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And The Winner For Poorest Big City In America Is...

2026-10-31T18:19:36.350-07:00

And The Winner For Poorest Big City In America Is...

Philadelphia has once again been named the poorest major city in the United States, reclaiming an unwanted title after briefly losing last year.

A whopping 20.4% of Philadelphia residents lived below the poverty line in 2025, according to newly released U.S. Census Bureau data, marking the city's first increase in poverty since 2011.

The figures, first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer, put Philadelphia ahead of Houston and New York City, which both recorded poverty rates of 17.7%.

The reversal comes after Philadelphia briefly surrendered its unwanted title to Houston in 2024, when its poverty rate dropped to 19.7%, its lowest level since at least 1979.

The latest figures also revealed that Philadelphia's median household income stood at just $67,400 in 2025. A family of four earning approximately $32,750 annually was considered to be living in poverty, according to federal guidelines.

In a statement to the Inquirer, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker (D) conceded that city's poverty rate unacceptable.

Democratic mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker is seen during a debate with Philadelphia Republican mayoral candidate David Oh at KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023.Matt Rourke/Associated Press

"A rate of 20.4 percent is too high and unacceptable to me as mayor," the mayor said, pointing to the rising cost of everyday necessities as a major burden on struggling families.

"Affordability is a very real issue, and basic staples like food, fuel and clothing cost too much for too many Philadelphians," she added.

Philadelphia's poverty rate peaked at 28.4% in 2011 before gradually declining over the following decade.

Philadelphia's poverty figures come as city officials push a risky new housing scheme that bears troubling echoes of the 2008 financial crisis.

As we reported earlier Friday, Philadelphia plans to roll out a taxpayer-subsidized mortgage program allowing first-time homebuyers to put down as little as 3% and avoid private mortgage insurance, with public funds covering part of the interest costs.

The program, dubbed One Philly Mortgage, is part of Parker's H.O.M.E. housing initiative, which earmarks $25 million for low-interest mortgages and down-payment assistance.

However, questions remain about who will shoulder the financial risks.

Private mortgage insurance typically costs between $30 and $70 per month for every $100,000 borrowed, according to Freddie Mac. Homeowners could end up paying nearly $3,000 a year on a $350,000 mortgage.

The insurance protects lenders if borrowers with little equity default on their loans. Under Philadelphia's program, buyers would not be required to pay it, although publicly available city materials do not specify who would assume that risk instead.

With the median listing price in the Philadelphia metro area hovering around $375,000, a buyer putting down just 3% would have only $11,250 in initial equity.

A 3% decline in the property's value would wipe out that initial equity, assuming no mortgage principal had been repaid, even before accounting for selling costs.

Translation: This could be a slow-moving train wreck. But don't tell the Democrats running Philadelphia that.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/31/2026 - 18:35
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Iran Issues Nov 1st Blanket Ban On South Korean Tanker Giant Moving One-Third Of Persian Gulf Oil Exports

2026-10-31T16:19:21.052-07:00

Iran Issues Nov 1st Blanket Ban On South Korean Tanker Giant Moving One-Third Of Persian Gulf Oil Exports

South Korean tanker giant Sinokor is the world's dominant VLCC owner (Very Large Crude Carrier) and has in recent weeks found itself front and center in the crosshairs of Iranian retaliation in the Strait of Hormuz and regional waters.

This past week, Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) has put the major South Korean maritime shipping and logistics group on notice, saying Sinokor will suffer sweeping action against its fleet starting November 1st if it keeps violating Tehran's protocol for shipping through the strait.

This has marked the first time the Islamic Republic issued a blanket warning covering a shipowner's entire fleet, but this is perhaps because Sinokor alone accounted for about 37% of Hormuz oil transits in September and more than 50% of VLCC traffic in the first 10 days of October, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence data.

Source: Sinokor

Despite regional passage being fraught with obvious ultra high risks, Sinokor has risen to dominance in the Gulf's shipping market, moving to capitalize on extraordinary freight rates.

However, this has come at a steep physical cost, with at least seven Sinokor-linked tankers having been attacked and struck by Iranian missiles or drones recently and during the conflict.

New VLCC's contracted from shipyards can run from $125 million to $135 million to build - but a prompt delivery resale can run much, much highter - especially now.

Also, war risk insurance has been exploding in price. One industry watcher has put together a brief primer:

Standard hull and machinery insurance excludes war risks, so owners buy separate hull war cover and pay an additional premium (AP) each time a ship enters a Joint War Committee listed area.
Before the war that began on February 28, 2026, Hormuz war-risk cover typically cost 0.15% to 0.25% of hull value; brokers quoted 6% to 10% in early October 2026, according to the Financial Times.
On a $100 million tanker, that swing turns a roughly $250,000 premium into $6 million to $10 million for one transit, before cargo cover, which is bought separately.
Quoted rates are not an official index: they vary by ship, flag, ownership links, route and date, and underwriters can reprice or withdraw cover at short notice.

WarBrief Live has provided the following brief timeline and outline of soaring rates:

Pre-war rate: 0.15% to 0.25% of hull value (Lloyd’s List, March 11, 2026)
Early October 2026 quote: 6% to 10% of hull value per voyage (brokers via the Financial Times, reported October 7)
Worked example: $100 million tanker: about $250,000 before the war, $6 million to $10 million at early-October quotes
Trigger: entry into a Joint War Committee listed area, usually priced for a seven-day period

Days ago, Bloomberg highlighted the outsized role this single South Korean company has played in shipping contract pricing amid the global energy crisis:

The messages from the world’s biggest supertanker owner often begin with pleasantries: “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.” Within minutes, the WhatsApps are the talk of the oil-tanker industry, a multibillion-dollar corner of the energy market that’s been plunged into chaos by the Iran war this year, and where word of mouth is the main way information spreads. The details vary, but the messages to shipbrokers from Sinokor Group, the South Korean company controlled by tycoon Ga-Hyun Chung, mostly boil down to the same thing — one of its vessels has just been hired at a new sky-high rate to ferry oil out of the Persian Gulf.
Some messages detail a new contract, listing the ship, counterparty and eyewatering price. Others just refer loosely to negotiations underway. The format fluctuates from terse strings of numbers and names to full sentences and florid signoffs: “Very respectfully. Thank you very much and best regards,” concludes one message sent to brokers in August, and seen by Bloomberg. Usually, in the days that follow, the global benchmark price set by London’s Baltic Exchange takes another leap higher.
What would simply be fodder for gossip in most industries, brokers say that Sinokor’s WhatsApp messages have for months played an outsized role in setting the cost of transporting oil around the world. Rates for very-large crude carriers (VLCC) — the biggest kind of oil tanker — have soared more than 1,600% this year amid disruptions caused by the war, creating an unprecedented boom for the industry, but throwing a spotlight on the arcane system used to price the world’s shipping contracts, and the centuries-old institution that manages it.

As for the threat against the company coming from Iran, it remains to be seen what unspecified "legal action" will be taken going forward or in what form, or how to interprete "appropriate enforcement measures" - which has so far involved full-on military attacks.

SINOKOR Fleet update - Given the direct threat to their fleet by the IRGC from 1 Nov onwards. The fleet seems very interestingly poised.

Image 1 - Live global fleet. Image 2 regional tanker positions. Image 3: Majority hanging out at Fujairah achorage, while Mombasa B is… https://t.co/9CogM6EOqt pic.twitter.com/dsE6Q5V0v7
— Live-AIS.com (@live_ais_com) October 30, 2026

The statement PGSA released on October 27 said Sinokor vessels "have committed the highest number of crossing violations over the past 3 months" and that "appropriate enforcement actions have been taken against at least 7 of them."

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/31/2026 - 17:00
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State Official Admits No System To Identify Whether Voters Are Noncitizens

2026-10-30T21:19:36.071-07:00

State Official Admits No System To Identify Whether Voters Are Noncitizens

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A top Washington state official said on Oct. 29 that the state has no way to confirm whether people are U.S. citizens when registering them to vote.

"We don't have a system that can identify whether someone is an actual noncitizen," Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said during a press conference in King County.

Hobbs also said that "it's not unusual for noncitizens to actually be on voter rolls" and that "we never said that there are none on there."

Federal officials recently said they identified more than 400 people registered to vote in Washington state who are suspected of being noncitizens.

They said they would send Hobbs's office a list of the people and ask him to set aside ballots from those individuals until their citizenship status could be confirmed.

Hobbs, responding in a letter on Wednesday, said a preliminary analysis showed that some of the people on the list are not currently registered to vote and that others are U.S. citizens, "based on information of which Washington is aware." Hobbs asked the federal government for "individualized proof that certain registered voters in Washington are ineligible."

Washington state has automatic voter registration. That means people who present proof of citizenship to state agencies are automatically registered to vote.

To meet the requirements, a person must sign a statement saying they're a U.S. citizen and provide identification.

Hobbs told the briefing, after saying the state lacks a system to verify citizenship, "That's why when people go up to get their registration done at a [government facility], they are asked if they are a noncitizen, they are asked to sign the form; they're attesting whether or not they're a U.S. citizen."

Hobbs's comments show that the state "does nothing to confirm citizenship" and is "knowingly sending out ballots to noncitizens and trusting that the noncitizens will not fill out the ballot," Charles Neil Floyd, acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, said in a statement to news outlets on Oct. 29.

"Registering noncitizens to vote with or without their knowledge could jeopardize their ability to become citizens. The noncitizens we have interviewed tell us that they assumed they could vote because the state sent them a ballot."

Hobbs said registering noncitizens to vote could happen because a noncitizen wasn't listening to what a government worker said or because a government worker clicked the wrong box.

He said that there have been 15 cases of noncitizen voting between 1982 and 2025 in the state.

Hobbs and King County Elections Director Julie Wise, who has expressed concerns in the past about noncitizens being registered to vote, told the briefing that noncitizens who are registered to vote have in the past called authorities to have their names removed.

"It is not a crime to be accidentally put on the voter roll, because sometimes it's not their fault," Hobbs said.

Officials noted that voting as a noncitizen is a crime, with prison time among the penalties upon conviction.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/30/2026 - 14:55
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US Military's Drug-Boat Strikes Have Now Killed At Least 240 People

2026-10-28T17:19:22.575-07:00

US Military's Drug-Boat Strikes Have Now Killed At Least 240 People

Authored by Austin Campbell via Task & Purpose,

The U.S. military killed five people Tuesday aboard what Southern Command described as a "go-fast vessel" associated with "narco-terrorists" in the eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing the death toll from its campaign against suspected drug traffickers to at least 240 since September 2025.

U.S. Southern Command said Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere carried out the Oct. 27 strike against a speedboat traveling along known drug-trafficking routes.

The command said intelligence confirmed the vessel's involvement in narcotics trafficking but did not publicly provide evidence supporting that assessment, with the majority of these killings occurring at sea.

Video released by U.S. Southern Command on X appears to show the vessel sitting nearly motionless in the water before a large explosion engulfs it. The footage does not establish whether the vessel was anchored or disabled.

On October 27, under the direction of #SOUTHCOM, Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere executed a lethal, kinetic strike on a go-fast vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific. Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel's active involvement... pic.twitter.com/egwWVgoypi
— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) October 27, 2026

The attack was at least the third deadly strike carried out by SOUTHCOM this month. On Oct. 4, U.S. forces killed four people aboard another suspected drug-trafficking vessel.

Over the previous months, these strikes have gained mounting legal scrutiny, domestically and internationally. In September, the United Nations found reasonable grounds to believe the killings constituted murder under international law and warned that the broader campaign could amount to crimes against humanity.

The organization rejected the Trump administration's argument that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with designated terrorist organizations, finding that suspected drug trafficking does not constitute an armed attack justifying military force in self-defense.

The families of two men killed in an October 2025 strike have also sued the U.S. government, alleging wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. The lawsuit, filed with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights, concerns Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, both from Trinidad and Tobago.

Their families say the men had been fishing and working in Venezuela and were returning home when the military struck their boat. The lawsuit seeks damages and a finding that their deaths were unlawful.

The Trump administration has maintained that the strikes are lawful. SOUTHCOM previously told Task & Purpose that all military operations had complied with the law of armed conflict and that every person killed was a confirmed member of a designated terrorist organization.

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/28/2026 - 17:50
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Google Plunges After Ugly Top And Bottom Line Miss, As AI Cannibalizes Search And Ads

2026-10-28T15:19:45.114-07:00

Google Plunges After Ugly Top And Bottom Line Miss, As AI Cannibalizes Search And Ads

Today, ahead of the doubleheader of Mag 7 reports when both Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet report, we wrote in our preview that Microsoft has become the consensus long, while Alphabet "still feels like the consensus funding short across megacaps." And both have to convince a market that, as Goldman's Rich Privorotsky put it this morning, now has "eye watering expectations":

"These really matter. Eye watering expectations… buyside probably closer to Azure growth around high 40s%, Google Cloud around mid 90s%. The question isn't whether those are good numbers, but whether they can surpass already high expectations... Azure probably needs a guidance raise to be properly supportive. The nuance is capacity… if they miss elevated expectations simply because they cannot bring enough compute online. That's disappointing for near term revenue but potentially even more bullish for the scarcity premium and future spending. Watch customer concentration, how broad the demand really is and, crucially, the relationship between revenue growth, capex and margins. The market wants evidence that the incremental economics work."

In other words, a cloud beat is just the price of admission, and the debate tonight is what all that cloud costs, and who pays for it.

