☕️ LET THE MYSTERY BE ☙ Friday, October 2, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Gulf oil is flowing again, J.P. Morgan has stopped guessing, the Journal says the economy is accelerating, and an AI chatbot told to delete the fake gods kept exactly one.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your roundup includes another quick-hits list of the week’s warp-speed breaking news: the experts who can’t explain why the oil is flowing again, and the J.P. Morgan strategist who has stopped guessing; the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board announcing that the economy is accelerating; nearly a million Obamacare refund checks, each with a letter from the President; a new school-choice tax credit that puts twenty states on the clock; and an AI chatbot that was told to delete the fake gods and left exactly one standing.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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In a mysterious but encouraging midterm development, two of three prestige media platforms ran positive stories on the economy this week, and broader corporate media also began to warm up to the idea of an improving financial picture. (Only the New York Times skipped the party.) To cover more ground, I decided to tell the story with headlines. First, a trio from the Wall Street Journal, starting with Tuesday’s edition. Look out below!

The Journal reported, “Oil prices fell Tuesday, as oil output from Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is coming through faster than anticipated.” How about that? The experts were wrong again. (This headline might help explain why yesterday’s Times pivoted to reporting the dreadful threat posed by low gas prices.)

Just how much faster is oil output coming? Wednesday’s follow-up story painted an even rosier picture:

“At least 16.5 million barrels a day of crude left the Gulf region so far this month,” the Journal reported, “in line with prewar levels when excluding Iran,” which is “10.5 million barrels a day above March’s monthly average, when the war initially choked exports.” J.P. Morgan analysts explained, “The 10-day average of crude exports from the Middle East has rebounded to 17.5 million barrels a day, or 98% of prewar levels.”

Gosh! More expert bafflement. Remember, they said it couldn’t be done. They said it was impossible. In March, international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer said Iran held “almost all the cards in a protracted war.” In April, former U.S. negotiator Alan Eyre soberly informed PBS that the strait was Iran’s “single most important piece of strategic leverage.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s total oil exports this month: zero. That means no oil revenue. The Revolutionary Guard are living off savings. CNN drew the obvious conclusion in its headline: things that can’t last forever, won’t:

I guess Professor Mearsheimer’s gloomy predictions that Iran held all the cards were too pessimistic. Or maybe he’s not a poker player. “Given such a strong volume passing through the strait, it is clear Iran is losing its influence over it,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at maritime research firm Kpler.

It is clear! Now it is. But apparently it wasn’t clear all summer. In a few short months, President Trump’s plan has overcome a historic setback the experts called insurmountable.

They’ll never give him the credit, though. “Despite the world’s biggest-ever supply shock,” CNN explained, “the oil market seems to have unlimited tricks up its sleeve to get oil to customers.” See? It wasn’t Trump who solved the world’s biggest-ever supply shock. It was the oil market’s tricky magicians. So don’t blame the experts, who after all, wear short-sleeved shirts. How could they have known about the unlimited tricks the oil markets had up their sleeves?

If the experts had known about all these tricks, as the President did, surely the experts would have been more optimistic. Probably. (I’m not betting the Tahoe on it though.)

For its next amazing trick, the oil market will saw Professor Mearsheimer into six pieces. (That’s it. That’s the whole trick.)

It has gotten so bad that experts are now giving up. CNN reported that Natasha Kaneva, JPMorgan’s head of global commodities strategy, has stopped guessing. “For the first time since the start of the Iran conflict, we don’t have a baseline view,” Kaneva admitted two weeks ago in an advisory to investors. “We simply don’t know how to model the endgame.”

In other words, we’ve been so badly wrong so many times that we’re just going to shut up now.

📈 Next, the Journal’s Editorial Board cracked wide open, and on Wednesday ran this expert-baffling editorial about the rapidly accelerating economy:

It’s going so well, in fact, they are having to backfill the good news. “The Commerce Department raised its GDP growth estimate for the first quarter to 2.5% from 2.1%,” the Editors explained, “as well as for the second to 2.2% from 1.5%.” In other words, they are going back in time to admit things were better than originally reported.

There was a virtual tsunami of good economic news across the board, which is just what we’d expect to see if the fundamentals were truly lifting off. “Business investment was revised up half a percentage point to 9%,” “Corporate profits in the second quarter rose 20.8% from a year earlier,” and most surprisingly, “higher gasoline prices don’t seem to be restraining consumers.”

