The post A Quick Note on Inflation and the Fed appeared first on CEPR.

 

 

This week, I speak with Seth Bernstein, Chief Executive Officer of AllianceBernstein (no relation). We discuss his tenure at JPMorgan Chase, where he was managing director and global head of Managed Solutions & Strategy at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. We also discuss understanding the private credit industry and the future of mutual funds as ETFs grow in popularity. Plus, Seth shares his thoughts on the importance of in-person collaboration, as well as how to invest for retirement.

A list of his current reading/favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Glen Kacher, founder and CIO of Light Street Capital. He launched the firm in Palo Alto after stints working with Julian Roberts at Tiger and Roger McNamee at Integral. His Mercury funds returned 45.7% in 2023, 59.4% in 2024, and 37.3% in 2025 — the best three-year stretch of any of the “Tiger Cubs.” He describes the firm as “the Silicon Valley Home Team, 100% focused on tech opportunities.”

 

 

 

Current Reading/Favorite Books

 

 

The post MiB: Seth Bernstein, Chief Executive Officer of AllianceBernstein appeared first on The Big Picture.

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• The largely hidden force helping drive America’s craze for weight-loss drugs: Firms are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince doctors to prescribe GLP-1 drugs. (Washington Post)

​• Sept. 11 Changed the World Order. But Not for the Reason We May Think. While America spent its strategic bandwidth in the Middle East, China joined the WTO and grew its share of global exports to 15%. The terrorist attacks consumed U.S. resources and attention, and left the country unable to address the bigger threats to its economy and global leadership (Wall Street Journal) see also ​America Has Forfeited Its Greatest Strength: Ali Soufan, who investigated al-Qaeda before and after 9/11, argues the attacks succeeded because of a failure of trust, not imagination — and that graver failures of trust have emerged since. Osama bin Laden wanted to eradicate faith in American power. Twenty-five years later, his dream is on the verge of coming true. (The Atlantic)

​• Invisible Companies: Colossus on Steve Ross, who started at his father-in-law’s funeral parlor and built Time Warner into one of the world’s largest companies — MTV and Nickelodeon were born under his roof. AI Rollups, the latest fad to take venture capital by storm, point to a different source of excess returns that is only becoming more valuable (Colossus)

​• A Field Guide to Seeing Through False Expertise: Reliable information has never been easier to access — or harder to find, with experts, politicians, celebrities, and influencers all in the chat. In an age of information overload, reliable sources are easy to access but often difficult to identify. (Big Think)

​• Will Taiwan Just Give Up? The Taiwanese don’t trust Trump, and they don’t believe America will come to their defense. A deal with China is starting to look inevitable. The Atlantic’s October cover story on Xi Jinping, Trump, and the question of whether Taiwan’s will to resist is eroding from within. (The Atlantic)

​• After Work, We’ll Have Each Other: Clara Collier Once you realize what that means, you’ll be giving two cheers for the American work ethic. What will people do all day if AI surpasses us at all economically necessary labor? The emerging consensus: when machines can do everything else, our relationships are what’s left. Once you realize what that means, you’ll be giving two cheers for the American work ethic. (Asterisk) see also The Dark Side of Mindfulness: Olga Khazan on Willoughby Britton, the meditation teacher and clinical psychologist who set out in 2004 to prove meditation improves sleep — and found something else. A prominent psychologist and meditation teacher set out to research the benefits of the practice. What she found alarmed her. (The Atlantic)

• How art invented humanity: When early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images. (Aeon)

• Schools should stop banning peanuts. Here’s what really keeps kids safe. Everyone wants to keep kids with food allergies safe, but the evidence suggests bans don’t do that. There’s a better way. (Washington Post)

• A Monday with Brad Pitt: The 62-year-old has lived a singular life. He resides in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of all movie stars, not only today but ever, as measured by any metric you like, including intrigue. What does he have to say about all of it? ​Esquire spends a day at home with the actor, starting with the dogs pawing at the plate-glass door.  (Esquire)

​• Can Andre Agassi Enjoy Pickleball More Than He Hated Tennis?: The 55-year-old boards a flight at Newark in plaid pajama pants and Air Force 1s, headed for an ESPN prime-time event with a much-hyped million-dollar purse. After years of relative quiet, the public is meeting “Andre 2.0” — a pickleball booster, an open book and a guy eager to build a less tortured relationship with competition. (New York Times)

Video of the day: Why Apple Didn’t Make Steve Jobs Rich

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Seth Bernstein, CEO of AllianceBernstein and Head of Asset Management of Equitable Holdings, the 69% owner AB. The firm manages $905.5B. Previously, he spent 32 years at JPMorgan Chase, where he eventually became the Global Head of Managed Solutions & Strategy at JPAM, responsible for all discretionary assets for Private Banking clients, and Global Head of Fixed Income & Currency. He eventually became CFO of JPM’s Investment Management & Private Banking division.

 

People 65 and older now outnumber children ages 5 and younger worldwide for the first time in recorded history

