Feb 13

Today’s News 13th February 2025

  • VDH: How To Commit Democratic Party Suicide
    VDH: How To Commit Democratic Party Suicide

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

    The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.

    Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.

    In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?

    Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?

    Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.

    The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.

    The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.

    Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?

    If they were stable, then they might renounce political suicide and perhaps return to something akin to the Clinton efforts of 1992 and 1996. Then the once self-destructive Democrats finally gave up on disastrous out-of-touch McGovernism, Carterism, an Dukakism. Instead, they began to embrace legal-only immigration, secure borders, balanced budgets, support for law enforcement, and meritocracy.

    The result?

    After twelve years in the wilderness (1980-1992), the Democrats regained power for the next 16 of 24 years—only in the second term of Barack Obama to go full radical Jacobin and soon lose it.

    The current self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.

    But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.

    On immigration, after wiping out the border and allowing in 12 million illegal aliens, including more than 500,000 suspected felons, they seem deliberately to be alienating public opinion even further.

    So, thousands of leftists swarm and block the freeways of Los Angeles to protest the deportations of criminals. And how exactly?

    By enraging middle-class commuters, while burning the flag of the country that they demand must allow them to stay, while chauvinistically waving the flag of the country to which under no circumstances they wish to return?

    New Jersey Democratic governor Patrick Murphy idiotically virtue-signaled that he would defy the law, as he bragged that he was harboring an illegal alien living above his garage.

    Then, when apprised that such performance-art showboating was a felony, in theory entailing a long prison sentence, the now buffoonish governor changed his narrative that the occupant of his garage was not really illegally living above his garage.

    Democratic governors and mayors vie, bragging that they will be foremost in breaking the law by impeding the efforts of the federal immigration services to find and deport illegal aliens—for now, half a million criminals. Other activists are tipping off criminal illegal-alien gang leaders to avoid US government efforts to apprehend such dangerous criminals.

    Is that the way to win back the working classes? By ensuring that the felons of M-13, Norteños, Sureños, and Tren de Aragua can flee and put in danger fellow American police officers?

    Elon Musk has been appointed by Donald Trump to create a new government agency, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), to find waste, fraud, and abuse in the government spending of taxpayers money.

    He and his young team of tech standouts have exposed shocking waste and fraud, but mostly insanity, in the USAID’s $50 billion of foreign aid grants.

    Why are Americans paying for overseas drag shows or gay and trans advocacy in culturally imperialist fashion in traditional and conservative societies abroad? Why are we paying eight percent of the budget of the hardcore left-wing BBC? Is that a way back to the White House?

    Do Politico, the New York Times, or the Wuhan gain-in-function virology lab and birthplace of COVID-19 really need millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars?

    Do Democrats really think the middle class will hate Elon Musk for exposing that their government may well have handed the communist Chinese the necessary cash to birth a manufactured killer virus that took one million American lives?

    Is that a winning strategy—to scream in Congress that Musk is a Nazi, a dictator for showing that Biden’s USAID under leftist Samantha Power was a clearing house to enrich and empower well-off leftist organizations that only weakened their own country abroad?

    Do we really wish to spend $20 million to bequeath a woke Sesame Street to Middle East television?

    Is it smart to gin up hatred of Elon Musk, who revolutionized space travel, the auto industry, and social media?

    Is the Democrats’ message something like “We hate Elon Musk and will stop his free internet service to Americans ruined by fires and hurricanes and abandoned by their government?”

    Or do Democrats despise Musk for providing free internet to Ukrainians battling for their lives against Russians?

    Or is the key strategy to loathe Musk for crafting a risky rescue mission to save the lives of American astronauts virtually abandoned by the incompetent Biden government space program?

    For Democratic officials to scream that Musk has no right to ferret out fraud is historically ignorant. He was selected by the president with the same powers that such appointees enjoy that are by statute not required to be approved by the Senate. The DOGE head is as legitimate as the National Security Advisor, who likewise needs no confirmation but also serves at the wishes of an elected president and likewise can do nothing without his approval.

    Is Musk’s position in the Trump administration new?

    Hardly.

    Musk certainly has more legitimate legal authority via his DOGE position than that of FDR’s in-house informal advisors—such as Harry Hopkins—who from within the White House directed much of World War II foreign policy with the Soviets.

    Financier Bernard Baruch held no major position for years under Woodrow Wilson and FDR and yet rebooted America’s wartime economy in two wars.

    DOGE head Musk is more akin to FDR’s appointed war production board—similar to the likes of the unelected and unconfirmed Henery Ford, Henery Kaiser, and William Knudson, with the caveat that the latter three exercised far more power than does Musk.

    During the confirmation hearings on Trump’s cabinet and agency nominations, Democratic senators did not question nominees like Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Kash Patel so much as scream, interrupt, and insult them on live television.

    Rather than ask the nominees questions about their policies and agendas, almost all the interrogatives were ad hominem.

    All this came from a party that oversaw the greatest weaponization of our government in modern history while leaving us with two theater wars abroad, a scary and dangerous DEI/woke destruction of meritocracy, hyperinflation, $7 trillion more in debt, 12 million illegal aliens, the erasure of the border, and a vast shortfall in military recruitment.

    During the recent Democrat Party convention elections, the voting turned into a virtual DEI tutorial on why the public is repulsed by Democrats.

    The Party’s carnival-like elections were overseen by race/gender/orientation censors. In incomprehensible, jargon-filled lectures, they droned on about the correct quotas—trans, non-binary, female, black, Hispanic, Native American—that would override simple democratic voting.

    When one looks for sanity among the Democrat Senate and House leaders, there is only madness to be found. Sen. Corey “Spartacus” Booker is back again, now screaming and playacting as if he were Winston Churchill willing to fight Trump-Hitler on the beaches, hills, fields, etc.

    Rep. Al Green was wheeled out on spec to bellow and bluster that he was introducing articles of impeachment—is it for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time against Trump?

    House Minority Leader Hakim Jefferies boasts he will fight Trump “in the streets”—alongside whom? The despised Antifa? The utterly corrupt and discredited BLM?

    I doubt Rep. Jefferies himself will replay the 2020 summer of destruction. More likely he will parrot Kamala Harris’s 2020 bragging of the then ongoing four months of violent protests: “They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day, and they should not.”

    Maxine Waters is back, trying to trump her earlier threats to birddog and harass Trump supporters in her usual racialist fashion.

    AOC—the supposed future of the Jacobins—drones that Musk is “one of the most unintelligent billionaires” she has met. This putdown comes from the nincompoop who claimed Trump’s low unemployment rate was due only to people holding two jobs.

    Does AOC think catching a rocket with a mechanical arm is proof of dumbness, and the rants of Mazie Hirono and Elizabeth Warren display wisdom?

    What the Democrats don’t realize is that they staged a French-style cultural, political, and economic revolution and tried to destroy their enemies by weaponizing government and the media—and they have now lost.

