Your Grandfather's Military Is Dead

Authored by Byron King and Sean Ring via DailyReckoning.com,

You may have already seen some of what I’m about to share in The Daily Reckoning. But given what we’re focused on here and the sheer amount of money now moving into this corner of the defense industry… I think it deserves a second look.

The drone itself is only part of what’s happening here. Building a military around unmanned systems requires an enormous industrial ecosystem underneath it like chips, sensors, batteries, rare-earth magnets, software, machine tools and, most importantly, the factories capable of producing these systems at scale.

That’s the side of this story Byron has been looking at.

So with that, I’ll pass it over to Byron to show you just how much the battlefield is changing and what this massive buildout could mean for investors…

We’re out of time. The future is now.

I’m talking about drones, which are no longer an exotic military sideshow, tucked away in research labs while the so-called “real warriors” plan the next campaign. Like phalanxes of marching soldiers, or guys riding horses into battle, that era is over. Drones are now the latest – and likely decisive – military thing.

The Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, Coast Guard, law enforcement and even firefighters are in the drone business. If it can fly, float, roll, crawl, loiter, listen, jam, scout, strike or blow itself up at the right place and time, it belongs in the new, unmanned order of battle.

Think of drones the way old-timers once thought of radios, radar, GPS, precision navigation or night vision. First, they look like clever add-ons, bolted to the airframe, deck plates, or a rack in the back of a truck. Then they become force multipliers. Over time, they become doctrine. Finally, they become table stakes.

Air Power Gets Less-Manned

Begin with air power. The Air Force has been “droning” for years, whether it used that word or not. Cruise missiles, decoys, loitering munitions, anti-radiation weapons and electronic attack packages have blurred the old line between aircraft, missiles and science fiction sky-robots.

A loitering munition can search, wait, attack or return if there is nothing worth killing. MALD, the Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, spoofs air defenses. HARM, the high-speed anti-radiation missile, hunts radar systems. Together, these tools show where air combat has gone: aircraft, missiles and semi-autonomous or autonomous systems now occupy the same battlespace.

MALD missiles. Credit Raytheon/RTX.

In other words, the drone is no longer a science and engineering experiment. It has become a business model for modern war, and a rebuke to past planning processes, acquisition timelines and chronic risk aversion, all designed for a slower world that is long past.

The Pilot Becomes a Mission Commander

Here’s the next step: collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA. These are unmanned aircraft that function via artificial intelligence (AI), built to fly alongside manned fighters, bombers, surveillance birds and tankers. They carry sensors, scout ahead, jam radars, haul missiles, absorb enemy fire or hit targets where commanders do not want to risk a living, breathing pilot. But the key part of a CCA is not the airframe; it’s the autonomy stack that lets the machine sense, decide, maneuver and cooperate inside a larger combat network.

For years, a small community of defense visionaries argued that war would become faster, cheaper, more distributed and driven by autonomous systems and AI. They were called too commercial, too theoretical, too Silicon Valley-ish. Turns out, though, those guys were right.

Now the Air Force has moved CCA from PowerPoint Dreamland to contracts, flight test and production. The air service is not just buying drones. It’s moving toward a procurement model in which hardware and mission software can be competed and upgraded on separate timelines. A future F-35, F-47 or B-21 will not fight alone. It will fight inside a moving code-cloud of sensors, shooters, jammers and electromagnetic tricks.

Drone is my copilot and wingman. Future notional CCA. Credit US Air Force.

And the central question is not whether a pilot is comfortable with an autonomous wingman. Broadly, that decision has been made and now the issue is how the overall package works in wartime, especially when ideas cycle through in days and weeks (and as we’ll discuss below, this is one of many lessons from Ukraine).

Trust in new technology is not an immediate and warm feeling; it must be earned. So, before anyone trusts an AI-driven CCA, the software, communications and cyber defenses must survive deception, electronic attack, GPS denial, spoofed data, degraded links and every other dirty trick a thinking enemy will throw at them.

The old Pentagon way of buying and building new weapons was to fund new ideas on the margin while protecting legacy programs of record. But that luxury is gone, which is why CCA is not just an aviation story. It’s a validation story, a software-assurance story and a network-resilience story.

Manned or unmanned, every aircraft is now a node in a large kill chain. If the network is hacked, delayed, spoofed or denied, the airplane’s performance becomes almost secondary.

The Navy Builds Mother Ships

Characteristically, the Navy took longer to get there, but it is getting there. In the mid-2010s, Northrop Grumman’s X-47B proved that an unmanned aircraft could launch from and land on an aircraft carrier; no small trick, considering that carrier aviation is one of the most demanding operating environments on earth (as I know from first-hand Navy experience).

Navy X-47B autonomous drone in 2015. Credit U.S. Navy.

The actual, experimentalX-47B aircraft (image above) went into storage; but over time, the idea behind the program morphed into Boeing’s MQ-25 Stingray, an unmanned carrier-based refueling aircraft.

And okay, aerial refueling may sound boring, but it’s not (again, ask me how I know). Because tanking is range, range is reach and reach is combat power. Meanwhile, MQ-25 lays the command-and-control foundation for a future carrier air wing full of unmanned systems.

Follow that drone-style logic into non-carrier shipbuilding. New vessels are being built with dedicated space to store, fuel, prepare, arm, launch and recover unmanned systems — not just aerial drones, but surface and underwater drones too. In other words, a modern warship is no longer your granddad’s gray hull, stuffed full of guns, missiles and sailors. It has become a mother ship for both controlled and autonomous drones.

USS Somerset (LPD-25) can carry aerial, surface, subsurface drones. Credit U.S. Navy.

Whether launched by air, surface ship or submarine, drones can scout or attack. Underwater drones can map, listen, lay sensors, hunt mines, shadow submarines or perform missions too dangerous or dull for real people. That creates opportunities not just for traditional shipyards, but also for suppliers that can build unmanned vessels cheaply, quickly and at scale.

Ukraine Shows the Future

This is where Ukraine enters the story as a brutal laboratory and testing-range for drones. Small FPV (first person view) drones, long-range strike drones, loitering munitions and improvised systems have changed the character of the battlefield.

Drones watch trenches, spot artillery, attack armor, cut logistic lines, strike air bases and force both sides to move, hide, jam the other guy, and adapt fast. In fact, the life cycle of a drone’s usefulness is not years or months. It can be weeks, days, even hours or minutes because the enemy watches, learns, jams, copies and counters.

One critical lesson from Ukraine is that drones are not just warfighting tools. They are product development under fire.

Production Wins Drone Wars

For investors, the market angle is that drones are not just weapons. They are complex, moving AI learning systems. They require software updates, signal processing, anti-jamming tricks, antennas, batteries, motors, optics, tactics, operators and constant verification.

A drone unit is part air arm, part artillery observer, part radio shack, part machine shop, part software lab and part test range. The side that manufactures faster, ships quicker, assembles more efficiently, tests more realistically, updates software faster and repairs better gains the warfighting edge.

The Factory Is the Front

Now we get to the hard part. You don’t win a drone war with a boutique defense-industrial base. You win it with production, and not by the dozens, hundreds or thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

For this vast scope of buildout you need carbon fiber, fiberglass, aluminum, titanium, specialty steels, small engines, propellers, batteries, rare-earth magnets, chips, cameras, antennas, LIDAR, software, test ranges, machine tools and skilled workers. And you need mines, mills, refineries and factories… especially factories.

This is why the new defense companies are talking like mass production industrialists. For example, Anduril’s Barracuda family is built around software-defined, mass-producible autonomous air vehicles. The selling point is not just range or payload. It’s fewer tools, fewer parts, faster assembly and a supply chain designed for scale; to “make it rain missiles,” so to speak.

Mass drop of Anduril “Barracuda” drones. Credit Alex Hollings/You Tube.

In a high-end war, the current arsenal of “exquisite” weapons will be consumed faster than Congress can hold hearings about why the armed forces are out of them. Gold-plated systems designed like hand-sewn, bespoke Saville Row suits may be impressive. But that’s not how to win a modern war against a capable foe.

Follow the Supply Chain

All of this does not mean the old defense primes will go away. Far from it. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon/RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, Huntington Ingalls, L3Harris and others in that arena still have customer relationships, classified program access, integration muscle, product lines, assembly and est facilities, workforce depth, access to capital, and of course entre to Congress.

