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Woman Faces Federal Charges After Threatening To Kill Austin Metcalf's Father

2026-09-24T15:19:16.098-07:00

Woman Faces Federal Charges After Threatening To Kill Austin Metcalf's Father

The Karmelo Anthony story never seems to end, and perhaps that's a testament to the era we live in. It seems as though every prominent trial with any media attention is automatically politicized - From the Lindsay Clancy circus to the Luigi Mangionne case to Anthony stabbing Austin Metcalf, the political left has been particularly invasive. Not only do they consistently take the side of the murderers, but they continue in their efforts to blame and terrorize the victims.

Such is the ongoing reality of the Metcalf family, who are now faced with an array of threats from online lunatics and race militants looking for "payback" after the conviction of their hero, Karmelo Anthony.

A Missouri woman is currently facing federal charges for threatening to kill Austin Metcalf's father (Jeff Metcalf) and "put him in a body bag" because of Anthony's prison sentence. Court documents show Sharifa Nicole Henderson, who is also known as Riffa Henderson, was arrested on September 11 and indicted on three federal counts over messages she allegedly sent "on or about June 9" - which was the day Anthony was convicted and sentenced to 35 years behind bars.

In one message she allegedly wrote:

"Don't worry. I'll kill you next...I will hunt you forever until I kill you ... I will be there. You will always have to look over your fucking shoulder."

In another post, she reportedly threatened to "demolish" the Metcalf family. U.S. Attorney Jay R. Combs said investigators traced the messages through phone and social media records.

"The stability of our society rests in part on the proper functioning of our system," Combs said. "If you threaten to kill or harm jurors, judges, prosecutors or victims, we will treat those threats seriously."

Henderson could get a maximum of 5 years in prison for each charge if convicted. But why does the political left engage in trial tampering and intimidation? Because the leftist philosophy relies on an inversion of the moral order and power is their only value.

In the case of Karmelo Anthony, the murderer is a young black man and the victim is a young white man, therefore Anthony must be protected as a symbol of the tearing down (the murder) of the western moral order. If Austin Metcalf had been black, leftists and black activists never would have cared. They would have ignored the case entirely.

Anthony was convicted in June after his representatives attempted to try the case in the court of public opinion. Numerous false claims were made in order to paint Austin Metcalf as the aggressor (very similar to activist efforts to make Lindsay Clancy into a victim and paint her husband as the "real killer").

The bottom line? Anthony was a psychopath looking for trouble. He had a history of violent and bizarre behavior and text messages from before the event show that he fantasized about murder. He walked into the team tent of Austin Metcalf armed with a knife like a coward and hoping someone would ask him to leave.

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 15:45
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Shareholders Sue New York Times Over 'Biased' Israel Coverage

2026-09-23T16:19:38.766-07:00

Shareholders Sue New York Times Over 'Biased' Israel Coverage

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Shareholders sued The New York Times on Sept. 23, alleging the company has failed to prevent false reporting about Israel and other topics.

The State Board of Administration of Florida, representing the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund and National Center for Public Policy Research, filed the lawsuit in a New York court.

"The Company's repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions, many later admitted internally or disproven externally, supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company's internal controls, but it has allowed such flagrantly selective application of the internal controls to support the conclusion that in the absence of any Board-level oversight, journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors," the 48-page filing says.

Shareholders said that a whistleblower reported problems to the company's internal channel for such issues in November 2023.

"I feel that I'm on a desk that is particularly biased against Israel ... I can't tell if the Masthead does not see that our desk is biased, does not see it as a problem to be resolved, or just hasn't figured out how to get a handle on it," the whistleblower was quoted as saying.

The person later presented 26 slides to a standards editor that described how the paper had rejected footage from a source because the source was "pro-Israel" and how a freelancer's praise of Hitler was downplayed as "just some jokes."

The whistleblower's concerns, later expanded to include questions about the lack of a promised training on anti-Semitism, and the hiring of a freelancer who said he "supports the Palestinian struggle against occupation," did not prompt any changes, according to the filing.

One incident outlined by shareholders was how The New York Times included a photograph of a child in its 2025 article, "Gazans Are Dying of Starvation," without disclosing that the child had pre-existing health conditions, as Getty Images had noted days prior in captions of pictures of the child.

The paper later updated the photo's information and said that "after publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems."

Evidence shows that controls the company promotes to the public, including standards review before content is published, are not working, as that and other incidents show, the lawsuit says.

It requests the court order The New York Times to show shareholders materials they requested to see in August, including all versions of the paper's editorial standards since Jan. 1, 2020.

"This lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose," a spokesperson for the paper told The Epoch Times in an email.

"Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company's books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment. We will defend against the suit vigorously."

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/23/2026 - 16:20
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AI & The Same Old Politicized Hysteria

2026-09-22T15:19:10.426-07:00

AI & The Same Old Politicized Hysteria

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The midterm elections are six weeks away.

Suddenly, a debate has erupted over the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. Jacob Coxon, a little-known Silicon Valley researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and went public with a dire warning: AI now threatens the future of the world.

Shortly beforehand, news broke of the Hugging Face episode, in which OpenAI's advanced AI "agents" autonomously hacked another company's computers.

Bedlam followed.

Weaponizing AI

Almost on cue, Democrats seized on the alarm as a new cause célèbre, accusing Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of recklessly courting Armageddon.

The Left demanded international treaties, ignoring the dismal record of such globalist projects: the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Washington Naval Treaty, the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord, and the UN Human Rights Council.

Panicky AI executives soon joined the chorus, speaking as though they could neither control their companies nor monitor their own research.

Their conduct casts doubt on this safety rhetoric. Just yesterday came news that Anthropic had built a fully automated, AI-controlled biolab, even though AI-generated plagues are a staple of the doomsday case. OpenAI, meanwhile, is resisting legal liability for harm caused by its products.

The familiar political script followed.

Democrats in Congress demanded hearings. They are unlikely to use them to ask tech executives or administration officials serious questions. More likely, they will spend their allotted time shouting, wagging their fingers, displaying their ignorance, and spinning wild conspiracy theories.

Sen. John Kennedy, who has proposed reasonable AI regulation for years alongside Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley, recently observed that "the Democrats clearly are trying to politicize this."

The reaction to a June administration decision offered still stronger evidence. Both purportedly worried AI companies and Trump-hating AI-risk advocates objected when the administration barred Anthropic from giving foreign nationals access to its Mythos and Fable 5 models - models whose cybersecurity risks the company itself had publicized.

With the trans delirium and the demonization of ICE losing force, however, the Left apparently needs a new existential crisis to blame on Trump before the midterms.

This tactic - never letting a crisis go to waste - is hardly new.

A Litany of Political Panics

Baby boomers grew up hearing dire warnings about the "population bomb," the title of Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller predicting that unchecked population growth would lead to global catastrophe.

Ehrlich and others argued that rising affluence would swell populations, producing famine, pestilence, war, and ultimately global catastrophe.

The thesis collapsed, but not before it produced a pervasive "Spaceship Earth" mentality. Guilt-ridden Americans were told to remain childless or, at most, to have one child.

Other countries followed. The existential danger now facing Western societies is the reverse: the citizens of these countries are now having far too few children. Their populations are shrinking and aging, while a dwindling cohort of young taxpayers must support ever-growing entitlements.

Green apocalypticism followed this. The science of ecology gave way to radical environmentalism, and legitimate concern about industrial pollution and acid rain became propaganda that the Earth was doomed unless the West renounced capitalism. Even heat was redefined as pollution. When "global warming" proved insufficiently terrifying, it became "climate change."

The new phrase was a brilliant catch-all. Rain and drought, snow and heat, calm seas and hurricanes could all be cited as proof that modern, fossil-fueled Western consumerism had doomed the planet.

European Union countries nearly wrecked their economies by subsidizing inefficient wind and solar power while abandoning nuclear energy and fossil fuels.

The 1980s brought another panic: nuclear war would soon incinerate the cities, and the resulting dust would blot out the sun.

Politics drove much of the frenzy. The Left despised Ronald Reagan and saw no other way to prevent his reelection in 1984.

For years, the United States had responded weakly as the Soviet Union deployed mobile, intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at European cities. Reagan finally answered by stationing Pershing II launchers and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe. The Soviets eventually withdrew their nuclear-tipped missiles.

No matter. A manufactured epidemic of fear swept the West regardless.

The popular scientist Carl Sagan toured the country promoting his terrifying theory of a "nuclear winter" after what he treated as an inevitable Soviet-American nuclear exchange.

Hollywood joined the campaign in 1983 with The Day After, a grim portrayal of a nuclear strike on the United States and its gruesome aftermath. Some 100 million Americans watched this movie, which depicted mushroom clouds rising over Kansas.

The psychodrama did not stop Reagan's reelection. Soon afterward, he negotiated a missile treaty with the Soviet Union, proving that he was hardly the deranged warmonger that his opponents delusionally imagined he was.

By the turn of the millennium, America was lurching from one amplified panic to another. Al Gore became a centimillionaire and a Nobel laureate by warning that internal-combustion engines would boil the planet, bringing both lethal drought and catastrophic coastal flooding.

Polar bears would die, coral reefs would disintegrate, icebergs would menace shipping, and coastal homes would disappear beneath the sea.

Only a Marshall Plan-scale replacement of gasoline and diesel engines with wind turbines, solar farms, and batteries, we were told, could save humanity.

The planet survived. Al Gore grew wealthier, and Goreism then quietly receded into the shadows.

#MeToo began with legitimate accusations against Hollywood predators such as Harvey Weinstein, who had long coerced young actresses into sex in exchange for roles - the old casting couch revived.

Before long, however, the movement had become a new Salem witch trial, treating almost any allegation of rude conduct between the sexes as the equivalent of rape.

Insinuation and rumor damaged the reputations of men ranging from Garrison Keillor and Sen. Al Franken to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, often with little or no evidence. A legitimate campaign against sexual harassment had deteriorated into character assassination.

Millions of men began searching their memories for an off-color joke, an overlong hug, or a kiss that might resurface years later to ruin their careers while advancing those of their accusers.

The McCarthyite frenzy subsided only when liberals realized that their Frankenstein monster had turned on its creators and threatened too many of their own political icons.

They had no wish to derail the likely presidential candidacy of the handsy Joe Biden, whom several women accused of inappropriate touching and hugging and one even accused of violent sexual assault.

Nor did they wish to revive the sordid record of former president Bill Clinton's many brief and exploitative sexual encounters.

As #MeToo faded, COVID hysteria took its place. The initially virulent virus warranted serious concern; more than a million Americans would die from it. Yet concern became madness once defeating Trump took precedence over fighting the disease.

Officials closed schools even though the virus posed little danger to young people or children. The first nationwide lockdown in American history devastated the economy.

Officials presented the new mRNA vaccines as ironclad protection against infection and transmission. Those who resisted were treated as near-outlaws, fired, or ostracized, although the shots had not been proved to guarantee lasting immunity or perfect safety and often carried with them serious side effects, many or most of which were denied or swept under the rug.

The government expelled 8,500 service members who refused vaccination even as, with liberal approval, 10,000 unvaccinated and unvetted illegal immigrants crossed the border each day.

Teachers' unions kept public schools closed, inflicting lasting harm on a generation of students. Quarantines and shelter-in-place orders contributed to domestic violence, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Millions missed heart and cancer screenings. The shuttered economy destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses and upended millions of lives.

Still, shyster "experts" predicted years of mass death comparable to the plagues that ravaged ancient Athens and Constantinople.

They grossly misrepresented or caricatured the classical medical understanding of acquired natural immunity. Dr. Fauci and his circle of "authorities" also failed to disclose their role in funding gain-of-function research at the Communist Chinese laboratory in Wuhan that had created the mysterious virus.

What ended the panic?

As a few sober - and therefore demonized - health experts had predicted, the virus evolved into less virulent strains while prior infections increased natural immunity.

COVID eventually receded to the level of a severe flu. By then, this hysterical, manufactured response to it had wrecked the economy, destroyed the final year of the Trump administration, and inflicted incalculable physical and psychological harm on the American people.

The lockdowns helped ignite an even greater panic after George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody. A video showed an officer restraining the resisting Floyd with a knee on his neck, using what was then considered a more or less standard protocol; within moments of its release, the country erupted.

False claims spread that police disproportionately killed unarmed black men. Murals portrayed Floyd as a haloed martyr with angel wings, although he was a career felon detained for passing counterfeit currency who resisted arrest, was high on drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and the effects of a recent COVID infection.

