"Not Entirely Satisfied": German Foreign Minister Grumbles That Ukraine Isn't Buying Enough German Guns

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

The more upset that his taxpayers become with their country's lack of tangible returns from the billions of euros that it's given to Ukraine, the more that support for the AfD is expected to surge...

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul complained that Ukraine isn't buying enough German guns. He told Bild, "We are now Ukraine's strongest supporter in terms of financial and military assistance. And naturally, the German defense industry should benefit from this. I told President Zelenskyy this during my last visit. We stand by you, we support you. But I also have to explain this to German taxpayers, and the very least you can do is involve the German defense industry in all procurement projects."

Wadephul then said that "At the moment, we are not entirely satisfied with the number of orders we are receiving in Germany. Therefore, we have asked the Ukrainian government to review the situation and ensure that it improves." For background, Germany and Ukraine agreed to jointly develop their deep-strike capabilities earlier this spring, which coincides with Germany's rapid remilitarization to the tune of at least €800 billion. The regular large-scale sale of arms to Ukraine can accelerate this trend.

There are three primary reasons why Ukraine hasn't met Germany's expectations:

The first of which is that the US remains Ukraine's top security partner due to the indispensable role of its arms, intelligence, and Starlink in perpetuating the conflict. In connection with this role, Trump recently posted that "Hundreds of Billions of Dollars was given to Ukraine and NATO, free of charge, that Europe would have paid for - If they were only asked, but we will be asking for that money, though somewhat belatedly!"

A creative solution for recouping these costs could be for European NATO to continue purchasing American arms at full price for donation to Ukraine, with this arrangement continuing after the large-scale phase of the conflict is over indefinitely or at least till Trump is satisfied with the profits.

In parallel with these sales, as well as after the scenario of them possibly being scaled back, Germany must compete with the UK and others like China (whose drone sales are indispensable to Ukraine's war effort).

Germany doesn't have the political sway over Ukraine that the UK does, nor is domestic drone production anything remotely close to China's, so it's expected to struggle in this arms competition.

Finally, the last point is that drones occupy a grossly disproportionate share of the casualties that Ukraine inflicts on Russia and are widely regarded as one of the reasons why the frontline has barely shifted in recent years, so German arms companies' traditional wares aren't needed as much anymore.

Despite Germany's disappointment at Ukraine's unsatisfactory purchase of its defense products, they still remain close at the political level and are coordinating a regional power play against their shared Polish "frenemy", which was elaborated on here over the summer. This joint effort advances the grand strategic goal of German domination over the post-war European security architecture west of the new "Iron Curtain", which is more important for Berlin than arms sales to Kiev, so no rift is likely over this issue.

The takeaway from Wadephul's complaint is therefore that German taxpayers are becoming increasingly upset with their country's lack of tangible returns from the billions of euros that it's given to Ukraine. It's not just their arms industry that's struggling to leverage aid for future profits but their reconstruction one too since it's expected that American and Chinese companies will dominate this industry too. The more fed up that Germans become with Ukraine, the more that support for the AfD is expected to surge.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 09:20

Long-Term US Unemployment Rate Creeps Up To 27% Despite Blockbuster August Hiring

Despite the recent blockbuster August jobs report, the anemic pace of hiring in prior months has been exacerbating challenges for long-term unemployed Americans, new research from the Richmond Federal Reserve finds.

The long-term unemployment rate - those who are out of work for 27 weeks or longer as a share of the total unemployed - has been steadily climbing since early 2023.

Of all unemployed Americans in August, more than one-quarter (27 percent), or 1.93 million, had been out of work for a prolonged period, according to last month's Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

This is up from 25.5 percent, or 1.77 million, in July.

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh gave the labor market glowing marks during his keynote address at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium last month.

With an unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent over the past couple of years, job conditions would suggest that the Fed has achieved its maximum employment mandate.

Last month's nonfarm payrolls also surged by 162,000, blowing past the consensus forecast of 56,000.

A job seeker waits to talk to a recruiter at a job fair in Sunrise, Fla., on Aug. 28, 2025. Marta Lavandier/AP Photo

But, as Andrew Moran reports for The Epoch Times, the situation might not be optimistic for Americans who have been out of the job market for many months.

This year's sluggish growth in U.S. payrolls is likely to present fresh hurdles for job hunters, regional central bank researchers warn.

"In the current 'low-hire, low-fire' labor market - which features both slower job creation and less job separation activity (including firings and layoffs) - becoming unemployed can be particularly challenging as finding a new job can be more difficult," the Richmond Fed economists wrote in a Sept. 1 paper.

America's labor market has been entrenched in an environment in which employers are neither increasing headcount nor laying off workers.

Weekly unemployment claims have been stuck in a historically low range of 189,000 to 230,000 - near 57-year lows. The number and layoff rate are near record lows. The jobless rate has been down in 241 of 387 metro areas over the past year.

Continuing jobless claims have also been on a downward trajectory since late 2025, a measurement that could signal two trends in the U.S. economy.

First, workers are finding it easier to locate job opportunities. Second, Americans have exhausted their benefits since many states cap eligibility at 26 weeks.

For a growing chorus of workers who have been searching for several months, the search may no longer be worth it, which could help explain the drop in workforce participation.

"The data have yet to show that job-finding prospects are improving meaningfully for those who have been jobless for an extended duration," the Richmond Fed said.

"In particular, those who have been out of work for a year or more are experiencing more challenges seeking reemployment relative to the 'standard' long-term unemployed."

The U.S. labor force participation rate ticked up to 61.6 percent in August - from 61.4 percent in July - hovering close to its lowest level since the 1970s (excluding the pandemic).

While part of this can be explained by older workers exiting the labor market, young men are not pursuing employment opportunities.

The participation rate for males aged 16 to 24 plummeted to around 56 percent last month, from 69 percent in 2000.

Skills Shortage

But while job growth has been choppy this year, labor demand has been robust.

Job vacancies are close to 7.3 million, and small businesses have indicated they plan to bolster their hiring plans in the coming months.

The challenge for employers is finding qualified workers to fill these openings.

According to the Federal Reserve's Beige Book - a periodic report summarizing economic conditions across the central bank's 12 districts - employment demand in the construction and manufacturing sectors was "healthy" this summer.

"Labor availability was mixed. Skilled trades and technical workers were difficult to find," the report stated.

It is estimated that employers face a talent gap of approximately 1.3 million workers, according to an Aug. 25 report by labor market intelligence firm Lightcast.

Additionally, seven of the 10 most in-demand skilled-trade occupations - construction, electricians, and technicians, for example - already face significant labor shortages.

"The impending lack of skilled trades workers has been a resounding issue in our economy for years," Ron Hetrick, principal economist at Lightcast, said in a statement.

The skills shortage comes at a time when the United States is witnessing a rebirth of manufacturing amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

The data-center expansion has already brought on about 315,000 additional skilled-trade workers in the past five years, the report found.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 08:45

Hey, Germany... It's Legitimate To Limit Immigration

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times,

Just weeks after far-left candidates have won surprising victories in Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, and New York City for the Senate and House in the United States, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won a widely predicted victory in the election last Sunday for the legislature of Sachsen-Anhalt, one of Germany's 16 federal states.

Most Democratic officeholders have rallied around their far-left nominees even as the Democratic Socialists of America national platform calls for abolishing police, prisons, and immigration enforcement agencies. In contrast, Germany's long-established parties - Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Free Democrats, and Greens - have promised to continue to regard AfD as a "right-wing extremist" group and not to support any coalition with it.

Germany, in its commendable efforts to prevent any recurrence of or sympathy for its Nazi past, imposes limits on political activity Americans would find appalling. And the AfD in its beginnings in the 2000s, as Christopher Caldwell explains in First Things, had members and leaders with disturbing views.

Currently, some of its leaders have views many may consider odious, like supporting Russia over Ukraine, but it appears less likely than some leftist European parties to transgress the boundary between criticism of Israel and incitement against Jews.

The traditional parties' case for isolating the AfD today is based on one issue, the same issue that has enabled the AfD to sprint ahead of the traditional parties in national polls: immigration. As Caldwell explains, "The Sachsen-Anhalt AfD was classified as 'proven right-wing extremist' for its ethnic conception of German citizenship."

The AfD is not the only European party characterized as "far right" for its advocacy of limiting immigration by establishment organs like the London-based Economist and most dominant news organizations on the continent.

The establishment has looked benignly on immigration, including from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, as an economic boost for a Europe whose low native birth rates have reduced economic growth down toward zero and jeopardized the financing of its generous old-age pension and medical care systems.

Voters have not been persuaded.

In Germany, the AfD, though its strength is concentrated in the former East Germany, leads in national polls over the Christian Democrats, who have led the government most of the time since 1949, and the Social Democrats, whose roots go back to the 1880s.

In France, the National Front's Marine Le Pen, though sidelined by an establishment-rigged court ruling for months, leads by wide margins in polls for the first round and runoff in the 2027 presidential election. One issue that may help her: aid for air conditioning, scorned during this hot summer by intellectuals as an American abomination.

In Britain, the newly installed Prime Minister Andy Burnham, boosted by his popularity in Manchester, has seen his party leap ahead of Nigel Farage's Reform Party. But his party, despite its name and history, is still losing many working-class areas and is reliant on support from high-income, high-education, high-immigration metro London.

As for Italy, the fourth most populous European democracy, its Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, initially labeled a far-right fringe candidate, celebrated early this month her achievement of the longest-serving head of government in the republic.

What do Le Pen, Farage, and Meloni have in common? Their objections to immigration, and especially Muslim immigration. For which they have some reasonable basis.

In Germany, former Christian Democrat Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally opened the doors to more than a million migrants, most of them young men, in 2015, and, to protests, insisted "Wir schaffen das" - "we can handle this." But as Germany's foreign-born population has increased from 8.1 million in 2014 to 13.4 million in 2022, violent crime has soared (despite news media attempts to hide it), and immigrants have dragged down high school student test scores.

Nor has the influx of Muslim immigrants spurred economic growth, as Germany's economy suffers from self-imposed high energy costs, and Chinese competitors threaten its auto industry. The establishment's economic arguments for high immigration are in shambles.

