maps, just as Apple envisioned.

Unfortunately, that’s all about to change.

Although Google is known for many things, its core business is all about ads. It’s an ad company, with more than half of its annual revenue attributed to this category. Google ads show up everywhere — in online searches, webpages, and even in some of its apps, like Google Maps.

Apple, on the other hand, is a hardware company that has since dipped its toes into services to expand its bottom line. It is not an ad company, but that hasn’t stopped Apple from taking the plunge into Google’s arena.

Apple Maps Ads/Apple

Much to users’ chagrin, Apple has brought ads to the Apple Maps experience for the first time. Now, when you search for a place — like a fast-food restaurant or a grocery store — Maps will offer up the expected list of locations, plus new paid options.

These show up as “Suggested Places,” making them sound more like friendly recommendations, but don’t be fooled.

These are paid placements added by companies trying to get your attention and your money.

On the bright side, ads don’t show up with every search in Apple Maps — just the ones where Apple has a relevant paying partner. Still, it’s sad to see Apple inject ads into its services for a bit of extra revenue, where the high prices of its devices once sufficed.

RELATED: New hack poses biggest iPhone threat in 19 years: What you can do

Xaume Olleros/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The late Steve Jobs likely would’ve disapproved. He even once went on record to proclaim that “mobile ads suck,” largely because they disrupted the user experience. Apple’s most recent former CEO, Tim Cook, believed differently. According to Mark Gurman, Cook said “digital advertising is not a bad thing. What is not good is vacuuming up people’s data when they’re not doing so in an informed basis. We try to put the user in the driver seat there to own their data.”

As for what new CEO John Ternus believes, we don’t know yet. He just took the reins of the company at the start of September, and he has a lot of work ahead. That said, ads in Apple Maps just launched, so unless Ternus is adamant about their removal, they’re not likely to go away anytime soon.

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​Apple, Maps, Google, Ios, Tech 

When Dolly Parton came to Nashville in 1964, finding a husband was the last thing on her mind. She was 18 years old, newly arrived from the mountains of East Tennessee, and clear about what she had come to do: “I was here to become a star.”

Then a young man with sky-blue eyes drove past the Wishy Washy Laundromat.

Reading about Parton and Dean makes you suspect we’ve forgotten how to disagree inside a marriage.

Parton was outside waiting for her clothes when 21-year-old Carl Dean spotted her, called something out the window, circled the block, and came back. She talked to him because he was “drop-dead handsome,” but she was also surprised that he looked at her face while they talked — “a rare thing for me,” she joked in her 1994 autobiography, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business.” More seriously, she remembered that Dean “seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”

Dean came back every day for a week. When Parton finally had a day free for a real date, he took her to his parents’ house, where his mother was putting supper on the table.

“Fix this girl a plate,” Dean announced. “She’s the one I’m going to marry.”

‘In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)’

This was news to Parton, since Dean hadn’t yet told her he loved her. But two years later, on Memorial Day 1966, they married in Ringgold, Georgia. The marriage lasted until Dean’s death in March 2025, just shy of 59 years.

By then, the penniless girl doing her laundry at the Wishy Washy had become one of the most famous women in the world, while Dean had spent most of those years avoiding the public attention that followed his wife everywhere. Parton liked crowds, travel, and attention; Dean liked cars, tractors, and staying home. She became so famous that strangers took tour buses past their house; he was so private that some fans suspected she had invented him.

Their marriage is particularly interesting at a time when we’re accustomed to hearing divorce described in the language of personal liberation. Celebrity divorce announcements that once might have contained at least a trace of embarrassment now tend to read like graduation speeches: Two people have decided to “choose themselves,” embark on “new chapters,” and continue their respective “journeys.” Whatever else has happened, we’re assured that tremendous personal growth is underway.

Parton would have been an excellent candidate for this kind of liberation. She was financially independent, professionally ambitious, frequently away from home, surrounded by attractive men, and married to someone whose personality and interests were almost comically different from hers. They had no children, and by the time divorce became commonplace, she certainly didn’t need a husband to support her.

‘Just the Way I Am’

Yet there is remarkably little sense in Parton’s accounts of her marriage that staying with Dean required surrendering some essential part of herself. Few entertainers have constructed a public identity as singular or pursued a career as independently as Dolly Parton did. She managed it while remaining married to the man she met outside a laundromat at 18.