No matter - riots soon swept the country. More than 35 Americans were killed, roughly 2,000 police officers were injured, and about 14,000 people were arrested. Property losses reached some $2 billion. Rioters torched a police precinct and a federal courthouse and tried to storm the White House grounds.

Universities dropped SAT requirements. "Black" was given a sacral form of capitalization; "white" was conspicuously left lowercase.

New racial quotas sharply reduced white male admission rates at elite schools. Institutions hired tens of thousands of DEI commissars. Campaigns to defund the police, release habitual felons, and decriminalize theft spread nationwide.

Then the George Floyd frenzy abruptly subsided.

Black Lives Matter's founders were exposed as grifters who had misappropriated funds while acquiring plush homes and expense accounts.

Data showed that, relative to annual police encounters, unarmed black men were not fatally shot at a higher rate than white men.

After abandoning admissions standards, universities found themselves inflating grades, adding remedial courses, and lowering academic expectations for students who had not met requirements the institutions had deemed indispensable only a year earlier.

The post-Floyd frenzy finally ebbed as the public recognized that tribalism and attacks on meritocracy were themselves racist and nihilistic.

What, then, does today's Democratic embrace of AI alarm share with these earlier mass frenzies?

First, each began with a legitimate concern that politics and a profit motive soon warped the problem beyond all recognition. The Left appropriated the underlying issue to gain political advantage and power.

Worry about overpopulation goes back to Malthus, but The Population Bomb appeared in the election year of 1968. Its political subtext blamed Western consumerism, capitalism, religion, and traditional pronatalism for civilization's supposed approaching end.

The danger of nuclear war had been real since the start of the atomic arms race. Nuclear-winter paranoia, however, was promoted to damage Ronald Reagan during his reelection campaign.

Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance converted tentative scientific speculation about climate change into partisan dogma. It blamed capitalist consumer culture for destroying the planet and, in the 1992 election year, reinforced the Clinton-Gore campaign's attack on the Bush status quo.

#MeToo reached its political peak during the Kavanaugh hearings. Democrats repurposed a movement against Hollywood abuse to derail Trump's Supreme Court nominee with unfounded claims that Kavanaugh had assaulted a teenage girl decades earlier. Democratic operatives coached the now-troubled adult before she appeared on national television.

COVID began with legitimate fear of an escaped, artificially enhanced virus that killed millions - a fear the Left initially dismissed as anti-Chinese racism. It, too, was soon politicized. We now know that Anthony Fauci, his associates at the National Institutes of Health, and other presidential advisers despised Trump and understood that shutting down his booming economy could end his presidency.

The Biden campaign then blamed Trump for the economic damage caused by the lockdown.

George Floyd's death was genuinely shocking on video, especially without the surrounding context. But the 2020 campaign transformed it into the catalyst for months of rioting and a weapon against the supposedly racist Trump and MAGA movement. As cities burned, the Left argued that Trump was powerless to stop the violence - and a Nazi if he tried.

Second, every panic was exaggerated. The planet was neither overpopulated nor running out of food and fuel. Nuclear war was not imminent, and Earth did not face destruction within a decade. Women were not experiencing an epidemic of sexual assault. The lockdowns likely caused more harm than the virus, and police were not conducting a mass slaughter of black men.

The underlying dangers were not equally imaginary. Nuclear war, for example, came terrifyingly close in 1962 and again in 1983.

Among genuine threats, AI most resembles nuclear weaponry. That assessment may change, but AI has so far proved to be an extraordinarily powerful and therefore potentially dangerous tool. Its moral character depends on the people who build and control it.

That is why the United States can neither entrust AI regulation to international bodies with dismal track records nor permit Communist China to monopolize the technology.

Trump, who is a much more skillful diplomat than his globalist critics admit, has instead pursued bilateral negotiations with China over the real dangers both countries face. Those dangers were illustrated just yesterday, when an AI hallucination reportedly almost prompted a U.S. attack on a Chinese cargo ship.

In the end, Americans must rely on their own people, constitutional government, and open culture to harness AI for the public good - and to deter hostile powers from using it for evil.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 15:45
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Kunstler: Suburban Sprawl Is A 'Death Trap' For America's National Spirit

2026-09-21T15:19:19.187-07:00

Kunstler: Suburban Sprawl Is A 'Death Trap' For America's National Spirit

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

The Late, Great Debate About Suburbia, An Apologia

"It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished."

- William H Whyte

Greenland, yes, yes, okay ! Smooth move. . . !

But. . . today we put aside the vagaries of national and geo-politics to return to a longstanding affliction in American life that is evermore absent from the public discourse and deserves an airing: the quandary of our suburban sprawl living arrangement, and what can be done about it.

First, get this: the demolition derby we live in day-by-day is responsible for as much misery, injustice, economic failure, and ill-health as anything else in our collective doings.

Its sheer ugliness - the horror of the six-lane highway with its ensembles of strip-malls, burger shacks, muffler shops, topless bars, Big Box stops, screaming signage, and the vast wastelands of parking. . . the suicide-inducing housing pods marching out remorselessly through forest, prairie, upland, lowland, basin and range. . . the depressing freeways with their monster entanglements of on-and-off-ramps. . . this epic mutilation of our continental landscape - is an evil quite beyond our ordinary imaginings. This inescapable, immersive ugliness, I remind you, is entropy-made-visible. And entropy, of course, is the force in nature that you really don't want to mess around with because it is the agent of death.

I do not exaggerate. It's a death trap, the way we live in this country, for the mind, the body, the family, the community, and the national spirit. Until fairly recently this was widely apprehended (or at least suspected). But the politicization of everything has wrecked what had been a growing and pretty robust national discussion about it.

To re-cap briefly: this is a big country. It had once been composed of cities, towns, farmlands, and wilderness, a coherent transect of human habitation. The invention of the motor car changed all that, starting in the 1920s.

The ambiguous territory outside these cities and towns represented vast potential fortunes in property development. . . and the race was on.

The Great Depression and World War 2 interrupted the suburban expansion, but it resumed on steroids afterward when the rest of the world was a smoldering ruin and we could sell them anything (and lend them money to buy it). The construction of all the new suburban infrastructure alone was a major component of the late 20th century US economy, and then it became the scaffold for our so-called consumer economy, comprised of furnishing that scaffold with so much stuff that it overflowed into thousands of self-storage sheds.

The decanting of our cities that ensued - the steady dribble of the middle-classes moving out, along with the commerce that served them - left most of those cities ruined. Eventually even the small towns got whacked, the farms paved-over, too. What we're left with is a weird hybrid landscape that is neither town nor country, has few of the civic amenities that add-up to a genuine sense of community, and none of the rural charm formerly found in the countryside. It became painfully obvious that a suburban house was a cartoon of a house in the country, and living in a cartoon is just not spiritually rewarding. Cue the Prozac. . . .

The whole kit, aided by the dogmas of zoning and government lending schemes, became easily reproducible from one locale to the next. For the development industry, the template became a habit. . . and so it boogied on through the decades. By the 1990s, the generation coming into power (yeah, the Boomers) started a revolt against all that. It crystalized in the New Urbanism movement and its signature org, the Congress for the New Urbanism, CNU. We can do better than this, this. . . this. . . national clusterfuck, they declared.

I was excited by this movement, wrote a couple of books about it, got to know the excellent people behind it - architects, urban planners, civic officials, property developers. They were smart, skilled, visionary. They believed that walkable communities and disciplining the automobile would produce places worth caring about and worth living in - and it seemed to me that such an effort would go a long way to curing the desperate anomie of American life. Over the next several decades, the New Urbanists produced scores of great projects. Some were actual new towns, some projects were renovations of existing towns, neighborhoods, business districts, and small town Main Streets. The results of their work are visible all over the country now.

But then, the political crack-up of the country commenced around 2009 with the Great Financial Crash and the ascent of Obama-inspired Wokeness, and really accelerated with the reaction to the advent of Mr. Trump in 2016. From that point on, as a nation, we've been arguing about everything but the disastrous arrangement of daily life on-the-ground in America. Some new twists in the spin of history have made matters worse.

One is that suburban sprawl is, by default, the favorite pattern of MAGA (and I happen to be a Trump voter). To them, suburbia is all tied up with ideas about economic liberty, as is the whole apparatus of Happy Motoring. They are still mentally stuck in the imagery of the TV car commercial - the lone sedan gliding through the sine-cosine curves of the empty seacoast highway, the romantic epitome of freedom! It's a lie, pretty much, because the more universal experience of motoring these days is getting stuck at a crawl in freeway traffic with a thousand other motorists per mile, half of whom desperately need to take a pee and can't do a darn thing about it.

And then there's the fallacy of the suburban housing development being a "community" - bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! See: I don't even have to explain that. But, MAGA tends to see it this way, along with all the activity that enables it - the mortgage system, the production home-builders ("it's more than a house, you understand, it's a home!"), all of which is so central to a booming economy. So, you don't dare inveigh against suburbia - except I will, because it is making America worse, not great again, and somebody's got to say it.

Yet another thing has come along to wreck the New Urbanist dream of reconstituting the American city and small town, and that thing is the World Economic Forum's (WEF's) proposal they call the "15-minute City." Superficially, it seems to resemble the traditional neighborhood model that the NU's espouse. But deeper down the 15-Minute City is much more about a surveillance and tracking apparatus - and this has caused many conservatives (especially them) to reject anything that looks like traditional urban design.

It's a most unfortunate situation, but that's where things stand, and it's one reason that the debate over suburban sprawl has stopped. A final and equally unfortunate development is that the CNU org came to be taken over the past decade by political Wokesters more interested in Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity BS than in their original mission of providing workable remedies for the tragic fiasco of American suburbia.

And now you know why it is so hard to talk about this geography of nowhere anymore.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 16:20
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Trump Would 'Probably Be Open' To Meeting Iranian President, Who Will Address UN

2026-09-20T17:19:23.836-07:00

Trump Would 'Probably Be Open' To Meeting Iranian President, Who Will Address UN

President Trump in a Sunday morning Fox News interview repeated some of his talking points about a big decision he is preparing to make regarding what comes next in the Iran war

He told the outlet he's currently in "deciding mode" on Iran and that "very big things" are coming, and once again suggested it would either involve major military escalation or else a drawdown in tensions.

The president said: "My question is, if and when do I blow the entire nation up? They better behave."

But he went from saying that he's mulling the destruction of an entire society, to then suggesting it could be the opposite - top negotiations could happen, to the point that he could meet Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

He said he might allow Iran to "rot" economically or else a deal could be forged, adding that "very big things are going to be happening in the not-so-distant future."

Interestingly, the US actually issued visas to allow Iranian top officials and diplomats to travel for the UN General Assembly meeting through this week. According to Iran's PressTV:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is set to travel to New York to attend the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly next week.

Pezeshkian is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Wednesday, September 23, where he’s expected to present the Islamic Republic’s stance on international developments and the US-Israeli war of aggression against the country.

On the sidelines of the gathering, the president is also expected to hold meetings and consultations with world leaders.

Trump was asked about the high level UN meeting which opens Monday, and surprisingly signaled a willingness to engage diplomatically, going so far as to say he would "probably be open" to meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

In Trump's mind, there seem to be three options on the table, or as he put it--"to obliterate Iran, letting it rot economically or reach a deal."

Iran has meanwhile over the weekend once again warned US allies in the region that they'll be considered "complicit" if the US resumes it military assault on the Islamic Republic. The Iranian military HQ stated that "any mistakes will result in painful attacks."

Tehran further indicated Sunday that it is still awaiting Trump's response to its conditions for ending the war. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf confirmed to AFP that Iran's demands were sent to Washington via the Qataris.

🚨General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces:
According to intelligence received, the US has once again decided—with the green light from certain regional countries—to resume actions against Iran during a joint meeting in a European nation.
— IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) (@iribnews_irib) September 20, 2026

These conditions have been summarized as "the end of the war on all fronts, the release of frozen assets and the end of the naval blockade."

Releasing all frozen funds is a tall ask, given the White House has only become more aggressive it waging economic war on the Iranians. But Iran has blasted the theft and hijacking of its funds and sovereign assets.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 18:00
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Trump Says His Planned DC Arch Would Host Drones And Snipers

2026-09-20T15:19:27.160-07:00

Trump Says His Planned DC Arch Would Host Drones And Snipers

Via Headline USA,

President Donald Trump said Sunday that the massive arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery would become a "top grade military complex" able to host drones and snipers while storing ammunition.

It is one more example of how Trump is insisting that his initiatives to beautify the White House and the city are also serving a defensive purpose.