Source: US Census via Axios

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

~~~

To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

 

The post 10 Weekend Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

PLA Purge May Be Driving China To Rely More On Military Pressure Against Taiwan: Analysts

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times,

China's purge of senior military leaders may be pushing Beijing to rely more heavily on military intimidation and gray-zone operations against Taiwan, even as the upheaval leaves the Chinese military with a weakened command structure, according to two Chinese academics and an insider familiar with the Chinese military.

Chinese ships patrol as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts drills on Pingtan island—the closest point to Taiwan—in eastern Fujian Province, China, on Dec. 30, 2025. Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images

The insider and academics spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

The developments are raising concerns that Beijing's increasingly aggressive operations around Taiwan could become more difficult to control as analysts say political loyalty takes precedence over military expertise within the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

Taiwan's Defense Ministry has reported near-daily Chinese military activity around the island, describing the operations as increasingly aggressive and unpredictable, according to Taiwan's national news agency CNA. Chinese military planners are studying drone swarms, long-range strikes, ammunition consumption, maritime blockades and coordination with other countries, while exploring methods that could potentially isolate Taiwan, cut off outside supplies, and weaken its defenses during the early stages of a conflict.

At the same time, the PLA is undergoing an unusually extensive leadership purge. The seven-member Central Military Commission (CMC), which formally oversees China's armed forces, is down to just two members.

A Chinese military academic told The Epoch Times that the continuing purge suggests Xi remains deeply concerned about the loyalty of senior military commanders.

"The CMC has had so many people fall. There are already very few military members of the Central Committee," he said. "The possibility of war is not very high, but the harassment [against Taiwan] will not stop."

Military Pressure Continues

The academic said the purge has created serious gaps in the military command structure at a time when Beijing continues to use military pressure against Taiwan.

He said former CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia had been authorized to oversee simulated training for operations against Taiwan and that it would be difficult to find a replacement with comparable experience.

"At present, the pressure on Taiwan is concentrated on military intimidation," the academic said. "If they give up intimidation, they simply cannot come up with a better method."

The leadership turmoil has unfolded alongside a series of high-level purges. In October last year, nine senior military officers, including CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong, were expelled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the military.

In January, the Chinese regime announced investigations into Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, chief of the CMC's Joint Staff Department.

The academic said the military could be experiencing an unusually broad leadership vacuum ahead of the CCP's 21st National Congress next year.

The leadership upheaval does not necessarily mean that Beijing is preparing to launch an invasion of Taiwan. Instead, military pressure could continue precisely because it is one of the few tools available to a command structure weakened by political purges, according to the academic.

Chinese military activity around Taiwan has increasingly extended beyond conventional military exercises. Beijing has also been combining military drills, combat-readiness patrols and China Coast Guard operations, creating pressure that remains between ordinary peacetime activity and open warfare.

Taiwan's National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Ming-yen told reporters in July that the months of July through September are typically a period of heightened Chinese military exercises. Taiwan had detected increased activity by the Chinese navy and other maritime forces, including four Chinese naval formations operating in the western Pacific at the time.

A Chinese military academic and researcher told The Epoch Times that Beijing was increasingly integrating military exercises with combat-readiness patrols and coast guard enforcement.

The approach allows China to maintain sustained pressure on Taiwan without crossing the threshold into open conflict, the researcher said.

He cautioned, however, that the pattern should not necessarily be interpreted as preparation for an imminent attack.

"If [the CCP] wants to launch military action against Taiwan, [it] needs to first carry out war mobilization, deploy logistical support, and even more importantly, have powerful offensive weapons and a strong and effective command system," he said.

Potential Blockade

Taiwan's Defense Ministry has assessed that China does not yet possess all the capabilities required for a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan. But Beijing has other options, including maritime isolation, a joint blockade, missile strikes, cyberattacks, and information warfare.

A blockade or maritime isolation campaign could require fewer forces than a full-scale invasion and could be conducted under the cover of military exercises or law-enforcement operations, according to researchers who spoke to The Epoch Times.

That creates a dilemma for Taiwan. If Taipei does not respond, Beijing could gradually expand its control over surrounding waters. If Taiwan responds militarily, Beijing could portray Taipei as the party responsible for escalating tensions.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said on Sept. 2 that Taiwan's defense budget for next year would exceed NT$1 trillion ($32 billion) for the first time, according to CNA. The government plans to invest in unmanned systems, AI, and Taiwan's domestic defense industry.

The Chinese military researcher said the continued expansion of Chinese military and maritime operations around Taiwan is reducing the island's warning time.

The greater concern, he said, is not a deliberate decision by Beijing to start a war, but the possibility that an incident could escalate when military judgment is compromised by political considerations.

For Taiwan, he said, that makes continued vigilance essential.

Shi Youliang contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 22:35

Appeals Court Won't Allow Trump Admin To Implement New Rules For Mail-In Voting

A federal appeals court on Sept. 10 declined to permit the Trump administration to enforce a new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) rule that changes mail-in voting requirements before the midterm congressional elections on Nov. 3.

The Supreme Court is currently considering a similar request.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined to pause an injunction issued on Sept. 4 by Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which extended a temporary restraining order that she granted on Aug. 27. The injunction halted key parts of the Postal Service's final rule.

The injunction applies to the Nov. 3 elections and any federal elections that take place before then.

The injunction blocks the mandatory parts of the Postal Service's final rule published on Aug. 26 that implements Section 3 of President Donald Trump's executive order 14399. That provision would assign federal agencies a larger role in who receives a mailed ballot and how those ballots are processed by the USPS.

As Matthew Vadum reporets for The Epoch Times, the Trump administration previously said the executive order would help to keep federal elections honest. The Department of Justice argued that the USPS is imposing mailpiece design and data standards under its general authority to regulate the mail, not deciding who is eligible to vote; states are still free to set voter lists and count ballots.

Talwani had said the postal rule could disenfranchise voters, was probably unlawful, and likely violated the U.S. Constitution, which gives states authority to run federal elections taking place within their borders. The judge previously said the postal agency presented no evidence of fraudulent mail-in voting that would justify the new Postal Service rule.

Talwani held that the USPS lacked authority to enforce the rule, and that, as election officials have said, given existing time constraints, complying with the rule for the midterms was "likely impossible."

Talwani said Congress never agreed to delegate its powers under the Constitution's elections clause to the USPS, so the rule "clashes with Congress's statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on ... [those] powers but also that power left to the States."

The judge added that even a small glitch in the new system would be problematic and could mean that ballots never go out, that eligible voters would almost certainly lose the chance to vote by mail, and that the disenfranchisement of plaintiff groups such as the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts was "practically inevitable."

Advocacy groups and a coalition of Democrat-led states had sued to block parts of the rule, arguing that implementation would lead to voter disenfranchisement. Republican states intervened in support of the federal government, arguing that the rule would promote election integrity.

In its new ruling, the First Circuit said the federal government failed to show that the Postal Service rule was likely lawful or that the district court's ruling was in error.

The appeals court panel said it agreed with the district court that the rule likely regulated the manner of holding elections for members of Congress, which the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress, not to an executive agency such as the USPS acting without congressional authorization.

The federal government is trying "to avoid the constitutional problem by denying that the Final Rule regulates the manner of holding elections," but "this denial rings hollow," the panel said, quoting the district court.

"The title of the Final Rule is 'Ballot Mail for Federal Elections,' and the Final Rule explicitly and exclusively regulates election mail," the panel said.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Sept. 3 to allow the government to begin implementing a regulation that tightens rules around mail-in voting. After Talwani dissolved the temporary restraining order, the federal government withdrew its application and filed a new one targeting the Sept. 4 injunction.

That application is still pending before the Supreme Court.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 22:10

Somali Piracy Was Under Control, Then Came The Iran War...

Authored by Khaled Mahmoud via Responsible Statecraft,

From the start, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has been a story of unintended consequences. Contrary to President Donald Trump's hopes for a quick victory, the conflict has morphed into a sustained crisis, one that has driven up oil prices, driven down tourism in the Middle East, and reshaped the region's geopolitical map.

Somali pirates on captured MV Faina off the coast of Somalia in 2008. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass communication Specialist 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky)

Now, a new unintended consequence has emerged: the return of piracy to Somalia's coasts. This shift, which comes after a decade of quiet, threatens some of the world's most important shipping lanes and the interests of the United States and its allies.

Pirates have attacked at least 15 vessels in the region this year, a sharp uptick from the five attacks that occurred last year, according to data from the International Maritime Organization. The renewed criminal activity has led to extended hostage situations, including one ongoing seizure of an oil tanker and its crew.

A controversial operation to free the MV LATUF, carried out by Somali forces and the Turkish navy late last month, raised questions about whether a ransom was paid. The government of Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia, says it has evidence of phone contacts between Somali government officials and the pirates, which undermines the official story from both Ankara and Mogadishu. The vessel was carrying Turkish weapons and satellite and communication equipment bound for a Turkish training facility in Mogadishu.

Global piracy dropped in the first half of 2026 to its lowest level since 1992 - only 38 incidents, compared to 90 in the same period of 2025 and 60 in 2024. But data from the International Chamber of Commerce shows that, by the end of last month, six commercial ships were still being held, with more than 90 seafarers on board.

When ransom money funds the pirates

The pirates recently received a new ransom estimated at around $1.7 million for the release of the hijacked ship MV Sward off the coast of Puntland, along with its crew of Syrian and Indian sailors, after a crisis that lasted more than four months.

On 26 April, about ten armed Somali men in three speedboats intercepted the ship near the town of Garaad. The vessel flies the flag of St. Kitts and Nevis and is managed by Turkey-linked companies. It was only six nautical miles from the coast. The ship had left the Egyptian port of Adabiya/Suez heading to Mombasa in Kenya with a cargo of cement or fertilizer.

