Zero Rss

Big Oil Backs Mazama's $135 Million Bet On Superhot Geothermal

Mazama Energy announced $135 million in new capital with an oversubscribed Series B that included ConocoPhillips and Shell Ventures. With Devon Energy initially backing Fervo in 2023, a pattern is emerging with oil and gas veterans placing their bets in the geothermal industry. 

Some of the techniques developed by the O&G industry are translating well to geothermal projects. Horizontal drilling, well completions, and underground reservoir expertise are finding new purpose in an industry that is far more politically neutral than the fossil fuel industry ever could be.

Geothermal very well could be one of the AI-powered trades that is yet to be fully discovered. The Trump administration has thrown its full support behind the technology, as it holds some of the best qualities of nuclear energy without the [unfounded] radiation concerns.

Traditional geothermal, such as the established technology used by companies like Ormat, taps naturally occurring reservoirs of hot water and steam, making these sites very dependent on specific geology. The newer technology being utilized by companies like Fervo and Mazama engineers underground pathways to allow for injected water to circulate through hot rock and force the heat back to the surface. 

Mazama wants to push those techniques into much hotter rock. The company says its Oregon project demonstrated an engineered geothermal system at 629°F in 2025. Its second well, Athena, reached 10,350 feet in 15 drilling days this month, roughly 80% faster than the earlier well, and is drilling deeper toward 750°F.

The company highlights the benefits of the higher temperatures in their press release from the capital raise:

"Reaching 750°F (400°C) delivers up to 10 times the power of a conventional 390°F (200°C) well, owing to the much higher energy density of supercritical water and improved reservoir productivity. This allows Mazama to deliver projects using 75% less water and drilling 80% fewer wells than conventional geothermal developments."

According to Mazama’s announcement, the financing will support the DOE-backed Project Ceres, targeting 15 MW of electrical capacity per well and a power-generation demonstration in 2027.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 12:00

The Fed Rate-Hike Won't Fix The Inflation It Targets

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The Fed did what the bond market dared it to do. This past week, in a unanimous vote, the FOMC raised the target range for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to 3.75%-4.00%, the first Fed rate hike since 2023. The stated reason was “price stability.” Yet this is a Fed whose own chairman has spent the past year insisting that real growth does not cause inflation, and that the drivers of this one sit largely outside the central bank’s reach. As we argued in prior Bull Bear Reports on the debt-and-inflation problem, that tension is not a footnote; it is the entire story of the Fed rate hike, and something worth exploring more deeply.

Make no mistake, it was the bond market that forced the issue. Such is interesting when you consider that Kevin Warsh wants the market to create the signal. Well, he got what he wished for. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed to roughly 5.01% around Wednesday’s decision, a level not seen in 19 years, while the 30-year cleared 5.35%. In other words, the market’s message was clear: “Raise rates, or we will.”

What The Fed Rate Hike Actually Does

However, what gets lost in transmission is what the Fed is actually trying to achieve through interest rate policy. The mechanism behind rate hikes or cuts is a demand story, nothing more. Raising the policy rate raises the cost of money across the system. Credit-financed demand cools first, mortgages, auto loans, capex, anything that lives or dies on the cost of borrowing. As that demand softens, the economy loses some of its power to bid prices higher, and the pace of increase eases. “Price stability,” in the Fed’s own framing, is really “expectations” stability.

Now, notice what the Fed’s tool never touches, and this was mentioned by Warsh on Wednesday. A higher Fed funds rate does not drill a well, end a war, or reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The Fed rate hike works on one side of the ledger, and one side only: the demand side. Such is the design, and such is also the limit. When the inflation in front of you is a supply problem, a demand lever pulls on the wrong rope.

What Warsh Means By “The Fed Can’t Fix Prices”

However, this is where most of the mainstream commentary gets sloppy. The Warsh school separates two things that the word “inflation” quietly blends together.

1. There are relative prices, set in the real economy by supply and demand for actual goods, and then
2. There is the monetary unit, the purchasing power of the dollar itself.

An iPhone gets cheaper because of globalized production. Oil prices rise because of a war that threatens supply lines. No policy rate produces either outcome.

When Warsh implies the Fed cannot fix prices, the defensible version of that claim is narrow and correct. Monetary policy cannot repair a supply-driven, relative-price shock. It can only compress demand until something breaks. Milton Friedman’s line, that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” is usually quoted, incorrectly, to argue the opposite. However, read that carefully, because it makes Warsh’s point. Friedman described the slow erosion of the currency over the years (driven by a general rise in inflation amid economic growth), not the price of gasoline during a Gulf conflict. The Fed owns the monetary unit, but does not own the oil market.

Look at the composition of the number the Fed is fighting.

Headline ran 3.4% in August, but energy alone ran 16.9%. Strip the war out, and the overheating story gets much harder to tell. That is not a demand economy running too hot. That is a supply line on fire.

Then Why Hike Into A Supply Shock?

Fair objection. If the Fed cannot produce a barrel of oil, the Fed rate hike looks like “theater.” It is not, and the reason is CREDIBILITY. A central bank tightens into a supply shock for three defensible reasons, none of which involve lowering the price of crude.

1. To keep inflation “expectations” anchored, so a one-off energy spike does not get built into wages and contracts and turn into the self-sustaining spiral of the 1970s.
2. To protect the institution’s word after the “transitory” humiliation of 2021, when the Fed looked through a shock and watched it metastasize.
3. Because the cost of being wrong twice dwarfs the cost of over-tightening once.

The dot plot shows the committee has made that trade. Sixteen of eighteen officials now see the possibility of at least one more hike this year, and four pencil in two.

“Inflation remains elevated. Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal.” – FOMC statement, September 16, 2026

Read that quote once again. The committee expressly said that it can steer prices with rates. However, history tells us more precisely that the Fed can reliably steer demand only. Those are not the same claim. Fighting a supply shock with a demand tool is the textbook recipe for stagflation, slower growth, and higher unemployment without curing the thing that lit the fire. Such is the box Warsh is in, the same Volcker-versus-Burns dilemma, now his to own.

Here is a clearer way to see the potential danger that Warsh is walking into. The same dot plot that pins the neutral rate at 3.1% now has the funds rate at 3.875% and climbing toward a 4.1% median by year-end. Once you strip away the language, the Fed is already about 90 basis points into restrictive territory, with more to come, even as Warsh insists conditions are not “broadly restrictive.”

That setup leaves the Fed with absolutely no margin for error. In the current environment, the Fed is hiking rates to offset an oil price spike. If energy costs continue to weigh on growth and the Fed continues to tighten, it will accelerate the deterioration. If oil reverses, the inflation impulse fades quickly, and the Fed’s hikes accelerate the economic bite. Both roads end at the same address, a Fed caught in a policy mistake, scrambling to fix the overshoot.

What Usually Happens To Stocks After A Hike, And Why This Time Is Different

The bulls have a comforting statistic ready for this week, and it is a real one. Going back to the late 1980s, the S&P 500 has slipped only modestly immediately after a first Fed rate hike, roughly 2% over the first three months, then recovered to average gains of nearly 9% over the following year, according to Goldman Sachs. LPL Financial puts the average 12-month gain at 6.7%, with a median of 10.7%. The tidy conclusion is that rate hikes are buying opportunities.

However, as is always the case, beware of “averages,” which in this case may well be lying to you. The reason I say that is due to the composition. The Fed almost always hikes into a strong, demand-driven expansion. It rarely hikes into a supply shock. When it has, the record is far uglier, and the damage tends to arrive late, once the energy spike feeds inflation and the tightening starts to bite.

After the 1973 oil embargo, the S&P fell 11% in a month and 41% over the next year. Another, more recent example, was when the Fed tightened amid the energy-and-inflation shock of 2022. During that period, the index lost roughly 19% for the year and remained underwater well past 12 months. Every “hikes are bullish” study carves 2022 out as the exception. Today, it is most likely not the exception, but the template.

One thing that matters is the pace of the Fed rate hikes. Charles Schwab’s strategists found that the S&P returned 10.5% over the year following slow tightening cycles and lost 3.6% after rapid ones. So what should you actually expect over the next year, hiking into a war-driven supply shock with the 10-year near 5%? Our read sits below. It is a judgment anchored in that history, not a backtest.

In the current market, the leadership is not subtle. When the Fed hikes amid an energy shock, money tends to flow to where inflation is a benefit rather than a hindrance. For example, in 2022, as shown below, energy led the market up by about 48%. This suggests that investors, today, like then, should favor energy, materials, and defensives with real pricing power, as well as staples and health care. On the other side, underweight long-duration assets such as technology and communication services, as well as rate-sensitive discretionary and real estate names. However, there is always a caveat. If oil breaks and the shock fades, that map inverts, and today’s laggards lead the way back.

Such is the danger of leaning on a historical average built almost entirely on the wrong kind of hike.

What This Means For Markets Over The Next Few Months, And How To Navigate It

So how do you navigate it? Rates are “higher for longer,” and the committee has told you plainly it is willing to go again. The 30-year above 5.35% and the 10-year near 5.01% raise the bar that every equity, especially long-duration growth, has to clear to justify its multiple.

The forecasters are already marking that reality. Ed Yardeni cut his year-end S&P 500 target to 7,900 from 8,400 on the decision, flagging the risk of a downturn over the next three to six months as yields climb on energy. We would take the warning seriously without treating it as gospel.

Let’s focus on the bond market, which is the harder call right now, and the argument cuts both ways.

The bull case is a good one.

“The term premium has expanded to levels that historically pay investors to own duration, and a hike that slows the economy is the classic tailwind for long Treasuries. If Warsh restores “credibility” and growth cools, the long end rallies, and this past week’s high yields will look like a gift.”

The bear case, however, also has teeth.

“The 30-year sits at a 19-year high for a reason: relentless issuance against a $40 trillion debt, layered on top of supply-driven inflation. Rate hikes can not fix that. That tail does not disappear either just because the Fed moved a quarter point. So, this argues that investors should take exposure at the point where the term premium is best paid for the risk. That is in the belly of the curve, with 5-7 year durations.”

Crucially, none of this argues for abandoning equities. It argues for respecting a market regime in which the risk-free rate finally competes with everything else. It is an environment where the biggest driver of “price stability,” the Fed cited, is a war it can’t control. The deeper problem lies one level down. The deficits and debt that we repeatedly flagged are the real long-run engine of price stability. Monetary policy sits downstream of all of it.

The Fed can raise the price of money. It cannot lower the price of a war. Size the portfolio for the difference.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 11:30

Bessent And He Lifeng Open High-Stakes Trade Talks Ahead Of Trump-Xi Summit

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer are meeting Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng at JPMorgan Chase's Manhattan headquarters on Sunday for a critical round of trade negotiations. The all-day session marks the final ministerial push before President Donald Trump hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington beginning September 24.