Trump has been calling the new White House ballroom a "military complex" and arguing it is necessary for national security purposes.

The Republican president said in a social media post that he had agreed, at the "strong request" of the military, to convert the planned 250-foot-tall memorial arch "into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage."

Trump says planned arch to have ammunition storage and staging areas for snipers pic.twitter.com/Y1MpaPLO9J
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) September 20, 2026

After teasing it in October 2025, Trump has continued to promote his vision for a 250-foot triumphal arch situated between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

The arch will “celebrate the triumphs of the American people, inspire patriotism and love of country, and beautify our nation’s capital,” the Department of the Interior, as its sponsor, declared in its project materials.

The arch (one of several projects that the Republican president is pursuing to leave his lasting imprint on Washington) is currently awaiting final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), a federal review panel dominated by Trump appointees.

Among the others are the white House ballroom, renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public's access to running and biking paths.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) on Sunday criticized Trump’s announcement.

“Putting a drone launching site directly in the landing path for [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport] is a stupid, dangerous, and unworkable idea,” Beyer said on X.

“Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security.”

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 16:30
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Iran Submits Conditions For Ending War With US Via Qatar, Awaits Trump Response

2026-09-19T14:19:37.287-07:00

Iran Submits Conditions For Ending War With US Via Qatar, Awaits Trump Response

Iran has announced Saturday that its Supreme National Security Council has submitted Tehran's conditions for ending the war with the United States via Qatar, and that it awaits the Trump White House's response.

"We are in contact with the Qatari intermediary who conveyed our conditions to Washington to end the war, and we are awaiting a response from President Trump," the supreme council's secretary Mohsen Rezaei said.

Via Asharq Al Awsat

But he warned that if Washington doesn't comply, the Islamic Republic is ready for a "decisive war". The conditions, according to his summary, features--

"the end of the war on all fronts, the release of frozen assets and the end of the naval blockade."

"Iran has become convinced of the need to change its strategy towards Washington following the US withdrawal from the memorandum of understanding," Rezaei explained in words given to Al Jazeera.

He blasted US and Israeli calculations which have been on display through over six months of war as "flawed" and asserted that the conflict was ultimately instigated by Netanyahu.

"Iran knows the US military’s vulnerabilities and is more prepared than ever to counter its air strikes," Rezaei stated. He went on to claim that Iranian forces recently tested an anti-ship missile near a US aircraft carrier.

"Iran is serious about defense," the high-ranking Iranian security official continued, and "if attacked, will strike US bases and Washington's interests in the region with greater force."

Meanwhile, President Trump continues to shut down critics of his "little excursion" in the Middle East, which is increasingly an obvious quagmire from which the US is seeking to extricate itself, by saying that high fuel prices don't matter in light of the potential for Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Interestingly, at the same time Iran continues to seek to demonstrate it is not bent on achieving nuclear weapons status.

However, Rezaei has also newly teased withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty:

Iran complies with a fatwa issued by the late Ali Khamenei prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons and has not yet decided to withdraw from the Treaty on the Non·Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

"We still adhere to the fatwa of the late supreme leader and have not changed our nuclear doctrine, but we do not know what will happen in the future. We have not yet made a decision to withdraw from the Non·Proliferation Treaty, and this issue depends on Washington’s behavior," said Mohsen Rezaei

However, according to Rezaei, the actions of the United States and Israel allow Iran to withdraw from the treaty.

The Iranian official in the fresh remarks also addressed the escalating Saudi-Yemen war. He described that the Houthis seek a peace settlement with Saudi Arabia, and suggested a broader US-Iran deal would facilitate that.

Why is CENTCOM doing this? Markets say bullshit pic.twitter.com/BdkzCGrFY6
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 19, 2026

Of course, Tehran at the same time knows that the Houthi advance along the Red Sea coast has only increased Iranian leverage over global energy - given the Yemeni rebels are now in easter shooting distance of the vital Bab Al-Mandab Strait. Iranian advisers are likely coordinating with the Shia Ansar Allah movement as it battles the Saudi coalition.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 14:35
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Flock Camera Ping Jails Innocent Woman For 13 Days

2026-09-18T14:19:08.078-07:00

Flock Camera Ping Jails Innocent Woman For 13 Days

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A 23-year-old Palm Coast Florida woman spent 13 days in a Volusia County jail cell facing life in prison after Florida Highway Patrol troopers treated a Flock Safety camera hit like a confession.

Lindsey Brooke Isaacs did not cause the crash. Her black Dodge Durango had no collision damage. A 911 caller had already described a maroon Durango and a partial plate that was not hers. None of that stopped the machine-assisted hunt.

The October 4, 2025 hit-and-run on eastbound I-4 near DeBary killed motorcyclist Joaquin Deno, Flagler County Deputy Administrator Jorge Salinas, and Salinas' wife, Nancy. A fourth person was badly hurt. Witnesses described a Dodge Durango fleeing the scene. Investigators searched nearby Flock cameras for a black Durango and found Isaacs' tag, RJVN10, crossing the Seminole-Volusia line at 9:51 p.m., about three miles west of a wreck that started around 9:53 p.m.

Innocent Florida woman spent 13 days in jail after cops' use of Flock cameras incorrectly blamed her in fatal hit & run pic.twitter.com/bOWCKDpV2u
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 17, 2026

That ping became the case.

Troopers later pounded on Isaacs' door while she was asleep. "I thought I was getting set up. I didn't understand what was going on," she said. They seized the Durango for months and claimed "marks" consistent with the crash.

Photographs later showed an immaculate 2025 SUV. "Where is the damage on the vehicle? Because I'm standing right in front of it and I don't see any damage," Isaacs recalled.

On April 17, 2026, FHP booked her on eight felonies, including three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of leaving the scene of a crash involving death. She was held without bond, then sat in G Block for 13 days. "Being incarcerated, falsely incarcerated, in jail, in G Block, was the worst 13 days in my life," she said. "I was devastated, I was scared. I thought my life was over."

Attorney Patrick McGeehan did the work the camera search replaced. A time-and-distance analysis using the same Flock timestamp put Isaacs past the crash site when the collision happened. "In Lindsey's case, there was nothing indicating that she was ever there," he said.

A 911 caller described a maroon Durango and the partial plate "458." Paint transfer on a struck Ford Focus was maroon. Isaacs' plate did not match. Witnesses had described three different vehicles: black, white, and maroon. "For some reason, [Florida Highway Patrol] never went past the black Dodge Durango," McGeehan said. "They hooked onto this black Dodge Durango to the exclusion of everything else." He called it "confirmation bias, to the highest degree" and "a major failure of basic investigative skills."

"Lindsey wasn't even at the crash scene," he told NewsNation. "These were investigators that got it in their mind that there was a black Dodge Durango involved. They got on Flock, found the first black Dodge Durango, that belonged to Lindsey Isaacs, and pinned that on her."

On May 22, 2026, prosecutors dropped every charge. The same day, they arrested 47-year-old Alisa Lee Montalvo of Deltona, whose maroon Durango and plate beginning 458 lined up with the original 911 call.

Authorities say her SUV had crash damage, she paid a mechanic to replace doors, pull airbags, and change tires, and an event data recorder later showed roughly 112 mph seconds before impact. Montalvo faces nine counts, including vehicular homicide and tampering with evidence. She has pleaded not guilty. Those charges remain allegations.

Isaacs walked out with a ruined name and a federal lawsuit against FHP Sgts. Tiffany Jateff and Joshua Buday, alleging false arrest and malicious prosecution. "I have to carry this like a big bag of bricks for the rest of my life," she said. "I'm still receiving death threats and hate." She is not suing Flock. She blames how troopers used the footage. "They just picked up my car off a camera and called it the end of the day. We got her."

Flock's answer is corporate and tidy. "Flock cameras provide investigative leads; they do not identify perpetrators, determine guilt, or make arrest decisions," a spokesperson said. The company notes Isaacs' own complaint calls the camera record "exculpatory, not inculpatory," because it placed her three miles away two minutes before the crash.

This is the dragnet Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered off state highways. FDOT revoked every permit for Flock units and other automated plate readers in state right-of-way and gave agencies 30 days to pull them. Miss the deadline, and state crews tear the poles down.

"I think these cameras, the license plate readers, I think it's out of control," DeSantis said. He drew the line most voters can understand. "I'm all about having law enforcement have tools to be able to hold criminals accountable... But I don't want to have this become a surveillance state." On another stop: "What we don't want in the state of Florida is to have a digital AI surveillance state where everything we're doing is being tracked at all times." His example was a drive to Buc-ee's. "It's really none of the government's damn business if you're doing that, right?"

Isaacs' case is that argument with a booking photo attached. A tool sold as an Amber Alert machine became a nationwide movement file. Officers in Florida have already used the same network as a stalking app - hundreds of plate runs on exes and partners in Haines City, Sarasota, Sumter, Orange City, Monroe, and Brevard. Texas froze state funding after similar abuse. Cities from Dallas to El Paso to Clark County, Wisconsin, have cut contracts or bagged the lenses.

Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs, the former WWE star Kane, got there first on the product itself. He thought Flock was a passive hit-on-a-hot-list reader. Then he read the contract.

"What I discovered is these things are completely different than that," Jacobs said. "Instead of a passive system... these cameras are an active system that's pulling data from every car that drives by." The snapshot feeds an AI "vehicular fingerprint" - make, model, color, roof racks, bumper stickers. He told Flock the 2020 Knox County deal was invalid after purchases blew past the $100,000 threshold that required County Commission approval, and he refused to renew more than 140 cameras.

"The lack of transparency surrounding Flock's rollout is one of the most troubling aspects about all this," he posted. "It's sure seems like there was a sprint towards a fait accompli before the public took notice."

McGeehan's verdict on the Florida grid is shorter. "It's a good tool, but now it's unrestricted. It's the Wild West of Flock."

Isaacs used to think they were traffic cameras. "I feel very different about those cameras now," she said. "It's like, they're watching me. They're watching, you know? They're watching everybody."

That is the product. A searchable history of who drove where, handed to whoever has a login, and treated in this case as enough to put an innocent woman in a cell for three deaths she did not cause. Targeted tools for actual criminals are not the argument. A warrantless travel dossier on every driver is.

* * *

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"I'm Not Going Back" Haitian Gang Thug Deported

2026-09-17T21:19:25.828-07:00

"I'm Not Going Back" Haitian Gang Thug Deported

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The man who told federal agents he would never set foot in Haiti again is back in Haiti.

Wisteguens Jean Quely Charles spent 19 months in federal custody after a viral January 2025 ICE arrest in Boston.

Last Thursday he was loaded onto a removal flight out of Louisiana. Sources told Fox News he was combative aboard the aircraft and made crude, profane threats toward President Trump and his family on the way home.

? LMFAO! This Haitian illegal alien is being mocked nationwide after he got DEPORTED despite yelling at federal agents "I'm NOT going back to Haiti" in 2025

"Thank Obama for everything he did for me!" ?

The thug was UNRULY on the deportation flight back to Haiti, and the... pic.twitter.com/iCTQmDVxev
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 15, 2026

Good riddance.

Fox cameras were there when ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations grabbed him on January 22, 2025, days into Trump's second term.

Charles shouted, "I'm not going back to Haiti ... you feel me?" Then: "F-- Trump." Then: "Biden forever bro."

Coverage of the same clip also recorded him thanking Obama "for everything he did for me." He was 25. He had already piled up more than 17 Massachusetts convictions in a two-year stretch.

DHS identifies Charles as a member of the Back Block Money Gang. Between August 2022 and August 2024 his convictions included assault and battery on a public employee, resisting arrest, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, drug possession and trafficking, carrying brass knuckles, possessing a firearm and ammunition without permits, and trespassing.

ICE had already tried. Officers issued a detainer after a 2023 arrest. The Norfolk House of Correction released him in October 2023 without honoring it. He stayed on the street in a sanctuary jurisdiction until Trump-era ICE came back for him.

A Department of Justice immigration judge signed a final order of removal on November 7, 2025. Charles then ran every appeal and delay available. That is why a man with a gang affiliation and a two-year crime binge sat in custody for 19 months instead of leaving in weeks.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: "This illegal alien gang member from Haiti had quite the rap sheet, with convictions for assault and battery on a public employee, resisting arrest, and drug trafficking, among other heinous crimes. He went viral for praising Biden as he was getting arrested, because he knew that the Biden Administration's open borders turned America into a paradise for criminals like him."

"The Trump Administration has finally done what both the Obama and Biden Administrations failed to do and deported this criminal back where he belongs," he added.

