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Kidman took her younger daughter to the men's semifinals.

Kidman took her younger daughter to the men's semifinals.

Costco Begins Rationing Kirkland Signature Motor Oil As Refined Crisis Spreads

Costco's Kirkland Signature motor oil has doubled in price, and customers now reportedly face a purchase limit as the Gulf energy conflict, combined with the Russia-Ukraine war, has sent the global refining market into a tailspin.

Auto news website The Auto Wire reports that a 10-quart package of Kirkland full-synthetic oil now costs about $58, up from around $30, with a new purchase limit of two packages per week.

Costco's online sales platform confirms an order limit: when attempting to order three packs, an alert message reads, "Item 997930 has a maximum order quantity of 2."

Another auto blog, MotorBiscuit, provided more detail on the refining crisis and its impact on the global liquids market:

The ongoing military entanglement with Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have effectively choked off these crucial exports. To compound the supply chain disaster, the massive Pearl GTL facility in Qatar sustained heavy damage from Iranian airstrikes in March 2026, instantly crippling a major portion of global production for at least a year.

Refineries Chase 40-Year Profit Highs

Typically, when Middle Eastern supply lines fracture, South Korean refiners step in to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, those refiners are currently struggling to secure raw crude oil themselves.

Furthermore, the petroleum industry is aggressively shifting its manufacturing priorities. Right now, global profit margins for diesel and jet fuel have hit staggering 40-year highs. Motor oil, diesel, and aviation fuel all originate from the same barrels of raw crude. Given the choice between producing essential base oils for passenger cars or cashing in on incredibly lucrative aviation and commercial diesel markets, refiners are overwhelmingly choosing the latter.

This geopolitical squeeze is hitting at the exact worst time for everyday drivers. Today's highly stressed, turbocharged, small-displacement engines require incredibly sophisticated oil chemistries to prevent catastrophic failure and comply with strict environmental standards.

Because modern engines are so sensitive, automakers demand rigorous chemical testing and licensing. General Motors, for example, requires vendors to pay double licensing fees (both per product and per unit sold) just to print the "Dexos-approved" badge on their packaging. This certification appears directly on Costco's Kirkland brand.

Combine a fractured Middle Eastern supply chain, international refiners chasing diesel profits, and the expensive licensing fees required for modern engines, and you have the perfect storm for empty shelves.

It's not just motor oil. Households relying on heating oil face the risk of sharply higher bills as the Northern Hemisphere winter approaches. With the national average retail diesel at a record $6.23 a gallon Monday morning, the squeeze on distillate fuels and other refined fuels is causing a shock. However, electric vehicle owners are just sitting back, watching this all unfold. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:45

George Kittle waited until Iowa reclaimed the state’s bragging rights to reopen his favorite argument with Brock Purdy. The Hawkeyes rallied from a 10-point deficit and defeated Iowa State 16-13 on a 42-yard field goal in the closing seconds Saturday. Soon afterward, Kittle posted the final score to his Instagram story and addressed his 49ers...

"These kids didn’t ask to be born into this, they’re finding their own way in life,” the Oscar winner argued.

"These kids didn’t ask to be born into this, they’re finding their own way in life,” the Oscar winner argued.

Common courtesy isn’t always plane and simple — especially at 30,000 feet.  A New York City tourist is receiving death threats after asking a fellow airline passenger to help lift her heavy luggage into an overhead bin on a recent flight to Hawaii. Her request — and her seatmate’s alleged “rude as f*** response” —...

Caitlin Clark repeatedly told a reporter to stop trying to pit her and Angel Reese against each other after the pair helped lead U.S. women’s basketball to a 97-79 victory over France in the FIBA World Cup final on Sunday.

What spell do we need to cast to watch Practical Magic 2 at home?

A My Little Pony superfan has broken the world record for having the largest memorabilia collection of the toys on the planet.

Altman and rival Elon Musk, who were earlier this year locked in a legal battle, made a rare alliance over the weekend as they backed a lengthy letter from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging global companies to slow their work on top AI models.

The average nationwide price of a gallon of diesel fuel stood at $6.23 Monday morning, the highest on record, according to AAA.

Despite operating in just three states, its breakfast has beaten out all other national chains. 

Trump Declares Ukraine, Russia Have Agreed To Halt All Attacks On Energy Targets

Update(11:19)ET: Amid soaring national diesel products and painfully high prices at the pump, President Trump on Monday announced the Zelensky government has acceded to the US president's prior call to abstain from attacking diesel infrastructure in Russia. He has unveiled what he's presenting as a new Russia-Ukraine energy ceasefire.

Trump says "Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy targets. Russia has agreed to do, likewise! The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/ Ukraine War, not Iran." Clearly high fuel prices are creating immense pressure within the GOP, and Trump is trying to essentially tweet his way out of this war-related mess...

DIESEL FUTURES PARE GAINS, TRADE NEAR $5.04/GAL

Diesel responded immediately...

