Category: zerohedge

Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

State Legislators in West Virginia have just introduced a bill, authored by Gun Owners of America, that would authorize the State to sell machineguns to citizens.

Currently, newly manufactured machineguns are banned for civilian ownership thanks to an amendment slipped into the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.

Known as the “Hughes Amendment”—named for Representative William J. Hughes, a Democrat from New Jersey—this amendment banned all civilian ownership of machineguns made after May 19, 1986.

While machineguns made and registered prior to the ban date can still be transferred, the law of supply and demand has created a massive disparity, as most ordinary Americans simply cannot afford these much sought after items.

Interestingly, though, the language of the Hughes Amendment specifies that the machinegun ban doesn’t apply to the government, which includes state and local governments.

Specifically, 18 USC Section 922(o) reads:

This subsection does not apply with respect to—

a transfer to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof.

Well, we at Gun Owners of America had a thought. What if the States wanted to sell machineguns to their citizens—that is, what if they were to engage in a “transfer … by … a State”?

That certainly would comport with the historical tradition in the United States, where governments have sold military arms to the civilian populace since the Founding.  And, of course, arming civilians with machineguns aligns with the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment, which reads:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”

What could be a better and more of a “well regulated Militia” than a citizenry armed with machineguns?

According to 922(o), a state government may lawfully “transfer”—that is, sell, give, loan, etc.—machineguns to ordinary citizens. And after the transfer is complete, those citizens may lawfully possess them, so long as the transfer was made by the State government.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. The Department of Justice recently made the very same argument in a court filing. The case is State of New Jersey v. Bondi, which is being litigated in the US District Court for the District of Maryland.

The case involves ATF’s return of Forced Reset Triggers to their original owners after a judge in Texas ruled that these triggers are not machineguns, as ATF had previously claimed. A forced reset trigger, or FRT, is a device that increases the rate of fire for semi-automatic rifles by (like the name entails) forcing the “reset” of a trigger so that a shooter can pull the trigger more quickly and thus fire more rapidly.

These FRTs were at one point classified as machineguns by ATF, and agents were sent out to confiscate them. But, in the aftermath of Cargil v. Garland, and a subsequent settlement with the manufacturer of these devices, they again have been recognized as semi-automatic triggers. And so, ATF was forced to return them to their rightful owners.

Of course, anti-gun jurisdictions didn’t like that. So, they sued to prevent the return of the FRTs to their owners in their respective states.

And in a filing in the case, the Department of Justice defended its return of FRTs.  DOJ argued that, even if FRTs were machineguns, ATF could still give them back to their owners, because federal law doesn’t apply to the transfer of machineguns by the government.

In other words, DOJ has already made the legal argument to support the West Virginia bill that we had introduced. DOJ has already admitted that the transfer of a machinegun by the government does not offend federal law.

And as DOJ’s filing clearly acknowledges, once that “transfer” from the government has occurred, the gun owner’s subsequent possession of the “machinegun” would also be lawful under Section 922(o).

Summed up, the exemption from the ban on machineguns follows the firearm, not who possesses it.

This is why our legislation, now officially introduced by our allies in West Virginia, would create State-Operated Machinegun Stores.

This state-run entity would be tasked with purchasing machineguns and conducting transfers to qualified members of the general public, much like how many states open and operate liquor stores.

Read the bill here…

This is a huge victory for GOA and our members.

*  *  *

We’ve been working to gut the National Firearms Act for decades. Last year, GOA spearheaded efforts in Congress to repeal most of the NFA’s taxes. Then, we filed suit to challenge the registration requirements with our One Big Beautiful Lawsuit. Now, we’re tackling the prohibition on machineguns with West Virginia.

If you hate the National Firearms Act or gun control in general, GOA is your one stop shop. We expect that it will be a fight to get this bill passed and into effect, and we’re going to need your help.

Consider supporting our efforts and becoming a member of Gun Owners of America. We won’t stop fighting until the Second Amendment is fully restored. No Compromises.

After the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee conducted an autopsy of the party’s defeat and intended to release it.

It pledged an honest accounting of how Donald Trump reclaimed the White House. It assured its own officials, strategists, and donor class that a thorough post-mortem was coming.

However, after the autopsy was complete, the DNC clammed up and kept it under wraps.

There was something in the report they didn’t want the public to see, and Democrats weren’t happy about it.

The official explanation for suppressing the report is that releasing it would distract from the party’s focus on winning back Congress in 2026 and not be distracted by the past.

That explanation doesn’t hold up.

Several Democrats, including advisers to potential 2028 presidential hopefuls, have argued that burying this report conveniently shields Harris from accountability runs again, while also protecting the consultant class whose strategic decisions contributed to the loss.

“I suspect the reasons why this isn’t being released are precisely the reasons why it should be released,” Lis Smith, a longtime adviser to Pete Buttigieg, said in a post on X last year.

“The DNC’s actual position is that if the public knew more about what Democrats got wrong in the last election, it would hurt the party’s chances in the next election,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote.

Favreau was more right than he realized. Because we know now what the DNC didn’t want the public to know.

According to a report from Axios, DNC staff members working on the report held a private meeting with the IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy organization, specifically to discuss the electoral impact of U.S. policy toward Israel.