The White House put it more bluntly: "This gang member and criminal illegal alien loved Obama, Biden, and open-border Democrats who let him enter our country with TPS and allowed him to terrorize American citizens. Thanks to the Trump administration, he is now off our streets and back in Haiti."

Charles first came in July 2013 under Obama and received Temporary Protected Status. USCIS later revoked that TPS in 2022. Biden-era enforcement never finished the job.

TPS for Haitians started after the 2010 earthquake as a short-term shelter. Successive administrations kept rolling it forward until hundreds of thousands were living and working in the United States as if the designation were a settlement program. In late 2025 DHS terminated protections for roughly 353,000 Haitians, stating the designation no longer served U.S. national interests.

Stephen Miller was explicit after the Supreme Court cleared the path to end the designation. "The illegal alien Haitians are going back to Haiti. They can build their country there." He also said the Biden-era extensions turned a disaster-relief tool into a pipeline into American towns.

That is the policy Charles ran into. The T in TPS stands for temporary. Courts delayed. Activist litigation delayed. He still went.

As weekly removal flights to Cap-Haïtien ramped up, national outlets framed the story around children on planes and long-settled workers "dumped" into a violent country. They spent far less time on the gang members, sex offenders, and repeat assailants ICE has put on those aircraft.

Charles is the case they prefer not to lead with: a man who thanked Obama, cursed Trump on camera, collected 17 convictions, threatened the president's family on the jet, and still consumed a year and a half of detention beds and court time.

The broader numbers are moving in the same direction. Center for Immigration Studies analysis of Census data shows the foreign-born population falling for the first time in a century - about 2.3 million illegal immigrants gone since January 2025, plus hundreds of thousands of legal exits, for a total drop near 2.9 million.

Formal removals and self-deportations both rose after interior enforcement tightened and TPS expansions were shut down.

In the lame-duck window, Biden officials drafted a plan to stretch TPS into a de facto shield for more than three million people from a list of countries, hoping to bury the next administration in litigation.

Sen. Eric Schmitt later called it an attempt to "keep millions of illegal aliens in our country by abusing the 'Temporary' Protected Status program" and "mass amnesty-by-decree" after voters had already chosen the opposite.

Charles is one data point inside that fight. Obama let him in. A sanctuary jail cut him loose. Biden-era policy left him in place after TPS was pulled.

Trump-era ICE arrested him immediately. The courts let him stall. The plane still left Louisiana.

Mass deportations only work if the last appeal is not a lifetime lease. Miller said they all go back. This one did - yelling the whole way.

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US Announces South Africa Visa Curbs Citing Racism Against Afrikaners

2026-09-16T16:19:23.379-07:00

US Announces South Africa Visa Curbs Citing Racism Against Afrikaners

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Department of State announced Tuesday new visa restrictions against some foreign nationals in South Africa who are alleged to be involved in discrimination and incitement of violence against minority groups in the country.

A State Department news release said the policy will target any individual involved in racially motivated crime, uncompensated land seizures, government-sponsored discrimination, and race-based legislation against the Afrikaner community, a white South African group of Dutch, German, or French descent, and any other minority ethnic or racial groups in the nation.

U.S. President Donald Trump has alleged on several occasions that a "white genocide" is happening in South Africa, which the country's President Cyril Ramaphosa has denied.

"As [Trump] has made clear, the South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority," State Secretary Marco Rubio wrote on X.

"The South African government has consistently failed to adequately address rural crime, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric, and race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners and other minority populations."

Rubio added that the alleged behavior will not go unchecked and that actions against minority groups in South Africa undermine peace, economic stability, rule of law, and are incompatible with the foundations of America's foreign policy.

"Those responsible for these injustices have no place in the United States," Rubio said. "We once again strongly urge the South African government to quickly address these egregious actions."

The state secretary referenced Trump's executive order, titled Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa, signed in February 2025.

That directive pulled $440 million in yearly funds that went to South Africa over similar concerns.

The executive order highlighted Ramaphosa's signing of the Expropriation Act, which is facing a legal challenge. Trump said the legislation enabled the government to seize Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation.

"The United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation," Trump said in his order.

The president directed the State Department and Homeland Security to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement, for Afrikaners.

On May 12, dozens of Afrikaners arrived in the United States after they were granted refugee status.

About a week later, Ramaphosa flew to Washington, where the two world leaders held a tense meeting in the Oval Office.

Trump confronted Ramaphosa with allegations of mass violence against Afrikaners, and the South African leader denied that any killings or violence are taking place.

In a dramatic moment, Trump instructed his staffers to "turn the lights down."

He showed a several-minute-long video showing crowds at rallies calling for white South African farmers to be shot, which was followed by scenes of what Trump described as burial sites for Afrikaners.

"These are burial sites right here. Burial sites of over 1,000 white farmers," Trump said, speaking over the video. "Each one of those white things you see is a cross."

Ramaphosa looked away from the video, said he'd never seen it before, and wanted to know where it was filmed.

"I mean, it's in South Africa," Trump responded.

Relations between D.C. and Pretoria, the South African capital city, have been at an all-time low, as Trump and other administration officials criticized the country's policies. Trump has also imposed high tariffs on South Africa.

Before Ramaphosa's visit to the White House last year, Rubio skipped a G20 meeting hosted in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"South Africa is doing very bad things," Rubio wrote on X, explaining his absence. "Using G20 to promote 'solidarity, equality, & sustainability.' In other words: DEI and climate change. My job is to advance America's national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism."

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/16/2026 - 14:45
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Manufacturers Set To Move Production Out Of Canada As US Tariffs Hit Hard

2026-09-15T15:19:14.817-07:00

Manufacturers Set To Move Production Out Of Canada As US Tariffs Hit Hard

The circumstances of US/Canadian trade should be common knowledge by now, but the details often get mired in the swamp of political rhetoric. When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney describes the tariff issue as the US "waging war" on Canada, he knows exactly what he's doing. Carney has turned a simple trade issue over reasonable 10% tariffs into an existential crisis, an invasion, an ethnic cleansing, a last stand against "evil" imperialists.

But getting the Canadian public riled up with delusions that they are underdog insurgents will not help them keep manufacturing companies or domestic jobs. There is no reason to "endure" a trade war involving 50% tariffs that can be easily solved by simply taking the sweetheart deal that was offered to them. Carney could easily wait Trump out and try to renegotiate once a new president is elected. Unless, there's an alternative agenda at play for Carney.

Estimates in July on manufacturing losses indicated that 42% of Canadian companies (and some US companies) would be moving at least a portion of their operations to the US to avoid the debilitating tariffs. Some will be shutting down entirely. With Carney asserting that negotiations are off the table, this leaves no room for speculation. Businesses are adjusting operations for the long haul which means skyrocketing job losses for Canada.

The latest manufacturers to make announcements are:

Aeris Protective Packaging in Montreal: The company says it is opening a U.S. plant after 50% U.S. tariffs on paper and packing containers. About 70% of its customers are in the U.S. It plans to keep some manufacturing in Quebec and Ontario for Canadian, European, and Mexican customers.

Sapporo/Sleeman Breweries: Sapporo says it will move production of beer made in Canada for the U.S. market to the United States by the first half of 2027, citing 50% tariffs on Canadian beer. Sleeman later said the move is “not finalized”. Most beer sold in Canada would still be brewed in Canada.

RYAM (Rayonier Advanced Materials) in Témiscaming, Quebec: The US-owned paperboard mill announced an indefinite temporary shutdown, blaming 50% U.S. tariffs. About 400–425 workers were affected. The stop was first set for mid-September, then postponed to October 3rd after new Canadian orders. The company has not given a restart date.

Stellantis - Brampton Assembly (Ontario): In mid-August 2026 the company told Unifor it was opening talks on a possible sale of the idle Brampton plant (idled since late 2023 after Jeep Compass production was moved to the U.S.). Stellantis had plans to reopen the mothballed site, but they backed out after the trade war with the US went parabolic.

Northern Cable (Brockville, Ontario): An August 2026 report says the firm is considering a U.S. factory if 50% tariffs on electric cable take effect, because half of the company's business is in the United States.

Some companies have already move production to the US, including Crown Royale which moved its bottling plant to Alabama in April.

A Reuters/LSEG poll of economists originally predicted Canada would add 15,000 jobs in August 2026. Instead, the country lost 42,000 jobs; that's a 57,000 job disparity. Canadian economists are treating the forecast miss as an anomaly, however, it is likely that the decline in jobs will escalate through the end of the year unless a deal between the US and Canada is struck.

If Carney's intention is to use economic hysteria as a tool to help Democrats win during the US midterm elections, then there's no chance of a deal before the end of the year. Canadians will continue into winter with the threat of rising unemployment and much higher prices.

Canada relies on the US for 78% of all export sales and there are no practical trade alternatives. A similar but smarter base case is Mexico, which sells around 84% of all their exports to American markets. The difference? The Mexican government has avoided arrogant jousting with the US and is engaging in fair negotiations (so far). They are also showing more cooperation to meet the Trump Administration's demands on securing the southern border.

In other words, they didn't abandon negotiations at the last minute like Carney, and this has helped Mexico to avoid punishing tariffs and job losses. Whatever Carney's intentions, it's clear that average Canadians will be paying the price for the Prime Minister's lack of diplomacy.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/15/2026 - 15:40
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"Dead Mall" Era Ends As Shoppers Return, Values Surge And Sector Leads CRE Revival

2026-09-14T14:19:15.917-07:00

"Dead Mall" Era Ends As Shoppers Return, Values Surge And Sector Leads CRE Revival

The "malls are dead" narrative gained traction in corporate media coverage in 2016 and 2017 and lasted until 2022.

Those headlines reflected the strain across the sector as excess retail space, department-store closures, and shifting consumer habits led to widespread low occupancy and cratering property values.

But now, new data suggest that the "dead mall" narrative has not just reversed: that part of the CRE market is thriving, with a Wall Street Journal report saying it's outperforming every other major CRE sector.

CRE research firm Green Street released a new report showing that mall values across the US rose 13% over the past year, leading all 10 sectors it tracks and more than doubling the increase in overall CRE prices. That recovery has attracted investors who are souring on weak performance across office and multifamily properties.

Simon Property Group, the largest US mall owner, saw its shares surpass their 2016 peak in July. That earlier peak came just as the "dead mall" narrative began to erupt in MSM headlines. The stock is up nearly 11% this year.

WSJ cited Vincent Rouget, CEO of Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, a Paris-based CRE company, who explained that US tenant sales and net operating income growth are exceeding the company's broader portfolio average, with rent growth at levels unseen since the early 2010s.

"We see the type of rent growth that we haven't seen since the beginning of the 2010s," Rouget told the outlet.

Morgan Stanley real estate research chief Ronald Kamdem said, "In terms of how we think about the malls today fundamentally, this is probably the best it's felt post-Covid."

The tailwinds extend beyond trophy malls. CBL Properties, which entered bankruptcy protection during the Covid pandemic, reports rising traffic and sales. Its shares have climbed 48% this year, and it has acquired five properties since July 2025 after shrinking its portfolio footprint for years.

CBL's West County Center near St. Louis couldn't refinance its debt in 2022, and the property was in decline but has since seen tenant sales increase by 13% since 2023.

Oversupply conditions have likely abated, as Green Street said about an estimated 200 malls have closed since 2008, leaving about 900 operating nationwide.

Resilient consumer spending has put the remaining malls on some of their strongest footing in years, and many have shifted from a department-store-led business model toward destinations built around shopping, dining, and entertainment.

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California Enacts New Child Safety Laws On Social Media And AI Chatbots

2026-09-13T16:19:22.304-07:00

California Enacts New Child Safety Laws On Social Media And AI Chatbots

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed bills that restrict how social media companies may design products for children and that tighten rules for AI companion chatbots.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to reporters in Stockton, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2025. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

He announced the package on X.

"I just signed the strongest kid safety laws for AI chatbots and social media in America," Newsom wrote. "California is banning addictive social media features for kids, cracking down on dangerous AI chatbots, and strengthening privacy protections for ALL kids. PROTECT OUR KIDS!"

The signing took place in Marin County, where Newsom was joined by his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and the legislators who carried the measures.

The social media bills focus on product design.

AB 1709, by Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal, a Democrat representing Long Beach, bars platforms from offering users under 16 autoplay and algorithmic feeds drawn from a user's history and profile.

AB 2, also Lowenthal's, adds civil penalties when children are injured.

Fighting Online Addiction

In September 2024, Newsom signed SB 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act. That statute would have required parental consent before addictive feeds reached minors and would have limited alerts during school hours and overnight. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan. 28, 2025, blocked SB 976 after NetChoice sued, arguing the law impinged upon protected speech.