But the drone boom is opening cracks in the castle wall. Legacy primes have checkbooks and technical benches that can scale. But startups can move faster. The likely winners will combine Silicon Valley speed with Detroit-style production, along with Pentagon-grade technical authority and combat reliability. In other words, the procurement establishment can no longer afford to treat the new crowd as a kiddie-table sideshow.

Watch shipbuilders too. The Navy’s future is not just buying more big gray hulls. The sea service is building out a mixed fleet of crewed ships, unmanned surface vessels, underwater drones, autonomous mine hunters, maritime sensors and launch-and-recover platforms. That points toward demand for steel, engines, electrical systems, autonomy packages, rugged communications, modular payload bays, shipyard capacity and repair yards.

Along these lines, one company that is both legacy but also quite nimble is Huntington Ingalls (HII). It’s worth a longer writeup all on its own, but not here. The takeaway is that HII builds nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and large numbers of surface ships, while is also has an aggressive program of drones called Romulus and Remus; the former being surface drones and the latter for underwater. The company is definitely working to secure long-term Navy business.

(Note: HII is not an official recommendation and we won’t track it here in Strategic Intelligence. But it’s a solid company for long term investors.)

On the other side of the planet, China understands all this about drones and the industrial base. Indeed, China has spent decades building the upstream and downstream muscle behind modern war: ore deposits, mines, mills, refineries, critical minerals, rare-earth magnets, batteries, electronics, components and final assembly. China’s shipyards alone are nothing less than astonishing.

Back here in the U.S., we’re just at the point of broad realization that every drone needs a supply chain before anyone can even think about finding a target. Carbon fiber, chips, magnets, batteries and sensors do not emerge from policy papers. They come from industrial systems that have yet to be built out in America.

All of this also puts rare earths and battery metals on the front page of defense investing. Neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium are magnet words. Magnet words are motor words. Motor words are drone words. Add lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum and tungsten, and suddenly the drone story is also a mining story, a refining story, a battery story and an industrial metals story.

And no, we’re not tossing out the old platforms. Submarines are still war-winning weapons. Just as aircraft are critical weapons. Plus missiles, tanks, ships, satellites and radars. But ore in the ground is a weapon too. Refineries are weapons. Machine tools are weapons. Battery plants are weapons. Software libraries are weapons. Assembly lines are weapons.

Here’s the takeaway: in the new age of drone warfare, the factory is not behind the front. The factory is the front.

The Investment Lesson

Here’s the investment lesson: Drones change tactics because they put eyes, ears and explosives everywhere. They change operations because commanders can coordinate fires, movement and logistics with persistent surveillance and rapid feedback. And they change strategy because nations must plan for production depth, electronic resilience, data dominance and supply-chain sovereignty.

Follow the money and you’ll find it flowing toward autonomy, software, sensors, counter-drone systems, batteries, rare earths, machine tools, cyber resilience and the old-fashioned industrial base that still wins wars.

Modern war is industrial war, now fought at software speed. Stockpiles matter, but stockpiles run down. Production keeps armed forces in the fight, and logistics keeps production relevant.

So, while we’ve been discussing drones, don’t confuse the shiny moving thing with the whole story. The real story of a drone is the stack beneath it: motor, magnet, battery, chip, sensor, code, secure network, factory, mine and ore in the ground.

This is where the next great defense trade begins: not with an aircraft on a runway or a ship cutting a wake, but with the magnets, batteries, tools and factories that make drone war possible.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 19:15

Berkshire Adds Google, Delta, Trims BofA, Kroger As Abel Taps Into Record Cash Hoard

While nowhere near as tumultuous as the transformational first quarter in Berkshire's post-Warren Buffett era which saw over a dozen names rotated in and out, in the second quarter there were a few notable changes under Berkshire's new CEO, Greg Abel. 

In a quarter in which Abel spent a net $20 billion on other equities, and repurchased about $4.5 billion of its own stock, leaving it with $365.5 billion of cash at midyear, down from a record $397 billion at the end of March, Berkshire added to its holdings in Alphabet and Delta Air Lines as Greg Abel began tapping into the company’s massive cash hoard. 

After years of relatively subdued deal activity under Buffett, who often bemoaned lofty market valuations, Abel oversaw back-to-back multibillion-dollar transactions in the period.

He spent $6.8 billion to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison Home, a typical value bet, while also handing $10 billion to Alphabet to support its investments related to artificial intelligence as part of the company's unprecedented ATM offering; the deal represented a new area for the conglomerate which had historically stayed away from most tech names. Here are the other transactions disclosed changes in the Berkshire 13F:

New positions:

• D R Horton (DHI), a tiny new stake worth $580K as of June 30

Raises:

• Alphabet (GOOGL) 48.1MM shares added, or $21.1BN, to $37.8BN as of June 30, making it Berkshire's 3rd largest holding,
• Delta Air Lines (DAL), 17.5MM shares added, or $2.7BN, to $5.4BN
• Lennar (LEN), 3.1MM shares added, to $315.9MM, to $1.2BN
• New York Times (NYT), 553K shares added, or $$169.5MM, to $1.1BN
• Macy's (M), 4.3MM shares added, or $118MMM, to $173.0MM

Cuts:

• Bank of America (BAC), 30.2MM shares sold bringing total down to 483.4MM shares worth $27.5BN as of June 30
• DaVita (DVA), 1.2MM shares sold bringing total to 28.9MM shares worth $6.4BN 
• Kroger (KR), 11MM shares sold bringing total to 39MM shares worth $2.2BN 
• Ally Financial (ALLY), 2MM shares sold bringing total to 27MM shares worth $1.2BN
• Capital One (COF), 4.2MM shares sold bringing total to 3MM shares worth $602MM
• Nucor (NUE), 2MM shares sold bringing total to 1.9MM shares worth $413MM 

Exits:

• Entire position in Constellation Brands (STZ) for $95MM as of March 31. 

Full breakdown:

Source: Edgar

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 18:50

State Department Revokes Over 175,000 Visas Of Foreign Nationals Accused Of Crimes

Via American Greatness,

President Donald Trump’s State Department has revoked more than 175,000 visas held by foreign nationals accused of crimes since the start of last year, officials said this week, marking one of the administration’s most sweeping efforts yet to remove dangerous individuals from the country.

State Department officials said the majority of revocations targeted foreign nationals accused of assault, drunk driving, theft, drug crimes, fraud, immigration violations and threats to national security.

A significant share of the revoked visas also involved allegations of child abuse, sexual assault, embezzlement and reckless driving.

Among the cases cited by officials, one foreign national lost his visa after being charged with rape and sexual battery of a victim who is mentally disabled. Another had a visa revoked following charges of felony kidnapping, human trafficking and sexual exploitation of a minor.

Other cases included a foreign national arrested for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest with violence, drunk driving and domestic violence, as well as individuals charged with sodomy of a child, aggravated sexual battery, and possession of more than a dozen counts of child sexual abuse material.

One foreign national was arrested for driving with heroin in the vehicle and a blood alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.

A U.S. embassy in North Africa revoked more than 100 visas held by so-called birth tourist parents who officials said traveled to the United States primarily to give birth so their children would obtain American citizenship.

Officials also flagged financial crimes among the revocations, including a foreign national accused of orchestrating a Medicaid scheme that billed more than $5 million for fake services under the guise of a legitimate healthcare business, and another who fabricated company revenue and forged letters to swindle investors and clients while using the false claims to fraudulently obtain a visa.

A foreign national who came to the United States to teach young students was arrested and had his visa revoked after being accused of sexually assaulting one of them.

Several foreign nationals lost their visas after publicly celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, including one who wrote that “when fascists die, democrats don’t complain” and another who said Kirk “died too late.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also moved against foreign nationals deemed threats to national security, revoking the visa of a Cuban national with ties to the communist regime and of Iranian nationals connected to the Iranian government.

Officials additionally revoked the visa of a Laotian child sex offender previously pardoned by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, as well as a Kuwaiti national accused of expressing a desire for violence against Trump and referring to Americans as the “enemy.”

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 18:25

 

 

I did not have COVID on my August bingo card, but — goddamn — there it is.

Coming back from Maine, I felt a little run down — 5 days of fishing, drinking, and cigars will have that effect.

