“What is perfection in love? Love your enemies in such a way that you would desire to make them your brothers … For so did He love, Who hanging on the Cross, said ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” (Luke 23:34)
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Site: Zero Hedge"Remarkable Turn Of Events" - Alleged Chinese Spy Working For AfD MP Was Informant For German Intelligence For YearsTyler Durden Tue, 04/30/2024 - 02:00
Authored by John Cody via ReMix News,
The news about Alternative for Germany (AfD) MEP Maximilian Krah’s assistant and his arrest for suspected espionage on behalf of China continues to make national headlines, but as more information comes out, the more German intelligence and the political establishment continue to look worse and worse.
Now, news reports have revealed that Krah’s employee, Chinese-German national Jian G., worked for the German domestic intelligence service for years before joining the AfD politician.
Krah has since commented on the new bombshell information, writing on X:
“Remarkable turn of events!”
https://twitter.com/KrahMax/status/1783917894159458787
Much is at stake, as Krah is the top candidate for the AfD in the run-up to the EU parliamentary elections in June. The latest report shows that the powerful Office for the Protection of Constitution (BfV) not only recruited Jian G. as a spy, but also dropped him as an informant because there were concerns he was a double agent for China.
However, despite these suspicions, Jian G. gained German citizenship, became a member of the Social Democrats (SPD), and even passed the EU parliament’s security clearance.
Former minister Mathias Brodkorb questioned the story on X, writing:
They are really funny. Let’s assume the story is true:
1. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution is working with the man.
2. Then, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution ends the collaboration because the man could be a double agent.
3. Then the German state naturalizes this agent.
Intermediate question: Where was the Office for the Protection of the Constitution at that time?
4. Then, Krah wants to hire the man as an employee of the EU parliament. That cannot be done without a security check. So the EU parliament should actually have asked the German security authorities whether there was anything against the man. But apparently they didn’t. Otherwise, the man would not have been cleared and could not have been hired.
Intermediate question: Where was the Office for the Protection of the Constitution at that time? And you are now seriously asking what the problem is? Seriously?
One of the main questions is why the Office for the Protection of the Constitution never informed Krah or the AfD about their suspicions, which is standard operating procedure, and one designed to protect the country’s parties from foreign infiltration. Notably, allowing Jian G. to work for Krah created a favorable political scenario for the establishment to later arrest him in order to smear the AfD. Notably, Jian G. was arrested right before EU parliamentary elections.
The question now is whether the BfV purposefully kept the AfD in the dark for years about the information it knew in order to damage the party.
Working for the BfV all the way back in 2007
According to Bild newspaper, Jian G. was an informant for the Saxon Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) since 2007 at the earliest. Previously, he had unsuccessfully offered to work for the federal branch of the BfV, but he was rejected, and referred back to the Saxon branch of the BfV.
Jian G. reportedly worked with the intelligence service on his own initiative, including supplying information that dealt with Chinese state actors taking action against Chinese exiles in Germany. Eight years after joining the Saxon BfV as an informant, the Saxon branch was informed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution that G. could be a double spy.
In 2015 and 2016, G. was then directly observed by the counterintelligence department of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Officers also questioned him about their suspicions but were unable to prove that he was a spy for China. He was therefore listed as a “suspected case” during that period.
In 2018, G. was finally removed as an informant by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
However, by that time, Jian G. had already made contact with Krah and then went on to work as his employee in the EU parliament beginning in 2019. He was then intensively monitored by the domestic intelligence service from 2020 and finally arrested in April 2024.
As noted above, despite the suspicion of espionage, the Chinese national was granted a German passport, was also a member of the SPD for a time, and was able to pass the security check for the EU parliament.
In addition, the BfV under Thomas Haldenwang (CDU), who is notoriously anti-AfD and publicly working against the party, failed to inform Krah or the AfD about the suspicion of espionage against Jian G.
As Remix News has documented, Haldenwang has made numerous remarks against the AfD, including on state-funded television, all in violation of neutrality. Haldenwang belongs to the CDU party.
Notably, this is standard procedure in such cases, which means the Office for the Protection of the Constitution withheld this information from the AfD in violation of past precedent and procedure.
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Site: The Unz ReviewBarack Obama was the affirmative-action president. Salman Rushdie is the affirmative-action literary giant. Like Obama, Rushdie didn’t get to the top of his profession thanks to the depth of his talent and power of his intellect. No, he got there thanks to the color of his skin and the leftism of his politics. Separated by...
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Site: The Unz ReviewThe roots of the “Hitler-Controlled-Opposition” myth go back to the 1920s and 1930s in the circles of Hitler’s political rivals, namely the German and Soviet Communist Parties, the leftists of the West and the hard left faction of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP).[1] The intention was obviously to prevent Hitler and the NSDAP...
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Site: The Catholic Thing
Hamas operates under a charter that demands the destruction of the state of Israel. And given last year’s brutal Hamas attack on Israel, you would think that the moral, political, historic, military, and economic repercussions of the attack on Israel and of Russia’s war on Ukraine would inspire productive discussions, analyses, debates, and seminars at America’s colleges. What we have seen instead is a wave of rage-driven primitivism and reptile-brain ‘ethical’ rhetoric.
The post Gaza vs. Ukraine: Selective Outrage at America’s Colleges appeared first on The Catholic Thing.
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Site: The Catholic Thing
Never was leaf so green,
for you branched from the spirited
blast of the quest
of the saints.When it came time
for your boughs to blossom
(I salute you!)
your scent was like balsam
distilled in the sun.And your flower made all spices
fragrant
dry though they were:
they burst into verdure.So the skies rained dew on the grass
and the whole earth exulted,
for her womb brought forth wheat,
for the birds of heaven
made their nests in it.Keepers of the feast, rejoice!
The banquet’s ready. And you
sweet maid-child
are a fount of gladness.But Eve?
She despised every joy.
Praise nonetheless,
praise to the highest.The post Song to the Virgin appeared first on The Catholic Thing.
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Site: The Catholic Thing
A state appeals court has found that an insurer for the Archdiocese of New York is not required to cover costs for hundreds of sex abuse claims, a ruling the archdiocese calls “extremely disappointing.” The insurer, Chubb, argued that Church officials knew about the abuse and failed to act accordingly, violating the state’s “known loss doctrine,” by which an insured party cannot secure insurance to cover a loss known before the policy’s effective date.
The post NY court: archdiocesan insurer not required to cover abuse costs appeared first on The Catholic Thing.
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Site: The Catholic Thing
According to a statement from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the pope will take part in a session of the June G7 summit Puglia (June 13-15) dedicated to artificial intelligence, a subject of mounting concern to this papacy. The pope’s participation will mark the first time a pontiff has taken part in a G7 summit.
The post Pope to take part in G7 Summit to talk about Artificial Intelligence appeared first on The Catholic Thing.
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Site: The Catholic Thing
[Note: In 1938, Britain’s leading Catholic journal asked young Catholics to give an account of their faith. Among those who responded was philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.]
The time has surely come for a turning outwards, an aggression, a separation, a proclamation of the Church not as one of a row of candidates for the chooser’s approval, but as utterly distinct from all else: so that every man and woman in England should be conscious of the one significant choice: to be, or not to be, Catholic.
The post A rallying cry to the Church by one of 20th century’s great intellectual converts appeared first on The Catholic Thing.
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Site: The Catholic Thing
I should pray more. And I definitely need to be a better person.
Since I am now a Catholic, I believe there is an important relationship between prayer and becoming a better person. But as a Catholic, I don’t believe that becoming a better person is something that God will do in me without me. I need to do my part. My part is made possible by God’s grace, but the operations of God’s grace are not contrary to my free will, nor do they preclude my own efforts. Grace, as Thomas Aquinas was fond of saying, does not violate nature but perfects it.
So I need to pray and work on developing the virtues. They’re not mutually exclusive; they’re mutually inclusive. You pray for more virtue. And if and when you feel a little of the freedom that comes with having developed the virtue, you turn your eyes to heaven like you were turning to address the doctor who just put your dislocated shoulder back into its socket, and you say, “Thank you, God. That’s much better now.”
On the Catholic understanding of grace, it would be a mistake to imagine that I do something truly charitable, truly good, apart from God’s grace, such that I can turn to God and say, “See how good I am! I did that! You should show me some respect!” This would be like a child who asks for money from his father to buy him a Father’s Day gift – then asking him for privileges because he bought his father a gift. Everything we have we got from God. What God wants in return is that we love our blessed, saintly mother and get along with our brothers and sisters.
And yet it would also be a mistake to imagine that we can depend on piety alone without virtue. If you’re an alcoholic, you can’t say, “Well, I do the rosary every day, so I don’t need to go to AA meetings.” That would be a big mistake. People in AA know that their sobriety depends on a “higher power.” But they also know that they must do the work and go to meetings. It’s not an either-or; it’s a both-and.
So too, it would be a mistake to imagine, “I have a deep devotion to Mary; I visit her shrine all the time; so I don’t need to work on my marriage.” I am repeatedly saddened and confused when I see pious, devoted Catholics simply dump their spouse, saying little more than, “That just wasn’t working out,” or, “I wasn’t fulfilled in that relationship,” much the way any non-Catholic or non-Christian would. Piety is no substitute for virtue. Saying the rosary is great, but it makes no sense to say it and then abuse your employees or support abortion. It’s like saying, “I love my mother” and then kicking her down the stairs.
It is classic among evangelicals to find someone who says he has “devoted his life to Jesus,” and who believes he has, but is still getting drunk and cheating on his wife. Just because a person has “given his life to Jesus” one day in an altar call doesn’t necessarily mean that all the temptations will miraculously go away or that now he will suddenly be caring and responsible in a way he never was before.
Saint Francis in Meditation by Caravaggio, c. 1606 [Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome]Faith is not magic. It’s not a magic wand that touches you and, in an instant, turns you, a frog, into a prince. God’s grace works in God’s own time. He rescues the Jewish people from their slavery in Egypt, but it’s forty years before they get to enter the Promised Land. In the meantime, they must work and sacrifice and prepare themselves. They must worship at the Tabernacle in the desert and fight their enemies. It required years of struggle. But God was there every step of the way.
St. Augustine would not have become the great preacher and bishop he became had he not trained endlessly to develop the skills of rhetoric. And St. Thomas would not have written the Summa had he not spent countless hours in study.
Some say: “Pray as though everything depended on God, and act as though everything depended on you.” I prefer to say that we should act knowing that, if we want to be better, God is already working in us, and pray knowing that God will not work in us without us.
If you want God’s help and God’s grace, He will give it to you. But it won’t necessarily transform you overnight. Not that this doesn’t ever happen, but don’t lose hope if it doesn’t. We must walk by faith and not by sight, the way Abraham did when he set out for God knows where, and the way Mary did when the angel told her something beyond understanding.
If we do our work each day and pray constantly, God will help us develop the virtues. But if you don’t do the work of developing the virtues, don’t expect God to rescue you miraculously when the time comes.
If you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, God might save you from disease, but remember, “you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” You cannot say: “God, I’m now going to do something utterly self-destructive, and later I will depend upon you to rescue me.” Or, “I won’t discipline myself to develop the virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, or justice; I won’t discipline myself to be other than my spoiled, arrogant, greedy, and spiteful self; I will do everything contrary to God’s wisdom and guidance; and yet I still want God to make me flourish.” You can’t get heavenly happiness if you’re living a hellish life.
God can turn water into wine, but He can’t make creatures designed for selfless love flourish if they say no to being transformed by that love.
The post Piety and Virtue appeared first on The Catholic Thing.
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Site: The Unz ReviewI attended a classic car show recently and realized why my generation was so happy compared to the current ones. Cars in those days were beautiful and the muscle car element had glorious sounds. Beginning in 1954 but especially with the advent of the 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air coup and Ford Fairlane coup you were...
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Site: AntiWar.com
President Biden’s campaign will continue using the popular social media site TikTok even though the president supported a provision in the military aid bill he recently signed forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok within 270 days. If ByteDance does not sell TikTok within the required time, TikTok will be banned in the USA. … Continue reading "TikTok Ban Exposes Hypocrisy in Congress"
The post TikTok Ban Exposes Hypocrisy in Congress appeared first on Antiwar.com.
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Site: AntiWar.com
The US Congress authorized a $95 billion military aid package for continuing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as for war preparations against China. This represents, in effect, a downpayment on World War III. US President Joe Biden, reading from a playbook that could well have been scripted by George Orwell, announced: “it’s … Continue reading "US Congress Makes Downpayment on World War III"
The post US Congress Makes Downpayment on World War III appeared first on Antiwar.com.
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Site: Zero HedgeDoes The CIA Run America?Tyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 23:40
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
We’ve all surely had dark thoughts that the CIA is really running the United States, including many media venues. Maybe that’s been true for decades and we just didn’t know it. If so, let’s just say that it would explain a tremendous amount of what has otherwise been clouded in secrecy.
How would this be possible? Knowledge is power while secret knowledge is full control. Even fake knowledge means power and control, such as we found out in the phony Russiagate investigation early in Trump’s term. They hounded the new administration for years under a completely fake scenario in which Russia somehow got Donald Trump elected.
Yes, that was an intelligence operation all along, one directly designed to overthrow an election, a “color revolution” on our own soil.
How dare an agency not elected by the people, and evading oversight and public accountability, put itself ahead of the Constitution and the rule of law? It’s been going on for many decades as the agencies have gained ever more power, even to the point of forcing a full lockdown of America and even the world under false pretense.
None of this is verifiable precisely because of the secrecy involved. It’s not as if the intelligence community is going to send out a press release: “Democracy in America is an illusion. We know because we control nearly everything, plus we aspire to control even more.”
The incredulous among us will shoot back: look at what you are saying! Your conspiracy theory is non-falsifiable. The less evidence you have for it, the more you believe it. How in the world can we argue with you? Your position is not really plausible but there is nothing we can do to convince you otherwise.
Let’s grant the point. Still, let’s not dismiss the theory completely. Based on a New York Times (NYT) piece that appeared last week, it contains more than a grain of truth. The article is titled: “Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on a Collision Course.”
Quote: “Even as president, Donald J. Trump flaunted his animosity for intelligence officials, portraying them as part of a politicized ‘deep state’ out to get him. And since he left office, that distrust has grown into outright hostility, with potentially serious implications for national security should he be elected again.”
Ok, let’s be clear. If the intelligence community led by the CIA is not the “deep state,” what is?
Further, it is proven many times over that the Deep State is in fact out to get him. This is not even controversial. Indeed, there is no reason for these journalists to write the above as if Donald Trump is somehow consumed by some kind of baseless paranoia.
Let’s keep going here: “Trump is now on a possible collision course with the intelligence community .... The result is a complicated and possibly destabilizing situation the United States has never seen before: deep-seated suspicion and disdain on the part of a former and perhaps future president toward the very people he would be relying on for the most sensitive information he would need to perform his role if elected again.”
Wait just a moment. You are telling us that all previous presidents have had a happy relationship with the CIA? That’s rather interesting to know. And deeply troubling too, since the CIA has been managing regime change the world over for a very long time, and is now directly involved in U.S. politics at the most intimate level.
Any president worth his salt should absolutely have a hostile relationship with such an agency, if only to establish clear civilian control over the government, without which it’s not possible to say that we live in a Constitutional republic.
And now, according to the NYT, we have one seeking the Presidency who does not defer to the agency and that this is destabilizing and deeply problematic. Who does that suggest really rules this country?
Is the NYT itself guilty of the most extreme conspiracy theory imaginable, or is it just stating facts as we know them? I’m going to guess that it is the latter. In this case, every single American should be deeply alarmed.
Crazy huh? As for the phrase “never seen before,” we have to push back. What about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Calvin Coolidge? They were all previous presidents, according to the history books that people once read.
There was no CIA back then. If you doubt this, I’m pretty sure that your favorite AI engine will confirm it.
