Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

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

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

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

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

The “please give it back” account

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

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

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

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

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New Jersey Student Sues After Professor Called Him a ‘Racist’ Over a Trump Flag on His Bedroom Wall

A New Jersey man is suing his former community college, a business professor, and a dean, claiming he was branded a “racist” in front of his classmates and pushed out of an online course because of a “Trump 2020” flag that was hanging on his bedroom wall during a Zoom class.

Justin Caiazzo, 29, of Lake Hiawatha, filed the complaint late last month in New Jersey Superior Court.

Caiazzo is suing Passaic County Community College, Professor Gladys Harris, and dean Peter Hynes.

The lawsuit says his First Amendment rights were violated during a business statistics class in July 2021.

Caiazzo was attending the class from home when Harris stopped the session after noticing the flag in his background, according to the complaint obtained by the New York Post.

The document says she demanded that he take it off the wall immediately and told him the class would not continue until he did. Caiazzo says he did not discuss or mention politics in class.

When he asked what was wrong with the flag, Harris called it “offensive,” the lawsuit alleges.

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The Inflationary Backlog 

Everyone looks at the headline manufacturing number and moves on, but buried inside the September ISM report is something far more important. The Prices Index surged 6.8 points to 77.9 while the Backlog of Orders Index jumped 4.6 points to 56.4. When backlogs move above 50, unfilled orders expand, meaning manufacturers are receiving work faster than they can efficiently complete it. When that happens at the same time prices are surging, the supply chain is telling us there is still pressure in the pipeline.

ISM reported that 43.5% of respondents were paying higher prices while only 2.7% reported lower prices, so this is not merely a story about stronger orders. Costs are rising sharply while unfinished work accumulates.

That combination can become inflationary because shortages change behavior. Companies begin ordering earlier because they fear they will not receive what they need later. Buyers become less concerned about negotiating the lowest price and more concerned about securing supply. Suppliers gain pricing power because customers cannot simply walk away when everybody else is waiting for the same materials. We saw precisely this during COVID when shortages encouraged businesses to order more inventory as protection against future shortages, making the bottlenecks even worse.

This is why the backlog matters more than most people realize. These are orders already sitting in the pipeline waiting to be completed, meaning they represent future production even if new demand begins to weaken. Consumer confidence can decline and the labor market can soften while manufacturers simultaneously face rising costs and unfinished orders. That is how you end up with economic weakness and inflation at the same time.

The Federal Reserve cannot fix this with another 25-basis-point move. Higher interest rates do not produce another barrel of oil, manufacture copper, eliminate tariffs, reopen shipping lanes, produce semiconductors, or build another factory. The Fed can suppress demand, but it cannot manufacture supply, and higher borrowing costs can actually make expanding productive capacity more expensive.

This is precisely why inflation can come in waves. CPI tells us what consumers have already paid, while manufacturing data can reveal pressure moving through the system before those costs reach the final customer. Manufacturers can absorb higher costs for a while by sacrificing margins, but eventually somebody pays. If the Prices Index remains elevated and backlogs continue expanding, businesses will increasingly attempt to pass those costs down the chain.

The September numbers should therefore be watched carefully. One month does not establish a trend, and backlogs could fall again, but a Prices Index of 77.9 alongside a Backlog of Orders Index at 56.4 is not a signal that inflationary pressure has simply disappeared. While Wall Street obsesses over every sentence from the Federal Reserve, the people actually producing goods are telling us something much more useful: their costs are rising while the work waiting to be completed is piling up.

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Cotton fires back at Trump, says he won’t support making Daylight Saving Time permanent

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., fired back at President Trump criticizing him for blocking a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent in the U.S.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter. Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first,” Cotton wrote.

Trump posted on Truth Social about Cotton on Saturday, prompting Cotton to respond. 

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Air Traffic Control Captures Moments Before Plane Traveling From Bermuda to Boston Mysteriously Vanishes

Per The New York Post: “Crews from the Boston-based Coast Guard cutter William Sparling rushed to the scene off the coast of Massachusetts and were sifting through wreckage to identify parts of the downed aircraft, a USCG spokesperson told The Post Saturday night.”

A Canadian medical plane traveling from Bermuda to Boston, carrying six people, vanished very early Saturday morning.

No Americans were on the doomed plane, according to ABC News.