And also crude...

*  *  *

The Kremlin has welcomed President Trump's weekend call for Ukraine to stop attacking Russian diesel supply and infrastructure sites. The somewhat surprise remarks which will only serve to further pressure the Zelensky government came when pressed by a reporter on Sunday. Trump responded by saying Zelensky "has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia."

The US president said at the sidelines of the Irish Open on Sunday, "There are plenty of other targets. Don’t hit diesel fuel, because that’s hurting, that’s hurting the world" - adding that he indeed had spoken to the Ukrainian president about it.

"I've asked Zelensky not to hit the Russian refineries. Diesel is being driven up by the fact that it’s having a hard time coming out of Russia," Trump additionally stated. "That’s a case that hurts the world, and we’ve got to stop it."

On Monday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about Trump's words. "Of course, one can only welcome any call on the Kiev regime to stop strikes on civilian economic infrastructure," Peskov told a press briefing.

via Associated Press

The Kremlin official had been questioned on whether Putin views the US call to refrain from strikes on Russia's diesel-producing infrastructure a positive step toward a settlement of the Ukrainian conflict.

"Any countries can contribute to a settlement in Ukraine by influencing Kiev and pushing it toward flexibility," Peskov said, leaving things somewhat vague. He said that disabling of Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline, which has reportedly knocked more than 4% of global supplies off the market, is cause of serious concern.

"The deterioration of the situation in oil markets cannot but cause concern among global economies," he emphasized. On that front, the Associated Press newly reports Monday:

A crucial Saudi oil pipeline hit in strikes will be mostly out of service for several weeks for repairs, reports AP citing officials

Specifically concerning the status of the 'special military operation' in Ukraine, the Putin spokesman described, "It is becoming increasingly clear to professionals, based on the dynamics at the front lines, that Russia is consistently moving toward achieving its goals in the special military operation."

He vowed: "The dynamics of advances at the front lines of the special military operation will continue; no one should have any doubts about that."

And he explained of the weekend New Delhi-hosted major BRICS summit, "Putin reacted positively to the readiness of the leaders of China and India to contribute to the Ukrainian settlement."

.@POTUS: "I've asked President Zelensky not to hit the diesel plants — refineries... Diesel is being driven up by the fact that it's having a hard time coming out of Russia." pic.twitter.com/G9P3tbsNMQ

— Scott Adams (@scottadamsshow) September 14, 2026

As for Ukraine, President Zelensky over the weekend pointed out that the country's own energy infrastructure has also subject of frequent attack by Russia.

"The Russians are burning warehouses with food and gas stations, pharmaceutical facilities and ordinary passenger trains, residential buildings and civilian businesses," Zelensky stated in a Sept.12 X post.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:19

Deshaun Watson started a football game on Sunday for the first time in nearly two years, and it went as poorly as many expected.

Beijing Rejects Pause, Slams Dario's 'Fearmongering, Cold War Playbook'

China's Foreign Ministry and state press had rejected the China provisions of Dario Amodei's essay calling for a 'pause' in AI development, while state security minister and President Xi Jinping laid out what Beijing wants instead.

On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier, an essay arguing that the industry must slow the rate at which it improves frontier models and asking Washington to help it do so. By Monday afternoon in Beijing, China's Foreign Ministry responded. 

The essay's three steps, are third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access inside the labs, which Anthropic committed to unilaterally; coordination among labs in democratic countries on safety standards and the pace of progress, which Amodei concedes needs a narrow antitrust waiver from the U.S. government; and, eventually, agreements with various governments, including China. It also asks Washington to keep the ban on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment, enforce it against smuggling and remote access to overseas data centers, crack down on distillation, prevent model-weight theft, and use the resulting three-to-five-year window to widen America's lead before any bargain is struck. Sam Altman said OpenAI would match the evaluator commitment. Elon Musk's reaction was three words: "Dario is right."

Amodei himself acknowledged the problem. On CBS on Sunday he called the possibility that China and other adversaries would not slow down the "toughest dilemma" in his proposal.

According to Xinhua, Beijing's Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Monday that the development of AI bears on the well-being of all humanity and that all parties should jointly promote its open and inclusive development for good and for all. He added: "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest."

On Sunday evening Beijing time, a Global Times editorial admitted that sure - on the surface the essay appears to be a "rational statement" about global AI security. A closer reading, the paper said, showed it "packed with containment provisions targeting China" and, in essence, a "Cold War playbook" for the AI sector - and that excluding China from the global innovation system would increase, rather than reduce, the "trial-and-error costs and risks of loss of control" in global AI development. China's AI capabilities "have long ceased to be a variable that can be excluded," reads the editorial. 