One must suppose that when the NYT says “never seen before,” it means in the post-war period. And that very well might be true. John F. Kennedy defied them. We know that for certain. The mysteries surrounding his murder won’t be solved fully until we get the documents. But the consensus is growing that this murder was really a coup by the CIA, a message sent as a lesson to every successor in that office.
Think of that: we live in a country today where most people readily admit that the CIA probably killed the president. Amazing.
It’s intriguing to know at this late date that the Watergate “scandal” was not what it appeared to be, namely an intrepid media holding government to account. Even astute observers at the time believed the mainstream narrative. Now we have plenty of evidence that this too was nothing but a deep state attack on a president who had lost patience with it and provoked another coup.
All credit to my brilliant father who speculated along these lines at the time. I was very young with only the vaguest clue about what was happening. But I recall very well that he was convinced that Richard Nixon was set up in a trap and unfairly hounded out of office not for the bad things he was doing but for standing up to the Deep State.
If my own father, not a particularly political person, knew this for certain at the time, this must have been a strong perception even then.
You hear the rap that these agencies—the CIA is one but there are many adjacent others—are not allowed by law to intervene in domestic politics. At this point and after so much experience, this comes across to me like something of a joke. We know from vast evidence and personal testimony that the CIA has been manipulating political figures, narratives, and outcomes for a very long time.
How involved is the CIA in journalism today? Well, as a traditionally liberal paper, you might suppose that the NYT itself would be highly skeptical of the CIA. But these days, they have published a long string of aggressively defensive articles with titles like “It Turns Out that the Deep State Is Awesome” and “Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe.” We can add this last piece to the list.
So let’s just say it: the NYT is CIA. So too is Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Slate, Salon, and many other mainstream publications, including major tech companies like Google and Microsoft. The tentacles are everywhere and ever more obvious. Operation Mockingbird was just the beginning. The network is everywhere and the practice of manipulating the news is wholly normalized.
Once you start developing the ability to see the markings, you simply cannot unsee them, which is why people who think and write about this can come across as crackpot crazy after a while.
Have you considered that maybe the crackpots are exactly right? If so, shouldn’t we, at bare minimum, seek to support a Presidential candidate with a hostile relationship to the intelligence community?
Indeed, that ought to be a bare minimum standard of qualification. There is simply no way we can restore civilian control of government and constitutional government until this agency can be thoroughly reigned in or abolished completely.
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Site: The Unz ReviewJews control the gods, meaning they decide what is holy and unholy, what is sacred and what is taboo. Now, if only half the nation accepts those gods and demons, the other half would at least be free to worship its own gods. But what if the entirety of the nation worships those same gods....
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Site: Real Jew News
The Mythos Of The Twenty-First Century
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Site: Zero HedgeHave Fun Staying Poor: Washington Announces $45 Million Subsidy For Low Income Families To Buy EVsTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 23:20
Just when you thought you've already witnessed a lifetime's worth of examples of the government being excellent capital allocators with your tax money, one more shining example comes along.
Last week it was reported that Washington Governor Jay Inslee has announced $45 million worth of subsidies that is going to allow "low income" families to purchase an electric vehicle.
The initiative offers families the opportunity to receive financial assistance for either leasing or purchasing electric vehicles, with up to $9,000 allocated for leasing and $5,000 for purchasing, according to Must Read Alaska.
The program is open to individuals earning 300% or less of the federal poverty level and extends to both new and used EVs. Approximately 9,000 people can benefit from the grant, with the potential for either 9,000 individuals to opt for the $5,000 deal or 5,000 individuals for the $9,000 option.
“Washingtonians really get it when it comes to electric vehicles,” Inslee said at a press conference last week.
Governor Inslee characterized the initiative as a means to "democratize EVs," emphasizing a broader goal of advancing the electrification of transportation. He expressed optimism about widespread adoption, anticipating significant participation and benefit from the program.
However, the program has faced criticism, notably from Washington Policy Center Environmental Director Todd Myers. Myers contends that the subsidies fail to effectively curb carbon emissions and represent a misallocation of taxpayer funds that could be better utilized for other environmental priorities like (we swear we are not making this up) salmon recovery.
Hey Todd, two wrongs don't make a right! But we digress. Despite the controversy, the grant funds are slated to become available to eligible low-income residents in August.
Myers wrote in a blog post: “This is one more example of how wasteful and ineffective Washington’s climate policy is."
He continued: “It also reveals the disingenuousness of claiming that climate change is an ‘existential crisis’ while wasting tens of millions of dollars on projects that do nothing to address that crisis.”
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Site: AntiWar.com
Two people were wounded.
The post <I>Iraq Weekly Roundup</I>: 56 Killed appeared first on Antiwar.com.
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Site: Zero HedgeVon Greyerz: The Real Move In Gold & Silver Is Yet To StartTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 22:20
Authored by Egon von Greyerz via VonGreyerz.gold,
Since the October 2023 gold low of just over $1,600 gold is up but is anyone buying?
Well no, certainly none of the normal players.
Gold Depositories, Gold Funds and Gold ETFs have lost just under 1,400 tonnes of their gold holdings in the last 2 years since May 2022.
But not only gold funds are seeing weak buying but also mints such as the Perth Mint and the US Mint with its coin sales down 96% year on year.
Clearly gold knows something that the market hasn’t discovered yet.
RATES MUCH HIGHER
For the last few years I have been clear that there will be no lasting interest rate cuts.
As the chart shows below, the 40 year down trend in US rates bottomed in 2020 and since then rates are in a secular uptrend.
I have discussed this in many articles as well as in for example this interview from 2022 when I stated that rates will exceed 10% and potentially much higher in the coming inflationary environment, fuelled by escalating deficits and debt explosion.
“But the Fed will keep rates down” I hear all the experts call out!
Finally the “experts” are changing their mind and believe that cuts will no longer happen.
No central bank can control interest rates when its government recklessly issues unlimited debt and the only buyer is the central bank itself.
PONZI SCHEME WORTHY OF A BANANA REPUBLIC
This is a Ponzi scheme only worthy of a Banana Republic. And this is where the US is heading.
So strongly rising long rates will pull short rates up.
And that’s when the fun panic starts.
As Niall Ferguson stated in a recent article:
“Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defence will not stay great for very long. True of Habsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire”.
So based on the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), the US will spend more on interest than defence already at the end of 2024 as this chart shows:
But as often is the case, the CBO prefers not to tell uncomfortable truths.
The CBO forecasts interest costs to reach $1.6 trillion by 2034. But if we extrapolate the trends of the deficit and apply current interest rate, the annualised interest cost will reach $1.6 trillion at the end of 2024 rather than in 2034.
Just look at the steepness of the interest cost curve above. It is clearly EXPONENTIAL.
Total Federal debt was below $1 trillion in 1980. Now, interest on the debt is $1.6 trillion.
Debt today $35 trillion rising to $100 trillion by 2034.
The same with the US Federal Debt. Extrapolating the trend since 1980, the debt will be $100 trillion by 2036 and that is probably conservative.
With the interest trend up as explained above, a 10% rate in 2036 or before is not unrealistic. Remember rates back in the 1970s and early 1980s were well above 10% with a much lower debt and deficit.
US BONDS – BUY THEM AT YOUR PERIL
Let us analyse the current and future of a US treasury debt (and most sovereign debt):
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Issuance will accelerate exponentially
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It will never be repaid. At best only deferred or more probably defaulted on
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The value of the currency will fall precipitously
HYPERINFLATION COMING
So where are we heading?
Most probably we are facing an inflationary period leading to probable hyperinflation
With global debt already up over 4x this century from $80 trillion to $350 trillion. Add to that a Derivative mountain of over $2 quadrillion plus unfunded liabilities and the total will exceed $3 quadrillion.
As central banks frenetically try to save the financial system, most of the 3 quadrillion will become debt as counterparties fail and banks will need to be saved with unlimited money printing.
BANCA ROTTA – BANKRUPT FINANCIAL SYSTEM
But a rotten system can never be saved. And this is where the expression Banca Rotta derives from – broken bench or broken bank as my article from April 2023 explained.
But neither a bank nor a sovereign state can be saved by issuing worthless pieces of paper or digital money.
In March 2023, four US banks collapsed within a matter of days. And soon thereafter Credit Suisse was in trouble and had to be rescued.
The problems in the banking system have just started. Falling bond prices and collapsing values of property loans are just the beginning.
This week Republic First Bancorp had to be saved.
Just look at US banks’ unrealised losses on their bond portfolios in the graph below.
Unrealised losses on bonds held to maturity are $400 billion.
And losses on bonds available for sale are $250 billion. So the US banking system is sitting on identified losses of $650 billion just on their bond portfolios. As interest rates go up, these losses will increase.
Add to that, losses on loans against collapsing commercial property values and much more.
EXPONENTIAL MOVES
So we will see debt grow exponentially as it has already started to do. Exponential moves start gradually and then suddenly whether we talk about debt, inflation or population growth.
The stadium analogy below shows how it all develops:
It takes 50 minutes to fill a stadium with water, starting with one drop and doubling every minute – 1, 2, 4, 8 drops etc. After 45 minutes the stadium is only 7% full and the last 5 minutes it goes form 7% to 100%.
THE LAST 5 MINUTES OF THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM
So the world is most probably now in the last 5 minutes of our current financial system.
The coming final phase is likely to go very fast as all exponential moves do, just like in the Weimar Republic in 1923. In January 1923 one ounce of gold cost 372,000 marks and at the end of November in 1923 the price was 87 trillion marks!
The consequences of a collapse of the financial system and the global economy, especially in the West can take many decades to recover from. It will involve a debt and asset implosion plus a massive contraction of the economy and trade.
The East and South and especially the countries with major commodity reserves will recover much faster. Russia for example has $85 trillion in commodity reserves, the biggest in the world.
As US issuance of treasuries accelerate, the potential buyers will decline until there is only one bidder which is the Fed.
Even today no sane sovereign state would buy US treasuries. Actually no sane investor would buy US treasuries.
Here we have an already insolvent debtor that has no means of repaying his debt except for issuing more of the same rubbish which in future would only be good for toilet paper. But electronic paper is not even good for that.
This is a sign in a Zimbabwe toilet:
Let us analyse the current and future of a US treasury debt (and most sovereign debt):
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Issuance will accelerate exponentially
-
It will never be repaid. At best only deferred or more probably defaulted on
-
The value of the currency will fall precipitously
That’s all there is to it. Thus anyone who buys US treasuries or other sovereign bonds has a 99.9% guarantee of not getting his money back.
So Bonds are no longer an asset of value but just a liability for the borrower that will or can not be repaid.
What about stocks or corporate bonds. Many companies won’t survive or experience a major decline in the stock price together with major cash flow pressures.
As I have discussed in many articles, we are entering the era of commodities and especially precious metals.
The coming era is not for speculation but for trying to keep as much of what you have as possible. For the investor who doesn’t protect himself, there will be a wealth destruction of an unprecedented magnitude.
There will no longer be a question what return you can get on your investment.
Instead it is a matter of losing as little as possible.
Holding stocks, bonds or property – all the bubble assets – are likely to lead to massive wealth erosion as we go into the “Everything Collapse”.
THE NEW ERA OF GOLD AND SILVER
For soon 25 years I have been urging investors to hold gold to preserve their wealth. Since the beginning of this century gold has outperformed most asset classes.
Between 2000 and today, the S&P, including reinvested dividends, has returned 7.7% per annum whilst gold has returned 9.2% per year or 8X.
In the next few years, all the factors discussed in this article will lead to major gains in the precious metals and falls in most conventional assets.
There are many other positive factors for gold.
As the chart below shows, the West has reduced its gold reserves since the late 1960s, whilst the East is growing its gold reserves strongly. And we have just seen the beginning of this trend.
The US and EU sanctioning of Russia and the freezing/confiscation of the Russian assets in foreign banks are very beneficial for gold.
No sovereign states will hold their reserves in US dollars any more. Instead we will see central bank reserves move to gold. That shift has already started and is one of the reasons for gold’s rise.
In addition, gradually the BRICS countries are moving away from the dollar to trading in their local currencies. For commodity rich countries, gold will be an important part of their trading.
Thus there are major forces behind the gold move which has just started and will reach further both in price and time than anyone can imagine.
HOW TO OWN GOLD
But remember for investors, holding gold is for financial survival and protection of assets.
Therefore gold must be held in physical form outside the banking system with direct access for the investor.
Also gold must be held in safe jurisdictions with a long history of rule of law and stable government.
The cost of storing gold should not be the primary consideration for choosing a custodian. When you buy life insurance you mustn’t buy the cheapest but the best.
First consideration must be the owners and management. What is their reputation, background and previous history.
Thereafter secure servers, security, liquidity, location and insurance are very important.
Also, high level of personal service is paramount. Many vaults fail in this area.
Preferably gold should not be held in the country where you are resident, especially not in the US with its fragile financial system.
Neither gold nor silver has started the real move yet. Any major correction is likely to come from much higher levels.
Gold and silver are in a hurry so it is not too late to jump on the gold wagon.
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Site: Zero HedgeMajor Dollar Tree Warehouse Demolished By Tornado, May Spark Supply Chain ChaosTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 22:00
A tornado outbreak on Saturday night across southern Oklahoma decimated a major distribution center for budget retailer Dollar Tree. The facility supplies stores across the Oklahoma-Texas area, plus other surrounding states, which may spark supply chain issues.
Professional storm chaser Aaron Rigsby posted several aerial images of the Dollar Tree distribution center in the Marietta area on X. The photos show the damage left behind after a tornado ripped through the center of the massive warehouse.
Images from Marietta, OK Tornado. Would appear as if cars and semis were tossed off the interstate last night next to the Dollar Tree DC that was impressively shredded to bits. #OKwx pic.twitter.com/2y46FeJfdF
— Aaron Rigsby (@AaronRigsbyOSC) April 28, 2024Another storm chaser, Brandon Clement, posted an up-close drone video of the wreckage, showing millions of products that won't arrive on store shelves anytime soon.
A tornado hit Matietta, OK. Destroying the Family Dollar Distribution center. It also hit a Dollar store, hospital and flipped cars and semis on I-35. #Tornado #Damage #OKWX #Oklahoma #WXTwitter pic.twitter.com/7AF7bgBcQ0
— WxChasing- Brandon Clement (@bclemms) April 28, 2024Marietta is located in Love County. The country's sheriff's office posted on Facebook that "power lines everywhere and buildings have been destroyed."
"Significant damage to dollar tree warehouse, homeland, dollar general, nursing home, and part of the hospital," the sheriff's office said.
With the Marietta distribution center offline, this may spark significant disruptions in the supply of goods to stores located in Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding states.
Dollar Tree operates 25 distribution centers nationwide, serving over 15,500 stores.
There is no official statement from the company specifying supply chain impacts.
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Site: Novus Ordo Watch
“Called by God a high priest according to the order of Melchisedech” (Heb 5:10)…
Heresy from ‘Cardinal’ Ravasi: ‘Christ Was a Layman’
The Vatican’s recently-retired president of the so-called Pontifical Council for Culture (since 2022 the Dicastery for Culture and Education), ‘Cardinal’ Gianfranco Ravasi (b. 1942), has made news again, and not in a good way.
The 81-year-old Ravasi was ordained a priest in 1966 in the traditional rite of priestly ordination. In 2007, ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI personally conferred the invalid Novus Ordo rite of episcopal ordination on him, and three years later he made him a ‘cardinal’. Ravasi has been working in the Roman curia since at least 2007, when Benedict appointed him president of the Pontifical Council for Culture.… READ MORE
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Site: Novus Ordo Wire – Novus Ordo Watch
“Called by God a high priest according to the order of Melchisedech” (Heb 5:10)…
Heresy from ‘Cardinal’ Ravasi: ‘Christ Was a Layman’
The Vatican’s recently-retired president of the so-called Pontifical Council for Culture (since 2022 the Dicastery for Culture and Education), ‘Cardinal’ Gianfranco Ravasi (b. 1942), has made news again, and not in a good way.