What I find most puzzling here is the evident feeling of the European establishment - and one might add that of their American counterparts as well - that opposition to mass immigration from culturally dissimilar sources is somehow morally equivalent to the Holocaust. Why is excluding arguably unassimilable people from your country morally equivalent to murdering millions and millions of people?

Yes, both policies may be sparked by a dislike of characteristics that those excluded and those slaughtered are presumed to share - call it bigotry if you want, and make your valid point that not all members of any group share the characteristics of the group's average. But when those characteristics tend to undermine the generally and increasingly improving ways in which the peoples of Europe and America have lived together over the lifetime of those of us born during World War II, is there not some reason people might want to exercise caution in changing the cultural mix?

Especially in Europe, where populations haven't had the success in assimilating newcomers that Americans have had. And perhaps in America as well, where we have been in danger of forgetting or denigrating our forebears' accomplishments along those lines.

Good counsel, in my view, comes from the liberal San Francisco-based economist Noah Smith. "Liberalism," he writes in his Substack, "needs a new philosophy of immigration."

AfD voters, he argues, with American Trump voters clearly in mind, are not just protesting COVID-19 restrictions or responding to "economic despair," as some of his liberal confreres have argued. It's "anger over immigration."

But liberals need to recognize certain principles, Smith argues. That "migration is not a human right." That "immigration law is legitimate." That "immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans."

The European establishment lost sight of these principles when it cheered Merkel's admission of more than 1 million, including tens of thousands of young men who consider it morally permissible to rape women not clad in hijabs. The American establishment lost sight of these principles when the Biden administration's open-borders policy allowed the nation's foreign-born population to increase (as the Census Bureau has reported) by 8.3 million in four years, compared to 6.3 million in former President Barack Obama's eight years and 1.6 million in President Donald Trump's first four.

That leaves an uncomfortably large number of people illegally here. I've often said, while advocating legalization of many, though not all, illegal immigrants, that it's a bad thing for a country and for the individuals involved to have a large number of people living here illegally. I continue to think that's a valid argument today.

And perhaps that view is having some effect. In the first 20 months of the second Trump administration, the Census Bureau reports, the U.S.'s foreign-born population has been reduced by 2.8 million. Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn't account for half that; obviously, some illegal immigrants are choosing to leave before they're forced to.

Plus, as Smith informs his fellow liberals, Germany is making it harder to get citizenship, France and Italy are tightening border controls, the European Union is toughening asylum rules, Canada is cutting back immigration, and Sweden is paying money to migrants who leave. It no longer makes sense for Germany to cordon off the AfD, as if it were bent on sending migrants to the gas chambers. And if anti-immigration parties have unsavory members, well, that's a problem with other (all?) political parties as well.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 07:00

How Romania Came To Host A Post-9/11 CIA Black Site & Got US Cash Bonanza

Via Middle East Eye

Ammar al-Baluchi remembers the cold most of all. Held nearly naked in a cell lit around the clock by fluorescent bulbs, he referred to his detention "as if I was living in a refrigerator".

The nephew of self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Baluchi was one of six to a dozen men believed to be held and tortured in a secret CIA prison in Bucharest between 2003 and 2005. The treatment of detainees at the facility, formally known as "Detention Site Black", is described in detail in Guantanamo court filings. 

via AFP: The Romanian agency Orniss, pictured here on 8 December 2011, sits on a leafy street in northern Bucharest close to a set of train tracks. The agency has denied hosting a CIA prison.

Solitary confinement under lights that never switched off, sleep deprivation that at times meant being forced to stand shackled for days, repeated dousing with icy water, and forced shaving and physical handling that interrogators euphemistically logged as "attention grasps" and "facial holds" were common practice.

A photo released by Baluchi's lawyers to the press in 2024 shows him stripped naked and photographed. It is believed to be the first published image - of tens of thousands - of a "war on terror" detainee in a CIA black site.

"We know they were tortured horrifically," Ben Keith, a British barrister representing Baluchi outside the US, told Middle East Eye. "It's not always possible to say which bit of torture took place because they were tortured for days and weeks, but you don’t detain somebody in a black site with the purpose of just talking to them."

A quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks, which triggered the so-called "war on terror" and devastating US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that directly killed at least 940,000 people, a US military judge has finally set a trial date for Baluchi: 5 June 2028.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama ruled this month that the case against Mohammed, Baluchi, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi will begin on that date.

Schrama is the fifth military judge to preside over a case that has been trapped for more than a decade in disputes over evidence, national security secrecy and, above all, whether confessions obtained under torture before the men ever reached Guantanamo can be used at trial.

That question runs directly through a basement in Bucharest, where the accused are believed to have been detained and tortured.

In April 2025, a Guantanamo military judge ruled that statements Baluchi gave the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, tainted by what the court called torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on him in CIA custody, including in Romania.

The judge found that Guantanamo's "modestly changed confinement circumstances" had not been enough to remove the “lingering taint” of what happened before he arrived there.

A gesture of courtesy

The Romanian site was part of a network of secret prisons the CIA ran across three continents in the years after 9/11 - in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania and Romania - as part of a rendition, detention and interrogation program that was formally shut down in 2009.

Romania's site opened in the autumn of 2003, according to court documents and NGO reports reviewed by MEE. According to a 2019 report by the Rendition Project, the CIA struck its agreement with Romanian authorities to host a black site in mid-October 2002.

By January 2003, the CIA's Bucharest station was already discussing how to show Romania that "we deeply appreciate the cooperation and support". 

That appreciation had a price: $8m, followed by "millions more", according to the same Rendition Project report. By autumn, the first batch of five prisoners had arrived.

The late Romanian president Ion Iliescu confirmed the outlines of the arrangement in a 2015 interview with Der Spiegel, describing a request that came "around the turn of the year 2002, 2003" from "our US allies" who asked Romania "for a site".

He said he approved it in principle as "a gesture of courtesy ahead of our accession to Nato", and that he deliberately did not ask for details. "We did not interfere with the activities of the USA on this site," he said. "This request seemed like a minor issue to me as the head of state."

The details, Iliescu said, were handled by Ioan Talpes, his national security adviser then. Talpes could not be reached for comment but gave a candid account to Der Spiegel in a 2014 interview, saying he discussed "a more intense cooperation" with the CIA from 2003 and understood that it involved detaining people at "one or two locations in Romania".

He admitted to personally approving the leasing of a government building to the American intelligence agency. Talpes put it more bluntly in Romanian media, saying his country "did not have the interest to know what the Americans were doing" at the site it provided, to prove to Washington that Romania could be trusted.

Crofton Black, a former investigator with the Rendition Project who spent close to a decade tracing the CIA’s rendition network through flight logs and declassified documents, told MEE that he thinks Romania "made the decision [to host the black site] because it was in their interest, and thought the US would cover for them".

'The highest state authorities were aware'

Swiss Senator Dick Marty, whose 2007 report to the Council of Europe was one of the earliest and most detailed independent reconstructions of the CIA's black-site network, concluded that while "very few people" in the countries involved likely knew the centers existed, "the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories".

His report named Romania and Poland specifically as having hosted secret CIA detention facilities. The Council of Europe's list of Romanians who knew, according to Marty and later research by the Rendition Project, extends beyond Iliescu and Talpeş to a few other officials, including Traian Basescu, who succeeded Iliescu as president in 2004. 

MEE reached out to Basescu for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. The 2019 report adds a detail Marty did not fully spell out. 

After September 2004, Romanian officials were formally briefed by the US ambassador and the CIA's Bucharest station chief on the program, in a presentation that "clearly described" the use of torture.

"It's definitively the case - the allegations of torture, the money, the people who were held there - it's definitively the case that that’s Romania in the court files," said Black, who co-authored the Rendition Project report.

Unlike the black sites in Lithuania and Poland, which are believed to have been in more remote locations, Romania's site is believed to have been located in central Bucharest.

An AP and ARD Panorama investigation in 2011 narrowed down the location of the site in Bucharest to the government building of the country's National Registry Office for Classified Information, also known as Orniss, on a quiet, leafy street in northern Bucharest close to a set of train tracks.

Orniss "categorically denied" speculation that there had been a CIA prison on the premises, telling MEE that it rejected any association between the institution and "the so-called CIA detention centers".

While the site's location is disputed, concurring testimonies in court records reveal details of the conditions inside it. The site consisted of six prefabricated cells painted white and tiled with impact-resistant glass, while the cells themselves were mounted on springs, engineered to keep detainees slightly off balance and disoriented. 

The site is sometimes referred to as "Bright Light" because of the fluorescent, continuous light inside.

Another detainee held there was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of being the mastermind of the October 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. He is believed to have been held in Romania between April 2004 and November 2005.

His case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which later found in a landmark 2018 ruling that his detention in Romania involved an "extremely harsh" regime, including blindfolding, total isolation, exposure to loud noise and unbroken light, and leg shackles during every movement. The Court and related records also document sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, slapping and, at one point, forced rectal feeding.

A 2014 US Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program in the black sites did not produce unique, life-saving intelligence that could not have been obtained by other means.

A US Senate report on CIA torture revealed that the CIA held at least 119 detainees in its secret detention program, with at least 39 of them subjected to the agency's "enhanced interrogation techniques," often without proper authorization.

The CIA also misled oversight bodies and the public about the program’s brutality, while there was little accountability for the abuses.

Continued denial

For two decades, Romania's official position has been one of denial. The country's foreign intelligence service replied to an MEE inquiry that "the matters had already been thoroughly examined by the competent judicial authorities, both nationally and within international bodies" and that it could not comment further.

Despite that, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2018 that Romania had violated Nashiri's rights, including by allowing his torture, both through what happened to him and through the state’s failure to properly investigate it.

The Court found that a secret detention center had operated in Romania and that Romanian authorities had "cooperated in the preparation and execution" of the CIA's rendition and detention programme, fully aware of its nature and purpose even if they were not privy to everything that happened inside.