Other Chinese notables chimed in as well. Xiang Ligang, a telecom and technology policy commentator, called Amodei's rhetoric inappropriate, groundless and hostile. After all, the 'pacing' would ultimately require China's cooperation while advocating restrictions on chips, computing power and models to slow China down. Xiao Qian, vice dean of Tsinghua's Institute for AI International Governance, attributed the China provisions to commercial pressure: Anthropic's closed-model approach is competing with Chinese open-source models on cost, performance and the developer ecosystem, and restrictions would protect its position. Liu Shaoshan of the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society, who the paper says previously worked with Amodei, added that framing AI as decisive for national security turns an AI company into "strategic infrastructure," which raises barriers to entry and valuations at the same time.

On Wednesday, Beijing's commerce ministry rejected a joint FBI, NSA and CISA advisory that accused Chinese developers of "aggressive, malicious" efforts to distill capabilities from Claude and GPT, calling the accusation "groundless in fact and without basis in law," distillation a normal technical and commercial practice, and the advisory further proof that Washington is "seeking to monopolize computing power."

Amodei's essay, published three days later, asks the U.S. government to crack down on the same practice in the same document that asks the industry to slow down for the sake of humanity. 

Trump Responds

Asked on Thursday in Dallas whether he had any concern about existential risk from AI, Trump said, "No, I don't have any." On Sunday, speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg resort during the Irish Open, he said the United States is "leading China in AI" and intends to stay there because "whoever wins AI, wins." Guardrails were possible, he said; the dire warnings came from "negative forces" raising things he insists will not happen. And on Monday, Trump slammed "perfect little angel" Dario over his screed.

House Speaker Mike Johnson made the same argument in institutional form: an emergency session to regulate AI would cost the United States the race with China.

The American Split

The domestic disagreement was already on the record. Barack Obama, at a Manhattan fundraiser on Thursday whose transcript his office released to the New York Times on Sunday, told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to make AI a governing issue if Democrats take the House. The technology, he said, is "moving very fast in private hands," and he positioned himself as neither an accelerationist nor a doomer.

David Sacks, the former White House AI czar, told Amodei and Altman in a Saturday-night post to go ahead and slow down if their unreleased models warrant it, but without the antitrust waiver, the regulatory approval process or METR, which he called intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff. Demanding a preferred framework as the price of restraint, he wrote, "will look like blackmail of the public and the political system." China, he added, was "very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know." Beijing confirmed the point two days later.

Beijing's Own Concerns

The most revealing document out of China this weekend wasn't the response to Dario. State Security Minister Chen Yixin's article, published Sunday in China Cyberspace, the Cyberspace Administration's journal, lists six categories of AI risk and, per Bloomberg, makes no mention of the Anthropic and OpenAI calls to slow down.

The first risk is regime security: "hostile forces" using deepfakes and bot networks to wage "cognitive warfare." The second is cyber offense, and here Chen named Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber as systems that sharply raise the efficiency of vulnerability discovery and malware development and threaten China's critical information infrastructure.

Chen describes AI as "a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers," warns that countries with an AI advantage may invoke national security to impose technology controls and build closed ecosystems, and calls for powers to "resolutely resist hegemonism, technological barriers, and exclusive blocs." None of this means Beijing dismisses loss-of-control risk: its cyberspace regulator has carried an explicit loss-of-control scenario in its safety framework since 2024, and Xi said at the World AI Conference in July that AI should "always remain under human control."

Chen's focus is on who controls the systems, who can weaponize them, and who is denied the hardware to build them, not about whether the frontier should move more slowly.

Then There's Xi

Xi's own contribution came at the BRICS summit in New Delhi on Sunday. China will take the lead in establishing a BRICS AI Open Source Zone to promote cooperation on large language models, AI training and an open AI ecosystem, he said. The logic is to build with the Global South and resist a ruleset written in San Francisco and enforced through American export licenses.

Trump and Xi are due to meet in Washington on September 24, with AI governance expected on the agenda.

Reuters reported that officials were preparing a separate mid-September AI-safety dialogue led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, covering AI-directed cyberattacks, distillation and the prospect of a Chinese model with Mythos-level cyber capabilities; a White House official said "there is currently no planned AI-related meeting in mid-September." Lizzi Lee of the Asia Society Policy Institute framed Beijing's question: if Washington wants cooperation on frontier safety while restricting China's access to frontier compute, "what exactly does that cooperation look like?"

As we laid out Saturday: Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax and Zhipu are downloadable, forkable and far cheaper to run, with cumulative downloads the Global Times puts above 10 billion. Export controls and evaluator regimes govern American labs and American hardware. They do not retrieve weights that have already been distributed. Amodei's essay does not pretend otherwise; it is why the proposal climbs to a negotiation with Beijing, and why he ranks a treaty-style limit on recursive self-improvement as "difficult but just on the edge of being possible." That third step requires a partner. As of Monday, the partner has said what it thinks of the first two.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:15

We’re smelling (and scrubbing, and slathering) what The Rock is cooking.

We’re smelling (and scrubbing, and slathering) what The Rock is cooking.

A British sprinter has lashed out at Sydney Sweeney over her risqué commercial.