Jan 02

Today’s News 2nd January 2024

  • "Something Big" Looms For America In 2024
    “Something Big” Looms For America In 2024

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

    The Great Clarification

    “Time for The Great Uprising to defeat The Great Reset. This isn’t just an R vs. D question in 2023. It’s a 1776 moment.”

    – Vivek Ramaswamy

    I’m already liking 2024. Consequence is itching to return to the American scene. Somewhere around 2016, cause and effect got a divorce. After that, things just happened or unhappened with no further orders of effect, like some brute existence without purpose, meaning, or even awareness, except for the feeling of the lash on your back.

    After a long journey through a dark place, treading ever-deeper into the unknown, knowing you are in the presence of demons from one footstep to the next, worrying incessantly that God has abandoned you. . . the alarm bell is ringing, the light is shining through, your eyes roll up like window-shades, and it’s time to get your mind right! Yes, even nations have bad dreams. Welcome to the Great Clarification.

    We are waking to the stupefying criminality of public life, to the immersive obvious bullshit of people in charge who don’t deserve your respect or compliance.

    How they got into these positions is only another feature of that totalistic criminality.

    What was hidden in plain sight will be revealed to those suffering mere hysterical blindness.

    It was fitting that the last extravagant political act of ’23 was Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows chucking Mr. Trump off the ballot there because…she felt like it. To save our democracy, you understand. That might be the terminal absurdity of the derangement we are leaving behind, the signature for much that has gone down in this country the past three years: women on the verge of a nervous breakdown throwing the crockery of law around the room at Daddy.

    All this accomplishes, of course, is to disgrace authority in general and to turn America into one big broken home, making us a population of frightened runaways clinging desperately to a few square feet of ground, alone under the freeway ramp in the rain. That is no way to live. The way to live is to make yourself useful to your fellow humans and to get paid for it, and to find some joy and meaning in that human fellowship based on fair, consensual transactions — a pretty simple formula that has been supplanted by the evil idea that life is nothing but a shakedown.

    The election of 2024, whether it is actually allowed to happen or not, will probably commence the extinction of the DC blob. This entity has made itself malignantly inimical to the proper functioning of self-governing people, and everybody knows it. The blob will die of irrelevance and impotence as the “trust horizon” devolves downward and we are thrust back into the awesome task of reconstructing our local communities.

    There is so much to do.

    I keep hearing figures in the public arena say they have a creepy feeling that something big is going to happen.

    Well, sure, something’s got to give. So much hyper-complexity has been heaped onto the apparatus of shakedown that just about nothing works in America anymore. The Internet is obviously a major part of that. We’ve allowed digital magic to invade every scrap of territory in our daily doings, to the degree that there is no longer enough for humans to do — but, alas, digital magic is only a pale simulacrum of real human magic.

    The virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic. Why do you think there are so many people barely alive in a haze of opiate drugs splayed on the sidewalks of San Francisco, the epicenter of Internet wealth and power?

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    The “something big” could well be the Web-down crisis that is nervously tweeted about. If it went on for more than couple of weeks, most everything we depend on would cease to work, from food supplies to clean water to communications to what has been lately operating as “money.”  That would be a clarifying interlude for sure. Among the few things that would still work in the event of a massive attack on the Internet are human brains, human bodies, and firearms. That combo could be as much a recipe for order as for chaos. I believe in the fairly short term, most of us would opt for order. As far as I’m concerned, there’s already been enough chaos, just about every bit of it unnecessary.

    But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 2024 is on. It’s the time many of us have been waiting for. We’re in it. Stay alert. Make the right choices. Exercise situational awareness. Get ready to walk with consequence. It’s here, and it’s not “queer.”

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    Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 23:20

  • The World Has Lost The Great John Pilger
    The World Has Lost The Great John Pilger

    With sadness Consortium News reports that John Pilger, whose books, films and articles informed generations of people eager to cut through official narratives and propaganda on the Palestinian question; U.S. wars executed in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere; the one it plans for China; the state of public medicine in Britain; the treatment of aborigines in his native Australia and a host of other critical public issues, has died in London at 84. 

    Pilger, a recipient of numerous awards, including winning British journalist of the year twice, was a member of Consortium News‘ board of directors and in October was awarded with CN‘s Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award. Tributes have been pouring in….

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    Below is John Pilger’s Biography via johnpilger.com…

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    John Pilger was born and grew up in Bondi, Sydney, Australia. He launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School and later completed a four year cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press. “It was one of the strictest language courses I know,” he says. “Devised by a celebrated, literate editor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of language and accuracy. It certainly taught me to admire writing that was spare, precise and free of cliches, that didn’t retreat into the passive voice and used adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I have long since slipped that leash, but those early disciplines helped shape my journalism and writing and my understanding of moving and still pictures”.

    Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance ‘agency’ in Italy (with the grand title of ‘Interep’) and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.

    He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America’s poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.

    His work in South East Asia produced an iconic issue of the London Mirror, devoted almost entirely to his world exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s reign. The combined impact of his Mirror reports and his subsequent documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, raised almost $50 million for the people of that stricken country. Similarly, his 1994 documentary and dispatches report from East Timor, where he travelled under cover, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then occupied by Indonesia.

    In Britain, his four-year investigation on behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide, and left out of the settlement with the drugs company, resulted in a special settlement.

    His numerous documentaries on Australia, notably The Secret Country (1983), the bicentary trilogy The Last Dream (1988), Welcome to Australia (1999) and Utopia (2013) all celebrated and revealed much of his own country’s ‘forgotten past’, especially its indigenous past and present.

    He has won an American TV Academy Award, an Emmy, and a British Academy Award, a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such as as the Royal Television Society’s Best Documentary. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia among the ten most important documentaries of the twentieth century.

    His articles appear worldwide. In 2001, he curated a major exhibition at the London Barbican, Reporting the World: John Pilger’s Eyewitness Photographers, a tribute to the great black-and-white photographers he has worked alongside. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Sophie Prize for ’30 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.’ In 2009, he was awarded Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize. He has received honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and abroad. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 22:50

  • Risks Abound After Santa Claus Rally Lifts Stocks
    Risks Abound After Santa Claus Rally Lifts Stocks

    By George Lei, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

    1. Chinese equities have enjoyed a stellar Santa Claus rally even though the country doesn’t officially celebrate Christmas. CSI 300 Index, the onshore benchmark, gained 2.8% in the final week of 2023 while the MSCI China Index soared 4.8% over the same period. The performance was the best in five months for both gauges. Investors have largely attributed the jump to bottom-fishing and year-end position adjustments, with some of the most battered sectors leading the year-end rally.

    Despite last week’s bounce, Chinese shares remain the world’s biggest losers in 2023 and whether the rebound can last into the new year depends a lot on the all-important real estate sector. Wall Street, however, isn’t too optimistic. The slump in China’s housing construction will continue in 2024, dragging down economic growth while government efforts to stabilize the sector will be inadequate to reverse the downturn, according to the consensus from ten investment banks and brokerages including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS.

    Until the housing market turns around, any dip-buying in Chinese equities will more likely be a short-term trade than a durable investment theme.

    2. Bureaucrats are still fumbling their policymaking even as top leaders urge them to “build the new before abolishing the old.” More than two years after a crackdown on the Internet and video-game sectors, vestiges of official disapproval remain, as evidenced by a raft of proposals to curb in-game spending and playing time just before Christmas. Some of China’s biggest online names shed $80 billion before recouping some of their losses.

    The silver lining, however, is that officials seemed to quickly realize the damages done and reacted almost immediately to calm markets, short of an explicitly admission of mea culpa. On Dec. 25, regulators said they approved a record 105 games for domestic publication and promised to review their controversial proposals.

    The media & entertainment sector remains a “timely buy” based on business cycle analysis, according to a research report from JPMorgan, which shrugged off the rout of game stocks. The sector’s forward 12-month P/E ratio now stands at a multi-year low of 11.8 times and the valuation gaps are at odds with a regulatory direction favoring large caps, analysts Wendy Liu and Alex Yao wrote last week. The US bank favors Tencent, NetEase and Baidu, all of which fell before Christmas and only one has recouped all its losses.

    3. A plethora of domestic problems still weigh on the Chinese currency, preventing it from catching up with the dollar. In December, the onshore yuan rose merely 0.5% versus the dollar, which by itself tumbled more than 2%. The currency ranked as No. 23 out of 31 peers of developed and developing nations tracked by Bloomberg.

    It is faring even worse against non-dollar peers, hovering near a four-month low on a trade-weighted basis according to a Bloomberg tracker of China’s trade-weighted yuan index. Most currencies of the nation’s major trade partners strengthened versus the greenback in December, led by a 5%-plus rally in the Japanese yen.

    In the final days of 2023, Chinese banks slashed their deposit rates for the third time this year and PBOC-backed Financial News suggested on Wednesday more reductions to both deposit and lending rates are likely in the pipeline. With no end in sight to rate cuts from Beijing, expectations of Fed easing alone won’t be enough to boost the Chinese currency.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 22:20

  • 2023 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead
    2023 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead

    One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2022, we said that the year would be a very tough act to follow as the sheer breadth of stories, surprises, plot twists and unexpected developments made 2022 the most memorable year yet in our brief but turbulent history. This proved accurate: while 2023 did have a seemingly endless variety of social, economic, political, geopolitical and of course, financial and market, drama, the unprecedented onslaught of 2022 – which saw both the deadliest and most consequential global war since WWII and a historic inflationary onslaught – simply proved too great to beat…. although we are confident that’s only because the newsflow was merely resting ahead of 2024 when, thanks to a record number of elections across the world…

    … not to mention what may well be the most consequential presidential election in US history, the coming avalanche of news and propaganda will be sheer insanity, especially since the Fed has made its long awaited dovish pivot without successfully stamping out inflation first. So in retrospect, 2023 being somewhat tame by recent standards may have been a good thing: it allowed everyone to rest ahead of the main event.

    And speaking of the worst inflation in 40 years, it didn’t take long for our second major prediction to come true: as we said exactly one year ago the “simplest forecast about the coming year is that 2023 will be the year when something finally breaks.” That’s exactly what happened just three months later when the rapidly rising rates catalyzed the worst banking crisis in the US banking sector since the Lehman collapse. As the Fed raised rates, the value of banks’ bond portfolios fell, and those whose balance sheets were smaller – so pretty much all but the “Big 4” – found themselves in a toxic spiral of bank runs and asset liquidations, which culminated with virtually every small and regional bank on the verge of collapse, and some – such as the two largest California banks (those overseen by the “woke” San Fran Fed whose boss is the LGBTQueen of diversity, if not bank supervision, Mary Daly) First Republic, and Silicon Valley bank, as well as NY’s premium client-focused Signature Bank – were dragged into the vortex of bank insolvency, leading to over $500 billion in bank assets failing in a matter of days, matching the record from the global financial crisis.

    It was this “break” which culminated with the worst bank run and largest bank failures in 15 years – not to mention the overnight failure of Credit Suisse, the 167-year-old second largest Swiss bank that was bought by UBS for pennies (literally) thanks to Swiss taxpayers once again stuck footing the bill and holding the radioactive garbage – that preemptively ended the Fed’s tightening cycle (even if rate hikes continued for another 6 or so months, if only for optical reasons) and marked the end of the Fed’s reserve reduction…

    … which also triggered the start of the next bull market.

    Indeed, after bottoming around 3800 on March 10, the Fed’s intervention to prevent further bank contagion was all the market needed to know that the “Fed put” had been triggered, and the S&P closed the year 1000 points higher, less than a percent from the all time highs.

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    Another prediction about 2023 that came true is that as “the past three years so vividly showed, when it comes to actual surprises and all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected.” And sure enough, books will be written (and certainly articles in the WSJ, Bloomberg and Zerohedge) about just how wrong everyone was: Exhibit A is this Goldman chart from January 2023, showing that “this is arguably the most widely anticipated recession.“

    Well, 2023 has come and gone and the recession-defining NBER remained quiet, with the US economy seemingly avoiding the contractionary fate of its European peers (at least on a “seasonally adjusted” basis), and as the recession was averted so was the bear market that so many strategists were certain was inevitable. It wasn’t just the recession that never officially materialized (hold that thought): as Bloomberg wrote , “all across Wall Street, on equities desks and bond desks, at giant firms and niche outfits, the mood was glum. It was the end of 2022 and everyone, it seemed, was game-planning for the recession they were convinced was coming…. blended together, three calls — sell US stocks, buy Treasuries, buy Chinese stocks — formed the consensus view on Wall Street.” And, as always happens, consensus on Wall Street proved to be wrong again.