According to a well-informed maritime source in Puntland, this incident shows the pirates going back to their classic method: using the hijacked ship as a mother vessel to carry out more attacks, including the hijacking of Iranian fishing boats.

Before the war on Iran, the threat from piracy to international shipping had dropped significantly. Now that the pirates are active again, the international community needs to rethink how military forces are deployed in the Middle East and the Red Sea to close the security gap the pirates are exploiting - a gap that stretches from Somalia's eastern coast through the Gulf of Aden to the route linking the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

Dr. Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert at Auxilium Worldwide, says the Houthis are playing a key role in the return of piracy. He points to the transfer of know-how and technology from them to Somali pirates, which could increase their ability to disrupt shipping.

Ralby says the main beneficiaries are the pirates themselves. But he does not rule out that other groups, including the Houthis and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, may find an indirect interest in the ongoing chaos. He also notes that the attacks have reached the waters off Yemen, widening the threat and increasing pressure on naval forces and coast guards.

The gaps behind the return of piracy

Somali State Minister for Foreign Affairs Ali Omar admits that the return of piracy shows there are still gaps in maritime security. The long Somali coastline makes monitoring difficult, and the country's naval capabilities are still being developed, he told RS.

But Omar stresses that today's Somalia is not the same country that faced the global piracy crisis more than a decade ago. It now has federal institutions, security forces and maritime authorities, along with wider international cooperation, especially with Turkey, to strengthen its naval capacity.

But the problem is not limited to poor policing, Omar said. It is linked to illegal fishing, organized crime, poverty in coastal communities, weak maritime surveillance and the wider security situation in the Gulf of Aden.

This view matches what Ralby says: the return of piracy is no longer a purely Somali issue. Attacks have moved further into the Gulf of Aden, and there are signs of technology and expertise being passed from the Houthis to the pirates. The challenge for Somalia is not only to regain control of its coastline, but also to stop piracy from becoming part of a wider effort to disrupt shipping.

Egyptian national security expert Mohamed Abdel Wahid, who focuses on Somalia, believes the international focus on securing navigation through Bab el-Mandeb (at the mouth of the Red Sea) and the Strait of Hormuz has helped create a security vacuum.

Who benefits from the return of piracy?

Colonel Mohamed Jama, a maritime security expert in Puntland, says the pirates' return has become a cross-border regional threat that exploits a gap in maritime coverage, partly because Puntland forces are busy fighting ISIS.

According to Jama, the pirates successfully hijacked six commercial ships between April and August. Their operations have extended into Yemeni waters and deep into the Indian Ocean, putting vital shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea at greater risk.

Jama says the beneficiaries of the return of piracy to the region include financiers and investors; arms and ammunition suppliers; fuel and logistics providers; suppliers of khat and drugs; and maritime smuggling networks. Somali and Yemeni networks are also moving resources, people and information across maritime borders.

Jama stresses that the focus should not only be on those who board the ships, but on those who finance the operations, supply the weapons and control the money.

Omar, the Somali minister, has warned about what he calls fragmented security arrangements as an additional reason for the return of piracy off the north-eastern coast. For years, Somalia has cautioned against outside actors training, funding and equipping security or maritime forces without the knowledge, coordination or supervision of the federal government. Such arrangements, he says, create parallel security structures, intelligence gaps and make accountability almost impossible.

The Somali solution

Warships alone will not defeat piracy, the Somali minister says. The whole issue requires unified national institutions and a responsible, coordinated international partnership.

As a journalist who has followed the pirates' activity for nearly 18 years, both at its peak and in its quiet periods, I can say that those I once described as the jinn of the sea and a headache for the world and international shipping are the result of mistakes both inside and outside the country. Not least among them is the conflict of authority between the federal government in Somalia and the Puntland administration.

But the most dangerous trend now is the security vacuum in the Red Sea created by the war on Iran, which has allowed the pirates to return in force. As long as the war continues, there is little hope of stopping this burgeoning banditry on the high seas.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 21:45

"Stud Or Dud" Dating App Launches A Platform For Background Checking Prospective Matches

The Daejon Love story is already having an impact on the dating world...

And singles who want to know more about a match before agreeing to a date now have another option besides scrolling through social media and playing amateur detective, according to the NY Post.

Stud or Dud, a new platform from public-records company PeopleFinders, is designed to gather publicly available information about a potential partner in one place. The service can surface details such as past addresses, bankruptcies and other records, while also organizing some of the findings into easier-to-read red- and green-flag categories.

The tool is aimed at a familiar modern dating problem: online profiles can create a convincing picture without proving that the person behind them is being truthful. A seemingly normal Instagram account, polished dating bio or professional-looking LinkedIn page may still leave major gaps about someone’s identity or history.

PeopleFinders CEO Amber Higgins said that distinction is important. “Records give you context, not certainty,” she said, describing background information as another layer of verification rather than definitive proof that someone is trustworthy.

The Post writes that the launch also comes as romance fraud and fake online identities remain a concern for daters. According to survey figures cited in the article, one-quarter of Americans said they had interacted with a fake profile or AI bot, and 15% reported losing money through an online dating or romance scam.

Stud or Dud is meant to streamline work that many singles already do before meeting someone: searching names online, checking employment claims, reviewing tagged photos or asking friends to investigate. Instead of relying heavily on material that a person can curate themselves, the platform emphasizes public records that may be harder to manipulate.

Still, a background search cannot replace judgment. Higgins pointed to behavior as another important warning system, including refusing video calls, changing details about work or location, pushing a relationship ahead unusually quickly or introducing financial problems early in the conversation.

Money requests are an especially significant warning sign. “If money comes up before you’ve met in person, that’s a moment to pause, not lean in.”

The broader idea behind the service is to make basic vetting a routine part of online dating rather than something people do only after becoming suspicious. For users already accustomed to checking a match before meeting, Stud or Dud essentially packages that research into a faster, more centralized process.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 21:20

Prosecutors In Huawei Criminal Trial Allege Company 'Cultivated Culture Of Crime And Corruption'

Authored by Nicholas Zifcak via The Epoch Times,

NEW YORK CITY - Prosecutors in the criminal trial against Chinese telecoms firm Huawei alleged that the company used lies, theft, cover-up, and a criminal conspiracy in its efforts to dominate the global telecommunications market.

A worker stands in the window of a Huawei store in a commercial area in Beijing on Nov. 5, 2024. Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

In opening remarks at a federal court in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on Sept. 9, Assistant U.S. Attorney Taylor Stout said that Huawei "engaged in a pattern of criminal activity to expand its business empire." He alleged that its two subsidiaries in the United States, Huawei Device USA and Futurewei Technologies, served as outposts to steal technology.

The trial covers 20 years of Huawei business activity in the United States and around the globe.

The prosecution said it will present evidence against Huawei in three categories: alleged theft of trade secrets from competitors, alleged bank and wire fraud in relation to efforts to skirt sanctions against Iran, and Huawei's alleged cover-up and efforts to block law enforcement from investigating its business activities.

A subsidiary of Huawei, Skycom, provided Iran's government with tools to spy on its own citizens, specifically during 2009 protests in Tehran, according to the U.S. government. Huawei employees falsely claimed that Skycom was not owned by Huawei.

Prosecutors allege that Huawei used confidentiality agreements, competitors' employees, and third parties to acquire trade secrets on technology for routers, storage, and wireless technology.

Huawei "cultivated a culture of crime and corruption," said Stout, such that employees who stole from competitors were just "following company practice." Stout alleged that an engineer who stole from New York state-based Quintel, which develops cellular antennae technology, received a bonus for the information obtained.

Huawei defense attorney Brian Heberlig portrayed Huawei as a global player serving underserved and remote communities. He said the government is relying on five incidents that happened over the course of 20 years.

Heberlig argued that the prosecution's witnesses are unreliable, as many were involved in civil litigation over commercial disputes with Huawei, including Cisco, T-Mobile, and Quintel. He also claimed that the government cherry-picked incidents to support racketeering charges but won't be able to prove a broad overarching conspiracy.

He challenged the government narrative that Huawei fostered a culture of stealing trade secrets, saying that when such activity was discovered, "Huawei acted appropriately in all three incidents," including by firing the employee caught taking pictures of a Fujitsu device at a conference.

Heberlig said that to prove a racketeering conspiracy, the government must prove that the "same people agreed to carry out the same criminal plan." He said the incidents cited by the government are isolated and insufficient to prove that there was some "blueprint for a criminal conspiracy."

The government also alleges that Huawei violated U.S. sanctions by involving the U.S. financial system in its business dealings with Iran and North Korea.

Heberlig contested prosecutors' narrative that Huawei knowingly violated U.S. sanctions, arguing that Huawei had no intention to violate U.S. laws but that the banks it was using in its business with Iran caused the funds to route through the U.S. financial system.

Prosecutors allege that Huawei misrepresented to banks its connection with Skycom, a subsidiary that was doing business with Iran, which prosecutors say received instructions to remove all Huawei logos from hardware sold to Iran.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 20:55

ICE Hits Legal Wall On Two Fronts As Denver Targets Polling-Place Enforcement And Appeals Court Curbs Detention Power

The Trump administration's immigration crackdown ran into two separate legal challenges Thursday, as Denver sued to keep armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents away from polling places while a federal appeals court rejected the government's attempt to subject millions of illegal immigrants already living inside the United States to mandatory detention without bond hearings.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents walk outside the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, California, on July 27, 2026. Blake Fagan/AFP via Getty Images

The disputes involve different statutes and different courts, but the underlying fight is increasingly the same: how far can the executive branch push immigration enforcement under existing federal law before judges conclude that Congress never gave it the authority being claimed?

On one front, Denver and several national advocacy groups filed suit in federal court in Washington seeking to stop ICE officers from carrying out immigration enforcement at voting locations ahead of November's midterm elections.

On the other, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that immigrants who have been living inside the United States for years - even if they originally entered illegally - cannot automatically be placed into mandatory detention under the provision the administration has been invoking.

Together, the cases put fresh judicial pressure on one of the administration's signature second-term policies.

Denver Takes ICE To Court Over The Polls

The City and County of Denver joined the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause and UnidosUS in challenging what the plaintiffs characterize as a federal policy permitting armed ICE officers to conduct enforcement operations at polling locations.