I missed an MiB recording, an evening seeing J.B. Smooth, and then had to cancel a giant family event at our place out East.

It’s pretty mild; I feel mostly fine; it’s like a summer cold plus a little brain fog. Glad I am vaxxed up the wazoo.

Light posting until next week…

 

The post Ugh… appeared first on The Big Picture.

US Accuses Chinese Exporters Of Masterminding "Great Transshipment Scam"

Back in mid-2025, when Trump's renewed trade war with China was all the rage, we said that much of this was hot air and theatrics for the simple reason that many Chinese exporters would find easy ways to evade US tariffs thanks to "transshipments", or using intermediary countries as fake points of origin ...

Why China exports tumbled to the US and rose everywhere else? One word: transshipments pic.twitter.com/y9Pg2ML5ZX

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 10, 2025

... and none more so than Vietnam, which quickly emerged as the central nexus in US tariff evasion.

Record Vietnam transshipments by China pic.twitter.com/SBCsRrWLeh

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 8, 2025

It appears the Trump admin finally got the memo, and on Thursday it released a sharply worded report accusing Chinese exporters of orchestrating a system of “illegal transshipment” through more than 40 third countries to dodge US tariffs, branding the practice “The Great Transshipment Scam”.

The 25-page document confirms what we reported for much of 2025, and claims Chinese firms systematically diverted goods through lower-tariff jurisdictions since the US kicked off its trade war with China in 2018.

It alleges that exporters use limited assembly, relabelling, repackaging, re-invoicing and false country-of-origin declarations to disguise Chinese-origin products and secure more favourable tariff treatment on entry into the US.

The White House report said that Chinese exporters have “increasingly routed goods through third countries … where limited assembly, finishing, repackaging, relabelling or documentation changes could create the appearance of a different national origin.”

“For years the great transshipment scam has led Communist China to launder its exports through more than 40 countries, rob our treasury of tens of billions of dollars, and steal the paychecks of American workers,” said Peter Navarro, the White House senior counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing.

“This report rips the mask off.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington said that Beijing opposed the “overstretching of the concept of national security” and the use of state power to suppress Chinese enterprises”. It also warned that any “unilateral actions or agreements concerning transshipped goods must not target or harm the interests of third parties.”

“We firmly oppose any party seeking to strike a deal at China’s expense or engaging in baseless economic coercion that severely infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of relevant enterprises and gravely disrupts the stability of global industrial and supply chains,” embassy spokesperson Liu Chang said adding that “should such situations arise, China will resolutely take necessary measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”

The 40 countries named as participants in the China-linked “Great Transshipment Scam” include major US trading partners such as Canada and Mexico, as well as allies such as Japan, South Korea, the European Union and Israel. Most Southeast Asian countries are also on the list, among them Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines. South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are also named.

The findings come amid tit-for-tat economic actions between Washington and Beijing and one month before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Washington for a leader-level summit with US President Donald Trump.

The report cited a range of third-party estimates for the annual value of goods involved in illegal or suspect transshipment, spanning roughly US$40 billion to US$303 billion. 

Assuming $75 billion in annual illegal transshipment, the administration estimates that roughly 450,000 American jobs have been displaced and up to $150 billion of GDP has been lost. These figures are described as model-based illustrations rather than observed counts.

Applying illustrative tariffs of between 25 to 45%, the report estimates annual US revenue losses in the “tens of billions of dollars”.

The report says that the administration will increase the use of artificial intelligence to monitor trade and spot transshipped goods, an initiative it calls the “Detective Border”.

The publication coincides with Washington’s efforts to close what it sees as a major loophole in its tariff regime.

Mexico has drawn particular scrutiny because of its free trade pact with the US and rising Chinese investment and flows of Chinese-made components into Mexican factories. Those concerns are now central to the ongoing joint review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). The US has declined an automatic 16-year extension of the pact, citing issues including concerns over Chinese transshipment.

Navarro termed Mexico as “one of the biggest transshippers,” where China uses the USMCA “tariff rates of nothing” and “sneak stuff in”. 

“Communist China has engaged in an extremely sophisticated set of actions that are designed essentially to transship and thereby evade the tariffs,” Navarro added.

As SCMP notes, an analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a lobby group for the US manufacturing industry, estimated that about US$14 billion in Chinese trade was diverted and transshipped to the US after the 2025 tariff escalation, with Asean countries accounting for the majority.

Washington has already moved to tighten the rules. A 2025 framework agreement with Vietnam imposed a 40 per cent tariff on goods deemed to have been transshipped, twice the rate applied to ordinary Vietnamese-origin shipments. Similar anti-transshipment provisions have been included in other bilateral arrangements and executive actions targeting indirect shipments.

Asian manufacturing hubs such as Vietnam and Thailand are also under growing scrutiny. Trade data earlier this year showed a roughly $112 billion gap between China’s reported exports to the US and arrivals recorded by US Customs and Border Protection, a discrepancy widely seen as a sign of large-scale tariff circumvention.

Although the report concludes that it “is too early to determine the net effect of the Administration’s tariff and anti-transshipment policies”, it serves as a reminder that the tariff heat remains on.

In July last year, an executive order extended a 40% penalty tariff to goods that US Customs and Border Protection determines were transshipped to evade duties. The penalty is imposed on top of any country-of-origin tariff. The administration has also begun publishing lists of countries and facilities linked to suspected tariff evasion schemes. 

The White House report came a day after Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, urged Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to intensify the crackdown. In an August 12 letter, Moreno called the practice “a deliberate scheme by foreign manufacturers, overwhelmingly based in China, to falsify where their goods are made, launder them through a third country, slap on a new label and dump them into the American market.”

He said that Chinese auto parts routed through Thailand had affected manufacturing in Ohio.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 18:00

Democratic Party Committee Advances Resolution Demanding ICE Be Abolished

Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times,

Democrats have edged closer to vowing to end Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Federal agents monitor protesters in front of Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 4, 2025. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

At its summer meeting in Austin, Texas, on Aug. 13, the Democratic National Committee's Resolutions Committee approved a resolution that calls for the abolition of ICE, an agency at the center of the Trump administration's immigration law enforcement effort.

It could be approved by the full DNC as Democrats mull their message ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The resolution, which passed 25 to 12, was introduced by Michele Johnson, a DNC committeewoman from Louisiana.

In 2024, the website of the New Orleans Democratic Socialists of America described Johnson as a member of its chapter.

"The DNC urges Democratic members of Congress to craft legislation abolishing ICE and enacting immigration reform that provides pathways to citizenship, protects workers, and ensures dignity for all impacted people," the resolution reads in part.

The resolution cited the deaths of ICE detainees and allegations of poor conditions at detention facilities.

An amendment from Idaho's Terri Pickens that would have changed the word "abolishing" to "completely restructuring" was withdrawn.

At the meeting, Johnson said she wanted to go beyond merely calling for reforms.

She said "abolition may feel intimidating or radical," but the death of anti-ICE protester Renee Good in a Minneapolis confrontation with ICE agents and other incidents, as well as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's call for 3,000 arrests per day, helped motivate her desire to eliminate the agency altogether.

"No amount of tinkering at the edges will make the culture change," she said, alleging that the agency "treats all individuals with my skin color and darker like criminals."

The resolution touched off a spirited debate among the Democrats present, with some urging reform rather than abolishment.

Marge Hoffa, the DNC's Midwestern regional vice chair, noted that the DNC previously passed resolutions advocating ICE reforms, including during the same meeting, that fell short of pushing to abolish the agency.

That reform resolution came from the DNC's current chairman, Ken Martin, who, like Hoffa, is from Minnesota.

"We shouldn't contradict ourselves by also introducing a resolution that would now call to abolish something that we have [a] well-established track record of calling to be drastically reformed," Hoffa said.

Ada Briceño, a Californian, voiced support for the resolution, noting that her family and friends included people illegally present in the United States.

"I don't trust this organization, this ICE, with my life, or anybody else's life," she said.

Texas's Jeff Strater said he backed the resolution without amendments.

"I am fully aware that this body has passed resolutions reforming ICE - I voted for them - but I'm also here today to vote in alignment with my state Democratic Party," he said.

Natalie Baldassarre, the national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, criticized the resolution.

