Zero Rss

USS Abraham Lincoln Returning Home After Being "Sunk" Three Times By Iran

In yet another example of Iranian social media claims not matching up with reality, the nuclear powered Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is returning home after a 286 day deployment and 5 days of rest at port in Thailand.  The ship was untouched by any signs of combat, despite the IRGC claiming on at least three separate occasions that they had sunk the mighty vessel with drones and missile strikes. 

Iranian aligned accounts even spread AI videos and video game clips of a ship sinking, arguing that the clips showed the Abraham Lincoln.  Left wing commentators celebrated the news, only to scrub their posts after it was revealed that the information was fake.

Despite resounding evidence to the contrary, many conspiracy advocates asserted that the Lincoln had been hit and the US government was "covering it up."  This also turned out to be nonsense after the carrier arrived at Laem Chabang Port in Thailand for rest and cleaning.  

The narrative then shifted, with people claiming that the Lincoln "looked damaged" and disheveled, which proved they were right about Iran hitting the vessel.  In reality, the carrier had normal rust and residue caused by months at sea. 

Is this rusty scrap metal Abraham Lincoln?
Where did this happen to it? pic.twitter.com/WItS8TBWXd

— Iran Embassy in Zimbabwe (@IRANinZIMBABWE) September 2, 2026

The posts exposed an embarrassing lack of basic knowledge when it comes to natural wear from sea water on naval ships facing long deployments.  

The cartoon depicts the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as an exhausted, rusted, and injured “old man” who can barely stand with the help of a walker. It is clearly a satire of the ship’s recently extremely long deployment (over 280 days at sea, including operations against… pic.twitter.com/A3LGzZoV1R

— 𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕻𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕤 (@SprinterPress) September 2, 2026

The ship was cleaned at port with no signs of damage from attack.  It has now left Thailand on a return trip to the US and the Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado (San Diego).  

🇺🇸🇹🇭 USS Abraham Lincoln Gets A Deep Clean

After an extended deployment at sea, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is getting some serious attention at Thailand’s Laem Chabang Port.

Thai port crews are using high pressure water jets and scaffolding to clean the carrier’s hull,… pic.twitter.com/3urAvxLWzn

— Defense Intelligence (@DI313_) September 6, 2026

Latest Visuals ⚡️:

USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) Aircraft carrier wraps visit to Laem Chabang Port, Thailand returning back to South China Enroute towards San Diego pic.twitter.com/9wrE4r3iSY

— OSINT Digest (@Indowatchosint) September 6, 2026

The carrier and all its sailors are accounted for.  The return of the USS Abraham Lincoln highlights an incessant disinformation campaign by Iran and Iran supporters, flooding social media with false claims in an effort to win the war in the theater of public opinion.  On the ground, the vast majority of supposed IRGC successes have proven to be fake. 

The Iran War and the war in Ukraine have become case studies for a new era of digital warfare.  Substantial efforts are being made to "play the algorithms" and manipulate consensus.  Iran, perhaps more than any government so far, has relied heavily on digital guerrilla tactics as a way to demoralize US operations.  They have, of course, received extensive help from sources in the west. 

Whether or not one agrees with the reasons behind the war, it is clear that propaganda alone is not going to lead to victory.  Tangible realities matter and Iran is being hit with those tangibles in the form of an inflation crisis, import/export crisis and fuel shortage crisis and foreign ships passing more freely through the Strait of Hormuz.   

The lesson here is simple:  Online discourse is rarely a reflection of the truth.  All one has to do is wait a few months for the fog of war to clear and the majority of false claims will melt away.     

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 08:50

Hartnett: A Democratic Sweep Will Trigger A Stock Market Rout, And Pop The AI Bubble

The biggest story last week was not the unexpectedly hot jobs report which, unfortunately, will be revised sharply lower next month as the labor market reverts to its deteriorating, AI-enhanced, trendline: Instead, what everyone was - or should have been focusing on - was the bottom falling out of the bond market with global yields jumping to the highest level in 2 decades, to wit: 

• 10Y Treasury yields jumping to 4.81%, near 2008 crisis levels
• 30Y Treasury yields jumping to 5.31%, highest since 2007
   
• Japan 10Y JGB  >3.0%    First time since 1996
• Japan 30Y JGB  4.2%, or 4x the BoJ policy rate
   
• German 10Y Bund  3.38%, post-2011 high
• France OAT-Bund spread 88bps, 2012 crisis highs
• Italy BTP-Bund spreads, 84bps, 2012 highs

A Bloomberg index of global bond yields just rose to the highest since 2007, and is just 1% away from the highest levels this century.

Appropriately, the topic of soaring bond yields is also the kick-off theme of the latest weekly Flow Show (available to pro subs) from BofA's Michael Hartnett, who writes that with a 99% probability the ECB hikes Sept 10th, 53% Fed hikes on 16th, 98% BoJ hikes 18th (per Bloomberg futures pricing), the hikes are coming fast and furious as central banks try to restore credibility to ward off surge in bond yields (which, as we have discussed extensively, is now the biggest threat to AI capex and the K-shaped consumer booms). In light of this, Hartnett says that if the Fed does hike despite stalled payrolls...

... then it will restore credibility and make sure the current "peak yields" don't go higher, it's also why to Hartnett, duration (RTY, XBI, KRE, REIT) keeps working despite surging yields and why "nouveau-leveraged" Mag7s are on the cusp of upside breakout. On the other hand, if the Fed does not hike - as Trump made painfully clear he will not approve - or even merely keeps rates on hold, then all bets are off, as is the Fed's credibility because for all his rhetoric, Warsh will prove to be "just one more of the guys."

Of course, it's not just the Fed: with Trump approval ratings the lowest on record...

... as a plurality of Americans say the most important problem facing the country is "the economy, unemployment and jobs" (followed in distant second place by those who said "threats to democratic values and norms"), Hartnett says that the White House is realizing that $4/gallon gas, 160 dollar-yen, 5% Treasury bond yields are "Maginot Lines" for the US admin, hence policy interventions via FX, bond buybacks, monetary policy (pressure on BoJ to raise policy rate that’s averaged 0.1% this century)...

... and why the policy panic working for now (see the surging Japan yen); or, as Hartnett described a month ago, global markets are subject to “whatever it takes” policies to maintain nominal macro boom and asset price bull...  and why Hartnett says to stay long commodities and debasement hedges, e.g. gold.

To be sure, this observation doesn't exist in a vacuum, and sits neatly inside a coherent set of themes Hartnett has been pushing over  the past several weeks: 

• "Bonds boss the bubble." His view is that long-dated yields - not equity stories - now dictate the AI trade, captured in his line from a week ago that "bonds trade information, equities trade ideas." He argues AI spenders and builders will keep underperforming AI adopters until global 30-year yields fall below 5%, and that the market is currently priced for a "perfect consensus": no landing, no Fed hike, no AI capex cut, and no Democratic sweep (which will inevitably disappoint).
• Stay long commodities and gold. With "whatever-it-takes" fiscal intervention holding down long-end yields, Hartnett has kept commodities and gold as the core inflation/geopolitical hedge. 
• The midterms are the contrarian flip. His base stance is long equities / short bonds, but he carves out a tactical exception: if Democrats look poised to sweep both chambers, a 10%+ equity selloff becomes likely, making bonds the contrarian Q4 buy. Investors have largely shrugged off election risk so far, which is exactly why he sees the asymmetry.
• The AI bubble is "fit to burst." In related commentary he laid out a post-bubble playbook — "long humiliation, short hubris" — favoring long bonds plus defensives (consumer staples, mining/materials, healthcare) over the crowded AI-buildout names, noting hyperscaler free cash flow has turned negative under buildout commitments.

As Hartnett continues to hammer the rising bond yield theme, he next takes a somewhat contrarian view, and notes that the 10-year rolling return from US stocks is 15%, commodities 11%... while Treasuries are -2%, the worst of the past 100 years.

For bond bulls (if any are still left, now that even career bond bull Lacy Hunt turned bearish) this is a good sign: as the next two charts show, negative long-run returns have been a great entry points for stocks in 1939, 1974, 2009...

... and commodities in 1933, 2018.

And while the US midterms are not a “regime change” election like Thatcher/Reagan in 1980, or BREXIT/Trump 2016, a Fed hike, TSY buybacks, signal a rising risk the midterms show the biggest voter priority is “affordability” not lower taxes, faster AI data center expansion... which is why to Hartnett lower Q4 yields remain a very good contrarian play.

Hartnett's latest Flow Show then pivots away from bond yields, and to the main topic of the week, namely the upcoming midterms (appropriately just as we penned "Democrat Sweep? Here Are JPMorgan's Midterm Trades - And Why Gridlock Pays"). The BofA strategist believes that for all the posturing, the midterms are not a “regime change” election, e.g. Thatcher/Reagan in 1980 = end of inflation/start of bond bull, BREXIT/Trump in 2016 = end of globalization = start of commodity bull;

Alas the coming midterms are unlikely to change the trajectory of US government spending (which will keep rising until it is forced to stop); Hartnett views that 2020s as a decade of political populism as MAGA (Reform party in UK) and Democratic Socialists of America (Greens in UK) represent the culmination of post-GFC Tea Party and Occupy Wall St insurgents. 

More importantly, the populists (right or left) are spending a lot to stay popular... which is why 2020s is a decade of fiscal excess, nominal GDP boom (past six years up 63% in US from $20tn to $32tn) and “Anything But Bonds” strategic asset allocations (TSYs up 74% in past six years, from $23TN to $40TN). Meanwhile, as the latest BofA Fund Managers Survey shows, investors are not fearful of midterms saying POTUS governs through Executive Orders not Congress (277 thus far, on track for most since Truman), and say a Democrat sweep is unlikely given tough Senate “map”; when asked about the most likely outcome from midterms in August BofA Fund Manager Survey (see report), 47% said GOP Senate & DEM House, 23% said DEM sweep, 9% said GOP sweep/maintains control of Congress (current GOP Senate majority is 53-47, in House 218-212).

Source: BofA FMS

To be sure, the Senate map is tough for Dems: they must flip 4 of 6 most vulnerable GOP seats in North Carolina (current probability of DEM flip = 92%), Maine (69%), Alaska (64%), Ohio (55%), Texas (51%), Iowa (37%); and DEMs must defend vulnerable seats in Georgia (94% = current prob of DEM hold), New Hampshire (84%), Michigan (65%); the key battleground states for investors to watch are Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Michigan.

Note that Wall Street is already focused on Texas Governor race between GOP incumbent Abbott (currently polling 49% according to Real Clear Politics) and his Democrat challenger Hinojosa (45%); the clash is seen as big referendum on AI data center expansion (Abbott was recently forced to announce a data center moratorium to arrest decline in polling numbers).

But as Hartnett's next chart shows, the Democratic sweep likelihood is rising, with Trump's Presidential approval number ranges from 35-40%, significantly below historical average 2 months ahead of midterms (53% as shown below).

Furthermore, the BofA strategist points to the latest Polymarket probabilities, which show odds of a Democratic sweep at 50% (vs., GOP Senate/DEM House at 35%, and a GOP sweep at just 10%).

