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Netanyahu Calls To Strip Citizenship Of Those Who 'Defame' Israeli Army

Via Middle East Eye

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the stripping of citizenship from those who "defame" the Israeli army.

His comments reflect anger from the Israeli government over the documentary NAZA, which featured soldiers testifying to the commission of war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu said he would introduce two bills to Israel's parliament in a video posted on social media.

"NAZA" Directors Rachel Szor, left, and Yuval Abraham, via Associated Press

"The first would revoke the citizenship of anyone who defames [Israeli army] soldiers, and the second would hit them in the pocket by increasing twentyfold the amount in damages for which they can be sued for defamation," Netanyahu said.

"We will hit them both in the pocket and in citizenship, because they have no place among us."

Israeli ministers have already called for NAZA directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor to lose their citizenship over the film.

On Monday, Culture Minister Miki Zohar called the film “despicable” and said its winning of the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on Saturday was “shocking”.

“The creators’ burning self-hatred, and their willingness to harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world, is beyond comprehension and constitutes a betrayal of the state,” Zohar said on X.

“I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators on the grounds of treason against the state."

Segment from the film:

“There was once approval to kill 500 people for one human target,” an ex-Israeli soldier says in the Gaza documentary NAZA, which features testimony alleging AI-assisted targeting and “mass killing on an industrial scale”. pic.twitter.com/ZcbwGkWjiz

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 11, 2026

The film features interviews with 24 anonymized Israeli military and intelligence insiders who describe using AI-powered systems to identify targets and carry out remote bombings, often knowing that large numbers of civilians would be killed.

One military insider interviewed for the film said that, in one incident, the killing of up to 500 civilians was approved to kill a single high-value Hamas member.

The Israeli army rejected the allegations made in the film. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 23:25

China's "Dogfighting" Satellites Come Into Focus As US Confirms Space Weapons

The United States has publicly acknowledged that it already has weapons in orbit, adding a new dimension to a military competition increasingly defined by highly maneuverable satellites - and what they could be used for. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink revealed the space weapons in a Monday disclosure at the Air & Space Forces Association's annual conference. 

Among other threats, China's 'dogfighting' satellites have caught the attention of US officials. 

In March of last year, Gen. Michael Guetlein, then the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, described five Chinese objects conducting coordinated maneuvers in low Earth orbit. The service subsequently identified three Shiyan-24C satellites and two Shijian-6 05A/B objects. He said they were "Dogfighting" (not that they had exchanged fire). 

More recent activity includes a Chinese spaceplane releasing a small satellite in June. The object looped around another Chinese satellite before moving back toward the spaceplane, according to LeoLabs tracking data reported by Reuters on September 2. That investigation also examined Chinese research into spacecraft pursuit and capture, while noting that the United States operates its own secretive uncrewed spaceplane. 

What changed this week was Washington's willingness to explicitly acknowledge an orbital arsenal. According to Meink, the United States possesses "on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action." He declined to identify the weapons or describe their technical characteristics, testing or employment.

In a subsequent statement to The War Zone, a Space Force spokesperson said the broader space-control mission includes kinetic and non-kinetic methods of disrupting, degrading or, when necessary, destroying an adversary's capabilities. The spokesperson said those capabilities can serve offensive or defensive purposes, but would not specify which particular systems are currently deployed.

What we don't know is whether the deployed weapons are physical interceptors, electronic warfare systems or something else. Nor does a description of the service's overall mission prove that every type of capability mentioned is already operational in orbit.

This goes way beyond satellites too. Space infrastructure supports communications, intelligence collection, missile warning and weapons guidance, while disruption can also affect civilian and commercial activity. The War Zone's reporting highlighted those dependencies alongside the service's acknowledgment.

China has opposed the U.S. announcement, reiterating its position against the weaponization of space. American officials describe their capabilities as necessary to deter attacks and protect forces. Experts interviewed by Reuters warned that secrecy and uncertainty can encourage competing governments to make worst-case assumptions about one another's intentions.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty is not a blanket prohibition on conventional weapons in Earth orbit. Its central orbital weapons restriction concerns nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Separate provisions prohibit military installations, weapons testing and military maneuvers on the moon and other celestial bodies. An acknowledgment of conventional orbital weapons therefore does not, on its own, establish a treaty violation.

Now for a 'complicator' - how do governments distinguish routine operations, surveillance, deterrent signaling and preparations for an attack when much of the relevant hardware and doctrine remains classified?

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 23:00

NASA Chief Says Critical For US To Win Space Race With China

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times,

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told members of the Air Force and Space Force that communist China will land on the moon, and it's imperative that the United States return to the lunar surface first.

"You are witnessing a very energized NASA, and we will need to be, as we are in the midst of a very real second space race," he said during his keynote address to the Air and Space Forces Association's annual conference on Sept. 15. "China will accomplish what the Soviets never could."

He told the Airmen and Guardians that communist China has demonstrated rocket reusability and developed a plan to land their astronauts - called taikonauts - with just two rocket launches, while NASA will need at least four to do the same. China also seeks to build a nuclear-powered moon base on the lunar south pole with the Russians.

"History has shown they could even be early, and we could easily be late," he said.

"Success in this endeavor will be measured in months, not years."

The China National Space Administration has announced plans to land taikonauts on the moon by 2030, while NASA aims to return its astronauts to the lunar surface before the end of 2028.

But Isaacman made it clear that this race is about far more than just bragging rights.

"Our allies and adversaries are watching," he said. "So is every nation deciding whose technology to buy, whose standards to adopt, whose security relationships to deepen, and whose vision of the future to follow, and, perhaps most importantly, our children will be watching, and the hopes and dreams of a generation inspired by these kinds of Apollo 11-like moments [are] really on the line."

One advantage he said that the United States did have over its communist adversaries was the booming commercial space industry pioneering reusable heavy-lift capabilities. But he added that NASA was not on a path to win this new space race until recently.

"I'm thankful for the reality that the Chinese have a plan to potentially, you know, to likely deny that critical area on the lunar south pole because it's given us the latitude to fix what is broken, to stop all the external impositions, the self-inflicted wounds that we had in our strategy, and bring extreme focus and mission," he said.

Some of those self-inflicted wounds included an inefficient launch cadence of both the Space Launch System moon rocket and robotic missions to the lunar surface, the decision to prioritize a lunar space station over a surface base, and a general lack of sufficient focus on winning the race.

Now, thanks to President Donald Trump's space policy, Isaacman said that moon rocket production was becoming standardized to increase launch capabilities, robotic missions will be flying to the moon at a cadence of almost once a month starting in 2027, and an unapologetic focus was put back on establishing a permanent human presence on the surface.

"Fortunately, we have a president who understands that great nations remain great by continuously undertaking and achieving the kind of big, bold endeavors that define American exceptionalism," he said. "These are no longer just stories in history books. This is what you've been waiting for, and this is our time.

"This is the golden age. We are going back. We are going back to stay, to build the base. We are doing it together to show the world once again what America is capable of achieving and inspire the next generation to pick up the fire of exploration and carry it farther than we ever could."

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 22:35

Stanford Scientists Create Mice With Half-Human Brains

Scientists at Stanford University have created mice whose brains are largely built from human cells, a shocking, first-of-its-kind experiment that is raising serious questions about how far researchers should be allowed to go.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, Stanford neuroscientist Sergiu Pașca said the development represents the most extensive integration of human neural tissue into an animal ever achieved.

The researchers started by genetically engineering mice so that most of the cells meant to form the cortex and hippocampus died off early in development. Those regions normally account for roughly half of a mouse's brain. The animals survived as other parts of the brain picked up the slack, though they were more forgetful and slightly clumsy.

Then scientists filled the empty space with human brain organoids, tiny clusters of neurons grown from reprogrammed human skin cells. Newborn mice received several injections totaling a few hundred thousand human cells.

Within two to three months, the human tissue had grown nearly fivefold, filling more than 90% of the vacant cortex and reaching about four million human neurons. The grafts hooked into the mouse's blood supply, fired electrical signals, and extended fibers all the way down to the spinal cord.

Researchers also spotted rare human cell types that have been difficult to grow in a lab, including neurons resembling von Economo cells, which are linked to social behavior.

Still, the researchers were quick to stress that these are merely mice, not "thinking like humans." The animals retain mouse senses, mouse bodies and the deeper structures of a mouse brain. In behavioral testing, they appeared largely like ordinary mice. In fact, the study claimed that the human tissue appeared to improve the mice's performance during maze tests than those left without most of their cortex.

"We've been trying really hard as a community to find therapeutic solutions for these conditions, but the reality is that in psychiatry and neurology we've been left behind [by] every single branch of medicine and we have fewer therapeutics than, again, every single branch of medicine," said Pașca in a statement obtained by The Guardian. "That could be because the human brain is very complex, but it's also because the human brain is inaccessible. To a large extent, our goal has been to make aspects of human brain development and function accessible for investigation."

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 22:10

Task Force Arrests 12 In $10 Million Daycare Fraud Scheme In San Diego

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

A dozen operators of allegedly fake daycare sites in Southern California were arrested last week on suspicion of stealing an estimated $10 million in funding, Justice Department officials announced on Sept. 15.

On Sept. 10, federal agents swarmed the San Diego-area homes listed as daycares by the operators and arrested the suspects, six males and six females.

Nine of the defendants entered the United States as refugees or asylum seekers from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, according to court records. Eleven have since become naturalized citizens, according to Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the Justice Department's National Fraud Enforcement Division.

"There were no children. There were no daycares. These daycares were fake and the taxpayers were paying for all of it," McDonald said during a news conference.

Each defendant was charged with one federal count of wire fraud in Operation Cradle to Grift. If convicted, they face a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison and a $500,000 fine.

Some defendants are also charged with money laundering, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which carries the same maximum prison term and fine.

"Fraud against these programs is an attack on vulnerable families, and law enforcement will continue to dismantle schemes that exploit them," McDonald said.