The potential conflict between marriage and career appeared before the wedding. Fred Foster, the head of Parton’s record label, asked her to postpone getting married because her career was beginning to move, and he worried that a husband might hurt her appeal to male record buyers. Parton told him she would wait, then she and Dean secretly drove to Ringgold to get married anyway.

Her mother went with them, having made Dolly a white eyelet dress and veil and wrapped a little white Bible in lace and field flowers for her to carry. At the courthouse, an official offered to marry them on the spot, but Parton balked. “I want to get married in a church,” she told him.

That presented a problem: They would have to wait until Monday and couldn’t afford a motel for the weekend. So they drove back to Nashville, returned three days later, and were married at Ringgold Baptist Church. Their honeymoon lasted about two hours: Dean had to work the next morning, while Parton had to get up at 3 a.m. for a television appearance.

The competing demands of Carl and career didn’t go away after the wedding, but the couple arrived at an arrangement that would probably horrify anyone who thinks a healthy marriage requires sharing all one’s interests. Dean eventually owned an asphalt-paving company and wanted almost nothing to do with show business. According to Parton, he saw her perform only once.

‘I Will Always Love You’

“My marriage is separate,” she once explained. “I have my life on the road and my life with Carl. He has seen me perform, once. But we have our own life at home — without music people.”

Their differences extended to ordinary domestic life. Parton was spontaneous; Dean liked routine. She spent money; he was frugal. She wanted more physical affection than he naturally gave. She traveled constantly while he preferred staying home. None of this prevented Parton from describing the arrangement with considerable satisfaction.

“It works out well between me and Carl,” she wrote. “We both get what we really want. We both have the freedom to come and go and do as we please.”

As she also put it in her autobiography, “Carl is the only man I could live with all of the time, because I don’t.”

Freedom comes up repeatedly when Parton talks about her marriage, but not in the way the word is usually used in discussions of unhappy marriages. She and Dean weren’t free from each other. They seem to have felt remarkably free with each other.

That required trust. Parton spent much of her professional life around men, and rumors about her love life were inevitable. Sometimes friends or relatives actually approached Dean to tell him his wife was involved with somebody else.

“Well, I would think less of any man that didn’t fall in love with her,” Dean would respond.

Parton believed he could take the rumors in stride. “He knows that I will always come home,” she wrote.

RELATED: Dolly Parton is dead at age 80

Rich Fury/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

‘Mommie, Ain’t That Daddy?’

This wasn’t a marriage without jealousy or hurt. Dean was badly shaken early in their relationship when he learned that Parton had been sexually involved with another man before him, an experience that helped inspire her 1968 song “Just Because I’m a Woman.” A few years later, a pretty bank teller began paying so much attention to Dean that he developed a newfound enthusiasm for trips to the bank. Parton poured her jealousy into writing “Jolene.”

Jealousy may have been an inevitable byproduct of the mystery each retained for the other. “They say that opposites attract, and it’s true,” Parton told People in 2015. “We’re completely opposite, but that’s what makes it fun. I never know what he’s gonna say or do. He’s always surprising me.”

She had said much the same thing more than 20 years earlier. “I am still learning about him to this day,” she wrote. “I think that’s the way a relationship should be.”

Reading about Parton and Dean makes you suspect we’ve forgotten how to disagree inside a marriage. He didn’t like show business; she built her life around it. He liked routine; she liked spontaneity. She spent; he saved. She wanted more affection than he naturally gave. Yet neither seems to have taken every difference as evidence of incompatibility — or proof that the other was preventing some truer self from emerging.

Carl didn’t ask Dolly to give up the career she wanted, and Dolly didn’t demand that Carl become part of the Dolly Parton enterprise. He didn’t have to learn to love awards shows, and she didn’t have to stop touring. They seem to have understood something increasingly unfashionable: You can be profoundly different from the person you married without having married the wrong person.

Dean also believed in Parton’s ambitions before there was much evidence that he should. When money was still tight, the couple bought 75 acres in Brentwood, Tennessee. Parton told him they needed the land for privacy because someday tour buses would drive past their house.

“He accepted that notion without question, showing that he had faith in my dream too,” she recalled. “This made me love him even more.”

‘Here You Come Again’

The tour buses eventually came, but Dean never showed much interest in joining the attraction. In her autobiography, Parton recalled a visit he made to the set of “Nine to Five,” where Jane Fonda met him without initially realizing that the handsome stranger was Dolly’s husband. Fonda later told Parton that she had praised Dolly to him, saying how sweet she was and how much she enjoyed working with her.

