Siberian Plague-Lab Death Draws FSB Escort For Ambulances

A possible plague case in Siberia has triggered a major containment effort after the death of a 28-year-old employee of an anti-plague laboratory. A hospital wing is under quarantine, nearly 200 people are reportedly under observation, and Russia's chief sanitary official has flown in. Local outlets say FSB units have been escorting ambulances carrying the woman's contacts for examination.

The authorities are clearly taking the threat seriously - but getting a straight answer out of the feds is another matter. Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev is still calling it a "particularly dangerous infection," while assuring residents that every identified contact is symptom-free and testing negative.

The dead lab worker has been identified as Daria Shipilova, a laboratory assistant at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, according to Lyudi Baikala and REN TV. She was admitted to hospital in Shelekhov with severe pneumonia, placed on a ventilator, and died. Reports differ slightly on the timeline: The Moscow Times gives a September 29 admission and a Thursday death (48 hours), while Lyudi Baikala says she spent three days in hospital. 

According to The Moscow Times, Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples. Lyudi Baikala, citing journalist Pavel Stepanov and the Telegram channel Mash, placed the alleged accident on September 25 and linked it to plague bacteria. Those reports describe the illness as pneumonic plague, although neither that diagnosis nor the laboratory accident has been publicly confirmed by investigators. IRK.ru reported that doctors initially suspected severe COVID and sent her to the hospital's COVID center.

By the evening of October 1, security and administrative officials were meeting in Irkutsk. Lyudi Baikala, citing a source close to law enforcement, reported that FSB units began accompanying ambulances transporting Shipilova's contacts for examination that day. The Insider carried the same account, while residents reported seeing people in protective suits on the streets. The FSB has not confirmed the escorts.

“There is a possibility that the number of people the young woman [lab worker] came into contact with reached into the three digits,” Irkutsk journalist Pavel Stepanov said*, and that residents have already noticed people on the streets wearing protective suits, masks and gloves.…

— Annie Jacobsen (@AnnieJacobsen) October 2, 2026

Shelekhov district head Maxim Modin confirmed that the hospital's inpatient department was under quarantine; the outpatient clinic remained open. Kobzev said the sanitary-epidemiological commission had convened on October 2 over a suspected "particularly dangerous infection." Anna Popova, who heads Rospotrebnadzor, the federal agency that runs Russia's disease surveillance and owns the anti-plague institutes, traveled to attend. The governor told TASS it was premature to identify the disease and made no mention of a death. Irkutsk also postponed a city cleanup day scheduled for October 3.

The reported contact numbers suggest how widely authorities are casting the net. REN TV and Izvestia put the total at roughly 197, with 189 hospitalized for observation: 114 in one facility, 63 in another, and 12 at the anti-plague institute. Eight remained outside hospital, and some accounts said the list was still growing. No secondary infection has been confirmed. Kobzev's October 2 statement said the contacts had no symptoms and negative tests, although some media reports claimed several people under observation had developed symptoms.

First Official Use Of 'Plague' 

The leader of Buryatia (the next region over from the lab), Alexey Tsydenov, wrote that the woman who died of plague in Irkutsk region had not visited his republic. Citing Rospotrebnadzor and his government, he also said Buryatia had no plague foci, including along the Mongolian border. But even that acknowledgment became less definite: Meduza reported that he later edited the post to say she "may have died of plague." He did not identify the pneumonic form.

Meanwhile, competing accounts sent Shipilova to Thailand or Buryatia before she fell ill. Tsydenov denied the Buryatia visit. Gennady Onishchenko, who ran Rospotrebnadzor until 2013, questioned whether plague was involved at all, pointing to dormant rodents and fleas and snow already falling in Buryatia. That argument addresses a possible wildlife exposure; it does not resolve the allegation that she broke a tube of bacteria at work.

Izvestia and the Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti both report that investigators have opened a criminal case under Article 236, which covers sanitary violations that cause death by negligence. Nobody has confirmed it on the record. That charge only makes sense if somebody broke a rule at work.

By Saturday, some of the public information was disappearing. Baikalsk's administration posted a notice urging residents to limit travel to Shelekhov and nearby settlements, citing "unofficial information" about a plague case. Roughly two hours later, the notice was gone. REN TV also deleted five Telegram posts about the Shelekhov hospitalization figures.

Kobzev's Saturday post concerned an inspection by Roszdravnadzor, the healthcare-quality regulator rather than the epidemiological service, and did not address the infection. Comments asking why there was still no official statement went unanswered. Meanwhile, Lyudi Baikala reported that pharmacies in Irkutsk and Shelekhov had sold out of antibiotics.

The institute where Shipilova worked was founded in 1934 to fight plague and still leads plague surveillance for the region, alongside cholera, anthrax and tularemia. It is one of five such institutes nationally and the only one covering Siberia and the Far East. Natural plague foci remain in parts of southern Siberia, including Tuva, Altai and Transbaikal. Russia's last widely reported human case involved a child in the Altai Republic in 2016 and was linked to marmots.

The negative tests are welcome news, and the reports so far do not establish a spreading outbreak. But a young laboratory worker is dead, a hospital wing is quarantined, and almost 200 contacts have reportedly been identified. "Particularly dangerous infection" is a description of the stakes. It still isn't an explanation of what happened.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 18:05

Quantum Isn't Coming For Your Bitcoin

Authored by Brandon Black via Bitcoin Magazine,

For as long as Bitcoin has existed, new forms of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) have been used to predict its demise. Despite this, Bitcoin has grown into a multi-trillion dollar asset and begun to take its place in the global monetary order. In recent months, the specter of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) enabling an attacker to recreate secret keys from public keys and sign Bitcoin transactions moving other people's coins has returned as an evolved form of FUD.

Is this a realistic threat to Bitcoin's continued growth? In a word, no.

There is no evidence that a CRQC will be built within a decade, and it remains unknown whether such a machine will ever be built. The quantum threat remains FUD.

State of the Art

To date, no quantum computing machine has computed anything out of reach of a precocious 6-year-old (confirmed empirically). Quantum computers are remarkable technology and showcase the truly science fiction worthy capabilities of the modern world. These devices harness foundational technologies such as optical tweezers, laser cooling, superconducting flux qubits, electromagnetic traps, dilution refrigerators, and many more. Within these devices individual qubits are coerced into specific subatomic states (different for each candidate technology), entangled into superpositions, manipulated to represent computations, and then their subatomic properties are read and interpreted. The astounding truth is that these devices exist, and can be manipulated to produce meaningful computations across a handful of inputs. The cold reality check is that (for an example candidate tech.) to do a computation that a small child can do requires enough power to air condition a Texas high school, many hours of setup, and further hours of post-processing.

Reading the Future

I know what you're thinking, "but there's so much money flowing into quantum computing". Does money flowing into a field correlate with the rate of real-world technological progress in that field? Not really. In fact, it can be argued that until the correct underlying technology has been developed and the product-market fit confirmed, money flowing into an area has a negative correlation with the likelihood of applicable technology being developed. This can be clearly seen by comparing NASA's Space Shuttle program to SpaceX's Falcon 9. SpaceX took (mostly) known science and reduced it to practice to satisfy a demonstrable market need for reliable and lower cost access to space, at a program cost of less than $5 billion to first crewed mission. The Space Shuttle cost roughly $50 billion to reach its first crewed mission. Not only did Falcon 9 cost an order of magnitude less to develop, but it has a perfect crew safety record to date. There are many reasons for these differences, but it goes to show that no amount of money makes a technology that is not ready practicable. Translating this to quantum computing: we can see that with tons of money being thrown at the problem, technology demonstrations at massive cost are possible.

But this tells us nothing about whether more money will bring us the holy grail of stable, low-error qubits (like the reliability of the Falcon 9).

No amount of continued development on the Space Shuttle program would ever have produced the low cost, high reliability of Falcon 9, and it's entirely probable that no amount of continued development, at any cost, will ever make any of the current quantum computing technologies reliable enough to break a single key pair.

Now, you might be thinking, "but what about all the recent advancements?" There are two important things to keep in mind about recently published advancements.

First, many of these advancements have been advancements in pure mathematics only.

For example, the recent Google paper which had such an important result that they chose to redact the theoretical quantum circuit rather than risk it being used to break important cryptographic systems. This may seem like massive progress toward the future of CRQCs, but in fact it changed nothing. Unless (or until) the quantum hardware has its Falcon 9 moment, there simply is no device which comes anywhere near the stability and scale needed to run the redacted circuit. It's pure theater to hide a circuit designed for a device which may never exist.

Second, on the hardware side itself, we see many new results and bits of progress published in a given year, but how many of these relate to the same quantum computing candidate technology? How many represent merely a starting over after a prior result ended in a dead end? The reality is that these advancements do not represent some linear track toward eventual success. They represent the breadth-first search of an infinite possibility space within which quantum researchers are hoping to find a path along which they can proceed for even a modest distance without reaching yet another dead end.

When we look at the reality of the future of quantum computing, it's hazy at best. There are promising technological developments. Especially, to my eye, in the area of neutral atom devices. But it's far too early to tell if there's a path open toward an eventual CRQC along any of the currently known branches or if more restarts are in our future. If, at some point, we see many iterations of the same candidate technology implementing progressively more capable devices, and computing meaningful results that a precocious child cannot also compute, we can revisit this discussion with different evidence.