It took me many years and a lengthy #FOIA lawsuit against the CIA to uncover exactly what happened at the Salt Pit, one of the CIA's black site prisons in Afghanistan where detainees were tortured. CIA just destroyed part of it, according to NYT

Gruesomehttps://t.co/kGlFei1sfe https://t.co/tmWHrQ3hBE

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 2, 2021

Romania responded by closing the domestic criminal investigation. A case opened in 2012 after a complaint from Nashiri's lawyers, represented by the Open Society Justice Initiative, had by 2014 been formally classified as an inquiry into unlawful deprivation of liberty and torture.

Lawyers who represented Nashiri in Strasbourg and Romania did not agree to interview requests before publication. But according to a Romanian parliamentary question answered by the foreign ministry in 2018, the Open Society complaint originally filed sought far more than charges of torture and unlawful detention. It asked prosecutors to investigate complicity in murder, unlawful arrest, abuse of office, and failure to report a crime, among other allegations.

Prosecutors narrowed that down in 2014 to two counts: unlawful deprivation of liberty and torture. The investigation went nowhere. In any case, by 2016, the statute of limitations on the alleged crimes had already expired because no investigative steps had been taken that would have suspended the clock, and no suspect had ever been formally identified.

Romania's public prosecutor's office told MEE in an official response that the file was closed in March 2021, with the perpetrator classified as "unknown" despite what it described as the use of international cooperation mechanisms to gather evidence.

The same year, the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers expressed "profound regret" that Romania could not show it had used all possible means to establish the facts, three years after the Strasbourg ruling required it to.

Keith, Baluchi's counsel, said senior Romanian officials acted with direct intent in 2003 and 2004 to allow the CIA to detain, torture and later transfer Baluchi to Lithuania. "We know from the ruling in al-Nashiri the Romanians knew about it; they might have not known exactly what was happening, but they facilitated the CIA to create a black site to torture these men," Keith said.

"Our contention is that Romania not only facilitated the CIA black site but knew they were being used to torture individuals."

MEE reached out to Romania's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Justice for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. Romania's domestic intelligence service, SRI, also declined to comment, telling MEE that it lacked legal standing to address claims "circulating in the public space".

With a trial date now set for June 2028, the confessions extracted under torture at CIA "black sites" – including the facility in Bucharest – have become central to the 9/11 case. So, too, has the role of the governments that allowed the CIA to operate these secret detention and interrogation sites on their territory.

Romania, for its part, is still refusing to talk about what happened in its basement, despite the body of evidence that has emerged. "There's been years of compelling evidence that Romania hosted a black sit,  and the more it has grown, the government continued to deny it was involved," said Black. "It's ridiculous, it's nonsense."

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 23:20

Florida's Attorney General Sues Netflix For Allegedly Harvesting, Selling Children's Data

Florida's attorney general sued Netflix on Sept. 9 claiming the streaming giant collected data on its youngest viewers and added addictive features to the platform after promising not to.

An aerial view of Netflix studios, with the Hollywood sign in the distance in Los Angeles on Dec. 5, 2025. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Attorney General James Uthmeier is seeking billions in damages from the company and asked the judge to order Netflix to stop its alleged deceptive practices.

"Parents were told kids' profiles were a child's own space - safe, separate, great for kids," Uthmeier said in a news conference Wednesday.

"Families believed them. But behind the brand, Netflix built something different."

In the lawsuit, Jill McLaughlin reporets for The Epoch Times,that Uthmeier claims Netflix offered an ad-free service that promised not to collect or sell data but began to track children and their profiles when it launched an advertising business in 2022.

The streaming service offers an under-12 profile option for children which promotes a non-advertising space, according to the state.

Uthmeier alleges Netflix violated the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the state's Digital Bill of Rights, including by selling sensitive personal data collected from known children without prior consent.

He seeks a permanent injunction, an order requiring Netflix to purge any deceptively collected data from Floridians, and an end to addictive designs that keep children watching on the platform, in addition to billions of dollars in civil and other monetary relief, he said.

"Parents, not streaming corporations, need to direct the upbringing of children," Uthmeier said.

In the complaint, Uthmeier stated Netflix's executive officer Reed Hastings told investors during a Jan. 22, 2020, earnings call the company's model was not based on using customer data.

"We don't collect anything, we're really focused on just making our members happy and we're not tied up on all that controversy around advertising," Hastings said.

Hastings also said Netflix wasn't interested in tracking customers' locations or other things they were doing. "We want to be the safer spy where you can explore, you can get stimulated, have fun, enjoy, relax, and have none of the controversy around exploiting users with advertising," Hastings said during the call.

The Netflix executive compared the company to Google, Facebook, and Amazon's advertising models that used consumer data collection and targeting information, saying Netflix was "not controversial that way."

James Uthmeier speaks at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington on Sept. 3, 2025. Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Uthmeier's complaint alleges Hastings' comments represented to customers that buying Netflix subscriptions bought an escape from tech surveillance, but in fact generated years of "lucrative behavioral data" for the company.

Hastings stepped down as Netflix's chairman of the board of directors in June.

Uthmeier claims that, behind the scenes, the company accumulated years of consumer data and surveillance and used it when Netflix deployed its advertising business in November 2022.

The lawsuit alleges the streamer uses dark patterns, or subtle designs, to manipulate users to take actions the company wants them to take. The autoplay feature is one of these designs, the complaint alleges.

An attorney listed for Netflix didn't respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.

Florida is the second state to sue the streaming giant. Texas filed a lawsuit in May alleging similar violations of the law arising from the collection of users' data without their knowledge or consent.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 22:45

Making The World Great One Nation At A Time

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

What we call "globalism" has been on the march for eighty years. A system that embraces centralized markets, bureaucratic regulation, international institutions, and so-called non-governmental organizations (predominantly funded by governments), globalism places significant power in the hands of a small collection of wealthy and powerful stakeholders from the planet's top investment houses, corporations, law firms, universities, central banks, and government bodies.

Globalism speaks in the language of "democracy" while ignoring - or even criminalizing - the will of the people. Across the West, citizens have opposed open border policies that have flooded their nations with unassimilable, foreign immigrants. Globalists have categorized this dissent as "hate speech," censoring - and even prosecuting - citizens for their social media posts and public speech. Globalists insist that there must be limits on free speech. They seek to punish "thought crimes." They label opposing points of view "disinformation" or "misinformation." In practice, globalists protect governments and institutions from public criticism.

Globalism also speaks in the language of "free markets" while heavily regulating industrial production, encumbering the use of private property, and manipulating currency valuation, stock markets, and trade. By effectively "printing money" and intervening in markets, central banks steal from citizens who save their cash earnings, inflate the prices of essential household goods, and protect privileged companies or industries deemed "too big to fail." By ginning up "global warming" fears among the public, lawmakers, bankers, and bureaucrats have justified the imposition of "carbon controls" that regulate energy use, economic production, and human activity. By expanding public welfare programs while weakening protections for property ownership, globalists tax citizens at increasingly higher rates, redistribute earned income and savings, confiscate real property, and even permit squatters (often foreign migrants) to occupy private residences.

Globalism falsely clothes itself in principle and tradition. Its proponents speak of "Western values," while encouraging non-Westerners to migrate to and radically change the culture and demographics of Western nations. Its propagandists claim to represent "the people," while doing the bidding of multinational corporations and investment banks. Its defenders pretend to respect public opinion, while mandating slavish devotion to "expertise." Globalism seeks to end the nation state while demanding that citizens sacrifice themselves for government bureaucracies. It wages war against Christians who refuse to worship government institutions as the highest authorities on "truth." Globalists divide societies into "victims" and "oppressors," so that citizens remain too busy fighting each other to notice the surveillance prison being built around them. Globalists criticize opponents by saying things such as, "That's not who we are," while taking a sledgehammer and blowtorch to Western identities.

In defiance of globalism's steady advance since WWII, a revolution has been brewing. Although its messengers have appeared all over the world - including Pat Buchanan in the United States, Shinzo Abe and Sanae Takaichi in Japan, Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Javier Milei in Argentina, Alice Weidel in Germany, and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom - President Donald J. Trump is the unofficial leader of the rebellion. What these men and women have in common is a strong sense of duty to their respective nations, a firm belief that culture matters, a preference for common sense, and a commitment to their countrymen over the international institutions, multinational corporations, and globalist NGOs (such as the World Economic Forum) that seek to eliminate national borders and condemn citizens to lives as disposable serfs.

President Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement has spawned similar campaigns around the world. Whether in El Salvador or Nigeria, Spain or Australia, Canada or India, there are locals who have appropriated that slogan as part of an effort to make their own nations great. While globalism diminishes the importance of culture and celebrates amorphous "multiculturalism" as an inscrutable ideal, nation-builders around the world know better: Culture is the lifeblood of every society. It is the glue that binds a people together, fosters cooperation, and turns dreams of the future into reality. Just as members of a family help each other to succeed, members of a shared culture ensure their nation's success.

People who climb mountains do not plant flags from the United Nations, European Union, the World Economic Forum, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; they fly their national flags at the top. Because no matter how much globalists lecture us about the evils of nationalism and the moral equivalence of all cultures, human beings know better. Our families, traditions, religious convictions, and historical memories matter. And when we ascend the icy peaks that few people have reached, we mark the moment, not as an achievement for "multiculturalism," but rather as a testament to the inherent greatness of the places we call home.

For decades, globalism has been promoted as a "free market" ideal that would generate economic growth and foster international peace. But how has it operated in practice? Powerful corporations and lobbying groups have worked with governments to construct elaborate trade agreements that benefit the bottom line of political and financial elites. Rarely are the interests of the common man considered, except in the context of labor unions, standards bodies, or trade groups that purport to represent the average worker. Instead, complex legal documents such as the North American Free Trade Agreement have assisted in the creation of large industry monopolies while squeezing out small businesses. After the creation of NAFTA and similar "free trade deals," American corporations and investment firms became multinational conglomerates, while Main Street mom-and-pop shops disappeared.

