Zero Hedge

Where's The 1929-Style Collapse MSM Predicted? UBS Finds Global Exports Surging To "Historically High Levels"

Where's The 1929-Style Collapse MSM Predicted? UBS Finds Global Exports Surging To "Historically High Levels"

Last year, lefty corporate media outlets pushed the narrative that President Trump's trade war with the world could trigger a 1929-style economic collapse. However, a new UBS report presents a markedly different picture: global trade growth is running at historically high levels, supported by AI-related demand and rising export prices. 

Let's take a trip in the "wayback machine" and look at Bloomberg's headlines when Trump was ratcheting up the trade war with China in early 2025. The outlet pumped out an ungodly number of headlines about "recession" and impending economic doom. 

MSM's 'Doom-Maxxing' Headlines:

Roughly 1.5 years later, UBS's latest data show continued growth in global trade, despite the recession risks economists highlighted when the tariff war broke out in the first half of 2025.

UBS chief economist Arend Kapteyn wrote Tuesday morning that global export values are rising about 19% from a year earlier, placing growth in the 84th percentile of the past 25 years. Higher volumes account for roughly 8.8 percentage points of that increase, while rising prices contribute another 10.3 percentage points.

Asia accounts for 71% of global export growth. The region, with China particularly prominent, generates about 95% of the technology-related contribution, highlighting its major role in the AI supply chain. 

Separately, Emmanuel Sharef, who oversees Pacific Investment Management Co.'s flagship Balanced Income and Growth Fund, told Bloomberg last week that he was seeking opportunities among Asian suppliers benefiting from the AI boom.

The report suggests that global trade remains resilient, but its core strength is concentrated in technology and Asia. That leaves the expansion heavily sensitive to the AI and power grid investment boom. It seems that all the doom-maxxing forecasts lefty corporate media outlets made last summer have fallen flat on their faces.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 17:20

25 State AGs Urge Defunding Of National Academies Of Sciences, Allege Bias On Climate Lawsuits

25 State AGs Urge Defunding Of National Academies Of Sciences, Allege Bias On Climate Lawsuits

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times,

A coalition of 25 state attorneys general called on federal agencies and Congress to defund the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), charging that the organization had used taxpayer dollars to produce reports that supported plaintiffs in climate lawsuits against energy companies.

In an Aug. 27 letter, the state attorneys general urged the federal government to "end grants to an organization [NASEM] that uses taxpayer money to prop up litigation theories that have been rejected by courts from Maryland to Mississippi to California."

Much of the conflict stems from a chapter on climate science in the Federal Judicial Center's Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for federal judges that was written by NASEM, together with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC).

This manual provides essential background and technical information for judges who are presiding over thousands of lawsuits in which states and cities across the United States are seeking billions of dollars in damages from energy companies as compensation for alleged harm from global warming.

Allegations of Bias

Critics allege that information NASEM produced for the manual supports the plaintiffs' claims while ignoring contrary views that favor the defense.

President Donald Trump stated in a July 19 Truth Social post that NASEM had "published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change" and that "taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it."

In January, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told the FJC in a letter that the manual appeared to include "biased programming" with the "underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs who allege injuries from the manufacturing, marketing, use, or sale of fossil-fuel products."

In response, the FJC removed the chapter from its manual. Initially, NASEM kept the chapter on its website but removed it on Aug. 7, pending an internal review.

"That chapter has received considerable scrutiny," NASEM stated. "[NASEM] has determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway."

However, attorneys general from the group of 25 states, led by Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia, say they have concerns regarding that review process.

"Now, over five months later, after presidential criticism and increasing public scrutiny, NASEM has temporarily removed the chapter from its website for an 'independent review' of the 'processes used to develop the chapter,'" the attorneys general wrote in their letter. "This review appears to be a sham, as demonstrated by NASEM's secrecy around all aspects of the review process."

The attorneys general charged that the chapter in the reference manual that NASEM helped write "materially misquotes the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], directly contradicts the manual's statistics chapter, was apparently substantially ghost-written by climate plaintiffs' attorney Michael Burger, and had funders, authors, and reviewers that included climate funders, activists, and litigation participants."

One of the co-authors of the Reference Manual's climate chapter, Columbia Law School professor Jessica Wentz, defended the work in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, stating that it had undergone a rigorous review process, that Michael Burger had not contributed to it, and that it was "objective and rooted in settled science."

In addition to the chapter in the reference manual for judges, NASEM produced a report in July titled "Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026," which critics say bolstered plaintiffs' arguments that harm from extreme weather events could be attributed to energy companies' production of fossil fuels.

That NASEM report supported "extreme event attribution" (EEA), the legal theory underpinning climate lawsuits, which claims that damage from extreme weather can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions, as plaintiffs assert. NASEM stated in a summary of the report that "the scientific tools, observational datasets, and methods developed and used for EEA have advanced considerably over the past decade and increased the confidence in EEA results for some types of weather events."