The lawsuit, filed Sept. 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, invokes a rarely litigated Civil War-era federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 592, that generally prohibits federal officials from bringing "troops or armed men" to places where elections are being conducted, except when needed to repel armed enemies of the United States.

The plaintiffs argue that even the prospect of armed immigration officers appearing at voting sites could deter voters, disrupt election workers and force municipalities to divert resources toward preparing for confrontations with federal agents. Denver officials are already training election personnel on how to identify federal agents, document encounters and de-escalate potential conflicts, according to the complaint.

The complaint also alleges that armed agents have already appeared at polling locations in San Antonio, Ventura County, California, and Syracuse, New York.

The lawsuit follows comments by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who said ICE would not patrol polling places but would not exclude them from normal enforcement activity.

Mullin said agents could enter a voting location if there were a security threat or if officers were serving a warrant on a person they had been tracking, while the administration's position is not that polling places are enforcement targets. It is that they are not automatically enforcement-free zones either.

DHS has similarly said ICE is not planning operations targeting polling sites, while maintaining that officers could make an arrest there if an active public-safety threat or targeted enforcement action required it.

That distinction is now headed for federal court - where the plaintiffs want a judge to declare the policy unlawful and prevent armed federal immigration officers from carrying out enforcement at polling locations and other places where votes are collected. The case arrives as election officials around the country prepare for a midterm season already saturated with litigation over voting rules, federal-state authority and election administration.

Fourth Circuit Rejects ICE Detention Theory

Hours away from the political fight over polling sites, the Fourth Circuit delivered a more immediate legal setback for the administration's detention policy.

In Lopez Garcia v. Guadian, a divided three-judge panel held that two immigrants who had lived in the United States for years could not be mandatorily detained without an opportunity to seek release on bond.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detain an illegal immigrant after a court hearing in Stamford, Conn., on July 3, 2025. John Moore/Getty Images

The dispute centers on two sections of federal immigration law.

The administration contends that immigrants who entered the country without being legally admitted remain "applicants for admission" under Section 1225 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and therefore can be detained without bond while removal proceedings play out. The detainees argued - and the Fourth Circuit majority agreed - that immigrants already established inside the United States instead fall under Section 1226, which generally allows for bond consideration.

Judge Nicole Berner, joined by Senior Judge Barbara Keenan, said the latter interpretation better fits the text, structure and historical application of the statute. The court noted that Section 1226 had for decades generally governed detention of noncitizens already inside the country, while Section 1225 had traditionally been associated with people seeking admission at the border. 

Berner warned that accepting the government's interpretation could expose millions of people to mandatory detention without bond and said such a reading would imply Congress quietly authorized an unprecedented expansion of immigration detention when it rewrote immigration law in 1996.

The majority eventually compared the implications to some of the darkest chapters of American detention policy, including the confinement of Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century and the internment of roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

The court ultimately affirmed habeas relief for Oscar Enrique Lopez Garcia and Juan Jose Rivera, ruling that both had to be given an opportunity to argue for release at a bond hearing.

The Dissent: Congress Meant What It Wrote

Judge Allison Jones Rushing rejected the majority's reasoning - with her dissent focusing heavily on the wording Congress adopted in its sweeping 1996 immigration overhaul. Earlier immigration laws explicitly referred to "arriving" immigrants, ports of arrival and people attempting to enter the country. Congress removed much of that language in 1996 and instead defined a broader category of "applicants for admission."

If Congress intended mandatory detention to remain limited to people physically arriving at the border, she argued, lawmakers could simply have retained the older language. Instead, Congress deliberately adopted terminology broad enough to include people physically present in the United States who had never been lawfully admitted. The statute treats anyone present without admission as an applicant for admission, and an applicant is by definition seeking admission, she wrote. "It's that simple."

The majority, she added, "clearly has strong views about what it considers the 'moral implications'" of denying bond, but those views do not rewrite the text.

That statutory disagreement is no longer confined to one court - meanwhile, the Fourth Circuit has now joined the First, Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits on the side of bond eligibility for immigrants already living inside the country.

The Fifth and Eighth Circuits have taken the opposite view, concluding that the government's mandatory-detention interpretation is consistent with the statute.

That 9-2 split puts the issue squarely in territory the Supreme Court often steps in to resolve.

ICE's Next Battle May Be At The Supreme Court

The two developments illustrate the rapidly expanding legal front surrounding the administration's immigration agenda. Denver's lawsuit asks whether federal immigration officers can carry their normal enforcement authority into one of the most legally protected environments in American civic life: the polling place.

The Fourth Circuit case asks a different but potentially far larger question - whether the government can automatically detain broad categories of immigrants already living in the country without first giving them access to a bond hearing.

DHS maintains that the administration is enforcing immigration law as Congress wrote it. The Fourth Circuit majority says the government is attempting to extract sweeping detention powers from statutory language that does not clearly provide them.

And Denver is effectively making the same structural argument from another direction: whatever authority ICE may have to execute immigration law, Congress imposed special limits around elections. So while the administration continues expanding immigration enforcement on the ground, the courts are increasingly being asked to define the perimeter.

For ICE, that means the next phase of the immigration fight may be determined less by how many agents Washington deploys - and more by how the Supreme Court ultimately reads statutes Congress wrote decades ago.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 20:30

Leopold Is Back: Situational Awareness Rerunning Exact Same Trades Which Blew It Up A Month Ago

A few days ago before it became public knowledge that the hilariously misnamed "hedge" fund Situational Awareness, run by a 24-year-old German ultra liberal who was fired by OpenAI, and then launched a new career investing like the most degenerate Korean momentum chaser blew up in explosive supernova fashion as a result of massive leverage in a handful of high beta momentum stocks like Sandisk, AMD and Bloom Energy, we warned that someone was blowing up - as indicated by the surge in Total Return Swap funding rates - and told our followers as much one week before the Leopold Aschenbrenner news hit.

ok Archegos 2.0... you can come out now https://t.co/xtxZL8wNTZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 24, 2026

We just didn't know who it was... 

Fast forward a little over a month when earlier this week we pointed out that in a very bizarre case of deja vu, it was as if Leopold had emerged from the career grave and was rerunning his entire high beta momo - with massive leverage - playbook. 

Specifically, in "What's Behind The Market's Sullen Vibe, And What Comes Next" we said that the market appeared to *lean forward*  last Friday and again on Tuesday's post-Labor Day holiday reopening, when as Nomura's Charlie McElligott pointed out, the market saw a string of large Flex Calls trade in many of those same "Concentrated AI"-names which were unwound during the Summer calamity, where the Nomura desk saw this "mystery buyer" spending $315 million of total Options Premium, $1.1B of Delta and $5.8mm of Vega on the buys.

McElligott went on, noting that the “Return of the mystery AI / Tech Vol Buyer” was feeding back into the same “Spot Up, Vol Up” / “Positive Spot / Vol Correlation” dynamic in these single-names that defined much of the pre-July market action, which after the recent single-stock Tech Vol bludgeoning was now acting as a much-needed positive PnL driver for Vol Dispersion (Short Correlation) trades again locally. McElligott listed some examples of this rampant tech vol buying observed in the Friday/Tuesday period, from the Nomura desk:

AMD (+10.9% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 5k Jan 540.01 Calls x $37.42 = $18.7M , $100M delta, $560k vega
• Tue: 3.7k Jan 580.01 Calls for $47.50 = 17.5M, $93M delta, $515k vega

BE (+17.5% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 5k Jan 250.01 Calls for $53.50 = $26.7M , $80M delta, $300k vega.
• Tue: 4k Jan 310.01 Calls for $53.75 = $21.5M, $60M delta, $265k vega

CRWV (+18% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 19k Jan 105.01 Calls for $11.03 = $21M , $80M delta, $400k vega
• Tue: 15k Jan 115.01 calls for 14.88 = 22.3M, $80MM of delta, $370k vega

DRAM (+8.9% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 30k Jan 65.01 Calls for $7.1 = $21.5M , $90M delta, $430k vega
• Tue: 29k Jan 70.01Calls for $7.30 = $21.2M, $83M delta, $425k vega

INTC (+14% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 22k Jan 105.01 Calls for $11.52 = $25.3M , $105M delta, $500k vega
• Tue: 15k Jan 115.01 Calls for $14.88 = $22.3M $80M delta, $370k vega

SKHY (+13.4% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 10k Jan 190.01 Calls for  $22.85 = $22.85M, $92M delta, $420k vega
• Tue: 6.5k Jan 210.01Calls for $24.60 = $16M, $56M delta, $290k vega

SNDK (+11.8% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 1250 Jan 2040.01 Calls x $230 = $28M of prem, $103M delta, $520k vega
• Tue: 1250 Jan 2200.01 Calls x $231 = $29M of prem, $95M delta, $520k vega

In short: all massively out of the money calls meant to trigger momentum ignition by starting a gamma squeeze, and all in danger of blowing up spectacularly - again - once the momentum flips

Upon reading this, our first thought - of course - was that Leopold had somehow come back from the trading dead, and that someone Prime Broker was allowing him to put on massive leverage yet again, knowing perfectly well how it ended up last time around .. but then we quickly ignored that because if true, it would mean that not only was the 24-year-old rerunning the exact same trade he had put on and which ended in tens of billions in losses for his investors in July, but that he was actively telegraphing to the entire world that he was back by putting on trades that intentionally moved the underlying prices and attracting attention to themselves - thus putting a very clear and palpable bullseye on his back, daring the entire market to stop him out... again.

Surely, he couldn't be that stupid, could he? 

It turns out he was. 

Two days after we first pointed out the bizarre activity in Flex Calls, today the FT reported that Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund Situational Awareness "has started building relationships with new brokerages as it attempts a rebound from the largest loss in the history of the hedge fund industry."

Not only has it started "rebuilding relationships" (more on that in a second), it has started trading: 

"Now, Aschenbrenner is rebuilding large trading positions in technology stocks such as semiconductor manufacturers AMD, Intel, SK Hynix and Sandisk and AI start-ups including CoreWeave, according to people familiar with the matter. His efforts have been bolstered by new relationships on Wall Street like with Clear Street." 

So all the same names that he blew up on the first time, he is going in for round two.

As for how young master Leopold is planing on handing his now wife another imploded hedge fund sujpernova (if not quite galaxy), why here too we find more of the same: only instead of Total Return Swaps courtesy of Goldman, this time Leopold was going all in using deep out of the money leverage in the form of the abovementioned "flex calls", to wit:

Situational Awareness in recent days has placed large new bets using so-called “flex options”, according to people familiar with the matter. Using fully-paid options reduces the risks a fund takes on because it can only lose the money it has already paid to open the trade and nothing more. 

These specialised options trades, which allow traders to customise the terms of the contract, can only be made through large brokerages.

Right... the same brokerages that were his counterparts on the TRS trades and who decided one day to gang up on him and destroy him on that one beautiful late July morning. Those same brokerages are now his option counterparts, and somehow the outcome is supposed to be different. 

