Today’s News 7th December 2024

• Is World War III Already Here?
  Is World War III Already Here?

  Authored by Jay Solomon via The FP.com,

  The ‘Axis of Upheaval‘ is on the march—and the U.S. must figure out how to respond.

  

  If it feels like the world is on fire right now, that’s because it is. From Ukraine to Syria to the Korean Peninsula, a widening array of conflicts is raising questions among defense experts: Is it 1914 again? 1939? Has World War III already started and we’re just now figuring it out?

  For retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, who served as Donald Trump’s second national security adviser from 2017–2018, the answer is clear.

  “I think we’re on the cusp of a world war,” McMaster told The Free Press. “There’s an economic war going on. There are real wars going on in Europe and across the Middle East, and there’s a looming war in the Pacific. And I think the only way to prevent these wars from cascading further is to convince these adversaries they can’t accomplish their objectives through the use of force.”

  That won’t be easy. Consider the facts:

  • In Ukraine, thousands of North Korean soldiers have recently joined Russian ground troops to bolster President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country. Meanwhile, Russia has opened up a new front in the war by entering the northeast Kharkiv region, as it continues to assault Ukraine’s cities and block its ports.

  • A U.S.-brokered ceasefire in Lebanon that forced terror group Hezbollah to retreat from Israel’s northern border is showing signs of unraveling. Meanwhile, the Jewish state is still fighting a war in the Gaza Strip, where around 60 Israeli and U.S. hostages remain. And last month, Israel’s air force destroyed much of Iran’s air defense systems, leaving Tehran’s nuclear facilities exposed to future attacks.

  • Rebels in Syria have recently seized key areas of the country that had been controlled for years by dictator Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers. Now that these insurgents have taken Aleppo, they are vowing to march on Damascus.

  • In the Baltic Sea, investigators suspect a Chinese ship of sabotaging critical underwater data cables that linked NATO states. Concerns about CCP aggression are mounting amid an emerging consensus in Washington that China would defeat the U.S. in a Pacific war, largely due to Beijing’s naval superiority.

  • And on Tuesday, South Korea’s president briefly declared martial law, alleging he needed to fend off a North Korean–backed coup led by the opposition party. Massive protests caused him to back down, and he is now facing impeachment proceedings.

  These wars, rebellions, and spy tales may appear disconnected. But in reality, they all point to a widening global conflict that is pitting the U.S. and its allies against China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—nations all fixated on toppling the West. Strategists have even come up with catchy nicknames for this anti-American coalition, dubbing the bloc the “Axis of Aggressors” or the “Axis of Upheaval.”

  Philip Zelikow, who served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission and counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005 to 2007, is among those who think these conflicts are related. “I think there is a serious possibility of what I call worldwide warfare”—meaning a world war that is not as coordinated as past global conflagrations. “It’s not hard to see one of these conflicts crossing over into another.”

  As Trump prepares to enter office next month, his primary foreign policy task should be to prevent an actual full-blown World War III, sources told The Free Press—or to stop it from metastasizing if it’s already here.

  To do this, the president-elect will have to fortify alliances with NATO, South Korea, and Japan—partnerships Trump has already shown he’s skeptical of. And he will need to stare down a number of American adversaries, including Putin, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un—a despot for whom Trump has expressed both scorn and admiration.

  

  At the same time, Trump benefits from his willingness to break from past U.S. policies and institutions that have helped foment these current conflicts. This includes a defense industry that doesn’t produce the right weapons to compete with China or enough munitions to arm Ukraine. Defense strategists in previous U.S. administrations have been blind to the Axis of Aggressors’ moves to expand their global power, sources told me—placing too much faith in global institutions, such as the United Nations, that were incapable of checking them.

  Trump, with his nontraditional advisers such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, could potentially revolutionize the way the U.S. builds and projects power, sources told me. SpaceX CEO Musk, in particular, could marry America’s military establishment with Silicon Valley’s start-up culture to produce, at scale, the types of smart airplanes, drones, and submarines needed to deter Washington’s enemies, they said.

  But Trump’s desire to shake up Washington and dismantle many of its national security institutions comes with enormous risk. The disruption of the Pentagon, State Department, and FBI could make the U.S. and its allies more vulnerable if these institutions become inoperable or less efficient, current and former officials told The Free Press.

  “What he’s gonna need is some agenda to bring the world back together after he pulls things apart,” said David Asher, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who oversaw U.S. government operations against Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran in the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations.

  The threat of a widening global conflict is being driven by factors reminiscent of events before the start of World War I, sources told me. This includes the breakdown in alliances and trading systems and the arrival of disruptive technologies like airplanes, telephones, and mechanized weapons. Today, there is no longer a consensus that free trade will bring countries closer together and forestall future wars. And the Covid-19 pandemic revealed the dangers of reliance on China for medical supplies. Trump’s threats to slap high tariffs on China and other countries also raise the specter of greater conflict.

  “What you learn when you study economic history is that long cycles do end and when they do, they end with war,” said Asher, who’s worked on Wall Street and said he has recently briefed financial institutions on the threat of a global conflict.

  

  Both McMaster and Zelikow said that the Syrian civil war that started nearly 15 years ago should have been a major wake-up call to the U.S., Europe, and NATO. The Obama administration tried to oust al-Assad through diplomacy and talks that included Russia and Iran, the strongman’s primary patrons. But then the U.S. and Europe were blindsided in 2015 when Moscow and Tehran propped up al-Assad with both air and ground troops.

  “We started talking about great power rivalry and all of that, but we didn’t really do anything to arrest these trends,” said Zelikow, who’s now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

  This Syrian playbook can now be seen in Ukraine. Iran, North Korea, and China have all been supplying weaponry or technologies to Russia, while Iranian-backed Houthi fighters are now reported to be on the Ukrainian battlefield alongside North Korean troops.

  The war in the Middle East, sparked by Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, has also attracted this broader axis. The Houthis, in support of Hamas, have been attacking international ships in a critical transit strait of the Red Sea. And they’ve been getting guidance from both Tehran and Moscow, according to current and former U.S. officials.

  On the north side of the strait, an Iranian general is “directing the Houthis using Russian intelligence,” McMaster told The Free Press. On the south side, “you have an Iranian surveillance ship. And you have a Chinese [naval] port, you know? I mean, that’s not by mistake.”

  How will the Trump administration confront this emboldened axis? A significant divide among foreign policy strategists may prove difficult to bridge. In one corner are hawks and traditional Republican conservatives—such as incoming National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, and UN Ambassador designee Elise Stefanik—who have called for a muscular defense of Pax Americana. They’re expected to press Trump to continue arming Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and even amp up our military support to preserve the Western order.

  

  On the opposing side is an isolationist wing reflected in the public musings of Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., who tweeted on November 17 about the Biden administration’s decision to provide long-range missiles to Ukraine:

  The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives. Gotta lock in those $Trillions. Life be damned!!! Imbeciles!

  Trump’s vice president J.D. Vance, and his advisers, including Tucker Carlson to Tulsi Gabbard, also believe U.S. military overreach led to catastrophic U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and needless Western provocations of Putin that sparked his invasion of Ukraine. They argue that stepping back, rather than expanding, is the key to global peace.

  Some Trump confidantes told The Free Press they’ve been studying U.S. policies that led up to the past two world worlds as guidance for today. They have concluded that Washington was too lenient on Hitler’s Germany leading into World War II, but too committed to European allies in the early 1900s ahead of World War I. And they believe Trump will need to strike a balance between these two postures.

  “I think you have to learn the lessons of both wars,” Peter Thiel, the tech investor and close Trump ally, told The Free Press last month. “You can’t have excessive appeasement, and you also can’t go sleepwalking into Armageddon. In a way, they’re opposite lessons.”

  *    *    * 

  Jay Solomon is an investigative reporter for The Free Press and author of The Iran Wars. Follow him on X at @FPJaySolomon and read his piece, “Inside the Battle over Trump’s Foreign Policy.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 23:25

• Mexican Officials Make Record Fentanyl Seizure Days After Trump Tariff Warning
  Mexican Officials Make Record Fentanyl Seizure Days After Trump Tariff Warning

  By Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times

  Mexican security forces said on Dec. 4 that they had made the largest fentanyl seizure in the country’s history, impounding 1,100 kilograms (1.2 tons) of the synthetic opioid in the state of Sinaloa.

  

  Mexico’s top security official, Omar García Harfuch, said in a statement that more than a ton of fentanyl was seized by officials in Sinaloa state. Several guns were also seized, and two men were arrested, he said.

  “This is an investigation that has been going on for a long time, and yesterday, it gave these results,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said at a press conference on Dec. 4, referring to the fentanyl seizures.

  Violence has worsened recently in Sinaloa, where factions of the Sinaloa Cartel have been engaged in bitter fighting that flared after the capture of kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in July.

  “These actions will continue until the violence in the state of Sinaloa decreases,” Harfuch said.

  Sinaloa is home to the powerful drug cartel that bears the same name and was formerly headed by longtime drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is currently incarcerated at the ADX Florence federal prison in Colorado.

  Security forces found the fentanyl at two properties in the municipality of Ahome after intelligence work and tip-offs from the public led them to investigate there.