The 81-year-old Ravasi was ordained a priest in 1966 in the traditional rite of priestly ordination. In 2007, ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI personally conferred the invalid Novus Ordo rite of episcopal ordination on him, and three years later he made him a ‘cardinal’. Ravasi has been working in the Roman curia since at least 2007, when Benedict appointed him president of the Pontifical Council for Culture.… READ MORE
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Site: Edward FeserAs faculty, including even philosophy professors, aid and abet student bad behavior on campus, it is worth considering what the most serious thinkers of the Western tradition would have thought about the political opinions and activities of the young. What follows are some relevant passages from Plato and Aristotle in particular. For purposes of the present article, I put to one side the specific subject matter of the recent protests, because it is not relevant to the present point. What is relevant is that the manner in which the protesters’ opinions are formed and expressed is contrary to reason. That would remain true whatever they were protesting. Part of this is because mobs are always irrational. But they are bound to be even more irrational when they are composed of young people.
Don’t trust anyone under thirty
Plato held that even the guardians in his ideal city should not be permitted to study philosophy, and in particular the critical back-and-form of philosophical debate, before the age of thirty. And even then, they could do so only after acquiring practical experience in military service, the acquisition of a large body of general knowledge, and the intellectual discipline afforded by mathematical reasoning. As he says in The Republic, “dialectic” (as he referred to this back-and-forth), when studied prematurely, “does appalling harm” and “fills people with indiscipline” (Book VII, at p. 271 of the Desmond Lee translation). For young and inexperienced people tend to make a game of argument and criticism, a means of tearing down traditional ideas without seriously considering what might be said in favor of them or putting anything better in their place. Describing the young person who pursues such superficial philosophizing, Plato writes:
He is driven to think that there’s no difference between honourable and disgraceful, and so on with all the other values, like right and good, that he used to revere… Then when he’s lost any respect or feeling for his former beliefs but not yet found the truth, where is he likely to turn? Won’t it be to a life which flatters his desires? … And so we shall see him become a rebel instead of a conformer…
You must have noticed how young men, after their first taste of argument, are always contradicting people just for the fun of it; they imitate those whom they hear cross-examining each other, and themselves cross-examine other people like puppies who love to pull and tear at anyone within reach… So when they’ve proved a lot of people wrong and been proved wrong often themselves, they soon slip into the belief that nothing they believed before was true…
But someone who’s a bit older… will refuse to have anything to do with this sort of idiocy; he won’t copy those who contradict just for the fun of the thing, but will be more likely to follow the lead of someone whose arguments are aimed at finding the truth. He’s a more reasonable person and will get philosophy a better reputation. (Book VII, at pp. 272-273)
Similarly, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that political science (by which he meant, not primarily what is today called by that name, but rather what we would today call political philosophy) is not a suitable area of study for the young. He writes:
A young man is not a fit person to attend lectures on political science, because he is not versed in the practical business of life from which politics draws its premises and subject matter. Besides, he tends to follow his feelings, with the result that he will make no headway and derive no benefit from his course… It makes no difference whether he is young in age or youthful in character; the defect is due not to lack of years but to living, and pursuing one’s various aims, under the sway of feelings. (Book I, pp. 65-66 of the Thomson and Tredennick translation)
This lack of experience and domination by feelings is commented on by Aristotle elsewhere in the Ethics. For example, he observes that “the lives of the young are regulated by their feelings, and their chief interest is in their own pleasure and the opportunity of the moment” (Book VIII, at p. 262). And he notes:
Although the young develop ability in geometry and mathematics and become wise in such matters, they are not thought to develop prudence. The reason for this is that prudence also involves knowledge of particular facts, which become known from experience; and a young man is not experienced, because experience takes some time to acquire. (Book VI, at p. 215)
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle develops these themes in greater detail, writing:
The young are by character appetitive and of a kind to do whatever they should desire. And of the bodily appetites they are especially attentive to that connected with sex and have no control over it… They are irate and hot-tempered and of a kind to harken to anger. And they are inferior to their passions; for through their ambition they do not tolerate disregard but are vexed if they think they are being wronged.
And they are ambitious, but even more keen to win (for youth craves excess and victory is a kind of excess), and they are both of these things rather than money-loving (they are least money-loving of all through never having yet experienced shortage…) and they are not sour-natured but sweet-natured through their not having yet observed much wickedness, and credulous through their not yet having been many times deceived, and optimistic… because they have not frequently met with failure…
And in all things they err rather towards the excessively great or intense… (for they do everything in excess: they love and hate excessively and do all other things in the same way), and they think they know everything and are obstinate (this is also the reason for their doing everything in excess), and they commit their crimes from arrogance rather than mischievousness. (Book II, Part 12, at pp. 173-74 of the Lawson-Tancred translation)
To summarize the points made by Plato and Aristotle, then, young people: are excessively driven by emotion and appetite; lack the experience that is required for prudence or wisdom in practical matters; in particular, are prone to naïve idealism and an exaggerated sense of injustice coupled with arrogant self-confidence; and tend, in their intellectual efforts, toward sophistry and unreasonable skepticism toward established ways. For these reasons, their opinions about matters of ethics and politics are liable to be foolish.
Democracy dumbs down
This should sound like common sense, because it is. And notice that so far, Plato and Aristotle are describing the tendencies of the young as such, even in the best kinds of social and political arrangements. But things are even worse when those arrangements are bad. In The Laws, Plato warns that the young become soft when pampered and affluent. “Luxury,” he says, “makes a child bad-tempered, irritable and apt to react violently to trivial things” (Book VII, at p. 231 of the Saunders translation). And again: “Suppose you do your level best during these years to shelter him from distress and fright and any kind of pain at all… That’s the best way to ruin a child, because the corruption invariably sets in at the very earliest stages of his education” (ibid.).
In The Republic, Plato argues that music and entertainments that celebrate what is ignoble and encourage the indulgence of desire corrupt the moral character of the young in a way that cannot fail to have social and political repercussions:
The music and literature of a country cannot be altered without major political and social changes… The amusements in which our children take part must be better regulated; because once they and the children become disorderly, it becomes impossible to produce serious citizens with a respect for order. (Book IV, at pp. 125-26)
Similarly, in the Politics, Aristotle cautions:
Unseemly talk… results in conduct of a like kind. Especially, therefore, must it be kept away from youth… And since we exclude all unseemly talk, we must also forbid gazing at debased paintings or stories… It should be laid down that younger persons shall not be spectators at comedies or recitals of iambics, not, that is to say, until they have reached the age at which they come to recline at banquets with others and share in the drinking; by this time their education will have rendered them completely immune to any harm that might come from such spectacles… We must keep all that is of inferior quality unfamiliar to the young, particularly things with an ingredient of wickedness or hostility. (Book VII, at pp. 446-47 of the Sinclair and Saunders translation)
Plato’s Republic also famously argues that oligarchies, or societies dominated by the desire for wealth, are disordered, and tend to degenerate into egalitarian democracies, which are even more disordered. I have discussed elsewhere Plato’s account of the decay of oligarchy into democracy, and of democracy, in turn, into tyranny. Among the passages relevant to the subject at hand are the following, from Book VIII:
The oligarchs reduce their subjects to the state we have described, while as for themselves and their dependents – their young men live in luxury and idleness, physical and mental, become idle, and lose their ability to resist pain or pleasure. (p. 291)
The young man’s mind is filled instead by an invasion of pretentious fallacies and opinions… [He] call[s] insolence good breeding, license liberty, extravagance generosity, and shamelessness courage… [He] comes to throw off all inhibitions and indulge[s] desires that are unnecessary and useless...
If anyone tells him that some pleasures, because they spring from good desires, are to be encouraged and approved and others, springing from evil desires, to be disciplined and repressed, he won’t listen or open his citadel’s doors to the truth, but shakes his head and says all pleasures are equal and should have equal rights. (pp. 297-98)
A democratic society… goes on to abuse as servile and contemptible those who obey the authorities and reserves its approval, in private life as well as public, for rulers who behave like subjects and subjects who behave like rulers…
It becomes the thing for father and son to change places, the father standing in awe of his son, and the son neither respecting nor fearing his parents, in order to assert what he calls his independence…
The teacher fears and panders to his pupils… and the young as a whole imitate their elders, argue with them and set themselves up against them, while their elders try to avoid the reputation of being disagreeable or strict by aping the young and mixing with them on terms of easy good fellowship. (pp. 299-300)
In short, the affluence and egalitarian spirit of a wealth-oriented society that has decayed into a democracy (in Plato’s sense of that term, which has more to do with ethos than the mechanics of governance) greatly exacerbate the failings to which the young are already prone. In particular, it makes them even softer and thus unable to deal maturely with challenges and setbacks, even more prone to sophistry and excessive skepticism, even more contemptuous of authority and established customs, and more vulgar and addicted to vice. Even worse, the egalitarian spirit of democracy makes adults more prone to acquiesce in this bad behavior, or even to ape it themselves. A general spirit of license and irrationality sets in and undermines the social order, greasing the skids for tyranny (in a way that, again, I describe in the article linked to earlier).
What then, would Plato and Aristotle think of the mobs of shrieking student protesters we see on campuses today (or for that matter, the student mobs of the 1960s and of every decade between then and now)? To ask the question is to answer it. Nor is it a mystery what they would think of the professors who egg on this foolishness. They are the heirs, not of Plato and Aristotle, but of the sophists to whom Plato and Aristotle sharply contrasted the true philosopher.
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Site: Zero HedgeWhat, No Bitcoin? How "Hundreds Of Billions" Are Laundered With Cash On AirplanesTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 21:20
Will anti-bitcoin crusader Liz Warren demand that British Pounds be banned next?
shut up https://t.co/7ytElXwXR5 pic.twitter.com/AiTKkB6aKJ
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 22, 2024Jo-Emma Larvin navigated through London’s Heathrow Airport on a fateful day in August 2020, pushing a cart laden with seven suitcases. Traveling business class to Dubai, Larvin and her companion passed through security, seemingly no different from the throngs of other travelers. Yet, unbeknownst to airport authorities, her bags held a clandestine cargo: millions of British pounds, wrapped in rubber bands and sealed in plastic.
Their destination? An international money launderer, adept at converting cash into gold or other currencies, the Wall Street Journal reports, without mentioning bitcoin once, because let's face it: 99% of all money laundering involves not crypto but cold, hard cash!
Jo-Emma Larvin at a London movie premiere in 2010. Photo: Mike Marsland/WireImage/Getty ImagesThe money launderer, who charges a hefty fee to clients to exchange cash for gold and other currencies, has been operating via Heathrow to Dubai - the former doesn't scan outbound luggage for cash, while the latter welcomes sacks of it. They're also the #1 and #2 of the world's busiest airports for international passengers.
The UK mandates passengers declare amounts exceeding $10,000 to customs authorities. Larvin, however, risked arrest by not disclosing her precious cargo, not that anyone would notice. The suitcases slid through Heathrow's baggage-handling system and its 3-D scanner, designed to detect explosives rather than contraband currency.
The next morning in Dubai, the women calmly collected their bags, declaring $2.8 million at customs, a practice fully permitted by UAE law. While the UAE allows any amount of cash to enter its borders, the laxity of international airports in monitoring money flows has created a loophole, one exploited by money launderers worldwide.
Each year, more than $2 trillion in proceeds from illegal enterprises enters the global financial system, with a significant portion smuggled across borders by air. According to estimates by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Financial Action Task Force, "hundreds of billions in illicit cash" fly out of the UK and other nations to countries with fewer regulations.
One of the reasons for so much airline smuggling is that banks around the globe have stepped up the reporting of suspicious transactions, making it more difficult to launder money using traditional wire transfers. So it's back to even more traditional ways of money laundering.
"You just can’t walk into a bank with this much money without being flagged," said George Voloshin, of ACAMS, an industry group for financial crime-fighting professionals. "You will be arrested at the next branch."
Larvin and her boyfriend became two operatives in an intricate web of money launderers working for a UAE-based kingpin. Over a few months in 2020, this network smuggled around $125 million, primarily from the UK to Dubai. "How did they manage so much money in such a short time?" wondered Ian Truby, a senior officer at the UK's National Crime Agency. "Security isn't designed to detect such activities."
Three weeks after her initial journey, Larvin returned to Heathrow with her boyfriend, carrying eight suitcases filled with cash. "It's fucking ridiculous," he texted, voicing concern about drawing attention. "Talk about conspicuous."
The pair's operation ultimately contributed to unraveling a broader international laundering scheme.
Bundles of cash found in a suitcase after an arrest at Heathrow Airport. Photo: National Crime AgencyThe Kingpin
Documents, court records, and interviews reveal how a man named Abdulla Alfalasi spearheaded the smuggling operation, transporting cash from Heathrow to Dubai since 2017. He expanded during the pandemic, once departing with 11 suitcases weighing 463 pounds and reporting $850,000 in Dubai. Alfalasi's connections, including his father-in-law's involvement in developing Dubai's airport, provided an air of legitimacy.
Abdulla Alfalasi Photo: National Crime AgencyHe recruited Michelle Clarke, an executive assistant from Leeds, who soon began recruiting others, including Larvin. The scheme enticed participants with promises of easy money, business-class flights, and luxurious accommodations. Yet the allure was short-lived for many.
In October 2020, two couriers were intercepted at Heathrow, and a subsequent investigation uncovered a vast network of 36 international couriers. Clarke was arrested in Zanzibar in December, carrying $9 million in gold on a private plane.
Authorities eventually arrested Alfalasi and several couriers, unveiling details of the operation. Alfalasi pleaded guilty to money laundering and received a 9-year, 7-month prison sentence. His assets, including vehicles and watches, were seized. Clarke remains under investigation in Dubai for money laundering.
In texts to the Journal, Larvin's boyfriend, Jonathan Johnson, said that he and Larvin were simply two ordinary people who were hoodwinked. He suggested that if what they did was such a big crime, why aren't airports scanning luggage for cash?
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Site: Zero HedgeFalling From GraceTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 21:00
Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”
Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.
I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.
As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”
This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.
And it never will.
If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.
But of what importance is this to us today?
Well, today, the US is the world’s undisputed leading empire and most Americans would agree that, whilst it’s going through a bad patch, it will bounce back and might even be better than ever.
Not so, I’m afraid.
All empires follow the same cycle.
They begin with a population that has a strong work ethic and is self-reliant. Those people organize to form a nation of great strength, based upon high productivity.
This leads to expansion, generally based upon world trade. At some point, this gives rise to leaders who seek, not to work in partnership with other nations, but to dominate them, and of course, this is when a great nation becomes an empire. The US began this stage under the flamboyant and aggressive Teddy Roosevelt.
The twentieth century was the American century and the US went from victory to victory, expanding its power.
But the decline began in the 1960s, when the US started to pursue unwinnable wars, began the destruction of its currency and began to expand its government into an all-powerful body.
Still, this process tends to be protracted and the overall decline often takes decades.
So, how does that square with the quote, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed”?
Well, the preparation for the fall can often be seen for a generation or more, but the actual fall tends to occur quite rapidly.
What happens is very similar to what happens with a schoolyard bully.
The bully has a slow rise, based upon his strength and aggressive tendency. After a number of successful fights, he becomes first revered, then feared. He then takes on several toadies who lack his abilities but want some of the spoils, so they do his bidding, acting in a threatening manner to other schoolboys.
The bully then becomes hated. No one tells him so, but the other kids secretly dream of his defeat, hopefully in a shameful manner.
Then, at some point, some boy who has a measure of strength and the requisite determination has had enough and takes on the bully.
If he defeats him, a curious thing happens. The toadies suddenly realise that the jig is up and they head for the hills, knowing that their source of power is gone.
Also, once the defeated bully is down, all the anger, fear and hatred that his schoolmates felt for him come out, and they take great pleasure in his defeat.