Ok, fine, but the Unawareness fund would surely need some prime broker to vouch for him and hand him the leverage Leopold needed for his 2nd attempt at ramping memory/momentum names. This would be challenging since after July, he was now radioactive on Wall Street where every broker who had worked with him was now being probed by the DOJ.

So where do you go when even JT Marlin, sorry, your former Prime Broker JPMorgan, tells you to fuck off? 

Why you go deep off the grid... to a name nobody has ever heard of: "the investor has recently begun working with specialist brokerage Clear Street, according to people familiar with the matter, as he begins rebuilding a portfolio of aggressive bets on technology companies."

That's the FT's take, and it is dead wrong, because if what Leopold wanted to do was just "rebuild his portfolio" he could certainly do that in quiet fashion - the way most traders do when they hope to accumulate a position without tipping off everyone else - where nobody would have any idea it was him. He did not want to do that.

Instead what he clearly intended to do was bring as much attention to his trades as possible, in hopes of making it clear to the market he was once again rerunning the same doomed play that nearly ended his career a month ago. In short, he is hoping that once it becomes clear he is back, his "followers" will follow him into triggering an other "meme stonk" gamma squeeze, one which allows Leopold to then dump everything to his witless followers. 

Only it won't work, because once again the "Nostradamus of AI" finds himself stuck in extremely illiquid names, and what's worse, instead of sharing risk exposure with his TRS counterparts, this time it is only his P&L that will blow up when his brokers rug pull him, which they will very soon now that it is again clear he is trying to squeeze them all, while the SEC is sniffing around. 

Which is why the only question we have is how to bet - in the cheapest possible way - on the second collapse of Situational Awareness in the coming days (especially now that DeepSeek is making a mockery of the massively overpriced memory space) a trade which even Leopold would profit from, as he prepares to hand his hedge fund over to Ken Griffin for the second time.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 20:10

Lock And [Re-]Loaded: Third Circuit Greenlights Major Challenge To New Jersey Gun Liability Law

Authored by Jonathan Turley via JonathanTurley.org,

Some of us have been closely following challenges to A1765, New Jersey's gun industry liability law. In my view, the law is facially invalid and preempted under federal law, and we may now find out after the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit greenlit a challenge from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) yesterday. The court found that the NSSF has standing to bring the lawsuit, which could reach the United States Supreme Court.

In 2022, New Jersey enacted A1765 to expose "gun industry members" - gun sellers, manufacturers, distributors, importers, and marketers - to lawsuits as a "public nuisance." This is a common effort among blue states to circumvent Second Amendment cases that reinforce the right to bear arms.

These laws are designed to achieve indirectly what the Court denied directly to the states: to effectively suppress the availability of guns. Indeed, the law effectively requires manufacturers to self-regulate after the state was prevented from direct regulations, mandating that these companies "shall establish, implement, and enforce reasonable controls regarding its manufacture, sale, distribution, importing, and marketing of gun-related products." Id. § 2C:58-35(a)(2).

The problem is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act ("PLCAA") which was passed to "prohibit causes of action against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and importers of firearms or ammunition products, and their trade associations, for the harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearm products or ammunition products by others when the product functioned as designed and intended." 15 U.S.C. § 7901(b)(1).

PLCAA does have exceptions, including negligence per se. Id. § 7903(5)(A)(ii). The predicate exception requires proof that the manufacturer or seller "knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product," and that "the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought." Id. § 7903(5)(A)(iii).

However, in Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 605 U.S. 280, 299 (2025), the Supreme Court stressed that this exception applies only to those cases where the "plaintiff makes a plausible allegation that a gun manufacturer participated in a firearms violation as in something that it wished to bring about and sought to make succeed." Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 605 U.S. 280, 299 (2025) (citation modified).

In the case, the Government of Mexico sued seven American gun manufacturers, alleging that the companies aided and abetted unlawful gun sales that routed firearms to Mexican drug cartels under the predicate exception. It argued that the companies failed to exercise "reasonable care" to prevent trafficking of their guns into Mexico, and so are responsible for the harms arising there from the weapons' misuse as "willful accessories." As some of us predicted, it failed spectacularly in a unanimous decision.

Nuisance is not negligence per se, and gun control advocates have tried to use product liability and nuisance laws to curtail gun sales for years as an alternative to legislative gun bans, which would be struck down. (There are a couple of gun ban cases going before the Court this term).

As previously discussed, public nuisance was originally addressed in England by criminal laws against such offenses as obstructing "the King's highways." It evolved into a common-law tort to address a broader range of "interests of the community at large - interests that were recognized as rights of the general public entitled to protection," in the words of the American Law Institute's Second Restatement of Torts (1965-79).

Those cases collapsed, and rightly so. In Chicago v. Beretta U.S.A. (2004), the Illinois Supreme Court rejected the claim while acknowledging that "the tragic personal consequences of gun violence are inestimable." The court found no interference with a legal public right. It held that such theories "would permit nuisance liability to be imposed on an endless list of manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of manufactured products." The opioid claims are similar. Neither product was defective; both worked - all too well in some cases. The claims were based on third parties' illegal or harmful use.

The same result appeared in nuisance claims involving lead paint. In State v. Lead Industries Association (2008), the Rhode Island Supreme Court rejected an effort to use nuisance as a substitute for product liability. The court recognized the huge toll from the product while insisting that if it is defective, that should be addressed by product liability: "Our hearts go out to those children whose lives forever have been changed by the poisonous presence of lead. But, however grave the problem of lead poisoning is in Rhode Island, public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm."

Consideration of the merits of the challenge in this case, however, was stymied by that state challenging standing. First filed in February 2025, the lawsuit was dismissed because it was filed before the law was enforced against any industry member companies. The state, under New Jersey's then-AG Matthew Platkin, sued several industry members, including GLOCK, Inc. NSSF promptly moved to reopen its lawsuit against New Jersey's gun control law.

The Third Circuit held, "NSSF's members' intended actions are arguably precluded by A1765 and affected with constitutional interests. NSSF argues A1765 enforcement actions against its members for otherwise lawful commerce would be an attempt to 'hold [its members] liable for the acts of third parties who use their legal products to commit heinous crimes.'"

Unless the standing decision is reversed, New Jersey will now face review (and a possible reckoning) over its latest effort to use civil liability as an alternative avenue for gun control.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution."

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 20:05

Trump: If I Had To Do Iran Again I Would Do Exactly As I Did

An interesting moment from Thursday night's Lara Ingraham exclusive with President Trump...

Q: Any regrets about Iran?

Trump: I don't believe in the word "regret."

Q: Any regrets about Iran?

Trump: I don't believe in the word "regret."pic.twitter.com/cia03v2rvz

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 11, 2026

Trump even commented to Ingraham that he would make the same decisions all over again if he had a chance.

The Fox show host had posed to the president, "If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now" - and made reference to high gas prices.

Trump replied: "supposing we were cruising, and all of a sudden Iran has a nuclear weapon. They would use it."

Explaining that he doesn't believe in "regrets" and that he has none especially about launching the Iran war, Trump asserted: "If I had it to do again, I would do exactly what I did."

He further argued that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, its leaders wouldn't hesitate to "wipe out" Israel and the Middle East, and could go so far as to hit American cities.

In a separate brief interview with the press this week, President Trump was asked about reports that Vice President Vance and Secretary State Marco Rubio warned him of the possibility that the Iran conflict could persist for the remainder of his term...

Reporter: Is it possible that the Iran war will last the rest of your term?

Trump: No. There’s not even a chance of that. pic.twitter.com/lUwxW9iiOL

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 11, 2026

Trump vehemently denied that there's so much as a chance of this, but didn't actually explain how he intends to wind down the war in a way favorable to the US and White House policy. Or in other words, the American public still awaits words on a realistic exit strategy.

On going into Iran "full" - Trump did underscore that the midterm elections makes this a bad idea. His administration has also repeatedly said there won't be boots on the ground in Iran.

Was this a quiet part out loud moment?

Ingraham: "Even the neoconservatives are saying, 'If you'ge going to go in [to Iran] just go in full.'"

Trump: "Well, maybe I don't do that because of the election." pic.twitter.com/ZEXtZv1jsI

— J (@jasonllevin) September 10, 2026

Among the most interesting parts of the interview came when he was asked about the young men in MAGA who are angry over the Iran war:

Q: What do you say to all the young men who supported you in 2024?

Trump: They still do.

Q: Some of them are demoralized.

Trump: I don't think they're demoralized. I think they're very proud of the fact I'm not letting Iran have a nuclear weapon.

President Trump, when asked about the millions of demoralized young men who voted for him in 2024: “I don't think they're demoralized. I think they're very proud of the fact I'm not letting Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/e0YEsKYfXA

— AF Post (@AFpost) September 11, 2026

Trump earlier this week insisted of Iran's position in the conflict, "I don’t know that they’re gonna be able to hold out," Trump said. “But it’ll get settled after the elections. Or maybe sooner. But it’ll get settled right after the election."

The reference to it'll "get settled" could have ominous meaning. It suggests Trump could ether escalate against Tehran dramatically, or else there could be the opposite: de-escalation. The world will find out within a couple months.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 19:40

Navy Evaluating Future At Key Middle East Base Following Iran War Damage: Acting Secretary

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Navy is evaluating what to do with its headquarters in the Middle East after the Bahrain-based installation sustained damage during recent months of fighting with Iran.

Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following strikes by the United States and Israel against Iran, in Manama, Bahrain, February 28, 2026. REUTERS/Stringer

For years, the Navy has managed its Middle East fleet operations out of Naval Support Activity Bahrain. Iranian forces began targeting the base after U.S. and Israeli forces launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28.

"They blew the hell out of Bahrain," acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Sept. 9, as he concluded a visit to a shipyard in Philadelphia.

While open-source imagery had previously indicated the Bahrain naval base sustained damage, Cao's comment marked a direct and official acknowledgement of the ongoing conflict's impact on the facility.

Last month, following reports that the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln were facing strains after months supporting combat operations in the Middle East, the Navy told The Epoch Times that combat actions had disrupted traditional supply hubs in the region. Despite these disruptions, the service said the Lincoln's crew maintained continuous access to clean water, healthy meal options, and functional air conditioning.

At a Navy town hall event on Aug. 31, a sailor who had been displaced from NSA Bahrain asked Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle whether she would see the return of personal belongings she left on the base. Caudle said the service was working on a plan to reunite personnel with their belongings but said the service doesn't plan to return to the base "anytime soon."

