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Warsh Faces An "Incredibly Difficult Dilemma" This Week

By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

Never Forgotten! And Some Work Stuff…

The 25th anniversary of 9/11 hit hard. What a scary day! What a scary time. I only attended a couple of funerals, but will never forget the last moments of some people who I had done business and hung out with for years. The funerals were cathartic. The whole experience even 25 years later seems surreal, at best. I will never forget walking through Central Park to avoid Grand Central (as a potential target). Then finally, standing around a TV with “bunny ears” outside a bodega on 1st avenue. Clutching a beer and trying to make sense of the news, as there was no way to reach anyone. Seeing firetruck after firetruck scream down the FDR on the way to ground zero. At first some of the names of the firetrucks made sense. Places in and around NYC. Then you saw them coming in from places like Patchogue (I could be wrong, but that one is somehow emblazoned in my mind). Places in Long Island that had no business being in NYC. I do not know to this day how many of those brave first responders, racing down the FDR, lived to breathe another day. Horrific. Walking in midtown, late in the day, once the “worst” seemed behind us, only to feel the ground shake as #7 came down. We lasted in the city, until the third time the area around us was put on strict alert due to legitimate threats on the Empire State Building. Being one of the first “civilians” being allowed back into the area, not because of anything heroic, but because we were working on a big deal with a re-insurance company in the ground zero area, that “had to get done.” Work did have to continue, but NEVER FORGET!

I am fortunate to work at Academy Securities, where those who enlisted post 9/11 help shape the goals of the firm in terms of creating opportunities for veterans. I am not a veteran, but it has been a pleasure to be involved with the growth of Academy in the almost 10 years that I’ve been here.

Here is a small selection of the challenge coins I’ve received in my time at Academy. If I’d thought of doing this in advance, rather than spur of the moment, the collection (and photo) would have been better. But the twin towers on the back of Academy Securities’ challenge coin never fail to inspire me, and even more so on this 25th anniversary.

And Some Work Stuff…

We will keep the work stuff relatively short today. Partly because we’ve covered a lot of this already, and partly because we have time to send the latest updates just ahead of the Fed.

Warsh Has A Difficult Job…

While it isn’t Warsh’s decision alone, he faces an incredibly difficult dilemma this week as he tries to steer the Fed into a hike or to a hold.

• The market is 90% pricing in a hike, so it is difficult to push for a hold.
• A hike will likely help the longer end of the yield curve. Which is good.
• With $6 trillion of T-bills maturing in 2026, any hike will immediately increase the amount the country is spending on interest. $15 billion annually. We really don’t benefit much from better longer-term yields. The Federal Reserve balance sheet sits at $6.7 trillion, most funded overnight. Another $15 billion of cost to the country. With interest expense already an issue relative to defense or discretionary spending, a rate hike does not help on that front.
• I find it difficult to imagine President Trump liking the idea, even if it helps the longer end of the yield curve, or that stocks have priced it in.
• While CPI disappointed, it is years of being above trend that make a relatively benign number seem malignant. I continue to wish we could move to alternative data sources sooner than later. The conversation around inflation should be much broader based. While I agree we missed inflation (especially in the aftermath of COVID, I’m not sure fighting old battles is the best way to manage the world’s largest economy).
• I don’t see how hiking rates helps the price of oil, or gasoline, or diesel, when the problem isn’t excess demand, it is supply disruption and a global system of refining that isn’t operating at optimal levels. If everyone was running around willy nilly, “splurging” on gasoline, electricity, and diesel, it might help, but the cost is already impeding demand. How does raising rates help? Maybe it hurts as it makes some projects to generate more oil, gas, and electricity less easy to justify economically?
• While we try to figure out whether AI will kill us all in 10 years or not, there is little to slow the “compute” spending. Well, there is an increasingly vocal, largely local, movement against data centers, but they will get built. The companies (who maybe should have been reading the T-Report months and months ago when we first discussed The AI Revolution) are finally starting to do some better outreach. I completely agree with Bessent when he gave them a poor grade on steps taken to persuade communities why they should want, and even embrace, data centers in their area. But there is a 0.00001% chance that 50 bps of hikes slows the compute spend. The compute spend is built on “addressable market shares” that dwarf even current valuations in the compute space. The only way the compute spend slows down is if the perception of the addressable market decreases. That could happen: too much AI slop, Cheap Chinese Compute, etc., but it won’t slow due to rate hikes. Until something changes in the value perception, we are going to see higher memory prices, etc., permeate consumer electronics. So why hike to slow this if it won’t slow it? Btw, here is the AI graphic we use for the AI Revolution and continue to advocate that the industry should spend more time on community outreach; we need AI for many reasons, including national security, but it needs to be “sold” (or better explained to the people than it currently has been).

Warsh has a tough job. I would fight tooth and nail to stay on hold! Not because it would make the President happy (it would). Not because it would help the long end of the yield curve (it won’t), but because hiking won’t help fight the current drivers of inflation, and inflation isn’t high enough to have what I think is a “pre-emptive/fighting past wrongs” hike.

Bessent Is Making His Job More Difficult Than It Is…

Ignoring the fact that periodically Bessent appears to be the spokesperson for the DoW, for Trade, and for the State Department, he is making his own job more difficult. Calling out “Bloomberg Bros” during an interview is curious at best, mildly amusing in the middle, and somewhat preposterous at worst. We addressed this in some reports this week that you may have missed.

Bessent: “Look, if some of the Bloomberg Terminal bros are unhappy with what I’m doing, well, that’s too bad.” pic.twitter.com/j0H7RbmuP0

— Annmarie Hordern (@annmarie) September 11, 2026

As a golfer who is scared of bringing down the wrath of the golf gods, as a trader who goes into panic attacks at the sight of a pen with red ink on the desk, I think he is risking “jinxing” himself (a polite way of saying being far too smug and condescending, when the issues facing markets are much greater than so-called Bond Vigilantes or Terminal Bros). The 3 reports together are comprehensive and worth a read if you missed any of them.

• I Am The House Now compared and contrasted what he is doing with the yen versus the Treasury market. Also highlighted the risk that he may push Japan too far, because they certainly don’t want to be viewed as initiating policy as a puppet of the U.S.
• The 6 Billion Dollar Man was an appropriate follow-up and still has the “bionic running” sounds going through my head. It explained in more detail why he isn’t doing enough, but I do turn mildly bullish on the long end (obviously early).
• For me, last weekend’s Supply & Demand vs Data, where we attempted to create a metric to measure the sheer volume of duration that the IG credit market has been sucking out of the system, is crucial. I do think that the “pleasant” surprise for yields and compute spreads is that more money may currently be set aside for future issuance, without realizing that maybe some of the “future” issuance was done in the summer?

If Warsh does the “wrong” thing (from my view) and hikes, the long end rallies.

Away from that, Bessent is going to have to get serious about addressing the situation (monetizing gold, urging the Fed to do QE, etc.), or get lucky with a smaller IG calendar. Otherwise, we will likely see 5% on 10s over time.

The Gulf States and Iran

There is reporting that the pipeline the Saudis have been using to bypass the Strait has been hit and is currently shut down. We have repeatedly argued that any “new” pipelines (or Middle East Data Centers) are going to be expensive and slow to build because they will need to be “hardened.” Hundreds of miles of exposed pipe is an easy target for drones and rockets and almost impossible to defend.

While the President seems to be indicating that there will be no resolution until after the midterms (consistent with our earliest expectations of when the increased economic pressure on Iran could bring results), he (and the country) faces a couple of realities. Let’s start with diesel.

Diesel permeates the economy. It is incredibly important in shipping and agriculture, therefore the entire economy. It is the highest ever. The 2007 “China Commodity Boom” was higher adjusted for inflation, but that was part of an economic boom. My understanding is that U.S. refineries are operating at close to maximum capacity. That some “normal” maintenance shutdowns have been pushed off. Can this continue? Are there risks even to the domestic system, let alone the global system? Ukraine’s attacks on Russia have also worked to push diesel prices higher.

It is far too late to wonder why no one bothered refilling the reserve when we could have.

About 125 million barrels have been extracted from the reserve since the start of the war. We are sitting at 285 million barrels as of last week, but the big question is what is the practical limit to how much can be withdrawn? Without a doubt it cannot be drained to zero and retain structural integrity. How close are we to risking structural integrity? How much more can be released?

During the first phase of the war, globally, reserves played a key role in containing oil prices and ensuring the refining systems were working relatively efficiently.

Without that, this could get much worse, and more quickly than markets have been pricing in.

Bottom Line

Oil and rates seem as important or more important than compute spend to markets and the economy. It is kind of refreshing, but unfortunately the risk/reward in both of those assets is geared towards more pain (higher bond yields and higher oil prices). Yes, I’m mildly bullish bonds (especially compute bonds on an all-in yield basis), but only for a trade, until something changes. The oil situation may get worse far faster than I expected.

Get ready for the Fed and Warsh’s difficult task, Never Forget!

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 14:00

If Dems Win The House: Data Centers, Nuclear, Venezuela Oil Deal Likely Targets

With polling favoring Democrats to win a House majority in the fall and two months till US midterms Nov. 3 (where BofA's Michael Hartnett expects a market rout in case of a Democratic sweep), Dems have begun to preview priorities should they win back the gavel.

Earlier this week, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), who won a crowded primary in August for Florida’s 20th congressional district, vowed if re-elected to help Democrats block Trump’s agreement over Venezuelan oil production. Lobbyists are already beginning prepwork in anticipation of industry executives being subject to congressional probes or subpoenas, Politico reported.

Winning back the House would give Democrats the ability to govern committee schedules, set investigative agendas, and leverage subpoenas. In the energy sphere, it is unlikely that we we see as hefty a climate focus as in the 117th Congress. Any clean energy focus will be instead from an affordability lens, i.e. how an “all of the above” energy approach helps lower electricity costs. Trump energy dealmaking, in particular equity stakes in companies, will also get attention from Democrats. 

Below, courtesy of Bridge DiCosmo and James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, we look at some of the likely oversight targets for a Democratic House:

Oil companies and profit margins likely back in the spotlight.

When Democrats last had control of the House in the 117th Congress from January 2021-23, the House Oversight environment subcommittee under then-chair Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) held at least three hearings in which executives of ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron, and Shell were called to testify. Much of the scrutiny then was around climate disinformation. This time around, Trump’s ties with the oil sector are likely to be front and center of oversight investigations, with a focus on how companies have benefited from Trump administration regulatory rollbacks. We may see an uptick in Democratic support for windfall profits tax proposals like S.4111, introduced earlier this year by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R), though they won’t go anywhere.

Clean energy focus may center on Trump agencies’ efforts to block wind and solar, and pull grant funds.

Renewables focus will likely be in two areas: the Trump administration’s efforts to block or stall wind and solar projects and the ongoing legal fight over termination of Department of Energy (DOE) grants. Specifically, we would anticipate some hearings and letters examining the Pentagon’s and Federal Aviation Administration's reviews of land-based wind projects to ensure they do not impair national security or military operations. A federal district court in Oregon last month ordered the agencies to lift the freeze on such projects. The administration’s clawback of some $7.6 billion in grant funds for clean energy projects is likely to be another core focus for Dems. Language in the Energy Bills Relief Act, H.R. 7977, a massive Democratic energy messaging bill introduced earlier this year, would block the DOE or Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from terminating future grants based on changes in administration policy direction. Similarly, the Democrats’ energy bill would prohibit “burdensome procedural requirements” for renewable projects.

Venezuela oil deal already drawing Democratic opposition.

The Trump administration’s brokering of a deal for U.S. majority control of 17 Venezuelan oilfields totaling up to 65 billion bbl in proven reserves is already prompting sabre-rattling from Democrats. According to a White House fact sheet, the partnership with private oil producer North American Blue Energy Partners would give the U.S. government off-take rights for 20% of the company’s Venezuela production and right of first refusal for the remaining 80%. “Let’s be clear: this isn’t a win,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a post on X. The fact that the deal would give the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital a 35% equity stake in a non-U.S. oil company is likely to emerge as a particular sore spot for Democrats.

More Democratic scrutiny over Trump critical minerals policy.

On one hand, the need to diversify critical minerals supply chains away from China is one of the few areas of general bipartisan consensus in Washington energy policy. However, the disagreements occur over the “how to” part. Trump’s array of investments giving the U.S. government an equity stake in critical minerals companies has not been popular with Democrats. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) Aug. 7 asked the Government Accountability Office congressional watchdog to launch a probe into the administration taking equity stakes in mining companies. And 54 House Democrats in an Aug. 17 letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent laid out broader concerns with the administration’s critical minerals trade and investment focus. Those concerns range from transparency to labor and human rights to “insufficient congressional oversight,” so expect the latter to ramp up considerably should the Dems win back the gavel.

Democrats’ support for nuclear has widened, but NRC oversight could become a point of contention. Surging electricity demand is shifting Democrats toward stronger support for increasing nuclear capacity. Earlier this year, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a directive to boost his state’s already large fleet. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a bill to increase New Jersey’s nuclear generation mix by 2028, lifting a longtime de facto moratorium on new builds in the state. There are a number of nuclear bills introduced this year with bipartisan backing. However, an overhaul of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and subsequent rulemakings aimed at scaling down overly burdensome licensing processes across the nuclear lifecycle have not gone over well with some congressional Democrats. The White House terminated then-Democratic Commissioner Christopher Hanson in 2025, prompting Democratic criticisms about the NRC’s independence. The administration’s proposal to license non-commercial reactors through the Departments of Energy and Defense has also drawn fire from Democratic lawmakers. This could be a focus of oversight hearings. And Democrats have also raised concerns over whether an NRC steering committee gives the White House too much influence over the NRC, an independent commission. Worth noting, the anticipated chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which oversees the NRC, is Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who earlier this year raised concerns about the agency’s independence.

Expect heightened pressure for regulatory safeguards for data centers.

While congressional Democrats are far from lined up behind the idea of a moratorium on data center construction, we would expect a Democratic House to put pressure on the administration for more environmental and regulatory safeguards.  The NYT reported that former president Barack Obama urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to assemble a clear framework for a public conversation about A.I. policy, and also suggested that candidates running for president in 2028 ought to make A.I. one of their “central agendas” and “have a very clear plan” for responding to safety and economic concerns around the technology.

Source: NYT

Elsewhere, a number of Democrats are still backing the Ratepayer Protection Act, H.R. 9340, that would require states to consider establishing a federal standard to ensure data centers foot the bill for costs of grid upgrades needed for their facilities. The bill passed unanimously out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee in July. Others, including likely E&C chairman Pallone, have suggested it doesn’t go far enough. Pallone during a Sept. 3 E&C hearing of the environment subcommittee on Safe Drinking Water Act reauthorization legislation reiterated a call for “real, substantial guardrails” to limit environmental impacts. Pallone backs a moratorium on new data centers absent such guardrails, but has not introduced legislation on the issue. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in June introduced a House version, H.R. 9442, of a Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), S. 4214. Neither bill has a Republican co-sponsor.

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 13:25

Don't Raise Rates Based On A PCE That Will Be Re-Written September 30th

Authored by Richard Roberts via RealClearMarkets,

The Federal Open Market Committee votes on interest rates September 16.

Two weeks later, on September 30, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will revise the PCE price index, the inflation measure the Fed targets, back to 2021 and publish the August reading in the same release.

Governor Christopher Waller has already said which way one of the changes is expected to go. On September 3 he said the change in the way the Commerce Department measures fees paid to stock-market traders and related professionals could lower 12-month PCE inflation by a few tenths of a percentage point. He called it "a welcome measurement correction."

Three FOMC voters -- Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan -- dissented in July in favor of a quarter-point increase. The Committee held 9 to 3.

So the inflation number being used to argue for higher rates is the number about to be rewritten.

Two Ways To Be Wrong

There are two possible mistakes here, and they do not cost the same.

Raise on the 16th and be wrong, and the Fed has tightened on a reading the government changes 14 days later. It is a credibility problem that would be hard to explain.

Wait, and be wrong, and the Fed can raise rates at its next meeting, on October 28.

That is six weeks.

If the revision confirms the hawks' case, their argument will be stronger in October than it is today, and it will rest on a number the government has just updated and is prepared to defend.

One mistake is hard to explain. The other costs six weeks.

Nothing This Month Forces The Choice

The case for urgency is being assumed more than demonstrated.

Core PCE inflation is too high at 3.3 percent. But it is not accelerating.

On Waller's own figures, three-month annualized core PCE inflation has fallen steadily, from 4.76 percent in February to 3.05 percent through July. He acknowledged that the level remains above the Fed's 2 percent goal, and called the fall "a considerable improvement."

The Dallas Fed's trimmed-mean measure, which removes the largest price changes in both directions, was running at roughly 2.3 percent over the same 12 months.

That is not proof that inflation is already at target. It is evidence that the underlying trend is less alarming than the headline core number suggests.

And some of the difference comes from categories whose measurement is unusually difficult.

Waller has singled out nonmarket services prices because they are imputed rather than drawn from actual transactions. He said those prices have long been a problem for him, and that excluding this one factor, underlying inflation is doing better than the core numbers suggest.

The pending BEA change goes directly at one of these problems. Legal services is priced today with a consumer index the Bureau itself says has produced "erratic changes that cannot be corroborated."

That matters because this is not a case in which the Fed is choosing between today's number and the possibility that the number might someday change.

The government has already scheduled the change.

Sit Tight

By October 28 the Committee will have something it does not have on September 16: the revised historical series and the August reading together.

The case for a quarter-point increase will be stronger or weaker on a number somebody is willing to defend.

None of this says rates are too high.

It says something narrower. When the government is about to rewrite the inflation series on which the decision rests, waiting one meeting is not indecision. It is the more defensible policy choice.

The 30th comes first. Then vote.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 12:50

Trump Admin Weighs Emergency Powers To Boost Refining As Diesel Tops $6

With national average diesel prices above $6 a gallon and regular gasoline firmly above $4.20, the Trump administration faces mounting pressure to deploy every available policy tool to contain fuel costs ahead of the midterm elections. Disruptions tied to the Russia-Ukraine war and turmoil in the Gulf are intensifying the global refining super squeeze.

Reuters reports late Friday afternoon that the Trump administration is considering whether to use the Defense Production Act to expand U.S. oil refining capacity as the Iran conflict drives up fuel prices.

According to the report:

The proposal to use the act came up during a recent meeting between President Donald Trump and nearly a dozen U.S. refiners, where White House officials sought to determine how federal support could best be used to add capacity, the sources said. No final decisions were made, and participants left the meeting with the expectation that the conversations would continue, according to the sources.

However, expanding refining capacity comes as U.S. refineries are already operating near their limits. The latest data shows that utilization has topped 98%. 

The discussions follow Trump's April decision authorizing support for domestic petroleum production, refining and logistics under the Defense Production Act. That directive identified financing constraints, long construction timelines, permitting delays and supply-chain limitations as obstacles to expanding capacity.

"America's refining capacity is essential to ensuring the United States has continuous access to secure, affordable, and reliable energy. Expanding that capacity is a top priority for the President and his energy team, who are evaluating concrete options to increase our refining capacity through regulatory reform, faster permitting, and additional investment," Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told the outlet.

Reuters pointed out: 

A proposed new refinery in Brownsville, Texas, has emerged as a test case for Trump's call to expand U.S. refining capacity. It was unclear whether the project would receive any Defense Production Act funding. 

America First Refining plans to build a 168,000-barrel-per-day facility at the Port of Brownsville, which Trump announced in March as the first new U.S. refinery in nearly 50 years. ⁠The project is backed by India's Reliance Industries, which has agreed to a 20-year deal to buy the refinery's output.

In March, JPMorgan's head of commodity research, Natasha Kaneva, outlined six policy levers the Trump administration could pull to contain oil prices. Some, including Jones Act waivers and Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases, have already been used. Other options include export restrictions and waiving federal fuel taxes. 

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 12:15

"I Ain't Playin'": Cognizant, Cloudera PERM Filings And H-1B Processing Suspended

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

The Labor Department's inspector general said Tuesday that federal officials have suspended PERM filings for tech company Cognizant and software company Cloudera and halted H-1B processing for both firms.

The logo of U.S. multinational information technology consulting and outsourcing company Cognizant in the Alpine resort of Davos during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting on Jan. 20, 2026. Ina Fassender/AFP via Getty Images

Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito posted the announcements on X throughout the day on Sept. 8. He credited the moves in part to Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, as well as to a White House anti-fraud task force.

"Fighting fraud is a TEAM SPORT," D'Esposito wrote. "@Sonderling47 and I are for real. @Cognizant's PERM filings are suspended. @DOLOIG is on the hunt. Threats to American workers will NOT be tolerated. Alongside @WHFraudTF, we're following facts, fraud and finances. Handcuffs await."

Hours later, he added Cloudera.

"One more," he wrote. "@cloudera: PERM filings SUSPENDED."

He followed up on the announcements later in the day.

"Cognizant. Cloudera. H1-B processing suspended. @Sonderling47 and I ain't playin'," he said.

PERM, or Program Electronic Review Management, is the Labor Department process employers use before sponsoring workers for employment-based green cards in the EB-2 and EB-3 categories. The department must determine whether able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers exist for the job before approving a PERM application. H-1B visas are temporary visas for specialty occupations. They generally last three years and can be extended to six.

Cognizant and Cloudera did not immediately return a request for comment.

In July, the Labor Department and the inspector general's office opened what officials referred to as a "major investigation" into alleged fraud in the H-1B and PERM systems, including possible human trafficking.

In a statement at the time, the two offices said they had "uncovered widespread schemes in which employers and labor brokers submitted fraudulent applications, exploited foreign workers through coercive wage-kickback arrangements, and undercut American workers by flooding the market with below-wage labor."

D'Esposito told Fox Business on July 8 that "dozens of subpoenas" had been issued by investigators.

"This is another example where fraud is fueling violent crime," he said. "Much of the visa and the human trafficking that we see when it comes to this foreign labor is tied to cartels, is tied to transnational gangs, and this is the work that we should be doing, not only to make America safe again, but to make America more affordable again."

He said the work was "not just people working in factories or actual labor," adding that some cases involve "people working in medical facilities and doctors' offices that are actually putting people in harm's way."

Cloudera was already involved in a separate federal case. The Labor Department announced in May 2026 that it had suspended Cloudera's PERM applications for 180 days after an April lawsuit.

The Justice Department sued Santa Clara, California-based Cloudera, alleging it discriminated against U.S. workers while using PERM to sponsor foreign employees. The complaint said the company directed American applicants to an internal email address that blocked outside messages.

"Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said at the time. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs."

She said the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division prioritizes protecting American workers from unlawful discrimination in favor of foreign visa workers.

Sonderling has served as acting labor secretary since April, and President Donald Trump said June 29 that he intended to nominate him permanently. A Senate committee advanced the nomination July 30 on a 12 - 11 party-line vote. D'Esposito's posts treat Sonderling as a partner in the enforcement effort.

The suspensions land amid other related policy initiatives.

The Department of Homeland Security proposed ending the 60-day grace period that now lets some temporary visa holders, including H-1B workers, remain in the country after a job ends. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote that once a person no longer meets the conditions of status, "such status, as well as the authorization to remain in the United States, should definitively cease and the impacted alien should immediately depart the United States (unless otherwise authorized to lawfully remain in the United States)."