Criminal investigators followed a money train, uncovering more than $10 million in fraudulent billing, according to Chief Jarod Koopman of the IRS's criminal investigations division.

"This is not a victimless crime," Koopman said. "It deprived working parents of critical support and eroded trust in programs meant to protect the most vulnerable in our communities."

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sends federal funds to California to help low-income families pay for childcare. In San Diego County, childcare subsidy programs are administered by the county, the nonprofit Child Development Associates, and the YMCA.

When a family qualifies for funding, the childcare providers are paid directly after the provider submits monthly attendance records. The records are signed by the provider and the parents.

California laws prevent schools and childcare centers from collecting or sharing immigration information, allowing all parents to apply for the state's subsidized and free daycare assistance, which is paid in part by federal grant funding.

State law requires licensed childcare providers to be on site and ensure that children are supervised at all times. The 12 cases investigated in the San Diego area are unrelated, but they allegedly used the same formula, according to the DOJ.

The defendants allegedly were granted a childcare operating license by a California state agency and registered with the local programs.

Investigators accused the defendants of submitting fake attendance records and signing affidavits saying that they were accurate. Using the false records, the programs paid the operators with government funds, according to the allegations.

In one case, Abdulrahman Ayman Alawad, 25, a Syrian who lives in El Cajon, allegedly claimed that he provided childcare to 23 kids in March and 25 in April. He eventually received more than $300,000 in payments from San Diego County, the nonprofit Child Development Associates, and the YMCA in 2025, according to court records.

Alawad allegedly said he provided childcare every day of those two months. Investigators claimed that surveillance footage showed children entering or exiting the facility on just one day during those two months, which was the day a state inspector showed up for an unannounced visit.

Prosecutors also accused Alawad and several other defendants of submitting records claiming to have provided childcare at their homes when border crossing records showed that they were not in the United States.

Each defendant earned $538,000 to $1.2 million during their alleged schemes, which lasted from months to years, prosecutors said.

"Today is a bad day for home daycare fraud," said Adam Gordon, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California.

Besides Alawad, the defendants are Fosiya Mohamoud, 50, of El Cajon, from Somalia; Zetun Abdi, 43, of San Diego, from Somalia; Ikramullah Mohmmand, 25, of El Cajon, from Afghanistan; Khetam Haouash, 37, of El Cajon, from Syria; Khatera Hashimi, 39, of El Cajon, from Afghanistan; Mariam Khamis, 42, of San Diego, from Sudan; Mohamad Alawad, 29, of San Diego, from Syria; Mazin Alawad, 22, of San Diego, from Syria; Turkiya Alawad, 63, of San Diego, from Syria; Zaryab Daudzai, 25, of El Cajon, from Afghanistan; and Cezar Yaqoob, 36, of El Cajon, from Iraq.

The operation was the work of the DOJ's National Fraud Enforcement Division, a task force to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in federal benefit programs chaired by Vice President JD Vance.

It was unclear whether the defendants had legal representation. They could not be contacted for comment.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 21:45

Waste Of The Day: Medicare Paid For Wrong Organs

Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations,

Medicare spent an estimated $380 million acquiring human organs that were either transplanted into patients without Medicare or never transplanted at all, according to a new Department of Health and Human Services inspector general audit.

Key facts: Medicare reimburses hospitals for removing kidneys, hearts, lungs and other organs from donors after they die. Federal law says Medicare should only bear those costs when the organ is used in a Medicare-covered transplant.

But decades-old Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services guidance tells hospitals to assume that any organ they send to a transplant center will eventually go to a Medicare patient - without checking whether that actually happens.

Auditors sampled 180 cases of organs that hospitals reported as Medicare-eligible from 2017 to 2022. Fifty-five were not used in Medicare-covered transplants, even though Medicare paid $2.8 million for them.

Of those, 43 went to patients whose transplants were not covered by Medicare. Another 11 were discarded or used for research. One supposed organ donor was still alive.

Based on the sample, the inspector general estimated Medicare spent $379.9 million on organs not used for Medicare patients during the six-year period.

CMS already identified the loophole in 2021 and proposed changing its rules. It abandoned the change after hospitals warned they could lose revenue.

Auditors are not recommending that Medicare recover the $380 million because hospitals generally followed CMS guidance. They did recommend recovering another $154,210 from two hospitals that could not document five organs they claimed were Medicare-eligible.

Background: Medicare's organ-acquisition costs increased 160% over 12 years, from $1.3 billion in 2011 to $3.3 billion in 2023. The number of organs rose only 77%.

Summary: Medicare knew its rules were making taxpayers subsidize transplants for other patients. Five years later, the costly loophole is still on life support.

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

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 20:55

Lockheed Fast-Tracks Secretive AIM-260 Missile As Pentagon Pushes To Expand Production

Lockheed Martin has signed a framework agreement with the Pentagon to accelerate production and delivery of the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, bringing a closely guarded air-to-air weapons program further into public view. The announcement Thursday sets the foundation for a multiyear procurement contract, which remains subject to congressional approval.

The company says the missile offers greater range and effectiveness than existing air-to-air weapons and is compatible with aircraft including the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II. It did not disclose a production target, delivery schedule, contract value or precise performance specifications. The announcement establishes a commitment to expand production, not a publicly measurable timetable for doing so.

Reuters reported that the program is intended to address increasingly capable Chinese long-range air threats, including those associated with the J-20 fighter. Although the weapon has spent years under tight secrecy, Thursday was not its first public appearance: images emerged in May. The production push also comes amid broader pressure on American and allied missile inventories following the Iran conflict.

That context makes two separate questions important: what the missile can do, and how many can actually reach operational units. A performance advantage has limited practical value if manufacturers cannot supply enough weapons, replace expended stocks or support additional customers.

Australia is already preparing to become one of those customers.

Canberra announced on August 6 that it would invest almost A$736 million to acquire the AIM-260 through the U.S. government's foreign military sales system. The planned integration sequence starts with Australia's F/A-18F Super Hornets, followed by its F-35A fighters and EA-18G Growlers. Australia's government says it will become the first country outside the United States to operate the weapon.

The Australian announcement describes the acquisition as a way to extend engagement range and improve interoperability with American forces. It does not specify a missile quantity or delivery date, although Marles has said the weapon will not be available before 2033, and a December 2025 U.S. approval covered up to 450 missiles in a package valued at about $3.16 billion.

Lockheed's industrial expansion extends beyond the AIM-260.

In a separate announcement Thursday, the company said GM Defense had delivered an initial batch of housing components for the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor just 22 days after the companies signed a formal contract. That agreement was signed August 6, with the first components delivered August 28. These were components for a different missile program, not completed interceptors or AIM-260 deliveries.

Lockheed says it is investing between $8 billion and $9 billion to expand munitions production across more than 20 American sites. Planned construction and expansion would increase its munitions production and warehousing space by almost 50%, according to the company. The GM partnership uses commercial casting and machining capabilities to supplement the defense supply chain.

Taken together, the announcements point to an effort to address both weapons performance and manufacturing throughput. Bringing commercial suppliers into missile production could widen the industrial base, although a fast initial component delivery does not establish the sustained output of an entire weapons program.

The funding line is already moving: the administration's fiscal 2027 request seeks $2.9 billion for the missile, up from $894 million this year, Bloomberg reported in April.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 20:30

USC, UCLA Study: 2028 Olympics Could Uproot 1000s Of 'Unhoused' People

Authored by College Fix Staff via The College Fix,

Even if they're relocated it 'can still carry serious consequences'...

According to a recent study by researchers at USC and UCLA, Los Angeles' hosting of the 2028 Summer Olympics could result in the "displacement" of thousands of "unhoused" individuals.

As reported by the Daily Trojan, Los Angeles county estimates that security perimeters established by the U.S. Secret Service will lead to approximately 1,600 "unsheltered" people not having access to where they currently reside.

The study from the two southern California universities puts the figure closer to almost four times that number.

Benjamin Henwood, a USC social policy and health professor and director of its Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research, said "It's closer to 6,000 people. I don't know how [county officials] came up with their numbers, so they might be looking at something a little different or more specific."

Henwood also is a curator at Home 2028, an "independent research hub" which studies how the homeless will be affected by the Olympics, according to the Trojan.

During the last Summer Olympics held in the city (1984), law enforcement utilized "large-scale and aggressive sweeps" to get the homeless away from "highly visible tourist areas."

From the article:

LA28, the independent nonprofit organization responsible for planning and delivering the Games, is deferring to city officials for managing the relocation. Under an agreement with the city council, LA28 is expected to fund game-related services that go above "normal and customary."

County officials said they intend to offer at least temporary housing for the unhoused population and have applied for nearly $93 million from the state to support the process. A portion of these funds would also be directed toward the county's Pathway Home model, which moves people into interim housing.

Beyond the final headcount, a critical question lies in exactly how these individuals will be cleared from the secured areas.

Henwood said even if the homeless are relocated it "can still carry serious consequences" such as "poor health outcomes."

USC Public Policy and Management professor David Brady, who researches poverty, social policy, racial inequality, and immigration according to his faculty page, said the upcoming Olympics "should not be the only reason the city invests in and provides housing for unhoused residents."

"If we can [provide housing] during COVID, or we [are hoping to] do it during the Olympics, why can't we do it otherwise?" Brady said. "We have the resources to do it otherwise. And so I would argue we should."

Henwood added "We all know that there's a homelessness crisis [...] it's like, well, what is the plan in general?"

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 20:05

Blue States With Strong Teachers' Unions Are Terrible At Literacy Reforms

A 2026 analysis from the Progressive Policy Institute found a strong negative correlation between the political power of state teachers' unions and states' adoption of evidence-based early literacy policies. PPI Director of Education Policy Rachel Canter conducted the analysis, comparing union-strength rankings from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute against literacy-policy data from the ExcelinEd education advocacy group. At least eight of the ten states with the worst student literacy scores lean Democratic and have politically powerful teachers' unions. Only five of the worst ten are Republican, and one is a swing state.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Canter explained that PPI sorts states by which party holds the legislature and the governor's mansion, and that the gap tracks union power more closely than it tracks party.