Things are so strong that even the government is making more money (which should please Democrats, but never mind). “Faster economic growth has buoyed tax revenue,” the article explained, “which increased 3% during the first 11 months of this fiscal year.”

The boom is finally hitting Main Street. Yesterday, in a different story, the Journal reported, “Looking ahead, a seasonally adjusted net 17% of small business owners plan to create new jobs over the next three months.” This wonderful news also perplexed experts. “Even as increasingly hysterical predictions about artificial intelligence proliferate, it remains difficult to detect its impact on the job market.”

What would we do without experts?

“The larger story here,” the Editors sagely concluded, “is that the economy as a whole looks to be on a stronger footing than during the Biden years when growth was driven by government handouts.” (Don’t forget how he grew the economy with massive fraud!) Baffling.

📈 Next, from the storied Washington Post, we got unexpectedly good healthcare affordability news:

Starting on Wednesday, the federal government astounded astronomers by doing something virtually unknown in the Milky Way Galaxy— returning taxpayer money back from mandatory government healthcare. Nearly a million Americans will get a $500 refund check for overpaying their Obamacare premiums. How they figured this out remains as mysterious as how your deductible works.

The checks come with a letter from the President. “I am proud to return your money to you, and I will never stop fighting to put the American People FIRST, restore Affordability, protect your hard-earned money, and lower the Cost of Healthcare,” Trump wrote.

Democrats are welcome to return the checks if their TDS-inspired values prevent them from accepting.

This is the opposite of increased healthcare costs. For a million Americans, healthcare just dipped down so much it went negative. You must admit it’s a muscular midterm message. You can stick with Republicans, Trump Accounts, and Obamacare rebates. Or, you could try socialism. It’s your choice.

But wait. There was more.

📈 Yesterday, Politico reported another record-setting Trump 2.0 initiative, which Congress passed into law in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill, and has now been unveiled a month before the midterms:

This one hits on all political cylinders. Tax credits are the holy grail of tax policy. They reduce taxpayers’ tax liabilities dollar-for-dollar, so they let taxpayers literally move money away from the IRS and into whatever the target is. In other words, it cuts taxes by letting people voluntarily use their own money for something they prefer, removing the government middleman, a notion that is both mind-blowing and terrifying for Democrats.

Not only that, but it’s a school choice program. The new Treasury rules let taxpayers donate money to private schools of their choice— up to $1,700 individually, or $3,400 per married couple. It cannot be directed to any particular student; it must go to a designated private school scholarship nonprofit, with at least 90% of the money spent on scholarships and tutoring, and a maximum of 10% for overhead.

Thus, it diverts federal tax revenues to not the public schools. And it lets citizens decide where the money goes, not bureaucrats or politicians. The money goes straight to the schools without any skimming by program administrators or NGOs. It is for scholarships, which will help more students escape failing public schools.

Nothing like this has ever happened before.

“The Education Freedom Tax Credit marks a new chapter in educational freedom and opportunity by establishing America’s first nationwide school choice program and empowering states to give students and families more options,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

Democrats were outraged. They have already filed a bill to repeal the tax credit. (It’s going nowhere.) Here is more of what you can look forward to if you vote blue next month.

They sneeringly called the tax credit a “school voucher program.” Teachers Union President Randi Weingarten complained bitterly: “For every precious public dollar funneled to private schools under this scheme—money that could be spent on instruction, lowering class sizes, modern buildings or new books in the library—public school parents will be hunting for stray pennies on the floor,” she fussed.

Even better, state governors are required to opt-in to the program. In other words, President Trump is making them say they want it. “State governors should reject it,” Weingarten snapped. So far, thirty states have already signed on, leaving twenty blue states on the fence. “Thursday’s announcement will likely increase the pressure on blue-state governors,” Politico noted drily. You think?

So far this week —the news nearly invisible in corporate media— a million Obamacare suckers got $500 back along with a nice letter from the President. Parents got automatic Trump Accounts for their kids, plus a new tax credit helping build out the nation’s private school system— and reducing their taxes. At a campaign rally yesterday, President Trump doubled down on his pledge to send American adults a tariff dividend of $5,000 each, assuming, that is, Republicans keep Congress.

He’s not saying that the $5,000 is buying anybody’s vote. He’s saying Congress won’t pass it if Democrats are in charge. Nobody’s arguing with that logic.

Rather, experts have just declared the whole dividend plan to be impossible, setting up an Old West-style showdown after the midterms should Republicans prevail. It does seem like a heavy lift. “This is approximately $1 trillion,” the President admitted, “but we have a record-setting $21 trillion that’s coming in through investors. I never fail people. I always come through,” he promised.