"[NASEM says] that these attribution studies have more prominence in the press and in legal proceeding and they say attribution methodology is getting better, but saying something is getting better is nowhere near the same as saying it's any good," Steven Koonin, physicist at Stanford University and former undersecretary for science under President Barack Obama, told The Epoch Times. "You would expect to see graphs throughout the report comparing the results of attribution with what the actual data is, and there is virtually none of that in the report."

The NASEM report also provides a methodology and causal link between greenhouse gas emissions, changes in climate, extreme weather, physical impacts on communities, and societal and economic harm.

Among the climate lawsuit cases currently moving through the courts is a pending Supreme Court case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which could set a precedent for many other similar cases.

Calls to Defund NASEM

Besides the attorneys general, other critics have also called for the government to defund NASEM.

"Federal agencies shouldn't need another minute to cut off funding to an organization laundering climate activism through the National Academies' name," Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, said in a statement.

"The National Academies took taxpayer money and used it to manufacture a scientific-sounding basis for climate lawsuits courts have already rejected, then timed a follow-up report to help plaintiffs in the Suncor case while locking out any rebuttal. Calling their own secret internal review 'independent' is a punchline."

The letter from the state attorneys general said "a truly independent review" would feature an external panel, exclude NASEM employees, activists, and litigation participants, and be made available to the public.

NASEM received hundreds of millions of dollars from federal agencies in 2024, including more than $84 million from the Transportation Department, $32 million from the Defense Department, and $23 million from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Aug. 27 letter stated. Signatories of the Aug. 27 letter also included attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina, Wyoming, and Utah.

The Epoch Times contacted NASEM for comment but did not receive a response as of press time. However, a spokesperson from the organization said in a statement to media outlets that its mission was "to provide independent, objective scientific advice."

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 17:00

Consumer Credit Smashes Estimates As Credit Card Debt Hits New All-Time High

Consumer Credit Smashes Estimates As Credit Card Debt Hits New All-Time High

The relevering of the US consumer continues: one month after the June consumer credit number came higher than estimates (and followed the unexpected May contreaction in US credit), in July consumer credit came in even higher than expected, with the Fed reporting in its latest G.19 report that in July, US consumer credit rose by a whopping $18.1BN - more than the $14.6 billion in June - and far above the $11.7 billion estimate. 

The rebound was driven by a modestly increase in revolving credit (i.e., credit card debt), as consumers added $2.8 billion to their credit card total...

... pushing it to new record high of $1.357 trillion.

The bulk of July's spike in consumer credit was in "non-revolving": student and auto loans rose by a whopping $15.3 billion, the biggest one month increase in over three years, and pushing total nonrevolving credit to $5.186 trillion, also a new all time high.

What is interesting, is that while auto loans have barely budged since late 2023, staying around 1.6 trillion for nearly three years, and hitting a record $1.571 trillion at the end of June, student loans have resumed their ascent, and after a modest decline in late 2023, student loans are once again at all time highs although in June we saw a tiny decline of $4.5 billion.

Finally for those keeping tabs, after a modest decline in the previous two quarter, the average interest rate on credit card accounts assessed interest rose again to 22.15%...

... a level last seen three years ago, when the Fed rates was almost 2% higher, which confirms our long-running observation that credit card rates go up but they never go down.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 16:40

Good Faith Vs Bad Faith

Good Faith Vs Bad Faith

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

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

- Eugyppius on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty-five years of being insane is enough.

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

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 16:20

When Will There Be An 'Alternative For Canada'?

When Will There Be An 'Alternative For Canada'?

Authored by Mark E. Jeftovic via Bombthrower,

On Sunday, Germany's Alternative für Deutschland won Saxony-Anhalt, which shouldn't really surprise anyone, but is being treated by the media like some kind of Black Swan event, blindsiding us all.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its result from five years ago and crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU, which came in at 17.2%. Apparently, if it wasn't for mail-in voting they would have had a majority.

As it stands, they're within three seats of an outright majority (maybe they can follow the Liberal Party of Canada playbook and induce a few other MPs to defect).

Naturally, practically every headline describing the result contains some variation of the words "far right".

We've been through this before.

A few years ago I wrote "What Does 'Far Right' Even Mean Anymore?" and came up with a working definition:

"Far right" is basically anything that contests the Establishment narrative.

That definition has held up remarkably well.

Because if you listen to the political establishment and its media organs, there are basically only two possible views around the problems facing Western countries.

The first is to double-down on what we've been already doing, irrespective of hard data showing that the policies of the last decade have made Canada the poorest performing country in the entirety of OECD nations, not to mention that the track we're on will keep us there out until 2060...

Here in Canada that means some variation on the policies we've pursued since 2015, many of them mirroring the European model: historically unprecedented immigration volumes, an ever-expanding temporary resident population, increasingly cumbersome restraints on energy and resource development, and a kind of managed degrowth dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Door #2 is that anyone who has an issue with this is a "far-right extremist", or more recently "a maple-MAGA".

There is apparently no middle ground.

Stipulate that immigration is a overall a good thing but that the volume and calibre of the migrants matters? Far right.