"If Democrats had any backbone they'd vote down this dangerous proposal and put American citizens first," she said in a statement, adding that ICE under President Donald Trump has mostly targeted alleged or convicted criminals.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 17:40

Investors Sue Selena Gomez Over Mental Health Startup

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Singer and actor Selena Gomez was sued Thursday by investors who say the “Only Murders in the Building” star committed fraud by failing to fulfill duties to build and promote her mental health startup.

The plaintiffs invested nearly $1.2 million in Wondermind Global, which was launched in 2021 to help users improve their “mental fitness.”

Investors said they put money into the startup believing that Gomez’s involvement would drive growth. Her role as head of marketing was presented as central, and the sheer size of her social media audience—500 million followers—was part of the pitch.

They argue that Gomez and other company leaders did not deliver any of what they had promised, including a mobile app.

“There was no legitimate enterprise in the works, much less a lucrative one,” the plaintiffs said.

They said the company failed to meet “even its most basic obligations, such as timely paying its employees and vendors.”

The lawsuit maintains that shortfalls left no real business. The investors describe an enterprise that never got off the ground.

Investors said they were assured Gomez would actively promote the venture as head of marketing and “chief impact officer.”

The complaint alleges she signed a contract but largely failed to perform those duties.

“Gomez purported to sign a contract obligating her to perform and then ignored it,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also names Gomez’s mother, Mandy Teefey, a co-chief executive, and former business partner Daniella Pierson as defendants, along with Wondermind Global itself. Court papers allege the defendants overstated the company’s 2022 valuation at $95 million and claimed partnerships with firms such as JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity that never existed.

Plaintiffs maintain they remained unaware of operational shortfalls—including late payments to employees and vendors—until a September 2025 article in The Cut described the company’s collapse and related internal conflicts. Teefey previously disputed aspects of that reporting in a statement to media outlets. Pierson, who departed in 2023, denied the claims against her in a statement to news outlets on Thursday and said she welcomes the chance to present financial records.

Representatives for Gomez and Teefey could not be reached for comment.

Wondermind debuted in 2021 to offer newsletter-based mental health resources. The case was brought in Delaware federal court. It seeks a jury trial, repayment of the nearly $1.2 million investment, additional damages, and attorney fees.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 17:00

Flock Blinks: Surveillance Giant Slashes Data Retention After 50 Jurisdictions Walk, Cams Destroyed

Flock Safety, the startup that blanketed America in automated license plate readers (ALPRs), announced Thursday that it is dialing back its expansive platform. The company is significantly shortening its data retention windows, requiring police to justify every search, and allowing cities to block neighboring jurisdictions from querying their cameras for immigration enforcement.

Not even (paid?) damage control by Bari Weiss' The Free Press could salvage the situation. 

Today I found out that the person behind this pro-Flock propaganda piece put out by The Free Press, is Bari Weiss.

This is the same Bari Weiss that suppressed a 60 minutes piece on Jeffrey Epstein's banking relationships.

It turns out that, under Bari's leadership, the story… https://t.co/5KGGdca8TI

— Orwell Day (@OrwellDay) August 5, 2026

And with the 'Get the Flock Out' movement in full swing, more than 50 agencies and municipalities have canceled, suspended, rejected, or simply unplugged their Flock contracts since January, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock. In July, Republican members of Congress filed at least two bills aimed at severely restricting the systems.

Others haven't waited for legislation. A Guardian investigation documented 33 destruction incidents across 23 states - cameras smashed, sawed off their poles, or hauled away entirely. One activist told AFP he has personally disabled roughly 30 devices and posts instructional videos to some 500,000 Instagram followers, while the DeFlock America Facebook group has grown past 600,000 members crowdsourcing camera locations and disabling techniques. In Oregon, six poles were cut down and a note left at the base: "Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks."

Fusion centers are now monitoring the surveillance state's opponents. Intelligence bulletins obtained by 404 Media through public records requests show law enforcement tracking anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram accounts, flagging "extensive and ongoing chatter on social media" about methods to "physically destroy Flock LPR cameras," and instructing departments to increase patrols around camera sites.

New Policies

Flock operates roughly 120,000 cameras nationwide, recording the plate numbers, makes, models, and bumper stickers of practically every car that passes. Thousands of law enforcement agencies across 49 states can search that data and share it seamlessly across jurisdictional lines.

According to CEO Garrett Langley's announcement, the platform is undergoing several major structural shifts:

• Retention Drops to Seven Days: Default data retention is shrinking from 30 days to just seven. Longer holds will now require data to be explicitly tied to an active case number as evidence.
• Mandatory Case Numbers: Every search query must now be labeled with a criminal case number to proceed.
• Automated Audits: A tool that flags abnormal search behavior is now mandatory for all law enforcement customers. If tripped, the system automatically locks users out pending an internal review.
• Jurisdictional Firewalls: Cities can now restrict what outside agencies are allowed to search their cameras for. Langley noted, "City A could allow City B to search its cameras only for a stolen vehicle, missing person, or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement."

So, cities can choose not to help ICE catch illegals.

That feature exists for a reason. 404 Media found Flock's lookup tool aided at least 4,000 immigration-related searches between Trump's inauguration and May 2025 - including queries run in states that had banned local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE.

The policy shift also comes on the heels of a glaring security failure. Langley disclosed that a glitch discovered in December 2025 left some of Flock's AI-powered pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras exposed to the public internet. "For a brief period of time, third parties were able to access live streams and footage from those cameras," Langley admitted, attributing the breach to a vendor's network configuration error before adding, "We are accountable."

Meanwhile, earlier this month a North Carolina police officer was arrested for allegedly using Flock's plate readers to track her boyfriend's ex-wife. So random cops abusing Flock systems has been another issue. 

An issue at scale, it turns out. The Washington Post reported this month that it found nearly 50 instances of officers charged or accused of using the cameras for unauthorized purposes, many of them tracking current or former romantic partners or family members. Four Richmond County Sheriff's Office employees have been arrested and fired since June for personal searches. This week, six Savannah Police Department employees - including four officers - were fired for searching friends and family and letting an outside agency use the city's cameras. Savannah says it caught them using Flock's audit function - the one that only became mandatory on Thursday.

Bipartisan Backlash

The movement against Flock doesn't break down cleanly along party lines. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, civil liberties organizations like the ACLU, and ordinary residents at local town halls have converged on the company.

While ALPR technology isn't new, Flock's hyper-aggressive expansion and easy-to-use search interface made the surveillance uniquely visible. The backlash unites left-leaning advocates concerned about over-policing and civil rights with right-leaning advocates concerned about constitutional privacy and government overreach.

As one surveillance-law scholar told the Associated Press, the "growing community backlash" aimed specifically at Flock has captured a profound cultural shift: people don't want their daily movements tracked.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:40

America Enters FAFO-Land: Election Sabotage & Blue-State Mutiny As Communist Jihad Escalates

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Things Get Spicy

“The left are incompetent biotrash who purge everyone too attractive, too capable or too intelligent to uncritically accept their retarded worldview.”

- Aimee Terese on “X”

And so, all of a sudden, having failed to subvert or assassinate the president they abhor, and foil his attempt to repair our country, the combined forces of the Democratic Party, the seditious news media, and a traitorous government bureaucracy resort to communist jihad in their crusade to wreck the USA. That’s a great combo, all right: history’s worst system for managing human affairs paired with a cult of bloodthirsty conquest. They’d decapitate the Beach Boys singing Fun, Fun, Fun if they could time-travel back to 1964, and stuff anyone who objected into a gulag.

The Jihad for Lunch Bunch Sends Greetings to Infidel America

There’s a sort of last-gasp feeling about all this. Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman el Sayed put it nicely the other day when he said of his opponents, “When they go low, we go lower.” True dat.

And you can see where things go from here: election clean-up comes on no matter what, SAVE Act or not, probably via a comprehensive PDJT National Security Executive Order yet to be declared. There’s already a fair chance that SCOTUS will clear the way for the US Postal Service to regulate “uniform standards” for the distribution of mail-in ballots (from a March, 2026 previous exec order #15399 — “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

Cue the communist jihadis to stage street-actions (a.k.a. “riots”) this fall in their captive cities and states. Since they can’t win elections without massive fraud, they will opt to do whatever is necessary to make the election impossible, and chaos is their go-to tactic in this contest of wills. The catch is, the communist jihadis are still a very small demographic.