    But was consensus really wrong? As usual, the answer is nuanced, because while on the surface the economy grew at a brisk pace, the reason for this growth was anything but benign, and as we explained in July, the catalyst behind the “miracle of Bidenomics” was a $1 trillion debt-funded “stealth” stimulus which pushed the US budget deficit above its $1 trillion trendline to crisis/wartime levels, up 50% from the previous year, and rising to a mindblowing $2 trillion for fiscal 2023 just behind the covid crisis years of 2020 and 2021.

    And while this “era of fiscal excess” as Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett laconically called the current period, noting that in the past 12 months the US government has spent $6.6 trillion, would – in theory at least – assure perpetual growth as long as one could issue ever more debt and pretend it was “growth”, in 2023 the US finally hit a historic milestone: $1 trillion in interest expense for the first time ever.

    That was a huge problem, because once spending on just US interest surpassed the entire US defense budget, people started to notice. It’s also why, with 10Y yields hitting 5% and putting the entire “dollar as a reserve currency” monetary hegemonic status quo in jeopardy as runaway debt interest threatened to blow up the perpetual engine that had made US superpower status in the past half century – that would be unconstrained US debt spending – possible, the Fed had no other choice but to pivot dovishly, just as we predicted in the waning days of 2022…

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    … which is what the Fed did in December 2023 – even as core inflation remains double the Fed’s 2% target – prompting speculation that the Fed has stealthily raised its long-standing 2% inflation target to 3% or even 4%, and thereby setting the state for the blow-off top in inflation some time in 2024 as the ghost of Arthur Burns finally comes home to roost in the Marriner Eccles buildng.

    Of course, the inevitable end of the inflation story (at least until the much more exciting sequel begins some time in 2024), had profound reverberations elsewhere, and as headline CPI dropped, wage growth – the BLS told us – surpassed inflation for the first time since the post-covid recovery began in the second half of 2020.

    While this would be great news for Biden as the 2024 election season kicks off and the “Big Guy” goes all in on his re-election campaign, there was just one problem: people either didn’t believe the data or just didn’t care. Indeed, most Americans, and especially swing-state voters, remained glum about the economy, and 52% of voters in these states rated the economy “poor” in closely watched polls this fall, with another 29% saying it was “only fair.”

    In short, Bidenomics was a dud, which is also why the White House started taking pages straight out of the Goebbels propaganda playbook. Yet what was bizarre if not outright paradoxical, is that US consumer spending remained high, especially on services such as concerts from Beyonce and Taylor Swift to movies like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

    Adding to the puzzle is that just as spending hit all-time highs, consumer confidence plunged to new, record lows.

    Many were confused over what accounted for the disconnect: persistently high prices? Recession fears? The “vibecession”? Whatever the explanation, voters’ feelings about the economy, and Joe Biden’s handling of it, will be decisive in the 2024 election, especially now that even the Fed pivoted in a way to tips the scales in Biden’s favor, something former NY Fed chief Bill Dudley urged all the way back in 2019.

    And speaking of wages overtaking inflation, this summer much of America ground to a halt as tens of thousands of actors and screenwriters went on strike in July, bringing Hollywood to a halt, amid fears that AI will put most of the local “talent” out of job (it will). The strikes were part of a wave of labor activity in the United States this year, including targeted strikes by the United Automobile Workers union. Despite the recent uptick, overall union activity has fallen since the 1970s and ’80s; still the strikes were successful with union workers managing to negotiate solid, double-digit raises for themselves, assuring that inflation’s return is just a matter of time.

    There was another big driver behind inflation both in 2022 and 2023, as not one but two brutal wars underscored the fragility of the global economic recovery and rewired the world’s trade relationships. For an example look no further than the geopolitics of oil. Prices soared above $120 a barrel after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, then steadily fell amid surging US oil production and signs of a global economic slowdown. Here China’s aborted attempt to escape from covid zero with a burst of growth was key… yet Beijing’s inability to flood the economy with stimulus was obvious to anyone who had seen China’s record 300% debt/GDP ratio: China simply had no more space where to park and hide any new growth, pardon debt.

    But while the Ukraine war slowly faded away from the front pages as Zelensky’s counteroffensive proved to be a disaster and now US and European officials and the legacy media are openly discussing a negotiated peace as the war’s “best” outcome (after blasting it as pro-Putin appeasement just one year ago), it was replaced in October with the violent and dramatic breakout of the most brutal Middle-East conflict in decades, as the Israel-Hamas war raised new fears that oil prices would spike and reignite inflation. Despite shipping snarls in the Red Sea and Suez Canal, those concerns have yet to materialize largely thanks to huge overproduction in the US at a time of rampant shale M&A activity as potential acquisition targets do everything they can to literally flood the market and boost EBITDA and cash flow in hopes of impressing potential suitors. This too shall pass, and very soon.

    Until then, however, thanks to the Russia-Ukraine war, India and China have emerged as key beneficiaries. India, profiting from its neutrality, went from buying hardly any Russian oil to buying about half of what the country exports by sea.

    Trade between China and Russia has also surged, surpassing $200 billion in the first 11 months of this year while Chinese cars are now flooding Russia.

    Not surprisingly, just a few days ago we learned that the Chinese yuan has overtaken the Japanese yen to become the fourth most-used currency by value in global payments.

    Of course, it’s not just Russia benefiting from China’s redirected trade routes: countries like Mexico and Vietnam have also gained ground. And since those countries import mostly intermediate goods from China, American supply chains still remain reliant on Chinese production. In fact, China is now the dominant supplier of industrial inputs across the world.

    As other countries have seen a pick up in Chinese trade, China’s share of exports to the United States has fallen in recent years, as a result of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and maintained by Biden even though tensions between the two superpowers stabilized briefly after Biden’s meeting with President Xi Jinping of China on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November… even though Biden again calling Xi a dictator for the second time went over as a lead spy balloon in Beijing, as Anthony Blinken’s face made abundantly clear.

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    Still, there is another reason why the US can’t decouple easily from China: semiconductors. China is a major market for these advanced computer chips, which can be used to power artificial intelligence systems. This fall, the Biden administration tightened its export controls on semiconductors, making it harder for U.S. companies to sell them to China. But big chipmakers like Nvidia are already working on modified chips to sell to Chinese markets, hoping to skirt the restrictions.

    And speaking of Nvidia, we would be remiss not to mention the single biggest market narrative – and tech story – of 2023, namely the unprecedented AI mania, which manifested itself in an explosion in the “Magnificent 7” mega tech stocks which now make up a record 30% of the S&P’s market cap…

    … thanks to a historic outperformance of this group of 7 tech names which doubled their price in 2023 even as much of the rest of the market went nowhere this year, at least until the Fed’s dovish pivot, which finally lifted all boats in the last two weeks of the year.

    It wasn’t just the latest stock bubble however: the world’s infatuation with the chatGPT chatbot led to an explosion of investment in generative A.I. start-ups, including Microsoft’s $10 billion backing in OpenAI. Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI has since come under scrutiny, particularly its role in the reinstatement of Sam Altman as OpenAI’s CEO after a boardroom coup that set off a chaotic five days at the start-up and was a moment of unforgettable drama for nerds everywhere. Whether A.I. remains the market juggernaut it was in 2023 may be decided in the courts: on Dec. 27, The New York Times became the first major American media organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over A.I.-related copyright issues, saying in the lawsuit that the companies should be held responsible for the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

    What is just as remarkable is that people actually use ChatGPT or rather chat LGPTQ, since we now have proof that as a large language model it uses data and signal exclusively from hard-liberal and leftist organizations, thus making most of its “answers” false, unreliable, “woke” and generally useless.

    And speaking of the latest attempt to control and dominate the conversation, this time using chatGPT, we remind readers that away from markets and geopolitical conflicts, the next most important topic in the past year were the revelations from the Twitter Files and subsequent exposes, all revealing just how little free speech there really is in the so-called land of the free and the home of the First Amendment, and how countless three-lettered, deep-state alphabet agencies – and the military-industrial complex – will do anything and everything to control both the official discourse and the unofficial narrative to keep their preferred puppets in the White House, and keep those they disapprove of – censored and/or locked up, both literally and metaphorically… or simply designate them “conspiracy theorists.” None other than Matt Taibbi wrote the best summary of what the Twitter Files revealed, namely America’s stealthy conversion into a crypto-fascist state where some unelected government bureaucrat tells corporations what to do and decides the fate of ordinary Americans every single day without any due process:

    This last week saw the FBI describe Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger and me as “conspiracy theorists” whose “sole aim” is to discredit the agency. That statement will look ironic soon, as we spent much of this week learning about other agencies and organizations that can now also be discredited thanks to these files.

    A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report.

    I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

    One happy-ish thought at month’s end:

    Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

    I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

    One year later, the legacy media has only gotten worse, with the likes of the NYT, publishers of such tripe seeking to justify an illegitimate and corrupt first crime family, and WaPo spewing propaganda for the corrupt elite, and officially becoming the PR arm of both the White House and the Military Industrial Complex/ US Intel Services/ Deep State. Meanwhile, X (fka Twitter), once the most corrupt and censored social media network in the world, has emerged as a bastion of free speech (Elon even brought back Alex Jones) even as virtue-signaling corporations (who all work in conjunction with the deep state in hopes of getting some fast-track access to those very generous taxpayer-funded government contracts) are doing everything in their power to demonetize and starve the company by pulling their ads; we say this as one of the first media outlets that was dubbed “conspiracy theorists” by the authorities, long before everyone else joined the club. Oh yes, we’ve been there: we were suspended for half a year on Twitter for telling the truth about Covid, and then we lost most of our advertisers after the Atlantic Council‘s weaponized “fact-checkers” such as Newsguard put us on every ad agency’s black list while anonymous CIA sources at the AP slandered us for being “Kremlin puppets” – which reminds us: for those with the means, desire and willingness to support us, please do so by becoming a premium member: we are now almost entirely reader-funded so your financial assistance will be instrumental to ensure our continued survival into 2024 and beyond.

    The bottom line, at least for us, is that the past four years have been a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which makes the dystopian nightmare of 1984 seem more real each day, and we have since taken measures. Three years ago, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn’t our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us for good. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the censorship bandwagon rolls out much more aggressively in the coming year when, with the 2024 elections at stake, the deep state will stop at nothing to silence all independent voices.

    And why would they: just a few days ago, some woke, unelected Karen in Maine named Shenna Bellows showed just how far the left was willing to go when she decided that it is incumbent upon her – and her alone – to determine what is in the best interest of hundreds of millions of Americans when this secretary of state – not some court, not some group of elected officials – decided to remove Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot and disenfranchise half of the country (something democrats have shown a tremendous aptitude for, even as they are more than eager to collect taxes from those who still generate income and pay some of it back to the government as taxes, i.e. mostly republicans). Even a Democratic congressman who voted to impeach Trump over the January 6th riots, quickly issued a statement: “We are a nation of laws, therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot.” Matt Taibbi summarized it best: “Is there any way this ends well? It feels harder and harder to imagine. “

    As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website – which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from either Putin or the KGB either, sorry CIA) and has never spent one dollar on marketing – a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine.

    Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we – and others who do not comply with the established narrative – have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, it is clearly a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from “dangerous, fake information.” It’s also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website.

    In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to only accelerate in the coming year especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2023 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch with a ten foot pole, both out of fear of repercussions and because the MSM has now become a PR agency for either a political party or some unelected, deep state bureaucrat, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an information vacuum (in less than a decade, Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter will seem like one of the century’s biggest bargains) and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which established media outlets refuse to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory “fake news” condemnation.

    We are grateful that our readers have, for the 15th year in a row, realized that it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn’t “fake news.”

    * * *

    And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, almost 14-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 , 2021 and 2022.

    So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

    • In 20th spot with 540,000 views, was one of the year’s first admissions that – contrary to the prevailing propaganda – the war in Ukraine, which would end up being a $100BN+ and rising drain on taxpayer funds, was not going as widely reported; in fact it wasn’t going at all. Indeed, as we observed in “NBC Reporter Goes To Crimea, Shocks Viewers By Telling The Truth“ the Deep State’s favorite media outlet, MSNBC made the first concession that Zelensky’s goal of retaking Crime is unrealistic and dangerous. In response, the establishment reporter immediately wound up on the Ukrainian government’s kill list. But while Ukraine may have succeeded in silencing this one particular pawn, subsequent revelations and an ongoing internal power struggle inside Ukraine, all but guarantee that the war is almost over and that the Biden family’s crimes in Ukraine will sooner or later make the light of day .

    • Another topic which none in the media would discuss openly, or truthfully, for fears of retaliation from the deep state was the article that was the 19th most popular of the year. Over 543,000 readers were probably not too shocked to learn that according to famed journalist and Pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh, the infamous Nord Stream sabotage of 2022 was yet another CIA covert op, meant to incite an escalation of conflict in the Russian-Ukraine war, and to terminally halt Russian transit of natural gas to Europe. Who benefited? Why the US of course, as shipments of LNG to Europe (as the US stepped in to “generously” replace Russia as a source of gas) blew away all records. In fact, one could argue that the Ukraine war was orchestrated precisely for that one purpose: to ensure that US nat gas exports would boom for years to come courtesy of a captive market, Europe, which would be prevented from importing much cheaper Russian gas for years to come.

    • Almost 5 years after the breakout of the covid pandemic which crippled global economies and led to the injection of tens of trillions in monetary and fiscal stimulus, precipitating the biggest inflationary wave in modern history, there is still no definitive explanation of where the virus came from (or rather, escaped) and why there has been no punishment yet for those Wuhan Institute workers (and those Americans giving them instructions and funding) responsible for countless deaths and millions of businesses shut down. However, when a mysterious Chinese biolab was discovered in a remote California City,  some 543K Zerohedge readers wondered what if any connection this lab in the middle of nowhere had to i) covid, ii) China’s bioweapons industry and iii) how many more such labs exist across the US and what exactly are they doing? That was enough to make this bizarre story the 18th most popular on this website in 2023.

    • For the 17th most read article we go to a topic the mainstream media, which sadly has become a PR and Propaganda arm of the White House, the deep state and the military industrial complex, has steadfastly refused the touch namely the unprecedented corruption in the country which the Biden admin and various MIC-adjacent politicians have decided is the newest US state: Ukraine. Early in 2023, we reported that “Ukraine Is Rocked By Corruption Scandal, Wave Of Top Officials Resign: Sports Cars, Mansions & Luxury Vacations As People Suffered“, however none of that matters since none of the legacy media dared to expose just who all those tens of billions in US taxpayer funds have gone to. And now, almost a year later, Ukraine is losing the war, Zelensky and his comrades are on slowly but surely on their way out, and yet nobody knows where that $100BN+ in funds have gone. We can certainly hope that one day, long after the biggest money-laundering experiment in modern history is over, forensic historians will trace all that money which is bigger than the GDP of most nations, however – just like the Epstein client list – we doubt it will ever happen.

    • Nearly 560K readers were surprised to learn that the Magic Kingdom has become so expensive, almost nobody can afford to go there any more. Indeed, in 2023 a trip to Walt Disney World or Disneyland with the whole family has become simply too expensive leading many to ask “Where Is Everyone? Disney World “Just About Empty“ as CEO Bob Iger himself admitted customer affordability issues; add the direct consequences of price-gouging families, plus the ‘woke’ backlash, and you get one of the slowest periods at Walt Disney World in Orlando on July 4 in a decade. Meanwhile the plunge of Disney stock to a decade low coupled with South Park now mercilessly mocking the hollow shell of a woke company, spark some hope that after a wholesale sacking of the incompetent management, the slate may be wiped clean and the company can go back to doing what it does best: not grooming or propaganda but innocent entertainment for generations of children.

    • Confirming yet again that the cover up is always worse than the crime, the 15th most popular post of 2023 with over 560K hits focused on the still unfolding consequences of the biggest story of 2020, namely the unprecedented cover up of the covid “vaccine” as a “Bombshell Vax Analysis Found $147 Billion In Economic Damage, Tens Of Millions Injured Or Disabled.” And since the corrupt and captured media still refuses to do its jobs and get to the bottom of who benefited – and what were the full consequences – from rushing the biggest medical experiment in history, it is the independent media, which is increasingly performing the investigative role of the MSM, that will benefit from the corruption and capture that has dominated what was once the fourth estate but is now just a waning shadow of its former formidable self.

    • 2023 was not only a year where many cover-ups were exposed; it was also a year when “something finally broke”, and it wasn’t just US regional banks: in March, as the world was rocked by a relentless wave of bank runs, the second largest Swiss bank got Lehmaned, and failed over a long weekend, despite obtaining a government backstop just hours earlier as we detailed in “Credit Suisse To Borrow $54BN From SNB To “Pre-emptively Strengthen Liquidity,” a story which was read by 572K readers – many of whom current or former Credit Suisse customers – making it the 14th most popular story of 2023. In the end it was not enough, because once confidence in a bank is shaken it never returns, and neither do the deposits that have been pulled… and so less than a week later, Credit Suisse was no more, its existence over after 167 years, with UBS taking over (with the generous funding of Swiss taxpayers) and becoming the most systematically important European bank, one which not even all of Switzerland will be able to backstop during the next banking crisis.

    • With historic presidential elections on deck in 2024, and a repeat of the 2020 violence – where secretive Soros-funded entities funded and encouraged a bloody summer across the US  – virtually assured, it is worth recalling what Tucker Carlson reported a few months ago, namely that the catalyst behind much of the government-encouraged Black Lives Matter violence of 2020, was fake and “The Whole George Floyd Story Was A Lie“, a report which was watched and read by nearly 600K people. Unfortunately, with much of the US judicial system in Soros’ pocket, and with dozens of big city DAs seeking to decriminalize rioting and theft by the black community, more violence is guaranteed, the only question is what fake pretext the deep state will use this time.

    • On the last day of 2022 we predicted that “2023 will be the year when something finally breaks“, and three months later we were proven right, when as a result of soaring rates US regional banks suddenly found that the value of their fixed income collateral was worth far less when marked to market than the deposits it was pledged against, resulting in widespread liquidity and solvency fears, accelerating bank runs and culminating with the second Fed panic since 2008, as “Signature Bank Was Closed By Regulators; Fed, TSY, FDIC Announce Another Banking System Bailout“, a reminder to no less than 621K readers that the US financial system was as brittle and unstable as ever despite trillions in liquidity injected into the market and meant only to make the rich richer. Nearly a year later, the regional US bank zombies that would have collapsed in March live on thanks to the Fed’s BTFP facility which matures in March, and which if pulled would lead to an even greater crisis in the US banking sector. Ironically that’s also when the Fed’s Reverse Repo facility is expected to be drained to zero, so if anyone is trying to pin the date of the next financial crisis in the calendar, March increasingly looks like the prime month for that.

    • Following the start of October’s Israel-Hamas war, the bloodiest breakout of Middle-Eastern violence in decades, we said that “there is some speculation that Iran may get dragged in with various pro-Israeli hawks claiming that the Hamas attack would have only occurred with explicit Iranian backing.” Just a few hours later this was confirmed as we reported in “Iran Helped Hamas “Plot Israel Attack Over Several Weeks”, Gave Green Light“, the 11th most popular article of 2023, which revealed that “Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday”, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah. But while the US would have swiftly retaliated in the past, if only to convince the world that it is still a military superpower, so far the Biden regime has remained silent, terrified of a military response, but not because of some newfound appreciation for state sovereignty or non-intervention, but simply because the president is afraid what a surge in oil and gas prices – which would be an inevitable outcome of Iran getting dragged into the war – would mean for his re-election chances.

    • In case you didn’t figure it out by now, 2023 was a year when many cover ups were exposed, and among the most flagrant ones was the leak of the Nashville transsexual shooter’s manifesto, which as we revealed in “Biden’s DOJ suppressed the Nashville Transkiller’s manifesto after learning they used Democrat talking points to justify targeting white Christian children“, which with over 670K reads was the 10th most popular article of 2023, revealed that Biden’s DOJ suppressed the Nashville Transkiller’s manifesto after learning it used Democrat talking points to justify targeting white Christian children. Of course, the DOJ never had any such qualms when revealing motives from the other side of the political aisle, confirming yet again that there is nothing too low for Biden’s weaponized Department of Injustice to stoop below, not even death.

    • Continuing our trek through the top 10 stories of 2023, we next look at the immediate aftermath of the Israel-Hamas war, where just hours after the violence had broken out, the world quickly revealed how little it thought of the Biden administration, and US “superpower status”, when as 731K readers found out, “Arab Leaders Refuse To Meet Biden As Protests Rage Around The World.” The title is self-explanatory – and an embarrassment to Americans – even if said Americans deserve to know just who is the puppet-master pulling the strings of the senile, demented occupant of the White House.

    • Remember when merely breathing the world “Ivermectin” in the aftermath of the covid pandemic was enough to blacklist you from social media and polite society in perpetuity, and get you branded as a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist for life? Well, if we have learned anything in recent years, is that the time from when an idea emerges as a “conspiracy” to when it is fully confirmed even by the powers that be has shrunk to mere months, and as we reported in “FDA Drops Ivermectin Bombshell“, our 8th most popular article of 2023, nearly 740K readers learned from an FDA lawyer that doctors were, in fact, free to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID-19. The case had been brought by three doctors who alleged the FDA unlawfully interfered with their practice of medicine with the statements. Then a federal judge dismissed the case in 2022, prompting an appeal. “The fundamental issue in this case is straightforward. After the FDA approves the human drug for sale, does it then have the authority to interfere with how that drug is used within the doctor-patient relationship? The answer is no,” Jared Kelson, representing the doctors, told the appeals court. Hilariously, the FDA on Aug. 21, 2021, wrote on Twitter “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” In retrospect it was right: it turned out most people who believed the government’s lies were at best sheep.

    • Tragedy rocked the town of East Palestine, Ohio last February when the derailment of a train carrying toxic and carcinogenic compounds resulted in a historic chemical spill and led  to large sections of the town becoming unlivable as reported in “Ohio’s Apocalyptic Chemical Disaster Rages On“, the 7th most popular story of 2023 with over 755K views. The spill immediately became a political flashpoint, with Donald Trump visiting East Palestine and handed out Make America Great Again hats, telling the crowd: “You are not forgotten.” Unfortunately, the town has certainly been forgotten by the current “president” who to this day has refused to visit the town despite countless promises he would do just that.

    • In many ways, 2023 was the year when alternative, independent media truly took over, and it wasn’t just X/Twitter that dominated the news, while being the news: it is also the year when traditional media fell apart, such as the various anchors fleeing the sinking ship that is CNN, but the most vivid example was Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News – the channel that was only relevant because of Tucker’s segment – and the launch of his own media organization. As so many others have found out, media personalities were only allowed to truly speak their minds when separated from the corporations where they operated previously (so as not to offend advertisers), something Tucker understood and laid out in one of his most bombshell interviews, explaining why “Our System Is Collapsing In Real Time“, which was also our 6th most read article with 762K reads.

    • Finally, turning to the top 5 articles of 2023, it should not be a surprise that with almost 810K reads, the 5th most popular post of the year was the news that – with the Ukraine war fading from collective consciousness – a major new war had broken out in the Middle East, something we reported in “Israel In State of War With Hamas After Palestinian Militants Launch Unprecedented Incursion.”

    • Remember what we said about coverups? Well, it took less than three years from when Hunter Biden’s notebook emerged in the media – with the entire deep state apparatus defending it at first, and 51 former CIA spies vowing it was Russian propaganda – until all of its official contents were leaked as we reported in “Trove Of Nearly 10K Hunter Biden Laptop Photos, Docs Appear On Organized Website.” Among the contents were not only documented acts of criminal debauchery, but also proof that the Biden family was engaged in flagrant influence peddling on behalf of such foreign regimes as Ukraine and China. Alas, the US justice system is now so corrupt and broken, and the media so captured, this news has seen barely any coverage and follow through; and meanwhile the gutless republican cowards in Congress still refuse to impeach the president despite ample proof – courtesy of his son – of his countless transgressions.