Suggest that a country has both the right and obligation to decide who gets to live there and optimize for higher quality immigrants? Far right.

Expect that people who immigrate to this country should integrate into it, obey its laws and be a net contributor economically, instead of a perpetual drain?

Careful now. You don't want to sound like you're "noticing things".

Which raises an interesting question after yesterday's result in Germany:

When will there be an Alternative for Canada?

How Canada's immigration system used to work

Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a merit-based immigration system, in 1967.

The underlying concept was remarkably simple: select for people who were likely to succeed here.

Education. Language. Skilled work experience. Age. Adaptability. Ability to support yourself.

There were family reunification and humanitarian streams alongside it, of course, but the economic immigration system was unapologetically selective and we unabashedly skimmed the cream across all ethnicities, countries, races and religions.

For awhile there, we had it: The Golden Age of Multi-Culturalism - and Canada was, in fact, a classically liberal paradise. For a while.

This is the system under which my parents, my wife, her mother-in-law, our daughter and my entire extended family came to Canada.

All immigrants. Most of them non-white.

It works fine.

For decades we brought in skilled, educated and motivated people from everywhere. While they retained homages to their cultures and religions, they also worked hard, obeyed the law, they opened businesses, raised families, integrated into Canadian society and, over a generation or two, became part of our "Canadian Mosaic".

What Changed

That basic architecture continued for decades and eventually evolved into Express Entry, which was launched under the Harper government in January 2015. Express Entry actually made the selection process more competitive, ranking eligible candidates against one another instead of simply processing qualified applicants in chronological order.

What changed after 2015 wasn't that Canada suddenly abolished the points system, but the Trudeau Liberals made changes to the volume and the pathways.

Permanent immigration targets climbed from roughly 250,000 to 280,000 annually during the Harper years to nearly half-a-million annually by 2024. At the same time, international students, temporary workers and other temporary residents expanded far faster (places like Conestoga College became veritable "diploma factories").

And somewhere along the way, "temporary foreign worker" stopped conjuring up an image of an agricultural worker filling a seasonal shortage and started meaning practically everybody behind the counter at Tim Hortons.

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was never designed as a mass pipeline for cashiers and fry cooks, but successive rule changes, plus a much larger companion program that does not require a labour-market test, made low-wage service jobs a normal use of temporary labour.

What makes it worse?

As many of those living in the GTA area are aware: home invasions are up, car thefts are up, assaults are up, so is firebombing Christian churches and anti-Semitic violence. The streets of Canada's major cities are routinely taken over by Islamic and far-left extremists who openly hate this country and pine for it's downfall...

(One wonders, why is she here then?)

And when non-citizens commit crimes, get caught, get released again, commit more crimes, and eventually, finally are convicted...

The final catalyst: The immigration discount on criminal sentencing

This may ultimately be the issue that causes the pot to boil over.

Canadian citizens watched citizens getting tackled by cops grocery stores for not wearing masks, people got tazed at outdoor hockey rinks. The federal government imposed martial law and seized your bank accounts for donating to the Freedom Convoy.

And now, they open the news and encounter an endless procession of home invasions, carjackings, sexual assaults, human trafficking cases and violent crimes where some variation of the same phrase seems to invariably appear:

"The accused was already out on release for previous unrelated charges."

...and they end up being released again, and people can't help but notice, that many such cases turn out to be, "Brampton men" (IYKYK).

This has become common enough that Ottawa has finally had to respond. This year the federal government enacted more than 80 changes to Canada's bail and sentencing laws, specifically targeting repeat violent offenders, home invasions, human trafficking, auto theft and accused persons carrying numerous or serious outstanding charges.

So the problem wasn't some imaginary, shared hallucination that came out of a far-right echo chamber.

More corrosive still is the perception that non-citizens who commit crimes have been receiving so-called "immigration discounts" precisely because they are non-citizens and the Supreme Court, in R. v. Pham held that judges may consider the immigration consequences of a sentence.

This has lead to examples such as:

  • A Kitchener man who battered his girlfriend was given a conditional discharge to avoid deportation to India
  • An Ontario court of appeal reduced the sentence of a man convicted of assault and multiple probation violations by one day in order to prevent a "potentially devastating immigration consequence". The Crown did not object.
  • A foreign resident on a work permit who was working as a Bell Technician who exposed himself to a woman in who's apartment he was servicing was granted no jail time because doing so would result in deportation. The man feels "stigmatized" and laments that he had to leave the area.
  • Finally, this guy, who was caught in a Peel Regional Police sting operation, because he thought he was soliciting sex from a 15 year-old minor. He was convicted, then argued that his immigration status should not be impacted by his sentencing because he still wants to bring his wife to Canada (who presumably still wants to be with him, for some reason). Justice Paul O'Marra concurred,

    "A conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences, such as jeopardizing his immigration status, delaying his citizenship, and preventing him from sponsoring his wife, which would likely result in their separation"

Uh, yeah, no shit. That a conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences is the entire point of having a legal system.