    This current counter-revolution is a return to centrist normalcy and just beginning. It is deemed wild only by feral Democrats, whose high crimes and misdemeanors, and various conspiracy theories over the years of their madcap rule are now being revealed every day.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 23:50

  • America's War On Coal Power-Plants Is Over
    America’s War On Coal Power-Plants Is Over

    Al Gore’s worst nightmare, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg TV hosts on Tuesday that coal-fired power plants will remain the backbone of President Trump’s reindustrialization of America. Wright emphasized that coal plants will be restarted to ensure affordable and reliable electricity for decades. 

    “What’s been the big issues for this president that he ran on, you know, the economic well-being of Americans and the National Security of our country. And our citizens, so we’ve had 20-plus years of sort of deindustrializing the United States and letting our heavy industry flow overseas. This president is passionate about increasing National Security, and that means we have to have the ability to build heavy steel-intensive and aluminum-intensive material systems in our country again. So this is an attempt, I believe, by our president to incentivize the reindustrialization of America,” Wright told Bloomberg hosts. 

    When asked about energy security and coal’s role, Wright responded: “Coal has been essential to the United States’ energy system for over 100 years. It’s been the largest source of global electricity for nearly 100 years, and it will be for decades to come, so we need to be realistic about that – now with coal, are we going to see a renaissance in surging coal production in the US – not likely – but we’re on a path to continually shrink the electricity we generate from coal – that’s made electricity more expensive and our grid less stable. So I think the best we can hope for in the short term is to stop the closure of coal power plants no one has won by that action.” 

    He continued: “The goal is just affordable, reliable, secure energy from wherever that comes from obviously, there’s going to be roles in the long run for solar energy. There are places where it makes tons of sense where the natural resources are there and the infrastructure is benefited by adding more solar to the grid, but I will say one thing for sure: we’re not going to go down the road of Germany – you know they spent a half a trillion dollars – they more than doubled their price of electricity – they actually shrunk the total amount of electricity the country produces by about 20% – and their industry is fleeing the country – that’s the path the United States was starting to go down, but that’s the wrong path.”

    The coal discussion starts around the four-minute mark… 

    The latest data from Bloomberg shows coal accounts for about 20.5% of power generation today. 

    “It’s not immediately clear what actions the US could take to help prevent coal-fired power plants from closing,” Bloomberg noted.  

    Michelle Bloodworth, president of America’s Power, a trade group representing Core Natural Resources and Peabody Energy, explained that many coal plants have been shuttered over the years because “bad policies have made them uneconomic.” He noted, “Fortunately, President Trump is seeking to change this.” 

    The entire global warming NGO machine must be having a meltdown over Wright’s remarks. With USAID funding slashed, one has to wonder—how will they bankroll Greta Thunberg’s marches now?

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    Earlier Wednesday, PJM Interconnection—which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity and ensures power supplies for 65 million people across all or parts of 13 Eastern and Midwestern US states, as well as Washington, DC, outlined how it will fast-track NatGas power generators to ensure grid stability as “The Next AI Trade” and Powering Up America theme progresses ahead. 

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    Our latest commentary on the coal industry: 

    Peabody Energy, the top US coal miner, has yet to catch a bid, blowing through three years of support. 

    After a decade and a half of the ‘green cult’ forcing the nation to buy Chinese green tech and wind down all fossil fuel power generation, the Russell 3000 Coal Subsector Index trades near decade lows. The question is whether Trump’s pro-grid stability policies reverse these toxic trends. 

    The nation needs grid stability before nuclear power is ramped up in the 2030s. The only way for that to occur is through coal and NatGas power generators amid rising power demand from AI data centers, electric vehicles, onshoring, and other electrification trends. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 23:00

  • Illinois Gun Requirement Is Unconstitutional: Judge
    Illinois Gun Requirement Is Unconstitutional: Judge

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A statewide requirement in Illinois for guns violates residents’ constitutional right to keep firearms in their homes, according to a new ruling.

    A customer shops for a pistol in Illinois in a file photograph. Scott Olson/Getty Images

    “After analyzing all the evidence in this matter, this Court finds that the Defendant’s activity of possessing a firearm within the confines of her home is an act protected by the Second Amendment,” White County Resident Circuit Judge T. Scott Webb wrote in the Feb. 10 decision.

    The state’s Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) Act mandates residents have a FOID card to legally possess guns or ammunition.

    Vivian Claudine Brown, a state resident, was charged by prosecutors with possessing a rifle despite not having a FOID card. She filed a motion to find the law unconstitutional.

    The U.S. Supreme Court has determined that the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense.

    Justices said in a 2022 ruling known as Bruen—which struck down a New York state law—that when restricting gun ownership, officials must show that the regulation in question is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

    Webb said there are no historical analogs for the FOID Act, leading to his conclusion that it violates the Constitution.

    “None of the laws cited by the State as being historically similar sought to disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens within the confines of their homes,” he wrote. “That is the essence of the FOID Act when the superficial layers of the Act are stripped away.”

    A state appeals court previously found the FOID Act constitutional, pointing to how the U.S. Supreme Court has said that background checks, which are a key part of the FOID Act, are permissible. The Illinois Supreme Court has twice remanded the case.

    Webb said the appeals court analysis was deficient and that following the decision “would be tantamount to judicial incompetence.”

    Prosecutors did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

    “This is an important ruling in a case that has been up and down the Illinois judicial ladder a couple of times already,” Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said in a statement.

    “We expect the state to appeal again, which could put the case right back before the Illinois Supreme Court for the third time, and we are confident we will win. It’s hard to see how the Illinois Supreme Court avoids the constitutional issue, as they have done on the previous two visits.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 22:35

  • Putin Holds First Call With Syria's Jolani As Fate Of Russian Bases Uncertain
    Putin Holds First Call With Syria’s Jolani As Fate Of Russian Bases Uncertain

    Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has spoken to Syria’s self-declared President Ahmad al-Sharaa (whose AQ name is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), the first such contact since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who fled the country on the weekend of December 8 of last year.

    “The Russian side emphasized its principled position in support of the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian state,” a Kremlin readout said. Moscow has been trying to secure and maintain its two military bases on the Syrian coast as their fate is uncertain.

    The Russians have been packing up the bases of heavy equipment ever since al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) stormed Damascus as Assad left power.

    A statement from Sharaa emphasized “the strong strategic ties between the two countries and Syria’s openness to all parties” in a way that serves “the interests of the Syrian people and strengthens Syria’s stability and security.”

    Surprisingly the statement also confirmed “an official invitation to Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani to visit Russia.” No doubt, the question of Russia’s bases in Syria will be high on the agenda.

    The irony is that Russia had for years assisted the Syrian Army in bombarding HTS-held Idlib province. Russia and HTS have been longtime enemies, but it looks like each side is ready for pragmatism and a way forward at this point.

    There have been unverified reports that the new rulers in Damascus are demanding that Moscow hand over Assad, and in return Russia can keep its bases.

    The former Syrian leader hasn’t been heard from since being granted asylum in Moscow. Sources say the Assad family is keeping a low profile, and adjusting to life in Russia.

    Meanwhile, Washington has yet to lift sanctions on Damascus, and its anyone’s guess what Trump will do. He has indicated that he’d like to see the US occupation end in Syria, and to bring the troops home, but there hasn’t been much movement on this amid a bigger focus on the Gaza and Ukraine war issues.

