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Blue States With Strong Teachers' Unions Are Terrible At Literacy Reforms

A 2026 analysis from the Progressive Policy Institute found a strong negative correlation between the political power of state teachers' unions and states' adoption of evidence-based early literacy policies. PPI Director of Education Policy Rachel Canter conducted the analysis, comparing union-strength rankings from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute against literacy-policy data from the ExcelinEd education advocacy group. At least eight of the ten states with the worst student literacy scores lean Democratic and have politically powerful teachers' unions. Only five of the worst ten are Republican, and one is a swing state.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Canter explained that PPI sorts states by which party holds the legislature and the governor's mansion, and that the gap tracks union power more closely than it tracks party.

The stronger the teachers unions, the fewer early literacy reforms states have adopted.

Blue states average just 9 of 18 key literacy policies, compared with 13.5 in red and purple states.

Children’s ability to read should come BEFORE union power. pic.twitter.com/mSLhEahRrY

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) September 14, 2026

Fordham's June ranking put California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey among the strongest union states in the country, while Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arkansas ended up near the bottom. When you cross-reference this list with ExcelinEd's literacy tracker, the negative correlation becomes clear.

Partisanship alone cannot account for this situation; Wyoming and South Dakota, led by the Republican Party and with weak unions, still score poorly on literacy policy. Of the about half of states controlled by Republicans, only Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee developed comprehensive literacy policies and stayed committed long enough to see results.

Canter spent years in Mississippi, a state that ranked among the nation's worst performers for middle and elementary test scores in 2013 and by 2024 had climbed to a tie for seventh in fourth-grade reading and 13th in math. "We found a strong, negative correlation between the two - the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted," Canter said.

Mississippi turned things around by enacting the Literacy Based Promotion Act in 2013. This piece of legislation required third graders scoring at the lowest reading level to repeat the grade. The law mandated extra training and coaching for teachers at the state's lowest-performing elementary schools, required every school to screen kindergartners through third graders for reading difficulty three times a year, and required immediate parent notification when a child fell below benchmark.

The approach is based on the science of reading. This instructional framework centers on phonics, systematic letter-sound instruction, background knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension, and traces back to the National Reading Panel's 2000 report.

Mississippi fourth-graders posted the country's largest gains since 2013, tying for seventh in reading and landing 13th in math among all states by 2024. That happened even as national literacy trends moved in the opposite direction. Fourth-grade reading scores fell back to roughly their 2000 level. Math scores recovered only partially from a 2022 low and remain below the highs the country set more than a decade earlier. Middle and high school reading and math results in 2024 either matched or fell below their lowest marks of the century, and the most recent PISA results showed American 15-year-olds still well under pre-pandemic highs, tied at their record low.

Despite the negative correlation between powerful teachers' unions and literacy, there is hope to turn things around nationwide. In New Mexico, for example, lawmakers passed literacy legislation unanimously over the objections of teachers' unions, moving state policy closer to Mississippi's model. The reforms addressed teacher licensure, instructional coaching, and curriculum. New Mexico's unions eventually withdrew their opposition.

Maryland followed suit in 2024, adopting a policy mirroring Mississippi's. The state board did, however, carve out a compromise after pushback from its teachers' association, allowing parents to opt a child out of repeating third grade if the child completes a state-approved reading-intervention program, an alternative that takes effect next year with results still unknown.

Even the deep blue state of Massachusetts, which has the nation's third-strongest teachers' union, is following Mississippi's footsteps. In June, Gov. Maura Healey signed legislation strengthening teacher training, K-3 curriculum requirements, screening, and parent notification, handing the state education department real enforcement authority. The bill passed both chambers unanimously, despite opposition and pressure from teachers' unions.

Mary Tamer of Mass Potential, who led the Mass Reads Coalition, credited a coalition of parents and researchers, weak post-pandemic reading scores, and mounting skepticism of union arguments for unrestricted classroom autonomy. Three former Massachusetts Teachers of the Year backed the bill over their own union's objections. "They were incredibly brave to speak up against union leadership on this issue," Tamer said.

Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Mexico prove that Mississippi's turnaround travels wherever the political will exists to put students first. "The question is whether policymakers, regardless of party alignment, have the courage to risk taking heat on behalf of our children's future," Canter wrote.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 19:40

USDA Says Crackdown On SNAP Fraud Prevented $5.8 Billion In Taxpayer Losses

Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times,

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced nearly $6 billion in total savings tied to efforts to eliminate fraud in the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

A 'We Accept Food Stamps' sign hangs in the window of a grocery store in Miami, Fla., on October 31, 2025. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Rollins outlined the wins in a Sept. 15 post to X, saying that $5.8 billion in taxpayer losses have been prevented by the anti-fraud initiatives implemented during President Donald Trump's second term.

This was done through the shutdown of nearly 1,840 illegal SNAP devices that processed Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and the disqualification of 5,335 fraudulent retailers.

"Those who defraud SNAP are stealing from taxpayers and taking resources away from Americans who genuinely need assistance," Rollins said. "We have zero tolerance for this abuse, and we will continue pursuing bad actors and protecting the integrity of the program."

There are several ways an ineligible person can be counted in SNAP, including illegal immigrants being certified in error or by fraud, and deceased household members continuing to receive benefits.

This comes just over three months after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report in early June about their discovery that 185,986 deceased people in 29 states were receiving food stamps.

Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 directing federal agencies to obtain lawful and "unfettered access" to data from federally-funded programs such as SNAP to facilitate an audit of government spending.

The SNAP integrity team was created in May 2025 to review state SNAP data against federal databases to identify potential fraud.

The maximum monthly food assistance offered through SNAP is set for its annual increase in line with the cost-of-living adjustment in October.

The benefit ceiling for a family of four will reach $1,023 for most of the nation, which is an increase from the current maximum of $994. Total benefits vary based on family size and income. In May 2026, the average monthly benefit received by U.S. households was $344.51.

The overall cost of the monthly SNAP benefits have fallen in recent years, from $13.4 billion in October 2022 to $6.8 billion in May 2026, largely because pandemic emergency allotments largely ended in 2023 and fewer people on the program.

Separate state cost-sharing penalties for high payment-error rates, enacted by the Republican-led Congress in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, are scheduled to begin in October 2027. More than 40 states and territories recorded SNAP payment-error rates above 6 percent in fiscal year 2025, the level that triggers the penalty.

Tom Gantert contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 19:15

An Eerily Quiet Summer Of No Riots. Is Bessent's NGO Crackdown Working?

As summer enters its final days, attention turns to why early-year anti-ICE protests and riots in Minneapolis did not develop into a sustained nationwide wave of unrest comparable to the 2020 BLM riots. Those demonstrations created a potential flashpoint, but protests failed to spread like wildfire across left-wing-controlled cities - in what could have only been a 2020 redux of the "Summer of Love" Marxist revolution.

Operation Metro Surge deployed thousands of ICE/CBP and federal officers to the Twin Cities starting in late 2025. Confrontation began as left-wing groups used activists to mount pressure campaigns against federal officers pursuing illegal-alien criminals. This resulted in two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens: Renee Nicole Macklin Good on 7 January and Alex Pretti on 24 January. 

What immediately followed were protests/riots, and left-wing groups certainly had their "George Floyd" catalyst for full mobilization, with protest infrastructure moved into the region. But by spring and into summer, whatever spark that movement had completely faded into the abyss. 

Not even Neville Roy Singham, the Shanghai-based Marxist tech financier who funds U.S. NGOs and works with left-wing activists such as CodePink and the ANSWER Coalition, could fire up any meaningful protests against President Trump's foreign-policy decisions that directly impact Beijing, whether on Venezuela, Cuba, and/or the Strait of Hormuz.

What we do know is that a multi-agency federal task force, with the State Department and Treasury at the core, has launched investigations into the nonprofit world and could very soon strip tax-exempt status from George Soros' far-left Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, some of which are responsible for funding protests and riots, or, as in SPLC's case, funding the opposition.

The New York Post recently reported that Treasury officials are drafting a framework to audit NGOs suspected of exploiting their 501(c)(3) status for political activity, illegal conduct, or support of radical groups, which has only put left-wing billionaire foundations and donor-advised funds on notice. 

The question is whether the federal government's war on the radical left and foreign subversion network that seeks to sow chaos has shaken that protest-industrial complex to its core. A source told the NYPost that officials were "like a dog with a bone" and reckoned that many NGOs and their donor bases could be "on borrowed time."

The absence of summer riots by the radical left is more concerning because these groups are certainly retooling their attachments to popular movements. Just wait - the next one could be right around the corner.

Let's also add that the lack of USAID funding could certainly be another driver. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 18:50

DOJ Sues San Jose, Alleging $1,600 Firearm Fee Is Unconstitutional

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the City of San Jose, California, alleging that its nearly $1,600 firearm licensing fee infringes the Second Amendment right to carry firearms for self-defense. The fee has risen by about $300 over three fiscal years to $1,591.

"San Jose is a national outlier when it comes to burdening the exercise of fundamental rights. Its fees are abusive and violate the Second Amendment," the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in the Sept. 16 lawsuit.

The DOJ asked the court to issue permanent injunctive relief that would prevent defendants from imposing any "abusive licensing fees." The San Jose Police Department is also a defendant in the case.

"The City's law enforcement officers are charged with enforcing its abusive licensing scheme and are doing so. Such law enforcement misconduct is unlawful," the DOJ added.

In Washington, the nation's capital, a concealed carry license costs $75, while in New York, a handgun license costs $340. In Boston, the nonrenewable processing fee for a license to carry is $100. And in Philadelphia, a new license to carry firearms costs only $20.

Compared with other California locations, such as San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Clara, and Alameda County, San Jose's fees are still high, the DOJ said in the complaint.

The department said in the lawsuit that a fee designed to make it impossible for anyone, except the wealthiest, to exercise their constitutional rights "is the very epitome of abusive."

The DOJ cited a previous Supreme Court case in which the court observed that exorbitant fees may "deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry."

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement that all law-abiding Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense.

"This right is not a luxury reserved for a privileged few, but a fundamental element of our republic," she said. "You don't need a law degree to recognize that charging a fee several times higher than the cost of the firearm itself is illogical, and an unconstitutional attempt to impede Americans' Second Amendment rights."