The far-right extremist in me can't help but notice, can't restrain myself from wondering out loud...

Do we really want anybody here who can't govern themselves accordingly before they even become a citizen?

Shouldn't this be the most obvious filter available?

By all means, come to Canada, build a better life, work hard and follow the fucking rules.

Otherwise, don't come, or get deported.

Too simple.

But try explaining the optics of that to a Canadian citizen who has just watched the state demonstrate zero reluctance to use its full powers against him and tell him that noticing the discrepancy makes him "literally Hitler".

At what point does "far right" simply mean "normal"?

One of the more revealing moments in CNN's coverage ahead of yesterday's German election came when correspondent Fred Pleitgen described the AfD's supposedly radical immigration platform.

'The AfD openly calls for mass deportation of undocumented foreigners and foreigners who have committed crimes"

Narrator's note: "undocumented foreigner" is someone who is there illegally.

When a person enters your country as a guest, commits a serious crime against somebody who lives there, they should, as a consequence, lose the privilege of remaining.

Holding this opinion will get you branded "far-right" extremist.

I suspect a fairly large percentage of Canadians would consider it common sense.

Living in Canada should be considered a privilege for non-citizens, and citizenship should mean something. It should be earned through some combination of productivity, commitment, integration and time.

None of this has anything to do with race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.

In fact, Canada's old system demonstrated precisely how unnecessary those criteria are.

This is where the "far-right" branding becomes dangerous

The problem with reflexively branding every objection to the current system as "far right" isn't simply that the label eventually becomes meaningless.

There is a much worse consequence.

For starters, you eliminate the legitimate middle.

People who simply say "immigration levels are too high" get called racists.

People who say temporary workers shouldn't displace Canadian teenagers from entry-level jobs are deemed xenophobes.

People who think convicted non-citizen criminals should be deported are branded as extremists.

Eventually some of those people stop caring what you call them.

That's when some truly unhinged egregores can arise.

I've been warning about this phenomenon for years, including in my book, Unassailable: when legitimate grievances are declared impermissible, they don't just go away.

They go underground, they tend to mutate, and they resurface as increased polarization, siege mentality and, eventually, real extremism.

We're already seeing the emergence Canadian groups openly espousing ideas that really are extreme, including ethnic cleansing, as though removing entire populations based on their skin-colour is the only remaining solution to problems the political system refuses to confront honestly.

As I lamented in my earlier "Canada Was A Liberal Paradise" piece, racism in Canada was for the most part, a thing of the past.

It was over.

Aside from the fringes and the individual Archie Bunker types, Canada was, for a brief, bygone age, a largely colour-blind meritocracy.

Then we made race central to practically everything again: post-nationalism, colonialism. Settlers on stolen land - this isn't coffee house Marxism by purple haired they/them's from affluent families anymore - it's literally baked into the curriculum, it's being taught in our schools and our universities by an academia overrun with Fabians and Malthusians.

Meanwhile, any criticism of immigration policy is synonymous with racial animus.

Is it any wonder that there are populist backlashes occurring in Germany, Ceuta, France, the UK?

The Alternative for Canada is not what you think.

I'm not here to tell you that some manner of nationalist, populist party is going to save Canada - I don't even think the AfD or any of these reaction movements will "save" their own respective countries.

The reason is that I think this is part of a much wider issue: the collapse of the global debt-based monetary system and a Fourth Turning-style destruction of our Industrial Age institutions. The dysfunction we see here in Canada and abroad isn't the result of the wrong political party or bad policy tracks. Those are symptoms of something much larger.

Populations vote in the wrong political parties, who embark on horrifically bad policy tracks, because there is no workable or tenable solutions to the current problems. Only emergent, alternative systems that are better suited to operating in world's network-shaped topology and hyper-accelerating pace will persevere, and a big part of that is just staying out of the blast radius of the failing machinery (much more on this in my new book, The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline - my premium membership already has access to it)

However intractable the problems of building a global financial system atop debt-based money, the situation is even more acute here in Canada, where the older generations still believe everything the CBC tells them, and the younger ones are indoctrinated to hate this country from pre-school onward.

In other words, Canada is cooked, and the "Alternative for Canada" is not having a different party in power, it isn't having some establishment outsider like Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke entering politics (although that would be refreshing), or a firebrand like Kevin O'Leary taking over the CPC (which also would be awesome).

Nor is it becoming "the 51st State" or merging with the US (although anybody who's ever read Dianne Francis' book on the topic would find themselves agreeing with a lot of it. It was written before the rise of Trump and TDS infected the majority of the Canadian "Elbows Up" contingent).

For our cousins out in Alberta, it's not even separation.

All of these things might forestall the inevitable, add a decade or two onto the long descent of The Industrial Age - but the real solution in an era where politics is just institutionalized grift and the masses are intentionally dumbing themselves down, the way forward is through radical personal sovereignty, critical thinking skills, financial independence, and optionality. Lots and lots of optionality.