Hamid Bendaas, a representative for the group, said the DNC acknowledged in that meeting that “their own data also indicated that this policy was, in their assessment, a ‘negative’ for the 2024 election.” 

Two additional senior IMEU Policy Project members independently confirmed that the DNC reached the same conclusion.

Axios separately verified that Democratic officials involved in the analysis found the Gaza issue hurt the party’s appeal with certain voter blocs.

Harris spent much of 2024 trying to navigate Israel-Gaza without alienating either side. She expressed firm support for Israel while also calling for a ceasefire and voicing empathy for Palestinian civilians.

It was a strategy that failed to satisfy the pro-Palestinian wing of the party, which is largely made up of younger voters and older progressives who had already grown skeptical of the administration’s backing of Israel, and proved particularly difficult to retain.

The autopsy appears to suggest that the party’s ability to succeed in the future requires it to be unequivocally anti-Israel.

DNC spokesperson Kendall Witmer denied the claim that findings related to Israel are driving the suppression of the report; however, even Kamala Harris seems to have confirmed the autopsy report’s findings.

During an event for her 107 Days book tour, Harris said the administration “should have done more” and “should have spoken publicly” about its criticism of Netanyahu’s handling of the war.

In the memoir, she wrote that Biden’s “perceived blank check” to Israel hurt her 2024 campaign and revealed she had privately urged him to show greater empathy for Gazan civilians even as she refused to break with him publicly. 

Democrats are now staring at an uncomfortable reality: their internal diagnosis is pushing them further down an explicitly anti-Israel path, and now everyone knows it.

 

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

School officials ordered two eastern Pennsylvania schools into lockdown on Feb. 20, while dozens of students left the schools and became unruly. The move came after officials directed the students to cancel their planned protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

Quakertown High School and Quakertown Elementary School, about 50 miles north of Philadelphia, were locked down for nearly two hours.

School officials took the action after police notified them that high schoolers, who had left the building without permission, “were engaging in unsafe and disruptive behavior in town,” acting Superintendent Lisa Hoffman wrote on the Quakertown Community School District website.

Her statement provides no further details about the students’ behavior, but CBS News reported that five students were arrested.

Video footage posted on X shows Quakertown police struggling to put a person into the back of a police SUV as a crowd mills around and some people shout. When an ambulance arrives, a man in plain clothes exits an unmarked vehicle, dabbing what appears to be a bloody nose while officers ask whether he is OK.

School officials said they were waiting for more information from the police regarding reports of students’ actions. A Quakertown police sergeant told The Epoch Times that he was not permitted to release a statement from the borough’s police administration.

Earlier in the day, Quakertown school officials had notified families and students that a planned “student-led walkout should no longer occur,” Hoffman wrote. District leaders made that decision after consulting with law enforcement over “a potential safety concern” in connection with the walkout.

However, in defiance of that directive, about 35 Quakertown High School students left the building at about 11:30 a.m. Immediately, administrators worked with police and locked down the high school and the elementary school, stopping anyone from entering or leaving the buildings, Hoffman said.

“Students in both schools maintained their normal school day activities,” Hoffman wrote, and the lockdown was lifted at about 1:15 p.m.

Meanwhile, in Spring Township, near Reading, Pennsylvania, the Wilson School District issued a statement addressing a widely circulated video showing Daniel Weber, principal of Wilson High School, telling student protesters that they would be suspended if they did not return to class.

In response to “numerous” phone calls and emails about the video, Superintendent Chris Trickett posted a statement on Feb. 19, a day after Weber addressed the group amid an unauthorized walkout.

Trickett said the video “captures only a portion of the interaction between school staff and students.”

Further, he wrote, “The situation was particularly challenging because we had been informed that the demonstration would not take place.”

A careful review of the circumstances revealed that no one was disciplined for expressing political views, the superintendent said. Rather, disciplinary action was based on violations of the student handbook, including “leaving class or the building without permission,” he said.

“Longstanding legal guidance, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines, affirms that students do not ’shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,’” Trickett wrote, referring to that 1969 landmark ruling.

However, Trickett wrote, “the Court made clear that schools may take action when conduct materially disrupts the educational environment or compromises student safety.” Further, schools can and must regulate demonstrations “in alignment with school rules and policies,” he said.

“Our response reflects this balance, between protecting student expression and fulfilling our responsibility to maintain safe and effective school operations,” Trickett said.

Whether you think AI is on the cusp of replacing millions of jobs, or an overblown Google search designed to agree with you, one thing is sure: people whose job it is to analyze complex medical data might want to pay attention…

For years, biomedical research has had a problem: too much data, not enough people who know how to wrangle it – or simply that it took months to do so. Modern health studies generate oceans of molecular information – gene expression, DNA methylation, microbiome profiles. Turning that into useful predictions about disease risk or pregnancy outcomes typically requires teams of data scientists, months of coding, and endless debugging.

Now, according to a new study in Cell Reports Medicine, some AI systems can do much of that work in minutes – and in at least one case, they did it better than humans.

The Test: AI vs. the Crowd

Researchers at UC San Francisco and Wayne State University took eight large language models – the same class of AI that powers systems like ChatGPT – and dropped them into a serious biomedical competition. The team used data from three previous international DREAM Challenges, where more than 100 research teams had built predictive models tackling reproductive health questions such as:

• Can you predict gestational age from blood gene expression?

