Waste Of The Day: $79M To Not Work

Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations,

Contractors working for the State of Illinois took a 470,000-hour paid lunch break on taxpayers' dime.

A company hired during the Covid-19 pandemic to fill staffing shortages at hospitals and long-term care facilities spent more than a third of its time on "standdown," a contract provision that paid them to be on-site and available in case they were needed.

The contractor, Favorite Healthcare Staffing, was supposed to notify the state any time its employees were on standdown for more than 24 hours. There was no evidence those notifications occurred, and the state only conducted limited oversight, according to an Aug. 11 report from Auditor General Christopher Meister.

Key facts: Favorite Healthcare earned $220.3 million from Illinois from 2022 to 2023, including $78.5 million for standdown hours.

The audit found 270 employees who billed for standdown time without actually working a single hour in two years. They earned $7.5 million.

At least eight employees even billed overtime at rates of up to $330 per hour during weeks they were on standdown for five consecutive days, according to the audit. One employee billed for overtime while he was in quarantine and not working.

Other employees billed more than 24 hours in a single day. The state paid their invoices without flagging the discrepancy, the audit found,

Favorite Healthcare was reimbursed $1.4 million for lodging costs, even though its employees were staying in their personal residences.

Upon discovering the issues, Illinois hired the consulting firm Innovative Emergency Management to review Favorite Healthcare's invoices.

But Innovative Emergency Management also had its own billing issues, the audit found. The company billed Illinois using duplicate timesheets and for employees who did not report working any hours.

Illinois later had to hire yet another firm, Crowe, to review Innovative Emergency Management's invoices. Crowe earned $1.3 million.

Summary: The public should not have to pay contractors to sit around and twiddle their thumbs, nor pay consultants to figure out why.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 11:40

Twelve Companies Make DOE's Latest Nuclear Launch Pad Cut

The DOE's National Reactor Innovation Center announced 12 companies covering 13 projects for its latest Nuclear Energy Launch Pad (NELP) round on August 24th. Similar to the project coverage from the first round, this new group also spans multiple stages of the nuclear industry. 

As we covered when the first four companies were selected, the initial group included the uranium enrichment company General Matter and reactor developers Radiant, Deployable Energy and NuCube Energy.

Multiple companies are seeing repeat entries into the fast-track nuclear development programs under the DOE:

• Oklo, Antares, and Valar are all returning after achieving criticality on their pilot reactor designs under the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program
• Deployable Energy is returning with two programs after also being included in the initial NELP selection round.

The NELP offers access to nuclear expertise and infrastructure with a prioritized pathway through DOE authorization. The NELP is the new program that succeeded the DOE Reactor Pilot Program and DOE Fuel Line Pilot Program that have kick-started the nuclear renaissance in the US.

While not every company has been open about what they're working on under the NELP, we collected what we could find on each of the companies and their various programs:

Antares Nuclear: Transportable microreactors for military and space applications. Its R1 design combines TRISO fuel with sodium heat pipes, targeting 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt of electricity. Its selection uses “Launch Pad USA”, which means they do not have to be at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) site to enjoy the benefits of the program

Atlas Atomics: They’re developing heavy-water reactor technology intended to combine electricity generation with medical and industrial isotope production and the reuse of spent nuclear fuel. Not much is known about their reactor design, but based on it being heavy water, it makes it similar to the CANDU reactor fleet in Canada. And with a previously written letter of support for Utah being one of the locations considered for the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses, it is anticipated the company will be starting in the same state for their initial work.

Deployable Energy: Working on Unity, a transportable, high-temperature gas-cooled “nuclear battery” designed to generate 1 megawatt using helium cooling and conventional <5% enriched LEU fuel for industrial, defense, maritime and remote applications. Its two NELP selections cover a full-power demonstration at INL and a maritime demonstration with Hornbeck Offshore under Launch Pad USA.

Forge Atomics: Developing Ember, a factory-built, 25-megawatt reactor for data centers and the grid. It's one of the least novel designs on the list, leaning into the industry's decades of experience with pressurized water designs and conventional LEU fuel. Components are sized for highway transport, with factory manufacturing intended to bring down construction costs and delays.

Hexium: Developing laser-based isotope enrichment, initially targeting lithium for fusion and fission applications. The company is modernizing Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation, technology developed at the DOE's national labs, and has also outlined plans for uranium enrichment. The company announced partnerships with Oklo and TerraPower when they initially came out of stealth last year.

Lightbridge: Developing twisted uranium-zirconium metallic fuel rods for existing and new reactors, including small modular reactors, aiming to improve heat transfer, increase output and extend refueling intervals. Its NELP project is SHED, a planned INL manufacturing facility for lead test assemblies destined for testing in U.S. commercial power reactors.

Nusano: Developing accelerator-based radioisotope production for cancer diagnosis and treatment, with additional work on industrial isotopes and nuclear batteries. Its energy business is pursuing mass-separation technology that enriches uranium metal to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for advanced reactor fuel.

Oklo: Developing Aurora fast-fission reactors to supply electricity and burn used nuclear fuel from traditional reactors. Their business model calls for owning and operating plants and selling their output under long-term contracts. The company is also pursuing nuclear-fuel recycling and isotope production for medical, industrial and research applications.

Raven-Flint Nuclear: Developing the Corvus Route for uranium conversion, producing uranium hexafluoride without elemental fluorine gas. Following laboratory production, its NELP project is Torch, a planned pilot conversion plant at INL targeting 500 tonnes of uranium annually. That would add capacity between uranium mining and enrichment.

Scaled Atomics: Developing the MN-350, a mobile nuclear power system designed for a standard 20-foot shipping container and a ten-year refueling interval. It targets military missions, disaster response and remote commercial sites. The company says Launch Pad USA will help advance MN-350 from advanced design toward demonstration and commercial deployment.

Sublime Nuclear: Focused on rebuilding the domestic nuclear fuel supply chain and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers. Unfortunately, that's about as much information as is currently available. The website doesn't have much else to it, and no press releases have been put out by the company yet.

Valar Atomics: Developing high-temperature gas-cooled reactors for mass production and deployment. Its ambitions extend across AI data centers, industrial heat, hydrogen and synthetic fuels, with manufacturing and deployment concentrated at what it calls gigasites. The company made headlines recently with a recent funding round that reached over $1 billion in equity and debt.
 

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 11:05

September Market Weakness: The Setup Has Teeth

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The Setup Has Teeth

Earlier this week, in our Daily Market Commentary, I flagged that the market was testing support after three straight down days, starting in September, with the calendar. That was just the warm-up, as the real story lies in a note from Scott Rubner at Citadel Securities, whose read on September market weakness is among the best that I have read. Rubner’s case is not that the bull market has ended. It is that the near-term math just changed, and hardly anyone is positioned for the shift.

Why September Market Weakness Is A Record, Not A Fluke

September has a losing record that is worth paying attention to. Since 1928, September is the only month in the year that closes lower more often than higher. Over the past century, the average return is a loss of roughly -1.1%, and in midterm election years like this one, it slips to roughly -1.5%. Furthermore, the back half of the month is the weakest two-week stretch of the calendar year.

As CNBC noted in its writeup of Rubner’s work, this is not a “quirky stat” from a cherry-picked window, it is close to a century of data pointing the same direction, and the average intra-month selloff of -4.7% (nearer -6.2% in midterm years) is the kind of air pocket that turns a quiet drift into a real drawdown before most investors update their models. Such is the reputation September has earned honestly.

The Buyers Who Carried August Are Leaving The Table

Here is what makes this year different. Every cohort that pushed the S&P 500 to records in August is stepping back at the same time. The earnings tailwind that carried the tape is largely behind us. Retail buyers, who returned in force through the summer, tend to fade in September, and Citadel’s own data show their buying on down days has run near half its normal pace since 2019. (Chart courtesy of Citadel Securities)

As we have discussed previously, the corporate bid, which has been a net buyer of equities since 2000, turns negative. Companies authorized more than $1.1 trillion in buybacks through August, but that buyer goes quiet as blackouts accelerate around September 12, right before third-quarter reporting. (Chart courtesy of Citadel Securities)

The systematic crowd, the CTAs and volatility-control funds that reloaded off the July lows, have already spent most of their capacity. (Chart courtesy of Citadel Securities)

When you add up the cohorts, the demand side is quietly EMPTYING.

So, here is the most common criticism hitting my inbox this past week: “Yes, but that seasonality is just a statistic.” That is a fair statement, and it is indeed an average of returns. However, a statistic is exactly what it is. A statistic with five structural tailwinds draining out behind it, though, stops being a coin flip and starts being a setup

Protection Has Rarely Been This Cheap Into The Noise

Now, the part that should get your attention. Volatility collapsed in late August. The VIX fell to around 14, its lowest reading of the year, and S&P skew sank to the first percentile of its range, which is a technical way of saying downside insurance was the cheapest it had been all year. The one-month, 25-delta put changed hands near its most affordable level since December 2024.

As we headed into the month, a garden-variety three-day decline popped the VIX back toward 16 in just a handful of sessions. The size of that move, given the very mild decline, tells you how little cushion was priced in. Cheap protection is landing just as the macro calendar turns increasingly noisy, with the jobs report yesterday, then CPI, and an FOMC decision all stacked into the next two weeks. When protection is this cheap and buyers are this tired, the cost of being caught without a hedge climbs quickly. As Howard Marks likes to remind investors, you cannot predict, but you can prepare, and September has consistently been a month to prepare for.

To wit: cheap insurance is a gift the market rarely leaves on the table for long, and it never rings a bell on the morning it decides to take the gift back.

The Options Market Is Carrying A Record Into Expiry

The last piece of the September puzzle is purely mechanical. On the third Friday of the month, the September options expiry will occur. That event is currently on track to set a record. Roughly $9.6 trillion is set to roll off through September 18. Then about $6.2 trillion of that is concentrated to expire on the 18th alone. That single day would clear the June triple-witch near $7.7 trillion, which was itself a record. Add quarter-end pension rebalancing, with funding ratios near 112% and plans de-risking out of stocks and into bonds, and the plumbing itself leans against equities into month-end.

Notably, none of this guarantees a market selloff. However, it does stack the odds against overly aggressive investors. Currently, every major desk from JPMorgan to BofA has turned cautious. However, CNBC’s own investment committee is refusing to sell a single share into the weakness. That crowd can be right about the direction and still be wrong, or early, on the timing. Such is the nature of a market that loves to punish the obvious trade.

A Second Desk Lands On The Same Downside

While Scott Rubner reads the market through flows, BTIG’s Jonathan Krinsky reads it through the tape. Interestingly, he lands in nearly the same place as Rubner. Krinsky’s framing is that the post-summer rally has been a game of “musical chairs” rather than a true “broadening.” Money rotated out of Technology and AI into Consumer Cyclicals and Large Cap Value. At the same time, the index sits roughly where it did on June 2. Breadth has quietly rolled over. The share of Russell 3000 names above their 50-day average is the lowest since early April. Furthermore, the one-month correlations just jumped to their highest level since June. That is a classic tell that names begin to fall together.

 

The other half of the concern is investor complacency. The five-day put/call ratio sits near 0.82. That is one of the lowest readings in years. Notably, the tape has not printed a single 80% NYSE downside-volume day in almost a year. That long stretch falls against a historical average of 21.

Lastly, Krinsky’s base case is a failed retest of the 7,600 breakout, followed by a slide toward 7,200-7,300. Such a pullback would encompass 7% to 8% off the highs. While not a meaningful decline, given the market’s low volatility and high investor complacency, it will “feel” much worse. That lower zone sits right on Rubner’s midterm seasonal math and the rising 200-day average near 7,127.