In Theory

There are two possible explanations for the repeated failure of quantum research to develop a CRQC over many decades. It's possible that it's just a hard problem and we're continuing to apply science and engineering to solve it and one day the ingenuity of the human species will prevail as it has in the development of the Internet, the smart phone, social media, and Bitcoin (left to the reader to decide which of these are positive developments). On the flip side, it may be that developing a CRQC is either impossible or will remain forever outside our grasp. Consider what it would mean for a CRQC to exist: the machine would have to represent within its superposition a field of possibilities the same size as the complexity of the cryptographic problem to be solved. I.e. to break the 128-bit security of the elliptic curve discrete log on Bitcoin's secp256k1 curve, the quantum superposition would have to represent all possible values of a 128-bit number. In classical computing, representing all such values would require more computer storage (by many orders of magnitude) than humans have ever produced. If there is even the slightest granularity to the quantum superposition (i.e. the quantum superposition is not perfectly continuous across all possible values) then the quantum computer cannot ever become cryptographically relevant. If the energy required to hold a superposition scales with the complexity of the field being represented then a quantum computer cannot ever be cryptographically relevant. The contemporary understanding of quantum physics does not rule out either of these possibilities.

Conclusion: Bitcoin Cannot Rest

Despite all of the preceding, Bitcoin development toward new cryptographic algorithms must continue. While a quantum attack on Bitcoin's cryptography is not imminent by any means, it's entirely possible that another flaw could be found through other means. We know that certain elliptic curves have been found to have weaknesses, and secp256k1 could be next. Bitcoin has survived as long as it has because attacks on the system have strengthened it and that will continue to be true as the quantum FUD attack plays out. The development of P2MR or P2TRv2, of SHRINCS, SPHINCS, IBC, ML-DSA, and more post-quantum signature schemes will eventually lead to improvements to Bitcoin's resilience in the face of future attacks even if an actual CRQC is never developed.

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Quantum Issue. We're sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 17:30

Mushroom Cloud Over Alabama: Trump Just Pulled A Condoleezza Rice

President Trump just pulled a Condoleezza Rice. 

George W. Bush's Secretary of State had (in)famously stated "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" in September 2002 while trying to fearmonger the public into getting on board with the Iraq invasion.

On Friday night, Trump rallied supporters in Mobile, Alabama amid a tour through deep-red states to bolster Republican turnout ahead of the November midterms.

On stage, he once again defended the decision to launch a war on Iran and repeated his line that voters should pretend that he is on the ballot. On higher oil as well as painful gas prices at the pump, he reiterated that it's a "small price" to pay to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. He also claimed the Iran war will "probably" end soon after the midterms. That's when Trump proclaimed:

"But remember about the oil: You're paying a price, but boy, is that a small price than what it would be if these lunatics were allowed to have a nuclear weapon and used it on Mobile, Alabama."

TRUMP SAYS HIGH OIL PRICES A SMALL PRICE TO PAY, IRAN WOULD HAVE NUKED ALABAMA *** pic.twitter.com/MH17sEhNZp

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) October 3, 2026

We should start by noting the obvious: There is nothing in Iran's missile arsenal capable of reaching the United States. Not a single report has even so much as ever claimed it, 

According to the Arms Control Association, the Islamic Republic does not possess operational intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and certainly has never tested one. Iran's most advanced missiles have a long enough reach to perhaps hit central Europe, or else the remote US-UK base Diego Garcia deep in the Indian Ocean - but hitting Mobile, Alabama is absurd and an impossibility. 

However, it's unlikely that your average Alabama voter knows this (though notably in the above clip the crowd's response is lackluster and the applause is very weak). Even the US intelligence community knows that the idea that the Iranians could send a projectile to reach the continental US is false on its face:

There is no serious evidence to back up all the claims that have been made about Iran developing long-range rockets to deliver nuclear warheads. The U.S. intelligence community assess that Iran may be technically capable of developing an ICBM with sufficient foreign assistance, not that they are doing so. Iran has never tested any long-range rockets. Iran's longest-range missiles are medium-range ballistic missiles, not the intercontinental-range missiles as critics will have us believe.

As far as the evidence shows, Iran is assessed to have deployed several dozen Shahab-3 and Ghadr-1 medium-range ballistic missiles with ranges up to 2,000 kilometers, as well as dozens of short-range ballistic missiles with ranges of 150 to 500 kilometers. Iran is testing a solid-fueled medium-range ballistic missile, the Sejjil-2, but that has not been tested since 2011 and the United States cannot confirm Iran's claims that this missile is deployed.

Likely Trump is himself fully aware of all this, but when the point is fearmongering the US public into supporting the next Middle East quagmire and half-baked 'forever war'.... well then logic, reason, and truth go out the window.

Vice President JD Vance pulled something similar not too long ago. Back in March in the opening weeks of Operation Epic Fury he implied that Iran could potentially turn a nuclear bomb into a suicide vest - another absurd claim, just based on the logistics and technical requirements alone.

Vance suggests Iran could have used nuclear suicide vests: “You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on, and they blow up the vest and a couple of people get killed, and that's a terrible tragedy. What happens when what's on the vest is not… pic.twitter.com/6HiCHhi4S9

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) March 26, 2026

"You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on, and they blow up the vest and a couple of people get killed, and that’s a terrible tragedy," Vance told a live briefing at the time. "What happens when what's on the vest is not something that can kill a couple of people, but can kill many, many tens of thousands of people?”

As we pointed out at the time, the simple reality is that a nuclear bomb could not be miniaturized to the point where it could be worn as a vest.

Dear Trump admin, at least come up with something better than old Bush NeoCon talking points.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 16:55

Egypt Arrests, Disappears Entire Newsroom Over 'Fake News' Allegations

Via Middle East Eye

Egyptian authorities have detained the entire newsroom of one of the country’s only independent media outlets in a move that rights groups have denounced as a "first" and an "alarming escalation" on free speech.

On September 28 and 29, security forces raided the homes of the six journalists - Mohamed Ashraf Abu Emeira, Abdallah Qadry, Islam Barakat, Omar Helal, Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel - who constitute the entire team working for Matsada2sh (Arabic for "Don’t believe"). The arrests bring the number of journalists detained in Egypt to 24.

via AFP

"It is a first in Egypt: an entire newsroom behind bars," press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said, criticising the authorities for failing to reveal the journalists' whereabouts.

"It's a violation of the Egyptian Constitution, even though this is common practice. Journalists detained in Egypt are often forcibly disappeared for several days before being officially charged and brought before a court," the group added.

According to multiple accounts by rights groups, the officers confiscated the phones and laptops belonging to the journalists as well as those of their family members during the raids. They also did not present any arrest warrants and refused to disclose where the journalists would be held.

The interior ministry later published a statement confirming the arrests and accusing the journalists of running an unlicensed platform that is "run from abroad" and of spreading "fake news".

It also accused its journalists of being affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition group that has been outlawed under the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since 2014.

One of the platform’s editors was previously detained in 2023 over similar allegations but was released two days later.

Matsada2sh was founded in 2018 as a fact-checking outlet that corrects misleading or inaccurate information by various sources, including those by official government sources or opposition media.

"Independent journalism is critical in any free society and Egyptian authorities’ failure to allow free exercises of expression to thrive flies in the face of a purported commitment to dialogue, transparency, anti-corruption, and regional leadership," more than 80 rights groups and independent media outlets said in a statement.

"The crackdown on the Matsada2sh platform and these arrests are alarming escalations on independent media and freedom of expression that cannot be allowed to stand."

One of the founders of Matsada2sh, Abdelrahman Mansour, who is not based in Egypt, told the Associated Press on Thursday that the families do not know where the journalists are.

"Everyone on this team knew the risks when they went to work every day, but it’s unacceptable for the government to make false accusations and forcibly disappear journalists just because they’re afraid of a free press," AP quoted Mansour as saying. "Their families are worried, we’re worried, we just want them released unharmed."

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 16:20

California Man Accused Of Routing More Than $300 Million In Restricted Servers To China

Authored by Arthur Zhang via The Epoch Times,

A California man has been arrested on federal charges accusing him of helping route more than $300 million in export-controlled computer servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore.

Greg Lui, 38, who also uses the name “Yiu Kong Lui,” is arrested by federal agents in Los Angeles County on Oct. 1, 2026. FBI

Greg Lui, 38, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, of San Gabriel, was arrested Oct. 1 after a federal grand jury returned a three-count indictment two days earlier.

Lui was the chief executive officer and owner of Earthmade Computer Inc., a company based in City of Industry, California, and established in November 2023. He was also the registered agent of another company, Coindigger, that did business as Earthmade.

Earthmade has not been charged in the case. The company did not respond by publication time to a request for comment.

Lui is charged with conspiracy to violate U.S. export-control laws, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege payments from Malaysia flowed into Earthmade's U.S. bank accounts and were then used to buy restricted servers from American manufacturers.

Prosecutors allege the conspiracy began no later than October 2023 and continued through at least Aug. 12, 2026. The indictment's detailed transaction examples are concentrated in 2024, when Lui and others allegedly bought high-end computer servers and graphics processing units, or GPUs, from U.S. manufacturers and routed them through Malaysia and Singapore before they ultimately reached China.

Malaysian Route

Between January and October 2024, Earthmade received more than $80 million from one Malaysian company and $96 million from another, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say Earthmade brokered nearly $300 million in sales of export-controlled Nvidia-powered servers from three U.S. manufacturers.

One of the Malaysian companies had been established in 1999 and primarily dealt in lumber, plywood, millwork, and wood panels. Prosecutors describe the second Malaysian entity as a front company.