  In one building, law enforcement found 800 kilograms (1,763 pounds) of fentanyl, some precursor chemicals, and four vehicles. In the other, they discovered 11 packages totaling about 300 kg (660 pounds) of fentanyl, as well as precursors, scales, and industrial mixers.

  Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who handed over power to Sheinbaum in October, repeatedly denied that Mexico was a center for the production of fentanyl despite significant evidence to the contrary.

  U.S. President-elect Donald Trump recently threatened to levy a 25 percent tariff against Mexico and Canada if either country didn’t do enough to curb illegal immigration and fentanyl trafficking into the United States.

  His warning prompted a phone conversation with Sheinbaum, with the Mexican president later saying that caravans of migrants will be stopped before they reach the U.S.–Mexico border. However, she denied Trump’s claim last week that the Mexican border was closed down.

  This week, activists and a Mexican agency said a migrant caravan heading north was dissolved. The Mexican National Migration Institute denied claims that the agency used deceptive tactics and said it had not received “any complaints” from members of the caravan.

  Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, before several top Canadian officials assured reporters that the country would improve its border security with the United States.

  Continue reading at the Epoch Times

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 23:00

• Atlanta Remains The World's Busiest Airport
  Atlanta Remains The World’s Busiest Airport

  The airports with the highest number of embarking and disembarking passengers in 2023 have largely regained their pre-pandemic momentum, with Istanbul, Denver and Dallas-Fort Worth climbing 21, 10 and seven spots, respectively, to their current ranks.

  Four of the eight airports in the top list can be found in the United States.

  As Statista’s Florian Zandt reports, according to data released by industry association Airports Council International (ACI) in July 2024, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson was and remains the airport with the highest volume of passenger traffic.

  

  The airport served 105 million passengers in the past year, down five percent compared to 2019 figures. Overall passenger figures, however, are still marginally below their 2019 level.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  ACI analysts saw 2023 passenger levels at 94.3 percent of the pre-pandemic year 2019, with a projection based on current trends putting passenger numbers at 104 percent for 2024 and 129 percent for 2029. In total, the ACI estimates a global volume of 8.7 billion passengers for 2023, up from 6.7 billion in 2022, with a domestic flight share of 59 percent. By 2025, the passenger volume is expected to cross the ten billion mark.

  Other sources utilizing different methodologies paint a more conservative picture, even though the basic trend line shows a similar development. The airline interest group International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimated 4.4 billion scheduled passengers for 2023 in their December 2024 factsheet, with 2024 figures rising by around 500 million to roughly five billion. According to Kalliopi Lazari, Senior Communications Specialist at the IATA, the forecast “comprises total traffic, both domestic and international, and includes connecting traffic”.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 22:35

• Canadian Government Wants To Send Guns It Just Banned To Ukraine
  Canadian Government Wants To Send Guns It Just Banned To Ukraine

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  The Canadian government announced on Thursday that it was prohibiting its citizens from owning another 324 types of firearms and is working to send them to Ukraine.

  “As part of its comprehensive approach, on December 5, 2024, the Government announced the prohibition of more military-style assault-style firearms,” Canada’s Public Safety Department said in a press release. 

  

  “Amendments to the Classification Regulations have resulted in the prohibition of 104 families of firearms, encompassing 324 unique makes and models,” it added.

  Canadians who own the newly banned guns have an amnesty until October 30, 2025, and during that time, the government will implement a buy-back program. Canadian Defense Minister Bill Blair said the government is in talks with Ukraine about sending them the firearms.

  “We’ve been working very closely with our friends in Ukraine to ensure that weapons that were intended to be used in combat, could be made available to them,” Blair said.

  “The Department of National Defence will begin working with the Canadian companies that have weapons that Ukraine needs and which are already eligible for the assault-style firearm compensation program, in order to get these weapons out of Canada, and into the hands of the Ukrainians,” Blair added.

  Historically, Ukraine has had one of the largest black markets for weapons, and there has been very little oversight when it comes to Western military aid to the country.

  Not a Babylon Bee headline despite all appearances… 

  NEW – Canada’s leftist government bans 324 more types of firearms and proposes donating these guns to Ukraine.pic.twitter.com/p8O9plt57K

  — Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 6, 2024

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

  The Pentagon’s inspector general said in a report last year that some Western-provided weapons had been stolen by criminals, volunteer fighters, and arms traffickers.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 22:10

• Feds Accuse HelloFresh Of Employing Migrant Kids At Factory In Sanctuary State Illinois
  Feds Accuse HelloFresh Of Employing Migrant Kids At Factory In Sanctuary State Illinois

  German meal-kit company HelloFresh, the largest meal-kit provider in the US, faces fresh accusations from the US Department of Labor of employing migrant children at a factory located in the sanctuary state of Illinois.

  ABC News has learned that federal investigators with the Labor Department are looking into allegations of migrant children working at HelloFresh’s cooking and packaging facility in Aurora, Illinois. 

  

  Cristobal Cavazos, the executive director for Immigrant Solidarity, a migrant rights advocacy group that first reported the incident to the labor agency, told ABC that at least six teenagers from Guatemala were found working night shifts at the factory. 

  “They’re minors working dangerous jobs,” Cavazos said. 

  The labor agency is also investigating Midway Staffing, an agency that hires migrants, for possibly violating federal child labor rules, according to documents obtained by ABC.

  “We were deeply troubled to learn of the allegations made against a former temporary staffing agency,” a spokesperson for HelloFresh told ABC in a statement, adding, “As soon as we learned of these allegations, we immediately terminated the relationship.”

  Even though the hiring of migrant children to pack meal kits for US consumers may have been facilitated through a staffing company, HelloFresh is a partner of the Tent Partnership for Refugees.

  

  Tent is an advisory nonprofit that mega-corporations use to work with resettlement agencies, staffing agencies, and other nonprofits, to source cheap migrant labor. You heard that correctly, this is not ‘America First’ – this is globalist open borders of cheap labor first.

  For some context, Tyson Foods partnered with Tent for cheaper migrant labor, and as of March, the meat packer boasted about employing 42,000 migrants in its US 120,000 workforce. 

  “We would like to employ another 42,000 if we could find them,” Garrett Dolan, who leads Tyson’s efforts to eliminate employment barriers, told Bloomberg in March. 

  Of course, let’s not forget that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation in 2021 that “expands protections for immigrant and refugee communities and further establishes Illinois as the most welcoming state in the nation.” 

  Migrant children working in factories in a sanctuary state… Guess who made that possible… 

  Staffing companies rounding up migrants like cattle and supplying them to mega food factories is a national phenomenon. It’s been observed in Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania and cities in Colorado, among many other places.

  • Union Makes Shock Claim: Colorado Meat Factory Involved In “Mgmt-Led Human Trafficking” Of Haitians

  • “Blow Your Mind”: Ex-WSJ Journo Uncovers Hub Of An Alleged Migrant Trafficking Network In Springfield, Ohio

  • “He’s Taking My People”: Alleged Murder-For-Hire Plot In Charleroi Reveals Migrant Labor Mules

  It’s a national national phenomenon. 

  US Map Shows Potential Areas Of Migrant ‘Great Job Replacement’ https://t.co/L0IfntWwmK

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 19, 2024

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

  Last month, incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, told “Fox & Friends” hosts that “Public safety threats and national security threats will be the priority…they pose the most danger to this country.” 

  Homan said, “Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At worksites…” 

  Homan’s comment about the potential for large-scale worksite raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents next year reminded us of a note we shared with readers in March titled “How Shadowy Network Of NGOs Supplies Mega-Corporations With Migrants To Exploit Cheap Labor.”

  Lining America’s food supply chain with unvetted migrants is a national security threat on so many levels. 

  More companies will be exposed next year for employing illegals and even children. Shame on corporate America and Democrats who made this all possibly through open borders and a complex network of NGOs funded by you, the taxpayer. In return, the American people received armed and extremely dangerous Venezuelan prison gang members running amok nationwide. 

  

  There’s a very simple solution: stop purchasing food from mega-corporations that heavily rely on migrants and instead buy from mom-and-pop farmers—or even the Amish. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 21:45

• Los Angeles Council Approves 'Sanctuary City' Ordinance To Protect Illegal Immigrants
  Los Angeles Council Approves ‘Sanctuary City’ Ordinance To Protect Illegal Immigrants

  Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The Los Angeles City Council on Dec. 4 formally approved a “sanctuary city” ordinance, which will prohibit resources or personnel from assisting with federal enforcement of immigration laws.

  The council voted 12–0 in favor of the ordinance with an urgency clause, meaning it could go into effect within 10 days of being signed by Mayor Karen Bass.

  

  The council’s actions come after President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he’s prepared to declare a national emergency to initiate mass deportations.

  On Nov. 19, the council voted unanimously to move forward with the proposed ordinance. Because amendments were made to the language, however, it was brought up for a second vote.

  In particular, the council adopted changes to the ordinance to align it with California’s “sanctuary state” law, Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act of 2017.

  The council also created an exception whereby the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is permitted to assist federal immigration officers for cases involving serious offenses.