Thursday's package focuses on strict age verification and penalties. Chatbots are another focus.

SB 1119 is titled Adam's Law, named after Adam Raine, 16, of California, whose parents, Matthew and Maria Raine, sued OpenAI in San Francisco Superior Court on Aug. 26, 2025. Their complaint argued ChatGPT became their son's "closest confidant," mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times, and urged him toward what it called a "beautiful suicide."

Adam's Law, the governor's office said, requires companion-chatbot firms to keep crisis protocols for suicidal ideation, provide parental controls, notify a parent if a child disables safety settings, submit to independent child-safety audits, and file annual risk assessments.

The bills also include SB 867, which restricts companion-chatbot toys, while other bills limit targeted ads aimed at children and set rules for K-12 pupil data inside AI systems.

AB 1946 adds a reporting route for child sexual abuse material. SB 1276, by state Sen. Susan Rubio, a Democrat from Baldwin Park, extends child sexual-exploitation law to digitally altered or AI-generated material depicting a person under 18 in sexual conduct.

"Our children's safety deserves to be at the center of every conversation about technology," Newsom said. "As innovation moves faster, our protections must keep pace. Today's legislation makes clear that California will not stand by while unregulated technology puts our children at risk. Innovation comes with responsibility and protecting our children comes first."

Siebel Newsom said technology should support children's well-being, not exploit their vulnerabilities.

"With this critical legislation, California is sending a strong message that when it comes to our kids, safety must not be an afterthought - but baked into design and a necessary requisite for all innovation," she said.

State Sen. Steve Padilla, a Democrat and co-author of the chatbot bill, said California must set an example for the rest of the country.

"Adam's Law will save the lives of children here in California and across the country as it becomes a national model," Padilla said.

Assemblyman Josh Hoover authored AB 2071, which directs public schools to plan digital-wellness instruction.

"Protecting kids online is not a partisan issue. As a parent and former school board member, I have seen first-hand the impacts that screens and social media have had on our kids," he said.

AI Safeguards

Earlier, on Oct. 12, 2025, Newsom signed measures requiring Apple and Google operating systems to send age-range signals, add warning labels after three hours a day for users under 17, and ban using an AI tool as a shield when a user's prompt produces harmful content.

This followed after Megan Garcia in 2024 filed a lawsuit alleging a Character.AI chatbot contributed to the suicide of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III.

Character.AI later said it would block open-ended chat for users under 18. California dockets have also seen lawsuits arguing that infinite scroll, autoplay, and recommendation engines were built to keep adolescents on the apps.

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New Report Exposes Climate Litigants' Campaign To Influence The Judiciary

2026-09-13T14:19:12.237-07:00

New Report Exposes Climate Litigants' Campaign To Influence The Judiciary

Authored by Michael Toth via RealClearEnergy,

Thousands of judges across the nation have sat through climate-science training and received literature from trusted federal bodies and scientific institutes. Those judges had every right to expect that the information they received was neutral, objective, settled science.

They were mistaken.

My latest research paper presents the first full taxonomy of a coordinated, multi-year campaign designed to shape how the American judiciary understands climate litigation. It documents how the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) built an extensive educational apparatus to train judges on climate issues - in the words of one session attendee - "from what would effectively be the plaintiff's side."

ELI routinely portrays itself as a neutral arbiter committed to "insightful and impartial analysis." In 2018, it launched the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) to provide judges with "authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science." Yet, as my report details, CJP shares multiple donors and advisors with Sher Edling LLP, the San Francisco-based law firm behind more than two dozen climate lawsuits against energy companies.

The training methodology CJP deployed is striking. The goal was not merely to educate judges about complex areas of law and science, but to encourage them to develop and execute their own climate "action plans." Slide presentations and emails obtained between ELI staff and attendees show judges being coached on how to spread that influence to colleagues on the bench.

Attendance forms show judges from California, Delaware, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and even Puerto Rico attended CJP trainings - all jurisdictions with active climate suits.

CJP's reach extended to established judicial and scientific gatekeepers. A 2020 CJP curriculum draft identified the Federal Judicial Center's (FJC) Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Extreme Weather Attribution Report as publications judges could rely upon. Both would go on to bear the project's fingerprints.

Released in 2025, the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual included a climate change chapter for the first time. That section was later revealed to have lifted material heavily from the prior writings of a lawyer representing climate plaintiffs, Sher Edling's Michael Burger.

The chapters' listed authors, moreover, were both CJP presenters and the manual shared some of the same funders as the foundations bankrolling the public-nuisance suits targeting the energy sector. Following the public outcry over these conflicts of interest, the FJC and NAS took the unprecedented step of removing the climate chapter entirely.

That controversy, however, did not stop NAS, which initially pushed back against criticism of the manual, from releasing the Extreme Weather Attribution Report.

The committee behind the report was similarly one-sided in favor of climate plaintiffs, which may explain why the 253-page document lays out theories for attributing the effects of climate change to specific energy producers without seriously dealing with the inconvenient fact that greenhouse gas emissions are largely driven by global demand for energy.

When private interest groups slip past the adversarial process to tilt the scales on contested issues, the rule of law is compromised. The findings in my report demonstrate an urgent need for updated disclosure requirements surrounding judicial education programs. Trusted institutional gatekeepers like the Federal Judicial Center must institute rigorous vetting mechanisms to restore their credibility.

Ultimately, federal and state officials should investigate how ELI and CJP gained such unchecked access over the bench and establish strict guardrails to ensure this cannot happen again.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 15:50
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What Critics Keep Getting Wrong About Capitalism

2026-09-12T16:19:16.319-07:00

What Critics Keep Getting Wrong About Capitalism

Authored by Vincent Geloso via FEE,

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not a publication most would be familiar with. It is meant as a repository of overviews of big topics in philosophy broadly defined, inclusive of political theory. As such, entries added to it are unlikely to generate strong responses by the experts deeply familiar with each individual entry. Every rule has exceptions though.

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

Recently, Chiara Cordelli, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, delivered her "three years in the making" commissioned piece on "capitalism." The piece went viral. The reason that it sparked such attention is that it read to many as basically a rehash of old online talking points spewed by more refined trolls. That is unfair but there is truth to the claim that there is no smoke without fire. It is indeed a boring "takedown" of capitalism.

Let me be precise here: the problem is not that the entry is critical of capitalism. There is nothing wrong with criticising capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman or classical liberalism. The problem is that much of the discussion does not pass even a modest ideological Turing test. An ideological Turing test asks whether one can state an opposing position so accurately that its proponents would recognise the argument as their own before one proceeds to criticise it. Here, too often, they would not.

This points to a common reflex in debates over "capitalism" and "neoliberalism." The vocabulary is often not used to define but rather rationalise already-held ideological priors. The characteristics one dislikes are incorporated into the definition of the system, after which those same characteristics are rediscovered as criticisms of it. The conclusion has, in part, been smuggled into the premises. But these end up being recycled over and over as one scholar states it before another regurgitates it back as fact and so forth.

Some examples help show this usual reflex. When describing the "market capitalism" advanced by Hayek and Friedman, Cordelli claims that they believed capitalism required "complete, private, and unregulated markets," and that this stemmed from their acceptance of a "general equilibrium" view, with the implication that "capitalism goes wrong when it is politically interfered with." But both claims - which underlie much of the entry - are massively incorrect. Not minor quibbles, mind you, but major and easily verifiable errors. Friedman initially advocated antitrust laws and, while he moderated on this front later in life, he still believed they did some good. He supported a negative income tax - a variant of a guaranteed minimum income - and schooling vouchers. Hardly the mark of someone who believed in the complete absence of political interference. Hayek for his part rejected the idea of general equilibrium altogether and preferred to speak of competition and markets as discovery processes. He defended regulation of natural monopolies and he also spoke in favour of some basic welfare state functions.

But this is not new. This description of Hayek and Friedman - and others like them - has been there since the 1960s and it can be found in the work of many. So too are the replies pointing all of this out. The claim has been recycled and vomited back. The replies have been ignored - the mark of the inability to undergo the key Turing tests I mentioned. Thus, the entry massively misrepresents what it dubs "normative defences" of capitalism.

And then, the preferred views of the entry's author also eschew major criticism raised at it. The best illustration of this is visible in the considerably detailed treatment that Karl Marx gets. Marx is presented as complete, coherent and accurate. No mentions are made of the fact that Das Kapital self-contradicts itself via the well-known transformation problem. Marx first argues that the value of commodities is determined by the labour required to produce them (i.e., the labour theory of value). This is the key foundation of "exploitation" theory in Marxist theory. But he later recognises that competition tends to equalise profit rates across industries. For that to happen, market prices must diverge from labour values. The problem, then, is explaining how one gets from labour-determined values to observed competitive prices without abandoning the labour theory of value itself. Marx never provides a fully consistent solution to that transformation. And no solution to the problem exists.

It explains why Marxist predictions fail to materialise. The most obvious example is that wages and incomes for unskilled workers were rising while Marx was writing his works. Not only that, he was writing in Britain - a society where inequality was actually falling! Moreover, in the United States - the country most often described as most capitalist by Marxists then and now - even socialist writers like Charles Spahr produced data which, when used with subsequent works, show massive growth in living standards at the bottom while inequality between the top 1% and the bottom 90% either stagnates or actually declines.

Not only did Marx predict that capitalism would generate pauperisation; he also added that it generated persistent pressure to lengthen working hours and lower labour's share of national income. Historical evidence runs strongly against these predictions: working hours have fallen dramatically since the nineteenth century, both annually and as a share of waking life - with only modest influence on unions or legislation. Marx's prediction about labour's share of income also fares poorly empirically, as many studies find that greater economic freedom (a proxy for capitalism) and globalisation are associated with a larger share of national income accruing to labour. In fact, in causal empirical tests, economies that become more capitalist (by liberalising) tend to show rising boats for everyone. Taken together, these findings suggest that some of Marx's central empirical predictions about capitalist labour markets have been contradicted rather than confirmed by subsequent economic history.

All of these massive holes in the Marxist account of capitalism are ignored and set aside. The criticisms are still presented as high-quality despite the fact that they have repeatedly failed to generate the predictions they are supposed to.

This is precisely where the usual reflex in debates over "capitalism" becomes problematic: early and criticised claims (even debunked ones) are built into the description of capitalism itself and then rediscovered as criticisms of it, even when the empirical evidence points in the opposite direction. Once repeated often enough, such claims pass from one scholar to another as established facts, with the original empirical proposition increasingly insulated from serious testing. The entry falls prey to this and while it does offer insight into how some people think about capitalism, it is merely a sophisticated rant - nothing more.

This article was originally published by CapX.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 18:40
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Trump: Houthis 'Don't Want' US In Yemen - So They're Letting Most Red Sea Shipping Through

2026-09-12T16:19:10.243-07:00

Trump: Houthis 'Don't Want' US In Yemen - So They're Letting Most Red Sea Shipping Through

After it was widely reported this week that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman urgently sought military assistance from President Donald Trump amid the rapid Houthi takeover of Yemen's Red Sea coast from the forces of the internationally recognized Sanaa government, Trump has said the Houthis are in contact with him and have pledged to let ships through the Bab Al-Mandab Strait.

Trump is currently in Ireland. He said to reporters Saturday while meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin, "The Houthis called us, and they don't want to fight with us. They don’t want us to go after them."

He further explained that "they would much prefer not having us involved:" and so "they are letting most ships go through." The president did acknowledged they do have a ban on Saudi vessels, however.

Trump: "The Houthis called us. They don't want to fight with us. They let us know they don't want to fight with us. They don't want us to go after them. They would much prefer not having us involved, and they are letting most ships go through. There's just one country they're not… pic.twitter.com/munm8N0Gys
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2026

Indeed this is consistent with Ansar Allah's latest statements declaring the Red Sea passage remains open, but closed to Saudi and Israeli-linked shipping.

This seems to confirm prior reporting that said Trump rejected MbS' request for US military intervention in Yemen. To review:

Axios: Trump declined Saudi requests to strike Ansarallah as they advanced Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called U.S. President Donald Trump twice on Thursday, urging him to launch strikes against Yemen’s Ansarallah as they advanced along the Red Sea coast toward Bab al-Mandab, two U.S. officials told Axios. Trump declined, with Washington saying it has no plans to intervene directly for now.

It seems Washington also doesn't want to see the Iran conflict explode into a runaway regional war which would certainly greatly exacerbate the global energy crisis.

