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Jobless claims hit near a 57-year low and media complained; the Times nearly learns to stop worrying but falls off a cliff; Texas fraudster gold-plates the one truck visible to the DOJ from orbit.
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Owing to an early meeting, today’s post is a little tighter than usual (for which some of you will be grateful). Your roundup includes: jobless claims sink to a 57-year low, home prices drop, and the corporate media somehow can’t find the story; the New York Times Magazine climbs within sight of self-awareness about apocalyptic thinking, then tumbles off the ridgeline; and a Texas counselor proves that a gold-plated Cybertruck is the worst possible getaway car for a $26 million fraud. It’s short, sweet, and gold-plated.
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Late last week, Reuters quietly reported more good economic news in a story headlined, “US weekly jobless claims near 57-year lows; price reductions boost new home sales.”
Which is more remarkable: The number of economic records being broken or the lack of coverage? Last week, the number of people filing for unemployment fell to its lowest level since 1969. Considering the clear downward trend line for the entire year, the article was forced to grudgingly concede, “the underlying trend in claims remains in line with a labor market that has regained its footing.”
What it looks like is an economy that is starting to fire on all cylinders.
Tucked at the article’s end, Reuters reported that affordability is improving for young people in at least one major category. “The median new house price dropped 5.8% to $393,700 in August from a year earlier, the Census report showed.”
Combined with a record stock market, nearly full employment, steady GDP growth, and rising wages, the economic indicators are as strong as they could be without overheating. Gas prices are a continuing irritant, but even those, when adjusted for inflation, are still below Biden peaks. (Inflation, as we’ve noted before, is a hangover from Biden’s money-printing parties.)
Still, the media continues to demonstrate its power to shape narratives by flooding the information zone with negative news and then polling everyone to find out how we’re feeling about it, with the net result that economists remain “baffled” by how pessimistic everyone is. What’s baffling is why the experts are baffled. It’s like being dragged to grandma’s house for a long visit, except where grandma spends the whole time complaining about how you’re getting fatter by the minute and your aunt Sophie is ruining her kids and the tea you just brought her tastes like pool water.
That’s it. The corporate media is evil grandma.
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Speaking of endless negativity, over the weekend the New York Times Magazine ran a surprising, long-form story that was remarkable for how very close it came to experiencing something akin to self-awareness. Stumbling over it was kind of like seeing your AI chatbot appear to become self-conscious by drawing a three-dimensional picture of the inside of a black hole, but then confidently informing you that only three days in the week include the letter ‘d.’ The article was headlined —prepare yourself— “The Problem With Apocalyptic Thinking.”
Take a moment to fully appreciate the headline’s irony. It was complaining about complaining. I think the kids call that meta. Well done, editors. Five stars. Then the sub-headline explained: “From climate to Covid to A.I., we face a terrifying feeling of exponential growth spinning out of our control. Are we right?”
If I were Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, I don’t know how I’d feel about the Times’ cover pic jamming him right next to splenetic climate grifter Greta Thunberg and what appears to be a Vietnam-era Huey dumping napalm on some innocent villagers. Just what, precisely, were they trying to say about Dario’s essays on the AI future? Nothing good, probably.
I often mock the Times for having the logic skills of a drunken sorority pledge combined with the ethics of an aggressive, meth-addled panhandler. But it manages at times to crank out some strong writing, and this article unleashed the full force of polished metaphor. “The most conspicuous peaksalong the apocalyptic ridgeline of our culture” were covid, AI, and climate alarmism, it said, “but the mountain range is punctuated by a number of other forms of existential dread: the fertility crisis, the mental health crisis, the smartphone theory of intellectual and social decline, border chaos and the ‘woke mind virus’” —note the scare quotes— and last but not least, “the fall of American democracy.”
The rhetorical geography lesson wasn’t finished. “Cast your eyes down into the foothills and you might see some more marginal conspiracy theories: 5G, and the ‘great replacement.’”
Honestly, it was a pretty good list. The comedy potential was infinite, charting out all the vastness of the oratorical peaks and valleys of modern dread and doom. If you stare at the map too long, the article explained, you experience feelings— in the form of “a sudden and overwhelming loss of control.”