Within the Mag 7, Microsoft and Alphabet sit at opposite ends. Goldman's derivatives desk has Microsoft at 8/10 on its positioning score (the same score Meta carried into its print last week, and we all know how that went). Alphabet, meanwhile, keeps getting sold to pay for everything else. JPMorgan's TMT trader Brian Heavey wrote this morning that "we continue to see GOOG being used as a source of funds (note there was another negative 3P check ahead of earnings - all pointing to a Search miss)." The stock dropped 10% from its October 13 high into Monday.

There are some signs of a thaw. Goldman's US desk saw "a buyer of 50k GOOGL 15Jan 360 calls" on Tuesday, and Privorotsky notes that "people have barely begun to re-risk. What we've really seen so far is the abatement of supply, rather than meaningful fresh demand."

Away from Goldman, and focusing on Alphabet, the whole debate fits in one line from JPMorgan's Mark Schilsky, whose Tech Sketch "Earnings Preview Bonanza" (available to pro subs) frames it as "Street (Consensus) Fighter II: Search vs. Cloud":

"On the one hand, Google Cloud Revenues are likely to crush this quarter, thanks to TPU sales. On the other hand, Search Revenue growth is expected to miss the Street because the alt data (which is always right!) suggests so... GOOGL is also on a path to where Google Cloud Revenues could be equal to Search Revenues by late 2028. That's massive! Who thought that was possible 1 year ago? And now we're debating whether or not Search is going to miss by like -50 bps this quarter. Who cares?!?"

Plenty of people care, apparently. Schilsky gives Alphabet a 5 out of 10 on his investor expectations gauge, vs. a 9 for Meta last week:

Here is the buyside bar, combining Schilsky and the UBS bogeys:

Search: investors expect ~14% growth, FXN and reported, vs. the Street's ~15%. UBS has the bogey at 14-14.5%. Goldman's analysts are 1% below consensus. Per Schilsky, "everyone 'knows' that Search is likely to miss by about -100 bps because that's where the alt data is," so "if this beats, the stock is almost assuredly going higher T+1." Watch paid clicks too (+13% in Q2), where "the comps get 3 points harder this print."
YouTube: ~11-12%. "Honestly, no one really cares about YouTube. As long as growth doesn't dip below +10% Y/Y, investors will continue to ignore it."
Google Cloud: this is where the buyside is way above the sellside. Schilsky hears +105% to +115%, UBS +100-115%, Goldman's analysts ~+100%, and Privorotsky's desk "mid 90s," all vs. the Street at roughly +90-96%. Implied TPU sales in the quarter: "most are in the $5B to $7B range."
Operating income: ~$45 billion vs. the Street's ~$43 billion (UBS says $44-45 billion).

Note just how wide the range is on Google Cloud in Bloomberg's consensus: the median is $29.1 billion, but individual estimates run from $24.3 billion to $36.7 billion, roughly 60% to 140% growth. Elsewhere, Search is expected at $64.9 billion, YouTube at $11.4 billion, and total operating income at $43.2 billion. And look at the bottom line: consensus has Alphabet generating negative free cash flow of $3.5 billion this quarter, as $55.8 billion of capex swallows $53.9 billion of operating cash flow.

For Schilsky, the sneaky most important number is the Google Cloud margin: "given that this is the first quarter in which TPU sales are likely to be truly meaningful, any beat to the Street's ~33% EBIT Margin estimate will be rightfully viewed by investors as modest validation that TPU margins are close to – or possibly higher than – core Google Cloud Margins." Goldman's TMT specialists add the other side of that ledger: "Watch cloud margin commentary as they have flagged modest pressure... Search still funds the build. Any softness in search monetization or YouTube would compound the spend narrative."

Then there's the consumer agent. UBS says investors want two things before sentiment can inflect: "a credible AI agent that helps ease Muse/Search concerns, and a broader Gemini 4 rollout." Perceptions of Alphabet as a direct competitor to the leading frontier labs "have faded" after the latest Gemini delay (and after Gemini 4 Argon proved to be, well, benchmaxxed). Goldman's Eric Sheridan sees "an eventual consumer agent launch, possibly aligned with Gemini 4 ahead of the holiday season," and Schilsky expects "a 'real' competitor to META Muse in the coming months."

The $350 Billion Question

As always, the number that moves the stock may not even be in the quarter. Alphabet's 2026 capex guide sits at $195-205 billion, and UBS says the focus tonight is simply a reiteration. 2027 is another story:

2027 capex: Street ~$305 billion, per Schilsky. The buyside is at "$330B to $350B" (JPM) or "$350-375 bn" (UBS). Goldman's own estimate is $350 billion.
2028 capex: "Trust me, I've been asking investors for weeks for this number, but the most common answer I've received is a combination of 'Higher' and 'If anyone tells you with any certainty what their estimate for Google's 2028 is, they are b*#!$#!ing you.'"
2027 EPS: $14.50-16.00 per JPM, $15-16 per UBS, vs. the Street at ~$15. 2028 EPS is anyone's guess, with the "modal outcome" in the low $20s vs. the Street at ~$18.
2027 Google Cloud growth: the Street is at +68%, while "most investors are >+100% Y/Y."

So, a 70%-plus jump in capex to $350 billion or more is now the bull case. Recall what Sundar told us in July when the market balked at the last increase:

*ALPHABET CEO: NEXT GEN FRONTIER MODELS WILL BE MUCH LARGER

With all that in mind (and it's quite a lot), here is what GOOGL reported moments ago, which judging by the negative stock reaction to the revenue and EPS miss a sign that the company is failing to generate enough return to justify its massive investments in AI, is a mirror image of the meltup after the stellar 2nd quarter, may explain why as noted above, GOOGL has been the funding short across the Mag 7 space:

Revenue ex-TAC $111.21 billion, +27% y/y, missing estimates of $111.29 billion
EPS $2.12 vs. $2.87 y/y, missing estimates of $3.03

Taking a closer look at the main segments:

Revenue $127.58 billion, +25% y/y, missing estimate $127.93 billion
- Google Services revenue $96.30 billion, +11% y/y, missing estimate $98.4 billion
- Google advertising revenue $82.01 billion, +11% y/y, missing estimate $83.57 billion as AI is starting to aggressively cannibalize search and ad revenue
- Google Search & Other Revenue $63.35 billion, +12% y/y, missing estimate $64.85 billion
- YouTube ads revenue $11.21 billion, +9.2% y/y, missing estimate $11.43 billion
- Google Network Revenue $7.46 billion, +1.4% y/y, beat estimate $7.24 billion
- Google Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices Revenue $14.29 billion, +11% y/y, missing estimate $14.78 billion
- Google Cloud revenue $30.71 billion vs. $15.16 billion y/y, beating estimate $29.1 billion
- Other Bets revenue $372 million, +8.1% y/y, missing estimate $387.8 million

Other items:

Hedging gains $194 million, estimate $21.1 million
Total TAC $16.37 billion, +10% y/y, estimate $16.53 billion
Operating income $40.58 billion, +30% y/y, estimate $43.16 billion
Operating margin 32% vs. 31% y/y, estimate 33.7%
Google Services operating income $39.16 billion, +17% y/y, estimate $40.53 billion
Other Bets operating loss $2.05 billion vs. loss $1.43 billion y/y, estimate loss $1.72 billion
Alphabet-level activities operating loss $7.66 billion vs. loss $4.47 billion y/y, estimate loss $5.49 billion
Number of employees 204,757, +7.7% y/y, estimate 200,614

Last but not least, Capex:

Capital expenditure $51.36 billion vs. $23.95 billion y/y, estimate $55.78 billion

Oops.

Here are the results visually:

Cloud was the only big beat. Google Cloud came in at $30.7bn vs $29.1bn expected (+103% y/y), but Search, YouTube, Subscriptions and Services all missed. Operating income of $40.6bn was 6% light.

Two speeds. Cloud doubled; Search grew 12% (vs the ~14% buyside bogey and ~15% Street), YouTube 9% (below the 10% line Schilsky said investors would tolerate), and Network just 1%.

Cloud margin jumped to 36.2% from 23.7%, well above the ~33% Street figure Schilsky flagged. But Alphabet-level losses rose 71% to $7.7bn and Other Bets lost $2.0bn, so about half of Cloud's $7.5bn profit gain went straight back out.

The cost of compute. R&D (+36%) and cost of revenues ex-TAC (+32%, where depreciation sits) both grew faster than revenue (+25%). G&A fell 17%, and headcount was still up 7.7% to 204,757.

Operating income was up 30%, but EPS fell 26% to $2.12. A $21bn swing in other income, including an $8.66bn net loss on equity securities, wiped out the operating gain. There was also a new $298mm preferred dividend line.

Capex rose 114% y/y to $51.4bn (below the $55.8bn consensus). Operating cash flow fell 13% y/y to $42.3bn, far short of the $53.9bn consensus, so the capex 'miss' did not help free cash flow.

Free cash flow was negative for a second straight quarter: -$9.1bn vs -$3.5bn consensus. Trailing-12-month FCF collapsed 73% to $19.7bn, from $73.6bn a year ago.

The funniest part is just how dramatic the Y-axis rigging was in the company's presentation to make the YoY growth better:

Some more comments from the press release:

Model Apis Now Processing About 32B Tokens Per Minute
Gemini App Has Reached 1 Billion Users
Gemini App Has Reached Oneb Users—making
Shares Drop 7% After 3Q Earnings Report
Surpassed 150M Youtube Music & Premium Subs
Gemini 4 Argon & Carbon Are Now Leading at Frontier
3Q Net Loss on Equity Securities $8.66B
Google Cloud Rev. Grew 103%
Surpassed 150M Youtube Music & Premium Subs Globally

We expect to hear much more on the call, including capex guidance: as a reminder, Google’s race to build AI infrastructure for both itself and its customers has sent its capital expenditures soaring to record levels. At the same time, the investments have helped Google evolve into a top supplier of computing power to AI companies including Anthropic PBC and Meta. The problem is that AI is now too successful, and is clearly cannibalizing from the company's core "bread and butter" advertising and search business, which missed badly across the board.

The company is also working to develop AI models itself and integrate them into consumer products such as the search engine, YouTube and Gmail - though those efforts have yet to pay off relative to the level of Google’s spending.

In response to the dramatic top and bottom line miss, GOOGL stock plunged 8%, not only reversing the July surge, but dragging the stock back to levels last seen in April as some 6 months of gains have been unwound.

Q3 Investor presentation linkl:

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/28/2026 - 16:47
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Illinois Man Charged With Mailing Threatening Letters Containing White Powder To Lawmakers

2026-10-27T16:19:16.003-07:00

Illinois Man Charged With Mailing Threatening Letters Containing White Powder To Lawmakers

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

An Illinois man was charged Monday with mailing letters containing a white granular substance to four members of Congress, telling investigators he used salt because it looked like anthrax, according to a federal criminal complaint.

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington on May 5, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The complaint says the letters were postmarked Oct. 19 in Springfield, Illinois, and arrived at district offices between Oct. 21 and Oct. 23.

Three contained the handwritten note "HA HA", while one to a senator's office read "HAH enjoy the gift," according to the filing. Preliminary testing found no chemical or biological toxins in the letters.

An anonymous tip reached the FBI's National Threat Operations Center on Oct. 16, with the tipster saying he overheard Matthew G. Unglesbee in a restaurant discussing the mailings. The tipster provided Unglesbee's name, address, and date of birth, the filing said.

According to the complaint, the envelopes also included Unglesbee's name and his return home address.

FBI agents interviewed Unglesbee at his Quincy home on Oct. 25, and he admitted mailing the four letters.

Unglesbee told agents the substance in the letters was salt because it "kind of looks like" anthrax. He acknowledged he knew recipients "took it serious" and would have "hazmat come in white suits" because "anthrax is dangerous," according to the complaint.

He said he was joking but recognized the recipients would not know that and could perceive it as a threat, the filing said.

A search of his residence turned up a fifth, unmailed envelope addressed to one congressperson's Washington office.

Unglesbee said he sent the letters after hearing someone mention a news story about other suspicious white powder mailed to officials. He denied any role in those mailings.

Unglesbee was charged with mailing threatening communications, false information, and hoaxes to at least four members of Congress, and with claiming that those letters contained a white granular substance. An attorney for Unglesbee could not be identified.

Election Offices Targeted

Unglesbee's case comes amid similar incidents in October, ahead of the November midterm elections.

On Oct. 15, the FBI confirmed to The Epoch Times that "a series of suspicious mailings" had been sent to election offices across the country. As part of this, four Republican election officials reported they were the intended recipients of the suspicious mail. A spokesperson said the agency was not confirming the number of mailings intercepted at the time.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose confirmed that his office was an intended recipient of one of the mailings, but federal investigators intercepted the letter. Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson's office was also an intended target, according to his spokeswoman, Liz Jonson. The Wisconsin Elections Commission said it received an envelope with white powder, according to a statement, and that tests concluded it was not hazardous.

In an alert on Oct. 23, the FBI also said it found suspicious substances in mail sent to media organizations, public and private polling companies, secretaries of state and related election offices, and other election-related entities. No hazardous material had been identified.

In a similar incident before the 2024 general elections, election officials in six states reported receiving envelopes with powdery substances. Investigators tested the substances and found no hazardous materials.

Jill McLaughlin contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/27/2026 - 16:20
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Rubio Urges Cubans To Partner With CIA To Bring Change To Communist Country

2026-10-26T16:19:14.013-07:00

Rubio Urges Cubans To Partner With CIA To Bring Change To Communist Country

Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times,

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a direct appeal to Cubans on Friday, encouraging them to partner with the CIA if they want to see change in the communist country.

"To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba - now is the time," Rubio said in an Oct. 23 post on X. "The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA."