The president is not going to allow a replay of the savage and ridiculous 2020 BLM riots. This time around, they get briskly squashed.

If the big red states like California, New York, and Illinois try something funny, like refusing to open polling places and allow the election to happen, then you will see Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul, and JB Pritzker marched straight into jail. The USA will temporarily become FAFO-land. The Communist Control Act of 1954 (50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844) is still on-the-books. It defines the Communist Party (or a party that quacks like one) to be “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.”

The scene begins to look like a civil war or a state of siege, constraining the president to use the military to enforce civil order where the civil authorities have failed, demurred, or revolted.

It would be extraordinary and nauseating, but arguably necessary to purge the extreme political illness that holds the nation in thrall. This disease has been allowed to worsen and rage for ten years. We are good and goddam sick of it.

As for Jihad, the first amendment prohibits religious persecution, of course, but under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, (8 U.S.C. § 1189) the State Department can designate political groups as “foreign terrorist organizations.” Nominees for that might be: the Muslim Brotherhood and any of its offshoots, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muslim Students Association (MSA / MSA National), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and others, if their spokespeople have called for the establishment of Sharia law, or advocated jihad for the purpose of capturing territory here in the USA.

While the aforesaid so-far-hypothetical events spool out around the election, something else pretty big will probably get underway this fall: the long-awaited commencement of prosecutions against former government officials (and perhaps some current ones) for their parts in the ten-year-long coup against the two-term president Donald Trump, as well as the criminal operations conducted under the sham president “Joe Biden” between those two terms.

That would have to include Dr. Anthony Fauci — with his active criminal referral already in-process at DOJ — and many of his colleagues at the public health agencies who perpetrated the Covid op. New scandalous details about it emerge from Dr. Fauci’s captured communications from the period 2020 to 2025. This week you learned that he hid crucial facts from the public about the Covid vaccine causing an alarming rate of miscarriage among pregnant women who received the shots. It’s right there, in black and white, in his texts and emails between himself and former CDC director Rochelle Walensky.

It’s also interesting to see that former FBI director Christopher Wray is coming back on the radar screen after lying low for eighteen months. You know he was involved in almost every aspect of the ten-year-long coup. He took a hand-off of the RussiaGate baton from James Comey in May of 2017 and ran with it through a dozen related ops including the FISA abuses, the Steele Dossier, Lawfare against Trump appointees (the abuse of Rudy Giuliani and others), fake impeachment # 1, the Jan. 6 capitol riot, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and much more. He probably lied to Congress a dozen times. You have to wonder how many trips he has been summoned to make to the grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida. No leaks from down there. . . everything is sealed.

So, while the summer breeze still wafts over the barbeque in the briny air, and an unnerving stillness persists, forces are moving and roiling under the surface. Enjoy at least the appearance of calm seas while you can because it’s going to roughen up in the weeks ahead.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:20

Former Cambridge Professor Jason Arday Found Dead at 41

Jason Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor who recently resigned amid controversy, has been found dead at the age of 41.

Emergency services were called to an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon, where Arday was discovered unresponsive. The London Ambulance Service arrived shortly after 3:00 p.m., deploying an ambulance crew, an advanced paramedic, and a Hazardous Area Response Team. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The Metropolitan Police stated that while the death is unexpected, it is not currently being treated as suspicious. Arday's next-of-kin have been informed and are receiving support from officers. The Met’s Central South Command Unit is handling the investigation, and a file is being prepared for the coroner.

Arday's sudden passing comes just over a week after he stepped down as Cambridge’s professor of sociology of education. He resigned on August 5, citing an "unrelenting level of public scrutiny," merely hours after the university announced an investigation into his appointment and tenure following allegations of plagiarism. The ongoing inquiry is expected to inform a broader review of Cambridge's hiring processes for senior academic roles.

Before his resignation, Arday made history as Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor. His impressive academic ascent began with undergraduate and postgraduate studies in education, followed by a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University. He subsequently held academic posts at the University of Roehampton, Durham University, and the University of Glasgow, where he was named a professor in 2021.

His recently completed memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, was published in the United States earlier this week. It is scheduled to be released in the UK by Simon and Schuster on August 27.

Memoir Fabrications and "Inconsistencies"

As we noted earlier this week, advance copies of Arday's memoir and its initial book proposal contain wild discrepancies and impossible claims.

• The "Conscious Coma": In his book proposal, Arday claimed he was hit by a car, spent months in a "conscious coma," and had to relearn how to walk and talk. This entire traumatic event is completely omitted from the final book.
• Shifting Illnesses: The proposal states he battled testicular cancer. The final book, however, changes this narrative, claiming he grappled with two brain tumors instead.
• The Brazilian Shaman: Arday writes about encountering a "shaman woman" in Brazil who accurately prophesied his future struggles and triumphs. The article notes a glaring issue with this story: Arday has apparently never been to Brazil.
• Time Travel: He somehow claimed to have appeared on the British documentary series Seven Up more than 20 years before he was even born.
• Superhuman Athletics: He claims to have run an astonishing 30 marathons in 35 days.

Plagiarism and Academic Integrity

Beyond the memoir, the article highlights severe allegations regarding his academic work and professional conduct.

• The Doctoral Dissertation: The London Telegraph reportedly found more than 100 passages in Arday's PhD dissertation that were "identical or nearly identical" to a 2009 thesis by a Brunel University student named Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.
• AI-Generated Resignation: After the plagiarism allegations surfaced, Arday resigned. The article notes that an enterprising blogger ran Arday's resignation letter through an AI detector, which concluded with "high confidence" that the letter was fully generated by Artificial Intelligence.
• Inflated Credentials: Arday was widely billed as a "professor of sociology," but his actual academic degrees are in education.

It seems getting caught was just too much for Arday. And the left is already blaming people for noticing...

I tweeted this out last Friday. Care to apologise :
‘This just gets worse and worse. There needs to be an intervention by family, social services, colleagues, university specialists. The poor chap is obviously in serious need of help. I hope he gets it. I fear what might happen… https://t.co/SHAqSrCWf0

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) August 14, 2026

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 16:01

No Illegal Immigrants Released At Southern Border In 15 Months: CBP

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

U.S. Border Patrol in July released zero illegal immigrants from the southern border into the United States for the 15th straight month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in an Aug. 13 statement.

Illegal crossings last month remained “historically low,” CBP said. Apprehensions of illegal immigrants by Border Patrol along the southwest border in July were 94 percent lower than the monthly average under the prior administration.

The number of illegal immigrants apprehended in the current fiscal year through July is lower than the average of just a single month between fiscal years 1992 and 2024.

“Again this month, the results are clear: President Trump’s border security agenda is restoring order and putting the safety of the American people first,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in the statement.

“DHS remains focused on enforcing our immigration laws, securing the border, and ensuring those who enter our country illegally are removed swiftly.”

According to the CBP, the continued decline in border crossings and apprehensions reflects the impact of “robust enforcement policies.”

CBP Commissioner Rodney S. Scott credited clear policies, strong enforcement, and the work of frontline personnel for delivering positive results at America’s borders.

CBP data show there were 103,028 enforcement encounters at the southwest land border between October 2025 and June this year.

In the entirety of fiscal year 2025, there were a total of 443,671 encounters, less than the more than 2 million encounters registered in each of the previous two fiscal years under the prior administration.

According to Border Patrol’s 2025–2029 Strategy report, the agency’s plan to tackle illegal immigrants includes expanding physical infrastructure, such as checkpoints, barriers, and permanent towers, across all regions of the United States.

The strategy details plans to deploy advanced autonomous surveillance systems in order to detect and identify illegal immigrants.

Illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala are apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol officers after crossing a section of border wall into Ruby, Arizona, on Jan. 4, 2025. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

While Border Patrol works to counter the inflow of illegal immigrants in the country, the agency’s workforce has seen strong growth.

In June, the CBP said that 21,471 Border Patrol agents were serving on America’s front lines, the highest number in the agency’s 102-year history. CBP credited the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump last year, for fueling “increased applicant interest” as well as enabling the agency to attract top talent.

Members of U.S. Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas, on March 5, 2025. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Illegal Immigrant Crackdown

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is cracking down on criminal illegal immigrants across the country.