In January 2024, Lui allegedly told a co-conspirator that the lumber company wanted 70 servers containing Nvidia H100 GPUs. Later that month, he placed an order for 27 H100-equipped servers worth about $7.6 million.

Those servers were shipped from Los Angeles County to Kuala Lumpur. Less than two months later, prosecutors say, a co-conspirator emailed a Malaysian government official stating that the 27 servers had been transshipped to a Chinese purchaser.

Another order was far larger. A U.S. manufacturer quoted Earthmade for 512 export-controlled servers in April 2024, and Lui placed the order the following day.

The indictment traces 92 of those servers. Although a manufacturer had said they were ready to ship to Earthmade in Los Angeles County, prosecutors allege Lui and a co-conspirator instead had them flown from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur and then onward to Hong Kong. The Chinese purchaser was listed as the consignee.

The indictment identifies the purchaser as an unnamed industrial company based in Hangzhou, China.

US Front Company

Prosecutors describe another transaction involving 100 servers equipped with Nvidia H100 GPUs and worth more than $22 million.

Lui allegedly used an unnamed U.S. front company to place the order and claimed that another City of Industry company, Topmost, was the buyer. He then submitted false documents identifying "Jackie Lui" as Topmost's chief executive, according to the indictment.

Topmost was also not charged in the case. The company did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Prosecutors allege Lui had purchased another person's identifying documents in 2021 and later used that identity in business transactions connected to the export-evasion scheme.

The indictment also alleges that a person presented as chief technology officer of the Malaysian lumber company was actually an international broker of export-controlled servers who incorporated Topmost in California.

Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, said the bureau's investigation found that Lui allegedly sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the technology to the Chinese government.

An Nvidia spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Oct. 2, "This case shows yet again that smuggling is a losing proposition - legally, economically and technically. Our work with law enforcement has led to prosecutions, and we will continue to engage with law enforcement."

If convicted of all charges, Lui faces statutory maximum sentences of 20 years on the export-control conspiracy count, 20 years on the money-laundering conspiracy count, and 10 years on the smuggling count.

Lui was expected to make his initial appearance and be arraigned Oct. 2 in federal court in downtown Los Angeles.

    OCTOBER ONLY.$10 OFFYOUR NEXT ORDER.$30 min. Ends Oct 31. One per customer.GET MY $10 OFF →Signs you up for ZeroHedge Store emails. Can't be combined. Every order helps support ZeroHedge. Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 15:10

Search Intensifies Off Nantucket After Gulfstream Jet Vanishes From Radar

A massive search is underway off Nantucket on Saturday morning after a Gulfstream G100 carrying six people disappeared from radar while flying from Bermuda to Boston.

The G100 was operated by Latitude Air Ambulance, which provides medical evacuation and repatriation services.

BREAKING: Gulfstream G100 with 6 persons on board has reportedly crashed into the Atlantic while flying from Bermuda to Boston pic.twitter.com/gHZI5Sq2vc

— Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) October 3, 2026

Company spokesman Clarence Togeretz confirmed to The New York Times that the G100 was missing and said Latitude had contacted search-and-rescue and law enforcement agencies.

Local outlet Nantucket Current said the search-and-rescue effort is focused on an area about 13 nautical miles south of Nantucket.

BREAKING: A search is underway 13 nautical miles south of Nantucket for a Gulfstream aircraft with six persons on board. The FAA reported losing contact with the aircraft early Saturday morning.

The Gulfstream G100 (tail #CGRJP) air ambulance was traveling from Bermuda to… pic.twitter.com/TvKEe9e2iU

— Nantucket Current (@ACKCurrent) October 3, 2026

Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 shows the area of interest where aerial and sea-based Coast Guard assets are searching.

The US Coast Guard is continuing to search for a missing G100 C-GRJP, which lost contact en route to Boston. https://t.co/Yv3BmlmJco pic.twitter.com/TYXdccMR9y

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) October 3, 2026

X user Breaking Aviation News & Videos lists the Coast Guard assets searching for the G100:

• HC-144 Ocean Sentry airplane crew from Air Station Cape Cod
• HC-130 Hercules crew from Air Station Elizabeth City
• MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew from Air Station Cape Cod
• 47-foot motor lifeboat crew from Station Brant Point
• Fast response cutter William Sparling (WPC-1154)

Nantucket Current said the G100 "declared an emergency before losing contact."

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 14:35

Trump Announces One-Time $90 Payments To 20 Million Seniors In Medicare

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump announced on Oct. 2 that his administration would issue one-time $90 payments to more than 20 million seniors enrolled in Medicare.

A file photo shows a federal Medicare office. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Trump said the payments were meant to help seniors cover Medicare premiums and would come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which Congress has allocated $2 billion to improve Medicare's fee-for-service program but has never been used, according to a White House fact sheet.

"We are finally using this Fund, along with my Most Favored Nations Deals, to substantially lower costs for our Seniors," the president wrote in a Truth Social post.

Eligible Medicare recipients will receive the payment in early October by direct deposit or by check sent to the mailing address they registered with Medicare, the White House said.

Most Medicare Part B enrollees are eligible for the payments, except those whose premiums are already paid by Medicaid or who pay an income-related monthly adjustment amount, the White House said.

"With this action, President Trump is the first President to ever use the Medicare Improvement Fund to directly lower costs for senior citizens," it stated.

Medicare is federal health insurance for Americans 65 or older and some with disabilities. Medicare Part B covers doctors' services, outpatient care, and some preventive services such as flu vaccinations and diabetes screenings.

Trump said in his post that the $90 payments are separate from the $500 rebate checks his administration planned to send to nearly 1 million people who were overcharged for their coverage through the Affordable Care Act - President Barack Obama's healthcare law, known as Obamacare - under the previous administration.

The one-time payments for seniors, Trump said, also demonstrated his commitment to carry out a plan to give every American adult a $5,000 dividend check if Republicans retain control of Congress in the November election.

The president first announced the $5,000 payment during a Sept. 9 Republican event in Dallas, Texas, calling it the Trump dividend. He promised the payment if Americans return Republican majorities to both the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections on Nov. 3, which he said could be made possible by his tariff policies.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimated that there were 245 million adult U.S. citizens in the country as of 2024, meaning the payouts would cost about $1.3 trillion.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told NBC News on Sept. 10 that, if implemented, the $5,000 dividend checks for citizens would not be paid for with taxpayer dollars. He said the administration could "earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers."

Melanie Sun contributed to this report.

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US Again Rebuffs Riyadh's Yemen Plea As 100,000-Man Force Readies For War

Several reports have indicated that Saudi Arabia and Yemeni government forces are preparing for a major offensive against Houthi rebels in the coming weeks, which will mobilize a huge force with an aim to take back Yemen's Red Sea coast and to ultimately secure the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, amid an ongoing threat to global shipping in the Red Sea area.

Over 100,000 Yemeni pro-government troops could mobilize for the offensive,  Reuters has reported. Last month, the ease and quickness of Houthi gains proved humiliating for the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

White House file image

The report described, "The Saudis are considering two possible options for the assault, the Gulf and Yemeni officials said: Either a narrowly focused attack on ​the area around Bab el-Mandeb or a broader offensive that also includes other synchronized attacks on multiple fronts around Yemen, in the governorates of Al-Bayda, Marib, Taiz and Al-Jawf."

Parallel to the Reuters reporting, Axios said Friday that the United States will definitely not join the offensive in any direct way, short of possible intelligence or even targeting help.

The report cited US officials who say Riyadh again directly requested military help from Washington, but the kingdom has been rebuffed for the second time in a few weeks.

The Saudis are expected to focus on air cover for ground forces loyal to Sanaa, and reports suggest the Saudis wanted US warplanes in the air as well. 

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth to brief him ahead of the operation and specifically requested US airstrikes as coverage for the ground operations. The request was rejected, US officials say.

An admin official was cited in Axios as saying the US "is not going to take kinetic action for now."It was just a week ago that President Trump was said to have been close to ordering US military support in the Yemen theatre, but that he decided against it at the last minute.

Sunni clerics denigrate Shi'ites of the region:

Speaking at a conference in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s top Muslim cleric said: "Houthis have no connection whatsoever to Islam.” pic.twitter.com/PY47Bmi99d

— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) September 30, 2026

US officials have said getting bogged down in the Yemen conflict would be a "distraction" at a moment US forces engaged against Iran and in escorting oil transit through the contested Strait of Hormuz.

There's also the fact that in prior years when the US was more directly supporting of the Saudis and UAE in coalition operations in Yemen, it did little to change realities on the ground, other than imposing misery and death on the broader Yemeni population.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 12:15

Turkey's Fix For Its $20 Billion Hedge Fund Meltdown: Kindly Ask The Winners To Give The Money Back

Two weeks after a cluster of Istanbul asset managers stopped honoring redemptions, triggering a market-wide circuit breaker and the liquidation of 131 funds held by some 455,758 Turkish retail investors, Ankara has unveiled its plan to make everyone whole. Or at least, to make everyone a little bit less un-whole.

As Bloomberg reports, Turkey will start payments to investors caught in the fund crisis. The Capital Markets Board (SPK) approved interim payments of up to 1 million lira (about $20,400) per eligible investor in funds run by Tera, Pusula, Atlas and Hedef, calculated on each investor's "net investment" as determined by the Central Securities Depository (MKK). Below a million lira, you get your money back; above it, you get a million and a place in the queue. Money market funds get paid first, the rest in descending order of investor count, with A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus funds slotted in afterward. The interim payments are advances against whatever the liquidation ultimately recovers, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows yet.

