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We're told the pop star and Kansas City Chiefs tight end were seated in the main dining room in the lower level of the restaurant.

We're told the pop star and Kansas City Chiefs tight end were seated in the main dining room in the lower level of the restaurant.

Derek Phillips, a marching band member at the University of Iowa, was taken off life support after he collapsed on Saturday during the Hawkeyes' season-opening football game.

The Frenchman received threats online and responded with antisemitic statements.

These lucky folks will get to experience the magic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that has plenty of people concerned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former NFL fullback Matt Suhey's cause of death has been revealed.

Are you one of the more than 15 million Americans dealing with this disease? Laughing it off could make a big difference.

Thomas Bakas, 77, was riding his stand-up electric scooter in downtown Brooklyn when he smashed into a bicyclist heading the opposite direction, authorities said. 

The Montreal-based manufacturer’s stock opened down 6.4% in Toronto before clawing back some of the losses.

Cage purchased the property in 2024.

Cage purchased the property in 2024.

Ooh, that smell. Can’t you smell that smell?

Gaga's skin care secret is already a star staple.

Gaga's skin care secret is already a star staple.

Relatives of the victims killed after a nurse drove 130mph before slamming into pedestrians at a Los Angeles intersection stormed out of the courtroom Tuesday after graphic video of a fetus was shown during opening statements at the suspect’s trial. Video of the fiery aftermath was displayed in court to show the carnage left behind...

Actress Susan Lucci was elated to be seated next to Yankees first baseman Ben Rice at the 2026 US Open on Monday.

Spoiler alert — the number keeps going higher.

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

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

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

AFP via Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video shows Israeli "settlers" entering Palestinian property in Turmus Ayya during U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s visit to meet an American citizen.

Huckabee filmed the incident.pic.twitter.com/r3K8WTae18

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 6, 2026

According to Israeli media:

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

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

The banned MPs are listed as follows:

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

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

The U.S. has condemned the siege of Palestinian homes in the West Bank by Israeli settlers, who have cut off water, electricity and essential supplies to residents.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee on Thursday called the settlers’ actions an “act of terror,” adding to… pic.twitter.com/pOrwgURCHZ

— PBS News (@NewsHour) August 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

Israeli settlers have attacked the historic Christian village of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, setting fields on fire and targeting Palestinian homes.

Local sources reported that the settlers opened fire on houses and threw Molotov cocktails pic.twitter.com/h3Jouvumga

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) June 10, 2026

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

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

More Investing Myths Dismantled

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

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

Chapter 1: Think Like An Investor

Chapter 2: Investor Psychology

Chapter 3: Why Crashes, Timing & Valuations Matter

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

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

Investing Myth One: You Have To Beat The Market

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You cannot have both.

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

Investing Myth Two: Just Invest Like Warren Buffett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investing Myth Three: Passive Investing Always Wins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What All Three Myths Have In Common

Step back and look at the three together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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