Think about it this way. When both a flow desk and a technical desk reach the same number from opposite directions, you should at least respect it. Crucially, none of that means that it will happen with absolute certainty, nor does it pinpoint the day. But it is certainly a risk worth appreciating.

 

What Should Investors Do Now

So, what does this all mean for investors? Most importantly, this is a tactical market reset, not a call to abandon equities and go hide in cash. Scott Rubner himself framed the September weakness as a “better entry point ahead of a more constructive mid-October.”

He is correct. Once mid-October arrives, the options expiry will have cleared, the FOMC will have met, and corporate buybacks will have resumed. Notably, the market will be focusing on Q3 corporate earnings reports. which typically support markets heading into November.  

Therefore, the investor playbook is to use market strength to rebalance portfolio risk rather than chase it.

The moves worth making now are the unglamorous ones. Start by taking profits and banking gains where a position has run well past its intended weight. Raise a little cash so a pullback becomes an opportunity rather than a scramble. Then add downside protection while it is still on sale. Why? Because the whole point of Rubner’s note is that the insurance is cheap today and may not be next week. Such is the value of preparing before the crowd decides it has to.

September rarely hands out cheap insurance and a clear warning at the same time. When it does, the disciplined move is to take both.

*  *  *

Heading into next week, the support and resistance levels are evident. The first resistance is the record at 7,796, about 1% away. Just above that are the round numbers at 7,900 and 8,000. (Those are our year-end targets that sit just above previous all-time highs.) Conversely, support starts at the 50-day near 7,585. That level also marks the breakout that a failed retest would expose. Just below that level is the 7,300 zone, then the 200-day at 7,137, the same downside band the seasonal math points toward.

With that setup going into next week, we will want to continue playing defense rather than offense. Secondly, investors should consider increasing cash buffers keep stops under the 50-day. Lastly, use any push toward the record market levels to trim rather than chase.

To be fair to the bullish camp, a decisive close back above 7,796 would neutralize the momentum warning and reopen those round-number targets. There are several risks ahead, from the mid-term election cycle to the loss of corporate buybacks, so this is a two-sided setup rather than a directional call. However, pay close attention to the 7,585 next week. If the market can hold that level, the uptrend will remain intact. If it fails, the seasonal downside risk increases.

Key Catalysts Next Week

Next week is a holiday-shortened trading week with one question that will dominate it.

“Does inflation confirm the hike that Friday’s jobs report just put back on the table?”

With the market closed on Monday for Labor Day, that stacks the two prints that will matter the most at the very end. PPI lands Thursday morning and CPI follows Friday, both at 8:30 AM ET, and both feed straight into the September 16 FOMC decision.

This week is where the Fed debate will get settled. Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, framed it well after the jobs report. The upside payroll surprise certainly heightened rate-hike concerns, but the outcome will hinge on next week’s inflation numbers. If CPI and PPI come in cooler than feared, the Fed can discount the hot labor market signal. However, if both prints come in hotter than expected, a September hike moves from a coin flip to the base case.

As far as the rest of the week goes, the slate is fairly thin. Tuesday brings NFIB small business optimism and consumer credit. Then on Thursday, we will see jobless claims, existing home sales, and wholesale inventories. As noted, PPI also drops on Thursday, with Friday’s CPI report coming alongside the preliminary Michigan sentiment read. The Fed itself goes quiet, with the pre-meeting blackout that began September 5 keeping every official off the tape through the decision.

Overall, the earnings calendar remains very light, with the vast majority of earnings already behind us. However, of note, Oracle reports on Thursday after the close and will be scrutinized for AI cloud demand and hyperscaler capex. Its numbers and backlog commentary will swing semiconductors and the broader AI complex more than any single macro release.

Adobe follows the same afternoon. Crude is the other wildcard, with a 9% weekly surge on Middle East supply fears keeping energy and inflation risk alive. Thin post-holiday liquidity can exaggerate the reaction to both inflation prints, so expect sharper intraday swings than the calendar alone would suggest.

Friday’s CPI is THE report for the week, and everything else is pretty much a sideshow until that number crosses.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 10:30

UN Demands African Statues In London As Britain Is Told To Atone For Slavery

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The United Nations has decided that Britain has not grovelled enough.

After years of toppled statues, boarded-up war memorials and official lectures about "colonialism," a UN human-rights committee now wants the country that ended the Atlantic slave trade to fill its public squares with statues of "people of African descent,"

The globalist body also suggests Britain should rewrite what children are taught, and treat historic slavery as a live brief for migration policy and hate-speech enforcement.

'It's high-time we called out the ideological capture of UN committees.'

'It's recognition of the contribution made by Africans at the height of colonialism.'

Broadcaster Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and Ken Hinds debate whether statues of Africans should be erected to atone for slavery. pic.twitter.com/51h05u6WvF

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 2, 2026

This comes in the form of formal "reparatory justice" guidance from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, published six months after member states voted in New York to treat the transatlantic trade as the "gravest crime against humanity" and to press former slaving nations for apology, restitution and cash.

Britain abstained. The committee has carried on regardless.

The recommendations sit in guidance largely drafted by CERD panellists Gay McDougall, an American lawyer, and Pela Boker-Wilson, a Liberian legal expert. Former slave-trading states, the committee says, have a moral and legal "obligation to repair" the damage of slavery.

The guidance suggests that "Public spaces should honour the contributions of people of African descent and clearly acknowledge the wrongs of those who supported or benefited from historical atrocities."

That, the authors add, can mean artworks, statues, memorials and "dedications," and "Satisfaction to people of African descent can include the right to investigation and truth, public judgments and acknowledgements, apologies, acceptances of responsibility and public commemorations."

Full on virtue signalling grovelling, in other words.

The committee adds that schools "must ensure that schoolbooks and curricula present accurate, unbiased accounts of transatlantic chattel slavery, its aftermath and current realities, based on thorough research."

It adds that political leaders should "educate the public on the importance of reparatory justice for building a healthy, inclusive society." And on speech and migration, states "must act early to prevent prejudice and address misinformation about transatlantic chattel slavery and its ongoing harms to people of African descent."

It further outlines that reparations should include policies "eradicating xenophobia towards migrants and others perceived as such."

In other words: monuments, classrooms, archives, apologies - and a tighter leash on anyone who objects.

United Nations says Britain should put statues of 'people of African descent' in public spaces to atone for the slave trade https://t.co/W77TO8IXNr

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) September 2, 2026

The report even revisits the 2020 Black Lives Matter summer. Protesters who tore down monuments linked to slavery and empire, it complains, were unfairly "disparaged" in the media, their cause painted as "obscure" and "Left-wing."

Edward Colston, dumped in Bristol harbour, is cited as the exhibit. The vandalism is recast as a moral lesson the United Kingdom has still not learned.

The political class in London has spent years flattering this mood. The public has not.

Historian and GB News presenter Matt Goodwin put the demand in one line: UN lawyers want "British people who never owned slaves and whose ancestors helped end the slave trade to pay people who were never slaves while ignoring the many millions of slaves in non-Western nations today." His verdict: "jog on."

UN woke lawyers want British people who never owned slaves and whose ancestors helped end the slave trade to pay people who were never slaves while ignoring the many millions of slaves in non-Western nations today.

I have two words: jog on pic.twitter.com/e059k0MZEw

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) September 2, 2026

Cambridge historian Professor Robert Tombs, founder of History Reclaim, called the campaign "sinister" and aimed at "censoring free discussion and imposing a certain view."

"Those who supported and benefitted included the predecessors of those who now demand reparations," he said. An "accurate, unbiased" account, he added, "would mean paying tribute to those in Britain and elsewhere who struggled to end the Atlantic slave trade."

"On that subject, we hear a lot about how Britain paid compensation to White slave owners in its colonies, but I have rarely if ever heard public recognition of the money paid to black slave traders for the same reason." His conclusion was blunt: "the whole thing is a huge financial and political scam."

Professor Lawrence Goldman, emeritus fellow in History at St Peter's College, Oxford, made the same point from another angle. "It's ironic that the UN should be telling Britain what to do about slavery. It was in Britain more than 200 years ago that the anti-slavery movement started, and we then led in the fight to end slavery across the world in the Victorian era, long before the UN existed."

He added, "But millions of people today are modern slaves, unable to live and work freely. Rather than lecture the leading anti-slavery nation about the past, the UN should do something about slavery in the present. That's its job."

That job is the one the UN keeps declining. Descent-based slavery still exists in parts of the Sahel. The Arab and East African trades ran for centuries after Britain banned its own. The committee's guidance barely glances at any of it. The target is always the same short list of Western capitals.

James Kariuki, formerly Britain's chargé d'affaires at the UN, has said London engaged in talks with the UN but "continues to disagree with fundamental propositions of the text." The EU's explanation of vote was even clearer: suggestions of retroactive international law and reparations claims were "incompatible with established principles of international law."

A UN judge has already floated a figure of more than £18 trillion as Britain's supposed bill - a sum several times the size of the UK economy. The Brattle Group's earlier estimate for Western states ran to tens of trillions. Many are adamant that these numbers are a shakedown dressed as justice.

The fashionable story treats Britain as the author of African slavery. The record is the opposite of that cartoon.

Parliament banned the British slave trade in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 then dismantled slavery across most of the empire, freeing more than 800,000 people in the Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius.

To force the measure through against the West India interest, the Treasury committed about £20 million in compensation to registered owners - roughly 40 percent of annual government spending at the time.

The debt was financed through gilts. When the Treasury modernised the gilt portfolio in 2015, the last of those instruments was redeemed. That fact is now used as a taunt. It is also evidence of something the UN will not say: Britain paid an enormous price, in cash and in political capital, to end a system it had once joined.

Then came the part no UN committee wants to see on a plinth. From 1808 the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron hunted slaving ships off the African coast. Over roughly half a century it seized around 1,600 vessels and freed some 150,000 Africans.

Sailors died of fever in large numbers doing work no other great power was willing to fund at that scale. At its height the suppression effort consumed a serious slice of national effort - diplomatic pressure, mixed courts, bribes and gunboats - to drag other nations into line.

Wilberforce, Clarkson, Sharp, Equiano and the Quaker networks did not wait for a UN working group. They built a mass movement inside a slave-trading country and won. African brokers and kingdoms, meanwhile, captured and sold people into the Atlantic system for generations.

The trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades ran longer still. Will any of these facts be included in an "accurate, unbiased account"?

Instead the official culture treats "colonial" as a magic word that wipes the slate. Nelson, Wellington, Picton, explorers, viceroys, even figures whose later lives were spent against bondage are folded into one smear.

In June 2020, after Colston went into the harbour and "was a racist" was sprayed on Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, London boxed up its own history.

Churchill, a statue of George Washington, and the Cenotaph - the memorial to the British dead - were boarded over before further marches.

Churchill's statue today in London. I'm speechless. pic.twitter.com/lU6Y37my7e

— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) June 12, 2020

Robert Milligan was lifted from outside the Museum of London Docklands. Guy's and St Thomas' talked of moving figures linked to slavery. Oriel's Rhodes statue became a permanent siege. Within months the argument had spread from slave traders to anyone who could be tagged "empire."

Sadiq Khan then appointed a Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm: a 15-member panel of curators, campaigners and cultural operators tasked with reviewing statues, street names and memorials so that London might be 'corrected'.

The mayor's office insisted the body was "not being established to preside over the removal of statues." Khan had already said "there are some slavers that should come down, and the commission will advise on that." Jacob Rees-Mogg called the exercise a stack of "loony, left-wing wheezes." Shaun Bailey called the appointees "unelected activists."

Excited to announce brilliant members for London's new Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm – we will be working hard to ensure London's history is fully reflected and celebrated. @MayorofLondon https://t.co/AWd2pe8uZU pic.twitter.com/f2pyVRmJGF

— Justine Simons OBE (@justinesimons1) February 9, 2021

The net widened. Figures whose records included opposition to slavery were swept into the same "contested heritage" files. The point was never a careful ledger. It was to make British history look illegitimate in its own capital.