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    HTS is still a designated terror organization, but the prior Biden administration had dropped the long-time $10 million bounty on Jolani/Sharaa’s head. Biden had also dispatched a diplomatic delegation to Damascus weeks after Jolani took power.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 22:10

  • USAID Staff Cry For Their Fiefdom
    USAID Staff Cry For Their Fiefdom

    Authored by David Bell via The Brownstoine Institute,

    The largest foreign aid agency on earth has, courts willing, abruptly closed its doors in the past week and sent most of its staff home. Finding their virtue has no place to strut its worth, the response of many has been indignation and assurances of retaliation. Many of them had been working from home for years, but now must rouse themselves to show such indignation for being sent (i.e. remaining) home on full pay. Like being told to continue as normal, perhaps, but in a way that exposes uncomfortable realities to those in the community who are actually paying them.

    Such cynicism is not the greatest of human traits, and when applied to an entire organization it is unfairly generalizing, but it also has its place. The new government elected by the people of the United States was, specifically, elected to dig into the accounts of large government bureaucracies and address a perception of profligate use of taxpayers’ money. Taxpayers who, mostly, get paid far less than the bureaucrats they are funding. Perhaps unusually, the elected government rapidly set about keeping some of its promises, co-opting a prominent private person (as they had also promised) as an agent to help drive the inquiries. Much of the current surprise, perhaps, arises from an elected President keeping some promises. Annoying as this can be, it is also how democracy is supposed to work.

    Much is being made of evidence that USAID had been pushing ideology over need, such as stoking coups in democratic nations or supporting children’s programs that encourage ‘non-traditional beliefs on gender in conservative cultures. Concern is also correctly levelled over apparently reckless funding of bio labs in poorly controlled environments. People will argue on whether such cultural colonialism and risk enhancement are in US taxpayers’ interests (it depends on how you perceive humanity). 

    However, it is also important to reflect on how USAID addressed its supposed core function of supporting development and healthcare for the benefit of those in less fortunate countries.

    This can be considered in America’s interests because a more stable and prosperous world is good for trade, and/or because Americans are humans and there is a moral imperative to care for those less fortunate. 

    Though some have contrary or isolationist views on this, Americans as a nation are generous givers, and this is roughly why most thought USAID was supposed to exist.

    For the past 5 years, the staff of USAID has, as a team, supported policies that they knew would impoverish over a hundred million people, push up to 10 million more girls into child marriage, and drive up child deaths from malaria and malnutrition. 

    Rather than support education, they largely ignored the removal of formal education from hundreds of millions of children around the world, many for over a year. They knew that this would cement intergenerational poverty and increase mortality globally – undoing everything USAID is supposed to be working for. If they did not know this, then how did they get a job in a development agency?

    While we now see USAID employees standing in the street protesting for being told to stay home on full pay, we did not see such protests a few years back when average American workers were told to stay home and lost pay or businesses. There were no protests in DC in support of hundreds of millions of day laborers in poor countries who lost all income and savings for a virus that posed minimal risk to them. For apparently ideological reasons that required considerable callousness or cowardice, many actually promoted this approach to Covid-19 whilst continuing to take their own salaries. 

    USAID does a lot of good. 

    Abruptly stopping all disbursement of funds will kill people, particularly children. Because of the nature of diseases, supply lines, and the state of health systems in low-income countries, a sudden interruption to HIV testing and distribution of antiretroviral therapies through PEPFAR, significantly managed by USAID, will result in increased transmission and death from HIV/AIDS. 

    Mothballing the Presidents’ Malaria Initiative (PMI) will increase the shortfall in bed nets, diagnostics, and treatment that directly stop children from dying of malaria. Child malaria deaths are quite likely to increase by tens of thousands because PMI plays a crucial role in plugging gaps in the availability of these commodities.  

    Cutting funding for tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment will also increase deaths, increase transmission (new infections), and increase the spread of resistant parasites (which will increasingly reach the US). Voluntary donations to charities, despite what many want to believe, do not replace this.

    So, the people stopping USAID from working in these areas also need to decide how many dead children will be acceptable. They may decide that it’s not their problem, but that is a philosophical approach that has implications that are not pleasant. It is also one that is probably not shared by most US taxpayers. Put those tens of thousands of dead kids in Texas and it starts to seem more real.

    However, the people auditing and trying to understand its USAID disbursements, unravelling the tangle of good and harm, are doing important work. They are responsible to US taxpayers who had assumed their hard-earned funds were well used. Many can barely pay rent or address the needs of their own children, children who now face an unprecedented national debt because so much federal money, wisely or not, has been spent. 

    A government has a direct responsibility to avoid wasting its citizens’ money on the pet projects of people on far more comfortable salaries. These taxpayers are the ones with the greater right to show indignation, not those who abrogated their responsibility to the world’s disadvantaged.

    Those who took USAID to a place where such radical reform is deemed necessary could devote time to introspection and examine why those funding them are asking where the money went, and why. 

    Their world is recovering from the mess of Covid-19, originating from a virus almost certainly arising from government-funded research, likely including funds dispersed by USAID itself. 

    While working from home after the virus’s inevitable escape, they supported a response that ignored risk and good public health practice, wrecking the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions. 

    They stood for corporate profit over the welfare of the many. Virtue signaling now is unlikely to help. 

    The real harms accruing from USAID shutdowns are very much its own doing.

    US taxpayers generally care about others, but many are struggling, as are the victims of the callousness of the last few years of global health malpractice. USAID has been an integral part of this problem. 

    We can hope that those tasked with sorting out the mess this institution created have the wisdom and compassion to rapidly sift the wheat from the chaff and minimize further harm.

    *  *  *

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

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 21:45

  • 2,400 New JFK Assassination Records Found, FBI Says
    2,400 New JFK Assassination Records Found, FBI Says

    It’s amazing what new leadership atop the FBI helps unearth…

    The FBI announced Tuesday it has uncovered 2,400 new records related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, part of efforts to comply with a recent executive order from former President Donald Trump mandating the release of thousands of files, according to AP. 

    These documents will be transferred to the National Archives for declassification.

    While over 5 million pages of JFK-related records have been made public, around 3,000 files remain partially or fully unreleased. The FBI did not disclose the contents of the newly found documents but credited its 2020 launch of the Central Records Complex and improved inventory technology for accelerating the discovery process.

    The disclosure was praised as “refreshingly candid” by Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and editor of the JFK Facts blog. “It shows that the FBI is serious about being transparent,” Morley added, noting it sets a precedent for other agencies to release undisclosed documents.

    This development follows former President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the national intelligence director and attorney general to devise a plan for declassifying related files. A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed a plan has been submitted but provided no details or timeline.

    The AP report says that although all assassination records were supposed to be public by 2017, presidential exemptions delayed full disclosure. Trump initially vowed to release all records but withheld some over national security concerns. The Biden administration has continued incremental releases, though some files remain classified.

    Decades of conspiracy theories have surrounded Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president from the Texas School Book Depository. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald during a jail transfer. The Warren Commission concluded Oswald acted alone, but skepticism has persisted.

    Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, which supports the lone gunman theory, suggested the new files might be duplicates. “If they are really new assassination documents, then it raises a whole bunch of questions about how they were missed for all of these years,” he said, adding, “the ‘wow’ would be if they are related to Oswald or the investigation.”

    Previous document releases have detailed intelligence operations of the era, including CIA memos about Oswald’s visits to Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Morley highlighted that the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald has been the “emerging story over the last five to 10 years,” speculating that the new files could shed more light on this.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 21:20

  • Matt Taibbi's Opening Statement To Congress About USAID, Free Speech, And The 'Censorship Machine'
    Matt Taibbi’s Opening Statement To Congress About USAID, Free Speech, And The ‘Censorship Machine’

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified before your Weaponization of Government Subcommittee, Democratic members called us “so-called journalists,” suggested we were bought-off “scribes,” and questioned our ethics and loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things: one, there is no digital censorship, two, if there is digital censorship, it’s for our own good.

    I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. No way the party I gave votes to all my life was now pro-censorship. Then last year I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talk to the World Economic Forum. Speaking about disinformation, he said “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to our ability to “hammer it out of existence.”

    He complained that “it’s really hard to govern” because “people self-select where they go for their news,” which makes it “much harder to build consensus…”

    I defended Kerry when people said he “looks French,” but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants are “self-selecting” their own media. What’s next, letting them make up up their own minds?

    Lastly, “building consensus” may be a politician’s job, but it’s not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media’s job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem.

    This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have already adopted draconian speech laws. We’re surrounded. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society.

    Ranking member Raskin, you don’t have to as far as Russiaor China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an Online Safety Act which empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like “false communication” or causing “psychological harm.” Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas.

    These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws.

    Take USAID. Many Americans are in an uproar now because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to Congress about training “hundreds of thousands of people” in journalism. Her views are almost identical to Kerry’s.

    She gave a talk about “building trust and combatting misinformation” in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a “really beautifully unified Covid-19 message,” vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when “mixed information on vaccine efficacy” got out, hesitancy ensued.

    We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote “unity” or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.

    Bourgault also once said that to fight “bad content,” we need to “work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists” and “really try to focus our ad dollars” toward “the good news.”

    Again, you don’t know the fastest way to erode “trust” in media is by having government sponsor “exclusion lists,” you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476 million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long list of agencies. Collectively they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think-tanks, research, “fact-checking,” “anti-disinformation,” commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, censorship.

    It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.

    Is there “right-wing misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.

    Obviously, some of you lack that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see with their own eyes.

    You sold us out, and until these “rather tiresome” questions are answered, this problem is not fixed. Thank you.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 20:55

  • US Intelligence Suggests Israel Is Trying To Drag Trump Into Preemptive Attack On Iran
    US Intelligence Suggests Israel Is Trying To Drag Trump Into Preemptive Attack On Iran

    A fresh report Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal has reviewed a US intelligence assessment which concludes Israel currently sees an opening for strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, sensing Tehran’s weakness after Hezbollah’s leadership was decimated, Assad fell in Syria, and following tit-for-tat major strikes between Israel and the Islamic Republic last year.

    The key line in the report is that “The intelligence analysis concluded Israel would push the Trump administration to back the strikes, viewing him as more likely to join an attack than now-former President Joe Biden and fearing the window for halting Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon was closing, two of the people familiar with the intelligence said.”

    The assessment, produced by multiple intelligence agencies, was issued within weeks of Trump taking office, but a similar follow-up conclusion was forwarded to President Trump upon his entering the Oval Office.

    “The U.S. intelligence community produced a second report delivered during the early days of President Trump’s administration reiterating that Israel is considering such strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one of the U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence,” the WSJ continues.

    But it also says that Israel would likely have to rely on Pentagon help. The WSJ cites US military officials who conclude that American “military support and munitions would likely be needed for an Israeli attack on Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear sites given their complexity.”

    While Trump has taken a hard pro-Israel line on the Gaza crisis, just this week telling Hamas it must release all remaining Israeli captives by noon Saturday or else there will be “hell” to pay, he has also long vowed to end ‘wars of choice’ and needless foreign military adventurism abroad.

    A major joint US-Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities certainly fits the definition of a ‘war of choice’ from the American public’s perspective, given war weariness has also long set in regarding the Ukraine war, and Washington’s costly role in it. But during his first term he showed a willingness to shoot from the hip, ordering the risky drone strike which took out IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport in January 2020 (risky, that is, in terms of blowback and the potential of starting a regional war).

    But certainly the new WSJ reporting signals that Israeli officials are trying to drag the Trump administration into a heightened conflict with Iran.

    “Iran is more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced in November. “We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel.”

    Trump on Monday warned no option is off the table to prevent the Iranians from achieving nuclear weapons status. But he also seems to be in the mood for a more peaceful negotiated solution.

    Source: Stratfor

    Trump told Fox that thwarting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons could be achieved either “with bombs or with a written piece of paper.” The warning came the week following his restoring ‘maximum pressure’ and new oil-targeted sanctions with an executive order.

    Crucially, he concluded, “I think Iran would love to make a deal and I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.” 

    There are plenty of Iran hawks in the Trump administration, but the question will be whether the non-interventionist leaning officials win out – such as newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. After all US, intelligence, including the CIA, still has not assessed that Iran is bent on building a bomb. Time will tell.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 20:30

  • Disney Announces Reduction Of DEI Programs Due To Trump Executive Actions
    Disney Announces Reduction Of DEI Programs Due To Trump Executive Actions

    Authored by Eric Lendrum via American Greatness,

    On Tuesday, it was reported that the Walt Disney Company is preparing to significantly reduce the scale of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiatives in response to President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on such practices.

    As reported by the Daily Caller, Disney’s Chief Human Resources Officer Sonia Coleman made the announcement in an internal memo, which was later reported on by Axios. 

    Among other changes, the company will replace its “Diversity and Inclusion” performance factor with a “Talent Strategy” metric that focuses less on identity and more on business success.

    Disney will also abandon its “Reimagine Tomorrow” campaign, which had touted efforts to increase “diverse representation” in media produced by Disney. 

    The program aimed to see at least 50% of Disney’s characters would consist of “underrepresented groups.”

    The company will also revisit disclaimer messages and content advisories that have been added onto older films.

    Films such as “Peter Pan” and “Dumbo” would see such warnings appear on-screen before the start of the movie, often referring to “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures.”

    Now, such messages will be moved to the summary section below the media player, and will not play in the movie itself.

    Back in 2023, CEO Bob Iger addressed possible changes to the company’s DEI policies, telling shareholders during an annual meeting that “our primary mission needs to be to entertain, and then through our entertainment to continue to have a positive impact on the world.”

    “I’m very serious about that,” Iger emphasized. “It should not be agenda-driven, it should be entertainment-driven.”

    President Trump has called for the elimination of DEI practices, pointing out that they often ignore merit in favor of arbitrary factors such as racial, gender, and sexual identity. Other companies that have reduced or eliminated DEI efforts in recent weeks include Google, Facebook, John Deere, and American Airlines.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 20:05

  • Redditor Reports "Melting Smell" Of Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPU While Playing Battlefield V
    Redditor Reports “Melting Smell” Of Nvidia’s RTX 5090 GPU While Playing Battlefield V

    Here we go again. Fire hazard risks are already mounting over Nvidia’s RTX 5090 after a Redditor shared images of the GPU’s wiring harness visibly melted after playing Battlefield 5. The incident has sparked memories of the RTX 4090‘s power connector failures a few years ago. 