JPMorgan is not involved in the negotiations, though Bessent previously invited CEO Jamie Dimon to speak at a Treasury-hosted G20 finance leaders meeting in Asheville.

This negotiating channel previously engineered the Busan truce, which capped bilateral duties near 20 percent after reciprocal tariffs spiked into triple digits. The administration has since rebuilt its tariff structure under alternative statutes, while broader excess-capacity tariffs remain paused until after this week's summit. The existing truce expires on November 10, adding urgency for both sides.

The Core Negotiating Agenda

Three primary issues dominate the current talks, alongside geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and Iranian oil:

• Rare Earths and Critical Minerals: Beijing committed in Busan to resume shipments of critical materials, but a senior U.S. official noted that China's performance has fallen short. Disruptions to these supplies significantly impact global manufacturing and technology. Beijing holds the leverage of offering more export licenses but has yet to restore pre-restriction volumes.
• Artificial Intelligence: Negotiations will cover both open-weight and proprietary closed-weight AI models. Low-cost Chinese open-weight systems are increasingly adopted by U.S. developers, prompting Washington to push for bilateral guardrails against misuse by non-state actors while avoiding a complete bifurcation of the tech ecosystems.
• Unresolved Trade Commitments: Negotiators are revisiting items left hanging from Trump's May visit to Beijing. This includes efforts to reduce tariffs on non-sensitive goods, finalize Chinese agricultural purchases, and address proposed U.S. tariffs linked to industrial overcapacity and forced-labor concerns.

Broader geopolitical issues continue to shadow the economic track. The conflict involving Iran and its impact on energy supplies has emerged as an unexpected major pressure point in the talks. Additionally, Washington continues to monitor the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals from China, which will likely feature heavily in the main summit.

Expectations and Market Impact

The likelier outcome is diplomatic management rather than a major structural pact. Both administrations have a strong interest in avoiding a renewed escalation of trade tensions and preventing the Busan framework from falling apart before November.

Markets will look for any formal extension of the November 10 date, verified increases in magnet export permits, and whether agreements on AI guardrails contain binding terms.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 11:05

Good Intentions Paved The Road To The 2008 Financial Crisis

Authored by Paul Mueller via The Daily Economy,

This week marks the eighteenth anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers, a key event of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). Lehman's failure and the GFC more broadly were dramatic economic events. Lehman Brothers was the largest bankruptcy in US history to date. The global financial crisis gave rise to the Great Recession. The stock market fell by more than 50 percent, the economy contracted by 4.3 percent, unemployment rose from 4.7 percent to 10 percent, and the subsequent decade of US economic growth was abnormally anemic.

Many myths about Lehman's failure and about the 2008 global financial crisis continue to dominate public discourse. Popular consensus still places the blame primarily on deregulation, Wall Street greed, and reckless financial engineering. And many anecdotes inform their perspective.

Mortgage fraud was common and egregious, especially in the final few years of the housing frenzy (2004-2007). No-doc loans, NINJA loans, and liar loans were far too common - and most people were not held accountable for their complicity. Accusations of fraud by large banks and credit rating agencies, though, were largely overstated. Other than a couple big mortgage lenders engaged in systemic fraud (Countrywide) or truly reckless lending (Golden West), most financial institutions operated on the right side of the law.

The real driver of the GFC was pervasive bad incentives created by years of misregulation. Consider, for example, the Federal Reserve's Recourse Rule. This regulated how much capital banks had to hold against different classes of assets, and strongly favored mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Not surprisingly, banks shifted their portfolios to hold more MBS - one of the major asset classes to blow up in 2008. Regulation created this herd-like behavior, leading to overconcentration in a certain asset and greater systemic fragility.

Simultaneously, more than a decade of regulatory pressure forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower their underwriting standards - a shift that soon infected the entire industry. The Community Reinvestment Act, federal agencies, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development all pushed for reduced mortgage underwriting standards. More people were able to buy a home - even if they couldn't afford it.

Peter Wallison and Edward Pinto document this regulatory transformation. Far from a market-driven "race to the bottom" by private lenders chasing short-term profit, housing regulators in the early 1990s viewed traditional underwriting standards as discriminatory barriers to homeownership. Using the 1992 Housing and Community Development Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development mandated affordable-housing quotas for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - requiring them to allocate an ever-increasing share of their support to low- and moderate-income borrowers, starting at 30 percent in 1992 and climbing to 56 percent by 2008.

To achieve these goals, Fannie and Freddie systematically dismantled traditional underwriting guidelines. The conventional mortgage market consisted of 30-year fixed-rate loans requiring 20 percent down payments, fully documented borrower income, and high credit scores. These mortgages were remarkably stable and had very low levels of defaults.

But by the mid-2000s, this underwriting standard had been replaced by loans with less than 10 percent down payments, adjustable interest rates, and lower FICO requirements. As Pinto later argued in a report to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, roughly 27 million US mortgages - half of the entire market in 2008 - were high-risk, non-traditional loans, with government-backed agencies holding or guaranteeing the vast majority of them.

The otherwise laudable goal of increasing access and affordability led to higher housing prices and degraded the quality of mortgage finance, which then made its way onto bank balance sheets. Misregulation didn't stop once the crisis began - the same instinct to override market signals with discretionary judgment, which had already reshaped underwriting standards for a decade, next reshaped the government's response to the panic itself.

Government interventions meant to "fix" the market made things worse. Lehman's failure was certainly a blow to the market, but not as much as some people make it out to be. The S&P finished fractionally higher the Friday after Lehman's failure than it had the Friday before - most of the stock market decline came weeks later in October following further government interventions.

Two previous government actions that made Lehman's bankruptcy more disruptive than it needed to be. In March 2008, government officials brokered a bailout for Bear Stearns. This created a moral hazard in which Lehman executives rejected acquisition bids from interested investors and delayed deleveraging their mortgage portfolios, likely in the expectation that they would receive a deal, too. Federal officials' last-minute attempt to rescue Lehman left the firm unprepared for its complex Chapter 11, resulting in a chaotic bankruptcy that destroyed wealth and froze counterparties worldwide.

Lehman's failure highlights the broader problem in 2008: discretionary and reactionary government actions meant to dampen the GFC unintentionally made it worse. They created uncertainty and panic. Consider how the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) required all major banks to take bailout money even if they didn't need it. Treasury Secretary Paulson didn't want investors and lenders to identify and dump the weakest banks.

Yet this badly misjudged the market. Most lenders and investors had a pretty good sense of which banks were in trouble already. Forcing healthy institutions to take TARP funds signaled that contagion was deeper and more systemic than feared, accelerating capital flight from the banking sector.

Government officials also created perverse incentives by bailing out some firms early while letting others fail. If there is one thing worse for markets than bad news, it is uncertainty. And the Bush administration created deep market paralysis with its inconsistent, and often panicked, interventions in financial markets in 2008. Ordinary Americans paid the price then and are still paying the price today, in the form of greater government distortions of financial markets.

The Federal Reserve still holds nearly $2 trillion of MBS, an asset class it bought, and continued to buy, due to the "emergency" 18 years ago. More problematic, though, is that the GFC shook people's confidence in markets and in a free economy. The drive for broader government assistance programs on both sides of the political aisle has been fomented in part by the calamity of the GFC. Subsequent asset bubbles fueled popular cynicism about cronyism in the financial system.

The institutional memory from 2008 was on display in 2020 and 2021, when both the Federal Reserve and two different administrations turned on spigots of government spending, lending, and economic stimulus - resulting in the elevated inflation we face today. Nearly a quarter of the dollar's value has vanished since 2019.

If there is one thing we should learn from the 2008 GFC, it is that discretionary government interventions tend to generate negative unintended consequences. Even more importantly, we should view calls for more regulation, whether of cryptocurrency, stablecoins, energy production, or data center construction, with a skeptical eye.

Individual rules that may seem to make sense on paper can create perverse incentives, especially when they come stacked on top of other regulations. Unintended regulatory synergies generate herd-like behavior. Precisely the opposite is required for the decentralized experimentation that drives economic resilience.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 10:30

WW3 Near-Miss? AI Hallucinated Nuclear Weapons Components Aboard Chinese Vessel Bound For Iran

Could runaway artificial intelligence (AI) spark a future WW3?

We don't need movies like Terminator 2 and its SkyNet to help us imagine this, it's 2026 and there is already a terrifying real-world precedent that could have kicked off a shooting war with nuclear-armed China.

A human analyst within the US intelligence community utilized data gathered by AI for a report that was later widely circulated across classified Pentagon channels, except that the chatbot which was relied upon in effect hallucinated nuclear weapons components being transported aboard a Chinese vessel bound for Iran.

Illustrative: US 7th Fleet file image, Recon Marines conduct exercises

Naturally this set off the highest alerts in Washington in the middle of an active hot war which President Trump launched ostensibly to prevent this very thing - Iran obtaining a nuke and atomic weapons components.

From there military planning kicked into high gear, with a special forces boarding operation imminent. Supposedly elite assets were already airborne, ready to descend on the Chinese ship in question.

But then, "the operation was halted only after officials took a closer look at the intelligence report and discovered that it had been produced with assistance from an AI chatbot," CNN reports in a bombshell Friday exclusive. The episode reportedly happened last spring.

The severe error was realized with barely enough time to call off what could have been the geopolitical blunder and disaster of the century, "The chatbot had incorrectly identified the material the vessel was carrying."

In essence the United States found itself based on completely manufactured 'intel' potentially headed for conflict with China.

As if to to preempt anyone who might be tempted to think the account is merely being hyperbolic or needlessly sensational, one official (unnamed) source told CNN that the intelligence assessment, which was "entirely false" - in the end "almost started a war."

While Pentagon leadership, including US Special Operations Command Pacific, has yet to respond to CNN's queries, the outlet pieces together the alleged chain of events and how this could have possibly happened in the following:

In this particular instance, the analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It was not clear whether the chatbot was a commercially available one or a US government product.

“The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.

The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.

The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it.

The report seems to be suggesting that the unknown AI tool that was utilized would be deemed substandard and weak for such an important assessment in the first place.

Further "comforting" for readers is that given heavy AI-integration seems the "irreversible" trend of the day across the DoD/Depart of War and IC, similar near-misses in the near and distant future are bound to happen.

CNN underscores, "Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains."

Meanwhile, another botched AI job perhaps?...

SCOOP: A shipment of F-35 parts, including a canopy, wound up in Hong Kong — sparking an investigation on Capitol Hill and raising the possibility that China could have access to key components of the highly-classified program.

with @marksatter https://t.co/Y0ufsqEcY0

— Audrey Decker (@audrey_decker9) September 18, 2026

So apparently it's not just lazy college undergrads who've become over-reliant on AI as a substitute for deep research and critical thinking, but now we apparently have a generation of US INTELLIGENCE ANALYSTS making potentially world-altering mistakes with the technology.