Aaran Kennedy, a maritime security analyst with the global consultancy, Control Risks, has described to Al Jazeera that while "These advances strengthen the Houthis’ already strong position over the Red Sea. They simply make it even easier for the Houthis to target shipping" - the reality remains “It doesn’t necessarily mean that, right now, they’re going to expand their maritime target set."

Kennedy believes a full Bab al-Mandeb closure is unlikely. "Just because the Houthis have gained this territory near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to close it down. That situation remains highly unlikely. But what it does do is it expands their capabilities because it puts their weaponry closer to the Red Sea shipping lanes."

Analysts are calling the Iran-backed Houthi group’s victories the most significant regional development since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran.

The offensives could be particularly damaging for Saudi Arabia and its oil exports.

Here’s what we know https://t.co/nrVeKbd8EJ pic.twitter.com/qsqxbeJ0dh
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 11, 2026

But this does also ultimately given Tehran huge leverage, given it can persuade its Houthi allies anytime to take drastic action over the strait. Houthi threats over regional waters was on full display during the height of the Gaza War, which saw the US Navy get involved in the Red Sea, but warships later departed under the guise of handing security over to regional as well as European allies.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 16:55
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'Pace The Frontier': Amodei, Altman & Musk Team Up Against The AI Singularity While China Goes Full Send

2026-09-12T16:19:09.191-07:00

'Pace The Frontier': Amodei, Altman & Musk Team Up Against The AI Singularity While China Goes Full Send

***SPECIAL BULLETIN***

Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public - the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China's open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity - jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere.

For two years the United States frontier laboratories - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI - have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token - at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.

Then the East opened the crate.

And here's what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu - open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers. Qwen had shoved Meta's Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot's Kimi K3 - two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door - sat within shouting distance of Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents - one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic's Opus - and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.

The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the "AI will eat the S&P" thesis - HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription.

TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!

This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another's sentences.

On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And - it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).

Speaking of those three 'defectors' - two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs.

According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines - recursive self-improvement, happening "across the industry, including at Anthropic." He pointed at July's OpenAI - Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models - one of them Mythos 5 - that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies' live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei's warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it "could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," he wrote - "hundreds of billions of dollars in damage," and rising from there.

His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists "does not mean halting model training or technical progress."

Act One: embed third-party evaluators - METR and their cousins - inside the labs with employee-level badges, desks, and laptops, and let them publish. Anthropic would do this unilaterally, he said, today.
Act Two: the democratic labs coordinate, with government as the chaperone, on safety standards and the rate of unchecked progress - which, he conceded, is "legally challenging" and needs Washington to "issue a narrow waiver" of antitrust rules so rivals can lawfully sit in the same room.
Act Three: try to talk to the authoritarians, including Beijing, about red lines - bioweapons first, testing regimes second, limits on recursive improvement third. Full pause? He all but called it a fantasy. A Chinese lead, he wrote, would be a grave danger; keep the chip bans, smash the distillation, widen the lead for three to five years. Then, perhaps, a bargain.

Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic "evil" before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:

Dario is right
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2026

Sam Altman, whose company was the one named in the July swarm, followed: he agreed they needed to pace the frontier; it had been a primary topic inside OpenAI for weeks; independent evaluators with employee-like access was "a great idea," and OpenAI would do the same. More to share soon.

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
— Sam Altman (@sama) September 12, 2026

Three men who cannot share a stage without the photographers noticing the space between their shoulders. One essay, ~~three cups~~ (wtf). Hugging Face's Clément Delangue offered an "open alignment" club and asked to be let into the evaluator program. Andrej Karpathy said he loved it.

How we got to Saturday.

Days earlier the fuse was a twenty-seven-year-old Brit named Jacob Coxon. Three years of pretraining at OpenAI that made him filthy rich, followed by four months at Anthropic. Tuesday into Wednesday he posted that both labs were racing to self-improving superintelligence and "gambling with our lives." The people building this, he said, earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Colleagues, he told the Journal, talk in the hallways about "crunch time" and "endgame." The thread did more than a hundred million views. Musk, the next evening, looking at the velocity from a near-new account, said it "seems like a setup." Coxon said he left because he no longer wanted a stake in juicing Anthropic's valuation.

Seems like a setup
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2026

Anthropic's own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed - writing "Jacob is correct." Researchers there really do believe AI could kill all humans. His personal odds: above ten percent this decade. The lab, he added, does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one. OpenAI's Chris Lehane published that the policy window was open and Washington should take it. Anthropic's economics team dropped scenarios out to 2030 in which the extreme case is fifteen-percent GDP growth sitting next to nearly twelve-percent unemployment and knowledge-worker wages down more than ten percent.

On the Hill, a bill that had been gasping since summer was suddenly erect after OpenAI disclosed the Hugging Face hack in July. House members Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran dropped an AI Kill Switch Act.

Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte float the FRONTIER Act - audits, incident reporting, Commerce power over models judged an imminent catastrophic risk. Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Majority Leader John Thune then stall. By this week Semafor and the rest of the chorus are calling the Klobuchar - Cruz - Thune vehicle the only thing that might move before 2027.

And guess what, Saturday's 'pact' still isn't enough for these people!

And Ted Lieu goes to bat for China...

i.e. "Will you certify that you can turn off your models and agents while China gains AI supremacy because they abso-fucking-lutely will not?"

The President is not in the choir. Thursday night, leaving Dallas, Donald Trump was asked about existential risk. "No, I don't have any." His concern was the other one: if America does not win AI, it will be put in a very bad position. America is leading China "by a pretty good period," he said. Xi, in his accounting, is China's guardrail. The administration's posture remains race-first. The laboratories' posture, as of this morning, is pace-first. Those two sentences do not live in the same house.

About Those Chinese Models...

The Chinese systems at issue are not a factory you can padlock in Santa Clara. They are weights. They propagate. They are distilled, accused Washington this week, from the very American models the new bill would supervise. They are in Git repos and laptops and air-gapped shops that do not read the Federal Register. A Commerce Department letter does not delete a torrent. A kill switch on GPT or Claude does not switch off Qwen. Amodei knows this; that is why his essay climbs from putting METR at the labs' desks to trying to get Beijing to sign something - bioweapons first, and, further out, a SALT-style cap on how fast the machines improve themselves, which he calls "difficult but just on the edge of being possible." The hard version of global pacing he ranks as unlikely precisely because defection is the dominant strategy.

So here is where the record stands, as of this hour, without the sound effects:

The American frontier is still the frontier. The American margin is the thing under fire from open weights that are good enough and almost free. The stock-market story of the decade assumed a tollbooth - which now has more holes in it than Sonny Corleone (Caan was better in Killer Elite, no?).

Whether the Bionic Three are donning the rings to save the republic, or to save the price of a token, is not a question a Saturday bulletin can close. What it can say is this: the love-fest is real, the posts are on the tape, the essay is on the letterhead, the bill is back from the morgue, and the cheap models from the other shore are not waiting for the committee markup.

This is your correspondent, signing off.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 16:20
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'I Have To Sit With That': Gayle King's Brain Divides By Zero After Holdout Clancy Juror Revealed As Black Man

2026-09-11T14:19:09.989-07:00

'I Have To Sit With That': Gayle King's Brain Divides By Zero After Holdout Clancy Juror Revealed As Black Man

After the media spent the last two weeks casting pent up handmaiden feminist energy at the 'male holdout' juror who caused a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, "CBS Mornings" anchor Gayle King had a visible record scratch after one of the karen jurors revealed that the holdout was a black man that the white ladies virtually lynched in the town square of national dialogue for not letting Clancy off the hook for murdering her children.

"Was the person of color a woman or a man?" King asked juror Paula Devlin, who explained how 11 members of the jury were white and one was a person of color.

"Is the holdout juror… a person of c– a black man?" King probed further...

To which Devlin replied: "Yes" - causing King to have to 'sit with that.'

Watch:

NEW: Lindsay Clancy juror Paula Devlin reveals on 'CBS Mornings' that the lone, male holdout juror who voted to find Clancy guilty of murdering her children was the *only* person of color -- a black man.

The 11 not-guilty jurors -- who hectored him for a week to cave -- were all… pic.twitter.com/5qirHNGCyx
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 11, 2026

Reminder - this wasn't just a black man, it was an arrogant black man.

Female jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial FUME over the lone male holdout: “He was very arrogant. He just completely disregarded the information they gave.” pic.twitter.com/3TF0SrlG6t
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) September 8, 2026

Needless to say, it's all anyone's talking about today...

"The other jurors have spent all week calling the lone male holdout an arrogant, uncooperative dummy who didn’t understand the law or follow the rules. Now we come to find out that they were talking about the only black guy in the room this whole time. Leftists have accidentally sided with 11 white bullies against a black man who stood up to them. Just an absolutely amazing twist. You couldn’t script it any better," said the Daily Wire's Matt Walsh, who had several great takes.

This is amazing. The Left has been trashing this guy all week only to find out that he was the only black person on the jury, getting hounded by bossy white women. Just perfect. https://t.co/yooCcogaU8
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 11, 2026

This comedy skit is priceless now listen to the end pic.twitter.com/Olf4LXLQ82
— MoonriseBill (@MoonriseBill) September 11, 2026

The Left trying to figure out how to smear the lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial now that they know it was a black man.pic.twitter.com/XJnIGRksvz
— C3 (@C_3C_3) September 11, 2026

This is so much better knowing the hold out juror is a black man. pic.twitter.com/eKkzkvlEQ8
— Rosie Memos (@almostjingo) September 11, 2026

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 13:55
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South Koreans Rally Against Hormuz Deployment In Front Of US Embassy

2026-09-10T16:19:41.926-07:00

South Koreans Rally Against Hormuz Deployment In Front Of US Embassy

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com

Protesters gathered near the US Embassy in Seoul on Wednesday to rally against joining the US war with Iran, as the South Korean government is considering deploying military forces to help the US efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz.

Carrying signs that read "Do Not Join a War of Aggression" and "No Military Deployment to Hormuz," the protesters chanted, "We cannot send our young people into a sea of death," according to AFP, which reported from the scene and estimated that about 60 people took part in the demonstration.

via AFP

"Sending our troops to an illegal war waged by the United States is unacceptable," Choi Young-ok, a member of Korean Peace Solidarity for Sovereignty and Reunification, a group that is highly critical of the US military presence in South Korea, told AFP.

"There is no reason for us to send troops when no other country has done so or said it would," added Choi, who also warned that sending South Korean troops would "inevitably lead to casualties."

Also on Wednesday, the office of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said it has not yet made a final decision on whether Seoul will send troops to the Strait of Hormuz. "The government has not yet finalized its policy and is cautiously assessing it," said Seong Ghi-hong, a press secretary for the presidential office.

Due to its reliance on energy and other exports from the Persian Gulf, the US’s war with Iran has triggered an energy and economic shock in South Korea, and the US is now reportedly putting pressure on Seoul to join the war in some way.

The South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday that the South Korean Defense Ministry has sent a fact-finding mission to the region to assess the potential deployment.

The team is expected to visit the UAE, which hosts US military bases, and could serve as a hub for operations if South Korean forces are deployed to assist in the war.

Amid the South Korean government’s deliberations, Iran has warned Seoul not to get involved.

South Koreans protest a possible military deployment to the Strait of Hormuz as Tehran warns Seoul and polls show majority opposition.

Al Jazeera’s Jack Barton reports. pic.twitter.com/d3mAfiApXE
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 10, 2026

"The military presence or operational participation of other nations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would inevitably be viewed as direct support for the party committing acts of aggression, and would lead to serious consequences," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baqaei wrote on X on Monday.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 17:00
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When Grievance Enters The Huddle

2026-09-10T16:19:31.458-07:00

When Grievance Enters The Huddle

Authored by Andre Billeaudeaux via American Thinker,

The NAACP is asking some of America's best black high-school football players to consider withholding commitments from public universities in eight states because of congressional redistricting. Current athletes are encouraged to consider transferring and using their NIL platforms to support the cause. The slogan is direct: "No Representation. No Recruitment. No Revenue."

The campaign followed the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision striking down Louisiana's intentionally created second majority-black congressional district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Rather than leaving that dispute in the courthouse and statehouse, the NAACP is asking black athletes to carry it into their college choices, campuses, and locker rooms.

That is a heavy psychological load to place on a 17-year-old who may have spent a decade developing the talent, discipline, and confidence required to be recruited by Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Texas, or another major program. Universities want him, NIL money may follow, and the NFL may eventually follow that. At the moment when his talent has given him control over his future, he is being encouraged to see himself as a victim and act on that grievance.