This matters because for Hartnett, a Democrat sweep is a threat to asset prices: an electoral shift from populist capitalism to populist socialism, means the next big direction in tax & regulation is up not down (and EPS negative), and would be accompanied by policies to lower inflation, healthcare, improve affordability challenge K-shape wealth boom, AI capex boom, stocks "too big to fail" Wall Street zeitgeist.

Additionally, loss of political capital = less ability for Trump to coerce resources, corporations, foreign governments into support for policy priorities of AI war with China, resource monopolization.

Putting all this together, Hartnett says a Democrat sweep = big risk-off: it would lead to a slump in i) stocks (more than 10%), ii) the dollar, and iii) bond yields into year-end, while international stocks outperform on less trade & military wars... but Europe outperforms Asia (loses Trump AI friend); the BofA strategist says the best hedge for a Democrat sweep is short financials & US dollar. In contrast, a surprise GOP sweep (maintain House/Senate) control = big risk-on, and more importantly a green light for AI bubble and positive US dollar (“exceptionalism returns").

Finally, the largely priced-in scenario of a “GOP Senate/ DEM House” translates into more of the same: modest risk-on... “gridlock = goldilocks”.

More in the full BofA Flow Show note available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 08:30

New York Rediscovers Nuclear Power, With Plenty Of Political Fine Print

Five years after Indian Point’s last reactor shut down, Albany rediscovered the appeal of electricity that runs around the clock without burning fossil fuels.

Governor Kathy Hochul wants 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity, with at least 1 GW developed by the publicly owned New York Power Authority, plus a separate 4 GW initiative. 

There haven't been any announcements for the technology of choice, but the most likely candidates are the large Westinghouse AP1000 and the smaller 300 MW BWRX-300 from GE Vernova Hitachi.

As Canary Media reports, the reversal follows this spring’s weakening of New York’s climate law. The state’s difficulties with delivering large renewable projects also hasn’t helped keep them on the pure-play renewables path, which was made worse with the Trump administration’s assault on offshore wind.

The construction of new nuclear power generation offers a governor facing re-election a unique win-win opportunity: nuclear offers dependable low-carbon generation alongside renewables while also offering industrial investment, construction jobs and promises of lower bills.

Eight upstate communities have expressed interest in hosting projects. With strongly Republican-leaning counties on the list of possibilities, including Jefferson, Oswego, and Schuyler, Gov. Hochul could use the new mega-projects to score political points.

NYISO’s 2026 Power Trends warns in their recent report that trying to replace over 4 GW of something that's almost always on (nuclear) with less than 3 GW of something that's almost always off (renewables) isn't exactly how you set the state up for future success.

The report from NYISO does highlight a common problem between nuclear and other sources of generation, which is the issue of actually getting the power where it needs to go. If most of the energy demand is downstate, then additional dependencies and bottlenecks come into play. Transmission capacity becomes a problem to get the power from upstate.

Then there is Indian Point. As we previously reported, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has pushed to revive the roughly 2 GW facility, whose retirement increased reliance on fossil generation. Hochul opposes reopening it while championing new construction upstate.

A restart would require substantial work, however, a precedent is already being set with other restarts around the country, most notably at the Palisades. If there is true concern in the state for meeting baseload needs, then outright rejecting the restart of a nuclear facility becomes confusing.

Opponents are arguing nuclear spending could crowd out faster alternatives, so Senator Kevin Parker’s pending legislation would impose a 30-month pause on taxpayer and ratepayer support for new or restarted nuclear facilities while a task force studies costs and alternatives.

As we have highlighted a few times now, selective nuclear enthusiasm extends well beyond Albany.

Texas committed $350 million to advanced nuclear development in 2025. Yet Greg Abbott fought the proposed Andrews County spent-fuel storage facility, and Texas enacted restrictions in 2021 on offsite high-level waste storage.

New Mexico similarly committed almost $5 million in development assistance and workforce support for Kairos Power’s Albuquerque expansion. Meanwhile, state officials battled Holtec’s proposed HI-STORE spent-fuel facility. Holtec abandoned the New Mexico project in 2025.

The common thread is an appetite for nuclear generation capacity accompanied by arguments over who carries the liabilities. New York’s pivot could strengthen its grid for decades, potentially even the next century, if it can follow through with its swing.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 08:30

The 10-Year Treasury Yield Over 5%? Some Thoughts

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

The 10-year Treasury yield has been zigzagging higher since mid-November when the Fed cut its policy rates again despite accelerating inflation. Since that rate cut, followed up by another rate cut in December, the 10-year yield has risen by 80 basis points, heading, apparently inexorably, for the 5%-line.

On Friday, it closed at 4.78%, within spitting distance of 5%, despite Bessent's three hocus-pocus shows to try to bring it down. Sure, they might have helped keeping a lid on long-term yields, as Bessent pointed out; who knows where the 10-year yield would be by now without the hocus-pocus shows. Maybe already over 5%?

The 10-year yield is now 115 basis points above the Effective Federal Funds Rate (EFFR, blue line), which the Fed targets with its policy rates. Note the November rate cut - the drop in the blue line - despite accelerating inflation. That's when the zigzag higher began.

Buyers and sellers in the bond market have good reasons for pushing up the 10-year yield: Inflation refuses to go back into the bottle. The Fed refuses to force inflation back into the bottle, triggering loose financial conditions in most areas of the economy, except in real estate. And the government refuses to even entertain a modicum of spending cuts and tax hikes to contain the deficits. It's been the opposite: tax cuts and spending hikes, and they're still talking in those terms.

The government's unwillingness to contain the deficit causes a flood of supply of new debt needed to fund the deficits. The bond market has to absorb that new debt by luring in new buyers with higher yields - investors that are now sitting on the sidelines watching this play out. If yields move high enough, these investors will begin to nibble, and if yields move higher still, these investors will nibble some more, and if yields move a lot higher still, investors might take big bites. Some of those investors have been nibbling, but the supply keeps coming, and so the 10-year yield keeps rising.

Those reasons for pushing the 10-year yield higher aren't going away anytime soon as neither the Fed nor the government is willing to do what it takes.

The 10-year yield had already breached the 5%-line for a few moments intraday on October 23, 2023, but that was too fast too soon, after a massive surge of 170 basis points in six months. And at 5%, the nibblers started taking out huge bites, and the sellers stopped selling, with the spectacular effect that the yield plunged by 19 basis points intraday, from 5.02% to 4.83%.

That day is circled in the chart above, showing only the closing yields. The yield then continued to plunge for the next two months, and that's how that run for 5% ended.

Here is the hourly spectacle on October 23, 2023:

A 10-year Treasury yield above 5% and well-above 5%, was essentially the norm in the decades before 2008, before QE. Between the mid-1960s and the Dotcom Bust recession, the 10-year yield was nearly always higher than 5%, going as high as 15%. So 5% isn't anything unusual or unheard of. For several decades, it used to be considered low.

The exception occurred during the Dotcom Bust that was hitting the economy, to which the Fed responded by cutting its policy rates as low as 1%, and kept them there too long, causing Housing Bubble 1 to bloom, which ended in the Housing Bust, which triggered the mortgage crisis, which triggered the Financial Crisis. During that time, starting in June 2002 through April 2006, the 10-year yield dropped below 5%, and stayed mostly below 5%, and for part of the time even below 4%. Then it went back over 5% again, when the Housing Bust and the Fed's reaction to the budding Financial Crisis pushed the yield back below 5%. But it didn't drop below 4% until the Fed started QE in 2008.

The 30-year Treasury yield hasn't been so constrained by an imaginary line that formed some kind of ceiling, where the masses come out and buy. It has zigzagged past its October 23, 2023 high, to a two-decade high. On Friday, it closed at 5.24%.

The 10-year Treasury yield looks like it wants to break out - it looks like it already made the first step to breaking out, by leaving behind its two-month range from 4.62% to 4.72%. At some point, sooner or later, given the history of the 10-year yield, the buyers and sellers in the bond market will make another run at 5%.

The big question that arises is this: Will the same thing that happened on October 23, 2023, happen all over again, when huge demand suddenly comes off the fence at that long-awaited 5%, while sellers, shocked and appalled, pull back, thereby causing the yield to plunge again?

Or will the 10-year yield blow through the 5% - with fretting sellers burning through the worried and careful buyers - and head higher, and remain above 5%?

The government's fiscal policies are asking for it. The Fed's policies of being soft on inflation are asking for it. The $40 trillion in Treasury debt outstanding is asking for it.

A 10-year yield of 5%+ is obviously not the end of the world. The US economy has done fine with a 5%+ yield, including during the Dotcom Bubble, which generated a very tight labor market, big pay increases, and lots of economic growth despite a 10-year yield mostly in the range between 5-8%.

And the ratio of interest payments to tax receipts that are available to pay for them was much higher from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s (see my analysis: Quarterly Update on the Ugly Fiscal Condition of the US in Q2 2026).

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 08:10

Oh Look, Yet Another Church Up In Flames...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Another week, another historic church reduced to smoke, rubble. The former Saint Agnes Church on Martha Avenue in Toledo, Ohio went up early Saturday morning. The 116-year-old landmark's steeple came down. The roof burned out. Nearby homes were evacuated. Once again the cause is listed as currently unknown.

Toledo Fire & Rescue was called around 6:30 a.m. Saturday after reports of heavy black smoke pouring from the roof of the vacant church in the Five Points neighborhood. Crews arrived to find the building already heavily engulfed.

Officials warned of collapse risk and alerted people in surrounding homes. The steeple later fell. By Saturday afternoon excavators were tearing the ruined structure down.

TODAY ? The steeple of the former Saint Agnes Church on Martha Avenue in Toledo, Ohio, burned down.

In America, churches are burned or destroyed, while mosques are not. pic.twitter.com/2n20ae0FcO

— Faraz Pervaiz (@FarazPervaiz3) September 5, 2026

Saint Agnes opened in 1910. It was among 29 parishes closed or merged by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Toledo in 2005. The parochial school shut the same year. The diocese no longer owns the property. A charter school now occupies the old school building next door and reported only minor smoke, water, and a cracked window.

One neighbor told local television: "About 6:45 we heard fire trucks and I peeked out my window and it literally looked like the whole street was on fire."

BREAKING: 116-year-old historic church just went up in flames in Toledo, OH

Another "cause unknown" church fire

I'm sure it's just a "coincidence" pic.twitter.com/f3ojltC6Gc

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 6, 2026

Investigators in Toledo have not named a suspect, a motive, or even a cause. Vacant churches do burn by accident. They also burn because someone wants them gone. The public is asked, week after week, to accept "unknown" as the last word while the buildings keep falling.

In the U.S. hostility against churches has jumped to hundreds of incidents a year - vandalism, arson or fires of uncertain origin, gun incidents, bomb threats.

Churches are not supposed to be disposable scenery. They are the markers of the civilisation that built the towns around them. When those markers keep mysteriously burning to the ground what does that say about our civilisation?

This is now happening every week all over the world.