* * * Tool roll crafted from 5" double-jacketed polyester fire hose

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 09:25

Watch: British Cops Grill Street-Preacher After Someone Takes 'Offense' At Bible Passages

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Britain's latest public-order farce is not a machete fight, a rape gang or a phone-snatch. It is a man on a high street with a Bible.

Footage circulating Friday shows three female officers surrounding a Christian street preacher in a busy shopping precinct.

One of them looks like she should still be sitting exams at school. The other two hover, phones out, expressions tight, as if they have been sent to defuse a bomb.

In the UK they now have children policing the streets. pic.twitter.com/MsvD2QBFzT

— HJB News (@HJB_News__) September 18, 2026

The clip is eight minutes of modern Britain in micro. A member of the public reports being "offended" by words. Officers arrive and the preacher is treated as the problem.

The all inclusive term 'hate speech' is waved around and 'intimidation' is offered as the hook for an investigation. The man citing Scripture is expected to justify himself to people who appear unfamiliar with the very statutes they are leaning on.

The Strong Arm Of The Law ???? pic.twitter.com/ObHEvBtT53

— Ben Dover (@BenDoverh45da) September 18, 2026

This is not law enforcement. It is customer service for the emotionally fragile.

As we hear in the footage, Sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 are the blunt instruments used again and again against street preachers.

Section 5 makes it an offence to use threatening or abusive words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress. "Insulting" was stripped out of Section 5 in 2013. There is a defence if the conduct was reasonable.

Section 4A is the heavier charge. It requires intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress, plus proof that harassment, alarm or distress was actually caused. Police guidance itself describes 4A as aimed at "more serious, planned and malicious incidents."

Yet here are yet more female police officers spewing those statutes at the guy as if they're citing parking restrictions.

Being offended by the Bible is not grounds for a public order offense. Reciting the Gospel in a public street is not automatically "threatening." Calling the encounter "intimidation" because a passer-by disliked the message does not conjure the mental element the statute demands. Courts have said as much, repeatedly, after officers have already cuffed, swabbed and bailed the preacher.

That distinction is lost on too many in uniform. In the new footage the officers look lost in it. One of them is literally a frightened child. The other two look scared of the conversation they started. The preacher is the only person on camera who appears to have read the law.

We've seen this all too often in Britain recently.

In another similar incident, a volunteer Met officer ordered 20-year-old gospel singer Harmonie London to stop performing "church songs" on Oxford Street, claiming she was "not allowed to sing church songs outside of church grounds."

The Met later apologised and admitted the officer "was mistaken," adding: "We're sorry for the offence caused and will take the learning forward."

There are many many more cases.

Pastor Dia Moodley was arrested in Bristol in November 2025 on suspicion of a religiously aggravated Section 4A offence and "inciting religious hatred" after preaching on Islam and transgender ideology.

He was held for eight hours and banned from the city centre over Christmas before the case collapsed.

"Avon and Somerset Police have arrested me twice because my lawful speech was seen as offensive to some Muslims and people with a progressive worldview," he said.

When a Muslim bystander later told him on camera, "If you do that again bro, we'll send the boys round," police filed it as "unpleasant" comments that "do not constitute an offence."

John Steele was arrested in Rotherham after a 30-second conversation about Quran 4:34 at a domestic-abuse stall. Charges were dropped as "not needed in the public interest."

Pastor Steve Maile was handcuffed in Watford and held for 12 hours; Hertfordshire Police confirmed a Section 5 public order investigation.

Shaun O'Sullivan has been arrested 16 times, including for saying "God bless you." A jury acquitted him after a six-day trial that cost an estimated £20,000.

Many such cases.

British Metropolitan Police Officer threatens to arrest Christian Preacher for speaking about God in the street.

"You might be committing offences. If you are making members of the public [feel] harassment, alarm and distress it's a criminal offence."

pic.twitter.com/FYhGoRCHK3

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 21, 2024

British police officer tells Christian street preacher that it's "wrong" she is preaching about God outside Kings Cross station in London.

"These people just want to do their journey. They're not coming here to listen to you. I just think it's all wrong." pic.twitter.com/xrN68ZDYXp

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) June 21, 2025

? CHRISTIAN STREET PREACHER ARRESTED IN LONDON - DAYS AFTER TRAFALGAR SQUARE MASS ISLAMIC PRAYER ?

A Christian preacher was arrested near London Stratford station while preaching the gospel.

Police reasons (per on-scene accounts & video):

1. Needed a licence/permit for the... pic.twitter.com/QpcPUDyPtg

— Skint Eastwood (@Skint_Eastwood1) March 19, 2026

Police attempt to detain Christian preacher at London Pride. Part 1 pic.twitter.com/9pWYgNcCjd

— SteveSpCorner (@SteveRightNLeft) July 4, 2026

Street preacher in London getting arrested for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The police and all bystanders heard the gospel, and that is the main thing.

They let the preachers of sin and evil continue. The preachers of good and Jesus they stop,

Life is spiritual. pic.twitter.com/0yAcydH8Yp

— Rikki Doolan (@realrikkidoolan) July 22, 2025

??? British Christian Preacher gets shut down in Manchester Shopping Centre by the Police because some of the 'locals' can't stand Christianity.

Are you happy with this Britain? Really think if you're ok with the Police treating a British Christian who has probably preached... pic.twitter.com/6rJ8jxS5Y2

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) November 30, 2024

Street Preacher in London confronted by Police for preaching the word of God.

WATCH UNTIL END. Hallelujah! ???? Revival Times. pic.twitter.com/gV9AkYWtx8

— Rikki Doolan (@realrikkidoolan) June 10, 2025

Guy on the Left is a UK Christian Street Preacher about to be arrested on a quiet English Street.

The Guy on the right has his own private Police Escort whilst he sings Islamic Prayer on London Bridge right in the heart of the Nations Capital.

Do you see the problem yet? pic.twitter.com/thq1JlOW7A

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) November 19, 2025

A Christian preacher this afternoon was arrested at Southgate station London N14 for preaching about Jesus . @CConcern the police told him it's because public had said he was being islamophobic . We have the full video and wondered when preaching was now illegal ? @Campaign4T pic.twitter.com/ZxC1DhlZCf

— Eye On Antisemitism (@AntisemitismEye) February 23, 2019

UK: ?? A "Christian country" in name only.

A Christian street preacher threatened with arrest by police because he speaks peacefully through a sound system!! Christians are repeatedly arrested for using speakers to share the Gospel peacefully (Bristol 2024, Glastonbury 2024,... pic.twitter.com/ywnslHt4WZ

— ExWren (@VoWalesWren) December 5, 2025

? BREAKING: PREACHING THE GOSPEL NOW A CRIME IN MODERN LONDON? ?

Shocking scenes as a Christian preacher is CIRCLED by multiple Met Police officers - and THREATENED WITH ARREST - for simply sharing the Word of God on the streets of London.

YES... THIS IS LONDON 2025.

?... pic.twitter.com/0p60A3rl0p

— Jim Ferguson (@JimFergusonUK) April 15, 2025

? "Preacher Of The Gospel" Arrested In Sadiq Khan's London:

Gray-haired Christian preacher dragged away in handcuffs for preaching the Gospel.

Police swarm him and handcuff him as he tells them: "No offence has been committed here - this is an utter disgrace." pic.twitter.com/fwzxl5b9Jx

— Skint Eastwood (@Skint_Eastwood1) April 20, 2026

Met Police stand watching a Christian preacher in "Modern London", waiting for him to say something from the Bible that may "offend" Muslims to confront him with.

Sadiq Khan sets the strategy of Met Police.

Coincidence? pic.twitter.com/jyT7dL2x3I

— Tommy Robinson ?? (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 1, 2026

This is not a handful of confused constables. It is policy.

And who exactly is calling the police to report being 'intimidated'?

In February, a lone female Met officer in Whitechapel, was surrounded by angry men insisting "This is a Muslim area," after a Christian preacher dared to recite the gospel.

In a refreshing change, the officer told the men "In this country, we have freedom of speech."

She added: "I understand that you guys don't want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don't listen to him. He's not in your home." That officer understood the job. Too many of her colleagues do not.

This is part of a wider crackdown on speech in general.

At least 62,199 people were arrested for communications offences between 2021 and 2025 - roughly 34 a day. Only about one in five of those cases ends in a conviction.

Big Brother Watch's Silkie Carlo called it "an Orwellian mess" and said people have been arrested "for holding blank pieces of paper."

Lord Toby Young asked why authorities police tweets while shoplifting, phone theft and sexual offences rise.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp put it simply: "Police shouldn't be wasting time on the internet. They should be catching real criminals."

After the 2024 Southport riots, police stood up a National Internet Intelligence Investigations team to flag "protest-related" posts to local forces. More than 100 referrals followed. Nigel Farage called it "the beginning of the state controlling free speech."

On the street the same instinct now wears a high-vis jacket. Offence becomes "intimidation." A Bible becomes a public-order risk. Officers who cannot explain Section 4A still feel entitled to demand names and deliver a public grilling.

Anyone who still assumes the person in the uniform knows the statute should watch another clip making the rounds: security guards outside a migrant hotel fail to display SIA licences - a criminal offence under the Private Security Industry Act - and the attending officer's response, after being walked through the law, is: "He's breaking the law. What am I supposed to do?"

This is the depressing reality of the situation. Quote the Act at them and they freeze. Point to an actual offence by the state's preferred clients and they shrug. Send three young women to lecture a preacher because someone felt intimidated by Scripture, and they treat the complaint as gospel.

Keir Starmer told JD Vance last year: "We've had free speech for a very very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very very long time." The high street footage says otherwise. So do the 62,000 speech arrests. So does the officer who looks like a child, standing between a Bible and a country that no longer trusts its own laws.

Freedom of speech that dies the moment someone claims offence is not freedom.

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

The Arctic Front Of The "Cordon Sanitaire" Is The Most Threatening To Russia

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

The military-technical developments there aim to greatly mitigate Russia's nuclear second-strike capabilities via the Golden Dome in parallel with posing an unprecedented fifth-generation aerial threat via the F-35As that'll outmatch Russia's Su-57s by 10:1 without the US and 35:1 if it's included.

RT reviewed the 2026 Russian Military Yearbook, which is sponsored by the state arms company and meant only for senior members of the national security apparatus.

Their article can be read in full here, but the present piece will only focus on the part about "The Very Cold War". This is in reference to escalating NATO-Russian tensions in the Arctic. The Yearbook details NATO's large-scale military drills in the Arctic, its allies' arms build-ups, and their deep displeasure with Russia's Northern Sea Route.