When asked whether the Navy would need to repair NSA Bahrain in order to sustain its forces in the region, Cao said, "I have a task force that's looking at that."

The Iran conflict has fueled discussion over the continued utility of U.S. military outposts in the region.

Jim Webb, a U.S. Marine infantry veteran and independent national security consultant, said Cao's latest comments suggest that the current U.S. force posture in the Middle East "is unsustainable without continuing to be under attack."

"I don't think there's any way, you know, in the short, medium, or potentially even long term, that we can adequately defend a place like NSA Bahrain, or let alone the rest of the logistics bases there," Webb told The Epoch Times.

Webb said keeping U.S. troops at bases in the region makes those troops "constant targets."

In an interview with The Cipher Brief last month, retired Army Gen. David Petraeus similarly said the current U.S. military outposts in the region "are no longer viable."

Petraeus previously led the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

As he discussed the Iran conflict with The Cipher Brief, Petraeus said the current commander for U.S. forces in the region, Adm. Brad Cooper, has largely overseen recent combat operations from a distance, rather than from CENTCOM's forward headquarters at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

"This is a result of the Iranians having capabilities they didn't have before, in terms of the numbers of drones and the numbers of missiles with the range required to hold our facilities at risk and to strike them and to kill our soldiers and wound them," Petraeus said.

Throughout the Iran conflict, U.S. forces have worked to reduce Iranian drones and missile launchers, and destroy storage and production facilities for those weapons. Still, U.S. forces have had to contend with these threats in recent clashes.

In the past week, U.S. forces reported striking 10 Iran-linked tankers in retaliation for Iranian missile attacks targeting U.S. warships.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 19:15

Trump Lays Out Republicans' Post-Midterms Agenda At Dallas Convention

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump on Thursday evening addressed a crowd in Dallas, touting his administration's achievements on the closing night of the two-day midterm convention and asking voters to back Republican candidates in the upcoming elections.

"I'm seeing spirit like we haven't seen in this country for a long time, long time," Trump said.

"But it came back about a year and a half ago. We went through four years of embarrassment, hurt, harm, sickness, filth was bad, but now it's good, and it's going to soon be greater than ever before, better than ever before."

Trump laid out a flurry of proposals that he said Republicans would pursue in the coming two years.

First, Trump said that Republicans would make most-favored nation prescription drug discounts "permanent in law."

He also mentioned the "No Invasion of Our Country Act," a proposed bill from the president to make it illegal for future presidents to "open the border again."

"We don't want any more invasions of our country," Trump said.

He also mentioned the related Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require most Americans to present documented proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

Trump also vowed that with the help of Vice President JD Vance, "we will win the war on fraud," and reiterated his past calls to end cash bail.

The speech is the capstone to a two-day meeting of Republicans in Dallas for their party's first-ever midterm convention, with Trump placed at the center of what has been dubbed a "Trump-a-Palooza" by Republican organizers.

A flurry of key Republican-aligned policymakers, candidates, social media personalities, and political organizations have descended on the Texas metropolis, with a litany of additional events, candidate speeches, and organization activities also taking place across Dallas.

During the speech, Trump highlighted stock market gains under his second term, his administration's efforts to lower drug prices, decreases in immigration, and other topics.

"Less than two years ago, the American people gave us a mandate to save America, and in 19 months, I've delivered on every single promise I made, and I think I delivered on far more," he said.

Trump delivered his speech on Thursday shortly after Vice President JD Vance addressed the convention.

The president told the crowd near the beginning that he intended to speak less than he had the previous night, when he addressed the convention for more than two hours.

During that earlier speech, Trump described his second term as "the greatest two years in the history of the presidency," urging voters to support Republicans in the upcoming elections.

Trump also promised voters a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen if Republicans keep control of the Senate and House this November. Previously, the president had floated a $2,000 check stemming from tariff dividends.

After his administration faced questions about how it will actually carry out the proposal, Trump reiterated the promise during the second night.

"If we win the midterms, we will ... provide a let's call it Trump dividend: $5,000 for every adult citizen in our country," he said.

Speaking to The Epoch Times at the convention ahead of Trump's speech, Republican attendees criticized Democrats for what they called the democratic socialist pitch of "free things."

Sisters Beth Mills of Shawnee, Oklahoma, and Colleen Robishaw of Arlington, Texas, told The Epoch Times that Republicans should tell people that nothing is free: Higher taxes would be needed to pay for free programs, and the government would exert more control over people's lives.

"I think you need to look at the cost, the overall cost of what free things are. It was never free," Mills said.

Nationwide, Republicans are facing difficult polling numbers across a variety of races.

Trump sits at 39.6 percent approval on RealClearPolling, compared with 57.1 percent who say they disapprove.

Following a handful of victories for candidates from the Democrats' rising democratic socialist wing in largely blue-district races, Republicans have criticized the party as shifting too far left for the average American.

According to polling by Pew Research in July, Americans' top concern at present is the economy, and by a wide margin. That poll found that economic issues were the driving political force this cycle for 29 percent of Americans.

Trump has described affordability, a key plank of his 2024 presidential campaign, as a "Democrat hoax."

The president doubled down on this position during his remarks on the convention's first night, calling affordability a "fake" issue, saying "I'm bringing the prices way down."

The most recent Consumer Price Index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that annual inflation in the U.S. currently sits at 3.4 percent for all items. That includes a roughly 25 percent increase in the cost of gasoline over the past year - especially after the Iran conflict started in late February and disrupted the global oil supply chain - while inflation on food items sits around 3 percent.

Some voters, meanwhile, told The Epoch Times that they don't understand the fuss about affordability.

"It's funny with the economy because, like, you know, under [President Joe] Biden it really wasn't even talked about at all, and then Trump gets [in], and all of a sudden everyone's talking about affordability," convention attendee Rodney Stokes of Fort Worth, Texas, told The Epoch Times.

The second key motivating issue for Americans, according to Pew Research, is government ethics and reform, with 9 percent labeling this a top priority.

Meanwhile, 7 percent of Americans described immigration as a top issue for them. Healthcare, foreign policy, and Trump each polled at around 5 percent.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 18:25

Fifth Circuit Questions Louisiana's Standing In Mifepristone Case

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

A federal appeals court on Sept. 9 questioned whether Louisiana, which has a near-total ban on abortion, has standing to force a nationwide return of in-person dispensing for abortion drug mifepristone, which patients can now obtain by telehealth and mail.

Mifepristone tablets are displayed at a family planning clinic in Rockville, Md., on April 13, 2023. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

A medication abortion generally involves mifepristone, which blocks the hormone progesterone, and misoprostol, which induces contractions.

Louisiana says mifepristone can cause heavy bleeding and, in rare cases, life-threatening infection, and that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should bring back the pre-2023 rule requiring the drug to be dispensed in person at a clinic, office, or hospital. The state argues the Biden-era change, which allows a certified prescriber to order the pills by telehealth services and a pharmacy to mail them, skipped an adequate safety review and undercuts Louisiana's abortion ban.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily blocked the rule in May, but later that month the Supreme Court lifted that order, allowing the drug to continue to be dispensed through the mail.

The FDA, now under President Donald Trump, is currently reviewing safety claims about the drug.

If the state ultimately wins its ongoing lawsuit against the FDA to reinstate the requirement for in-person dispensing, demand for medication abortions, which now account for most abortions in the United States, could drop. This is because patients who currently obtain the medication through the mail without visiting a doctor would have to do more legwork to obtain it.

Louisiana has been challenging so-called shield laws in places such as California and New York that protect healthcare providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions. Louisiana has indicted out-of-state doctors for prescribing mifepristone to Louisiana residents.

But mifepristone continues to find its way into Louisiana.

Louisiana Solicitor General Ben Aguinaga told a newly constituted three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit on Sept. 9 that the FDA rule undermines abortion bans enacted by his state and others after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That 2022 ruling held there was no constitutional right to abortion and returned regulation of the practice to the states.

"There's no dispute that Louisiana is experiencing 1,000 abortions a month due to mifepristone mailed into the state," Aguinaga said.

U.S. Circuit Judges Stephen Higginson and Dana Douglas asked whether the state had legal standing, or a close enough connection to the legal controversy, to sue over the FDA decision, saying Louisiana could not show that abortions taking place in the state were related to the 2023 rule.

"There are too many independent actors to say that actually the government's assessment of safety is what's causing your 1,000 abortions a month," Higginson said.

Daniel Winik, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, said the FDA's review is still in progress.

"The whole point of our position in this case is that it's the FDA's job in the ongoing consideration of mifepristone to address all these issues," Winik said.

U.S. Circuit Judge Priscilla Richman asked how many complications "would not have occurred had the woman seen a physician in person."

Attorneys for mifepristone makers GenBioPro and Danco have said the drug is safe and that the FDA appropriately considered the drug's risks when making its decision in 2023.

"The FDA's decision was richly supported," GenBioPro lawyer John Elwood told the panel.

It is unclear when the panel will rule.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 18:05

UAE Moves To 'War-Proof' Data Centers After Iranian Retaliatory Strikes

Via The Cradle

The UAE is redrawing its plans for a five-gigawatt artificial intelligence (AI) data center project, one of the largest anywhere outside the US, after Iranian retaliatory strikes on infrastructure across the Gulf forced the Emirates to rethink how and where critical facilities are built, Reuters reported on Friday. 

Speaking in anonymity, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters that Emirati authorities began reassessing where and how sensitive facilities should be built once the war reached the Gulf. 

Four of those sources said the campus, first designed as a single 26-square-kilometer site in Abu Dhabi, is now expected to take shape as several data centers distributed across the country. 

Authorities are weighing ways to shield the facilities from drone and missile strikes, the sources said, including installing air defenses and putting some of the centers underground.

Sources also said interceptors and electronic jamming equipment are being written into the redesign, with blast-resistant concrete and additional backup power and cooling systems also under consideration, and with the most sensitive material, including military data, possibly housed inside mountains. 

Iran began striking Gulf states hosting US forces with missiles and drones in response to US and Israeli airstrikes on Iranian territory. Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain were damaged in March, and the company's regional cloud services remain disrupted.

In April, the Iranian armed forces released a video naming Stargate UAE, the $30 billion, one-gigawatt first phase of the campus, as a potential target for retaliatory strikes, showing a map of the site alongside the caption “Nothing stays hidden from our sight.”