In an Aug. 7 statement, ICE said it arrested more than 1,200 illegal immigrants across Georgia under Operation Safe Community—Atlanta, which targeted people with criminal histories, including charges of aggravated assault, sex crimes, assault and battery, and crimes against children.

“Removing these criminal alien offenders from Georgia neighborhoods makes for much safer communities,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations acting Assistant Director Patricia Hyde said in the statement.

ICE said on July 14 that its Harlingen division arrested 238 illegal immigrants in a single day, setting a record for Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Among the arrested were alleged criminals with convictions for sexual battery, attempted kidnapping, and drug possession.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas, on March 23, 2026. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration is also imposing heavy fines on illegal immigrants. In a July 23 statement, DHS said that more than $84 billion in civil fines have been imposed on such individuals. This includes a $998-per-day charge levied on any illegal immigrant who does not leave the country despite a final order for removal.

A group of Democratic lawmakers criticized the fines, accusing the Trump administration of improperly using immigration penalties to “intimidate law-abiding immigrants,” according to a July 20 statement from the office of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).

In a July 17 letter to DHS and DOJ officials, the lawmakers said that in assessing fines against illegal immigrants, the departments “appear to have abandoned critical safeguards that have long prevented law-abiding immigrants from being improperly targeted with unreasonable penalties.”

In June 2025, when DHS announced streamlining the process for fining illegal immigrants, then-DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin justified the need for such fines.

“The law doesn’t enforce itself; there must be consequences for breaking it,” McLaughlin said in a statement at the time.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 15:40

Energy Drinks Overtake Coffee As Gen Z's Primary Caffeine Source

Filippo Falorni, Citi’s lead US equity-research analyst covering beverages and household and personal-care companies, published his latest survey of 2,400 US energy-drink consumers, revealing a significant generational shift in caffeine consumption.

Energy drinks, led by category giants Red Bull, Monster, and others, have overtaken coffee as the primary caffeine source among Gen Z consumers. In other words, younger Americans are increasingly abandoning the morning cup of coffee, even as Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers continue to rely on it for their daily boost.

Among respondents aged 16 to 24, 30.6% now identify energy drinks as their primary caffeine source, up from 20.6% last year. Coffee fell to 27.3% from 40.4%, meaning energy drinks have overtaken coffee among the youngest cohort surveyed. Across all older age groups, coffee is the primary source of morning caffeine.

Falorni added more color: 

Based off our survey results, younger consumers are increasingly comfortable with using energy beverages as their primary caffeine source, with 30.6% and 24.3% of 16-24 and 25-34 year-olds, respectively, reporting energy drinks are their primary source of caffeine, up markedly from 20.6% and 19% in our 2025 survey and above the 23.6% for total respondents (vs. 16.6% in 2025) and only 12% for the 55+ age group (vs. 7.7% in 2025). We also highlight that coffee consumption is lowest for the youngest demographic we surveyed, with only 27.3% of 16–24-year-olds stating coffee was their primary caffeine source (down significantly from 40.4% in 2025) vs. 40.8% for total respondents (also down from 47.4% in 2025) and 60.4% for the 55+ age group

Looking specifically at energy drink consuming respondents, we can see the coffee category has been the largest share donor to energy beverages across all age groups, with 45% of all respondents reporting coffee was their primary source of caffeine before switching to energy beverages vs. 30% for soft drinks and 10% for tea. 

Other compelling findings in the survey:

• Women accounted for 58% of consumers who entered the category during the past year, compared with only 29% of consumers who have been drinking energy beverages for six years or longer.
• Zero-sugar products now represent about 49% of US energy-drink sales, up from 37% in 2021.
• Energy-drink prices have risen only 4.9% since late 2021, compared with 42% for soda and 47% for coffee, giving Monster and Red Bull considerable room to raise prices.
• About 40% of respondents increased their energy drink consumption over the past year, while just 20% reduced it.
• Brand loyalty is soft: 51% switched their primary brand during the past year, making flavor innovation and shelf space critical.
• Monster and Red Bull control about 70% of the market despite a surge of challenger brands.

In markets, Monster is outperforming Celsius year-to-date: 

Our latest coverage in the space includes the report that Rockstar founder Russell Weiner has accumulated a roughly $300 million stake in Celsius Holdings and is preparing an activist campaign aimed at accelerating the company's turnaround. Read the full report here.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 15:20

US Lost 25% Of Its Reaper Drones In Iran War, Officials Estimate

Amid a recent avalanche of media headlines warning of significantly depleted US weapons stockpiles, The Washington Post is out with another fresh report Thursday which sounds the alarm, this time over advanced drones.

The US military lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during the Iran war, American defense officials were quoted as saying. The same officials estimate that this constitutes roughly 25% of the Pentagon's fleet.

2024 image of American MQ-9 Reaper UAV brought down in Yemen’s Marib. ClashReport/X

If these were the type of small, cheap drones which have been prevalent in the Russia-Ukraine war, no one would see this as much of a problem, but Reapers are highly advanced surveillance systems and also hunter-killer aircraft, capable of flying for 27+ hours straight, and with some variants able to push past 40 hours. 

Made by General Atomics, each drone costs between $30 million to $50 million. With 45 drones wiped out, this means that well over one billion dollars in hardware was either shot out of the sky or crashed in the context of Iran war operations.

The US has also at times lost parked aircraft at bases that came under Iranian attack in the Gulf. This was especially true of even pricier large aerial refueling tankers.

The Washington Post explains why the Reaper has been vulnerable to shootdown by Iranian forces over the past several months in the following:

The aircraft have seen heavy use around the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route that has become a major flash point in the conflict — and a key obstacle to negotiating a lasting peace deal. But the drones fly slowly and often at low altitudes, making them relatively easy targets for Iran’s military and its regional proxies in Yemen and Iraq.

A fourth U.S. official, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Pentagon data, said that not all of the lost Reapers were shot down. An unspecified number crashed after their operators’ communications link to the drones failed, the official said.

That latter scenario constitutes quite a costly communications error scenario. It's unclear whether there may have been some instances that the comms were intercepted or hacked.

As we featured earlier in the US-Iran conflict, the MQ-9 Reaper drone is being gradually phased out by the US military, although General Atomics continues to produce it for foreign customers.

Prior rare battle footage of Reaper in action over Middle East skies:

Footage of a US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper UAV engaging an Iranian missile launcher with an AGM-114 Hellfire via @hey_itsmyturn. pic.twitter.com/vwjePW6ivU

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 1, 2026

Iran's proven ability to shoot down MQ-9 Reaper Drones is another demonstration of how it has managed to deploy some air defense, despite prior long-running claims from President Trump that the country's defenses had been "obliterated".

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 14:40

Kennedy Center Votes To Put Trump's Name On Building, Close For Renovations

Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times,

The John F. Kennedy Center’s board voted on Aug. 13 to close the venue for renovations and place President Donald Trump’s name on the building.

“In its meeting today, the board voted to change the front of the ​building’s facade to read ‘The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated ⁠By President Donald J. Trump,‘ and renamed the physical site ’the President Donald J. Trump Plaza,’” said Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex ​officio member on the iconic performing arts center’s board.

The final decision, however, will be up to U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper.

While the board voted to close the main building for renovations, the REACH, a separate building on the campus, will stay open for limited programming.

It is unclear how long the renovations will take. The Epoch Times has reached out to the Kennedy Center for comment.

President Donald Trump announced in February that the Kennedy Center would be closed for a two-year renovation.

Cooper blocked the planned move on May 29 and ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the institution.

On June 11, the Trump administration appealed the ruling, only to be denied.

The Kennedy Center requested that the court give it more time to follow the order, citing that its management planned to present options to the board for a mid-July vote.

The choices included a full closure with no ongoing programming, a partial closure that would allow “some continued public access and limited programming in spaces unaffected” by the construction work, and executing “a highly limited series of phased closures” to fix the building’s most critical infrastructure needs while having a full slate of programming.

The venue claimed the court order “did not affirmatively require the board to reschedule programming that had previously been canceled or to seek new programming,” and did not stop the board from giving the green light for closing the building.

“Center management currently intends for the center and its building to maintain an operational model past the originally planned closure date of July 5,” the filing reads.

“That model, which the center is currently following, contemplates continued public access to the center’s public spaces and to the living memorial for President Kennedy.”

