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We found shockingly cheap tickets to see Ringo Starr live on his 2026 tour

NY Post

2 weeks 2 days ago

Here's how you can see a Beatle for under $30. Yes, really.

Matt Levy

US Shipment Of F-35s Goes MIA In Shocking Detour To Hong Kong

Zero Rss

2 weeks 2 days ago

US Shipment Of F-35s Goes MIA In Shocking Detour To Hong Kong

Authored by Luis Cornelio via Headline USA,

Lawmakers and the Trump administration are investigating the odd disappearance of a U.S.-bound shipment of F-35 fighter jet components from Australia, which were originally meant to be repaired on U.S. soil, according to new reporting by Politico.

The report, published Friday and citing three anonymous sources, noted that an intermediary was transporting the equipment on behalf of American defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin through the Pacific Ocean before it was diverted to Hong Kong.

The three unnamed sources suggested that neither the Pentagon nor Lockheed Martin knows why the shipment ended up in Hong Kong.

The current whereabouts of the components remain unknown, triggering concerns over whether China may have gotten its hands on them.

China, which has tightened its control of Hong Kong in recent years, has long sought to gather intelligence on the F-35 program.

The missing components were part of the F-35 Lightning II, which Lockheed Martin describes on its website as the "most lethal, survivable, and connected fighter aircraft" for America and its allies.

Specifically, among the missing items is an F-35 canopy, a major part of the fighter jet that contains sensitive technology, according to Politico.

🚨🚨SCOOP: A shipment of F-35 fighter jet parts was rerouted to Hong Kong this summer - then vanished.

Congress and DOD are investigating, amid the possibility that China may now have access to the highly-classified program.

W/ @audrey_decker9 https://t.co/u5Ip309Ke9

— Mark Satter (@marksatter) September 18, 2026

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has called the F-35 the "most costly weapon system" in the U.S. military, and the Pentagon has already spent between $200 billion and $250 billion on the program, according to estimates.

The State Department and the Pentagon reportedly briefed lawmakers on the matter in June, the report added.

In a statement, the Pentagon office responsible for the F-35 jets said it was "aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components."

The military office said an investigation is underway to retrieve the missing components and determine what happened.

Headline USA reached out to the office for further clarification but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Lockheed Martin, for its part, declined to provide information on the matter, citing security reasons, Politico noted.

"Our teams handle every shipment with the utmost diligence and safeguards to ensure the integrity of the F-35 program and the security of our allied partners," the company said.

We asked an F-35 pilot to describe the jet in one word.

His answer: sneaky. 👀

But behind that word is a lot of 5th Gen capability: stealth, advanced sensors and the information pilots need to stay ahead when the mission demands it. pic.twitter.com/QrmfBunlwt

— F-35 Lightning II (@thef35) July 9, 2026 Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 16:30

Tyler Durden

Kunstler: Suburban Sprawl Is A 'Death Trap' For America's National Spirit

Zero Rss

2 weeks 2 days ago

Kunstler: Suburban Sprawl Is A 'Death Trap' For America's National Spirit

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

The Late, Great Debate About Suburbia, An Apologia

"It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished."

- William H Whyte

Greenland, yes, yes, okay ! Smooth move. . . !

But. . . today we put aside the vagaries of national and geo-politics to return to a longstanding affliction in American life that is evermore absent from the public discourse and deserves an airing: the quandary of our suburban sprawl living arrangement, and what can be done about it.

First, get this: the demolition derby we live in day-by-day is responsible for as much misery, injustice, economic failure, and ill-health as anything else in our collective doings.

Its sheer ugliness - the horror of the six-lane highway with its ensembles of strip-malls, burger shacks, muffler shops, topless bars, Big Box stops, screaming signage, and the vast wastelands of parking. . . the suicide-inducing housing pods marching out remorselessly through forest, prairie, upland, lowland, basin and range. . . the depressing freeways with their monster entanglements of on-and-off-ramps. . . this epic mutilation of our continental landscape - is an evil quite beyond our ordinary imaginings. This inescapable, immersive ugliness, I remind you, is entropy-made-visible. And entropy, of course, is the force in nature that you really don't want to mess around with because it is the agent of death.

I do not exaggerate. It's a death trap, the way we live in this country, for the mind, the body, the family, the community, and the national spirit. Until fairly recently this was widely apprehended (or at least suspected). But the politicization of everything has wrecked what had been a growing and pretty robust national discussion about it.

To re-cap briefly: this is a big country. It had once been composed of cities, towns, farmlands, and wilderness, a coherent transect of human habitation. The invention of the motor car changed all that, starting in the 1920s.

The ambiguous territory outside these cities and towns represented vast potential fortunes in property development. . . and the race was on.

The Great Depression and World War 2 interrupted the suburban expansion, but it resumed on steroids afterward when the rest of the world was a smoldering ruin and we could sell them anything (and lend them money to buy it). The construction of all the new suburban infrastructure alone was a major component of the late 20th century US economy, and then it became the scaffold for our so-called consumer economy, comprised of furnishing that scaffold with so much stuff that it overflowed into thousands of self-storage sheds.

The decanting of our cities that ensued - the steady dribble of the middle-classes moving out, along with the commerce that served them - left most of those cities ruined. Eventually even the small towns got whacked, the farms paved-over, too. What we're left with is a weird hybrid landscape that is neither town nor country, has few of the civic amenities that add-up to a genuine sense of community, and none of the rural charm formerly found in the countryside. It became painfully obvious that a suburban house was a cartoon of a house in the country, and living in a cartoon is just not spiritually rewarding. Cue the Prozac. . . .