And this, in a nutshell, is what happens with empires.
A nation that comes to the rescue in times of genuine need (such as the two World Wars) is revered. But once that nation morphs into a bully that uses any excuse to invade countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria, its allies may continue to bow to it but secretly fear it and wish that it could be taken down a peg.
When the empire then starts looking around for other nations to bully, such as Iran and Venezuela, its allies again say nothing but react with fear when they see the John Boltons and Mike Pompeos beating the war drums and making reckless comments.
At present, the US is focusing primarily on economic warfare, but if this fails to get the world to bend to its dominance, the US has repeatedly warned, regarding possible military aggression, that “no option is off the table.”
The US has reached the classic stage when it has become a reckless bully, and its support structure of allies has begun to de-couple as a result.
At the same time that allies begin to pull back and make other plans for their future, those citizens within the empire who tend to be the creators of prosperity also begin to seek greener pastures.
History has seen this happen countless times. The “brain drain” occurs, in which the best and most productive begin to look elsewhere for their future. Just as the most productive Europeans crossed the Pond to colonise the US when it was a new, promising country, their present-day counterparts have begun moving offshore.
The US is presently in a state of suspended animation. It still appears to be a major force, but its buttresses are quietly disappearing. At some point in the near future, it’s likely that the US government will overplay its hand and aggress against a foe that either is stronger or has alliances that, collectively, make it stronger.
The US will be entering into warfare at a time when it’s broke, and this will become apparent suddenly and dramatically. The final decline will occur with alarming speed.
When this happens, the majority of Americans will hope in vain for a reverse of events. They’ll be inclined to hope that, if they collectively say, “Whoops, we goofed,” the world will be forgiving, returning them to their former glory.
But historically, this never occurs. Empires fall with alarming speed, because the support systems that made them possible have decamped and have become reinvigorated elsewhere.
Rather than mourn the loss of empire that’s on the horizon, we’d be better served if we focus instead on those parts of the world that are likely to benefit from this inevitability.
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Socialist ideas are becoming increasingly popular in the US. At the same time the US government is printing money hand over fist. All while the US empire continues to overstretch itself across the world. It’s all shaping up to be a world-class disaster… one unlike anything we’ve seen before. That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video showing how it all could go down. Click here to watch it now.
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Site: Zero Hedge"A Lot Of Shuttered Nuclear Power Plants Could Be Turned Back On", Fed Energy Official SaysTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 20:40
The United States is about to experience a resurgence in nuclear energy. The federal government is expected to continue restarting shuttered nuclear power plants in the coming years to meet the increasing demand for clean, dependable energy essential for powering the economy of tommorrow.
"There are a couple of nuclear power plants that we probably should, and can, turn back on," Jigar Shah, director of the US Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, told Bloomberg in an interview.
In March, Shah's office approved a loan to Holtec International Corp. to reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. This was a historical shift, and it was the first nuclear power plant to be reopened in the US, setting a precedent for atomic energy to make a triumphal comeback. The plant could begin producing power as early as the second half of 2025.
Shah said, "A lot of the other players that have a nuclear power plant that has recently shut down and could be turned back on are gaining that confidence to try." He declined to give specifics about which plants were slated to reopen.
Nuclear power is the largest single source of carbon-free electricity. Given onshoring trends, electrification of transportation and buildings, and, of course, as we've noted in "The Next AI Trade," the proliferation of AI data centers will overload power grids nationwide unless a significant upgrade is seen.
We again highlighted the enormous investment opportunity early Monday titled "Everyone Is Piling Into The "Next AI Trade"", which lists companies powering up America for the digital age.
Nearly 3.5 years ago, we provided readers with a straightforward investment thesis: "Buy Uranium: Is This The Beginning Of The Next ESG Craze." Back then, it became apparent to us that the resurrection of the nuclear power industry was imminent.
And the trend is only gaining steam as the revival of nuclear power plants will continue benefiting some of the largest uranium producers, such as Cameco. We told readers to buy uranium stocks, such as Cameco around the $10 handle - now it's nearing $50 a share.
As a whole, uranium stocks have soared...
We'll leave readers with recent comments from Patti Poppe, the chief executive officer of Pacific Gas & Electric.
Poppe told a Stanford University forum that nuclear power should continue to be part of California's power generation mix as efforts to decarbonize the grid.
"Nuclear should be part of the future," she said, noting that the state's only nuclear power plant - Diablo Canyon - could be granted a license extension through the 2030s by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So there it is: Nuclear is being revived at a time when the nation's grid is nearing a major upgrade due to rising power demand.
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Site: Henrymakow.comPresley's manager was Col. Tom Parker.That wasn't his real name. He wasn't even anAmerican but he had the special saucethat made Elvis Presley a megastar.Mike Stone thinks he was worth hismega commission.by Mike Stone(henrymakow.com)When you're in show business, it helps to have a Svengali, someone to manage, guide, and help create your career. In fact, without such a Svengali, many famous entertainers would have never gotten to first base in the music or movie industries.
Cher had Sonny Bono, a hit songwriter, without whom she'd have never amounted to anything.
The Sex Pistols had Malcolm McLaren, who created the group from scratch.
Frankie Avalon and Fabian had the Idolmaker himself, Bob Marcucci, who built both of their careers.
The Beatles had Brian Epstein managing their career, and some would say Theodor Adorno writing all of their songs.
Bono, McLaren, Marcucci, Epstein, and Adorno (if he did write songs for the Beatles) were directly responsible for the success of their protégés.
Of course, not every Svengali gets along well with every protege.
Paul Snider brutally murdered Dorothy Stratten.
Tippi Hedren, commenting on the one thing that no one in Hollywood was ever allowed to comment on, called Alfred Hitchcock a "fat pig."
And Elvis Presley frequently clashed with perhaps the greatest Svengali of them all - Colonel Tom Parker.
The Colonel Who Was Never a Colonel
Colonel Tom Parker was never a real colonel, his name wasn't Tom Parker, and he wasn't an American citizen. He was born Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk in the Netherlands in 1909 and immigrated to the United States illegally when he was twenty-years-old. As for the rank of colonel, it was an honorary title bestowed upon him by Governor Jimmie Davis of Louisiana for helping to get Davis elected.
In the make-believe land of entertainment, no one held any of those things against Parker. After all, anyone who could help Davis, a singer with no political experience, get elected as governor, and consequently reinvent his own life in such spectacular fashion, deserved to be called "colonel." For what it's worth, Davis wrote and recorded the immortal song "You Are My Sunshine."
Parker met Elvis Presley in 1955 and quickly became his "special advisor" and then his manager. Because Presley was still a minor, his parents had to sign the contract with Parker. A contract which gave the colonel 50% of Presley's earnings - for life.
When people outside of show business, and even some naive people in show business, hear about that they immediately balk. The idea of signing away 50% of one's earnings to a manager sounds like fraud, especially when the standard rate is 10%. But you have to remember that Parker was directly responsible for Presley's massive success. Without Parker, there's no Elvis Presley, as we know him today.
It was Parker who helped Elvis exit Sun Records and get signed by RCA Victor, where he became an instant million-selling artist. It was Parker who convinced Elvis to make movies and then set up and negotiated those deals. It was Parker who got Elvis's career back on track after he was discharged from the army. He was worth every penny of his 50% commission.
Presley and Parker fought frequently. In 1973, after a massive backstage argument, Presley fired Parker, who responded, "You can't fire me, I quit." After two weeks of trading insults, however, they decided to maintain their business relationship. Parker remained Presley's manager until his death, and then afterwords, running the Presley estate and merchandising scores of Elvis products.
Parker himself died at the age of 87.
Preying on the Young?
It's interesting to note how Parker and other Svengalis are attracted to youth. Elvis was twenty when he met his future manager, Parker. Cher was a sixteen-year-old waif when she met Sonny Bono. Both Frankie Avalon and Fabian were teenagers when Bob Marcucci stepped into their lives. Dorothy Stratten was seventeen-years-old and working at a Dairy Queen when Paul Snider promised he'd make her a star.
The basic premise of a Svengali finding a talented youngster and managing them to success is as old as "A Star is Born." Companies like Walt Disney have institutionalized the process.
If you want to make your mark in the world as a Svengali, find yourself a talented young teen to represent and sign them to a managerial contract. Of course, if you go by the rumored history of Mario Puzo's "The Godfather," you may find yourself confronted by someone else with a stake in your client's future; a stake bigger than yours; someone with no qualms about making you an offer you can't refuse.
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Mike Stone is the author of the new book 101 Reasons Why You Might Have a Low IQ https://shorturl.at/otL13 and Teen Boy's Success Book: the Ultimate Self-Help Book for Boys; Everything You Need to Know to Become a Man: https://amzn.to/3o0BQdOReplyForward -
Site: Zero HedgeCalifornia State Lawmaker Introduces Bill To Ban Excessive HomeworkTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 20:20
Authored by Eric Lundrum via American Greatness,
A state lawmaker in California has introduced legislation that would severely restrict a teacher’s ability to hand out homework assignments to students that are deemed to be too much.
As reported by Breitbart, State Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo (D-Calif.) introduced AB 2999, formally known as The Healthy Homework Act, in February.
The bill would mandate public school officials to “develop, adopt, and update” their policies regarding homework “at least once every five years.”
The bill would also require schools to take into account research which allegedly shows the physical and mental health impacts of homework.
“I think this is going to make a huge impact for the students,” said Schiavo.
“The times have changed and our homework policies don’t always change with the times, so we need to make sure we are addressing issues that are effective and also don’t harm kids.”
Schiavo was partially influenced by the fact that her sixth-grade daughter, Sofia, hates homework; she described homework as “exhausting” and “overwhelming.”
“It’s depressing that my whole day, from when I wake up to when I go to bed, is nearly all taken up with schoolwork,” said Sofia.
Several alleged “experts” have agreed with Schiavo’s view that homework largely needs to be banned. Harris Cooper, professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, claimed that “there is a limit to how much kids can benefit from home study,” and that students should have no more than 10 minutes of homework per day.
A recent survey by Stanford University found that, of over 300,000 student respondents, 45% said that homework was their top source of stress.
“If it’s such a source of stress for kids, and we know taking stress off kids’ plates will make a difference in their mental health, this is something that can practically impact kids’ mental health overnight,” Schiavo continued.
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Site: Public Discourse
Editors’ Note:
This essay is adapted from a James Madison Program event on April 10, 2024, in Princeton, New Jersey. Oren Cass and Samuel Gregg discussed the right and the future of capitalism in the American founding and offered their perspectives on the conservative approaches to markets and the economy.
The editors lightly revised the transcripts for clarity and added the links to sources with more information on the points discussed.
Yesterday, we shared Oren Cass’ s remarks. Today, we are sharing Samuel Gregg’ s.
Over the past eight years, we’ve witnessed major debates about the market’s place in American conservatism. The Right is now fractured on this topic. That seems unlikely to change—at least in the near future.
As a participant in those debates, I found they have enhanced my understanding of why some conservatives have become more inclined to interventionism. It has underscored two things.
First, these conservatives are asking good questions that merit considered responses. They are right, for example, to highlight the dysfunctionalities that presently mark America. Who can deny the rise in social pathologies among particular demographic groups?
Second, however sympathetic I am to these worries, I think these conservative critiques of markets—and the proposed remedies—are problematic. I think that they overlook insights patiently developed through sound economic theory for the past 250 years. Such insights include our tendency to act in self-interested ways, the dysfunctionality of state bureaucracies, the dangers of meddling with free prices, and the need for what I call epistemological humility.
But let me start in a different place. Many conservatives’ concerns about markets begin not with America but with another country.
Since 2012, China’s behavior has caused many conservatives to question whether economic freedom is a force for magnifying liberty around the world. In the 1990s, many argued that the more that nations like China allowed scope for economic liberty, the harder they would find it to put the freedom genie back in the bottle. That idea is now clearly discredited. Incidentally, Milton Friedman arrived more or less at the same conclusion not long before he died in 2006.
Expanding China’s access to global markets certainly brought many benefits to America. It significantly reduced the cost of many products for American consumers, especially poor Americans. It opened up new export markets for American businesses that created millions of jobs for Americans in areas as different as farming and high-tech manufacturing. It also exposed the American economy to more competitive pressures, and I think that the more competition to which the U.S. economy is exposed, the better for America.
But contrary to expectations, Beijing has never shown any interest in relaxing its grip on Chinese society. Beijing’s authoritarianism is accelerating, and that tightening has now extended to China’s economy.
I should mention that Beijing’s embrace since 2008 of more state-centric economic policies is costing China dearly. The problems include massive capital misallocations as state-controlled banks lend to inefficient state enterprises, the growing corruption that inevitably goes along with that, as well as falling productivity and declining foreign investment.
Scott Lincicome’s extensive analyses of the Chinese use of industrial policy, for instance, show massive failures in areas like semiconductors, 3G mobile technologies, and automotive manufacturing. It’s not coincidental that China’s National Bureau of Statistics is becoming progressively more selective about what economic data it releases. In August 2023, China stopped releasing information about its youth unemployment rate. I wonder why.
But putting aside these facts, China’s behavior has caused many conservatives to become more skeptical of things like free trade and more open to things like industrial policy.
I think adopting such policies would be counterproductive. For one thing, there’s no evidence that these policies will change China’s behavior. We know, for instance, that the 2017 Trump tariffs didn’t change China’s behavior—something publicly conceded on pages 502–504 of the 2019 Economic Report of the President. The report went on to say that it only produced retaliation against groups like farmers.
Which leads me to another point. Economic nationalist policies aimed at other countries end up hurting America and Americans. The historical evidence for this is conclusive.
Consider, for example, the 1930 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and its disastrous effects on the American economy at the worst possible time. It produced massive retaliation from countries across the globe. Or consider Henry Clay’s American System, much of which was underpinned by Clay’s hostility to Britain. As the economic historian John Larson illustrates, the internal improvements constructed under the American system were largely determined by congressmen and senators pursuing their pet projects, which were justified, Larson shows, on increasingly dubious claims of national significance. Likewise, as Phillip W. Magness has stressed, the setting of tariffs by Congress accentuated regional tensions between North, West, and South as politicians struggled to devise a tariff schedule that could reconcile conflicts between manufacturers, raw material producers, and agriculture.
Tariffs, in fact, had little to do with the emergence of America as an economic superpower in the nineteenth century. America’s emergence as an economic superpower was a result of entrepreneurship, rich natural resources, imports of capital, lots of immigration, free internal trade, and private property rights and the rule of law being maintained. Tariffs actually retarded growth. One reason that we know this is that the parts of the American economy that grew the fastest in this period were those that were not subject to tariffs. That was recognized at the time by the economist Frank W. Taussig but also confirmed by subsequent research by Douglas Irwin and Brad DeLong. Irwin comes loosely from the “conservative” side of the economic spectrum. DeLong comes loosely from the more “progressive” side.
Trade issues don’t agitate some conservatives just because of foreign actors. Some maintain that trade liberalization has wreaked havoc on America’s manufacturing regions. Blue-collar communities, they argue, can no longer look to the local factory for jobs that once allowed people with relatively low education to earn wages sufficient to marry and have children in economically secure environments. As we know, many young men in these communities have turned to alcohol and narcotics to fill the void.
When I hear conservatives say that we can’t leave entire communities of Americans to rot, I can only agree. But solutions to problems require accurate diagnoses of the sickness and prescriptions likely to help rather than hurt, and I think some conservatives are misdiagnosing the problem and proposing counterproductive solutions.
Let’s begin with the claim that America has deindustrialized. I think that’s mistaken. Certainly, the number of people employed in manufacturing declined from 19 million in 1972 to about 12 million in 2016. And it has maintained that level more or less since then. But in the same period, total employment in America grew from 99 million to 150 million, dwarfing the loss of manufacturing jobs. Millions of people who might have been employed in manufacturing fifty years ago are now employed elsewhere, especially in the service sector.