The Alternative for Canada is you.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 15:40

New York Officials Lied About Air Quality After 9/11, New Documents Show

New York Officials Lied About Air Quality After 9/11, New Documents Show

Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

New York City has agreed to release new documents showing that officials lied about the air quality in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

The more than 170,000 pages of documents are being released by NYC in response to the transparency organization 9/11 Health Watch, which had sued to force their disclosure.

According to the New York Times, the documents reveal that higher-than-acceptable levels of asbestos and other contaminants were in the dust and air in other parts of Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

"An audit from November 2001, prepared by a private firm and submitted to the federal E.P.A. based on data collected by New York City and state agencies, showed other troubling findings," the Times reported Monday.

"That audit demonstrated that air concentration of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking near the towers' footprint, and that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island had increased after the attacks."

Despite having information about the poor air quality, government officials, including then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, said the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

Whitman has since apologized for her misrepresentations.

The Times warned that the disclosures could reopen NYC to new litigation at a time when New Yorkers who were in the city at the time are dying of lung and blood cancers, as well as heart and respiratory diseases.

Denise Verzi, whose husband, Michael, was a firefighter who suffered from lymphoma after responding to the attack, criticized the city for its lack of transparency.

"I don't understand hiding it to begin with," Verzi told the Times. "That was horrific. But 25 years in, there's people that are still getting sick."

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 15:20

Mamdani Turns City Hall Into A Socialist Union-Organizing-Machine

Mamdani Turns City Hall Into A Socialist Union-Organizing-Machine

New York City has established a government office to assist worker in unionizing, following an executive order announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Labor Day. The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power aims to help workers “get informed, connected and organized” to facilitate union formation. City Hall has not yet released information on the office’s budget or staffing levels, both of which are important considerations when creating a new government entity.

 "Every day, working New Yorkers show up, do their jobs, and keep this city running. Too often, they have no say in the conditions they work under," Mamdani said in a statement.

"The Mayor's Office of Worker Power will make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine. We're connecting workers to their rights, to each other and to the organizations ready to stand with them. Because when workers have power, this city works better for everyone."

The office's stated functions include holding hearings on workplace issues, drafting policy proposals based on employee testimony, distributing information about workers’ rights, and connecting employees with outside groups equipped to help them organize.

Tony Perlstein, a former dockworker, union organizer, and deputy director of communications for the Center for Popular Democracy, will run the office. He will report to Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su.

“This office allows us to get ahead of exploitation instead of simply responding to it," Su said in a statement.

"By building relationships with workers, unions and worker centers, we can understand what is happening on the ground and act before problems become crises."

The City Reporter, which broke the story, said the office follows the blueprint of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint project of the Democratic Socialists of America and United Electrical Workers. 

Critics have zeroed in on a provision in the executive order that goes well beyond hearings and pamphlets. It directs city agencies, including the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and the Commission on Human Rights, to develop "directed investigation procedures" for workplace violations. These agencies used to wait for a complaint before opening a case. Under the new order, they can target businesses that employ large numbers of low-wage workers, carry a documented history of labor violations, or show other signs the city considers evidence of poor compliance, whether or not anyone has filed a complaint against them.

And that has plenty of people concerned.

 "It's remarkable that the Mamdani administration conflates being forced to pay a union with being protected from exploitation," Manhattan Institute fellow Ken Girardin said. "The city shouldn't be putting its thumb on the scale to squeeze more dues out of workers."

Ashley Ranslow, New York State director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, called the office "deeply concerning.” 

"Federal laws already protect workers rights to organize," Ranslow said.

Her larger worry concerns what proactive enforcement looks like in practice: small businesses facing scrutiny, she said, "even if there are no complaints filed against them."

Ranslow argued City Hall has inserted itself into a relationship that was never its business. "City government should not be interfering with a process that is between employees and the employer," she said. "Small businesses should be supported, especially in a place like New York City where it's unaffordable to keep the doors open and lights on, instead of having the deck stacked against them."

A recent CUNY report has discovered that the level of unionization in the city is more than twice the national average, revealing the office to be nothing more than a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, a structure designed to create grievances even though the labor market has already clearly shifted in favor of organized labor.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 14:40

Israel Shutters UK Consulate For Leading New European Sanctions Against West Bank Settlers

Israel Shutters UK Consulate For Leading New European Sanctions Against West Bank Settlers

The UK is a lead nation among a dozen countries that jointly announced Tuesday they are imposing sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The additional nations are Ireland, Denmark, Finland, France, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband informed parliament about the new measure, saying "Today I announce that the official view of the British government is that the occupation [of the West Bank] is unlawful."

AFP via Getty Images

"The government believes the unlawfulness of the occupation should be reflected in the economic relationships we choose to have with the occupied territories," he added.

Miliband declared that Israeli "terrorists" are conducting ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, which follows a series of deadly incidents involving fanatical settlers widely reported over the last weeks and months. He sought to demonstrate that the sanctions action would underscore that "Britain is not silent in the face of deep injustice and nor is it powerless."