• Can you estimate the biological age of the placenta from DNA methylation?

• Can you detect risk of preterm birth from vaginal microbiome data?

So this is modern AI creating modeling code in Python vs. human-coded predictive models, not humans manually processing the data (to be clear). 

One dataset included around 360,000 molecular features. Another required parsing genomic data from public repositories. In the original competitions, human teams spent up to three months developing and tuning their models.

The AI systems were given a carefully written prompt describing the dataset and the task. Then they had to generate executable R or Python code from scratch. Researchers ran that code and measured how well the resulting models performed on unseen test data.

No special hints. No iterative coaching. Just one shot.

The Results: Faster, Sometimes Better

Four of the eight AI systems successfully generated working code and usable prediction models.

One of them – OpenAI’s o3-mini-high – completed nearly all the tasks and scored the highest overall.

But here’s the part that surprised even the researchers: on the placental aging task, one AI-generated model outperformed the top human team from the original challenge. The difference was statistically significant.

In other words, the AI built a more accurate predictor of placental gestational age than the best human competitors had.

And it generated the code in seconds to minutes.

By contrast, the human teams had months to refine their approaches. Some built complex multi-stage random forest systems and leveraged additional clinical information. The AI, using a relatively straightforward ridge regression model, still won.

Across the other tasks, AI models generally matched the median performance of human participants – solidly competitive, though not always beating the top experts.

Why This Matters

Preterm birth affects roughly 11 percent of infants worldwide and remains a leading cause of neonatal mortality. Clinicians still lack reliable predictive tools for many pregnancy complications.

Better models could mean; earlier identification of at-risk pregnancies, more precise timing of interventions, and reduced long-term complications for children – among other things. But building those models is slow. – requiring extensive writing, debugging, and standardizing analysis pipelines.

And this is where the LLMs kick ass – given that they’re especially strong at generating structured, reproducible workflows: loading data, splitting training and test sets properly, fitting models, calculating performance metrics, and even producing plots. Notably, none of the successful AI systems accidentally “leaked” test data into training – a surprisingly common human mistake that can inflate results.

That said, AI is still in its infancy and it wasn’t all a slam dunk. In fact, half of the tested models failed outright – often due to basic coding issues like referencing nonexistent packages or mishandling data formats. R code proved more reliable than Python in this setting.

Even the top models were stochastic: run the same prompt multiple times, and you might get slightly different modeling strategies or results.

And there’s a deeper concern. If many researchers rely on similar AI systems, they may converge on similar modeling approaches. That standardization could improve reproducibility – but it might also reduce methodological creativity.

Where is this Going?

Large language models are already showing promise in reading medical records, generating radiology reports, and assisting in pathology analysis. What’s new here is that they’re moving beyond language tasks into hands-on data science, writing actual code. 

The authors emphasize that human oversight remains critical. AI models can hallucinate, misunderstand instructions, or silently make errors. Advanced API-based systems also come with cost and privacy considerations, particularly in clinical contexts.

The question is; will AI in 1, 3, 5 years from now be error free? No hallucinations and generally considered reliable? 

h/t Capital.news

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

US envoy Steve Witkoff said in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday that President Trump was “curious” that Iran hasn’t “capitulated” to US demands due to the major US military buildup in the Middle East and threats of war.

“I don’t want to use the word frustrated because [Trump] understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious, he’s curious as to why they haven’t, I don’t want to use the word capitulated, but why they haven’t capitulated,” Witkoff told Fox News host Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law.

“Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power, naval power, that we have over there, why they haven’t come to us and said, ‘we profess that we don’t want a [nuclear] weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do,’ yet it’s hard to get them to that point,” Witkoff added.

Tehran’s official position is that it doesn’t seek nuclear weapons and that the development of such weapons is banned by a fatwa issued by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iranian leaders have repeatedly “professed” that they don’t seek a nuclear bomb.

According to media reports, Iran has offered a deal that would involve it suspending its uranium enrichment program for three to five years and later restarting it at a civilian-grade level, far below the 90% needed for weapons-grade, as part of a joint nuclear program with regional countries.

Iran has also publicly offered to dilute its stockpile of uranium enriched at 60%, though it’s likely buried underground following the US airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Witkoff isn’t acting like a diplomat trying to reach a deal. Seems more like he’s trying to get the public primed for war. https://t.co/L3wCkm8DA5

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) February 22, 2026

Despite the US bombing those facilities, which forcibly suspended Iran’s nuclear enrichment, and President Trump’s insistence that the US “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, Witkoff made the false claim that Iran could have uranium to make a bomb within one week.

“They’re probably a week away from having industrial-bomb-making material,” Witkoff claimed, facing no pushback from Lara Trump. The US envoy also confirmed that he recently met with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Iranian Shah who was overthrown in 1979, as the Trump administration has made clear its ultimate goal is regime change in Tehran.

Even the Jerusalem Post contradicted Witkoff’s claim…

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday that he expects to hold another round of negotiations with Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, this Thursday in Geneva.

Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

After the election offices of Georgia’s most populous county were raided last month, the FBI has disclosed information indicating where its investigation is heading.

Federal laws may have been broken during the 2020 election according to the affidavit supporting the court-approved raid. Yet the breadth of the materials seized shows the FBI may be able to check the integrity of the ballots more broadly, uncovering further issues or putting speculation to bed.