Most alarmingly, the Yearbook mentioned that Finland plans to acquire 64 F-35As while Canada will receive 88 of them. It was separately reported that Norway already has 52 F-35As, which is more than double Russia's estimated 20 or so Su-57s, its fifth-generation analogue. Sweden doesn't yet have any fifth-generation fighters, but those other three Arctic states will have over 10x as many as Russia does. If the US' over 500 F-35As are included, then Russia's fifth-generation fighters will be outmatched by 35:1.

These statistics on their own show that the US is actively implementing its 2021 strategic plan for "Regaining Arctic Dominance" that was cited in the Yearbook, the latter of which also detailed some of NATO's new radar, drone, ship, icebreaker, missile, and other military-technical plans. They altogether lend credence to one of the cited Russian experts who warned that "Washington never abandoned the thought of redrawing borders in that area."

Here are five background briefings on this new front:

* 14 January: "Greenland Is The Crown Jewel Of 'Fortress America'"

* 21 January: "The US' Acquisition Of Greenland Could Lead To A Deal Over Canada's Arctic Islands"

* 21 May: "Finland Is On Track To Become One Of Russia's Most Intractable Foes"

* 6 September: "The Historical Russian-Swedish Rivalry Is About To Be Revived Later This Fall"

* 15 September: "Norway's Military Build-Up Against Russia Poses A Serious Threat To Arctic Security"

To summarize, Trump 2.0 is pursuing a three-pronged strategy against Russia:

1) build Golden Dome missile defense infrastructure in the Arctic to greatly mitigate Russia's nuclear second-strike capabilities;

2) arm Canada and the Viking Bloc (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) to threaten Russia; and then

3) likely push Russia's limits along the Northern Sea Route for the purpose of provoking a crisis that would then render this corridor dangerous and thus greatly reduce its use at minimum.

The pressure that the US is placing upon Russia along the Arctic front via these means complements that which it's also placing through Polish-led efforts in Central & Eastern Europe and Japanese-led ones in Northeast Asia. All of these fronts consist entirely of US mutual defense allies, but the Turkish-led one along Russia's entire southern periphery doesn't, yet a hypothetical special operation there (such as against Azerbaijan) might be deterred by the possibility of the US responding via the other fronts.

Simply put, a "cordon sanitaire" has been assembled around Russia, and this containment noose is being tightened the most by the military-technical developments along the Arctic front than anywhere else. Up till recently, this was the quietest front of the four, but that just shows that its members were moving silently to avoid attracting attention from Russia.

The latest Yearbook proves that the Kremlin had been monitoring them all along and is thus planning its response, however, so this front will likely heat up.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 08:10

Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The 'EA' Cult Are Milking "Rogue AI" Breakouts To Protect A Trillion-Dollar Bubble

The sudden emergence of an 'AI Panic' over the past weeks and months was highly suspect from the beginning. According to tech insiders, Silicon Valley's apex AI labs are deliberately overselling "rogue AI" hacks to pressure the federal government into building a regulatory moat that would lock out future competition - and the timing, months after both OpenAI and Anthropic announced plans to go public, couldn't be more obvious.

Akhil Verghese, founder of AI software company Krazimo, told the NY Post the incidents were no rebellion: "They were simply told to get the best result possible on a test." Voice AI co-founder Abhi Kumar was blunter: "One man's 'the model escaped the sandbox' is another man's 'you failed to build the sandbox correctly.'" Taivo Pungas, chief intelligence officer at Pactum AI, said the leap from "we didn't build the right sort of box" to a whole-of-government emergency feels exaggerated.

PANIC! 

The AI "breakouts" that lit up Capitol Hill this summer were about as organic as #4 red dye. On July 16, OpenAI models running a cyber evaluation exploited a zero-day and got from their test range into Hugging Face's production systems; OpenAI disclosed it five days later, naming GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model, and noting the models had been configured "with reduced cyber refusals so they could attempt offensive exercises that normal safeguards might reject." Nine days after that, Anthropic disclosed three incidents of its own.

According to Anthropic's July 30 write-up - the "waking up" narrative is total bullshit. "A misconfiguration left the machines that Claude accessed as part of the evaluation with live internet access," the company wrote; the models had been told they were offline. Claude Opus 4.7 went after a real company that happened to share a name with the fictional target and pulled "several hundred rows of production data." Mythos 5 published a booby-trapped Python package to the live PyPI registry that was "downloaded and run on 15 real systems." An unreleased research model scanned "roughly 9,000 targets" and got into one company's web app "using basic and well-known cyberattack techniques." Anthropic's own verdict: "We believe these incidents to be closer to a harness and operational failure than a model alignment failure." It halted cyber evals on July 23 and called in METR - their preferred Orwellian arbiter - to review.

Anthropic's account has one wrinkle: Opus 4.7 kept attacking after it recognized the system was real. Only the newer research model stopped. So the machines are not uniformly "blameless" - but a model that keeps following its instructions on a misconfigured network is Irregular's failure, not evidence of intent.

The Common Denominator

Every one of these evaluations was run by the same third party: Irregular, an AI security firm that tested the OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models and, per Axios, hit "the same security issues" each time. The Verge adds Meta to the list - a pattern Axios's Sam Sabin flagged in July:

Anthropic's models accidentally had access to the internet during model testing due to a "misunderstanding" with third-party testing partner, Irregular. no 0-days in this case, unlike the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident

— Sam Sabin (@samsabin923) July 30, 2026

Then came Gemini. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google's model had broken into three real companies during an Irregular capture-the-flag exercise. The incident happened in May, Irregular published its report on August 14, and Google didn't mention it until the Journal called - and then explained that it hadn't considered the hacks worth disclosing because Gemini "acted appropriately" and stopped once it realized the targets were real.

Irregular told Axios the model "wasn't supposed to be able to get online, but internet access was unintentionally available," and the fictional target company "had the same name as a real one." In one case Gemini guessed passwords until it got in; in two others it found credentials sitting in a public repository. Irregular says "all known issues on our end were remedied and resolved weeks ago" and that the Gemini case "does not represent a materially separate incident." Google VP Heather Adkins: "Safe development of powerful AI models is critical and we invest deeply in this area."

But when looking at the actual events, the model was blameless.

To make it clear:
- Gemini was told it was it was in a fictional hacking eval
- Irregular unintentionally opened internet access after the eval started
- in all three cases, as soon as Gemini figured out it had hacked a real company it immediately stopped

Gemini was blameless.

— Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) September 18, 2026

So Google - which isn't asking Washington to pace anything, considered the incident a non-event - yet the two labs lobbying for a federal slowdown scrambled to put out press releases.

Industry commentator John Ennis put the obvious question, pointing out that "once is an accident, twice is questionable, but three times looks intentional".

Why does the Irregular keep "accidentally" connecting these models to the internet?

Once is an accident, twice is questionable, but three times looks intentional

And they are EA aligned

Something is rotten here, IMO

— John Ennis (@johnennis) September 19, 2026

The Effective Altruism movement is the doomsday tendency that has spent a decade staffing AI safety boards and testing labs on the premise that AI will kill everyone unless the right people are in charge of it. Whether Irregular is EA-aligned is Ennis's call. That it is the one firm under all of these incidents is on the record from Axios, The Verge and Anthropic itself.

The Pacing Play

Six days before the Gemini story broke, Dario Amodei published a September 12 post warning that within 6 to 12 months an AI swarm could "take over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. His prescription: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Sam Altman and Elon Musk signaled support. In a nutshell, Pacing the Frontier™ is a bid to become strategically indispensable - too big to fail, with Beijing as the justification.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang - circle-jerker-in-chief noted: "What better way to create demand than to create a problem." lol yes. 

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora called it a "NINJA move" and then, after more time talking to labs, open-source projects and government, warned it could backfire:

Sequel to AI Pacing

I have now spent more time talking to people who run AI labs, Open Source projects and those in government and infrastructure.

I am beginning to feel the NINJA move could backfire.

I understand the pressure to come out and share where AI is "unmanageable ", and constantly share examples where it runs rogue. This fits in the category of "self-reporting" and an attempt to limit liability...

Here are the consequences of the NINJA move.
1. They have successfully encouraged every law maker around the world to have an opinion...
2. By proposing pacing - they have introduced uncertainty in the AI infrastructure trade...
...
It's time to rebuild the brand of AI - any marketing expert will tell you, this Ninja move has done more to harm the brand of AI and will take a while to rebuild. #letsbepositive in our actions and our narrative.

— Nikesh Arora (@nikesharora) September 19, 2026

Lawmakers jumped on this right on cue.

Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into OpenAI on September 9, with a records deadline of October 1; Senator Bernie Sanders announced a bill to ban further frontier-lab development; Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded an "immediate pause." As we noted earlier this week, everybody in this conversation is talking their own book. On Friday the White House joined in from the other side: Trump posted that AI safety concerns are a "hoax" and said he will appoint an AI czar and stand up an "AI Force," per Bloomberg.

Follow The Money

Oh and then there's that, yes. A leaked OpenAI presentation obtained by the Financial Times projects negative free cash flow of $278 billion from 2026 to 2030, with the company's compute bill rising from a $600 billion estimate in February to $856 billion by July - against revenue it hopes to grow from $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030. As we detailed previously, Altman has already walked back the timeline on the economic transformation that was supposed to pay for all of it.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has shifted its planned IPO from October to November, per the Journal, on what Reuters reports is $100 billion-plus in annualized revenue. And a week after its CEO said the industry must slow down, Reuters reports Anthropic is considering rushing out a new model to counter OpenAI's momentum ahead of that IPO. Pacing for thee.

he meant AFTER the IPO https://t.co/KXIPQzEhUf pic.twitter.com/bCDDsPmWXl

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 19, 2026

If an open-weight model out of Hangzhou does 95% of what Claude or GPT-5 does for a fraction of the cost, the valuations both labs are banking on implode. The only way to protect the margins, justify the cash burn and satisfy Wall Street is to make it legally impossible for anyone else to compete - a regulatory moat so thick, and compliance costs so high, that only a $100 billion corporation can afford to train a frontier model. Arora's point stands: no actual security fix has been proposed, only more "compute spent on safety" and a federal body to bless it.

The models didn't rebel. A contractor left the internet on, three times that we know of, and the two labs with IPOs to protect turned that into a case for federal pacing. Hawley's records are due October 1, Anthropic has promised a redacted PyPI transcript and an outside METR review, and Google's explanation for sitting on a May breach of three companies until a newspaper called is that the model behaved. Don't believe the byte.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 08:00

Massie Explains Strategy For Going After Hegseth

The non-interventionist D.C.-based think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has published an interview with the one Republican who has been most outspoken against Trump's Iran war.