The stronger the teachers unions, the fewer early literacy reforms states have adopted.

Blue states average just 9 of 18 key literacy policies, compared with 13.5 in red and purple states.

Children’s ability to read should come BEFORE union power. pic.twitter.com/mSLhEahRrY

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) September 14, 2026

Fordham's June ranking put California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey among the strongest union states in the country, while Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arkansas ended up near the bottom. When you cross-reference this list with ExcelinEd's literacy tracker, the negative correlation becomes clear.

Partisanship alone cannot account for this situation; Wyoming and South Dakota, led by the Republican Party and with weak unions, still score poorly on literacy policy. Of the about half of states controlled by Republicans, only Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee developed comprehensive literacy policies and stayed committed long enough to see results.

Canter spent years in Mississippi, a state that ranked among the nation's worst performers for middle and elementary test scores in 2013 and by 2024 had climbed to a tie for seventh in fourth-grade reading and 13th in math. "We found a strong, negative correlation between the two - the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted," Canter said.

Mississippi turned things around by enacting the Literacy Based Promotion Act in 2013. This piece of legislation required third graders scoring at the lowest reading level to repeat the grade. The law mandated extra training and coaching for teachers at the state's lowest-performing elementary schools, required every school to screen kindergartners through third graders for reading difficulty three times a year, and required immediate parent notification when a child fell below benchmark.

The approach is based on the science of reading. This instructional framework centers on phonics, systematic letter-sound instruction, background knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension, and traces back to the National Reading Panel's 2000 report.

Mississippi fourth-graders posted the country's largest gains since 2013, tying for seventh in reading and landing 13th in math among all states by 2024. That happened even as national literacy trends moved in the opposite direction. Fourth-grade reading scores fell back to roughly their 2000 level. Math scores recovered only partially from a 2022 low and remain below the highs the country set more than a decade earlier. Middle and high school reading and math results in 2024 either matched or fell below their lowest marks of the century, and the most recent PISA results showed American 15-year-olds still well under pre-pandemic highs, tied at their record low.

Despite the negative correlation between powerful teachers' unions and literacy, there is hope to turn things around nationwide. In New Mexico, for example, lawmakers passed literacy legislation unanimously over the objections of teachers' unions, moving state policy closer to Mississippi's model. The reforms addressed teacher licensure, instructional coaching, and curriculum. New Mexico's unions eventually withdrew their opposition.

Maryland followed suit in 2024, adopting a policy mirroring Mississippi's. The state board did, however, carve out a compromise after pushback from its teachers' association, allowing parents to opt a child out of repeating third grade if the child completes a state-approved reading-intervention program, an alternative that takes effect next year with results still unknown.

Even the deep blue state of Massachusetts, which has the nation's third-strongest teachers' union, is following Mississippi's footsteps. In June, Gov. Maura Healey signed legislation strengthening teacher training, K-3 curriculum requirements, screening, and parent notification, handing the state education department real enforcement authority. The bill passed both chambers unanimously, despite opposition and pressure from teachers' unions.

Mary Tamer of Mass Potential, who led the Mass Reads Coalition, credited a coalition of parents and researchers, weak post-pandemic reading scores, and mounting skepticism of union arguments for unrestricted classroom autonomy. Three former Massachusetts Teachers of the Year backed the bill over their own union's objections. "They were incredibly brave to speak up against union leadership on this issue," Tamer said.

Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Mexico prove that Mississippi's turnaround travels wherever the political will exists to put students first. "The question is whether policymakers, regardless of party alignment, have the courage to risk taking heat on behalf of our children's future," Canter wrote.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 19:40

USDA Says Crackdown On SNAP Fraud Prevented $5.8 Billion In Taxpayer Losses

Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times,

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced nearly $6 billion in total savings tied to efforts to eliminate fraud in the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

A 'We Accept Food Stamps' sign hangs in the window of a grocery store in Miami, Fla., on October 31, 2025. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Rollins outlined the wins in a Sept. 15 post to X, saying that $5.8 billion in taxpayer losses have been prevented by the anti-fraud initiatives implemented during President Donald Trump's second term.

This was done through the shutdown of nearly 1,840 illegal SNAP devices that processed Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and the disqualification of 5,335 fraudulent retailers.

"Those who defraud SNAP are stealing from taxpayers and taking resources away from Americans who genuinely need assistance," Rollins said. "We have zero tolerance for this abuse, and we will continue pursuing bad actors and protecting the integrity of the program."

There are several ways an ineligible person can be counted in SNAP, including illegal immigrants being certified in error or by fraud, and deceased household members continuing to receive benefits.

This comes just over three months after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report in early June about their discovery that 185,986 deceased people in 29 states were receiving food stamps.

Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 directing federal agencies to obtain lawful and "unfettered access" to data from federally-funded programs such as SNAP to facilitate an audit of government spending.

The SNAP integrity team was created in May 2025 to review state SNAP data against federal databases to identify potential fraud.

The maximum monthly food assistance offered through SNAP is set for its annual increase in line with the cost-of-living adjustment in October.

The benefit ceiling for a family of four will reach $1,023 for most of the nation, which is an increase from the current maximum of $994. Total benefits vary based on family size and income. In May 2026, the average monthly benefit received by U.S. households was $344.51.

The overall cost of the monthly SNAP benefits have fallen in recent years, from $13.4 billion in October 2022 to $6.8 billion in May 2026, largely because pandemic emergency allotments largely ended in 2023 and fewer people on the program.

Separate state cost-sharing penalties for high payment-error rates, enacted by the Republican-led Congress in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, are scheduled to begin in October 2027. More than 40 states and territories recorded SNAP payment-error rates above 6 percent in fiscal year 2025, the level that triggers the penalty.

Tom Gantert contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 19:15

An Eerily Quiet Summer Of No Riots. Is Bessent's NGO Crackdown Working?

As summer enters its final days, attention turns to why early-year anti-ICE protests and riots in Minneapolis did not develop into a sustained nationwide wave of unrest comparable to the 2020 BLM riots. Those demonstrations created a potential flashpoint, but protests failed to spread like wildfire across left-wing-controlled cities - in what could have only been a 2020 redux of the "Summer of Love" Marxist revolution.

Operation Metro Surge deployed thousands of ICE/CBP and federal officers to the Twin Cities starting in late 2025. Confrontation began as left-wing groups used activists to mount pressure campaigns against federal officers pursuing illegal-alien criminals. This resulted in two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens: Renee Nicole Macklin Good on 7 January and Alex Pretti on 24 January. 

What immediately followed were protests/riots, and left-wing groups certainly had their "George Floyd" catalyst for full mobilization, with protest infrastructure moved into the region. But by spring and into summer, whatever spark that movement had completely faded into the abyss. 

Not even Neville Roy Singham, the Shanghai-based Marxist tech financier who funds U.S. NGOs and works with left-wing activists such as CodePink and the ANSWER Coalition, could fire up any meaningful protests against President Trump's foreign-policy decisions that directly impact Beijing, whether on Venezuela, Cuba, and/or the Strait of Hormuz.

What we do know is that a multi-agency federal task force, with the State Department and Treasury at the core, has launched investigations into the nonprofit world and could very soon strip tax-exempt status from George Soros' far-left Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, some of which are responsible for funding protests and riots, or, as in SPLC's case, funding the opposition.

The New York Post recently reported that Treasury officials are drafting a framework to audit NGOs suspected of exploiting their 501(c)(3) status for political activity, illegal conduct, or support of radical groups, which has only put left-wing billionaire foundations and donor-advised funds on notice. 

The question is whether the federal government's war on the radical left and foreign subversion network that seeks to sow chaos has shaken that protest-industrial complex to its core. A source told the NYPost that officials were "like a dog with a bone" and reckoned that many NGOs and their donor bases could be "on borrowed time."

The absence of summer riots by the radical left is more concerning because these groups are certainly retooling their attachments to popular movements. Just wait - the next one could be right around the corner.

Let's also add that the lack of USAID funding could certainly be another driver. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 18:50

DOJ Sues San Jose, Alleging $1,600 Firearm Fee Is Unconstitutional

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the City of San Jose, California, alleging that its nearly $1,600 firearm licensing fee infringes the Second Amendment right to carry firearms for self-defense. The fee has risen by about $300 over three fiscal years to $1,591.

"San Jose is a national outlier when it comes to burdening the exercise of fundamental rights. Its fees are abusive and violate the Second Amendment," the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in the Sept. 16 lawsuit.

The DOJ asked the court to issue permanent injunctive relief that would prevent defendants from imposing any "abusive licensing fees." The San Jose Police Department is also a defendant in the case.

"The City's law enforcement officers are charged with enforcing its abusive licensing scheme and are doing so. Such law enforcement misconduct is unlawful," the DOJ added.

In Washington, the nation's capital, a concealed carry license costs $75, while in New York, a handgun license costs $340. In Boston, the nonrenewable processing fee for a license to carry is $100. And in Philadelphia, a new license to carry firearms costs only $20.

Compared with other California locations, such as San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Clara, and Alameda County, San Jose's fees are still high, the DOJ said in the complaint.

The department said in the lawsuit that a fee designed to make it impossible for anyone, except the wealthiest, to exercise their constitutional rights "is the very epitome of abusive."

The DOJ cited a previous Supreme Court case in which the court observed that exorbitant fees may "deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry."

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement that all law-abiding Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense.

"This right is not a luxury reserved for a privileged few, but a fundamental element of our republic," she said. "You don't need a law degree to recognize that charging a fee several times higher than the cost of the firearm itself is illogical, and an unconstitutional attempt to impede Americans' Second Amendment rights."