The CIA followed up Rubio's post on the same platform with the same message in Spanish and included instructions on how to contact the agency. It urged Cubans to use non-personal devices and VPNs.

Cuban leader Miguel Diaz-Canel attends a rally in Havana on May 22, 2026. Norlys Perez/Reuters

Cuban-born Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-Fla.) said in a post on X that the Cuban regime must be "relegated to the ash heap of history."

U.S. President Donald Trump hinted at a new American intervention in Cuba, potentially with military force, as he addressed supporters at a midterm campaign rally in Florida on Oct. 23.

He made the comments about Cuba after touting investments in the U.S. military and in military operations this year in Venezuela and Cuba.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran will tell you that we have the best equipment," Trump said, before appearing to respond to comments about Cuba from someone in the crowd. "He wants to know 'what about Cuba?' Give me a break. Give me a break. Don't worry. We'll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran."

Cuban Deputy FM Carlos Fernández de Cossío mocked Rubio's direct bid to the island.

"Now the U.S. is resorting to public recruitment campaigns for the CIA," he said in an Oct. 23 post on X. "There must be a lot of desperation or a serious lack of resources within the agency if it has to market its offers like toothpaste."

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced earlier this month that state authorities had secured an arrest warrant for former Cuban leader Raúl Castro Ruz.

Castro was charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in connection with the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue over international waters.

"The Castro regime's spies operated in our communities, fed intelligence to Havana, and helped put civilian pilots in the crosshairs of Cuban MiGs," Uthmeier said. "Thirty years later, we are still fighting for justice for Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales, Mario de la Peña, and Armando Alejandre Jr."

Castro, then minister of the Cuban armed forces and first vice president of Cuba, was a final decision-maker in the chain of command that authorized the shootdown, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit stated that Castro gave senior military leaders standing orders that said, "Fine, shoot them down at sea when they show up, and those who have the authority are not to consult anyone."

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez described the arrest warrant against Castro as a "disgraceful act" with no legal, ethical, or practical value, during a press conference on Oct. 21, Spanish news agency EFE reported.

Trump issued an executive order in January that said the government of Cuba had "taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States."

It said that the regime aligns itself with, and provides support for, numerous hostile countries and organizations, including Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

It noted that Cuba hosts Russia's largest overseas signals intelligence facility and also continues to build deep intelligence and defense cooperation with the Chinese communist regime.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/26/2026 - 17:00
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Bill Gates Faces Court Over Claims COVID Jabs Were 'Lethal Biological Weapons'

2026-10-25T15:19:37.519-07:00

Bill Gates Faces Court Over Claims COVID Jabs Were 'Lethal Biological Weapons'

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity,

In a packed courtroom in Leeuwarden, the official COVID story is being put on trial as Dutch plaintiffs demand personal liability from Bill Gates, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, former Prime Minister Mark Rutte and others for what their lawyer calls a coordinated global deception.

The civil case, filed in 2023, alleges the mRNA injections functioned as lethal biological weapons rolled out through unlawful public deception tied to the World Economic Forum's Great Reset.

Two of the original seven plaintiffs have already died. Defendants' lawyers rejected every claim, repeating that the shots were safe and effective and developed through normal science.

?BILL GATES/BOURLA TRIAL: "These injections are a BIOLOGICAL WEAPON." "COVID-19 injections are LETHAL." "The global deployment of this biological weapon can only take place through the UNLAWFUL deception of the public on a global scale." "The defendants [including Bill Gates and Albert Bourla] are implementers of the 'COVID-19: The Great Reset' project and are GUILTY of this deception; they are therefore being sued individually in these proceedings."
— John F. Kennedy Jr Q (@Real_JFK_Jr_) October 23, 2026

The substantive hearing on the merits took place on October 22, 2026 before three judges at the District Court of Northern Netherlands. Lawyer Peter Stassen told the court the injections were not ordinary medical products.

"These injections are a biological weapon," Stassen declared. "Global deployment of this biological weapon can only take place through the unlawful deception of the public on a global scale."

He added that "COVID-19 injections are lethal, or at least highly harmful to human health and fertility" and that "the defendants are implementers of the 'COVID-19: The Great Reset' project and are GUILTY of this deception."

Outside the courthouse Stassen told supporters, "COVID-19 was not a disease; It was a project." He said the plaintiffs had crucial evidence showing the official narrative was false.

Supporters gathered with banners while critics outside and in mainstream outlets called the arguments extreme conspiracy theories.

The judge noted the case was highly unusual, with the two sides diametrically opposed: one side arguing there was no virus, that the injections were a bioweapon and that genocide had occurred; the other side insisting the opposite.

Justice is coming for the COVID Vaccine Injured... two of the original plaintiffs against Bill Gates, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and PM Mark Rutte have already died. The Netherlands Case moves FORWARD as Lawyer Peter Strassen receives a monumental welcome. Peter Stassen walks out of the District Court of Northern Netherlands after a substantive hearing in the civil case brought by Dutch plaintiffs who say they were injured by COVID-19 injections and policies. Defendants include Bill Gates, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, former PM Mark Rutte, and the Dutch State. The plaintiffs are seeking personal liability for what they call coordinated deception and coercion. Outside, Stassen and expert witnesses (including Sasha Latypova) addressed supporters and laid out their core claim: the official COVID narrative is false, and the court must decide which side it stands on. The case has already survived jurisdiction challenges and is now being heard on the merits. Two of the original seven plaintiffs have since died.
— Valerie Anne Smith (@ValerieAnne1970) October 23, 2026

Expert witness material submitted by the plaintiffs included statements from Sasha Latypova, former Pfizer scientist Mike Yeadon, Catherine Austin Fitts and others.

Latypova has described the response as a coordinated government effort originating in changes to U.S. law over roughly 25 years that enabled the global program, rather than originating solely in pharmaceutical companies. She has spoken of dark practices, including the slow killing of disabled children to maximize profits, and of people who appeared to enjoy the process.

Sasha Latypova, an expert witness in the lawsuit against Bill Gates et al. in the Netherlands, on the Covid crimes as a "government effort" + doctors "getting off" on killing "they... killed disabled children... slowly to maximize their profits... they were getting off on it" "we actually got to depose one of these people... they were enjoying doing this" "I can tell you it's dark. It's like, as dark as you can think of" "I came out first and I said this is, first of all, a coordinated effort by global governments" "a lot of so-called health freedom advocates still today insist that this is just pharma. We just have to blame pharma here" "[but] it's not just pharma, and [the crimes don't] even originate necessarily in pharma. [They originate] in the U.S. government that changed the laws... [over the course of] about 25 years of lawmaking to enable this global crime" @sasha_latypova @PaulChek
— Sense Receptor (@SenseReceptor) October 23, 2026

Defendants' representatives denied all allegations. Gates's lawyer stated that his client denies every accusation and that the claims rest on incorrect premises, with nothing in the large dossier attributing liability to him.

Bourla's side repeated that the vaccines are proven safe and effective, with only rare side effects as with any vaccine. The State's lawyer warned against unfounded personal accusations that could deter scientists and officials from acting in future crises, asking which scientist would still stick their neck out. Some defendants' lawyers noted that their clients had received hate messages and death threats.

A ruling is not expected before December 9, 2026 and could come as late as the end of February 2027. The case survived earlier jurisdiction challenges, including Gates's attempt to argue the Dutch court lacked authority over him.

The plaintiffs' dossier runs to thousands of pages plus video evidence. Stassen has said the parties stand opposed and only one side can be telling the truth, with the court tasked to seek that truth.

The timing coincides with fresh public comments from Gates. He has stated that the COVID pandemic "didn't work out the way I expected" and warned that over the next several years there will be "attacks" different in scale from anything seen before.

Bill Gates:- "Covid didn't work out the way I expected" This basically implies that there was a pre-orchestrated plan for Covid - which there obviously was So what did Bill Gates expect? He wanted a Deadly Virus that required full compliance from EVERYONE in getting fully Vaccinated with the mRNA Jabs & use of Covid Passports to access every day life 'They' will try again
— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) October 24, 2026

Critics interpret the first remark as implying an expected outcome of higher lethality, fuller compliance, universal mRNA uptake and permanent digital passports for daily life.

?BILL GATES: The COVID pandemic "didn't work the way I expected." "Over the next several years... you will see a lot of ATTACKS different in terms of scale than anything we've seen in the past." That literally sounds like a threat...
— Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (@NicHulscher) October 23, 2026

These remarks sit against Gates's longer pattern of pandemic preparedness and funding. Through the Gates Foundation he co-founded CEPI, which has sought billions more for next-pandemic vaccines while the WHO and World Bank deploy large sums across dozens of nations.

CEPI has directed tens of millions to Moderna for mRNA platforms, including work on an Ebola jab using the same technology as the COVID product.

Gates has recently separately predicted that AI combined with ill-intent actors could drive events causing a billion deaths, describing AI as an evolutionary event more dangerous than previous technologies, and has warned of grim cyberattack surprises and bioterror risks now far higher than natural pandemics.

The Dutch proceedings remain a civil damages action, not a criminal trial. Plaintiffs seek compensation for physical and psychological injuries they attribute to the injections and the policies that pushed them.

Whether the court accepts the bioweapon and Great Reset framing, or accepts the defense that the shots were ordinary safe-and-effective vaccines, will be decided on the written record and the arguments heard in Leeuwarden.

The case places the official preferred narrative under formal judicial scrutiny for the first time at this level. Supporters outside the court have framed it as a rare chance for accountability.

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Record Oil, Empty Tanks: The UAE's Miracle Recovery

2026-10-24T16:19:36.662-07:00

Record Oil, Empty Tanks: The UAE's Miracle Recovery

Authored by Larry Johnson via Sonar21.com

Good news, everyone. The war is over, at least in the United Arab Emirates. That is the only conclusion you could draw from this month’s headlines. On October 14, Bloomberg reported the International Energy Agency’s estimate that UAE oil supply hit a record 5.3 million barrels a day in September. Fujairah, the port the Emirates built so they would never have to worry about the Strait of Hormuz, loaded a record 2.62 million barrels a day. The giant Ruwais refinery was declared back at full capacity at the end of August. Pop the (non-alcoholic) champagne.

Then Karl Miller sent me his October 22 assessment of the UAE’s oil and gas system, and spoiled the party. The Emirates have indeed recovered their crude exports. What they have not recovered is everything else. The gas business is still limping, the petrochemical plants are starving for feedstock, and the fuel reserves that are supposed to carry the country through the next attack have been drained to about a third of their prewar level. The UAE is setting production records with its gas light on.

The safe haven that wasn't

For years the UAE sold itself as the Switzerland of the Gulf: stable, diversified, insulated from the region’s chaos, a place where hedge funds and oil majors could sleep soundly. Then came 2026. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, UAE crude and condensate production fell from about 4.0 million barrels a day at the start of the year to an average of 2.4 million in March through May. A 40 percent collapse. Switzerland, it turns out, is within drone range of Iran.

The damage list reads like a sightseeing tour of Emirati industry. The Ruwais refining complex caught fire on March 10 and shut down. The Shah sour-gas plant, built to process 1.28 billion cubic feet a day, burned on March 16. The Habshan gas complex, the beating heart of the UAE’s gas system, was hit on April 3 and, in case anyone missed it, again on April 8. Borouge’s petrochemical plant was damaged on April 5. The Emirates Global Aluminium smelter went dark on March 28. And on May 17, a drone hit an electrical installation supporting the Barakah nuclear power plant, which is the sort of sentence nobody in Abu Dhabi ever wanted to read in a Security Council transcript.

Then there is Fujairah, the bypass port, the whole point of which was to keep UAE oil flowing no matter what happened at Hormuz. Reuters counts at least 19 attacks on it since the war began. In the week of March 16, loadings fell to 440,000 barrels a day. After a strike on May 4, refined-product exports essentially stopped for a month, with exactly one product tanker leaving between then and June 1. One. The insurance policy turned out to need insurance.

Available, just not working

Crude came back. Gas did not. ADNOC Gas’s second-quarter numbers compared with a year earlier: domestic gas production down 32.5 percent, export liquids such as LPG and naphtha down 54.5 percent, the company’s share of LNG down 63 percent. Export liquids sales fell from 252 to 117 trillion British thermal units. LNG sales fell about 71 percent. Revenue fell 39 percent, EBITDA 47 percent, net income 52 percent. That is $2.3 billion of revenue that evaporated in one quarter, at one company.

But my favorite statistic in Miller’s entire deck is this one. ADNOC Gas proudly reported that its assets were 99.9 percent available in the second quarter, better than the year before. Its actual asset utilization, meanwhile, fell from 80 percent to 54 percent. The plants were ready, willing and able. They just could not run, because the feedstock, the storage and the export routes they depend on had been knocked out. It is the corporate equivalent of announcing that your car is in perfect condition while it sits on blocks without wheels.

The recovery since then has been real but partial. Habshan’s gas supply was 85 percent restored as of August 10. Borouge had fixed its plant by the end of June, then discovered it had nothing to feed it, and ran at 60 percent utilization. The aluminium smelter had restarted a quarter of its pots by late August and now expects to finish the job sometime in early 2027. Repairs, as it happens, are faster than recoveries.

Running on fumes

Here is the number that should ruin a European energy minister’s weekend. On October 19, Fujairah held 7.25 million barrels of refined products. Before the war it held about 20.7 million. That is a 65 percent drop. Gasoline and naphtha stocks are down 87 percent. Fuel oil is down 53 percent. Diesel and jet fuel are down 23 percent, and fell 18 percent in a single week this month, just in time for winter.