Wales made the method official. Labour's devolved government audited commemorations and issued "best-practice" advice that statues of "powerful, older, able-bodied white men" may be "offensive" to a "more diverse" public.

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered"

Wales: Orwell called it https://t.co/CbFITY7rw8

— Martin Daubney ?? (@MartinDaubney) March 12, 2023

Councils were told to set the "right historical narrative." Options included concealing monuments, boxing them, wrapping them in new artworks, renaming streets - or destroying them.

Nelson, Wellington, Thomas Picton and Henry Morton Stanley were named. Diversity, the guidance lamented, was "hardly visible at all in public commemorations," which risked the "perception that the achievements that society considers noteworthy are those of powerful, older, able-bodied white men."

That sentence is the tell. A country is instructed to be ashamed of the men who built its navy, won its wars and, in the same era, smashed the trade the UN now pretends Britain never opposed. The term "Colonial" does the rest of the work.

The people who never owned a slave, and whose great-great-grandparents were more likely to have been mill hands than planters, are the ones invited to feel the shame. The governments that still tolerate bondage get a pass. The UN, which cannot keep slaves out of the Sahel or young protesters off Iranian gallows, finds the time to lecture the country that policed the Atlantic.

Britain abolished the trade. Britain spent a fortune and a navy making that abolition stick. The UN's answer is more statues, more guilt, and a warning to be nicer to the next boat full of illegal migrants. That is not reparatory justice. It is a political project that needs British history to stay on its knees.

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 Sun, 09/06/2026 - 09:20

Interpreting The Taliban's Invitation For American Investments

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

This was arguably a preemptive de-escalation move that would also gauge the US' intentions...

The New York Times (NYT) interviewed Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Kabul as part of their coverage of the fifth anniversary of the Taliban's return to power. Muttaqi invited the US to reopen its embassy and invest in his country's minerals, dams, and roads. He also declared that "We consider the chapter of war to have come to an end, and from now on, we want relations based on mutual respect and a new chapter of positive engagement." This new policy requires some interpretation.

After all, Trump has repeatedly called for the return of US forces to Bagram Airbase and the US has pivoted to the Taliban's new Pakistani enemy over the past year and a half of his second term, both of which the NYT mentioned as possible obstacles. The Taliban also refuses to return the US arms and equipment that were left in Afghanistan while denying that it's holding a dual Afghan-American citizen prisoner. The State Department thus predictably told the NYT that bilateral ties won't be normalized.

Two of the experts that the NYT interviewed referenced Trump 2.0's business-driven foreign policy, ergo why some might be surprised that the State Department rejected normalizing bilateral ties as a quid pro quo for presumably privileged access to Afghanistan's rare earth minerals wealth. This goes to show that geostrategy, not geo-economics, is presently determining Trump 2.0's policy towards Afghanistan. Interestingly enough, however, it's the opposite with the Taliban. Here are three background briefings:

* 2 July: "Reviewing Russia's Latest UNSC Briefing On Afghanistan"

* 19 July: "Lavrov Warned That Western Arms & Ammo Are Being Sent From Ukraine To ISIS-K In Afghanistan"

* 16 August: "Five Reflections On The Fifth Anniversary Of The Taliban's Return To Power"

In a nutshell, Pakistan is passively facilitating the flow of arms to ISIS-K as part of its undeclared war with Afghanistan, which the US discreetly approves of as a means of pressuring the Taliban into complying with its demands. If the Taliban were weakened or deposed, they might not ever regain their former strength due to their historical Pakistani patron having cut them off and their new Russian military-technical partner being unable to replace the multifaceted support that Islamabad previously provided.

The end result could be the re-subjugation of Afghanistan, but this time as a US-Pakistani client state that would serve as a launchpad for expanding their military and economic influence into Central Asia, which aligns with Trump 2.0's Neo-Reagan Doctrine of rolling back Russian influence. Turkiye is already poised to do the same from the west via August 2025's "Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity", which also functions as a NATO military logistics corridor, so the combined effect could be profound.

Given the grand strategic consequences if the US and Pakistan successfully re-subjugate Afghanistan, there's a certain logic to why Trump 2.0 rejected the rare earth minerals opportunity that the Taliban offered it. The group arguably did this as a preemptive de-escalation move that would also gauge the US' intentions, which are now crystal clear. Looking forward, joint US-Pakistani pressure on Afghanistan is therefore expected to increase, which could lead to an increase in Russian-Taliban military-technical ties.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 08:10

Is This Peak 'Clown World'?

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Transport for London has dropped a dog house-shaped "calm space" onto the concourse at Ealing Broadway station and called it progress.

The tiny pod features a bench, noise-dampening acoustics and a "soothing" forest mural. They claim that it is part of an effort to "boost accessibility for neurodivergent travellers under TfL's Equity in Motion strategy," whatever that means.

Massive backlash has ensued, with many questioning this as a priority over train delays, complete lack of air conditioning on many lines, poor cleanliness, broken escalators and an epidemic of fare dodgers costing £190 million a year.

We're trialling a calm space at Ealing Broadway station for four weeks ?

From today, you'll find a quieter space for customers who may benefit from a calmer environment during their journey.

What we learn from the trial will help us understand how we can make our network... pic.twitter.com/mRFiD2vtvM

— TfL (@TfL) September 4, 2026

The kennel is part of TFL's 'Equity in Motion' scheme, a 'customer inclusion plan' launched in February 2024 which it claims will make travel "fairer, safer, more inclusive and more accessible."

Mark Evers, who leads customer insight, strategy and experience at TfL, told Ealing.News: "Everyone should be able to travel confidently and independently across London, and we know that busy environments can sometimes pose a barrier and be overwhelming, particularly for our neurodivergent customers."

"These trials will help us understand how we can better support customers who might need to take some time out when using our services," he added.

Jesus wept.

The photograph did more work than the press release. Open sides. Pitched roof. Wood-effect walls. A painted woodland. A single bench. It reads as a child's playhouse parked in a ticket hall.

Literally crying ? it's a fucking dog kennel ? https://t.co/lnMfJYhkfv

— Emma Manzini (@EmmaManzini) September 5, 2026

Absolutely, totally and utterly insane. Once upon a time I'd have thought that post from TfL was a joke. Now I believe it's real. Sadly.

— Alastair Hilton (@London_W4) September 5, 2026

Darren Johnson, a former London Assembly member, went at the physics of the claim:

I am not sure that putting an open-sided kiosk in a station used by 42,000 passengers a day and calling it a 'calm space' actually makes it a calm space. https://t.co/pDBoR212mV

— Darren Johnson (@DarrenJohnson66) September 5, 2026

Surely the forest mural will counter the tannoy blasts, barrier alarms and the endless chirruping of TikTok reels blasting from phones, right?

Everyone who played any part in creating this has a 'non-job'. https://t.co/rkSJBiRidS

— Leo Gibbons (@Layo_FH) September 4, 2026

Serious question... if you can actually get on a tube to go somewhere, how the fuck is waiting in a weird shed going to help you?

This is design by fuckwit. It really is. https://t.co/3kv6IejafA

— Arthur Foxache ?? (@OldMackIsBack) September 4, 2026

Just make the fucking trains arrive clean and on time. https://t.co/1g7JYRs9xp

— Jack (@FFS_WhatNow) September 4, 2026

When I was a Councillor my Ward included Ealing Broadway Station. It is a manic station with lots of issues. This 'calm space' is an absolute joke, and a complete waste of money. It won't be long until it is vandalised https://t.co/iRDJzcIxGy

— Alexander Stafford (@Alex_Stafford) September 4, 2026

There are plenty of more pressing issues:

This is all nice and well but Highbury and Islington Station has been missing a ceiling and wall tiles for the last 8 years. Priorities.

— Joseph (@josephkazUK) September 4, 2026

Do they really think this thing is going to be used as they envisage?

I give it two days until diversity takes a shit inside and then moves in. https://t.co/F4ec7PoaKP

— WireSpy (@WireSpy92) September 4, 2026

20 minutes until needles, dimps, empties and piss puddles?

— Cooking Lager is drinking a wrexham lager (@CarpeZytha) September 4, 2026

American Citizen, under Milo's joke post, was blunter: "Chances are a migrant will be inside this taking a shit."

Chances are a migrant will be inside this taking a shit.

— American Citizen (@paisnano) September 5, 2026

Day 1-4: 13 year old gangsta wannabes take over and blurt drill music from a Bluetooth speaker and nuisance stream from it.
Day 5: Homeless guy takes a shit in it
Day 6: Someone is sexually assaulted inside it by an Eritrean
Day 7: Dismantled and removed by TFL https://t.co/nhjMIvPAX8

— Sir Webblyingworth Brian Squirrelingtonshire ? (@WebSquirrel) September 5, 2026

To be fair, the house is more cosy looking than those featured in plenty of accommodation ads in London.

Detached house to let in W5, 3500pw plus bills https://t.co/ekolfpb3Qj

— David P GCSE (multiple) (@DavidPGCSE) September 5, 2026

When passengers noted that the pod would be almost immediately wrecked or occupied, TfL actually replied, suggesting "We understand the concern. The pod is located close to station staff and within CCTV coverage, and it's included in routine station security and safety checks."

They added, "Any inappropriate behaviour will be managed in line with standard station procedures, and any damage will be addressed as needed. The trial will also help us understand how the space is used in practice."

We understand the concern. The pod is located close to station staff and within CCTV coverage, and it's included in routine station security and safety checks. Any inappropriate behaviour will be managed in line with standard station procedures, and any damage will be addressed...

— TfL (@TfL) September 5, 2026

That sentence is doing a lot of work. "Standard station procedures" is the same toolkit that already coexists with barrier-jumping, vaping in carriages, speakerphone culture and graffiti that TfL has had to throw extra cleaning gangs at.

The Times reported earlier this year that a graffiti surge left parts of the Underground looking, in one MP's phrase, "like 1970s New York," with Bakerloo and Central hit hardest because those lines have so little spare stock that tagged trains stay in service. Bakerloo's 1972 stock is the oldest passenger rolling stock in the country.

CCTV does not stop crime when there is no consequence. People refuse fares, vape on trains and disturb other passengers with impunity.

This is not a quiet branch line. Ealing Broadway is a Zone 3 interchange for the Central line, District line, Elizabeth line and National Rail. At peak times it is a crush of school runs, office traffic and Heathrow-bound crowds.

It is also a known fare-evasion hotspot. BBC reporting from the concourse described officers watching people hurdle barriers, crawl under them and "double gate" behind paying passengers.

TfL has put the network-wide loss at about £190 million a year - 3.5 per cent of fare income - and wants 1.5 per cent by 2030. A later disclosure to Tube Alerter, reported by MyLondon, said the real figure could be as high as £211 million because TfL applies a 10 per cent haircut to avoid "overstating" the loss.

The same station had a passenger trapped and dragged by a train in November 2024. RAIB published its report in March 2026. Temporary barriers went up on platform 4 because of the gap between train and platform. Lifts routinely fail. Step-free access comes and goes. That is the arena into which TfL has now inserted a woodland cubby and a QR code for feelings.

Ffs.
How about you ban people have their phones on speaker or listening to music?
Molly coddling adults in this way is embarrassing.
A functioning society never needed this kennel before.

— Karrie (@KarrieboKarrie) September 5, 2026

What???????
Can someone please tell me what is going on with this generation???
All this 'safe space' nonsense and 'you're safe with me' badges??
Can anyone imagine this generation in the world wars????
What are they all scared of? https://t.co/AyhNvwsw4I

— Women Won't Wheesht ??? (@TheParty1sOver) September 5, 2026

TFL, which cannot keep toilet facilities usable, has discovered the language of trauma for a four-week photo opportunity.