President Donald Trump’s campaign challenged the Georgia election most vigorously, as he lost the state to President Joe Biden by fewer than 12,000 votes according to the official tally. The legal challenges failed. Instead, Trump was indicted based on rationale that his efforts to challenge the election results were allegedly executed with corrupt intent. The case was dismissed after he became president again in 2025.

The renewed investigation now targeting Fulton County, which covers the broader Atlanta area, uses a rationale analogous to the case against Trump. The affidavit states that if known irregularities in the election were intentional, such acts would be criminal.

On Jan. 28, agents seized some 700 boxes of election records, including physical ballots from the 2020 election. County officials have since filed a lawsuit seeking to have the materials returned.

The issues detailed in the affidavit were largely discovered years ago by concerned citizens using data obtained through freedom of information requests or litigation. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was responsible for overseeing the election and is running for governor of the state, has dismissed the issues as administrative and human errors too small to affect the election’s result.

The FBI, however, has a different perspective.

“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law regardless of whether the failure to retain records or the deprivation of a fair tabulation of a vote was outcome determinative for any particular election or race,” reads the affidavit signed by FBI Special Agent Hugh Evans.

Raffensperger has repeatedly stressed that the 2020 votes were counted three times, including a hand recount and a machine recount.

However, many of the deficiencies outlined in the affidavit happened during these recounts.

The Original Count

Vote counting in Georgia starts by law on election day. Fulton County had more than half a million ballots to tabulate—almost 90 percent cast early or by mail. The result was announced several days later: Biden won the county by 26-point margin.

One issue with the results was a lack of receipts. Each tabulator machine should be “closed” at polls closing and tabulator tape should be printed out to show how many ballots and votes for each candidate were counted. Then, the tape should be signed by the poll manager and two witnesses.

Yet tabulator tapes for more than 300,000 votes weren’t signed, and some were missing altogether, wrote Evans, referring to an analysis by Clay Parikh, a voting machine security expert.

Raffensperger said that was merely administrative oversight, as the vote tallies aren’t recorded on the tape alone. They are also preserved on memory cards in the machines.

But Parikh’s analysis went deeper.

“Parikh identified one tabulator that was used to close out 15 tabulator machines from 12 different locations. In addition, the poll closing time and report printed times on several closing tabulator tapes were close enough in time that Parikh believed someone had to have manipulated the times on the reports,” Evans wrote.

“Parikh believed this showed that the memory cards were removed from the original tabulator and put in another tabulator to print out the closing tabulator tapes.”

The tabulators also have “protective counters” that track how many ballots have been scanned on them over their lifetime.

“The protective counters on at least five tabulator tapes from the same unit were identical,” Parikh found, according to Evans. “Some of the reported ballots scanned exceeded the protective counter number.”

“This indicated to Parikh that no ballots were ever scanned on these machines and that the numbers generated from those ballots were done so by placing an unencrypted memory card into the unit to generate the closing tape,” Evans wrote.

“This would have allowed an opportunity for the tabulation to be tampered with.”

The tabulators are supposed to scan each ballot, creating a digital record. But the majority of the images from the original in-person voting count have not been preserved by the county, Evans said. At the time, the county was not legally required to preserve them, but it’s not clear why they were discarded to begin with.

“This is another impediment to ruling out non-criminal explanations for the activities during the election,” the affidavit said.

Hand Recount

On Nov. 11, 2020, Raffensperger announced a Risk Limiting Audit. Because the race was so close, it meant recounting all the ballots by hand, according to state law. The ballots were counted in batches and the final tally for each batch was supposed to be put into an electronic auditing system called “Arlo.”

Several people who participated in the audit said they witnessed suspicious occurrences, including a batch of 110 ballots that contained 107 featuring votes for exactly the same candidates. The bubbles on them were filled exactly the same and the paper felt different from other ballots, the participants said. The ballots were marked as absentee but lacked creases from being folded in a return envelope.

It’s possible such “pristine” ballots can be created by duplication, where a damaged ballot is copied on a new one. But those should be clearly marked as “duplicate,” and the original needs to be preserved, Evans said.

One of the witnesses, who had been a poll manager for 25 years, also remembered a batch of about 60 ballots marked as coming from a senior living center. She “believed these ballots should have been folded as well but were not,” the affidavit said.

Yet another witness, one of the Fulton County Commissioners, was a poll worker at the time. When helping test the voting machines prior to the election, she saw a pile of unsecured papers used to print testing ballots.

“She stated she could have printed any ballot she wanted,” Evans wrote.

She also saw some people “printing random ballots” and managed to rip some up, according to Evans

“She was not sure the reason they were printing ballots as all the test ballots had already been printed.”

None of the witnesses in the affidavit were identified by name.

Evans also mentioned a complaint submitted to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp by chemical engineer Joseph Rossi, alleging inconsistencies in the hand recounts results for dozens of ballot batches. Kemp’s office independently verified the allegations, concluded they were factual, and passed them on to the State Election Board for an investigation, which was eventually conducted by Raffensperger’s office.

Raffensperger dismissed those as human errors during data entry. But some of them raise the question of how such a specific error could have been made.