Historic London Church BURNS To The Ground Amid SILENCE From Government

ANOTHER Historic UK Church TORCHED; Cause “Unknown”

Another Day Another Church BURNED To The Ground

Another TWO Historic Churches Explode Into Flames…

Historic Buffalo Church TORCHED TWICE In Four Days Following Sale To ISLAMIC Group

NYC Historic Church TORCHED in Confirmed Arson — City REJECTS Save Plan As Demolition Ordered

NYC Church BURNS; Cause “Unknown”

Yet Another HISTORIC CHURCH TORCHED In Canada

Yet MORE Churches Torched; Sustained Attack On Christianity Gathers Pace

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 07:20

Labor Day Gas Prices Have Never Been Higher

American travelers are facing record-high gasoline prices this Labor Day weekend as conflict in the Middle East and disruptions to global fuel supplies keep prices elevated.

The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline stood at about $4.15 on Sept. 5, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). That is nearly $1 higher than a year ago.

This year's Labor Day is now the first in history with a national average above $4 per gallon. The previous Labor Day record was $3.82 per gallon, set on Sept. 3, 2012.

Gas prices are displayed at a gas station in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on Sept. 4, 2026. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

As Bill Pan reports for The Epoch Times, GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan said he expects the national average to be about $4.03 on Labor Day, well above the previous record.

"Gasoline, while not at all-time records, is at its highest level ever recorded this late in the calendar year," De Haan said.

Prices vary widely across the country.

AAA said California has the nation's highest average on Sept. 5 at $5.83 per gallon, followed by Washington at $5.50 and Hawaii at $5.40. Oregon, Alaska, and Nevada are all near or above $4.90.

At the other end, Indiana has the lowest average at $3.43, followed by Texas at $3.67. Oklahoma and Mississippi are just above $3.70.

Air Travel Also Costs More

Drivers are not the only travelers facing elevated costs.

AAA booking data show that domestic round-trip airfare for Labor Day is averaging about $750, up by 2 percent from last year.

Travelers flying to the most popular domestic destinations face a much larger increase. Those fares are nearly 20 percent higher than a year ago, averaging close to $800 for a round trip.

However, international travelers are seeing some relief. Average international airfare is down by 4 percent from a year ago, according to AAA.

Oil, Fuel Supplies Under Pressure

Gasoline demand typically begins to decline near the end of summer as vacations end and schools reopen, putting downward pressure on prices. However, this year, high crude oil costs have outweighed the seasonal drop in demand.

Oil prices moved back above $90 per barrel this week, after renewed exchange of fire between the United States and Iran raised concerns about supplies moving through the Middle East.

The wartime disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important oil shipping routes, have been a major source of uncertainty.

Oil traffic through the waterway has improved from earlier disruptions. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said 17 million barrels of crude passed through the strait on Aug. 31, the highest daily volume since shipments were disrupted by the war.

But continued fighting and threats to commercial shipping have kept energy markets on edge.

Another source of pressure has come from Russia, where Ukrainian drones target oil refineries deep inside Russian territory. Those strikes have tightened supplies of refined products such as gasoline and diesel.

"While some oil shipments are apparently getting through the Strait of Hormuz, the dominant force propping up both gasoline and diesel prices is increasingly the growing loss of Russian refinery capacity," De Haan said.

"Until that refining supply picture improves, both gasoline and diesel prices face continued upward pressure."

Measures to Boost Supply

For the week that ended on Aug. 28, American refineries were running at 98 percent of capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. That was the highest utilization rate since August 2018.

The federal government has also taken steps to make it easier to move fuel around the country.

President Donald Trump extended a waiver of the Jones Act for another 90 days, through Nov. 15. The waiver allows some foreign-flagged vessels to carry fuel and other covered cargo between U.S. ports when qualified American ships are unavailable.

The Environmental Protection Agency has also relaxed seasonal fuel rules. An emergency waiver effectively ended summer-blend gasoline requirements early, beginning on Sept. 1, allowing more gasoline to enter the market.

Gasoline supplies remain tight. U.S. gasoline inventories fell by 1.2 million barrels last week to 205.7 million barrels. That was about 6 percent below the five-year seasonal average.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 06:45

Cambodia, US Begin Planning For Resumption Of Military Exercises In 2027, Says Cambodian Army

Authored by Victoria Friedman via The Epoch Times,

The Cambodian army announced it would resume joint military exercises with the United States early next year, in a bid to foster stronger relations nearly a decade since the last bilateral drills were held.

U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby speaks as part of a meeting of NATO Ministers of Defense Summit at the NATO headquarters in Brussels on Feb. 12, 2026. John Thys/AFP via Getty Images

The Royal Cambodian Army (RCA) said in a statement on Facebook that it and other officials met with representatives from the U.S. Army Pacific and the Idaho National Guard between Aug. 31 and Sept. 4 to begin planning for Exercise Angkor Sentinel 2027.

The Sept. 4 statement said the meeting was "marking an important step toward the resumption of the bilateral exercise."

Cambodian officials said both sides had discussed training activities, including a command post exercise, explosives disposal, and medical and engineering exchanges.

"Exercise Angkor Sentinel 2027 is scheduled to take place in February 2027, with the aim of strengthening interoperability and disaster-response capabilities, reflecting renewed momentum in Cambodia-U.S. military cooperation and a shared commitment to strengthening defense cooperation," the statement said.

The announcement follows several meetings between U.S. and Cambodian officials in an effort to improve relations, after Phnom Penh suspended joint exercises with the U.S. military in 2017.

Cambodia said it canceled the 2017 exercises because its armed forces were needed for local elections and an anti-drug campaign. Some observers, however, saw the move as a sign that then-Prime Minister Hun Sen was distancing Cambodia from the United States, according to a 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service.

Last month, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby met with Cambodia's prime minister, Hun Manet, as well as the country's Minister of National Defense Tea Seiha.

Mutually-Beneficial Military Cooperation

Colby said in a series of Aug. 15 X posts that the United States was "building a stronger, practical defense relationship in a spirit of partnership, mutual respect, and pragmatism."

The U.S. official said he and Seiha discussed Washington's and Phnom Penh's shared interest in expanding military cooperation in a way that is pragmatic and mutually beneficial.

"We are ready to work with countries like Cambodia where they are, through a realistic approach that focuses on where our interests overlap," Colby said. "We want a Southeast Asia of independent, strong, and economically prospering nations."

At the time, Manet said he was satisfied with the "positive momentum" in U.S.-Cambodian relations, as well as with the progress in preparing for Exercise Angkor Sentinel.

The Cambodian prime minister said that "the joint exercises and training not only build military capability but also serve as a vital bridge to foster close friendship between the armed forces of both countries."

Washington has previously been concerned over China's military presence at a Cambodian naval base on the Gulf of Thailand. China has assisted in upgrading the base, and the United States has voiced its suspicions that Beijing was granted special but secret privileges there. Cambodian officials have repeatedly rejected that claim.

US Seeks 'Partners Not Protectorates'

Colby said on Aug. 10 that the United States was not disengaging from its Asian partners but wanted those partners to be more proactive in their own defense.

"America is definitely not disengaging from Asia," Colby said in a speech in Manila, the Philippines. "We are not leaving; in fact, we are digging in, to ensure a favorable balance of power where it matters most."

The Pentagon official made the remarks while on a broader tour of Asia, that included the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

Colby, the third-ranking official in the Department of War, said that when the United States asks for allies "to step up, to invest more in their own defense, and to take responsibility for their own sovereign security, we are not signaling abandonment."

"We are looking for partners, not protectorates," he said.

"When our partners are strong, deterrence is strong."

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 06:10

AfD Sweeps Saxony-Anhalt Election In First "Far Right" Victory Since WW2: "Signal To Berlin"

Update(1400ET): In a political earthquake, the AfD has taken a massive lead, per exit polls, at the Saxony-Anhalt election in what the party's state leader hailed as sending a resounding "signal to Berlin." This moment marks the first time what has been dubbed a German "far-right party" taking power at a state level since World War II. This is absolutely historic.

"The exit polls, published by German public television stations, suggested that the party, known by its German initials AfD, would win between 39 and 41 seats in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt," NY Times reports. "That would leave it just short of an absolute majority of 42, but far ahead of its nearest rival."

But it remains unclear whether it will be able to form a government. Below is the latest via Deutsche Welle:

Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Tino Chrupalla  says his party secured a mandate to govern with its strong election result in Saxony-Anhalt.

"We have halved the CDU, so from that point of view it’s a great evening," Chrupalla told journalists in Magdeburg, referring to an earlier remark by Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and chancellor Friedrich Merz that AfD's result could be cut in half.

Chrupalla called the outcome "sensational." 

"Ulrich Siegmund will be the new premier of Saxony-Anhalt," he said. "From here, we will change Germany."

If the party falls short of an absolute majority, Chrupalla said it would be open to talks and even suggested an AfD minority government could be tolerated by other parties.

AfD has signaled it is open to a coalition partner that would be open to changing its migration and energy policy - though this option doesn't seem to be on the political map realistically at this early point.

Youth turn to AfD in droves...

Bei den jungen 5%! pic.twitter.com/W7Mb67WpRc

— Anosteras (@anosteras) September 6, 2026 AFP/Getty Images

*  *  *

Voters in Saxony-Anhalt head to the polls today in an election that could deliver Germany's most massive political shock in decades, with the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland on track to beat Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats.

AfD is the only hope for Germany https://t.co/6ONn1LOipE

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 19, 2026

Final polling estimates put the AfD at 40% to 41%, nearly double the CDU's 23%. The party's lead candidate, 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, has ruled out governing in a coalition, suggesting the AfD would need an outright majority to take power of its first German state government.

🚨 BREAKING: Germany's right-wing anti-mass migration AfD party backed by Elon Musk is poised for a HISTORIC VICTORY in the Saxony-Anhalt elections — with polling showing them over 40% support, a STUNNING LEAD of close to 20 points

CDU at just over 20%, and other parties near… pic.twitter.com/HnYvxgKlQr

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 6, 2026

About 1.7 million people are set to vote today, with polls closing at 6 p.m. local time. AfD's rapid ascent comes as voters are furious over Germany's stagnant economy, deindustrialization, energy costs, and the Third World migrant invasion.

The Polymarket bet on how many seats the AfD is expected to win today assigns a 74% probability to 38 to 41 seats, with 42 to 45 seats at 16%.

Ahead of the historic election, thousands of far-left Antifa crazies took to the streets wearing all black and holding Antifa and LGBT flags. Others were seen carrying signs reading "FCK NZS" and "FCK AFD."

EIL: Schwere Krawalle in Halle, Antifa-Demo eskaliert! 🚨

Am Vorabend der Landtagswahl hat die linksextreme Szene nach Halle mobilisiert. Die Demo versinkt in Gewalt, es werden Unmengen an Pyrotechnik gezündet und teils auf die Polizei geworfen. Straßenkampf mit Ansage. Und ein… pic.twitter.com/k2bwEQtZ8N

— COMPACT-Magazin (@COMPACTMagazin) September 5, 2026

A reported 15,000 left-wing activists joined a so-called pro-democracy festival in the state capital, Magdeburg, on Saturday, organized by the "Saxony-Anhalt Open to the World" alliance. Yet the whole globalist cult in Germany has likely run its course. It has been nothing more than what some call a nation-killing experiment, pushing uncontrolled mass migration and deindustrialization policies that have sent Europe's largest economy into a tailspin.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Saturday threatened the AfD, saying, "We will not let these people, who trash Germany and everything we have achieved in recent years and decades," before adding, "We will not let these people talk our country into ruin!"