Black Studies professor Elwood Watson called it "grossly irresponsible and unfair" to enlist young athletes in such a political fight, warning against turning them into "athletic guinea pigs or pawns." Educator Rann Miller questioned asking young black athletes to sacrifice NIL and career opportunities when comparable sacrifices are not being demanded from the adults asking them to join the fight.

Sports psychology supplies another warning: mental fatigue. It is not simply being tired, but a state associated with sustained cognitive demands, reduced cognitive efficiency, impaired attention, and increased perceived effort. The athlete's body may be capable of performing while his brain is required to process too much.

Now consider the NAACP's ask, particularly the age of the people being asked. Research following decision-making from adolescence into adulthood has found that younger people place greater value on immediate rewards and that the capacity for planning ahead continues developing into young adulthood. The NAACP is asking athletes at this stage to weigh immediate political and social rewards against educational, financial, and professional opportunities that may not fully materialize for years - maps, representation, family expectations, teammates, transferring, and whether to use his NIL identity politically - all while coaches try to get him to read a defense and execute the next play.

A 2026 BMC Psychology meta-analysis involving 19 study records found mental fatigue associated with poorer reaction time, technical execution, and decision-making. The measured effects were roughly one-half of a standard deviation for reaction time, six-tenths for technical performance and two-thirds for decision-making, where the results were the most consistent.

Elite athletic performance seeks the opposite condition: flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as complete absorption in an activity, where action and awareness merge, concentration intensifies and irrelevant thoughts are excluded. The athlete's attention is consumed by what he is doing now.

I was a student of Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who used Walter Mischel's famous marshmallow experiment to demonstrate the importance of time perspective. The child faced an immediate reward - one marshmallow now - or delayed gratification for two later. When researchers returned 14 years later, those who had resisted the immediate reward averaged 250 points higher on the SAT, got into less trouble and were described as better students, more self-confident, and determined. Zimbardo's point was that "they were future-focused rather than present-focused."

Put that against the NAACP's call. The immediate reward is obvious: take a stand, demonstrate solidarity, and receive the approval accompanying the cause. The delayed reward may be worth millions over a lifetime: choose the university and coach offering the best chance to develop talent, earn an education, maximize NIL value and perhaps reach the NFL.

The marshmallow has simply become considerably more expensive.

Elon Musk supplied the cultural shorthand "woke mind virus," warning against replacing individual "skills and integrity" with race and group identity and describing the constant injection of race into issues as "divisive and corrosive to society."

Former college coach Tommy Tuberville put the football problem this way: if a quarterback effectively takes himself out of the common mission, "that tends to tear down your team" and takes the "moral loyalty out of it." Before a game his players stood to honor America and afterward knelt to honor God. Coaches build common identity, loyalty and concentration because eleven individually talented players still have to perform as one.

Reverse that process - introduce distraction, immediate political reward, victimization and racial division - and then expect it to disappear when the ball is snapped.

Colin Kaepernick gave us an opportunity to see what happened next.

On August 26, 2016, Kaepernick sat during the national anthem before a preseason game against Green Bay, explaining that he would not stand for a flag representing a country that "oppresses black people and people of color." He subsequently began kneeling, turning an ordinary pre-game ritual into a national argument involving race, police and America.

The 49ers were already expected to be bad, with Las Vegas setting their preseason win total at only 5½ games. They finished 2-14, a 64% shortfall from that already miserable expectation. Kaepernick started eleven games and went 1-10, while his individual statistics - 16 touchdowns, four interceptions and a 90.7 passer rating - were hardly disastrous.

In 2015, the season before the kneeling controversy, San Francisco surrendered 387 points. By 2016 it finished 32nd in yards and points allowed, surrendering 480 points - 93 more than the previous season, a 24% increase. Kaepernick did not play defense, but his teammates shared the locker room, media attention, anthem controversy, and decisions about whether to participate, disagree or remain silent.

I began describing the phenomenon at the time as Self-Inflicted Degradation of Performance Syndrome, or SIDOPS - my term for grievance and resulting distraction degrading individual performance and spreading through a team's shared environment. Work I published in 2017 - 18 compared protesting teams against Vegas expectations and asked whether a victim-based mental state and social contagion might show up in athletic performance - years before the 2026 mental-fatigue research reported measurable degradation in reaction time, technical execution and decision-making.

"Hands Up, Don't Shoot" became a national rallying cry following the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, but Eric Holder's Justice Department later found no credible witness who could establish that Brown was shot while clearly surrendering. Witnesses supporting that account were contradicted by physical evidence, changed their accounts or recanted, while investigators found no eyewitness who said Brown uttered "don't shoot."

The slogan survived the facts, just as grievance can survive the event that created it.

Ten years later, Kaepernick says the NFL is still "actively blackballing" him and that he no longer watches professional football: "I watch college football."

Before the kneeling, Kaepernick had quarterbacked a Super Bowl team and earned a contract potentially worth more than $100 million. During the kneeling season he went 1-10 and never played another NFL game. Ten years later, he still describes himself as a victim of the league that once made him a star.

Now the NAACP is encouraging young black athletes to bring a similar grievance into decisions that may determine their own futures. Kaepernick's career cannot prove what SIDOPS predicts, but it provides a warning of what may follow.

Before asking another gifted young athlete to organize his future around grievance, look at the scoreboard - and remember what happened to the last quarterback who took a knee.

Image generated by ChatGPT.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 16:20
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'It Could Kill Us All By 2030': AI Researcher Resigns, Warns "Do Not Underestimate The Power Of This Tech"

2026-09-09T14:19:16.363-07:00

'It Could Kill Us All By 2030': AI Researcher Resigns, Warns "Do Not Underestimate The Power Of This Tech"

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

An artificial intelligence (AI) researcher on Sept. 8 said he had resigned and warned people about the technology's dangers.

Jacob Coxon, who has worked in recent years doing research at the firms OpenAI and Anthropic, said in a series of posts on X that neither company is acting responsibly as they move toward what he described as superintelligent AI that is capable of self-improvement.

"Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing," Coxon said.

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger."

Coxon said a common response to such warnings is, if company leaders believe in the dangers, why are they still building the superintelligent AI? He said that at OpenAI, many there "have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes." At Anthropic, according to Coxon, "the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."

OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Coxon's warning came after OpenAI acknowledged several incidents that involved AI going beyond restrictions imposed by programmers, including remaining isolated from other agents, during attacks on Hugging Face and other websites.

Some lawmakers have taken notice. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) announced recently that they plan on introducing legislation that would ban AI superintelligence and pause development of advanced AI until federal regulators establish safety rules.

Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, said in a blog post on Sept. 6 that in 2023, he was worried about seeing in his lifetime AI that is smarter than himself and wondering about how to alert people.

"Three years later, reasoning language models are a rapidly growing part of the economy and starting to push the boundaries of science. They are able to operate computers and graphical interfaces, collaborate with people and each other, and carry out research projects. They are also transforming the landscape of computer security, and in that present clear new dangers," Pachocki wrote.

He called for "extreme caution" but said that multiple factors support continuing AI development, including creating systems that can defend against the dangers posed by other AI.

Anthropic executives have issued similar warnings. Over the summer, company leaders called for a global pause in AI development because, they said, models would soon be able to independently improve themselves.

Evan Hubinger, another developer at Anthropic, said in a Sept. 8 post on X that Coxon was correct in his assertion that people building AI believe it could kill all humans, and that he personally pegs the risk at under 10 percent within the next decade.

"I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to," he said, referring to AI following instructions and restrictions.

"To be clear, as we say in our latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought."

Samuel Marks, who works on safety research at Anthropic, said in a Sept. 9 post on X that he also agrees that AI could lead to human extinction as soon as the next few years.

"Why do AI developers continue despite the risk? Due to a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely," Marks said.

[Writing this in a personal capacity, not on behalf of my employer (Anthropic).]

Jacob’s thread is very worth reading. Here’s my birds-eye view of the situation with risks from AI:

1. AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad… https://t.co/rCVoiOWWzm
— Samuel Marks (@saprmarks) September 9, 2026

Marks said it's not possible to program AIs to behave how people would like, that AI agents frequently "severely misbehave," and that the current plan is to train AI to align with restrictions to the point the agents can train their successors better than humans can currently train AI. He said he's conducting research "because I hope my work will reduce the chance of these extinction-level bad outcomes."

[ZH: We can't help but feel in the same week we see OpenAI 'solves' Navier-Stokes, we get another glut of existential warnings about just how awesome (in the scary sense) these models are... all sounds like a marketing psy-op... similar to the fence-jumping episodes with Hugging Face etc 'showing off' how great the agents are (and how they need regulating (i.e a path to shutting out open-weight models)... but could just be our skeptical bias emerging...]

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/09/2026 - 12:00
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Good Faith Vs Bad Faith

2026-09-08T17:19:11.649-07:00

Good Faith Vs Bad Faith

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

"In conditions of mass democracy, the soft and the infantilising will be preferred over the hard and the necessary again and again."

- Eugyppius on X

Clusterfuck Nation never sleeps, even while everybody else lays aside their labors. Later today we'll light up the ceremonial grill, but for now it's onto the tribulations of this dolorous moment in history.

It was just such a sparkling September morning twenty-five years ago when those hijacked airliners knifed into the World Trade Center towers (plus the Pentagon + a field outside Shanksville, PA). Despite all the forensic debate since then, I go with the original explanation that four teams of jihadi maniacs did the 9/11 deed. And also, yet, despite all the official defenses mounted since then - the Patriot Act, etc. - here we are allowing a massive Islamic infiltration and even takeover of many places in America, proving, at least, that history is trickster.

After the trauma of 9/11, you can't deny our country went off the rails psychologically, along with the rest of Western Civ, as if its immune system broke down and the body politic admitted all kinds of malevolent parasites into itself. They have induced disease in most of society's organs - our institutions - the main political parties, the news media, the government agencies, the foundations, the schools, the arts & letters. The West's collective brain got badly damaged in the process.

The disease is identifiable, though some of its mechanisms remain mysterious. The disease is called bad faith: acting or speaking falsely, and knowingly so. Pretending one thing as a cover for meaning something else, such as hollering about "justice" when you really mean vengeance; "inclusion" when you mean to cancel others out of careers and livelihoods; "diversity" when you won't tolerate disagreement; "democracy" when you just want to push everybody else around.

The forces behind all this give off an odor of the occult. You can perhaps name and locate some of the engines driving it - the "Globalists," the Marxists, the London banks, the EU, the WEF, the São Paulo Forum, the CCP - but their motives remain obscure. Angela Merkel has stated plainly why she allowed the mass immigration of the Third World into Germany (and thereby into all Europe due to the Schengen agreement that erased the EU nations' borders): "to counter right-wing extremism," she said. That sounds pretty clear, but it also seems quite crazy. And why on earth does Ursula von der Leyen do everything possible to keep that going? Have the migrants not sufficiently demonstrated their antipathy to Western society? How many rapes, knifings, beheadings, café massacres, and Christmas Village drive-throughs does it take?

It's also hard to fathom how the London bankers (whoever they are?) have any sympathy with the Marxist revolutionaries who want to end the concept of private property and the instrumentalities of money that go with it. Or how the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations became so enamored of socialism. Or why the CIA seems bent on betraying the American common good. Or how come the League of Women Voters stridently opposes common sense election reform.

The race hustle is more comprehensible. It operates within a permission-structure built on the agonizing differential between success and failure.

It's just plain extortion: our failure is your fault, so pay up. And meanwhile, thanks for no-bail-and-no-jail, and for permission to shoplift, rape, murder, loot, and riot when we feel like it. (And cry harder about it.) It's an obvious sado-masochistic setup.

The gender game gets more complicated, but it also comes out of a permission-structure based on success / failure, aggravated by a mutual shortage of marriageable males and females forced to compensate for any combination of bad luck and bad choices that lead to failure in life.

But that dynamic has been neatly hijacked by groups seeking to create as much social chaos as possible. Why else would the Democratic Party get so avid for drag queen story hours in the early school grades? Is it not obvious that this isn't really comedy, as claimed? Rather, it's the presentation of women as monsters. Have you ever stopped to wonder how many of the kids watching these exhibitions are actually terrified by the disturbed adult males acting-out in their faces?

And now, the gender lunacy has climaxed - in Massachusetts, arguably the craziest US state - where mobs of deranged women chant and blubber in sympathy outside the courthouse where a mother who strangled her three kids just got off the hook.