But here’s the other important number. Real U.S. manufacturing production grew by 180 percent between 1972 and 2007. There was a blip because of the Great Recession, but by 2019, America was back to pre-Great Recession levels in manufacturing output. According to all the major international manufacturing indices, America is still in the top three manufacturing countries in the world.
That doesn’t sound like de-industrialization to me.
It’s important to remember that an industry’s productivity isn’t measured by the number of people that it involves. The growth in manufacturing output and fall in manufacturing employment primarily reflects technological improvements and a shift in America’s comparative advantage toward high-tech manufacturing as well as the service sector. The most up-to-date studies illustrate that the China Shock from roughly 2000 to 2009 accounted for only 16 percent of manufacturing employment decline in that decade.
I think conservatives should consequently ask themselves some questions. Should we pretend that technology has not displaced certain types of manufacturing employment? Should we ignore the fact that manufacturing employment is declining across the world as millions shift—often quite happily—into economic sectors where they are generally paid more for less strenuous work?
Perhaps some conservatives’ response to this would be: “Yes, the government should intervene directly to help distressed communities throughout Rust Belt regions. We cannot stand by and do nothing. Surely, everyone should be willing to pay a little more to help communities economically reliant on steel and aluminum production.”
Fair enough, but unfortunately, such aspirations encounter problems.
First, neither protectionism nor industrial policy is effective in achieving goals like preserving (let alone bolstering) steel and aluminum production jobs. Such efforts have failed overwhelmingly. Yes, you can subsidize manufacturing, but, as the economist Veronique de Rugy writes, it won’t produce manufacturing jobs anywhere near the scale imagined, precisely because manufacturing today relies heavily on automation.
Let me say that again: industrial policy won’t significantly bolster manufacturing jobs. Even if it produced a manufacturing boom—about which I have doubts—it wouldn’t produce a boom in manufacturing jobs.
Moreover, a 2021 Brookings study of the Northeast and Midwest suggests that of the 185 counties identified as having a disproportionate share of manufacturing jobs in 1970, 115 had managed to successfully switch away from manufacturing by 2016. Of the other 70 counties, 40 exhibited strong economic performance.
Also revealing is that the most successful transitions in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Greenville, South Carolina, by and large didn’t use industrial policy. Changes occurred through bottom-up innovation that changed Grand Rapids from primarily a furniture and car town to also being a medical, aeronautical, and educational hub that has provided jobs in health care support, banking, education, health sciences, etc.: jobs that required more education than a 1970s factory worker but not the education of a lawyer or a doctor or, God forbid, an economist.
By contrast, less than 200 miles away, Detroit opted not to adapt. It opted to lobby for tariffs and subsidies. And Detroit’s subsequent decline is a poster child for the economic inefficiency and cronyism that is part and parcel of industrial policy.
Second, using tariffs to try to protect blue-collar communities has backfired, not least by taking away jobs from other blue-collar workers. Let’s go back to the Trump steel and aluminum tariffs. A 2019 Federal Reserve study estimated these tariffs resulted in a net loss of 75,000 jobs. Why? Because as Irwin observes, “Many more workers are employed in steel-using industries than in the steel industry itself. Higher steel prices penalized domestic producers of steel-intensive products, like farm equipment and machinery, harming their competitive position in domestic and foreign markets (by reducing their exports and increasing other imports).”
How did steel-using industries react? They lowered their costs by cutting jobs. Those 75,000 lost jobs were mostly blue-collar jobs, mostly located in blue-collar towns.
Those are just a few economic critiques of economic nationalism. And if they’re accurate, conservatives should be skeptical about interventionist policies.
Let’s turn to another part of the discussion: the social pathologies that characterize parts of American society, such as prime-age blue-collar men dropping out of the workforce or collapsing marriage rates among similar demographics. Some conservatives have argued that these pathologies resulted from economic changes. I agree that economic changes can have powerful social effects, but I think some of these pathologies owe more to factors other than economics.
Consider the decline of work among prime-age American males without college degrees. That’s a real trend and it’s a worrying trend. But as the economist Nicholas Eberstadt points out, the prime-age American male’s long march out of the labor force began in the 1960s and it’s been rising at a remarkably consistent rate since then.
Eberstadt also shows that events like the Great Recession and China’s entry into the WTO had little impact on American prime-age male inactivity rates. He then suggests that the more relevant pieces of the puzzle are factors like changing family structures, government benefit dependence, and mass incarceration.
I think there’s little reason to imagine that state interventionism can fix these problems. No family income supplement is going to encourage these men to get out of their parents’ basements. Substance addiction can’t be addressed by tariffs. In fact, there’s evidence that not even economic prosperity will necessarily change some of these dynamics.
Take, for example, the fracking boom. It certainly created higher wages and well-paid jobs in many blue-collar communities. Yet as one 2017 NBER working paper by two University of Maryland economists illustrates, there was no change in the low marriage rate among these populations or any reduction in out-of-wedlock births.
The problems that I’ve highlighted haven’t inhibited conservatives from proposing policies like direct family payments, promoting unions, and even a return to the activist state of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But such policies have a track record. And when we examine that record, we discover hard lessons.
Here, may I draw your attention to two books written by the economic historian Amity Shlaes. Her 2008 study of the New Deal, The Forgotten Man, illustrates the Roosevelt administration’s failure to reduce unemployment substantially. It also failed to ignite a significant economic recovery. Likewise, Shlaes’s 2019 book Great Society is a severe indictment of interventionist programs implemented by very intelligent, often well-meaning people and how these policies harmed many communities—especially black communities that they were designed to help.
What remains from these programs is an institutional landscape littered with legacy bureaucracies from these two systematic efforts to reorient the U.S. economy by intervention: bureaucracies, I might add, full of people who have little sympathy for conservative ideas.
Let me close with some thoughts about the future. I agree that our economic status quo is not tenable. American conservatives do need to embrace an economic reform agenda. For me, such a reform agenda would go broadly something like this:
One: Creating space in America for bottom-up-driven entrepreneurship, fierce competition, and dynamic trade inside and outside America’s borders.
Two: Creating that space by de-clogging the U.S. economy of the regulatory and bureaucratic sludge that envelops it.
Three: Reforming the Federal Reserve to focus it on a single mandate of monetary stability.
Four: Decentralizing as many welfare responsibilities as possible to civil society.
Five: Reforming our immigration system so it is easy for migrants to come here, but to do so legally and in a way that affirms American sovereignty.
Six: Focusing government on fulfilling those particular economic responsibilities that it alone can do—like defending property rights, upholding the rule of law, providing monetary stability, and providing a last resort rather than a first resort welfare function.
These are not small economic responsibilities for the government. Moreover, I’d argue that government in America is presently performing sub-optimally in these areas because it’s doing so many other things that it’s not well equipped to do.
The truth is that America isn’t a dynamic market economy. We’re a mixed economy with huge amounts of regulation, interventionism, welfarism, bureaucracy, and cronyism, all of which benefit politically connected businesses and political insiders at everyone else’s expense. Our federal code of regulations alone has grown from 77,000 pages in 1975 to 154,000 pages today. The Index of Economic Freedom shows that America’s economy is less free than some European nations that we used to deride as welfare addicted social democracies.
That’s the institutional side. But I think there’s something else in many ways more substantive that conservatives can bring to thinking about capitalism. The best free market thinkers (people like Adam Smith, Michael Novak, Friedrich Hayek, etc.) have always understood that markets must be grounded in a specific type of culture. In a 1978 interview, for example, Hayek said: “Capitalism presumes that apart from our rational insight we also possess a traditional endowment of morals.”
Adam Smith was a powerful proponent of markets, but he acknowledged the social challenges associated with commercial societies. Smith recognized how greater wealth can seriously warp our sense of what’s important. How many people, he lamented in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, ruined themselves “by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility”?
In the section entitled “Of the Character of Virtue,” Smith explains that commercial virtues require supplementation by classical virtues like magnanimity and justice, as well as habits of benevolence like charity, generosity, and friendship. Smith didn’t see these virtues simply as extra grease for market exchanges. Virtue, Smith wrote, is nothing less than “excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful.” Virtue civilizes our use of liberty in markets while also expanding our horizons beyond the achievements of markets.
Here, it seems to me, lie real opportunities for conservatives to shape American capitalism. How do we help people in dynamic markets understand that certain things should never be bought and sold? How do we revive Tocquevillian and Burkean ideas about bottom-up associationism that binds people together in extra-economic ways and exorcizes the demon of soft despotism?
I don’t underestimate the difficulties in trying to shape the culture in which our markets operate. They are indeed formidable. But undertaking that type of work helps define, I suggest, what it means to be a conservative in the modern world.
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Site: Zero HedgeCocoa Crash Unfolds As "Liquidity Evaporates"Tyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 20:00
Cocoa futures in New York crashed Monday in their biggest daily drawdown on record, driven mostly by improved weather forecasts and sliding liquidity.
"Cocoa prices are melting down. New York and London cocoa futures are down ~15% today (that's, by far, the largest one-day % drop in data going back nearly 65 years)," Bloomberg's Javier Blas wrote on X.
CHART OF THE DAY: Cocoa prices are melting down. New York and London cocoa futures are down ~15% today (that's, by far, the largest one-day % drop in data going back nearly 65 years). #cocoa #chocflation https://t.co/hzcOgHkC2U pic.twitter.com/a3BxC9XjCw
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 29, 2024Futures fell 15% to $8,931 a ton, having hit a record high of $11,722 on April 19.
On April 9, during the surge from $9,000 to nearly $12,000, Blas warned: "Liquidity in cocoa markets is quickly evaporating."
Saxo Bank's head of commodity strategy, Ole Hansen, explained to Dow Jones Newswires that today's selloff was triggered by an improving weather forecast for rain in West Africa, the mecca of cocoa farming. This will only boost the bean outlook for mid-season crops. He also noted that the front contract showed strong signs of 'buyer fatigue.'
"Liquidity in the market due to the intense volatility of cocoa's prices has also disappeared, so any kind of news--good or bad--will trigger strong fluctuations in price," Hansen said, adding that the latest commitment of traders report exhibited broad selling from commercial traders, with the long exposure sliding to a 14-month low as traders panic exit the chaotic market.
Despite the cocoa plunge, London-based trading and agricultural consultant Paulo Torres told Bloomberg, "The shortage is not over" and "the elephant in the room is the fact that Ivory Coast and Ghana do not have cocoa, so there is no way prices can fall significantly."
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Site: Zero HedgeCalifornia's Tax Revenue Projections Weakening As Newsom's Budget Revision Deadline LoomsTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 19:40
Authored by Travis Gillmore via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
With the state facing a record-high budget deficit, tax collections are failing to meet California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal projections, which could put further pressure on the state’s finances.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks in Los Angeles on Jan. 3, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)As of April 25, the state’s franchise tax board is showing personal income tax collections on track to approximately match estimates for the month.
However, corporate tax revenues of $4.16 billion equate to more than $500 million below forecasts for the month and are off by $1.4 billion for the fiscal year.
Some economists point to disruptions in the technology industry—with thousands of California jobs slashed across several companies in recent months—as a contributing factor in declining corporate and personal income taxes.
“The loss of tech jobs has also hurt California’s public finances, which have grown heavily dependent on Silicon Valley,” Joseph Politano, independent writer for online data and economy newsletter Apricitas Economics, posted April 14 on Substack. “It will mean less future potential revenue—forcing the state to raise tax rates or pare back spending on investment, social services, and more.”
Sales and use taxes are also driving the shortfall, missing estimates by $1 billion since November.
In March, such receipts came in $653 million below forecast, which the finance department said, “reflect ongoing weakness in taxable sales.”
Data analysts blamed inflation and high-interest rates, in part, for the lackluster sales tax collections, as cash-strapped consumers are managing their finances by reducing spending on some items.
“This decline reflects consumer challenges balancing higher prices and financing costs with essential household needs,” Andy Nickerson, president and CEO of HdL Companies—a data and consulting services provider for local governments—said in an April 16 tax report summary. “As the Federal Reserve considers a delay in softening rates, [we anticipate] consumer spending may continue to stagnate, delaying a return to normal historical growth trends in 2024.”
Cumulative March tax receipts came in $243 million below estimates and contributed to a $5.8 billion shortfall since November—representing a 4 percent miss—according to a recently released report from the state’s Department of Finance.
While personal income tax receipts exceeded expectations in March, estimated payments since November were down $4.7 billion, suggesting weakness in tax collections for the 2023 tax year, the finance department reported.
With the income tax due date of April 15, more details will be available in the first week of May once calculations are complete. Preliminary information from the state’s controller’s office suggests the governor’s estimate could be $6 billion or more higher than actual revenues collected.
While Mr. Newsom’s January proposal was based on forecasts, a revision due in May will be able to incorporate receipts received, which should provide more clarity.
“All of these results suggest that April revenues, in the aggregate, may come in several hundred million dollars below monthly estimates,” Jason Sisney, budget director for Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, said in a Substack post April 25. “It is virtually certain that the May Revision will downgrade revenue projections from those the Governor released in January.”
Mr. Newsom is expected to provide the revision on or before the May 14 deadline.
The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office predicted earlier this year after weak tax collections in January that revenues would miss the governor’s estimates by about $16 billion for the 2023–2024 fiscal year and another $9 billion for 2024–2025.
But following personal income tax revenues in February and March that were closer to estimate, Mr. Sisney believes the shortfall will not be as large as the analyst’s office suggested.
“Based on revenue trends to date ... it is difficult for me to see revenues dropping quite that much,” he said.
Disparities in estimates between the governor and the analyst’s office have existed since January regarding the severity of the budget deficit.
Mr. Newsom estimates a $38 billion shortfall, while analysts forecast a $73 billion gap in funding. Some of the differences lie in the governor’s calculation of solutions proposed, which the analyst’s office says accounts for about $20 billion of the discrepancy.
With the numbers in flux, lawmakers and policy experts are awaiting final totals so that budget proposals can be debated in earnest.
Mr. Newsom recently approved a “budget bill junior” crafted by Democratic lawmakers as an early action plan to address a portion of the deficit.
Approximately $17 billion to chip away at the deficit—including deferrals, delays, borrowing, and some $3.6 billion cuts—primarily to one-time funding—were enacted by his signing of Assembly Bill 106 on April 15.
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Site: Zero Hedge"The Only Safe Asset" - Chinese Consumers Overtake India In Gold-Buying FrenzyTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 19:20
Who could have seen this coming?
ICYMI from Nov 2023, when gold was still 1900
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 28, 2024
Behind The Mysterious Explosion In Gold Prices: China's "Massive Accumulation Of Gold"https://t.co/6Yg2HPmMwfIn November 2023, with gold trading around $1900/oz, we highlighted the beginning of a precious metal buying-binge from China, noting that the prcie for physical gold had never been more expensive at the time (while western gold prices were still below their prior record highs).
Additionally we noted the total lack of demand for so-called 'paper gold' via ETFs as holdigs underlying these vehicles was declining, as investors rotated from paper to physical:
“The rising interest in gold bars and coins was primarily driven by investors’ safe-haven demand, supported by global geopolitical instability and weak performance of investment products denominated in Chinese yuan.”
Source: Bloomberg
Now, a few months later, we get confirmation as The South China Morning Post reports that consumers in China bought 308.9 tonnes (10.9 million ounces) of gold in the first quarter, representing a 5.9% increase compared to the same period in 2023.
Having burned out in Chinese gold ETFs, we recetly noted that, amid a notable pick up in capital flight that the Chinese had "grabbed gold by the throat."
Sure enough, as SCMP points out, Chinese consumers are increasing their appetite for gold, seeking to protect their assets amid a volatile stock market, a depreciating yuan and property doldrums, which analysts said would continue to boost international gold prices coupled with geopolitical uncertainties.
Purchases of gold bars and coins, which largely reflect investment and hedging demand, surged by 26.8 per cent year on year to 106.3 tonnes, while gold jewellery sales declined by 3 per cent from a year earlier to 183.9 tonnes.