Globalism's preferred winners became entities "too big to fail." Why were they "too big to fail"? Because their trillion-dollar operations stretched like a circulatory system around the globe. Their drive for "efficiencies of scale" pushed them into every local bank, industry, and consumer market that could be secured as a beachhead for future profit. But in the endless expansion of it all - the mergers, acquisitions, and amalgamated monopolies - globalism's circulatory system resembled that of a morbidly obese man only one meal away from a massive heart attack. A system so interconnected that it cannot survive the loss of any part makes the whole thing vulnerable to a few drops of poison.

Globalism's rise has been debilitating for national self-sufficiency. In their unending quest for returns on investment, the globalists have built a world in which slave labor is used in communist China, India, and most of the African continent (while corporate news media ignore the story). Natural resources are extracted from third-world countries where environmental protection laws do not exist (while corporate news media ignore the story). Companies exploit both illegal immigration flows and legal work visas to drive down wages and drive up demand for (and therefore the prices of) food, fuel, rents, household necessities, and homes (while corporate news media ignore the story).

In treating individual nations as stolen cars being stripped and sold for parts, globalists have taken what is most valuable from each country while depriving those countries of the resources to build resilient economies of their own. From the slave mines of Africa to the sweatshops of China, globalism profits from blood. From the American Rust Belt to Germany's decommissioned nuclear plants and the U.K.'s abandoned oil and gas fields, globalism sacrifices the wealth of nations, so that multinational investment banks can suck just a little more profit from the husks of countries with one foot already in the grave.

Why is it that patriotic love for one's nation is making a comeback? Because globalism's hatred for nations has left a trail of social conflict, government dependence, drug and alcohol addiction, deteriorating public health, environmental degradation, and cultural decline in every land it drains of life. What President Trump and his fellow rebels understand is this: Nations and their people matter. You cannot make the world great, while letting great nations die.

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

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 22:10

US Limits Its Air Defense Coverage For Tankers Sailing Through Hormuz: Report

Via The Cradle

The US military has reduced the daily window in which it offers air defense to commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the Financial Times (FT) reports on Saturday.

Since May, Washington has sought to break Iran's control of Hormuz by providing air defense for vessels sailing through the strategic strait along a southern route hugging the coast of Oman.

Image source: US Air Force

Iran imposed a blockade on the strait shortly after the US and Israel launched an unprovoked war on the Islamic Republic on February 28.

However, the US began limiting the time slots in which vessels can receive protection from US aircraft as of the start of this month, FT reported.

The move comes in response to stepped-up Iranian attacks on ships transiting Hormuz, particularly at night. Ships are reportedly advised but not required to sail during the air defense time slots.

To receive protection, shipowners must apply to a US naval coordination center known as the Naval Cooperation and Guidance for Shipping (NCAGS).

Upon approval, the vessels received coordinates to follow during a broad time window. However, that window was "reduced to two specific time slots daily around the start of September," FT wrote, citing emails NCAGS sent to maritime advisors.

Vessels are now being told to begin their journey at specified times, such as 9:00 am, to receive air defense.

"We are now providing recommended transit times that vary by day. Your vessel is not required to go during these times, but it is encouraged to receive the best support," one NCAGS email said.

"Transiting during a period of darkness has not proven to be the most secure time of day," stated another email, highlighting the increased threat of Iranian attacks at night.

Iranian forces have attacked dozens of vessels attempting to pass through the strait since the beginning of the war, greatly limiting the oil exports of Washington's Gulf allies.

The US responded by imposing a naval blockade on Iranian ports in a bid to block Tehran's own oil exports. Before the war, at least 20 percent of world oil exports passed through Hormuz.

Not only security but also cost considerations may have influenced the US decision to reduce the protected transit window.

Joshua Tallis, a researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), stated that it costs the US Navy $25,000 to $75,000 an hour to operate its advanced aircraft.

Both Iran and the US stepped up their attacks on commercial vessels in the region earlier this week. Iran targeted two vessels and eight oil tankers in Hormuz in response to US strikes on five Iranian tankers. The US launched the strikes following an attack by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on a US warship days earlier.

"These waters aren't safe," stated Michelle Wiese Bockmann, an analyst at maritime intelligence firm Windward. Bockmann estimated that oil exports from Gulf countries other than Iran in August stood at about two-thirds of prewar levels, largely because of exports rerouted through pipelines to bypass Hormuz.

'Reached final stage' – Iran says agreement with Oman close on 'temporary secure passage in Strait of Hormuz' pic.twitter.com/UHFoKlfW5Q

— Syed Ali Salman Bokhari (@SyedAliSalman70) September 8, 2026

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei announced on Saturday that foreign ministers from several Gulf states will meet in Oman on Monday to exchange views on regional issues, including talks between Iran and Oman on designating safe routes for transiting the strait.

Baghaei added he hoped the meeting would improve understanding among regional countries and contribute to joint regional security.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 21:00

China's 70% EV Target Deals Another Blow To Oil Demand

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

China aims to have electric and hybrid vehicles account for as much as 70% of all passenger car sales by 2030, in a massive transport shift set to further dent oil demand for road fuels.

As of the end of last year, the share of the so-called new energy vehicles was 54% of all passenger vehicle sales.

In the new five-year plan for the automotive industry compiled by nearly a dozen Chinese government agencies, China also targets to have 40% of new commercial vehicle sales be electric by 2030.

The 70% target by 2030 could even be achieved earlier than planned, analysts say, as this year's oil and fuel price shock is accelerating the shift to electric vehicles.

EVs and hybrids accounted for 65% of China's total passenger car sales in August, according to data by the local Passenger Car Association (PCA) cited by Bloomberg.

The ambitious EV targets are expected to continue eroding road fuel demand in China, which has been falling for the second year in a row. This year, the decline has been steeper amid the energy price shock following the start of the war in Iran.

Chinese state refiners expect continued declines and prepare for the future of plateauing and falling road fuel demand.

For example, China's Sinopec, the world's top refiner by capacity, expects Chinese oil demand to drop by 8.9% in 2026 from a year earlier amid demand destruction from higher oil prices and the acceleration of electric vehicle adoption. Gasoline demand is set for an 8.7% decline, while diesel consumption is expected to crash by 11.4%, Sinopec Economics & Development Research Institute says.

The high oil prices destroyed some demand and sped up the adoption of EVs, which has been growing anyway in recent years, suppressing total oil demand even without blocked crude supplies in the Middle East.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 19:50

What Critics Keep Getting Wrong About Capitalism

Authored by Vincent Geloso via FEE,

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

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published by CapX.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 18:40

Bill Maher Delivers A Brutal 9/11 Reality Check To The Left

Bill Maher used the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks to say something that once required no courage at all: terrorists are terrorists. That the observation now counts as provocative says something about how far we've come since 2001.

On Real Time with Bill Maher, in a segment titled "Clash of Civilizations," Maher walked through what has happened in the 25 years since 9/11.

"Since it's the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and since, for 25 years, we've been kept relatively safe from anything close to another 9/11, how about a hand for the Americans who made that happen? Because it didn't just happen; there was a war on terror, and we won," he said. "And yet so much has changed since 9/11; for example, back then we were against the terrorists."

The audience laughed, but he was being serious.

Around the 20th anniversary, for example, four American journalism associations issued guidance insisting that "terrorism should only be used in quotes because it's emotionally and politically loaded." Canadian state broadcasters instructed staff, "Do not refer to the September 11th attacks as terrorist attacks." The BBC told its reporters that using the word "terrorist" can be a "barrier rather than an aid to understanding."

The pattern shows that the media establishment many years ago concluded moral clarity amounted to a kind of bigotry and that to name an ideology responsible for mass murder was the same as harboring hatred towards all those who happen to share that ideology.

Maher made that distinction himself by dividing radical Islamism from Islam in general and also separating both of them from the issue that liberals consistently avoid, which is why so many of them came to sympathize with the side that attacked the West rather than with the side that was attacked.

Maher revisited his own history on this point, playing a clip of himself from shortly after the attacks on his ABC show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in which he argued that political correctness "is something we can no longer afford" because "feelings are going to get hurt so that actual people won't."

Maher lamented that the idea of "ditching political correctness and actually being honest" never "even got off the ground."

He then pointed out that after 9/11, there was a big debate over whether it was a "clash of civilizations." According to Maher, "it was, and it still is." But that clash isn't between Muslims and Christians, but rather radical Islamism and Western liberalism.

Maher then referred to a poll that showed that one in five young Americans now holds a positive view of Osama bin Laden (which would have been unthinkable 25 years ago) and compared it to how Luigi Mangione came to be seen as a folk hero; he assassinated Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. In both cases, a killer becomes a symbol of grievance, and the actual victims become a footnote to a woke narrative about systemic injustice.

"You hear it in a lot of places now that the worst thing about 9/11 was innocent Muslims came under suspicion," Maher continued. "Yeah, where that did happen, it's wrong, but the worst thing about 9/11 was 3,000 people got roasted at the office. But the prevailing view of so many young people is that 'Well, come on, we're the worst country ever, so if someone attacks us, they can't be all bad.' That certainly wasn't the attitude 25 years ago. In fact, I know a guy whose show got canceled just for saying that terrorists weren't cowards, and that guy was right; they weren't cowards. But I'll tell you who is: Democratic Party politicians. And I'll tell you why, because nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza."

Maher argued that activists have recast the conflict as genocide at the hands of Israel to serve broader attacks on capitalism, borders, and Western institutions. "And the fact that so many prominent Democrats go along with it is, to me, the party's worst moment since they undid Reconstruction after the Civil War."

The prevailing view of so much of the young left in America is that we’re the worst country ever, so if someone attacks us, they can’t be all bad. pic.twitter.com/u01HsCRnv3

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 12, 2026

Maher's monologue traces a straight line from post-9/11 unity against Islamic terrorism to a political culture on the left that now treats the side committing violence as more sympathetic than the side that was attacked. Younger generations have learned to locate the villain in American power rather than in the perpetrators of an attack. Maher describes the slow erosion of the basic instinct to know who the villain is when violence occurs. That instinct used to be reflexive, requiring no debate and no hedging. Its disappearance from mainstream left-wing politics isn't a matter of nuance or sophistication - it's actually a failure of judgment in the name of tolerance.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 17:30

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what we know https://t.co/nrVeKbd8EJ pic.twitter.com/qsqxbeJ0dh

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 11, 2026

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

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 16:55

DHS Proposes Quickly Removing Visa Holders After Job Loss

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is floating the end of a 60-day grace period that currently allows some immigrants to remain in the United States after they lose their jobs.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin speaks during a news conference in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, on July 17, 2026. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Immigrants with temporary work visas such as H-1B visas would have to immediately leave the country if they no longer have a job, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a proposed rule filed on Sept. 10 and set to be formally published in the Federal Register on Sept. 11.