For example, one batch was reported as 200 votes for Biden and zero for any other candidate. But when Kemp’s office checked the ballot images for that batch, it showed 85 votes for Biden, 12 for Trump, and three for other candidates.

Another batch was reported as 150 votes for Biden and zero for other candidates. In fact, the batch contained 97 votes for Biden, eight for Trump, and one for a third-party candidate.

There were two more batches reported each as 100 votes for Biden and zero for others. In fact, one had 87 votes for Biden and 10 for Trump; the other had 74 for Biden and 25 for Trump.

Read the rest here…

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

“China is dumping US Treasuries to get out of the dollar.” This claim has been circulating the mainstream feeds lately, with the narrative that the “end of the dollar is near,” or “the US will lose its funding base” and the “bond yields will surge.” But are those claims valid? Such is what we will explore in more detail.

Let’s start with the chart that has everyone concerned. As shown, China’s holdings of US Treasury bonds have fallen from nearly $1.2 trillion to $600 billion, or a 50% decline. On the surface, you can certainly understand the reasons for concern, as the decline in holdings over the last decade supports a clean storyline.

However, the problem is the step between observation and conclusion. A lower line item for “China, Mainland” does not equal a forced sale, it does not prove intent, nor does it prove a structural exit. What it does show is a lack of understanding about the dynamics of reserve currency management, and, in the case of China, the need to protect those reserves.

Let’s start with the Treasury Department, which states that the holdings tables are built “primarily on the basis of custodial data.” That phrase matters. Custodial data records where securities are held for settlement and safekeeping. Critically, the custodian is not the same as the beneficial owner, and that distinction undermines the headline narrative.

The Treasury’s own FAQ is the most important in this particular narrative:

“If a Treasury security purchased by a foreign resident is held in a custodial account in a third country, the true country of ownership will not be reflected.”

Read that sentence again.

The system is designed to track where the bonds sit, not whose balance sheet carries the risk. This is crucially important when it comes to the narrative that China is dumping its bond holdings and moving away from the dollar.

For those jumping to that conclusion, they did not take the time to ask the right question: “Where did the custody shift to?” That question matters for investors because it changes the risk assessment. If China were liquidating, you would expect pressure across Treasury auctions, persistent stress on dealer balance sheets, and visible strain in dollar funding markets. While those episodes occur from time to time, often tied to Fed policy or risk shocks, there is no clear connection to the “China dumping” storyline.

A better way to approach the claim is to follow the settlement trail, which takes us to the Belgium and Luxembourg connection.

The Belgium and Luxembourg Connection

Over the last decade, geopolitical risk has been rising. Heavy sanctions have been imposed on Iran and Russia, assets frozen or seized, and political pressure brought to bear. If you are a country with significant US dollar reserves and face the risk of sanctions or seizure, what measures could you take to limit that risk? Here is a good example:

“Policymakers [in Beijing] are mindful of the precedent set in 2022, when the US and its allies froze about $300 billion of Russia’s central bank reserves after the invasion of Ukraine. The worry is that if tensions were to escalate, the US could — in an extreme scenario — restrict access to China’s state and privately held dollar assets in a similar fashion.” – Bloomberg

It is critical to understand the two main economic reasons that China buys and holds US Treasuries. The most important reason is that China wants its currency, the yuan, pegged to the dollar, a practice common among many countries since the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. A dollar-pegged yuan helps keep down the cost of Chinese exports, particularly to the US, its largest customer, which the Chinese government believes makes it stronger in international markets. Secondly, dollar-pegging adds stability to the yuan because the dollar is still seen as the safest currency in the world. To conduct trade on a global scale, they hold their reserves in US Treasuries, gold, or the dollar itself.

However, just because China owns U.S. Treasuries does not mean it must have custodial holdings in the U.S. Look at the same holdings table and focus on Belgium and Luxembourg. In the November 2025 snapshot, Belgium shows about $481 billion in Treasury holdings, and Luxembourg shows about $425 billion. Those are massive totals for very small countries that are not building reserves at that scale.

In reality, Luxembourg and Belgium are “hosting custody” for China. Just for reference look at the chart of US Treasury holdings of China and Belgium. Over the same period, while China’s holdings fell by $600 billion, Belgiums rose by $500 billion.

This is why the Treasury’s FAQ points directly to this issue and calls out “major financial centers,” such as Luxembourg and Belgium, as the source of “custodial bias.” The chart below adjusts China’s treasury holdings for its “custodial” accounts, showing that its holdings of US Treasuries are essentially the same as in 2011.

This is not a conspiracy. It is plumbing. One of the primary reasons that China uses Belgium for custodial purposes, besides avoiding geopolitical risk, is that the Euroclear Bank is based there and sits at the center of cross-border settlement and collateral mobility. Clearstream’s international depository is based in Luxembourg and serves the same global institutional client base. When a central bank or a state institution wants to hold a large Treasury portfolio with flexible settlement and collateral options, these hubs help address operational challenges.

With this understanding, it should be clear that the “China is dumping bonds” narrative is incomplete. However, it is the problem that arises when individuals seeking to spin a narrative for headlines, clicks, or views focus on one line item and ignore the framework.

Brad Setser at the Council on Foreign Relations has repeatedly made the point that the reported data understate China’s dollar bond exposure due to offshore custodians and portfolio shifts across dollar instruments. In his words, “China isn’t shifting away from the dollar or dollar bonds.”