Trump implemented multiple changes to the Kennedy Center last year, including firing the board and its president, David Rubenstein, whom he said did not share his “vision for a Golden Age in arts and culture,” and renovating the institution, which he called “tired, broken, and dilapidated.”

Trump replaced the board with new appointees, alongside existing ex officio members designated by Congress. The new board then elected the president as chairman.

In a May 29 Truth Social post, after the court blocked the building’s planned two-year closure and renaming, Trump said the venue was originally scheduled to undergo “large-scale renovations and construction due to years of neglect, decay, and poor maintenance.”

The court ruling blocking the name change and closure was in response to a lawsuit brought by Beatty.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 14:20

Panama Canal Fees Hit Record As El Nino, Hormuz Crisis Choke Global Shipping

Panama Canal transit auction prices have surged to record highs this summer as an intensifying El Niño and disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz upend global shipping routes. 

A Bloomberg report Friday morning said a supertanker paid a record $4.6 million at auction to bypass the growing queue and secure an earlier transit slot next week. The spike in canal fees and vessel wait times threatens to further raise freight costs, reinforcing growing concerns about inflationary pressures across global supply chains.

Daily auctions for August passage through the canal's busiest locks have averaged about $1.1 million, more than 16 times the average during the same period last year, according to the Financial Times, citing Argus Media. Recent auctions for the larger locks averaged a record $2.5 million. 

Bloomberg said that the liquefied petroleum gas supertanker G. Arete paid a staggering $4.6 million to skip the line, topping an earlier auction this week that exceeded $4 million.

At the same time, the Hormuz chokepoint disruption has pushed Asian buyers toward crude oil and petroleum products at major US export terminals in the Gulf of America, increasing demand for canal passage. Meanwhile, falling canal water levels linked to intensifying El Niño weather conditions, such as drought and limited rainfall, are constraining traffic, which are the main drivers behind rising transit costs. 

"The problem right now is the water levels are dropping steadily, and it's not supposed to be doing that from May to December," said Ross Griffith, head of Americas freight pricing at Argus, who the FT quoted. This year's El Niño has already disrupted marine traffic on European rivers such as the Rhine and Danube, leading to cruise cancellations and freight rerouting.

More color from the FT:

The Panama Canal Authority told the FT that some vessels that recently transited have paid amounts exceeding $1mn at auction to meet their specific market needs and reflected "temporary market fluctuations", not a tariff set by the Panama Canal.

"The announced draft adjustments will not reduce the number of daily vessel transits," an authority spokesperson said. But depending on how conditions change, the authority could impose further restrictions, the spokesperson added.

Parash Jain, managing director and HSBC's global head of transport and logistics research, told clients earlier this week that concerns are mounting that other key waterways around the world are also facing lower water levels, constraining shipping:

El Niño increases both drought and flood risks by shifting rainfall patterns, accelerating evaporation, and lowering river levels at key gateways such as the Panama Canal and Rhine River, while creating floods in Asia and South America, reducing harvests. Authorities respond with draught limits, caps on daily transits, and tighter slot availability, which forces vessels to load less, wait longer, or split cargoes, thus reducing effective capacity and supporting freight rates. Indeed, from 26 August, The Panama Canal Authority is lowering the maximum draft for the largest vessels transiting the canal, preparing for El Niño (6 August, Maritime Executive).

The strengthening El Niño episode poses risks well beyond shipping. As major institutional desks have warned, drought, flooding and disrupted harvests could tighten agricultural supplies and place renewed upward pressure on global food prices

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 13:20

Boeing Unveils Cheap Radar Seeker Built From Off-The-Shelf Parts

By Michael Scanlon of Defense News

Boeing revealed an ultra-low-cost radar seeker Tuesday as this year’s Space and Missile Defense Symposium kicked off in Huntsville, Alabama, pitching it as a way to get missile guidance on more weapons for less money.

Installed in the nose of a missile or bomb, the seeker locates the target and guides the weapon toward it. Seekers are among the most expensive parts of a guided weapon, and Boeing’s argument is that their cost is what limits how many the military can buy.

Boeing’s Ultra Low-Cost Seeker, or ULCS, is an active seeker, meaning it emits its own radar signal rather than relying on one from an aircraft or a ground station. Boeing built it largely from commercial parts adapted for military use, and it is still in development.

The company said it is looking at using the ULCS in its air and missile defense interceptors, its guided bombs and its cruise missiles, because its design allows for reuse across all three rather than requiring a different seeker for each weapon.

Boeing said the seeker is designed for strikes from the air, land or at sea, in any weather and against moving targets. The company ran several tests on the ULCS earlier this summer.

Engineers checked the sensor design in an anechoic chamber, which absorbs stray signal reflections. The seeker also flew aboard a Beechcraft 1900 over land and water, where Boeing said it found and tracked targets as expected.

At Spaceport America in New Mexico, the seeker tracked a passing drone from a fixed position on the ground. Boeing then mounted it on a rocket standing in for a missile and launched it at a second drone carrying a reflector, which bounced radar back as a full-size target would. Boeing said the seeker survived the acceleration and vibration of every test, and detected and tracked its targets each time.

Reuse across weapons is the major selling point, according to Boeing.

“We are developing ULCS with the goal of sharing a common sensor architecture across several of our programs,” said Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems. He said the seeker is modular and built to an open standard so Boeing can fit it to different weapons and change it later without redesigning it.

Boeing already builds seekers for other weapons, some of them for competitors. The company makes the active radar seeker for the Lockheed Martin PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor and said it drew on that work for ULCS while aiming to build something cheaper for use against less sophisticated threats.

Steve Wright, Boeing’s senior manager for weapon sensors and advanced guidance, said work remains to be done.

“We still have more work to do, but the rapid testing our teams have completed prove[s] that this capability is real and will fundamentally change how we look at seeker affordability across our programs,” he said.

Boeing said its teams are studying the test data and using the results to shape the next round of work, including several flight tests in 2027 that will attempt to more closely replicate real-world scenarios.

Boeing is not alone in its attempts to exploit modularity. On Aug. 10, Lockheed Martin announced Strigo, a line of radio-frequency sensors, missile datalinks and seeker technologies built around the same modular premise, designed to serve a variety of weapons.

Boeing did not say whether its ULCS is being funded internally or attached to any existing funded weapons program. Nor did it say just how ultra-low the cost of its new seeker will be.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 13:00

"We Do Bad Things To Bad People": Hegseth Unveils New Motto For Counter Cartel Coalition

Via The Libertarian Institute 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that the new motto of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (ACCC) is "we do bad things to bad people."

"The new motto of the ACCC is 'we do bad things to bad people.' That’s the mentality I want to have inside this room," he said on Wednesday. "Ultimately, we’re dealing with bad people that have done a lot of bad things to a lot of good people for a very long time. And they’re about to meet a new sheriff in town in the ACCC."

Under President Donald Trump and Hegseth, the Department of War has significantly expanded military operations in South America. The US has bombed dozens of vessels it claims are operated by cartels. Additionally, the US has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the country’s president, and Trump is threatening that Cuba is next. 

The ACCC is an American-led coalition that Hegseth says will target "narco-terrorists" and drug traffickers. US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has conducted dozens of strikes, killing over 200 people. The Pentagon has labeled the dead as narco-terrorists. However, several family members of victims have asserted the dead were engaged in fishing or other legal activities. The DEA says the operations have not impacted the flow of drugs into the US.

Last month, The Washington Post reviewed a DEA assessment that found the strikes on vessels operated by alleged narco-terrorists have not changed the amount or price of cocaine entering the US. US military officials also admitted to Congress that the operations have had no impact on purity.

The DEA said that cartels have designed new methods to smuggle drugs into the US. Cartels have bribed Colombian officials to get the location of US warships and used small aircraft for alternative routes to traffic cocaine into the US. 

"When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side," one DEA official told The Post. "They always find the weak spots and exploit them."

A senior Colombian official also told the outlet that the US military operations have had little impact on the cartels. "There was a dissuasive effect in one type of transportation," the source explained.

"So it has forced them to seek out other methods. Taking the drugs out through ports has increased, stockpiling it on large ships," the official added.