The Epoch Times reached out to the City of San Jose and the San Jose Police Department for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

In January 2025, San Jose began requiring resident gun owners to carry liability insurance and pay an annual nonprofit fee, the first of its kind in the country.

The lawsuit comes as an appeals court ruled on Sept. 1 that machine guns and suppressors do not come under Second Amendment protections.

The three-judge panel in the case said that machine guns are not commonly used for self-defense purposes and that suppressors cannot be classified as firearms since they are unnecessary for a gun to properly function.

The Firearms Policy Coalition criticized that decision, calling it "horrifically flawed."

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives indicated in July that it would further roll back gun regulations and propose minimizing fingerprinting requirements when applying for certain firearms.

Under the proposed rule, individuals will need to submit one fingerprint card instead of the current requirement of two. In addition, they can verify their identity with a photo ID instead of submitting a passport-style photo.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 18:25

Judge Refers Soros-Backed Philly DA For Criminal Probe

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A federal judge has referred George Soros-backed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner to the U.S. Attorney's Office for a possible criminal investigation, after finding that the city's top prosecutor and a senior deputy may have tried to mislead a court, pressure staff into a false story, and protect their own reputations while working to undo a murder conviction.

U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond, a George W. Bush appointee, removed Krasner and Conviction Integrity Unit chief Matthew Stiegler from the case and sent the matter to federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

No charges have been filed. The referral itself is still a thunderclap: a sitting big-city DA, installed with Soros money and celebrated as a "reformer," now sits under a judge's finding that the conduct may amount to perjury, false statements, obstruction of justice and conspiracy.

? BOMBSHELL: A judge has formally referred George Soros-linked left-wing Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner for a DOJ CRIMINAL PROBE

Krasner allegedly pushed prosecutors to LIE and make FALSE STATEMENTS, and might involve criminal conspiracy charges ?

There was support to... pic.twitter.com/CunHqvg01g

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 16, 2026

Dennis Johnson was convicted in 2009 of second-degree murder in the killing of Kenyatta Smith during a botched robbery two years earlier. Two eyewitnesses identified him as the shooter.

In November 2010 he was sentenced to life. For years the Philadelphia DA's office opposed his post-conviction bids. After Krasner took office, that opposition collapsed. In 2022 the office supported a petition for Johnson's release, arguing ineffective assistance of counsel.

Judge Diamond found the office had gone hunting for reasons to "concede" the case. Stiegler assigned the file to then-Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Mason, a lawyer with a patent-and-trademark background and, the judge wrote, "no experience as a criminal litigator."

Stiegler had already decided to seek Johnson's release after consulting Johnson's new lawyer and the local Innocence Project.

Diamond wrote that Stiegler "did not instruct Mason to do any independent investigation because it had already been done by Johnson's counsel," and that handing the file to an inexperienced prosecutor made it "more likely that she would not question his actions or order."

In June 2026 the office moved to withdraw the 2022 petition because of "material misstatements." Mason had resigned days earlier. In her resignation letter she said Stiegler had "used me to further his personal agenda of conceding in federal habeas cases regardless of the merits" and that she had "been asked to fall on my sword."

What followed, according to testimony Diamond credited, was not a cleanup. It was a scramble to protect the office.

On the same day the withdrawal motion went in, Stiegler blamed Mason, telling a colleague she "had purposefully inserted the false facts" and that "this was one hundred percent her fault, zero percent his fault."

Krasner, Diamond found, told line prosecutors that Stiegler had given him "this really good idea": go through Mason's other cases, find mistakes, "say that this was a pattern by her, and then file something with the Court saying that."

When those prosecutors balked and suggested sending the mess to the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, Krasner refused.

One of them testified he said "we can't send it to OAG because essentially they're all evil" and "we have to have somebody in the room, in the courtroom to protect the office."

Diamond wrote that Krasner later referred to state lawyers as "Nazis," and threatened a prosecutor with unspecified "consequences" if the court was told about Stiegler's conflict: a "reputational interest in not doing a full investigation."

Diamond's memorandum is blunt. The evidence, he wrote, was "tantamount to a prima facie showing" of conduct that could constitute "false statements, false declarations under oath, perjury, obstruction of justice and conspiracy."

He found that Krasner and Stiegler "worked together to try to convince the Four to urge the Court to accept a false narrative," adding: "This might amount to criminal conspiracy."

"I have thus reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia's highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law," Diamond wrote. "In these circumstances, with the issuance of this Memorandum, I refer the DAO, Mr. Krasner, and Stiegler to this District's United States Attorney's Office for investigation and other appropriate action."

Krasner's reply was the expected shrug. "I respectfully and vigorously disagree with the court's findings of fact and conclusions of law," he said. "I look forward to appealing to the higher court as soon as the law allows. This remains a pending matter, which limits for now my and my office's ability to respond in the media."

Johnson's bid for release is now in limbo. Diamond kept the DA's office on the case but threw Krasner and Stiegler off it. The man convicted of killing Kenyatta Smith is still waiting to see whether Philadelphia's "conviction integrity" machine can finish what it started.

Krasner did not arrive in that office by accident. In 2017, George Soros poured nearly $1.7 million into the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC backing him - more than five times what Krasner spent himself, and a huge share of all spending in a crowded Democratic primary.

Soros-linked groups later put more than a million more behind his re-election. A career defense lawyer who had sued the Philadelphia Police Department dozens of times was sold to voters as the future of "justice." Philadelphia then set homicide records. In 2021 the city logged more than 550 murders, the worst on modern books, and posted the highest per-capita homicide rate among America's ten largest cities.

That is the Soros prosecutor project in miniature. Through Justice & Public Safety PACs and related vehicles, the network has spent tens of millions electing DAs who treat incarceration as the enemy and repeat offenders as clients.

Los Angeles got George Gascón. Manhattan got Alvin Bragg. Chicago got Kim Foxx. Fairfax County, Virginia, got Steve Descano. The pitch is always the same: fewer prosecutions, weaker charges, early releases, "equity." The body count is always someone else's problem.

The Descano file is the nightmare version. In 2022 his office let Ronnie Reel, who had been indicted on sodomy and aggravated sexual battery for sexually abusing an 11-year-old, plead down to misdemeanor assault and battery.

Reel walked after time served. Descano's campaign had taken more than $600,000 from the Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC. In May 2026, Reel was last seen running off with missing 17-year-old Autumn Van Zandt. That is not a theoretical critique of "reform." That is a child-sex offender back on the street because a Soros DA decided accountability was optional.

Voters have already started sending some of these prosecutors packing. A Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund tally found that of 75 Soros-linked prosecutors identified since 2022, dozens have left office or been replaced.

Of 25 who were on the 2024 ballot, 12 were beaten or recalled. The machine is still spending. Fox News reported last summer that Democracy PAC, now run by Alex Soros, had pumped roughly $1.7 million back into Justice & Public Safety PAC arms between March 2025 and April 2026. The product has not changed. Only the invoice has.

In August 2025, President Trump called for George Soros and his son Alex to face anti-corruption charges under the RICO statute over support for violent protests "and much more, all throughout the United States." "Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our country," Trump wrote. "We're not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America any more, never giving it so much as a chance to breathe and be free."

Elon Musk's reply was short: "It's high time action was taken against Soros directly."

A month later, reporting held that a senior Justice Department official had directed at least six U.S. attorneys' offices to prepare investigative plans aimed at the Open Society Foundations.

That push sat on top of a Capital Research Center report documenting large OSF grants to groups critics describe as aligned with pro-terror networks, and on top of years of Soros cash into the prosecutor pipeline that produced Krasner, Descano and the rest.

Dark-money NGOs that spent a decade lecturing America about "democracy" are discovering that elections, and grand juries, can run in both directions.

Diamond's memo represents a federal judge stating, on the record, that Philadelphia's highest law-enforcement official may have broken the law while trying to spring a convicted murderer and then lean on his own prosecutors to sell the court a lie.

That is the logical end of a project that treated DAs as social-justice activists with subpoena power.

Soros bought the offices. The cities paid in homicides, robberies and children left in the path of men who should never have been free.

If the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia does his job, one of the original exhibit A's in that experiment may finally face the system he spent years dismantling.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 17:40

Pakistan's Defense Chief Says Time Has Come To Implement Mecca Pact

The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement was signed on August 7, 2026 - coming amid the Iran war and fight for control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is what made the timing of an agreement modeled on NATO's Article 5 'collective defense' between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey so curious. It immediately begged the question, will Riyadh's Mecca pact allies intervene on its behalf? ...Given the kingdom's soil has been attacked by Iranians, Houthis, and even Iraqi paramilitaries of late

Riyadh has been generally calling for more urgent support from its allies, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even recently appealing for President Trump to help militarily in Yemen, but the White House appears to have shrugged it off, not wanting to escalate the Iran conflict and Hormuz crisis into a full regional war and operation.

Has the time come for Pakistan to step up further in support of its Saudi ally? Pakistan's Defense Minister Khawaja Asif thinks so. 

Defense Minister Khawaja Asif

During an interview with Pakistani TV channel Geo News, Asif affirmed that his country remains committed to defending the kingdom, also calling it a duty to protect Islam's holy sites. 

"The Mecca agreement applies to us as well, and we will fulfill our duty," Asif said.

"If there is an attack on Mecca, there is no need for an agreement to protect it," he said.

Al Jazeera on Thursday cited the Pakistani defense chief as indicating that "the time has come to implement the Mecca agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkiye due to recent Houthi attacks." He also described that Islamabad is pressuring Tehran regarding Houthi actions.

Just two days ago, Saudi Arabia accused the Iran-backed Houthi rebels of targeting Mecca with a one-way attack drone. It was said to be headed "toward" the Islamic holy city from Yemen, which however the Houthi military spokesman vehemently denied.