Such visas are contingent on an immigrant's employment, and a company sponsors the employee. Some of the visas are granted only to workers who have specialized expertise.

DHS originally provided the grace period to encourage immigrants who no longer have jobs to remain in the United States and try to obtain another form of legal status or get another job, Mullin said. But rulemakers did not sufficiently consider the negative effects of the grace period, such as burdening immigration officers who handle additional paperwork from visa holders during the time period, he said.

"DHS now believes that once the alien is no longer fulfilling the very specific conditions under which he or she was admitted or otherwise provided status, such status, as well as the authorization to remain in the United States, should definitively cease and the impacted alien should immediately depart the United States (unless otherwise authorized to lawfully remain in the United States)," he wrote.

"This is generally consistent with the requirements for aliens admitted or otherwise provided status in other non-immigrant categories when the alien fails to fulfill the very specific conditions under which he or she was admitted or otherwise provided status."

If finalized, the change could cause thousands of jobs to not be filled by specialty foreign workers, DHS estimates.

The department is presuming that the companies looking to fill the jobs "will either offer the same jobs to equally qualified U.S. workers or go through the I-129 petition process depending on their workforce requirement," the notice said, referring to the process of bringing foreign workers to the United States.

"In some situations, aliens who have gone abroad can be readmitted for employment if the I-129 petition filed on their behalf is approved and the alien is admissible. Even though these petitioners would witness a temporary loss of productivity, they might be able to gain U.S. workers for the positions that were generally offered to ... nonimmigrants during the possible grace period," the notice reads.

The proposal will be available online on Sept. 11. Parties can comment on the proposal for 60 days. Officials will then decide whether to finalize it, potentially with alterations in response to comments.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 15:10

Trump & Hegseth Try To Tie Iran To 9/11 At Pentagon Ceremony

The two main 9/11 ceremonies on Friday marking 25 years since the terror attacks were held at Ground Zero in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC. President Trump attended the latter while VP JD Vance was present at the former.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth also helped lead remembrance events at the Pentagon, but at the annual NYC commemoration, Vance appeared to keep a lower profile while listening from the audience to names being read out.

Trump and Hegseth in their respective addresses tried to tie the ongoing Iran war to Sept. 11, 2001. They both sough to frame current Iran action as a continuation of the Global War on Terror.

"We salute the service members working right now to ensure the world's number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon," Trump said at the Pentagon.

via Associated Press

As for Hegseth, he spoke just ahead of the president and said that US forces remain "vigilant" against the "Islamic theocracy" in Iran.

"Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11," he said.

"A regime that has sponsored terrorist attacks against Americans for decades, killing thousands, including our comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they did not factor in this president," the Pentagon chief continued.

"We’re still sending terrorists where they belong — to hell — and tankers to the bottom of the ocean, where they belong," Hegseth added. "And we are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon."

Ironically it was close American ally Saudi Arabia which actually factors in most directly to the 9/11 tragedy, and family members of victims have filed a lawsuit against the kingdom for state-level and intelligence complicity in the terror attacks.

The majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and each and every one of them was a Sunni Muslim. As for Iran, it is a historic enemy of the Sunni Saudi kingdom and practices Shia Islam, which Riyadh considers 'heretical'.

Trying to link Iran to 9/11 also has a whiff of Bush-era propaganda to it. Not only did some NeoCon pundits at the time try to link Tehran to it, but a major talking point was also a far-fetched 'Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda alliance'.

Of course, Saddam was a secular Ba'athist autocrat and historically sought to persecute radical fundamentalist sects. Still, Iraq got invaded on the heels of Afghanistan and Saddam was overthrown by US forces.

More recently, in the last decade of the Syria proxy war, Iranian officers and Shia militias were typically the ones along the front lines fighting ISIS and other Sunni jihad movements. The latter were often sponsored by the Gulf states as well as US intelligence. When it comes to the Middle East and Washington policy, nothing is ever as it seems.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 14:35

Sweden Discovers That Deporting Immigrant Gangsters Reduces Crime...

Authored by Mike McDaniel via AmericanThinker.com,

Among the things a police career taught me is that a small number—usually single digits—of felons commit most felonies. They’ll draw in other criminals, involve them in their crimes, and when convenient, abandon them to arrest. There is no honor among thieves. And the number of the most prolific felons increases and decreases slightly from place to place, and in relation to the specific type of crime.

In some places, crooks specialize in home or business burglaries. In others, specialization might involve burglarizing vehicles or carjacking.

But one thing is certain: take these small bands of crooks out of circulation, and the number of their crimes in those areas immediately, dramatically plummets. The trick is identifying the crooks and rolling them over on each other. Catch some in the act or with the evidence, and the second part is usually easier than the first. When they’re put away, innumerable people we’ll never know don’t end up as victims.

Of course, these kinds of positive results also rely on prosecutors willing to prosecute and judges willing to keep criminals in jail and hand down realistic sentences. That’s a real issue in blue cities and states.

Now it seems Sweden is discovering this reality, particularly where gang-committed, immigrant crime is involved. And it’s about time too. Reports out of Sweden, which has shown suicidal empathy for third-world barbarians, indicate that hand grenade(?!) attacks have become common. At PJ Media, Stephen Green explains:

So Sweden elected a conservative prime minister four years ago who promised to send criminal migrants back to their home countries, and you'll never believe what happened next.

Violent crime went down. Way down. Particularly gang violence, according to a new report out this week.

Imagine that.

Graphic: X Post

When he campaigned for the PM spot in 2022, Ulf Kristersson — then a member of the Swedish parliament or riksdag — said of violent acts: "If you commit such crimes in Sweden and are not a Swedish citizen, you should be thrown out of the country.”

Apparently, Swedes got tired of dodging grenades and having their women raped.

By the summer of '22, escalating gang shootings and even bombings were commonplace in what had once been a country better known for spas than jihads. In total, Sweden suffered 361 shootings, 62 shooting deaths, and 90 bombings. The problem with migrant gangs escalated so quickly that Swedish authorities didn't bother to record bombings until 2018.

By the last election, even the governing soft-on-crime Social Democrats promised tougher measures, but that wasn't enough to stop Kristersson from putting together a coalition big enough to oust the SD.

Sweden didn’t bother to report bombings until 2018? That’s terminal suicidal empathy, but the Swedes had enough. They better funded the police, did more wiretapping, and directly focused on stopping gang recruitment among the young.

As it turns out — and again, you won't be shocked by this — sending foreign criminals home is just as effective as locking up homegrown thugs. But the numbers must be seen to be believed. 

Shootings are down "by 80 per cent since their 2022 peak," the Financial Times reported on Monday, and Kristersson reduced "the number of asylum seekers to its lowest in four decades."

It was apparently a huge deal earlier this year when one Swedish paper reported "No shootings in May."

“The fact that you have headlines saying no shootings at all this month: it says something,” Kristersson told the FT.

Sadly, the national tendency toward suicide may once again assert itself:

Still, Sweden holds another national election on Sunday, and the Social Democrats could very well take power again. “There’s a lot of discussion about the Winston Churchill effect,” Mattias Karlsson, the nationalist Sweden Democrats' chief ideologue, said.

Having all but won the war, will Swedish voters reject the man who got them this far?

The “Churchill effect” refers to what happened to Winston Churchill after WWII. Without him, England likely would have fallen to the Nazis. He was, during the war, the indispensable man, but once the war was won, he was put out to pasture, and the kinds of political forces that would have lost the war wormed their way back into power.

Having once again discovered the benefits of national sanity, Will Sweden fall back into leftist delusion and defeat? Perhaps there’s a lesson there for our midterms and beyond.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 14:00

Beijing Threatens To Cancel Trump-Xi Summit If US Approves New Arms Sales To Taiwan

Chinese President Xi Jinping used today's 18th BRICS Summit to push for a greater diplomatic role in Gulf affairs. The move appears to be transforming the bloc's economic weight into geopolitical influence, really positioning it as a counterweight to US foreign policy.

Beijing's leverage also rests on its control over rare-earth and other critical-material supply chains, as it maintains a "quasi-monopolistic" grip on the industry that will persist through the end of the decade.

Keeping that leverage in mind, Japanese news outlet Kyodo News reported that Beijing threatened earlier today to cancel the summit with President Trump in Washington if the US approves new arms sales to Taiwan.

Kyodo stated:

China has told the United States that it intends to cancel a planned meeting between their leaders later this month if Washington approves any new arms sales to Taiwan by then, multiple sources familiar with bilateral ties said Saturday.

U.S. President Donald Trump, apparently eager to showcase some diplomatic achievements ahead of November's midterm congressional elections, places great importance on holding the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

While preparing for Xi's upcoming trip, China has restated its position that the Taiwan issue is a "red line" in bilateral relations, sources said.

The report comes ahead of Xi's planned summit with Trump at the White House on September 24. The threat is another obstacle for the administration as it seeks to maintain an already fragile diplomatic and trade truce amid worsening relations over the Gulf conflict.

Polymarket traders appear unfazed by the Kyodo report, with Xi still leading the "Who will Trump meet with in September?" market at 95% and odds showing little reaction to the reported threat.

Taiwan arms sales have already emerged as a critical focal point for both superpowers. After meeting Xi in May, Trump declined to commit to approving another weapons package, while Beijing warned that mishandling Taiwan could spark a conflict.

A late-August report cited by Taiwan's main English-language daily newspaper, the Taipei Times, said that China had deployed a record 244 coast guard, research, and other government vessels around the island amid mounting fears of a blockade next year.