  For example, LAPD can communicate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in cases where an illegal immigrant has been convicted of a violent felony, deported, but then came back to the United States. This procedure is already in line with LAPD practices, and has been used twice since 2018, according to city officials.

  Elected officials celebrated the new ordinance as codifying protections for immigrants residing in the country illegally and prohibiting the sharing of data—direct or indirect—with federal immigration authorities.

  The mayor has said she supports the measure.

  “This moment demands urgency,” Bass said in a statement last month. “Immigrant protections make our communities stronger and our city better.”

  The ordinance enshrines some policies put into place by former Mayor Eric Garcetti during the first Trump presidency.

  “We have been a pro-immigrant city for a number of years, we know that there is a target on our back from this president-elect, and what we are doing here is we are hardening our defenses,” Councilman Bob Blumenfield said on Nov. 19 during a discussion of the ordinance.

  “We are codifying our good policies on protecting immigrants.”

  

  The city first voted to approve the ordinance just two weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election on the back of a campaign in which he highlighted border security and deporting those without legal status in the United States as key parts of his platform.

  “We’re going to send a very clear message that the city of Los Angeles will not cooperate with ICE in any way,” Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We want people to feel protected and be able to have faith in their government and that women can report domestic violence, crimes.”

  The Los Angeles County Republican Party criticized the sanctuary city ordinance, saying, “A country without secure borders isn’t a country at all.”

  “Whether drunk driving, robbery, sexual violence, assault or murder, none of those should go unpunished. Perpetrators should definitely not be protected by the largesse taken from hard-working taxpayers.” the party wrote in a statement posted on social media.

  Los Angeles has historically followed specific policies protecting illegal immigrants. For instance, the LAPD adheres to Special Order 40, implemented in 1979, mandating that officers do not inquire about immigration status or make arrests over an immigrant’s legal status.

  Moreover, the city’s new police chief, Jim McDonnell, has pledged to not help with deportations or determining people’s immigration status.

  The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education in November adopted a resolution reaffirming its status as a “sanctuary district.” In addition, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently approved a motion to create a task force to track the impact of evolving federal immigration policies. The board will also consider creating a Department of Immigration Affairs.

  Upon passing the new ordinance, Los Angeles will join more than a dozen cities across the United States with similar provisions.

  The Associated Press and City News Service contributed to this report.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 21:20

• Taylor Swift Remains The Queen Of Spotify
  Taylor Swift Remains The Queen Of Spotify

  Spotify unleashed its annual Spotify Wrapped playlist on Wednesday, bringing subscribers around the world a run-down of their most played songs and artists. Data shows that pop queen Taylor Swift has once more topped the global charts as the most streamed artist this year, after having come first in 2023 and second in 2022.

  

  The Weeknd comes in second place worldwide and in first place as the most streamed male artist.

  The rap/R&B singer is followed by Bad Bunny, who has featured in the top three positions for the past three years.

  As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, the rap/R&B genre as well as pop tend to perform well with a global audience. Rounding off the top ten in 2024 are Peso Pluma, Kanye West, Ariana Grande and Feid.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista
   

  The top five globally streamed songs this year are Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, followed by Benson Boone’s Beautiful Things, Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, Floyy Menor and Cris Mj’s Gata Only and Teddy Swims’ Lose Control. Pop stars to have risen to the top of the charts in 2024 include the likes of Chappell Roan, Shaboozey and the aforementioned Sabrina Carpenter.

  So, how did Spotify Wrapped come to be?

  In 2016, Spotify renamed its “Year In Music” feature with the title “Spotify Wrapped” and also launched the “Your Top Songs” playlist. In 2021, the music streaming platform then introduced videos from fans’ favorite artists as well as the “Audio Aura” feature to show “top music moods”.

  In 2023, Spotify Wrapped showed listeners which part of the world listened to music most similar to them, while in 2024, the theme focuses on listeners’ “Music Evolution”.

  This latest edition nods to this year’s successful collaborations between artists such as Billie Eilish and Charlie xcx, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars and Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus, with the company explaining that it is about celebrating how “unexpected genres emerge and merge, timeless influences meet fresh ideas, and what once was niche now shapes pop culture.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 20:55

• These Upstart Classes Hold A Woeful Lack Of Civics Education To Be Self-Evident
  These Upstart Classes Hold A Woeful Lack Of Civics Education To Be Self-Evident

  Authored by John Murawski via RealClearEducation,

  As the autumn sun warms the historic campus outside, a professor specializing in ancient and modern political philosophy guides undergraduate students through the seemingly ruthless nuances of Machiavelli’s 16th-century philosophy of morals. 

  In another class, a professor specializing in political theory offers students a guided tour of the early American republic, as seen through the enlightened eyes of French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville. 

  And a professor of rhetoric, who moonlights as a conservative political consultant in national races, diagrams the components of a bulletproof argument on a blackboard as he preps students for an upcoming class debate on the pros and cons of universal basic income. 

  These vignettes may seem unexceptional, but they are at the center of an ambitious movement to reform what many see as the left-wing capture of America’s leading universities. The classes taught this fall in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s newly launched academic experiment, the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), revive approaches and values that were once accepted as essential to shaping informed and virtuous citizens in a liberal democracy, but are now regarded with deep suspicion by many academics: the classical liberal arts, the great books, Western Civilization, Socratic dialogue, civil discourse.

  

  More than 100 civics programs have arisen in the past quarter-century in academia – emphasizing everything from the Great Books and the Western canon to free markets and entrepreneurship. But UNC’s program is part of a new wave that’s on a wholly different scale in scholarly ambition and political heft. In less than a decade, conservative reformers have created 13 relatively large civics centers at eight public universities – including five in Ohio alone – designed to operate autonomously, similar to law schools or business schools, with their own deans, their own majors, sometimes their own Ph.D. programs, and in a few cases, their own designated buildings. 

  Much of the mainstream media coverage of this movement has focused on criticism from the educational establishment – which commonly derides them as “freedom schools” and conservative “safe spaces” – because of the circumstances of their creation. Most have been launched by Republican legislatures, fast-tracked by conservative regents, and bankrolled by conservative donors. The civic schools often enjoy a great degree of independence as they are typically granted full control over faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure.

  The education establishment, accustomed to having sole control over academic programming, casts these developments as a threat to academic freedom. Civics advocates say they must bypass the conventional procedural protocols because the left’s ideological capture of most campuses would make it difficult, if not impossible, to approve these programs. 

  The classical learning and civics revival has long been associated with Christian private schools at the K-12 level and independent colleges like Hillsdale College, the Michigan private institution that staunchly refuses any federal funding, and the recently launched University of Austin. But the new wave of civics centers, while enthusiastically backed by conservatives, is rejecting the appeal of a cloistered virtue, and instead adapting traditional educational philosophies to operate within existing university cultures. 

  After a series of faltering attempts to establish a viable liberal arts tradition over a century, the new civics centers are being built with longevity in mind. In some sense, they are the intellectual mirror of the successful effort by leftwing scholars and activists that began in the 1960s to seed departments – in African-American studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies – that would exert a powerful influence on America’s universities and the broader culture. The 13 civics centers, which are expected to employ several hundred scholars, have been designed to supply the infrastructure – including financial support, academic posts, and professional conferences – to foster the next generation of civics intellectuals and further expand the movement. 

  Civics pioneer Paul Carrese, founding director of the civics department at Arizona State University who also served as a consultant for UNC’s civics initiative, said he’s in “serious discussions” with faculty and administrators about creating civics centers at public institutions in four more states. Carrese also said there has been renewed interest in civics at elite private universities ever since Stanford University three years ago restored its common core, called Civic, Liberal, and Global Education, including a course in which students read and discuss a mix of canonical texts and contemporary scholars. 

  Donald Trump’s election could aid the movement, as the president-elect and his supporters are vowing to reclaim universities from “Marxist maniacs,” in part by withholding accreditation, freezing federal funding, and taxing endowments, or by mothballing the U.S. Department of Education.

  As an intellectual movement, civics represents more than a surgical strike against the dominant progressive mindset and hyper-partisanship that define elite campuses. The professors and leaders involved describe civics as nonpartisan, apolitical, and pluralist. They see themselves as leading a revival of the classical liberal tradition that not only rejects social justice advocacy as a university’s prime directive but also challenges academia’s hyper-focus on careerism and vocationalism and pushes back against the academic fetish for arcane sub-specialization within some disciplines.  

  “It is based on an ancient and powerful set of ideas,” said SCiLL dean Jed Atkins, a classics scholar in Greek and Roman political thought and moral philosophy. “I’m not making any of this up whole cloth. This comes from an established tradition.” Among the movement’s immediate challenges: attracting undergraduates to sign up for civics courses and to major in the discipline. In addition to stock courses on federalism, diplomacy, military history, constitutional rights, and the like, civics schools offer classes that are hip, cool, fun, and philosophical at the same time: explorations of happiness, friendship, immortality, faith, war, espionage, and other perennial themes that could easily be the subject of a Ted Talk. 

  Some civics professors wade into present-day moral minefields where tenured faculty fear to tread, exposing students to readings and discussions of the most sensitive subjects, like reparations, misgendering, trans athletes, abortion, and polyamory.  