Stargate UAE is shaping up to be the fastest AI data center buildout in the world with 5GW of total planned capacity. pic.twitter.com/tXsFxfJgTb

— Shay Boloor (@StockSavvyShay) February 13, 2026

Daniel Benaim, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state for Arabian Peninsula affairs, called the war an “economic earthquake” for Gulf states that had spent years selling themselves as safe havens, adding that hardening critical infrastructure was now vitally necessary.

Data centers have moved from commercial facilities into the category of critical infrastructure, processing financial flows, sustaining public services, and feeding into military communications and intelligence work. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 17:25

Oprah Audience Calls For 'Same Passion' For Black Child-Killers As For Lindsay Clancy

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Oprah Winfrey flew into Massachusetts to host a "watershed" conversation about Lindsay Clancy.

What the cameras captured was not a sombre conversation regarding her three dead children. It was a room brainwashed into treating a child-killer as a ideological cause - and then demand the same energy for black women who have murdered their kids.

Yes really. The takeaway from this particular creepy corner of culture is no longer "killing your children is unthinkable." Rather, it is "lets make sure we support child killers of color just as much as white child killers."

As we now know, Clancy strangled her three children - 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan - with exercise bands in the family basement on January 24, 2023, then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She has never denied the killings. Her defense argued postpartum psychosis and a lack of criminal responsibility. Prosecutors said the acts were planned. After 21 days of testimony and more than 80 witnesses, the jury hung. A mistrial was declared in early September.

Days later Oprah's podcast put the case on a soundstage with medical experts, legal voices, a former colleague who testified at trial, and women describing their own postpartum breakdowns. Official branding called it "Understanding Postpartum Psychosis." The clip that detonated online was something else entirely.

A doctor in the room told the audience she wanted the same passion for women "who don't look like Lindsay."

Okaaaaaay. "Passion"?

"I want us to have the same passion for people who don't look like Lindsay, who don't have her same access... who don't have her same access and education, her melanin, her privilege," she said.

Right, you can see where this is going.

"There are women of color sitting around this country in prisons for this same thing that we've never heard of. And I just want to remind us to have the pink shirts and the energy for them as well."

The room cheered.

Room full of women on the Oprah show starts cheering after a doctor says that black female child murderers need to be supported too, not just the white child murderers like Lindsay Clancy.

"I want us to have the same passion for [female child murderers] who don't look like... pic.twitter.com/VbaQfq9BYi

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 10, 2026

What the actual fuck is this? It's demented.

The moral argument slid, in one breath, from mental-health treatment to racial bookkeeping for filicide. Not "stop this." Not "the children come first." The demand was representation - pink shirts and energy for other mothers who killed their kids.

Once the killer is recast as the victim, the next move is to complain that some victims of this new compassion have the wrong skin tone.

AND OF COURSE they're trying to make child murder"more racially inclusive" now.

Throw this whole timeline into the Sun. It needs to be purged https://t.co/HSyi8sr3df

— TrippyLiberty (@TrippyLiberty) September 11, 2026

Let's be equally empathetic to black mothers who kill their babies. pic.twitter.com/YuJD0h7AIu

— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) September 11, 2026

If you tried to write the darkest possible parody of this movement, I don't think you could do much better than "it's important to support child-stranglers of color" https://t.co/S0a48D8gLi

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) September 11, 2026

There was a break in the madness. A young woman stood up and said the sentence the rest of the room had spent an hour avoiding.

"I do believe she's a murderer..."

Oprah answered: "After all you've heard today?"

Oprah Brought together a bunch of crazy ass women to normalize what Lindsay Clancy did...

One young woman wasn't buying it, and stood up amongst the crowd, and she brought the entire room to silence.

Girl
"I do believe she's a murderer..."

Oprah:
"After all you've heard today?"... pic.twitter.com/Qu0n3gmEzH

— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) September 10, 2026

Belief that a mother who strangled three small children is a murderer was treated as a failure to absorb the program. The safe answer in that room was not the names Cora, Dawson and Callan. It was the sermon: hormones, sleep, the medical system, "access," "melanin," "privilege."

Mothers are supposed to be the safest place for children. That used to be the one thing that did not require a panel debate.

The rest of the taping ran on the same track: identification with Clancy, regardless of the murdered children.

One woman described hearing a man's voice whispering in her ear to drown her baby. The camera found tears on cue.

In an effort to sympathize with Lindsay Clancy, woman who says she had postpartum depression says she heard the voice of a man whispering in her ear to drown her baby.

Make sure you watch the woman at the end of the clip crying just in time for the camera.... https://t.co/QVZFCIgboX pic.twitter.com/zyP37MxXqw

— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) September 10, 2026

Another told Oprah she sat in her son's bedroom and saw his toys as weapons. She played out strangling him in her mind. When Clancy's case hit the news, she said she recognized the same intrusive thoughts. "The reason my story ended differently is because who my husband is," she stated.

Oprah told her she had "a lot of courage."

Oprah:
You have a lot of courage.

Woman:
Before I was hospitalized— I sat in my son's bedroom and I saw all of their toys as weapons. I played out in my mind me strangling my son.

And when I saw that play out in real life with Lindsay Clancy, I said this is a lady who had the... https://t.co/hj2Mwcj2l7 pic.twitter.com/Fk6UJPGwyK

— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) September 10, 2026

A third guest said she began hearing voices telling her that her daughter was the second coming of Christ and that she wanted to rewrite the Bible. She said she improved after 17 days in a hospital. The point of the story, in that room, was kinship with Clancy.

This woman tells Oprah she sympathizes with Lindsay Clancy because she started hearing voices telling her that her daughter was the second coming of Christ and she wanted to rewrite the Bible... and she got better after being hospitalized for 17 days https://t.co/WLp1iQywHI pic.twitter.com/vVuNyDhc9y

— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) September 10, 2026

An 'expert' then offered "Society expects women to be perfect. So what are we supposed to do? This bliss-myth of what it is to be a mother is so society engrained, it's very hard to ask for help."

Expert defends Lindsay Clancy:

"Society expects women to be perfect. So what are we supposed to do?

This bliss-myth of what it is to be a mother is so society engrained, it's very hard to ask for help."https://t.co/vLSGQY6H5D https://t.co/O2AEX3tRwN pic.twitter.com/AFNp7yPwfQ

— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) September 10, 2026

Most mothers have been exhausted. Most mothers have not treated their children as a problem to be solved with an exercise band.

Ladies... I'm listening to this thing Oprah hosted and it is absolutely scary insane to me— the common theme they're trying to push is that hormones and sleep deprecation is a justifiable reason for women to murder their children.

Most of you have had kids. Did you ever once... https://t.co/QVZFCIgboX

— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) September 10, 2026

The pink-shirt movement formed outside Plymouth Superior Court. In mid-August, hundreds of women in pink treated Clancy's van like a homecoming. Organizer Renee Kimball said, "I think that every one of us women believe that it could be any one of us." She added that women who have dealt with anxiety, depression and postpartum "just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair."

Days earlier the same scene was already apparent online: TikTok mothers filming themselves relating to a confessed child-killer while holding their own babies, a GoFundMe for Clancy's parents swelling toward seven figures, and comment threads that talked more about her treatment than about the murdered kids.

Bill Maher, no MAGA activist, asked the question the pink crowd still will not. "What I don't get is why does she have fans?" He compared the courthouse scene to the folk-hero treatment of Luigi Mangione. He could grant that postpartum illness is real. He could not explain the merch, the cheers, or the need for a fandom.

Joe Rogan was less delicate. "If those ladies could see the crime scene and see those dead kids with their vacant eyes staring up because their mother took their life, the last thing that they saw was their mother standing over them, choking them to death, I don't think they would feel so bad." He added that if she walks, "her supporters should have to let her babysit."

Prosecutors in Frankfort, Illinois, say Corie Walsh hanged her 2-year-old son, Barrett, from a basement rafter, then tried to kill herself. She told police the boy was the "devil" and the "anti-Christ." Witnesses said she had become "very invested" in the Clancy trial and was still texting friends about it hours before the child was found.

Meanwhile the living victim of the original crime - Patrick Clancy, the father who came home to three dead children - has been hunted online by the same ecosystem. His attorney, Howard Cooper, said Patrick and his family have been "subjected to a relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign" from "minor celebrities, so-called influencers and outright conspiracy theorists." Cooper's demand was simple: "Enough is enough - this spread of blatant and baseless falsehoods must stop."

Lindsay confessed. Nobody in the courtroom argued Patrick did it. The pink movement needed a villain who was not the woman with the bands in her hands, so they invented one.

Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz has said "This case has always been about those three children. We are here today because they are not."

Latarsha Sanders was convicted in 2022 in the same county, before the same judge, of stabbing her sons Edson, 8, and La'son, 5, in their Brockton apartment in 2018. Prosecutors said the boys were found in bed after being stabbed roughly 100 times between them. Sanders received two mandatory life terms.

Erin Merdy of Brooklyn pleaded guilty this year to drowning her three children - Zachary, 7, Liliana, 4, and 3-month-old Oliver - in the ocean near Coney Island in 2022. Relatives had said she may have been struggling with postpartum depression. A judge sentenced her to 20 years to life. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said, "No sentence can fully measure the loss of a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a three-month-old baby, or the grief their loved ones will carry forever."

None of this requires a studio audience to cheer a racial audit of child murder.

A movement that cannot say "do not kill your children" without attaching a demographic rider has abandoned all morality.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 17:24

Is An Elite 'Clash Of The Titans' Looming?

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

Light and Dark

"It's astonishing that anything exists."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is this a week to drain our souls, or what? Yesterday, the memory of Charlie Kirk, a decent young man known for acting nobly in an ignoble era, cut down (it is alleged in court) by a pathetic product of Woke cultism - the trans avenging angel, avatar of our national mental illness. And today, the memory of 9/11, for which no alt-theory or engineering lecture can obviate the lonely arc of those little bodies free-falling out of the flaming towers into nothingness.

So, we move on because there is nothing else you can do, really. . . sad, furious, or what. . . and then do what you can to fix this joint. If this was a house in a storm, you'd be hearing the joists groan and the rafters squeak as they torque out of true, like just before the whole shootin' match goes down. Meanwhile, news is out that Joe DiGenova, the former DC federal attorney supervising the grand jury action in Florida concerning RussiaGate and associated treasons, is out. He said he "resigned." That's usually a cover. Somebody gave him the boot, and it was either Todd Blanche or President Trump. Cuz, why? I suppose we'll find out.

Trollish insinuations are flying in the usual channels that he couldn't get enough evidence to bring any proper cases, but I don't believe that for a horse-face Hochul's New York minute, nor that Mr. DiGenova actually said anything like that. Anyway, at least twenty million civilians 'out there' have been following this constitutional death dance closely for years. We know the names, the acts, the memos, the emails, the money trails, the dots and the receipts by heart. Many can even recite long legal memoranda on the likes of John Brennan, Adam Schiff, Jim Comey, Hillary, Strzok, Page, blah blah, dates, times, document numbers.