"Might be the first in history to see a power play coming from China when it comes to this. Not because they want, but because they can. One of the main reasons would be because of the control they have over critical minerals US has to pick which front to focus on- China or Iran," Teo Sinamin, who runs a Substack focused on rare earths, wrote on X.

Might be the first in history to see power play coming from China when it comes to this.

Not because they want,but because they can.

One of the main reasons would be because of the control they have over critical minerals

US has to pick which front to focus on- China or Iran https://t.co/VIyOSuHaOp

— Teo (@Teo_Sinamin) September 12, 2026

Sinamin continued ...

Greenest Monday ever for critical minerals https://t.co/tgxwyZj1jo

— Teo (@Teo_Sinamin) September 12, 2026

A further deterioration in US-China relations could trigger tighter export licensing or renewed restrictions on critical materials, intensifying pressure on Western industrial and defense supply chains. This issue resurfaced earlier this month when Reuters reported that some Chinese rare-earth suppliers refused shipments to US customers for fear of repercussions from Beijing.

The ongoing disruption supports the bullish investment case for reducing dependence on China, with junior miners and established producers offering alternative supplies. That is certainly the talk among private equity and hedge funds to date. Further escalation could push the decoupling theme to the forefront across the investing world, as these critical-material supply chains are the building blocks for AI data center buildouts, electrification upgrades, reindustrialization, and the upcoming rearmament cycle.

The strongest beneficiaries would likely be companies that can deliver ex-China supplies at scale in time to ease Western shortages as demand soars for the reasons mentioned above.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 12:15

Gen Z Has No Idea What 9/11 Is

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Twenty-five years after Islamist hijackers murdered 2,977 people on American soil, a young man in Lower Manhattan looked at 2,977 memorial drones drawing the towers in the night sky and asked why anyone would build a "fake" building.

He called the Tribute in Light the "Batman signal."

This is what happens when media and universities treat the Islamist nature of the attack as a political embarrassment instead of a fact.

?? Young American outraged by a 9/11 memorial action

2,977 drones, one for each victim, went up at once to draw a full-size silhouette full-size silhouette in the sky over Lower Manhattan.

The man did not understand what was going on and sharply commented: "We have enough... pic.twitter.com/6gkGbIbpRt

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 11, 2026

"We have enough buildings, bro. Why are they making a fake one?" The guy filming the video states.

Critics assert that education about the September 11 2001 attacks has been avoided due to the Islamist nature of the terror attack, leaving large parts of Gen Z with almost no knowledge of what happened that fateful morning.

Gen Z's indifference to Sept. 11 is inexcusable | RESTORING AMERICA by @SouthernKeeks https://t.co/vscKWQag7k

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 11, 2026

Washington Examiner columnist Kimberly Ross called the indifference inexcusable. Younger Americans cannot be blamed for being born after 2001, she wrote, but they can be charged with treating the day as a bother.

"If you have the immense privilege of calling yourself an American, you have a duty to understand both the scope of loss and how it forced a titanic shift in our national perspective," she writes, noting that the dead, the jumpers, Flight 93, Todd Beamer's "let's roll" cannot be treated as optional educational content.

The vacuum is not accidental. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia told teachers not to "associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims" and not to "center the extremists."

Roughly half of that district's commemorative guide is devoted to "safe spaces" for Muslim students.

Penn GSE's "Teaching Beyond 9/11" curriculum, pushed into New York City schools and several state education departments, gives the attacks themselves a single paragraph, says the United States merely "accused" Osama bin Laden, and then piles on units about Islamophobia, right-wing extremism, and "avenues for solidarity."

Only a handful of states mandate real instruction. Texas just approved language tying "radical Islam" to the attacks; Democrats on the board called it an outrage.

One Navy veteran put the motive in the open:

What should be taught in every single American school is intentionally hidden and lied about by our own education system. They don't want them to know Muslims were responsible for thousands killed that day and years after by war. That's why people are stupidly voting for them,...

— megourd1967 (@ProudUSNvet67) September 11, 2026

Others expressed consternation about the lack of knowledge among Gen Z:

If they don't even know history from 25 years ago, what do they know?

— Creature of Habit2 (@CreatureHabit2) September 11, 2026

Generation Z is a disaster. They are completely out of touch and stupid. They respect nothing and don't study their own history.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana.

— Roger Pellegrini (@Pellegrini_RG) September 11, 2026

Media and universities are to blame, yes. But where TF are the parents on this? If my kids had no idea 9/11 even happened, I have failed. It's kind of a big deal..

— TheArmedGardener (@Cheeky1iam) September 11, 2026

While that ignorance played out over Manhattan, New York's first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, stood at Ground Zero after families and first responders spent weeks begging him to stay away.

Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was killed in the North Tower, organized a petition that passed 100,000 signatures. "We don't believe in what he believes in, and we really want us to be left alone," Galante said. "This 25th anniversary is for victims and survivors... not have a circus around us."

Charles Wolf, who lost his wife, said: "This mayor is not serving us. He's serving himself." Monica Iken asked him to "respect us from 7 to 11 and let us have our mourning." Cheri Sparacio, whose husband Tom died on the 84th floor of the South Tower, pointed to Mamdani's chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, who previously represented a convicted al-Qaeda operative.

City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino demanded he "not show his face at that sacred ground." The Port Authority Retired Police Association, which lost 37 officers that morning, told him the day was "not a political occasion, a photo opportunity, or a platform."

He came anyway. Cameras then caught him laughing with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while family members read the names of the dead.

They're Showing You EXACTLY Who They Are...

Mourner Walter Matuza, whose father was killed and who helped push the petition, said: "He showed up anyway. It does bother us." Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani had already said Mamdani's presence "offends" him and that the mayor "stands in direct support of the movement that killed their children."

Andy Ngo documented another face of the same contempt a few blocks and a few hours from the names: a trans 'activist' who regularly dances at Pride events ripping pages from a Bible at a 9/11 "direct action."

NYC (Sept. 11) — A trans activist who regularly dances at Pride events rips out pages of the Bible at a 9/11 direct action. pic.twitter.com/6qtsAyaIzO

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) September 11, 2026

Sick. Just sick.

Meanwhile, 9/11 families have once again demanded release of files that the deep state has spent a quarter-century ducking. Terry Strada, after reading her husband Tom's name, asked: "How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?"

She said families had "proved that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia fomented a rancid culture of anti-American terrorism" and sent agents to support the hijackers. "For 25 years, administration after administration... chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families." She told Vice President JD Vance: "Stand with the families. Stand with the survivors. Stand with Americans."

The nephew of Lisa Marie Terry said: "For 25 years, the Deep State has hidden the truth about what happened 25 years ago. President Trump, you're our last hope. Release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia, while what's left of the victims' families are still alive to see it."

9/11 Family Members Demand Trump Admin Release Docs 'Deep State Has Hidden'

A generation that cannot identify a silhouette of the towers has no grounding in modern American society. A school system that treats "Islamophobia" as the real lesson of 9/11 will not produce one.

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, 09/12/2026 - 11:40

Left-Wing Media Doxxes And Attacks Black "Rogue" Lindsay Clancy Juror

Critics say they have never seen a more egregious example of political groups and the media attempting to expose and destroy a juror for not making the decision they wanted. 

During the Lindsay Clancy trial Judge William Sullivan sealed the identities of all 12 jurors until at least September 18th, citing safety concerns after the high-profile trial.   An incident in which a woman was arrested for allegedly attempting to film and intimidate the jury added weight to the decision.  Deranged feminist activists have been rallying for weeks hoping to manipulate the outcome of deliberations in favor of Clancy, a mother who brutally strangled her three small children and then claimed "postpartum psychosis" as a defense.  

The announcement of a mistrial due to one male juror triggered a rabid fervor among leftist wine moms, leading to immediate calls for the juror to be doxxed, harassed and potentially "punished" for his refusal to conform to the wishes of the rest of the jury.  Evidence suggests that a pro-Clancy group formed very early in the deliberations process, and this group pressured the few holdouts to give in.  Only one man remained.  

Lindsay Clancy juror Paula Devlin tells @gayleking that the holdout juror was a Black man, whom she estimates is in his 30s. Devlin says after watching a video of an interview with Clancy, the holdout juror “realized that it wasn’t murder in the first degree,” adding the jury… pic.twitter.com/ZxFa2hgSsY

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) September 11, 2026

The problem for the political left?  The juror is black, and they were hoping for an "evil white man".  This revelation has caused liberal heads to explode because black people within woke culture generally rank higher on the DEI totem pole than white women.  However, as everyone knows, when a black person leaves the liberal plantation these activists can become some of the most racist people on the planet.  They would rather destroy a minority than let him "go rogue".  

Lindsay Clancy supporter learns the lone holdout juror was a Black man—and suddenly says it “changes the landscape of the conversation.”

“I think a lot of us were assuming that it was a white man.”

Absolutely wild.pic.twitter.com/0vCiWsWrG0

— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) September 11, 2026

New outlets and online headhunters have been scrambling to dig up dirt on the black juror in order to gain some kind of narrative leverage.  Media sources have somehow obtained the man's name, though they can't release it yet without violating the court order.  NBC published a hatchet job article outlining the jurors criminal history.  

EXCLUSIVE: The holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial had a history of domestic violence allegations, the NBC10 Boston Investigators have learned through court documents and interviews with family members. Read the full investigation here. https://t.co/qSjIiU8Og8

— NBC10 Boston (@NBC10Boston) September 11, 2026

Defense Attorney Kevin Reddington's wife is apparently leading the charge on social media to undermine the juror's credibility.  It's a bizarre decision given that the trial is already over, unless the goal is to intimidate future jurors in a future trial. 

Kevin Reddington's wife is leading the slander campaign against the black hold-out juror.

You heard that right.

The wife of Clancy's lawyer is putting a target on the back of the one brave person who stopped her husband from getting a 3X child killer off the hook.