“Well, she’s an angel,” Dean said.

Fonda agreed.

“No, you don’t get it. She’s a real angel.”

Parton was touched when Fonda repeated the conversation. “It’s just like him to say it to somebody else, figuring I’ll never hear about it.”

Dean had known her before the rest of the world did, meeting her on the day she arrived in Nashville with a load of laundry and the certainty that she was going to become a star. Almost 50 years later, Parton credited their meeting to something more than luck. “God has been good to me,” she said in 2014. “He gave me Carl Dean. And that was the perfect man that I needed.”

They renewed their vows for their 50th anniversary in 2016. Dean rarely spoke publicly about their marriage, but for the occasion offered his own assessment: “I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”

Dean died in March 2025 at 82 after a long illness. Parton later said she had neglected her own health while “watching over Carl.” Shortly after his death, she released “If You Hadn’t Been There,” thanking the husband who, as she put it, “made me dream more than I dared.”

Parton hardly sacrificed herself to marriage. She became rich, famous, independent, and unmistakably Dolly Parton. She just never seems to have thought that becoming herself required getting rid of Carl Dean.

​Celebrity, Divorce, Dolly parton, Husband, Lifestyle, Marriage, Love, Culture, Carl dean, Music, Movies, Entertainment, Appreciation 

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) put his hesitation about the Clarity Act into one theory: “Crypto is not going to be loaning any money for small businesses.”

He is exactly right. And that is why his objection misses the point entirely.

Washington’s biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology.

A regulated stablecoin cannot lend. Federal law requires the issuer to hold a dollar of Treasury bills and cash for every digital dollar in circulation. That makes a stablecoin a payment instrument, a faster wire, not a bank. Lending, the hard local work of judging character, collateral, and cash flow, stays exactly where it has always lived: with bankers.

The digital dollar moves the money. The community banker still decides who deserves the credit. Those are different businesses, and the Clarity Act keeps them different on purpose.

If stablecoins were draining the deposits that fund small business loans, the damage would show up in the numbers. It does not. The FDIC has recorded seven consecutive quarters of domestic deposit growth, through the fastest stablecoin expansion in history. When the White House Council of Economic Advisers modeled the disputed yield provision this spring, it found a lending effect of two hundredths of one percent, largely because nearly nine of every 10 stablecoin dollars sits in Treasury bills that recirculate into the banking system as deposits.

The money is not leaving the system. It is running a lap and coming home.

Community banks are not waiting to be told any of this. Several are already live on stablecoin services through their digital banking providers, with early adopters reaching about 1,670 banks and credit unions nationally. A consortium model has been built specifically so that when money goes digital, the community bank keeps the deposit rather than surrendering it to an outside issuer. State banking associations across the country have backed this infrastructure for their members. The institutions closest to the small business customer are not running from this technology. They are installing it.

The institutions running from it, loudly, sit on Wall Street. And they are only running in public. Privately, the biggest banks are spending tens of billions of dollars a year building token networks of their own while their lobby campaigns work to keep everyone else out of the field. When the largest player in an industry warns that a new tool will hurt the small player, the useful move is to check what the large player is quietly building while it talks.

Washington’s biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology. The cost falls on the small institutions the objection claims to protect.

Sen. Cornyn has spent a quarter-century on the unglamorous machinery that makes American law work: courts, procedure, institutions, the rules of the road. The Clarity Act is that kind of work. It draws jurisdictional lines between regulators, sets disclosure duties, and writes the market rules that let a community bank adopt a payment technology without betting the charter on a lawsuit.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

His own objection contains the answer: because crypto does not lend, it does not threaten the lenders. It threatens the wire transfer, the correspondent fee, and the three-day settlement delay, luxuries no American small business will miss.

The real threat to community banking is four decades of consolidation, compliance costs that fall hardest on the smallest charters, and a technology gap against Wall Street’s $10 billion and $20 billion annual technology budgets. Killing the Clarity Act treats none of that. It keeps America’s small banks in the waiting room while the biggest institutions operate on themselves.

American small business does not need Washington to ban a payment rail. It needs its hometown banks free to use one. September 15 is the vote that decides which it gets.

​Banking law, Clarity act, Crypto, Digital banking, Fdic, Federal law, Regulators, Sen john cornyn, Small businesses, Stablecoin, Technology, Treasury bills, Wall street, White house, Opinion & analysis 

We should all be for vision and ambition.