Emre Tezmen, chair of Tera Yatırım, was arrested early last Wednesday.

Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, insists that "we are not talking about a systemic problem," pointing out that public debt is just 22% of GDP and the budget deficit is "roughly half the developing country average." All true, and also not much consolation to the investor who, as Turkish Minute recounts, sold her Istanbul home before moving to Portugal, parked the proceeds in stock funds as an inflation hedge, and has watched her account fall ~90% while being unable to withdraw even that. "It is melting away before my eyes, and I can't do anything about it."

The "please give it back" account

The payouts are the boring part. The truly bizarre part is how Turkey - long the biggest banana in crowded bus of capital markets banana republics - plans to refill the pot.

Alongside the interim payments, the regulator announced the creation of "Voluntary Return Accounts" at Birlesik Fon Bankasi "for individuals seeking to return excessive profits obtained from pre-liquidation share sales." Proceeds will be funneled to the fund liquidation estates and on to Ziraat and Isbank for distribution to investors. A separate "General Share Refund Account" has been opened for anyone who would like to hand back profits from speculative trading in listed stocks, and a new fund inside the deposit insurer TMSF will receive assets later determined to be proceeds of crime (details here).

To summarize: Turkey's plan to compensate 455,000 losers is, in part, to ask the winners nicely.

Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas summed it up best: "Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b."

Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b in funds w ponzi like schemes that are being liquidated. Wow. pic.twitter.com/Aw7RVn6DJQ

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 1, 2026

Which raises a question that every holder of Turkish assets, foreign ones included, will now be asking: if realized gains can be deemed "excessive" after the fact, at what point do they become yours?

For those who don't feel like volunteering, there is the stick, or rather a discounted stick: under a leniency provision, anyone who pays twice their gains (minimum 500,000 lira) within 15 days of a criminal complaint gets a reduced penalty. Note where that money goes: not to the stranded investors, but to the Treasury and Finance Ministry. Market manipulation as a revenue line.

So who exactly made the "excessive gains"?

Here the honor system runs into a few practical problems. According to a detailed timeline of the probe, Pusula chairman Muhammed Yariz wired roughly 2.89 billion lira (~$15 million) to Edmond de Rothschild in Switzerland on September 1, two weeks before his firm defaulted; Pusula Holding chairman Serdar Turhan sent ~1.2 billion lira (~€25 million) to the same Swiss bank on August 24. Both have since been arrested. One suspects the Birlesik Fon Bankasi "voluntary return" desk is not their first call.

Then there's Cengiz Avci, a major shareholder in Odine Solutions, a stock that rose 987% this year to a peak 366 billion lira valuation before collapsing 94%. Prosecutors allege he booked ~15 billion lira in gains and converted 12 billion lira (~$244 million) into cash. There is an arrest warrant. He "had not returned and was not located." Presumably the voluntary return form got lost in the mail.

And then there's the politics. Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, deputy chair of Erdogan's ruling AKP and a former family minister, resigned after the opposition alleged she bought shares in shipbuilder Ozata Denizcilik, a navy contractor whose valuation was ramped to $5 billion (above Ford Otosan) while Tera's brokerage reportedly controlled 95% of its shares, for about €1.1 million in April and sold for €23.3 million just before the September 16 crash. Kaya has not directly addressed the allegations, which remain unproven in court. A 21x return in five months: if that isn't "excessive," we'd love to know what is.

It doesn't stop there. As Middle East Eye details, one Erdogan adviser sat on Tera Portfolio's board until January, another former presidential adviser stayed on until the crisis erupted, and an Ozata board member arrested this week is the son of a former banking regulator and the son-in-law of a sitting deputy finance minister. Tera chairman Emre Tezmen, arrested on charges of running a Ponzi-like scheme, previously served on the board of the MKK, the very central depository now tasked with calculating each investor's "net investment" for the payouts.

Freeze, unfreeze, arrest the tweeters

The enforcement response has been equally on-brand. On a Friday, the Justice Minister announced asset freezes on 46 companies, 18 funds and 42 individuals. By Sunday, the freezes on 45 companies and 19 funds were lifted after the CMB conducted "a new assessment," with Simsek explaining that "protecting investment, employment, production and exports was a priority." Restrictions on the 42 individuals remain. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Bakirkoy arrested 16 people for social media posts deemed to be market manipulation and blocked access to 246 accounts "spreading speculative panic." It's always the tweets.

Officials have now identified 217 suspects across 26 manipulated stocks, with 56 detained as of September 30. The mechanics of the scheme were hardly sophisticated: funds piled into illiquid, low-float stocks, and with nobody on the other side, prices went vertical. Prosecutors allege some prices were inflated nearly 100x. Then the regulator tightened concentration rules in late August, the funds were forced to sell into a market with no bid, and retail rushed for the exits on the TEFAS platform. The ones who got out first were, inevitably, the ones closest to the funds.

The numbers tell the story: Pusula's funds shrank from 115 billion lira to under 8 billion, with 107 billion lira withdrawn before the doors closed. Money market funds, supposedly the safe end of the spectrum, saw 456 billion lira pulled in a single week (from 2.14 trillion to 1.68 trillion). In other words, those who knew ran, and those who trusted a "state-supervised system," as one law graduate who invested with her mother put it, are now waiting for a $20,000 interim check.

What Goldman is telling clients

As the crisis erupted, Goldman's EM credit desk wrote on September 17 that the equity market's 6% plunge was due to the "near-collapse and redemption default of asset manager Pusula Portfoy, precipitated by the regulator's clampdown on concentrated 'fund-chain' positions," followed by Tera "failing to meet redemption requests." The central bank responded with bond buybacks (you know, "NOT QE"), bigger repo auctions and lower discount rates, while Simsek spent the day "defending current policy mix and committing not to deviate from the anti-inflation track despite elections." Turkey CDS widened 10bps intraday before closing +6.5bps; Turkish bank perps fell as much as 65 cents. 

We were more laconic: Turkey was getting "Leopolded" we reported late on Sept 16 when first news of the fund meltdown emerged.

Turkey getting Leopolded pic.twitter.com/vZYZqcPT24

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 17, 2026

By that weekend, Goldman's EM credit team was calling it a "systemic liquidity squeeze" in which "the liquidation of approximately $20 billion in local funds, sparked by redemption failures, dragged the BIST 100 down 6% and pushed external sovereign debt and CDS as much as 15bps wider midweek." Yet the bank's key takeaway was that "Turkey's move was technical rather than credit-driven, with a domestic fund liquidation transmitting into external debt before local buyers and short covering reversed most of it."

Goldman CEEMEA sales trader Ashwin Sharma went further, noting that the crackdown targeted a speculative boom that index provider MSCI had described as "co-ordinated trading," and that reining it in, "given threats of possible MSCI demotion (to Frontier)," was "a clear positive for me." His conclusion: "Despite near-term redemption-driven volatility, I continue to see Turkey as an attractive buy-on-weakness story," with banks pointing to further rate cuts and NIM expansion into 2027, and an energy price shock (Turkey is a net oil importer) the biggest risk. The bank's GIR EM strategists echoed the theme in their weekly kickstart, flagging Turkey's 5% weekly drop on "regulatory action on select investment funds."

The carry crowd hasn't left either. In a September 29 note, Goldman's EM SSA desk said Turkey remains a carry trade "GIR continues to favour and where we continue to see client allocation," with clients extending out the curve into paper like the EBRD 27.5% 2029s, which yield ~200bps above the 2027s. Then again, as of this morning, the bank's credit desk reported that in the Turkish corporate complex "risk was still available and offered with corps feeling particularly abandoned."

Which is, in a nutshell, the Turkish trade: the high-30s lira yields and the orthodox finance minister are real, and so is the system in which an AKP deputy chair allegedly makes 21x on a navy shipbuilder ramped by a fund whose chairman sat on the board of the securities depository, while the regulator's answer to the losers is a $20,000 advance and a bank account for the winners' conscience.

Been here before

Readers will recall the last time Turkish markets needed a marketwide trading halt, after the arrest of Erdogan's top rival Ekrem Imamoglu sent the lira to a record low ("All Hell Breaks Loose In Turkey"). And in May we noted that Turkey had sold nearly all its US Treasuries, dumping holdings from ~$16 billion to $1.8 billion alongside gold to defend the lira after the Middle East war erupted. The buffers, in other words, are thinner than the macro tables suggest.

As for the gated funds, the playbook should be familiar to anyone who followed the private credit redemption mess earlier this year: illiquid assets, daily liquidity promises, and a "screen price" that only exists until someone tries to sell. As one local analyst put it, whether the till "will have the money to pay it is unclear." The interim payments come out of what's left in the funds; the rest depends on the liquidators finding buyers for stocks that, by prosecutors' account, had been inflated as much as 100-fold, and on the winners volunteering to give back their winnings.

We wouldn't hold our breath. But we would watch the precedent: in Turkey, a realized gain is now only yours until the government decides it was excessive.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 08:45

Black Smoke Reported Over Critical Aramco Refinery As Saudis Weigh Major Assault On Houthi Rebels

Unverified reports and footage circulating on X early Saturday morning appear to show smoke rising from Saudi Aramco's Riyadh refinery. The cause and any impact on operations remain unclear. Separately, Axios reports that Saudi Arabia is preparing a major offensive against Iran-backed Houthis in the coming days. President Trump's comments last week that a bombing campaign against Tehran could resume after the midterm elections add to signs that the Gulf conflict remains far from any near-term resolution.