Joe DiGenova is old, others say. Not a good organizer, turns out. . . not a good team leader. . . things like that. Well, maybe his force of personality or renowned avidity to correct epic insults to the nation concealed all that. Anyway, he was brought in to replace a federal attorney name of Maria Medetis Long, and I bet none of you even know her name. She was on the case down there in Florida during Pam Bondi's unfortunate commission, too blah even to go down in infamy. To the casual observer, the whole wicked business begins to look like a Chinese fire drill.

Or possibly a circle-jerk. And, of course, everybody is wondering: what's the blast radius on this one? Can the DOJ's Southern District of Florida recover some kind of equipoise and carry on and usher this pretty large troupe of scoundrels into courts of law? Or is folding like a Broadway tryout in New Haven? Does it now all get sucked into some vortex of lost causes? And wouldn't that be demoralizing?

My guess: these acts against the country and its people are too grave, too important, to just go away, and won't go away. What the diGenova fumble seems to point to is that persons and parties behind that treason - and you might suppose I'm thinking: the Intel (so-called) "community" and its many-footed ancillaries - are both desperate and powerful enough to try to derail the process. Just imagine how many retired Intel rogues are out there after seventy-plus years of, say, the CIA alone. Must be a lot of them, including the fifty-one ex-Intel bigshots who signed the Hunter Biden laptop public letter in 2020 to queer the election.

You've got to wonder whether the agency that John Ratcliffe is supposedly in charge of has an equally large shadow org of these people, perhaps operating under the likes of one ex-CIA honcho John Brennan. And then you have to wonder what machinery of government they've still got their mitts on? Or maybe they just put the word out that pursuing any just resolution of the traitorous trips laid on America by them could be bad for anyone's health. In any case, I don't hesitate to point out that the legions of ex-spooks and their bag-men all have names and records and. . . well. . . apply a little Anthropic hocus-pocus. . . we'll know where you live and what you had for breakfast before the ten a.m. break.

What I'm getting at - and I regret even having to affect coyness - is that the departure of Joe diGenova could signify some Battle of the Titans, a civil war not on the ground between plain citizens too bamboozled by sexual hysteria to put up a fight, but between the general officer ranks of two opposing elite dominions, the legitimate and the shadow, the light and the dark.

The action won't stay backstage for long. Barbarians really are at the gate, and that gate is the midterm election. America has gone so crazy that it doesn't seem to even recognize how crazy many of the candidates for high office are. The shadow dominion appears to be behind them, too: Telarico, el-Sayed, Peggy Flanagan, Becerra, Hochul. . . Lord have mercy! These are not just not-normal people. They are outright sickies, working hard to wreck the country.

Well, Labor Day is gone and the blandishments of summer with it. Time to stop sulking. All hands on deck. The bell has rung.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 17:20

"Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda": Hillary Clinton Gives Flippant Answer When Pressed On Patriot Act Support

Hillary Clinton attempted to wave off criticism of her post-9/11 votes this week, telling a Columbia University audience that Monday-morning quarterbacking carries its own bias and that relitigating the Patriot Act does little good.

The former secretary of state, who teaches crisis decision-making at Columbia's Institute of Global Politics, was pressed by a moderator on whether Americans were "served well" by the Patriot Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and on what she remembered about the deliberations.

https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/2098234790692446256?s=20

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) September 2026

"I think what you just heard is such a reminder about how difficult decision-making is in the midst of a crisis," Clinton said, speaking at a Columbia SIPA Institute of Global Politics panel titled "The 9/11 Attacks 25 Years Later: Lessons Learned, Lessons Forgotten."

"And that's the course that the dean and I teach every day, or every week, because hindsight is always perfect."

"But it's got as much bias as anything else. And so looking back and saying shoulda, coulda, woulda doesn't really help us," the failed presidential candidate added.

Clinton was a freshman senator from New York when hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers in her home state. Clinton joined 97 colleagues in voting for the USA Patriot Act that October. Then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) was the lone no.

Days earlier, the Senate had cleared the AUMF 98-0. Across the Capitol, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood alone as the only member of Congress to vote against it.

That authorization became the legal blank check for roughly two decades of American military adventurism spanning multiple wars in the Middle East and multiple administrations, power lawmakers in both parties have since tried, and failed, to claw back.Gives 

The Patriot Act's Section 215, the so-called "business records" provision, became the legal foundation for the National Security Agency's bulk collection of American phone records, a program the public learned about only in 2013 through the Edward Snowden leaks. Congress scaled it back with the USA Freedom Act in 2015. The authority finally lapsed in March 2020.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 16:40

Beijing Preps For Currency Wars

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

The fact that China has a large quantity of gold in its official reserve position is not news. China's gold reserves have been rising substantially since 2009.

At that time, China's official gold reserves were 1,054 metric tonnes (mt). Today, those reserves stand at approximately 2,366 mt, an increase of about 124%. But that does not tell the whole story.

The official reserves are reported by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the Chinese central bank. But China may also hold gold through other state entities, including the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). China is non-transparent about the full extent of its gold holdings. The exact amount of any unreported gold is unknown. Estimates can be formed based on imports from Switzerland via Hong Kong, but those are inexact.

One estimate is that the amount of "hidden gold" held by Chinese state entities is approximately the same as the amount reported publicly by the PBOC. If that estimate is correct, total Chinese gold reserves would be about 4,700 mt, or roughly 58% of U.S. gold reserves of 8,133 mt.

That would make China the second-largest sovereign gold holder in the world after the U.S. and put China ahead of gold powers such as Germany, Italy and France. Still, caution is warranted. Actual official gold holdings in China could be higher or lower than that estimate.

Both the publicly reported gold reserves of PBOC and any hidden state gold reserves are in addition to the amount of privately held gold in China. That figure is even more difficult to estimate. It is widely reported that Indian citizens privately own substantial quantities of gold, with estimates often running into the tens of thousands of tonnes.

China has a population about the same size as India and an equally strong cultural affinity for gold bullion. An estimate of perhaps 10,000 metric tonnes of gold held privately by Chinese citizens seems reasonable, although it cannot be verified precisely.

By any measure, China is a gold powerhouse, even if its reported official holdings still fall short of those of the U.S. But what is China doing with its gold? What is the point of massive gold accumulation by the Chinese government and its people?

The Gold-Backed Yuan Is a Chimera

One thing that is not happening is the creation of a gold-backed Chinese yuan. China may have an enormous amount of gold, but China has an even larger money supply than the U.S. and an enormous debt burden once provincial debt issuance is taken into account.

Traditionally, gold holdings must be between 20% and 40% of the money supply to engender trust in a gold-backed currency system. China's reported gold holdings are in the low single digits as a percentage of money supply. In my view, there will be no gold-backed yuan for the foreseeable future.

The idea that the Chinese yuan, whether gold-backed or not, can replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency is also nonsense. Official foreign exchange reserves are not simply piles of currency. They are held largely as securities and deposits denominated in a currency. These securities are typically government bonds but can include other assets, depending on the country.

In short, you cannot be considered a major reserve currency unless you have financial markets large enough to absorb global official savings.

A bond market requires underwriters, called "primary dealers" in the U.S., a range of maturities, regular auctions, hedging instruments such as futures, options and when-issued trading, a large pool of institutional buyers and, above all, a strong rule of law.

China has a large bond market, but it lacks the depth, openness, convertibility and legal protections needed to rival the U.S. Treasury market as the foundation of the global reserve system. It will take years to build a system that does. China is simply not in the same league when it comes to reserve-currency status, with or without gold.

The latest IMF data show that the U.S. dollar accounts for about 57% of global foreign exchange reserves. The euro accounts for about 20%.

That leaves all other currencies to share the remaining 23%, with significant portions taken up by Japanese and U.K. securities, along with Australian and Canadian dollars and Swiss francs. The Chinese share is about 2%.

If a gold-backed yuan is a chimera and the yuan as a dominant reserve currency is a nonstarter due to the limitations of its financial markets, why is China buying so much gold? What is the real plan?

Follow the Gold, Not the Yuan

To understand China's gold acquisitions, we need to look at what else China is doing in the gold market.

Major Chinese banks have recently moved to suspend or restrict individual trading in precious metals linked to the Shanghai Gold Exchange. This was presented as a risk-reducing measure. The restrictions do not prohibit physical gold purchases or ownership through gold funds by everyday Chinese citizens.

In effect, China is curbing certain forms of retail "paper gold" trading while allowing accumulation of physical gold. That's an amplification of trends already in place.

Hong Kong also launched a new central clearing and settlement system for gold in July 2026. Hong Kong has a better rule of law than mainland China, although it is firmly under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.

This arrangement gives China greater flexibility to develop gold trading and settlement outside the traditional dollar-dominated system. That result is not the same as a gold-backed yuan, but it does lessen China's dependence on dollar-denominated payment systems with regard to gold.

China also changed its insurance regulations to allow ten major insurance companies to invest in gold, with exposure capped at 1% of total assets. Given the size of the Chinese insurance market, even 1% represents a potentially major increase in demand for gold.

Hong Kong is also expanding its physical storage capacity, with a target of over 2,000 metric tonnes within three years. That would make it one of the world's major gold storage centers, although the target has not yet been reached.

China's Golden Escape Hatch

Taken together, these measures show that China - already the largest gold producer in the world based on its mining operations - is building more than a massive gold reserve.

It is positioning itself as a global gold trading center, with infrastructure for investment, retail accumulation, hedging, imports, settlement, clearing and storage.

China is not troubled by the decline in the dollar price of gold between January 2026 and today. The reason is that China is in acquisition mode.

In my view, Chinese policymakers expect the price of gold to soar sooner rather than later. Any buyer accumulating gold favors a lower price for the time being because it means getting more gold for every dollar spent.

The payoff comes later if the dollar price of gold spikes higher. Whoever has the most gold then is the biggest winner.

All of this dollar price action really says more about dollar volatility than it does about gold. That's one more reason to get out of dollars and into physical gold.

China is looking ahead to the day when a confrontation with the United States could force it to separate from the dollar payments system entirely in order to avoid asset freezes and financial sanctions.

Chinese policymakers are watching the financial sanctions that the U.S. is imposing on Russia and Iran and drawing the appropriate lessons.

China's solution to geopolitical chaos and financial warfare is to buy physical gold. Investors in the U.S. are well advised to take the same approach.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 15:40