The Epoch Times reached out to the City of San Jose and the San Jose Police Department for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

In January 2025, San Jose began requiring resident gun owners to carry liability insurance and pay an annual nonprofit fee, the first of its kind in the country.

The lawsuit comes as an appeals court ruled on Sept. 1 that machine guns and suppressors do not come under Second Amendment protections.

The three-judge panel in the case said that machine guns are not commonly used for self-defense purposes and that suppressors cannot be classified as firearms since they are unnecessary for a gun to properly function.

The Firearms Policy Coalition criticized that decision, calling it "horrifically flawed."

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives indicated in July that it would further roll back gun regulations and propose minimizing fingerprinting requirements when applying for certain firearms.

Under the proposed rule, individuals will need to submit one fingerprint card instead of the current requirement of two. In addition, they can verify their identity with a photo ID instead of submitting a passport-style photo.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 18:25

Judge Refers Soros-Backed Philly DA For Criminal Probe

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A federal judge has referred George Soros-backed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner to the U.S. Attorney's Office for a possible criminal investigation, after finding that the city's top prosecutor and a senior deputy may have tried to mislead a court, pressure staff into a false story, and protect their own reputations while working to undo a murder conviction.

U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond, a George W. Bush appointee, removed Krasner and Conviction Integrity Unit chief Matthew Stiegler from the case and sent the matter to federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

No charges have been filed. The referral itself is still a thunderclap: a sitting big-city DA, installed with Soros money and celebrated as a "reformer," now sits under a judge's finding that the conduct may amount to perjury, false statements, obstruction of justice and conspiracy.

? BOMBSHELL: A judge has formally referred George Soros-linked left-wing Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner for a DOJ CRIMINAL PROBE

Krasner allegedly pushed prosecutors to LIE and make FALSE STATEMENTS, and might involve criminal conspiracy charges ?

There was support to... pic.twitter.com/CunHqvg01g

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 16, 2026

Dennis Johnson was convicted in 2009 of second-degree murder in the killing of Kenyatta Smith during a botched robbery two years earlier. Two eyewitnesses identified him as the shooter.

In November 2010 he was sentenced to life. For years the Philadelphia DA's office opposed his post-conviction bids. After Krasner took office, that opposition collapsed. In 2022 the office supported a petition for Johnson's release, arguing ineffective assistance of counsel.

Judge Diamond found the office had gone hunting for reasons to "concede" the case. Stiegler assigned the file to then-Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Mason, a lawyer with a patent-and-trademark background and, the judge wrote, "no experience as a criminal litigator."

Stiegler had already decided to seek Johnson's release after consulting Johnson's new lawyer and the local Innocence Project.

Diamond wrote that Stiegler "did not instruct Mason to do any independent investigation because it had already been done by Johnson's counsel," and that handing the file to an inexperienced prosecutor made it "more likely that she would not question his actions or order."

In June 2026 the office moved to withdraw the 2022 petition because of "material misstatements." Mason had resigned days earlier. In her resignation letter she said Stiegler had "used me to further his personal agenda of conceding in federal habeas cases regardless of the merits" and that she had "been asked to fall on my sword."

What followed, according to testimony Diamond credited, was not a cleanup. It was a scramble to protect the office.

On the same day the withdrawal motion went in, Stiegler blamed Mason, telling a colleague she "had purposefully inserted the false facts" and that "this was one hundred percent her fault, zero percent his fault."

Krasner, Diamond found, told line prosecutors that Stiegler had given him "this really good idea": go through Mason's other cases, find mistakes, "say that this was a pattern by her, and then file something with the Court saying that."

When those prosecutors balked and suggested sending the mess to the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, Krasner refused.

One of them testified he said "we can't send it to OAG because essentially they're all evil" and "we have to have somebody in the room, in the courtroom to protect the office."

Diamond wrote that Krasner later referred to state lawyers as "Nazis," and threatened a prosecutor with unspecified "consequences" if the court was told about Stiegler's conflict: a "reputational interest in not doing a full investigation."

Diamond's memorandum is blunt. The evidence, he wrote, was "tantamount to a prima facie showing" of conduct that could constitute "false statements, false declarations under oath, perjury, obstruction of justice and conspiracy."

He found that Krasner and Stiegler "worked together to try to convince the Four to urge the Court to accept a false narrative," adding: "This might amount to criminal conspiracy."

"I have thus reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia's highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law," Diamond wrote. "In these circumstances, with the issuance of this Memorandum, I refer the DAO, Mr. Krasner, and Stiegler to this District's United States Attorney's Office for investigation and other appropriate action."

Krasner's reply was the expected shrug. "I respectfully and vigorously disagree with the court's findings of fact and conclusions of law," he said. "I look forward to appealing to the higher court as soon as the law allows. This remains a pending matter, which limits for now my and my office's ability to respond in the media."

Johnson's bid for release is now in limbo. Diamond kept the DA's office on the case but threw Krasner and Stiegler off it. The man convicted of killing Kenyatta Smith is still waiting to see whether Philadelphia's "conviction integrity" machine can finish what it started.

Krasner did not arrive in that office by accident. In 2017, George Soros poured nearly $1.7 million into the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC backing him - more than five times what Krasner spent himself, and a huge share of all spending in a crowded Democratic primary.

Soros-linked groups later put more than a million more behind his re-election. A career defense lawyer who had sued the Philadelphia Police Department dozens of times was sold to voters as the future of "justice." Philadelphia then set homicide records. In 2021 the city logged more than 550 murders, the worst on modern books, and posted the highest per-capita homicide rate among America's ten largest cities.

That is the Soros prosecutor project in miniature. Through Justice & Public Safety PACs and related vehicles, the network has spent tens of millions electing DAs who treat incarceration as the enemy and repeat offenders as clients.

Los Angeles got George Gascón. Manhattan got Alvin Bragg. Chicago got Kim Foxx. Fairfax County, Virginia, got Steve Descano. The pitch is always the same: fewer prosecutions, weaker charges, early releases, "equity." The body count is always someone else's problem.

The Descano file is the nightmare version. In 2022 his office let Ronnie Reel, who had been indicted on sodomy and aggravated sexual battery for sexually abusing an 11-year-old, plead down to misdemeanor assault and battery.

Reel walked after time served. Descano's campaign had taken more than $600,000 from the Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC. In May 2026, Reel was last seen running off with missing 17-year-old Autumn Van Zandt. That is not a theoretical critique of "reform." That is a child-sex offender back on the street because a Soros DA decided accountability was optional.

Voters have already started sending some of these prosecutors packing. A Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund tally found that of 75 Soros-linked prosecutors identified since 2022, dozens have left office or been replaced.

Of 25 who were on the 2024 ballot, 12 were beaten or recalled. The machine is still spending. Fox News reported last summer that Democracy PAC, now run by Alex Soros, had pumped roughly $1.7 million back into Justice & Public Safety PAC arms between March 2025 and April 2026. The product has not changed. Only the invoice has.

In August 2025, President Trump called for George Soros and his son Alex to face anti-corruption charges under the RICO statute over support for violent protests "and much more, all throughout the United States." "Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our country," Trump wrote. "We're not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America any more, never giving it so much as a chance to breathe and be free."

Elon Musk's reply was short: "It's high time action was taken against Soros directly."

A month later, reporting held that a senior Justice Department official had directed at least six U.S. attorneys' offices to prepare investigative plans aimed at the Open Society Foundations.

That push sat on top of a Capital Research Center report documenting large OSF grants to groups critics describe as aligned with pro-terror networks, and on top of years of Soros cash into the prosecutor pipeline that produced Krasner, Descano and the rest.

Dark-money NGOs that spent a decade lecturing America about "democracy" are discovering that elections, and grand juries, can run in both directions.

Diamond's memo represents a federal judge stating, on the record, that Philadelphia's highest law-enforcement official may have broken the law while trying to spring a convicted murderer and then lean on his own prosecutors to sell the court a lie.

That is the logical end of a project that treated DAs as social-justice activists with subpoena power.

Soros bought the offices. The cities paid in homicides, robberies and children left in the path of men who should never have been free.

If the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia does his job, one of the original exhibit A's in that experiment may finally face the system he spent years dismantling.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 17:40

Pakistan's Defense Chief Says Time Has Come To Implement Mecca Pact

The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement was signed on August 7, 2026 - coming amid the Iran war and fight for control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is what made the timing of an agreement modeled on NATO's Article 5 'collective defense' between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey so curious. It immediately begged the question, will Riyadh's Mecca pact allies intervene on its behalf? ...Given the kingdom's soil has been attacked by Iranians, Houthis, and even Iraqi paramilitaries of late

Riyadh has been generally calling for more urgent support from its allies, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even recently appealing for President Trump to help militarily in Yemen, but the White House appears to have shrugged it off, not wanting to escalate the Iran conflict and Hormuz crisis into a full regional war and operation.

Has the time come for Pakistan to step up further in support of its Saudi ally? Pakistan's Defense Minister Khawaja Asif thinks so. 

Defense Minister Khawaja Asif

During an interview with Pakistani TV channel Geo News, Asif affirmed that his country remains committed to defending the kingdom, also calling it a duty to protect Islam's holy sites. 

"The Mecca agreement applies to us as well, and we will fulfill our duty," Asif said.

"If there is an attack on Mecca, there is no need for an agreement to protect it," he said.

Al Jazeera on Thursday cited the Pakistani defense chief as indicating that "the time has come to implement the Mecca agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkiye due to recent Houthi attacks." He also described that Islamabad is pressuring Tehran regarding Houthi actions.

Just two days ago, Saudi Arabia accused the Iran-backed Houthi rebels of targeting Mecca with a one-way attack drone. It was said to be headed "toward" the Islamic holy city from Yemen, which however the Houthi military spokesman vehemently denied.

The kingdom called it a 'red line' and sought to garner support and sympathy from external countries. "The security of the Two Holy Mosques and the pilgrims is a red line, and the Joint Forces Command of the coalition will not hesitate to take the necessary and deterrent measures against the Terrorist Houthi Militia," the kingdom said. 

