September 11, 2026

NOT UNEXPECTED: US Treasury yields surge as $6 billion bond buyback disappoints markets.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose above 4.85%, its highest level in nearly three years, before easing slightly.

The yield on the 30-year bond stood at 5.29%, up from 5.26% a day earlier. It reached 5.33% in August, its highest level since 2007.

Treasury yields influence interest rates across the US economy, meaning sustained increases can make mortgages, business loans and other forms of borrowing more expensive. Higher borrowing costs can also slow economic growth and weigh on share prices.

The rise came after the Treasury Department said it would buy back up to $6 billion of bonds maturing in 10 to 20 years on Thursday. This is three times the size of its previous long-dated buyback operation.

Bessent can play around on the margins — or maybe “rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic” is more apropos — but it’s hard to see rates coming down so long as Congress adds another two trillion dollars to the country’s MasterCard every years.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

BURN DOWN PUBLIC EDUCATION:

Posted at 9:24 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Any Moral Equivalence About 9/11 Is Pure Evil. “I’m glad I’m on the side that remembers the horror of 9/11 and still calls it a horror. The side that’s not electing politicians who think we had it coming. The side that doesn’t have Palestinian flags displayed in their United States congressional offices.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green

OMG, THIS STORY JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER:

Posted at 9:07 am by Glenn Reynolds

I’VE POSTED A LOT OF STUFF ON SEPTEMBER 11TH OVER THE LAST 25 YEARS. But this year, it’s just this: Brad Todd’s 109 Minutes essay. “Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism — the most deadly yet invented — came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective. Deconstructed, unengineered, thwarted, and put into the dust bin of history. By Americans. In 109 minutes.”

Ordinary Americans have tremendous skill and ability. That’s why people who want to rule over them hate and fear them.

Posted at 8:46 am by Glenn Reynolds

CDR SALAMANDER: No European NATO Navies are Ready to Fight Today’s War at Sea.

We are coming up on three years from the final wakeup call after October 7th, 2023, that conventionally armed ballistic missiles are the premier threat to critical capabilities ashore and at sea.

In the U.S. at least, though production was minimal and inventories allowed to be too small, we at least had the technology to meet the threat from Medium, Intermediate, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

At sea, which will be our focus today, we just made it across the finish line in time with the RIM-161 SM-3, which built off the success of the iterative development of the SM-2 for decades.

This work has paid off via the exceptional performance of our Arleigh Burke Class destroyers off Israel, and in defending our fleet from the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea against Iran and her proxies.

With each engagement, our software gets better…the next update to our missiles gets better, and, more importantly, it has yanked the Lotus off the dinner plate of our defense establishment to expand production and inventories.

Bravo Zulu to those people who fought, mostly nameless and unseen, for decades to ensure we did not take our eye off the need to be able to meet the threat from ballistic missiles.

Here’s the issue. We’re alone here, and our European allies just don’t seem to get it.

That’s the issue with our European allies pretty much across the board.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

AYAAN HIRSI ALI: What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us.

In April 1996, more than five years before he steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, Mohamed Atta sat in a small Hamburg apartment and wrote his last will and testament. He was 27, an architecture student at the Technical University, the son of a Cairo lawyer, fluent in German, and living comfortably in one of the most affluent societies on earth.

Nothing in his circumstances compelled him to dwell on death. Yet he gave detailed instructions for the handling of his corpse. “I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter,” he wrote. He did not want a pregnant woman, or “a person who is not clean,” to come and say goodbye. The man who washed his body should wear gloves so as not to touch his genitals. He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned cloth, laid on his right side facing Mecca, and buried “next to good Muslims.” His money was to be divided “according to the Muslim religion as almighty God has asked us to do.”

There is no political program and no mention of foreign policy or economic grievances in the document. There is only a young Muslim man, in a German apartment, arranging to sacrifice his life to Allah in the confidence that Allah will reward his martyrdom in the life to come. The will was witnessed by fellow believers at the al-Quds mosque, where Atta prayed in Arabic, grew his beard, and where, four years later, he would meet the men he would die with.

The document is among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept. 11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for.

Related: The end of The End of History:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT:

Posted at 8:22 am by Stephen Green

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE NORM MACDONALD AGAIN:

Evergreen:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

AT LEAST NOBODY MENTIONED THE WAR: Nice Little Election You Won There – It’d Be a Shame If You Acted Like It Changed Anything.

There’s even been some surprising blowback on sainted figures within the German establishment once the smoke cleared and people could think somewhat calmly again.

Mutti Merkel might have a heavy heart over the results…

…but it’s not stopping accusing fingers from pointing in her direction, something that would have been nearly unthinkable in public before Sunday’s disaster. Merkel might well be Germany’s affectionate ‘Mutti’ or ‘mother,’ but she also literally gave birth to the AfD through her policies while chancellor.

It’s also a sign of the times that the slippery Merkel now claims never to have been a fan of the firewall, where she ripped Merz for reaching over it to pass a bill in January of 2025.

Much more at the link.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

ASTROTURF ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Posted at 7:20 am by Stephen Green

MEMORY HOLING THE BIGGEST AMERICAN EVENT OF THE 21st CENTURY:

As far back as 2005, Mark Steyn how strangely quiet Hollywood was on both 9/11 and the GWOT: Hollywood’s real slump is in storytelling. 

Say what you like about those Hollywood writers of the Thirties and Forties, but they were serious lefties. Their successors are mostly poseurs loudly trumpeting their courageous “dissent” while paralyzed into inanity. This year’s Sean Penn thriller, “The Interpreter,” was originally about Muslim terrorists blowing up a bus in New York. So, naturally, Hollywood called rewrite. And instead the bus got blown up by African terrorists from the little-known republic of Matobo. “We didn’t want to encumber the film in politics in any way,” said Kevin Misher, the producer.

But being so perversely “nonpolitical” is itself a political act. If there were a dozen movies in which Tom Cruise kicked al-Qaida butt across the Hindu Kush, it would be reasonable to say, “Hey, we’d rather deal with Matoban terrorism for a change.” But, when every movie goes out of its way to avoid being “encumbered,” it starts to look like a pathology.

And by the time Hollywood released this summer’s “Stealth,” some studio exec must have panicked that, what with all this Bono/Live8 debt-relief business, it might look a bit Afrophobic to have any more Matoban terrorists. So “Stealth” was a high-tech action thriller about Air Force pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane.

That’s right: an unmanned, computer-flown plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is – stop me if this rings a vague bell – a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.

Similarly, in 2015, Hollywood released The Walk, about Philippe Petit’s insane 1974 tightrope walk between the two towers. Cheer for the nostalgia of seeing the World Trade Center digitally recreated on a tall movie screen! Thrill to the sight of a daredevil Frenchman 1,350 feet in the air! Pay no attention to our industry’s inability to tell the story of how the twin towers were felled 27 years later!

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll