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The Alchemy Of Wealth Taxation

Authored by Robert Blumen via The Mises Institute,

“Transmutation” is the process of changing one substance, element, or form into another.

We owe this word to the ancient pursuit of alchemy, which sought to accomplish the artificial production of gold from base metals. While it is now considered a pseudo-science, in our rational age, its aspirations survive in currently popular proposals for taxing billionaires.

The most advanced of these proposals is California Prop 40. Appearing on this fall’s ballot, if passed, would levy a “one time” balance sheet tax of five percent tax on taxpayers with ten or more figures to their name. US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), in “Why I Support a Billionaire Wealth Tax,” likes the idea. He likes it a lot. But, unlike CA-40’s one-time imposition, Khanna’s projects the results for at least ten years:

This [tax] will raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. This is enough to establish a $60,000 salary floor for every public school teacher in America, cap child care at 7 percent of a family’s income, and restore the $1 trillion stripped from Medicaid and the ACA, with a $3,000 check left over for every household under $150,000.

The intention of these plans is to increase access to goods and services for those at the lower end of the income tier, at the expense of the wealthy. The revenue from CA 40, should there be any, is earmarked for,

Medi-Cal and other health coverage programs for low- and moderate-income individuals; health care access, benefits, and services; public education from K-14; and food assistance programs such as CalFresh, CalFAP, CalFood, or California’s Universal Meals Program for school meals.

Billionaires have a lot; working people, not so much. Take from one, give to the other. Make those at the bottom of the pile better off at the expense of those at the top. How hard can this be? As often is the case in economic matters, intended results differ from actual ones.

To determine if these measures achieve their stated goal, we must first ask: “What is the composition of the wealth being taxed?” The point is not just to transfer money. Advocates of these schemes want to increase the consumption of important goods, such as health care and housing. Where, exactly, will they get those things? Billionaires do not have them in large quantities. While the average billionaire might have a few houses, a private jet, a yacht, and some nice cars, their net worth is not a warehouse. Their net worth does not consist of hospitals, MRI machines, or pharmaceuticals.

Rep. Khanna’s arithmetic might be correct, or at least as correct as his assumptions. Where he runs into problems is in thinking that the net worth of billionaires can be transmuted. Stockpiles of unused consumer goods, such as health care, and housing, do not exist in the quantities that Khanna wants to provide. Likewise there do not exist large pools of the types of unemployed skilled labor needed in those fields. The super rich do not have on their payroll thousands of idle doctors, nurses, and teachers. Any trained health care providers whose license is in good order can find work if they wish to do so.

The key point that backers of these proposals miss is that the net worth of the wealthy consists almost entirely of capital goods or assets which are financial claims on capital goods. Capital goods are tools and infrastructure. Most of the durable wealth in the world consists of capital goods. A wealthy society means a society that has accumulated vast amounts of capital goods.

The BEA’s Fixed Assets Accounts reports the value of the US gross capital stock held by businesses, government, and households in 2024 at around $92 trillion. This total includes consumer fixed assets, consisting of residential housing, of $33 trillion. Whether housing is a capital good or a durable consumer good is debated, but, outside of housing almost all long duration wealth consists of capital goods.

Capital goods and labor are the variable factors in the production of consumer goods. A higher standard of living means more consumer goods per capita. This requires a greater concentration of capital goods per unit of labor.

All of the preceding points are true because capital goods are scarce, in the economic sense. Scarcity means that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good.

Factories, oil wells, and pharmaceutical plants are not the things that Khanna wants the tax recipients to have more of. The things he does want, such as medical care, schools and affordable housing, are scarce goods. At any time existing flows of these goods are consumed by someone. Taxing rich people and forcing them to sell assets does not immediately create any more of them.

To be clear on what can and can not happen, imposition of a tax can force rich people to sell some of their capital goods to pay a tax. Government actors can, then, take the monetary proceeds from the sale and use them to buy consumer goods that were already procured. Those consumer goods were procured with labor and other capital goods. It is these consumer goods that the government provides to the poor.

A tax cannot transmute capital goods into consumption goods. The government can only purchase consumer goods that were already produced, with the use of other scarce labor and capital goods.

Many popular criticisms of these taxation schemes circle around the target but fail to make a direct hit because they do not address the fundamental issues of the scarcity and heterogeneity of both capital and consumer goods. These critiques such as:

• rich people do not keep their entire net worth in cash;

• billionaires would have to sell off some of their assets to pay the tax;

• for every seller, there must be a buyer;

• for positions in the necessary size, there are a limited number of potential buyers

All true, without quite grasping the important part about why they are true. 

If the beneficiaries of the tax receive funds are able to obtain more health care, they will not be displacing billionaires. Billionaires do not have stockpiles of—or consume billions of dollars of—health care. The working-class person who receives the tax benefit will displace the marginal existing consumer. Who is that consumer? That depends on which margin can the consumer be most easily displaced. That margin might be the price. Or it could be waiting time, connections, or the ability to work the system. If California is able to use revenue from this tax to hire a doctor from Missouri, then patients in MO will have one less doctor.

But wait—if there is more money to be spent on those goods won’t the free market economy respond by producing more of them? Yes, but that requires more capital goods and skilled labor. Those things that the rich were forced to sell to pay their “fair share.”

Saving is the source of capital accumulation.

This form of taxation would disincentivize saving in favor of consumption. Over the long term fewer consumption goods will be produced.

Another problem with Khanna’s ten-year projection is to assume a sustainable recurring revenue projection each year.

Did he think that the base net worth that is subject to the tax will regenerate itself each year? One might similarly ask, do capital goods reproduce themselves without savings?

Can the first year’s haul be relied on, as Khanna does, for ten years? Probably not. That view ignores responses that would defeat the goal of the tax.

First, the rich taxpayer might have to sell 8-9 percent of his net worth to pay the capital gains tax and have five percent left. In some years after tax return on a portfolio is nine percent but on average, it’s not. The investor’s base would not recover year after year of nine percent compounded erosion.

Second, Khanna assumes that asset prices would remain unchanged by this tax. Advocates of wealth taxation look at the net worth of billionaires as a fixed number of dollars. This is not so. The monetary value of businesses and assets is variable, not fixed. Each and every asset has a price, which changes from minute to minute in response to market conditions. According to Khanna, the $1 billion marker is only a proof of concept: the eventual tax boundary should be $50 million. As the tax cutoff goes lower, there would be more sellers and fewer potential buyers. If enough people want to, or are forced to sell at the same time, the only adjustment is higher real cash balances and lower asset prices.

Absent transmutation, there is a way for society to have more consumption goods.

This is called “production.”

Production is where labor and capital goods are provided as inputs into a process of manufacturing, moving, or arranging, according to a plan, to yield something useful at the other end.

That is the way—the only way—for everyone, including those in the lower income tiers—to have more of the things that the tax cannot provide.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 22:35

CNN Panel Melts Down As Democrats Blast GOP Over El-Sayed Ad For Using His Full Name

Following his Michigan Senate primary win, Republicans launched attack ads against Abdul El-Sayed. The ad opens with a narrator branding him "the most radical Senate candidate in America," shows him standing alongside left-wing streamer Hasan Piker - who once said Americans deserved 9/11 - and cuts to El-Sayed declaring himself "pretty damn dangerous." But Democrats and the liberal media are focusing on the fact that the ad uses his full name, "Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed," and accusing the ad of being Islamophobic.

The NRSC debuts first attack ad in the US Senate Michigan race against Abdul El-Sayed pic.twitter.com/d3N3RB3CGT

— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) August 5, 2026

Debate over the ad got heated on CNN's NewsNight after guest host John Berman opened the segment with a clip of CNN's Manu Raju pressing Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) on the ad.

Raju asked Scott whether the full-name treatment was meant to signal to voters that El-Sayed is Muslim. Scott denied it. "Not at all," he said. "He says he's the most dangerous candidate you can find. He's right. We should trust his words, not ours." Pressed again on why the ad would not simply use the name El-Sayed goes by, Scott reached for a comparison to his own name. "I go by Timothy Eugene, and so I get called that all the time," he said. "It's about what he stands for."

"And we're going to focus and bring attention to the fact that not only is he sympathetic for Hamas, not only does he run around with Hasan Piker - someone who said that Americans deserved 9/11 - he should be held account for exactly where he stands and what he's for," Scott added.

RAJU: Why use El-Sayed's full name in attack ads? Are you trying to say, 'Hint hint, he's Muslim'?

TIM SCOTT: Not at all

RAJU: But why not just use the name he goes by?

TIM SCOTT: Listen, I go by Timothy Eugene. I get called that all the time. pic.twitter.com/p3YrkSYIfF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 9, 2026

Berman was not buying it. "I have never heard Tim Scott referred to as Timothy Eugene in a campaign ad," he said, setting up a panel that spent the next several minutes proving his point in the worst possible way.

El-Sayed himself has not shied away from his whole name. After the NRSC press release, he told his opponent: "If you can't say the name Abdulrahman, keep the name out of your damn mouth! I'll be happy to give you lessons!"

Michigan socialist finally introduces himself with his full name:

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed pic.twitter.com/oCResAMy5y

— Senate Republicans (@NRSC) August 1, 2026

Niall Stanage, an Irish journalist and White House columnist at The Hill, dismissed Scott's comparison as absurd. "The idea that using Tim Scott's full name, unabbreviated, is equivalent to using Abdul El-Sayed's full name is just ludicrous," he said. "It is obviously in El-Sayed's case an appeal to anti-Muslim, anti-Arab sentiment."

But conservative radio host Jason Rantz wasn't buying the idea that El-Sayed's Islamic faith was some kind of secret. "People didn't know he was Muslim until they said his full name," he said sarcastically.

Stanage eventually pivoted to the Biden administration's record, accusing it of "forfeiting concerns for human rights, all the while shoveling weapons to Mr. Netanyahu with which to kill 70,000 Palestinians." That is when the segment stopped being about a Senate race.

"But it always goes back to the Jews, like every single time," Rantz said. "Which is a perfect example of like some of what you're talking about, like the coded language and whatnot. El-Sayed has brought up AIPAC, and brings it up absolutely every single time he can, because he wants to talk about the Jews."

Stanage rejected the framing. According to him, AIPAC draws criticism "because they support the most right-wing government in Israel's history." Jesse Arm, executive director of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, mocked Stanage by saying, "we understand that Ireland cares a lot about Palestine." Stanage swung back. "Because we don't like people militarily subjugating and occupying people!" he said.

Berman stepped in and gave each panelist ten seconds to land a point before the crosstalk could swallow the segment again.

"People in Michigan are actually scared of Abdul El-Sayed, not because of Israel or whatever. No one cares about Israel. He's going to rip away Obamacare," Arm argued. "He's going to rip away private health insurance from the 66 percent of Americans who have it." He also pointed to Rep. Rashida Tlaib's primary attacks on Stevens over her support from General Mills and General Motors, calling it the kind of anti-business politics Michigan voters tend to punish.

Stanage argued that those attacks are a distraction from an economic message that has polled well for years, anchored in Medicare for All and reducing money in politics, an idea with appeal across the ideological spectrum. "That combination," he said, "is why he won."

After Niall Stanage goes on an unhinged bender about using Abdul El-Sayed's full name and, @jasonrantz and @Jesse_Leg chime in with a much needed dose of reality on CNN NewsNight:

Stanage: Using El-Sayed's full name is "an appeal to anti-Muslim, anti-Arab sentiment.... [If… pic.twitter.com/4oux3f0DkN

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 11, 2026

Rantz then proved him wrong, pointing out that El-Sayed won the primary "by the skin of his teeth" after once leading Stevens by 10 to 13 points, and Rantz claimed Democrats are conceding behind closed doors that he will lose the general election. This would sink their chances of retaking the Senate.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 22:10

No Fourth Amendment In American Airports?

Authored by M. Walter via AmericanThinker.com,

Do you, as an American citizen, have to hand over your cell phone — along with the access code to open it — upon a (warrantless) demand by a border agent at the airport?

There’s a case grinding through the courts about that right now because one man, a Mr. Sam Tunick, refused.  

Not only did he refuse but he had an app on his phone that triggered its erasure once you keyed in a particular code to open it.  That was the code he gave CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) when they demanded his code to open it.  And then his phone was, indeed, erased right there on the spot, in the hands of the CBP agent.

That’s when CBP got really p***ed off.

According to the reporting on his case, this man was not a criminal.  He was not under suspicion or surveillance for anything, so far as we know. He is not related to Spencer Tunick, an artist who famously creates mass nude photo shoots in public places. He was, in point of fact, a left-wing activist with environmental interests, but, again, without any contact with or prior interest from law enforcement that we know of.

He was just a guy.  Coming home from an international trip (the Dominican Republic.).

You may well be thinking, “A left-wing activist with an erasure code?  Sounds suspicious!”

Let me pause to explain why I don’t think so.

A “right-winger” I know just traveled internationally recently and she traveled with a burner phone to avoid exactly this kind of search in another country.  It was England specifically.  

In England there is no Fourth Amendment and they can search your phone when you land.  They also have no First Amendment and they have terrible censorship laws now.  You can be arrested and jailed for social media posts.  Even some perfectly benign ones, like “Islam is incompatible with Liberty” — that kind of thing.

The Dominican Republic also has no Fourth Amendment and if they simply suspect you have contraband or are engaged in some other illegal activity (so a very wide berth), they have every right to inspect your phone.  Maybe this young man just didn’t want the hassle. Maybe this app was this “left-winger’s” choice instead of a burner, and in the heat of the moment, decided to deploy it once facing our own CPB here in the U.S.

In short, I don’t find it suspicious at all knowing the legal overreach climate we are living in now.  And we certainly can’t be searching American citizens and seizing their devices based on politics alone.  I hope we can all agree on that.

Back to the case:

One attorney, Mike Fox of the Cato Institute characterized Mr. Tunick's situation this way: “This is new, uncharted territory.”

The Supreme Court has never ruled on your Fourth Amendment rights as they specifically relate to your cell phone at American airports/border crossings.  They have ruled on whether or not your phone is searchable in the interior of the United States and the answer is “no” — not without a warrant.

But somehow an American in an American airport on American soil has to surrender his rights to an American customs agent?  What is this sorcery?

Let’s review the Fourth Amendment, in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court has ruled on Fourth Amendment exceptions at border crossings, but not cell phones in particular.  That’s why you have to go through customs and scanners and open your luggage, etc.  We’ve all been doing it forever without a thought.

But your phone ought to be a separate matter entirely, containing as it does, your digital “papers and effects.”  According to the available reporting, there was no “probable cause” to search Mr. Tunick. CPB wasn’t looking for anything specific, which is what a warrant would demand.  They just wanted to go out on a scenic drive, seeing what they could see on his phone.

Hell. No.

The Washington Post just published an op-ed about Mr. Tunick’s case entitled “Your privacy rights don’t disappear at the border,” with the sub-headline, “Congress or the courts need to make clear that a smartphone is not a suitcase.”  It was written by Mike Fox, the attorney mentioned above.

Mr. Fox was also quoted in a CNN article on the case and it sums up his position in both pieces pretty well:

“Obstruction means I’m obstructing some type of investigation, and without any type of warrant or even reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, what investigation am I obstructing?”

The definition of “reasonable” and the deployment of the key code erasure seem to be the real sticking points here, but the larger issue of your cell phone privacy absolutely deserves specific adjudication.

One hopes Mr. Tunick isn’t subjected to a crushing ordeal here, but one does hope that his case makes it to The Supreme Court so we can settle this once and for all.  The other option would be for the Hill to act and pass some legislation making a specific carve out specifying the need for warrants for cell phones, but I’m still choking on the jet fumes from them hurrying out of town for six weeks before they could vote on the Save America Act, so them?  Useful?  On this or any other matter?  That strikes me as a fool’s errand.

There’s no magic fairy dust in the soil at American airports. Your Fourth Amendment rights do not defy gravity there. It’s one thing to paw through my underwear looking for explosives;  I think we can all appreciate the safety concern in that, as absurd as it sounds and even though it’s a pain.  It’s entirely another to thumb through my cell phone just for the heck of it.

Get a warrant.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 21:45

Russia Agrees To Repurpose Strategic Military Bases In Post-Assad Syria

Some 20 months after Syria's Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus and went to Moscow, amid jihadist groups taking over the capital city in December of 2024, Russia has finally reached a negotiated settlement over the fate of its Syrian bases with the new Sharaa government.

Russia's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that a memorandum of understanding over the future of its bases at Tartus and Khmeimim has been set. While some Russian forces will remain at the bases, civilian facilties at these locations will be handed over and operated by the Syrian government and civilian administrators, including Khmeimim airport and the commercial berth at Tartus port.

via Associated Press

The military facilities are expected to be repurposed as joint training sites, where Russian troops will still be based, and the sites will also likely serve as transit hubs for Russian military and logistics operations in Africa. 

It's as yet unclear the degree to which this marks Russia losing its only deep-water naval port on the Mediterranean, at Tartus, but it certainly at least represents a significant downgrade.

The Sharaa government described that the new arrangements represent a "reorganizing of the Russian presence" along Syria's coast and that "this move marks the most significant development since negotiations began approximately a year and a half ago, paving the way for a new phase in Syrian-Russian relations."

Russian forces have long been on their way out of Syria after the Syrian Arab Army under Assad had lost the long-running proxy war. Russian troops had intervened in 2015 in Syria, at Assad's request, and for much of that time had pounded Al-Qaeda held Idlib from the air. 

Ironically it's many of those same jihadists which the Russians were fighting in Idlib which now hold government posts in Damascus.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has acknowledged, "We regard the signing on Aug. 9 of the memorandum between the Russian Federation and the Syrian Arab Republic on the operation of our bases in Khmeimim and Tartus as an important step aimed at further improving bilateral cooperation in the military sphere."

"We believe that reaching this agreement will give further impetus to the development of the full range of relations between our countries, which are based on a long history of friendship and partnership," it added.

Moscow is now having to deal with a completely new reality in the Levant region, and is facing a greatly diminished presence and influence in this post-Syrian war situation. Iran also retreated from Syria, and Hezbollah has completely moved back to its home front in Lebanon.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 21:20

Fauci Privately Flagged Miscarriage Risk Before Telling Pregnant Women There Were 'No Red Flags'

Newly disclosed text messages show Dr. Anthony Fauci privately entertained the possibility that the COVID-19 vaccine could trigger first-trimester miscarriages, months before he told the public there was no risk.

The messages come from a trove that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) released, containing more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails the Senate Homeland Security Committee pulled from Fauci's government-issued phone. Among the trove is a January 2021 text chain between Fauci, Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who went on to serve as the Biden administration's surgeon general and CDC director, in which the three officials worked through how the vaccine's risks might interact with pregnancy.

On Jan. 25, Murthy opened the thread with a question. "For pregnant women considering getting the vaccine, are you aware of any data or theoretical reason why vaccinating early vs late in pregnancy would be preferred? And any sense of when there will be more robust data on vaccine risk in pregnant women?"

Walensky noted that more than 15,000 pregnant women had already enrolled in the CDC's V-safe vaccine safety monitoring system. Fauci wrote there "are no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred." He also flagged a caveat that would later look prescient. "Yet, some people (even female health care professionals) feel concerned about injecting a 'genetic' vaccine very early in pregnancy," he wrote.

Nearly two hours passed before Fauci circled back with something he had not mentioned the first time. "I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of," he wrote. "Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester."

NEW: Dr. Fauci was concerned in January 2021 that the second dose of the COVID shot “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
@SenRandPaul and I released the texts between Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and Vivek Murthy below.

While I’ve… pic.twitter.com/jktB1PxfPL

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) August 10, 2026

Walensky's response left little doubt the group treated the concern as legitimate. Fauci's point about the first trimester was "definitely a good point, [especially] after dose two," she wrote back.

None of that made it into Fauci's public messaging. On Feb. 3, 2021, during a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) question-and-answer livestream, he told viewers the FDA had "found thus far, and we have to be careful, but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women." Months later, while serving as the Biden White House's chief medical adviser, he went further, telling the public that tens of thousands of pregnant women tracked by the CDC after vaccination showed "no indication whatsoever" of increased adverse issues compared with unvaccinated pregnant women. "It's pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated," he said.

Fauci on August 30, 2021: “it's really one of those things that's kind of not a close call. It really is pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated.”

But 7 months earlier he was concerned that the second dose of the COVID shot “theoretically could be associated with… https://t.co/5J5tpwNJ0i pic.twitter.com/7QmEHP9Nkb

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) August 10, 2026

The texts also show the three officials weighing vaccine risk against the risk of the virus itself while worrying about how competing health authorities were muddying their message. On Jan. 26, 2021, Murthy told Fauci and Walensky he was "surprised to see WHO put out a strong [statement] saying they do not recommend moderna [sic] in pregnant women," calling it "a strong statement to make and potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women." Public confidence kept surfacing as the metric that mattered most to the group, even as the underlying science remained unsettled in their own private assessment.

Paul and Johnson said the phone the committee obtained lists only three contacts, and cautioned it is "too early to determine whether any data has been deleted." Paul referred Fauci for prosecution earlier this month over his refusal to testify before the Homeland Security Committee. Asked Monday whether he had discussed potential prosecution of Fauci with Attorney General Todd Blanche or DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, President Trump told reporters, "I have not spoken to them about that, no."

Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a July 29 hearing covering the pandemic and federally funded gain-of-function research. After the hearing, Paul and Johnson said they had obtained a forensic copy of Fauci's phone along with emails showing health officials had requested deletion of some records. 

Johnson said Monday on Fox News' America Reports that the committee has invited Fauci for a transcribed interview. "He's been quoted as saying he's not afraid of congressional oversight. He'll talk to any oversight committee; he's got nothing to hide," Johnson said, noting that Fauci's attorneys have been in contact. He called Fauci "the only guy that can answer some of these questions" and warned, "If they don't set that up voluntarily, I will subpoena him."

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 20:55

Massachusetts Legalizes Abortion Up To Birth As Liberals Cheer

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Massachusetts Democratic Governor Maura Healey has signed into law a measure that effectively permits abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, right up to the point of birth. Liberal women packed the room and gleefully cheered as she put pen to paper.

The previous statute restricted abortions after 24 weeks to specific circumstances: preserving the life of the patient, physical or mental health, lethal fetal anomaly, or a grave diagnosis incompatible with sustained life outside the womb without extraordinary intervention. That framework is now gone.

The new law, deceptively titled the "Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act" (H.5595), states that an abortion may be performed by a physician based solely upon the professional judgment of the physician. No medical review process can override that judgment and the patient's decision.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signs the bill for abortions up to birth as Democrats celebrate. pic.twitter.com/BlfTobYbeD

— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) August 10, 2026

Healey framed the change around stories of "pain and anguish and heartache and a lot of trauma." She declared: "We're signing this law today so that new patients, people we won't know or won't meet, will be able to get the care that they need in Massachusetts."

She added that health care decisions should be made "between women and families and their doctors, not politicians," and promised abortion would remain "safe... legal, and... accessible here in Massachusetts."

The ceremony featured applause and smiles from advocates, doctors, and lawmakers. Massachusetts now joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., as jurisdictions with no statutory gestational limit. The law takes effect in 90 days.

? UPDATE: Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) has officially signed a law allowing abortion up to the POINT OF BIRTH, with liberals cheering

This is straight-up demonic.

The previous law only allowed abortions after 24 weeks in limited circumstances.

Pray for the kids ??... pic.twitter.com/n6cjjcplAv

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 11, 2026

Pro-life leaders did not share the celebratory mood. Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, stated: "Governor Healey and the Massachusetts Legislature have erased the final protections for unborn children who can feel pain and who could survive outside the womb."

"At the very stage when premature babies are receiving lifesaving care in neonatal intensive care units, Massachusetts will permit abortionists to end the lives of children of the same age - and even older. That is not compassion, and it is not health care," Tobias further urged.

This is what a 34-week-old baby looks like outside the womb.

In Massachusetts, you can now abort an unborn baby at this age.

The only difference is the child's location. pic.twitter.com/ZN4iipOH7P

— Anna Lulis (@annamlulis) August 11, 2026

Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, was blunt: the measure "legalized elective abortion up to birth on healthy moms and healthy, pain-capable infants."

She continued that it is "not about protecting the doctor-patient relationship. It is about abortionists normalizing the deaths of fully-developed infants and pressuring vulnerable women to permit their unborn children to die in heinous acts of violence."

These procedures, she noted, rank among the most severe human rights abuses permitted in only a handful of places worldwide.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) responded simply: "Jesus wept."

This movement fits a pattern of cultural celebration around the destruction of the unborn. Earlier this year a woman in Memphis took abortion pills at a gender-reveal party after learning she was having a girl while friends shouted "kill it."

Washed up Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon drew widespread criticism for posing in a red hat altered to read "Make Abortion Great Again," once again providing an example of how weirdo celebrities with dysfunctional lives should not be taken seriously whenever they spout off about how society should function.

Across the Atlantic, the UK House of Lords advanced measures that also effectively open the door to abortion up to birth, despite polling showing only about 1 percent of Britons approve of such extremes and clear majorities favor gestational limits to protect viable life.

The Massachusetts law removes objective statutory guardrails and hands the decision entirely to the attending physician.

Pro-life physicians emphasize that true medical emergencies requiring separation of mother and child are distinct from induced abortion intended to end the life of a viable unborn child.

Late-term procedures often involve dismemberment or induction, with the latter risking live birth if fetal demise is not first induced.

Supporters insist the change merely prevents families from traveling out of state for "complex medical circumstances."

Critics counter that the prior exceptions already covered life-threatening situations and severe anomalies, and that the new open-ended standard invites elective procedures on healthy mothers carrying healthy, pain-capable infants.

Data from the state's own Department of Public Health already showed dozens of abortions at 24 weeks or later in recent years; the removal of limits is expected to increase that number.

Healey and Democratic lawmakers fast-tracked the bill in the final days of the legislative session. It passed the House 119-33 before clearing the Senate. The governor, facing reelection, presented the signing as a defense against what she called attacks on reproductive health care after the Supreme Court returned the issue to the states.

The result is another blue-state outpost where the unborn lose the last remaining legal protections based on gestational age or viability. At the same moment premature infants of identical ages receive aggressive neonatal care, the same state now authorizes ending their lives under the sole criterion of a doctor's professional judgment.

This is the logical endpoint of a movement that treats abortion as both medical necessity and political sacrament.

The cheers at the State House, the "kill it" chants, the novelty hats all point in the same direction: a culture that has decided some human lives are disposable right up to the moment of birth.

Pro-life Americans continue to insist the opposite is true, and that every state still has the power - and the moral obligation - to protect those who cannot speak for themselves.

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Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 20:55

Bank Of America: The US Unemployment Rate Is Falling Because Americans Are Too Rich

Last Friday's dismal jobs report (where 23K jobs were lost) had a silver lining: the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%, the lowest since June 2025, dinging expectations that the AI revolution would lead to a spike in unemployment. There was just one problem: unemployment dropped not because more people found a job, but because the labor force shrank by a whopping 264K, and down more than 2 million since the start of the year.

To be sure, the continued shrinkage of the US labor is hardly new and has long been attributed to Trump's anti illegal immigration policies which have led to a substantial trimming of the US labor force. 

However, in a novel spin this morning, Bank of America - seemingly convinced that the US is now enjoying a new Golden Age - published a report titled "A stock-fueled retirement party" in which it makes the modest proposal that the US unemployment rate is shrinking because Americans are simply too rich. 

That's right: according to BofA economist Stephen Juneau (full note available here), the labor force participation rate among older (55+) workers never recovered after the pandemic shock. It remained roughly range-bound until the summer of 2024, but has taken another big leg down since then.

Why? Well, to BofA, this is related to the 35%+ increase in the S&P 500 over the last two years. The resulting surge in wealth has likely made retirement an easier choice for many.

More broadly as well, the economist notes that there appears to be a modest negative relationship between equity gains and older workers’ participation.

Is BofA right? We don't know, but if they are it would be ironic that while we wait for the unemployment rate explosion as a result of chatbot agents taking millions of white collar data-heavy jobs, the unemployment rate would actually drop thanks to all those who were long AI stocks. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 20:30

Florida Seeks NY Times Internal Documents Over Errors In Israel-Hamas War Coverage

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sought to inspect records from The New York Times on Aug. 10, claiming the newspaper's pattern of admitted mistakes covering the Israel-Hamas war threatens the state's pension fund.

The New York Times building in Manhattan on Feb. 5, 2024. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Uthmeier, representing the pension fund and the thousands of shares it holds in company, sent a 28-page letter to The New York Times seeking to scrutinize six years' worth of internal records, board documents, and meeting minutes, dating back to January 2020, and asking the company to prove it was operating smoothly.

"The Times tells investors that its brand and reputation are its most important assets and that if people see its journalism as unreliable or biased, the company can be hurt," Uthmeier said in a video on X. "We want to exercise our rights under New York law to review the company's internal board documents, meeting minutes, reports, and other materials, to see what the directors know.

"The First Amendment protects what a newspaper publishes, but it does not let a public company's board ignore its shareholders," Uthmeier continued.

Uthmeier is a trustee and legal counsel for Florida's State Board of Administration, which oversees the pension fund and its 160,000 shares of stock in The New York Times.

The paper has two weeks to respond or Uthmeier said he would sue them in the New York Supreme Court.

"Shareholders have tools to ensure the Board prevents The Times from becoming a newspaper the public comes to regard as untrustworthy," Uthmeier wrote in the letter.

A downturn in revenue forced the news company to consolidate its editorial staff in 2017 to shift the balance of the newsroom to give them more on-the-ground reporters.

The changes included eliminating an independent editor position, or ombudsman, which received reader complaints and questioned New York Times journalists on how they made decisions.

"Since the New York Times got rid of its independent public editor, it has several times now admitted, only after outside pressure, that published articles did not meet its standards," Uthmeier said. "According to reports, between Oct. 7, 2023 and June 2024, The Times admitted 72 errors in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war that had to be corrected. Many, if not most, of those errors favored Hamas."

The New York Times received the letter Monday and views it as an intimidation tactic, according to a spokesperson.

"We are aware of the demand letter, which, while positioned as a request under corporate law, is a clear attempt to chill First Amendment-protected journalism. We will respond more fully in due course," Danielle Rhoades Ha, spokesperson for The New York Times, told The Epoch Times.

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

Florida's threat of legal action comes two months after President Donald Trump's allegations against the company over coverage of the Iran war. Trump threatened to sue The New York Times in June, accusing the newspaper of publishing "treasonous" coverage that downplayed the impact of the war with Iran.

The New York Times defended its coverage, saying it was presented "fairly, thoroughly and above all, accurately to readers."

The newspaper's board of directors includes Chairman and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger; GoDaddy CEO Amanpal Bhutan; former chief product officer at the online gaming platform Roblox Manuel Bronstein; Beth Brooke, former global vice chair of public policy at Ernst and Young; Rachel Glaser, former chief financial officer at Etsy; Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha and other novels; and Meredith Kopek Levien, CEO of The New York Times.

Also on the board are: Brian McAndrews, former president and CEO of Pandora Media; David Perpich, vice chair of The New York Times; John Rogers, Jr., founder of Ariel Investments; Anuradha Subramanian, chief financial officer of Beast Industries, the parent company founded by YouTube star MrBeast; Margot Golden, freelance graphic designer; and Rebecca Van Dyck, chief marketing officer at Airbnb.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 20:05

Mysterious Drone Threat Emerges At America's "Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier," Prompting Curfews

One of the most strategically important US military bases outside the continental U.S., often described as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the central Indian Ocean, faces a mysterious drone threat, according to a new report.

TWZ cited the UK Ministry of Defense, which said it was aware of reported drone sightings over the remote US-UK military base but declined to identify the drones.

"We are aware of reported sightings of drones (UAS) over Diego Garcia," the UK Defense Ministry (MoD) told the military blog Monday morning. "We are unable to provide any details about a situation which may affect the security or operation of the joint U.K.-U.S. base on Diego Garcia."

"The U.S. and U.K. Commanding Officers on Diego Garcia consider and implement appropriate measures to ensure the security and safety of the base and the safety of the personnel on the island," MoD added.

TWZ noted that US officials "were less forthcoming" about the drone threat against Diego Garcia.

"As a matter of operational security, we do not discuss specific force protection measures or security procedures at U.S. military installations," an official from U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) told the outlet on Friday. "We remain vigilant in protecting U.S. personnel and facilities."

Last Friday, the Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page said drones were spotted near the base's fuel tank farm, and a daytime curfew had been imposed. "

"Inbox: Diego Garcia. Drones spotted near fuel farm. Base on 0700 to 1900 curfew until further notice. Note: message us if you have further information, thanks," the Facebook post read.

A post on Sunday by the Air Force amn/nco/snco page, titled "Diego Garcia Curfew Reportedly Due to Drone Threats," displayed curfew times across the base.

The incident highlights the growing drone threat launched from ships, submarines, or uncrewed surface vessels. Officials did not disclose the drone group size.

Here's the classification via Piper Sandler:  

The incident is also a reminder that the drone scare on the US East Coast in December 2024 likely began with a drone or drones launched from a shipping container aboard a cargo ship. Drone threats are emerging outside of modern battlefields, something we've been warning about. 

Also last week, a one-way attack drone was found on the tarmac at Leipzig/Halle Airport, one of Europe's most important freight hubs. 

The drone threat is only going to get worse from here as the federal government is in full race mode to secure high-value assets, abroad and domestically. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 19:40

Looking Back At The Uranium One Scandal

Authored by Stu Cvrk via American Greatness,

The Uranium One scandal was a 2010 controversy in which the Obama administration approved the takeover of Uranium One - a Canadian company with significant uranium mining assets in the United States - by Russia's state-owned Rosatom corporation. Critics alleged a pay-to-play scheme, pointing to large donations (roughly $145 million) to the Clinton Foundation from individuals connected to Uranium One and its investors, as well as a $500,000 speaking fee paid to Bill Clinton by a Russian bank involved in the deal.

The conventional wisdom is that no evidence was uncovered of improper influence or criminal wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton or other U.S. officials in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approval process, though the foreign donations and influence aspects have never been fully resolved.

Could the "conventional wisdom" be wrong (because it was manufactured to hide the reality), and could the truth of those elusive foreign connections involve Iran?

Let us take a deep dive and speculate using facts and logic.

URANIUM ONE ORIGINS AND PURPOSE

Uranium One started as a South African-Canadian mining company. It became a major uranium player after absorbing UrAsia Energy in February 2007. UrAsia's chairman was Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier and longtime Bill Clinton associate. Giustra had negotiated Kazakh uranium mining rights beginning in 2005, and in September 2005 he and Bill Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan and dined with President Nazarbayev; UrAsia closed its Kazakh mining deals shortly after. UrAsia's share value rose roughly seventyfold between 2005 and 2007, and Giustra donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2006 - an amount later dwarfed by further pledges once his UrAsia stake was sold into Uranium One two months later.

Rosatom's stated purpose in acquiring Uranium One was straightforward from Moscow's perspective: vertical integration of its state nuclear conglomerate into global uranium supply, part of a broader post-2008 push (noted in leaked State Department cables) to secure uranium sources after Russia felt constrained by import limits elsewhere.

THE CHRONOLOGY

2005-2007: Giustra/UrAsia secure Kazakh uranium rights; UrAsia merges into Uranium One (Feb. 2007); Giustra exits and begins large Clinton Foundation donations.

2009: Rosatom subsidiary ARMZ begins acquiring a stake in Uranium One (first tranche, ~17%).

June 2010: Rosatom announces a deal to acquire majority control. Because Uranium One held U.S. mining assets (Wyoming), the acquisition of Uranium One by Rosatom required review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States because uranium is considered a strategic asset with national security implications.

2010: CFIUS's nine-member agencies unanimously approve the deal; no member raised a formal security objection. The committee approved the proposal, and in 2013 Russia assumed 100 percent ownership, renaming the company Uranium One Holding.

June 29, 2010: Renaissance Capital, a Kremlin-linked bank promoting Uranium One stock, pays Bill Clinton $500,000 for a Moscow speech shortly after the deal's announcement.

2009-2013: As Rosatom's stake grows in stages, Ian Telfer (Uranium One's chairman) makes four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation through his family foundation - donations the Foundation later admitted it failed to disclose despite a transparency pledge.

2013: Rosatom completes full ownership.

2017-2020: House Republicans open an investigation; DOJ appoints U.S. Attorney John Huber to review the matter (2017); the inquiry never becomes a special counsel probe and winds down by 2020 without public findings.

2023: Special Counsel John Durham's final report did not include Uranium One.

2025-2026: Newly declassified FBI/DOJ records surface via the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), reportedly describing internal assessments that there was "significant evidence worth pursuing" on possible criminal activity tied to the Foundation and the sale - reigniting the controversy.

WHO MADE MONEY OFF THE DEAL

Frank Giustra: Sold his UrAsia/Uranium One stake in 2007, three years before the Rosatom deal review. Total lifetime Clinton Foundation giving exceeds $100 million; he sits on the foundation's board. Fact-checkers note he had exited the company well before the CFIUS-reviewed transactions.

Ian Telfer: Remained Uranium One's chairman through the Rosatom acquisitions; donated $2.35 million via his family foundation, undisclosed at the time.

Bill Clinton: $500,000 speaking fee from a Kremlin-linked bank in 2010.

Other Uranium One-connected donors: Nine individuals related to the company donated to the Clinton Foundation, though PolitiFact's review found only Telfer's donations fell clearly within the deal's timeframe. Were the delayed donations merely set up to look like there was no Uranium One connection?

Russian side: Rosatom's U.S. executive Vadim Mikerin was later convicted in a separate racketeering case (kickbacks, bribery, extortion) tied to Rosatom's U.S. nuclear business - a scheme the FBI had informant evidence on as early as 2009, before CFIUS approved the deal.

CFIUS PLAYERS AND POTENTIAL CORRUPTION

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is a nine-member interagency body (State, Treasury, DOJ, DOD, Commerce, Energy, DHS, USTR, and OSTP), and it does not have unilateral veto power - that rests with the president, and any recommendation goes through consensus review by all nine agencies.

Hillary Clinton did not personally sit on the committee; Assistant Secretary of State Jose Fernandez represented State and has said Clinton was not involved in the matter, with several former State and DOJ officials saying it would be unlikely for her to have more than nominal involvement since these reviews are handled by career civil servants. How plausible are these denials (by Clinton appointees, no less) given what the Clinton Foundation received from Frank Giustra et al?

The corruption allegation ("use of high office to influence the decision") rests almost entirely on inference from timing: donations flowed from Uranium One-linked figures during the review period, and Bill Clinton was paid by a Kremlin-linked bank around the same time. Official investigations conducted by the DoJ and FBI have conveniently found no criminal behavior. Given the manipulation by these investigating agencies in the Russia hoax and later scandals, including former FBI Director James Comey's whitewashing of Hillary Clinton's email server scandal in 2016, how plausible is it that "nothing was found"?

Interestingly, newly surfaced 2025-2026 FBI/DoJ memos are the most significant open question. Reporting by Just the News says they describe an internal assessment that "significant evidence worth pursuing" existed and that the Obama-era DoJ did not pursue it further.

Here is a very interesting quote from those emails, specifically from former US Attorney Cody Hiland, who was involved in the 2018 investigation: "[T]he intelligence summary regarding Uranium One ... fails to account for the dynamic related to possible deliberately false statements that may have been made by U/O officials to CFIUS to induce the authorization to sell U/O to Rosatom (i.e. that Rosatom could not export uranium)."

Even more damning was this quote that implied a pending investigation that may have been quashed: "There are remaining investigative tasks that should be completed before making a final assessment of the U/O [Uranium One] matter.... [including interviewing] the foreign nationals specifically identified by [Redacted] as having made statements concerning the attempts to use the Foundation as a vehicle to influence the Secretary of State."

Bottom line: there is a well-documented appearance of conflict (donations, speaking fees, timing) and documented Russian criminal conduct in the broader nuclear sector, but no investigation to date has yet produced hard evidence of a quid pro quo directly implicating Clinton's CFIUS role. The newly declassified memos may change that picture depending on what they actually show when made public.

WHERE THE URANIUM WENT

There was one documented export, according to The Hill. NRC records show a shipment of yellowcake from the Russian-owned U.S. mines to Canada in 2012 through a third party, with the Obama administration later approving the transfer of a portion of that shipment to Europe. No exports have occurred since.

That 2012 Wyoming to Ontario (Canada) shipment is the one hard data point in the public record. NRC/CNSC incident reports (from a Blind River refinery spill investigation) show the yellowcake drum involved had been shipped from Uranium One's Willow Creek Facility in Wyoming on May 29, 2012, to Cameco's Blind River refinery in Ontario - that's the "third party" as referenced in that report from The Hill. Cameco is Canada's dominant uranium company and operates the world's largest uranium refinery (Blind River) and Canada's only conversion facility (Port Hope).

From there, the normal processing chain is:

1. Blind River (Ontario) - refines yellowcake into uranium trioxide (UO₃)
2. Port Hope (Ontario) - converts UO₃ into uranium hexafluoride (UF₆, "hex") for light-water reactor fuel, or uranium dioxide for Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactors
3. Since Canada has no enrichment capability, the UF₆ is shipped onward - Cameco's own description of its export pattern says its Port Hope hex is transported by truck or ocean freighter to enrichment plants in the United States, Japan, and Europe.

Uranium One's U.S. production (Willow Creek/Christensen Ranch, Wyoming) was sold, like virtually all Western-mined uranium, under confidential long-term supply contracts to nuclear utilities - not sold as raw ore on a spot market to end-users directly (standard industry practice). The most likely commercial destinations are U.S. and allied nuclear utilities (U.S. reactors consume the vast majority of Wyoming ISR production domestically, since ISR-mined material rarely gets exported given the added cost/friction of export licensing).

Once Rosatom owned Uranium One outright (2013), commercial logic would suggest more of that output could be marketed through Rosatom's global trading arm (TENEX-Techsnabexport or Rosatom's international fuel-cycle business) rather than solely through U.S. utility contracts. This is a logical inference from Rosatom's usual global marketing structure, not a documented shipment per se.

IS THERE AN IRANIAN CONNECTION?

So far, there is no documented evidence - in any congressional investigation, NRC export record, or FBI file that has surfaced - that any Uranium One material reached Iran. In fact, the probability that Uranium One-derived material specifically ended up in Iran is low based on the public record - though "low" is not the same as "zero" since neither NRC disclosures (withheld as proprietary) nor downstream tracking of the Canadian/European shipments that Iran has regularly received over the years has been made fully public. The fact that "we don't have a documented final destination" is a real evidentiary gap, not a clean exoneration of anyone.

The most plausible mechanism by which Iran could have received Uranium One product is through commodity fungibility, not smuggling or theft.

Uranium markets don't work like tracked serial-numbered goods. Once yellowcake is refined and converted, it's a fungible commodity - one country's UF6 is chemically indistinguishable from another's. The global trade runs heavily on "swaps" and "book transfers": a producer with material in Location A can contractually deliver to a customer in Location B while someone else's equivalent material physically moves the other direction because it's cheaper than shipping the actual atoms across the world. This is completely standard and legal in the industry.

Given that, the realistic pathway isn't "a truck full of Wyoming yellowcake crosses into Iran." It's something more like this: Rosatom, once owning Uranium One's U.S. production, could have counted that output toward its own global supply obligations - freeing up an equivalent quantity of Russian-origin uranium that Rosatom's fuel arm (TVEL) was already contractually supplying to Iran. That's a real, legal, and well-documented Russia-Iran nuclear relationship, not speculation - TVEL has supplied fuel for Iran's Bushehr power plant for years, openly and under IAEA safeguards, as part of the original construction deal for that reactor.

That is the most logical mechanism by which "Uranium One-linked material" could be economically connected to Iran, as that swap/displacement logic is the most defensible one because it's how the commodity accounting works and nobody has any obligation to disclose it.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

There are International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "safeguards" involved in managing Iran's uranium imports. Uranium destined for Iran's declared enrichment facilities (Natanz, Fordow) is subject to material accounting under IAEA safeguards precisely to prevent unaccounted diversion. Significant undeclared quantities moving in would risk detection. That said, were any of these safeguards compromised since Rosatom acquired Uranium One in 2013?

The answer could easily be yes, as Iran has historically restricted or denied IAEA access to certain facilities, particularly those suspected of weapons-related (possible military dimensions) activities. One example is the Parchin military site, which was long restricted with limited, managed access granted only after years of delays and under the 2015 JCPOA framework. Environmental sampling subsequently found man-made uranium particles inconsistent with Iran's explanations. Note: Iran has generally argued that military sites are off-limits or require special authorization, asserting a distinction between civilian and military facilities (a position the IAEA rejects for safeguards purposes).

What does all this mean? Let us connect the dots:

• Uranium One was sold to Rosatom (Russian-owned).
• Uranium ore from Uranium One (later Rosatom) could have been transported almost anywhere through "global trade of a fungible commodity."
• Russia had/has a long-standing nuclear exchange relationship with Iran.
• Uranium ore from Rosatom could have bypassed the clearly incomplete IAEA safeguards in Iran. The Kremlin would gain significant blackmail leverage over key US decision-makers by facilitating this transfer.
• The newly discovered Uranium One-related emails being pursued by Sen. Grassley et al. could potentially expose a cover-up by some of the same players involved in the Russia hoax. There are no such things as coincidences.

Note: circling back to the beginning, CFIUS members/State Department personnel involved in the original Uranium One sale would only be culpable if they had contemporaneous knowledge that diversion to a sanctioned/prohibited end-user was likely and approved anyway. There is a long row to hoe before that can be proven, but stranger things have happened lately.

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his geopolitical commentary.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 19:15

Woman Who Defrauded USAID-Funded Nonprofit Avoids Prison, Settles Civil Claims For $160,000

A Maryland woman has agreed to pay the U.S. government $160,000 to resolve civil allegations that she submitted false claims for payment, following her earlier criminal conviction for defrauding a nonprofit that received USAID funding.

Carleena Graham, 59, formerly served as vice president of human resources at World Learning, a nonprofit that received millions of dollars in grants and contracts from both the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department. According to the USAID Office of Inspector General, she orchestrated a scheme that drained roughly $425,000 from the organization between about 2016 and mid-2022. Of that total, approximately $272,500 came directly or partially from U.S. government funds.

Graham arranged for goods and services to be delivered to Washington-area nonprofits where she held positions or had relationships, then directed World Learning to pay for them through electronic transfers from its accounts. She falsified vendor invoices to create the appearance that World Learning itself had received the items. She also used the organization's credit cards to cover expenses for those outside entities.

Federal authorities charged her with one count of wire fraud in May 2023. She pleaded guilty and, in March 2024, received a sentence of four years' probation, an order to pay $425,000 in restitution, and a three-year debarment from receiving U.S. government funds. Her plea agreement estimated an advisory sentencing range of 27 to 33 months' imprisonment.

In July 2026 she entered a separate civil settlement with the Department of Justice under the False Claims Act, agreeing to the $160,000 payment. That agreement closes a joint investigation by the USAID and State Department Offices of Inspector General. The government's announcement notes that the claims resolved by the civil settlement are allegations only and that there has been no determination of liability.

Graham's is not the only USAID-linked fraud case to reach resolution. As we reported in June of last year, former USAID contracting officer Roderick Watson and three corporate executives pleaded guilty over a decade-long bribery scheme spanning at least 14 prime contracts worth more than $550 million. Prosecutors said Watson accepted bribes valued at more than $1 million, including cash, laptops, tickets to a suite at an NBA game, a country club wedding, and down payments on two residential mortgages. He faced a maximum of 15 years. The two contractors involved, Apprio and Vistant, admitted criminal liability and entered deferred prosecution agreements. In a separate case, a British national who worked on a USAID-funded power distribution program in Pakistan was extradited after more than two years, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to time served for a kickback scheme that cost the program almost $100,000.

The settlement lands amid broader scrutiny of USAID's oversight of foreign-aid spending. Inspector general memoranda issued in 2025 flagged weaknesses, including limited visibility into sub-recipients, resistance from some international partners in sharing misconduct information, and incomplete reporting of potential fraud by organizations that received agency funds. World Learning was among the recipients of USAID programming during the period of the scheme.

USAID was formally dissolved on July 1, 2025, with its remaining functions absorbed into the State Department.

Also, the DNC is oddly out of money.

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 18:50

Homeschool Families Are Pushing For High School Sports Participation

Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times,

Luke Cecchi watched from the bleachers as his friends and neighbors played varsity sports.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Courtesy of Sherry Luke Photography, Courtesy of Luke Cecchi, Clemed/CC BY-SA 3.0

The homeschooled student from Cazenovia, New York, wasn't allowed to try out for the local high school soccer and basketball teams under a state law regulating scholastic athletics, even though his family paid thousands of dollars in property taxes to the local school district and supported local recreation sports programs through fees, participation, and volunteer coaching.

New York state has resisted change, despite bipartisan support from lawmakers and the growing number of states allowing homeschooled students access to extracurricular activities at their neighborhood public schools.

"I wanted to play so badly," Cecchi, now a 23-year-old law school student, told The Epoch Times. "It didn't make sense to me."

On his own, Cecchi found a way to train in competitive basketball and eventually made a Division I college team as a walk-on.

Still, he took an unusual, daunting path against incredible odds in America's ultra-competitive scholastic sports landscape.

All told, the vast majority of states either have laws allowing homeschooled students to participate in their local public school sports and extracurricular activities or leave it to individual districts to decide on a case-by-case basis.

But in California, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma, and Virginia, homeschooled students are barred from public school sports by way of legislation, court decisions, or regulations set by organizations that govern interscholastic athletics, according to the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

A pending state court case in Virginia could set a precedent that opens interscholastic competition to all students, though many families in these exclusive states are content building a league of their own.

Tim Tebow Laws

A decade after Florida passed laws allowing homeschooled students to participate in public school sports, University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow won the Heisman Trophy as college football's best player and went on to compete in the National Football League.

His parents chose to homeschool him because of their Christian beliefs. He played on a public high school team in the Jacksonville area despite never being enrolled at that school.

The Sunshine State's legislation inspired red and blue states across the nation to follow suit and enact "Tim Tebow" laws.

Some states, such as Alabama, require public schools to make sports available to all nontraditional students. Others, including Georgia, stipulate minimum academic standards and code of conduct provisions. Wisconsin allows it "if space permits."

Nine states and the District of Columbia leave it up to the school district or locality to decide, though New Jersey so far "rarely allows homeschoolers to participate," the Homeschool Legal Defense Association says on its website.

"The majority of states allow it now because of Tim Tebow," Will Estrada, the association's senior legal counsel, told The Epoch Times.

"It was because of legislation, not litigation. We were losing in court everywhere. Judges didn't like to force public schools to do anything."

"All we really need is one case to set precedent."

In Mississippi, where sports and extracurricular participation is currently decided at the district level, the state's House passed its Tim Tebow Act during the 2025-2026 legislative session.

The bill stalled in the Senate Education Committee early this year following opposition by the Parents' Campaign. The citizens group says the measure "incentivizes dropouts, creates an unlevel playing field that favors homeschool over public school students, and inflicts an enormous administrative burden on public school administrators."

Litigation

In Virginia, two parents from the Roanoke area filed a lawsuit after the local public school, as dictated by a governing high school athletic association, refused to allow their ninth-grade son, Samuel Palmer, to join local high school cross-country and track teams. A federal court declined to hear the case, so it's now before a state court.

The complaint filed by the Founding Freedoms Law Center states that Palmer shouldn't be excluded "from an otherwise available government benefit" simply because his parents choose to educate him at home for religious reasons.

Josh Hetzler, the center's executive director and chief counsel, said Palmer had been allowed to run in middle school meets and that the state organization should consider that there are provisions in both high school and college athletics to allow "unattached" runners to compete if they cover their own entry and travel fees and wear apparel that doesn't represent a school.

Moreover, the governing scholastic athletic organization has allowed Christian schools to compete in the same league, as well as students who are fully online and complete all of their coursework at home.

"There's a lot of inconsistencies," he told The Epoch Times.

Alternative Organizations

In Central New York, homeschooled students can join soccer, basketball, or volleyball teams run by the Syracuse Eagles or the Port City Royals community athletic organizations. They compete against each other and small private schools that are also not part of the statewide interscholastic high school sports leagues.

It takes volunteers, fundraising, and sometimes small fees to keep it going. A web search shows there are many groups like these serving homeschool communities in several states.

Nathan Emmons, one of Port City's main volunteers and leaders, said there has been plenty of lobbying and bipartisan support for legislation reversing New York's current regulations, "but we just can't get it over the finish line."

He said the lack of money, facilities, equipment, and trained coaches and referees makes it difficult for his organization to expand to other sports such as track and field, ice hockey, or football. The availability of junior varsity teams and level of competition vary by year, and students who are very serious about their sport also participate in travel-level clubs.

"I don't remember the last time an NCAA recruiter has cared to come to a game," Emmons told The Epoch Times.

Still, he added, this arrangement goes a long way in providing socialization, physical fitness, and lessons about teamwork for students who desire some level of competition without overshadowing their interest in other activities.

"The sports piece is the most challenging for homeschoolers," he said, "but these students still kind of find their way to sports."

Samuel Palmer of Roanoke, Va., leads the pack during a middle school track event. Palmer, a rising high school freshman who is homeschooled, is barred from competing on his local public high school team under current Virginia regulations. His family has filed a lawsuit challenging the rules. Courtesy of Daniel Palmer Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 18:25

California Orders NGO Serving As "Financial Backbone" For Singham-Linked Marxism Causes To Cease Operations

Foreign policy investigator Adam Kredo of The Washington Free Beacon revealed on Monday that California regulators ordered Arc of Justice, a nonprofit operated by left-wing Code Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin, to cease charitable operations after years of missing tax filings and unanswered questions about what happened to $51 million in reported assets. 

The state attorney general revoked the foundation's charitable registration in January 2025, barring it from distributing assets without prior approval. A June 19 warning letter went further, directing Arc of Justice to stop soliciting, holding or spending charitable funds in California and warning that board members could face personal liability for unauthorized distributions.

Kredo cited an investigation by the watchdog group Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN) that said since California first revoked the foundation's charitable registration 18 months ago and ordered it to provide a full accounting of $51,445,599 in outstanding assets it held as of 2023, "no public document establishes what has happened to the money, where it is held, or whether any of it has moved." 

The California Franchise Tax Board subsequently confirmed that the foundation was no longer in good standing or certified as tax-exempt. At the same time, the Secretary of State listed the organization as suspended.

"The silence from Arc of Justice raises unanswered questions about a foundation that has long served as the financial backbone for a network of radical advocacy groups tied to Benjamin and her Code Pink cofounder, Jodie Evans," Kredo wrote in the report. 

Far-left extremist Hasan Piker & Jodie Evans in Cuba 

He added, "Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham, a Maoist American tech mogul who funds far-left causes from his base in Shanghai and who's currently the subject of a Justice Department criminal probe." Read the report here. 

FIRST ON FOX: A federal grand jury is investigating China-based tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham over alleged financial improprieties involving $278 million that investigators say moved through his financial network over the past decade.

Federal investigators are examining… pic.twitter.com/cqqt9QthU6

— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 29, 2026

Interesting https://t.co/HHh8RcM3gI

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2026

Risk intelligence platform Sayari shows Evan is Arc of Justice's registered agent and serves as the bridge to a broader network of entities, including:

• Codepink Action Fund
• Codepink: Women for Peace
• Environmentalism Through Inspiration and Nonviolent Action
• The MEP Foundation
• MP & JK, LLC
• Gateways and Passages, LLC
• Agrarian Land Trust
• Schumacher Center for a New Economics

The chart's main takeaway is that Arc of Justice is connected through Evans to several far-left Code Pink-related and other nonprofit or corporate entities. 

Singham, who resides in China, has a long track record of supporting far-left entities, such as Code Pink and the Party for Socialism and other socialist NGOs, that oppose U.S. interests and support U.S. adversaries.

According to investigative reports (e.g., New York Times, 2023), Singham has worked closely with pro-CCP propaganda networks targeting the US.

From NYT:

What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.

From a think tank in Massachusetts to an event space in Manhattan, from a political party in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Mr. Singham that mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.

Bitcoin Policy Institute documented one of those alleged Singham foreign influence operations: 

Circling back to Kredo's report. Here's more color: 

Singham is reportedly under federal investigation for breaching federal law by funneling millions through his nonprofit groups to Chinese entities and then lying about it on tax forms. The shadowy benefactor's dark money operation is under pressure, according to Sam Lyman, a former senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

"For years, Neville Singham and his associates have been playing financial shell games across a series of U.S.-based nonprofits," said Lyman, who now serves as head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. "The goal is to fund extremist causes that undermine American sovereignty by using the 501(c)(3) legal structure as a shield. But the scheme is starting to unravel, and Medea Benjamin's Arc of Justice is the latest example."

The California Attorney General's Registry of Charities and Fundraisers first revoked Arc of Justice's registration in January 2025, barring it from spending any assets without approval from the attorney general. In June of this year, the California oversight agency went even further, according to a previously unpublished document obtained by IAN and shared with the Free Beacon. The June 19 warning letter, issued by the California Department of Justice, directly orders Arc of Justice to cease "any activity in California for which registration is required ... including holding or soliciting assets for charitable purposes."

"A revoked registrant is prohibited from distributing or expending charitable assets without prior written approval from the Attorney General," the letter makes clear. "Members of the board of directors or any person directly involved in distributing or expending charitable assets may be held personally liable for assets improperly expended."

The foundation's dire tax situation was revealed further on Aug. 3, when the California Franchise Tax Board confirmed that Arc of Justice "is not in good standing" with regulators and is no longer certified as tax-exempt, according to a copy of that document reviewed by the Free Beacon. The California Secretary of State's online system also declares Arc of Justice's status as "suspended."

Still, the mystery surrounding Arc of Justice and its multimillion-dollar assets has only deepened in recent months: On May 8 of this year, seven days before the federal tax filing deadline passed, a new Florida-based nonprofit corporation was founded with the same name and same officers, according to IAN's research. The address provided for the group, in Miami's downtrodden Little River neighborhood, is the same one "the California foundation used on its federal filings for years," the watchdog group found. Google Street View images of the address, dating back to 2022, show a small, colorful shack adorned with peace signs and other cheerful imagery.

The tangled tax web surrounding Arc of Justice is drawing scrutiny amid the closely watched federal grand jury probe into Singham, who has poured millions of his own money into Code Pink and other related causes. While Benjamin's Arc of Justice foundation is not suspected of any related wrongdoing, its tax woes are certain to raise further questions about Code Pink and the advocacy network tied to it.

"Arc of Justice — a $51 million California foundation founded by Code Pink's Medea Benjamin — went completely dark in 2022. Benjamin remained its president of record at least through November 2024. California regulators revoked its exemption and froze its assets," said IAN CEO and cofounder Susan George. "The federal exemption, however, is untouched, and nobody outside the foundation can say where the money is or what has happened to it. IAN found this one. How many more are operating entirely in the dark?"

Code Pink's March trip to Cuba included Ilhan Omar's (D., Minn.) daughter, Isra Hirsi, and anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker, who both praised the communist government. Benjamin herself, the New York Post reported, traveled to Gaza at least seven times between 2009 and 2012 to meet with Hamas leadership, including the terror group's late chairman Ismail Haniyeh. Benjamin and her Code Pink cohorts have also traveled to Iran while stoking opposition to the U.S. and Israeli military campaign against the Islamic Republic. Code Pink, Sen. Tom Cotton (R. Ark.) said in November 2025, "has received funding from groups aligned with the Communist Chinese government and partnered with designated foreign terror organizations."

Arc of Justice, formerly known as the Benjamin Fund, was incorporated by Benjamin in California in 2002, when she signed its articles of incorporation as the sole initial director. Benjamin's daughter, Maya Danaher, was listed as the foundation's treasurer at the time and, as of June 2026, is now listed as the CEO. Benjamin herself is no longer listed as an Arc of Justice officer, per the June 2026 filing.

From 2009 to 2022, Arc of Justice paid Code Pink $2,214,200, available documents compiled by IAN show, even though federal law generally prohibits "self-dealing" between a private foundation and disqualified individuals, including foundation managers. "The extent of the related-party grantmaking documented here — much of it undisclosed — raises serious questions about potential self-dealing that only regulators can resolve," IAN concluded in an earlier May 19 report on Arc of Justice's finances.

During the time of these disbursements, Benjamin simultaneously served as Arc of Justice's president and Code Pink's treasurer, IAN discovered. Arc of Justice also disbursed $1,897,950 to Global Exchange, another purported "human rights organization" cofounded by Benjamin. Code Pink itself—flush with Arc of Justice cash—doled out $1,550,000 between 2018 and 2024 to Environmentalism Through Inspiration & Non Violent Action (ETINA), another left-wing advocacy group that lists Evans as its president on tax forms. Evans, notably, is also listed as the Arc of Justice foundation's California agent for service of process. (She was replaced as its agent in a 2026 statement of incorporation that was submitted to the California secretary of state.)

"Arc of Justice's own 990-PF filings disclosed Code Pink as a related-party grantee, identifying the relationship as 'Common Board Member/Officer,'" IAN noted in its May report. "No comparable disclosures appear for Global Exchange or ETINA despite the documented relationships described above."

Still, much about Arc of Justice's finances remains opaque. The foundation did not file the required Form 990-PF tax return for fiscal years 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Under federal tax law, a charity that fails to file its return for three consecutive years should have its tax-exempt status automatically revoked. For Arc of Justice, that should have occurred on May 15 of this year, though records indicate no such action was taken by the IRS, which did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment on the matter.

The last tax document filed by Arc of Justice also offers little clarity about its finances and disbursements. In 2024, the foundation furnished a 990-T form to the IRS, which only documents "business income" and is mostly unrelated to a charity's tax-exempt activity. That form, which Benjamin signed, "reports no grants, no recipients, and nothing about how charitable funds were used," according to IAN.

The irony is that this NGO is part of a network that sympathizes with communism and failed to meet basic tax obligations. More importantly, the enforcement action phase suggests federal investigators may be circling NGO networks suspected of promoting revolutionary Marxism and potentially serving as financial channels or for foreign subversion operations (read here).  

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 18:00

China's Teapot Refiners Poised to Ramp Up Iranian Oil Buying

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

China’s independent refiners are likely to return to buying higher volumes of Iran’s crude oil this month as stockpiles in Shandong, home to the independent Chinese refiners, have dropped to the lowest level this year after the biggest estimated monthly draw in a decade.

For most of the Middle East conflict, now in its sixth month, China’s independent refiners, the so-called teapots, have drawn on their reserves and limited purchases and imports amid spiking international crude oil prices and what appears to have been an unofficial Chinese policy to slash crude imports. China could afford to slash imports as it was estimated to have amassed more than 1.3 billion barrels of crude oil stashed in all commercial and strategic reserves.    

However, current stockpiles at Shandong are estimated to have dropped to the lowest level in eight months at about 360 million barrels at the end of July, per data by Energy Aspects cited by Bloomberg.

The drawdown in July was about 35 million barrels in July alone, the biggest decline in a month since Energy Aspects began estimating and compiling data in 2016.

The independent Chinese refiners are therefore expected to increase imports of Iranian oil as of August, especially after millions of barrels of crude from Iran exited the Strait of Hormuz and are positioned to ship to Asia during the mid-June to early July window when the U.S. lifted its blockade aimed at preventing Iranian exports.

Total Chinese crude oil imports rebounded in July from the decade-low in June, with a 22% jump from June to an average of 8.45 million barrels per day (bpd) last month, customs data showed last week.

Thanks to this substantial supply cushion, China became instrumental in keeping a cap on global oil prices despite the turmoil in the Middle East, as the biggest importer of the commodity in the world could hit pause on imports for a while. However, analysts have warned that at some point China will return to international markets, and that would not be a good day for oil bears.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 17:40

Hegseth Pushes $1.5 Trillion Military Budget As Tribute To Lindsey Graham

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called on Congress to approve his request for a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027 during remarks at a ceremony in South Carolina for the renaming of Joint Base Charleston to Joint Base Lindsey Graham in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last month.

Hegseth claimed that before he died, Graham told him that the $1.5 trillion request was the best military budget he'd ever seen.

Department of War photo

"As we gather here today, the War Department is seeking a historic generational investment of $1.5 trillion for American warriors. And Lindsey himself said, to me in his office, ‘this is the best military budget I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress,'" Hegseth said, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon.

"This department pays tribute to Lindsey Graham in the naming of this base, but there could be no greater tribute than Congress could give than to invest in our warriors for the full $1.5 trillion," he added.

Hegseth said that he had known Graham for nearly 20 years, going back to when he was a member of a veterans group pushing for the US to escalate the war in Iraq.

"Nineteen years ago, young lieutenant, uh, First Lieutenant Pete Hegseth came back from Iraq and was a part of a veterans’ organization called Vets for Freedom that believed in the surge in Iraq and advocated for the troops on the ground," he said. "The first and only senator willing to meet with First Lieutenant Pete Hegseth and nowheresville Vets for Freedom was Sen. Lindsey Graham."

The event came as Hegseth has been struggling to get support from Congress for the full $1.5 trillion military budget, a nearly 50% increase from this year’s budget.

The Trump administration seeks to reach that figure through a $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) plus a supplemental funding bill worth about $350 billion. Hegseth said that he and Graham discussed the plan just a week before the senator’s death.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was joined today by Secretary of the Air Force Dr. Troy E. Meink, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, and Sen. Darline Graham for the renaming of Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, as Joint Base Lindsey Graham,… pic.twitter.com/5dz6TvGOhB

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) August 10, 2026

"He looked at me and said, how’s $355 billion sound? He wanted to give even more than $350 billion. He wanted to ensure our military was as equipped as humanly possible, because he was thinking of places like this one right here," Hegseth said.

Hegseth was joined at the ceremony by Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, who has taken over his Senate seat and is expected to pursue the same policies as her brother. Lindsey Graham was notorious for his hawkishness, and following his death, footage came out of him laughing and celebrating days after the start of the US-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran, a war he had been pushing for years.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 17:00

Phoebe Gates & Co-Founder Caught In The Cookie Jar: Slack Logs Contradict Phia's '24-Hour Bug' BS

When Bloomberg first caught Phia - the AI "personal shopping assistant" co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe Gates and climate-activist-turned-founder Sophia Kianni - claiming affiliate commissions on sales it had nothing to do with, the company's ham-fisted damage control was a Silicon Valley classic: an unfortunate software bug, discovered "within the last 24 hours" - and of course it was 'fixed immediately.' 

Except that's total bullshit. 

According to a follow-up investigation published Tuesday, they knew about it for at least seven months - and Gates along with other execs were actively pushing for its use, according to internal Slack messages and people familiar with the matter.

Phoebe Gates

According to the report, an internal dashboard screenshot shows the automatic cookie-dropping behavior was a named feature flag that could be toggled remotely - independent researcher Ben Edelman identified it in Phia's own code as enable_coupon_auto_drop. It was reportedly switched on December 10 and switched off July 7 - which happens to be the day Bloomberg first reached out for comment. Two people familiar with the matter confirmed the toggle meant the feature was live. So after seven months, the "bug" was magically cured the moment a reporter shot off an email. 

The Bug = The Business

A Phia data scientist estimated in a July 7 Slack message that cookie stuffing accounted for roughly 51% of the gross merchandise value the company claimed credit for in June, per Bloomberg. An internal revenue chart reportedly tells the same story: when the features went dark in early July, average daily revenue collapsed from about $80,000 to somewhere between $10,000 and $28,000.

The company disputes the math - a spokesperson called the 51% figure a preliminary analysis built on flawed methodology, and says the revenue cliff also reflects Phia voluntarily shutting down most of its monetization at the same time. Except - when switching off the "bug" vaporizes the majority of your revenue, that's the business. 

The receipts

For readers unfamiliar with the affiliate marketing underworld: publishers earn commissions by dropping a tracking cookie when a shopper intentionally interacts with them - clicking a referral link, applying a coupon. Dropping cookies without user interaction is called cookie stuffing, it's prohibited by essentially every affiliate network contract, and it works by hijacking credit (and commission) from whoever actually drove the sale.

Per Bloomberg, here's what the founders were doing while their future PR statement about a 24-hour-old bug was still unwritten:

• December 18: Gates, worried that Etsy commissions were coming in light, pressed developers on Slack to confirm that automatic cookie-drops were live across every site offering a coupon - so the company would monetize all merchandise value flowing through checkout. When an engineer confirmed cookies were being set even when shoppers never touched a coupon, she reportedly reiterated that every transaction should be captured regardless. (Phia's explanation: she was concerned a broken pop-up meant users weren't seeing coupons, which would also depress attribution. Noted.)
• October through July: a feature internally dubbed "passive trigger" reportedly re-dropped a Phia cookie every two hours on any top-1,000 website where the user had ever interacted with the extension - potentially steamrolling other publishers' legitimate referrals along the way. Bloomberg says its review of Phia's historical source code confirmed the features existed.
• A second feature, also per Bloomberg, reportedly set a cookie if a shopper clicked anywhere on the page after Phia's pop-up appeared - including while trying to close it.
• Kianni, after a colleague warned that dropping cookies on dismiss events violates Google's Chrome extension policy, reportedly floated the idea of claiming users had been trying to open the extension and simply reversing charges if anyone complained - before cheering the team on to keep the cookies dropping by whatever means available. (A spokesperson says that particular feature was never implemented or launched.)

Oh, and the Slack exchanges in question? Per two people familiar with the matter, they're no longer visible to Phia employees. Memory-holed, as it were.

Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates announce Phia, a digital fashion platform. Credit : Emma McIntyre/Getty

Ben Edelman - the advertising consultant who has spent 20 years dismantling deceptive marketing schemes - reviewed Phia's source code and merchant data, corroborated Bloomberg's findings, and described a multipart effort engineered to inflate Phia's revenue while delivering nothing to merchants. His suggestion that the founders should have spent more time reading their contracts and less time building tricks is about as polite as this gets. Phia declined to comment on his analysis.

Sound familiar?

It should. This is the Honey playbook - the same last-click attribution hijacking that blew up in PayPal's face in late 2024 and spawned a wave of class actions and a creator revolt. The difference is that Honey's scandal was reconstructed from the outside. Phia's, per Bloomberg, comes with the founders' own fingerprints on the toggle. And cookie stuffing isn't some novel gray area: a decade ago, in the infamous eBay affiliate cases, it ended in federal wire-fraud pleas.

The fallout is already rolling. Affiliate network Impact.com suspended Phia from its marketplace after Bloomberg's first story and is reallocating unpaid commissions attributed to the startup since June 20. Phia has begun repaying retailers - and with the timeline now stretching back to at least December rather than July, that refund bill is unlikely to shrink. Nike, Gap and Nordstrom, all reportedly among the affected merchants, did not respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment.

One question the piece leaves hanging: Phia announced a $35 million Series A led by Notable Capital on January 27, at a $185 million valuation - roughly seven weeks after the auto-drop toggle reportedly went live, and weeks after that December Slack thread. The launch announcement touted, among other things, a 40% increase in monetized GMV. The growth metrics were, evidently, impressive. It's just that, if Bloomberg's reporting holds, a meaningful chunk of that growth may have belonged to somebody else.

Phia, for its part, says all misattribution features were removed on July 7, that it is reviewing every transaction and issuing reversals to brand partners, and that it is hiring a head of compliance - a role whose necessity apparently revealed itself the same day Bloomberg's phone number did. The company adds that it remains focused on giving users the best possible shopping experience, including its new digital closet feature.

But sure. It was a bug.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 16:40

Not Winning? Just Change The Rules...

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome - lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster - helped give birth to the socialists.

U.S. Capitol Police move in to remove anti-war protesters interrupting Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testifying on June 24, 2026 Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the "system." Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and DOJ, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.

By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants - without audits, English proficiency, health checks, or the ability to support themselves.

Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years and another five million illegal aliens. And perhaps America would have gone from 50 million foreign-born residents to 60 million, or about 18 percent of the population.

In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal - and most ideal - state and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28 percent of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.

Today, 50 percent of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45 percent of California's current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.

So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives - or is born to immigrant parents - with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left, but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.

It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America - only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.

If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K-12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.

Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely - as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests - and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.

Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation.

In fact, its racialist war on standards only magnified its dilemmas. The SAT had once informed admissions officers not only about applicants' qualifications but also whether admitted students could do the work once enrolled.

But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements, and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.

So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework. But again, racialism is never a solution to problems. Instead, it is a catalyst that fuels them - as we have seen with the new notion that plagiarism is not an actionable offense when the culprit can plead victim status, whether a former president of Harvard or a current professor at Cambridge. But there are ancient laws and norms that insist intellectual theft is a crime and should be punished, not rewarded or ignored.

Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing, and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.

The Left likewise pushed for lower physical standards for the military's ground-combat brigades so that women, on average far less strong than their male counterparts, could join elite units. Again, the same ignorance and arrogance were evident. Physical standards were based on a century of combat experience in which morale, group discipline, and unit success rested on ensuring that all soldiers achieved a common level of physical strength and endurance.

This neo-Marxist-driven demand to mandate equality - albeit now substituting racial and gender consciousness for class consciousness - requires the destruction of established traditions, laws, and norms. The radical Left's key agendas - defunding the police, destroying the border, granting mass amnesties to illegal aliens, subsidizing wind and solar energy while waging a war on fossil fuels, and expanding racial essentialism in hiring and admissions - have never won more than 30 to 40 percent support among the general public. Yet the solution was not to ask why, and then to reflect, reboot, and recalibrate in order to discover how the Left had lost public support.

Instead, the solution was to alter or destroy the system that had denied them power.

So communists, socialists, and radical Democrats prefer moving the goalposts. When equality of opportunity was largely achieved, next they demanded a mandated equality of outcome.

With the ascendancy of a large, affluent middle class, the Left, in its eternal search for a victimized class, pivoted and replaced class oppression with racial victimization.

And when there were not yet enough victimized minorities to guarantee a majority constituency of the aggrieved, the Left redefined the victimized to include anyone who was not a white heterosexual male, regardless of income and privilege.

And when the people finally tired of the Leftists' totalitarian social engineering, the Left sought to change the system by radically altering the way Americans vote, the manner in which government is formed and functions, and, finally, the very demography of America.

The common denominator? Human nature revolts at forced statism, coercive redistribution, and government-mandated equality of results. It instead yearns for liberty and freedom.

No matter how much deception, camouflage, or brainwashing is employed, statism, socialism, and communism can never sustain public support. Throughout history, the Left has therefore begun by changing the rules and altering the demography - if not initially through changes to election rules, bureaucratic fiat, and biased court orders, then eventually through sheer violence.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 16:20

The Diamond Crash Accelerates

The Diamond Standard Index, tracked on Bloomberg under the ticker DIAMINDX, tumbled to new record lows during the first half of August as a surge in affordable lab-grown stones eroded the scarcity premium underpinning natural diamond prices.

"Technological progress in growing diamonds in labs has been amazing. It's no surprise most engagement rings are now using lab diamonds," X user Crémieux said.

Technological progress in growing diamonds in labs has been amazing.

It's no surprise most engagement rings are now using lab diamonds. https://t.co/MZ4zWVlQNq pic.twitter.com/fH1lFYD3Ih

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) August 8, 2026

X user Saul Sadka warned that the diamond downturn will likely persist for years as lab-grown stones flood the market:

Expect the collapse in diamond prices to accelerate substantially over the next few years. The natural-diamond market is shrinking in both size and value and circling the drain following the commoditization of its product by modern technology. The same thing happened to pearls 100 years ago, but it will be much worse for diamonds: they will become a signal of bad taste rather than wealth, just as pearls went from high society to a matronly cliché within 50 years.

I have been telling friends in the diamond industry to find a new line of work for ten years. It was clearly only a matter of time before lab-grown diamonds became a mass-market commodity, sold at some small premium over production costs, which would themselves continue to plummet.

Since they are identical to natural diamonds, and buyers actually have multiple reasons to choose them instead, including no "blood diamonds" and supposedly greater environmental friendliness, most buyers will not care.

Attempts to differentiate the products using $20,000 machines will not help: they are indistinguishable in real life.

There was always going to be some multiple that people would be willing to pay for "natural" over "lab," but it did not really matter whether that multiple was 2× or 10×. Once lab-grown diamonds can be made for next to nothing, even ten times next to nothing is still very little. People will pay more, perhaps much more, for an identical product because of its backstory, but not infinitely more.

The reason natural-diamond prices have held up reasonably well over the past four years, "only" falling by around 50% in real terms, has more to do with supply cutbacks. Production has been reduced by about 20% over that period, from 120 million to 98 million carats, in a desperate attempt to support prices as the natural and lab-grown markets diverge. If production returned to its previous level, prices would fall even faster.

But it is going to get much, much worse. A trip to Miami will explain why: people who look like gangsters walk around wearing enormous tennis bracelets that would have cost a million dollars 20 years ago but can now be purchased for the price of a used Rolex.

Diamonds are going to become a sign of tackiness, as, frankly, they always should have been, rather than class or exclusivity. And then the game will be up for everyone in the diamond industry.

Expect the collapse in diamond prices to accelerate substantially over the next few years. The natural-diamond market is shrinking in both size and value and circling the drain following the commoditisation of its product by modern technology. The same thing happened to pearls… https://t.co/XdHRsgSp6h pic.twitter.com/c0zHoUqi2L

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 9, 2026

Sadka continued in a series of follow-up tweets:

One of the biggest problems for hopes of a residual natural-diamond industry is that diamonds ARE, in fact, FOREVER. At some point, the market will shrink to the point where the secondhand supply, fed by the estates of Boomers as they fall off this mortal coil, will provide sufficient supply to make any mining or polishing uneconomic.

One of the biggest problems for hopes of a residual natural diamond industry is that diamonds ARE, in fact, FOREVER. At some point, the market will shrink to the point where second-hand supply, fed by the estates of Boomers as they fall off this mortal coil, will provide… pic.twitter.com/VkOhukpH5I

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 10, 2026

This would have been true 30 years ago, and it would have been a big blow to the Israeli economy, but it's not true anymore. The industry once accounted for up to 3% of Israeli GDP, but it's now under 0.2%. Sorry, Turkey.

This would have been true 30 years ago, it would have been a big blow to the Israeli economy, but it's not true anymore. They once were up to 3% of Israeli GDP, but its not under 0.2%.

Sorry Turkey. pic.twitter.com/pORcoY4GcK

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 10, 2026

There might be some limited residual market at the high end, but my guess is that there will be enough supply from Boomers as they "check out" to glut that demand without any need for miners or cutters, etc.

There might be some limited residual market at the high end, but my guess is that there will be enough supply from the boomers as they "check out" to glut that demand without any need for miners or cutters etc.

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) August 10, 2026

To sum up: natural diamonds face a structural, rather than cyclical, collapse. If you're in the market for an engagement ring and hoping it will serve as some store of value, you might be out of luck because lab-grown stones are destroying the scarcity premium, while a potential wave of secondhand supply from aging Baby Boomers could pressure the market even further. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 15:40

Judge (Partly) Rejects Minnesota Bid To Block Trump Admin Title IX Rules On Trans Students

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on Monday largely dismissed Minnesota’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, the 1972 law that bars sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and activities.

U.S. District Chief Judge Eric Tostrud of the District of Minnesota ruled that most of the state’s claims fell short.

Minnesota had argued that the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the 10th Amendment by determining that the state’s policies allowing transgender students to compete on sports teams and use facilities consistent with their gender identity breached federal law. Tostrud determined that the administration’s findings and related letters to the state to enforce Title IX did not constitute final agency action that could be challenged under the Administrative Procedure Act. The findings and letters themselves, he wrote, imposed “no legal injury on Minnesota.”

He also referenced a June Supreme Court decision upholding state bans on male athletes in female sports. While the high court did not rule on whether states or schools may allow such participation, the judge said its determination that “sex” in Title IX refers to biological sex offers “at least some support” for the administration’s reading of the statute.

Part of Lawsuit Still Standing

The orders also outlined penalties for federally funded entities that allow male athletes to compete in women’s sports. The administration used the threats of withholding federal education funding to press school districts to end policies allowing students to act based on their gender identity.

Tostrud left intact Minnesota’s challenge tied to the potential loss of roughly $2.9 billion in federal funding, finding that it presented a concrete injury for the court to consider.

The judge noted that the funding issue was a separate issue from challenging the interpretation of Title IX, as the state did not have “sufficiently clear notice” of Title IX’s prohibition on transgender women and girls at the time it accepted the federal funding.

Minnesota stands as the only state to sue President Donald Trump and his administration over his executive orders this term defining sex as binary.

The Justice Department’s enforcement action against the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League for violating Title IX by allowing males to compete against and access intimate spaces designated for females remains pending.

The Minnesota Attorney General’s office has defended the state’s longstanding policies as consistent with the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity. The state has maintained that executive orders and agency findings cannot override state law or rewrite Title IX without proper process.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 15:20

Putin Pardons Ailing Former US Marine After Years In Russian Prison

A Marine veteran who had been held in Russian prisons since his arrest in January 2022 has been released back to US custody, reportedly after a consistent pressure campaign from Trump administration officials and global advocacy groups.

32-year old Robert Gilman, a former US Marine and English teacher imprisoned in Russia, is said to have received direct pardon from President Vladimir Putin based on humanitarian reasons, given reports say Gilman's health has been rapidly deteriorating. Soon after Gilman's arrest he was slapped with an steep eight-year prison sentence for allegedly kicking a police officer while drunk, followed by an alleged assault on a prison official, according to court records.

Robert Gilman, via Reuters

Gilman had actually following his jailing owned up to the attacks on prison staff - but claimed self-defense and that he was provoked and responding to insults.

Gilman's family as well as advocacy groups say he was wrongfully detained on false charges, and further that was held as a bargaining chip for future possible prisoner swap with Washington. Here's how one such US non-profit organization characterized his arrest:

Robert is a Marine Corps veteran, who was traveling in Russia when he fell sick on a train. Instead of medical help, he was taken to a police station. He fell into a cycle of charges, which began with a case that was dismissed, a second that was without evidence, and a third for assault of a police officer where even the police officer says he should not be charged.

A typical Russian Government tactic is getting Americans into their system, and pile on various unfounded charges to keep them there. This is Robert’s story, and they continue to put him in conditions that set him up for further charges that further politicize his case. Beyond this, the profile of the case against Robert appears eerily familiar to the Trevor Reed case, where a former Marine unexpectedly blacked out and was charged with punching a police officer, suggesting this may all have been staged.

So there does seem to be an admission that Gilman indeed acted violently toward law enforcement officials. The whole situation might be a politicized case, but it's also the reality that Americans sometimes do stupid and drunken criminal acts abroad. 

According to more on the context of the American citizen's release:

Gilman’s sudden release comes after his family and the hostage advocacy group Global Reach had appealed to Moscow for his release, warning that he was “near death” following months of alleged torture in Russian prison. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also said to have raised Gilman’s imprisonment with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in the Philippines last month.

The family and some US officials are alleging that the former Marine was tortured while in Russian prisons, including being subject to mind-altering drug injections:

And according to Reuters:

But Eric Lebson, chief strategy ​officer of Global Reach, an advocacy group representing Gilman's family, told Reuters last week that Gilman was moved in late ​June from the prison hospital to the psychiatric ward of a civilian emergency hospital in ⁠a catatonic-like state assessed as a "dissociative stupor."

The U.S. officials said Gilman on Tuesday was on a State Department plane ​carrying him from Russia to Washington Dulles Airport.

BREAKING: U.S. Marine veteran Robert Gilman, a Lowell native detained in Russia since 2022, has been released after advocates raised dire concerns about his health. pic.twitter.com/njUt3OQt5D

— WCVB-TV Boston (@WCVB) August 11, 2026

However, concerning his current state of health while being transferred back to America, there is this line in Reuters: "All ​things considered he seems to be in good shape," an unnamed US official said.

It is as yet unclear if a prisoner swap will emerged, but so far there's been no word of any Russians being released from US custody. There may have as yet been other undisclosed incentives that Moscow was responding to.

Trump quickly took to social media...

🚨 GREAT NEWS: President Trump just secured the release of American Robert Gilman from a Russian prison. The former U.S. Marine is coming home tonight. Russia agreed to free him with no exchange required. This is another major win for bringing Americans home. Welcome back to… pic.twitter.com/kutNhNN2H2

— Commentary Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) August 11, 2026 Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 15:00