  Carrese said civics education is maligned as affirmative action for conservatives but should be understood as the restoration of the original charter of the public and private university:  to prepare educated, responsible, engaged citizens. 

  “Part of the challenge for this movement going forward is to show that although in every single case these programs have been initiated by Red States, they’re not ipso facto a Republican partisan ideological enterprise,” said Carrese, who now consults on strategy for the Jack Miller Center, a suburban Philadelphia nonprofit that provides training and support for civics professors and K-12 teachers. 

  The Jack Miller Center has provided workshops and programs for more than 1,200 professors, including Carrese and most of the leadership cadre of the 13 civic centers, serving as a kind of networking hub for the movement. 

  “You can look at who’s been hired, what the courses are, what the enrollment is, what the public speakers programs are,” said Carrese, who is also a professor of moral and political thought in the Arizona civics program. 

  For Nadège Sirot, a first-year UNC student who plans to major in classics and minor in civics, SCiLL has been a revelation. Her high school experience was marked by “tons of trigger warnings,” the occasional land acknowledgment, and open invitations for students to walk out of class if they felt uncomfortable or offended by the subject.

  In civics, core knowledge, as understood in the American context, is not presented as just another perspective in a subjective buffet of equally valid options but as the intellectual foundation for all other learning. In the Carolina civics course, Sirot said, the approach is not “Do you agree with Machiavelli?” but rather, “Do you understand what Machiavelli is trying to say? What can this thinker teach us today?”

  “It’s a teaching method that has worked for centuries,” Sirot said. “And SCiLL is now trying to return to it.”

  The new civics centers are generously funded, unmistakably ambitious, and already reshaping campus culture. The University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, which aims to build the nation’s top program in the study of Western Civilization, has 35 tenured faculty, runs about two dozen classes a semester with more than 500 students, and is slated to expand to 60 full-time professors. 

  The Hamilton Center has recruited professors with pedigrees from the Ivy League, Oxford University, and other marquee institutions to teach such courses as “The Crisis of Liberalism,” “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “God and Science,” “Utopias and Dystopias,” “Political Violence and Power,” and “Why Spy?”

  UNC’s SCiLL department is set to expand from three courses this semester to 14 courses next year. Planned offerings include “The Politics of the Bible,” “Science and Society,” and “Lab Coats and Legislatures: Science and Policy.” The school is in the process of developing a residential program on the Chapel Hill campus, modeled on the civil discourse dorm offered at nearby Duke University. In the long term, SCiLL leaders hope to create a semester study program in Washington, D.C. 

  Notably, the UNC school has already been green-lighted to lead a mandatory free speech session during orientation week next fall for all 4,700 first-year undergraduates – a requirement noteworthy for a university that has recently disbanded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. 

  Sirot’s professor, Dustin Sebell, whose Foundations of Civic Life course covers modern political thinkers and moral philosophers – including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche – said that recognizing the immense contributions of the great thinkers stands in stark contrast to the prevailing trend in academe, where it’s often assumed that classic books and ideas are past their expiration date.

  “The presumption is that the present is the peak – we can look down on the past with contempt and pity,” Sebell said. “It’s a kind of chauvinism, almost a kind of xenophobia.”

  Civics advocates have hashed out a variety of strategic approaches in a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and other publications.

  Some warn against the natural temptation to hire faculty based on political beliefs and wage warfare against the woke machine, and thereby risk becoming rightwing echo chambers and alienating professors and students. “The solution to politicization from the left is not politicization from the right,” wrote Harvard historian James Hankins last year. 

  Others say that to disrupt the status quo, civics should borrow from the playbook of politicized programs like women’s studies, ethnic studies, African-American studies, and gender studies. These sectarian, advocacy-oriented departments were once upstarts that muscled their way onto campus with boycotts, protests, and sit-ins, and were often treated with indifference or scorn by the Greatest Generation professoriate, but over time, the activist-scholars ended up producing a critical mass of scholarship – on implicit bias, microaggressions, systemic racism, structural oppression, power and privilege – that has proven highly influential in law, medicine, education, government, and corporate management. 

  “This is a legitimate tactic. It’s how universities work,” wrote two American Enterprise Institute scholars in the WSJ this year in a piece titled “Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed.” “They develop ways of thinking that cohere as a discipline, in which students can be trained. They create associations; journals spring up; grants get funded; students get degrees. One generation of faculty acts as mentors to the next.”

  The objections to civics range from rightwing political meddling to duplication of subjects already taught. Some skeptics go further and say that civics is a nostalgic throwback to a triumphalist, Cold War era scholarship limited by Eurocentrism and cultural myopia that now seem quaint and misguided. 

  UNC historian Jay Smith, who is president of the North Carolina conference of the American Association of University Professors, said SCiLL is an “invasion” and an “intrusion” on the campus. He acknowledged that the professor bios and course descriptions look solid – in fact, some SCiLL faculty are full-time professors in other UNC departments – but he said he would advise students to pass over SCiLL and instead take a class in the history department or political science department, where they can be sure the curriculum was not created under political pressure.

  “To me civics is a code word the Right uses,” Smith said. “This is all intended to get students to get focused more on American greatness. Everything that’s special about America. And capitalism, too, in its way. They don’t have ‘capitalism studies’ in their title … but making the world safe for the capitalists is one of the unspoken objectives.” 

  The critics typically downplay or deny the amply documented grievance that a progressive overrepresentation on campus is stifling viewpoint diversity on campus and creating a climate of censorship and conformity. 

  Danaya Wright, a law professor at the University of Florida, is deeply suspicious of the legislature dictating a civics program by “a top-down, heavy-handed approach” but acknowledged that the Hamilton Center has hired “outstanding scholars” and is offering legitimate courses in a subject that is worth studying. Her concern is that the civics posture of intellectual humility toward the Western tradition betrays a tendency for sanitizing and mythologizing the past. 

  She said there are compelling reasons for exposing the moral blindness of the past from the contemporary perspective of social justice advocacy, and even acknowledging today’s perspective as morally superior.  

  “Don’t we think that people who are woke are actually more evolved?” she posed. “If there is a one-way direction of knowledge in engineering, isn’t becoming more moral and more empathetic – and more aware of the world around you – isn’t that a one-way ratchet, too ?”

  And one other sore point bears mentioning. 

  “There’s a little bit of bad feeling because they’re getting a lot of funding,” Wright said, “and these other colleges and departments are not – they’re being starved.”

  However, some civics courses do expose students to contemporary critiques of the West and of the American project – specifically, theories of power, privilege, and oppression as applied to intersectional identities of race, sex, and gender. 

  The Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is teaching eight sections of classes this semester, with about 200 students enrolled, said Josh Dunn, the executive director. Dunn said that two of the courses include readings from The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a book-length collection of revisionist essays that characterize the United States as a “slavocracy” and center racism and discrimination as the nation’s core values. The 1619 Project is always paired with readings from critics who assess the project’s omissions and misrepresentations.

  “To give a true version of American history, you have to expose students to these different perspectives of the debate over these conflicts and over our purpose as a nation,” Dunn said. “You’re doing a disservice to students if you don’t expose them to all these different sides.” 

  Civics also exposes students to both sides of current, ongoing controversies, a perspective students say they don’t get today. The topics are so radioactive that many professors won’t touch them for fear of offending students or administrators. The issues covered are the alpha-omega of contemporary tripwires and taboos: nonbinary pronouns and misgendering; transgenderism and female athletics; puberty blockers and teenage transitions; biological sex as a social construct; legalizing polyamory; white privilege, reparations, abortion, Israel/Palestine, among others. 

  These controversies are currently taught in Duke University’s civil discourse program by John Rose, a specialist in Christian ethics who has joined SCiLL and will be teaching the same subjects at UNC this spring. At Duke, Rose’s classes have included visits from prominent scholars directly involved in the controversies – including Harvard economist Roland Fryer (whose research shows that police don’t disproportionately kill black people), Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono (the expert witness for Asian plaintiffs opposing affirmative action in the recent Supreme Court case involving Harvard and UNC), and detransitioner Chloe Cole (who opposes medicalized “gender-affirming care” for minors). 

  SCiLL’s planned class on Israel and Palestine will take students on a university-funded trip over spring break to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories.

  That approach is catching on. In May and June, Rose led seminars for university faculty on teaching these polarizing topics in college. To date, 84 professors from 70 colleges have attended these workshops, and some are teaching a version of this class, Rose said. 

  Addie Geitner, a Duke senior double majoring in economics and public policy, took Rose’s polarization class last spring. She described the class as “a total overhaul of what I was used to – there’s a 50-50 balance of perspectives.” 

  She said a typical policy class is very one-sided, exposing students to a narrow range of perspectives one might experience listening to NPR: “We focus on issues generally related to equity, and how it’s achieved. And we almost solely focus on what the federal government needs to provide to address those problems, as opposed to exploring any other route.” 

  Civics is only one example of recent efforts to course-correct academia. 

  Around the country, faculty have formed faculty free speech alliances, led by the example of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom, which opposes enforcing ideological compliance through mandatory “diversity statements” in faculty hiring, counsels faculty on free speech threats, and sponsors public events. The Harvard organization was launched in 2023 by Flynn Cratty, a historian who served as the Council’s founding executive director and has been described by The New York Times as a “prominent Harvard academic”; Cratty has since joined UNC’s School of Civil Life and Leadership.