Fujairah is not a corner gas station. It is one of the world’s great bunkering and product-trading hubs, the place where ships refuel and traders park cargoes between Asia and Europe. With a third of its normal stocks, it has about a third of its normal ability to absorb a shock. Miller’s arithmetic is unforgiving: lose a million barrels a day of export outlets with 10 million barrels of usable storage to fill, and you have roughly ten days before the oil fields have to shut in. Ten days. That is not a strategic reserve. That is a long weekend.

A bypass for a third of the traffic

The UAE’s answer to a closed Strait of Hormuz is the ADCOP pipeline from Habshan to Fujairah. It is designed to carry 1.5 million barrels a day, maybe 1.8 on a good day. ADNOC claims 4.85 million barrels a day of production capacity. So the escape hatch fits about a third of the passengers. A second pipeline is planned, for 2027, which will be a great comfort to anyone planning to hold this war in 2028.

And that record September? Some of it reflects genuine repairs. Some of it reflects the UAE’s exit from OPEC, which conveniently ended its production quotas in May. And some of it, by the IEA’s own account, came from drawing down inventories that were already at a record low. Selling your savings is a fine way to post record income for a month. It is not a business model. Meanwhile, across the region, refined-product shipments in September were 1.9 million barrels a day against 4.7 million before the war, and LPG shipments were 670,000 barrels a day against 1.5 million. The recovery is real for crude tankers. For everything else, it is a press release.

One more round, anyone?

To be fair, and Miller insists on being fair, nobody can prove that 30 to 40 percent of the UAE’s energy system is still destroyed. There is no complete public register of damage and repairs, and he gives full credit to the recoveries at Ruwais and in crude output. But the shape of the problem is plain. The UAE has rebuilt its ability to ship crude. Its gas business, its petrochemical feedstock and above all its fuel reserves remain badly depleted.

Which brings us to Washington’s latest bright idea: another round of strikes on Iran. Iran has already demonstrated, at least 19 times at Fujairah alone, that it can reach the UAE’s export system. The last time the Emirates absorbed a blow, they had 20 million barrels of products in Fujairah to soften it. Next time they will have about seven. Record output and empty tanks is not resilience. It is a country standing on the edge of a cliff and posting about the view.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/24/2026 - 17:30
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JetBlue Creditors Call In Restructuring Advisers As Stock, Bonds Crater

2026-10-24T14:19:41.359-07:00

JetBlue Creditors Call In Restructuring Advisers As Stock, Bonds Crater

A federal judge blocked JetBlue Airways' $3.8 billion takeover of Spirit Airlines during the Biden administration to protect consumers. That supposedly brilliant decision is now looking increasingly disastrous for both airlines and the passengers it was meant to protect.

First, Spirit Aviation shuttered all operations earlier this year, stunning travelers with the abrupt move after 34 years of offering some of the most deeply discounted fares. Now, JetBlue could be on a similar trajectory, as the carrier's shares and junk bonds have cratered over the last several months.

Bloomberg News reported late Friday that JetBlue's creditors are organizing with restructuring advisers as the budget airline grapples with cash burn and high jet fuel prices.

The report centers on a group of creditors, including holders of $2 billion in bonds due in 2031 and a $742 million first-lien loan, who are working with PJT Partners and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

JetBlue's 9.875% 2031 bonds traded near 80 cents on the dollar at the start of October but, just three weeks into the month, had fallen to distressed levels around 44 cents by Friday's close.

The stock has followed a similar trajectory, falling from $4.50 to $2.62 over the same period.

JetBlue reported about $2 billion in cash and $6 billion in unencumbered assets in the second quarter, as well as $8.5 billion in total debt. S&P stated that the budget airline had sufficient liquidity and borrowing capacity but warned about mounting debt-service costs.

Creditors of junk-rated airlines were worried this past week as larger airlines slashed guidance and warned of margin erosion from soaring jet fuel costs.

Latest guidance updates from airlines:

Southwest Airlines

Southwest lowered its full-year adjusted EPS guidance to $2.60-$2.85, down from a prior range of $3.25-$4.25. For Q4, it now expects adjusted EPS of $0.55-$0.80, below the $0.81 analyst consensus. The cuts came despite better-than-expected Q3 results and continued strong demand.

American Airlines

American cut its full-year outlook to an adjusted loss of $1.00-$1.60 per share, a significant deterioration from prior guidance of a $0.65 loss to $0.65 in earnings. For Q4, it guided to an adjusted loss of $0.50-$1.10 per share vs. the $0.49 consensus loss. CEO Robert Isom said fuel prices are expected to remain "higher, longer."

United Airlines

United guided Q4 adjusted EPS to $0.50-$1.50, well below the $1.88 analyst consensus, after fuel expenses surged 61.6% to $4.84 billion in Q3. Shares fell ~2% in after-hours trading on October 20.

For context, the Biden administration's DoJ sued to block JetBlue's $3.8 billion takeover of Spirit in March 2023, claiming the deal would reduce competition and raise fares. Then, in early 2024, U.S. District Judge William Young sided with the Biden administration. Notably, Young was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985.

A reasonable argument can be made that government intervention backfired and is now hurting the very consumers it sought to protect, as Spirit's shutdown has reduced competition in the budget airline market. Now the odds are increasing that JetBlue could face a similar fate.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/24/2026 - 16:00
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Here's One October Surprise, Anyway...

2026-10-23T16:19:35.881-07:00

Here's One October Surprise, Anyway...

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

"The Left has always preferred the ashes of its own making to the inheritance of better men." - Celina101 on X

By now, everybody and his uncle interested in public matters has probably read that a claque of current-and-former agency officials, ex-USAID busybodies, military officers, activist academics, Democratic Party paladins, and freelance communist jihadis has been exposed plotting the overthrow of the US government. The plot was reported by the diligent "X" blogger Jennica Pounds under her nom-de-plume "Data Republican," who lately received an enormous document-and-recording dump courtesy of careless color revolutionaries who recorded themselves and saved doc files against orders, the dumb bunnies.

Erica Chenoweth of Harvard (They / Them?) Master Color Revolutionary

Ms. Pounds, an experienced software engineer turned political detective, came to public attention early in 2025 when she assisted Elon Musk's DOGE operation in building a database of NGO money trails emanating from the colossal USAID grant matrix - after which her identity was "doxed" by Rolling Stone and she underwent a harassment campaign.

Of course, USAID was abolished early in the Trump 2.0 admin, and a lot of the "activists" defenestrated from it moved into scores of NGOs, with their salaries switched from taxpayer funding to the bank accounts of George Soros-connected orgs and sundry other shady characters like Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham. These are the NGOs forever puling about "our democracy," meaning their drive to punish, persecute, and push around Americans who demur from a communist future. Data Republican says her reporting so far is "only the beginning" of much more detailed and alarming disclosures.

Coincidentally this week, their cover was also blown by Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI and former CIA analyst), who told an audience at the U. of Chicago that the Democrats intend to go after and wreck any young person who might think about working in the current administration. Ms. Slotkin, you might recall, was in that video put out a year ago - with five other US lawmakers - telling military officers they should-and-must refuse "illegal" orders. Sedition-lite, it looked like at the time.

Before we get into the meat of their playbook for us, and what might happen in response, let's just dox a few of the characters involved. You should know who they are (and maybe the DOJ should, too). They are not necessarily the usual suspects you've read about before like the omnipresent lawfare ninjas, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Mary McCord, et al., so busy filing frivolous lawsuits in the federal courts.

For instance (as reported by one Eric Schwalm on "X"), there's Erica Chenoweth, the transvestite professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of government who acts as chief strategist and hub for the "color revolution" planned by the United Democracy Alliance cabal she is associated with. Ms. (or Mr.?) Chenoweth's big contribution to Jacobin thought is "the 3.5 rule" which says that if you can get that percentage of people out on the streets making a ruckus, you can successfully overthrow a government.

Then there's Danielle Reiff, former USAID, now co-founder of the Democracy Renewal Group, Renew American Democracy, and Renew to Thrive orgs. . . very verbal on video laying out the exact procedures for the US color revolution. And there's Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith (Ret.) who runs a network of over a thousand retired military officers called National Security Leaders for America. He's in charge of "role-playing" exercises in preparation for post-election hijinks. Then there's Julia Roig, founder of the Horizons Project who is responsible for "building relational infrastructure so that disparate groups can act in concert without a single hierarchical command." Then there's Maria Stephan, co-author, with Erica Chenoweth, of the sedition tract Why Civil Resistance Works. Then there's Brenden Halloran, former USAID, now with the Renew to Thrive org, responsible for "accountability ecosystems, overcoming fragmentation among groups, and long-term sequencing of reforms." Then there's Walt Roberts, also on the Renew to Thrive team, plus the Mediators Foundation and the Inter-Movement Impact Project. Then there's Laura Adams, also former USAID, now in Renew to Thrive and PACT, whose mission is to turn strategy papers into operational plans. Then there's Zoe Marks, also in Harvard's Kennedy School, a "scenario-planner" for Horizons and United Democracy Alliance. Then there's "cohesion" strategist Paul Zeitz, co-founder of UnifyUSA, partner with Danielle Reiff on Renew to Thrive, and active in NGOs Renew to Thrive and National Security Leaders for America. There's the bunch. Now you know.

Top row: Reiff, Smith, Roig; Center row: Roberts, Halloran, Adams; Bottom Row: Stephan, Slotkin, Chenoweth

As to the coup playbook, here goes: The idea is to turn out massive street actions (protests and riots) in the blue cities, based on rumors that President Trump has somehow "interfered" in the election, and create enough chaos so that Mr. Trump would be tempted to invoke the Insurrection Act or some-such national emergency measure. The coupsters mentioned above, and their cohorts and underlings, have been quietly confabbing with blue state attorneys general and governors. These officials would unite to declare that Mr. Trump's actions make him illegitimate, and would set in-motion procedures for said governors to declare the president a tyrant and an outlaw and themselves as the "new governing authority." They would move from that to a new constitutional convention and bring about all the heralded revolutionary changes chattered about for months such as abolishing the electoral college and Senate, changing-up the Supreme Court, etc. Voila! Trump and his government are out! The Democratic Party (and their new DSA commissars) would take over and the punishments would begin. . . .

But. . . what if President Trump doesn't play along? What if he insists that the blue state governors must ask (or beg) for federal troops to be sent in to control the street violence in their cities before he commits to anything? Then the onus would be theirs, wouldn't it? They will have asked for help? Mr. Trump will have obliged. How does that make him a tyrant? (It doesn't, of course.) Or. . . the blue state governors might not ask for federal help and Mr. Trump could just watch their cities burn down. That would kind of be on the blue governors, too, wouldn't it - hey, they didn't ask for federal troops and their own feckless police couldn't get the job done because: previous "de-funding" and all that nonsense.

Then, how about Mr. Trump moves to arrest said blue state governors for sedition and treason (especially if they entertained any collusion with foreign operators, such as CCP-connected Neville Roy Singham's NGO network or any of Soros's overseas outfits)? And how about arresting and likewise charging many of those aforementioned NGO strategists, along with the governors? (And while you're at it, throw in the lawfare ninjas who have assisted in all this mischief.) And how about after accomplishing that, the president then and only then declares the Insurrection Act, sends in federal troops to quell the street chaos, and moves to indict and try said seditionists and traitors in the military tribunal apparatus? There it is! Just some suggestions. . . .

* * *

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/23/2026 - 16:20
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Republicans Face Losing Senate Seat They've Held for 107 Years, And It All Comes Down To One Thing

2026-10-22T14:19:05.971-07:00

Republicans Face Losing Senate Seat They've Held for 107 Years, And It All Comes Down To One Thing

Republicans are confronting an increasingly concerning political situation in Kansas, where a Senate seat the party has held for more than a century has become unexpectedly competitive.

Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton debated in Kansas City, discussing the Iran war, fuel prices, and campaign attack ads as Election Day approaches. SOURCE: Associated Press

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) is facing Democrat Adam Hamilton in a reelection contest that recent polling suggests is within single digits, despite the Sunflower State not having elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932.

During an appearance on Fox Business Network's Big Money, Marshall was pressed about why the race remains so close.

"Well, no, I think it's the price of gasoline," Marshall declared. "It's that simple, and I'm not sure it's as close as what the national polls are showing. Six years ago, I was an open seat. The poll showed the same thing, and we won by 11 points. Now, I don't think we're going to win by 11 points right now."

Marshall also blamed negative media coverage of President Donald Trump for shaping perceptions of the economy.

"The national media, the legacy media has just beat the heck out of President Trump now for, what, 10 years, and despite what's really a pretty strong economy here in Kansas, the legacy media is just telling you the sky is falling," the senator said.

The national polling shows why the senator's worried.

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos survey found that 71% of Americans consider gasoline unaffordable, compared with 28% in February. Additionally, a Pew Research Center survey found that 74% of Americans are very concerned about gasoline and energy prices, up from 43% in January.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/22/2026 - 15:45
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"Polished But Rough": First Major Review Casts Doubt On Foldable iPhone Duo's Mass Adoption

2026-10-21T14:19:48.351-07:00

"Polished But Rough": First Major Review Casts Doubt On Foldable iPhone Duo's Mass Adoption

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who has more than 21 million subscribers, offered a mixed first take on Apple's foldable iPhone Duo ahead of its Friday release, describing the device as "very polished around the edges, but kind of rough in the middle."

Brownlee's review of Apple's first foldable iPhone may present a hurdle to adoption. At more than $2,000, the Duo's first-generation shortcomings could make buyers reluctant to pay the hefty premium, prompting some to wait for a second generation.