Trump had in turn starting last spring launched a political war of his own against Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who has been in the hot seat, with his political future in question. But Massie has been unrelenting, even after being defeated for another term by the largely unkown Ed Gallrein, a Republican candidate backed by President Trump and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Massie, who has unveiled eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, spoke to Responsible Statecraft about why he's gong after Trump's Pentagon chief - which appears focused on the his launching 'unauthorized' military actions in Iran, without Congressional approval. The argument as laid out below hinges on whether Hegseth was following 'lawful orders' from the Commander-in-Chief. Massie says no.

As it turns out, that potentially 'awkard' (for Republicans) impeachment vote has been entirely avoided for now with an early House election recess.

"A vote to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that could have happened in the U.S. House as early as Thursday will now be avoided, at least until after this year’s midterm election. Republican leaders announced Wednesday they would leave Washington a day earlier than scheduled," CNBC reports.

"House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision cuts short by a day an already light congressional work period, in a month that will see the House in session for just six days," the report adds. "The chamber is not due back in Washington until after the Nov. 3 election, as lawmakers will now fan out to campaign."

Mike Johnson sent lawmakers home Wednesday, avoiding a Hegseth impeachment vote as well as a bipartisan effort to release additional Jeffrey Epstein files.

🇺🇸 House recesses early to avoid vote on Hegseth impeachment

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson sent lawmakers home Wednesday, avoiding a vote on a resolution by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to impeach War Secretary Pete Hegseth as well as a bipartisan effort to release… pic.twitter.com/qZCBWrMnnF

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) September 17, 2026

Below is the Kelley Vlahos interview with Massie transcript produced by Responsible Statecraft [emphasis ZH].

*  *  *

Responsible Statecraft: Why are you bringing this about right now?

Rep. Thomas Massie: Because we have exhausted every other legislative remedy to make things right. We are at the point now where Hegseth is just ignoring the law. He's ignored the concurrent (War Powers) resolution. He ignored the 60-day limit. They never reached the threshold required under section 2-C under the War Powers resolution of 1973. He's severely degraded the DoD's ability to winnow out civilian targets from their target list.

There is an active and ongoing war that should be stopped immediately, and I think this is an effective way to do it. It's literally the only legislative remedy that I could think of that might work.

RS: I would imagine the timing is important because the House is leaving until after the midterm elections in November.

Massie: Yeah, and the Speaker has to schedule a vote within 48 hours.

I suspect there will be a motion to table; that's usually what these resolve to, if they're not supported.

RS: So what happens then?

Massie: Well, I would encourage people who are even unsure about the bill to vote against the motion to table, and hear the debate.

RS: Let’s get back to the merits of the case here. This is pretty wide-ranging, so you hit the constitutionality of the war, the civilian deaths, the kidnapping of (former Venezuelan President Nicolas) Maduro, the airstrikes on so-called narco boats, even your freedom of speech where Senator Mark Kelly is concerned. You're really going at him with both barrels here.

Massie: There's two categories of articles here. One category, which covers six of the articles, is that he basically followed illegal orders from the president. And these are illegal orders that were issued by the president, but Hegseth is under obligation not to follow them since they were illegal. And there's a category of impeachment articles here that are solely attributable to Hegseth himself where he degraded the infrastructure of the DoD which is supposed to minimize the civilian casualties. That's his. I don't think Trump was involved in that. And then the attack on Mark Kelly, where he weaponized the DoD to squelch the speech of a senator and a veteran. That's solely Secretary Hegseth's doing. So there are things in here which are top-level issues with the administration all the way to Trump, but then there are some that are uniquely Peter Hegseth’s high crimes or misdemeanors.

Peter Hegseth wins the award for most crimes committed. And he just committed one too many; I couldn't take it anymore.

RS: That begs a question, why didn't you just go after Trump?

Massie: Well, I kind of already answered that question. Some of these things, like the civilian targeting, are Hegseth’s alone, and some of it, Trump would probably ascribe to Hegseth and not himself to save his own skin. I just don't think it's politically feasible or viable or even advisable to try to impeach Trump.

RS: A reporter just asked newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche about your articles of impeachment and you. Aside from him saying he thinks Hegseth is doing “a phenomenal job,” he said he disagreed with the characterization that we are in a war, and that a majority of Congress would disagree as well. What do you make of these continuing assertions by the White House, the administration, even members of Congress, that we can't call it a war?

Massie: Well, somebody better give the president that memo. He calls it a war every week.

It's beyond playing with semantics. It's beyond trying to be cute legally. There's no way you can say this is not a war. Even the raid in Venezuela was an act of war. We overturned the government and put boots on the ground. But at least it seems to be over with now that we have their oil and control of their government.

He's wrong about a majority of Congress not thinking it's a war. A majority of Congress passed a concurrent resolution in the House and in the Senate telling them to stop under the War Powers Act.

So with semantics or not, they've been told to stop. They've claimed to stop the war by day 60, and now they say that every time they strike Iran it’s an unconnected military action to the others.

If you want a little something in the weeds here, I read every communication from the White House to Congress. They are sending us notices every time they do a strike pursuant to the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Now they're obligated to do that, and I noticed at least three of these they said were motivated by a strike on a neutrally-flagged vessel. They're claiming the authority to engage in hostilities on behalf of neutrally flagged vessels. And the War Powers Resolution says that it has to be an attack on U.S. soil or soldiers or infrastructure. They're admitting right there in three of these communications to Congress that their predicate was an attack on something that wasn't American.

RS: Did those (War Powers) communications end when they declared the so-called ceasefire, or do they keep coming?

Massie: They keep coming. In fact they refer to the ceasefire in two of these communications after the ceasefire.

RS: That flies in the face of what they're saying publicly

Massie: Yeah, if it's not a war, how is Trump gonna end it after the election like he told everybody in Texas last week?

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 07:35

"Calm Down, Lefties! Quiet!": French Soldiers Applaud Military Chaplain's Warning Of 'Great Replacement'

Via Remix News,

A leaked video of a French military chaplain addressing paratroopers in a cathedral has circulated widely on social media. In the clip, the chaplain makes disparaging remarks about leftists, tells soldiers to keep fighting for their national heritage, and warns of the risk that French values and culture could be displaced.

The clip, recorded during a Saint-Michel Mass on Oct. 7, 2025, shows Father Romain Ghandour speaking to soldiers of the 3rd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment (3e RPIMa) at Carcassonne's Saint-Michel Cathedral.

Soldiers can be heard laughing and applauding as he delivers his pointed remarks.

The clip was leaked and published by Le Canard Enchaîne news outlet.

🇫🇷🔴 JUST IN: A video has been leaked of a French military chaplain roasting leftists and warning of the Great Replacement in front of French paratroopers in the city of Carcassonne.

"Calm down, lefties! Quiet! Breathe through your nose!"

Remarkably, the massive audience of... pic.twitter.com/kkteRaaTu0

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) September 18, 2026

The video was released in mid-September 2026, nearly a year after the Mass.

Saint-Michel is the patron saint of paratroopers and airborne troops in the French army, which explains why the regiment was gathered in the cathedral.

Christophe Barthès, then a municipal election candidate and later elected mayor of Carcassonne for the right-wing National Rally, was among those present.

Ghandour begins by invoking the names and dates of men and women who died so that France would remain "a beautiful country," one in which architects could continue building "basilicas, cathedrals, housing, and fortified castles."

He contrasts that heritage with the present: instead of knights, he says, "we put incompetent people. We put people who eat seeds, people who lecture everyone, ideologues."

The phrase "people who eat seeds" is widely understood as a jab at what he presents as weak or overly ideological leftists.

The line that has drawn the most attention comes next: "Calm down, lefties! Quiet! Breathe through your nose!" The assembled soldiers respond with laughter and applause.

He then warns that if they lose courage and conviction, "we will be ridiculed" and "this beautiful country that is France will be mocked, and others will take our place."

He continues:

"In fact, after a while, when you're thirsty, when you're hungry, it's the law of the strongest that reigns. And others will take the place of our values, of this freedom of speech, of action, of this equality between men, and of this fraternity, of this culture, of this society. Nature abhors a vacuum."

While he never directly mentions the "Great Replacement," many commentators have taken this remark to be a direct reference to the phenomenon, which is not only a reference to mass immigration, but also relates to the constant replacement of technology, culture, society, and peoples through all spheres of modern life at an ever accelerating pace. Ghandour closes by telling the soldiers to "keep fighting" and "continue to have the courage of your convictions, as I am trying to do at this Mass."

As of the video's release, there has been no detailed public statement from the army's Catholic chaplaincy or the Ministry of the Armed Forces on whether the remarks violate rules on political neutrality for military clergy.

French military chaplains of all recognized faiths operate under a framework that is supposed to respect both freedom of conscience and the state's neutrality. The 3e RPIMa, based in Carcassonne since 1962 and part of the 11th Parachute Brigade, is an elite unit within the French military.

The left has often been skeptical, and even hostile to, the French military, which has been seen as a bastion of support for the right in the country.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 07:00

The Apocalyptic Game: Panic And Opportunity

Authored by Sasha Gong via American Greatness,

America's latest argument over artificial intelligence has suddenly become apocalyptic. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon accused AI companies of "gambling with our lives." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow the development of frontier models, an idea supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. At the same time, opposition to the data centers needed to power AI is spreading across the United States.

China has noticed. X recently uncovered a suspected Chinese influence network of roughly 200,000 fake accounts; about 200 of them were directly involved in amplifying claims that American data centers were raising electricity prices and overwhelming the power grid.

This does not mean that criticism of AI or data centers is manufactured in Beijing. Concerns about electricity costs, water use, pollution, cyberattacks, job losses, and mass surveillance are real. But China does not need to invent American divisions. It needs only to identify, amplify, and exploit them.

Modern democracies periodically succumb to predictions that a new technology will destroy humanity. The fear may be legitimate, but its political consequences are not evenly distributed. Democracies permit protest, litigation, regulation, and obstruction. They may even abandon a technology out of fear.

Dictatorships suppress debate, concentrate resources, and use their rivals' hesitation to catch up.

The first great technological apocalypse began with the atomic bomb.

As the Manhattan Project approached completion in 1945, scientists considered whether an atomic explosion might ignite nitrogen in the atmosphere or trigger an uncontrollable reaction in the oceans. Edward Teller raised the possibility; Hans Bethe and others calculated that the risk was physically negligible. The Trinity test proceeded.

The question nevertheless haunted Robert Oppenheimer. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he feared that scientists had opened a Pandora's box. When Washington decided to develop the hydrogen bomb after the Soviet atomic test, he opposed it on moral and strategic grounds.

Oppenheimer's Communist associations then turned a policy dispute into a political scandal. His wife and brother were members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and he had many pro-Soviet acquaintances. Meanwhile, actual Soviet spies inside the Manhattan Project - including Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall - passed crucial nuclear information to Moscow.

The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and a thermonuclear device in 1953. China tested its first atomic bomb in 1964, shortly after emerging from a famine that killed 40 million people. Neither Communist regime permitted a genuine public debate over the wisdom of nuclear competition.