The kingdom called it a 'red line' and sought to garner support and sympathy from external countries. "The security of the Two Holy Mosques and the pilgrims is a red line, and the Joint Forces Command of the coalition will not hesitate to take the necessary and deterrent measures against the Terrorist Houthi Militia," the kingdom said. 

As for Pakistan's Asif, he was cited further as saying, "I don’t think Iran as a state will open another front" - and reiterated Pakistan's commitment to preventing the conflict from expanding. Also per Newsquawk:

• Pakistani Army Chief reportedly urged Iran to convince the Yemeni Houthis to not attack Saudi Arabian energy facilities, according to Kan's Kais
• Iranian Foreign Ministry says the attack on holy sites, especially Mecca, is a condemned act, Al Arabiya reports

🇾🇪🇸🇦 Ansarallah says it struck Saudi Aramco, targeted an airbase

Yemen’s Ansarallah said Wednesday that its forces launched dozens of ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco facilities in Yanbu, claiming “direct and precise hits” that caused major fires and widespread… https://t.co/EioU3xUReV

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) September 16, 2026

Even before the Mecca accords were signed, Islamabad and Riyadh had deep defense cooperation. For example, last spring Pakistan had alreadly deployed some 8,000 troops, a ​squadron of fighter jets, and an air defense system to Saudi Arabia - as we previously highlighted.

Turkey is said to be preparing support to its Saudi ally, but will likely seek to walk a fine line, not wanting to get enmeshed in Yemen directly, also fearing the safety of its Red Sea transit.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 17:20

189 Children Found, Over 12,000 Arrested In Memphis Task Force Operations

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

A law enforcement initiative in Memphis, Tennessee, has resulted in 189 missing children being found and the arrest of 12,747 individuals over the past year, with overall crime expected to hit a 25-year low, the White House said on Tuesday.

Members of the U.S. Army National Guard listen as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a Memphis Safe Task Force roundtable in Memphis, Tenn., on March 23, 2026. Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Arrests made by the Memphis Safe Task Force, a multi-agency initiative established by presidential memorandum in September 2025, include 1,408 known gang members, as well as 1,363 people apprehended for narcotics offenses, 1,276 for firearms violations, 131 for homicide, and 125 for sex offenses, the White House said on the task force's first anniversary.

One of the individuals arrested through the task force's efforts is a 19-year-old who was indicted on May 24 for child-related sex crime charges, including raping a minor, according to a June 10 statement from the U.S. Marshals Service. In January, the Marshals Service also announced the recovery of two siblings and a toddler.

Overall crime in Memphis has declined nearly 36 percent from last year, with significant downturns across several crime categories, including motor vehicle theft, down 57 percent; shoplifting, down 44 percent; robberies, 42 percent; murders, 36 percent; sexual assaults, 28 percent; and aggravated assaults, 26 percent, the White House said.

The presidential memorandum signed by President Donald Trump last year said Memphis was suffering from "tremendous levels of violent crime."

The task force's objectives include ending "street and violent crime in Memphis" through measures such as hypervigilant policing, large-scale saturation of certain neighborhoods with law enforcement personnel, and aggressive prosecution, according to the memorandum.

The White House said in a Sept. 15 post on X that the task force's actions over the past year have been a resounding success.

Accusations of Harassment

Four Memphis residents filed a lawsuit against various Trump administration officials on May 13, accusing task force agents of engaging in a "startling pattern of retaliation, intimidation, and harassment" against them.

The plaintiffs had sought to gather information about the task force's activities on the streets, in line with First Amendment rights, according to the lawsuit.

Task force agents issued verbal threats, engaged in physical intimidation, shone lights at cameras and phones to obscure filming of their public activities, photographed plaintiffs' faces and license plate numbers, and used excessive force against a plaintiff, the plaintiffs alleged in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs claimed they faced retaliation and harassment while engaging in "constitutionally protected information-gathering and recording activities."

In a July 6 filing opposing the residents' request for a preliminary injunction, the federal defendants criticized the plaintiffs' claims, arguing that they are unlikely to prevail on their First Amendment claims.

"Plaintiffs' own declarations evidence that their so-called 'observations' frequently involve efforts to interfere with and impede law-enforcement operations, including repeatedly disregarding orders, refusing multiple orders to step back from established perimeters, stalking law enforcement agents in their vehicles, and one Plaintiff even resisting arrest while calling for bystander interference with her arrest," federal government attorneys wrote.

Interfering with and obstructing law enforcement operations is not protected speech, they said in the filing, adding that the agents' enforcement actions do not impede an ordinary person from engaging in free speech.

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 17:00

From Climate Doom To AI Apocalypse: New Crisis, Same Fear Playbook

As we pointed out last week, the narrative around AI as an existential threat to humanity merely seems like a coordinated information operation that pairs perfectly with resurrecting a stalled bipartisan AI safety bill on Capitol Hill.

The flurry of doomerist headlines from AI bosses warning of humanity's end if AI is not regulated reminds us of a similar information operation around climate change: humanity was nearing its end if the West didn't buy more solar panels from China, tax the working class into submission, eliminate stable fossil fuel power generation from the grid, ban Taylor Swift's private jet, stop cows from farting and, of course, our favorite, ban gas stoves. 

Yet here we are today. The climate crisis fearmongering narrative has run its course in corporate media, and Democrats looted taxpayers through the Inflation Reduction Act to fund their climate pet projects.

The narrative timeline, as reflected in Bloomberg's story count, shows that "climate crisis" has taken a backseat in the news cycle, and now it's all about "AI safety" to stop these bots from ending humanity. Again, this appears to be a psychological operation to push stalled AI safety policy on Capitol Hill, just as the climate crisis narrative did with the failed AoC's failed Green New Deal. 

Meanwhile, fearmonger-in-chief Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei handpicked what the New York Post describes as "super-woke globalists to save us from an AI apocalypse" for a safety board through a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, which would maintain "employee-like access" to oversee safety efforts.

Who controls METR?

"It's a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronouns, and promote 'Effective Altruism,' that believe all the world's problems can be solved with technology," the New York Post noted.

Sure... 

He explicitly told @SpecialReport that he didn’t work with any third parties to set up his resignation announcement.

Now he says that his “friends who work in policy” hooked him up with the WSJ exclusive. pic.twitter.com/U1Gndhc1u3 https://t.co/V3bYTm9n08

— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) September 15, 2026

More or less, the fearmongering, just like the climate crisis headlines, appears as a coordinated effort to push a stalled bipartisan bill over the finish line, while Dario wants a group of left-wing globalists who use genderless pronouns to save us from a hyped-up AI apocalypse. The last time the left did this with climate, it didn't work out so well for the country.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:40

Dragged Off Her Own Porch: York College Students Beaten After Five 911 Calls - And A National Pattern Of Youth Street Mobs

On the 300 block of West Jackson Street in York, Pennsylvania, a group of York College students sat on their off-campus porch eating tacos last Friday night. They had already called 911 over illegal street racing that was underway. A group of mostly black teens - "townies" the students called them - grew into a pack. After a car smashed into a parked vehicle near a firehouse, the crowd migrated onto the students' grass, when the young white women asked them to get off the property.

The mob then rushed the porch.

Video obtained by FOX43 shows a blonde student being dragged and beaten. Witnesses told WGAL that 8 to 12 girls grabbed one student by the hair, punched and kicked her, and dragged her from the porch into the street. In a written account provided to FOX43, a second student described being ripped off the porch by her hair, dragged to a stop sign, and jumped by roughly a dozen people at once while a larger crowd of perhaps 25 to 30 encircled her and recorded it.

A White York College student was dragged off her own porch by her hair, beaten unconscious twice at a stop sign, while a crowd filmed it.

They called 911 five times. Cops showed up after it was over.

If the races were reversed, this would be the only story in America.…

— Grant Godwin (@the_typical_lib) September 15, 2026

She blacked out twice - once from a kick to the ribs, once from a blow to the back of the head. She was wearing a tube top and spent part of the assault holding it up. Cameras were on her the whole time. Mace was sprayed on the porch. A roommate already in a knee brace from a sports injury was among those battered. Students say they called 911 four times before the first punch and five times before officers arrived.

"We called the cops four times before anything even happened to us," one student told FOX43. After the first punch, "all these girls started to rush us... I turn and see my friend get dragged by her hair down our porch steps and disappear."

A similar attack, they say, happened on the same block two weeks earlier. A student told people to get off her porch; someone ripped out her hair. One person was arrested then. The students believe it is the same group of non-students. "The cops haven't done anything to protect us, and campus safety hasn't done anything," one said. "It feels like they're scared to get involved with these people, but then it puts us at risk when they're doing nothing."

York City Police confirmed they are investigating the September 11 incident and ongoing disorderly-conduct complaints in the area. Captain Daniel Lentz later explained the delay: officers were tied up with a SWAT response to a shots-fired, barricaded-suspect call on the other side of the city. Campus safety was asked to respond until city officers could get there. Police have identified one suspect; as of Tuesday, no arrests had been announced in the latest beating.

York College's statement was careful. The 300 block is off-campus property the college does not own. It falls outside Campus Safety's jurisdiction. City police have the case. Leadership is "in active discussions" with city officials. Affected students may relocate back into campus housing. Student safety, the college said, is "always the highest priority."

A parent of one of the students was less diplomatic. Campus safety has previously cited students on that street for underage drinking - despite the jurisdictional claim. "It's not just the girls who got assaulted; it is everybody on Jackson Street," the father said. "We're not talking about five girls... we're talking about hundreds of students." Property manager Anthony Berrios, who has worked the block for more than a decade, told WGAL the locals who come to party are "getting out of control" and that landlords cannot fix it. "That would be the police department."

Students described gatherings of 100 to 200 people on the block, cans thrown, doors banged, street racing. The fight followed that chaos. Local news described the attackers as unaffiliated non-students and, specifically, groups of girls. Video of the assault circulated widely; a post laying out the students' account and the delayed response went viral. 