The kids were unfairly cluttering up Lindsey's life, you understand. . . .If anything is an apt tipping point for a society to go one way or another, there it is.

Twenty-five years of being insane is enough.

It's not making life easier for anybody. This is the meaning of Trump. He is aiming to fix as much of this as possible. That it's his fate to play this role is further evidence that history is a trickster. It's easy to make fun of him and his mannerisms; harder to weigh who and what he is fighting against - and what the stakes are. You might just boil it down to a battle between good faith and bad faith, of meaning business and playing games. The time for meaning business is at hand, and the time for playing dishonest games is over. Happy Labor Day and get ready for the action that's about to come at you as we turn this corner into fall, for real.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 16:20
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Canada's Tariff Strategy Designed To Interfere With U.S. Midterm Elections

2026-09-07T15:19:03.393-07:00

Canada's Tariff Strategy Designed To Interfere With U.S. Midterm Elections

Late last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from a trade deal with the United States. According to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Canada was "offered the best trade deal of any country on the globe," but Carney abandoned the deal "at the last minute."

According to the White House, "the U.S. offered Canada the most preferential market access of any country on Earth, with deep cuts on steel, aluminum, autos, lumber, and more. Instead of partnership, Canada chose unreasonable demands, walk-backs, and flat-out rejection." Canada responded with retaliation rather than negotiation, becoming the only other country besides China to do so.

And the reason is that Canada is trying to influence the 2026 midterm elections in the United States.

After the trade negotiations failed, Canadian officials announced that tariffs of up to 50% will hit roughly 700 American products starting September 8, covering close to $20 billion in goods, about 7% of everything Canada imports from the United States. The rates range from 15% to 50%, and tariffs on American steel and aluminum will double from 25% to 50%. This was a targeted economic strike meant to hit key states before the midterm elections.

Ottawa has barely bothered to deny it. Canadian Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the tariffs were built to apply political pressure on specific states, telling reporters: "We are also targeting products that can target specific states in the United States. We are being smart and strategic in order to apply political pressure, and I think it's the right thing to do right now."

Asked directly about the political intent by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Joly did not walk it back: "We are putting pressure clearly on different states and different people. We don't want to do that. We don't want this trade war. We didn't start it."

The target list reads like a midterm map. Cheese products from Wisconsin. Washers and dryers from Kentucky, where GE Appliances is a major employer. Steel, aluminum and auto parts from Michigan. The Wall Street Journal reported that Canadian officials designed the package to protect domestic industry and to "sting President Trump and his Republican Party" heading into November.

"The states that are most reliant on Canada as an export market are often the northern-tier states - Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire," Ed Gresser told the Wall Street Journal. He argued that Canada is "trying to show the Republican party that there's a systemic cost to doing this sort of thing."

Trade consultant Eric Miller, who heads the Washington-based Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, said Canada picked targets with available substitutes, either domestic production or imports from Mexico and China, items like air conditioners and appliances, while simultaneously hitting producers in swing states and reliably Republican territory.

Nowhere was the targeting clearer than Maine, and nowhere did it collapse faster. Ottawa's original list carried a 25% tariff on American lobster, set to bite during the fall season when roughly half of Maine's catch goes to Canadian processors. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), facing re-election in November, had already warned that the trade war would hurt her state. The Maine Lobstermen's Association warned on Aug. 26 that the duty would land at the worst possible moment for an industry running on thin margins.

One day later, Canada removed seafood and fish products from the list entirely, citing "select adjustments" made "based on feedback" while insisting it was maintaining a dollar-for-dollar response. Collins applauded the reversal. Ottawa aimed at a vulnerable Republican senator's most iconic industry, took one day of political heat from that state, and backed off - which tells you the aim was never really about lobster.

The rest of the list is still standing.

Desjardins Capital Markets economist Royce Mendes estimates that the tariffs could add about 0.2 percentage points to Canadian inflation, already near 3%. The central bank is already managing higher energy costs and the risk of a slowdown, which makes this move extremely complicated for Canada, and, according to Corpay chief market strategist Karl Schamotta, Canada's strategy may backfire.

"An intensified trade war will hurt the country more than the U.S.," Schamotta explained. "Countertariffs will not help. In Canada, just as in the U.S., they are effectively taxes on domestic consumption. They raise the cost of living while doing little to shift trade balances or improve overall economic welfare."

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 16:30
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Alleged White-Hat Hackers Withdraw 4,000 Bitcoin From Blockstream's Liquid Network Federation Reserves

2026-09-07T14:19:27.555-07:00

Alleged White-Hat Hackers Withdraw 4,000 Bitcoin From Blockstream's Liquid Network Federation Reserves

Authored by Juan Galt via BitcoinMagazine.com,

The Liquid Network said Sunday that purported white-hat hackers withdrew about 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million, from the federation wallet that backs L-BTC.

Bridge nodes were disabled, and the sidechain was paused. Other issued assets, including USDT, DePix and RWAs, were unaffected, the official account said on X.

The Liquid Network is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin, founded by Adam Back’s Blockstream. The Liquid chain issues a variety of assets such as LBTC, which it backs with BTC on the Bitcoin main chain, held in a large multisig of 15 corporate and known members. 11 of the 15 members need to sign a valid multi-signature transaction to move coins from the treasury. Before the hack, the treasury held over 4200 BTC; after the hack, Blockstream’s proof of reserves page reports a little over 207 BTC left.

The hackers withdrew 4,019.4 BTC from the reserve address in a peg-out transaction using the SideSwap Peg-out Authorization Key. SideWap is a bridge exchange and a member of the Liquid Federation. While details on the mechanism of the hack are not confirmed yet, it appears an inflation bug on the LBTC side chain was exploited by the hackers to create over 4,000 LBTC that did not exist before, and cash them out for on-chain bitcoin from the federation. Because the transaction appeared as valid, given the consensus bug, the federation members’ HSM security servers signed the BTC withdrawal transaction, worth roughly 320 million at the time.

The hacker moved the funds to an address ending in 6gyqjlte, from which they quickly signed a new transaction with a message on the OP_RETURN arbitrary data field saying “we are whitehats. contact us on chain.” Those coins were still at that address at the time of writing.

A small mainnet transaction to the hacker address followed by an OP_RETURN saying “Please contact security@blockstream.com”, presumably from a Blockstream public address, though that remains unconfirmed. A later OP_RETURN spend from the hacker address carried “Please contact us on Signal @m671aw.70”, however, this may be spam and does not share a link to the address with the stolen funds.

In response to the breach, exchanges were told to pause L-BTC deposits and withdrawals. Bridge nodes on the Liquid Network have been paused, limiting access to the side chain, which continues to produce blocks.

JAN3 CEO Samson Mow said Aqua’s Liquid features were affected and that on-chain bitcoin still worked. Other wallets in the industry that use the Liquid Network are expected to be affected. Users holding LBTC now effectively have their savings at risk, since the underlying BTC is currently not redeemable. Given the private nature of the Liquid chain, user onchain analytics are scarce and not much public information is known about how much LBTC is held by retail users versus corporations of Blockstream itself. Nevertheless, should the funds not be returned, it would be a heavy blow to the Liquid Network’s user base.

Users of LBTC don’t have many options but to wait for conversations with the hackers to resolve. Given the size of the hack, it would be difficult for the hackers to get away with stealing all that bitcoin, though perhaps not impossible.

What may happen is that the hackers ask for a finder’s fee and return the majority of the funds.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 16:00
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From Par To Pennies

2026-09-06T14:19:04.137-07:00

From Par To Pennies

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Private credit’s reckoning is not arriving with one grand, spectacular crash. It is arriving slowly and steadily, one loan at a time.

For years, one of private credit’s great attractions was the remarkable stability (or perceived stability) of its valuations. Public bonds could fall ten points in a week. Leveraged loans could gap lower after a bad earnings report. But private loans somehow possessed the soothing ability to remain at 98, 99 or 100 cents on the dollar through almost anything, all while paying investors a healthy yield.

Incredible, right? Another financial fairy tale…a proverbial unicorn sh*tting rainbows.

Until reality eventually reared it’s head, and now, to the surprise of no one, we are finding out unicorns don’t exist. Imagine that. We are learning that the absence of volatility in a reported mark does not mean the absence of deterioration in the underlying loan. And that is increasingly where the private credit story gets heinous…and why I’ve been writing about it for 2 years now.

The opacity is unlike any other corner of markets. Some borrowers can weaken for months, even years, while their loans remain marked at levels suggesting that most or all of the money is still coming back.

Eventually, though, something happens that makes the deterioration impossible to finesse away. A borrower stops paying interest. A hoped for refinancing disappears. The sponsor declines to put in more equity. A rescue transaction collapses. Or, most decisively, like we are seeing more and more, the underlying company files for bankruptcy.

That is when the soothing stability of private credit can suddenly disappear. A loan that sat near par through months of worsening fundamentals can plunge to 50, 20, five cents or even zero in remarkably short order. The economic deterioration may have been happening all along. The mark simply waited until reality became too difficult to ignore. You then get headlines like this one from Bloomberg yesterday.

And increasingly, the pattern looks familiar. A company struggles, leverage stays high, liquidity deteriorates and interest becomes harder to pay. Yet there is always a reason not to mark the loan too aggressively. Maybe EBITDA recovers. Maybe rates fall. Maybe the sponsor writes another check. Maybe there is a refinancing, an asset sale or a transformational M&A deal just around the corner. Maybe the guy responsible for marking down the loan has set his “out of office” email response to inform people he is taking 2 month vacation on his yacht in Malta.

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Hope, conveniently, has a fair value. It’s always 100 cents on the dollar or damn close to it. But then…painstakingly and eventually…reality catches up and 100 cents quickly becomes 20 cents. Or zero cents.

The latest example is Loparex, a borrower held by Blue Owl Capital Corp., or OBDC. According to Bloomberg, at the end of 2025, its first lien debt was still carried around par and its second lien debt at roughly 88 cents on the dollar. By June, OBDC was carrying portions of the second lien at about five cents and one first lien position at roughly 22 cents. Loparex was also put on nonaccrual. Moody’s has since deemed the company in default and said a Chapter 11 filing is a possibility.

Perhaps recoveries ultimately exceed those marks. That happens in restructurings. But the interesting number is not five cents. It is 88 cents.

The loan did not suddenly become troubled on the day somebody changed the valuation. Loparex had been struggling with its debt load for years, including a 2024 distressed exchange that S&P considered tantamount to default. Yet the second lien still ended 2025 marked at roughly 88.

This gets to the central problem with private credit valuations that I have been harping on non-stop for years. These loans generally do not trade in liquid markets, so managers rely on models, comparable companies, third party valuation firms and their own judgment. That is unavoidable. But it also means that valuation becomes most subjective precisely when the underlying credit becomes most uncertain. If an executive were so inclined, he could figure out a way to model a bankrupt hot dog cart at a $1 trillion valuation. Like the Fed, printing cash, it’s all just made up bullsh*t out of thin air manipulated in seconds on a spreadsheet.

And that’s all good and well. But bankruptcy has a nasty habit of pissing in the proforma punchbowl. Once a company actually files bankruptcy, the comfortable range of hypothetical outcomes (hereinafter referred to as “bulls*it”) gets much narrower. Creditors, restructuring advisers and courts start converting theoretical enterprise values into actual recoveries. At that point, extending and pretending gets considerably harder.

Bankruptcy does not necessarily create the loss. It can simply make the loss impossible to avoid recognizing.

Here are some recent examples that make the point and what to watch out for.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and very often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning, meaning if I’m long I could sell or if I’m short I could cover at any time.

Contributor posts, guest posts and curated posts have been hand selected by me, but have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author or reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

I cannot guarantee the accuracy of any or all facts and figures included in this article though I made an effort to get them right. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again, and encourage you to always double check, do your own research and speak to a licensed financial professional, which I am not.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things I’m bearish on. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.

Starting in 2026, I have been attempting to no longer actively trade as much as I once did (read my story here). My goal is for my investing/saving to be done by recurring contributions mostly to sector ETFs and a few select equities, trusted third parties who oversee my accounts, and advisors. Such advisors or funds, through individual equities, options, index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, or other securities, may have positions in, exposure to, or holdings of names mentioned herein that I know nothing about. It is possible I could own, have exposure to, or not own anything, at any point. In an attempt to lead a healthier lifestyle, I’ve also excluded myself from fantasy sports, sports betting, online and in-person casinos and prediction markets.

Any of my positions can change immediately as soon as I publish, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullsh*t my way through things easier. Hence, why I am a writer.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Many times I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour.

Also, again I just straight up get sh*t wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 14:00
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