That leads to the next question: why would China shift custody at all?

Why Is China Using Other Countries to Buy and Hold Treasuries

We already touched on avoiding geopolitical risk, but there are four practical reasons for China to shift custodial holdings, none of which requires an exit from US bonds.

1. Settlement efficiency and scale: Large reserve portfolios require scale, operational redundancy, and deep settlement connectivity. European custody hubs provide that. Euroclear’s work on US Treasury DVP repo settlement is a signal of where institutions want improved collateral movement and repo settlement workflows. When the infrastructure improves, demand follows. Holding through a hub often reduces friction.

2. Collateral mobility and financing optionality: Treasuries are collateral. They are not only an investment. They are a financing tool. A portfolio held at a hub links more easily into repo markets, securities lending, and collateral transformation. That matters for institutions managing liquidity. If you want the option to raise dollars quickly against Treasury collateral, the custody venue matters.

3. Risk management after sanctions shocks: Following the freezing of Russian reserve assets in 2022, reserve managers began reassessing legal and operational exposures. The Financial Times has reported extensively on Euroclear’s central role in the custody of frozen Russian assets and the policy debates surrounding them. The lesson for global reserve managers is straightforward. Jurisdiction, legal perimeter, and operational touchpoints matter. Shifting custody and settlement routes is one response.

4. Data optics and portfolio composition: The Treasury table is widely quoted. It is also widely misunderstood. A shift from direct custody into a third country changes what the table shows. Some investors read the table as a loyalty scoreboard, but that interpretation is wrong. There is also a composition component. A holder can reduce Treasury holdings while raising exposure to other dollar assets, such as gold, agency debt or deposits, while staying inside the dollar system. That can reduce the “Treasuries only” line item without reducing dollar exposure.

So when you see “China, Mainland” drift lower, the right response is to think in layers: 1) Custody, 2) Instrument mix, 3) Funding and collateral function, and 4) Geopolitical risk management.

Put those together, and the incentive to use Belgium and Luxembourg is clear. The goal is not a panic move to “dedollarize” the US, which would harm the Chinese economy. Rather, it is to gain operational efficiency and optionality in a world where finance and politics collide more often.

Now step back and ask the investor question: What does this mean for you and your portfolio?

How Investors Should View US Treasury Bonds in Portfolios

Investors should treat Treasuries as a tool, not a referendum on geopolitics. However, it is critical to your portfolio outcome to understand the entire context of how the “financial plumbing” operates.

As such, investors should start with the role Treasuries play in global markets. US Treasuries:

• Anchor dollar risk-free pricing.

• Sit at the core of repo and collateral systems.

• Serve as a settlement asset during stress.

Those functions do not disappear because one country adjusts custody venues.

Secondly, focus on the real drivers of Treasury returns. The return of US Treasuries is driven by expectations for economic growth and inflation over time. Federal Reserve policy drives the front end of the interest rate curve. Economic growth and inflation drive the long end. The chart shows a strong correlation between the composite of GDP, inflation, and interest rates. Those factors matter more than headlines about one foreign holder.

Next, as an investor, you should build your Treasury investment exposure based on objectives, rather than narratives. If you need:

• Liquidity and drawdown control hold more short to intermediate-term Treasuries, which often serve as portfolio ballast during equity stress.

• Income with controlled volatility, a ladder across the front-to-intermediate curve, helps manage reinvestment risk.

• To adjust for inflation uncertainty, blend nominal Treasuries with TIPS.

Lastly, avoid the common mistake of basing bond decisions on some misguided narrative. However, US Treasuries are not risk-free in price. As such, investors must focus on the risks that matter for their bond holdings.

• Duration risk

• Inflation risk

• Policy risk

The “China dumping” narrative is not a risk worth worrying about.

Focus on what matters by aligning duration and inflation sensitivity with your time horizon and risk tolerance. Treat headlines as noise, and Treasuries as a portfolio instrument built for cash flow, liquidity, and risk control. If you do that, you will be much better off.

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

Most people have never heard of Mrinank Sharma. That is part of the problem.

Earlier this month, Sharma resigned from Anthropic, one of the most influential artificial intelligence companies in the world.

He had led its Safeguards Research Team, the group responsible for ensuring that Anthropic’s AI could not be used to help engineer a biological weapon.

His final project was a study of how AI systems distort the way people perceive reality. It was serious, consequential work for humankind.

His resignation letter was seen more than 14 million times on X.

It opened with the words, “the world is in peril.”

And it ended with a poem and by announcing that he was leaving one of the most consequential jobs in artificial intelligence to pursue a poetry degree. Yes, you read that right: peril and poetry.

The poem he quoted is, “The Way It Is,” by the American poet William Stafford.

It speaks of a thread that runs through a life—a thread that goes among things that change, but does not change itself. While you hold it, you cannot get lost. Tragedies happen. People suffer and grow old. Time unfolds, and nothing stops it. And the final line: you don’t ever let go of the thread.

Although he didn’t state it explicitly, I argue that that thread is morality. It is the enduring sense that some things are right and some things are wrong—not because a law says so, and not because it is profitable, but because human beings, at their best, have just always known it.

Sharma spent two years watching that thread being let go under pressure, in rooms the public is never shown.