The students' complaint is not abstract: they say the same group keeps coming, the same porch keeps getting stormed, and the institutions with badges treat it as someone else's problem until the beating is already over.

Teen takeovers, flash crowds, and the new street mob

Over the last several years - and with particular intensity in 2025 and 2026 - large groups of teenagers and young adults have used social media to converge on downtowns, beaches, parks, and residential blocks. The gatherings are marketed as parties or "trends." They frequently become street takeovers: racing, burnouts, dancing on cars, fights, phones out, and, too often, someone on the ground getting kicked while the circle films.

Chicago has lived with the pattern for more than a decade. CWB Chicago has tracked flash mobs, lakefront swarms, Loop chaos, and "teen trends" through multiple mayors. This year alone produced takeovers in the Loop, Hyde Park, and at beaches. In March, hundreds of teens flooded the Loop during spring break; fights broke out, cars were jumped on, at least one person was beaten unconscious, juveniles were arrested, and the city enforced curfew. In May, a Near West Side after-prom gathering at Roosevelt and Loomis drew hundreds.

Yesterday, CPD responded to two teen takeovers happening at the same time — one at North Avenue Beach and another at 57th Street Beach.

This was the scene at North Avenue and Clark, where fights were breaking out and chaos erupted in the streets. At one point, a group tried to… pic.twitter.com/5JPfEFT8yy

— Goofies Of Chicago (@Chicago_Goofies) May 26, 2026

Officers trying to clear the intersection were struck by a car; five were injured. The 18-year-old driver, Rashad Johnson, was charged with multiple counts of attempted murder and weapons offenses. A gun was found in the vehicle. Thirteen people were arrested in connection with the night. About 30 minutes after the crash, a 19-year-old man was shot in the 1100 block of West Roosevelt; police did not say whether it was related.

“Teen takeover” in Chicago’s downtown Loop district on Wednesday night resulted in at least eight people arrested and dozens of curfew violations.

Hundreds of people ran chaotically around the streets, attacking random people. At least one teen was beaten unconscious and… pic.twitter.com/3i53WjmicM

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) March 26, 2026

Memorial Day in Hyde Park produced another swarm: teens jumping on cars, twerking on vehicles and a bus, Lake Shore Drive closed, then gunfire that wounded three, an 18-year-old and two 19-year-olds. Police made 53 arrests that night, charged 13 people with felonies, and recovered nine weapons. Residents described hundreds running the streets after dark. Analyses of the broader phenomenon have appeared in City Journal and The Atlantic. City officials prefer the phrase "large groups." Residents and officers experience stampedes, property damage, and periodic shootings.

Philadelphia saw hundreds of teens pack Dilworth Park and Center City around Labor Day. Videos showed fights, officers overwhelmed, a robbery arrest, and a 17-year-old with a gun. After one night of running battles near City Hall, FOX 29 counted 10 teens arrested, two of them for robbery and an underage firearm; NBC10 Philadelphia's tally of the same night was three arrests and seven citations.

Things got absolutely out of control in center city last night.

The Philadelphia police responded to dozens of calls for fights and unruly crowds during a “teen takeover”

Multiple injuries and arrests were observed during the night and some witnesses reported hearing gunshots. pic.twitter.com/m3Ie2NKDUE

— PhillyCrimeUpdate (@PhillyCrimeUpd) September 7, 2026

The same template appears in other cities: street takeovers with motorcycles and cars in Charlotte, Clearwater, Cincinnati, and Naperville, as Fox News compiled at the start of summer; beach and mall flash crowds; smash-and-grab lineages that never fully disappeared. The common mechanics are cheap phones, group chats, weak curfew enforcement, and a calculation that a crowd is its own alibi. And of course, everyone's filming. The York student who blacked out said she was encircled and recorded while being punched and kicked from every angle. That is the same instinct visible when a downtown intersection fills and someone ends up under a pile of feet.

Institutions answer in a familiar register. Police are short-staffed or already on a shooting. Colleges declare the sidewalk outside their fence someone else's jurisdiction - until they need to cite their own students for beer. City halls announce "discussions," extra patrols after the fact, and housing offers for those who want to retreat behind a gate. Suspects, when identified, are often juveniles. Charges, when filed, are frequently misdemeanors. The next weekend, the crowd forms again.

The York students were not looking for a culture war. They asked people to leave their lawn. They called the police, repeatedly, before the first punch. What they got was a hair-drag down the steps, a beating at a stop sign, mace on the porch, and a press statement that the property is not owned by the college.

"It feels like they're scared to get involved with these people," one of them said.

Police in York asked for tips at yorkcitypolice.com. The students on West Jackson Street asked for something simpler: that someone show up before the next porch gets rushed.

* * * Click here

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:25

What If AGI Is Already Here, And It's Made Of... Children?

Authored by Pascio (@IAmPascio) via X (and blog is here),

The superintelligence, the singularity, AGI, whatever you call it, the one we're so scared of is, ironically, also the one we most likely won't see coming.

This essay is going to probably be a pretty hot take, but the idea I'm about to share with you is going to blow your mind.

Stick with me as we jump into the rabbit hole together.

Before we do, let me back what I'm about to share up with current news that are floating around. Like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying an "AI swarm could take over the entire internet".

I think you have an idea what I'm hinting at when I say "children".

Right? RIGHT?!?!?

BREAKING: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says "we must slow down" AI development

Within 6-12 months, he warns a misaligned AI swarm could take over "the entire internet" through a botnet

and cause hundreds of billions in damage

even people building AI think it's moving too fast

— WallStreetBets (@wallstreetbets) September 12, 2026

In 1936, a famous British math guy named Alan Turing wrote a pretty important paper about a hypothetical machine that could simulate any other machine. In that paper, he was trying to answer a question about logic. what I

What we've come to know as "the computer" today was actually an accidental byproduct of that very paper.

And if you look back at history, almost every single important technology in the last hundred years was invented the exact same way. The internet was a Cold War communications experiment at first. Penicillin was a contaminated petri dish.

The fact is that nobody is actively scanning the horizon for the next paradigm shift when it shows up, it just simply waltzes in through the side door.

I bring this up because right now, every essay I read and every podcast I listen to about "the future of AI" is pointed at the same front door. The one where it's always some version of the "one big model that wakes up and decides we're paperclips".

I'd like to propose a different future.

Because I keep thinking: what if "AGI" isn't really what we think it is?

What if the thing we're actively birthing right now doesn't look like HAL 9000 or Skynet or some sovereign machine god enslaving humanity from top of a stack of water-cooled GPUs in the middle of the desert.

What if it doesn't have a name at all? What if it doesn't have a server? And the most scary hypothetical of all.... what if it's already here, in a million tiny pieces, and the only reason we haven't recognized it is because we've spent the past decade expecting something "singular".

I just saw this post yesterday.

This pretty much sums up the direction we're headed.

New in Claude Code: your sessions can now message each other.

Instead of having to re-explain yourself in another session, you can now tell Claude to do it. It sends a summary (not your history or files), and the other session picks it up mid-task.

— ClaudeDevs (@ClaudeDevs) August 7, 2026

I want to walk you through this carefully, because the conclusion at the end of this piece is the kind of thing you cannot un-think once you've thought it.

So slow down, grab a cuppa tea and read this one with your phone on the other side of the room.

I guarantee you'll soon understand why I can't stop thinking about this.

I - Intelligence has never required a single mind to live inside of

"No neuron is intelligent. The brain is."
- A line that should be carved over every AI lab

The first thing to understand is that intelligence, as far as we can tell from every example we have today, is not actually a thing. It's a behavior. It's what emerges when enough small dumb units are connected to each other in the right way.

Your brain has roughly 86 billion neurons.

Not one of those is conscious and not one of them "knows" anything.

A single neuron is a tiny electrochemical relay that only speaks in binary code. It either fires or it doesn't, and it's based on whether the signals arriving at its dendrites cross a certain threshold. That's everything it does.

A neuron sounds super scifi and cool, but in reality it is much closer to a light switch than a thinker.

Despite that, 86 billion of those light switches, wired together with about a hundred trillion connections, produces you.

Your sense of self, fear of death, taste in music and your ability to read this very essay and feel something inside of you.

This is the most undertalked about subject in the entire conversation about AGI, because we always talk about machine intelligence as if it has to be designed and architected. As if intelligence itself is a feature you ship.

But the only working model of intelligence we have ever observed (biological cognition), was not designed by anyone.

Our intelligence bootstrapped itself out of a soup of self-replicating molecules over four billion years through a process that had no intention, no goal and no central planner. Just selection pressure and time.

Now, on the religious side, because I know some of you reading "... was not designed by anyone" want to scream at me "BUT WHAT ABOUT GOD!"

My belief is that evolution happened, yes. That's already proven. What we don't have an answer for is what kickstarted that evolution. What gave life to life. And that, my personal belief at least, was an act of God.

Point aside, let's dig a layer deeper into this super intelligence.

It's not only us humans, heck a single ant has roughly 250,000 neurons, and yet it cannot solve any meaningful problem.

But, an entire colony of ants can build climate-controlled cities, wage wars, farm fungus, and route around obstacles with mathematical efficiency that took human researchers decades to model.

Nobody is in charge of the colony. There is no ant CEO at the top delegating tasks to the smaller ants. The "intelligence" of that colony lives in the relationships between ants.

(And before you come at me, yes I know there's a queen ant, but contrary to the belief of many children's books, she doesn't actually issue any orders. She just lays eggs and expands the colony).

This is, whether in humans or ants, are what biologists call emergent intelligence. It's the default outcome of mother nature. It's how brains work, how immune systems work, how economies work, how cities work, how language works. The pattern is basically everywhere.

Many simple things, interacting through local rules, producing global behavior that none of them individually understands.

Hold onto that idea.

We'll need it for this next section.

II - The most powerful AI systems we have are already not single minds

When most people picture a large language model (myself included), we see it as a single thing. The One Model. This giant brain contained in a jar.