The whole kit, aided by the dogmas of zoning and government lending schemes, became easily reproducible from one locale to the next. For the development industry, the template became a habit. . . and so it boogied on through the decades. By the 1990s, the generation coming into power (yeah, the Boomers) started a revolt against all that. It crystalized in the New Urbanism movement and its signature org, the Congress for the New Urbanism, CNU. We can do better than this, this. . . this. . . national clusterfuck, they declared.

I was excited by this movement, wrote a couple of books about it, got to know the excellent people behind it - architects, urban planners, civic officials, property developers. They were smart, skilled, visionary. They believed that walkable communities and disciplining the automobile would produce places worth caring about and worth living in - and it seemed to me that such an effort would go a long way to curing the desperate anomie of American life. Over the next several decades, the New Urbanists produced scores of great projects. Some were actual new towns, some projects were renovations of existing towns, neighborhoods, business districts, and small town Main Streets. The results of their work are visible all over the country now.

But then, the political crack-up of the country commenced around 2009 with the Great Financial Crash and the ascent of Obama-inspired Wokeness, and really accelerated with the reaction to the advent of Mr. Trump in 2016. From that point on, as a nation, we've been arguing about everything but the disastrous arrangement of daily life on-the-ground in America. Some new twists in the spin of history have made matters worse.

One is that suburban sprawl is, by default, the favorite pattern of MAGA (and I happen to be a Trump voter). To them, suburbia is all tied up with ideas about economic liberty, as is the whole apparatus of Happy Motoring. They are still mentally stuck in the imagery of the TV car commercial - the lone sedan gliding through the sine-cosine curves of the empty seacoast highway, the romantic epitome of freedom! It's a lie, pretty much, because the more universal experience of motoring these days is getting stuck at a crawl in freeway traffic with a thousand other motorists per mile, half of whom desperately need to take a pee and can't do a darn thing about it.

And then there's the fallacy of the suburban housing development being a "community" - bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! See: I don't even have to explain that. But, MAGA tends to see it this way, along with all the activity that enables it - the mortgage system, the production home-builders ("it's more than a house, you understand, it's a home!"), all of which is so central to a booming economy. So, you don't dare inveigh against suburbia - except I will, because it is making America worse, not great again, and somebody's got to say it.

Yet another thing has come along to wreck the New Urbanist dream of reconstituting the American city and small town, and that thing is the World Economic Forum's (WEF's) proposal they call the "15-minute City." Superficially, it seems to resemble the traditional neighborhood model that the NU's espouse. But deeper down the 15-Minute City is much more about a surveillance and tracking apparatus - and this has caused many conservatives (especially them) to reject anything that looks like traditional urban design.

It's a most unfortunate situation, but that's where things stand, and it's one reason that the debate over suburban sprawl has stopped. A final and equally unfortunate development is that the CNU org came to be taken over the past decade by political Wokesters more interested in Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity BS than in their original mission of providing workable remedies for the tragic fiasco of American suburbia.

Zero Rss

2 weeks 2 days ago

Judge Rules EPA Must Reinstate $7 Billion Biden-Era Subsidies For Solar Promotion

Authored by Jeremy Lott via The Epoch Times,

A $7 billion federal government grant program for solar promotion, authorized during the Biden administration, was reinstated by a federal judge on Sept. 18 in a ruling that rebuffed the Trump administration's efforts to cancel it.

Solar panel array at a solar farm near Lancaster, Calif., on June 17, 2026. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island wrote in her ruling that the current Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) "termination of the Solar for All program is declared unlawful."

Money was appropriated in 2022 for a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund under the Inflation Reduction Act that later spawned the $7 billion Solar for All grant program in June 2023. Congress at the time dedicated billions of dollars to the program and a separate smaller amount in the millions of dollars for its administration by the EPA.

Funds for the grant program would be used to "create and expand low-income solar programs that provide financing and technical assistance, such as workforce development, to enable low-income and disadvantaged communities to deploy and benefit from residential solar," the Biden-era EPA wrote.

Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin criticized the program on Sept. 7, 2025, saying that canceling it would save taxpayers billions of dollars.

"The One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which included a $7 billion pot called 'Solar for All,'" he said in a statement announcing the program's cancellation.

"EPA no longer has the statutory authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive."

An audit of the program found that as of early August 2025, the program's 60 grant recipients had "drawn down approximately $71 million, or 1.02 percent, of the obligated funds for various aspects of project planning and implementation."

The Trump-era EPA canceled the program. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the current Congress canceled some funds for administering the program and rescinded Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money that was not already obligated.

The EPA noted that none of the plaintiffs suing the government were actually grant recipients. Instead, they were prospective subrecipients or third-order beneficiaries, such as unions. The government argued that they lacked standing to sue.

McElroy disagreed on the standing question. She also interpreted the text of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to mean that "existing grants were not to be rescinded" and that only minor "unobligated" funds could be clawed back.

Practically, all of the funds were spoken for by designated recipient organizations. What that means is that, unless reversed on appeal, the current EPA may find itself obligated to give out the remaining nearly $7 billion in solar promotion subsidies from the Biden era.

Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, one of the parties that brought suit, told The Epoch Times that he was "very pleased with the ruling."

The union president said he did not "think the federal government should appeal," as the ruling makes "very clear that this program should never have been stopped by the EPA in the first place."

Carolyn Holran, a spokesperson for the EPA, indicated that Crowley might be disappointed by her agency's next steps.

"EPA is reviewing the decision and considering options for appeal," she told The Epoch Times.

Crowley said the total Rhode Island slice of federal funding should come to $49 million, which would provide "thousands of good-paying union jobs."

Unions and the Trump administration have often been at loggerheads over green projects. Crowley said that they had notched up legal victories on offshore wind projects and solar grants, and promised more.

"We won't back down in our efforts to protect our members' jobs while we build a new carbon-free economy," he said.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 15:45

Tyler Durden