“Gold represents the only safe asset for [Chinese consumers] to protect their wealth against domestic inflation, asset price declines as well as against geopolitical risks,” said Chen Zhiwu, the chair professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong.
“I expect Chinese household demand for gold to rise more in the future. And the Chinese central bank will also continue to purchase more gold to prepare for more geopolitical turmoil ahead.”
China’s central bank bought 160,000 ounces of gold bullion in March, marking its 17th consecutive monthly purchase and bringing its total reserves to 2,262 tonnes (72.74 million ounces), as it aims to diversify holdings away from US bonds amid strained bilateral relations.
“The escalation in gold holdings by global central banks, coupled with heightened gold demand in the Chinese market, has emerged as significant drivers propelling recent gold prices beyond market expectations,” the Bank of China said on Friday.
“In the future, gold prices are expected to sustain their robust upwards trajectory, driven by ongoing global central bank efforts to de-dollarise, escalating geopolitical uncertainty, and shifts in the [US] Federal Reserve’s monetary policy,” the report said.
China eclipsed India as the largest purchaser of gold jewellery in 2023, with consumption totalling 630 tonnes last year, representing an annual increase of 10 per cent.
“The China story is one of the reasons supporting gold prices, but the global risk-off sentiment is also fuelling the demand,” said Gary Ng, senior economist at Natixis Corporate and Investment Bank, who expected China’s demand for gold to remain resilient in 2024.
“Beyond China, whether the US can take inflation is another determinant for future gold prices, which is probably the biggest uncertainty.”
However, as TD Securities' Daniel Ghali points out another potential source of gold strength.
With little trace in exchange data, buying activity must be OTC. However, price action in basis, forwards, and BoE gold suggest the buying program is price insensitive, has a sense of urgency, and deep pockets. This mysterious bid may point to curiously aggressive OTC buying activity, which appears to be highly correlated with acute currency depreciation pressures.
Ongoing currency pressures could explain the sense of urgency behind this bid, with a high correlation with the CNY's deviation from its fix inching towards its fixed band.
Historically, this has been associated with a significant outperformance as the exceptional buying activity underpins a squeeze from those using the traditional playbook.
Finally, US election dynamics are a positive for gold, according to TD Securities' Bart Malek.
A Republican administration is likely to push lower taxes, with spending largely unchanged. The resulting higher deficit projections, from the already very high numbers, should help gold, as it suggests higher inflation, lower real rates and continued central bank buying. A likely even more adversarial stance toward China and Iran taken by a Republican administration would also contribute to gold's good fortune and should see oil well supported.
Simply put, gold remains a good sanction-proof private- and central-bank-diversifier.
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Site: Zero HedgeMammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be ActivistsTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 19:00
Authored by Roger Simon via The Epoch Times,
I am writing this column in the hopes you will pass it around.
To be honest, I write every column in the hopes it will be passed around, times being what they are. I’m arrogant enough to think what I have to say is at least somewhat needed. More humbly, G-d gave me a modicum of writing skill I have concluded for a reason and, more than ever in my life, I, at the age of 80, seem constrained to use it. I rarely stop, and when I do, all I seem to think about is what I’m going to write next, except when I’m playing tennis... And even then...
Today’s title is, of course, a knock-off of “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” written by Ed and Patsy Bruce, but made famous, as these things go, by others—the estimable Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. If you’ve been living under the proverbial rock and haven’t heard their fabulous recording—and even if you have; I listen to it all the time—it’s right here.
It begins: “Cowboys ain’t easy to love/And they’re harder to hold.” If you replace “Cowboys” with “Activists,” it still makes sense, maybe more. Trust me—I’ve been there myself, years and years ago. We were wrong then. They’re worse now.
This is all a long way around to what my theme is - the cause of the civilization-threatening unholy mess we are in with so many of our supposedly premier institutions of higher learning - indeed the world’s supposedly premier institutions of higher learning - Ivy League on down, turned into satanic campgrounds celebrating a group of bloodthirsty maniacs that make the Nazi Party seem like... well, let’s just leave it there.
Except that 1939 has come back. From Wikipedia:
“On February 20, 1939, a Nazi rally took place at Madison Square Garden, organized by the German American Bund. More than 20,000 people attended, and Fritz Julius Kuhn was a featured speaker. The Bund billed the event, which took place two days before George Washington’s Birthday, as a pro-‘Americanism’ rally; the stage at the event featured a huge Washington portrait with swastikas on each side.”
Déjà vu all over again? The proverbial canary in the coal mine come back for yet another bow?
Yes, but now it’s arguably worse. No more wrapping themselves in the flag. George Washington, no longer revered, is just another statue to be toppled. It’s “Death to America” all the way down at our leading universities and it’s spreading.
It’s Rashida Tlaib’s world. We just live in it.
Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be activists—see what I mean?
I’m not talking about the loyal readers of this site. I’d be astonished if they were the kind of parents or grandparents who would countenance that kind of thing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they (you) know plenty who are.
Also, I know many fine people who have done their bests with their progeny only to find that years of critical race theory (flagrant or masked) and other assorted “woke” excrescences in the schools, not to mention the inability to concentrate brought on via the supposed gifts of Silicon Valley, have made it impossible anyway.
When looking for blame for what happened to this generation of college students, half or near of whom seem to prefer Hamas to Israel, most point at the educational system itself, so neo-Marxist “woke” from kindergarten up it’s hard to imagine how they could be more so, and to the media who cheer it along, amplify it, and excuse its excesses.
But it all starts in the home. In other words, someone was not home to give these young people guidance and rein in at least some of their excesses—the parents.
It’s not been just an abdication of responsibility. In more cases than we would like to know, the parents may also have cheered them on, seeing in their rebellious children the vindication of their own, much more tepid, rebellions years ago.
In yet other cases it’s more direct, and worse.
As illustration, recall how, back in 2020, former president Barack Obama proudly announced his daughters’ participation in protests led by Black Lives Matter, an organization that proved to be a financial rip-off not just of other blacks, but of all who contributed to their racialist con game. (That link, by the way, comes to you via the oh-so-chic folks at Harper’s Bazaar.)
Of the three causes mentioned, the parents may, in the end, be the most to blame, though needless to say a fourth element, our government, has its portion too, an amazingly large one, fomenting what Christopher Rufo sees as internal “color revolutions” via such amusements (for children yet) as “Drag Queens for Palestine.”
It’s impossible to know how many of these protestors come from single-parent homes, but it’s almost certain to be a high percentage. This is a national disaster in itself.
It’s hard to know in general how many of them there are or even who they are because they wear masks or keffiyehs covering their faces (for fear of COVID or, more likely, identification by future employers).
What we are seeing on our campuses is the product of a family environment imploding or, sadly, already imploded. Much of this is and has been intentional.
I apologize to all of you for being so “hobbyhorsical,” as Laurence Sterne termed it hundreds of years ago, on this topic, but the situation we are in is indeed civilizational. One can only praise the few governors—Texas, Florida—who have stood up to the onslaught and properly used the National Guard to return their universities to what was supposedly their real purpose—something called education.
So let’s end with some good news. It was long overdue, but the Ivy League and similar institutions are finally losing their luster. It is being widely reported that many students and their families—not just Jewish ones—are deciding to go elsewhere, to the Midwest and South, for their studies that might be more even-handed.
Others are deciding that college isn’t such a great thing after all and are going to trade schools. Good on them. (I wonder how many of those trade schools are having pro-Hamas demonstrations. Not many, I’d wager.)
Finally, a word about a word—“activists.” It is used as well to characterize adherents of what we often think of as good causes. I say—bag it. Let’s leave that term to the Left. That way you don’t have to let your babies grow up to be “activists,” because, chances are, they’re not going to be the kind you want.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
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Site: Zero Hedge"Do Not Disclose This Is An Ad": OnlyFans Creator Says Biden Admin Paid For "Full On Political Propaganda"Tyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 18:40
OnlyFans creator and TikTok star Farha Khalidi says that the Biden administration paid her to push "full on political propaganda," and asked her not to disclose that she was advertising for them.
Speaking with commentator Richard Hanania, Khalidi said she'd been asked to boast about Ketanji Brown Jackson after Jackson was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Biden.
"I was doing full-on political propaganda," she said, adding "The funny thing is they're like, do not disclose this is an ad because technically it's not a product so you don't have to disclose it's an ad. Because I think they just wanted, like, some edgy girl of color to just tell people — like when they nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson, they’re, like, ‘Can you say “as a person of color,” you know, that you feel “reflected”?’"
Watch:
NEW: OnlyFans creator Farha Khalidi says she was paid by the Biden Administration to spread "political propaganda" & was told to not disclose her videos were ads.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 28, 2024
Everything about Biden is fake.
Khalidi says the Biden admin reached out to her because they wanted someone with… pic.twitter.com/CQ40K5IHIDKhalidi has 1.8 million TikTok followers.
Speaking of propaganda, and we'll save you the eye bleach by not posting his picture... director Steven Spielberg is also helping the Biden campaign with reelection, NBC News reported on Friday.
The filmmaker will help to "convey the president’s successes and his vision for the country" to delegates and viewers of the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to take place August 19-22 in Chicago. Spielberg has been meeting event organizers, who expect more than 5,000 delegates from across the country to officially select Biden as the presidential nominee.
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Site: Zero HedgeThe Travesties Of The Trump TrialsTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 18:20
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,
Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases - prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis - were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.
These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.
Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.
Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left.
Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed - and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.
Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.
Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.
Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left. The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a conservative Republican and leading presidential candidate, he would have never been indicted.
Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.
Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.
Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.
James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s votes had been fully counted.
Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.
In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.
Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.
Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.
Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.
Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.
In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.
Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.
For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory by appealing to the electors to renounce their states’ popular vote tallies and thus become “faithless electors.” In sum, there was a true conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional duties of electors to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was the legitimately elected president.
In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the election year 2024 to do what Democrat voters likely cannot. They are ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law, and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is accused of.
Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United States.
If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur has already investigated and confirmed?
Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to descend into the Biden beach house?
Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?
Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas, Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them? Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?
Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouflaged to avoid income taxes?
Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all those in 2016 who sought to undermine the electors and flip them to Hillary Clinton?
In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a $450 million fine, payable before appeal?
And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the ballot?
Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of law.
A final note.
There is a divine order of balance in the world, one known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma, or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump years straining to find ways to invoke the 25th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”
Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.
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Site: LifeNews
While a dozen pro-life advocates face over 10 years in prison for protesting abortion at an abortion center, a radical abortion activist won’t face any prison time for attacking a pregnancy center.
That’s even though both abortion businesses and pro-life pregnancy centers are covered by the same FACE Act.
On April 15, Whitney M. Durant, 20, of the Columbus suburb of Worthington, scrawled “abort God” on the HerChoice pro-life women’s center of Bowling Green in northwestern Ohio. She also wrote “Jane’s Revenge,” “fake clinic,” “liars,” and “fund abortion” messages on the pregnancy center during her attack.
Durant — a transgender-identified socialist activist who goes by the name “Soren Monroe” — was caught on surveillance footage wearing a surgical mask and a hat vandalizing the facility at 3:26 a.m.
She later posted a social media video praising the attack, which no one knew she had perpetrated. After public outrage that the Biden administration had not fulfilled its legal obligation to protect all Americans, the DOJ prosecuted Durant under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
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But the Biden administration’s Justice Department announced on April 12, that Magistrate Judge Darrell A. Clay sentenced Durant/“Monroe” to two years’ probation and a $2,000 fine. But the radical activist, who faced a year in jail, reportedly had a history of violet outbursts toward pro-life advocates. Falcons for Life President Morgan Reece revealed that Durant/Monroe barged into a pro-life display at Bowling Green State University and repeatedly beat her fists on the table while screaming that pro-life students were “racists” and “fascists.”
U.S. Attorney Rebecca C. Lutzko for the Northern District of Ohio said the sentence proves the “United States Attorney’s Office is committed to neutrally enforcing federal laws that protect uninterrupted access to all clinics providing reproductive health services, whether those clinics provide women with options that include abortion care or whether they solely encourage women to consider non-abortion alternatives.”
But the Biden administration’s record on FACE Act prosecutions calls that into question.
Here’s more on the Durant situation:
“Durant was a Bowling Green State University student” at the time, according to the department. A Students for Life of America blog post this week referred to Durant as a former student.
Morgan Reece, president of Bowling Green’s pro-life club Falcons for Life, said she is happy Durant was held accountable, but she wishes the punishment was more than a “slap on the wrist.”
“The assistant U.S. prosecuting attorney told me and the Bowling Green Pregnancy Center’s executive director that Durant will not be getting jail time since this is only her first offense,” Reece wrote on the Students for Life blog.
The post Radical Abortion Activist Won’t Go to Prison for Attacking Pregnancy Center appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
A reply to a parliamentary question by Deputy Carol Nolan from the HSE has revealed the levels of spending as part of its Sexual Health and Crisis Pregnancy Programme. A total of 28 organisations received funding under the programme between 2019 to 2023 which totals €18,752,332.
Avowedly pro-abortion campaigning organisations are on the receiving end of funds which are earmarked for ‘counselling’, this includes the likes of the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) which receives €550,000 – €600,000 annually. Their total funding for 2019-2023 adds up to €2,849,401.
Meanwhile, the reply letter states that “My Options service – One Family & Caredoc” received a total of €3,376,254 in the same period. A research project undertaken by Students for Life in 2021-23 revealed that MyOptions counsellors are failing to provide non-directive counselling and the findings showed that they frequently tell women to book their first abortion appointment, even in situations where the women make it clear that they are unsure if they want an abortion.
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The problems with MyOptions’ counsellors’ practices could also be seen in the recent RTÉ Investigates programme (15 April) which featured a phone call between a woman and a MyOptions counsellor. In the clip, the woman told the counsellor she was over 12 weeks pregnant and the counsellor immediately brought up abortion and sought to refer her to an abortion provider in the UK. Unless the clip was highly edited, no attempt was made to ask whether the woman would like to avail of counselling or receive information on the support available should she decide to keep her baby.
The lack of funding for genuine counselling services which aren’t simply abortion providers or advocates is shocking. Since the 2018 referendum, the government has gutted funding previously made available to organisations which provided genuine support and counselling to women in unplanned pregnancies.
Commenting on the answers she received to the latest questions she submitted, Deputy Nolan said: “Once again we see clear evidence that the Government is actively directing massive amounts of taxpayers’ money toward services that reflect the positions of abortion advocacy rather than genuine crisis support. It needs to be reminded that the exchequer is not there to act as a fundraiser for the promotion and support of such a narrow range of views.”
The post Ireland Sends Funds Meant to Help Women in Crisis Pregnancies to Abortion appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
Thirty-three-year-old Neesha smiled as she talked about the state law that led her to choose life for her son. In 2022, Neesha lived in Georgia and was a busy single mom to four beautiful children. When she found out that she was expecting a fifth child, she worried about having the time and resources to give her baby the life he deserved while also caring for her other children.
“I kept thinking that I can’t do another pregnancy alone, and I had to look at other options,” she said.
Neesha told a friend that she felt like abortion was the only answer. She had already experienced eight abortions, and while she was familiar with the process, each abortion had left her feeling empty and, as she put it, more “desensitized” to life. She thought often about her aborted children, and she wondered what their life would have been like.
Feeling as though she had no other options, Neesha called an abortion center to schedule the procedure. She was told that Georgia’s heartbeat law limits abortion once a baby’s heartbeat is detected, usually around six weeks’ gestation. At this stage of fetal development, a baby’s heart is already beating at 110 beats per minute and the unborn baby has over a 90 percent chance of surviving to birth and beyond.
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Neesha’s unborn baby already had a heartbeat, so she didn’t proceed with an abortion. Recounting her experience now, she said that she is grateful and thankful for the heartbeat law because it opened her eyes to the other options available for her and her child.