🚨🇩🇪 German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is once again threatening to ban the AfD?!

"We will not let these people — who trash Germany and everything we have achieved in recent years and decades."

"We will not let these people talk our country into ruin!" pic.twitter.com/3iiyrwBRV2

— Mario ZNA (@MarioBojic) September 6, 2026

German politics coverage:

• Germany Braces For AfD Election Breakthrough In Saxony-Anhalt

• Germany's Anti-Immigration AfD Party Reaches Record Support Days Before Pivotal State Election

• "Citizens Want Political Turnaround": AfD Now Polls At 43% Across Eastern Germany

• Merz Warns Right-Wing Victory Will Hurt Germany, But Nomura Says Investors Aren't Buying It

What Nomura analysts see over the next 18-month election cycle across Europe: 

• "Seeds Of Political Change": Nomura Sees Europe Lurching Right, And Markets Are Fine With It

Yet what did Merz actually achieve? Destroying Germany's economy? That is something he certainly accomplished.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 06:00

153 Million US And Canadian Driver’s Licenses Are Being Sold On A Russian Cybercrime Forum

A trove of identity documents allegedly containing more than 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses has drawn the attention of the FBI after appearing for sale in the cybercrime underground. The collection also reportedly included millions of passports, identification cards and other sensitive records, according to Yahoo News and Tom's Hardware.

Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs investigated the database after a copy of his own driver’s license was posted as a promotional sample on Exploit, a Russian-language cybercrime forum. The seller operated a service known as Nexus, which allowed prospective customers to search its collection. Nexus has since gone offline.

Krebs tested the database with several people he knew, after obtaining their permission, and found records that appeared authentic. He also reported seeing a preview of information associated with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. That discovery raised the stakes of the incident, given the potential security implications of exposing identification belonging to senior government officials.

Rather than originating directly from the businesses where customers presented their IDs, the data may have passed through a common third-party verification provider. Several affected people had previously supplied identification while renting vehicles from Hertz. Security researcher Zach Edwards, whose information also appeared in Nexus, traced his record to an ID check performed at Planet 13, a cannabis dispensary.

The Yahoo report says that both companies relied on Louisiana-based IDScan for identity-verification services, according to Krebs. Timestamps attached to some of the exposed scans reportedly corresponded with the dates and times the individuals had presented their identification. That overlap led investigators to focus on IDScan as a possible common link, although the precise cause and scope of the apparent compromise have not been publicly established.

The scale extends well beyond driver’s licenses. Nexus claimed its inventory included roughly 10 million ID cards, 1.9 million travel documents, 1.3 million international driving permits, hundreds of thousands of medical, residence and employment-related records, and about five million documents in other categories.

IDScan told Krebs that it was examining the information he provided but was not yet in a position to disclose further details. Meanwhile, the FBI’s New Orleans field office has reportedly opened an investigation into the incident.

Beyond the sheer number of records, the type of information involved makes the apparent breach particularly significant. Detailed scans of government-issued identification can provide criminals with material for impersonation, fraudulent financial applications and other forms of identity theft. Some leaked licenses reportedly included photographic as well as UV and infrared scan data, potentially making misuse more sophisticated.

The episode also illustrates a broader privacy concern surrounding outsourced identity checks. When businesses rely on centralized verification companies, large volumes of highly sensitive documents can flow through a relatively small number of providers. A compromise at one point in that chain can therefore expose customers from multiple unrelated businesses at once, while creating potentially serious consequences for people whose personal information or whereabouts require additional protection.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 05:35

The Reckoning Of 2028: Civilization's Ledger Is Bleeding Red

Authored by Milan Adams via Prepp Group / WordPress,

Walk through the financial districts of London, New York, or Singapore at six in the evening, and you'll catch the last act of a performance that grows harder to maintain by the quarter. The tailored suits still stream from glass towers into black cars. The conversations still touch on market adjustments and projections. But watch closely, and you'll notice the strain. There's a tightness around the eyes now, a rehearsed quality to the optimism. The numbers on their screens say one thing. The price of milk, rent, and diesel say another.

We've built an elaborate choreography around the idea that currency holds its value. Yet somewhere between 2019 and now, that assumption quietly fractured. A dollar doesn't travel as far as it once did. It buys less bread, less time, less security. Central bankers have their explanations ready - inflation is transitory, supply chains are healing, the economy is resilient. But walk through a supermarket in Stuttgart, a gas station in Phoenix, a pharmacy in Manchester, and you'll feel the truth your paycheck already knows. The purchasing power hasn't just eroded; it's evaporated, and official metrics barely capture the half of it.

The arithmetic is brutal when you look at it directly. Global debt has climbed to roughly $315 trillion. That's not a percentage point on a chart. That's a claim on future labor so vast it would take several generations working at full capacity just to service the interest, never mind the principal. In Washington, the federal government now borrows about $5 billion every twenty-four hours to keep the lights on. Weekends included. No holidays. The interest alone will swallow roughly $2 trillion this fiscal year. That's more than the entire defense budget. More than all discretionary spending combined. These figures come from the Treasury Department itself, buried in reports that few bother to read.

Since 2008, and with terrifying acceleration during the pandemic years, monetary expansion has become the silent thief in everyone's pocket. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet hovered below $1 trillion in 2008. By 2022, it had ballooned to nearly $9 trillion. Even after some reduction, it sits above $7 trillion. This wasn't money earned or produced. It was conjured through digital ledger entries, diluting every existing dollar in circulation. Official inflation numbers - those seven to nine percent figures you see in headlines - exclude the categories that actually determine whether families make it to the end of the month. Add housing, energy, and food back in, and you're looking at fifteen to twenty percent erosion of purchasing power over five years. Ask any wage earner. They'll tell you the official numbers feel like fiction.

Energy tells its own story, and it's not the one politicians prefer. Despite all the transition rhetoric, the global economy still runs on hydrocarbons. The investment required to maintain current production simply hasn't materialized. In the United States, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drawn down to levels not seen since the 1980s - not for emergencies, but to manage political optics and prevent price spikes that might trigger unrest. Meanwhile, the easy oil is gone. What's left requires more energy to extract, more capital to process. Major fields discovered decades ago are declining faster than new discoveries can replace them. By 2027, conservative estimates suggest demand will outstrip sustainable supply by several million barrels daily. Renewable infrastructure cannot scale fast enough to close that gap. The physics don't care about our timelines.

The Portrait in Numbers

Let's try to make $315 trillion concrete. If each dollar were a grain of sand, you'd fill about 120 Olympic swimming pools. That's the debt sitting on balance sheets worldwide, earning interest, demanding service, compounding while we sleep. Every second, it grows by roughly $350,000 in new obligations. Every minute, $21 million. Every hour, $1.26 billion. The mathematics doesn't negotiate. It doesn't respond to political will or optimistic speeches.

Velocity matters too. In 1999, a single dollar of monetary base supported about $12 of economic activity. By 2023, that same dollar supported barely $3. Currency has grown sluggish, accumulating in asset markets where it inflates real estate and equity prices without building actual productive capacity. The wealth effect central banks tried to engineer - rising asset prices stimulating consumption - instead produced a split economy. Asset holders watch their portfolios swell while wage earners watch their real incomes shrink. In the United States, the top one percent now holds more wealth than the bottom ninety percent combined. We haven't seen concentration like this since 1929. Economies need circulation. When capital pools at the apex, it stops moving. It stops working.

Look at the banking sector, supposedly fortified after 2008. Regional banks in the United States carry massive exposure to commercial real estate, a sector facing structural decline as remote work permanently reduces office demand. Estimated losses exceed $400 billion, concentrated in institutions without reserves deep enough to absorb them. The Federal Reserve's emergency lending facilities see increasing use - not for routine liquidity management, but for solvency support that masks deeper problems. Liquidity issues are cash flow mismatches; time and bridging can fix them. Solvency issues mean your assets are worth less than your obligations. That's permanent impairment. And we've been papering over it with accounting flexibility and regulatory forbearance.

Energy requires looking through thermodynamics, not just economics. A barrel of oil extracted in 1950 yielded about 100 barrels of equivalent energy for every barrel spent getting it out of the ground. Today, conventional oil manages perhaps 20-to-1. Shale and tar sands run below 5-to-1. That surplus energy - the energy available beyond mere subsistence - is what built modern complexity. As that ratio declines, the complexity it supports becomes harder to maintain. Renewables help, but they cannot replicate fossil fuel energy density and storage at the scale our economy demands. Transition, if it happens, means less energy available. Less energy means less economic activity. The conversation rarely acknowledges this trade-off.

When the Margins Vanish

Historical analogies for what's coming often miss the mark because they focus on financial mechanisms rather than material constraints. The 1930s Depression occurred when energy availability was growing and industrial capacity expanding. The crisis was financial and organizational; the physical substrate could support recovery. What's approaching now differs in kind. We're facing not just a financial crisis requiring monetary adjustment, but a transition between energy regimes that will reshape economic geography, trade patterns, and the very possibility of growth.

Germany offers a real-time lesson. Europe's industrial engine, with manufacturing at roughly 23% of GDP, has contracted for five consecutive quarters. Energy costs - driven by the loss of cheap Russian gas and inadequate replacement sources - have made German industry uncompetitive globally. Chemical plants producing fertilizer and pharmaceuticals have shuttered or relocated to jurisdictions with cheaper energy. This isn't cyclical downturn. This is structural hollowing-out, the dismantling of industrial capacity that took decades to build. By 2026, projections suggest German manufacturing will contract to levels last seen in the early 1990s. The employment, tax revenues, and social stability that industrial work supported will follow.

China's trajectory presents different warning signs. Property and construction account for roughly 25% of GDP when you include materials and related services. That sector is unraveling in slow motion that accelerates as it goes. Major developers have defaulted on obligations rippling through shadow banking networks opaque even to domestic regulators. Local governments, dependent on land sales for revenue, face insolvency as property values fall and transactions collapse. The demographic dividend that powered four decades of growth has reversed; the working-age population peaked in 2014 and declines by millions annually. The infrastructure built for growth - high-speed rail, airports, highways - now requires maintenance that strained budgets cannot afford, while utilization fails to justify operational costs. The model that lifted hundreds of millions from poverty has hit thermodynamic and demographic walls.

Japan may be the clearest preview. Three decades of monetary stimulus, government spending, and demographic aging produced a society where the central bank owns most government debt and significant equity positions, where interest rates cannot rise without bankrupting the government, where the yen has depreciated 40% against the dollar in two years despite these measures. The yen carry trade - borrowing cheap yen to invest elsewhere - has sustained global liquidity for decades but now threatens systemic disruption as the Bank of Japan attempts modest normalization. Japan demonstrates what happens when monetary policy reaches its limits: additional stimulus produces only currency depreciation without growth. The United States and Europe are approaching that threshold.