Israel's response was almost immediate, with Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar quickly announcing the closure of the UK consulate in Jerusalem. Saar blasted Miliband for what he's calling "outrageous lies" and charged that London was "systematically working against the state of Israel."

While the United States is not expected to sign on to this European initiative, or voice political support for it, Washington does have sanctions on some individual Jewish settler leaders and groups. However, various international bodies and rights groups have long seen such prior US designations as a positive, but largely symbolic step.

According to an outline of Miliband's words before parliament, he listed the following new legal actions impacting Israeli West Bank settlements and associated entities:

  • An import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
  • A comprehensive sanctions regime against providing services such as construction or financing for Israeli settlements.
  • A ban on the advertising in the UK of illegal settlement properties.
  • Personal sanctions against key individuals accused of promoting settler violence.
  • A new ban for arms licenses and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”.

Another key part of Israel's retaliation has been to list a dozen British election officials who will now be barred from entering the country

According to Israeli media:

The list includes 11 members of parliament... and a lawyer, Fahad Ansari, who has represented Hamas’s political wing in court in the UK as it attempts to remove itself from the list of proscribed terrorist organizations.

Responding to the Foreign Ministry’s announcement, Ansari says on X that he is “neither British nor an MP but do take this as a badge of honour.”

The banned MPs are listed as follows:

  1. Jeremy Corbyn, Your Party co-founder
  2. Zarah Sultana, Your Party co-founder
  3. Naz Shah, Labour Party
  4. Diane Abbot, Labour Party
  5. John McDonnell, Labour Party
  6. Richard Burgon, Labour Party
  7. Hannah Spencer, Green Party
  8. Carla Denyer, Green Party
  9. Sian Berry, Green Party
  10. Ellie Chowns, Green Party
  11. Adrian Ramsay, Green Party

All of this is likely going to ratchet the pressure on the US Embassy and the State Department. Last week, even US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee last week called out Israeli settler violence in the West Bank an "act of terror."

It's unprecedented and unexpected that a self-identified outspoken Zionist and Evangelical pastor like Huckabee would make such an announcement.

He's lately been touring some West Bank areas, describing this as on behalf of US citizens "who live in Turmus Ayya and other communities across this region" who are "disturbed by people who have created extraordinary challenges that are unfair and illegal."

Also, while most Americans might tend to assume that the entirety of the West Bank is Muslim, it has also long had an ancient and significant minority of Christians, chiefly Palestinian Orthodox Christians.

The Christian town of Taybeh has been under repeat attack all summer...

The last all-Christian West Bank town of Taybeh has also this summer come under repeat attack by Jewish settlers. The Israeli government itself has had to send IDF troops to protect the enclave from settler attacks. Perhaps such instances have started to get the attention of US officials, but it's also likely that they will stop at just paying lip service to the issue.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 14:20

More Investing Myths Dismantled

More Investing Myths Dismantled

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

“Investing Myths Dismantled” is chapter 4 of a 5-part series examining the narratives around “investing for the long run.”

Chapter 1: Think Like An Investor

Chapter 2: Investor Psychology

Chapter 3: Why Crashes, Timing & Valuations Matter

Chapter 3 of this series, linked above, ended with a simple question. If the math so plainly says avoid big losses, respect valuations, and mind your timing, why does so much of the industry preach the opposite? Why are you told to stay fully invested no matter what, that you cannot beat the index, so do not try, that the great investors are magic and cannot be copied, and that the only thing worth worrying about is fees?

The reason is that those messages are comfortable, and comfort sells. Each one is an investing myth that sounds like wisdom and quietly talks you out of managing your own money. In this article, we take three of the biggest ones and run them through the same unforgiving logic we used on the math. These articles are not meant to scare you out of stocks, but rather to hand you back the judgment the myths are designed to take away.

Investing Myth One: You Have To Beat The Market

From your first day as an investor, you are handed a scoreboard. The S&P 500 index. If you beat it, you win; but if you trail it, for any one of a million different reasons, you lose. Wall Street loves this scoreboard because a scoreboard keeps you comparing, and comparing keeps you moving your money, chasing whichever fund topped the index last year.

Perhaps it is inevitable that, as social animals, we have an urge to compare ourselves with one another. Such is particularly the case since the rise of social media, where we are constantly bombarded by images of how well “everyone” else seems to be doing. Here is an example.

Assume your boss gave you a new Mercedes as a yearly bonus. You would be thrilled until you learned everyone in the office got two. Now you are upset because on a “relative” basis, you got less than everyone else. However, are you deprived on an absolute basis by getting a Mercedes?

Comparison-created unhappiness and insecurity are pervasive. Social media is full of images of people showing off their lavish lifestyles, giving you something to compare to. It is unsurprising that repeated studies show that social media users are terminally unhappy.

The flaw of human nature is that whatever we have is enough, until we see someone else who has more.

Therefore, it should be unsurprising that comparison in financial markets can lead to awful decisions, so investors have trouble being patient and letting whatever process they have work for them. Chasing that scoreboard does not just set you up for disappointment. It makes you behave badly. You lag the index for a year, so you fire your fund and chase last year’s winner, usually right before it reverts to the mean. You buy high and sell low on a permanent loop, all in the name of keeping up with a number.