A friend at church connected her with a whole network of resources in Georgia to support women facing unplanned pregnancies before, during, and after the birth. One of these organizations was Abiding Love, an adoption agency that works to support birth mothers through an open adoption. Neesha said adoption was never really discussed among her family, and she had many questions about the process.
After meeting with the team at Abiding Love, Neesha chose life for her unborn son and decided to move forward with adoption. As the process started, Neesha faced an incredible hurdle when she was laid off from her job. The Abiding Love team never left Neesha’s side and assisted her financially so that she could focus on her health and her family.
When Neesha was ready, she selected a couple from Florida to adopt her son, and they met for the first time at a local restaurant. Months earlier, Neesha had been encouraged to write down everything she was looking for in an adoptive family, and this couple perfectly aligned with what she envisioned.
Over the next several months, Neesha bonded with the adoptive couple, and they supported her during her pregnancy and helped prepare for the new baby’s arrival.
“They loved him before they even knew who he was,” Neesha said. “They gave me a tour of his room, and they had clothes for him. They were ready for him.”
The adoptive parents stayed with Neesha at the hospital during her delivery of a beautiful and healthy baby boy. “I was able to bask in the moment and to see that his new parents were there for me and for him.”
Today, Neesha has a loving and open relationship with her 10-month-old son and his adoptive parents.
“Even though I didn’t plan for this pregnancy, even though I didn’t have a plan in place, there were people who did,” Neesha said. “There were people who were waiting for his arrival. There were people who already loved him before they met him. There were people ready to embrace him. There were people ready to conquer everything with him no matter what.”
Neesha credits Georgia’s heartbeat law with opening her eyes to the beauty of adoption. “I love my son so very much. The heartbeat law not only saved his life, but it blessed another family’s life. It’s an all-around beautiful story,” she said.
Today, Neesha openly shares her story to help other women who face unplanned pregnancy and to draw attention to the importance of life-affirming laws like the heartbeat law.
“I get to live a life of freedom and rejoicing, and I get to show women that there is another way. It doesn’t make you any less of a mother if you choose adoption for your child. It makes you a strong individual.”
LifeNews Note: Anna Callahan writes for SBA Pro-Life, where this column originally appeared.
The post Mother Confirms Abortion Ban Saved Her Baby’s Life appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Zero HedgeUranium Stocks Rise After White House Mulls Russian Import BanTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 17:20
Uranium stocks moved higher late in the US cash session after a report from Bloomberg, citing "people familiar with the matter," revealed that the Biden administration is considering an executive order to ban Russian imports of enriched uranium after congressional efforts stall.
Officials from the White House National Security Council, the Department of Energy, and other top-level officials have discussed reducing reliance on Russian uranium imports. The people said the potential ban could include waivers similar to legislation that quickly passed the House last year.
"Because of procedural rules, the next best potential legislative vehicle to attach the uranium ban in the Senate to is must-pass legislation needed to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, which is slated for the Senate floor this week," Bloomberg said.
Certainly, final decisions have yet to be reached on the matter. According to sources, the administration and the nuclear industry favor Congress enacting the ban. However, if push come to shove, executive authority could be used, they said.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Washington imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.
In this graphic, Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti shows how much America's nuclear power plants rely on Russian uranium.
According to the Energy Information Administration, Russia supplied about a quarter of all enriched uranium used in more than 90 commercial reactors.
Bloomberg estimated that America's power plants spend at least $1 billion a year on Russian-enriched uranium. The White House has warned that dependence on Russian sources of uranium "creates risk to the US economy."
"At the same time, replacing that supply could be a challenge and is poised to raise the costs of enriched uranium by as much as 20%," the media pointed out.
In markets, the world's largest publicly traded uranium company, Cameco Corporation, caught a slight bid after the Bloomberg story was released. Miner Uranium Energy Corp and Sprott Uranium Miners ETF (URNM) also rose.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a ban on Russian uranium imports could raise nuclear fuel costs by at least 13%, if not more.
Late last month, Jonathan Hinze, president of UxC, a nuclear industry research firm, told Bloomberg that uranium prices have likely "reached a bottom."
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Site: Zero HedgeThe Fed's Game Of "Make Believe" Comes To An EndTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 17:00
Authored by James Hickman via SchiffSovereignMan.com,
It’s barely been a year since the 2023 bank crisis in which several large banks, including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, failed.
At the time, I wrote that the bank failures weren’t over, and that there would be more.
But it’s been quiet for most of the last year; the banking system has been pretty calm thanks in large part to an emergency program that the Federal Reserve created to bail out other troubled banks.
They called it the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), and it essentially expired a few weeks ago. In other words, no more emergency lending to troubled banks.
Barely a month later, we have already witnessed our first casualty: Pennsylvania-based Republic First (not to be confused with First Republic, which failed last year) was shut down by regulators on Friday afternoon.
Republic First had the same issues as the others that failed last year — too many ‘unrealized bond losses’ on their balance sheet.
Just like Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, etc. last year, Republic First had used their customers’ deposits to buy US Treasury bonds in 2021 and 2022, back when bond prices were at all-time highs.
By early 2023, the situation had reversed. Bond prices had plummeted; even supposedly ‘safe’ and ‘stable’ US Treasury bonds had fallen substantially in price, and banks were sitting on huge losses.
Remember that bond prices fall when interest rates rise. So when the Fed jacked up interest rates from 0% to 5% in an attempt to control inflation, they were simultaneously creating huge losses in the bond market… which also meant huge losses for banks.
Silicon Valley Bank was just the tip of the iceberg. Plenty of other banks (including Bank of America) had racked up enormous bond losses. In fact the total unrealized losses in the banking sector last year amounted to a whopping $620 billion.
The Fed knew they had an enormous problem on their hands. So they created this Bank Term Funding Program, which was basically a giant game of ‘make believe’.
Through the BTFP, banks were allowed to borrow money from the Fed using their cratering bond portfolios as collateral. But instead of valuing the bonds at the actual market price, everyone simply pretended that the bonds were still worth 100 cents on the dollar.
In other words, the banks just made up prices for their assets, and the Fed allowed them to do it.
(It’s ironic that a certain former President is on trial in New York City for inflating the value of his assets, even though banks were inflating the value of their bonds through the BTFP.)
The Fed managed to prevent any further embarrassing bank failures last year by sprinkling this magical fairy dust across the banking system.
But now that the BTFP has expired, it has become obvious that problems in the banking system haven’t gone away. Republic First’s failure a few days ago is just one symptom.
Think about it: Bond prices are still down (because interest rates remain much higher than they were in 2021-2022). Banks are still sitting on massive unrealized losses.
And now that the Fed has stopped playing ‘make believe’, the bank failures have started up again.
It’s not to say that ALL banks are in terrible shape; some banks wisely used the last twelve months to get their financial houses in order.
Unfortunately most didn’t… which is why there’s still more more than HALF A TRILLION dollars in unrealized losses in the US banking system. This means that Republic First probably won’t be the only failure, unless the Fed steps in with its magical fairy dust again.
Also bear in mind that losses from their US Treasury portfolios aren’t the only problem in the banking system; for example, plenty of banks are sitting on huge potential losses from loans they made on office properties.
I don’t think the scope of this problem is anywhere near the 2008 financial crisis, which brought down some of the world’s largest banks. Not even close.
But the reality is that there are still a lot of banks with a lot of unrealized losses. And the biggest one of all happens to be the Federal Reserve.
According to its own financial statements, just released last month, the Fed’s total unrealized losses are almost $1 TRILLION — $948.4 BILLION to be more precise. And the vast majority of those unrealized losses come from US Treasuries.
So just like Silicon Valley Bank, Signature, First Republic, and now Republic First, the Federal Reserve has rendered itself completely insolvent.
In fact, total Federal Reserve capital is just $51 billion… versus $948 billion in losses. This means the Fed is insolvent 19 times over.
Think about that: the largest, most important central bank in the world… the steward of the global reserve currency… is completely insolvent on a mark-to-market basis.
You’d think that would be front page news. But no one ever talks about it. No one even wants to talk about it.
Of course plenty of people will insist that it doesn’t matter, just like they insist that the national debt doesn’t matter.
But this is yet more absurd fantasy; just look at the facts:
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The FDIC’s published reports show more than $500 billion in unrealized losses in the US banking sector.
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The Federal Reserve, which in theory would bail out the banking sector, is itself insolvent by $900 billion.
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The US government, which would bail out the Fed, is insolvent by more than $50 trillion.
It’s just debt on top of debt on top of debt. Losses on top of losses on top of losses.
Just like the BTFP, everyone wants to play a giant game of ‘make believe’ and pretend that the Fed’s solvency is not a problem, that the US government’s enormous debt is not a problem.
On the contrary, they’re huge challenges. And the ultimate consequence is going to be the loss of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
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Site: Zero HedgeBiden Rejects World Court Investigation Of Israel As Netanyahu Arrest Warrant LoomsTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 16:40
The Biden administration is reportedly in the midst of a diplomatic full court press in efforts to prevent the International Criminal Court (ICC) from issuing arrest warrants for top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The ICC is also expected to issue warrants for Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Herzi Halevi, in connection with alleged large-scale human rights abuses related to the war in Gaza.
Axios reports Monday that the Israeli government is growing "increasingly concerned" over the possible action, while Walla news has written that Netanyahu is "under unusual stress" over what will be a largely symbolic, albeit still deeply embarrassing reputational black eye for his government at a moment he's facing immense domestic pressure at home to bring back the hostages.
Via AFPThe Israeli leader has personally asked President Biden to intervene. Axios details of the call: "The officials said Netanyahu expressed his concern to Biden in a phone call on Sunday, where the two leaders also discussed hostage negotiations, Israel's defense against Iran's missile attack, and the need to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza, according to a White House readout."
The White House has issued a fresh statement Monday stressing that the United States "does not support" the ongoing ICC investigation into Israeli war crimes.
The ICC's investigation actually goes all the way back to the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. But also following Oct.7 and Israel's invasion of Gaza, South Africa brought a fresh war crimes case - which has gained the support of countries like Turkey, but especially a number of countries of the Global South.
The Hague-based court in March 2023 issued an arrested warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war, so this means that ironically Netanyahu could soon be a "wanted" man right alongside Putin.
On Friday Netanyahu defiantly said, "We will never stop defending ourselves. Whereas decisions of the court in the Hague will not affect Israel’s actions, they would be a dangerous precedent threatening the soldiers and officials of any democracy fighting criminal terrorism and aggression," in a message on X.
Israel is now warning that an ICC warrant could blow up a hostage deal being mediated by Egypt and Qatar:
If the International Criminal Court does issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, continues the official, it will lead to “a wave of antisemitism around the world” that could blow up a potential hostage deal. This is not an Israeli threat to walk away from talks in the case of an ICC decision, explains the official, but reflects Israel’s belief that international pressure on Israel will remove pressure on Hamas to make compromises necessary for a deal.
Reacting to the US State Department report that found five IDF units guilty of “gross human rights violations,” the official says that Jerusalem “categorically rejects any attempts to harm the IDF and Israel’s right to defend itself.”
In January, the ICC issued an interim ruling which stated that South Africa's case has legal merit and can proceed while ordering Israel to take all measures capable to prevent acts of Genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Ultimately the ICC has no enforcement power on its own, but can call on member states to arrest leaders on its blacklist if they ever travel through their territories. Putin back in August canceled an in-person trip to South Africa for a BRICS summit precisely to avoid a potential embarrassing situation at a moment Pretoria was being pressured to act.
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Site: LifeNews
Help the Calgary father of the 27-year-old autistic woman stop his daughter from being killed by euthanasia by donating to his legal expenses.
Due to a publication ban, the media refers to the father as (WV) and his daughter as (MV). WV contends that MV does not qualify for euthanasia because she is physically healthy, even though she is experiencing suicidal ideation.
I reported on April 9, 2024, that the father was granted an injunction preventing the euthanasia death of his 27-year-old autistic daughter–at least until the Alberta Court of Appeal decides on his challenge to the decision approving his daughter’s euthanasia death.
This case is particularly distressing for me since I have an autistic son.
Please follow LifeNews on Rumble for the latest pro-life videos.
The Calgary father has already accumulated more than $100,000 in legal expenses in his attempt to prevent the euthanasia death of his healthy autistic daughter.
The legal expenses will continue to climb as his lawyers prepare for the Alberta Court of Appeal hearing in October 2024.
Help the Calgary father of the 27-year-old autistic woman stop his daughter from being killed by euthanasia by donating to his legal expenses.
LifeNews.com Note: Alex Schadenberg is the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and you can read his blog here.
The post Father of Daughter With Autism is Trying to Stop Her From Being Euthanized appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Zero Hedge"We Live In An Age Of Full-Spectrum Deception"Tyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 16:20
Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
Pep Talk On A Dark Day
“We live in an age of full spectrum deception.”
- Edward Dowd
You realize, don’t you, that what’s going on in our country is the collapse not just of an empire, or an economy, but a comprehensive paradigm of human progress. The hallmark of post-war life in Western Civ was supposed to be a return to sanity after the mid-twentieth century fugue of mass psychotic violence. The wish for just and rational order was not entirely pretense. But that was then. Now that we are going medieval on ourselves, the not-so-ironic result will be our literally going medieval, sinking back into a pre-modern existence of darkness, superstition, and penury, grubbing for a mere subsistence in the shadow of scuffling hobgoblins, our achievements lost and forgotten.
What’s most appalling is that our governing apparatus is visibly willing that to happen. When Barack Obama warned America to not underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up, was that some kind of joke? After all, it was Mr. Obama and his fellow blobsters — the cabal of Intel spooks, covert Marxist bureaucrats, lawfare ninjas, globalist megalomaniacs, post-liberal think tankers, weapons grifters, degenerate billionaires, and assorted mentally-ill camp followers — who inflicted Joe Biden on the body politic. And then ran him on the country like some demon algorithm designed to wreck the USA as fast as possible.
The source of anguish in all that is the struggle to understand why they would want that to happen. What debauched sense of history would drive anyone to such lunatic desperation? It’s a cliché now to say that the Democratic Party has turned its traditional moral scaffold upside down and inside out. It acts against the kitchen table interests of the working and middle classes. It’s against civil liberties. It demands mental obedience to patently insane policy. It’s avid for war, no matter how cruelly pointless. It’s deliberately stirring up racial hatred. It despises personal privacy. It feeds a rogue bureaucracy that has become a veritable Moloch, an all-devouring malevolent deity. And now, rather suddenly, it aligns itself with a faction that seeks to exterminate the Jews.
And how did the opposition to that epic divergence into bad faith turn so flabby? How did the Republican Party roll over and wheeze so feebly while the FBI ran amok swatting grandmothers in dawn raids, and the US attorney general made justice a whore, and a Republican Congress allowed the Frankenstein agency of Homeland Security to flood the country with its enemies and give them gobs of operational cash? If Mr. Trump was unappetizing to them as a leader, why were they unable to produce an alternative figure of standing and stature at least equally resolute? They look like traitors and cowards.
For the moment, the country lies mired, inert, and demoralized in the face of in those terrible mysteries. But events are still tending and the hidden hand of emergence still operates backstage, preparing surprises for us. You are necessarily aware that the center did not hold. It’s even hard to locate where the center used to be with the action so heavy on the far-out margins. You’re watching drag queens importune young children to shove all the Jews into the sea. And the kids are sitting next to their mommies. What happened to the mommies’ brains that permits them to think this spectacle is okay? How will the mommies ever get their minds right?
In some quarters, a great rage is building. Not a few resent the overthrow of common sense, common law, and common decency. You better believe they will be aiming to do something about it. They will stand up for their dignity, their culture, their history. Virtue isn’t dead; it’s just broke down on a lonely highway waiting to hitch a ride back to where the lights are still on. Don’t forget that this really is the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Meanwhile, prepare for action. It’s obvious that the enemies of the people don’t intend to rest. They are going to try to play out this string to the last move because otherwise a lot of them will be going to jail, or might even hang for their wickedness. Once they turned criminal, there was no turning back. They have dishonored themselves and they’re trying to dishonor their country.