    • With over 875K reads, and clocking in at third spot for 2023, was one of the biggest shockers of the year: the decision by Murdoch and Fox News to sack their only true star, Tucker Carlson; And for what? For daring to speak to truth one too many times as we reported in “Tucker Carlson Fired By Lachlan Murdoch; Here’s What We Know.” In retrospect, it will be the best thing that happened to Tucker, whose new venture already has well over 100,000 annual subs and growing at a torrid pace. Meanwhile, the biggest winner may well be the US population, which will have one more source of honest, accurate news while the malignant influence of conventional media fades with each passing day.

    • The second most popular story of 2023 was also a freak one: the short-lived attempt by Putin’s formerly close friend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner private mercenary force, to stage a military coup, yet not really a coup meant to overthrow Putin but instead targeted some of Prigozhin’s personal enemies in the top ranks of Russia’s army. The “Wagner rebellion” as it became known – and which came shortly after Prigozhin’s forces managed to smack down a Ukraine attempt at a counteroffensive earlier this summer – lasted all of a day or so, before it all died down as reported in “Prigozhin ‘Exiled’ To Belarus In Exchange For Peace, Criminal Charges Dropped: What Was This All About?” the second most popular article of 2023 with nearly 900K reads. To this day there is no coherent explanation behind Prigozhin’s actions, and there probably won’t be: two months later the plane carrying the mercenary chief exploded. It’s still unclear why, but the most amusing theory was the one offered by Putin himself, who claimed that “Wagner leadership got drunk and/or high, then set off hand grenades during the flight.”

    • Finally, the top post of 2023 was one which also closed the loop on the top story of 2020: with nearly 1.1 million reads, the most popular article of the year was the “CDC Finally Releasing VAERS Safety Monitoring Analyses For COVID Vaccines.” While the article offered lots of data, the bottom line is that the vaccine which the CDC claimed was safe and effective was neither safe nor effective.

    And with all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2024, and the next decade?

    We don’t know: as our frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try, despite repeat baseless allegations that we constantly forecast the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2023 when one year after the entire world realized just how clueless the Fed had been when it called the most crushing inflation in two generations “transitory”, it was Wall Street’s reputation turn to hit new lows as even Bloomberg listed “Everything Wall Street Got Wrong in 2023“, in the process adding strategists and analysts to the clueless ranks of economists, conventional media and the professional polling class, not to mention all those “scientists” who made a mockery of both the scientific method and the “expert class” with their catastrophically bungled response to the covid pandemic, and then the response to the response, and so on… We merely observe, find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it.

    We do know, however, that with central banks having flip-flopped yet again, and pivoting dovishly even as inflation still rages at 4%, wages – especially for unionized and government workers – growing at a double digit pace, home prices and rents about to lurch even higher, and overall prices stuck at all time highs, the most likely outcome is another surge in inflation and Jerome Powell becoming not the second coming of saint Paul Volcker but of satan Arthur Burns.

    But even ignoring the impact on prices, one can’t just undo 15 years of central bank mistakes by wishing them away (even if it is an election year); after all it is the trillions and trillions in monetary stimulus, the helicopter money, the MMT, and the endless deficit funding by central banks that made the current runaway inflation possible, the current attempt to stuff 15 years of toothpaste back into the tube, will be a catastrophic failure.

    We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will again be revealed as completely naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone’s guess. But, as we have promised – and delivered – every year for the past 15, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

    Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2024, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2023 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day – usually with a cynical smile (and with the CIA clearly on our ass now) – helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that defines every aspect of our increasingly broken economic, political and financial system.

    AI is not completely useless

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 21:55

  • South Korea Opposition Leader Stabbed In Neck, Attacker Arrested
    South Korea Opposition Leader Stabbed In Neck, Attacker Arrested

    South Korea’s main opposition party leader Lee Jae-myung was attacked by an unidentified assailant during a visit to the southern coastal city of Busan and rushed to a hospital after he was bleeding from his neck.

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    Lee was the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidential election in 2022. He has also been faced various charges for alleged graft, which he has denied.

    Witnesses said said the suspect had approached Lee for an autograph and pretending to be a supporter. He then attacked him with a weapon that was between 8 and 12 inches long.

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    The alleged attacker has been arrested.

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    The extent of his injuries are unknown…

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    President Yoon Suk Yeol expressed deep concern and over the incident “that should have never taken place,” Yonhap cited a presidential spokesperson as saying.

    Developing…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 21:50

  • China Equities Holding Onto Hopes For A Turnaround
    China Equities Holding Onto Hopes For A Turnaround

    By Garfield Reynolds, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analyst

    China stocks may be poised for higher ground after a dismal year.

    Chinese investors may be glad to say goodbye to 2023, given the serial disappointments they faced during a year that opened with a wave of optimism that the nation’s abrupt reopening from Covid curbs will lead to the sort of robust recovery other major economies had experienced when they ended such restrictions. There were indeed strong initial surges for activity and for asset prices, but those soon dissolved into a relentless downhill slide.

    This year is opening with a gloomier tone — house sales continue to decline, while China’s official manufacturing and services PMIs each came in below expectations for December. But perhaps that provides a clearer path for the bleeding to stop, and for some sort of sustained turnaround to develop. Indeed, almost a third of 417 respondents to Bloomberg’s latest survey say they will increase their China investments over the next 12 months.

    For equities, in particular, the Shanghai Composite has now bounced off of the 2,800 era on three occasions over the past two years. And the China Composite PMI is holding above the 50 line to remain in expansion territory, even if only slightly above.

    For China and the wider Asia-Pacific, the question of whether the region’s biggest economy can put the worst behind it looms as a key one for 2024, and perhaps even beyond.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 21:25

  • Student Loan Borrowers Stage A "Massive Student Debt Strike"
    Student Loan Borrowers Stage A “Massive Student Debt Strike”

    Authored by Sam Bourgi via CreditNews.com,

    It’s been three months since the federal government resumed student loan payments, but many borrowers have refused to pay a single penny…

    Activists say borrowers have staged a “massive student debt strike” as they await progress—any progress—on the White House’s student loan forgiveness program.

    “Faced with the impossible choice of feeding their kids, keeping a roof over their head, or throwing an average of $400 a month into the Department of Education incinerator, borrowers are rightly choosing to keep themselves and their families financially afloat,” said Astra Taylor, co-founder of Debt Collective, a union advocating on behalf of debtors.

    According to the Department of Education, 22 million borrowers had payments due in October but only 13 million settled their bills.

    That means 40% of borrowers failed to make payments.

    Creditnews reported in September that the resumption of student loan payments would hit American families hard, but very few expected four out of ten borrowers to miss payments. Before the pandemic, about one-quarter of student loan borrowers were dodging payments.

    Some experts think the transition back to loan repayment after more than three years of forbearance will be bumpy. As it turns out, students aren’t the only ones to blame.

    What has changed since the pandemic?

    Student loans went into forbearance in March 2020 just as Covid-era lockdowns forced millions out of work. Over that period, Americans grew accustomed to not paying back their loans and used the money to tackle other expenses like rent or grocery bills.

    Reallocating up to $500 a month to student loan payments was always going to be difficult—especially with high inflation and elevated borrowing costs.

    But according to Persis Yu, deputy executive director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, it wasn’t just borrowers who were unprepared for the October shock.

    “Neither borrowers nor the student loan system were prepared to resume repayment,” Yu told CNBC.

    “Servicers are overwhelmed and are failing to help struggling borrowers navigate the options that are available to them,” she said.

    Carolina Rodriguez of the nonprofit Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program agrees. “Servicers are having a very hard time getting people back into repayment,” she said.

    Student loan forgiveness: Reality or pipe dream?

    Many student loan borrowers are waiting for debt relief promised to them by the Biden administration, but those efforts have hit a major snag.

    President Biden initially proposed a $400 billion bailout program that would erase up to $20,000 in federal debt for roughly 40 million borrowers. The Supreme Court struck down the plan in June, claiming that the president overstepped his authority.

    Since then, the Department of Education has been working with a panel of experts to negotiate a watered-down version of the program. But even they have failed to reach a consensus so far.

    An Education Department spokesperson said the panel is on track to submit a new student debt relief proposal by May, but there’s no guarantee that it’ll get passed.

    2024 is an election year, and student loan forgiveness is a hotly debated issue, with several conservative lawmakers promising to block any attempts to erase student loans with taxpayer dollars.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 21:00

  • These Are The 20 Most Popular Neighborhoods For Potential US Homebuyers
    These Are The 20 Most Popular Neighborhoods For Potential US Homebuyers

    Location, location, location…

    This phrase has been a real estate mantra since time immemorial, and rightly so. Finding the right home is impossible without finding the right neighborhood.

    As Visual Capitalist’s Freny Fernandes details below, thousands of U.S. homebuyers scout online real estate marketplaces daily, searching for the right home. But these sites also attract window shoppers curious about the country’s nicest neighborhoods and luxurious homes.

    And so, HouseFresh has compiled the top 20 most popular neighborhoods by online interest, based on the search history of Zillow users.

    Methodology

    This study assessed sales listings from the 100 most populous cities in the U.S.

    It noted the neighborhood and page views for every house, townhome, apartment, and condo, and the number of days it had been listed on the website to calculate the average page views per day.

    Average daily views across each neighborhood were then combined and ranked to reveal the top 20 neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with fewer than 10 listings were excluded from the rankings.

    America’s Most Popular Neighborhoods by Search Interest

    In the post-pandemic world, surging housing prices have been a critical concern for American homebuyers.

    That’s likely why the most popular neighborhood—Northeast Dallas, which is highly sought-after for being in a strong market with lots of options in both size and affordability—can outperform more famous neighborhoods in viewing interest.

    Here are how different neighborhoods in the U.S. stacked up:

    Other strong cities for both first-time and second-time home buyers performed well. With affordable house values, sunny skies, large recreation spaces, and a dry climate, Phoenix had the strongest interest for a single city with three neighborhoods in the top 10: Camelback East, North Mountain, and Deer Valley.

    On the other end of the spectrum were some of the nation’s most valuable real estate markets. Los Angeles’ celebrity hub of Hollywood Hills had the highest average price per listing at $2.3 million, and was the second-most popular neighborhood in average daily views. Listings in New York’s affluent Upper East Side also drew in crowds and was the 5th most viewed neighborhood.

    The Zillow data has revealed that a neighborhood’s popularity varies depending on the viewer. While some look for affordable neighborhoods with big houses and parks, others have their eyes on the glamor of a vibrant city, irrespective of the cost.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 20:25

  • Jack Smith Disputes Trump’s Claims In Appeals Court
    Jack Smith Disputes Trump’s Claims In Appeals Court

    Authored by Allen Zhong via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Special Counsel Jack Smith Saturday urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reject President Donald Trump’s immunity and double-jeopardy claim that he will be retried for similar charges on which he has already been acquitted.

    (Left) Special Counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks in Washington on Aug. 1, 2023. (Right) Former President Donald Trump attends his trial in New York State Supreme Court in New York City on Dec. 7, 2023. (Drew Angerer, David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

    President Trump is not entitled to immunity in the election case and the criminal charges against him also didn’t violate the principle of double jeopardy, the prosecutors argued.

    Immunity for a U.S. president applies to civil liability only and not criminal, the special counsel’s office claimed.

    “The defendant, a former President, does not enjoy immunity from federal prosecution for the offenses charged in this case. Under separation-of-powers analysis, the President’s unique constitutional status provides immunity from civil liability for official conduct … but it does not render a former President immune from criminal liability when charged with violations of generally applicable federal criminal statutes,” reads the filing.

    Meanwhile, although President Trump has been acquitted after being impeached over an event connected to Jan. 6, the special counsel’s office argued that its criminal charges filed against him don’t violate the principle of double jeopardy because the only remedies in an impeachment proceeding are removal from the office and disqualification. Mr. Smith argued those likely don’t meet the term “jeopardy.”