But here is the part you may not know – the scoreboard you are comparing yourself to is rigged, and not in your favor.

“There are many reasons why you shouldn’t chase an index over time and why you see statistics such as ‘80% of all funds underperform the S&P 500’ in any given year. The impact of share buybacks, substitutions, lack of taxes, no trading costs, and replacement all contribute to the index’s outperformance over those investing real dollars who do not receive the same advantages. More importantly, any portfolio allocated differently than the benchmark to provide for lower volatility, income, or long-term financial planning and capital preservation will also underperform the index. Therefore, comparing your portfolio to the S&P 500 is inherently ‘apples to oranges’ and will always lead to disappointing outcomes. – Absolute vs Relative Returns

One of the most important points to consider is what “substitution” really means. The index you admire is survivorship bias sold as a product, and it quietly buries its dead. Every company that went bankrupt, got acquired, or simply fell out of favor is deleted from the record, so the smooth line climbing across the page is the winners’ bracket with all the losers erased. Your real portfolio never gets that “magic eraser.” You must live with your mistakes, and you pay to fix them, while the index just pretends its mistakes never happened.

So what should you measure against instead? The only benchmark that actually matters is your own goals. The rate of return your financial plan requires, at the lowest risk that gets you there. Your portfolio is specific to your life, so a thirty-year-old and a sixty-year-old should not own the same things, and neither should be graded against an index that has no age, no goals, and no end date.

Reaching for the index’s return means reaching for the index’s risk, and as we saw in the last article, higher returns demand an exponential increase in risk. That is a fine bargain at thirty and a potentially ruinous one at sixty. I dug into this in “Relative Returns or Absolute and again in “The 5 Reasons Benchmarking Works Against You“. 

The investing myth of comparing to a benchmark index is dangerous. The reality is that you cannot eat relative returns. Say the market falls 20% in a bad year and your portfolio falls 19%. You beat the index, so you should be happy about that. But you still lost nearly 20% of your portfolio. In real life, nobody has ever felt richer for losing slightly less than an index. The relative game feels like winning right up until the moment you actually have to spend the money.

It comes down to one honest question. What matters more, matching the index in a bull market, or protecting your capital in a bear market?

You cannot have both.

Critically, since you can replace lost money but never lost time, protecting capital is almost always the trade worth making.

Investing Myth Two: Just Invest Like Warren Buffett

The second investing myth wears a friendlier face. If investing is hard, just do what the greatest investor alive does. Buy good companies and hold them forever. You will even hear that Buffett himself says to just buy an index fund and never look at it again. It sounds like permission to stop thinking. It is also a caricature of the man, and following the caricature will hurt you.

Here is what Buffett actually does, and why you can’t replicate it. He is a value investor to the bone. He estimates what a business is truly worth and then refuses to buy until the price offers a wide margin of safety, a discount deep enough that he can be wrong and still not lose. Furthermore, he buys quality businesses with durable advantages, and he is famously willing to do nothing for years; when he cannot find value, he does not force it. He can sit on an enormous pile of cash and wait, sometimes for years, for the fat pitch. Most importantly, he sells. The buy-and-hold-anything-forever story is the opposite of a man who is ruthlessly disciplined about price.

Watch what he does with that cash, and you see the entire philosophy. His cash pile is not random, and it swells when the market is expensive and shrinks when it is cheap. He even has a favorite yardstick for measuring that, the total value of the stock market compared to the size of the economy, a ratio now known as the Buffett Indicator.

When the Buffett indicator runs hot, as I covered in a piece on that very gauge, he stops buying and waits. The greatest investor alive is the living opposite of “stay fully invested no matter what.” He calls cash oxygen, cheap and unexciting, and absolutely necessary, held precisely so he can act when everyone else is forced to sell. Sitting on your hands with dry powder is not a failure of nerve for Buffett. It is the strategy.

It is also important to notice what he is not doing. He is not buying the benchmark index. When Buffett does invest, specifically in the public securities side of the portfolio, Berkshire holds around 40 names, but the vast majority of its value is concentrated in just a handful of high-conviction bets. That is the opposite of spreading your money across five hundred companies by size and hoping it all works out. Buffett’s edge was never breadth; it was judgment, patience, and the discipline to concentrate only when the odds were overwhelmingly in his favor.

Then there is the part that the investing myth never mentions. Buffett is not even playing your game. He invests permanent capital that no client can yank at the wrong moment.

  • He has spent decades using cheap insurance float as leverage.
  • He buys whole companies and shapes how they are run.
  • His horizon is measured in decades, and he has no retirement date and no tuition bill coming due.

However, you have a finite life, a real deadline, and money that might be needed at any time. The gap between you and Buffett is not mostly talent. It is structural.

So no, you cannot be Warren Buffett; however, there is a part worth keeping, and it is the whole reason his name is worth invoking. You can copy his discipline, even if you can never copy his position.