"It's $2,000 to get an iPad mini that can fit in your pocket. 120 Hz iPad Mini OLED fits in your pocket. Have you ever wanted that? They made it. They did it. Great. This is the first generation. It's made for you. But also, yeah, it is it is polished but rough," Brownlee noted.

The Duo is slightly thicker and heavier than the latest Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, a difference Brownlee said "makes a big difference in daily use."

After testing the Duo for a week, he said, "you would be happy if it were 20% lighter."

Brownlee pointed out that the battery capacity is about 4,900 mAh, split across the two halves. With typical mixed use (roughly 75% closed and 25% open), Brownlee called it a "very efficient phone" and "an all-day phone and then some," regularly finishing the day with more than 30% battery remaining.

The dual rear cameras (48 MP main and ultra-wide) are "right on par with the rest of the foldables" and "solid" most of the time, though the smaller main sensor gets noisier in weaker light and there is no optical zoom, he explained.

He continued, "The app situation on the iPhone Duo is its biggest downside right now."

"I think after the learning curve and getting used to not having Face ID, this is a really fun phone to use," he added.

Brownlee's verdict is mixed:

If you are the iPhone filmmaker who wants the absolute best cameras to go shoot their next thing, no. Uh if you're the type of person who breaks your phone every like nine months cuz you drop it all the time, yep, probably no. But if the $2,000 or the difference between 35 and 55 bucks a month doesn't mean much to you and you just kind of like the idea and want to jump in, I think after the learning curve and and getting used to not having Face ID, this is a really fun phone to use.

And it's really just cuz that polish, that polish around the edges goes a long way towards the fun factor. So, the awesome animations, the incredible hinge, the wonderful inside display, like all of that is just really nice and it hides a little bit of the rough core. Like, it will feel a little heavy sometimes and not all your favorite apps will be updated right out the box, but it is fun.

Apple can't completely engineer their way around the compromises of this form factor, like the slightly worse battery and the slightly worse speakers and the slightly worse cameras. Like, that's just physics. But what they have done is an admirable job with their first generation. Now, I'm just going to have to cross my fingers that second generation actually listens to some of that core feedback cuz that could be an amazing phone.

Watch The Duo Review Here Before Buying

Last Friday, when preorders for the Duo opened, we pointed out the incredible initial demand as delivery estimates slipped further and further beyond this Friday by the minute.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Duo's estimated delivery date is January 22.

The question remains whether the Duo, at a base price of $2,000, can achieve mass adoption, given that Tim Cook's $3,400 Vision Pro was a total disaster. Now it's John Ternus' turn to prove to investors that Apple still has demand for its premium products.

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/21/2026 - 14:45
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1% Of Companies Account For 80% Of OpenAI And Anthropic Spending - And It Just Stalled

2026-10-21T14:19:42.082-07:00

1% Of Companies Account For 80% Of OpenAI And Anthropic Spending - And It Just Stalled

Just 1% of companies account for 80% of all business spending on OpenAI and Anthropic, according to corporate card giant Ramp, which tracks payments across more than 70,000 U.S. businesses. Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian, who flagged the figure in early September, noted that spending on the two AI labs is more concentrated than in any other software category the firm tracks.

Per capita, the biggest spenders are overwhelmingly venture-backed. According to Ramp's summer report, the median VC-backed startup spent $76 per employee per month on AI - more than ten times the $7 spent at private equity-backed firms.

That top-heavy dynamic mirrors what YipitData uncovered at Anthropic specifically: the lab's top 1% of customers generated 46% of its revenue in August, nearly doubling from 25% a year earlier. How many of those whale customers, we asked at the time, are funded by the very same VCs backing Anthropic?

Anthropic's IPO prospectus - the updated version of which we dissected yesterday - confirms the concentration at the very top: just two unnamed customers generated nearly a quarter of its 2025 revenue, according to Reuters. Their identities aren't hard to guess. Last year, two AI coding tools - Cursor and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot - drove roughly $1.2 billion of Anthropic's $5 billion annualized revenue run-rate, as VentureBeat reported.

Follow the money. Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation last November in a round co-led by Accel and Coatue, alongside Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and Google. Three months later, Coatue and Singapore's GIC led Anthropic's massive $30 billion Series G, with Nvidia again participating. Coatue's cash flows into Cursor, Cursor spends it on Claude tokens, those tokens book as Anthropic revenue, and that revenue underwrites the markups on Coatue's Anthropic stake.

Even the scorekeeper is inside the loop. Ramp itself raised $1.85 billion at a $60 billion valuation last week in a round led by Dragoneer, Thrive, Founders Fund, Sands Capital, and Avenir Growth. Its cap table also features Coatue, D1, ICONIQ, GIC, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed - every single one of which, alongside Dragoneer and Founders Fund, backed Anthropic's Series G.

Volumes Up, Dollars Flat

Yet it is Ramp's own economist who is documenting the cracks in the facade. In his October AI Index - pointedly titled "Cracks in the AI Thesis Part 3" - Kharazian reported that the top 1% of AI-spending firms shelled out $9,568 per employee in September. While that was up 11.7% from August, it remained 3.1% below July's peak of $9,873.

Across the broader cohort, the stall is even starker. In August and September, Ramp recorded "two straight months of virtually no growth in token spend," even as raw token volumes continued to climb.

Total dollar spend did eke out a new high in early October, but cleared its previous August peak by a paltry 1.5%.

Source: Ramp Rate

The culprit, according to Kharazian, is deflation: "the main driver is price declines at the frontier, in addition to efficiency and quality improvements for models across intelligence levels, that are driving the blended price per million tokens down."

Source: Ramp Rate

Nor have the AI labs been able to lock in their biggest customers. Asked whether OpenAI and Anthropic are using enterprise contracts to guarantee revenue, Kharazian noted that buyers hold all the leverage. Enterprise deals are rarely signed on the assumption of higher-than-normal spend, and when they are, "the labs are willing to provide concessions in the form of discounts on models from the sticker price." His takeaway: "These contracts could contribute to price cuts without driving additional volume."

The customer base isn't widening much, either. Paid AI adoption across Ramp's corporate network nudged up just 0.62 percentage points to 55.9% in September. "It feels like we're at the top of the S-curve," Kharazian wrote, "where the growth in the market will have to come from more intense adoption rather than more customers."

Source: Ramp Rate

Anthropic Joins The Price War

Meanwhile, Anthropic's realized token price has been cut in half in just a month. The Ornn Anthropic Token Price Index - which measures the actual dollars customers pay per token consumed - has cratered to $0.83 per million tokens from over $1.70 in mid-September, marking a record low since the benchmark launched in June.

Even after that plunge, Anthropic remains pricier than OpenAI, whose index sits at $0.45. OpenAI's realized pricing collapsed in late July after it slashed rates on its GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra models by up to 80% - just three days after Chinese lab Moonshot released the open weights for Kimi K3, the model blamed for sending chip stocks into a bear market earlier that month. OpenAI has since reportedly leaned toward delaying its IPO until 2027.

Jevons Isn't Riding To The Rescue

Jevon is an offset and total demand is rising... until it hits physical constraints of hundreds of delayed or canceled data centers. https://t.co/BqONarz80n
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2026

The bulls' reflex answer to relentless price cuts is Jevons paradox: make tokens cheap enough, and usage will explode so fast that total revenue rises anyway. The data isn't cooperating. In a Sept. 25 note, Goldman Sachs warned that "token demand growth will need to outpace declining token prices to support continued growth in investment spending," noting that while "frontier models are currently a key source of demand for hyperscaler compute," cheap open-source rivals are rapidly gaining ground. By Goldman's estimate - built on Anera and OpenRouter data - total token demand has surged roughly 18-fold since December, but demand for high-margin frontier models has grown only half as fast.

That margin squeeze is now flowing directly upstream to the companies building the data centers. Goldman calculates that realized return on invested capital (ROIC) across Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle has fallen from 40% to 25% - the lowest reading in its dataset going back to 2016.

On Tuesday - the same day Citadel's Ken Griffin told Bloomberg that markets are "almost certainly" in an AI bubble - Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok diagnosed the underlying demand problem. "Silicon Valley operates on the premise that compute demand is unlimited, yet the recent slowdown in token spending growth suggests that this appetite may exist only when compute is effectively free," Slok wrote, citing Ramp's figures. Instead of inelastic hunger, compute faces "a flat, highly price-sensitive demand curve, where even modest changes in token prices can drive buyers to throttle usage or substitute cheap open-source alternatives."

"Ultimately, the number-one variable governing the viability of data center construction models is not physical capacity or power; it is the actual price users are willing to pay for the compute being built," Slok concluded. Corporate buyers will only pay a premium if they can translate tokens into "higher top-line growth, bigger profit margins or substantial cost savings, little of which is showing up at scale yet. Maybe that will come in the future. Maybe not."

Back in June, Ramp product director Adam Sommer boasted to a New York panel that "our largest AI spenders at Ramp are seeing their spend double month-over-month for the last several months." Three months later, the top 1% were spending less per employee than they had in July.

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/21/2026 - 14:30
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Pollster Cited By NY Times, Other Outlets Admits It's Fake

2026-10-21T14:19:41.126-07:00

Pollster Cited By NY Times, Other Outlets Admits It's Fake

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A purported company whose polls were listed by a slew of outlets, including The New York Times, has said that all but one of its surveys were not real.

Wedgewood Polling said in a statement on Oct. 20 that it was developed by people who previously worked in the poll sector and wondered how easy it would be for a fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and "expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary."

The entity said that its surveys often did not have any real data behind them, but they were nonetheless included in poll averages by the NY Times and some other outlets.

"Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms - including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS Now," Wedgewood Polling said. "The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation."

The surveys largely favored Democrats, including having Democrat candidate Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Republican candidate Mike Rogers in the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan.

Wedgewood Polling conducted a single legitimate poll, in Nebraska, that served as a baseline to compare against fake data.

Wedgewood Polling said it did not intend to mislead the public or sway an election, and that the purpose was to spark changes in the polling and media industries.

Decision Desk HQ said on X on Wednesday that it removed 17 polls from Wedgewood Polling in light of the company's admission.

"As polling and averages are a component of our forecast model, we have rerun the model and all of our forecasts now reflect the removal of the fraudulent data," Decision Desk said. "The removal of these polls has not changed the projected seat totals or chamber control probabilities in the Senate or House."

Zachary Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub, another poll aggregator, said on X on Tuesday that he contacted Wedgewood Polling's head pollster after the company first appeared, and that the individual said he was a college student who had experience in the polling space. The conversation led to VoteHub including polls from the company on its website.

"A few years ago, I was a college student following politics as a hobby myself, so I try to give people in that position the benefit of the doubt," Donnini said. "It's disappointing to see how this has unfolded, because it's going to be a ... lot harder for the next college kid who's actually well-intentioned and super into politics to break into the space after this."

FiftyPlusOne, which had also included Wedgewood Polling surveys, said on Tuesday that it had sent questions about the polls to the company prior to the admission that most of its polls were fake. It said the questions prompted the disclosure.

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/21/2026 - 14:15
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The Simpsons Brings Back Apu As Irritable, Loud, And Unlikeable

2026-10-20T14:19:24.014-07:00

The Simpsons Brings Back Apu As Irritable, Loud, And Unlikeable

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Simpsons has finally let the the Indian character Apu speak again after nearly a decade of silence prompted by previous accusations of 'racist stereotyping' levelled at the show all stemming from the fact that a white actor voiced the character.

However, what has now transpired perfectly illustrates what happens when producers cave to activist pressure and then overcorrect.

The once happy, lovable Kwik-E-Mart owner is now irritable, loud and unlikable, according to viewers reacting to Sunday's episode "The Revengening."

Removes Indian immigrant character who was happy and lovable because of claims of racist stereotyping. Bring character back after hiring authentic Indian immigrants to write and voice character. He is now irritable, loud, and unlikable. What did the producers mean by this?
— Magills (@magills_) October 19, 2026

The character last spoke in the October 2017 episode "The Serfsons." He continued to appear in the background as a mute figure while the show grappled with complaints over voice actor Hank Azaria affecting an Indian accent.

Azaria told a podcast at the time that he had spoken at his son's school and encountered a 17-year-old Indian student who had never watched the show yet treated "Apu" as a slur.

"It's practically a slur at this point," Azaria said. "All he knows is that is how his people are thought of and represented to many people in this country." He continued: "I really do apologise. I know you weren't asking for that but it's important. I apologise for my part in creating that and participating in that. Part of me feels like I need to go around to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologise."

Plenty of Indian viewers rejected that framing at the time.

No Indian was ever offended by Apu apart from that failed comedian Hari Kondabolu.
Most Indians loved Apu.
So take your concepts of cancel culture and cultural appropriation and stick it where the sun don't shine.
— Raj (@rsn) April 13, 2021

Why do people keep listening to a small percentage of outraged marxist mobs on the internet ????
— s?? ???????? ???? ? (@SamChenkual) April 13, 2021

The pressure that produced the apology originated with Kondabolu's 2017 documentary The Problem With Apu. The film argued that the convenience-store clerk character rested on harmful stereotypes. The show made a glancing reference to the complaints in 2018, then largely parked the character.

Azaria later described the decision to stop as a collective one the production team felt was "the right thing." He continued voicing other Springfield residents while Apu stayed quiet.

Sunday's Halloween-themed episode treated the long absence as plot. A mysterious killer in a "Daft Monk" costume (a Daft Punk helmet plus monastic robe) is repeatedly killed by Springfield residents, survives, and returns a year later seeking revenge. He summons the town to City Hall, removes the helmet, and reveals himself as Apu. "I am the man you left for dead. I am the one you pretended never existed," he declares.