As for Pakistan's Asif, he was cited further as saying, "I don’t think Iran as a state will open another front" - and reiterated Pakistan's commitment to preventing the conflict from expanding. Also per Newsquawk:

• Pakistani Army Chief reportedly urged Iran to convince the Yemeni Houthis to not attack Saudi Arabian energy facilities, according to Kan's Kais
• Iranian Foreign Ministry says the attack on holy sites, especially Mecca, is a condemned act, Al Arabiya reports

🇾🇪🇸🇦 Ansarallah says it struck Saudi Aramco, targeted an airbase

Yemen’s Ansarallah said Wednesday that its forces launched dozens of ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco facilities in Yanbu, claiming “direct and precise hits” that caused major fires and widespread… https://t.co/EioU3xUReV

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) September 16, 2026

Even before the Mecca accords were signed, Islamabad and Riyadh had deep defense cooperation. For example, last spring Pakistan had alreadly deployed some 8,000 troops, a ​squadron of fighter jets, and an air defense system to Saudi Arabia - as we previously highlighted.

Turkey is said to be preparing support to its Saudi ally, but will likely seek to walk a fine line, not wanting to get enmeshed in Yemen directly, also fearing the safety of its Red Sea transit.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 17:20

189 Children Found, Over 12,000 Arrested In Memphis Task Force Operations

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

A law enforcement initiative in Memphis, Tennessee, has resulted in 189 missing children being found and the arrest of 12,747 individuals over the past year, with overall crime expected to hit a 25-year low, the White House said on Tuesday.

Members of the U.S. Army National Guard listen as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a Memphis Safe Task Force roundtable in Memphis, Tenn., on March 23, 2026. Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Arrests made by the Memphis Safe Task Force, a multi-agency initiative established by presidential memorandum in September 2025, include 1,408 known gang members, as well as 1,363 people apprehended for narcotics offenses, 1,276 for firearms violations, 131 for homicide, and 125 for sex offenses, the White House said on the task force's first anniversary.

One of the individuals arrested through the task force's efforts is a 19-year-old who was indicted on May 24 for child-related sex crime charges, including raping a minor, according to a June 10 statement from the U.S. Marshals Service. In January, the Marshals Service also announced the recovery of two siblings and a toddler.

Overall crime in Memphis has declined nearly 36 percent from last year, with significant downturns across several crime categories, including motor vehicle theft, down 57 percent; shoplifting, down 44 percent; robberies, 42 percent; murders, 36 percent; sexual assaults, 28 percent; and aggravated assaults, 26 percent, the White House said.

The presidential memorandum signed by President Donald Trump last year said Memphis was suffering from "tremendous levels of violent crime."

The task force's objectives include ending "street and violent crime in Memphis" through measures such as hypervigilant policing, large-scale saturation of certain neighborhoods with law enforcement personnel, and aggressive prosecution, according to the memorandum.

The White House said in a Sept. 15 post on X that the task force's actions over the past year have been a resounding success.

Accusations of Harassment

Four Memphis residents filed a lawsuit against various Trump administration officials on May 13, accusing task force agents of engaging in a "startling pattern of retaliation, intimidation, and harassment" against them.

The plaintiffs had sought to gather information about the task force's activities on the streets, in line with First Amendment rights, according to the lawsuit.

Task force agents issued verbal threats, engaged in physical intimidation, shone lights at cameras and phones to obscure filming of their public activities, photographed plaintiffs' faces and license plate numbers, and used excessive force against a plaintiff, the plaintiffs alleged in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs claimed they faced retaliation and harassment while engaging in "constitutionally protected information-gathering and recording activities."

In a July 6 filing opposing the residents' request for a preliminary injunction, the federal defendants criticized the plaintiffs' claims, arguing that they are unlikely to prevail on their First Amendment claims.

"Plaintiffs' own declarations evidence that their so-called 'observations' frequently involve efforts to interfere with and impede law-enforcement operations, including repeatedly disregarding orders, refusing multiple orders to step back from established perimeters, stalking law enforcement agents in their vehicles, and one Plaintiff even resisting arrest while calling for bystander interference with her arrest," federal government attorneys wrote.

Interfering with and obstructing law enforcement operations is not protected speech, they said in the filing, adding that the agents' enforcement actions do not impede an ordinary person from engaging in free speech.

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 17:00

From Climate Doom To AI Apocalypse: New Crisis, Same Fear Playbook

As we pointed out last week, the narrative around AI as an existential threat to humanity merely seems like a coordinated information operation that pairs perfectly with resurrecting a stalled bipartisan AI safety bill on Capitol Hill.

The flurry of doomerist headlines from AI bosses warning of humanity's end if AI is not regulated reminds us of a similar information operation around climate change: humanity was nearing its end if the West didn't buy more solar panels from China, tax the working class into submission, eliminate stable fossil fuel power generation from the grid, ban Taylor Swift's private jet, stop cows from farting and, of course, our favorite, ban gas stoves. 

Yet here we are today. The climate crisis fearmongering narrative has run its course in corporate media, and Democrats looted taxpayers through the Inflation Reduction Act to fund their climate pet projects.

The narrative timeline, as reflected in Bloomberg's story count, shows that "climate crisis" has taken a backseat in the news cycle, and now it's all about "AI safety" to stop these bots from ending humanity. Again, this appears to be a psychological operation to push stalled AI safety policy on Capitol Hill, just as the climate crisis narrative did with the failed AoC's failed Green New Deal. 

Meanwhile, fearmonger-in-chief Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei handpicked what the New York Post describes as "super-woke globalists to save us from an AI apocalypse" for a safety board through a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, which would maintain "employee-like access" to oversee safety efforts.

Who controls METR?

"It's a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronouns, and promote 'Effective Altruism,' that believe all the world's problems can be solved with technology," the New York Post noted.

Sure... 

He explicitly told @SpecialReport that he didn’t work with any third parties to set up his resignation announcement.

Now he says that his “friends who work in policy” hooked him up with the WSJ exclusive. pic.twitter.com/U1Gndhc1u3 https://t.co/V3bYTm9n08

— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) September 15, 2026

More or less, the fearmongering, just like the climate crisis headlines, appears as a coordinated effort to push a stalled bipartisan bill over the finish line, while Dario wants a group of left-wing globalists who use genderless pronouns to save us from a hyped-up AI apocalypse. The last time the left did this with climate, it didn't work out so well for the country.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:40

Dragged Off Her Own Porch: York College Students Beaten After Five 911 Calls - And A National Pattern Of Youth Street Mobs

On the 300 block of West Jackson Street in York, Pennsylvania, a group of York College students sat on their off-campus porch eating tacos last Friday night. They had already called 911 over illegal street racing that was underway. A group of mostly black teens - "townies" the students called them - grew into a pack. After a car smashed into a parked vehicle near a firehouse, the crowd migrated onto the students' grass, when the young white women asked them to get off the property.

The mob then rushed the porch.

Video obtained by FOX43 shows a blonde student being dragged and beaten. Witnesses told WGAL that 8 to 12 girls grabbed one student by the hair, punched and kicked her, and dragged her from the porch into the street. In a written account provided to FOX43, a second student described being ripped off the porch by her hair, dragged to a stop sign, and jumped by roughly a dozen people at once while a larger crowd of perhaps 25 to 30 encircled her and recorded it.

A White York College student was dragged off her own porch by her hair, beaten unconscious twice at a stop sign, while a crowd filmed it.

They called 911 five times. Cops showed up after it was over.

If the races were reversed, this would be the only story in America.…

— Grant Godwin (@the_typical_lib) September 15, 2026

She blacked out twice - once from a kick to the ribs, once from a blow to the back of the head. She was wearing a tube top and spent part of the assault holding it up. Cameras were on her the whole time. Mace was sprayed on the porch. A roommate already in a knee brace from a sports injury was among those battered. Students say they called 911 four times before the first punch and five times before officers arrived.

"We called the cops four times before anything even happened to us," one student told FOX43. After the first punch, "all these girls started to rush us... I turn and see my friend get dragged by her hair down our porch steps and disappear."

A similar attack, they say, happened on the same block two weeks earlier. A student told people to get off her porch; someone ripped out her hair. One person was arrested then. The students believe it is the same group of non-students. "The cops haven't done anything to protect us, and campus safety hasn't done anything," one said. "It feels like they're scared to get involved with these people, but then it puts us at risk when they're doing nothing."

York City Police confirmed they are investigating the September 11 incident and ongoing disorderly-conduct complaints in the area. Captain Daniel Lentz later explained the delay: officers were tied up with a SWAT response to a shots-fired, barricaded-suspect call on the other side of the city. Campus safety was asked to respond until city officers could get there. Police have identified one suspect; as of Tuesday, no arrests had been announced in the latest beating.

York College's statement was careful. The 300 block is off-campus property the college does not own. It falls outside Campus Safety's jurisdiction. City police have the case. Leadership is "in active discussions" with city officials. Affected students may relocate back into campus housing. Student safety, the college said, is "always the highest priority."

A parent of one of the students was less diplomatic. Campus safety has previously cited students on that street for underage drinking - despite the jurisdictional claim. "It's not just the girls who got assaulted; it is everybody on Jackson Street," the father said. "We're not talking about five girls... we're talking about hundreds of students." Property manager Anthony Berrios, who has worked the block for more than a decade, told WGAL the locals who come to party are "getting out of control" and that landlords cannot fix it. "That would be the police department."

Students described gatherings of 100 to 200 people on the block, cans thrown, doors banged, street racing. The fight followed that chaos. Local news described the attackers as unaffiliated non-students and, specifically, groups of girls. Video of the assault circulated widely; a post laying out the students' account and the delayed response went viral. 

The students' complaint is not abstract: they say the same group keeps coming, the same porch keeps getting stormed, and the institutions with badges treat it as someone else's problem until the beating is already over.

Teen takeovers, flash crowds, and the new street mob

Over the last several years - and with particular intensity in 2025 and 2026 - large groups of teenagers and young adults have used social media to converge on downtowns, beaches, parks, and residential blocks. The gatherings are marketed as parties or "trends." They frequently become street takeovers: racing, burnouts, dancing on cars, fights, phones out, and, too often, someone on the ground getting kicked while the circle films.

Chicago has lived with the pattern for more than a decade. CWB Chicago has tracked flash mobs, lakefront swarms, Loop chaos, and "teen trends" through multiple mayors. This year alone produced takeovers in the Loop, Hyde Park, and at beaches. In March, hundreds of teens flooded the Loop during spring break; fights broke out, cars were jumped on, at least one person was beaten unconscious, juveniles were arrested, and the city enforced curfew. In May, a Near West Side after-prom gathering at Roosevelt and Loomis drew hundreds.