  • Refuse to overpay.
  • Demand a margin of safety.
  • Hold cash when nothing is cheap and,
  • Treat that patience as a strategy, not a personal failing.
  • Sell when the reason you bought is gone.

Buffett himself says the most important quality in an investor is not intellect but temperament, which means the real Buffett lesson is not a stock list at all. It is everything we covered in the first two articles. The self-control to think like an owner and to do nothing when there is nothing worth doing.

Investing Myth Three: Passive Investing Always Wins

The reason this third investing myth is the most seductive is that, for a very long stretch, it has looked to be absolutely true. Just buy the index, keep costs low, and you beat almost everyone. Let’s be fair, low costs and staying out of your own way are genuinely powerful, exactly as we covered in the first two articles. But “passive always wins” hides a mechanism that quietly builds risk into the market, and understanding it changes how you think about that index fund.

The problem is that an index fund does not buy good companies; it typically just buys big ones. Because the S&P is weighted by size, every dollar that flows in gets pushed hardest into whatever is already the largest, regardless of price or quality. That creates a loop.

Follow the loop, and you see the problem. The biggest companies get bigger not because they earned it that year, but because they were already big and the flows had nowhere else to go. They come to dominate the index by default, not by merit. You can watch the machine at work in the numbers. The ten largest stocks have swollen to more than a third of the entire index, nearly double their share a decade ago. A tiny handful of names now sets the direction for nearly every retirement account in the country, whether the people who own them ever chose them or not.

And that hollows out the one thing you thought you were buying. Diversification. If you own an S&P index fund, a Nasdaq fund, and a technology ETF, you do not own three different things. You own the same handful of giant companies three times over. I laid this out in “Why Diversification Is Failing In The Age Of Passive Investing.” Your portfolio may look diversified, but in reality, it is a concentrated bet with much higher risks than you realize. Therefore, in a real crisis, the little diversification you have left tends to vanish, because correlations rush toward one and everything falls together at once.

There is a deeper problem hiding beneath this investing myth: “Passive money never asks what anything is worth.”

Passive investors simply buy in proportion to size. As an increasing share of the market moves this way, fewer participants remain to price companies on fundamentals. The market drifts away from being a weighing machine and toward being a pure momentum machine, where prices rise because money is flowing in, not because the underlying businesses have gotten any better.

The stocks most owned by passive funds become the most sensitive to those flows. As long as the market rises, passive flows come in. Those flows are consumed by the companies with the heaviest index weightings at the top. However, when it eventually falls, and it will, those same companies are dragged down the hardest and fastest. This is because the selling is mechanical and indiscriminate, hitting the crowded names in unison. I made this case in a piece on the fragility that passive flows create. Simply, a market that goes up together tends to come down together.

None of this means that index funds are evil or that you should never own one. There are real truths to the indexing story. For example, low cost is real, and for many investors, a broad fund is a perfectly reasonable core. However, that also means an index fund is not the safety blanket of diversification that the marketing brochure says it is. Yes, own an index fund if you choose, but own it with your eyes open.

Knowing what you actually hold and how concentrated it has quietly become is crucial. Critically, that is a very different thing from buying an index as a substitute for thinking.

Passive is not a free lunch. It is a bet that the flows never stop, but they always eventually do..

What All Three Myths Have In Common

Step back and look at the three together.

  • Beat the market.
  • Be like Buffett.
  • Just buy the index.

On the surface, they say different things. Underneath, they deliver the exact same instruction.

  • Stop thinking.
  • Hand your judgment to a scoreboard, a guru, or a formula, and
  • Just hold on, no matter what.

That message is comfortable, and it is enormously profitable for an industry that would rather you never question it.

But notice the thread running through every rebuttal. In each case, the answer was not a better guru or a cleverer index. It was always you, doing the work.

  • Measuring against your own goals instead of a scoreboard.
  • Copying Buffett’s discipline instead of his ticker symbols.
  • Owning an index fund with your eyes open instead of as a substitute for judgment.

Remember, it is your money. These are your goals, your risk, and your finite, unrecoverable time.

Outsourcing your judgment to a comfortable story, but it will not serve you well.

  • You do not have to beat anyone.
  • No one is asking you to be a legend.
  • And it is okay, in fact, you have an obligation to manage your own risk rather than pretend it does not exist.

The myths want you to be passive. The math wants you awake.

The Bottom Line

We have spent four articles clearing the ground. We learned to think like an investor rather than a speculator, to beat our own psychology and conditioning, to respect the hard math of losses, valuations, and timing, and now to see through the comforting myths that tell us to stop managing our money. That is a great deal of what NOT to do. It raises the obvious question. So what do you actually do instead?

In the final chapter on investing myths, we will provide you with the rules and guidelines to win the “long game” in investing. How to actually manage risk in a portfolio, the three practical ways to run one depending on who you are, and the timeless rules the greatest investors leave behind. We have torn down the myths. In the last piece, we built the thing that replaces them.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 14:00

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