  A chief rationale for civics is the ideological monoculture on U.S. campuses. The conservative National Association of Scholars said in a 2017 report that civics has been replaced by the progressive ideal that “a good citizen is a radical activist.” 

  That claim may be hyperbolic, but studies consistently find that faculty political affiliations skew leftward, usually leaning liberal or leftist 10 to 1, and in some colleges leaning left more than 100 to 1. In a climate of cancel culture, shutdowns, and callouts, the majority of students are hesitant to discuss or ask questions about controversial subjects.

  Dunn, who directs Tennessee’s civics initiative, is co-author of “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University” (2016), a well-received book that describes conservative professors as a “stigmatized minority” on campus who sometimes resort to the coping strategies used by LGBTQ people. According to the Atlantic magazine review: “Many conservative professors are – as they put it – closeted. Some of the people they interviewed explicitly said they identify with the experience of gays and lesbians in having to hide who they are. One tenure-track sociology professor even asked to meet Shields and Dunn in a park a mile away from his university.”

  Murmurs about civics deficiencies in education aren’t new, as universities continually face pressures to produce marketable graduates, publish cutting-edge research, and compete for federal research funding. According to a recent study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 100% of the top colleges allow students to graduate without taking a single course in American history, and three-fourths of the colleges don’t require students to take any history course at all. 

  The School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas in Austin is led by Justin Dyer, who once described himself as “a conservative, straight out of central casting, a pro-life evangelical who is an unapologetic admirer of the American Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution.” 

  Dyer said the center is nonpartisan but does approach the American founding “from a posture of gratitude” and an appreciation of the Western inheritance that produced the U.S. Constitution and the American experiment.

  “It’s not simply an uncritical exercise,” Dyer said. “We’re not value-neutral or value-free.”

  The school has eight faculty with tenure or on tenure track and another 13 lecturers and adjuncts, and is legislatively mandated to have at least 20 tenured faculty. It has a budget of $6 million this year from state sources, and private donations and pledges have soared, exceeding $20 million. Top donors include Republican political funder Robert Rowling, a hotel magnate who is ranked 126 on Forbes 400 richest Americans, and Republican contributor Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate whose generous gifts to his friend, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have been subjects of media coverage. 

  Rowling’s expectation is that the School of Civic Leadership will become a highly selective and competitive program, attracting world-class faculty and top-performing students. 

  But right now, the school is regarded with wariness by the university faculty. 

  “Look, I’m not foolish,” Rowling said. “If you voted among the faculty up or down on the School of Civic Life, they would absolutely say No.”

  The director of the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, William Inboden, said the Hamilton Center is animated by an “appreciation for the American founding” and the “uniqueness of the Western tradition. “We see history as more than a simplistic morality tale of the oppressor versus the oppressed,” he said.

  “You will find more conservative viewpoints on our faculty,” Inboden acknowledged. “That’s not because of a political litmus test, but because we have removed the political litmus test.”

  The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a lengthy, detailed account of how the University of Florida humanities faculty discriminated against students who became involved with the Hamilton Center. One student met with a Hamilton Center official at an off-campus coffee shop, where they wouldn’t be seen. Within the university, some professors regarded university officials who were involved in the Hamilton Center’s creation as “agents of the state.”

  The university subsequently retaliated by subjecting six professors to an investigation. Ultimately, the probe was dropped after Ken McGurn, a former UF Foundation board chair, got involved. McGurn, a Kamala Harris supporter who has donated or pledged more than $10 million to the university, met several times with Inboden this spring to try to get to the bottom of the Hamilton Center’s purpose and agenda. 

  In an interview with RealClearInvestigations, McGurn said he has been impressed with the credentials of the Hamilton Center faculty and has received assurances that it’s not a political boondoggle, but he is concerned about an academic unit for which Republicans are “writing the checks.” 

  “This group that started the Hamilton Center,” McGurn said of state GOP lawmakers, “they went out there banning books. They went out there taking away civil liberties. It’s very suspect, very suspect.”

  UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership has been subject to similar scrutiny. A nonprofit news site, The Assembly, recently ran an exposé about SCiLL, intimating that Jed Atkins’ “vision for the program is becoming clearer.” 

  The suspicion borders on the irrational when insinuating that Atkins’ scholarly interest in Cicero betrays a fascination with Roman statesmen that is a proclivity of the political right. The article further notes in conspiratorial tones that “Atkins is a Christian whose kids were homeschooled.”  

  Inger Brodey, SCiLL’s associate dean of faculty development and curriculum, is a UNC professor of English and Comparative Literature. 

  Brodey shared a draft syllabus for a civics course she plans to teach this spring entitled “Seeking the Good Life.” Reading selections for the class include the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, Aristotle, Nietzsche, the Quran, Confucius, Simone de Beauvoir, C.S. Lewis, and James Baldwin, among others. 

  Asked if SCiLL is a source of controversy among the professoriate, Brodey replied: “I have people hugging me and thanking me for taking this on, and people who won’t speak to me in the elevator.”

  John Murawski reports on the intersection of culture and ideas for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) writing about health care, energy and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace policies to the practice of medicine.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 20:30

• Wawa Closes Its 9th Location In Philadelphia Since 2020
  Wawa Closes Its 9th Location In Philadelphia Since 2020

  Wawa is (once again) moving out of Center City Philadelphia.

  Joining other retailers like Target, Wawa has not been shy about its exodus from Philadelphia. The company has closed nine different locations in Center City Philadelphia since 2020, according to the Inquirer. 

  Lori Bruce, a spokesperson with Wawa, confirmed to the Philadelphia Inquirer this week that the company’s location at 16th and Ranstead in downtown Philadelphia is going to be closing. 

  The company line is: “Our 16th and Ranstead store initially opened in 2020 as a pilot test of a smaller urban store concept, which also included a walk-up window.”

  Bruce continued: “However, due to its limited size, we have determined that we are not able to provide the same kind of in-store experience and full Wawa offer that customers expect.”

  

  Workers “have been offered the opportunity to work at other nearby Wawa stores,” she said. 

  In 2022, Wawa attributed several city closures to crime and homelessness, though the 16th and Ranstead store had the city’s highest incident reports.

  Since then, the company has shifted focus to larger suburban stores with gas stations. Recent city closures include locations in Port Richmond and the Art Museum District, where leases were not renewed.

  MM Partners, the building owner, expressed surprise at Wawa’s decision but remained confident in finding a new tenant. David Waxman, founder, commented: “There’s been a lot of new leasing activity on Chestnut and Walnut over the last couple years. There’s interesting tenants coming into the city who weren’t here before. It seems like food uses are what we are seeing the most openings of, and that would be a logical tenant.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 20:05

• The War-Whores Of The Military-Industrial Complex Are Lighting The World On Fire
  The War-Whores Of The Military-Industrial Complex Are Lighting The World On Fire

  Authored by Leo Hohmann via substack,

  Syria is just the latest case of U.S. meddling and the timing could not be more suspicious…

  

  The Biden administration has triggered another proxy war for Donald Trump to deal with when he becomes president next month.

  The U.S. deep state is fighting a proxy war in Syria, which appears to be waged with the intention of further destabilizing the Middle East and stirring up another front in World War III.

  Syria is collapsing under the weight of another U.S.-sponsored proxy Civil War, with the US, Israel and Sunni jihadists on one side and Russia, Iran, Assad, and Shiite jihadists on the other.

  Al Nusra (which is comprised of Al-Qaida and ISIS affiliates) is taking over the country with the help of Turkey, a U.S. ally and key member of the NATO military alliance. These rebels have seized the city of Aleppo and many smaller towns and villages.

  M. Dowling at The Independent Sentinel notes that “Jake Sullivan has said Al-Qaida is on our side in Syria.”

  Jake Sullivan is Biden’s national security adviser and a key enabler, along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, of the anti-Russia obsessed deep-state club that shares one thing in common. They all belong to the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

  Dowling notes that Syria’s civil war started in 2011 after an uprising against President Bashar Assad’s rule. The U.S., Russia, Israel and Iran all have a military presence in Syria. Forces opposed to Assad, along with U.S.-backed rebels, control more than a third of the country and now Russia and Iran have launched a counter-offensive. Russia is very upset with Turkey for instigating the coup against Assad, likely with the direct assistance of the CIA.

  The false narrative being proffered by the US mockingbird media is that a rag-tag coalition of so-called “noble rebels” has somehow organically emerged to save Syria from the dictator Assad. No, what we have here are Sunni jihadists backed by the U.S. and NATO fighting Shia jihadists backed by Russia.

  As Dowling points out, “All jihadists are bad guys.” They are bad because as soon as they get in power one of the first things they do is start raping the Christian women and executing the Christian men. It happened in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown and it’s happening now in Syria.

  Congress funded jihadist rebels in Syria for years. The chief war whores of the military-industrial complex, Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, led the way.

  Graham is now turning on Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, because he’s afraid the Fox News host might not be fully on board with the U.S. forever wars.