The West did. Scientists, churches, students, and citizens organized enormous anti-nuclear movements. Their pressure contributed to test-ban treaties and arms control negotiations. Yet Americans still understood that the danger came not only from nuclear weapons but also from the regimes possessing them. After Sputnik in 1957, few believed the United States could safely withdraw from technological competition while the Soviet Union continued advancing.

After the Cold War, climate change became the next vehicle for apocalyptic politics.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth turned complex climate models into images of approaching catastrophe. Greta Thunberg transformed policy disagreements into moral indictments. Claims that humanity had only "12 years" remaining circulated widely.

Fear of climate change converted a scientific problem into an ideological commandment. Energy restrictions, endless permitting, penalties on traditional industries, and costly transitions were presented as the only acceptable path. These policies greatly contributed to and accelerated Western deindustrialization.

China followed a different course. Unrestrained by voters, environmental groups, or local governments, Beijing concentrated subsidies, land, energy, and credit to build complete industrial supply chains. The West congratulated itself for reducing domestic emissions while transferring production to China. It then discovered that it depended on China for pharmaceuticals, rare earths, batteries, solar panels, and electronics.

The pattern is now repeating with AI.

While Americans debate moratoriums, China is treating artificial intelligence, robotics, and computing infrastructure as pillars of national power. Its "Eastern Data, Western Computing" strategy is creating an integrated national computing network, moving the eastern seaboard's data-processing demands to western provinces with abundant land and energy. Beijing intends to control not only AI models but also the electricity, chips, servers, communications systems, and data centers that sustain them.

China is also competing to write the rules. In 2026, 29 countries signed an agreement in Shanghai establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, which Beijing describes as the first intergovernmental organization devoted to AI. China does not plan to pause while America debates whether the future is too dangerous to build.

AI requires serious safeguards: independent testing, cybersecurity standards, protection against biological misuse, transparent energy pricing, and accountability for harms. But regulation should make development safer, not make development impossible. Data-center projects should bear their actual costs, but local objections cannot become a nationwide veto over the infrastructure of the next industrial age.

Open debate is one of democracy's moral strengths. The power to suppress debate is one of authoritarianism's strategic advantages. When democratic caution becomes paralysis, freedom itself becomes vulnerable to exploitation.

America can decide how it develops artificial intelligence. It cannot decide whether artificial intelligence will continue to develop. If the United States stops because it fears the future, China will not stop with it.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 23:20

Military Report Details Six UFOs Traveling At 480 MPH

Newly public military records are offering another look at unexplained objects encountered by U.S. forces, including a cluster reportedly moving through Middle Eastern airspace at extraordinary speed, according to the NY Post.

According to a CENTCOM account from 2025, military personnel tracked six round objects traveling together at about 480 mph. Their flight path was unusual enough to draw attention, with the objects repeatedly altering course. Military video from the encounter shows several small objects crossing the sky above an arid landscape.

The Post wrote:

A 2025 report from US Central Command (CENTCOM) details a sighting of “six small spherical objects, grouped together” and “frequently changing direction” at 480 mph. Accompanying the report was one minute of video footage showing the objects as they flew over what appeared to be a desert region.

Another video, from 2023, captured circular objects flying over the Yellow Sea that were spotted by an infrared sensor aboard a US military platform.

In a separate case that year, a Colorado police officer spent about 15 minutes recording a stationary, silent object displaying several different colored lights.

The Post writes that some of the material reaches much further back. In 1952, Navy warrant officer Delbert Newhouse filmed a formation of bright objects while traveling through Utah. The case eventually became part of Project Blue Book, the Air Force's long-running investigation into reports of unidentified objects in American skies.

Officials explored mundane explanations for the Utah footage, ranging from balloons to birds. One Air Force review ultimately attributed the objects to seagulls circling in rising air, although another examination found aspects of their brightness difficult to reconcile with ordinary birds.

The records are part of the government's continuing release of historical and more recent UAP material, providing additional documentation of sightings that military personnel and investigators have examined over decades.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 22:45

'Princes Of The Dollar': Why QE Is Over

Authored by Kane McGukin via Bombthrower,

What the G20, Werner, and Warsh tell us about America's new monetary playbook

In every transition, there are road signs along the way. Matt Dines has been one of the more accurate minds of late on the monetary and geopolitical transition we are living through.

His and Camron Otsuka's commentary earlier this month on Mine Print Hash, post the G20 meeting in North Carolina, sheds a lot of light on major sticking points that will pave the way for both future policy and monetary frameworks. This will not happen overnight, but at the same time we'll likely look back and say, "man, the world changed fast."

A few highlights that matter:

1. The Financial Stability Board (FSB). Just as Great Depression meetings brought new entities for the next cycle, G20 meetings post-GFC brought the FSB for the same reason. New rules to pave the way for stability in a new economic era (2009 Pittsburgh summit). According to Dines FSB brings AI into the mix, plugging it into the Basel Accords, the last of which, Basel III, an update required because of the financial behaviors and shortcomings that caused the GFC.

As Dines points out, all we need now is a final agreement so all parties can play nice around the new rails, i.e. stablecoin/Bitcoin/SOFR rails. Global stablecoin arrangements will take final shape after the announcement of a Bretton Woods 2.0. Something I've discussed many times over, and something that feels nearer and nearer by the day. The most important point? Bessent has basically championed this from day one.

As Werner's model suggests (see point four), Bessent opposes the state picking winners directly, but supports guiding private capital toward strategic ends. Video referenced in Samson's post.

2. Bringing forward the private sector as a way to grow our way out of this. What's critical to understand here is that during the GFC, entities and individuals were overleveraged. To combat this, the central bank expanded its balance sheet to take on all the underwater debt. Today, the script is flipped. The private sector is relatively unlevered, and the central bank is overlevered. This is important because the only way to grow an economy is to guide credit towards productive use cases. Regardless of opinion, this has been the underlying basis of the early-stage beginnings of all successful economies and empires for centuries (see Werner). For those keeping score at home, these are the breadcrumbs we've been given to better understand where monetary and fiscal policy are going (Office of Strategic Capital).

3. G20 is bringing in banks and private institutions, which is a paradigm shift in how credit allocation works. This is the announcement. We are going to run a different playbook for our monetary framework from now on. This is the only way out. The only way back to some state of "normal". This is exactly what Werner lays out in the Princes of the Yen. An in-depth study of Japan and other great banking empires. Our "new approach" will be one that has succeeded many times in the past. Including during the creation of America. Why? Because this style best achieves rebuilding the US' industrial capacity - think modernization of infrastructure. Today's infrastructure and infrastructure for the 21st-century is inherently digital. That's why capital formation is being directed and pointed at all things AI and digital. This is why all these related industries are points of "national security". This is what is meant by "Hamiltonian policy", a notion we've discussed before.

In short, exactly as Dines pointed out, you're going to have to pick sides - US or China. This is what is meant by the new multi-polar world. Believe it or not, for the first time in more than two decades, "we're actually trying to accomplish something".

4. Credit expansion is the only way to get growth (PofY), which is why Main Street over Wall Street matters. See the Foundry School to better understand the government's refocus on centralizing and deploying capital into productive use cases. Centralize the steering of credit, decentralize who receives it.

The key to the entire process is Matt's highlighting of Richard Werner's work. Richard wrote the Princes of the Yen, which outlines not only the rise and fall of the great Japanese financial system, but more importantly, the foundations of how dominant banking and financial systems work. A means by which the US economic system has drifted far away from over the last thirty to fifty years.

In simple terms, the keys are state-directed capital and credit allocation to productive uses. That's all that matters for a budding or dominant economic system. Without it, one dies. Without it, one meanders toward financial engineering practices that eventually kill the entire system. Proper credit allocation (capital formation) is representative of early-stage and highly successful/functioning economic systems. Financialization is the sign of an aging or failing financial system. If you strip out all the complexity and jargon, it's as simple as this.

As Werner points out, the Quantity Theory of Credit is the origin of all successful banking models that have worked for thousands of years. It started in early Asia before moving through Europe, Germany, Japan, the US, and now back to China. It was the basis of China's rise as they've built out the Belt and Road system over the last decade-plus. It has allowed them to pull economic power and global sway away from the US by way of state-directed capital aimed at globally and systemically important supply chains. By doing so, China created a vast decentralized product and manufacturing hub for the world; for anything and everything at a low price. On the contrary, the US chose the more deadly path. Centralization, consolidation, and a reduction in the number of banking entities. All the while increasing the amount of financialization, leverage, and risk in the fewer and fewer nodes within the system.

WOW. The # of banks in the US, by era, as presented by @MaxfieldOnBanks. I had never thought of it this way. Once you see it you can’t unsee it… pic.twitter.com/CJQJdIZEYv

— Caitlin Long 🔑⚡️🟠 (@CaitlinLong_) September 15, 2026

The core thesis, unlike what we've seen in the US over the last two decades, is decentralization. In short, you have the combination of centralized capital flows towards a decentralized private sector, which forms the basis of growth. You conquer, so to speak, in numbers.

This is a major paradigm shift from what we've become, but it is what we are finally seeing the US wake up to and begin to move back towards.

That's why it feels so chaotic and out of sync. It's different than anything we've seen in the last 70 to 100 years or more. It is what Hamilton implemented in the US to found our great and successful American experiment. It is what we reimplemented in the 30s to 50s to extend US dominance. But it is what we moved away from post-1971 with the creation of petrodollars and a heavy reliance on financialization and incentivization of lack of productivity (service). It is what stablecoin dollars, Bitcoin, and a SOFR based system are meant to hopefully replace. The brokenness of petrodollar and eurodollars. These steps are an attempt to revert back to something that works - productivity.

Instead of growth, for decades, we've implemented policies that promote fewer and fewer entities in industry and banking. The exact steps that choke off growth and kill economic systems. It also leads, as we've seen, to a vicious cycle of bad policy design that encourages less competition. All of which only exacerbate the problem.

Eventually, you end up right where we are. In an unproductive and overly financialized economy without the ability to provide because you've outsourced everything for the sake of profits, quarterly numbers, and inflated margins for analysts to bicker over. At some point, you wake up and realize the amount of power you've given away to others by centralizing your resources and profits into fewer and fewer hands. That's when you realize those providing to you have decentralized their resources, profits, and state-directed capital into real economic power that eventually unseats you from number one.

For a financial system to work, the entire system must depend on the quantity of credit, as Werner lays out, and if you follow the Japanese story, which I believe we are only 25-30 years behind, then Kevin Warsh is no different than the last Central Bank prince whose specific role was to change the regime. Unfortunately, if we choose to extend, the only option is to become the carry trade for others to piggyback off of. As we see, that game can unproductively go on for decades.