The character is now voiced by India-born, U.S.-raised actor Sunil Malhotra, known for animation work including The Legend of Korra and The Legend of Vox Machina.

In the episode, Apu recounts being dumped on the Island of Forgotten Garbage, healed by Dr. Nick, returning home to find his family and the Kwik-E-Mart gone, and then being ignored by everyone in town as if invisible.

Marge steps in with language that tracks the show's own earlier hesitation: "Apu, we're so sorry we left you for dead. Believe me, we wanted to do the right thing." Bart adds, "But we were so scared, and just didn't know what to do."

Homer offers a penance that doubles as a reminder of the character's previous place in town life: "You were on our bowling teams, our barbershop quartets, our dad rock cover bands. We took you for granted. I took you for granted." The sequence turns out to be a nightmare; Apu wakes in the Kwik-E-Mart with Manjula (now voiced by Janina Gavankar) and agrees to attend a Halloween party.

Showrunner Matt Selman described the approach as deliberate. "We love this character, and wanted to bring him back in a smart, 'Simpsons'-y way that allowed him to evolve," he told Variety. "We're excited by what Sunil has already brought to the role, and look forward to seeing more of Apu in the future."

Viewers who watched the episode did not share that enthusiasm. Reactions on X described the new voice as try-hard and the character as louder and much less appealing than the version that had been retired.

@DiscussingFilm This seems more racist then the first voice
— I hear you (@Seriously_try) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm Leftism and political correctness ruins everything. This shit is ass.
— holysmokes (@holysmokes_84) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm Sounds like a shittier version of what his voice was before
— Cozy Autumn Groyper (@thatgroyper2) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm This actually sounds way more offensive because he is trying to emulate the original
— Karim Jovian (@KJovian) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm id rather have him silent than this. honestly, just end the show already.
— ?? (@1c0pnq) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm That voice is fucking garbage. Insulting to fans. Just end the show. The Simpsons, as great as it was its heyday, is now an anachronism that cannot exist in today’s hypersensitive culture. It is now something else, so just end the show and create something else, FFS.
— William Sullivan (@WillyJSullivan) October 19, 2026

This is what happens when a show that once thrived on sharp, boundary-pushing satire decides every joke must first clear a committee of the professionally aggrieved.

The Simpsons built its appeal on equal-opportunity exaggeration, the willingness to mock everyone and everything without pausing to check who might claim injury on behalf of someone else.

That edge is gone. What remains is a cautious, self-flagellating version of the same program, rewritten to soothe activists who treat other people's cultures as props for their own moral status.

The result is not progress. It is a shambling remnant of the original, kept on air by people more interested in signalling their virtue than in telling a funny story.

* * *

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/20/2026 - 14:45
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Intifada For All...

2026-10-19T16:19:19.958-07:00

Intifada For All...

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via kunstler.com,

"The Dems are a total mess of cluster B psychopathology. They will continue to humiliate themselves & alienate the normal population."

- JD Haltigan on X

Looks like the punishments will continue across the pond until morale improves. France on fire in the "mostly peaceful" riots - according to the BBC - this past weekend could yet ignite a final, furious, Globalist-Jacobin bid to wreck Western Civ as populist nationalism looms ever larger to defeat them. That is, whatever the demonic coalition of desperate Euro elites backed by the Soros NGO empire, the WEF, the UN bureaucracy, possibly the British Crown, and the EU, can induce their Lefty-left useful idiots to act out intifada-style against the people and their culture.

A Nice Bordeaux with Your Intifada?

President Macron stepped up Sunday to ask, "How can French people do this to France?" as the ancient tower of the Limoges city hall collapsed in flames. Somebody please inform him that the parties responsible for all the fiery chaos are not necessarily French people. Any way you cut it, this has got to be the end-of-pretend that flooding Europe with jihadis for two decades was a grand and noble idea. Where's that whiff of grapeshot when you really need it?

You also must wonder whether the American Lefty-left has riot-envy. Their handlers in the Democratic Party and its dark entourage of "resistance" foundations, billionaire NGO-funders, and Deep State seditionists must be itching to unleash similar punishments across the USA, as they managed to do in 2020 to honor the saintly George Floyd. Of course, they don't have the same resources they enjoyed back then. The US president - know who that is? - has choked off a good deal of their money-laundered cash-flow.

The main question seems to be: will any street-fighting commence here before or after the mid-term election? Before Nov. 3, let's face it, would not be such a good look for the Dems. Flash mobs of "teens" looting the sneaker stores and burning down 7-Eleven shops might only prompt the Trump-weary Republican hold-outs to show up at the polls bigly in swing states. Certainly, big, violent street demonstrations full of jihadi and communist iconography won't reflect well on Mamdani wannabe Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who assisted Tim Walz in covering-up the Somali fraud operations for years and years, and ran the Signal comms network during the Minneapolis ICE riots of last winter.

Of course, if the Euroland riots keep going, the American Lefties just might bust out anyway. "Solidarity," and all that. Comically, the "No Kings" demos of Saturday were hamstrung when Mark Zuckerberg's Meta company (formerly Facebook) suspended the No Kings Instagram account around the peak time of scheduled events around the country (starting at 1:30 p.m. ET) and for nearly two hours after. Meta later explained something about an automated security system triggered by a high volume of bot postings linked to an Anthropic AI tool. The No Kings organizers lost their action coordination platform. Fizzle fizzle. . . Boo-hoo.

After the election, however, you might consider that the same Lefty-left minions in America will take to the streets whether they win or lose the big contest over who gets to run Congress. For one thing, do not underestimate the degree of scrutiny that the federal government will give to balloting in previously sketchy corners of the land such as Michigan, Arizona, Minnesota, California, and many other places.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, sent letters to fifty states last summer warning officials they could face criminal liability for allowing or enabling non-citizens to vote. This ain't no fool' around. The DOJ is also sending attorneys by the hundreds to "observe" election proceedings. The Department of Homeland Security announced and is taking multiple actions framed as "protecting election integrity and addressing voter fraud."

The Democratic Party is already royally pissed-off at the prospect that their manifold cheating operations might be stifled this time around. You can bet that a failure to win the House and Senate will produce a vigorous reaction, easily turning violent, along with a massive effort led by lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen and Marc Elias to foul up all efforts at certifying the vote in a thousand frivolous lawsuits. Is it not time to recognize that as a form of seditious conspiracy and prosecute it accordingly?

The last big question, then, is how the president might respond to post-election shenanigans. Well, for one thing, and whatever the outcome, Mr. Trump will no longer be constrained by the need to avoid the appearance of election interference. My guess is that he will finally go medieval on these vile seditionists, even if it requires declaring some sort of national emergency or invoking the Insurrection Act. He is not going to allow a replay of anything like the 2020 mayhem.

Whatever the Europeans choose to do, it would be a shame if they lose their countries. We won't lose ours, and we are not coming to rescue them this time.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/19/2026 - 17:00
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44% Of Americans Have Trouble Paying For Basic Necessities As Lifetime Cost Of The American Dream Tops $5 Million

2026-10-19T14:19:13.672-07:00

44% Of Americans Have Trouble Paying For Basic Necessities As Lifetime Cost Of The American Dream Tops $5 Million

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse Blog,

How did we get to a point where nearly half of the entire population is struggling to even pay for the most basic necessities? A lot of people talk about "economic collapse" as something that will occur someday in the future. The truth is that "economic collapse" has been slowly happening for decades as the middle class has been systematically eviscerated. It now takes 5.3 million dollars to live the American Dream over the course of a lifetime. Who can afford that? Most Americans aren't even going to come close to making 5.3 million dollars during their working years. Of course in this economic environment, much of the population is just concerned with trying to survive from month to month. The cost of living crisis that has been raging for this entire decade is absolutely crushing millions upon millions of U.S. households, and now we just learned that the official inflation rate has gone up again.

If financial stress has become a major theme in your life, I want you to know that you are not alone.

According to a shocking new survey just released by the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of Americans struggle to even pay for the most basic necessities...

More than four-in-ten Americans (44%) indicate they have had trouble paying for at least one of these basic necessities in the past year

We aren't talking about having difficulty paying the phone bill.

The survey found that an alarmingly high percentage of the population can't even afford to pay for housing, food and medical care.

It also discovered that a whopping 27 percent of Americans can't pay their monthly bills in full...

60% say they do not currently have enough income to lead the kind of life they want.
53% say they do not have emergency funds that would cover their expenses for three months.
27% cannot pay some of their monthly bills or can only make partial payments.
32% say they worry every day or almost every day about the cost of healthcare and the amount of debt they have.

More than a quarter of the population is getting behind on their debts.

That is what you call a crisis.

And there is no end in sight.

Most Americans don't want to be rich.

Most Americans just want to live a middle class lifestyle like their parents did.

Unfortunately, it now costs 5.3 million dollars to live the American Dream over the course of a lifetime...

The cost of the American dream is rising at a faster pace than household earnings, driven by notable increases in the cost of homeownership, raising children and paying for college, according to a new report.

An analysis by Investopedia finds that the lifetime cost of the American dream rose 4.1% from 2025 to 2026, with the cost increasing by more than $208,000 from $5.11 million a year ago to $5.32 million this year.

Are you going to make more than 5 million dollars during your working years?

If not, you are out of luck.

Housing costs have been eroding the middle class faster than just about anything else...

Homeownership costs rose the most in dollar terms, with the lifetime cost rising by over $91,000 from $1.184 million in 2025 to $1.275 million in 2026. That rise amounts to a 7.7% increase year over year.

That figure includes a 20% down payment on a median-priced single-family home of $420,000, with a 6.32% 30-year mortgage that brings the total cost with interest to about $837,000, as well as $3,057 a year in insurance costs, property taxes and 30 years of upkeep and utilities which adds another $438,000 to the price tag.

Of course the figures quoted above no longer apply, because the average rate on a 30 year mortgage is now well over 7 percent.

So now homeownership is even more unaffordable.

And just about everything else is becoming more expensive too.

Today we learned that the official rate of inflation just went up again...

September brought little relief to the accelerating cost of living, as consumer prices increased again and kept the inflation rate well above the Federal Reserve's goal.

The consumer price index, a broad measure of goods and services costs across the U.S. economy, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.6% for the month, putting the 12-month rate at 3.7%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones expected respective gains of 0.6% and 3.6%.

The formula that is used to calculate the official rate of inflation has been changed dozens of times since the Jimmy Carter era, and at this stage it doesn't even come close to accurately reflecting how quickly prices are actually going up.

But the fact that even the government is admitting that inflation is rising is not good.

Soaring energy costs were the primary reason for the spike in the inflation rate...

Energy costs drove inflation in September, and high retail prices in October suggest pain at the pump will continue. Prices have soared since the Iran conflict started at the end of February.

Gasoline prices last month rose 9.1% from the prior month - a faster pace than August's 3.9% increase - and are up 34% over the past year. Fuel-oil prices, meanwhile, are up 74% since last September.

When this inflation report was released, it really spooked investors, and bond yields spiked dramatically...

The 10-year Treasury note yield rose on Wednesday following the latest U.S. inflation print.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note - the main benchmark for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt - jumped more than 7 basis points to 5.289% and reached the highest level since Oct. 8.

The longer-dated 30-year U.S. Treasury yield - which tends to react most to geopolitical events - was up more than 3 basis points to 5.602%.

The U.S. Treasury has been working really hard to keep bond yields under control.

I think that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is going to need a bigger boat.

During most economic downturns, normally we are either facing an inflation crisis or an unemployment crisis.

This time around, it appears that we will have both.

Mass layoffs have been occurring all over the nation, and on Wednesday we learned that Netflix is joining the party...

Netflix is reportedly laying off 1,000 workers - the streaming giant's biggest cuts since 2022.

Staff were told Wednesday that about 6% of the workforce - within product, tech, legal, and human resources teams - was being slashed, according to a memo obtained by the Post.

I thought that Netflix was doing well.

I guess not.

Kroger is another company that was once thriving, but now they have decided to give the axe to about 3,000 highly-paid corporate workers...

Kroger is planning to eliminate approximately 3,000 corporate positions over the next three years as the grocery giant expands its use of artificial intelligence and looks to cut costs, according to a report.

The planned cuts would affect roughly 37% of Kroger's approximately 8,200 corporate employees, Reuters reported Monday, citing an internal memo from CEO Greg Foran.

The restructuring comes as Kroger faces pressure to improve sales, keep grocery prices competitive and streamline operations through increased use of AI.

Every time more highly-paid jobs are wiped out, the middle class gets even smaller.

If you still have your seat in the middle class, you should be very thankful, because more chairs are being pulled out of the game with each passing day.

The top 10 percent of all income earners are still thriving, but for almost everyone else life is a struggle.

It didn't have to turn out this way.

Decades of insanely bad decisions have brought us to this point, and now the cost of living is the number one political issue during this campaign season by a very wide margin.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/19/2026 - 16:20
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"Escape Valve" No More: San Francisco Moves To End School Choice Lottery

2026-10-18T15:19:17.445-07:00

"Escape Valve" No More: San Francisco Moves To End School Choice Lottery

Authored by Lear Zhou via The Epoch Times,

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUD) board passed a resolution on Oct. 13 to replace the current lottery-based admission policy with a neighborhood-based system for elementary schools.

Board members voted 5-2 to develop a policy under which every student would be assigned to a neighborhood school based on their home address, with a seat guaranteed even if applying late. Programs such as language immersion, K-8 schools, and special education remain open to citywide students to apply.

There were two options up for the vote: Option B and Option C.