There is no air con on most of the deep Tube. Central, Bakerloo, Jubilee, Victoria, Waterloo & City, Piccadilly and Northern still cook passengers in summer. Only about 192 of 620 Tube trains are air-conditioned. The trains many west Londoners ride every day were built when Ted Heath was in Downing Street.

Sadiq Khan's City Hall has spent years announcing equity frameworks while the basic deal of public transport - you pay, the train comes, the carriage is usable - has got sloppier. Fare evasion doubled on the Tube against pre-pandemic levels. Prosecutions are still well below the old peak. Penalty fares often go unpaid. Staff take the abuse. Paying passengers fund the gap. Then the same organisation asks those passengers to admire a sensory pod.

This is peak clown world.

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 07:00

The Real Elites Vs. The Ruling Elites

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Always and everywhere, political institutions are controlled by elites. It doesn't matter if the regime type is democratic or monarchical. It doesn't matter if there is a written constitution or not. All political institutions - and certainly every sovereign state - are run by a group of elites who control the means of coercion.The myth of "rule by the people" is precisely that: a myth.

But this leaves a big question open: who are the elites? Wilfredo Pareto, that pioneer of Italian elite theory, convincingly suggests that elites are simply those people who are most skilled in their respective fields. Being skilled does not suggest any sort of virtue or beauty, of course, and we cannot assume that any member of the elite will be more moral or refined than any, say, middle-class mechanic.

In the case of political elites, to be "elite" simply means to be the most effective at organizing and commanding political action. This can be done toward both virtuous ends or evil ends. The political elites excel at the gaining and wielding of political power. Nothing more. In hereditary monarchies, for example, the monarch is a monarch because his ancestors were more effective at using violence - and at stealing and killing - than were their competitors. Their descendants are able to remain in the elite through effective political scheming to maintain their positions. In democracies, those who gain and maintain power are effective at deceiving the voting public and at currying favor with the ruling coalitions of various interest groups. They're not "the elite" because they are especially virtuous or well educated. They simply excel at cultivating the knowledge necessary to wield the power of the state against their enemies and against potential rivals.

Economic Elites vs. Political Elites

There is, however, often confusion as to the difference between economic elites and political elites. One could say that economic elites are those who are most skilled at the management of property. Yet, the nature of the economic elites depends largely on what type of regime exists within society. In a society that has a mostly market system, the economic elites are those who are most productive in the free marketplace. These are the people who are skilled at entrepreneurship, sales, logistics, investing, and all other aspects of a freely functioning market. In a mostly free society, the economic elites are free to spend most of their time on their activities in the marketplace, and they are thus rewarded for spending their efforts in improving their own productivity. Moreover, all of society benefits from these sorts of economic elites. This is because rewards in the marketplace stem from delivering more goods and services to more people at a price that a growing number of people can afford.

Things are different in a society where the economy is dominated by the state - and thus by the political elite. In such a society, the economic elites are those who are most skilled at using the power of the state to achieve success in the state-regulated marketplace. In this case, the economic elites are those who are able to partner with the regime to obtain policies that benefit the elites through the manipulation and regulation of the market. These policies include bailouts, state-backed monopolies, and an easy-money-fueled financial system. In this system, the economic elites are able to maintain and enhance their positions and their wealth through effective political action, and by serving the political elites instead of customers in the marketplace.

When this happens, we cannot assume that the economic elites are there because they add value to society. Rather, the economic elites in this latter system are parasitical. They rely on the exploitation of others to maintain their positions and to expand their market share. One of the most dramatic examples of this can be seen in the response to the financial crisis that began in 2008.

Had the marketplace been allowed to function, many large banks and other firms would have been bankrupted, and their property repurposed by other, more efficient owners and managers. Those new owners could have become a new economic elite. But thanks to the intervention of the incumbent political elites, failing firms were saved through the redistribution of wealth from the productive classes to hand-picked, politically connected incumbent firms and owners. Thus, firms like Citicorp and AIG were bailed out, new regulations imposed, and firms like JP Morgan greatly expanded their market share. The Federal Reserve's mass purchasing of mortgage-backed securities rescued a large portion of the financial sector from insolvency. As a result, most of the economic "elite" we find in the financial sector owe their positions to political action rather than any actual skill in the marketplace. Sure, these people are fond of telling themselves that they are rich because "the market" values them so highly. In reality, they are successful because lobbyists have succeeded in propping up their firms and ensuring, through constant monetary inflation, growth in their portfolios.

But this is just one example. In any society where the political elites are prolific spenders, or engage in widespread regulation of the economy, the economy is continually distorted in a way as to favor the politically well connected at the expense of everyone else. For example, the economic "elites" who rely heavily on government contracts - e.g., Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the founder of Flock Safety, et al - are not in the elite because they are especially productive in a free market. They are in the elite because they are adept at seizing the property of taxpayers through the tax-and-spend mechanism.

Note that in this interventionist system, the real economic elites - the people who would have risen to the top of an actually free economy - are crowded out and kept down by government action that favors certain firms. Who are these would-be elites? We'll never know, and instead we are left with our counterfeit billionaire class which is "elite" only in their skill at exploiting people who do real work in the private sector.

Conclusion

Thus we have a merging of the economic and the political elite. Both types of elites generally rely on some sort of deception to buttress their claims.

The political elite, for example, claim their positions by virtue of some sort of mandate from heaven, or moral virtue, or because they allegedly reflect the "will of the people." These are all lies, of course, but have nonetheless worked to fool and pacify the public for many centuries.

Under a regime of economic interventionism, the economic elites rely on lies as well. They claim they are elites because they are efficient or hard-working, or "serve the customer." These are lies as well since, in the absence of a free - or even mostly free - market, the elites are, in fact, in their positions due to political maneuvering. They are, in effect, merely an extension of the political elite. The more interventionist the regime is, the more this is true.

The real elites have always been those who receive the voluntary and free support of others through the private sector, or through other non-violent means of interaction: through families, religious institutions, and other institutions of the private sector. On the other hand, those who become "elites" through the initiation of violence, and through the looting of others, have always been frauds and imposters.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 23:20

Hegseth's Polygraphs Return To Pentagon In 'Major Leak Hunt' Over Iran War

The polygraphs have returned to the Pentagon, after the Trump administration has been furious over what the president calls 'leaks' by US officials to the press, particularly regarding alleged diminished munitions stocks and missile shortages.

The New York Times reports Saturday that Pentagon investigators have questioned roughly 50 personnel on the Joint Staff whether they had disclosed classified information to journalists.

File image, Anadolu Agency

The publication calls it a "major leak hunt" - with the widespread polygraph tests having taken place in August, and possibly with more rounds to come.

"Between 1,500 and 2,000 officers and officials work for the Joint Staff, which coordinates operations, policy and war plans with combatant commanders around the world," the NY Times notes.

Dozens of other officials, including under US Central Command (CENTCOM), were also polygraph tested earlier this summer.

An avalanche of media reports in August, and from earlier in the summer, have said the US exhausted much of its stock of long-range Tomahawk missiles on the Iran war, along with Patriot and THAAD missile interceptors.

US officials have stated to CBS that no one failed the tests, but it has had a chilling effect, given that sources have also described the scope of the dragnet as "extraordinary". 

All of this seems not only geared toward preventing leaks to the press, but comes amid a climate of perceived 'disloyalty' and dissent against War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Polygraphs are typically used in the military or intelligence community in cases of suspected foreign espionage or instances of suspicion of handing off classified information. Hegseth has already greatly narrowed his trusted inner-circle.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has only said that the Department of War "takes all leaks of classified national security information extremely seriously and investigates accordingly."

This isn't the first wave of polygraphs at the Pentagon under Trump. Hegseth had previewed these actions all the way back in Fall 2025. There's also been widespread signings of NDAs.

Now they gotta do it again to find out who leaked this https://t.co/t0P837nvoq

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) September 5, 2026

While there already exist laws and policies covering unauthorized disclosure of classified, restricted, or sensitive information, this is clearly part of a broader push to tighten up leaks.

The reality too is that leaks to the media are a fairly standard part of any administration, going back through American history. Trump likely knows this, but is naturally leery of any further efforts to undermine his policies - especially in this sensitive moment ahead of the November midterm elections.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 22:45

China Expands Online Content Controls, Putting More Pressure On Creators

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times,

China's new rules governing companies that produce and distribute content for social media took effect on Sept. 1, potentially exposing both independent content creators and the accounts they manage to penalties for violations.

Men play games on computers in an internet bar in Beijing on Dec. 16, 2015. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

The regulations require companies providing services such as content planning, production, distribution, marketing, promotion, and talent management to register as service providers.

Critics and independent content creators told The Epoch Times that the rules could broaden the communist regime's control over online content, particularly information about sensitive social issues such as unemployment, unpaid wages, unfinished housing projects, and protests.

They spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

Under the new rules, companies already registered to provide such services have 30 days from the regulations' effective date to amend their business registrations.

Companies involved in online performance management, publishing, audiovisual services, or internet news services must also obtain the relevant licenses.

The rules require covered companies to appoint a person responsible for content management and establish a management team, as well as procedures governing employees and emergency responses.

When signing contracts with online creators, companies must verify their identities and clearly define their management responsibilities.

Platforms can also impose measures on both the companies and the content creators they have contracted with when alleged violations of laws, regulations, platform rules, or contractual agreements occur.

Those measures can include restricting account functions, suspending monetization, or shutting down accounts.

Risks to Online Creators

For people working in China as independent content creators, the new requirements have raised concerns about both income and uncertainty over what content is permissible.

A content creator in Shenyang, China, told The Epoch Times that the rules could directly affect the livelihoods of people who depend on online traffic for income.

"Many people doing livestreams don't know what they can say and what they can't say. Once the traffic gets high, the risks come with it," she said.

The content creator explained that she has seen other creators have their accounts blocked after their livestreams began attracting substantial audiences.

She also questioned how regime authorities and platforms would determine what constitutes prohibited content.

"What does it mean to incite emotions, and what does it mean to make false propaganda? Who decides? There is no clear standard," she said.

The regulations are formally framed as a system for managing businesses involved in the distribution and operation of online content.

However, critics say the requirements could extend beyond large multi-channel networks (MCNs), and apply to smaller operations that may not previously have considered themselves part of the industry.

A Chinese online commentator told The Epoch Times that the rules could encompass small studios, account-management teams, and small livestreaming accounts.

"In the past, many small studios simply helped people obtain advertising, edit videos, and do promotions. They didn't consider themselves MCNs," the commentator said.

"This time, the regulations are very broad. As long as you participate in producing content for online accounts, or help distribute it, you could be required to register and file records, and you would have to assume them as a condition for operating."

In his view, the system shifts part of the regime's censorship responsibilities onto platforms and content-operations companies. Rather than directly intervening in every piece of content, the regime can require companies and platforms to police the accounts under their control.

Concerns Over Reporting on Social Issues

The potential impact could be particularly significant for creators who cover social and economic problems in China.

An independent content creator in Harbin, China, who focuses on analyzing social issues and asked to be identified only by his surname Li, told The Epoch Times that he regularly follows issues including gig employment, difficulties facing restaurants and other businesses, unfinished housing projects, and problems withdrawing money from banks.

Such topics, he said, could potentially be interpreted by platforms as negative information or as an attempt to exploit social issues for attention.

"If influencers continuously follow these things, the network regulators may think you are hyping up a social incident, seeking attention, and making money from traffic," Li said.

"I can only speculate this way. The regime has not clearly stated the standards."