Turkish news outlet Türkiye Today cites NASA's FIRMS satellite monitoring system, which shows higher-intensity VIIRS thermal hits across Aramco's Riyadh refinery, one of Saudi Arabia's most important refining assets, with a capacity of about 130,000 barrels a day.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) accounts on X are sharing footage of what may be Iran-backed Houthi attacks on the refinery. No official word yet on why thick black plumes of smoke are rising from multiple locations at the refinery.

More unconfirmed close-up footage showcasing the ongoing fire inside Saudi ARAMCO Riyadh Refinery, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia.
https://t.co/m4ITAHGBy0 pic.twitter.com/BMOGtYrtws

— Hexagone Intel (@osinthexagone) October 3, 2026

⚡️BREAKING: Saudi Aramco Riyadh Refinery has been Struck by Yemen's Houthis

Smoke is rising from Multiple Locations pic.twitter.com/s1apeEtfIX

— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) October 3, 2026

Houthis have managed to Strike the Main Saudi Aramco Refinery in Riyadh!!
Nasa Frim shows it's likely on Fire after the hit. https://t.co/Sx0gLmwYRY pic.twitter.com/fgiXtH1R5k

— Ali (@MerruX) October 3, 2026

Unconfirmed footage showcasing ongoing fires inside Saudi ARAMCO Riyadh Refinery, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia. Unusual VIIRS thermal hits with increased intensity are observed across the refinery on NASA FIRMS satellite imagery. https://t.co/0GF1rCFoqV pic.twitter.com/Aow3HglPgh

— Hexagone Intel (@osinthexagone) October 3, 2026

A separate report by Axios overnight states that the Saudis are preparing for a major operation against the Houthis in the coming days, targeting coastal areas that give the rebels leverage over the critical maritime chokepoint of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The report cites two US officials.

More color from Axios:

Behind the scenes: A U.S. official said the Saudis have been planning the operation for weeks and that plans were approved by Saudi leadership several days ago.

• The operation will include ground forces loyal to the internationally recognized government in Yemen with Saudi air cover.
• On Thursday, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to brief him on the planned operation and ask again for U.S. airstrikes against Houthi targets, the U.S. official said.
• A U.S. official said that the U.S. "is not going to take kinetic action for now."

President Trump reiterated to TIME last week that he may escalate attacks on Iran after the November midterms if an acceptable deal can't be reached.

Separately, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has warned that Oct. 1 could mark a new phase in the conflict. He writes that "Iran's 45-day deadline to the United States expired today."

"On August 16, Iran's Supreme National Security Council decided that if Washington did not lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports within 45 days, Tehran would retain the option of launching renewed attacks against U.S. forces," Pape underscores. "That clock has now run out."

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 08:10

"One Month Until Drawdown": UBS Sounds Alarm On Europe's Thin Gas Buffer As Winter Looms

UBS energy analyst Nayoung Kim warned about a growing vulnerability in Europe's natural gas market on Thursday: with less than a month before seasonal withdrawals begin, storage levels remain well below historical norms for this time of year, leaving the continent with a smaller buffer against winter demand and supply disruptions.

Kim wrote that despite optimism this week over improved Hormuz flows (read the Goldman report), which has kept energy prices in check, top LNG exporter Qatar shipped just four cargoes in September, compared with 25 a month before June 2025 and an average of around 30. Force majeure has also been extended into November or early December for some buyers.

The final countdown to Europe's NatGas drawdown period is underway, with EU gas storage standing at just 71.50% full as of the end of the week, well below the 15-year average of around 88% for this time of year.

Weekly injections slowed to 1.3 billion cubic meters from 1.6 billion, with Norwegian maintenance and higher industrial demand offsetting an increase in LNG arrivals.

"We expect storage to reach 74% by winter, below last year's 84% and the five-year average of 90%, before falling to around 25% by the end of winter," Kim wrote in the note.

Meanwhile, Asian buyers are stepping up purchases. Weekly LNG inflows into Asia rose 12%, led by Northeast Asia, while combined arrivals into Japan and South Korea jumped 33% from the previous week.

Europe will have to pay up to keep cargoes coming before the Northern Hemisphere winter arrives. Asia's JKM benchmark is trading at a premium of more than $1.50 per million British thermal units to Europe's TTF, potentially forcing European buyers to raise bids for spot supplies, according to the analyst.

For Europe, the reality is clear: its benchmark Dutch TTF natural gas price will have to stay elevated through the winter, and buffers will remain unusually thin.

All it will take is one cold shot, renewed disruption to Gulf shipments, or sustained Asian buying for the Europeans to panic.

Beyond low NatGas supplies, Europe is also facing a fuel crisis, as the Trump administration has asked France and Germany to begin releasing emergency diesel supplies.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 07:35

Far Left UK Green Party Wants The Words 'Mother' And 'Father' Erased

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Green Party is going to war against language, having decided the words "mother" and "father" are no longer fit for its members.

Ahead of its conference in Brighton this weekend, Zack Polanski's party has circulated an 'Inclusive Terminology Guidance' telling activists to drop "mothers and fathers" for "parents and carers", and warning that the wrong vocabulary can create "unwelcoming or exclusionary" environments and feed into bullying and harassment under the party's own code of conduct.

The Telegraph reports that the document, already in use as equalities training, brands a run of ordinary English "unacceptable", then tells members what to say instead. 'Sexual preference' is out because it "implies that attraction is a choice". 'Transsexual' is out because it "does not encompass non-binary people". 'Homosexual' is discouraged for the same reason.

Green Party members have been told to replace terms such as "mothers and fathers" with gender-neutral terminology under new guidance on inclusive language ??https://t.co/s1W0OR75Ob pic.twitter.com/onYLGHsaFj

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) October 1, 2026

'Lunatic' and 'nutter' are non-compliant because they "reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health". 'Elderly', 'youngster', 'able-bodied', 'sex-change', 'female politician' and 'lady doctor' are all on the discouraged list. Gendered job titles go too: 'chair', not 'chairman'; 'police officer', not 'policeman'.

The race section is the same project in different clothes. Members are steered toward "global majority", described as an umbrella for people of Black, Asian, Brown, Indigenous and Latin American heritage, on the grounds that these groups are most of the world's population and are "often minoritised" in countries such as the UK.

'Brown' should be "used with caution," while "racially minoritised" is preferred because it "emphasises that minority status is created by social and power structures, rather than being inherent". "Black, Asian and minority ethnic" is to be handled carefully, because "many people are uncomfortable with grouping diverse experiences under a single label".

'The party wants to legalise drugs and ban mother and father. What planet are you on?

Martin Daubney and Ben Smoke discuss the 'inclusive terms' set out for the Green party conference. pic.twitter.com/g9Av86IsyM

— GB News (@GBNEWS) October 1, 2026

A section titled "What if I get it wrong?" tells members "it's OK to make mistakes from time to time", provided they are trying to be more "inclusive". The approved response is to apologise, thank the person who corrected you, and "adjust your language moving forward". Then the stick: "repeated or deliberate behaviour may be considered harassment, which is unlawful".

A Green Party spokesman told the Telegraph and the Daily Mail: "This is an existing and standard equalities training document, similar to those found in other organisations that also take equalities seriously. It is a guide and nothing else." The spokesman did not say when it was published.

The Free Speech Union called it "absolutely mental":

This is absolutely mental. When will this madness end?

The censorious Green Party is back to policing what we can and cannot say.

This time, rather than turning its sights on the press, it has published an Orwellian language guide telling delegates which words and phrases are... pic.twitter.com/sFKr2Tc7tp

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) October 1, 2026

Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said: "The Greens are obsessed with policing people's language and thoughts in the name of their increasingly bizarre crusade against ordinary Brits. Last week they were dictating who people spend time with and what jokes they make. Now they're attempting to prohibit perfectly normal words like 'mother' and 'father'."

He added, "This extraordinary obsession with censoring how people speak and behave in their everyday lives is made even more nonsensical by Polanski's inability to get a grip of the vile antisemitism within his own party." He added that Polanski should "look closer to home before lecturing others about what they can and cannot say."

JK Rowling answered in the only register the document deserves. "Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn't had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters."

Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn't had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters. pic.twitter.com/omMjs7Nxbb

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 1, 2026

None of this arrives in a vacuum. Polanski took leadership of the party in September 2025. Membership has since jumped from about 68,000 to 200,000 by March 2026, with 441 new councillors elected in May, a haul swollen by left-wing activists who left Labour under Sir Keir Starmer after Polanski put Palestinian activism and transgender rights ahead of anything resembling environmental policy.

A YouGov poll this week found Britons now rate the Greens "weak, out of touch, incompetent and serving their own interests", with net favourability sliding from plus five to minus 19 on his watch. He is standing in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October, against Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali.

The language guide is the internal version of positions the party has already taken in public. Last year, on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Polanski was asked if a woman can have a penis and answered yes. He called biological sex "not necessarily" binary, described gender as a "spectrum", and claimed he knew better than the UK Supreme Court, whose April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland had defined sex under the Equality Act as biological sex at birth.

By March 2026 a leaked Green dossier was proposing a Department of Migration that would work with education authorities to "disseminate knowledge" in classrooms about "the situations from which those seeking asylum and resettling refugees are fleeing, and the need for and moral obligation of asylum and humanitarian protection."