The global financial architecture, designed in 1944 for American industrial dominance and commodity-backed currency, grows more misaligned with material reality by the year. The dollar's reserve status lets the United States borrow in its own currency and export inflation to trading partners. That status depends on confidence that American obligations will be honored in real terms. As debt-to-GDP ratios climb and political dysfunction prevents fiscal consolidation, that confidence erodes. Central banks worldwide have accelerated gold purchases, diversifying reserves away from dollar dependence at rates unseen since the 1970s. Bilateral trade agreements in yuan, rupees, and regional currencies multiply, creating parallel financial infrastructures that bypass the dollar system. These shifts happen gradually, then suddenly, as confidence thresholds breach.

The Reckoning Approaches

By 2028, the convergence of these pressures will likely produce discontinuities that current models cannot capture. The sovereign debt crisis that manifested at the periphery - Argentina, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Ghana - will migrate to the core. Currency instability in smaller economies will trigger capital flight to the dollar, temporarily strengthening it before American obligations overwhelm even that haven. The euro, already fractured by divergent conditions between north and south, will face existential pressure as energy costs and demographic decline render southern European debt unsustainable. The Bretton Woods institutions, designed for American hegemony and expanding trade, will lack the resources and legitimacy to coordinate response to simultaneous crises across multiple jurisdictions.

Consider a few possibilities that sound shocking now but may seem obvious in retrospect.

By late 2027, a major developed economy - possibly Italy or Japan - could impose emergency banking holidays, restricting withdrawals to prevent collapse. Not for days. For weeks. The ATMs would run dry. The queues would form at dawn. Governments would promise restoration of access while quietly negotiating behind closed doors with the IMF for emergency liquidity that comes with sovereignty-shredding conditions.

Around the same timeframe, we might see the first sovereign default by a G7 nation on domestically-held debt. Not external debt - that's already happened to smaller nations. But a major economy informing its own pension funds, its own banks, its own citizens, that obligations will not be met in nominal terms. The "guaranteed" would prove unguaranteed. Retirement accounts would be converted to longer-dated instruments at below-market rates, a soft default dressed as restructuring.

Energy markets could deliver their own surprises. By 2028, we might witness coordinated rationing in developed European economies - not through price mechanisms, which would exclude the poor entirely, but through direct allocation. Three days of heating per week. Rolling industrial blackouts prioritized by sector. The infrastructure exists to implement this; the smart meters are already installed. What's missing is the political will to admit necessity until crisis forces the hand.

The psychology of this moment unsettles more than the numbers. We've been conditioned to believe economic systems self-correct, that markets find equilibrium, that intervention prevents catastrophe. These beliefs rest on assumptions of rationality and information symmetry that algorithmic trading, information asymmetry, and political capture of regulatory function have rendered obsolete. The denial isn't conspiracy. It's consensus - a shared unwillingness to acknowledge that the prosperity of recent decades was largely borrowed against a future that has arrived.

Those observing these patterns without ideological commitment to their reversal recognize we're not approaching a single catastrophic event but a reconfiguration. The global economy of 2030 will not resemble that of 2020. Trade will regionalize as shipping costs and geopolitical friction make globalized production uneconomical for all but the highest-value goods. Living standards in developed nations will decline in absolute terms for the first time since the Second World War. This won't appear as uniform deprivation but as chronic insecurity - housing instability, medical debt, the disappearance of retirement security for all but the wealthiest. Currency instability will necessitate capital controls, price controls, and gradual nationalization of financial systems that cannot function under market discipline.

This isn't prophecy. It's projection based on data that is publicly available and widely acknowledged among those who examine primary sources rather than prepared summaries. The debt curves, energy reserves, demographic pyramids, and monetary velocity measurements describe physical and social reality. That public discourse ignores them doesn't invalidate them. It merely ensures the adjustment, when it arrives, will prove more disruptive than necessary because preparation was dismissed as pessimism.

The Ledger Closes

The question that remains isn't whether the current trajectory alters, but who possesses flexibility to adapt when it does. Institutions designed for continuity - central banks, treasuries, international bodies - are not equipped for phase transitions, for moments when old rules cease to apply and new configurations emerge from disorder. Those who understand this distinction, who have studied historical precedent and recognize symptoms of systemic fragility, are already positioning themselves outside conventional structures. Not because they desire collapse. Because they see its inevitability.

Somewhere, in offices that will soon stand empty, analysts prepare reports that will never reach the decision-makers who need them. Spreadsheets calculate probabilities approaching certainty. The machinery of collapse operates slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, through erosion of trust and quiet abandonment of assumptions that once seemed permanent.

By the time the general population recognizes what has occurred, preparation will no longer be possible. The garage doors will be down. The signs will be posted. And the permanence of the closure will be undeniable.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/07/2026 - 05:00

Freedom Is Much More Important Than Democracy

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Democracy invites despotism. When understood as majority rule, democracy means that fifty-one of every hundred citizens can have their way with the other forty-nine.

"But I want to keep my possessions, weapons, and children." Too bad, the majority have decided to redistribute your property to those lazy bums over there, disarm you before you can do anything about it, and indoctrinate your children in public schools, so that they learn to resent you and love the State.

Democracy is dangerous without guardrails. Unless a society has a strong sense of moral virtue that fosters personal discipline, duty, and honor, base selfishness becomes the driving motivation behind all political action. Unless certain constitutional protections exist to safeguard each individual's inviolable rights, democratic majorities devour those rights whenever expedient.

This should surprise no-one. Political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke described humans' pre-government "state of nature" as a chaotic, violent clash of self-interest. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" regards self-interest as the engine of free markets. Consequently, it is easy to understand why forms of democracy that are unshackled from both moral and constitutional restraints prompt a society to descend back into a state of nature in which humanity's worst impulses are again indulged.

When Western leaders speak adoringly of "our democracy," citizens should prepare to guard their freedoms. My goodness, there is nothing inherently virtuous about democracy. North Korea's Kim Jong Un runs the most repressive regime on the planet, but his country is known officially as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea! China's Xi Jinping is the general secretary of the oppressive Chinese Communist Party, but his nation remains officially the People's Republic of China! Dictatorships around the globe claim to govern in the name of the people.

One might think that the blurry line between democracy and despotism would make Western leaders wary of singing democracy's praises. Defenses of majoritarianism embrace the notion that the votes of a hundred people will lead to a more prudent outcome than we could reasonably expect from the decision-making of a single person. But that doesn't make any sense. Would you rather live in a kingdom with a benevolent king or in a democracy filled with rapists, thieves, and murderers? If there is a 50/50 chance that any single dictator is good or bad, would there not be a 50/50 chance that a majority of citizens are good or bad, too? If one communist would take everything you have, wouldn't fifty communists do the same thing? Democracy is a coin toss. It is the veneer of legitimacy that makes authoritarianism look shiny and sparkly. That hardly feels like something worth celebrating.

Democracy is just a process. It shouldn't be idolized for its own sake. It can lead to just or unjust outcomes depending upon the moral virtue, shared culture, and general wisdom of the voters. Aside from these cultural attributes of a society, there is nothing more essential to a nation's long-term peace and happiness than the recognition of and protections for inviolable, natural, God-given rights.

Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to self-defense - these rights and other natural liberties do not come into existence because of majority rule. Our natural rights exist despite majority rule. As the Founding Fathers articulated in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." We aren't equal because of democracy; we are equal despite any democratic vote that might claim otherwise. Our lives, personal liberties, and connections to God exist because of His will, not the government's.

The idea that rights and liberties exist separately from the promulgations of government forms the foundation of our constitutional system and, more generally, of human rights.

The U.S. Constitution spells out quite succinctly what powers each of the three branches of government - Legislative, Executive, and Judicial - shall have. From where do our three branches of government get these powers? The Preamble to the Constitution lays out the source of government power plainly: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." In other words, the government's legitimacy comes directly from the people.

Every power that one of the three branches exercises is a power that arises from and is borrowed from the individual citizens of the United States. Any power not specifically delegated to the U.S. government remains with either the individual state governments or individual American citizens. This is profoundly important. The Constitution is not a document that empowers the federal government to do whatever it wants. It is a document that says, "You get to do only these discrete things. Everything else is off-limits!"

During the Constitutional Convention, there was significant debate among the Founding Fathers about the need for a Bill of Rights explicitly defending the inalienable liberties of American citizens. Since the text of the Constitution clearly limits the delegated powers of each branch of government, some Founders resisted the inclusion of a Bill of Rights because they feared that later generations might incorrectly interpret Americans' inviolable freedoms to include only those rights specifically listed. Other delegates feared that, without a Bill of Rights, later generations might incorrectly reimagine the Constitution's limited delegation of powers to include additional authorities that directly infringe upon Americans' personal rights. Both fears proved prescient.

In order to clearly state their intentions to maximize the size of Americans' personal liberty and to minimize the powers of the federal government, the Founding Fathers gave us the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as part of the Bill of Rights:

Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Taken together, these two amendments provide a redundancy within the U.S. Constitution that is meant to preserve human liberty. First, the text of the Constitution restricts the authority of the federal government to a small number of specifically delegated powers. Second, the Bill of Rights repeats the framers' intent to reserve all other powers for the people or their individual state governments.

With this understanding in mind, a reasonable person should ask: How is it possible that the federal government is now so large and powerful that it encroaches upon nearly every aspect of our private lives? How is it possible that tens of millions of Americans either work directly for government agencies or receive taxpayer dollars in some form? How is it possible that there are too many administrative agencies, committees, and bureaucratic groups for any one person to name? How is it possible that three federal branches with a small number of delegated authorities have been replaced with a growing number of government programs with seemingly unlimited authorities?

The answer to each of these questions is the same: The generations between the Founding Fathers and our own progressively traded freedom for democracy. In the name of the people, lawmakers, presidents, and judges ignored the plain text of the Constitution - including the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights - to steal our inalienable rights and liberties.

In order to reject democracy's despotism, the American people will have to demand their rights and liberties back.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 23:40

US Military Begins Mandatory Testosterone Testing For Service Members

The U.S. military is expanding routine health checks to include hormone-related testing, with new Pentagon rules requiring testosterone screening for a large portion of the force. The requirements apply to both active-duty personnel and reservists and took effect immediately, according to CBC.

The biggest change affects men beginning at age 30. They will now have testosterone levels checked through bloodwork as part of the military’s broader effort to identify health conditions that could interfere with physical performance, energy or readiness. Younger men will not automatically receive the same testing, although doctors can order it when symptoms raise concerns or a service member asks to be evaluated.

Female service members will be assessed under a separate protocol rather than receiving universal testosterone tests. Medical providers will look for symptoms such as persistent fatigue or changes in menstrual cycles that could signal inadequate energy intake, hormonal disruption or related health problems.

"Dolce and Gabbana...hello?"

CBC writes that the Pentagon’s framework also gives military physicians direction on what to do when potential problems are discovered. That includes further evaluation and possible treatment rather than simply measuring hormone levels and leaving the results without follow-up.

Testosterone treatment for women is addressed as well, although in much narrower circumstances. The guidance allows doctors to consider off-label testosterone for certain postmenopausal women experiencing abnormally low sexual desire rather than recommending the hormone broadly.

The initiative follows a push by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who announced plans for expanded testosterone testing in July and has spoken favorably about the hormone. Pentagon officials are framing the program as another tool for maintaining a healthier and more capable fighting force.

Not everyone in the medical community is convinced. Some doctors have questioned whether routinely testing large numbers of otherwise healthy troops will produce meaningful improvements in military performance. They have also warned that finding borderline or naturally fluctuating hormone levels could encourage treatment that provides little benefit while carrying potential side effects.

The debate is unfolding as federal regulators separately examine testosterone therapy more broadly. The Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to bring together medical experts in mid-September to discuss the appropriate use of testosterone and the evidence surrounding its treatment applications.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 23:05

Dr. Robert Malone On Well-Being & 'Mental Illness' In Women

Authored by Dr. Robert W. Malone via Malone.news,

Back in 2020, Pew Research Center surveyed more than 11,000 Americans. Political scientist Zach Goldberg subsequently examined the underlying data and broke the results down by age, sex, race, and political ideology.

What he found was rather remarkable.

Among white women ages 18 to 29 who identified as liberal, 56.3% reported that a doctor or other health-care provider had diagnosed them with a mental health condition.

• Not 15%.

• Not 25%.

• Fifty-six percent.

• For white moderate women of the same age, the number was 28.4%.

• For white conservative women, 27.3%.

In other words, young white liberal women were more than twice as likely as their conservative counterparts to report having received a mental health diagnosis.

Now, correlation is not causation. Perhaps liberals are simply more willing to seek psychiatric care. Perhaps conservatives are less willing to admit that they have a problem. Perhaps political ideology attracts people with particular personality traits rather than creating those traits. All perfectly reasonable possibilities.

But here is where it gets interesting.

Five years later, the numbers have not exactly moved in a reassuring direction.

Gallup found that only 15% of American women ages 18-29 surveyed from 2020 through 2024 described their mental health as excellent. In 2010-2014, that number had been 48%.

That is not a small decline. That is a collapse.

And the ideological divide is still there.

The 2024 American Family Survey found that only 12% of liberal women ages 18-40 described themselves as "completely satisfied" with their lives.

• Among moderate women: 28%.
• Among conservative women: 37%.

Liberal women were also nearly three times as likely as conservative women to report feeling lonely several times a week or more: 29% versus 11%.

So perhaps endlessly telling young women that they live in an oppressive society, that the world is on the verge of climate catastrophe, that words are violence, that disagreement is dangerous, that our President is evil, that the patriarchy is lurking behind every corner, that Western civilization is fundamentally corrupt, and that their personal unhappiness is caused by vast structural forces over which they have virtually no control is not actually a recipe for human flourishing.

Who could have guessed?

There is an important caveat. A 2025 study found that some of the apparent liberal-conservative mental-health divide may reflect differences in how people think and talk about "mental health." When researchers simply asked people about their mood, rather than their mental health, much of the ideological difference disappeared.

Fair enough.

But that doesn't explain away the extraordinary collapse in reported well-being among young women generally, nor does it make the life-satisfaction and loneliness data disappear. Maybe the question isn't whether liberalism causes mental illness.

Maybe the more interesting question is whether a culture built around grievance, victimhood, fear and powerlessness is particularly attractive to unhappy people, makes unhappy people unhappier, or both. That seems like a question worth asking. Even if asking it makes someone very, very upset.

There is, however, an uncomfortable counterpoint to all this discussion of female unhappiness and mental illness. Men are far more likely to actually die by suicide. In the United States, the male suicide rate is nearly four times the female rate, and men account for roughly four out of every five suicide deaths. The disparity exists globally as well. Perhaps that exposes a deeper truth about the modern cult of victimhood. We have created a culture extraordinarily skilled at teaching certain groups to name every grievance, diagnose every distress, identify every oppressor and demand that society recognize their pain, while other forms of suffering remain remarkably easy to ignore. Young women may be reporting extraordinary levels of anxiety, depression and psychiatric diagnosis, but men are quietly killing themselves at vastly higher rates.

That does not diminish women's suffering. It suggests that our entire framework for understanding suffering may be badly distorted. A society obsessed with determining who is the victim and who is the oppressor can become remarkably blind to the human being who doesn't fit the approved narrative, particularly when that human being is male.

There is another possibility here that deserves far more attention: the diagnosis itself has become part of the epidemic. When more than half of young women in a political demographic report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition, the appropriate response is not simply to declare that half the population is mentally ill. It is to ask what the hell the health-care system is doing. Psychiatry has steadily expanded the boundaries of pathology, medicalizing distress, grief, anxiety, loneliness, adolescent turmoil, and ordinary difficulty as diagnosable disease. A system that can convert normal human suffering into a billing code, a prescription, and a lifelong medical identity should not be treated as a neutral observer of this crisis. At some point, an exploding diagnosis rate stops being proof of exploding disease and starts becoming evidence that the diagnostic machinery itself may be broken.

Consider what we are now being asked to accept as normal. The 2026 Lancet Global Burden of Disease study estimates that 1.17 billion human beings, roughly one person in seven on Earth, are living with a mental disorder, and mental disorders now account for 17.3 percent of all years lived with disability worldwide, making them the single largest source of nonfatal disability. Women carry an even greater burden than men, with the female age-standardized mental-disorder burden about 18 percent higher. This is insane, not because hundreds of millions of people do not genuinely suffer from serious psychiatric illness, but because at some point a civilization has to ask what these numbers actually mean. Did humanity suddenly become catastrophically mentally ill, or have we built a medical system that increasingly converts sadness, fear, loneliness, grief, adolescent turmoil and difficulty coping with life into psychiatric pathology? When one in seven people on the planet fits into the modeled category of mental disorder, the diagnostic framework itself deserves scrutiny. A medical system cannot simply keep expanding the definition of sickness and then point to the resulting mountain of sickness as proof that it was right.

Toxic Feminism

There was a feminism that told women they should have choices. Then there is the more modern version of feminism that increasingly seems to tell women which choices an enlightened woman is supposed to make. Career is achievement. Marriage is dependence. Motherhood is unpaid labor. Men are potential oppressors. Traditional families are suspect. Finances should always be kept separate, plan for a divorce, financial independence is a must. Independence is liberation, and needing another human being is somehow weakness. Delay marriage. Delay children. Establish the career. Find yourself. Become independent. Never settle. Put yourself first.

There is just one rather awkward problem with this prescription for female happiness: human beings are profoundly social animals, and the scientific literature keeps rediscovering the importance of precisely the relationships that modern culture has spent decades teaching women not to need.

Femininity is Real

There is also an uncomfortable biological reality that modern ideology would prefer to treat as an inconvenience: women are not simply smaller men with different reproductive organs. Progesterone is central to female reproduction, but its effects extend into the brain and behavior. Human research has associated higher progesterone with affiliation, social bonding, sensitivity to relationships and even greater willingness to sacrifice for another person.

Estrogen, particularly estradiol, does far more than regulate reproduction. It acts throughout the female brain, interacting with oxytocin and other neuroendocrine systems involved in mood, sexuality, emotional processing, social attachment, and stress. Together with progesterone and oxytocin, estrogen contributes to the biological systems underlying bonding, maternal behavior, and caregiving. And that capacity for nurturing does not suddenly switch off when there is no baby in the room.

Women show stronger tendencies toward caregiving, empathy, and relational investment, although there is enormous individual variation. Biology is not destiny, but neither is it imaginary. To dismiss these deeply rooted female tendencies as merely products of the patriarchy, or to teach women that caring for and depending upon others is somehow incompatible with independence, comes at a real psychological cost, and we are witnessing this worldwide. A feminism that requires women to deny important parts of their own biology is a strange definition of female liberation.

The female impulse toward attachment, relationship and nurturing cannot simply be dismissed as a patriarchal social construct. There is biology underneath it. A culture that tells women that caring for others is servitude, that motherhood is an impediment to achievement, and that putting another human being ahead of oneself represents oppression may therefore be fighting something considerably older than the patriarchy. It may be fighting female biology itself.

Psychology even has a validated instrument called the Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory, developed specifically to measure hostile prejudices and stereotypes about men. And the hostility is measurable. In a subsequent study of 488 college students, women scored significantly higher than men on the instrument's Hostility Toward Men scale, 2.76 versus 2.25 on a 0-to-5 scale.

How a broader culture came to normalize the sweeping negative generalizations about men, male sexuality, male power and masculinity that would immediately be recognized as prejudice if the sexes were reversed is an interesting question. Hostility between the sexes is not liberation. It poisons precisely the trust, affection and intimacy upon which successful relationships depend.

The evidence surrounding work, family and mental health should make us reconsider what women have been sold as liberation. In one nationally representative study of 4,714 working women, high work-family conflict was associated with 2.29 times the odds of depressive symptoms, with some of the strongest associations occurring among younger, highly educated, higher-income and never-married women. Studies of female physicians and longitudinal studies of working women tell much the same story: when professional life and family life are placed into sustained conflict, mental health suffers.

The mistake was never telling women that they could become physicians, scientists, executives, farmers, entrepreneurs or anything else they were capable of becoming. Of course they could, and they should have been free to do so.

The mistake was turning independence itself into the objective, as though dependence upon people who love us were some sort of character defect. A husband and wife depend upon one another. Children depend upon parents. Parents eventually depend upon their children. Families are elaborate networks of mutual obligation. That isn't oppression. It is much of what gives human life meaning.

And perhaps most poisonous of all is the idea that relations between men and women should be understood primarily as a contest for power. Teach a generation of women to approach half of humanity with suspicion, to interpret ordinary disagreement through the language of oppression, and to view compromise as surrender, and then act surprised when relationships become difficult. Whatever one chooses to call that worldview, it is a miserable foundation upon which to build intimacy.

Girls do not generally sit through a classroom lesson entitled Marriage Is Bad. The message is subtler than that. From school through college, the language surrounding female success increasingly emphasizes independence, autonomy, empowerment, career, individual rights and self-realization. What is striking is what receives far less emphasis: interdependence, marriage, sacrifice, obligation, motherhood, building a household, choosing a good husband and creating a stable family.

Dependence itself has acquired an almost pathological meaning, as though needing a husband, wife, children or extended family represents personal failure rather than the normal condition of human beings. A girl is repeatedly asked what career she wants when she grows up. How often is she asked what kind of marriage she hopes to build, what kind of mother she hopes to become, or what sacrifices a lasting relationship will require? The lesson does not have to be written on the blackboard to be learned: success is something you achieve individually; family is something you fit around it later, and you would be stupid not to be financially independent before having children, cause men generally aren't to be trusted to hang around long enough to raise a family.

There is an enormous difference between telling a woman you do not have to marry or have children and telling her, explicitly or implicitly, that marriage and motherhood represent lesser ambitions than professional status. Biology also imposes a deadline that corporate advancement does not. A promotion can arrive at 42. A first child may not. Women deserve to know that when they are 22, not discover it when they are 39.