    At the start of the week, a Reddit user named /u/ivan6953 wrote in the Nvidia subreddit that the power connector on his RTX 5090 had melted while playing Battlefield 5:

    I am not distant from the PC-building world and know what I’m doing. The cable was securely fastened and clicked on both sides (GPU and PSU).

    I noticed the burning smell playing Battlefield 5. The power draw was 500-520W. Instantly turned off my PC – and see for yourself…

    1. The cable was securely fastened and clicked.

    2. The PSU and cable haven’t changed from 4090FE (which was used for 2 years). Here is the previous build: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/RdMv6h

    3. Noticed a melting smell, turned off the PC – and just see the photos. The problem seems to have originated from the PSU side.

    4. Loki’s 12VHPWR pins are MUCH thinner than in the 12VHPWR slot on 5090FE.

    5. Current build: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/VRfPxr

    I dunno what to do really. I will try to submit warranty claims to Nvidia and Asus. But I’m afraid I will simply be shut down on the “3rd party cable” part. Fuck, man

    . . .

    The Verge weighed in on the cable incident, noting that another user of the new graphics card also reported a burnt cable issue:

    While it’s tempting to blame the MODDIY cable, Spanish YouTuber Toro Tocho has experienced the same burnt cable (both at the GPU and PSU ends) with an RTX 5090 Founders Edition while using a cable supplied by PSU manufacturer FSP. Plastic has also melted into the PCIe 5.0 power connector on the power supply. MODDIY also responded in a Reddit thread, ruling out the “possibility of a defective cable or manufacturing error” and offering to cover the cost of repair if Nvidia and Asus don’t honor their warranties.

    YouTuber der8auer has also examined the Reddit poster’s equipment in person, and ruled out any form of user error in the process. He’s also found that this could be related to a current distribution problem with RTX 5090 Founders Edition models instead. Either way, nobody should be blaming 12VHPWR issues on end users.

    X user chimed in:

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    This development comes less than a month after Nvidia stated that its new RTX 50-series cards won’t melt power plugs this time: 

    “It is expected that such a phenomenon will not occur in the RTX 50 series. We made some changes to the connector to respond to the issue at the time, and now, about two years later, I understand that such problems do not occur.”

    This is a worrisome flashback to the RTX 4090 Founders Edition’s power cable melting incidents a couple of years ago, ultimately leading buyers to file a class-action lawsuit against the US chipmaker. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 19:40

  • Final Tally For Biden-Era Improper Payments? $925 Billion…
    Final Tally For Biden-Era Improper Payments? $925 Billion…

    Via OpenTheBooks substack,

    The House Committee on Oversight and Reform spent today investigating how to address the crisis of improper payments made by the federal government each year. The hearing is called The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments.

    It comes as DOGE works to create lasting efficiencies for taxpayers, and following record improper payments under the Biden administration.

    BY THE NUMBERS

    During fiscal year 2024, federal agencies reported $161.5 billion in improper payments – money sent to the wrong entity, for the wrong amount or wrong reason – according to data released by the Office of Management and Budget in November.

    That means President Biden left office having presided over $925.7 billion in waste, fraud, abuse and duplicative payments – and that’s just what agencies were able to report.

    Adjusted for inflation, the figure grows to $986.2 billion – almost a trillion dollars lost through improper payments!

    That’s the worst for any president since reporting began in 2004, even when adjusting for inflation.

    NOTE: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the single-year record came during the fog of Covid, as enormous amounts of cash were shoveled out quickly by Congress. Fiscal year 2021 say $281.4 billion in improper payments, which we now know includes Covid-related aid that was subject to massive fraud.

    BY AGENCY

    As Open the Books first reported in RealClearInvestigations, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wasted $87 billion in improper payments, more than any other government entity. Medicare reimbursements to health providers had a 7.7% mistake rate this year, the worst since percentages were first reported in 2019.

    Another $4 billion was sent to recipients who had issues regarding their citizenship, including $824 million in unemployment insurance from the Department of Labor.

    The government also sent $346 million to dead people, mostly because the Office of Personnel Management continued to send benefits to retirees who are no longer alive. That’s the highest amount since at least 2021.

    The Treasury Department is working to rectify the problem of payments sent to dead people, having reported it recouped $31 million in such payments in five months. 

    It did so simply by gaining access to the Social Security Administration’s federal death database. It’s amazing what can happen when the left hand simply knows what the right hand is doing! That said, Open the Books has reported $3.6 billion in Covid stimulus checks went to dead people. 

    As our CEO, John Hart, told FOX News, “There are miles to go before we break even.”

    Other Covid-era programs continued to have some of the worst improper payment rates. 

    Roughly 25%, or $2 billion, of loans forgiven under the Paycheck Protection Program this year were paid improperly.

    The data was released on Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving, leaving little time for negative coverage before families began breaking bread.

    For comparison, Biden leaves office with an overall mistake rate of 5.42%, slightly higher than President Trump’s 4.94% in his first term. Still, Trump presided over $846.8 billion in improper payments, adjusted for inflation as of last October.

    Now, he has an opportunity to make good on the war on waste.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 19:15

  • Polar Vortex Forces EIA To Hike 2025 US NatGas Price Forecast By 20%
    Polar Vortex Forces EIA To Hike 2025 US NatGas Price Forecast By 20%

    The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published its Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) for February, which boosted its outlook for natural gas by 20% for 2025 after a polar vortex in January led to some of the largest withdraws from underground storage in years. 

    “The Henry Hub spot price averaged $4.13 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in January and reached a daily high of $9.86/MMBtu on January 17 ahead of a cold snap that spread across the United States, leading to above-average inventory withdrawals,” EIA wrote in the STEO report. 

    Here is EIA’s outlook on NatGas prices, which was revised higher: “We expect the spot price to rise through 2026, averaging almost $3.80/MMBtu in 2025, up 65 cents from our January 2025 Short-Term Energy Outlook, and reaching nearly $4.20/MMBtu in 2026.” 

    This revision follows a massive cold blast across the Lower 48 in January, significantly increasing energy consumption.

    Some of our reporting on the cold blast last month:  

    Even a grid emergency was declared:

    EIA explained in a separate report that last month’s cold snap led to the fourth-largest withdrawal from underground NatGas storage.

    Here’s more from the report:

    Colder-than-normal temperatures across much of the United States in mid-January increased natural gas consumption, resulting in the fourth-largest reported weekly withdrawal from natural gas storage in the Lower 48 states, according to our Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report (WNGSR). During the week ending January 24, 2025, stocks fell by 321 billion cubic feet (Bcf), which was nearly 70% more than the five-year (2020–24) average withdrawal for the same week in January. With withdrawals in January totaling nearly 1,000 Bcf, U.S. natural gas inventories are now 4% below their previous five-year average after being 6% above the five-year average at the start of the 2024–25 heating season, which began in November.