In May, Scotland's loosened rules produced Green MSP Dr Q Manivannan, a transgender Tamil immigrant on a temporary student visa, without British citizenship or permanent residence.

The victory speech introduced "a transgender Tamil immigrant" whose pronouns are "they/them", and included the claim that "Transness is Blackness. Transness is womanhood. Transness is disability." A party that will not say mother and father had already elected someone for whom every category is interchangeable.

In July, two weeks after Reform's Ann Widdecombe was killed in a hammer attack at her Dartmoor home, Polanski shared an Instagram post of a man in a T-shirt bearing a guillotine and the line "We're only making plans for Nigel." Reform UK reported him to the Metropolitan Police for incitement. He later unshared it.

A party spokesman said he "unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message" and had accepted the collaboration "without realising there was more to it." Nigel Farage said: "If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski."

The same week as the language guide, the Mail on Sunday reported Green training that told members to police friends' jokes, log "what happened, including dates, times, locations", and audit the race of their closest friends to fight "affinity bias".

The attempt to retire "mother" and "father" flattens a biological relation into an administrative one.

The Communist Manifesto treats the charge of wanting to abolish the family as a boast as much as an accusation, and answers it by declaring that the bourgeois family vanishes with capital. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, cast the monogamous household as a property arrangement whose job was to produce heirs, and looked forward to its supersession once private property was abolished.

Later Western Marxism kept the target and dropped the economics. The family became the workshop in which "oppressive" norms, sex roles, and authority were said to be reproduced.

Erasing words is how that is done without a manifesto. "Mother" names a woman who carried a child. "Father" names the man who fathered one. "Carer" names a function anyone can be assigned. Once the specific words are marked as harmful, the specific institution becomes harder to defend, because the defence has to be made in the replacement language.

This is exactly what George Orwell warned of in 1984.

A party that already tells children they owe a moral debt to asylum policy, that already treats sex as a spectrum, and that already elevates identity over citizenship, has every reason to want "mother" and "father" filed under unacceptable. The family is the rival loyalty. Marxism has always understood that. The Green guide is the HR version.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 07:00

Failing Canada And Britain Blame Trump, Putin, And 'White Supremacy'

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Commie Canada and the dis-United Kingdom should be renamed the "Dumb and Dumber" of the British Commonwealth.

King Charles III's North American prime minister, Mark Carney, ran to The New York Times last week to talk about his military combat preparations against the United States in the event that President Trump crosses Lake America and liberates Canada from its delusional leaders. What a showboating dunce. The U.S. singlehandedly sustains Canada's economy and national security, yet the tiny central banker huffed and puffed in a hilariously Napoleonic display of fake strength.

In the same interview with the failing Times, Con-man Carney outlined his intent to integrate Canada's economy with that of China and the European Union and to replace the U.S. Dollar with a China-linked global reserve currency. Rhetorically defending Canada's sovereignty while insulting his U.S. benefactor, Little Mark Carney explained how he would subjugate his socialist nanny-state to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Mark is the global mascot for "educated" idiots everywhere.

Not to be outdone by not-so-Great Britain's Canadian cousin, U.K. Prime Minister Poindexter (er, I mean Andy Burnham) informed the United Nations General Assembly last week that his government was constructing yet another speech-police organization (this one given the august name, "National Centre for Information Defence," which should not be confused with the "Research, Information, and Communications Unit," the "Government Communication Service," the "Counter Disinformation Unit," the "Defending Democracy Taskforce," the "Information Threats and Influence Directorate," the "Rapid Response Unit," the "National Cyber Force and Social Cohesion Taskforce," the "Media Monitoring Unit," or any of the other information-control agencies already mobilized across totalitarian Britain) to protect the British people from scary thoughts and words. Burnham blamed the Russians for spreading "a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair" in the U.K. (and definitely not Westminster's promotion of decline, division, and despair!) and promised to counteract this "information warfare" by censoring Britons' public speech and feeding his collapsing country a steady diet of State-sanctioned propaganda. In order to beat back the Russians, Dilapidated Britain must have its very own digital Iron Curtain! Two cheers for democracy! Hip hip...who cares.

The British people are screwed. On average, their government grants settlement or citizenship to an illegal alien every single minute. These foreign nationals receive more welfare from British taxpayers than ever before. The third-world invaders (I mean, "newcomers") use Britain's streets as public toilets. Rather than securing the kingdom's borders, the Home Office hands out a nine-page booklet informing mostly-Muslim men of military age that it is illegal to rape women and children while they conquer the islands. In the last two years alone, the number of illegal immigrants (and future citizens!) arriving by boat has exceeded the size of the entire British Army! But if these outrageous facts disturb you enough to publicly express your feelings on social media, you will most likely join the roughly 65,000 Brits who have been arrested for "speech-related offenses" over the last five years. Foreign invasion? Good! Free speech? Very bad!

Apparently, the British police state also plans to imprison anyone who would rather not fight WWIII against the Russian Federation. During a recent episode of former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg's "State of the Nation" on GB News, one leftist-globalist commentator in favor of mass conscription argued, "We would have to lock a few people up...some of the pro-Russian voices, people saying there isn't a threat, don't fight for your country, don't go to war for Burnham, we'll have to lock 'em up." Rather than responding with horror at the suggestion that his fellow Britons should be imprisoned for opposing a catastrophic war, Rees-Mogg pedantically replied, "Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars...indeed, yes." In another interview, Rees-Mogg nonchalantly remarked that British citizens have a "duty" to "die" for Britain in a war against Russia.

In Burnham and Rees-Mogg's Britain, the only way to "defend democracy" is to imprison anyone who disagrees with the British Establishment and to sacrifice everyone else to the killing fields! The British Isles might as well be renamed the "Gulag Archipelago."

Interestingly, GB News - which leans conservative - discovered last week that Britain's media regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), had covered up data showing that viewers trust GB News more than the BBC. GB News, in fact, is ranked above all other networks with regard to viewpoint diversity and impartiality. British authorities apparently did not want the public to know these inconvenient truths because the BBC is treated as an objective, trustworthy, and premier source of news (fact check: false!). In an effort to control the public's perception of the BBC, Ofcom restricted what information the public was permitted to know. P.M. Burnham takes the "defense of information" very seriously!

How seriously? Burnham and the British government force citizens to pay for the BBC's awful dreck whether they watch it or not! Every household in the U.K. must fork over a £180 license fee to the BBC each year. Because more households are refusing to pay the license, the government is considering the imposition of a mandatory £11-a-month Internet tax in order to keep the BBC's fake news funded. The BBC says that the "fee is essential for maintaining the quality and diversity of public broadcasting in the UK."

What does "quality and diversity" look like at the BBC? Two "reporters" just did a major exposé describing how women who don't polish their nails perpetuate "white supremacy." No joke! "Nail art's historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures," the BBC "reports." "They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty." Yes, Burnham, force Britain's working-class to pay for this race-baiting propaganda posing as hard news!

Earlier this year, British authorities announced that YouTube and other social media platforms would be forced to manipulate their algorithms and push BBC "news" to the top of feeds in order to counter "disinformation." In other words, Whitehall steals money from British citizens to pay for State-run TV and then forces them to watch it. During the Cold War, we called that Soviet-style propaganda. Yet if you ask the fake "reporters" at the BBC, Canada's publicly-funded CBC, or America's NPR or PBS, all these propagandists would insist that they have nothing in common with the Soviet Union's Pravda or the Russian Federation's RT (Russia Today) News. In the West, State-funded media are somehow not State media. Does that sound more like propaganda or breaking news?

Britain's State-imposed "narrative control" is utterly totalitarian. Dismissing the "narrative of decline" and "despair" in Britain as a "corrosive narrative...which bears no resemblance to reality" and a "distorted and untrue narrative about Britain," P.M. Burnham casts all public dissent as "far-right narratives." As military historian Professor Michael Rainsborough mocks, "The problem isn't the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem." Rainsborough points out that right after Burnham rebranded "decline" as "disinformation," the prime minister laid out a "10-year plan" to fight inflation, housing costs, hopelessness, inequality, and division. "The narrative of decline," in other words, "bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan."

Both Canada and Britain are failing. The public has noticed. Carney and Burnham wish to whitewash reality with fake "narratives." The worse things become, the more difficult it will be for their ministries of truth to succeed. Expect the BBC to blame Trump, Putin, and "white supremacy."

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 23:25

"Are You An FPV Pilot": Pentagon Calls On Drone Operators For Next "Gauntlet" Showdown

The Department of War has put out a request for service members with "FPV experience" to participate in testing events called “Gauntlets” and fly Category 1 drones in field training exercises to accelerate drone development and prepare the US for the next conflict, where drones, robotics, and automated kill chains dominate the modern battlefield.

"Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you!" DoW asked on X on Friday morning.

"The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts," the request said.

Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you! The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts. Interested? Visit https://t.co/dlfuzlu2c0 to learn more: https://t.co/AyOAxjw9jt

— Department of War Innovation Unit (@DIU_x) October 2, 2026

The Drone Dominance Program is the DoW's answer to purchasing large quantities of drones across every category, from 1 to 5, and building out a domestic supply chain of components free from dependence on conflict areas and countries such as China, which can easily weaponize supply chains to hinder procurement.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that Autonomous Warfare Command, dubbed "AutoWarCom," is set to accelerate the DoW's purchases across all categories of drones, robotics, and AI.