His letter said:

“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions.

“I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society, too.”

He wrote that humanity is approaching a threshold where “our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”

He wanted to contribute in a way that felt fully in his integrity and to devote himself to what he called “the practice of courageous speech.”

A man who built defenses against bioterrorism concluded that the most important thing he could do next was learn to speak with honesty and courage.

That is a major signal about what is happening behind closed doors in AI research and development.

Many experts have compared the development of AI to the development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project was built in total secrecy. The public had no knowledge of it, no voice in how it was used, and no say in what came after. When it was over, some of the scientists who built it spent the rest of their lives in anguish. Several walked away during the project itself.

Sharma was not alone. Numerous safety researchers have walked off AI projects from multiple companies. These departures may be the only signals we, the public, have, because almost everything else about AI development is happening beyond public view. The internal debates, the safety trade-offs, the negotiations over what this technology will and will not be permitted to do—none of it is being shared with the people whose lives it will most profoundly shape. We are not part of this conversation. We are being presented with outcomes and told to adapt.

John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for any other. George Washington warned that liberty cannot survive the loss of shared moral principles. The founders studied the collapse of republics throughout history and arrived at the same conclusion: The machinery of freedom requires a moral people to sustain it. Laws and institutions are not enough on their own. They depend on citizens and leaders who hold themselves to something that exists before the law and above it.

That is the thread of human society, and no AI system holds it. If people allow AI to replace the question of right and wrong with the measure of what is legal and permitted, the machine will carry that measure forward at a scale and speed that no previous generation has had to reckon with.

As Sharma ended his resignation letter, “You don’t ever let go of the thread.”

We are at a crossroads not unlike the one the atomic scientists faced.

Sharma’s resignation was a signal.

The wave of departures before and after it are signals.

The reported tensions between AI companies and government over where moral limits should be drawn are also signals.

Together, they are pointing at something the public has not yet been fully invited to consider: that the most important questions about this technology are being worked out without us, and that the thread of morality, which has always required people to hold it by choice, needs to be part of that conversation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Military generals tend to be much more realistic about the potential negative consequences of going to war, as well as difficulties and challenges, over and against the often more hawkish policy-makers.

Currently, Pentagon generals appear to be belatedly speaking up, as Washington beats the drums of war on Iran. The Walls Street Journal reports Monday, “The Pentagon is raising concerns to President Trump about an extended military campaign against Iran, advising that war plans being considered carry risks including U.S. and allied casualties, depleted air defenses and an overtaxed force.” This is increasingly looking like a military buildup in search of a political and strategic rationale.

Of course, also not too distant in the collective memory of top brass is the disastrous 2003 Iraq invasion, which led to two decade long extremely difficult and bloody occupation and quagmire. 

The Bush administration had essentially said it would be a cake walk, with then-US Vice President Dick Cheney famously telling NBC’s Meet the Press in March 2003: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Some remnant Neocons, who of course never learn their lesson – such as Senator Lindsey Graham – are currently trying to a paint a similar picture with Iran in 2026. Graham and even some within the Trump administration are arguing for full regime change. 

Removing the Ayatollah would more than likely require a ground invasion. But there will be significant hurdles with even just an air war, and it’s no less than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine issuing these dire warnings. According to a paraphrase and outline of what’s being freshly reported by WSJ:

1) Caine warned that the war plans under consideration carry a high risk of significant American and allied casualties.

2) He cautioned that a multi-day campaign would exhaust air-defense munitions and other limited-supply items, which are critical for protecting regional partners like Israel if Iran retaliates.

3) An intensive operation against Iran could deplete stockpiles to a level that would complicate U.S. readiness for a potential future conflict with China.

4) He described the potential campaign as one that could “stretch the military thin” and leave forces “overtaxed”.

5) Caine’s gave “high likelihood of success” reassurances before the January 2026 mission to apprehend Nicolas Maduro, he has been unable to provide similar guarantees regarding a large-scale strike on Iran.

President Trump has not made up his mind, the report says, but also: “Officials say the issues raised by Caine, widely seen as a trusted aide by Trump, and others will be a factor in the president’s decision on whether to attack Iran and how.”

Iran is prepared to make any strikes, however ‘limited’ they might be, into something costly for US forces. Already Tehran has said it would unleash ballistic missiles and drones on US bases in the region. Israel could come under fire too.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has said Monday that any American military action, even on a small scale, would be seen as an act of war and unwarranted aggression. “And any state would react to an act of aggression as part of its inherent right of self-defense, ferociously. So that’s what we would do,” ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said at a briefing in Tehran.

Within hours after the WSJ report being out, President Trump slammed it as fake news, and has assured that if the decision to strike Iran is given by him as Commander-in-Chief, Caine will be fully supportive and ready…

Might Gen. Caine’s arguments from a place of caution win out? There’s a strong chance that he is speaking some sanity into Trump, who himself had repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail no more dumb regime change wars in the Middle East.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly has been quoted as saying: “General Caine is a talented and highly valued member of President Trump’s national security team. The president listens to a host of opinions on any given issue and decides based on what is best for U.S. national security.” 

* * *

Meanwhile, Hegseth on the hilarious Pentagon/DOD activity ‘pizza tracker’ as an indicator of imminent war chances: “I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off.”