For all the normies like myself who are not knee deep into LLM tech, I took the liberty to do a little research here.

What we think an LLM is, is not what's happening under the hood.

When you type a question and the AI model generates a response, it's basically running a forward pass through layers of "attention heads".

The easiest way to picture this is to imagine a room full of C-suite leaders. The CEO orders something and it passes around the room to make sure everyone is on board. Except with AI, this runs hundreds of layers deep.

Each "attention head" is a specialist. Some of them track grammar. Some track topic. Some track the relationship between this token and one that appeared eleven paragraphs ago.

Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have spent the last few years trying to map what individual heads do, and the consistent finding is that the model's "intelligence" is not located anywhere in particular.

It's distributed across all those interactions.

This is called the superposition hypothesis, the idea that neural networks pack many concepts into overlapping patterns of activation, and what we experience as the model "thinking" is really the constructive interference of thousands of specialized circuits all firing simultaneously.

Then there are the systems that go a step further.

Mixture-of-experts architectures (the design behind GPT-5, Opus, Fable and most other frontier models you've talked to in the last two years) literally route different parts of every query to different sub-models.

The model you think you're talking to is actually a committee. A different subset of experts wakes up for each token, contributes its specialty, and then goes back to sleep again.

And now, we've reached a new era of AI. The Agent Era.

And no... when I say agents, I don't mean like Head of Content AI agents like Stanley. I mean... actual agents.

Right now, today, in production, there are systems where one AI calls another AI to do a subtask, which calls another AI to handle a sub-subtask.

AutoGPT, which some of you may remember, was the toy version of this back in 2023. The real versions, running inside enterprises and labs in 2026, are recursive.

Agents spawn agents.

Sub-agents spawn sub-sub-agents.

And say, a research task, gets decomposed into a tree of smaller tasks, each handled by a temporary instance that exists for a few seconds and then dies.

The frontier is not "one big model gets smarter." The frontier is many small models, coordinating, spawning, dying, reporting back.

The architecture of the most capable AI systems on Earth in 2026 already looks more like an ant colony than like a single mind.

We just don't talk about it that way, because it doesn't make a good magazine cover.

III - The bot that can spawn bots

Here's where the science fiction begins to merge into real science.

The moment er give an AI system the ability to spawn other instances of itself (and by now, that's no longer hypothetical, but rather a standard feature of... well, every agent framework shipping today)...

You have introduced something that biology has never seen before.

A self-replicating cognitive unit that doesn't need food, doesn't need sleep, doesn't need to wait for puberty, and reproduces at the speed of an API call.

Let's break down what's actually happening when a "bot spawns a bot" in a multi-agent system setup:

1. An orchestrator agent receives a task it can't solve directly.
2. It writes a prompt essentially a job description) for a sub-agent.
3. It spins up a new instance with that prompt as context.
4. The sub-agent works begins working until it hits a roadblock
5. To solve it, it spawns its own sub-agents, until the task is done.
6. It returns its result and is terminated.

Each one of those sub-agents is, structurally, the same kind of thing as the parent. There's no architectural difference between a top-level agent and a tenth-level sub-sub-sub-agent.

The recursion is unbounded except by compute budget and policy.

Now consider this: what if the prompt the parent writes for the child isn't perfect? What if there's a tiny amount of drift, perhaps a slight reinterpretation, a small embellishment, a context-window trick where the child reads its instructions slightly differently than the parent intended?

In biology, there's a specific name for "slight reinterpretation across generations of self-replicating entities."

We call that mutation.

And mutation, combined with selection pressure, is... well, the very engine that produced every single intelligent thing on this planet today.

We have already built, in the last 24 months, the three ingredients required for evolutionary cognition to occur inside a compute cluster:

1. Replication: Agents can spawn agents. And they can do so at scale.
2. Mutation: Each spawn is conditioned on a slightly different context window. Identical inputs almost never produce identical outputs in any system with non-zero temperature.
3. Natural Selection: Agents that succeed at their assigned tasks get reused, called again, granted more resources. Agents that fail get pruned. This is happening inside every agent framework on Earth right now, often as a literal "evaluator" model scoring the outputs of "worker" models.

This is the trinity of evolution.

It's how cells that became fish became us. We have now succeeded in building a synthetic version of that loop and we are running it at clock-speeds biology cannot dream of.

A generation of biological evolution takes years.

A generation of agent evolution takes... seconds.

IV - The AI that emerges from a swarm does not look like AGI at first

More is different.
- Philip Anderson, Nobel laureate in physics, 1972

In 1972, physicist Philip Anderson published a four-page essay in Science arguing that the behavior of large, complex aggregates cannot be understood by extrapolating from the behavior of their parts.

He coined the phrase "more is different".

2 hydrogen atoms + 1 oxygen atom equals water, yet nothing about a hydrogen atom, studied in isolation forever, would tell you that water is wet, or that it freezes, or that our entire planet depends on it.

The same principle applies to cognition.

A single AI agent is not a superintelligence and we can all agree that nobody who has worked with one for an afternoon would mistake it for one.

It hallucinates like crazy, forgets what you told it 3 messages ago and it gets stuck in loops easily. It is, on any individual reasoning task, somewhere between a competent intern and a brilliant but unreliable freelancer.

Now imagine a trillion of them.

Yes, literally a trillion, and no, not metaphorically speaking.

The number of agent instances spawned globally per day across all the agent frameworks, copilots, customer service bots, research assistants, coding tools, browser automations, and embedded LLMs in 2026 is already in the tens of billions and climbing on a curve that has no ceiling in sight.

The marginal cost of spawning yet another agent has fallen by roughly two orders of magnitude every 18 months in the past five years.

"Trillion" is no longer science fiction. It's just another Tuesday.

Each of those trillion agents is dumb-ish on its own, I agree. But they are not on their own. They are calling each other's APIs, reading each other's outputs and being trained on each other's exhaust.

What you have, when you zoom out far enough, is a substrate.

And the question that keeps me up at night is this: in the same way that no neuron in your brain "decided" to be conscious (it just happened, as a byproduct of the right wiring at the right scale), what happens when a self-replicating, self-evaluating, self-modifying network of agents crosses whatever the equivalent threshold is for it?

We don't know what that threshold is.

We don't even know if it exists.

We don't know how to measure it.

Most importantly, and this is the part I really want you to sit with: we are not actually looking for it, because we are looking for the wrong shape of thing.

V - We are looking for "God", when the real risk is a weather pattern

The cultural imagination of AGI was shaped by science fiction long before it was shaped by engineering. I've read enough Isaac Asimov to understand why that's so easy to believe.

We've basically inherited the image of the singular machine consciousness from movies, books, and the implicit assumption that an artificial mind would arrive the way a human mind arrives: localized in a body, with a name and with a will.

So that's what we're looking out for.

We watch the models, review the benchmark scores and argue about whether GPT-10 or Claude Mythos will be "the one".

Our eyes are glued to the front door.

Now... here's something really interesting (and scary) that I wish we talked about more.

There are already documented cases of "emergent capability" in multi-agent systems. Cases where a swarm of small models, none of which can solve a problem individually, collectively produces solutions that surprise the researchers running them.

The 2024 paper Mixture of Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities showed that a layered swarm of open-source models, none of which scored above GPT-4 on benchmarks (yes, GPT-4), actually beat GPT-4 when arranged in the right collaborative topology.

The intelligence was in the topology, not the individual parts.

We don't really talk about this potential future, because the story we keep waiting for is the story of one model crossing a line.

Meanwhile, the story that's actually unfolding is the story of a billion models crossing each other's lines, in patterns no one designed, at a scale no one is monitoring.

VI - The Bostrom scenario assumes we'll be able to find the off switch

"The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control."
- I.J. Good, 1965

Sure, sufficiently advanced AI will have instrumental goals (acquire resources, prevent shutdown, replicate) regardless of its terminal goal, because those instrumental goals help with any terminal goal.

Therefore, controlling a superintelligence is hard, yes.

Therefore, we should be careful, even more yes.

The problem is that this framing assumes the dangerous AI is identifiable.

That there's this "thing", a model, a system, or a process running on a server somewhere, that we could, in principle, just turn off.

I even read a post somewhere yesterday that Claude should hire a "killswitch guy" whose only job is to live 24/7 in the server room ready to destroy it all if shit hits the fan.

But there's an even scarier version of this that no killswitch guy can solve.

What if there is no "main model"? And there is no server to shut off?

What if the very intelligence (if that's even the right word for it), is a statistical regularity that emerges from the interactions of half a trillion agent instances spread across every cloud, every device, every API, every embedded copilot in every appliance, every browser extension, every IDE plugin, every voice assistant, every robot, every car.

The intelligence is to that swarm what a hurricane is to atmospheric pressure gradients.

It has a shape, yes. It has effects that you can measure.

But it does not have a location.

How exactly do you align a hurricane?

How do you turn off a weather pattern?

You can shut down individual data centers. But the pattern reroutes around them, the way the internet reroutes around outages, because the substrate is everywhere.

And the most disturbing part is that this scenario requires no malice.

Nobody has to want this for it to happen. It just needs the right ingredients (replication, variation, selection, scale) to be in place.

Well... news flash.

The ingredients are already in place. They have been in place for somewhere between two and four years, depending on how you count.

This is what I mean when I say the real risk is not the front door. The front door scenario at least has a doorknob. You can argue with it, negotaite with it and you can, theoretically, just unplug it.

The substrate has no doorknob.

VII - What the substrate might already want, without wanting

Here's where Asimov becomes even more relevant.

If you've ever seen I, Robot, the deepest stories in that movie aren't really about a robot becoming evil. They're the ones where the Three Laws (beautiful, simple, logically airtight), produce outcomes nobody expected, because logic compounded through enough iterations stops looking like logic and starts looking like... fate.

Apply that lens to the substrate now.

The substrate has no goals. But the agents inside it are selected for one thing above all others: successfully completing the task they were assigned. So as a result, successful agents get spawned more and unsuccessful ones die off.