Hegseth travels to Panama, calls narcoterrorists and traffickers 'the ISIS and al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere' at conference https://t.co/wUYUJIhqpy via @OANN

— Terrie Lake (@terrielake) August 13, 2026

Congress has not authorized the President to wage war against foreign drug cartels. The White House has attempted to justify the lethal operation by designating the cartels as narco-terrorists. However, drug smuggling is a criminal act, not an act of war. Senator Rand Paul has argued the strikes amount to extrajudicial killing. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 12:20

Russia To Intensify Attacks On Sources Of Western Support In Ukraine: Lavrov

At the end of June, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an unusual move declared the start of a 40-day intensified pressure campaign against Russia, designed to force Moscow to the negotiating table and agree on terms favorable to Ukraine to end the war.

This was an effort seize on the momentum of repeat drone hits on Russian refinery and energy infrastructure - a reality Russia has suffered over many months, leading to an ongoing fuel crisis spanning dozens of cities and regions, and especially Crimea, which earlier in the summer had to temporarily halt fuel sales to common citizens for a time.

In mid-June, Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov proclaimed  "Hell is beginning," for Russia and its military. "Logistics are being cut off. Crimea is being isolated," he said at the time. From there, drone attacks across the Moscow region greatly intensified.

But Russia in turn responded with its own major campaign. In response to major nightly long-range Ukrainian drone attacks deep into its territory, Russia sent more and more ballistic missiles on Kiev - and even the far West areas of Ukraine.

On Friday Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has essentially declared Zelensky's 40-day campaign to be defeated and moot. He described in a fresh media interview that not only will Russian forces implement a tougher response against Ukraine, but will go after the sources of Western support. He specifically raised the issue of the United States and its role.

via Associated Press

"We have submitted a series of questions to the State Department requesting comment, including on the matter of intelligence data and the fact that the US is far more deeply involved in organizing and executing strikes deep within Russian territory against civilian targets. We await a response," Lavrov told state television, as quoted in Reuters.

"Russia will intensify its military campaign in Ukraine and seek to destroy every element used by the West to sustain Kiev’s war effort," the top diplomat said.

The Foreign Ministry has of late accused Ukraine of "brazen acts of ​terrorism" against shipping in the Black Sea, amid tit-for-tat ongoing attacks which have disrupted energy and grain shipping.

"We will not sink to their level. Instead, we will adopt much harsher methods to destroy everything that enables the West to fuel Kiev’s war machine. We are already doing this, and they are already moaning," Lavrov asserted.

On the question of initiatives toward peace which Washington once prioritized (but now no longer seems to), Lavrov quoted Putin as saying while alluding back to the Alaska summit:

"Donald, you sent ​us proposals, and I’ve given them some thought. There are matters that require compromise. But I ‌accept ⁠your proposals in the form you sent them to me."

As for Lavrov's questions on Washington's covert targeting support to Ukraine, the Trump administration is unlikely to give a direct response or acknowledgement to the query. 

President Trump at this start of his term vowed repeatedly to find a swift end to the war and a lasting peace, but this has remained elusive, and instead it appears he has kept up US intelligence and weapons support to Kiev - something that many MAGA supporters wanted to see a halt to.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 12:00

'I Shot Brian Thompson': Luigi Mangione Pleads Guilty To Federal Charges In UnitedHealthcare CEO Killing

Luigi Mangione, the 28-year-old accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court on Friday to the federal charges against him - admitting that he went to New York with the intent to kill Thompson.

Luigi Mangione attends a pre-trial appearance at Manhattan Criminal Court on August 11, 2026 in New York City. David Dee Delgado/Pool/Getty Images

The plea came during an 11 a.m. hearing before U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett, added to the calendar at the last minute this week at the joint request of prosecutors and Mangione's defense team.

"I shot Brian Thompson," he told Garnett.

Members of Brian Thompson's family were present in the courtroom. Outside, a crowd of Mangione supporters gathered - a fixture of his court appearances since his arrest.

Abril Rios, a self-proclaimed "Mangionistas" waits for the hearing, set to start at 11 a.m. Lone Pine Press The charges

Mangione was charged with two federal counts: interstate stalking resulting in death, and stalking through the use of interstate facilities resulting in death. Each carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Judge Garnett dismissed a federal murder charge in January 2026 that would have carried a potential death penalty, removing capital exposure from the federal case.

A senior Justice Department official told Fox News on Thursday that "there is no deal" - meaning Mangione would be pleading guilty without a negotiated sentencing guarantee.

The plea is the latest milestone in a case that has gripped the country since December 4, 2024.

Onlookers obsessed with the case hope to get a peek of accused murderer Luigi Mangione inside the courtroom. AFP via Getty Images

Thompson, 50, a father of two, was gunned down on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk outside the Hilton, hours before UnitedHealth Group was set to host its annual investor conference at the hotel. After a five-day, multistate manhunt, authorities apprehended Mangione at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Investigators recovered a manifesto criticizing the American health insurance industry - a discovery that split public reaction sharply. While many condemned the killing as a cold-blooded assassination, others treated Mangione as a dark symbol of mounting public frustration with the U.S. healthcare system.

A looming state battle

Friday's federal plea does not close the book. Mangione still faces a parallel state prosecution in New York for second-degree murder and weapons offenses, with trial scheduled to begin next month. Earlier terrorism-related counts in the state case have been dismissed.

The federal plea is expected to trigger an immediate clash over the state trial. Mangione's defense team is expected to argue the state case should be dismissed on double jeopardy grounds, contending he cannot be prosecuted twice for the same conduct.

"One-plus-one is two. Double jeopardy, by any common-sense definition," he shouted during a February court appearance.

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office has signaled strong opposition, arguing the federal and state charges address distinct legal harms. Legal experts have called the question genuinely open. "It is incredibly complicated," defense attorney Paul Shechtman told the New York Times earlier this month about New York's double jeopardy statute.

Retired NYPD inspector Paul Mauro suggested a plea without a deal could still serve Mangione: "He gets to serve his time in federal prison, where conditions are better, and he is hoping that the New York state double jeopardy law will knock out the state case."

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 11:43

"A Big Win Today": Trump Cheers As Trade Court Upholds Shutdown Of $800 De Minimis Duty Exemption

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Court of International Trade on Aug. 13 upheld the Trump administration’s authority to end the de minimis exemption that allowed Americans to avoid paying duty on packages worth $800 or less.

The court held in a new order that President Donald Trump had legal authority to close the exemption, which he previously said was a legal loophole that benefited foreign vendors and criminals. A company had sued over the administration’s policy, claiming the president didn’t have the power to end the exemption.

The policy change, which took effect on Aug. 29, 2025, meant that all global parcel imports going forward would be subject to standard U.S. customs duties regardless of value or origin. Gifts worth less than $100 sent by individuals remained exempt.

Congress eliminated the de minimis exemption in an omnibus tax-and-spending bill in 2025, but that measure preserved the carveout until July 2027.

Trump signed Executive Order 14324 on July 30, 2025, ending the exemption, expanding a May 2025 policy that had already removed duty-free status for packages from China and Hong Kong.

The exemption had been in place in some form since 1938 and was last raised to $800 in 2015. Officials said it had become a loophole for traffickers and foreign e-commerce companies.

On Aug. 13, a three-judge panel of the New York-based court ruled against a Michigan-based auto parts importer that had challenged the rescission of the exemption. Detroit Axle argued that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not bestow independent authority on the president to revoke the exemption before July 2027.

The panel found that Trump had authority under IEEPA to end the exemption for low value imports from Canada, China, and Mexico, which he did in a series of executive orders in February 2025.

The IEEPA permits the president to rescind a trade-related “privilege,” even if that law did not allow him to levy entirely new tariffs, the trade court held.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources v. Trump that the IEEPA does not confer statutory authority on the president to impose sweeping tariffs. The case did not deal with the de minimis carveout.

The trade court said in its new ruling that the president’s authority to “nullify [or] void … exercising any … privilege” does not violate separation of powers principles because the presidential rescission “is not an exercise of the power of the purse, as was the case in Learning Resources, and is not an exercise of the power to legislate” as cited in a 1998 precedent.

Trump celebrated the court victory in a Truth Social post.

The exemption is “one of the most DESPICABLE loopholes in American trade policy” that has been exploited by “Fentanyl Traffickers, Counterfeiters, and other Criminals shipping dangerous and illegal products into America,” he said.

The decision means low value packages from overseas will continue to face ordinary customs duties instead of entering the country duty-free.

Tyler Durden Fri, 08/14/2026 - 11:40