Option B would guarantee a seat at a child's neighborhood school for families who apply on time. Families could also apply to any other SFUSD school with available space, preserving broader citywide choice.

Option C would guarantee a neighborhood-school seat even for families who apply late. But families could apply elsewhere only to designated citywide programs, such as language immersion, K-8 schools, and special education programs.

SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su recommended option C, while the parents' survey favored option B.

About 65 percent of families responding to the survey did not believe the district would fulfill promises made in option C, according to Su.

"Option C will actually not let the district off the hook. It will require the district to be very intentional with how we resource our schools; it puts the responsibility squarely on the district to make sure that every single neighborhood school is worth choosing," Su told the board at the Oct. 13 meeting, promising that the schools have "safe, academically rigorous, and stable staffing by trusted adults."

The new policy would take effect in October 2027, following the board's approval on April 13, 2027, and would apply to the 2028-29 school year.

"Any district that goes through this type of turnover is at least going to take five to 10 years," deputy superintendent John Davis told the board.

"There's going to need to be a lot of difficult discussions to get a strong staff at schools that have historically been disinvested in, through their community, through redlining, through all the negatives that our society has imposed on folks."

Under the current student assignment system, families can list any number of schools on their application in order of preference, and are assigned to their highest-ranked choice if seats are available.

If more students request the limited number of available seats at a particular school, a series of preferences is weighted in a lottery-like selection process to determine who gets the spot.

"It is every parent's responsibility to think about what's best for their kid. It is our responsibility to think about what's best for all the kids," SFUSD commissioner Matt Alexander said.

"The choice system creates an escape valve for the families that have the most wherewithal, the most understanding, the most ability to navigate the system and escape from schools that are perceived to be bad."

SFUSD commissioner Alida Fisher, who voted no on Option C, criticized the change. "Saying it will take time and yet forcing families into a system where we know we can't within two years equitably resource those schools and put the programs into place." she said.

"Frankly, we are screwing over families in certain parts of the city. Neighborhood schools will by definition be segregated schools."

The current student assignment policy, which applied from 2011, was initially designed to "reverse the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students in the same school," but the city's public schools became more segregated than 30 years before, according to SFUSD.

SFUSD commissioner Supryia Ray, who also voted against option C, said the elephant in the room is that SFUSD is facing a 14,000 enrollment gap.

"There seems to be some idea here that if we force people to go to their neighborhood school, outside of maybe citywide schools, somehow this will fill up all these schools," Ray said.

If the board chose option B, Su said, "Families who do not trust their neighborhood schools will continue to leave those schools; those schools will stay under-enrolled. And that pattern impacts our southeast neighborhoods the hardest."

Su argued that by choosing option C, the district could keep the funds in the southeast neighborhood and consider merging schools in neighborhoods with few students.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/18/2026 - 17:30
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Saudi Helicopter Downed, Two Pilots Killed, In First Of Renewed Yemen War

2026-10-18T14:19:37.879-07:00

Saudi Helicopter Downed, Two Pilots Killed, In First Of Renewed Yemen War

Saudi Arabia has confirmed two military pilots are dead after their reconnaissance helicopter crashed near the border with war-ravaged Yemen - the first such reported Saudi military deaths since the renew of war with the Houthis last month.

Saudi official statements are calling it a crash, describing it as a malfunction or accident, while the Houthis are saying they shot down the aircraft.

Illustrative file image: Boeing

"The AH-6i helicopter’s crash near the city of Najran was due to a technical fault and killed two of the crew members, the Saudi-led coalition leading a campaign against the Houthis said," according to Bloomberg. "That disputes the Iranian-backed group’s earlier claim that it had downed a similar aircraft."

Najran has been under frequent attack by the Houthis, including when the helicopter went down on Saturday. It happened amid the typical missile and drone barrage on the kingdom from neighboring Yemen.

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sari had on Saturday soon on the heels of the incident announced the group had shot down a Saudi attack helicopter near Najran.

He said the helicopter wasn't just for reconnaissance, but was actively targeting Houthis positions along the border.

There is a fierce PR dispute among the warring sides:

On Sunday, October 18, al-Maliki responded to Sari’s post. He posted a photo of several Apache helicopters lined up in a row and wrote: “You claim to have shot it down, but it will soon reappear on the battlefield.” Thus, the Saudi-led coalition has denied the Houthis’ claim that an Apache helicopter was destroyed. At the same time, the report of the AH-6i crash and the deaths of two crew members remains a separate, officially confirmed fact. The details of the incident and the possible connection between these reports require further confirmation. Reuters reported this, citing a statement by Saudi Coalition spokesperson Major General Turki al-Maliki.

The Houthi side has produced what it says is video proof of the AH-6i helicopter being targeted:

Ansarallah released footage showing the interception of a Saudi AH-6i attack helicopter off the coast of Najran, Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition had previously claimed that the helicopter went down due to a "mechanical failure". This footage disproves that claim. https://t.co/LdgYju6ywy
— AMK Mapping 🇳🇿 (@AMK_Mapping_) October 18, 2026

Whichever ends up being the case, this could be the first of more military disasters for the superior-armed Saudis to come. The Houthis don't have air power or an air force, but likely have shoulder-fired and ground-to-surface systems capable of taking out low-flying aircraft.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/18/2026 - 15:30
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Egypt's Sisi Declares His Presidency Will End In 2030

2026-10-17T15:19:25.550-07:00

Egypt's Sisi Declares His Presidency Will End In 2030

Via Middle East Eye

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has declared that his presidential term will end in 2030 and that the question of his departure from office is now "settled and will not be discussed".

Sisi, 71, said on Saturday during a graduation ceremony at the Egyptian Military Academy that "the Egyptian constitution would not be touched". He is currently serving a six-year term.

Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi (source: Russian Information Office)

"The year 2030 will mark the end of my presidential term. This matter is completely settled," Sisi said.

"I will not leave the Egyptian state until it is brimming with its own people capable of shouldering responsibility."

The president added that the military academy was creating a new generation of leaders.

Sisi came to power in 2013 after leading a military coup that deposed Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

Rights groups estimate that over 60,000 prisoners of conscience are held in Egyptian jails, including more than 1,000 women.

Many prisoners, including former President Morsi and several opposition figures, have died as a result of medical neglect and other inhumane prison conditions, according to rights groups.

Sisi's latest comments come at a turbulent time in the region. Last week, Egypt’s foreign minister reaffirmed the country's support for Saudi Arabia in its conflict with Yemen's Houthis, saying that "Gulf security is integral to Egypt’s national security and our solidarity with Saudi Arabia."

Egypt has also been involved in military conflict with its neighbors. Last week, an Egyptian air strike killed 72 civilian workers at a gold mine on the Sudan-Egypt border.

Egypt backs the Sudanese Armed Forces in its war against the UAE-backed paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Egyptian President el-Sisi on leaving office by 2030: I’m saying this more than 40 months in advance so that no one can claim I’m preparing someone from my family or relatives to take over. No, no, no. Nothing like that. This is a very big country, and such things cannot happen here.
— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 17, 2026

Sisi's government is also at loggerheads with Ethiopia, which it sees as a potential naval rival in the Red Sea and with which it has a long-standing dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

Egypt recently hosted a conference with representatives from Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea to discuss coordinating military and intelligence efforts should conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea escalate.

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"Trans ID In Free Fall": After Decade-Long Surge, Far Fewer Teens Identify As Lesbian, Gay, Or Bisexual

2026-10-17T14:19:20.761-07:00

"Trans ID In Free Fall": After Decade-Long Surge, Far Fewer Teens Identify As Lesbian, Gay, Or Bisexual

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times,

The percentage of American high schoolers who say they are homosexual or bisexual has plummeted after years on the rise.

Based on data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, psychologist and researcher Jean Twenge found that "the decline appears to be driven almost entirely by girls."

Girls identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual dropped 5 percentage points, hitting 22 percent last year. Among boys, that percentage fell by 2 percentage points to 7 percent.

"The trends are striking," especially compared to data from a decade ago, Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University, wrote on her blog in late September.

Reasons for the decline in teen in lesbian, gay, or bisexual identification are not readily apparent. "I have to confess: I have no idea," Twenge wrote.

Determining whether the numbers reflect the start of a trend requires further examination, she and other professionals say.

Competing explanations for the shift are emerging amid a larger debate over alternative sexuality in America.

Patterns Emerge

By comparing the CDC's newly released 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey with its 2023 figures for grades 9 through 12, Twenge identified a pattern: The younger the grade level, the sharper the decline in lesbian, gay, or bisexual identification.

Ninth graders calling themselves lesbian, gay, or bisexual dropped from 17 to 11 percent.

For 12th-grade students, the number dipped by 2 points, from 18 to 16 percent.

Twenge's analysis excluded responses from students who said they describe their sexual orientation "another way," were unsure, or didn't understand the survey question.

Identifying as transgender - which is a gender identity, rather than a sexual orientation - also was not specifically addressed.

The newly reported drops contrast with data from preceding years.

With 2015 as a baseline, the number of girls identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual ballooned 128 percent in six years; for boys, the number went up 99 percent in eight years, Twenge wrote.

At the same time, the percentage of young adults aged 18 to 24 identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual "is no longer racing upward as it did between 2014 and 2022," Twenge wrote in another blog post.

In 'Free Fall'?

A few studies appear to reflect findings similar to those Twenge described in the CDC data.

Between 2022 and 2025, students identifying as "straight" or heterosexual climbed from 76 percent to 83 percent, the University of Minnesota reported. That study surveyed Minnesota schoolchildren in grades 5, 8, 9, and 11.

And, a year ago, Canadian political science professor Eric Kaufmann pointed to a few studies reporting non-heterosexuality was dropping among high schoolers and college students.

The data showed "trans identification is in free fall among the young," he wrote on X.

Twenge referenced Kaufmann's quote and wrote that while declining lesbian, gay, or bisexual identification is not dramatic in older teens, the data for ninth graders "really does look like a free fall."

That observation about Generation Alpha - young people born in 2010 or later - "could be a harbinger of a coming wave of change, or it could be a blip - it's hard to say," Twenge wrote.

Presidential Politics

Liberals and conservatives alike opined that the pro-traditional-family policies of President Donald Trump appear to be playing a role.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, which combats "anti-family extremism," told The Epoch Times that his organization has supported the Trump administration's efforts to "eliminate transgender ideology from school curriculum" and to ban boys from playing in girls' sports.

The administration has done a good job overall with "getting this type of ideology out of our schools, and instead embracing normalcy," he said.

A married father of eight, Schilling said: "It's very clear across all social data that families are incredibly important to someone's fulfillment and happiness and well-being in life."

He has witnessed lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual ideology tearing families apart and distorting what "love" means.

"So many of these young people are getting lost in this seemingly attractive ideology that proposes tolerance and acceptance - when, ultimately, it doesn't provide either of those things," Schilling said. "It's eliminating anyone in their lives that might have concerns or questions about these newfound identities, it's just a totally tragic and sad political ideology that's taking hold."

'Oppression'

Biology professor and blogger PZ Myers, who calls himself a "godless liberal," is skeptical about the CDC data possibly revealing a trend.

"Are teenagers actually becoming straight again? That makes no sense," he wrote in an essay.

Those young people are "in the process of discovering their sexuality; it's not as if ten year olds were biased towards gayness and then 'straightened up' when they were 15," Myers wrote on his blog.

His essay - titled, "Oppression Works!" - implies that the respondents may have been unwilling to admit they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual in the current political climate.

"This is not a good time to honestly express yourself, because the [expletive] crazy Republicans are running roughshod over schools, education, and science," Myers wrote.

The data Twenge compiled shows that a slight drop in lesbian, gay, or bisexual identification began in 2021 for students in ninth and tenth grades. That year, Trump ended his first term in office.

More noticeable declines began around 2024, during Democratic President Joe Biden's tenure, even though his administration advanced pro-LGBT policies.

'Fad' Versus Human Nature

Politics aside, Pennsylvania licensed professional counselor Andrew Rodriguez believes cultural influences and human nature could be driving the decrease, if it holds.

"It's clear there was a social contagion, because of the 'fad' aspect of this," he told The Epoch Times. "And now people are starting to realize, 'Oh, this isn't truly who I am.'"

"Social engineering" - using society-wide influences to steer a culture in a desired direction - helped make identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual socially acceptable or even cool, especially for girls, Rodriguez said.

For some young people, "it just was an idea, and they jumped on it ... there was some social capital they got out of it, and now they're realizing that's not as popular anymore," he said.

Rodriguez, who owns and operates Integrity Christian Counseling, said he believes God instilled people with a drive toward unions with the opposite sex.

He thinks more girls are probably realizing "I really do want to be a wife and mom."

Texas psychologist David Pickup said a recent historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling will help more people face "reality" about sexuality and gender.

In Chiles v. Salazar, the court held that a Colorado law violated therapist Kaley Chiles's constitutional right to fully explore sex and gender issues with some clients.

Pickup leads a group that includes therapists, scholars, and researchers who believe adolescents and their parents "should not be pressured to affirm homosexual identity."

With the ruling, coupled with other societal shifts, "some people are realizing that LGBT issues are not inborn and change is possible," Pickup said.

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Princeton Researchers Find A Lower-Energy Route To Fusion Ignition

2026-10-16T14:19:41.288-07:00

Princeton Researchers Find A Lower-Energy Route To Fusion Ignition

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

A new Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory model finds that heating plasma first and compressing it second could sharply cut the energy needed to reach fusion ignition.
Tungsten at just one part in 10,000 could double the pressure ignition requires, a red flag for the dozen-plus next-gen machines built with tungsten walls.
The findings are theoretical, but a liquid lithium coating could keep tungsten out of the plasma as AI-era money keeps pouring into fusion.