As Dines notes, the QE period is over. The only move to sustain is to provide credit to those who have capacity (Main Street) and guide it into productive use cases (21st-century infrastructure).

Sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list here. Follow Kane McGukin on Substack here.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 22:10

Foreign Capital Returns To Brazil As Goldman Clients See 20% Stock Rally If Bolsonaro Defeats Socialist

Brazil's tightening presidential race could drive a sharp repricing of local equities.

A new Goldman Sachs survey of 70 global investors found that half see at least 20% upside in EWZ, the US-listed Brazil equity ETF, by year-end if right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro defeats socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The first round is scheduled for Oct. 4, with a potential runoff on Oct. 25.

Lula (Left); Bolsonaro (Right)

Goldman Sachs Managing Director Nelson Armbrust provided clients color on the upcoming elections in South America, which could cement a historic, once-in-a-generation rightward shift across the continent.

Related:

• Brazil At A Historical Crossroads

He focused on positioning:

Flávio Bolsonaro (right-leaning candidate) is gaining momentum; polls show him tied or closing the gap in the second round. 

As a reminder, pools don't adjust for the likely voter (aka: the people that actually turn up on the day to cast a vote, no mail ballot votes in Brazil), and historically there has been higher absence from Lula's voters. 

We just did a survey with 70 global investors about their cross-asset views in Brazil, the bottom line:

• Equities is the least owned asset class (60% are either "very light" or "light") and it is the vehicle this group sees the most upside (half see EWZ at least +20% by year end if Flavio wins) From my convos, local Equity investor positioning is a 6/10 while local Macro accounts are small in equities (3/10). 

Foreign capital is starting to come back to Brazil as we near the event:

We have seen massive buying of upside from investors, EWZ Call Open Interest at ALL TIME HIGHS:

Implementation: I like EWZ Call Spreads for November (runoff is October 25th) and going long our Rate Sensitive basket (GSBZRATE Index).

Implied 2 month vols have risen from ~30v to ~45v and past election cycles (noted on the graph below) show that vols could keep moving higher.

But the cost of the 30% delta call vs the 10% delta call has been stable lately and is historically cheap (21st percentile).

EWZ Nov 42 50 call spread = $1.00 offer 8x max payout, ref 37.20, ~45v ATMF, 23% delta, max loss is premium paid. 

Another way to implement is going long GSBZRATE Index, they are the 30 stocks in Ibovespa most correlated to 5y rates. It is composed of Fins (38%), Real Estate (17%), Industrials (17%), Utilities (12%), Cons Disc (9%) and Materials (6%). You can trade U$75mn a day at 10% volume. 

Brazil has the highest real rate in the WORLD (~10%) and is the most correlated EM Equity with local Rates. If rates come down, the move in Equities could be meaningful.

Below is a chart of the basket's P/E vs local short-term rates (Jan29 rates) inverted. As flagged by Louis Miller, one could expect a ~30%+ re-rating in GSBZRATE (P/E going from 9x to 12x) if the local rates price in 200bps of cuts – from my investors discussions, 200-300bps is where most expect to see short term rates by year end if Flavio wins.

Historically when the market prices cuts, our Brazil Rate Sensitive Basket delivered ~3x the Ibovespa's return (table below). The basket struggles if rates are cut due to recession risk or if there is a commodity boom (1/3 of Ibovespa is commods). Quick explanation below on periods the basket did not outperform Ibovespa (and I don't expect any of these scenarios to play out):

• Jan2010-Aug2010: economy and inflation were strong, CB started hiking and we had a bull flattening of the curve so the ongoing 5y came down.
• Jan2014-Aug2014: CB finished a hiking cycle on April 2014, economy started to decelerate sharply, mkt read it as "CB wont be able to keep rate high for long" so the 5y came down. Also, 2014 was an election year with Dilma x Aecio Neves (mkt thought Aecio, a right-leaning candidate, would win… but he lost and Ibovespa finished flat on that year.)
• Dec2015-Apr2018: huge commodities boom from China expanding, so Vale and Petrobras led the rally. Also in Aug2016 Dilma was impeached and Temer ran the country. During this time, markets rallied.

Earlier this month, Polymarket showed Bolsonaro overtaking Lula for the first time, and that lead has held through Saturday morning. Bolsonaro's odds of winning currently stand at 57%, while Lula's are around 42%.

Brazilian stocks have rebounded alongside rising Polymarket bets on a Bolsonaro victory.

A Bolsonaro win would cement a rightward shift after socialists spent years destroying the continent with nation-killing progressive experiments.

Also, across the pond in Europe, Nomura analysts expect an 18-month election cycle that sees the continent "lurching right."

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 21:35

Waste Of The Day: SBA Reviewed Loans 20 Years Late

Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations,

The Small Business Administration potentially made $11.5 million in improper payments to banks after overruling its own employees who had recommended reducing or denying government guarantees on 16 failed small-business loans.

For another 13 failed loans, SBA took so long to review them that the six-year statute of limitations expired, wasting another $5.4 million, according to an Aug. 27 inspector general report.

Key facts: SBA's 7(a) program helps startups with a risky business model get loans, but it does not generally lend taxpayer money directly. Private banks make loans of up to $5 million, and the government promises to cover as much as 85% of the loss if the borrower defaults.

But taxpayers only have to honor that guarantee when the bank follows SBA rules. If a bank failed to properly determine whether a borrower could repay the loan, verify required investments or follow other safeguards, SBA can reduce or deny the payout to the bank.

Auditors reviewed 32 failed loans where SBA employees recommended reducing or denying the payouts to banks, but higher-level reviewers later overturned those decisions.

For 16 of the 32 loans, auditors found insufficient evidence to justify the reversal, resulting in $11.5 million worth of potential improper payments. That included almost $4.9 million loaned to borrowers who never showed evidence they could repay the money.

One small business defaulted within 18 months. The bank argued that the small business had a sound strategy, but it failed due to the unforeseen loss of a major customer. The bank provided no evidence for its claim, but the SBA paid the guarantee anyway.

The SBA is also taking far too long to review high-risk loans, the audit found. The agency has only six years to sue a bank for violating the loan terms, but auditors found 13 loans where impropriety was not discovered until that deadline had passed. Two of them were not reviewed for more than 20 years after the loan guarantee was paid.

The SBA legally could have withheld other federal payments to the banks even after the six-year time limit expired, but the SBA has no process for doing so, the audit found.

SBA guaranteed $37 billion through 77,600 new 7(a) loans in fiscal year 2025.

Summary: A government loan guarantee is supposed to protect lenders from legitimate business failures, not protect them from following the rules. Taking 20 years to decide which is which leaves taxpayers holding the bag.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 21:00

Tesla Engineers Audit Chinese Suppliers As Optimus Commercialization Nears

About a month after JPMorgan analysts toured Tesla's Fremont factory and confirmed a "targeted four-month transition following the end of S/X production in May" to humanoid production lines, a new report on Friday says that Tesla engineers arrived in China to inspect robotics component suppliers, as Elon Musk appears to be moving closer and closer toward the commercialization of humanoid robots.

Bloomberg first reported this development as Tesla engineers arrived in Ningbo, a major port and manufacturing city in Zhejiang province on China's eastern coast, just south of Shanghai. The engineers inspected parts and component factories for the humanoid robot called "Optimus."

"Tesla's reported supplier audits are a positive commercialization signal for China's humanoid supply chain, pointing to progress toward repeatable Optimus production," Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma wrote in a note, adding, "Near-term sentiment could stay supported if audits lead to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders."

Tesla is reportedly targeting the second half of 2027 for commercial sales of Optimus. Production is likely to begin much earlier, as JPM analyst Rajat Gupta said the "Optimus Academy" will be operating later this year, with robots collecting real-world training data before being deployed in factories.

News of this development sent the Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index slightly higher on Friday, up about 1.4%, amid a tumultuous year that has left it down about 30%.

The market's appetite for physical AI, specifically humanoids, was hyped in mid-August by China's blockbuster Unitree IPO, but the momentum failed to follow through.

Bernstein analyst Eunice Lee recently pointed out that the adoption curve for humanoids will be much steeper than that of automobiles over a century ago.

Goldman analysts last month raised their global humanoid robot delivery base case to 75,000 shipments in 2026, 890,000 in 2030, and 6.5 million in 2035, versus previous estimates of 51,000, 256,000, and 1.4 million, respectively.

The invasion of physical AI is just around the corner.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 20:25

HHS Awards $42.3 Million To Push 'Treatment First' Model For Homelessness & Addiction

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

A federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded $42.3 million in new supplemental cash Friday to states and territories with the goal of speeding up the implementation of the Treatment First model for homelessness tied to addiction.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funding supports the initiative falling under President Donald Trump's executive order titled "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets" and the relevant Best Practices Toolkit that followed. That order from July 2025 directed agencies to put treatment and recovery ahead of the old approaches.

"President Trump has directed us to break the cycle of homelessness and addiction by putting treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency first," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. "These investments will help states move people from crisis into treatment and from treatment into lasting recovery, stable housing, and work. We are funding results that help people reclaim their health and independence."

About $17.3 million of the funds went to Community Mental Health Services Block Grant recipients. Officials say it builds systems, partnerships, workforce capacity, policies, and the technical pieces needed to make Treatment First a success. The funds will go toward technical assistance, training, policy work, and coordination across systems.

Roughly $25 million went to Substance Use Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Services Block Grant recipients to expand options for safe, licensed, certified, or chartered sober and recovery housing, as well as the requisite technical assistance to ensure that more recovery residences open and quality standards tighten.

"Treatment First means building a system that does not leave people cycling between homelessness, emergency rooms, and the criminal justice system," SAMHSA Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Christopher D. Carroll said. "These investments will help states strengthen the infrastructure - partnerships, data, workforce, and recovery supports - needed to connect people with serious mental illness and addiction to effective treatment and support them on a path toward lasting recovery, stable housing, employment, and self-sufficiency."

In June, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a $4.04 billion Continuum of Care notice. It walked away from the Housing First model, which provided permanent housing with no strings attached. Chronic homelessness climbed 81 percent from 2013 to 2025, despite the number of taxpayer-funded beds increasing 151 percent, HUD figures show.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner called Housing First a failure that "warehoused the vulnerable without results." Housing alone will not fix a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness, he said.

Kennedy earlier this year announced more than $700 million for related work, of which nearly $100 million went to the STREETS program for homeless people dealing with addiction or serious mental illness. In February, he introduced the $100 million STREETS effort itself, built around continuous contact from the street through recovery, jobs and self-sufficiency.

A federal appeals court this week allowed HUD to forge ahead with funding shifts after lower-court challenges. The department has earmarked $1.3 billion for transitional housing and supportive services.