This is… pic.twitter.com/GXVuuzwWjM

— Pro America Politics (@proamericapol) September 11, 2026

The man's previous charges include a restraining order filed in 2021 by his wife, who claimed at least one incident of physical abuse.  It should be noted, though, that all criminal charges were dismissed.  NBC also dug up a $12,000 civil dispute the juror had with a landlord.  NBC has not attempted to dredge up dirt on any other juror in the Clancy trial, only the juror who refused to accept the insanity plea.

It's only a matter of time before the juror's full identity is revealed, opening the door to a barrage of harassment from activists and journalists.    

It shouldn't need to be explained, but the man's past is completely irrelevant to his duties on the jury.  He was approved by the defense and criminal histories of all candidates are examined during jury selection.  Perhaps Reddington assumed that the jury was stacked in Lindsay Clancy's favor and adding a black man to the list was the same as adding another sure vote.  This explains why the lawyer acted so aggressively to have the juror pressured or removed - His "rogue" decision" is viewed as a betrayal.     

This effort by political movements and establishment journalists to assassinate the character of a juror from a trial that has already ended represents a dangerous subversion of America's justice system.  If future juries cannot make decisions based on evidence without being worried that they'll come under attack after the trial is over, this would mean the death of the jury based system.  

Such a precedent would devolve into absolute chaos within the legal structure, and of course, vigilante justice to fill the void that follows. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 11:05

No Secretary Bessent, We Aren't Magically Growing Our Way Out Of Debt

Authored by Vincent Cook via The Mises Institute,

As the official federal debt hit the $40 trillion mark and attracted a lot of negative publicity, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure CNBC's Sara Eisen in an August 20 interview that there is nothing to worry about:

Well, yes, I mean, look, Sara, there's nothing magic about the $40 trillion number. And we can grow our way out of that. So, but what we do want to signal is, I think that there's been a lot of misinformation in terms of what's going on with the deficit, what's going on with the deficit to GDP. We actually had a fiscal consolidation for the calendar year 2025. We had, we are at about 5.7 percent of GDP. And one of the things that's temporary here that's influencing the deficit has been these tariff refunds. And we won't have to do that again. . . . The other big item in the budget that we're seeing is the hit that we're taking from, to revenues for the immediate expensing of factories and of equipment and farm structures. And I think that, if people sit back and think, that's not government spending. That is actually an investment in the future and we're increasing the tax base. And that's how, that is what measures the wealth of a nation, is the ability to increase after-tax return on capital. So we're pulling back the, think of it as pulling back the slingshot here. We have a lot of potential energy that will turn into kinetic energy during this year, next year, as these factories come online.

While Republicans have long been chanting "voodoo economics" incantations (i.e., claiming that increased growth happens in spite of federal deficit surges caused by tax reductions, so tax revenues will eventually catch up to spending over the long run), Bessent's remark does represent a new wrinkle on this theme. Here Bessent focuses attention on the ratio of the official budget deficit to GDP, as if the official budget is the only relevant factor affecting the future growth of total public debt and as if a short-run increase in GDP is a strongly positive indicator of the economy's long-run ability to sustain increased taxes.

The most basic objection to Bessent's argument (and indeed to the older versions of "supply-side" voodoo as well) is that it doesn't make any fundamental difference in the physical quantity of capital goods if private savings are consumed by higher deficits instead of being consumed by higher taxes. Either way, the labor and natural resources that otherwise could have been devoted to increased net capital accumulation are instead diverted towards increased present consumption and/or increased governmental malinvestments. Giving a tax break to encourage greater investment without corresponding decreases in government spending is self-defeating, since increased deficits divert the additional savings away from private businesses towards the government and its clients and minions.

We can see through the Republican smoke and mirrors to visualize the relationship between deficits and net saving with a graph of historical data. Figure 1 shows these amounts as fractions of net national product (NNP, a measure of what was actually earned by Americans at home and abroad) over the past seventy-five years, with the green line representing net saving and the green line representing federal surpluses and deficits.

Figure 1: Net saving, federal surpluses/deficits as fractions of net national product, 1950-2025

Source: BEA and OMB via FRED®

During the first twenty-four years, net saving varied between ten percent to fifteen percent of NNP, while the federal budget was close to being balanced. However, net saving peaked in 1965, and has since declined to very nearly zero percent in the 2020s. This sixty-year decline in net saving coincides with the emergence of steadily worsening federal deficits, which started becoming particularly acute in the 1980s and early 1990s at around 5 percent of NNP (roughly comparable to the New Deal deficits of the 1930s). During Clinton's two terms things turned around and the federal budget climbed all the way back to a small surplus, coinciding with a partial recovery of net saving.

Since the Clinton era the deficit situation has severely deteriorated, punctuated by sharp spikes during the 2008 financial crisis and during the 2020 covid lockdowns. It is in this fiscal morass that net saving has almost vanished. While Bessent can truthfully boast that net saving in 2025 was a little bit better than in 2024, keeping up this rate of improvement for three more years won't even get net saving back to the level achieved under the first Trump administration in 2019.

Chronic deficits have canceled whatever successes Republicans have had otherwise in reducing tax rates on investors. Their failure since the Eisenhower administration to keep spending under control, in conjunction with the equally reckless fiscal policies of the Democrats, has had a catastrophic impact on America's ability to keep increasing its stock of capital goods out of its own private thrift. While soaring deficits didn't cause the entire decline of net saving over the past sixty years, they did account for roughly half of it.

The official debt figure as such isn't even accurate as a measure of the problem, let alone magical, as $40 trillion gravely understates total federal obligations. This official figure does not include the net present value of the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security, Medicare, and federal employee trust funds, which the trustees (including Secretary Bessent) estimate will put the federal government a further $80 trillion in the hole in the absence of any growth-killing tax increases or political career-killing benefit cuts. The total liabilities of the federal government add up to at least $120 trillion; just servicing such an almost incomprehensible burden requires extremely powerful magic indeed, since no politician even dares acknowledge that two of the trust funds are set to go broke in the early 2030s, let alone come up with a plan to balance all the trust fund budgets.

So what are we to make of Bessent's contention that everything is fine because GDP is growing faster than deficits are? The deficit/GDP ratio referenced by Bessent (figure 2) did decrease from 6.2 percent in 2024 to 5.8 percent in 2025, but such a tiny improvement is barely noticeable when viewed over a seventy-five year perspective.

Figure 2: Federal surpluses/deficits as a fraction of GDP, 1950-2025

Source: BEA via FRED®

The deficit-GDP ratio in figure 2 looks very similar to the red line of figure 1, the main difference being that GDP is somewhat larger than NNP because it includes capital depreciation expenses (which makes "gross" metrics bigger than "net" metrics), offset slightly by the overseas earnings of Americans (which makes "national" metrics smaller than "domestic" metrics). GDP has grown slightly faster than NNP over this period, but it is NNP that is the better proxy of the income tax base, since depreciation expenses are not taxable while overseas income is taxable.

Admittedly Bessent overstating growth slightly by his preference for GDP over NNP is a minor issue, but it highlights a more fundamental methodological problem in his thinking. He starts by cherry-picking a popular metric to compare to the deficit metric and then extrapolates long-term trends from a single year's changes in each metric. What he fails to do is to apply sound economic theories deduced from the incontrovertible fact of human purposefulness to the historical statistics, a priori theories which are necessary both for selecting the most relevant comparative metric and for correctly inferring what possible combinations of causal factors might account for observed changes. Moreover, extrapolating a sustained trend reversal from a single, small year-over-year improvement makes absolutely no sense; a credible time-series analysis of these data can only show a worsening budget trend.

The GDP growth illusion conjured up and widely touted by Trump, and Vance, as well as by Bessent depends heavily on wicked black magic of the monetary variety. The accelerating creation of fiat dollars out of thin air by the Federal Reserve and the creation of fractional reserve dollar deposits and other dollar-denominated substitutes out of thin air by the banking system - that is, accelerating inflation and faster inflation-caused price increases - are what temporarily boost GDP, what permanently increase trust fund obligations via statutory cost-of-living adjustments, and what fuel wasteful boom-bust cycles characterized during the bust phase by burgeoning deficits, severe declines of net saving due to intensified government interventions, and the writing off of massive quantities of malinvested capital.

This sort of monetary hocus-pocus never makes tax revenues catch up with soaring expenditures over the long run; inflation can "solve" the federal liabilities problem only by utterly destroying the purchasing power of the dollar and thereby making all dollar-denominated obligations worthless. Whatever one may think about the efficacy of the central bank's monetary wizardry and the Treasury's fiscal sorcery, none of their spell-casting, witchery's brews, or prestidigitations are equivalent to private restraint of present consumption by Americans making more labor and natural resource inputs available for growing the physical quantities of sustainably-productive factories, equipment, and farm structures in America. The green line in figure 1 demonstrates that such growth has virtually halted; over the decades Republicans and Democrats alike have put a bipartisan hex on growth.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 10:30

"Riyadh In Difficult Position": Saudis Shutter Critical East-West Pipeline After Drone Attacks

Saudi Arabia temporarily shut its 7 million-barrel-a-day East-West pipeline following multiple drone attacks, exposing a massive vulnerability in a critical export route used to bypass the Strait of Hormuz during more than six months of US-Iran conflict.

The closure puts new pressure on Saudi oil exports as the pipeline designed to bypass the Hormuz chokepoint becomes a target. The Energy Ministry described the shutdown as precautionary while emergency crews secured the pipeline and assessed its safety.

The oil pumping station on the Saudi East-West pipeline was completely destroyed during yesterday’s attack, according to satellite imagery released today.

This is incredibly important news, as the East-West pipeline can transport up to approximately 210 million barrels of crude… https://t.co/6GCaYnkkAs pic.twitter.com/YggT4Lwzwm

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) September 11, 2026

Here's the ministry's statement:

An official source at the Ministry of Energy stated that the East-West Pipeline in the Riyadh and Madinah regions was subjected to multiple attacks on the morning of Thursday, 10 September 2026. The pipeline was shut down as a precautionary measure. The attacks resulted in a number of injuries, and medical care was provided to those affected.