    For the week ending January 24, the South-Central region of the United States, which accounted for approximately 35% of working gas in US storage, reported its fourth-largest withdrawal of 136 Bcf. In the East and Midwest, the regions with the next-largest storage inventories, stocks fell by 10% in the East and by 11% in the Midwest over the week. The East and Midwest are also the US regions with the most natural gas consumption in the winter to meet space heating demand.

    The EIA’s STEO report also estimated that residential electricity prices would only rise 2% this year—the smallest annual rise since 2020. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 18:50

  • Restoring America With Common Sense
    Restoring America With Common Sense

    Authored by Robert Curry via RealClearPolicy,

    Because common sense is the key to understanding America’s original design at every level, America was long known as “The Common Sense Nation.”   Now, President Trump and his “common sense revolution” might succeed in making America the common sense nation once again.

    Unalienable rights and self-evident truths are the core ideas of the American founding. Those ideas are also the core ideas of a philosophical school known as “common sense realism,” inspired by Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and other representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the words of Arthur Herman, “Common Sense Realism was virtually the official creed of the American Republic…” As historian Allen Guelzo explained in “The American Mind,” his indispensable college lecture series, “before the Civil War, every major collegiate intellectual was a disciple of Scottish common sense realism.”

    The Founders were guided by the ideas and the thinking of the common sense realists. Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, especially, were thoroughly trained in common sense realism by their teachers who brought those ideas and that manner of thinking from Scotland to America.

    Today, the centrality of Scottish common sense realism to the Founding of our nation and to its ongoing sense of purpose is all but unknown. The Founders would be astonished by our ignorance of the men who inspired their work. Admittedly, it has been a struggle—for more than a century, American academia has labored to obliterate the memory of what was once known by virtually every American.

    Of course, academia has also been working hard to destroy “common sense” in its ordinary usage, too, insisting that men and women are arbitrarily designated categories, and that the imperative of every English professor is to support violent insurgency. As a witty friend of mine likes to say, “Say what you want about the liberal arts, but they’ve found a cure for common sense.”

    Thomas Paine was the great champion of ordinary common sense at the time of the founding. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Paine’s short book Common Sense. This pamphlet was and remains the best-selling American book in publishing history, and it was read aloud in taverns and village squares.  It had a decisive influence on American public sentiment in favor of the Revolution. Paine turned the spotlight of common sense upon monarchial rule to devastating effect.

    “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it to ridicule, by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.”

    The Founders’ wild and crazy idea was that the people are sovereign. At the time, this construction was a contradiction in terms. The monarch was the sovereign. To say that the American people are sovereign was to say that the American people would rule, and that government in America would be the agent of the people. Talk about turning the world upside down! 

    The Founders were true revolutionaries, believing that the people were capable of self-rule by virtue of their common sense. Today, the Progressives—whose purpose from their beginning has been to dismantle the America of the founders—often justify their claim to power by claiming that Americans do not have enough common sense to be able to rule themselves. That is a back-handed reference to the fundamental role of common sense in the Founders’ America. 

    It certainly feels as if we are now engaged in a titanic struggle to determine America’s future. Perhaps the best way to understand the meaning of that struggle is to see it as an effort to restore rule by the common sense of the American people. President Trump and his common sense revolution may be precisely what patriotic Americans have longed for, and what America has long needed.

    Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.  Both are from Encounter Books [https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/reclaiming-common-sense/].  His articles and reviews have appeared in American Greatness, the American Thinker, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Federalist.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 18:25

  • "It Stops Today": DOJ Sues New York, Governor Hochul, And NY AG Letitia James Over Licenses For Illegals
    “It Stops Today”: DOJ Sues New York, Governor Hochul, And NY AG Letitia James Over Licenses For Illegals

    The US Department of Justice on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the state of New York and key officials over the state’s 2019 “Green Light” law, which has allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, while blocking federal immigration and border enforcement agencies from accessing the state’s motor vehicle database.

    NY AG Letitia James (L) and Governor Kathy Hochul

    The lawsuit, filed in US district Court in Albany, was announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi during a Wednesday press conference.

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    Aside from the state of NY, Governor Kathy Hochul, state Attorney General Letita James, and DMV Commissioner Mark Schroeder were named as defendants.

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    The 2019 Driver’s License Access and Privacy Act prohibits New York sheriff’s departments and other agencies from sharing motor vehicle data with federal authorities for the purposes of immigration enforcement. It has allowed tens of thousands of migrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

    Yet, as the Times Union notes, the program has been mired in fraud.

    The Times Union reported in 2021 that there had been allegations of widespread cheating in the driver permit program, involving schemes to illicitly obtain driving credentials for immigrants. Many of those individuals allegedly also used the licenses to falsely prove New York residency in order to receive unemployment benefits under the state’s pandemic-era Excluded Worker Fund. The $2.1 billion program had provided unemployment benefits for a short period in 2021 for immigrants who did not qualify for regular state and federal benefits.

    In December, following an investigation by multiple agencies, including the New York inspector general’s office, five men, including two immigrants who had returned to Brazil, were indicted on federal charges in Massachusetts for conspiring to apply for New York driver’s licenses for more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants who did not live in New York. 

    Those charges allege the group’s conspiracy took place between November 2020 and last September, and that they typically charged customers about $1,400 to obtain a driver’s license. The scheme relied on fraudulent residency documents and falsified driving school certificates, according to the indictment.

    When the law was enacted, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other Democrats said it was intended to improve public safety by ensuring that illegal immigrants are authorized to drive – with advocates remaining silent on subsequent allegations of widespread fraud.

    “From a state point of view, I want to make sure the people who are driving on our roads pass a driving test. It is a public safety issue,” Cuomo insisted during a February 2020 interview.

    In February 2020, former acting director of ICE, Matthew T. Albence, said that law enforcement leaders urged Cuomo and state lawmakers to restore access to NY’s motor vehicle database for ICE and the US Customs and Border Protection.

    “New York has barred these two agencies, and only these two agencies, from obtaining information we need to do our jobs, and to keep you safe, and it was done purely for political purposes,” Albence said at the time. “As a 25-year law enforcement professional, it’s unfathomable that information which could be used to prevent crime or a potential terrorist attack is purposefully being withheld in this state, the same state that less than 20 years ago suffered the worst terrorist attack on American soil.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 18:00

  • Many Top Universities Have Yet To Comply With Trump's Order On DEI
    Many Top Universities Have Yet To Comply With Trump’s Order On DEI

    Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    President Donald Trump recently put the wealthiest U.S. colleges and universities on notice: If your endowment exceeds $1 billion, prepare for an investigation.

    Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock

    The president said he plans to shut down what he called “illegal and immoral discrimination” conducted under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that involve racial or gender preferential treatment in student admission, financial aid, employment, and curricula at elite institutions.

    Under a Jan. 21 executive order that cites long-standing civil rights laws, identity-based functions such as so-called antiracism training or minority hiring initiatives are prohibited. Those who don’t scrap DEI face costly repercussions.

    More than 120 U.S. colleges and universities have $1 billion-plus endowments, including all Ivy League institutions and the most selective flagship state universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

    Trump advised that up to nine schools in that category will be audited in the coming months, though any American higher education institution found in violation could lose federal money for research, student financial aid, and other programs under the executive order.