The Gulfstream G-100 departed Bermuda at approximately 12:40 Saturday morning and plunged 10,000 feet before it lost communication with the FAA shortly after 1:20 am.

The FAA issued a Search and Rescue alert, according to Fox News.

Air Traffic Control Audio captured the moments before the plane vanished.

The US Coast Guard is currently searching for the missing aircraft.

Four Canadians and two Bermudians were reportedly on the flight.

“You’re coming in blind. Is that what you said?” the Air Traffic Controller said to the pilot.

“You’re coming in a little weak so I didn’t hear what your response was, if you were declaring an emergency or not,” the air traffic controller said.

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Corporate Media Don’t Understand the Houthis—and Don’t Want You to, Either

It’s that time of year again: The Houthis are making the news—and so is the Western corporate media narrative that surrounds them.

The Houthis—formally Ansar Allah, “Supporters of God”—are from the Zaydi Shia minority in Yemen, and have governed the most populous sections of the country, including the capital Sanaa, since the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2014.

Like many a “civil” war, the conflict has plenty of outside participants—most notably Saudi Arabia, which led a coalition of Arab states (with the backing of the United States) in an effort to bomb and starve Yemen away from Houthi control.

In 2022, a tenuous truce took hold between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, but the Saudi blockade of the country was never lifted.

This July, the Houthis declared their own naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, in response to the Saudi siege and resumed bombing of Yemen. In a rapid September offensive, the group completed its takeover of Yemen’s Red Sea Coast and the strategic Bab al-Mandeb strait, putting Saudi oil shipping operations in a decisive bind. The Houthis have also launched missiles at Saudi Arabia in response to Saudi attacks on the country.

The offensive has prompted a slew of media interventions to ostensibly explain to everyone who the Houthis are. The New York Times (9/23/26), for instance, ran the headline “Who Are the Houthis, and What Do They Want?”; the BBC (9/24/26) ran the very same title, minus the comma.

The Washington Post (9/15/26) asked: “Who Are the Houthis, the Iran-Backed Rebels Threatening a Key Maritime Passage?” Its headline characterization revealed what corporate media see as the primary thing anyone needs to know about the Houthis: that they are simply proxies of Iran, the West’s current favorite enemy.

In a typical example, a recent CNN dispatch (9/21/26) identified the Houthis as “Iran-backed” in both the headline and the first sentence, with a reference to “Tehran’s proxies” appearing further down.

For its part, an Associated Press exclusive (9/23/26) on how “Iranian Advisers Helped Houthis Seize Yemen’s Red Sea Coast in Less Than 48 Hours” sounded the alarm that “Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers were in the field helping direct the battle,” in a show of “how Iran has built the Houthis into a major regional partner able to open a new front in the wider war with the US.”

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EU Piracy Watch List Targets YouTube Downloader and VPNs

The European Union (EU) continues to be a major world player in the war on copyright infringement, and the next salvo is the EU’s updated Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List.

Rights holders have been busy submitting their input, and the European Commission (EC) published their contributions on September 24. Some of the suggestions are an open source tool, four major VPN companies, and several internet infrastructure firms.

The Commission says the list “will identify and describe the reportedly most problematic online services and marketplaces in order to encourage their operators and owners, as well as the responsible local authorities and governments to take the necessary actions and measures to reduce the availability of IPR infringing goods or services.”

However, the same page is at pains to explain that the list “does not purport to make findings of legal violations.” It’s not clear how the EC expects to prove that a site or service is “problematic” without establishing whether it is in fact breaking the law, but this is not the first time that the EU has tried to have its cake and eat it, too, on copyright.

The consultation opened on June 11 and closed on September 21. Those who wish to react to what has been submitted can do so until October 28, and the next Watch List is due in the second quarter of 2027.

One of the submissions came from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the recorded music industry globally. On September 11, IFPI asked the EC to include yt-dlp, a command-line program used to download videos and audio from sites like YouTube, in the Watch List.

In fact, it is the openness of the project, and the fact it is maintained by a community of developers that makes it difficult to control, IFPI said in its submission. The document also reveals that the music industry has been keeping a close eye on the project’s development, and knows that it was originally created by a developer using the username “pukkandan”, and that the current maintainers are “coletdjnz”, “bashonly” and “Grub4K.”