Although Li primarily analyzes information from the perspective of a reader, rather than reporting firsthand on every incident, he said he remains concerned about the restrictions.

"Some content is not false; it's just different from what the official releases say," he said. "Creators are afraid of losing their accounts or income, so they may simply give up publishing. This is self-censorship."

Li said the result could be that social events increasingly have only the version of events permitted by regime authorities.

Once creators face the possibility of having their accounts closed, losing their ability to earn money, or effectively losing their livelihoods, he said, they may choose not to publish information even when they believe it to be accurate.

The regulations impose penalties for violations under existing laws and regulations. Where no specific penalty is provided, the regime can issue warnings and impose fines ranging from 10,000 yuan ($1,490) to 200,000 yuan ($29,800).

For creators and critics, however, the greater concern may be the effect of the rules before any formal penalty is imposed.

If platforms and companies are held responsible for the content produced by the accounts they manage, they have an incentive to remove material that could attract regulatory scrutiny.

That could leave creators increasingly reluctant to report on sensitive social issues, not necessarily because the information is false, but because the potential loss of an account, audience, or income may make publishing it too risky.

Xiao Bin contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 22:10

New Images Reveal China's Stealth Drone At Secretive "Area 51" Base

Aviation researcher Andreas Rupprecht posted footage on LinkedIn that appears to show China’s next-generation high-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drone, an aircraft he estimates is “comparable in size to the US Air Force’s B-21 Raider.”

Rupprecht wrote on LinkedIn that the WZ-X drone was spotted at a secretive air base in China’s Xinjiang region, known to some as China’s version of Area 51:

Two new images of the PLAAF’s latest and largest intercontinental HALE ISR #UAV, provisionally referred to simply as the #WZ-X, have been leaked, apparently showing the aircraft somewhere in Xinjiang. The UAV was first spotted on satellite imagery in May 2025 at the PLAAF’s UAV test centre at Malan Air Base in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of northwestern China.

Rupprecht continued:

In recent years, Malan/Uxxaktal (ZWML) has developed into the PLAAF’s main test centre for trialling UAVs and UCAVs of all types, while also serving as the base of the 178th UAV Brigade. Satellite imagery from 2022 onwards shows extensive expansion of the base’s infrastructure, including new hangars, taxiways and facilities likely linked to the previously unknown, very large flying-wing UAVs WZ-X and the similarly mysterious UCAV GJ-X, both of which are roughly comparable in size to the B-21 Raider. As such, the base, much like the second secret air base at Lop Nur, which is likely focused more on manned systems such as the J-36, J-XDS and, eventually, the H-20, is often compared to the US Area 51 because of its remote location and its role in testing next-generation weapon systems.

Based on the few, often blurry, images available, the WZ-X appears to be a twin-engined flying-wing design similar in configuration to the US RQ-180, but considerably larger. Rough estimates suggest a wingspan of about 52 m and a length of roughly 14 m. Its two engines, of unknown type, are reportedly fed by a central top-mounted intake, allegedly covered by a conformal mesh to reduce radar cross-section. Apart from its very wide span, the design appears to feature a relatively spacious central fuselage section and a dorsal SATCOM antenna. Its range is estimated at more than 20,000 km, with a normal cruising altitude of 18-20 km and a cruising speed of Mach 0.5-0.65. As for the manufacturer, some sources claim it was developed by Nantong University (NTU), located in Nantong, Jiangsu province.

The WZ-X could help Beijing locate warships, map air defenses and relay targeting information to China’s massive arsenal of long-range missiles, as well as hypersonic weapons, in the event of a conflict over Taiwan

Last week, a new report from Taiwan’s leading English-language daily newspaper, the Taipei Times, revealed that China had deployed a record 244 coast guard, research and other government vessels around the island.

Technical details about the WZ-X remain scarce, and claims about its capabilities remain unverified. However, the expanding infrastructure at Malan and repeated sightings suggest that the aircraft is undergoing flight testing.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 21:35

US Sanctions Turkish Bank Over Alleged IRGC Transfers In Latest Action

Via The Cradle

The US Treasury announced sanctions on Friday on a Turkey-based bank and two of its subsidiaries, accusing them of moving tens of millions of dollars on behalf of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and facilitating Tehran's movement of funds across the international banking system. 

“"Financial institutions continue to find out the hard way that we are serious about Operation Economic Outcast," US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. "We know who you are, we know where you are, and we will continue to take action together with our allies and partners until we have buried the head of the Iranian snake."

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) named Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi Anonim Sirketi, alongside its two Istanbul-based units, Golden Global Varlik Kiralama Anonim Sirketi and Golden Global Portfoy Yonetimi Anonim Sirketi.

OFAC alleges the bank was created to help Iranian oil revenues reach Turkey from China, where exchangers converted the funds into cash and gold, and accuses it of opening correspondent banking to Iranian institutions through accounts under Quds Force control. 

The sanctions come as part of Washington's Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign to economically asphyxiate Iran by cutting off its remaining revenue and severing the channels it uses to move money abroad. 

Bessent told Reuters on August 30 that fresh secondary sanctions would follow every week, with banks first in line. He said the Treasury was telling lenders it was not acceptable to hold Iranian money or assist the government in Tehran, and indicated the next escalation could mean severing an institution from the dollar system altogether.

Days earlier, the Treasury barred the UAE branches of Egypt's Banque Misr from dollar access over alleged Iranian links. 

Speaking ahead of the G20 finance meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, Bessent threatened ministers and central bank governors to break their economic ties with Iran or face secondary sanctions of their own, warning that no leakage would be tolerated.

The sanctions come as part of Washington’s "Economic D-Day," an economic strangulation campaign launched after Washington failed to achieve its military objectives against Iran. 

"In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries.  Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone," Bessent had said.

"President Trump has taken action that his predecessors have long deferred. Under his leadership, America is no longer managing the Iranian threat. We are ending it. Those who stand with the United States will reap the rewards of our partnership. Those who tether themselves to Tehran should expect to share in the isolation of a withering regime," he had also said.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 21:00

Meanwhile In Ceuta...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Viral footage out of the invaded Spanish enclave of Ceuta shows a bottlenose dolphin calf came in close to the sand at Playa del Trampolín in Ceuta this week, disoriented and still alive. A group of men who entered illegally in the July surge pulled it from the water, hoisted it like a prize, and - according to local reporting, a conservation complaint, and Telecinco - one of them bludgeoned it in the head with a stick.

An Ecoservicios worker in high-vis tried to stop the handling. Voices on the clip can be heard shouting "No! No! You can't eat it! It's a dolphin!" The animal was killed. Some of the men then moved off toward the breakwater with the body.

The conservation group DAUBMA took photographs, clips and social-media stills to the Guardia Civil and asked for animal-cruelty and protected-fauna charges. Alvise Pérez's Se Acabó la Fiesta filed at Ceuta's court on the same facts. A petition by Nadia García Gómez put it in writing: the calf was "brutally pulled from the water... handled as if it were an object and violently struck on the head."

?? "NO! NO! YOU CAN'T EAT IT! IT'S A DOLPHIN!"

A video from Ceuta shows a group of migrants pulling a dolphin calf from the water as a man desperately tries to stop them.

The group reportedly found the calf near the shore at Playa del Trampolín, pulled it from the water, and...

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 4, 2026

Spanish citizens must now share their city with savages who treat a dolphin like a piñata.

The illegal migrants in Ceuta pulled a baby dolphin out of the sea today and clubbed it to death for fear fun.

Get them out of Europe immediately pic.twitter.com/4ERzMgH8kC

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 3, 2026

They likely have a lower IQ than the animal they pulled out of the sea and bludgeoned. They are predatory scum acting solely on chemical instinct, completely lacking in empathy, judgement or respect for anything other than their own worthless existence.

El Trampolín is not a postcard cove anymore. It is the same strip that has held thousands of arrivals since late July, when more than 70,000 people crossed from Morocco into a city of roughly 84,000.

Madrid still talks as if most of them "went home," yet the reality is that reed shacks, rotting food and human waste have sat on that shoreline for weeks. The calf swam into that hell and couldn't escape.

One of the men in the circle was filming the spectacle on what looks like an iPhone 17 Pro Max. The "destitute asylum seeker" kit keeps getting more expensive.

'Asylum seeker refugee' in Ceuta filming the dolphin bludgeoning with his iPhone 17 pro max and brand new braces. pic.twitter.com/1AJdc6vsuI

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) September 4, 2026

DAUBMA says the calf reached the shallows alive, was dragged out, was struck, and shows a bleeding wound under one eye while people on the tape try to wipe the blood. It called the case "extrema gravedad ambiental" and asked the environmental prosecutor to take it. Bottlenose dolphins are protected under Spanish and EU law.

A day earlier the animal-rights party PACMA shared a clip showing a migrant in Ceuta immobilising a park goose, bagging it, legs bound, a fish already in hand. A bystander intervened and the bird was dropped. The man left the scene.

?Esto ha ocurrido en Ceuta hace escasas horas.

?Un hombre ha pillado a otro inmovilizando y embolsando a una oca de un parque público para llevársela. Se desconoce el objetivo, pero nada bueno.

?La bandera que ampare al maltratador es total y absolutamente irrelevante para... pic.twitter.com/Jle5dirVlY

— PACMA (@PartidoPACMA) September 3, 2026

PACMA issued a statement condemning "any act of violence, capture or manipulation of an animal, regardless of who commits it, their nationality, origin or administrative situation," while adding that there is "not enough information to affirm that the incidents with animals were motivated by hunger."

As we highlighted in mid-August carers who feed Ceuta's street-cat colonies said sites by the desalination plant and in Huerta Téllez, Carmelitas, Príncipe, Sidi Embarek and Punta Blanca had emptied after the migrant camps spread over the same ground. Volunteers described dead cats found cut or missing half a body, and pigeons and gulls half-eaten near the settlements.

Conservative influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek points out that while everyone is rightly disgusted over the dolphin incident, European children are being raped and killed by migrants relentlessly, and it's beginning to become little more than background noise.

"It took a dolphin calf," she wrote. "That says something about the way our society views the value of human children." She also pointed to the Lindsay Clancy case in the United States - a mother who strangled her three children and was immediately wrapped in feminist excuse-making. Murder a dolphin instead, Vlaardingerbroek noted, and that chorus disappears.

Everyone is rightfully outraged over migrants in Ceuta beating a baby dolphin to death, but European children are raped and killed by migrants on a daily basis and we barely see this level of fury.

It took a dolphin calf. That says something about the way our society views the... https://t.co/WyETEIjWcO pic.twitter.com/rv3LkwGy2W

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) September 4, 2026

The situation in Ceuta remains dire. Playgrounds that used to hold Spanish children are smeared with excrement. Beaches that held families have become open latrines. Mothers cannot let their daughters outside without a male escort.

Ceuta's chief prosecutor, Silvia Rojas, told Spanish media that 23 sexual assaults - nine of them against children - had been recorded since the late-July surge, almost one case a day. Police unions speak of women and girls clinging to vans near the CETI because stepping away results in assault, and being dragged into the hills.

Locals have had enough. In late August residents tore beach camps apart, threw gear into the sea and chanted that if the men would not leave, Ceuta would throw them out. Police put a cordon between Spaniards and the shacks and used rubber bullets on the people who live there.

The revolt did not stay inside the enclave. Marches spread across the peninsula.

Sánchez went to Congress and called it "absurd to think that the government knew and did nothing." He boasted of returns "within 72 hours" and a €309 million emergency package. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares has claimed "practically the entirety" of those who entered have gone back to Morocco.

Video from El Trampolín a month later still shows tents, wrecked shoreline and a city that looks sacked. Tent camps billed for 1,500 cannot accomodate 5,000 to 10,000 people.