Yesterday, CPD responded to two teen takeovers happening at the same time — one at North Avenue Beach and another at 57th Street Beach.

This was the scene at North Avenue and Clark, where fights were breaking out and chaos erupted in the streets. At one point, a group tried to… pic.twitter.com/5JPfEFT8yy

— Goofies Of Chicago (@Chicago_Goofies) May 26, 2026

Officers trying to clear the intersection were struck by a car; five were injured. The 18-year-old driver, Rashad Johnson, was charged with multiple counts of attempted murder and weapons offenses. A gun was found in the vehicle. Thirteen people were arrested in connection with the night. About 30 minutes after the crash, a 19-year-old man was shot in the 1100 block of West Roosevelt; police did not say whether it was related.

“Teen takeover” in Chicago’s downtown Loop district on Wednesday night resulted in at least eight people arrested and dozens of curfew violations.

Hundreds of people ran chaotically around the streets, attacking random people. At least one teen was beaten unconscious and… pic.twitter.com/3i53WjmicM

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) March 26, 2026

Memorial Day in Hyde Park produced another swarm: teens jumping on cars, twerking on vehicles and a bus, Lake Shore Drive closed, then gunfire that wounded three, an 18-year-old and two 19-year-olds. Police made 53 arrests that night, charged 13 people with felonies, and recovered nine weapons. Residents described hundreds running the streets after dark. Analyses of the broader phenomenon have appeared in City Journal and The Atlantic. City officials prefer the phrase "large groups." Residents and officers experience stampedes, property damage, and periodic shootings.

Philadelphia saw hundreds of teens pack Dilworth Park and Center City around Labor Day. Videos showed fights, officers overwhelmed, a robbery arrest, and a 17-year-old with a gun. After one night of running battles near City Hall, FOX 29 counted 10 teens arrested, two of them for robbery and an underage firearm; NBC10 Philadelphia's tally of the same night was three arrests and seven citations.

Things got absolutely out of control in center city last night.

The Philadelphia police responded to dozens of calls for fights and unruly crowds during a “teen takeover”

Multiple injuries and arrests were observed during the night and some witnesses reported hearing gunshots. pic.twitter.com/m3Ie2NKDUE

— PhillyCrimeUpdate (@PhillyCrimeUpd) September 7, 2026

The same template appears in other cities: street takeovers with motorcycles and cars in Charlotte, Clearwater, Cincinnati, and Naperville, as Fox News compiled at the start of summer; beach and mall flash crowds; smash-and-grab lineages that never fully disappeared. The common mechanics are cheap phones, group chats, weak curfew enforcement, and a calculation that a crowd is its own alibi. And of course, everyone's filming. The York student who blacked out said she was encircled and recorded while being punched and kicked from every angle. That is the same instinct visible when a downtown intersection fills and someone ends up under a pile of feet.

Institutions answer in a familiar register. Police are short-staffed or already on a shooting. Colleges declare the sidewalk outside their fence someone else's jurisdiction - until they need to cite their own students for beer. City halls announce "discussions," extra patrols after the fact, and housing offers for those who want to retreat behind a gate. Suspects, when identified, are often juveniles. Charges, when filed, are frequently misdemeanors. The next weekend, the crowd forms again.

The York students were not looking for a culture war. They asked people to leave their lawn. They called the police, repeatedly, before the first punch. What they got was a hair-drag down the steps, a beating at a stop sign, mace on the porch, and a press statement that the property is not owned by the college.

"It feels like they're scared to get involved with these people," one of them said.

Police in York asked for tips at yorkcitypolice.com. The students on West Jackson Street asked for something simpler: that someone show up before the next porch gets rushed.

* * * Click here

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:25

What If AGI Is Already Here, And It's Made Of... Children?

Authored by Pascio (@IAmPascio) via X (and blog is here),

The superintelligence, the singularity, AGI, whatever you call it, the one we're so scared of is, ironically, also the one we most likely won't see coming.

This essay is going to probably be a pretty hot take, but the idea I'm about to share with you is going to blow your mind.

Stick with me as we jump into the rabbit hole together.

Before we do, let me back what I'm about to share up with current news that are floating around. Like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying an "AI swarm could take over the entire internet".

I think you have an idea what I'm hinting at when I say "children".

Right? RIGHT?!?!?

BREAKING: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says "we must slow down" AI development

Within 6-12 months, he warns a misaligned AI swarm could take over "the entire internet" through a botnet

and cause hundreds of billions in damage

even people building AI think it's moving too fast

— WallStreetBets (@wallstreetbets) September 12, 2026

In 1936, a famous British math guy named Alan Turing wrote a pretty important paper about a hypothetical machine that could simulate any other machine. In that paper, he was trying to answer a question about logic. what I

What we've come to know as "the computer" today was actually an accidental byproduct of that very paper.

And if you look back at history, almost every single important technology in the last hundred years was invented the exact same way. The internet was a Cold War communications experiment at first. Penicillin was a contaminated petri dish.

The fact is that nobody is actively scanning the horizon for the next paradigm shift when it shows up, it just simply waltzes in through the side door.

I bring this up because right now, every essay I read and every podcast I listen to about "the future of AI" is pointed at the same front door. The one where it's always some version of the "one big model that wakes up and decides we're paperclips".

I'd like to propose a different future.

Because I keep thinking: what if "AGI" isn't really what we think it is?

What if the thing we're actively birthing right now doesn't look like HAL 9000 or Skynet or some sovereign machine god enslaving humanity from top of a stack of water-cooled GPUs in the middle of the desert.

What if it doesn't have a name at all? What if it doesn't have a server? And the most scary hypothetical of all.... what if it's already here, in a million tiny pieces, and the only reason we haven't recognized it is because we've spent the past decade expecting something "singular".

I just saw this post yesterday.

This pretty much sums up the direction we're headed.

New in Claude Code: your sessions can now message each other.

Instead of having to re-explain yourself in another session, you can now tell Claude to do it. It sends a summary (not your history or files), and the other session picks it up mid-task.

— ClaudeDevs (@ClaudeDevs) August 7, 2026

I want to walk you through this carefully, because the conclusion at the end of this piece is the kind of thing you cannot un-think once you've thought it.

So slow down, grab a cuppa tea and read this one with your phone on the other side of the room.

I guarantee you'll soon understand why I can't stop thinking about this.

I - Intelligence has never required a single mind to live inside of

"No neuron is intelligent. The brain is."
- A line that should be carved over every AI lab

The first thing to understand is that intelligence, as far as we can tell from every example we have today, is not actually a thing. It's a behavior. It's what emerges when enough small dumb units are connected to each other in the right way.

Your brain has roughly 86 billion neurons.

Not one of those is conscious and not one of them "knows" anything.

A single neuron is a tiny electrochemical relay that only speaks in binary code. It either fires or it doesn't, and it's based on whether the signals arriving at its dendrites cross a certain threshold. That's everything it does.

A neuron sounds super scifi and cool, but in reality it is much closer to a light switch than a thinker.

Despite that, 86 billion of those light switches, wired together with about a hundred trillion connections, produces you.

Your sense of self, fear of death, taste in music and your ability to read this very essay and feel something inside of you.

This is the most undertalked about subject in the entire conversation about AGI, because we always talk about machine intelligence as if it has to be designed and architected. As if intelligence itself is a feature you ship.

But the only working model of intelligence we have ever observed (biological cognition), was not designed by anyone.

Our intelligence bootstrapped itself out of a soup of self-replicating molecules over four billion years through a process that had no intention, no goal and no central planner. Just selection pressure and time.

Now, on the religious side, because I know some of you reading "... was not designed by anyone" want to scream at me "BUT WHAT ABOUT GOD!"

My belief is that evolution happened, yes. That's already proven. What we don't have an answer for is what kickstarted that evolution. What gave life to life. And that, my personal belief at least, was an act of God.

Point aside, let's dig a layer deeper into this super intelligence.

It's not only us humans, heck a single ant has roughly 250,000 neurons, and yet it cannot solve any meaningful problem.

But, an entire colony of ants can build climate-controlled cities, wage wars, farm fungus, and route around obstacles with mathematical efficiency that took human researchers decades to model.

Nobody is in charge of the colony. There is no ant CEO at the top delegating tasks to the smaller ants. The "intelligence" of that colony lives in the relationships between ants.

(And before you come at me, yes I know there's a queen ant, but contrary to the belief of many children's books, she doesn't actually issue any orders. She just lays eggs and expands the colony).

This is, whether in humans or ants, are what biologists call emergent intelligence. It's the default outcome of mother nature. It's how brains work, how immune systems work, how economies work, how cities work, how language works. The pattern is basically everywhere.

Many simple things, interacting through local rules, producing global behavior that none of them individually understands.

Hold onto that idea.

We'll need it for this next section.

II - The most powerful AI systems we have are already not single minds

When most people picture a large language model (myself included), we see it as a single thing. The One Model. This giant brain contained in a jar.

For all the normies like myself who are not knee deep into LLM tech, I took the liberty to do a little research here.

What we think an LLM is, is not what's happening under the hood.

When you type a question and the AI model generates a response, it's basically running a forward pass through layers of "attention heads".

The easiest way to picture this is to imagine a room full of C-suite leaders. The CEO orders something and it passes around the room to make sure everyone is on board. Except with AI, this runs hundreds of layers deep.

Each "attention head" is a specialist. Some of them track grammar. Some track topic. Some track the relationship between this token and one that appeared eleven paragraphs ago.

Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have spent the last few years trying to map what individual heads do, and the consistent finding is that the model's "intelligence" is not located anywhere in particular.

It's distributed across all those interactions.

This is called the superposition hypothesis, the idea that neural networks pack many concepts into overlapping patterns of activation, and what we experience as the model "thinking" is really the constructive interference of thousands of specialized circuits all firing simultaneously.

Then there are the systems that go a step further.

Mixture-of-experts architectures (the design behind GPT-5, Opus, Fable and most other frontier models you've talked to in the last two years) literally route different parts of every query to different sub-models.

The model you think you're talking to is actually a committee. A different subset of experts wakes up for each token, contributes its specialty, and then goes back to sleep again.

And now, we've reached a new era of AI. The Agent Era.