    “They are really worried about it—and they should be,” Steven McGuire, a senior fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told The Epoch Times. “The federal government can do some things that are financially debilitating.”

    On Jan. 30, Boston University announced that its Center for Antiracist Research, which employs 13 people, will close at the end of this academic year.

    Many other schools across the country, in anticipation or response to Trump’s order or previous anti-DEI laws at the state level, have already rebranded their DEI offices with new descriptions such as “access,” “community engagement,” or “civil rights” to avoid scrutiny. Northeastern University in Boston, for example, now has an office of “Belonging.”

    “Our reimagined approach centers on embracing the experiences of individuals across the global university system to maximize impact at the institutional level,” the school’s new Belonging web page states.

    Louis Galarowicz, a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars, estimates that large flagship public universities in more populated states spend tens of millions on DEI departments that include investigators who investigate harassment, bias, and “microaggression” complaints.

    He said schools have been quick to rebrand themselves to avoid lawsuits, let alone layoffs or program cuts.

    “A faculty diversity action plan could be renamed: critical needs hiring program,” Galarowicz told The Epoch Times. “It’s just a disguise, but their purpose hasn’t changed.”

    Several institutions removed official DEI statements for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions last year, but that doesn’t mean they scrapped all race-based initiatives.

    Students walk past an entrance to the College of Arts and Sciences of Boston University in Boston on Nov. 29, 2018. Steven Senne, File/AP Photo

    The University of Michigan, for example, still follows a five-year plan, DEI 2.0, according to its website. It details how more than a dozen major campus programs are embedded in DEI initiatives and that school leaders are advancing DEI-related ideas through “hundreds of activities.”

    The University of Michigan’s Museum of Art, for five years, will dedicate itself to anti-racism efforts and prioritize exhibits that expose colonial histories. The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning will de-emphasize singular Western historical narratives and center on the global south and historically marginalized populations. The Center for Academic Innovation is responsible for identifying academic performance disparities by race and recommending curriculum changes for “fostering equitable outcomes,” according to the DEI 2.0 plan.

    The University of Michigan, with an undergraduate acceptance rate of about 17 percent and an endowment of $19 billion, is a leading academic research institution. The federal government is its primary sponsor for research and provided more than $1.4 billion last year, according to the school’s 2024 financial report. Under Trump’s executive order, the school stands to lose that amount if it doesn’t discontinue DEI 2.0.

    The University of Michigan did not reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

    Harvard University eliminated its DEI pledge for hiring last year, but it still maintains a well-staffed Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and has a diversity administrator for each of its 12 schools. It also maintains a Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Academy with workshops on Understanding Unconscious Bias, Power and Privilege, Microaggressions, and Anti-Black Racism, according to its website.

    Harvard, with a $50 billion endowment and a 3.5 percent undergraduate acceptance rate, received $686 million for research last year from the federal government, according to its 2024 financial report.

    Harvard did not reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

    The University of Colorado Boulder’s Critical Needs Hiring Program, though it no longer has diversity in the title, is still centered around recruiting “BIPOC” (black, indigenous, and people of color), according to hundreds of memos from that office obtained and publicized by the National Association of Scholars. That school, with an endowment of about $2 billion, received more than $1 billion in federal grants last year, according to its 2024 financial report.

    Read the rest here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 17:40

  • Liberal Hangout Reddit Craters After Google Algo Change Cripples User Growth
    Liberal Hangout Reddit Craters After Google Algo Change Cripples User Growth

    For much of the past few months we had watched in stunned amazement as the world’s most overvalued and censored website, not to mentioned favorite haunt of woke and recently laid off deep state communists and various other radical liberals, saw its price rise by a multiple of 2025 revenue every single day (rising as high as 31 turns of 2025 revenue)…

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    … and not all the stupid explanations – it will be used by chatGPT scanners for its content, it is growing faster than X, it should be valued at a multiple of 2026 EBITDA… and we actually aren’t even joking about that, Deutsche Bank really said the stock was cheap because it was trading at only 60x 2026 EBITDA…

    … made a shred of sense to explain what was clearly a bubble.

    Well, that bubble just popped after hours when the company reported results that were slightly better than estimates, but missed on the all important daily active users, which promptly imploded the unlimited growth story that the narrative has been pushing here.

    Here is what the company just reported for Q4:

    • Revenue $427.7 million, estimate $405.5 million
      • Advertising rev. $394.5 million, estimate $367.3 million
      • Other revenue $33.2 million, estimate $36.1 million
         
    • Adjusted Ebitda $154.3 million, estimate $128.7 million
    • Net income $71 million, estimate $46.9 million
       
    • Average rev. per user $4.21, estimate $3.91
      • US average rev. per user $7.04, estimate $6.35
      • International average rev. per user $1.67, estimate $1.50
    • Free cash flow $89.2 million.

    That was the good part, here is the bad: it took a lot of spending to push up the company’s revenues to the desired range

    • R&D expenses $188.6 million, estimate $174 million

    And here is the ugly: the company missed badly on the number of daily users.

    • Daily active users 101.7 million, missing the estimate 103.81 million
      • US daily active users 48 million, missing the  estimate 51.52 million
      • International daily active users 53.7 million, beating estimates of 51.84 million

    Worse, while low-ARPU international users continued to grow in Q4 – because the company used its “huge investments” in AI to add a translator…

    … US users actually declined in Q4 from 48.2 million to 48.0 million. So much for the growth case (and that’s even with millions of deep staters laid off thanks to DOGE).

    Reddit said user growth slowed after Google made a change to its algorithm that impacted search traffic. The forum-based site had benefited from deals that surface Reddit results in search engines, including Google and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to Bloomberg, over the past few years, Google has accounted for as much as 50% of Reddit’s traffic in a single day, making the social media site susceptible to changes in Google’s search engine.

    And sure enough, realizing that it had helped blow a huge Reddit bubble, Google changed its algo, Reddit user growth not only slumped, but in the case of the US, it posted its first decline in over a decade.

    Commenting on the results, Bloomberg said that RDDT plunged after the slow down in Q4 user growth was seen as “a sign the newly public company is struggling to keep up with larger digital advertising peers Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”

    And sure enough, RDDT shares cratered as much as 20% after hours, but it has a long way to drop as the stock has increased more than sixfold since it went public last March, and had already jumped more than 30% this year, significantly outpacing the broader market. It’s been one of the best performing stocks to go public since the market for IPOs began to slow in 2022. Unfortunately, now that US growth has peaked and is declining, the growth case is over and there will be a lof of pain as the company find its new fair value some 70% lower…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 17:30

  • Ayatollah Responds To Trump's Big Stick Threats: 'Go Forward' With Military Growth
    Ayatollah Responds To Trump’s Big Stick Threats: ‘Go Forward’ With Military Growth

    President Trump kicked off the week saying in a Fox interview that “Iran is very concerned. Iran is very frightened, to be honest with you, because their defense is pretty much gone.” He had provocatively laid out that “I think Iran would love to make a deal and I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.” 