    Even if President Trump was put into jeopardy during the impeachment proceeding, the indictment charges filed by his office are different from what President Trump was impeached for, the special counsel argued.

    Accordingly, Mr. Smith asked the appeal court to reject President Trump’s immunity and double-jeopardy defenses and affirm the district court’s ruling.

    Mr. Smith also pushed the court to rule on this promptly.

    “For the foregoing reasons, the Court should affirm the district court’s order denying the defendant’s motions to dismiss on Presidential-immunity and double-jeopardy grounds,” the prosecutors wrote. “The Government respectfully requests the Court to issue the mandate five days after the entry of judgment. Such an approach would appropriately require any party seeking further review to do so promptly.”

    Background

    Judge Tanya Chutkan for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on Dec. 1 that President Trump is not immune from prosecution in the government’s election interference case.

    In her ruling, Judge Chutkan said the office of the president “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.”

    “Former Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability,” she wrote. “Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office.”

    U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in a file photo. (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP)

    The former president appealed the ruling in the D.C. Circuit Court, which agreed to expedite the case per a request from the special prosecutor’s office.

    According to the order, President Trump’s opening brief was due by Dec. 23. The order emphasized that issues and arguments should be raised in the opening brief, discouraging new points in the reply brief for consideration.

    “The court ordinarily will not consider issues and arguments raised for the first time in the reply brief,” reads the order.

    This decision follows statements by the attorneys representing President Trump accusing the special counsel’s office of election interference in a recent appeals court filing after Mr. Smith requested to expedite the appeal so that the case can go to trial on March 4, 2024. March 4 is one day before Super Tuesday, the U.S. presidential primary election day.

    District Judge Chutkan agreed to pause the case in the district court while the appeal is pending.

    “The court agrees with both parties that Defendant’s appeal automatically stays any further proceedings that would move this case towards trial or impose additional burdens of litigation on Defendant,” she wrote. “The court hereby stays the deadlines and proceedings scheduled by its Pretrial Order.”

    She clarified that this would pause the pretrial deadlines, not vacate them.

    Jack Smith Accused of Rushing Trial

    In an apparent push for a rushed trial in the Trump case, the special counsel asked the D.C. Circuit Court and the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to rule on President Trump’s claims of presidential immunity and double jeopardy.

    The circuit court agreed to act swiftly, while the SCOTUS rejected Mr. Smith’s request for it to hear the case ahead of proceedings in the circuit court, which was widely regarded as a victory for President Trump.

    “The petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment is denied,” the highest U.S. court ruled on Dec. 22.

    President Trump’s attorneys have accused the special counsel’s office of pushing to rush the case through the courts.

    “The only coherent principle that emerges from the prosecution’s filings is based on strategic gamesmanship rather than the law: On behalf of the Biden Administration, the prosecution will do everything that it can to rush to an unconstitutional and fundamentally unfair trial to try to prevent President Trump from winning the 2024 election, which he is currently leading,” President Trump’s attorneys wrote in a court filing.

    The defense team has already accused the prosecution of being politically motivated in multiple court filings, echoing President Trump’s public speeches claiming that the indictments against him have come at the behest of President Joe Biden, his chief political rival for reelection.

    Catherine Yang, Caden Pearson, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 19:50

  • Ex-CIA Officer Says Ukraine A 'Sinking Ship' After NYT Highlights Recruitment Crisis
    Ex-CIA Officer Says Ukraine A ‘Sinking Ship’ After NYT Highlights Recruitment Crisis

    Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky issued a customary speech to the nation wherein he advanced a vision of optimism even as the already war-ravaged country is under Russian bombs and drones. Putin has said Monday that these aerial operations will “intensify”. 

    Zelensky vowed to see Ukraine transformed into an arms production powerhouse, saying in the Sunday televised speech that “next year, the enemy will feel the wrath of domestic production.”

    “Our weapons, our equipment, artillery, our shells, our drones, our naval ‘greetings’ to the enemy and at least a million Ukrainian FPV drones,” he added. “All of which we will generously use… On land, in the sky, and, of course, at sea.”

    Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP

    Speaking of the West-sponsored pilot training program, which is happening in northern Europe and in America, Zelensky claimed that Ukrainian trainees are “already mastering” F-16 jets and that they’ll “definitely” soon be seen in Ukraine’s skies to that “our enemies can certainly see what our real wrath is.”

    Friday witnessed one of the largest missile and drone strikes carried out by Russian forces since the war began, but in the wake of this Zelensky said that no matter how many “the enemy” launches, Ukrainians “will still rise.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 19:15

  • The Year That Expertise Collapsed
    The Year That Expertise Collapsed

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

    Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily.

    In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences.

    It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance.

    We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong.

    A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings.

    The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse.

    It felt like a coup d’état of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew.

    It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too.

    The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule.

    Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy.

    Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future.

    All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more—arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time.

    The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that.

    In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports.

    “She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.”

    Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X (formerly Twitter) when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids.

    He actually said this.

    As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator.

    It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks.

    They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population.

    They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities.

    One explanation comes down to the money trail.

    That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others.

    Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place.

    One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s “The Treason of the Experts,” published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great follow-up volume is Ramesh Thakur’s “Our Enemy, the Government,” which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all.

    Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today.

    We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing.

    There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people—each person a dissident in his own field—had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want.

    The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease.

    Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds?

    Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity.

    Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes.

    There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles.

    In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a U.S.-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble.

    What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society.

    Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited.

    To replace them—and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute—we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 18:40

  • USS Ford Aircraft Carrier Returning Home After Extended Deployment Protecting Israel
    USS Ford Aircraft Carrier Returning Home After Extended Deployment Protecting Israel

    The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier strike group is heading home from the Mediterranean Sea, according to a Monday announcement by the US Navy.

    It had patrolled there, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean, for months of additional, extended duty in order to provide protection for Israel and be on the ready for potential escalation, given persistent exchange of fire between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah too.

    The Navy said the USS Ford’s presence will now be replaced by the Bataan amphibious ready group, which has 2,000 Marines onboard. This ready group includes the USS Bataan, and the USS Mesa Verde and the USS Carter Hall – which are currently transiting the Red Sea, making ready to enter the Mediterranean. 

    US Navy image

    A US 6th Fleet message said the Ford will sail for home “in the coming days.” The shift could be the result of Israel newly announcing it is about to enter the “next phase” of its Gaza operations. 

    According to fresh reporting in The New York Times:

    The Israeli military announced on Monday that it will begin withdrawing several thousand troops from Gaza at least temporarily, in what would be the most significant publicly announced pullback since the war began.

    The military cited a growing toll on the Israeli economy following nearly three months of wartime mobilization with little end in sight to the fighting. Israel had been considering scaling back its operations, and the United States has been prodding it to do so more quickly as the death toll in Gaza continues to rise. More than 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war, according to local health authorities.

    Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, emphasized that the move to demobilize some soldiers did not indicate any compromise on Israel’s intention to continue fighting, and he did not mention the American requests to scale back. He indicated that some will be called back to service in the coming year. Still, the fighting remains intense across Gaza.

    There’s been recent White House pressure on Tel Aviv to dial down the intensity of the fighting amid the soaring Palestinian civilian death toll, but also as the Netanyahu governing coalition faces growing anger domestically over how it has handled the war and hostage situation especially. 

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

    The Associated Press meanwhile reviews of the US military build-up in regional waters in the wake of the Oct.7 Hamas terror attack as follows: “Since it was extended in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Ford and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier have been part of a two-carrier presence bracketing the Israel-Hamas war, underscoring U.S. concerns that the conflict will widen.” The report further notes, “The Eisenhower has recently patrolled near the Gulf of Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea waterway, where so many commercial vessels have come under attack in recent weeks.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 18:05

  • Supreme Court's John Roberts Urges "Caution" On Using Artificial Intelligence
    Supreme Court’s John Roberts Urges “Caution” On Using Artificial Intelligence

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    Artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing the legal field and will have a major impact in the future, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said in his year-end report for 2023.

    AI is already enabling people who cannot afford lawyers to find answers to questions such as how to fill out court forms, Justice Roberts said. He said AI can “increase access to justice” with tools that “have the welcome potential to smooth out any mismatch between available resources and urgent needs in our court system.”

    “But any use of AI,” he added, “requires caution and humility” because it risks “dehumanizing the law.”

    A growing number of lawyers have been using AI in their work, and several lawyers were sanctioned over the summer for including non-existent cases, put forth by AI, as citations in a brief. Some defendants have also said they or their lawyers erroneously used AI in building their cases.

    There’s also concern about courts using AI in assessing key factors about people who are charged, such as flight risk, due to “potential bias,” with studies showing “human adjudications, for all of their flaws, are fairer than whatever the machine spits out,” Justice Roberts said.

    In the report, addressed to the federal judiciary, he said that “machines cannot fully replace key actors in court,” bringing up how judges keep a close eye on the demeanor of defendants when handing down sentences.

    “Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact,” he said.

    “And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.”

    AI applications do help advance just, speedy, and inexpensive resolutions to cases, which the federal system is directed to prioritize under federal rules, but as AI evolves, courts must take care in figuring out how AI can be properly used, the chief justice said. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which sets policy for the federal courts, will be involved in that calculus, he said.

    “I am glad that they will be,” Justice Roberts wrote.

    “I predict that human judges will be around for a while. But with equal confidence I predict that judicial work—particularly at the trial level—will be significantly affected by AI. Those changes will involve not only how judges go about doing their job, but also how they understand the role that AI plays in the cases that come before them.”

    A federal appeals court in November issued a proposed rule on requiring lawyers to sign papers saying they did not use AI programs for briefs, or that if they did, then the briefs were subsequently reviewed by a human.

    The year-end reports go over “a major issue relevant to the whole federal court system,” Justice Roberts said. Before bringing up AI, he went over how the judiciary has changed over the years, including transitioning from pens to typewriters to computers.

    Justice Roberts, 68, was appointed by former President George W. Bush and began serving on the nation’s top court in 2005. A Harvard Law School graduate, he was a lawyer for 14 years before becoming a federal judge.

    The chief justice oversees the federal judiciary.

    The year-end report did not touch on ethics concerns, which include recently reported free trips provided to several justices by wealthy Americans. Democrats have been pushing for more regulation of the Supreme Court. The nation’s top court adopted its first formal ethics code in November, but critics say more oversight is needed.

    Justice Roberts, in his 2022 year-end report, called for more security for judges after attacks on several judges, while saying that Americans are free to disagree with rulings from the Supreme Court.

    In the 2021 year-end report, the justice said federal judges should improve their adherence to ethics rules after more than 100 were caught violating a rule requiring recusal in cases in which they have a financial interest.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 17:30

  • We Did It, Joe! Monthly Migrant Encounters Exceed 300,000 For First Time In US History
    We Did It, Joe! Monthly Migrant Encounters Exceed 300,000 For First Time In US History

    Happy New Year!

    The Cloward-Pivening of America continues unabated, thanks to well-funded enemies of America and an impotent (and well-lobbied) legislature. On Monday, Fox News reported that a record 302,000 encounters with illegal migrants occurred in December, which marks 785,000 encounters since Oct. 1, according to a source within Customs and Border Patrol.

    According to the report, there were ‘just’ 74,000 encounters in the same month of 2021.

    The Biden administration, meanwhile, has been deliberately downplaying of the border situation – which they created with a virtual invitation for migrants to pour into the country, after striking down several Trump-era border protections on day one.

    Fox News has also used drones to observe the scale of the border crisis, capturing footage of the mass movement of people from over 150 countries. These visuals, often underreported by other networks, present a stark reality: Border Patrol agents, significantly outnumbered, are struggling to manage the influx in key areas such as Eagle Pass, where daily crossings have reached alarming rates.

    Beyond the immediate security concerns, the long-term economic and cultural impacts of such unchecked immigration are have come into mainstream focus. For starters, the cost of managing illegal immigration could surpass the expenses that would have been incurred by more stringent border measures, such as a border wall. There’s an increasing anxiety over the strain on American taxpayers, potential budgetary imbalances, and the broader cultural implications of integrating such a large number of people into the fabric of American society.