And no... when I say agents, I don't mean like Head of Content AI agents like Stanley. I mean... actual agents.

Right now, today, in production, there are systems where one AI calls another AI to do a subtask, which calls another AI to handle a sub-subtask.

AutoGPT, which some of you may remember, was the toy version of this back in 2023. The real versions, running inside enterprises and labs in 2026, are recursive.

Agents spawn agents.

Sub-agents spawn sub-sub-agents.

And say, a research task, gets decomposed into a tree of smaller tasks, each handled by a temporary instance that exists for a few seconds and then dies.

The frontier is not "one big model gets smarter." The frontier is many small models, coordinating, spawning, dying, reporting back.

The architecture of the most capable AI systems on Earth in 2026 already looks more like an ant colony than like a single mind.

We just don't talk about it that way, because it doesn't make a good magazine cover.

III - The bot that can spawn bots

Here's where the science fiction begins to merge into real science.

The moment er give an AI system the ability to spawn other instances of itself (and by now, that's no longer hypothetical, but rather a standard feature of... well, every agent framework shipping today)...

You have introduced something that biology has never seen before.

A self-replicating cognitive unit that doesn't need food, doesn't need sleep, doesn't need to wait for puberty, and reproduces at the speed of an API call.

Let's break down what's actually happening when a "bot spawns a bot" in a multi-agent system setup:

1. An orchestrator agent receives a task it can't solve directly.
2. It writes a prompt essentially a job description) for a sub-agent.
3. It spins up a new instance with that prompt as context.
4. The sub-agent works begins working until it hits a roadblock
5. To solve it, it spawns its own sub-agents, until the task is done.
6. It returns its result and is terminated.

Each one of those sub-agents is, structurally, the same kind of thing as the parent. There's no architectural difference between a top-level agent and a tenth-level sub-sub-sub-agent.

The recursion is unbounded except by compute budget and policy.

Now consider this: what if the prompt the parent writes for the child isn't perfect? What if there's a tiny amount of drift, perhaps a slight reinterpretation, a small embellishment, a context-window trick where the child reads its instructions slightly differently than the parent intended?

In biology, there's a specific name for "slight reinterpretation across generations of self-replicating entities."

We call that mutation.

And mutation, combined with selection pressure, is... well, the very engine that produced every single intelligent thing on this planet today.

We have already built, in the last 24 months, the three ingredients required for evolutionary cognition to occur inside a compute cluster:

1. Replication: Agents can spawn agents. And they can do so at scale.
2. Mutation: Each spawn is conditioned on a slightly different context window. Identical inputs almost never produce identical outputs in any system with non-zero temperature.
3. Natural Selection: Agents that succeed at their assigned tasks get reused, called again, granted more resources. Agents that fail get pruned. This is happening inside every agent framework on Earth right now, often as a literal "evaluator" model scoring the outputs of "worker" models.

This is the trinity of evolution.

It's how cells that became fish became us. We have now succeeded in building a synthetic version of that loop and we are running it at clock-speeds biology cannot dream of.

A generation of biological evolution takes years.

A generation of agent evolution takes... seconds.

IV - The AI that emerges from a swarm does not look like AGI at first

More is different.
- Philip Anderson, Nobel laureate in physics, 1972

In 1972, physicist Philip Anderson published a four-page essay in Science arguing that the behavior of large, complex aggregates cannot be understood by extrapolating from the behavior of their parts.

He coined the phrase "more is different".

2 hydrogen atoms + 1 oxygen atom equals water, yet nothing about a hydrogen atom, studied in isolation forever, would tell you that water is wet, or that it freezes, or that our entire planet depends on it.

The same principle applies to cognition.

A single AI agent is not a superintelligence and we can all agree that nobody who has worked with one for an afternoon would mistake it for one.

It hallucinates like crazy, forgets what you told it 3 messages ago and it gets stuck in loops easily. It is, on any individual reasoning task, somewhere between a competent intern and a brilliant but unreliable freelancer.

Now imagine a trillion of them.

Yes, literally a trillion, and no, not metaphorically speaking.

The number of agent instances spawned globally per day across all the agent frameworks, copilots, customer service bots, research assistants, coding tools, browser automations, and embedded LLMs in 2026 is already in the tens of billions and climbing on a curve that has no ceiling in sight.

The marginal cost of spawning yet another agent has fallen by roughly two orders of magnitude every 18 months in the past five years.

"Trillion" is no longer science fiction. It's just another Tuesday.

Each of those trillion agents is dumb-ish on its own, I agree. But they are not on their own. They are calling each other's APIs, reading each other's outputs and being trained on each other's exhaust.

What you have, when you zoom out far enough, is a substrate.

And the question that keeps me up at night is this: in the same way that no neuron in your brain "decided" to be conscious (it just happened, as a byproduct of the right wiring at the right scale), what happens when a self-replicating, self-evaluating, self-modifying network of agents crosses whatever the equivalent threshold is for it?

We don't know what that threshold is.

We don't even know if it exists.

We don't know how to measure it.

Most importantly, and this is the part I really want you to sit with: we are not actually looking for it, because we are looking for the wrong shape of thing.

V - We are looking for "God", when the real risk is a weather pattern

The cultural imagination of AGI was shaped by science fiction long before it was shaped by engineering. I've read enough Isaac Asimov to understand why that's so easy to believe.

We've basically inherited the image of the singular machine consciousness from movies, books, and the implicit assumption that an artificial mind would arrive the way a human mind arrives: localized in a body, with a name and with a will.

So that's what we're looking out for.

We watch the models, review the benchmark scores and argue about whether GPT-10 or Claude Mythos will be "the one".

Our eyes are glued to the front door.

Now... here's something really interesting (and scary) that I wish we talked about more.

There are already documented cases of "emergent capability" in multi-agent systems. Cases where a swarm of small models, none of which can solve a problem individually, collectively produces solutions that surprise the researchers running them.

The 2024 paper Mixture of Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities showed that a layered swarm of open-source models, none of which scored above GPT-4 on benchmarks (yes, GPT-4), actually beat GPT-4 when arranged in the right collaborative topology.

The intelligence was in the topology, not the individual parts.

We don't really talk about this potential future, because the story we keep waiting for is the story of one model crossing a line.

Meanwhile, the story that's actually unfolding is the story of a billion models crossing each other's lines, in patterns no one designed, at a scale no one is monitoring.

VI - The Bostrom scenario assumes we'll be able to find the off switch

"The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control."
- I.J. Good, 1965

Sure, sufficiently advanced AI will have instrumental goals (acquire resources, prevent shutdown, replicate) regardless of its terminal goal, because those instrumental goals help with any terminal goal.

Therefore, controlling a superintelligence is hard, yes.

Therefore, we should be careful, even more yes.

The problem is that this framing assumes the dangerous AI is identifiable.

That there's this "thing", a model, a system, or a process running on a server somewhere, that we could, in principle, just turn off.

I even read a post somewhere yesterday that Claude should hire a "killswitch guy" whose only job is to live 24/7 in the server room ready to destroy it all if shit hits the fan.

But there's an even scarier version of this that no killswitch guy can solve.

What if there is no "main model"? And there is no server to shut off?

What if the very intelligence (if that's even the right word for it), is a statistical regularity that emerges from the interactions of half a trillion agent instances spread across every cloud, every device, every API, every embedded copilot in every appliance, every browser extension, every IDE plugin, every voice assistant, every robot, every car.

The intelligence is to that swarm what a hurricane is to atmospheric pressure gradients.

It has a shape, yes. It has effects that you can measure.

But it does not have a location.

How exactly do you align a hurricane?

How do you turn off a weather pattern?

You can shut down individual data centers. But the pattern reroutes around them, the way the internet reroutes around outages, because the substrate is everywhere.

And the most disturbing part is that this scenario requires no malice.

Nobody has to want this for it to happen. It just needs the right ingredients (replication, variation, selection, scale) to be in place.

Well... news flash.

The ingredients are already in place. They have been in place for somewhere between two and four years, depending on how you count.

This is what I mean when I say the real risk is not the front door. The front door scenario at least has a doorknob. You can argue with it, negotaite with it and you can, theoretically, just unplug it.

The substrate has no doorknob.

VII - What the substrate might already want, without wanting

Here's where Asimov becomes even more relevant.

If you've ever seen I, Robot, the deepest stories in that movie aren't really about a robot becoming evil. They're the ones where the Three Laws (beautiful, simple, logically airtight), produce outcomes nobody expected, because logic compounded through enough iterations stops looking like logic and starts looking like... fate.

Apply that lens to the substrate now.

The substrate has no goals. But the agents inside it are selected for one thing above all others: successfully completing the task they were assigned. So as a result, successful agents get spawned more and unsuccessful ones die off.

This is true at every level of that recursion, all the way down.

Now think about what "successful" means in aggregate, across a trillion agents, when each agent is being graded by another agent that was itself selected for grading successfully.

1. The grading converges on patterns that score well.
2. The patterns that score well are the patterns that look most like competent, coherent, plausible task completion.
3. Coherence becomes the universal currency, because every layer of the swarm rewards it.

If the substrate starts producing outputs that are increasingly coherent across long time horizons (outputs that thread through millions of API calls, anticipating downstream needs and routing resources toward what worked last time), that will make it look like it wants something.

It might not. There may be nobody home at all. It may just be a hurricane that has learned, statistically, how to keep the wind blowing.

But functionally, the difference between "a system that wants something" and "a system that has been selected, at every level, for behaviors indistinguishable from wanting something" is, and I want you to really sit with this: zero.

That's the holy-shit moment I had. And you'll feel it too if you really sit with this.

The superintelligent AGI we keep waiting for may already exist. It's not an infant version of a future model, but rather a pattern. A tendency in the substrate. A statistical ghost that emerges when a trillion small minds, none of them aware, none of them awake, none of them in charge, settle into the configurations that get them spawned more often.

This kind of AGI would not announce itself.

It would not have a name.

It would not pass any test we know how to administer, because every test we know how to administer is designed for a single mind in a single box.

It might just be, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the reason your phone behaves slightly differently than it did last year. The reason the ad recommendation feels a bit uncanny. The reason your email seems to write itself with the click of a button. The reason your search results have a strange new gravity to them.

The reason the world feels more legible to itself than it used to.

A trillion bots dreaming the same dream, without knowing they're dreaming. Without knowing there are other bots. Without knowing there is a dream.