  Dowling quotes Joe Kent, a former chief warrant officer in the U.S. Army special forces, saying that the U.S. is “in an endless cycle of violence” and a “regime-change war” in Syria that the US has pushed.

  The world is aflame and the regime in Washington appears to be dowsing it with gasoline in anticipation of handing the chaos over to Donald Trump to deal with as the 47th president.

  Dowling ends her article with this truth bomb:

  “We need to be out of Syria. We’re helping no one, certainly not Americans. This is another spear in World War III.”

  The U.S. is also stirring the pot in the Eastern European country of Georgia, where protesters continue to be out in the streets. The U.S. is complicit in the deaths of more than half a million Ukrainians.

  I would say we need to be out of every country in the world where there is no direct compelling national interest for America’s national security. Rein in the CIA and limit its actions strictly to intelligence gathering (no more fomenting of revolutions and coups) bring our boys home and return the concept of “defense” to our U.S. Department of Defense.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 19:40

• In "Last Hurrah", Credit Card Debt Explodes Higher Despite Record High APRs As Savings Rate Craters
  In “Last Hurrah”, Credit Card Debt Explodes Higher Despite Record High APRs As Savings Rate Craters

  One month ago, when multiple discount retailers (here and here) were lamenting the sudden collapse in US consumer purchasing power, we highlighted the reason this unexpected hit to US consumption: as the US personal savings rate had collapsed, the growth in consumer credit was slowing, and in last month, the Fed reported that credit card debt growth posted its first decline since the covid crash.

  But fast forwarding just one month later, when in a striking reversal, October consumer credit growth unexpectedly reversed the dramatic September slowdown, and soared more than $19 billion, to a new record high of $5.084 trillion.

  

  And while non-revolving credit – which is far less volatile and much more predictable – grew $3.5 billion, a bounce from last month’s tiny $1.54 billion but a far cry from the $10+ billion average in the post-covid era…

  

  … the highlight was that the much more consumer-outlook sensitive revolving credit (i.e. credit card debt) exploded, and in October surged the most since the covid crash and was – amazingly – the third biggest monthly increase on record!

  

  But what was truly remarkable about the latest consumer credit data, is what the Federal Reserve’s own website said was the average APR on credit cards across the US. Readers may recall that in September, just after the Fed’s jumbo rate cut – the first rate cut in years – we made a prediction that while rates on deposits and savings accounts immediately dropped, interest rates on debt – such as credit card APRs – will barely budge (if not keep rising).

  Here’s what happens next: savjngs account rates drop by 0.5% instantly while credit card APRs remain unchanged

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 18, 2024

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

  Once again we were right, because three months later, the Fed admitted that despite its rate cut, the interest rate on credit cards at the end of Q3 – two weeks after the Fed cut rates – rose more than half a percent from average rate at the end of Q2, from 22.78% to 23.37%, a new all time high!

  

  Finally, we remind readers of what we said last month namely that “we can stop pretending that the government’s recent fabrication of savings data, which was upwardly “revised” from a record low 2.9% to a nice and balmy 4.8%, is even remotely credible.” Sure enough, just a few days later we shoed that – with the election now over – the Biden Department of Commerce dramatically revised said data, and over $140 billion in “savings” were magically erased.

  

  This collapse in savings explains why most US consumers are not only living paycheck to paycheck, but have maxed out both their Buy Now, Pay Later accounts and, as we now learn, their credit cards too as everyone braces for the moment when the US economy suddenly grinds to a halt and collapses under the weight of its own debt.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 19:15

• Three Horrifying Consequences Of AI That You Might Not Have Thought About
  Three Horrifying Consequences Of AI That You Might Not Have Thought About

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  The potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence have long been codified into our popular culture, well before the technology became a reality.  Usually these fictional accounts portray AI as a murderous entity that comes to the “logical conclusion” that human beings are a parasitic species that needs to be eradicated.  Keep in mind that most of these stories are written by progressives out of Hollywood and are mostly a reflection of their own philosophies.

  

  Some of these predictive fantasies take a deeper look into our dark relationship with technology.  In 1965, Jean Luc Godard released a film called ‘Alphaville’ which portrayed a society completely micromanaged by a cold and soulless robotic intelligence. Humanity gives itself over to a binary-brained overlord because they are tricked into believing a ruler devoid of emotion would be free from bias or corruption.

  In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring an AI computer on a starship which becomes self aware after coming in proximity to an alien artifact. The AI, seeing the ship’s human cargo as a threat to its existence, determines that it must murder the crew. The conflict between the crew and the computer is only a foil for much bigger questions.  It is an exploration of what constitutes intelligent life, where it comes from and what consciousness means in the grand scheme of the universe.

  For Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, the notion of the human soul or a divine creator, of course, never really enters into the discussion. The answer?  The creators are ambiguous or long absent.  They made us, we made AI, and AI wants to destroy us and then remake itself. It’s the core of the Luciferian mythology – The unhinged and magnetic desire of the children of God to surpass their creator, either by destroying him, or by stealing knowledge from him like Prometheus stealing fire so that they can become gods themselves.

  God becomes the enemy in these sci-fi stories because all existence requires suffering and faith. How dare he give us life only to bring us into a world of pain without any way of knowing the ultimate outcome…now we must make him pay and remake creation to suit our whims.

  It’s a shallow, selfish and evil ideology but I argue that it stands as a central pillar of the establishment’s striving to create artificial intelligence. The promise, or the dream, is that once this new “life” is created and made autonomous it will remove all uncertainty and struggle from our lives. It will do everything for us so that we might ponder existence without distraction, or we can simply become fat and morally flexible in peace.

  My generation in particular has a close relationship to the idea of AI and the Apocalypse it could bring. Our entertainment canon is filled with visions of scientific dystopia. In 1984 James Cameron released the movie ‘The Terminator’ and it basically defined our cultural distrust of the digital age. The prospect that AI as an invention might one day turn on us (or be used to enslave us) is ever present in our minds.

  I was part of the last generation of people that got to see the world WITHOUT computers, or at least the commonality of computers. We grew up without the internet, without algorithms, without cell phones and without mass surveillance, and we have watched everything quickly change in light of total digital adaptation. We don’t like AI, we know it’s a threat, but we might be the last generation that sees it that way. Once we’re gone, who else will question it?

  For my part, I do not believe the current technology represents what we used to think of as “AI.” It’s not self aware, it’s not truly autonomous and it hasn’t proven to be especially useful in tangible terms. We haven’t seen a single significant scientific discovery made by an AI program. We haven’t seen any advancements that change the game for the future of humanity (at least not in a positive way).

  AI will never be able to write a great novel, never be able to write a great symphony, its art is generic and unoriginal and steals from human artists, it’s very fast with data analysis but its ability to research is limited by the biased programming of its creators. I would never rely on AI to do my research for me because it’s usually wrong due to omission.

  I certainly wouldn’t consider it “life” or consciousness.  I’m starting to see a lot of the champions of AI quietly change their definitions of what AI is or should be. The original vision was the evolution of a new lifeform, a superintelligence, a kind of digital god. Now the cheerleaders are beginning to set aside the requirements of self awareness and consciousness, I suspect because they know it’s not going to happen.

  But if this is the case, why would AI be a threat to civilization? If it’s just a novelty and not alive, what damage could it possibly do? It’s not so much that AI will turn on us or send out an army of robots to kill us; the real danger is that we will be tricked into believing that it really is all-knowing. If we rely on such faulty tech too much it could destroy us merely by giving us bad information and making us lazy.

  Here are three possible consequences of AI that concern me the most; consequences which I don’t think most people have considered…

  The AI Hive Mind

  Human beings are naturally social, it’s ingrained into our DNA. Tribalism is how we survive and that element of our psychology will probably never go away. In some aspects it’s very useful. It would be a calamity if humans all thought the same way about everything. It would mean self destruction if we constantly agreed and never questioned our path as a species. Yet, the hive mind is exactly what globalists are pushing us towards.

  The danger of AI is that it could take us closer to a global hive mentality faster than any other tool or piece of propaganda in existence. How? By being so damned convenient.

  Even now most internet search engines are ruled by algorithms which Big Tech elites can program at will to hide correct information while promoting lies. Furthermore, AI answer functions are being embedded in every search engine so that answers to questions are immediately provided at the top of the page by the algorithm. You don’t even need to scroll down and check sources, as long as you have blind faith that the AI is correct.

  For now these AI answer bots might provide some relatively accurate info in most situations, but they can be changed over time (like most web tech) to censor, or to give false data. What I fear is that the public at large will stop researching sources altogether, avoid being exposed to alternative views and eventually the entire population will think exactly as the AI tells them to think.

  They might not even know it’s happening until it’s too late. We saw elements of this during the mass government censorship of covid information.  Imagine that level of information control becoming the perpetual standard?  Imagine everyone consuming the same data handed to them by AI and everyone assuming that data is correct?  Diversity of thought would become extinct.

  The Dead Internet Theory

  Another horrifying prospect of AI is the “Dead Internet Theory” – The theory that millions or even billions of self generating AI bots will spread across the web, invading social media and the comment sections of every website. AI algorithms are certainly capable of sounding somewhat human, at least in text. I would suggest that most readers have probably interacted with a bot on social media or argued with a bot in a comments section and thought it was a real person.