IFPI also names several infrastructure companies as being “problematic” – Cloudflare, Njalla, GoDaddy, and Verisign.

On Verisign, IFPI notes that the company “is the registry for the .com and the .net top-level domains.”

Meanwhile, Spain’s top football league LaLiga has asked that four VPN providers – NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN, and Surfshark – be included in the Watch List.

The football league does not object to VPNs as such, but to the way they are marketed by affiliates. The submission says that these affiliates publish guides on how to use the VPNs to watch LaLiga matches for free, and that the VPN companies are aware of this and profit from it through their affiliate programs.

In fact, the guides are written by third parties who have affiliate deals with the VPNs, and who earn a commission when they sell subscriptions. The “guides” rank VPNs and link to their discounted offers.

LaLiga’s submission puts it this way: “The conduct that takes these services beyond neutral technical provision is the deliberate marketing of circumvention, conducted at arm’s length through affiliate programmes.”

LaLiga does not name or link to a single one of these guides, nor does it say that the VPN companies are behind them.

In the past, LaLiga tried to get NordVPN to pay a fine for not blocking IP addresses that were accessing its content, but a Spanish court refused the request.

The nature of the submissions made by IFPI and LaLiga also shows that the targets are now no longer only sites accused of piracy and their operators, but also perfectly legitimate and lawful technology and services – such as VPNs and open source software – that happen to be used in ways that cut into the profits of the entertainment and sports industries.

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Florida Judge Denies Rapper Rick Ross Special Treatment After Attorney Plays the Fame Card: “I Have No Idea Who You Are”

If you attempt to play the “fame card” in Judge Mindy Glazer’s courtroom, you will not have any luck.

Rapper Rick Ross found out the hard way.

William Roberts II, whose stage name is Rick Ross, turned himself in to Florida authorities on Thursday morning and was charged with two counts of battery.

Later on Thursday, the rapper appeared in the Miami-Dade Bond Court before Judge Mindy Glazer, where his attorney requested that his client be expedited from Miami-Dade County Jail because he’s a celebrity.

Judge Glazer, without missing a breath, quickly responded, “Hi, Mr. Roberts. I have no idea who you are, except as somebody here in the court who’s going to be treated fairly just like everybody else here,”

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RTX’s Raytheon Awarded $24.4B Missile Contract as Trump Finally Admits Stockpiles “A Little Bit Lower”

The Pentagon on Thursday announced a massive new defense contract at a moment many Congressional members are concerned over America’s dwindling arsenal of both defensive and offensive missiles and weapons systems.

Raytheon, an RTX unit, has been awarded a $24.4 billion contract for the accelerated production of SM-6 missiles, amid the scramble to replace them in the wake of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury bombing campaign of Iran.

A Pentagon statement described the missiles as “critical anti-air and anti-surface warfare munition” and previewed that “this five-year agreement, with two additional option years, will drive faster production.”

The announcement further described that the deal “provides the defense industry with the long-term predictability needed to expand workforce capacity and secure critical supply chains.”

Additionally, “The Navy said the multiyear contract is meant to provide a steady and reliable supply of the Standard Missile-6 interceptors, which can carry out both offensive strikes and missile defense missions.”

President Trump has stretching back over weeks and months consistently denied that the Pentagon is suffering a weapons shortage due to the Iran war. Instead, he has blamed any shortfall or stockpile concerns on his predecessor Biden and his Ukraine war policies.

But certainly the Pentagon is acting like there’s a problem, given it is quickly handing out these large contracts in order to establish “faster production” and greater “long-term predictability”. This after a mid-July report from the Pentagon’s inspector general did point to a serious and growing problem.

Trump had slammed the report as “mostly fake news” at the time; however, just this week he finally did acknowledge that some munitions “are a little bit lower” in the wake of the seven-month long Iran conflict. Trump’s new remark this week is as follows:

“Some forms of ammunition are a little bit lower than other forms,” the president said in an interview with TIME magazine published Thursday, adding: “We’re stocking up at levels we’ve never done before.“

Some critics among MAGA have underscored that the munitions crisis reveals an abandonment of ‘America First’ policy, also given the immense amounts of interceptors expected on Israel and Gulf allies of late.

Ultimately the only winners in all of this are Israel and the major defense contractors, who will continue to see huge returns with the help of the US taxpayer.

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