    How is Tehran’s top leadership responding to the “big stick” threat? On Wednesday Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged his country to go forward with bolstering military development.

    Khamenei said “progress should not be stopped” in the defense sector, amid ongoing threats from Israel and the US.  “We cannot be satisfied,” Khamenei stressed. “Say that we previously set a limit for the accuracy of our missiles, but we now feel this limit is no longer enough. We have to go forward.”

    “Today, our defensive power is well known, our enemies are afraid of this. This is very important for our country,” he added, at a moment Trump is warning no option is off the table to prevent the Iranians from achieving nuclear weapons status.

    Trump had further said in that Fox interview that thwarting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons could be achieved either “with bombs or with a written piece of paper.” The warning came the week following his restoring ‘maximum pressure’ and new oil-targeted sanctions with an executive order.

    Iran has meanwhile protested Trump’s threatening remarks, saying in a letter submitted to the UN Security Council, “These reckless and inflammatory statements flagrantly violate international law and the UN Charter, particularly Article 2(4), which prohibits threats or use of force against sovereign states.”

    On Monday Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had charged that the US is not “sincere” about negotiations with Iran following last week’s new sanctions.

    “If the US were sincere about negotiations, why did they sanction us?” Pezeshkian posed in a speech in Tehran commemorating the 46th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution.

    When Trump signed the maximum pressure order, he actually said something which will be welcomed by Tehran, and could be an opening for legitimate restored negotiations:

    While signing a new presidential memorandum calling for maximum pressure sanctions on Iran, Trump poured cold water on it and openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the policy.

    “So this is one that I am torn about,” he said during Tuesday’s signing ceremony. “I am signing this, but I am unhappy to do it.”

    Yet, this was the least stunning moment of his comments about Iran during a gaggle with journalists in the Oval Office. Even more remarkable was what he said about the intent — or lack thereof — of decision-makers in Iran.

    “There are many people at the top ranks of Iran that do not want to have a nuclear weapon,” he declared.

    Trump is of course fully aware of recent CIA findings stating its belief Iran has not yet decided to pursue nukes. The Islamic Republic has long claimed its program is merely for peaceful energy development for domestic consumption.

    Iran has been showing of its new toys of late…

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    But things in the Middle East have drastically changed and realigned – and not in Iran’s favor – given Assad has fallen and Hezbollah’s leadership was decimated by Israel. There are fears Iran could ramp up its Uranium enrichment to weapons grade. Hawks have maintained that this trajectory is assured at this point.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 17:20

  • SpaceX To Switch Capsules To Bring 2 Stranded Astronauts Back To Earth Sooner
    SpaceX To Switch Capsules To Bring 2 Stranded Astronauts Back To Earth Sooner

    Authored by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times,

    NASA said Tuesday they have revised their strategy in order to expedite the homecoming of two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS), the space agency said on Feb. 11.

    Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been aboard the space station for eight months, are now slated to return to Earth in mid-March—two weeks earlier than the previously anticipated late March or April timeframe, according to NASA.

    The change in plans involves SpaceX altering its capsule assignments for upcoming missions.

    “Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said in a statement released by the agency.

    The extended stay of Williams and Wilmore stems from a series of setbacks that began in June 2024. Initially, the pair was scheduled to return after a brief June 5 test flight aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule. 

    However, the Starliner experienced major issues during the flight, including helium leaks and problems with its reaction control thrusters, as it approached the ISS.

    The issues led to NASA’s decision to return the Starliner to Earth without crew members, leaving Williams and Wilmore safe but stranded on the ISS.

    “Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine. A test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated at the time.

    The situation was further complicated when SpaceX and NASA said they would delay the launch of the replacement astronaut crew to late March 2025 due to necessary preparations for flight of a new capsule, which would have extended Williams and Wilmore’s mission even further without the revisions now in place.

    With additional work still needed on the new capsule, NASA has now opted for an older SpaceX capsule for the next crew launch, to bring Williams and Wilmore home earlier, weather permitting on March 12. This capsule had previously been assigned to a private mission organized by Axiom Space, featuring astronauts from Poland, Hungary, and India. As a result of NASA’s decision, the Axiom mission has been postponed to a later date, potentially still within the spring season.

    Returning with Williams and Wilmore are NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who were selected to join the pair on the ISS in September 2024, where they have been preparing for their return mission together.

    The replacement crew to take over duties at the ISS after a week-long handover period will include two NASA astronauts, as well as one astronaut from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and one Roscosmos cosmonaut.

    This latest adjustment comes just two weeks after NASA announced it was working “expeditiously” to bring Williams and Wilmore back as soon as possible. The announcement followed a request by President Donald Trump for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to speed up the astronauts’ return.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 17:00

  • Fired Inspectors General Sue Trump To Get Jobs Back
    Fired Inspectors General Sue Trump To Get Jobs Back

    A group of eight federal inspectors general has sued the Trump administration after they were ousted from their jobs last month.

    The IGs claim that their firings – which came in the form of a two-sentence email, were illegal because they violated a federal law requiring the White House to inform Congress with 30 days’ notice, and provide “substantive rationale” for the firings, according to their 32-page  complaint filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia – where we’re guessing they’ll find a sympathetic judge.

    The plaintiffs are eight of the 17 Senate-confirmed inspectors general who were fired just four days into President Donald Trump’s second term in what the White House cited as “changing priorities.” They are seeking their jobs back at the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Education, Agriculture, Labor and State, and the Small Business Administration.

    “IGs must be watchdogs, not lapdogs,” reads the complaint, which names the Trump-appointed leaders or interim acting heads of each agency as defendants, according to the Washington Post.

    “Plaintiffs’ purported removals have sent shockwaves and a massive chilling effect through the IG community,” the complaint continues, adding that they “have been sent a message that non-partisanship and truth-telling will not be tolerated. That message will have the effect of intimidating the [inspector general] workforce and thus chill their critical work for the American people.”

    The fired IGs who joined the lawsuit are; Rob Storch (Defense), Michael Missal (VA), Christi Grimm (HHS), Sandra Bruce (Education), Phyllis Fong (Agriculture), Larry Turner (Labor), Cardell Richardson (State) and Hannibal “Mike” Ware (SBA).

    Only two cabinet-level watchdogs were spared their jobs – those at Homeland Security and the DOJ, after the Tuesday firing of another IG; USAID’s IG Paul Martin, a Biden appointee. Martin was fired after his office issued a blistering report slamming the Trump administration for ‘hobbling’ USAID’s mission (to enrich corrupt politicians and influence the news?), and shrinking its staff.

    The Wednesday complaint also claims that Trump has yet to communicate his intention to remove the watchdogs to Congress, in writing or otherwise, using any “substantive rationale for the removal of any IG — let alone the required detailed and case-specific reasons.”

    “His only public explanation came during a press gaggle on January 25 … when he stated, ‘I don’t know them … but some people thought that some were unfair, some were not doing their job,’ and falsely asserted that ‘it’s a very standard thing to do.”

    “The President did not identify the ‘people’ who supposedly ‘thought’ these things, which IGs any such thoughts pertained to, or how the unidentified IGs supposedly “were not doing their job,” the complaint continues.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 02/12/2025 – 16:40

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