A new model for nuclear fusion has potentially discovered a significantly more energy-efficient way to achieve nuclear fusion, and flipped everything we thought we knew about the fusion process. The scientists' modelling also flips the traditional order of operations for managing and sustaining plasma in a controlled fusion experiment. Traditionally, fusion processes start by compressing plasma for higher density, and then heating it to superhot temperatures. However, new modelling from the United States Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) shows that reversing this order of operations could drastically reduce the energy inputs necessary to achieve ignition.

This is big. Ignition refers to when a fusion experiment creates more energy than it consumes. To date, this has been the biggest and most elusive challenge of achieving fusion - the process which powers our own sun - here on Earth. The first ever successful ignition was achieved in 2022 at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And while this achievement has been repeated and other instances of ignition have occurred, the sector is still a far cry from creating enough net energy to be anywhere close to practical and commercial application.

Unlocking the secret to commercially scalable nuclear fusion would solve much of the world's energy problems essentially overnight. Fusion provides a near-limitless source of clean energy and yields none of the hazardous and radioactive spent nuclear fuel associated with nuclear fission. It's therefore viewed as a 'holy grail' of clean energy. This is why finding more energy-efficient pathways toward ignition is such a big deal, even if they are - at this point - purely theoretical.

But the team at PPPL didn't just discover how to make fusion easier. They also discovered a way to make fusion much, much more difficult - and found that it could be a major stumbling block for many of the nuclear fusion experiments and startups racing to achieve commercial nuclear fusion. The team found that the incorporation of just a tiny amount of the element tungsten in the fusion process - as small as one part of tungsten in 10,000 within the plasma - could cause the pressure needed to achieve ignition to double, creating major issues for efficiency and stability.

This is highly relevant for many next-gen fusion experiments which use tungsten in the design of their reactors. According to reporting from Interesting Engineering, "More than a dozen next-generation fusion machines have selected tungsten for their inner walls because the metal can withstand extremely high temperatures." If the tiniest bit of this tungsten enters the plasma, achieving fusion quickly becomes much more difficult, and could even make the experiment unstable.

Discovering this risk now may avoid a lot of wasted energy and expenditures going forward. And, happily, those tungsten-based reactors don't need to be scrapped; they just need to be coated, such as with liquid lithium, to ensure that the tungsten doesn't contaminate the plasma.

"While more study is needed, we are excited by these results, and they suggest a clear path forward for future research in this area," PPPL physicist Jonathan Menard told Interesting Engineering.

PPPL is far from alone in its enthusiasm for fusion research and its disruptive potential. After a century of slow and painstaking progress from very few players, the field of nuclear fusion is now exploding as investors take note of the accelerated developments in the field, and the AI boom causes VC money to flood into all kinds of alternative energies. As a result, startups are starting to crowd into the sector, creating more competition and leading to increased innovation.

Some of the tech sector's biggest names and deepest pockets are heavily involved in the burgeoning fusion sector. Microsoft's Bill Gates and OpenAI's Sam Altman are vocal advocates for and financial backers of nuclear fusion research as a critical solution to the energy monster their own companies are creating through the hyperscaling of AI data centers. Altman has admitted that the world simply doesn't have enough energy to support the tech sector's growth trajectory in a business-as-usual scenario.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/16/2026 - 14:45
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Iran War Has Cost Nearly $2,000 Per US Household: Moody's Top Economist

2026-10-15T14:19:30.169-07:00

Iran War Has Cost Nearly $2,000 Per US Household: Moody's Top Economist

Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi estimated Oct. 12 that the Iran war has cost the average U.S. household nearly $2,000 since it began, or about $265 billion nationwide. He put roughly $1,100 per household on higher energy and transportation costs, $540 on higher interest rates and $360 on military spending, and said the energy tab is still rising by about $50 per household each week at current fuel prices.

An MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter, assigned to Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 50, takes off from the flight deck of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Thomas Hudner on May 4, 2026. US NAVY/AFP via Getty Images

Zandi wrote on X: "Consider that the war's costs taken together have absorbed about half the average American household's income gain over the past eight months. No wonder the war is so unpopular."

White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly answered in a statement: "Mark Zandi is a Democrat donor who is frequently wrong - including predicting multiple recessions that never happened." She added: "President Trump is rightfully ensuring that Iran, a country that for 47 years chanted 'Death to America,' can never have a nuclear weapon." U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began Feb. 28.

Consider that the war’s costs taken together have absorbed about half the average American household’s income gain over the past eight months. No wonder the war is so unpopular.
— Mark Zandi (@Markzandi) October 12, 2026

Zandi's number is a broad economic estimate, not a federal outlay. Brown University puts consumer costs at $133.3 billion, about $1,018 per household, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has testified to about $37.5 billion in direct military costs, Newsweek reported. ZH has tracked estimates running well above the White House's.

As the Epoch Times notes further, "Higher energy prices are contributing most to the costs," Zandi said. "A gallon of regular goes for $4.37, up from just under $3 before the war. Diesel is above $6, and jet fuel has nearly doubled. As winter approaches, the much higher price of home heating fuel is also adding to the costs."

Zandi said the war's inflation contributed to the Fed's decision last month to raise rates and signal that more rate increases are coming.

"Long-term rates are also up a lot - fixed mortgage rates have climbed from below 6 percent before the war to 7.5 percent. By our reckoning, the higher rates have cost the economy about $540 per household," he said.

In September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the war cost the U.S. military $38.1 billion through Aug. 1. With fighting expected to continue, the war was estimated to cost between $2 billion and $3 billion each month, depending on its intensity.

On Oct. 5, the Congressional Research Service published a report listing some of the major equipment losses during the war.

The report listed 81 fixed-wing or rotary-wing aircraft, including drones that were lost or damaged during the conflict.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of equipment losses as of Aug. 1 to be between $1.9 billion and $3.3 billion, depending on the Department of War's plans for replacement.

Democrats have continually pointed to the cost of the war in their criticism of Trump.

In September, 46 Democratic or left-leaning Independent Senators sent a letter to Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth demanding more information on the costs of the war.

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Dowd: "Investment Bubbles Are A Feature Of Capitalism, Not A Bug"

2026-10-14T14:19:32.915-07:00

Dowd: "Investment Bubbles Are A Feature Of Capitalism, Not A Bug"

Authored by Ed Dowd via Ed Dowd's Beyond The Narrative Substack,

On Friday October 9th Bloomberg published an article titled "Jeffries' Chris Wood Sees 'Massive Capital Destruction' in AI." His view is that the most likely long-term outcome of the AI boom is massive capital destruction in the US, with market share shifting to cheaper open-source Chinese models. Wood has mostly got it right in my opinion except for two differences. My first difference is that Chinese models are not the only open-source models available and that western open-source models are closing the gap. Secondly, while his view correctly flags the overbuild and the competitive pressure from lower-cost alternatives what it leaves out is the long history of innovative technology infrastructure bubbles and the reliable pattern that follows them which is:

excitement/mania → overinvestment → financial collapse → distressed assets → recapitalized cheap infrastructure fuels the next economic wave.

In regard to the AI bubble, I believe we are currently in the overinvestment phase with cracks emerging. Let us look at some historical examples to illustrate the pattern and see if we can glean what the future of this current bubble might look like.

The US Railroad Bubble

In the decades after the Civil War, railroads became the transformative technology of the era. Capital, much of it European, flooded in. Between the late 1860s and early 1870s, tens of thousands of miles of track were laid, often into sparsely settled or unprofitable territory. Speculative financing, land grants, and the expectation of endless growth created a classic mania. Early projects showed strong returns, which attracted more money into later, riskier lines built far ahead of demand. When financing dried up, highlighted by the failure of Jay Cooke's bank in marketing Northern Pacific bonds, the Panic of 1873 followed. More than 100 railroads went bankrupt in the ensuing years, banks failed, and investors were wiped out. The depression lasted years. Yet the physical tracks remained. The surviving and reorganized network became the backbone of American industrial expansion, enabling efficient movement of goods, people, and capital that powered decades of growth. The overbuilt infrastructure, once distressed and recapitalized, proved far more valuable to the broader economy than the paper losses suggested.

The 1920s Utility Bubble

The 1920s electrification boom followed a similar script. Central-station utilities expanded rapidly, and holding companies consolidated regional systems into large, leveraged empires. Electricity generation and revenues grew dramatically as the technology moved from novelty to infrastructure. Utility stocks soared and became a major part of the market. Holding companies facilitated access to capital and technical expertise, but the structures were opaque, and capacity was built aggressively. The 1929 crash and subsequent Depression exposed the leverage and accounting. Samuel Insull's empire collapsed in spectacular fashion, and the Dow Jones Utilities Average plunged. Reforms including the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 broke up the largest structures and shifted the industry toward regulated regional monopolies. What remained was a vastly expanded electrical grid and generation capacity. Widespread electrification transformed industry, homes, and productivity for the rest of the century. The bust was painful for equity and debt holders; the long-term economic payoff from cheap, abundant power was enormous.

The Dotcom Bubble

The most recent and directly analogous example is the late 1990s telecom fiber buildout during the Dotcom era. Carriers and infrastructure firms poured hundreds of billions into fiber-optic networks, switches, and related equipment, largely financed with debt and encouraged by forecasts of internet traffic doubling every few months. Capacity vastly exceeded near-term demand. After the bubble burst, market values collapsed, many telecoms went bankrupt, and bandwidth prices fell sharply. A large portion of the newly laid fiber sat "dark" or unlit. Through bankruptcies and recapitalizations, that physical infrastructure was acquired at deep discounts, often pennies on the dollar. The resulting cheap broadband made business models viable that would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Apple's smartphone ecosystem, Netflix, software-as-a-service, and cloud services all scaled on that excess capacity. Without the overbuilding and subsequent distress, Web 2.0 as we know it does not happen at the same speed or cost. The capital destruction was real but the residual infrastructure seeded the next wave of growth.

AI Bubble (Yes it is a bubble!)

I believe we are now in the AI infrastructure equivalent of the overinvestment phase. Massive capital is flowing into data centers, chips, power, and related equipment. The sheer scale of spending is turning advanced AI models into a commodity faster than many equity and debt investors appear to appreciate. Chinese open-source models are already applying downward pricing pressure, consistent with the Jefferies view. Cracks are visible. In my Substack piece "Wall Street's AI Capex Party...It's 2 AM & The Bar Is About to Close!", the signals included stalled private credit funding for the buildout, cracking enterprise demand as promised productivity gains fail to materialize at scale, looming power constraints that are becoming the binding limit rather than chip supply, and open-source pricing pressure that compresses margins.

Additional recent indicators from public commentary reinforce this: circular deals in which AI companies run negative free cash flow and rely on debt investors to keep purchasing chips at elevated prices; recent analyses showing major players cannot cover contracted compute commitments under realistic revenue assumptions; and narrative shifts such as space based data centers that paper over terrestrial grid and power bottlenecks. Growth rates implied by current valuations look vulnerable once the second derivative of funding and utilization slows. It is not a question of not if the bubble bursts but when it bursts.

Credit Markets Always End Infrastructure Buildouts

Debt and credit have been central to every one of these infrastructure buildouts. In the railroad boom, bonds financed the majority of the expansion, often more than three-quarters of the capital. When those markets stopped absorbing new bond issues (e.g. Jay Cooke & Co. could no longer place Northern Pacific bonds) the credit system seized up. Then bank runs followed, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, and within two years roughly a third of outstanding railroad bonds had stopped paying interest. The equity markets lagged in this period...credit markets ended the railroad party abruptly.

The 1920s utility expansion followed the same pattern on a different scale. Samuel Insull's holding company pyramid relied on layers of debt and bank loans secured by the securities of the operating companies themselves (financial engineering). Once revenues softened and the banks refused to roll the notes in 1932, the structure collapsed into receivership. In this period the equity markets led the credit markets first with the 1929 crash then credit followed later.

In the telecom fiber boom, carriers raised hundreds of billions in bonds and used vendor financing and circular deals to keep the buildout going. Credit markets ultimately marked the end of the buildout but equities peaked in March of 2000 before credit. Credit spreads later widened sharply in 2001 and 2002, defaults clustered in the sector for years, and bondholders recovered roughly twenty cents on the dollar in many cases. When lenders stopped funding incremental capacity, the overinvestment phase ended and the financial collapse began.

The same dynamic is now visible in the AI buildout, where private credit has stalled, circular debt structures are proliferating, off balance sheet financing is growing and early signs of stress are appearing in CCC junk credit markets. Whether equity markets lead or lag this cycle remains to be seen but the case could be made that given the tremendous amount of passive equity investing the discounting mechanism of equity could lag and credit leads this time.

Bottom Line

Innovative technology capex cycles repeat themselves because human nature has not changed. Mania and excitement give way to overinvestment, which produces financial collapse and distressed assets. Those assets then become the cheap foundation for the next economic wave. Those who believe in cycles and a constant human nature may want to protect themselves accordingly and reduce exposure in the AI complex where risk-reward no longer makes sense. Then when the bust does arrive watch for the opportunities that emerge from the ashes where durable longer-term value will be created.

Bubbles are a feature of capitalism, not a bug. They destroy capital in the short run and, through the process of overbuilding and recapitalization, often leave behind the physical and technical foundation for longer-term productivity gains. The pattern is consistent throughout history...though the timing and severity may vary. The long-term outcome for the economy is usually more favorable than the peak-to-trough equity charts imply and a net positive over time.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9

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