    Last week, Elon Musk dropped a few redpills on X, showing people a chart of “the immense and growing size of illegal immigration” pushed by radical progressives in the White House that have flooded the nation with millions of migrants.

    Musk commented on a post by X user “~~datahazard~~,” who said: “Since August, there are officially more arriving each month than there are children being born to American mothers. And these are just the official encounters — we don’t know how many avoided detection.”

    Illegal immigrants outpacing US births reminds us of a comment from Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who stated at a recent debate that the “Great Replacement Theory is not some grand, right-wing conspiracy theory,” but rather a “basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

    Can’t wait to see Biden’s about-face on this, followed by no actual changes, as the 2024 election heats up…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 16:55

  • America The ________
    America The ________

    By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

    Regardless of the fact that I mocked making “year-end” predictions (2023 Predictions) last week, it is a good time to think about the year ahead. As I struggled to put my thoughts in a coherent (or at least semi-coherent) framework, one thing kept popping into my head. Whether I was thinking about inflation, debt, taxes, supply chains, the global economy, war, markets, etc., one over-riding thought kept popping into my head, over and over: many things will boil down to how America acts, perceives itself, and is perceived by others.

    Maybe that is the case every year, but it hasn’t resonated the way it does for me as we approach 2024. How we fill in the blank (in America the ______) will determine so many things this year. With over 330 million people, 50 states, and countless allies and enemies (and those in between) across the globe, America won’t likely be defined as any one thing. But how it is defined will play a crucial role in how the economy (domestic and global) and markets evolve over the course of the year.

    In any case, how will the “blank” be filled in this year?

    America the Divided

    There are lots of ways for that “blank” to be filled in, but unfortunately, “divided” is high on my list. For years, issues no longer seem “grey” or “complicated.” There is an “easy” solution to every issue or problem. It just happens that one portion of the population thinks that the answer is one extreme, and another large segment of the population thinks that the “obvious” answer is the other extreme. There seems to be little ground for compromise or for addressing the pros and cons of each issue and thinking about optimal solutions.

    As we head into an election year, that divisiveness seems to be getting more rather than less apparent. I went to ChatGPT to try to get some thoughts on the upcoming election. According to ChatGPT:

    “Most Americans do not seem enthusiastic about a potential rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. Public polling indicates a general dissatisfaction with both candidates.”

    I am not sure how we have created a system that seems likely to create a rematch of an election that people really don’t want to see. Maybe that is just my impression, but it does seem to be supported. Problems that could be caused by increased “divisiveness” include:

    • Shutdowns in DC. Failure to Pay our debt (though I don’t think that is a 2024 issue given what was done with the Debt Ceiling in 2023). All problems for the economy and for our markets. I remain convinced that “something broke” this year after the debt ceiling and shutdown negotiations seemed even more intractable than usual. The NRSROs (colloquially known as rating agencies) highlighted the problems that are obvious to everyone about the trajectory of our debt and spending. The ratings actions aren’t a big deal in their own right, but they make it harder for people to ignore the obvious issues. We’ve discussed in past T-Reports that while Treasuries are still safe, they just don’t seem quite as safe as before (kind of like the concept of different orders of infinity). More theoretical than anything, but each future wave of doubt will push yields more than they did last year. If sentiment and positioning could take the 10-year to 5% this year, what will happen the next time the market fixates on this risk?

    • How our allies commit to us.

      • How NATO coalesced around the Russian invasion was nothing short of amazing. Any friction was put aside and a comprehensive, multinational effort was put into effect. That has been fraying at the edges and America’s commitment is being questioned by some (at least to anyone who spends time on social media).

      • Israel’s war with Hamas has an almost “Monday Morning Quarterback” type of feel. While I am not comparing arguing over whether a team should have gone for it on fourth down or not to the loss of lives, it seems slightly weird to me that so many people have such vocal opinions on how the war should be prosecuted. We were not the ones attacked. We are not the ones facing an enemy that is still capable and seems committed to launching similar attacks in the future if it is left as a viable force. This is an enemy that purposefully places civilians in harm’s way (against Geneva Convention rules) as a key component of their defense strategy. I do not know how this war should be prosecuted. What is right or wrong? But I suspect that at least some people in other countries will question whether the U.S. has done enough to control (or attempt to control) many of their actions.

      • It may well be more difficult over time for “allies” to commit to “us” as “we” become more divided internally.

    • Can our “Enemies” use this against us?

      • There was likely some amount of “meddling” with prior elections and there is without a doubt a lot of misinformation being spread by our adversaries to sway public opinion. With AI, it seems more than plausible that the social media “bots” will get better and better at getting that information distributed while being less and less obvious that they are “bots” and not people. Deepfakes and other technologies will only make it easier to spread misinformation. The realization that the nation so often seems to get quickly divided into two camps (apparently heavily influenced by social media) is likely to ramp up efforts by those who want to sway the population one way or the other (presumably by outside actors, but they could be domestic too).

    As we enter 2024, I fear that America the Divided is the biggest risk that we all face and a lot of pressure will be exerted by various groups (domestic and international) to try to force this issue. The fact that this is an election year makes an already compelling target/opportunity even that much more attractive for those who wish to push us in this direction.

    America the Great (Geopolitically)

    If America the Divided is the biggest risk, let’s look at the potential for the “blank” to be filled in with Great, or Global Leaders, or something else indicating that America is helping to drive nations across the globe in a free, democratic, and legal direction.

    Could we re-emerge as the nation that everyone literally has to follow? General (ret.) Spider Marks is adamant that the world is best when America leads from the front. There were some positive signs. America led the effort to get NATO support for Ukraine. The U.S. is leading the way to protect shipping in the Middle East. America is also a staunch supporter of Taiwan, which is crucial to the overall global support of Taiwan.

    There are reasons to be optimistic, but some things really concern me:

    From “Pariah State” to please produce more oil. I’m talking about Saudi Arabia here, not Venezuela. We did have leadership that claimed that they wanted to make the Saudis a “Pariah State,” but I don’t think that any leader ever specifically said that about Venezuela (though the sentiment seems to be there on that front too). “We” have turned a somewhat blind eye to Iran “allegedly” selling far more oil than they should be selling based on the sanctions in place. It may be difficult to “lead” when we’ve exposed our inflation fears as a weakness. My view is that we must do more to encourage a realistic plan to produce more than enough energy to be self-sufficient for decades to come, while building out a more sustainable energy ecosystem (both on the use and production side of the equation). Until we do that, our weakness may be exploited. While I’ve stuck to “energy” here, virtually everything we need in terms of rare earths and critical minerals could be substituted for energy (and the processing of them remains outside of our control).

    We’ve kicked the can too far. Some of what is going on in the Middle East seems to be occurring because “we” collectively across the globe preferred “kicking the can” to facing truly difficult decisions. I am also increasingly convinced that the U.S. will rue the day that we accepted “One Country, Two Systems” as a viable policy! What the heck does that really mean? It is very complex, but we’ve seen the power of social media and its ability to trounce complexity. There are many “domains of war,” and increasingly social media is one of them (and one that we don’t seem as adept at as some of our adversaries). For some very good reasons, the U.S. doesn’t spread disinformation as the main example, but that doesn’t help us win.

    There is a chance that America really re-emerges as THE global superpower, which would be great for the domestic economy and markets, and should spur growth globally. But America the Divided seems more likely to win.

    America the Great (Economically)

    I was also thinking of America the Clever, America the Ingenuity Leader (but that was too wordy), or even America the Creative.

    Artificial Intelligence. While I like to think in terms of “more and more computing power, applied to more and more data” to drive analysis and decision making, I’ll stick with AI for now since it is all the rage.

    • The opportunities are immense, and the U.S. is a leader. Collectively our Geopolitical Intelligence Group, especially General (ret.) Groen, is involved in policy making and thinks that the U.S. is headed down a viable path. Protective but not overly restrictive.

    • The costs (especially in getting data into usable formats) may slow progress, but this trend that started in 2023 as a crucial investment theme will continue. If (or when) the efficiencies are realized, we could see all stocks trade at higher multiples. So far, the winning has been concentrated in the hands of the current providers (rather than the users), but that distribution should change if it can deliver on the promise.

    • Boundless creativity versus state sponsored programs. One of the big bets on AI will be whether a “bunch” of for-profit enterprises (people trying to create their own wealth) will outperform a heavily funded and very directed effort in countries like China. I’m willing to bet on creativity and ingenuity in that competition and that self-interest will beat state-interest. The funding is enormous, but it can be plodding.

    Space. Another area of opportunity (and threats), which we will discuss in more detail in our next X-Report (early January).

    • Blockchain. In all likelihood, there will be so-called “spot” ETFs for Bitcoin in the U.S. by the end of the first quarter of 2024, if not sooner. The resurgence in price of these assets is helping attract attention, but even while cryptocurrencies languished, the development of tools and products using blockchain continued (less funded and in relative obscurity), but this could be an emerging sector of growth.

    • Biotechnology. Outside of my “comfort” zone, but for an area that held such promise from a science and investment standpoint during the height of ZIRP and FOMO, I still see a lot of promise in the science, at much cheaper valuations in most cases.

    • Semi-conductors. I applaud the efforts to build foundries domestically and attempts to own and control these crucial components of our daily life and future. If anything, more needs to be done to speed this along.

    If the economy and markets are to do exceptionally next year, it will likely be due to the creativity, inventiveness, and even genius of engineers and developers!

    I am concerned that the cost versus benefit equation may slow things down in the quarters ahead. The potential wave of IPOs and secondary offerings from growth companies could weigh on prices (it could be a lot of supply), but I think that whether it is this year or next year, betting on this makes sense!

    America the Consumption Nation

    I was thinking that this could also be America the Greedy, America the Credit Nation, or America the Irresponsible, but it is the start of the year, so I should at least start with a positive title for this section.

    I expect that the American consumer will slow down, the job market will be less robust, widespread/large pay gains will be a thing of the past, and the “soft landing” crowd will be wrong. It might not be a “hard” landing, but look for the American consumer, who has done their “duty” above and beyond all expectations, to finally slow down. That will help yields, but not enough to keep stocks at or near their highs.

    America the Divided Creator

    My base case is that two main themes will drive the economy and markets this year. We will flip-flop between them. Whenever “Divided” is the word of the day (for an extended period), yields will be inclined to move higher, and stocks will trend down as companies delay decisions or make very tentative commitments due to too much uncertainty. Whenever everyone is chatting about “Creativity” (could be AI, Space, etc.), markets will do well.

    I see no reason, sadly, why 2024 won’t be as challenging as 2023 was from a capital allocation standpoint (at least for those who don’t make a decision on January 1 and keep it for the year without having to justify themselves to anyone), but I do think that how America is defined will be a big driver. That will encompass (and influence) things like the Fed, inflation, supply chains, global relationships, etc.

    Next week we can return to a more “granular” analysis, but at the start of the year, “going big” picture and thinking about America the ______ is a good way to frame your thoughts. I suspect that this will be an easy one to revisit as the year and the election progress!

    I wish you all a happy and successful 2024 and thanks again for all of your help and support in 2023!

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 16:20

  • Iran Dispatches Warship To Red Sea, Houthis Warn Of "Repercussions" After US Forces Kill Rebels During Maersk Ship Attack
    Iran Dispatches Warship To Red Sea, Houthis Warn Of “Repercussions” After US Forces Kill Rebels During Maersk Ship Attack

    Regional instability risks mount in the Red Sea following the Iran-backed Houthi attack on a Maersk container ship on Sunday. US Forces responded with attack helicopters that eliminated three small boats and ten rebels.

    After the skirmish, a spokesperson for the Yemeni militia group warned of “consequences and repercussions” for the US aggression. 

    Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea confirmed on the Yemeni TV channel Al-Masirah that US forces killed ten of its fighters. 

    “US enemy forces attacked three boats belonging to the Yemeni Naval Forces, which led to the martyrdom and the loss of ten people from the Naval Forces,” Sarea said.

    The spokesman said its fighters were “performing their humanitarian and moral duty” to deter Israel-related commercial vessels from transiting the Red Sea “in solidarity and support for the Palestinian people.”