Few have demonstrated the power of both better than Elon Musk. SpaceX has transformed the economics of space launch, while Starlink has shown that low-Earth-orbit satellites can deliver broadband connectivity on a remarkable scale. There is plenty to admire.

Starlink says it has a new ambition: not simply to fill coverage gaps, but to become a ubiquitous communications platform — potentially offering broadband, mobile service, handsets, and even operating systems.

This audacious vision runs headlong into the forces that have constrained telecommunications for decades: the laws of physics, economics, and regulation.

The laws of physics don’t bend to stock prices. The laws of economics don’t care about hype. And regulators don’t care how disruptive the pitch sounds.

The first reality check is physics.

Starlink’s strength of remote area coverage to fill gaps becomes a limitation in cities. Terrestrial networks divide coverage into thousands of cells, enabling repeated spectrum reuse and capacity scaling. Satellite beams cannot match this granular spectrum efficiency.

The next challenge is buildings. Satellite signals do not penetrate shopping malls, offices, apartment blocks, or underground space. People spend much of their time indoors, places that require terrestrial networks, small cells, Wi-Fi, fiber, and other ground-based infrastructure.

This is not a satellite model failure; it just demonstrates that no single network can do it all. Different networks have strengths and weaknesses: The ability to fill coverage gaps is not the same as providing reliable, nationwide capacity. SpaceX says it plans to build a terrestrial component. This will likely strengthen its network, but it does not make satellites a substitute for terrestrial networks.

Then comes the law of economics.

Telecom has an elusive holy grail: the fourth operator. Regulators and competition authorities routinely argue that markets need four or five mobile networks. Yet mobile markets around the world are consolidating toward three, and sometimes two, operators — including sophisticated markets such as India and China. Why? Because mobile networks have enormous fixed costs.

Operators must acquire spectrum, obtain permits, build sites, and continually upgrade networks as traffic grows — all while consumers expect more data for less money. Starlink is not immune to this reality. It has added demand surcharges for some customers, pushing broadband prices as high as $1,500 per month in some markets.

The fourth-operator dream has another inconvenient history. Starlink acquired 65 MHz of spectrum from EchoStar for $19.6 billion. That spectrum came from DISH Network, which spent years trying to make itself the fourth nationwide U.S. mobile operator but could not get the economics to work

Starlink has advantages DISH did not, including its satellite network, capital, and global customer base. But it still must overcome the conundrum of continuously absorbing more traffic while keeping customer prices low.

RELATED: Big Tech gets the network. You get the bill.

Baona/iStock/Getty Images

Then there is the law of regulation.

Telecommunications is not a “move fast and break things” industry. Spectrum is governed by complex national, technical, and international rules. Deployment requires coordination with other spectrum users, permitting, environmental reviews, zoning, rights-of-way, and state public utility commissions.

SpaceX has already experienced this reality. When California regulators objected to aspects of SpaceX’s launch plans, the company moved activity to Texas. Internationally, governments can be even more consequential. Turkey, for example, has not allowed Starlink to operate within its borders.

Spectrum creates another obligation. Public spectrum is not an ordinary asset. It is allocated according to set conditions, often including build-out or use requirements.

Finally, there is the law of the market.

Investors love news: big ambitions, disruptive narratives, barbs, and vibes. SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said on the company’s first earnings call that she expected Starlink to win “quite a few” customers from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile and that SpaceX “definitely” intends to build a terrestrial component. The comments rattled some telecom investors. Such statements are catnip for traders: the market can trade on the story long before the network exists. It is a familiar asymmetry: incumbents must respond to the threat today, while Starlink can promise to deliver the network tomorrow — or never.

Starlink deserves both praise and scrutiny. Its satellite network is extraordinary, and direct-to-device connectivity will fill coverage gaps. But disrupting the mobile market is not the same as replacing mobile carriers, just as owning spectrum is not the same as building a nationwide network.

The laws of physics don’t bend to stock prices. The laws of economics don’t care about hype. And regulators don’t care how disruptive the pitch sounds. The markets may react to the statement, but seriously competing for customers at scale will require a robust terrestrial network. Starlink has already shown that hard things are possible. It has not yet shown how it can do this.

​Broadband connectivity, Elon musk, Market dynamics, Mobile service, Network limitations, Regulation, Spacex, Starlink, Terrestrial networks, Mobile carriers, Economics, Opinion & analysis