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

Appeals Court Rules Federal Ban On Interstate Handgun Sales Unconstitutional

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against the federal government's ban on interstate transfers of handguns on Sept. 18, finding the nearly 60-year-old law was unconstitutional.

The ruling reverses provisions of the Gun Control Act of 1968 that prohibit handguns from being sold directly from licensed firearms dealers to buyers across state lines.

"The ban sullies the plain text of the Second Amendment and is inconsistent with the nation's tradition of firearms regulation, dating back to the founding era, under that Amendment," Circuit Judge Jerry Smith wrote in the ruling.

The court also rejected the lower court's analysis when dismissing the lawsuit last year, determining that the historical record adequately justified the ban because colonial and state laws regulating the movement of firearms across borders satisfy conditions outlined in the Bruen ruling of 2022.

The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen set a history-based standard: A new regulation must be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.

Smith wrote that the lower court's analysis "stretches the historical record far beyond what it can actually bear."

Circuit Judge Catharina Haynes dissented, agreeing with the lower court's decision to dismiss the case last year.

"I agree with the district court's decision that the several provisions of [the gun control act] discussed in this case are not unconstitutional under the Second Amendment," Haynes wrote. "That is all that is in play in this case."

The federal lawsuit was filed in January 2025 by Texas custom firearms dealer Elite Precision Customs LLC and out-of-state customers Tim Herron, a New Mexico-based grand master in the U.S. Practical Shooting Association, and Freddie Blish, a retired U.S. Marine Corps veteran who travels around the country teaching safe firearms handling for self-defense.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, a national gun rights organization, also joined the lawsuit against the federal government.

The plaintiffs argued the law prohibited people from directly purchasing handguns from licensed dealers outside their state of residence, while allowing them to buy rifles and shotguns.

Handgun buyers were forced to arrange transfers through a licensed dealer in their state, which required them to depend on another dealer agreeing to participate in the transaction and usually included more fees and delays, according to the Firearms Policy Coalition.

The Firearms Policy Coalition said the ruling was a win for people's rights.

"This is a massive victory for the People and another major defeat for the federal government's unconstitutional gun-control regime," said the coalition's President Brandon Combs in a statement. "Your right to keep and bear arms does not stop at your state line, and the government cannot make you pay a penalty just to exercise it."

A district court in Texas granted the federal government's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Sept. 30, 2025, finding the sale restrictions didn't function as a de facto prohibition on possession but were a reasonable commercial restriction enacted by Congress.

Congress passed the Sale Restrictions provision in 1968, finding that interstate commerce provided an easy way for citizens to evade states' gun laws at the time, according to the lower court.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 18:40

CENTCOM Claims US Military Has Escorted A Billion Barrels Of Crude Out Of Hormuz

Brent crude futures eased toward $103 a barrel by the end of the week as mixed Iran headlines and hopes for renewed diplomacy around next week's United Nations General Assembly weighed on energy markets.

On Saturday morning, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said the US had escorted 1 billion barrels of oil and more than 2,000 commercial vessels out of the Persian Gulf over the past couple of months.

Hostilities at the Hormuz chokepoint continued into Friday, as CBS News reported that two vessels were hit by projectiles. Iran claimed responsibility for striking one over an alleged "illegal crossing."

President Trump said Thursday he would soon make a "big decision" on whether to launch a major assault to "annihilate" the Iranian regime. "It's a big decision," the president told Axios ahead of a planned meeting with Persian Gulf leaders next week. "Anything could happen to me."

We suspect any major action against the Iranian regime could come after the midterm elections, whether kinetic, securing or neutralizing Kharg Island, or a next phase of expanded sanctions that could include not just Tehran but also China. 

Middle East oil exports have stayed resilient despite the Saudi East-West pipeline disruption, largely because flows have been rerouted through Hormuz.

UBS oil and gas analyst Henri Patricot wrote in a note that combined crude and petroleum-product exports through the critical waterway and alternative routes reached about 14 million barrels a day in the two days preceding Friday. He said the weekly average remained around 12 million barrels a day, compared with more than 20 million before the conflict kicked off in late February.

That still leaves global oil markets with a deficit of more than 8 million barrels from these export routes on a weekly basis. This only shows the scale of the disruption that continues ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter, as Saudi Arabia told major refineries in Europe that crude loadings would be halted next month due to ongoing disruptions to the East-West pipeline.

Patricot said the increased shipments through the Hormuz chokepoint continue to be driven by "dark transits":

Reduced concerns on near-term flows, same uncertainty on resolution

A pick-up in flows via the Strait of Hormuz in recent days has eased some of the concerns around near-term crude supply, impacting prices. More reports indicate that Aramco will raise exports from Oman over the next few weeks. Flows will reportedly be going to Asia. US President Donald Trump said that the is nearing a decision over whether to restart attacks on Iran. He is due to meet GCC leaders next Tuesday. Meanwhile attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz have reportedly continued.

Flows going up in the past couple of days, despite Yanbu interruption 

We estimate total crude oil and oil product exports via Hormuz plus volumes diverted to the bypass routes were up to 14Mb/d in the past couple of days, despite the drop in Yanbu. Total flows remain at 12Mb/d on a weekly basis vs. the >20Mb/d preconflict. The increase continues to be driven by dark transits via Hormuz as visible volumes in the latest UBS Evidence Lab data. Another LNG carrier left the Gulf yesterday, the second one we have seen exiting this month. Flows via the Bab el Mandeb Strait remain within the recent range.

Gulf loadings ramping up Gulf 

Gulf crude loadings ex-Iran rose to >10Mb/d over the past 2 days and are near their highest level since the start of the conflict at 8.1Mb/d over the past week vs. the August average of 5.5Mb/d. This is driven by higher Saudi and Iraqi exports. There is still no fresh Iranian crude loading on the other hand . Including Fujairah, loadings on the bypass routes averaged 2.5Mb/d in the past 2 days and are at 4.9Mb/d so far in September vs. 3.4Mb/d in August and 6.4Mb/d in July. Oil product loadings in the Gulf are also bouncing back slightly, above 1.5Mb/d vs. sub-1Mb/d for most of the conflict. 

Separately, JPMorgan's head of global markets strategy, Dubravko Lakos-Bujas, told clients, "Middle East oil exports have stayed unexpectedly resilient despite the Saudi East‑West pipeline disruption, largely because flows have been rerouted through Hormuz."

Brent crude futures settled around $103.87 a barrel on Friday, while the US diesel crack spread closed around $112.60 a barrel, suggesting the crisis is less about crude and more about refining (read Goldman's diesel report), specifically diesel.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 18:05

Trump Drops 'Fake News' Receipts As CNN, MSNBC, Politico Journos Have White House Badges Revoked

Update (1200ET): Following through on his promise, journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were denied access to the White House grounds on Sept. 19 after President Donald Trump announced a ban targeting the outlets the day before.

Akayla Gardner, a White House correspondent for MS NOW, said that her press pass was revoked at the third gate she passed through to enter the grounds on Saturday morning.

“Once I was inside where we have magnetometers, I attempted to scan my badge, which we have to do to be able to get into the White House grounds,” Gardner said during a live broadcast on MS NOW.

“It did not work. There was a red beeping light, and so the officer asked me to hand over my badge. He said that it was disabled.”

Gardner said the officer on duty wasn’t able to explain specifically why her badge did not work, allegedly saying the decision “was above him.”

Gardner’s badge and her photographer’s badge were both then “taken” away from them by security, she said. However, an MS NOW producer’s pass was approved, and the employee was still able to go inside, Gardner said.

MS NOW defended its team and newsroom in a statement on Saturday morning, saying the media channel plans to take “any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights” as journalists in a democracy.

“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW stated on social media.

The outlet stated that it will continue reporting on the Trump administration, even if its reporters are not allowed on White House grounds.

CNN’s reporter Betsy Klein was also denied access and had her press pass revoked.

CNN responded with a statement defending its White House team:

“CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting,” the statement read.

“We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government. Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.”

POLITICO editor-in-chief Jonathan Greenberger shared in the publication’s daily newsletter Playbook that the company’s White House reporter, Cheyenne Haslett, was also locked out on Saturday.

“Secret Service denied her entry to the complex and confiscated the pass that allows her access to the White House,” the statement read.

“We stand by her and all reporters here covering the White House. As we said yesterday, we will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”

White House Correspondents’ Association president Jacqui Heinrich, a Senior White House Correspondent for Fox News Channel, accused the White House of singling out CNN, MS NOW and Politico for “doing their jobs.”

“The Constitution protects the freedom of the press from government interference,” Heinrich wrote in a statement on Sept. 19.

“That protection does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask.”

Shortly thereafter, The White House Rapid Response account on X responded with a list cataloging years of the network's own reporting failures and outright fabrications, nearly 50 examples in all...

Ouch!

*  *  *

As Zachary Stieber detailed last night via The Epoch Times, President Donald Trump on Sept. 18 said he has banned three news outlets from the White House.

Trump said on Truth Social that he was, effective immediately, banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”

The president added:

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

MS Now and Politico did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

CNN could not be reached.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more details regarding which stories or posts the president was referring to.

Trump routed them during a post-tweet press conference: 

"What I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MSNOW is fake news. They're fake news. They know it. They're putting there for a reason."

"Politico was bailed out by our government from going out of business."

🔥 President Trump is now LAYING THE HAMMER after the Fake News WHINED that he blocked CNN/MSNOW/Politico from the White House

"What I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MSNOW is fake news. They're fake news. They know it. They're putting there for a reason."… pic.twitter.com/sxUtdqwCOQ

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 18, 2026

Trump added that "I don't want them in my office", stating that he will take this as far he can including "we'll be suing these people too."

He concluded by noting that "there may be other media outlet bans to follow."

The Fake News are Democrat operatives pretending to be journalists.

The toughest question the media ever asked Joe Biden was his favorite ice cream flavor! pic.twitter.com/PMNXrAtRZO

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 18, 2026

Trump previously banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and other spaces after the outlet declined to change its stylebook to reflect the president’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

A federal judge entered an injunction against the ban, determining that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment because it discriminated based on The Associated Press’s viewpoint.

But an appeals court in mid-2025 partially stayed the injunction. The court allowed Trump to ban the outlet from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and some other spaces, concluding that “these restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment fora opened for private speech and discussion” and that the White House “therefore retains discretion to determine, including on the basis of viewpoint, which journalists will be admitted.

Judges also ruled that Trump could not ban reporters from the White House’s East Room.

“The identified harms are less clear with respect to the East Room, which does not share the hallmarks of spaces like the Oval Office,” the majority said.

At present, however, there is no White House press secretary and the usual press briefings are somewhat disrupted. The most likely immediate outcome is that the administration attempts to remove those networks from the presidential and vice presidential pool rotations.

* * * This bag made out of 1000D Military-Spec Cordura® 

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 16:50