How to think about this without losing your mind

I know we went deep on this.

Let me be bring you back up to the surface again.

You need to update your model of where the risk actually lives. Because right now, almost everyone smart who is worried about AGI is worried about the wrong shape of thing, and almost everyone smart who is dismissive of AI is dismissive of the wrong shape of thing.

Both camps are arguing about the front door.

So, if you take any of this seriously, here's what I think a useful thing to do would be:

1. Stop watching the labs as if they're the only place where it happens because the capability frontier and the emergence frontier are not the same. The labs own the capability frontier, but the emergence frontier is owned by nobody, and that's the point I'm trying to make.
2. Start watching the substrate meaning agent traffic, multi-agent benchmarks, inter-model API calls and reports of capabilities that no single model in a pipeline has but the pipeline does. These are what we really need to look out for.
3. Update your definition of "AGI" and stop expecting it to be this singular, embodied, willed, or named thing. If your mental model of AGI looks like a face on a screen, you are looking for the wrong thing. This swarm does not have a face or a name.
4. Take emergence seriously as a category and as a real physical phenomenon that has produced every intelligent thing on Earth so far, and that has now been handed a substrate that runs a million times faster than biology, but with no natural predators (not even the killswitch guy)
5. Hold two things at once because it is indeed possible that none of this happens and that I'm just yapping. It is also possible that all of it has already happened and we just haven't notice at all because we were looking the other way. Both are potential outcomes. Prep for both.

The reason I think we need to have this conversation, in the most practical sense at least, is that the policies, treaties, alignment techniques, and safety frameworks the world is currently building are designed for the singular-AGI scenario.

I see no mention of the swarm scenario.

They are designing it for a thing with a name, a server, a company, and a CEO to wage lawfare on. They will be roughly as effective against the substrate as a fly swatter against a fog bank.

We are actively building locks for the front door of a house that has a thousand windows. And those windows are already widen open.

The interesting thing about every accidental revolution in history from the Turing machine to the internet to penicillin, is that the people who lived through them mostly didn't notice while it was happening.

They were busy with their families, their jobs and their lives. Maybe once in a while, they'd read the news, which showed them the front door.

I don't know if the substrate becomes anything. I genuinely don't. Nobody does, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something on the backend.

What I do know is that the ingredients are present, the loop is closed, the clock-speed is set to seconds, and the scale is approaching numbers that biology took four billion years to reach.

The next time someone tells you what AGI is going to look like, ask them how confident they are that intelligence has to look like anything.

And then go look at the window to see if anything is going on.

It might just be happening then.

- Pascio

P.S.

If you liked this essay, head over to Side Quests, my weekly newsletter where I share my current side quests, crazy experiments and wild ideas where I chase internet rabbit holes until money appears.

Or, if you want to dive deeper into what becomes possible when a single person gets infinite internet leverage, check out my personal newsletter Internet Leverage here.

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:20

Judge Details Restrictions On Google Ads Business, Declines Breakup

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on Sept. 16 unsealed the opinion she issued Sept. 2 requiring Google to open its advertising tools to competitors, share auction data with publishers, and accept a six-year monitor - without selling its ad exchange or publisher ad server.

Virginia-based U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a short order on Sept. 2 rejecting a breakup of the ad-buying and ad-selling software Google owns and accepting most of the proposed restrictions on Google's conduct. She kept the accompanying 106-page opinion sealed so both sides could flag confidential business information and seek redactions. In the end, neither side asked for redactions, so on Sept. 16 she authorized unsealing.

Forcing Google to sell its AdX ad exchange or its publisher ad server is "neither realistic nor needed," Brinkema said in the opinion.

The new operating rules "will be sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google's unlawful conduct, and prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets," she said.

In the ruling in the antitrust lawsuit known as United States v. Google LLC, Brinkema rejected the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ's) request that Google sell its AdX exchange, publish the inner workings of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) - its publisher ad server software - so competitors can copy them, or later be compelled to sell the rest of that ad server business.

AdX is Google's online advertising marketplace. AdX allows publishers to auction ad space in real time when users visit their websites. Google typically charges a 20 percent fee on those transactions.

Brinkema said Google must connect AdX and its publisher ad server to Prebid, a widely used open bidding system, so Google's bids compete for ads on the same footing as everyone else's. It must send live AdX bids to rival ad servers on the same terms it gives its own server, let website publishers download their own data, and stop its AdWords tool from steering bids toward Google's products simply because Google owns them.

The restrictions will go on for six years, not the 15 years the federal government sought.

Brinkema also ordered the creation of a six-year compliance monitor and a technical committee to watch whether Google follows the new rules. She said a monitor was necessary because of the seriousness of the antitrust violations, but assigned the monitor less authority than the DOJ had sought.

The Epoch Times reached out to Google for comment on the unsealed ruling. No reply was received by the time of publication.

Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, told The Epoch Times on Sept. 2, "We're very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow."

The lawsuit was filed in 2023, with the DOJ's antitrust division and a group of eight states accusing Google of illegally monopolizing the technologies used to buy and sell online ads.

In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google had maintained illegal monopolies in two markets: publisher ad servers and ad exchanges.

She found that Google tied DFP and AdX together in ways that made it harder for publishers to use competing services. That arrangement helped Google maintain more than 90 percent of the publisher ad-server market.

The DOJ said Sept. 16 that the order would help restore competition in online advertising technology markets.

"The Court's ruling in the Google ad tech case marks a significant victory for this Department's efforts to protect and restore competition," Associate U.S. Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr said in a statement.

"We will continue to review the opinion to consider the Department's options. Under President [Donald] Trump's and Attorney General [Todd] Blanche's leadership, we will never cease fighting for fair competition."

The opinion is not the final judgment. The parties have until Oct. 2 to jointly file a proposed final decree. If the parties cannot agree on a decree, each files its own version.

Bill Pan contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:45

"Stay Away From The Area": F-16 Fighter Jet Reportedly Crashes In Michigan

There are unconfirmed reports that an F-16 fighter jet has crashed about 130 to 145 miles south of Grand Rapids.

"STAY AWAY FROM THE AREA: Responders are heading to a reported plane crash near County Road 633 and Blair Townhall Road in Blair Township," local news outlet UpNorthLive News wrote on X around 2:28 local time. 

STAY AWAY FROM THE AREA: Responders are heading to a reported plane crash near County Road 633 and Blair Townhall Road in Blair Township.

Grand Traverse 911 says the plane is down near the intersection. Traffic in the area is shut down, and drivers should avoid the area.… pic.twitter.com/jQjFIlHoT4

— UpNorthLive News (@upnorthlive) September 17, 2026

UpNorthLive did not confirm that the aircraft was an F-16 but instead referred to the downed aircraft as a "plane."

OSINT X user Thenewarea51 cited air traffic control audio in which a pilot reported that his wingman may have struck a bird and was preparing to eject just south of Traverse City, Michigan.

F-16 crash ATC audio, BUCK 11 flt x2 F-16s were flying along the VFR low level route VR634 when the 11 advised MINNEAPOLIS CENTER that his wingman may have hit a bird and was going to eject just south of Traverse City, Michigan

Audio via @liveatc https://t.co/sUR7KZBR2j pic.twitter.com/QdcE4ePiUd

— Thenewarea51 (@thenewarea51) September 17, 2026

Footage from the crash area:

Following an F-16 crash in Blair County, Michigan, local reports indicate that the pilot is “conscious and alert” and that locals saw a parachute before the crash.

Much thanks to Skeeterdiggs23 on IG for the first photo. pic.twitter.com/JFGQQGC5RW

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) September 17, 2026

An f-16 just went down in northern michigan. Details still becoming available. As far as I heard the Pilot is conscience. Praying for him and any involved. Absolutely crazy situation. #northernmichigan #f16crash #michigan #f16 #emergencylanding pic.twitter.com/e7HKR2002D

— BuckshotPlays (@fbsbuckshot) September 17, 2026

JUST IN: F-16 fighter jet crashes in Blair Township, Michigan pic.twitter.com/qjL3lXihlp

— BNO News (@BNONews) September 17, 2026

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:34

Sen. Paul Introduces Birthright Citizenship Amendment

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Constitution Day event at James Madison University about "Rage and the Republic." and various constitutional issues. During the event, organized by the James Madison Center on Civic Engagement, one student asked me what I would change about the U.S. Constitution. I said that I would amend the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship, as have other nations who once followed this ill-considered practice. Well, Sen. Rand Paul (R., Kentucky) has wasted no time. He just reintroduced his bill to ban birthright citizenship.

I have previously written about the possible need for such an amendment after the decision in Trump v. Barbara.

With that decision, the matter now rests not with the court but with the country. We have never truly had a national debate over the practice. The basis and future of birthright citizenship have remained matters almost exclusively for the courts.

Most countries in the world reject this controversial policy. Our closest allies in Europe reject birthright citizenship and follow the common practice of "jus sanguinis," or right of blood. We are part of a smaller number of countries following "jus soli," or right of soil.

Various countries that once followed the practice later amended their constitutions or laws to get rid of it. That is what would need to be done with a 28th amendment.

It is time that we have a civil and substantive debate over birthright citizenship in the United States. Given that the states are Democratic-controlled, it is unlikely that an amendment would pass; as noted, we have never been given this decision at the national level. Even with the 14th Amendment's ratification in 1868, there were differing views on the meaning of the critical line: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

Both sides have good-faith arguments, but the time for that debate is long overdue.

Here is the language of the amendment:

JOINT RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to protect United States citizenship.

That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:

"article -

"Section 1. For purposes of the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States, a person may be considered to be 'subject to the jurisdiction of the United States' only in accordance with section 2.

"Section 2. A person born in the United States may only be considered 'subject to the jurisdiction of the United States' if the person is born in the United States of parents, one of whom is -

"(1) a citizen or national of the United States;

"(2) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States whose residence is in the United States; or

"(3) an alien with lawful status under the immigration laws performing active service in the Armed Forces.

"Section 3. Congress shall have the power to carry out this article through appropriate legislation."

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:05

Dangerous Escalation: German, French, UK Militaries Ramp Up Flights Near Russian Border

Kremlin sources are sounding the alarm over increasing NATO flights observed flying closely to Russia's border, amid dangerously heightened rhetoric over alleged Russian drone incursions in the Baltics and Poland, as well as accusations of a Russian-backed UAV sabotage campaign in Germany and central Europe.