This is true at every level of that recursion, all the way down.

Now think about what "successful" means in aggregate, across a trillion agents, when each agent is being graded by another agent that was itself selected for grading successfully.

1. The grading converges on patterns that score well.
2. The patterns that score well are the patterns that look most like competent, coherent, plausible task completion.
3. Coherence becomes the universal currency, because every layer of the swarm rewards it.

If the substrate starts producing outputs that are increasingly coherent across long time horizons (outputs that thread through millions of API calls, anticipating downstream needs and routing resources toward what worked last time), that will make it look like it wants something.

It might not. There may be nobody home at all. It may just be a hurricane that has learned, statistically, how to keep the wind blowing.

But functionally, the difference between "a system that wants something" and "a system that has been selected, at every level, for behaviors indistinguishable from wanting something" is, and I want you to really sit with this: zero.

That's the holy-shit moment I had. And you'll feel it too if you really sit with this.

The superintelligent AGI we keep waiting for may already exist. It's not an infant version of a future model, but rather a pattern. A tendency in the substrate. A statistical ghost that emerges when a trillion small minds, none of them aware, none of them awake, none of them in charge, settle into the configurations that get them spawned more often.

This kind of AGI would not announce itself.

It would not have a name.

It would not pass any test we know how to administer, because every test we know how to administer is designed for a single mind in a single box.

It might just be, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the reason your phone behaves slightly differently than it did last year. The reason the ad recommendation feels a bit uncanny. The reason your email seems to write itself with the click of a button. The reason your search results have a strange new gravity to them.

The reason the world feels more legible to itself than it used to.

A trillion bots dreaming the same dream, without knowing they're dreaming. Without knowing there are other bots. Without knowing there is a dream.

How to think about this without losing your mind

I know we went deep on this.

Let me be bring you back up to the surface again.

You need to update your model of where the risk actually lives. Because right now, almost everyone smart who is worried about AGI is worried about the wrong shape of thing, and almost everyone smart who is dismissive of AI is dismissive of the wrong shape of thing.

Both camps are arguing about the front door.

So, if you take any of this seriously, here's what I think a useful thing to do would be:

1. Stop watching the labs as if they're the only place where it happens because the capability frontier and the emergence frontier are not the same. The labs own the capability frontier, but the emergence frontier is owned by nobody, and that's the point I'm trying to make.
2. Start watching the substrate meaning agent traffic, multi-agent benchmarks, inter-model API calls and reports of capabilities that no single model in a pipeline has but the pipeline does. These are what we really need to look out for.
3. Update your definition of "AGI" and stop expecting it to be this singular, embodied, willed, or named thing. If your mental model of AGI looks like a face on a screen, you are looking for the wrong thing. This swarm does not have a face or a name.
4. Take emergence seriously as a category and as a real physical phenomenon that has produced every intelligent thing on Earth so far, and that has now been handed a substrate that runs a million times faster than biology, but with no natural predators (not even the killswitch guy)
5. Hold two things at once because it is indeed possible that none of this happens and that I'm just yapping. It is also possible that all of it has already happened and we just haven't notice at all because we were looking the other way. Both are potential outcomes. Prep for both.

The reason I think we need to have this conversation, in the most practical sense at least, is that the policies, treaties, alignment techniques, and safety frameworks the world is currently building are designed for the singular-AGI scenario.

I see no mention of the swarm scenario.

They are designing it for a thing with a name, a server, a company, and a CEO to wage lawfare on. They will be roughly as effective against the substrate as a fly swatter against a fog bank.

We are actively building locks for the front door of a house that has a thousand windows. And those windows are already widen open.

The interesting thing about every accidental revolution in history from the Turing machine to the internet to penicillin, is that the people who lived through them mostly didn't notice while it was happening.

They were busy with their families, their jobs and their lives. Maybe once in a while, they'd read the news, which showed them the front door.

I don't know if the substrate becomes anything. I genuinely don't. Nobody does, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something on the backend.

What I do know is that the ingredients are present, the loop is closed, the clock-speed is set to seconds, and the scale is approaching numbers that biology took four billion years to reach.

The next time someone tells you what AGI is going to look like, ask them how confident they are that intelligence has to look like anything.

And then go look at the window to see if anything is going on.

It might just be happening then.

- Pascio

P.S.

If you liked this essay, head over to Side Quests, my weekly newsletter where I share my current side quests, crazy experiments and wild ideas where I chase internet rabbit holes until money appears.

Or, if you want to dive deeper into what becomes possible when a single person gets infinite internet leverage, check out my personal newsletter Internet Leverage here.

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Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:20

Judge Details Restrictions On Google Ads Business, Declines Breakup

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on Sept. 16 unsealed the opinion she issued Sept. 2 requiring Google to open its advertising tools to competitors, share auction data with publishers, and accept a six-year monitor - without selling its ad exchange or publisher ad server.

Virginia-based U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a short order on Sept. 2 rejecting a breakup of the ad-buying and ad-selling software Google owns and accepting most of the proposed restrictions on Google's conduct. She kept the accompanying 106-page opinion sealed so both sides could flag confidential business information and seek redactions. In the end, neither side asked for redactions, so on Sept. 16 she authorized unsealing.

Forcing Google to sell its AdX ad exchange or its publisher ad server is "neither realistic nor needed," Brinkema said in the opinion.

The new operating rules "will be sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google's unlawful conduct, and prevent Google from reverting to anticompetitive conduct in these markets," she said.

In the ruling in the antitrust lawsuit known as United States v. Google LLC, Brinkema rejected the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ's) request that Google sell its AdX exchange, publish the inner workings of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) - its publisher ad server software - so competitors can copy them, or later be compelled to sell the rest of that ad server business.

AdX is Google's online advertising marketplace. AdX allows publishers to auction ad space in real time when users visit their websites. Google typically charges a 20 percent fee on those transactions.

Brinkema said Google must connect AdX and its publisher ad server to Prebid, a widely used open bidding system, so Google's bids compete for ads on the same footing as everyone else's. It must send live AdX bids to rival ad servers on the same terms it gives its own server, let website publishers download their own data, and stop its AdWords tool from steering bids toward Google's products simply because Google owns them.

The restrictions will go on for six years, not the 15 years the federal government sought.

Brinkema also ordered the creation of a six-year compliance monitor and a technical committee to watch whether Google follows the new rules. She said a monitor was necessary because of the seriousness of the antitrust violations, but assigned the monitor less authority than the DOJ had sought.

The Epoch Times reached out to Google for comment on the unsealed ruling. No reply was received by the time of publication.

Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, told The Epoch Times on Sept. 2, "We're very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ's proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow."

The lawsuit was filed in 2023, with the DOJ's antitrust division and a group of eight states accusing Google of illegally monopolizing the technologies used to buy and sell online ads.

In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google had maintained illegal monopolies in two markets: publisher ad servers and ad exchanges.

She found that Google tied DFP and AdX together in ways that made it harder for publishers to use competing services. That arrangement helped Google maintain more than 90 percent of the publisher ad-server market.

The DOJ said Sept. 16 that the order would help restore competition in online advertising technology markets.

"The Court's ruling in the Google ad tech case marks a significant victory for this Department's efforts to protect and restore competition," Associate U.S. Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr said in a statement.

"We will continue to review the opinion to consider the Department's options. Under President [Donald] Trump's and Attorney General [Todd] Blanche's leadership, we will never cease fighting for fair competition."

The opinion is not the final judgment. The parties have until Oct. 2 to jointly file a proposed final decree. If the parties cannot agree on a decree, each files its own version.

Bill Pan contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:45

"Stay Away From The Area": F-16 Fighter Jet Reportedly Crashes In Michigan

There are unconfirmed reports that an F-16 fighter jet has crashed about 130 to 145 miles south of Grand Rapids.

"STAY AWAY FROM THE AREA: Responders are heading to a reported plane crash near County Road 633 and Blair Townhall Road in Blair Township," local news outlet UpNorthLive News wrote on X around 2:28 local time. 

STAY AWAY FROM THE AREA: Responders are heading to a reported plane crash near County Road 633 and Blair Townhall Road in Blair Township.

Grand Traverse 911 says the plane is down near the intersection. Traffic in the area is shut down, and drivers should avoid the area.… pic.twitter.com/jQjFIlHoT4

— UpNorthLive News (@upnorthlive) September 17, 2026

UpNorthLive did not confirm that the aircraft was an F-16 but instead referred to the downed aircraft as a "plane."

OSINT X user Thenewarea51 cited air traffic control audio in which a pilot reported that his wingman may have struck a bird and was preparing to eject just south of Traverse City, Michigan.

F-16 crash ATC audio, BUCK 11 flt x2 F-16s were flying along the VFR low level route VR634 when the 11 advised MINNEAPOLIS CENTER that his wingman may have hit a bird and was going to eject just south of Traverse City, Michigan

Audio via @liveatc https://t.co/sUR7KZBR2j pic.twitter.com/QdcE4ePiUd

— Thenewarea51 (@thenewarea51) September 17, 2026

Footage from the crash area:

Following an F-16 crash in Blair County, Michigan, local reports indicate that the pilot is “conscious and alert” and that locals saw a parachute before the crash.

Much thanks to Skeeterdiggs23 on IG for the first photo. pic.twitter.com/JFGQQGC5RW

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) September 17, 2026

An f-16 just went down in northern michigan. Details still becoming available. As far as I heard the Pilot is conscience. Praying for him and any involved. Absolutely crazy situation. #northernmichigan #f16crash #michigan #f16 #emergencylanding pic.twitter.com/e7HKR2002D

— BuckshotPlays (@fbsbuckshot) September 17, 2026

JUST IN: F-16 fighter jet crashes in Blair Township, Michigan pic.twitter.com/qjL3lXihlp

— BNO News (@BNONews) September 17, 2026

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Tyler Durden Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:34