It’s true nonetheless that we’re moving into a new disposition of the human project. It’s going to be smaller and leaner, and not nearly as complex as the tottering Rube Goldberg apparatus we’re currently trapped in. We don’t know yet what the shape and texture of that America is going to be. As the sage Yogi Berra observed, our whole future is ahead of us. If you’re not among the insane, have faith. We’ll get there and everything is going to be all right.
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Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack
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Site: PeakProsperityThe US has lost its diplomatic clout and is making demands that are so lopsided and historically ungrounded that they come off as petulant and childlike. But Antony Blinken apparently lacks the necessary perspective and context to know that. He's an embarrassment. Or he's doing a bang-up job of intentionally destroying America. One or the other.
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Site: Zero HedgeYen & Yellen Yank Stocks, Bonds, & The Dollar On Otherwise Quiet DayTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 16:00
A quiet micro and macro-economic day was dominated by Treasury's refunding size estimates (which spoiled all the fun by coming in less than some hyperbolic expectations a but generally in line with expectations), and Japanese intervention the FX markets.
As Goldman's trading desk noted, a quiet start to a busy week with the S&P trading within a 15 handle range (volumes -11% vs 20dma) and largely traded in a vacuum for the majority of the session as the market awaits macro (QRA, ISM, ECI, FOMC, JOLTS, NFP) and micro (24% of SPX reports including AAPL, AMZN and AMD) catalysts slated for later this week.
And that prompted a rapid kneejerk down-draft in stocks shortly after 3pmET (led by Small Caps which had been outperforming). However, that didn't last long as traders quickly remembered that the buyback window reopens later this week. All the majors ended higher on the day with Small Caps leading and the S&P and Nasdaq lagging. By the last few minutes, all the QRA anxiety was long-gone and stocks were surging back towards the highs...
The Dow and Russell 2000 both found support at their 100DMA on the initial QRA dip and bounced right off it...
'Most Shorted' stocks dumped on the QRA news, after extending the large two-day squeeze from Thurs/Fri. The basket still ended green on the day...
Source: Bloomberg
TSLA made headlines with news from China that the carmaker's full-self-drive will be cleared for us, rallying 15% for its best day in three years...
Yields also kneejerked higher on the QRA news but not enough to ruin the day, with yields down 2-4bps across the curve (with the belly outperforming)...
Source: Bloomberg
By the end of the day, yields were at the low of the day and stocks at the high of the day...
Source: Bloomberg
Elsewhere the reaction was muted as traders tried to figure out what the QRA news meant.
The dollar index was dominated by Japanese officials fiddling while Tokyo burns...
Source: Bloomberg
...after yen plunged overnight to its 1990 lows and the very visible hand stepped in...
Source: Bloomberg
Did Japan's "benign neglect" come to an end?
Source: Bloomberg
Gold was magnificently unmoved by the Borrowing and BoJ buggery, ending very modestly lower...
Source: Bloomberg
Oil ended lower on the day, legging down three times, interestingly in tune with Japan's intervention...
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin was lower today after a modest rollercoaster over the weekend. Notably BTC found support at $62,000 and bounced this afternoon...
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, fear is being rapidly rinsed out of the markets once again...
Source: Bloomberg
...and financial conditions will start easing...
Source: Bloomberg
...too much (again) for Powell's liking (even in an election year)
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Site: LifeNews
The Biden administration is under fire for selectively prosecuting pro-life advocates who protested abortion inside abortion centers while ignoring hundreds of pro-abortion attacks on churches, pro-life groups and pregnancy centers.
That political persecution is bad enough, but a new report indicates at least one pro-life advocate jailed for protesting abortion has been treated in a horrific manner that can only be described as a human rights abuse.
Heather Idoni is one of the dozen pro-life advocates who have been charged or convicted of violating the bogus FACE law that denies free speech rights to pro-life Americans. As LifeNews reported, the pro-life advocates have been found guilty of violating a federal law protecting abortion centers and now face the possibility of 11 years in prison.
Idoni was found guilty on all counts the Biden administration brought against them for allegedly violating the FACE law. The jury found all of the defendants guilty of both charges they faced in court and they were taken into custody.
Now a new report indicates Idoni has been treated shoddily while in prison and was shackled like a death row inmate during a court appearance – and was subjected to 22 days of solitary confinement for sharing food with other prisoners.
In an exclusive interview, she said that she received this punishment for sharing food with fellow prisoners. Idoni alleged that she was allowed to walk outside her cell only for two hours in the middle of the night for two hours each day and that the lights of her cell were continually kept on. Idoni has been in prison since she was convicted last autumn.
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Fellow pro-life advocate Cal Zastro, who joined Idoni in another traditional pro-life rescue in Tennessee and has also been convicted of violation of the FACE Act, told LifeSiteNews that when Idoni was brought into the courtroom for a trial in Nashville, the U.S. marshal had the middle-aged woman shackled at the wrists, waist, and feet, as if she were a dangerous criminal.
Zastro said that, upon entering the courtroom, the shocked judge ordered the shackles removed. Initially the marshal agreed to remove the shackles from only one wrist to allow Idoni freedom to write, a concession necessary for her to take notes, as she was then representing herself in court. Only at the insistence of the indignant judge were the shackles of both wrists finally removed, although the marshal left the bars around her waist and feet.
According to the report, Idoni is relying on her faith in God saing that, despite the prison harship “God is going to be glorified” and she has “never not felt His presence.”
Idoni and the other pro-life advcoates are appealing the bogus convictions.
The post Pro-Life Advocate Placed in Solitary Confinement for 22 Days for Sharing Food appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Zero HedgeTreasury Estimates Borrowing Needs For Q3 Which Sneak Below The Median EstimateTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 15:25
Ahead of today's big event - the Treasury borrowing estimates publication - we said that contrary to hyperbolic expectations of $300BN in revised Q2 funding needs and a whopping $1.2 trillion in Q3, the most likely range of Q2 and Q3 borrowing estimates is as follows: a ranges of $120bn to $240bn for Q2, and $650bn to $850bn for Q3, to wit:
Well, at exactly 3:00pm the Treasury published the numbers, and while we were almost spot on correct, they did come on the high end of our forecast range, specifically:
- Q2 funding needs were revised higher to $243 billion (just above the upper end of our range of $240 billion) from $202 billion projected last quarter. According to the Treasury, the borrowing estimate was "$41 billion higher than announced in January 2024, largely due to lower cash receipts, partially offset by a higher beginning of quarter cash balance."
- Q3 funding needs (released for the first time) were estimated at $847 billion, just below the upper end of our range of $850BN.
But wait, there's more, because while the Treasury projects $750BN cash balance at end of Q2, this number rises to $850BN at end of Q3, and since the streetwide estimate for Q3 end of quarter cash was $750BN, this suggests that the real funding needs (on an apples to apples basis) is actually $747BN, which is below the median Wall Street estimate.
Source: TreasuryBottom line: amid some ridiculous speculation and even conspiracy theories that the BOJ intervened today because it was expecting a surge in funding needs, the Treasury reported numbers that came in in line with expectations for Q2, and actually below the estimate for Q3, which is precisely what we said, because the number is driven not so much by financial but by political considerations.
The real question should be not what the Treasury projects for Q2 and Q3, but Q4, which is after the election, and when all the lipstick on this pig will finally wash off.
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Site: LifeNews
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin issued the following statement after co-leading, alongside Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a coalition of 17 states in suing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over its new rule mandating workplace abortion accommodations through an erroneous interpretation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act of 2022 (PWFA):
“This is yet another attempt by the Biden administration to force through administrative fiat what it cannot get passed through Congress. Under this radical interpretation of the PWFA, business owners will face federal lawsuits if they don’t accommodate employees’ abortions, even if those abortions are illegal under state law. The PWFA was meant to protect pregnancies, not end them.
“The new rule, passed by a bare 3-2 majority of unelected EEOC commissioners, goes beyond what Congress authorized under the PWFA.”
The PWFA fills a gap in federal law by ensuring pregnant workers receive accommodation to protect their pregnancies and unborn children. A diverse coalition of bipartisan lawmakers, business groups, and nonprofit organizations supported the pro-family aim of the 2022 legislation.
LifeNews is on TruthSocial. Please follow us here.
Seventeen states have brought this lawsuit to enjoin and set aside the EEOC’s unprecedented and unlawful abortion-accommodation mandate. The states joining Arkansas and Tennessee are: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the Eastern District of Arkansas, can be accessed here.
The post 17 States Challenge Biden Rule Forcing Employers to Facilitate Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Zero Hedge"He's Back": Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas Say Musk's China Trip Is "Gesture Of Tesla Commitment"Tyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 14:55
Tesla bears are getting their nuts squeezed in the US cash session Monday after Elon Musk's surprise weekend trip to Beijing landed the EV carmaker a deal with tech giant Baidu to roll out its driver-assistance system, known as "Full Self-Driving," or FSD, in the world's largest car market.
Earlier, we noted Wedbush Securities senior analyst Dan Ives' comment on Musk's trip as a "watershed moment" for Tesla and "this could open up FSD in China, which I view as unlocking what really could be the golden opportunity for them."
Now Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas, one of Tesla's most prominent Wall Street bulls, states in bold print on the top of his note to clients today, "He's back."
"Elon Musk's visit to China means far more than seeking approval for self driving tech on Chinese roads. Whether Tesla's CEO is sleeping on a floor or on a plane... the message is clear: he's back," Jonas said.
Jonas wrote there had been mounting investor concerns about whether Musk was "all in" on Tesla, considering the billionaire spends some of his precious time (only appears) on an anti-woke crusade on his X platform. The analyst said Musk's weekend trip to China was a "gesture of commitment" to Tesla:
- Commitment. Investor concerns around whether Elon Musk was 'all in' on Tesla have been weighing heavily on the stock since the compensation package was rejected by Delaware judge. Even the smallest gesture of commitment (an unannounced trip to Beijing) has elevated meaning here, combating concerns over Musk's commitment to Tesla relative the broader Musk ecosystem of companies (SpaceX/X.AI/etc.).
Jonas made a very interesting point about Musk's national security clearance, saying it must be "higher than that of the typical American CEO due to his control of SpaceX and the range of missions it conducts with NASA, Space Force and the broader DoD."
He added that China's "blessing" of an FSD rollout in the country "seems to address embedded fears of Tesla's China profit (we estimate China accounts for as much as one half of profit)."
Jonas reiterated an overweight rating on Tesla with a $310 price target.
Here's how the analyst arrived at the $310 figure:
He also touched on notable upside and downside risks to the future outlook.
Musk's timing of the China trip comes as Tesla's short interest hit a three-year high, or about 3.84% of the float short, equivalent to about 106 million shares.
For all those technicians out there...
Meanwhile, on X, Musk posted this image...
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2024There's nothing like a good ole' squeeze.
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Site: Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
Alex Schadenberg
The assisted suicide lobby announced in their fundraising email on April 29, 2024 that they are spearheading a bill to force American to pay for assisted suicide (Medically approved killing by poison) with their tax dollars. The fundraising letter states:
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
The Patient Access to End-of-Life Care Act would end a ban on federal funding to help terminally ill people pay for medical aid in dying where it is currently authorized or will be authorized in the future.The Patient Access to End-of-Life Act is sponsored by Representatives Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) and Scott Peters (D-CA) and would essentially replace the Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act of 1997 which prohibited the use of appropriated funds for:- causing or assisting in suicide, euthanasia, or mercy killing;
- compelling any person or entity to provide or fund any item, benefit, program, or service for such purpose; or
- asserting or advocating a legal right to cause or assist such actions.
The act is titled: The Patient Access to End-of-Life Care Act because the assisted suicide lobby intends to promote the funding of medically approved killing in conjunction with other end-of-life care, such as palliative care.
Based on the current political configuration, it is unlikely that this bill will pass, but it indicates the direction of the assisted suicide lobby and it makes the issue of medically assisted killing, which has essentially been a state by state issue, into a federal issue.
Oppose the Patient Access to End-of-Life Care Act. Don't let your tax dollars be used to kill people.
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Site: Zero Hedge'Crying Out For Justice': Female Athletes Sue NCAA Over "Dangerous" Transgender PoliciesTyler Durden Mon, 04/29/2024 - 14:35
Authored by Liliana Zylstra via The College Fix,
Female college athletes are “crying out for justice,” safety, and privacy in a lawsuit challenging the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s transgender policies, their attorney told The College Fix in an exclusive interview.
Attorney William Bock III said the 16 plaintiffs, all current or former collegiate athletes, are challenging the NCAA and the University of Georgia for violating Title IX’s provisions for equal opportunity in sports by allowing males to compete in the women’s category.
The lawsuit also alleges female athletes’ right to bodily privacy under the 14th Amendment was violated.
According to the suit, the NCAA authorized “naked men possessing full male genitalia to disrobe in front of non- consenting college women and creating situations in which unwilling female college athletes unwittingly or reluctantly expose their naked or partially clad bodies to males.”
Bock told The Fix in a recent phone interview that many athletes sent letters sharing their concerns about these policies to the NCAA, but they were ignored.
“They’re crying out for justice and the NCAA won’t even talk to them,” he said.
“It isn’t even willing to respect their concerns enough to give them an audience. So it became clear that the only thing that would have a chance of changing their policy is filing a lawsuit.”
Bock told The Fix, “The NCAA is so committed to radical gender ideology that they have completely lost concern for women’s rights.”
“It’s very clear that the NCAA violated the law,” he said.
Bock formerly worked as general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and served as the lead attorney for USADA in the case against professional cyclist Lance Armstrong.
“The advantage that Lance Armstrong got through doping pales in comparison to the advantage that male athletes have when competing against females in collegiate sports,” he said.
“The NCAA suggests that one can reduce or eliminate the performance gap [between men and women] by suppressing testosterone and that’s ludicrous from a matter of science,” Bock told The Fix.
Bock also served on the NCAA Committee on Infractions for several years. However, he quit earlier this year after expressing concerns about transgender athletes like former University of Pennsylvania swimmer William “Lia” Thomas, a male who identifies as female who won an NCAA Division I championship on the women’s team in 2022.
Safety is among female athletes’ biggest concerns, Bock said. “The NCAA is not in many instances even telling women that they’re competing against a male. And that’s dangerous … in a contact sport where you can get a concussion.”
Female athletes speak out
Two of the plaintiffs also spoke with The Fix in a phone interview about their concerns for safety, fairness, and the overall future of women’s sports.
Ainsley Erzen (pictured right), a soccer and track athlete at the University of Arkansas, said, “We want the stories that people are seeing now to be the last ones. We don’t want the generations in the future to deal with that.”
Erzen said she and her fellow athletes are fighting so women will have the opportunities to set records, win championships and earn college scholarships.
“What kind of message are we sending to women — but especially to young girls — when we tell them that their safety doesn’t matter, their rights don’t matter, their opportunities don’t matter, their futures don’t matter?” she told The Fix.
Kaitlynn Wheeler (pictured left), a former swimmer for the University of Kentucky, said the protection of women’s sports is a ”common-sense issue.”
Wheeler told The Fix speaking up is important “because the overwhelming majority of people are on our side.”
“This lawsuit is really not about hurting anyone. It’s about helping the women who have been hurt and preventing it from happening in the future. It’s about ensuring fair, equal, and safe competition and I think that just about everyone should want that,” she said.
An NCAA spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit in response to a request from The Fix.
“College sports are the premier stage for women’s sports in America, and while the NCAA does not comment on pending litigation, the Association and its members will continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships,” the association said in an emailed statement.
Others involved in the lawsuit include Riley Gaines, a former 12-time All-American swimmer at the University of Kentucky and current advocate for women’s sports. The Independent Council on Women’s Sports is supporting the athletes’ case.