In our lives, we know two women in their thirties who are in the process of freezing their eggs; evidently, they believe that when they are forty or fifty, they will be in a better position to have a child? And we have another single friend, who at fifty, has decided she has aged out of ever being a mother. All of these women are college-educated professionals, never married, and are coming to terms with their biological clocks running out.

A culture that encourages women to postpone permanent relationships, prioritize professional status, regard dependence as weakness, and treat men principally as a source of danger or oppression should at least be willing to examine the results. If the promised liberation ends with unprecedented numbers of young women anxious, depressed, medicated, lonely and unable to form the families they later discover they wanted, declaring the experiment an unquestionable success is not feminism.

It is marketing.

The Big Lie

And then there is the part nobody is supposed to mention: this arrangement is extraordinarily good for industry. The intact family is an economic institution as well as a social one. Husbands and wives share labor. Grandparents care for grandchildren. Families cook meals, repair things, care for the sick and elderly, grow food, teach children, share houses, lend money, pass down skills and provide an enormous amount of economic activity that never appears on a corporate balance sheet. Break those bonds apart and suddenly nearly everything has to be purchased. Two adults maintaining two households need two rents or mortgages, two sets of utilities, two kitchens and twice the household goods.

Put both parents into full-time employment and families purchase more childcare, prepared food, transportation and other substitutes for work once performed within the home. Send rural children hundreds of miles away to college and then into metropolitan corporate employment, and another generation is separated from grandparents, land, community, and the informal economy of extended family. None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only incentives. And corporations benefit enormously from this arrangement.

Corporations benefit when people become workers first, consumers second, and family members somewhere farther down the list. The Big Lie was convincing women (and men) that exchanging dependence upon people who loved them for dependence upon employers, banks, universities, childcare companies, and the consumer economy was somehow independence. The destruction of family and community did not make people independent. It merely changed whom they depended upon, and unlike a family, the corporation collected the dividends.

The Result is "Mental Illness"

Going back to those numbers at the beginning of this essay, perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. When 56.3 percent of young white liberal women report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition, the immediate assumption is that something must be terribly wrong with these women. Maybe instead, something is terribly wrong with the culture they have been raised in.

For decades, young people, and young women in particular, have been sold a remarkably destructive definition of success. Leave home. Go deeply into debt for college. Build the career. Delay marriage. Delay children. Treat dependence upon another person as weakness. Treat compromise as surrender. Regard traditional institutions with suspicion. Learn to identify grievances. Put yourself first. And when the loneliness, anxiety, purposelessness and unhappiness arrive, there is an enormous medical industry waiting to provide the diagnosis and, frequently, the prescription.

Then we marvel at the epidemic of mental illness.

Perhaps a significant portion of what we are calling a mental-health crisis is actually a crisis of meaning, belonging and human connection. A pill cannot provide a husband or wife. Therapy cannot manufacture grandchildren around the Thanksgiving table. A diagnosis cannot replace friendship, faith, family, community, useful work, children who need you, parents who depend upon you, or the knowledge that one's life matters to people other than oneself. Medicine can treat disease. It is considerably less capable of treating a culture that has systematically stripped away many of the institutions that once gave ordinary people purpose.

And men have hardly escaped this experiment. While women report extraordinary levels of anxiety, depression and psychiatric diagnosis, men are killing themselves at vastly higher rates. That should be the flashing red warning light. The ideology of victimhood may teach women to describe their suffering endlessly while feminist teachings overlook the suffering of those assigned the role of "oppressor."

None of this means returning women to some imaginary 1950s existence or denying anyone education, independence or a career. It means admitting something considerably more radical in 2026: human beings need one another. Men need women. Women need men. Children need parents. Parents need children. Families need communities, and communities need people who remain invested in them. Independence was never the highest human good.

That may be the real Big Lie. We were told that liberation meant needing fewer people, carrying fewer obligations and being free to put ourselves first.

Instead, we became more dependent upon employers, corporations, universities, government programs, therapists, pharmaceutical companies and the marketplace to provide things that families and communities once provided for one another.

And now 1.17 billion people are estimated to be living with a mental disorder.

Perhaps the strangest response imaginable is to look at that number and conclude that the problem is simply that humanity needs more mental-health treatment.

Maybe people need more life.

More family. More marriage. More children. More friendship. More community. More responsibility. More people depending upon them, and more people upon whom they can depend.

That isn't oppression.

It is called being human.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 22:30

Iran Threatens South Korean Assets If Seoul Joins Hormuz Mission

Via Middle East Eye

Iranian academic Mohammad Marandi has warned that Tehran would consider South Korea an enemy and could strike its economic and military interests across the Persian Gulf if Seoul joins the US-led war on Iran.

Speaking on Al Mayadeen’s The Grand Standoff, Marandi said South Korea’s involvement in efforts to secure freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz would expose its interests in the region to Iranian retaliation.

US Army AH-64 Apache helicopters at Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, 21 August 2026 (Yonhap/AFP)

“If the South Koreans participate in this war against Iran, Iran will see it as the enemy,” Marandi said, adding that Tehran would seek to “destroy whatever assets South Korea has in this region”.

Those targets would not necessarily be military installations, he said, and Iranian strikes could include South Korean assets in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

“So the Koreans are very vulnerable to Iran,” said Marandi. “Iran can hurt them very badly.”

His comments came as South Korea considers potential naval contributions to efforts to restore freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global energy supplies.Various options are under consideration, but no decision has been mad e, South Korea’s presidential office said on Friday. 

The office said general options had been discussed on possible military contributions, including combat participation, noncombat roles and search operations, Al Jazeera reported. “Please be advised that nothing has been decided yet concerning actual contributions,” the presidential office said.

Seoul was considering sending military assets to the region and seeking approval from parliament, South Korean media reported.  Options under consideration included a P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and a naval logistics support ship, a report by The Guardian said. 

South Korean broadcasters also reported that a navy explosive ordnance disposal team could be included. Any new deployment of military personnel would have to be reviewed by South Korea’s National Security Council, passed by a resolution of the cabinet and approved by the National Assembly, the presidential office said.

The debate comes as South Korea faces mounting pressure from Washington to join efforts around the Strait of Hormuz. US President Donald Trump has blasted Seoul for not backing the US war on Iran and tied the spat to wider strains in the US-South Korea alliance. South Korea also depends heavily on the waterway for its energy supplies. 

Last year, the country depended on shipments traversing Hormuz for 61 percent of its crude oil imports and 54 percent of its naphtha imports.

Marandi said the potential contribution was not likely to be a game-changer in the conflict and said South Korea had little military capability to contribute to the US. “What is a ship or two from South Korea going to do? It’s foolish,” he said.

Trump blasts South Korea:

I called the president of South Korea. I said, “Would you help with Iran? If you would like, we don’t need help.” He said, “No thanks.”

I said, “What do you mean? We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, and you are not going… pic.twitter.com/xD1dZ1AANQ

— Clash Report (@clashreport) August 17, 2026

But he warned that any participation could have economic implications far beyond military assets. “Iran will not only target the South Korean military assets, but Iran could easily destroy their economic assets across the Persian Gulf region,” Marandi said.

Under pressure from Washington, South Korea expanded the deployment of an anti-piracy naval unit from Somalia to waters around the Strait of Hormuz in 2019. 

However, South Korea’s defense minister said in March that any substantially different mission in the strait would require parliamentary consent.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 21:20

Nick Shirley Sues California Over 'Stop Nick Shirley Act'

Independent investigative journalist Nick Shirley spent the better part of a year investigating alleged fraud at nonprofits accused of diverting taxpayer funds meant for immigrant services. California responded by passing a law that makes it harder to look at those nonprofits at all. Now he is suing to have that law thrown out. 

Shirley filed a federal lawsuit against the state of California on September 4, arguing that Assembly Bill 2624, nicknamed the Stop Nick Shirley Act, violates his First Amendment rights by restricting his ability to investigate and report on immigration-related service organizations. Critics gave the bill a blunter name months ago. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2624 last month. The law, which doesn’t take effect until October 1, 2027, expands California's existing Safe at Home program, a shield the state originally built for domestic violence survivors, to cover nonprofit employees who help people navigate the immigration system.

Anyone who distributes information or images of a covered worker under circumstances the law defines as inciting violence or threats faces a penalty of $4,000. 

“Now, in a world where we all want more transparency and not less, it is more critical than ever that we do not just sit back and do nothing,” Shirley asked in a video posted to X announcing the lawsuit.

“That is why I am filing this lawsuit against the State of California. Because why would they create a law that pushes for less transparency when all we want is more transparency, especially when it comes to our tax dollars being defrauded? And why specifically make immigration support service providers a protected class inside of California?”

Under the law, a worker at a covered organization, or an entity acting on their behalf, can submit a written demand blocking publication of certain identifying information about them.

Shirley and other critics say that provision hands anyone under scrutiny a built-in kill switch for the story, and thus any accountability for fraud.

According to the bill’s language, "A program participant or an individual entity or organization authorized to act on their behalf may make a written demand to a person, business or association to not publicly post or publicly display, disclose, or distribute on the internet the personal information or image of the program participant," he said, reading from the statute.

"California has decided to push for less transparency and create laws that penalize citizens and journalists for looking into potential fraud inside 'immigration support services providers,'" Shirley wrote in the X post announcing the suit.

Shirley traces the bill's origin to January 31, when he announced that he was in California investigating alleged fraud.

Days later, Newsom said the San Diego Somali community felt "under siege" from what he called "right-wing provocateurs," a comment Shirley says was about him. On February 5, California Attorney General Rob Bonta held a news conference dismissing the fraud allegations, calling them "reckless, false, outrageous, and ridiculous."

Fifteen days later, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, who happens to be married to the attorney general, introduced AB 2624.

"They needed the Stop Nick Shirley Act, AB 2624, to protect the fraud and stop people from exposing these locations inside of immigration support providers," he said.

The bill's text defines immigration support service providers broadly enough to include legal services, healthcare, and nonprofits generally, and one of the organizations that helped push the legislation has itself pulled in tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for immigration legal work in the state. Shirley's history with this beat predates the California fight. 

Shirley's lawsuit does not seek monetary damages.

“We're not suing for a single dollar,” he explained. “We're suing simply on the fact that they're taking away your First Amendment, right with this new law. In fact, I might spend months, I might spend years fighting this lawsuit for so long, think about it for so long. These corrupt politicians have been able to push and shove us around and receive no consequences for their actions.”

I'm suing California...

California has decided to push for less transparency and create laws that penalize citizens and journalists for looking into potential fraud inside "immigration support services providers." A written demand is all it takes to stop the publishing of a… pic.twitter.com/nFnfDUff0h

— Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) September 4, 2026 Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 20:45

California Police Seize 2,400 Stolen Catalytic Converters Worth $4.3 Million

A three-month investigation into widespread catalytic converter thefts in Southern California culminated Thursday with five arrests and the recovery of an enormous cache of allegedly stolen auto parts, according to KTLA.