And so those exploring the Times’ terremotodiscovered the article’s first legitimate insight, the sum of all our fears. Loss of control. This was simultaneously a shrewd perception and also a banal description of the most common topographic feature of human existence. Threats like invisible viruses that transmit themselves without symptoms and will kill you before you can say ‘Fauci’! Artificial intelligence that will go rogue and steal your job! Rising oceans! Al Gore crawling out from under the bed! Aliens! Right-swipers! Dogs in strollers.
In a word, the most ancient enemy of them all: chaos. A gossipy snake in the original garden. The Times’ soaring words described a typical morning on social media in 2026: “the way we pictured the planet racing past tipping points and spinning off its familiar axis as unpredictably as a top cast out into the void.”
As it transitioned into its real subject —the AI panic— it compared it to covid, which described “the early pandemic response as shambolic, full of contradictory guidance and sometimes baseless panic.” Note the careful hedge: sometimes baseless panic. Sometimes. This was the ridge where an essay brimming with potential for saying something real flew off the rails. “Those efforts did flatten the curve, as they were intended to,” the article assured anxious Times readers. “The line did not keep going up.”
Oh boy.
Readers were then treated to two vomitous paragraphs of reassurance of how well-intentioned the government’s covid response was and how it ultimately rescued millions from undetectable germs. Sigh. You were so close, Times.
But then, after undermining its own story into a landslide, roughly 1,000 words in, it finally got to the point: “The charts sketched by A.I. doomers are, if anything, more vertiginous than those plotted in the early months of Covid.” This was where something approaching real journalism miraculously appeared, the one remarkable paragraph that marked this story for today’s post. Here it is, in full:
And here, at last, we stumbled into the media’s undiscovered country. The territory that reporters could reach anytime, but seem unable to find even with real-time GPS. Accountability. Context. A simple recounting of all the previous failed predictions of doom. That’s literally all it would take to pull the fangs from each day’s current object of social terror. All they have to do is remind us how wrong the same fearful experts were last time. (And the time before that. And … well, you get the idea.)
Readers could demand this kind of accounting, but we almost never do. It seems like we prefer it this way. Almost exactly two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher asked, “Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?” Ancient texts record that he suggested dealing with real problems, like deciding whether the milk is still okay two days past the expiration date, instead of worrying about possible Skynet futures.
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow,” he advised, “for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
This two-millennia-old advice is still sinking in. But it isn’t gripping. The trouble is, we don’t want to stop worrying. This is a very bad habit that the corporate media is only too happy to indulge. The article came closest to saying it outright: the daily predictions of doom are always wrong. Scientists can confidently predict the temperature at which a pot of water will boil, but they are less accurate when it comes to confident predictions about boiling oceans:
Imagine how different life would be if that single sentence were footnoted in every dramatic front-page story about how Trump’s tariffs will wreck the economy, or how people who ask questions about the efficacy of cloth masks will destroy our democracy.
Does this mean there is no role for subject matter experts? Heavens, no. That’s why we let experts testify at trials, to give the jury more things to consider. But, and this is the point, we don’t let the experts decide the case. That remains a job for the jury, which holds a DoorDash deliverer, a community college student, and a guy who sells papier-mache umbrellas on Etsy. Laugh if you want, but they are all better qualified to decide lawsuits than the testifying experts.
Experts should say things like, we might want to think about letting robots make kill decisions. And then shut up, or take questions. But that kind of common sense doesn’t generate clicks.
Alas, having come so close to achieving a big bang breakthrough about the proper role of experts, the article ended with an anxious whimper. “ Researchers reported an average 18 percent chance of near-term human extinction,” it fretted, as though grand predictions about possible futures could be reduced to a statistical sample. “Yet the technology and the industry races full speed ahead, dumping more investment into technological acceleration every quarter, as though a future machine god was trying to drown the whistle-blowers in cash.”
(Not to be pedantic, but that concluding sentence included two grammatical errors, a neat metaphor for its logical ones. “Technology and industry” are a compound subject, so they “race” ahead, not “races.” And a “future machine god,” however frightening, is hypothetical and forward-looking, so it should be described as though it were trying to drown the whistle-blowers, not was. But never mind.)
I suppose the good news is that my job as a media critic remains secure. I will continue cutting ‘experts’ down to size whenever I get the chance. But we can all accept the lesson that the Times almost taught us, the 2,000-year-old advice we have yet to take (advice, I might add, from an actual god, not just a hypothetical future one who drowns whistleblowers). Cough up the black pill. Today’s problems are enough for today. Go tackle them.