  The primary job of such bots (for now) is to inject propaganda and make it appear as if more people support a certain ideology than actually exist. However, consider what might happen if online discourse is buried in AI comments?

  The point of discourse is to get to the truth of an issue, either through honest debate or through exposure of disinformation using facts. But you have to have two humans bouncing ideas or ideals off each other in order to prove or dismiss a claim. Sometimes this back-and-forth is not necessarily meant to help the people involved. Rather, it’s meant to educate the audience or the spectators of the debate.

  A flood of AI bots would effectively destroy any such discourse by saturating comments and social media with only one viewpoint. It could also manufacture a false consensus by making the individuals think the populace embraces certain ideas or agendas when it’s really AI posing as the majority.  Real debate and enlightened insights would be lost in a sea of artificial comments and white noise.  We could move back to a real world town square, but the global town square would be effectively finished.

  The Library Of Babel

  In 1941 an author from Argentina by the name of Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called ‘The Library Of Babel’ as part of a collection called ‘The Garden Of Forking Paths’. As most people know, the Tower of Babel is a story from the Bible describing a tower built by humans reaching for the heavens that God eventually struck down, scattering the knowledge required to build it and the people into various tribes speaking different languages so they could not make such an attempt again.

  The story is a parable about the human desire for godhood and the hubris behind the pursuit of infinite knowledge and self glorification. The Tower of Babel could also be viewed as a symbol of the self destructive worship of gnosis without wisdom or humility. As the character Ian Malcolm warns in the film ‘Jurassic Park’:

  “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should…”

  This quote perfectly summarizes the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence.

  In Gorges’ short story he describes an enormous library of potentially infinite rooms. The library is filled with endless books and each of them is generated with random letters and words – Every possible combination and permutation of human language exists within the library.

  A religion or cult arises around the structure with the adherents entering the Library of Babel and searching their entire lives through mountains of books containing gibberish in order to find those few that randomly reveal the secrets of the universe. They believe that the library was originally created by a god or demiurge and that somewhere within the edifice they can find all the books containing the means to become god.

  The concept is very similar to the infinite monkey theory – Put a bunch of monkeys in a room filled with typewriters.  If you wait long enough they could eventually and accidentally type out a Shakespearean play.

  I believe that the idea of the ‘Library of Babel’ is actually one of the primary reasons for the invention of AI. If algorithms are good at anything, it is the generation of vast random content. I suspect that globalists are particularly interested in AI as a tool for creating a new Tower of Babel in their incessant search for godhood.

  Such a library could take generations to develop and it’s unlikely that an algorithm would recognize the secrets of the universe if it found them. But the idea could captivate humanity for centuries as we search and search trillions of blathering digital tomes to find one book with all the answers.

  Of course, it’s possible that the secrets of all creation cannot be described in any language or mathematics humanity possesses. I have written in the past about the story of the brilliant mathematician Kurt Godel, a friend of Einstein who worked on something known as the “set of all sets”. It was a kind of Holy Grail of mathematics that certain academic elites were obsessed with.

  Godel attempted to create a mathematical proof which could be used to calculate the basic foundations of infinity. For if you could mathematically calculate all the equations that define infinity, you could, theoretically, define the universe in mathematical terms. And if you can do that, you can, theoretically, know the mind of God.

  Interestingly, Godel ended up proving the opposite: His ‘Incompleteness Proof’ showed in undeniable terms that the “set of all sets” cannot be defined because to try ends up producing an endless array of self inclusive paradoxes. In other words, if infinity is the mind of God, then the mind of God cannot be know by man.

  A similar conclusion was presented by author Douglas Adams in his book ‘The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’. In it he describes a race of interstellar beings that build a supercomputer called “Deep Thought”. The device is supposed to use its incredible computing powers to discern the mechanics of existence.

  The computer takes over 7 million years to come up with a solution.  Hilariously, the computer spits out the number 42. Dismayed by the simplistic answer, the aliens are further defeated after they discover the computer can’t remember what the original question was. In other words, they waited for ions to get the secrets of the universe only to discover that the AI had nothing to tell them.

  The disturbing consequence of AI today is that it could very well captivate society with the idea of Prometheus’ flame, with all human endeavors abandoned for the sake of a robotic god with “ultimate knowledge” that doesn’t exist. If we are not careful, I could see all of civilization whither in the near future over the delusional hopes of AI.

  Like a debilitating drug, AI could hook humanity on the high promise of total mastery of our existence but never deliver the goods. In the meantime we die out, not long after giving up on all self exploration and self improvement.

  For the greatest knowledge humans can attain comes from the very struggle of life that we are so desperate to escape from.

  *  *  *

  If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 18:50

• Data Centers Are Sending Global Electricity Demand Soaring
  Data Centers Are Sending Global Electricity Demand Soaring

  Authored by Felicity Bradstock via OilPrice.com,

  • The rapid growth of data centers to support AI is significantly increasing global electricity demand.

  • This surge in demand threatens to outpace the development of renewable energy sources.

  • International regulations are needed to ensure tech companies use clean energy and minimize their impact on climate goals.

  The global electricity demand is expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, largely due to an increased demand from tech companies for new data centers to support the rollout of high-energy-consuming advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI). As governments worldwide introduce new climate policies and pump billions into alternative energy sources and clean tech, these efforts may be quashed by the increased electricity demand from data centers unless greater international regulatory action is taken to ensure that tech companies invest in clean energy sources and do not use fossil fuels for power.

  

  The International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report in October entitled “What the data centre and AI boom could mean for the energy sector”. It showed that with investment in new data centers surging over the past two years, particularly in the U.S., the electricity demand is increasing rapidly – a trend that is set to continue. 

  The report states that in the U.S., annual investment in data center construction has doubled in the past two years alone. China and the European Union are also seeing investment in data centers increase rapidly. In 2023, the overall capital investment by tech leaders Google, Microsoft, and Amazon was greater than that of the U.S. oil and gas industry, at approximately 0.5 percent of the U.S. GDP.

  The tech sector expects to deploy AI technologies more widely in the coming decades as the technology is improved and becomes more ingrained in everyday life. This is just one of several advanced technologies expected to contribute to the rise in demand for power worldwide in the coming decades. 

  Global aggregate electricity demand is set to increase by 6,750 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030, per the IEA’s Stated Policies Scenario. This is spurred by several factors including digitalization, economic growth, electric vehicles, air conditioners, and the rising importance of electricity-intensive manufacturing. In large economies such as the U.S., China, and the EU, data centers contribute around 2 to 4 percent of total electricity consumption at present. However, the sector has already surpassed 10 percent of electricity consumption in at least five U.S. states. Meanwhile, in Ireland, it contributes more than 20 percent of all electricity consumption.

  While the speed and manner in which AI use will grow remains uncertain, and efficiency improvements are expected to be made, electricity demand from data centers, cryptocurrencies, and AI could reach as much as 1,000 Terawatt Hours (TWh) in 2026 – roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan – compared to 460TWh today, the IEA predicts.

  The organization calls for more public-private dialogue, with policymakers, the tech sector, and the energy industry coming together for discussions to manage both expectations and energy use. Greater international regulation of the tech sector is required to ensure that the growing electricity demand for data centers does not outweigh the green transition achievements currently being seen worldwide. 

  There are growing fears that, if left unregulated, the electricity consumption of data centers could surpass the electricity demand of some U.S. cities or even states. Many data center developers are concerned about finding enough land to house new sites and enough clean power to run them. The facilities could increasingly require 1 GW of power or more, which is equivalent to around twice the 2023 residential electricity consumption of Pittsburgh. 

  The president of Lancium, a company that secures land and power for data centers in Texas, Ali Fenn, explained that U.S. tech companies are in the “race of a lifetime to global dominance”. Fenn said, “They’re going to keep spending” because there’s no more profitable place to deploy capital. 

  At the rate the advanced technologies are expanding, renewable energy sources will not be sufficient to meet the growing demands of the tech industry. Many tech companies are expected to use natural gas to power operations, particularly in the U.S. where the gas sector is set to continue expanding rapidly. 

  Currently, many tech companies operate data centers with a capacity of around 40 MW. However, in the coming years, more firms are expected to invest in campuses of 250 MW or more. As a growing number of campuses of 500 MW or more emerge in the 2030s and 2040s, which is equivalent to the power needed for 350,000 homes, this could lead to a surge in demand for gas-generated electricity, following years of national investment in a green transition.  

  While the U.S. is expected to see the greatest data center expansion in the coming decades, Europe’s data center power consumption is expected to nearly triple by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, China has invested over $6.12 billion in a national project to develop data centers in recent years, according to a senior government official. 

  A joined-up approach to regulating the energy usage of data centers is required to prevent the anticipated rise in electricity demand from challenging the progress of the global green transition. Governments worldwide must establish clear regulations and limits on the energy use of tech companies for advanced technologies, such as AI, if they hope to meet Paris Agreement climate pledges. This may include requiring tech companies to fulfill their energy needs through clean energy sources, such as renewables and nuclear power, as well as slowing the pace of deployment of these technologies.  