H-1B use remains concentrated, with a Pew Research survey showing that India accounts for about 73 percent of H-1B workers by country of birth, while China represents about 12 percent.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 11:40

Yemen Blame Game Begins: "Saudi-American F**k Up Of Epic Proportions"

An official affiliated with Saudi-backed militias in Yemen told CNN that the Houthis "committed everything they had – waves upon waves of fighters... along with their available ballistic missiles and weapons."

"But the air support never came," the source said in reference to the fact that the Saudi-backed side rapidly folded and retreated in just days last week. "And Mocha has now fallen." The blame game has begun after a mere 36 hours has seen the Saudi coalition fracture on the ground, and the finger-pointing is likely to go on in the halls of government, now as Saudi territory continues coming under direct missile and drone threat.

Handout via Reuters

Another regional source told CNN on Thursday that "The failure this time is not with the Yemenis" but that "it's a disaster made in DC and Riyadh."

According to some further key lines and expletives:

The regional source told CNN that it was "a complete failure of political leadership" amid fierce squabbling and delayed decision-making in Riyadh.

"There was not one air strike throughout the day yesterday (by Saudi support forces), although there were minute-by-minute updates," the regional source added. "It’s a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions."

There are at the same time widespread reports that the Iran-backed Houthis have seized US made M-ATVs and MRAP armored vehicles. 

Dudes in sandals breaking the coalition with lighting speed...

The Houthis are literally fighting in sandals and are routing a military provisioned by (directly) KSA and (indirectly) the US. https://t.co/DxcTorDBO1

— History Speaks (@History__Speaks) September 11, 2026

Amr Al-Bidh, the top official of Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council (STC), has also been quoted in the CNN report, explaining that the Houthis "don’t need to use advanced weapons to close Bab al-Mandeb. They can just use a cannon on a car."

He added "It’s a leverage that they have without using advanced weapons. And they will keep it."

All of this has further emboldened the Houthis to take the fight directly to Saudi territory, amid the ongoing "siege for siege" policy. Riyadh has long sought to impose a brutal blockade on Houthi-controlled ports. The group has so far indicated it intends to allow most international vessels to traverse the Red Sea, but will attack Saudi or Israeli-linked shipping.

There are fresh Sunday reports of another ballistic missile attack on a Saudi base:

Yemen's Houthi group on Sunday claimed that it had launched a ballistic missile and drone attack on a Saudi military base, as fighting between the group and Riyadh-backed Yemeni government forces intensified. 

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the attack targeted the Sharurah base in southern Saudi Arabia, including “weapons depots and command and control centers that are managing the aggression against our nation and people”.

Saree declared that the strikes had hit their targets and threatened further bigger strikes deeper inside the kingdom if the Saudis keep up their military operations in Yemen.

gonna tell my kids this was Toyotathon https://t.co/0mYxwFDk7U

— Luke Metro (@luke_metro) September 12, 2026

Saudi coalition aerial assets have been belatedly at work: "On Sunday, the Yemeni military said its air force had conducted three strikes against Houthi positions and barracks in the Taiz region," MEE reports.

Al Jazeera writes: Analysts are calling the Iran-backed Houthi group’s victories the most significant regional development since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran. The offensives could be particularly damaging for Saudi Arabia and its oil exports.

The Yemeni military announced on X, "Air force of the armed forces targeted positions and barracks of the terrorist Houthi group with three air strikes" in the Taiz region.

Meanwhile, President Trump has said the Houthis are in contact with him and have pledged to let ships through the Bab Al-Mandab Strait. He said to reporters Saturday while meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin, "The Houthis called us, and they don't want to fight with us. They don’t want us to go after them."  He further explained that "they would much prefer not having us involved:" and so "they are letting most ships go through." The president did acknowledged they do have a ban on Saudi vessels, however. But the Houthi threat of closing the energy transit chokepoint lingers heavily.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 11:05

Attack Drone Hits Warsaw-Bound Passenger Train Near Polish Border, Raising NATO Spillover Risk

Western media outlets reported early Sunday that a Russian attack drone struck a civilian locomotive on the Kiev-to-Warsaw route just two kilometers from Poland's border. Whether a false-flag operation or an actual Russian strike, the incident suggests mounting spillover risks near NATO territory ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter.

🚨 BREAKING: Russian drone targeted a passenger train on the border with Poland.

"Russian barbarians are at your gate, dear partners. Act now: throw the full weight of your sanctions at Putin’s aggressive regime," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Sybiha wrote in response. pic.twitter.com/VsgQ2UGtPb

— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) September 13, 2026

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha responded to the incident on X, saying:

Russia's barbaric strikes at the Ukraine-Poland border in Yahodyn are not just a continuation of its attacks on our state borders. This is Putin's terror "knocking" directly on the doors of the EU and NATO. Russian barbarians are at your gate, dear partners. Act now: throw the full weight of your sanctions at Putin's aggressive regime. Make Moscow feel the consequences of its terror. Not just half-decisions, but uncompromising, powerful steps. Full trade embargo. Full entry bans. Full sanctions on the military-industrial complex. Putin needs to understand that his barbarism will be met with decisive action that increases the cost of war for him to an unacceptable level. This is the only way to stop him.