PETER DOOCY: “There is an account on X that tries to forecast military action based on how busy the pizza places are around the Pentagon… Have you guys thought about maybe just going to the cafeteria?”

SECRETARY HEGSETH: “I’m aware of that account. I hadn’t thought of just… pic.twitter.com/rLiA5bzMuT

— Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) February 22, 2026

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“The SAVE Act can pass today under existing procedure. The obstacle is not the filibuster. It is the habit of surrendering to a myth.”

– Alex Muse on X

Lunacy proceeds from crime. In case you wonder why half the country has gone crazy, seek no further than Susan Rice’s stark warning to the other half of the country that is not crazy.

Ms. Rice was Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor and then “Joe Biden’s” Domestic Policy Advisor. She did a podcast last week with Preet Bharaha, former US Attorney in the SDNY, now a private lawyer with the Beltway law firm WilmerHale. Her message to Trump supporters: We’re coming after you when we’re back in power. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

WEAPONIZATION: Susan Rice lays out her vision of a post-Trump America where supporters are rounded up and sent to reeducation camps or prisons. pic.twitter.com/IyEPXx4G9T

— @amuse (@amuse) February 20, 2026

It was an important signal and it got a lot of people’s attention. It telegraphed the fear running through the Lefty-left that their crimes against the country are being tallied, carefully catalogued, and presented to a grand jury in Florida.

The crimes are bundled as a multifaceted conspiracy to overthrow the US government.

Pretty serious.

Sedition and Treason.

Susan Rice knows what she (and others) did.

First, in the frantic days between Nov. 3, 2016 and January 20, 2017, Barack Obama’s White House cooked up the Russia collusion hoax with John Brennan’s CIA, James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ. Ms. Rice, who was in on it, notoriously wrote a CYA memo memorializing the meetings and planted it in her office desk to be easily discovered by the new Trump admin. The memo stated that “every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’.” Of course, that was exactly the opposite of what really happened. The mischief emanating from it has run for ten years, crime upon crime upon crime.

Secondly, and surely less-known to the American public, was Ms. Rice’s role as Domestic Policy Advisor under “Joe Biden.” Her actual job from 2021 to 2023 was to serve as a conduit for Barack Obama to run “Joe Biden’s” White House, along with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. During those years, the public rarely (if ever) saw Susan Rice. She avoided the news media and did not make public statements or appearances at White House events. The news media were happy to ignore her. They knew exactly what she was up to.

The prime concerns of this cabal were to protect the image (cover up the crimes) of Barack Obama and his associates, to cover up the criminal degeneracy of the Biden family, and to get the Democrat Party back in power by utterly destroying Donald Trump and the populist revolt he headed.

Everything done in “Joe Biden’s” name during those years was to guarantee his party’s return to power, especially the deluge of illegal aliens across the border to pad the census for congressional districts and provide millions of future voters indebted to the party for letting them in (and giving them tons of freebies when they got here. . . phones, housing, food, walking-around money).

Meanwhile, the Democrats erected an immense scaffold of NGOs to funnel taxpayer money into salaries for their corps of political activists — outfits such as Stacey Abrams’ empire of grift in Georgia, the national networks of Antifa and BLM street-fighters, and the matrix of Somali social service fraud in Minnesota and Maine.

This created a huge parasitical patronage class, basically a national racketeering operation.

Eventually all the NGO grift became an end in itself — the Democrats animating principle: grift for grift’s sake, power to just keep it all going and continue to cover up the crime behind it.

The vital component to all this was weapons-grade mind-fuckery to produce a fog of war that would keep the American public utterly bamboozled, unable to comprehend what was happening amid gales of hoaxes, ops, and scams. The Covid-19 caper was the doozy. We still don’t know definitively if the mRNA vaccine program was a deliberate depopulation project, but it kind of looked like it, while plenty of messaging from global institutions — from the Gates Foundation to the WEF to the UN — was pretty explicit about getting rid of useless eaters. On top of all that, throw in the trashing of Western Civ’s industrial economies with “green” trickery, adding another layer of anxiety onto a sore-beset citizenry.

Of course, despite their best efforts — and it was a mighty crusade of bad faith and ill will — the Democrats failed to vanquish Mr. Trump, a strange miracle itself suggesting some sort of divine intervention. The question now is, will Mr. Trump be able to vanquish them? It begins to look like he might, with plenty of help from the Democrats themselves, who have reached a pitch of madness rarely seen in human societies.

Their latest prank: a boycott of the State of the Union speech to Congress.

So far, seven senators and nine congresspersons have promised to bail on the speech, led ostensibly by Senator Adam Schiff of California, a liar so prodigious and fertile that it can be truly said he never uttered an honest word including “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” This faction will gather on the mall instead and hurl objurgations at the Capitol rotunda.

All that’s needed to finish them off, really, is passage of the SAVE Act so that voters will be required to prove their identity and citizenship, and absentee ballots will be restricted to the old rules about being too sick to get to the poling place, or else out of the country.

Last week, staffers behind the walking mummy, Mitch McConnell, prevented the bill from reaching the Senate floor with some procedural rigmarole.

Mr. Trump must call them out, and call out Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), too, for dragging his feet on whatever’s necessary to pass the SAVE Act.

The country demands honest elections, and one way or another they’ll get them.