What's key is that drone procurement will be a massive part of the rearmament supercycle and provide tailwinds to drone companies, such as heavily shorted Ondas, whose Ultra drone could very well see ramped-up orders by the military as it's seen as an MQ-9 Reaper alternative for ISR missions. 

"Once we apply sustained budget to changed doctrine, we will outperform the world," said Owen West, a former Marine, assistant defense secretary, and Goldman Sachs trader who has been tasked with leading the DoW's Defense Innovation Unit. "And by snapping in AI, we will be ahead of the world, because we are the leaders in AI."

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 23:00

The Tyranny Of One Man's Opinion

Authored by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano via LewRockwell.com,

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office - one of whom was St. Thomas More - and even the king's second wife, Queen Anne.

When Cromwell's son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen's guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of "the tyranny of one man's opinion."

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man's opinion. The Constitution's Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process - a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers' money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks.

A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration's attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president's characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker - or even a mass murderer - does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders.

The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians - beyond the thousands he has already killed - if a peace agreement is not soon reached.

Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump's war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.

Nor can the president's personal assessment of Iran's nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department's compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.

Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president's personal belief - whether informed or uninformed - is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump's tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump's vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them.

The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power - and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man's opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man's conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions - particularly actions that kill innocents.

The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man's opinion.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 22:35

NASA Wants To Resurrect The SR-71 Blackbird

Earlier this month, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman fueled speculation about the agency's high-speed flight research plans by unveiling a mysterious aircraft silhouette on a slide titled "Rebuilding our X-plane portfolio."

Asked whether the image on the slide depicted the famed SR-71 Blackbird, Isaacman denied it was a Blackbird but signaled renewed ambitions for high-altitude, high-speed flight, saying NASA was getting back into the business of "flying high and fast again."

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman showed a mysterious aircraft during the portion of his All-In Summit presentation on rebuilding NASA’s X-plane portfolio ✈️

• Isaacman showed a dark silhouette resembling a next-generation SR-71 Blackbird while discussing 'radical airframe and… pic.twitter.com/VNEDExk8K0

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) September 22, 2026

This brings us to an Aviation Week report saying NASA is working to return a Blackbird to flight after nearly three decades in retirement.

The agency has approached retired Blackbird engineers about restoring Tail No. 844, a 59-year-old aircraft removed earlier this year from an outdoor display at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.

The aircraft was moved into a former Space Shuttle hangar, where crews have been working on it, former NASA and Air Force test engineer Mike Relja revealed to the aviation news website. 

However, as the outlet shared, there is one major problem:

The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the Blackbird fleet in 2007. The move came long after it seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that an SR-71A would return to operational service.

That decision could lead to significant restart costs. In addition to all of the consumable spares that must be in regular supply, NASA would need to restore access to the Blackbird's unique JP-7 fuel blend, the triethylborane ignition chemical, engine oil and hydraulic fluids, Relja adds. A hodgepodge of bespoke ground equipment also no longer exists, leaving the current effort without vital, if unheralded, pieces of equipment.

"To raise the wing, you need a cart," he says. "To get the engine out, you need a cart. You need equipment to pull the [engine] spikes, pull the [ejection] seat. All that stuff is gone."

When Relja raised all of these issues with Ash, the NASA manager assured him it would not be a problem, without going into details about their solutions.

"Every time I threw one of these things out there, he says, 'Oh, engineering will take care of that [and] engineering will take care of that,'" Relja recalls.

At the same time, he does not dismiss a return to flight as impossible, especially if NASA has enough resources to make it achievable.

"If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen," he says. "They went to the Moon, you know."

Why NASA wants to restore the SR-71 to flightworthy status remains unclear. Reports over the years have pointed to Lockheed Martin's development of the SR-72, dubbed the "Son of Blackbird," for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Yet no flight tests have been publicly confirmed. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 22:10

Mystery Gunmen Slaughter Seven People On Bus In Syria's Homs

Via Middle East Eye

Gunmen in Syria killed seven people and wounded four others after opening fire on a civilian bus in western Homs province on Wednesday evening.

The bus was carrying company employees returning home from work when it came under fire as it crossed the Masyaf Bridge in the western Homs countryside, according to the Homs Health Directorate.

Downtown Homs. Wiki Commons

Security units were immediately deployed to the scene to secure the area, while criminal investigators began collecting evidence to identify those responsible and determine the motive, according to Homs Internal Security Forces commander Brig Gen Bassem Mohammad Shaaban.

The injured were taken to hospitals across the governorate, while security forces began an investigation.

Maan Mahmoud Fahd, director of the Homs Grand Hospital, told Sana that four individuals were declared dead upon arrival, after suffering from severe gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

No group has yet claimed responsibility, and authorities have not named any suspects. Shaaban vowed to pursue those responsible, saying the attack would not go unpunished.

"We view this cowardly attack as an attempt to undermine security in Homs and destabilise the stability we have worked to consolidate," Shaaban said.

"We will not allow criminals to threaten the security of our people or undermine the stability the city is experiencing," he added.

The ambush was one of several recent attacks to raise security concerns in Syria since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's government in December 2024.

Brigadier General Munir al-Hariri, a Syrian military analyst, told Syria TV that former Assad loyalists were most likely behind Wednesday's attack, which he said aimed to destabilize security in the country. [ZH: We should note the presence of the literally hundreds if not thousands of jihadist groups, many of them foreign, unleashed on Syria during the height of the CIA/NATO/Gulf-backed proxy war to overthrow Assad].

In August, a bus carrying members of the internal security forces was targeted near Damascus, while an explosive device exploded on a passenger bus in Jaramana, southeast of the capital, wounding 14 people earlier that month.

Gas pipeline blast

The bus attack was one of three major security incidents to hit Syria on Wednesday. A gas pipeline explosion at the Tishreen thermal power plant in Syria's Damascus countryside on Wednesday evening forced three power stations out of service, the Syrian Electricity Company said, warning that the shutdown would cause longer scheduled power cuts.

The blast triggered a large fire and injured two people, according to state broadcaster Alikhbaria. The explosion hit a pressure-reduction station at the plant entrance and damaged the two gas lines that supply it, the Syrian Petroleum Company said.

The loss of gas supplies shut down the Deir Ali and Nasiriyah plants, along with Tishreen, which lies about 36km from the capital.

Abdul Hamid Salat, director of the energy ministry's media department, said the interruption to gas supplies had also affected water-pumping and treatment stations, disrupting services for hundreds of thousands of people across Damascus and its countryside, Daraa, Sweida and Quneitra.

Speaking at the site late on Wednesday, Energy Minister Mohammad al-Bashir said the fire was brought under control overnight. Al-Bashir added specialists would inspect the site once civil defense teams finished cooling it, to determine "the causes and circumstances precisely".

The Homs microbus that was targeted, via SANA

Authorities have not yet established whether the explosion resulted from a technical fault, a deliberate attack or sabotage.

Israeli incursion

Israeli forces fired three artillery shells at the area around al-Mantara Dam in Syria's southern Quneitra province on Wednesday. No immediate casualties or damage were reported.

On Thursday morning, Israeli forces also entered the village of Saida al-Golan in southern Quneitra with around 12 military vehicles as students were making their way to school. The forces later withdrew towards villages in the Yarmouk Basin, with no reports of arrests or house searches.

Reports from Al-Araby News outlet indicate that there was an assassination attempt on a Ministry of Defence officer in the city of Sanamen, situated to the north of Dara.The shelling came amid continued Israeli military activity in southern Syria.

On Tuesday, Israeli forces carried out incursions in Quneitra, including an operation in which soldiers questioned and assaulted shepherds, according to Syrian state media.

The latest developments also come days after Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said talks with Israel on a security framework had reached nearly 90 percent agreement before Israel withdrew or introduced additional conditions.

Speaking at an Atlantic Council panel in New York last week, al-Sharaa said several rounds of negotiations had taken place over the previous year with US involvement and that the talks were continuing.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 21:45

DOJ Won't Defend Suppressor Registry In Court After Congress Killed The $200 Tax

The Justice Department has now made it official: it will not defend part of the 92-year-old National Firearms Act in court, confirming what we reported in August.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer told Congress that "the Department of Justice has determined not to file an appeal" in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, the case in which a federal judge ruled that NFA registration requirements for suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns are unconstitutional now that the tax behind them is gone. The letter, addressed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and dated Sept. 24, was made public this week.

The NFA has required owners of suppressors and short-barreled guns to pay a $200 tax and register with the federal government since 1934. President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated that tax for suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns, but left the registration requirement in place. Gun rights groups sued, arguing that a registry justified by Congress's taxing power can't survive once there's no tax to collect.

On Aug. 5, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas agreed, finding the challenged provisions could no longer be sustained under Congress's taxing power and rejecting the government's fallback argument that the interstate commerce power could save them. The case was consolidated with Jensen v. ATF.

The injunction protects the plaintiffs and their "current and future members and customers," not the general public. The covered groups include Gun Owners of America, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, FPC Action Foundation and the Texas State Rifle Association, according to Bearing Arms. Machine guns, destructive devices and the NFA's special occupational tax are not covered at all.

The result is a two-tier Second Amendment. If you hold the right membership card, the federal registry no longer applies to your suppressor. If you don't, nobody in Washington will say. "The DOJ has yet to release any guidance about how the court's decision will impact the NFA's registration requirements for those who fall outside the protection of the injunction," Bearing Arms' Cam Edwards wrote.