Russia’s barbaric strikes at the Ukraine-Poland border in Yahodyn are not just a continuation of its attacks on our state borders.

This is Putin’s terror “knocking” directly on the doors of the EU and NATO. Russian barbarians are at your gate, dear partners.

Act now: throw the…

— Andrii Sybiha 🇺🇦 (@andrii_sybiha) September 13, 2026

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said there was no border violation but described the strike as a Russian escalation. Polish authorities identified the weapons involved as Geran-5 jet-powered drones.

Polish railways said the train carried 208 people. Ukraine's railway operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, said an advance warning allowed the crew to respond and that no one was injured. The service was delayed for six hours.

Russia has attacked European politicians right on the Polish border.

According to media reports, former British Prime Minister Johnson, Merz advisor Günter Sautter, national security advisors from several European countries, members of the Bundestag, diplomats, and academics… pic.twitter.com/XutCKSJ85I

— Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 (@jurgen_nauditt) September 13, 2026

Separately, Lithuania temporarily closed Vilnius airport Sunday as NATO scrambled fighter jets following a possible drone sighting.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out, "Almost every week this summer brought new reports of drone incursions over NATO's eastern frontier, the airspace over which is now a front line."

Last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that attacks on Europe's borders had intensified, as some intelligence agencies warned of a buildup toward a direct attack by Russia on a NATO member country. She warned that NATO faces "an escalating campaign of threats" and "hybrid warfare."

* * *

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 10:30

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

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skills Shortage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropic Bans Israeli Account Over Iran, Gulf Social Media Citizen Profiling

Via The Cradle,

An operation run by or on behalf of the Israeli-Singaporean commercial intelligence vendor S2T Unlocking Cyberspace used Claude models to map, classify, and profile social media users across Iran and the Persian Gulf, according to a threat intelligence report published by Anthropic on 11 September.

(Photo credit: AP / Vahid Salemi)

The platform recorded the locations of users, sorted them as supporters or opponents of their governments, and grouped populations into six demographic categories covering urban, clerical, military, youth, diaspora, and rural.

Its output was written in formal Arabic and styled as official government communications, with sentiment scores broken down by Gulf nationality alongside recommended counternarratives.

The actor fed the model batches of roughly 25 social media posts at a time and directed it to return each poster's demographic group, location, and political leaning, with confidence ratings attached to every finding.

Anthropic identified a second workstream of more than 255 fabricated social media accounts, which the company said indicated the actor was assembling a stock of fake profiles for later deployment.

In a separate task, the actor directed the model to generate posts for online personas in Persian, Arabic, English, and German, intended to pass as members of both pro- and anti-government Iranian populations.

The company said its findings independently corroborate a February 2023 investigation by the journalism network Forbidden Stories, which documented an S2T surveillance product described in a company brochure recovered from leaked Colombian military files.

Anthropic said the capabilities in that brochure map closely onto the behavior it observed.

Anthropic added that it identified the activity at its pilot stage and found no evidence that later stages of the surveillance chain described by Forbidden Stories were used against real targets before the account was banned.

Israel has invested heavily in cyber capabilities, signals intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced surveillance - a technological expansion that shifted the balance of its intelligence collection away from recruited human agents.

Mossad chief Roman Gofman dismissed two of the agency's most senior officials in August over the failed plot to topple the Iranian government earlier this year.

One had run the intelligence directorate since December while the other headed the Mossad's Iran division, and both were among the architects of a plan to bring down the Iranian government by igniting nationwide protests and supplying military and communication equipment to opposition groups and insurgents.

Channel 12 said the plan was drawn up in coordination with Washington and was meant to unfold under joint Israeli-US airstrikes.

The New York Times (NYT) reported on 22 March that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had embraced the Mossad's promise of a popular revolt when he urged US President Donald Trump into the war, and had grown frustrated when no uprising came.

Before the war on Iran, then-Mossad chief David Barnea had told Netanyahu and Trump that once Iran's leaders were killed, his agency could galvanize the Iranian opposition into renewed mass unrest, swiftly producing regime change.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 08:10

"Something's Going To Happen": DHS Chief Says Lefty Ilhan Omar "Married Her Brother", Floats Deportation

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said "something's going to happen" in an ongoing investigation involving unhinged leftist Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), speaking with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas. 

Mullin said that Omar married her brother as part of an immigration-fraud scheme and raised the prospect of deportation. 

"Something's going to happen. This is an ongoing investigation. We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States. We know he lives now in London," Mullin told Johnson on the sidelines of the GOP midterm convention. 