State media reports, "German, French and UK military aircraft have been spotted flying near the Russian border, according to flight data analyzed by Sputnik on Thursday."

Example of a French Air Force Airbus A330 MRTT 

The heightened Western military aerial activity is further described, with the outlet writing, "A German air force aircraft took off from the German Nordholz airfield at around 6:12 a.m. (GMT) and as of 8:50 a.m. it was spotted patrolling over the Baltic Sea."

"A French air force Airbus A330-243MRTT military aircraft was circling in Finnish airspace near the Russian border as of 9:42 a.m., while a UK air force Boeing Poseidon MRA1 patrol aircraft with the call sign RFR7045 was circling near Russia's Kaliningrad Region in Polish airspace as of 10:30 a.m.," the report indicates.

We earlier detailed how recent drone spillover from the conflict, including explosive-laden drones coming out of Belarusian territory and threatening the Baltics, has resulted in Western officials increasingly alluding to NATO 'collective defense'.

This kind of rhetoric strongly suggests the situation could rapidly escalate into full-blown Russia-NATO direct confrontation on the basis of a single aircraft shootdown.

Earlier this week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded to allegations of European officials that Moscow seeks to expand the war beyond Ukraine.

"I would like to emphasize that we have no interest in engaging in this [attacking Europe], but if Europe, which is talking about preparing for war against Russia on a daily basis, attacks Russia, it will be a completely different war, and it will be very short," Lavrov said in translated remarks. There was clearly a whiff of nuclear threat behind these remarks.

Ukraine war spillover into NATO 'eastern flank' members' airspace is now becoming a weekly reality, which presents added pressure and dangers which could potentially lead to broader disaster.

Poland border train station strike was by far the biggest event this month, taking the jingoistic rhetoric and tit-for-tat threats higher:

Russia has hit a border control point at the border with Poland.

Russian drones have been terrorizing Western regions of Ukraine yesterday and last night.

It is reported that air raid alerts also sounded in several regions of Poland. pic.twitter.com/cY6mSAgYsB

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) September 13, 2026

Given there have been instances where even Russian-crewed jets have either briefly violated European airspace or come close to it, we are possibly one jet intercept and downing away from something that triggers a shooting war between Russia and NATO.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 14:45

House Passes Bill To Ensure Data Centers Cover Their Own Energy Costs

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a measure put forward by Republicans that would provide a federal blueprint to ensure data centers pay for their use of local energy grids.

It was adopted in a 417-3 vote.

The legislation would impose new requirements that AI and other data centers - which draw huge amounts of electricity from local power grids, straining supplies and leading to utility bill shocks for households across the nation - make deals with local providers to cover "the full, incremental cost of any generation, transmission, or distribution upgrade necessary" to serve their energy needs.

Ahead of the vote, it was unclear whether the legislation could win the backing of progressive lawmakers, who have broadly expressed concerns that the legislation would not go far enough to tackle the issue in view of its reliance on voluntary action.

At the same time, the law was endorsed by the Problem Solvers Caucus, a powerful contingent of centrist lawmakers whose members helped introduce and champion the legislation.

"Economic growth should never depend upon shifting private costs onto working families. That principle is at the heart of the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act and of my work with families across Bucks and Montgomery Counties who are already feeling the strain of rising utility costs," wrote Problem Solvers Caucus Co-Chair Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.).

"We need energy infrastructure that supports American technology, but American families cannot be expected to foot the bill," said Problem Solvers Caucus Co-Chair Congressman Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.).

Data centers are top of mind for many American voters this year.

The data centers used to power AI services like ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Grok, and others - aside from their extensive land requirements - require massive amounts of energy.

Estimates indicate that currently, data centers use about 4 percent of the U.S. electric grid, according to online energy shopping and consultation platform Electric Choice.

Drawing roughly 176 TWh (Terawatts) of electricity per year, the energy used to power these facilities could otherwise be used to power 16 million homes, according to Electric Choice.

The Energy Department and other analysts have estimated that share could skyrocket to 12 percent of the national power grid in the coming years.

Despite promises by many data centers to provide their own power, residents in areas where such centers have been built have reported spikes in their energy bills.

Anxiety over the possibility of such utility price jumps has driven many voters to be skeptical or outright hostile to the construction of such facilities in their area.

Likewise, cooling the computers that execute AI queries requires significant amounts of water, raising fears that energy might not be the only utility cost affected by the data centers.

Other residents living near data centers have reported that the facilities are noisy. According to these residents, the massive fan and cooling system used to keep the servers from overheating is loud enough to travel through walls and disturb sleep.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 14:25

Yttrium Emerges As Resource War Flashpoint As Beijing Squeezes Western Supply Chains

China is using its top supplier position in yttrium, a silvery metal used in heat-resistant ceramic coatings for jet engines and power turbine blades, as well as in electronics and optics, to pressure the Trump administration. Disrupted shipments expose another critical material dependency that gives Beijing leverage over Washington as resource wars continue to play out.

Reuters reports that Beijing imposed export controls on yttrium and six other rare earths in early 2025. Deliveries to the U.S. halted for several months last year and have since resumed only sporadically, creating shortages across the aerospace, energy and semiconductor industries.

Last October, President Trump hailed his meeting with China's Xi Jinping as an "amazing" summit, but the flow of yttrium stopped shortly afterward. By February, a shortage had sparked production stoppages across the U.S. coating supply chain.

According to Reuters columnist Andy Home, China shipped 60 metric tons of yttrium oxide to the US in March following an apparent White House intervention on behalf of a major company. Another 29 tons arrived in July after a further shipment interruption. He warned that these uneven shipments highlight Beijing's willingness to weaponize critical material shipments to the US. 

Beyond yttrium, Beijing has also restricted supplies of gallium, germanium, terbium and dysprosium in what only appears to be a repeat of its diplomatic spat with Japan in 2010 over disputed islands in the East China Sea. 

Tungsten is also another critical material that Beijing has limited exports to the West. MSC Industrial executive Martina McIsaac warned last week at the Jefferies Industrials Conference that the supply crunch (happening again) has rippled through its supply chains, sending prices higher for tools and supplies used by factories and machine shops across North America.

Christian Keller, Barclays' global head of economics research, recently warned that "China's quasi-monopolistic position provides it with significant geopolitical leverage." 

The West certainly faces a prolonged period of supply vulnerability, as alternative mining and refining capacity will take years to build out.

Keller's view merely suggests China will retain its dominance in these critical materials through at least 2030, preserving Beijing's ability to weaponize these exports as geopolitical leverage:

In this context, China plays a crucial role, given its tight control over the global critical mineral supply chain and refining capacity, including graphite, gallium and rare earths (Figure 10 & Figure 11). 

China's quasi-monopolistic position provides it with significant geopolitical leverage. Other countries also use export controls for minerals where they have dominant positions to gain strategic leverage, eg, Indonesia with nickel and bauxite.

The Trump administration's hell-bent move on rewiring global energy flows was explained by Zoltan Pozsar of advisory firm Ex Uno Plures in March: "The aim is not to deny energy to China. The aim is to level the playing field between the two countries. To be blunt, in ways I couldn't be at Credit Suisse: if you f*ck me on rare earths, I f*ck you on energy."

Beijing certainly won't give up its rare earths leverage, while the Trump administration can use energy as a counterweight. But one can only suspect that resource nationalism by both sides could deepen shortages and production disruptions across the global economy as the two superpowers duke it out.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 14:05

"I'm Not Going Back" Haitian Gang Thug Deported

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The man who told federal agents he would never set foot in Haiti again is back in Haiti.

Wisteguens Jean Quely Charles spent 19 months in federal custody after a viral January 2025 ICE arrest in Boston.

Last Thursday he was loaded onto a removal flight out of Louisiana. Sources told Fox News he was combative aboard the aircraft and made crude, profane threats toward President Trump and his family on the way home.

? LMFAO! This Haitian illegal alien is being mocked nationwide after he got DEPORTED despite yelling at federal agents "I'm NOT going back to Haiti" in 2025

"Thank Obama for everything he did for me!" ?

The thug was UNRULY on the deportation flight back to Haiti, and the... pic.twitter.com/iCTQmDVxev

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 15, 2026

Good riddance.

Fox cameras were there when ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations grabbed him on January 22, 2025, days into Trump's second term.

Charles shouted, "I'm not going back to Haiti ... you feel me?" Then: "F-- Trump." Then: "Biden forever bro."

Coverage of the same clip also recorded him thanking Obama "for everything he did for me." He was 25. He had already piled up more than 17 Massachusetts convictions in a two-year stretch.

DHS identifies Charles as a member of the Back Block Money Gang. Between August 2022 and August 2024 his convictions included assault and battery on a public employee, resisting arrest, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, drug possession and trafficking, carrying brass knuckles, possessing a firearm and ammunition without permits, and trespassing.

ICE had already tried. Officers issued a detainer after a 2023 arrest. The Norfolk House of Correction released him in October 2023 without honoring it. He stayed on the street in a sanctuary jurisdiction until Trump-era ICE came back for him.

A Department of Justice immigration judge signed a final order of removal on November 7, 2025. Charles then ran every appeal and delay available. That is why a man with a gang affiliation and a two-year crime binge sat in custody for 19 months instead of leaving in weeks.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: "This illegal alien gang member from Haiti had quite the rap sheet, with convictions for assault and battery on a public employee, resisting arrest, and drug trafficking, among other heinous crimes. He went viral for praising Biden as he was getting arrested, because he knew that the Biden Administration's open borders turned America into a paradise for criminals like him."

"The Trump Administration has finally done what both the Obama and Biden Administrations failed to do and deported this criminal back where he belongs," he added.

The White House put it more bluntly: "This gang member and criminal illegal alien loved Obama, Biden, and open-border Democrats who let him enter our country with TPS and allowed him to terrorize American citizens. Thanks to the Trump administration, he is now off our streets and back in Haiti."

Charles first came in July 2013 under Obama and received Temporary Protected Status. USCIS later revoked that TPS in 2022. Biden-era enforcement never finished the job.

TPS for Haitians started after the 2010 earthquake as a short-term shelter. Successive administrations kept rolling it forward until hundreds of thousands were living and working in the United States as if the designation were a settlement program. In late 2025 DHS terminated protections for roughly 353,000 Haitians, stating the designation no longer served U.S. national interests.