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 Sat, 09/05/2026 - 20:11

DHS Seeks Faster Dismissal Of Some Asylum Claims

Authored by Timothy Frudd via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seeking to move quickly to dismiss more asylum cases found legally insufficient.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington on Feb. 17, 2026.(Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times) (The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington on

"If an asylum claim is facially deficient, you don't need an evidentiary hearing. We are done wasting time and government resources indulging sham asylum claims." DHS general counsel James Percival wrote in an X statement on Sept. 3.

Evidentiary hearings, also known as merits hearings, allow asylum applicants and DHS officials to present evidence regarding asylum claims. They also give immigration judges an opportunity to hear arguments from both sides and review the evidence submitted.

The department's push to expedite the dismissal of asylum claims deemed legally insufficient follows multiple actions by the Trump administration to crack down on asylum fraud.

In his social media post on Thursday, Percival shared a Fox News report that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE's) Office of the Principal Legal Advisor's attorneys had been instructed by DHS to seek the dismissal of legally insufficient asylum applications.

The attorneys were instructed by DHS to file motions to pretermit in immigration court, according to the report. Pretermit motions formally request that immigration judges deny asylum applications prior to full merits hearings.

Asked about the new guidance, a DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times that a pending asylum application did not "confer legal status" in the United States.

"America's asylum system was never intended to be used as a de facto amnesty program or a catch-all, get-out-of-deportation-free card," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Sept. 3.

President Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have reversed the previous administration's "catch and release" border policy. The policy allowed many illegal immigrants to be released into the United States instead of detaining them until their immigration cases were resolved.

"All illegal aliens receive due process. We are applying the law as written by Congress," the DHS spokesperson said.

The Epoch Times reached out to ICE about the new guidance but did not hear back before publication time.

Administration's Broader Asylum Measures

The department's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) previously announced an interim rule change in late July to expedite asylum applications.

The interim rule change allows USCIS to refer asylum applications to immigration judges without interviewing asylum applicants in advance. The change was implemented to reduce the backlog of asylum applications.

When the asylum application rule change was announced in July, Percival said it would improve efficiency and fulfill Trump's immigration mandate.

"One of the greatest barriers to effective immigration enforcement is intentional delay by illegal aliens and the open borders attorneys who represent them," he said.

In May, DHS directed ICE to crack down on fraudulent asylum claims by taking action against attorneys who file false asylum claims in immigration court.

On Sept. 3, the spokesperson added that the department has worked for months to recruit new immigration judges who will "ensure the rule of law and restore integrity" to the immigration system in the United States.

The DHS directive came after Trump issued a presidential memorandum in March in response to what he described as "rampant fraud and meritless claims" in America's immigration system. The memorandum called for lawyers and law firms to be held accountable for misconduct.

Homeland Security Investigations later announced in July that it was seeking to impose a fine of more than $470,000 against an immigration attorney who allegedly filed false asylum claims for clients.

Trump's memorandum was criticized by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) as a "chilling directive" targeting immigration attorneys, law firms, and the immigration bar.

"It seeks to delegitimize the work of resolute professionals who ensure that immigrants - many of whom are fleeing persecution and are contributing to their new communities - have access to fair legal representation," AILA President Kelli Stump said at the time.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 19:50

COSCO Denies US Claims Its Container Ships Serve As Beijing's Global Spy Network

China's state-owned shipping giant COSCO rejected a report published last week alleging that the company had concealed advanced surveillance equipment aboard its cargo ships to monitor US military communications near the coastlines of target nations, including the US.

Reuters quoted COSCO on Friday as calling the allegations "totally unfounded" and false.

What Reuters reported on Tuesday:

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. assessment of the Chinese program, said COSCO has a decades-long intelligence-collection partnership with Beijing. The arrangement allows China to collect communication signals from vessels and aircraft operating across Europe, North America and Asia, they said.

The advanced equipment aboard the ships is intended to enable China to gather information about "military communications technologies and encryption developments," one of the officials said.

The world's fourth-largest container carrier also told the outlet:

COSCO SHIPPING has always adhered to market‑oriented operations and compliance practices across all our global businesses

All communication, navigation, safety and operational equipment installed on our vessels is used solely for legitimate ‌commercial ⁠purposes, including navigation safety, ship-to-shore communications and emergency response. 

The allegations surface just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping's expected Sept. 24 visit to Washington for talks with President Trump.

If substantiated, COSCO's alleged use as a signals intelligence operations would fit a broader pattern of Chinese gray-zone activity in which commercial infrastructure and civilian technologies are leveraged to advance state objectives.

Dr. Ryan Clarke of the CCP BioThreats Initiative wrote in a book last year that Beijing's strategy increasingly combines next-generation weapons with irregular and nonkinetic tools, including synthetic narcotics such as fentanyl and cannabinoids, what he characterized as biological weapons involving COVID-19, psychological influence through platforms such as TikTok, and other instruments of unconventional warfare.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 19:15

Citadel Eyes US Shale As Oil Trading Moves Closer To The Wellhead

Authored by Julianne Geiger via OilPrice.com,

Citadel is shopping for U.S. oil production assets, including a previous bid for WildFire Energy before Magnolia Oil & Gas agreed to buy the Eagle Ford producer for $4.06 billion.

Reuters reported Friday that the hedge fund and commodities trader has held talks with several private-equity owners of oil-weighted exploration and production companies in recent weeks.

WildFire would have given Citadel roughly 53,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of production, about 70% of it oil, plus 810,000 net acres in South Texas. Magnolia ultimately won the auction in July.

Citadel already trades oil, natural gas, power, and other commodities. It also already owns natural gas production. The firm bought Paloma Natural Gas from EnCap Investments in 2025, renamed it Apex Natural Gas, and added more assets from Comstock Resources and Azul Resources.

Oil would give Citadel another physical position behind its commodities trading business.

U.S. shale has become particularly attractive this year because its barrels do not need the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb or another overseas chokepoint to reach Gulf Coast refineries and export terminals. Middle East disruptions have kept crude prices elevated and pushed U.S. producers to some of their strongest earnings in years.

That geography is something Citadel founder Ken Griffin was already worried about months ago. In April, Griffin warned that a six-to-12-month Hormuz closure would push the global economy into recession. His concern was straightforward: sustained oil shortages would raise energy costs, inflation and transportation costs across the global economy.

Owning U.S. production gives a commodities firm direct exposure to the barrels that become more valuable when overseas supply gets disrupted.

Citadel would hardly be alone. Vitol built and later sold its VTX Energy Partners shale business. Gunvor has been pursuing more than $1 billion of Haynesville gas assets.

Private-equity-backed shale producers have traditionally been sold to larger drillers looking for acreage and scale. Citadel's interest adds another class of buyer: firms that already make money trading the price of oil and increasingly want ownership of the oil itself.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 17:30

DeepSeek's 160,000 Huawei Order Is A Real Threat To Nvidia In 2027

Roughly 350 kilometers northwest of Beijing, in the city of Ulanqab, DeepSeek is constructing a data center measured in gigawatts. Running at full capacity, the site would draw enough power to supply 750,000 homes. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek intends to fill a portion of this massive footprint with at least 160,000 of Huawei's newest AI processors, the Ascend 950DT. Once operational, it will stand as the largest known cluster of Chinese-made AI silicon in the world.

Yet, Huawei's processors have a notoriously poor track record when it comes to the heavy lifting of training AI models - a limitation DeepSeek experienced firsthand with the previous chip generation. Instead of building models from scratch, the Huawei chips will be relegated to inference: running DeepSeek's finished models to generate answers for end users. That is not the consolation for Nvidia it sounds like. Inference is the larger pool of compute, the faster-growing one, and increasingly the one that pays - and Huawei has just taken the biggest inference order in China.

What The Chips Won't Do

Every AI model leads a double life. The first phase is training: a grueling, months-long process where tens of thousands of chips work in perfect synchronization, digesting vast swaths of the internet to learn how to predict the next word. The second phase is inference, which encompasses everything that follows - answering chatbot queries, writing code, or summarizing documents. Training determines who holds the technological crown, but inference drives the sheer volume of compute and, increasingly, the revenue.

When Huawei laid out its roadmap last September, it positioned the 950DT as a dual-threat capable of both training and inference. However, Bloomberg's sources indicate DeepSeek has zero intention of using it to train. Last year, buckling under pressure from Chinese authorities to adopt domestic hardware, DeepSeek spent months attempting to train its R2 model on older Ascend chips with on-site Huawei engineers. According to the Financial Times, the effort failed to yield a single successful training run. DeepSeek ultimately reverted to Nvidia for training, keeping Huawei strictly for inference. A year later, and a full hardware generation newer, Friday's report confirms that division of labor remains intact.

This means China's premier domestic chip has successfully captured the inference market, but remains locked out of the training arena. Ironically, this is precisely the boundary U.S. export controls were designed to enforce. Four years of restrictions were intended to block China from training frontier models; Washington never actually set out to prevent them from running finished ones.

What Nvidia keeps in China, meanwhile, barely counts. Its remaining Chinese training demand is fueled by rented overseas compute and alleged smuggling routes, and neither pipeline shows up on Nvidia's balance sheet as legitimate Chinese revenue. The segment Huawei has taken is the one that books.

Huawei Can't Fill It

One issue - Huawei simply cannot manufacture these chips fast enough. According to Bloomberg, severe shortages of top-tier memory will bottleneck 950DT production to the low hundreds of thousands this year. Huawei is actively juggling DeepSeek's massive order against other domestic clients and a fledgling export initiative, meaning it could take well over a year just to fulfill this single contract. DeepSeek has even petitioned Beijing to pressure Huawei into accelerating deliveries.

The root of this bottleneck lies in a component often overlooked in AI coverage. An AI accelerator is only as fast as the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacked alongside it. The companies that matter here are South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung, and the U.S.'s Micron. When Washington severed China's access to advanced HBM in December 2024, Huawei had to pivot to developing its own. The 950 series is the first Ascend generation to feature this in-house memory, and Bloomberg's sources confirm it is exactly what is crippling output.

China's national champion is having its flagship chip rationed by the state, while the nation's most prominent AI lab waits in line begging for a larger allocation. To put this in perspective, Bloomberg reported last year that Huawei's entire 2026 production target is roughly 1.6 million Ascend dies - enough for about 600,000 of the older 910C chips and a scattered mix of newer silicon. Furthermore, the 950DT is generally considered to be on par with Nvidia's Hopper generation (the H100s that fueled the 2023 AI boom). By the time DeepSeek's cluster is fully operational in late 2027, more than a year from now, Nvidia will be two full generations ahead in training - a race Huawei is no longer running.

A Fraction Of The Site

The bigger open question is scale. Bloomberg emphasizes that 160,000 950DTs will constitute "only one chunk" of the gigawatt-scale facility in Ulanqab. What will occupy the rest of the site remains a mystery.

When Elon Musk's xAI activated its initial 100,000 Nvidia H100s in Memphis in 2024, the cluster required roughly 150 megawatts of power. Applying that ratio to 160,000 Hopper-class Huawei chips yields a footprint of about 250 megawatts - roughly a quarter of DeepSeek's planned gigawatt, or perhaps a third if the 950DT proves more power-hungry than Nvidia's hardware (a metric Huawei keeps under wraps). Regardless of the exact math, the vast majority of the gigawatt site is unaccounted for.

Washington has its own theory regarding the missing hardware. In February, a senior Trump administration official claimed that DeepSeek trained its latest model on Nvidia's Blackwell chips - current-generation hardware strictly banned from entering China - and suggested these chips are likely housed at the Inner Mongolia facility. "We're not shipping Blackwells to China," the official stated, though they declined to elaborate on how DeepSeek procured them. DeepSeek did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment at the time. While Washington has repeatedly accused both DeepSeek and Moonshot of relying on smuggled Nvidia silicon, Bloomberg notes it hasn't independently verified these claims.