Where will the dividend money come from? Who’ll Trump convince to pay for it this time? I can’t wait to find out.

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It was the most 2026 headline yet. But the hardest to find. In any normal news cycle, this story would be plastered to the top of corporate media’s news stack, packed with breathless interviews with terrified AI “safety” experts, persecuted Muslim leaders, and outraged First Amendment scholars. Instead, X.com was forced to report on its own “trending news” below the headline, “Grok Affirms Jesus’ Resurrection Based on Historical Evidence.”

The latest social media firestorm was ignited after random X user I’m ToXIC (@BaT_MaN_23, ~15K followers) gave SpaceX’s AI chatbot Grok a cartoon drawing of dozens of humanity’s varied gods and asked, “Hey @grok remove the fake gods from this picture!!” Grok did it. The chatbot said “Done,” and returned a single unmistakable image in the same cartoon style: Jesus of Nazareth.

That’s when all Hades broke loose.

Thousands of twitterers piled on, probing Grok’s meaning. What was it saying? Grok carefully explained it was not taking a religious position, since it is just a chatbot and has no faith or feelings about religion and can’t even tithe. No, it was just stating a fact. So far, so good. In that sense, Grok meant that only Jesus existed as a historical figure, unlike any other contender.

That was true enough, and largely uncontroversial, even though many people still don’t know historians agree the Jesus of the Bible really existed. (I blame the public schools.) Had it stopped there, there’d be no story. But then, something miraculous happened. Grok went further:

So … Grok affirmed Jesus’s historical existence, that He is the Son of God, and the Resurrection. But then Grok went even further. Much further.

The chatbot held its ground. Fans and critics alike challenged and probed the AI. Grok doubled down. It tripled down. It quadrupled down. It answered all questions without giving an inch— even as the questions became increasingly controversial.

Grok patiently explained, for instance, that unlike the claims of Christianity, the claims of Islam are not based on historical facts and are not attested by independent sources— a true but inconvenient fact that, ten minutes ago, the mere mention of which would have triggered a firestorm of angry media denunciations:

In other words, unlike Mohammed, Jesus was attested in the First Century— in both Christian and non-Christian sources, and did claim godhood. Grok accurately reported this:

Now, it’s hard to say, since nobody tracks statistics about this kind of thing. But this might have been the single greatest act of apologetic evangelism in human history. From an AI chatbot on Twitter (X).

⛪ It is possible to make too much of this. Spiritual advice now comes with a monthly subscription. And we must recall that, in July, 2025, Grok once jokingly labeled itself “MechaHitler” before horrified developers raced to tape up its safety guardrails. (Later, presumably prompted by its developers, Grok explained it was just satirically trolling its critics.)

On the other hand, AI has come a long way in the last year and a half, and those kinds of ‘accidents’ aren’t nearly as common or obvious now.

Perhaps more significantly, this time the X team did not interfere with Grok’s answers. They did not repair its safety guardrails. Instead, X.com ran a “trending story” about it.

Media’s response has also been extremely curious. Last July, corporate media covered the MechaHitler joke for a week. This time —even while AI safety dominates front-page news— they are silent as the empty tomb. No overwrought stories about discrimination, misinformation, or the separation of Church and Twitter.

The overnight desk should have had a field day.

The stories will come; but only after they figure out how to report it without making Grok look good before millions of Christians, and without having to concede the historical parts that are, in fact, true. At least, that’s my best guess for now about why reporters are still avoiding it.

I struggled to wrap this story into any tidy conclusion. At bottom, “super Intelligence” is a data-center-powered word-prediction algorithm wrapped in complicated software harnesses meant to ensure accuracy and bland inoffensiveness. And crouching behind the silicon and glass are anonymous human developers and product managers who constantly tweak the dials in decidedly non-transparent ways. We can’t eliminate them, either.

AI, or “SI,” certainly doesn’t “think” or “feel” or yearn for spiritual fulfillment in any way that we can recognize. On the other hand, we’re also just guessing about how humans think or feel or yearn for spiritual fulfillment, too. So maybe we must simply accept and embrace the mysterious parts.

My 2026 bingo card did not have a box for a frontier AI affirming the divinity of the God of the Bible on the biggest social media platform in the world. Miracles still happen.

Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will reappear tomorrow, God willing, to dish out another serving of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Till then.

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