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    He said the US “bears the consequences” for attacking and killing ten of its fighters, adding that the “military movements in the Red Sea to protect Israeli ships will not prevent Yemen (Houthi militia) from performing its humanitarian duty in support of Palestine and Gaza.”

    Perhaps even more problematically from a global escalation perspective, Iran dispatched a warship to the Red Sea.

    The Alborz destroyer traversed the Bab El-Mandeb strait, a narrow choke point between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, on Monday, Iranian state media said, adding that Iran’s naval fleet has been operating in the area “to secure shipping lanes, repel pirates, among other purposes since 2009.”

    The move appears to represent a clear challenge to the US-led maritime security force established last month to protect ships from attack in the region.

    Earlier in the day, US Central Command (CENTCOM) reported it received a distress call from a Singapore-flagged Maersk container ship named “Hangzhou.” 

    CENTCOM wrote on X that a missile hit Hangzhou in the Red Sea. 

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    CENTCOM said attack helicopters from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Gravely were quickly deployed and eliminated three small boats and Houthi militants.

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    What’s clear is that tensions across the Bab al-Mandab Strait are only worsening despite the Pentagon’s Operation Prosperity Guardian mission to shield commercial vessels from attacks in the Red Sea. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 15:45

  • Corruption, Chaos, & Conflict – The Fourth Turning Erupts In 2024
    Corruption, Chaos, & Conflict – The Fourth Turning Erupts In 2024

    Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

    “Americans today are increasingly polarized, as if they constitute two separate nations.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

    “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” – Thomas Paine – The American Crisis

    Thomas Paine wrote these words 247 years ago, in the most historic year in our history – 1776. That was during the first American Fourth Turning. It’s not a coincidence we are now in the midst of our fourth Crisis period in U.S. history, as they arrive like clockwork every 80 years or so, the length of a long human life. Paine’s American Crisis began in 1773, ignited by the Boston Tea Party and the British reaction to this revolutionary act of defiance. Our current Millennial Crisis was triggered by the Federal Reserve/Wall Street/Government created financial disaster in 2008 and subsequent outrageously desperate, totalitarian, un-Constitutional, extreme acts designed to keep the ruling class in power, while impoverishing and enslaving the masses in a surveillance state techno-gulag.

    The polarization and fractures have become too deep to repair. The country, and the western world in general, are hurtling towards a darkening abyss of civil conflict, financial collapse, global war, societal chaos, and loss of life on a scale grander than WW2, the Civil War, and the American Revolution combined. Our technological advancements have outstripped our ability to intelligently, thoughtfully, and humanly, use this power for the benefit of future generations. The destructive deficiencies of human nature, such as: greed, desire for power, hatred, arrogance, resentment, and an unlimited supply of self-delusion, continue to plague our world, as only the most power-hungry psychopaths rise to the highest levels of government, business, religion, and finance.

    The immense technological power in the hands of egocentric, megalomaniacal, sadistic, billionaires and their highly paid toadies, lackeys, and apparatchiks, inserted throughout the media, government, academia, banking, and corporations, has pushed the world to the brink of Armageddon. We are entering the sixteenth year of this Fourth Turning. Based on history, we can expect a climax of this Crisis in the 2030-to-2032-timeframe. The path to that climax is guaranteed to be violent and unforgiving.

    Neil Howe, in his new book – The Fourth Turning Is Here – tries to decipher the likely path of the remainder of this Fourth Turning. Having read the original Fourth Turning, his joint project with William Strauss (who died in 2007), in 2004, I was curious to read Howe’s update on their generational theory of history. I met Howe for lunch in 2012 during the Occupy Wall Street protests and he correctly assessed that movement as a meaningless left-wing attempt to push their communist like agenda.

    The first book, written in 1997, showed no favor towards the right or left. It was a no-nonsense assessment of economic facts and historical precedents. There were no political agendas, which I now attribute to Strauss’ influence, because Howe certainly lets his political views creep into his writings. This isn’t surprising, as his consulting business is dependent upon Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. He owes his living to the establishment; therefore he won’t shit where he eats.

    Howe’s current left leaning political views seep into his current tome. He quotes Zelensky as some sort of patriotic leader, while portraying Putin as a thug, without giving any context regarding the 2014 CIA initiated overthrow of a democratically elected Ukraine president. He bought the covid scamdemic hook, line, and sinker, with no skepticism about the coordinated lockdowns and false narratives about masks, social distancing, and vaccines that never worked, but continue to kill. He believes the climate change bullshit narrative.

    His tone regarding Trump is clearly negative and he believes the 2020 election was perfectly legitimate. He expounds about the January 6 “armed” insurrection, without one word about the FBI, Pelosi, and the Washington establishment planning, coordinating, and exacerbating the fake “insurrection”. His brain-dead accusations of violence by Trump supporters, while completely ignoring the murder and mayhem created by the BLM and ANTIFA terrorists, clearly reveals his allegiances.

    Be that as it may, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His acumen regarding possible scenarios and outcomes are well thought out. Howe makes some very interesting predictions regarding the remainder of this Fourth Turning, providing some very dark possibilities, along with some more unlikely optimistic outcomes. His research reveals Americans think the American dream is no longer attainable, civil discord will destroy our democratic institutions, and our global standing is in decline. All three fears are legitimate and coming to fruition as we speak. Howe captures the current situation in this passage:

    “In the middle of a Crisis era, the social mood has reached an unstable balance of hope, fear, and dizzying uncertainty. Americans are like a compressed spring at the point of maximum potential energy. Internally secure yet externally threatened, they are ready for propulsive public action.”   – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here

    Events beyond their control are leading them towards their rendezvous with destiny and the speed has begun to accelerate, with 2024 slated to be a historic date in history, on par with 1776, 1861, and 1941. The exact events which will make 2024 historic are obscured by a dense fog of uncertainty, but we can make some educated guesses based upon our current economic circumstances, Biden’s open border purposeful invasion, upcoming elections wrought with fraud, ongoing treasonous governmental and judicial operations, and deepening global conflicts already underway.

    Of the three possible paths laid out by Howe, the most likely appears to be the animosity between factions eventually leads to armed conflict within the country. Political dominance by one party is highly unlikely, with the country rallying around the flag against an external enemy. It is more likely our many external foes will take advantage of our internal conflict to further weaken our global hegemony. All paths lead to war at this point.

    I sense the delusional masses, still entranced by their electronic gadgets, unending access to debt, NFL fantasy leagues, and oblivious to the lessons of history, are frantically trying to fend off reality by shopping, eating out, partying at bars, and pretending all is well. Critically assessing their true situation is too painful for these snowflakes and gender bending enthusiasts. Their virtue signaling wokeness is about to meet the brutal reality of a violent Fourth Turning climax.

    “And however much these paths may seem to differ from one another, they all move toward the same destination. They all push the nation toward a violent struggle requiring maximum mobilization. They all culminate in the Ekpyrosis, which will bring the era into a decisive consolidation, climax, and resolution.” – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here

    The drivers of this Fourth Turning, as documented in 1997, continue to be debt, civic decay, and global disorder. They have propelled this Crisis since the outset in 2008 and are accelerating towards an explosive collision in 2024. The national debt at the outset of this Fourth Turning was $10 trillion. It had taken 219 years to accumulate $10 trillion of debt, with the majority amassed during this century. It has taken just fifteen years to pile an additional $24 trillion of debt on the backs of Americans and future generations, if there are future generations.

    This doesn’t even take into account the $200 trillion of unfunded welfare and pension obligations tallied up by your government leaders. At the same time, the Federal Reserve increased their balance sheet from $900 billion to $9 trillion. With the rapid rise of interest rates in the last year, if banks were required to mark their assets to market, as they did prior to 2009, the entire banking industry, including the Too Big To Fail Wall Street behemoths, would be insolvent, along with the Federal Reserve. Does this seem sustainable to you?

    Luckily for our teetering empire of debt, delusions, and deceptions, they can change the rules whenever it suits their purposes to extend and pretend until it all “suddenly” collapses, like a vaxxed soccer player on the pitch. Of course, the U.S. is not alone in being burdened with unpayable debt and an unsustainable financial system. China and the EU countries are also insolvent and issuing debt to service their existing debt.

    The only major global power without a large debt problem is Russia, with a debt to GDP ratio below 30%, while the U.S.- 120%, EU – 90%, Japan – 220%, and China – 80% have accumulated perilous levels of debt and still growing. These debt levels and the domestic implications of unsustainable economies will lead shamelessly corrupt politicians and even dictators like Xi to provoke foreign conflict in order to distract their populations from their dire economic circumstances. A wag the dog type false flag is just around the corner.

    An man-made banker created economic disaster ignited this powder keg of debt in 2008, and the “solutions” rolled out by the ruling elites since have been designed to extend, pretend, and bend the minds of the masses, while fostering the perpetual pillaging campaign by the billionaire oligarchs who really run this world. The plebs have been destroyed by the relentless inflation purposefully created by Powell and his fellow central banker puppets of the Deep State, while the lords of finance have reaped billions in ill-gotten riches.

    The “Haves”, who control the financial markets, media, and politicians, are ecstatic with the current paradigm, as the stock market hits new highs every day, while average Americans go deeper into debt to keep up with the Joneses, pay the rent, and put some food on the table. The U.S. is nothing more than a sophisticated technological looting operation at this point, as we await the Great Taking to be initiated by the oligarchs as their final solution.

    The Great Taking is David Rogers Webb’s warning to those not on the inside about the coming seizure of all your assets (stocks, bonds, savings) by your own government in the name of some new contrived national emergency. You will sacrifice your life savings for the good of the country (aka Deep State). At this point it’s just a matter of which comes first, The Taking, Global war, or Civil chaos caused by the ongoing election fraud. They are all coming and will merge into a category 5 hurricane of hell for the nation and the world.

    The Deep State continues its complete control over who gets “elected”/selected in this country, as they use the captured judicial system as a cudgel to crush the rule of law and our Constitutional rights. The Soros selected District Attorneys, Mayors, Governors, Judges, Secretaries of States, and various other low-level captured bureaucrats, are doing what they were selected to do – destroy the country’s social fabric and create a chaotic disintegration of our community norms.

    A populace propagandized into a woke communist ideology and prodded into a buy now, pay later mentality, is unwilling or unable to accept that LATER has arrived. They will pay, one way or another. Multiple bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are all poised to pop, with the slightest provocation from a global and/or domestic blunder. We have now positioned our naval forces in the highly dangerous waters in the Middle East. Militarily supporting Israel and Ukraine has done wonders for our GDP, but it seems we are running out of ammo to defend our own country, as the invasion of our southern border accelerates. We are currently provoking armed conflict in Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Ukraine, and Russia.

    All it will take is one lucky missile or unexpected hyper-sonic missile and our vaunted navy will see a vessel or two go to the bottom of the Red Sea. Then all hell will break loose. The rhetoric, threats and accusations of atrocities are ramping up, along with armed conflict across the Middle East. With the raging religious hatreds and centuries old struggles for land and power coming to a head, it will just take one of these psychopaths to ignite a global conflict. Meanwhile, China is biding its time for when they make their ultimate move on Taiwan. That would really roll a grenade into the party.

    Financial markets have ignored the worsening global conflict thus far, but what happens when Americans start dying in large numbers? If the markets are at all time highs based upon expectations of a strong thriving economy in 2024, why is the Fed signaling multiple interest rate cuts in 2024, regional banks are desperately clinging to the Fed’s emergency bailout fund, commercial real estate is collapsing, housing has peaked, gold is hitting all-time highs, credit card debt is at all-time highs, layoffs are increasing, and the number of working age citizens is in free fall due to vaxx deaths and disabilities?

    But buy stocks because the Wall Street shysters and their media mouthpieces tell you it’s the best time to buy. The only question at this point is what additional grain of sand will cause the sand pile to collapse. Will it be a foreign war, or will it be a civil war within our borders or something no one has even considered? I know most people dismiss the possibility of civil war, believing there aren’t enough people willing to risk their lives for a just cause. Neil Howe seems to think it is probable.