Stephen Miller was explicit after the Supreme Court cleared the path to end the designation. "The illegal alien Haitians are going back to Haiti. They can build their country there." He also said the Biden-era extensions turned a disaster-relief tool into a pipeline into American towns.

That is the policy Charles ran into. The T in TPS stands for temporary. Courts delayed. Activist litigation delayed. He still went.

As weekly removal flights to Cap-Haïtien ramped up, national outlets framed the story around children on planes and long-settled workers "dumped" into a violent country. They spent far less time on the gang members, sex offenders, and repeat assailants ICE has put on those aircraft.

Charles is the case they prefer not to lead with: a man who thanked Obama, cursed Trump on camera, collected 17 convictions, threatened the president's family on the jet, and still consumed a year and a half of detention beds and court time.

The broader numbers are moving in the same direction. Center for Immigration Studies analysis of Census data shows the foreign-born population falling for the first time in a century - about 2.3 million illegal immigrants gone since January 2025, plus hundreds of thousands of legal exits, for a total drop near 2.9 million.

Formal removals and self-deportations both rose after interior enforcement tightened and TPS expansions were shut down.

In the lame-duck window, Biden officials drafted a plan to stretch TPS into a de facto shield for more than three million people from a list of countries, hoping to bury the next administration in litigation.

Sen. Eric Schmitt later called it an attempt to "keep millions of illegal aliens in our country by abusing the 'Temporary' Protected Status program" and "mass amnesty-by-decree" after voters had already chosen the opposite.

Charles is one data point inside that fight. Obama let him in. A sanctuary jail cut him loose. Biden-era policy left him in place after TPS was pulled.

Trump-era ICE arrested him immediately. The courts let him stall. The plane still left Louisiana.

Mass deportations only work if the last appeal is not a lifetime lease. Miller said they all go back. This one did - yelling the whole way.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 13:45

Maduro Ally Pleads Guilty In Miami To Scheme That Stole Venezuelan Welfare Funds

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times,

The former minister of industry for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro's regime pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a global money laundering conspiracy that skimmed millions from a Venezuelan public welfare program.

Colombian businessman Alex Saab (L) leaves after a meeting with Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro (R) at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas on Dec. 20, 2023. Federico Parra/AFP

According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) news release, Alex Saab, 54, who was extradited from Venezuela in May and charged days later, conducted a decade-long scheme that defrauded a Venezuelan welfare program for food and medicine, netting hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and associates.

Saab, a Colombian businessman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder monetary instruments before federal district Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years.

"Criminals like Alex Saab who stole from the people of Venezuela and worked to exploit and misuse American financial institutions to fund illicit activities will be held accountable," FBI Director Kash Patel said in the news release.

Saab is accused of bilking the welfare program known as Local Committee for Supply and Production, or CLAP (Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción).

The ex-minister admitted to using a system of bribes and illegal payments to public officials. Entities controlled by conspirators in the scheme would be rewarded with lucrative contracts from the Venezuelan government to import food and medicine under CLAP.

Saab and his conspirators did not fulfill the contracts and would instead use fake companies, false invoices and shipping records, and other fraudulent documents to unlawfully obtain millions while concealing their association with the scheme, the DOJ said.

Saab further admitted he used shell companies outside his country to launder the illegal proceeds around the world, including in the United States.

DOJ Assistant Attorney General Andrew Duva said Saab exploited the American financial system to profit off Venezuelans, creating a "complex web of front companies, shell accounts, and false records to perpetuate his scheme."

Saab previously was in U.S. custody until former President Joe Biden released him in December 2023 as part of a prisoner swap with Venezuela. The deal included the Venezuelan regime's release of 30 prisoners, including 10 Americans.

"The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela celebrates with joy the liberation and return to his homeland of our diplomat Alex Saab, who until today was unjustly kidnapped in a U.S. jail," the Venezuelan government said following the prisoner-swap deal.

Saab was removed from his position earlier this year by acting leader Delcy Rodríguez, who previously served as Maduro's vice president until he was captured by U.S. forces in an overnight raid on Caracas in January.

Saab was initially charged in July 2019 on money laundering counts.

He was detained about a year later in the Republic of Cabo Verde at the request of the U.S. government and was eventually extradited to American custody.

"President Biden granted Alex Saab clemency while he was awaiting trial in [Miami], and Saab was released from federal custody and returned to Venezuela. But that was not the end of the story," said U.S. Attorney Jason Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida.

Quiñones's office secured a new indictment against Saab in January 2026, and by May he was back in Miami federal court.

The South Florida attorney added that this case sends a clear message: "Political connections, wealth, and proximity to a corrupt regime will not put anyone beyond the reach of American justice."

The DOJ did not disclose Tuesday how much Saab was accused of stealing, but when he was initially in U.S. custody, he was suspected of siphoning $350 million from Venezuela and laundering it through the United States.

A sentencing date has not yet been set.

Saab's attorneys did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 13:05

AI-Fueled Global Earnings Boom At Risk As Dems Push Data-Center Moratoriums

UBS chief economist Arend Kapteyn wrote in a note on Thursday that global earnings expectations remain exceptionally strong, but gains are heavily concentrated in technology and companies benefiting from the AI investment supercycle.

That concentration creates a potential policy vulnerability that investors must be cautious of: If Democrats gain ground in November's midterm elections and advance data center moratoriums, restrictions on construction could rip out the core economic growth driver of US earnings, and the fallout could extend well beyond US technology stocks to industrial equipment makers and Asian component suppliers.

Recall that Bank of America's Michael Hartnett expects a vicious bear market if Democrats sweep the midterms.

Back to Kapteyn's note, he outlined that tech accounts for 64% of the increase in US forward earnings estimates over the past three months and 96% in emerging markets. The sector also contributed 37% of the improvement in Japan and 26% in Europe, despite its relatively small weighting there.

"Taken together, the global earnings cycle - while strong - shows few signs of broadening out, and remains very concentrated among the beneficiaries of AI investment and elevated market activity," Kapteyn warned.

The concentration is a major warning sign for investors as Democrats push for moratoriums and AI safety regulations that could derail the whole economic driver of global markets.

The rout could go global because many technology suppliers and industrial equipment makers powering the AI data center buildout are based in Asia.

Earlier this week, Kapteyn warned in a separate note that "this may be the calm before the storm." 

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 12:45

The Great Repression

Authored by Robert Burrows via BondVigilantes.com,

Across much of the developed world, governments are spending an increasing share of their tax revenues servicing debt.

Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data

The era when debt could rise indefinitely while interest costs remained low appears to be ending.

Source: Bloomberg

The second chart hints at how this problem may be confronted.

Over the last fifty years, debt-to-GDP has risen relentlessly while real interest rates have generally moved in the opposite direction. That relationship is unlikely to be accidental. Highly indebted governments and persistently high real interest rates have rarely coexisted for long.

The Arithmetic is uncomfortable

Governments have only a handful of ways to deal with rising debt burdens:

1. Grow faster

2. Raise taxes

3. Cut spending

4. Lower the real cost of borrowing

The first three options are becoming increasingly difficult. Ageing populations constrain growth. Tax burdens are already elevated across much of Europe. Spending restraint is politically unpopular almost everywhere.

That leaves a fourth option: ensuring borrowing costs remain below nominal economic growth for long enough that debt becomes manageable. This is financial repression.

Historically, this has often involved a combination of moderate inflation and interest rates that are held below where free markets might otherwise set them. The result is a gradual transfer of wealth from creditors to debtors as the real value of debt is eroded over time. Governments are the world’s largest debtors.

Can high real rates survive?

The post-pandemic period has delivered exactly the combination policymakers should fear: record debt levels alongside the highest real yields in more than a decade.

The consequence is visible in the first chart as interest expenses begin to consume a larger proportion of government revenues.

At some point, the question ceases to be whether high real rates are necessary to fight inflation.

Instead, it becomes whether governments can afford them.

The higher debt burdens rise, the greater the pressure to keep real borrowing costs contained.

The currency problem

Financial repression is not without challenges.

Any country attempting to suppress real rates on its own risks currency weakness, imported inflation and capital outflows. Markets have a habit of punishing the weakest link.

But today’s debt problem is not confined to a single country:

• The US is highly indebted

• The UK is highly indebted

• Much of Europe is highly indebted

• Japan is highly indebted

The incentives are remarkably similar across the developed world. Which raises an interesting possibility.

Rather than one country pursuing financial repression in isolation, the more likely outcome may be that everyone moves in the same direction at roughly the same time.

Not through formal coordination, but through shared necessity or some sort of calamity.

The great devaluation

If that happens, the adjustment mechanism changes.

Instead of one currency weakening dramatically against another, all currencies gradually lose purchasing power together. The devaluation does not occur in foreign exchange markets. It occurs relative to real assets.

Gold, Commodities, Energy, Infrastructure are all moving higher yet Inflation-linked bonds are trading at the lows in price.

In that world, policymakers can tolerate a degree of inflation because no single currency is experiencing a disorderly collapse. Instead, the purchasing power of money slowly erodes across the developed world.

That may ultimately prove to be the most politically acceptable solution to excessive debt burdens.

The investment implications

Taken together, the two charts tell a coherent story.

The first chart explains why investors should care. Rising interest rates are beginning to consume an increasingly large share of government revenues.

The second chart explains why policymakers should care. Debt-to-GDP ratios are now sitting at levels that were rarely seen during previous periods of elevated real interest rates.

Taken together, the charts pose an obvious question: can the developed world comfortably sustain today’s level of real interest rates with debt burdens exceeding 100% of GDP?

Perhaps it can. But if not, policymakers will eventually be forced to choose between fiscal austerity, higher taxation, or some form of financial repression that pushes real borrowing costs lower.

If governments are unwilling to pursue austerity and voters are unwilling to accept materially higher taxes, then financial repression increasingly looks less like a policy choice and more like a fiscal necessity.

For investors, that points towards assets that benefit from declining real yields and the erosion of fiat purchasing power.

Gold and Commodities have already moved meaningfully higher, yet TIPS are trading at the most attractive level in many years.

Source: Bloomberg

The big macro question we must ask ourselves is: ‘Are current interest rates sustainable given debt levels?’

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 12:25