The source said emergency and specialised technical teams responded immediately following the attacks, taking the necessary measures to secure the pipeline and assess its safety in line with approved safety procedures and emergency response plans, in coordination with the relevant authorities. Any further developments will be announced in due course.

The shutdown deepens an already severe export squeeze on the kingdom. Saudi oil shipments fell to about 3 million barrels a day in August, the lowest level on record since early 2017.

Iran-backed Houthis seized the strategic island of Mayun in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait last week, tightening pressure on the kingdom's Red Sea export hub. With Hormuz already disrupted, ongoing threats to both maritime chokepoints are narrowing the kingdom's options for moving crude to global markets. 

"Riyadh is in a difficult position," said Rapidan Energy Group analyst Fernando Ferreira. "As the US maintains the blockade and succeeds in escorting more tankers out of the region, Iran will pivot toward increased attacks on Gulf energy facilities."

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 09:55

UK Government Reserves Two-Thirds Of Elite Jobs By Race; Leaked Doc Exposes

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Sixty-six per cent of the slots are ringfenced for staff who are ethnic minority, disabled, or from a lower socio-economic background. Everyone else - including the white working-class kids the same government claims to champion - can take whatever is left. They've essentially built a public-sector caste system.

The Cabinet Office's defence is the same tired formula used across the British state. The scheme, it says, complies with the "positive action" provisions of the Equality Act. In plain English: race, disability status and class background are now official sorting criteria for who gets accelerated towards the top of the machine that writes the country's laws.

Exclusive: The Civil Service is reserving two-thirds of places on a taxpayer-funded talent programme for "diverse candidates".

A leaked document reveals 66% of places are ringfenced for ethnic minority, disabled and lower socioeconomic background staff.

The Cabinet Office says...

— Steven Edginton (@StevenEdginton) September 8, 2026

Reform UK's home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf put the objection in one line: "Jobs and opportunities should be awarded on merit, not handed out according to someone's ethnicity."

"Positive action" is the legal fig leaf. Positive discrimination is illegal in Britain. Positive action is the workaround: employers may favour a candidate from an under-represented group if they are "as qualified" as the other person. In practice, the ringfence comes first. Two-thirds of the places are already spoken for before a single application is scored on competence.

The Civil Service already runs dedicated fast-tracks for favoured identities. META - the Minority Ethnic Talent Association - sits on top of the Future Leaders Scheme. DELTA does the same for disabled staff. Mentoring, mock interviews, senior sponsorship and extra visibility are reserved for those groups. The leaked 66 per cent figure is simply that architecture made explicit: most of the taxpayer-funded pipeline is not open competition. It is a reserved lane.

Official numbers make the "under-representation" story look thinner by the year. Civil Service Statistics 2026 put ethnic minority representation at a record 19.2 per cent, against 19.6 per cent of the economically active working-age population.

Declared disability among civil servants is now 18.4 per cent - above the national working-age average. The gap that remains is concentrated at the Senior Civil Service, where ethnic minority staff sit at 10.6 per cent. The official answer is not to test harder for the best people. It is to fence off two-thirds of the development scheme and call it justice.

This is not an isolated HR experiment. Britain's domestic intelligence service has already told white students, including poor ones, not to bother applying.

For the 2026/27 academic year, MI5's Summer Intelligence Internship is confined to people "from a Black, Asian, mixed heritage or ethnic minority background and from a socially or economically disadvantaged background."

The agency's own careers page states: "We're confining the applications for this internship to those within this demographic due to a current underrepresentation in our workforce." White British applicants - even those from the most deprived postcodes - cannot submit a form. A narrow "White other" box exists for Romany Gypsy, Scottish Travellers or Irish Travellers. Ordinary white Britons are out.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp called it "flagrant racism from MI5 & GCHQ." He wrote: "White applicants for summer 2027 internships - including from disadvantaged backgrounds - can't apply. The scheme must be scrapped." And: "Applications should be merit-based and colour blind. Working class white boys are among the most disadvantaged - yet are ignored."

Security minister Dan Jarvis has defended the internships as "a lawful measure (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) used to encourage people from under-represented demographics to consider national security careers." The same statute, the same incantation. The people who will one day hold files on the rest of the country are being pre-sorted by ethnicity before they sit a single test.

The National Audit Office ran the same play. Its six-week paid public-sector accounting internship in Newcastle accepted only applicants who were female, of black heritage, or from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Middle-class white men were barred. Yusuf called that "blatant discrimination."

The same pattern reached frontline policing in April 2025. West Yorkshire Police, one of the largest forces in the country, told white British candidates to wait while "under-represented groups" were waved through the door.

The force's recruitment page stated: "We are currently accepting applications for the two police constable entry programmes (uniform and detective) from people from our under-represented groups... If you are not from one of these groups, please keep checking this page for future recruitment opportunities."

A whistleblower report to senior officers, seen by The Telegraph, said the effect was blunt: "the pipeline for anyone white British is strangled, whilst anyone not white British is ushered through." Over a 15-month stretch, ethnic minority candidates were given 446 days to apply. White British applicants were given 99. In one round they had 48 hours.

West Yorkshire denied it was a ban. It said early applications from minorities were "positive action" and that those files were held until the scheme opened to everyone. The force still employs a small army of DEI officers. Chief Constable John Robins has argued that the law itself should be changed to permit open positive discrimination.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called the episode "social engineering." She said she believes in "meritocracy, not race-based quotas," and warned that such policies risk "the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes that ethnic minorities cannot succeed unless a well-meaning Leftie is holding the door open." Police, she added, exist "to prevent crime and catch criminals, not social engineering."

Once the recruitment gate is racialised, the training follows. Thames Valley Police put officers through "equity training" covering "white privilege," "micro-aggressions" and the difference between being "non-racist versus anti-racist."

The course landed a month after an employment tribunal found the same force had positively discriminated against white officers by handing an unadvertised inspector post to an Asian sergeant.

An independent review ordered by the police and crime commissioner noted that white privilege "can often be seen as demonising white people and therefore building barriers to the learning." The training went ahead anyway.

Police Scotland's anti-racism package lists the same canon: white privilege, white fragility, micro-aggressions, allyship. The National Police Chiefs' Council Race Action Plan treats "unconscious bias" as a fact about everyone and proceeds from the premise that many people still believe policing is institutionally racist.

Officers are taught to see their own skin as a problem before they are taught to see a suspect. That is not operational training. It is political catechism, paid for by the public those officers are supposed to protect.

The legal profession also has its own reserved lane. The Bar Council partnered with the 10,000 Interns Foundation on a paid six-week scheme that excluded white applicants. Sophie Corcoran, a commentator who had been exploring a legal career, applied and was shut out.

She said she was "shocked to discover that the scheme is restricted to applicants of a particular racial background." She has since issued proceedings. "This case is not simply about my own experience," she said. "I am pursuing it because I believe that no person in Britain should be denied opportunities because of the colour of their skin. I believe strongly that equality before the law must apply to everyone."

The Bar Council's answer is, again, the Equality Act. It has called the scheme "lawful positive action under sections 158 and 159 of the Equality Act based on evidence of under-representation in relation to access to the profession," filed a defence, and said it will "vigorously contest" the claim. The 2026 intake went ahead.

Rupert Lowe, then an independent MP, had already described the programme as "anti-white racism."

He further urged, "What message does this send to a generation of talented, hard-working young people who happen to be white - that their ambitions are less worthy? That they must be excluded to balance some imagined historical scale?"

The body that speaks for barristers is defending a racial filter on entry to the profession that exists to interpret the law equally.

The same logic has already eaten the Treasury. In 2020 the department that runs the public finances quietly scrapped the numerical reasoning test on its policy adviser graduate scheme.

Internal papers obtained by The Spectator explained why. "The Numerical Reasoning Test (NRT) was removed due to evidence of the test having adverse impact on candidate diversity."

Board minutes were more direct: "We want more diverse ethnicity at assessment centre." Two tests were treated as "an additional 'hurdle'" and "another opportunity for candidates to be sifted out of the process."

The verbal reasoning test later went the same way. In its place came a "Civil Service Strengths" questionnaire, including items such as "I find it frustrating when others don't understand my ideas." Dr Zubir Ahmed's verdict on the numeracy decision was short: "I'm sorry, but this is insane and helps no one."

A state that deletes the maths test from the Treasury application so that the ethnicity numbers look better is a state that has stopped caring whether the people who will spend your money can count.

Every one of these schemes points back to the same statute. The Equality Act 2010, passed by Labour and left standing by the Conservatives, created the "positive action" gateway.

Ministers, permanent secretaries and police chiefs now treat that gateway as a mandate. The Civil Service Code itself tells officials they must support "equality and diversity." Once that is written into the operating system, every talent board, internship and constable intake becomes an exercise in demographic engineering.

Labour has pushed the same logic from the other direction. In 2025 Pat McFadden announced that the main Civil Service undergraduate internship would be restricted to students from "lower socio-economic backgrounds," judged by what their parents did when they were 14.

"We need to get more working class young people into the civil service so it harnesses the broadest range of talent and truly reflects the country," he said. Class ringfences and race ringfences now sit side by side. The one group that is never the intended beneficiary is the ordinary white applicant who is neither poor enough nor minority enough to clear the new hurdles.

Across the Atlantic, the second Trump administration has spent two years ripping DEI out of the federal government and the universities. Whitehall has spent those same years thickening the paperwork. America First meant colour-blind hiring. Britain First, in the hands of the Blob, has meant the opposite.

Edginton's leak does not reveal a rogue HR officer. It reveals the settled doctrine of the British governing class. A taxpayer-funded talent programme with 66 per cent of places reserved is not "inclusion." It is a quota with better branding.

MI5 internships that refuse white applications, police portals that tell white Britons to check back later, classrooms that instruct officers in their privilege, and a Bar scheme that locks white graduates out of paid chambers experience are not separate scandals. They are one policy, applied wherever the state still controls the gate.

A country that sorts its future mandarins, spies, constables and barristers by ancestry should stop calling itself a meritocracy. It should at least have the honesty to admit what the leaked paper already says: two-thirds of the ladder is reserved, and the people who built the state are no longer first in line to run it.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 09:20