Mullin continued:

There may be more to this — the whole family migration, and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with. But all of this, we're investigating.

Here's what I want to make sure we do: if we actually move a case forward, it's not a political case. It's an actual case because they did things wrong.

If you decided to break the law or lie on the information you gave to the United States — to be able to come into the United States, through either asylum or because you were just wanting to seek a better life — but you didn't tell us who you actually were, you lied about certain things about your application.

Those things, there’s no expiration to that. If we can prove it then, that you shouldn't have been here in the first place, we'll deport you.

And so we're looking at — it's more than just her case. We're looking at a lot of cases that are very similar to this, that we feel like there may have been fraud from the get-go.

But when we move forward, it's not political; it's because you chose to break the nation's laws.

And I've said this multiple times and I continue to say it. I don't make the laws anymore. I'm in charge of enforcing the laws, and I will not pick and choose which laws I'm going to enforce and which laws I'm not. I'm going to enforce all of them regardless of who you are. Regardless if you're Omar or some other individual in that community. We're going to enforce it equally.

🚨BREAKING: DHS Secretary Just Confirmed That Rep. Illhan Omar Did Marry Her Brother

“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States. There may be more to this, possibly some illegal activity."

I asked DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin about… pic.twitter.com/BuZGdpiGjJ

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 11, 2026

The anti-American congresswoman has long rejected the allegation. She says she legally married British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 and told MPR News in 2016 that claims he was her brother were "absurd and offensive."

Ilhan Omar calls Americans dumb idiots.

Ilhan Omar previously said, "Some people did something on 9/11".@FBIDirectorKash should launch an investigation into her alleged marriage to her brother to "get him papers."pic.twitter.com/3N4Mksrfyl

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 23, 2025

Deportation would present a major legal hurdle for the Trump administration because Omar is a naturalized US citizen. She obtained citizenship in 2000, years before the disputed marriage.

Any effort to remove her would require Mullin and his investigators to have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that she participated in the immigration-fraud scheme; denaturalization requires proof that she obtained citizenship unlawfully, including through material fraud or concealment.

A 2020 Daily Mail report cited Somali blogger and community leader Abdihakim Osman, who alleged that Omar had married her brother, Ahmed Elmi, to allow him to obtain cheap student loans in the United States. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 07:35

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

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voters have not been persuaded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Middle East Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gesture of courtesy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The highest state authorities were aware'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued denial

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

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

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

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

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

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 2, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making The World Great One Nation At A Time

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

West Virginia Joins Nuclear Campus Race With Waste Storage In Focus

West Virginia’s Governor Patrick Morrisey announced that the state had signed a memorandum of understanding with the DOE, joining Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah as the sixth contender for a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus (NLIC).

West Virginia’s energy future will cover all the bases! 🔌

“You’ve heard me talk a lot about coal. You’ve heard we talk a lot about gas. And I said, just you wait, nuclear is coming.” —Gov. @MorriseyWV pic.twitter.com/J4LkLT8wmW

— West Virginia Prosperity Group (@wvprosperity) September 9, 2026

The state was not included on July’s initial shortlist, which postured itself as the final roster that the DOE would downselect from. Morrisey’s took to "working the phones" to emphasize their abundance of skilled workers and industrial capabilities, but the state’s willingness to accommodate spent nuclear fuel is likely all it took for the DOE to open the door to further discussions.

Marla Morales, the acting deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and high-level waste disposition at the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, recently made it explicitly clear what we had already come to the conclusion on in our previous coverage of the NLIC program: it's all about handling the used nuclear fuel.

At the NECX conference, Morales stated, “One of the things we knew from the beginning of this was that we had to be open and transparent with what we were talking about. We had to make sure that everyone understood: You can want all the fancy reactors you want; you're going to have waste at the end of this. It has to go somewhere. So, by the fact that we started the conversation with waste, it really helped frame our narrative to begin with.”

Clearly, any state that started getting uncomfortable when the DOE started asking about what they intend to do with all the used nuclear fuel that would be produced by their programs, was simply asked to stop pretending and please leave. This brings to a close the suspicions for why states like Texas and New Mexico are not included. 

The DOE’s initial selection followed 28 applications from 26 states. NLICs would combine enrichment, fuel fabrication, recycling and waste disposition, potentially alongside reactors, manufacturing and data centers.

An individual campus could attract up to $50 billion in investment and create nearly 25,000 jobs.

The expanding NLIC list stands alongside an expanding Nuclear Energy Launch Pad (NELP) program. The NELP is one of the many other programs under the DOE intended to speed up nuclear development. The program recently saw a dramatic expansion from an initial four projects to now over 15 projects across over a dozen companies 

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 21:35

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

Via The Cradle

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

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

Image source: US Air Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Critics Keep Getting Wrong About Capitalism

Authored by Vincent Geloso via FEE,

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

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published by CapX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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