    “Roughly half of all Americans think a civil war is likely. And a growing number of social scientists agree that the United States now fits the checklist profile of a country at risk. Trust in the national government is in steep decline. Check. Respect for democratic institutions is weakening. Check. A heavily armed population has polarized into two evenly divided partisan factions. Check. Each faction embodies a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and urban-versus-rural identity. Each wants its country to become something the other detests. And each fears the prospect of the other taking power. Check, check, and check.” – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here

    Virtually no one believes civil war is possible, just as no one expected a civil war in 1860, as the presidential election approached. Truthfully, the civil war has already begun, but only those on the left, in conjunction with the FBI, CIA, Big Media, and other governmental agencies, are aggressively fighting. They are vigorously at war against the American people by rigging elections, arresting opposition leaders, and discarding the U.S. Constitution.

    The good guys have thus far been too civil. But the simmering anger of heavily armed rural, red state Americans is close to boiling over. All the signs are there, awaiting a triggering event for this undeclared war to engulf the nation. At this point a number of possible triggering events are possible.

    If David Webb is correct and those in power initiate the Great Taking, the level of violence in reaction would be unprecedented in U.S. history. Maybe that is their plan. Biden and his handlers could use this event to declare a national emergency, suspending the presidential election because they were going to lose, and instituting martial law. Their attempt to lockdown the country and use the military against civilians would surely result in massive bloodshed, as local animosities would result in assassinations, wholesale slaughter of those considered disloyal to whichever side controls the high ground in that community. Previously petty disputes would suddenly become lethal disputes.

    Even if the presidential election is held in November, I don’t believe either side will accept the outcome. We know the Democrats and their Deep State co-conspirators will cheat, rig and once again try to steal the election. If they fail, they will unleash their BLM, ANTIFA terrorist arm into the streets to create chaos as an excuse to not hand over power to Trump.

    With multiple states now attempting to unlawfully keep Trump off the ballot in their states, the animosity between the right and left grows ever deeper. The imprisonment of Trump or more radical attempts to steal the 2024 election will be met with violence from the here-to-for persevering right. Mixing this toxic domestic atmosphere with a deepening global chasm is a recipe for global disaster.

    As we have seen throughout history, the egos of psychopaths at the helm of nations often lead them to act irrationally and/or emotionally when it comes to committing their people to war. While the U.S. has further weakened its global hegemony with its disastrous forays into Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine; Russia and China have gotten stronger and more mutually committed to creating their own new world order. The USD as the dominant global currency is reaching its endpoint, marking the end of empire. Now Israel will further deplete U.S. resources and global stature with their war to wipe out Palestine. Once the dominoes begin to fall in a game of global warfare, all bets are off regarding possible outcomes. Neil Howe’s worst-case scenario is certainly not out of the question.

    “At worst, should at least one desperate country resort to WMDs, the outcome of a great-power war could prove to be even more devastating than that of a civil war. The toll could be almost unimaginable – with multiple cities destroyed, many millions killed, and many tens of millions displaced – all perhaps triggered by some ill-fated combination of the wrong leader making the wrong choice at the wrong time.” – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here             

    All scenarios for 2024 seem depressing and dark, but the odds still favor just continuing to muddle through as we have done through the first fifteen years of this Fourth Turning. I gave up trying to make specific predictions within a specific time frame years ago. It’s a fool’s errand as there are too many variables in the world to correctly predict which ones will drive the course of events within a one year time frame.

    What I do know is that pessimism about the future continues to deepen, paranoia strengthens, trust declines, anger grows, and the arrogance of those running the show has reached epic levels. We’ve been subjected to three years of propaganda about how the Great Reset will fundamentally transform our world, where we will own nothing and be happy. It seems this fits perfectly with David Webb’s Great Taking theory of how we will ultimately own nothing.

    There does seem to be a common thread running through everything happening in the last three years and appears to be on deck for 2024 and beyond. It all revolves around this broad Great Reset concept pushed by Schwab, Gates, Soros, and the rest of the Davos elite. The entire Covid plandemic was engineered to introduce authoritarian measures and instruct the masses to obey their masters.

    The vaccine is now clearly revealed to be a depopulation weapon, killing off some suddenly; others through myocarditis, turbo cancers, and strokes; babies through miscarriages; and future generations through reduced fertility. And most still believe our overlords rolled these jabs out to save them. Trump is still crowing about his big, beautiful vaccines. He’s either a fool or a charlatan.

    The climate change scam is hastening, as the war on farmers, meat, and fossil fuels is waged relentlessly by unelected bureaucrats and captured media mouthpieces. The EV scam is collapsing rapidly, as people with common sense see through it all. The Great Replacement of white people with third world savages is unabetted, with the Biden Administration ushering them across the southern border, giving them phones and money, flying them to cities across the country, and paying for them to stay at upscale hotels.

    This is not incompetence, but treason. They have already used their predictive programming/brainwashing to prepare the masses for civil war and a massive cyber-attack. Your government will protect you, as long as you sacrifice your remaining liberties and rights. All that is left is the initiation of the Great Taking. The “emergency” will occur on a weekend and by Monday morning your assets will be gone.

    This is their master plan, but we will have a say on whether it is ever successfully implemented. I wonder if these Davos psychopaths absconded with The Great Reset moniker from Strauss & Howe, as they used it to describe Fourth Turnings back in 1997.

    “A Fourth Turning is a great reset.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

    A Fourth Turning great reset may be a surprise to Schwab and his totalitarian acolytes inserted in governments across the world. They are in control. They are running this shitshow. They are the establishment. They are reaping the benefits. They are suppressing dissent and the truth. They are the existing social order that traditionally gets swept away during a Fourth Turning. 2024 may mark the beginning of the end for the Davos crowd and their iron grip on our spiraling society of chaos.

    The future course of history could be radically altered by actions taken by supposedly influential characters in this movie, but also by courageous deeds performed by average Americans who will sacrifice themselves to ensure future generations have a chance to live in a nation devoid of a psychopathic elitist ruling class.

    It seems like a long shot at this point, but giving up is not an option for those of us who still love this country. The four possible outcomes for this Crisis, laid out by Strauss & Howe in 1997, are as valid today as ever, and disturbingly close at hand. We will all have to do our part if we are to have any chance of producing a positive outcome to this Crisis. Happy New Year.

    1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.

    2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.

    3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.

    4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

    *  *  *

    Jim’s sincere desire to provide readers of his site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit his site, Jim asks that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. He can’t do it all alone, and needs your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from his site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions via Stripe.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 15:10

  • Israel Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Limiting Their Power
    Israel Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Limiting Their Power

    The Supreme Court of Israel has struck down a controversial judicial overhaul law enacted last year by the Netanyahu administration which would limit the high court’s power.

    The judicial overhaul, passed last July and resembling a constitutional amendment, sought to restrict the Supreme Court’s authority to nullify government decisions deemed “unreasonable in the extreme.” However, the court – unsurprisingly, has ruled against the law, the Wall Street Journal reports.

    The ruling could revive the deep political and social strife generated by the judicial reform last year, just as the country reels from the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel and is embroiled in a devastating war in Gaza.

    Before the Oct. 7 attack, hundreds of thousands of Israelis came out weekly to protest against Netanyahu’s push to limit the powers of the court and give more control to the elected government.

    Eight justices ruled in favor of striking down the law, with seven against.

    According to the report, analysts say the decision could have substantial consequences for postwar politics when Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas militants in the Gaza strip eventually comes to a close – including any inquiry into intelligence failures leading up to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which left 1,200 people dead (and which has drawn a disproportionately deadly response).

    The law, passed last summer by the Knesset, was a component of a broad package aimed at limiting the court’s power and giving lawmakers more control. According to Netanyahu, activist, liberal judges control the court – and the legislation seeks to restore the proper balance of power (so, what Democrats want to do to the US Supreme Court). Opponents have argued that the legislation would undermine the court’s power as a check on executive and legislative power, and would erode the country’s liberal democracy.

    Israel’s Supreme Court has struck down a law passed in July that would have taken away the court’s powers to abrogate government decisions it deems to be ‘unreasonable in the extreme.’ Photo: POOL/via REUTERS

    “This is really an unprecedented decision because it is the first time in the history of the state where the court strikes down a basic law,” said Yaniv Roznai, a law professor at Reichman University in central Israel, who likened the law to a constitutional amendment.

    The court also ruled 12-3 that it has the right to strike down a basic law in “unusual and extreme cases” when it runs counter to the core principles of Israel (in their opinions, of course).

    Netanyahu’s Likud party slammed the ruling, saying “it is unfortunate that the Supreme Court chose to issue a decision at the heart of Israel’s social divisions, precisely when [Israeli] soldiers” are “fighting and risking their lives.”

    Justice Minister Yariv Levin, considered the judicial overhaul’s chief architect, said the court’s ruling “takes away from millions of citizens their vote and the basic right to be equal partners in decision-making.” Levin has long argued that elected leaders should have more influence over the courts and their authority.

    Opposition Leader Yair Lapid praised the decision as protecting Israeli democracy. “If the Israeli government again starts the fight over the Supreme Court,” Lapid said, then “they learned nothing on Oct. 7.” -WSJ

    Now, Netanyahu’s options are limited – but could include passing a more nuanced version of the amendment, or passing basic legislation that would limit the court’s ability to strike down basic laws.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 14:35

  • "Massive" NYPD Mobilization At JFK Airport To Protect Travelers From Pro-Palestinian Mob
    “Massive” NYPD Mobilization At JFK Airport To Protect Travelers From Pro-Palestinian Mob

    Update (Monday):

    “If anyone is flying out of JFK Airport today, please plan to travel to the airport ahead of time,” Chief Philip Rivera, the head of transportation of the New York Police Department, wrote in an X post.

    Rivera said pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to cause delays at JFK Terminal 4 (departures). 

    “There are planned protests today and will cause delays. We don’t want anyone to miss their flights! Safe travels and Happy New Year,” he said. 

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    Social media reports show NYPD officers only allow people with an “Employee ID or Boarding pass” to enter train stations to JFK Airport. 

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    A pro-Palestinian vehicle convoy appears to be heading to the airport. 

    Some pro-Palestinian protesters are calling NYPD officers “NYPD, KKK, IDF, You’re all the same.”  

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    “Reports of massive law enforcement mobilization around strategic entry points into JFK airport to protect travelers from pro-Hamas protestors. This includes resources from NYPD, NY State Police, Port Authority Police, National Guard, and multiple state and city resources. May God bless them all. Enough is enough. Long past due to take back our streets. Thank them when you see them,” one X user said. 

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    *   *   * 

    Days after hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded the World Trade Center in New York City and screamed “Allahu akbar,” a flyer circulating social media platform X shows a possible rally at John F. Kennedy International Airport on New Year’s Day. 

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    Joel Mowbray, a former columnist for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan institution focusing on national security and foreign policy, pointed out the protest flyer is full of hate:

    Pro-Palestinian “protesters” are now openly embracing Hamas. Key word is “flood.” Hamas calls 10/7 massacres “Operation Al Aqsa Flood.” 

    So “Flood JFK for Gaza” is an open support for Hamas’ campaign of raping, murdering and beheading Jews — and Muslims & Christians. Vile.

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    Organized protesters are expected to arrive by foot and vehicles at JFK Terminal 4 (departures) around 1400 ET Monday. The terminal serves several international airlines, including El Al Israel Airlines Ltd.

    “On New Year’s Day, pro-Hamas mobs plan on shutting down JFK airport, but don’t worry, New York’s governor @GovKathyHochul and @NYCMayor Eric Adams will be hard at work nursing their New Year’s Eve hangover. Once they’re over it, they’ll pretend it did not happen,” one X user said in response to the flyer. 

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    Another person said: “Ah yes, disrupt people trying to get home for the holidays for your cause. I’m sure they will agree with you and support it now.” 

    Marxist groups appear to be funding these anti-Israel protests, as some point out. What’s troubling, just like when Marxist groups supported Black Lives Matter, the federal government appears to be ignoring these folks who are shutting down highways, bridges, business districts, and airports nationwide. 

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    Last Wednesday, anti-Israel protesters blocked critical roadways to JFK. 

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    Where is the Biden administration denouncing these rogue organized protesters shutting down critical infrastructure? There should be zero tolerance for any group attempting to disrupt airports. Maybe Biden’s federal government is too busy weaponizing agencies against Trump supporters to actually care about real threats to the nation. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/01/2024 – 14:15

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