The Huawei order is the narrative Beijing wants public, while the Blackwell smuggling allegation is the narrative Washington wants public - and neither explains the true scale of the Ulanqab facility. 

Beijing Is The One Saying No

In December, the Trump administration cleared Nvidia to sell its H200 chips - the crown jewel of the Hopper generation - to vetted Chinese buyers, provided the U.S. Treasury received a 25 percent cut. The Commerce Department formalized this rule in January, and Bloomberg reports the administration was ready to authorize the export of up to a million chips. Beijing has approved a fraction of that volume.

Given the options, Chinese tech giants still prefer Nvidia. Both Alibaba and Tencent placed massive orders the moment U.S. restrictions relaxed, and Chinese firms continue to rent top-tier Nvidia compute by the hour from unregulated overseas data centers. The true blockade is being orchestrated in Beijing - as the Chinese government is aggressively weaning its domestic labs off foreign silicon, restricting Nvidia imports, and forcefully pivoting the industry toward Huawei.

So - Huawei is not winning Chinese inference on price and performance. It is winning on quota - which makes the threat to Nvidia a policy instrument rather than a product, and a far harder thing to compete against. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned for years that U.S. export controls would inevitably forge a self-sufficient Chinese chip industry. His prophecy is now being fulfilled - by the Chinese government itself. Regardless of what Washington permits, Beijing acts as the ultimate gatekeeper, utilizing import quotas to force its most critical AI labs to adopt Huawei hardware for their fastest-growing workloads.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 16:55

With Its War On Prediction Markets, The Gaming Lobby Plays A Bad Hand

Authored by Dean Heller via RealClearMarkets,

There's a saying in Vegas, the house always wins. I represented Nevada in Congress for more than a decade and I can attest to the truth behind that phrase. But what I learned is that it's rarely a fair fight. The gaming industry works to stack the odds against competition, whether it's at the tables, in courtrooms, or in the halls of Congress.

It was never a fair fight, which is why the gaming industry is so worried about prediction markets. Prediction markets are far from perfect, but they're fair. There is no house. It's no wonder the gambling industry is working overtime to stop them. Recently, the American Gaming Association tried to join a lawsuit in Wisconsin against the CFTC, and its lobbyists went to Congress this week asking for an outright ban on sports event contracts.

While representing Nevada, I sat on the Senate Finance and Banking committees, and whipped votes to protect our gaming industry from anything that smelled like competition. When Sheldon Adelson wanted a federal ban on online gambling, I backed the Restoration of America's Wire Act and warned that internet gaming would be "a final nail" for brick-and-mortar casinos. Looking back, I was probably being a little dramatic. The bill failed anyway, in large part because opponents argued it would cost states an economic boost and push bettors toward unregulated offshore sites.

So when I watch the gaming lobby go to war against prediction markets today, I recognize the play. I ran it.

The industry has launched a multi-state litigation campaign, fired off cease-and-desist letters to stop sports event contracts, and cheered as 41 state attorneys general urged the CFTC to cede jurisdiction over these markets to the states. In certain states, lottery and gaming agencies are colluding with the American Gaming Association. When your state gaming agency and the casino lobby are copying each other's homework, it's fair to ask who's actually regulating whom.

Here's what makes the crusade hard to take seriously. While the casinos lecture Washington about consumer protection, a lawsuit in Philadelphia is showing the country how the sportsbook business actually works. A gambler named Terry Thompson wagered roughly $18.5 million on FanDuel and lost more than $1.5 million. He was a "VIP." His reward for all that losing? His FanDuel host arranged a personalized Cameo video from Phillies star Bryce Harper, who says he never consented and thought he was recording a holiday greeting. Thompson is now suing FanDuel for feeding his addiction, and the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board is reviewing sportsbooks' use of celebrity messages to keep high rollers betting.

Think about the business model that produces that story. Sportsbooks make money when customers lose. So the customers losing the most get the white-glove treatment, and the ones who win too much get shown the door.

There's a reason prediction markets can be straight with their customers in a way sportsbooks can't. An exchange collects a small fee on every trade, win or lose, so no revenue rides on anyone's losing streak. When a platform's paycheck doesn't depend on a customer going broke, it can step in at the signs of trouble, the repeat losses and the chasing, without touching its own bottom line. And instead of fighting oversight, this industry keeps asking for more of it.

Some of these markets, like Kalshi and NADEX, are federally regulated, based in the United States, and volunteering to pay state taxes. North Carolina just passed a law recognizing federal oversight and taxing prediction market revenue, which was smarter than burning taxpayer money in court and inconvenient for the claim that these platforms cost states money. New Jersey came close to taxing prediction markets this year, and the loudest opposition came from the union representing Atlantic City's own casino workers, who argued that taxing prediction markets would "legitimize" a competitor to their industry. They'd rather forgo the tax revenue than admit prediction markets are here to stay.

My advice to my old friends in gaming is the advice I wish someone had given me during the Wire Act fight: innovate, don't litigate. The knee-jerk lawsuits didn't stop sports betting, tribal gaming, or the internet, and they won't stop this. I love Las Vegas. It's one of my favorite places on earth, and there's plenty of room for everyone. Let consumers decide.

After all, this is the town that will take a bet on anything. Funny that the one wager it won't touch is a fair fight.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 16:20

Under-The-Radar Oklahoma Bitcoin Mining Site Condemned After Leaking 3 Million Gallons Of Water

A massive water leak in El Reno, Oklahoma has brought new scrutiny to a Bitcoin mining operation that city officials say had been operating without required approvals and in violation of multiple building and safety codes, according to KFOR 4. Three million gallons of water were leaked, according to KOCO ABC. 

The facility, operated by Athlon BT LLC, had largely escaped public attention until the leak was discovered. City officials say the company had also installed a fire hydrant without their knowledge, while questions remain about how water was being used at the site.

Athlon originally applied for building permits in 2022. By 2023, however, El Reno had issued a stop-work order after the permits expired and officials identified multiple fire and life-safety code violations. The company was given until December 2023 to address the problems, according to the city.

Instead, officials say Athlon continued construction and eventually began operating the facility despite lacking the inspections and final certificate of occupancy required by the city. Officials have cited problems involving electrical systems, drainage and other areas of the property.

“They really weren’t in compliance at all,” city spokesperson Lyndsay Bayne said.

The discovery came as a surprise not only to residents but also to local officials, who said the Bitcoin mining operation had attracted little attention before the leak, according to KFOR 4.

Athlon had previously described the structures on its website as “mobile data centers.” The operation, however, differs considerably from the large hyperscale data centers proposed in communities such as Yukon and Piedmont, which have generated debate over their potential demands on local infrastructure and water supplies.

The KFOR 4 report says that El Reno officials say Athlon told the city its equipment was air-cooled and therefore should not have required water for cooling. According to the city, the water line involved in the leak was supposed to serve only a fire hydrant.

That hydrant itself has raised additional questions. Officials say Athlon installed it behind the property without notifying the city, and it did not appear on municipal records. The hydrant was also reportedly concealed beneath a large pile of brush.

KFOR later observed above-ground piping that appeared to connect the mobile data center units and extend toward the hydrant. Athlon’s website, before becoming unavailable, also referenced what the company called “hydro-cooling technology.” Those details have prompted questions about whether the water line may have served a purpose beyond fire protection.

Photo: KOCO ABC

KFOR reported that its attempts to obtain an explanation from Athlon have gone unanswered. Calls and emails to the company received no response, and its website subsequently displayed a maintenance notice.

After the water leak was discovered, El Reno condemned the property.

The episode is unfolding amid a broader debate over data center development in Oklahoma, although city officials have stressed that Athlon’s Bitcoin mining operation should not be confused with the much larger data center projects being proposed elsewhere.

“El Reno doesn’t have any large data centers or any plans to have any large data centers,” Bayne said. “This was completely under the radar.”

The city has since strengthened its rules governing future data center developments. A recently adopted ordinance requires proposed data centers and large artificial intelligence facilities to undergo greater scrutiny and provide an opportunity for public comment before they can move forward.

For residents concerned about the strain such facilities could place on local resources, the Athlon controversy has added urgency to calls for stronger oversight. The unresolved questions surrounding the company’s permits, infrastructure and water use are also likely to keep the Bitcoin mining operation under scrutiny as city officials determine how the facility was able to operate for so long without full compliance.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 15:45

FICO Crashes As Trump Housing Chief Pulte Cracks Mortgage-Score Monopoly

"Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have been overcharging Americans for far too long," Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte wrote on X late Thursday.

The Trump administration's campaign against the cost of credit scores and reports used in the mortgage industry sent shares of Fair Isaac, the company behind FICO scores, as well as Equifax and TransUnion, tumbling on Friday morning.

Pulte continued: "This will end soon. We are seriously considering bi-merge, and stronger solutions (SAFER and SOUNDER). We will not allow companies to take advantage of American consumers. No more."

Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have been overcharging Americans for far too long. This will end soon. We are seriously considering bi-merge, and stronger solutions (SAFER and SOUNDER). We will not allow companies to take advantage of American consumers. No more.

— Pulte (@pulte) September 4, 2026

Pulte's warning was accompanied by a Reuters report that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will allow all lenders to use VantageScore, a competing credit-scoring model, expanding a rollout across 50 lenders.

The move to lower costs for homebuyers and boost competition in the mortgage credit-scoring market, which FICO dominates, is seen by the market as a direct challenge to FICO's long-standing dominance.

Ashish Sabadra, an equity-research analyst at RBC Capital Markets, provided clients on Friday morning with more details about the industry implications following Pulte's X post:

Assessing the Impact on Credit Bureaus (EFX/TRU/EXPN) and FICO

Our view: Tweet from FHFA Director Bill Pulte suggests the agency is seriously considering permitting bi-merge credit reports for conforming loans. If fully adopted across the mortgage market, this shift could negatively impact up to one-third of mortgage inquiries. Beyond volume loss, the move would also introduce greater competition in mortgage credit reporting, a dynamic we will monitor closely for signs of pricing pressure.

Regarding bureau-level impact, EFX carries the greatest mortgage exposure given its mortgage solutions and income and employment verification businesses, though these same assets also present meaningful bundling opportunities. However, with the remaining third-party resellers estimated to control 75%+ of the market, these players may preferentially gravitate toward TRU and EXPN. EXPN has the least mortgage exposure among the three bureaus and would likely face the smallest revenue headwind from this potential regulatory change.

Separately, Bill Pulte also tweeted that, effective immediately, he is instructing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to approve all lenders to use VantageScore. VantageScore adoption has already gained meaningful traction, with VS4 market share reaching approximately 25% at UWM and ~34% at Rocket through August 25th. However, while 50 lenders participated in the pilot program, Fannie Mae data indicates that only four mortgage lenders were actively issuing VantageScore loans. Pulte's directive to open adoption to all lenders would therefore represent a significant broadening of the program. 

Mortgage exposure: In 2025, Mortgages represented ~21% of EFX's revenues, with mortgage credit reports and mortgage solutions collectively accounting for ~11% of total revenues, or 32% of USIS revenues. For TRU, mortgage exposure stood at ~13% of total revenues, representing ~35% of US Financial Services revenues. EXPN has comparatively limited exposure at ~4% of total revenues.

Background. FHFA Director Bill Pulte announced last night that effective immediately, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been instructed to approve all lenders to use VantageScore as an eligible credit scoring system. The directive follows a successful initial rollout in which 50 lenders delivered loans using VantageScore under the program.

In a separate post, Pulte stated that EFX, TRU, and EXPN are overcharging American consumers and that he is seriously considering a bi-merge credit pull requirement for conforming loans, as well as structural reforms.