Law enforcement agencies executed several search warrants across Los Angeles and Orange counties, uncovering roughly 2,400 catalytic converters with an estimated value of $4.3 million. Images released after the raids show converters packed into large containers and stacked throughout a warehouse allegedly connected to the operation.

Investigators believe the suspects were part of a broader system for handling stolen converters rather than simply carrying out individual thefts. Authorities say the investigation connected thefts reported across several northern Orange County communities to an organized operation that collected, stripped, transferred and purchased the stolen equipment.

KTLA writes that the searches also turned up more than $105,000 in cash, two firearms that authorities said were not registered and several boxes containing precious metals. Catalytic converters are attractive to thieves because they contain valuable metals that can be extracted and resold.

The operation brought together several agencies, including the Orange and Los Angeles county sheriff’s departments, California DMV investigators, state insurance investigators and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Authorities said the scale of the seizure was the product of months of coordinated investigative work.

Following the arrests, officials encouraged vehicle owners to make their cars harder targets by parking in garages or well-lit locations when possible. They also recommended catalytic converter protection devices and having identifying information etched onto vulnerable vehicle components to make stolen parts more difficult to resell.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 19:35

"Hurry Up And Die": Michigan Democrat Joins Other Radicals In Scrubbing Past Social Media Statements

Authored by Jonathan Turley via JonathanTurley.org,

A certain pattern is emerging on the far left. Political figures spend years currying the favor of other extremists with outrageous commentary, proudly proclaiming their commitment to eliminating the Senate, opening the border, and other measures. Then, they delete all of the comments and declare themselves mainstream. The idea is to run in the center but govern from the far left, the so-called Spanberger strategy. The latest example is William Lawrence, who is running for Michigan's 7th Congressional District. However, Lawrence's prior self reveals just how radical this movement could prove.

Like many professors, pundits, and politicians on the left, Lawrence has called for sweeping changes in our constitutional system. Lawrence reportedly has demanded a "fundamental overhaul" of the Constitution while calling for the elimination of the Senate, police, prisons, and borders.

He has even denounced the nuclear family as an "isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society."

Notably, he is the latest radical to show that the "Big Tent" party has little room for moderates. While establishment figures like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries seek to use this mob, radicals have made clear that they will be next. Darializa Avila Chevalier is the latest Democratic Socialist to mock the establishment's pitch of a Big Tent party: "A big tent doesn't pay your rent, lower your grocery bill, or take on the corporations bleeding our country dry. Democratic socialism does."

In Lawrence's case, he even put this feelings to music, writing a song a few years ago that calls for the death of moderate former Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, declaring, "Our generation says f**k you for everything...Hurry up and die so that we can get started."

He has also denounced capitalism and the very concept of the nation-state.

Lawrence was previously arrested for resisting police officers while protesting a pipeline.

As discussed earlier, candidates like James Talarico in Texas have scrubbed their social media accounts or dismissed their earlier radical claims, including attacks on capitalism. Supporters view these candidates as already proving their bona fides and understanding that they are just sanitizing their records for voters who want the illusion of a moderate. Accordingly, many applaud figures such as Socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dismissing her own extremist statements just a few years ago as "Woke 1." like some distant childhood stage.

These radical figures are learning that their views are distinctly unpopular with American voters so they are perfecting stealth socialist candidates who can run a type of Spanberger campaign while later pursuing a socialist agenda.

Lawrence's past positions show little nuance and closely track the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. Destroying the constitutional system, rejecting the nation-state, eliminating prisons, and other radical positions propelled these candidates through the primaries. The effort to now scrub the records shows the utter contempt that many have for average voters.

Lawrence shows the delusion of establishment figures such as Gavin Newsom that they can use a mob to gain power without being eventually devoured by it. In my book Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I discuss the French Revolution and its decline into what the Framers called a mobocracy. What became known as "The Terror" was started not by the working class, but by educated lawyers, journalists, and even aristocrats as part of the Jacobin movement.

These are hardcore revolutionaries with an agenda that would destroy the world's oldest and most successful democratic system in history. Party leaders facilitate them because they can only think about the next election, not the next generation. Lawrence is a cautionary tale that Benjamin Franklin remains correct, this is our Republic but only if we can keep it.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 19:00

5 Dead As Amazon-Branded Cargo Jet Overshoots Miami Runway, Plows Into Tesla Cybercab Lot

An Amazon-branded Boeing 767 cargo jet overran a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, leaving five people dead and five others injured.

Footage of the plane crash from earlier today | #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/iGoOtnd6cD

— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) September 6, 2026

Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 said the Boeing 767-300 cargo aircraft, operated as 21 Air Flight 7598, was arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, shortly before 2 p.m. when it overran Runway 30, struck several vehicles, and came to rest in a parking lot. 

A 21 Air Boeing 767 operating for Amazon overran Miami’s Runway 30 this afternoon. Flightradar24 data shows a ground speed of 112 knots as it left the usable runway.

Downloadable flight data and updates available at https://t.co/uHIF4KdM17 pic.twitter.com/dnfX0uWjxt

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 6, 2026

Footage from the scene shows the 767 cargo jet colliding with multiple vehicles before coming to rest in a parking lot filled with Tesla Cybercabs, Cybertrucks, and other vehicles.

The first Cybercab accident is not what I expected https://t.co/9KknfA7tRp pic.twitter.com/YFvz9HfsJS

— Robin (@xdNiBoR) September 6, 2026

NBC News quoted Miami-Dade Fire Chief Raied Jadallah as saying that five people died in the incident and five others were injured. Three of the injured were transported to a trauma center in critical condition, while two others were taken to a local hospital.

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told the outlet, "This is a fast-moving situation and we're still gathering details. We're working closely with local authorities and officials to understand exactly what happened," adding, "Right now, our absolute priority is the safety, well-being, and care of everyone involved."

Flightradar24 said that, as of 1700 ET, departures at MIA had resumed.

Departures have now resumed at Miami as well. https://t.co/HNHCeSA6z1 pic.twitter.com/8oOJUdTBJB

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 6, 2026

The National Transportation Safety Board said it is gathering data and working with the FAA to determine the cause of the crash.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 18:26

Army To Spend $465 Million On 'Group 3 Killer' Anti-Drone Laser

Authored by Jeff Schogol via Task & Purpose,

The Army has awarded a $464.8 million contract for a laser weapon designed to destroy the type of drones that Iran has launched against U.S. troops and partner nations in the Middle East for more than five months.

The Army has awarded a $464.8 million contract to AeroVironment, Inc. for the LOCUST X3 laser system. Image via AeroVironment, Inc.

The service has selected the LOCUST X3 laser made by AeroVironment, Inc. for its Enduring-High Energy Laser program, according to a company news release.

The 30-kilowatt laser is specifically designed to counter mid-sized drones that the U.S. military refers to as Group 3 unmanned aerial systems, said John Garrity, vice president of directed energy systems at AeroVironment, Inc. One such unmanned aerial system that has frequently been used against U.S. troops in the Middle East is Iran's Shahed-136 one-way attack drone.

"LOCUST X3 is intended to be the Group 3 killer," Garrity told reporters on Aug. 7. "When we talk about Group 3, that's just one of the more prevalent threats that you see in warfare today, seen in conflicts in Iran and in Ukraine with Shahed drones."

The laser allows U.S. troops to destroy drones at greater ranges than other types of weapons, and the LOCUST X3 can bring down targets in seconds, Garrity said. Those attributes allow the weapon to rapidly destroy drone swarms.

"When you talk about a LOCUST laser weapon system, you're able to put effects on target at wide ranges at the speed of light," Garrity said. "If you're able to kill off drones in single-digit seconds or less, depending on the range and the type of material, you're able to jump between targets quite effectively and efficiently."

The laser is also meant to destroy smaller drones, which the military calls Group 1 and 2 unmanned aerial systems, he said.

"Unfortunately, all three classes of those drones can do a tremendous amount of harm to our assets and our servicemen and women," Garrity said.

The LOCUST X3 is meant to be "the apex predator" of the Army's layered defenses against small to mid-level drones, said Aaron Westman, senior director for business development at AeroVironment, Inc.

"It can really kill a lot of threats," Westman said during the media roundtable. "Its job is to really, let's say, thin the herd to be able to kill high volumes of threats."

That allows the military to save its more expensive interceptors for specific threats so that its system of layered defenses "doesn't run out of bullets," Westman said.

Currently, the U.S. military's inventory of ground-based air defense missiles has been so depleted during the Iran war that experts estimate it will take years to replenish all the interceptors that have been fired.

The LOCUST X3 laser is designed to be mounted on Army vehicles. Image via AeroVironment, Inc.

Westman added that a missile can miss its target, but with a laser, "as long as you can see something, you can hit it."

AeroVironment, Inc. will deliver dozens of LOCUST X3 lasers to the Army over the next few years as part of the contract, a company news release says. The laser is designed to be mounted on vehicles, such as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. Efforts are ongoing to determine if the laser can also be mounted on the Infantry Squad Vehicle.

An Army spokesperson previously told Task & Purpose that if the laser were approved and fielded as planned, it would become the service's first directed-energy program of record.

Over time, the company expects to field higher power versions of the lasers, Garrity said.

Earlier versions of the LOCUST laser have already been fielded, with some laser systems deployed within the continental United States, Garrity said. One feature common to the company's lasers is that they use an Xbox controller.

"To a young soldier, sailor, airman, guardian that's using these systems, it's not unlike what they're using at their own house for video games," Garrity said.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 18:00

Trump Admin Weighs Child Care Subsidies For Stay-At-Home Parents

The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would allow some married couples with a stay-at-home parent to receive federal child care subsidies, an initiative reportedly championed by Vice President JD Vance, according to the New York Times. 

The proposal would use the existing Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which has traditionally helped lower-income parents pay for child care while they work, attend school or receive job training. Federal guidance currently ties CCDF assistance largely to those activities.

Under the proposal, a married couple meeting income requirements could qualify when one spouse works at least 35 hours a week and the other cares for their child at home. The subsidy would effectively help compensate for income forgone by the stay-at-home parent. Unmarried couples with a stay-at-home parent and nonworking single parents would not qualify under the draft.

The Times reports that the change reflects a broader effort within the administration to support families that choose parental care over commercial day care. Vance has previously argued that “Young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.”

Critics warn that expanding eligibility without adding funding could reduce assistance available to working parents and threaten child care providers that depend on subsidy payments. Joshua McCabe of the Niskanen Center said, “Expanding the eligibility without increasing funding would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents — particularly single working parents — worse off.”

Krystal Gastineau, a Colorado child-care center owner who said about half of the children she serves receive subsidies, warned that the proposal could pull funding away from providers: “If they could, I think parents would choose to take the money and stay home.” She added, “That would take away a major source of income.”

Supporters argue that federal policy should treat parental care more like paid child care and give families greater flexibility. The proposal could potentially be implemented without new legislation, although questions have reportedly been raised about its legality, particularly the preference for married couples, as well as possible fraud risks.

The draft still requires White House approval and a public-comment period and could change before becoming final.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 17:30