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Finally, yesterday, in another article including excellent life advice, Fox News reported, “Texas clinic owner convicted in $26M military health fraud tied to gold-plated Cybertruck.” Don’t be Kevin.
There is one vehicle you absolutely neverbuy if you are running a secret multimillion-dollar fraud against the federal government. It is angular, stainless, and roughly the size of an obese hippopotamus. It is the most recognizable and distinctive automobile on American highways. On a clear day, you can spot it from low Earth orbit.
Unfortunately, Kevin D. Curry bought that truck. Then he had it gold-plated. Even the rims.
Curry, 64, of Frisco, Texas, was convicted Thursday by a federal jury in Fort Worth on nine felony counts: three for health care fraud, three for paying illegal health care kickbacks, and three for money laundering. Prosecutors said his clinics billed TRICARE —a healthcare program covering active-duty troops, veterans, and their families— more than $26.9 million for “depression therapy” that was medically unnecessary or, in many cases, never provided at all. TRICARE paid out about $17.1 million before anyone caught on.
Questions about oversight remain unanswered.
By The clinics were Acuity TMS of Plano, Acuity TMS of Fort Worth, and Emerald Coast TMS, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Believe it or not, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a real, FDA-cleared treatment: magnetic pulses stimulate areas of the brain to treat depression (and let you stick spoons to your face, but that’s just an unintended side effect). The fraud, per the Justice Department, was that many of the billed sessions were never delivered, weren’t medically necessary, or were encouraged with cash payments to the “patients.”
Curry is a licensed mental health counselor. He likes to stand out, clearly, but he’s not an actual doctor. To file the claims, prosecutors said he borrowed other doctors’ names and credentials —without their knowledge— then directed his employees to fabricate medical records to make the billing look legitimate. (How he got away with this for so long remained unexplained.)
You can argue about the ethics of his mainly Biden-era scheme, but Curry was, at least, generous. The kickbacks included more than $5.5 million, paid between September 2022 and the end of 2025, to active-duty service members, veterans, and their families— to consent to treatment they didn’t qualify for and usually didn’t receive. It was alternative medicine, a mental health practice where the patients got paid. Most therapists charge $200 an hour to listen to you complain. Curry paid his patients to let him bill the government for not treating them. No complaints.
With the proceeds, Curry bought luxurious hotel stays, a lavish casino-themed party, and the aforementioned inconspicuous gold-plated Tesla Cybertruck, worth “more than $100,000,” according to the DOJ. (If that seems low, it might’ve just been a gold-chrome vinyl wrap. But still. The point stands.)
There is a special kind of confidence in throwing yourself a casino-themed party with stolen money. The counselor was literally gambling with the house’s money, except the house was the United States taxpayer. It was true to form in one way: the house always loses. Only the house was us. That was Curry’s whole business model: a magnetic casino.
So let’s review. Medical degree: fake. Therapy sessions: fake. Medical records: Also fake! The doctors whose names appeared on the claims: real doctors, but clueless. And now, possibly even the gold: just a big sticker. It was fraud all the way down, a luxury truckload of federal crimes.
Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, who runs the DOJ’s new National Fraud Enforcement Division, said, “This defendant exploited a critical health care program serving active-duty servicemembers and their families, diverting taxpayer dollars to bankroll personal luxuries.” U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould was more blunt, accusing Curry of having “shamelessly preyed on the trust of servicemembers, veterans, and their families.”
More encouragingly, Curry was one of 13 North Texas defendants charged as recently as June, part of a national takedown that swept up 455 defendants, $6.5 billion in alleged fraud, and more than $182 million in seized assets, per HHS-OIG. Each of Curry’s nine counts carries up to 10 years— a 90-year theoretical maximum, which is a ceiling and not a prediction, since federal sentencing guidelines will land somewhere well below the ceiling and well above the truck’s appraised value.
The FBI seized the low-key truck, along with $136,022 in cash, back in January, months before the verdict. Sentencing hasn’t been scheduled yet.
Meanwhile, the Cybertruck —gold-plated (what DOJ and media report) or gold-wrapped, either way— is currently parked in federal custody, surely one of the most conspicuous pieces of evidence in the history of white-collar crime. Curry’s lesson, then, is a master class in at least one subject: if you’re going to steal $17 million from the troops, consider driving something beige.
Have a marvelous Monday! Return tomorrow for your Tuesday roundup, neatly packaged into an all-new roundup of essential news and stimulating caffeinated commentary.
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