The court granted DOJ a 10-day extension, to Oct. 12, to respond to nine plaintiff states asking whether the injunction covers all of their residents or only members and customers of the plaintiff groups, and ATF Director Robert Cekada has said guidance on transfers and interstate travel is coming "within weeks."

Republicans on the Hill want the department to go further. In August, Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia led 46 House members and 8 senators in urging Attorney General Todd Blanche not only to skip the appeal but to apply the ruling nationwide through rulemaking, warning that "an appeal would prolong regulatory uncertainty for law-abiding gun owners and businesses and would consume DOJ resources."

Whether the nationwide relief they asked for arrives, in the Oct. 12 filing or ATF's promised guidance, will decide whether gun owners outside the covered groups are still committing a federal felony by skipping paperwork for a tax that no longer exists.

* * *

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 21:20

When Regulation Changes Who Becomes Rich

Authored by Shahid Islam via RealClearMarkets,

Economic debates about inequality usually begin with a familiar question: Who has how much income?

It is an important question. But perhaps it is not the only one we should be asking.

A society can change who becomes rich without substantially changing how unequal the society is. Regulation can weaken one economic elite while creating opportunities for another. Entrepreneurs and investors may lose relative influence while lawyers, compliance specialists, lobbyists, consultants and regulatory experts gain it.

The Gini coefficient may barely notice.

Income distribution and income-source distribution are not the same thing.

Regulation does more than redistribute income. It changes the relative returns to different kinds of knowledge and human capital. And when those returns change, talented people respond.

Elite Substitution

Imagine an economy in which high returns come primarily from producing things consumers voluntarily buy. Entrepreneurs search for new products, engineers improve production and investors search for promising companies.

Now introduce an increasingly complex regulatory system.

Those activities do not disappear. But another set of skills becomes more valuable: interpreting regulations, satisfying disclosure requirements, obtaining government permissions, anticipating political decisions and influencing the rules themselves.

The relevant question is not simply whether regulation reduces inequality. It is what happens to the return from creating economic value relative to the return from navigating political and regulatory institutions.

If intervention reduces the return to one form of economic power while increasing the return to another, we may get what I call elite substitution.

The elite does not disappear. Its composition changes.

Sarbanes-Oxley and the Fixed Cost of Complexity

Consider the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Following Enron and WorldCom, Congress sought to strengthen financial reporting and restore investor confidence. But compliance costs are not necessarily proportional to firm size.

A large corporation and a small public company may both need auditors, lawyers, internal-control systems and compliance personnel. The large company can spread those expenses across billions of dollars of revenue. The smaller company cannot.

GAO research has found that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs, although generally higher in absolute terms for larger companies, are proportionately more burdensome for smaller companies. GAO also found that companies moving from exempt to nonexempt status experienced a median increase of about $219,000, or 13 percent, in audit fees in the year of transition.

Sarbanes-Oxley did not cause the rise of private equity by itself. But increasing the fixed cost of public ownership changes the relative attractiveness of public and private organizational forms.

That matters because public markets allow ordinary investors to participate directly in corporate growth, while many private-market opportunities have historically been concentrated among institutional and accredited investors.

Regulation intended partly to protect ordinary investors can therefore inadvertently encourage some activity to migrate toward markets to which those same investors have less access.

Who Can Afford the Maze?

I saw another version of this phenomenon while working in the wealth-management industry before 2008.

I remember a rule of thumb concerning sophisticated offshore trusts: they generally became economically worthwhile only for estates of roughly $75 million or more. The precise threshold varied, but the economics was straightforward.

Lawyers, accountants, trustees and other specialists were expensive. Below a sufficiently large asset level, the cost could exceed the benefit.

That experience taught me something important:

Complexity has a fixed cost.

A $100 million household can economically justify sophisticated legal and tax strategies whose professional costs would make little sense for an ordinary household.

The same principle applies to businesses. A small company may struggle to employ one regulatory specialist. A multinational corporation can maintain entire departments of attorneys, accountants, lobbyists and compliance professionals.

Rules may formally apply equally while imposing very unequal economic burdens.

This creates a paradox. Regulation intended to constrain powerful economic actors can sometimes increase their relative advantage because they possess the resources necessary to navigate the resulting complexity.

We have not necessarily eliminated privilege. We may simply have changed its technology.

Dodd-Frank and Yesterday's Crisis

The same issue appears in banking.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Dodd-Frank increased the importance of compliance officers, attorneys, risk specialists, consultants, programmers and regulatory analysts. A Government Accountability Office study found that community banks, credit unions and industry associations reported increased staffing, training, employee time and compliance-system expenditures associated with selected Dodd-Frank rules.

The obvious defense is that this activity may prevent another financial crisis. If so, its social return could be enormous.

But that argument contains a difficult knowledge problem.

Major financial regulations are often responses to observed failures. Sarbanes-Oxley followed Enron and WorldCom. Dodd-Frank followed the financial crisis.

But the next crisis need not resemble the last one.

Financial institutions adapt. Capital moves. Technology changes. New products appear and risks migrate. The Federal Reserve's financial-stability framework itself acknowledges that shocks are inherently difficult to predict and therefore focuses primarily on monitoring vulnerabilities rather than predicting particular shocks.

This does not mean regulation produces no benefits. Higher capital, greater liquidity and improved risk controls may make institutions safer.

But the costs are relatively visible: compliance departments, legal expenses, reporting systems and management time. One of the largest claimed benefits - the crisis that did not happen - is much harder to observe.

The economic question is whether the marginal resources devoted to regulation make the financial system sufficiently safer to justify their opportunity cost.

The ACA and the Value of Political Knowledge

The Affordable Care Act illustrates another side of the same phenomenon.

The ACA changed subsidies, insurance rules, reimbursement arrangements and government-financed coverage. These changes affected expected revenues and profits throughout the healthcare industry.

Economists Mohamad Al-Ississ and Nolan Miller examined Scott Brown's surprise 2010 Massachusetts Senate victory, which reduced the perceived probability that the pending healthcare legislation would survive in its expected form.

They found striking differences. Managed-care firms experienced abnormal returns of about 6 percent, pharmaceutical companies about 2.8 percent, while healthcare facilities experienced abnormal losses of about 3.5 percent.

This does not prove that these gains and losses were political rents. A hospital could become more valuable under expanded insurance simply because more patients could pay their bills.

But it demonstrates something important:

Government rules can change expected private cash flows sufficiently that political events become capitalized into asset prices.

Once the government determines reimbursement formulas, subsidies and eligibility rules, understanding government becomes part of business strategy.

Political knowledge acquires economic value.

And when political decisions can create or destroy substantial corporate value, firms rationally devote resources to anticipating, navigating and influencing those decisions.

What the Gini Coefficient Cannot See

Imagine two economies with identical income distributions.

In one, high incomes depend primarily upon success in markets. In the other, they depend much more heavily upon successfully navigating political and regulatory institutions.

The Gini coefficient could be identical.

The economies would not be.

This is why inequality statistics tell us only part of the story. We measure how much income people receive but rarely ask enough about what activities generate that income.

None of this establishes that regulation necessarily makes society poorer. Preventing fraud, improving disclosure or correcting genuine externalities can create social value. Elite substitution and a smaller economic pie are separate propositions.

But every society has unusually talented and ambitious people. The important question is what institutions reward them for doing.

Do they receive the highest returns from inventing products, building companies and allocating capital successfully?

Or increasingly from mastering the rules governing those activities?

People respond to incentives. Economists have understood that for centuries. There is no reason the principle should stop operating when the government enters the picture.

Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act addressed very different problems and may have produced important benefits. But all three raise a question conventional discussions of inequality often overlook:

When the government changes the rules, does it eliminate economic privilege - or merely change who is best positioned to capture it?

And when talented people discover that navigating the rules offers greater rewards than creating value outside them, we should ask one final question:

Did we redistribute the pie - or did we also make it smaller?

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 20:55

US Squeezes China's Jet Parts Supply As Rare Earth Showdown Escalates

If you want an indication that resource nationalism and Beijing's weaponization of critical material exports to gain leverage over the US in high-stakes trade negotiations are accelerating, a new report Thursday afternoon says the Trump administration is planning to slow shipments of commercial jet parts to China.

Reuters cites several people familiar with the Commerce Department's moves to slow export licensing and limit the quantities of jet parts approved for shipment to China's state-owned planemaker COMAC to prevent stockpiling.

Officials have also explored new licensing requirements covering aviation hydraulic fluid and rules that could make it easier to restrict landing gear and other components.

The report stated:

The slowdown has taken several forms. The Commerce Department slowed export licensing for airplane parts bound for China in recent weeks, two other sources told Reuters.

Officials have also expressed interest in issuing an export regulation that could make it easier to restrict landing gear and other aircraft parts to China, two sources said. A draft version included a new licensing requirement on aviation hydraulic fluid shipped by US suppliers like ExxonMobil, one of the people said.

And the Commerce Department has been ⁠limiting the number of parts licensed to be shipped to China's state-owned planemaker, COMAC, to keep the company from stockpiling, another source said.

What this suggests is that last month's Trump-Xi meeting in Washington produced no resolution on rare earths, only now an increased willingness by Beijing to tighten restrictions on critical material exports to the US and the West even further. 

This has produced shortages of gallium, germanium, tungsten, and other critical materials essential to the looming defense rearmament supercycle, and in return, we've launched our "own the bottlenecks" theme. 

In early 2025, China ramped up restrictions on critical material exports to the US, while the Trump administration sought a level playing field and has choked off China's access to cheap crude, whether from Cuba, Venezuela, or through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 20:30