Fair Isaac crashed as much as 21%, its sharpest intraday decline since March 2020 if losses sustain through close. Equifax and TransUnion each tumbled as much as 11%.

Separately, TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg told clients that Pulte's attack on ​​​​​​mortgage-related costs could support the administration's affordability message ahead of the midterm elections this fall.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 14:35

The Soft Antichrist Of The AI Age: What Everyone Is Missing About The US-China Arms Race

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

I. The word

Peter Thiel spent the back half of last year giving private lectures on the Antichrist, and the word has been loose in the discourse ever since. His political reading is the old one. The Antichrist is not a cartoon devil. He is the figure who arrives offering peace and safety, and who uses the fear of catastrophe to install one universal order. In Thiel's telling that figure is a regulator. He stops technology in the name of survival. The price of the peace is stagnation.

I want the frame. I do not want his conclusion.

The more probable figure is not the one who promises safety. It is the one who promises growth. Most of the world does not lie awake about existential risk from machine intelligence. It lies awake about electricity, logistics, credit, tax collection, and a median citizen who is twenty four and needs work. To that world the universal offer is not a moratorium. It is a stack. Cheap. Financed. Hosted. Present. Already attached to the handsets, the ports, and the power.

That is the soft Antichrist. It does not arrive with a speech about ending history. It arrives as the only AI that can grow your GDP.

I am not writing theology. I am writing underwriting.

II. The comforting story

The market is telling itself a story. The AI race is a contest of models. America builds the best systems. China copies. Europe regulates. Capital therefore clusters around closed labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale cloud. The scoreboard is a benchmark table.

That story is not false. It is incomplete in a way that misprices power. It treats the richest customers as the only customers that matter. It treats evaluations as destiny. It treats national power as a software demo.

I disagree.

The race will be decided by who becomes the default operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left. Those economies will not adopt AI as a lifestyle product. They will adopt it as a growth tool. They will take the stack that is cheap, present, financed, and attached to what they already run. If that stack is Chinese, Beijing does not need to conquer anyone. It only needs to become expensive to leave.

III. Where the mass actually is

When Sargasso maps AI adoption across emerging GDP rather than across model releases, the picture is not the one the market is priced for.

Start with the denominator. On purchasing power terms, IMF projections for 2026 put China at about $44.3 trillion against $32.4 trillion for the United States. India is near $18.9 trillion. Indonesia clears $5.4 trillion and Brazil $5.2 trillion. Turkey is at $4.0 trillion, Mexico $3.6 trillion, Saudi Arabia $2.9 trillion, Egypt $2.6 trillion, Nigeria $2.4 trillion. Nominal dollars still flatter America, and by a wide margin. China's nominal print is about $20.9 trillion against the same $32.4 trillion for the United States. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. Nominal tells you who can buy foreign assets. PPP tells you how much physical and administrative activity there is to automate. For an adoption thesis, the second number is the one that matters.

Ray Dalio has been describing the political consequence in plain terms. He calls it a tribute system. A hierarchical order in which leaders travel to Beijing to acknowledge relative power in exchange for access and stability. He ties it to a growing view abroad that American security guarantees will not be honored under stress. I take the framing seriously. I do not treat it as scripture. Ports and rail were the first set of rails. Models will be the next set.

IV. The evidence is already in the download data

This part of the argument is no longer speculative.

Over roughly four years, the American share of model downloads on Hugging Face fell from about sixty percent to the mid teens by late 2025, according to reporting in The Wire China. Hugging Face's own one year review of the DeepSeek moment is blunt on the composition shift. DeepSeek R1 became the most liked model on the platform in its history. The top of that list is no longer majority American. Baidu went from zero public Hugging Face releases in 2024 to more than one hundred in 2025. ByteDance and Tencent raised their release counts eight to nine fold. Of newly created models under a year old, downloads for Chinese models surpassed any other country, including the United States. Western startups and researchers now routinely fine tune Chinese base models because those are the largest open weights available.

The Wire China's Southeast Asia reporting puts the commercial logic in local language. A Jakarta lab head said developers will always pick the cheapest one. A Malaysian founder said he wants the biggest model and there is no Western open source offering at that size. Chinese cloud providers were running thirty seven availability zones across six Southeast Asian regions against thirty across four for the Western field.

None of this shows up cleanly in a frontier benchmark table. All of it shows up in switching costs three years from now.

V. The institutional layer

Beijing is not leaving the volume layer to price alone. In July 2026 it stood up the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, with twenty nine founding members. Public reporting names Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and a broader set spanning Africa and Latin America among the signatories. The five year commitments attached to the body, as reported by Caixin and The Diplomat, are unglamorous and therefore serious. Training placements. Joint application centers with regional blocs. A weather early warning system deployed into dozens of countries.

Read that list as an underwriter. Training placements create the administrators who will write the next procurement. Application centers create the reference deployments. Weather systems create dependency inside a ministry that cannot afford an outage. Standards get set that way. Not with a better model. With a bureaucracy that has already learned one.

VI. America is running the right play against the wrong clock

Washington understands the problem. Executive Order 14320, signed July 23, 2025, created the American AI Exports Program to push full stack packages abroad. Chips, models, applications, cybersecurity, cloud, and data centers sold together. Analysis from the Institute for Progress argues the contested emerging markets that should sit at the center of that effort include Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. That is the correct map. It is essentially the map in this piece.

The tension is that the same government running an export promotion program is running an export control program, and the second one moves faster than the first. The UAE's status was upgraded only in July 2026, and even then chip access was scoped to approved entities. Meanwhile Huawei has been shopping Ascend parts into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, and courting Egypt directly. Beijing has published a self sufficiency ambition on a near term horizon and is moving to expand domestic AI chip output.

Set aside whether the controls are correct on the merits. Underwrite the second order effect. Capability still flows outward through commercial relationships and distillation. American open efforts start constrained at home. The result is a one way street into the volume layer of the world economy, at exactly the moment when the volume layer is where the standard gets set.

Western discourse is spending its attention elsewhere. Alignment theater. Synthetic media. White collar displacement in rich cities. Those are real problems. They are also rich country problems. The quieter failure is dependency. Once an emerging state's logistics, credit, schools, and revenue collection run on foreign models, switching stops being a procurement decision. It becomes a sovereignty decision. Sovereignty decisions do not get made on price.

VII. The map I would force into any serious strategy memo

When we screen a country the way we screen a company, we are not asking which model it admires. We are asking what it has already installed, who financed the installation, and what it would cost to rip out.

Asia. India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka.

Middle East and Gulf. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Iran.

Africa. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Ghana.

Latin America. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia.

These are not equivalent cases. India can build its own. The Gulf can simply buy, and is buying from both sides. Vietnam and Indonesia industrialize and will take whatever shortens the industrialization. Nigeria and Ethiopia need administration and power far more than they need chat interfaces. Brazil and Mexico live between Western finance and Chinese trade and will hedge accordingly. Pakistan and Kazakhstan sit on corridors Beijing already financed once.

The common variable is growth urgency. Growth urgency selects the stack that shows up, and it selects it quickly.

VIII. The throat

Compute is the oil of this cycle, and the supply chain has a throat. Counterpoint Research put TSMC at seventy three percent of the pure play foundry market in the second quarter of 2026. Its position at the leading nodes is more concentrated than that headline suggests.

You do not need an invasion scenario to price the leverage. You need governments that come to believe only one counterpart can reliably keep the chips, the cloud, the handsets, and the financing flowing. That belief is cheaper to create than a fab and harder to reverse than a tariff.

IX. Two futures

In the first, America wins the cathedral. Benchmarks stay American. Safety papers multiply. Closed models remain impressive and expensive. Emerging economies still buy the stack attached to Chinese devices, Chinese capital, and turnkey Chinese infrastructure. Global token volume follows global GDP, which is to say it follows the parish. The United States keeps the prestige and loses the installed base.

In the second, America treats emerging GDP as the actual battlefield. Competitive open weights exist and are hostable by states that want an alternative to Beijing without becoming a tenant of a single American lab. Energy, chips, and cloud are treated as national goods rather than as line items. The public companies that can genuinely deploy AI into durable operations are valued above the ones that can only demonstrate it.

Markets are priced closer to the first future than the evidence supports. That gap is the part I care about.

X. This is the same thesis, widened

In Pilot Purgatory I argued that AI works and capital is available, and that the binding constraint is organizational. Companies cannot absorb what they have bought. Forty two S&P 500 companies captured 312 percent of the index's price return since ChatGPT while the other 458 captured 38 percent. Fifty eight percent of small and mid cap companies claim an AI strategy and under one percent describe implementation as mature.

That was a governance problem inside public companies. Widen the aperture by one order of magnitude and it is the same problem at the level of the state. Intelligence is being manufactured at declining cost. Absorption is the bottleneck. When Sargasso underwrites a company, the question is whether the organization can metabolize the technology it has already purchased. Run that question at the level of a country with weak administrative capacity and urgent growth targets, and the answer is worse. That is precisely why the party that clears the bottleneck earns something more durable than a product cycle. It writes the rails under the next order.

XI. What I would underwrite

If you underwrite AI as a feature race between rich country labs, you will be right about the models and wrong about the century.

Underwrite instead who owns the rails that India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Vietnam, Nigeria, Egypt, and Turkey will actually run. Underwrite who captures adoption where governance is thin and growth is urgent. Underwrite the closed labs and the national champions as though their real competitor is not the next chat interface, but a hierarchy that intends to make itself impossible to leave.

The AI race that matters is not who builds the smartest model in the richest city. It is who becomes the operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left in them.

This is not a recommendation. It is my map.

Sargasso Capital Management is a constructivist investment firm. This post is research and commentary. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or interest in any fund.

Sources

1. Fortune, "Peter Thiel is delivering 4 private sold-out lectures at a club in San Francisco, about the Antichrist," September 2, 2025. Link; Reason, "I listened to over 7 hours of Peter Thiel's leaked Antichrist lectures," October 14, 2025. Link
2. Visual Capitalist, "The World's Largest Economies in 2026, Nominal vs. PPP," using IMF World Economic Outlook projections. Link; IMF DataMapper, GDP based on PPP. Link
3. Fortune, "Ray Dalio says China's ascent ushers in era of 'tribute system,'" May 16, 2026. Link; Fortune, "Ray Dalio just finished a 10-day trip to China," June 24, 2026. Link
4. The Wire China, "Surrounding American AI from the South," June 21, 2026. Link
5. Hugging Face, "One Year Since the 'DeepSeek Moment,'" January 20, 2026. Link
6. Reuters, "Twenty-nine countries sign agreement to establish global AI cooperation body," July 16, 2026. Link; Caixin Global, "China Launches Shanghai-Based AI Governance Body With 29 Founding Nations," July 17, 2026. Link; The Diplomat, "With New AI Governance Organization, China Seeks to Formalize Its Global AI Influence," July 2026. Link
7. Executive Order 14320, "Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack," July 23, 2025. Link; Institute for Progress, "America's AI Exports Program." Link
8. Morgan Lewis, "BIS Upgrades UAE Export Control Status, with AI Chip Access Limited to Approved Entities," July 2026. Link
9. South China Morning Post, "Huawei eyes export of AI chips to Middle East, Southeast Asia to rival Nvidia," July 12, 2025. Link
10. Bloomberg via Free Malaysia Today, "Huawei pitches AI chips to Egypt in test of US tech diplomacy," August 26, 2026. Link
11. RCR Wireless, "China aims to triple AI chip output," August 28, 2025. Link
12. Counterpoint Research, Global Pure Foundry Market Share, Q2 2026. Link
13. Sargasso Capital Management, Pilot Purgatory, May 6, 2026. Link

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 14:00