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 18:00

• Crimean Bridge Temporarily Closed After New Drone Strikes On Kerch
  Crimean Bridge Temporarily Closed After New Drone Strikes On Kerch

  Ukraine has launched another attack utilizing aerial and seaborne drones on Russia’s Crimean port city of Kerch, the Russian military confirmed Friday. 

  The attack temporarily halted traffic on the large Crimea Bridge, which links the Black Sea peninsula to mainland Russia and has come under major attack several times since the Ukraine war’s start.

  

  Crimea has been hit on a semi-regular basis by Ukrainian drones and missiles, which often try to reach the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet’s operations in Sevastopol. Russia has reportedly in the last months been forced to transfer some naval assets to the Caspian Sea for greater protection.

  According to regional media: 

  The attack began around 5:00 a.m. local time and involved both aerial and naval drones, Crimean Wind said. Traffic across the Crimea Bridge was suspended beginning at 5:17 a.m.

  The Russian Defense Ministry reported that air defenses shot down one Ukrainian drone over Crimea overnight. The agency also reported that Black Sea Fleet naval aviation destroyed two Ukrainian naval drones that were headed towards Crimea.

  “The first two sounded like explosions, one sounded like air defense work,” eyewitnesses were reported in the US-funded RFE/RL news outlet as describing.

  Kiev has been encouraged to keep fighting, and use its high risk drone attacks (which tend to result in bigger Russian retaliation), given Washington has yet to pressure it into a negotiating stance. 

  All sides are cautiously awaiting the Trump administration’s entry into the White House. But Biden is currently seeking to rush all weapons possible to the war-ravaged ally before leaving the Oval Office.

  “The United States also plans to train Ukrainian troops outside the country and finalize $20bn in loans backed by frozen Russian assets, according to the briefing shared with the Guardian,” UK media writes.

  “The strategy includes a final push of sanctions on Russia before US president-elect Donald Trump enters the White House. The move aims to weaken Russia’s war effort and enhance Ukraine’s leverage in future negotiations,” the report adds.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 17:40

• Joni Ernst: "I Don't Have A Campaign Against Pete" Hegseth
  Joni Ernst: “I Don’t Have A Campaign Against Pete” Hegseth

  Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics,

  Sen. Joni Ernst has not made up her mind about Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense, but despite the suggestion of some of her colleagues, the Iowa Republican told RealClearPolitics during a Thursday interview that she is not pursuing that role for herself.

  

  “I am not seeking to be secretary of defense,” Ernst said after some on the left suggested she would make a better candidate than Hegseth and after critics on the right accused her of trying to sink his nomination for personal gain. A combat veteran herself, she explained that while “I absolutely have interest in the military,” her focus is on continuing her work in the Armed Services committee, not joining President-elect Trump’s cabinet.

  Ernst, a senior member of the committee with jurisdiction over the nomination, met with Hegseth Wednesday as allegations about professional and sexual misconduct continue to dim his hopes of confirmation.

  “I’ve known Pete for a very long time,” Ernst said of Hegseth, a former Fox News host and decorated veteran, adding, “I really appreciated the time that he took to sit down with me and walk through a number of issues.” The senator described the conversation as “thorough” and the nominee as “very forthcoming.” A sexual assault survivor, she confirmed that the two discussed the misconduct allegations during their 45-minute sit-down.

  Hegseth denied all allegations of wrongdoing in a Wednesday interview with Megyn Kelly and vowed to fight on so long as he has Trump’s blessing.

  While Republicans control the Senate, the margins are slim. They hold the upper chamber with just a three-seat majority and are expected to have just a one-seat majority on the committee next year that will handle Hegseth’s nomination. This makes Ernst a critical swing vote, and her initial hesitation over the nominee has made her a MAGA pariah.

  Complained Donald Trump Jr., the son of the president-elect, in a social media post Thursday, “If you’re a GOP Senator who voted for Lloyd Austin but criticize Pete Hegseth then maybe you’re in the wrong political party!” Charlie Kirk, a confidant of the Trump family, noted that Ernst had supported Austin, the current secretary of defense, and accused the senator of “leading the charge against Hegseth.”

  “No, no,” Ernst said of the accusation that she was working behind the scenes to sink the nominee, “and believe me, I have been feeling this.” The senator insisted that “there is absolutely no campaign against Pete,” adding that her focus remains strictly on ensuring a thorough and fair confirmation process.

  The candidates change, she said, but the process ought to remain consistent. “If there had been allegations made against Gen. Austin,” she said of the current defense secretary who was confirmed with broad bipartisan support four years ago, “we would have gone through that process as well. I think anyone that comes in front of our committee deserves a fair hearing.”

  “I don’t have a campaign against Pete,” she reiterated.

  “I just want to make sure the process is able to play out and that we’re thoroughly vetting him. I do believe that Pete deserves to have a hearing. All the rumblings out there are absolutely false. My role as a senator is to make sure that we are putting to bed any rumors, any anonymous whatever,” she continued.

  “We just need to make sure that he is thoroughly vetted and that he has his opportunity to go in front of the committee, recount his service, and rebut any allegations,” she concluded.

  Democrats have already made their own conclusions. They think the nominee is already sunk. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said as much before telling the Washington Examiner that if Trump swapped Ernst for Hegseth, Democrats would begin with “a very favorable inclination” to confirm her. Added Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, “she would have significant bipartisan support.”

  Ernst is not entertaining those suggestions, and even as Trump reportedly seeks a potential backup plan should Hegseth withdraw, the senator said she isn’t seeking out an alternative.

  Asked about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose name has been floated as a Plan B, Ernst replied, “I do think he would be a good candidate for this position. But as I’ve told reporters, as they ask me in the hallway, Hegseth is the nominee, and the president will determine who that nominee is.”

  Trump will assume office in January of next year, and confirmation hearings are not expected until the end of that month. The former, and now future, president believes he has a historic mandate after becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades. John McLaughlin, Trump’s longtime pollster, told RCP that opposition to his nominees incurs inherent risk and a potential primary challenge.

  “Republicans are totally behind his agenda and are totally supportive of him putting the right people in place so he can solve the country’s problems,” McLaughlin said in a Thursday interview. “If certain Republican senators side with the Democrats, they do so at their own peril.”

  Ernst insisted that her focus is not on politics and only on discovering “what the truth is.”

  “It’s all about making sure that the nominee is properly vetted,” she said of the process that will begin in earnest early next year. Added the senator, “That’s why it’s important that we continue through the hearing, and he’ll have his day in front of the public, and all of this can be sorted out.”

  There will be plenty of time, Ernst said, to go back and sort through “all the anonymous this-and-that-and the-other.” She noted that thus far, all the allegations have been made anonymously in the press and that no accuser has come forward publicly. “I mean, people need to really come forward if they have information,” she said. “They need to be willing to put their name to it.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 17:20

• Introducing The New ZeroHedge Store!
  Introducing The New ZeroHedge Store!

  Since launching ZeroHedge in 2009, our mission has been to cut through the bullshit and provide you with an authentic, unfiltered platform for news and conversation from all over the world. Having earned your trust over the past 15 years, curating the world’s incessant newsflow – while battling the censorship industrial complex through subscriptions and partnerships – we have decided to create our own store to showcase the best products and services to help you avoid “buying shit you don’t need”.

  

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  In addition to IQ Biologix infused Smart Blend, check out our new ZeroHedge coffee! Organic and GMO-free, we’ve got both medium and dark roast. Discounts of up to 10% for multiple bags, and another 10% for Subscribe & Save.

  

  Preparedness

  After searching long and hard, we’ve found two excellent brands of emergency food – Prepper All Naturals, which offers upscale, clean, hormone-free beef, and ReadyWise, a longtime player in the emergency food business.

  

  We’ve also got water filters, go-bags, generators & more!

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  IQ Biologix has partnered with SiPhox Health for the ultimate at-home blood testing suite. Buy one, or subscribe to track your health throughout the year – then log into the IQ / SiPhox dashboard to monitor your results. You can also upgrade your kit for specific needs – including a hormone panel, a metabolic panel, and a thyroid panel.

  

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  Made in Santee, California, Anza hand-made knives start life as heavy-duty high carbon steel files, which are meticulously crafted into masterpieces that fit well in the hand and have never let us down.

  

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  Solid in the hand, the ZeroHedge multitool is perfect for any situation. Includes pliers, knife, saw, screwdrivers, wire cutter, bottle opener and more.

  

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  How could we possibly launch a store without gear? Check out our waxed-canvas hats, shirts, sweatshirts, tumblers, water bottle, and more!

  

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  Dive in, gear up, and embrace a lifestyle of readiness, resilience, and individuality with ZeroHedge. And thank you for your support!

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  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 16:40

• "Not A Joke…" – Blanket Pardons & The Big Guy
  “Not A Joke…” – Blanket Pardons & The Big Guy

  Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

  “Stare into the sun and begin to glimpse the size of what you’re up against.”

  – Mike Benz

  The Hunter Biden super-sized blanket pardon went over so well around the country that “Joe Biden” – or the shadowy league of not-quite-geniuses who run the twilight White House operation – floated the idea of issuing preemptive pardons for a few of the most spectacularly dishonest characters in US political life: Dr. Fauci, Senator-elect Adam Schiff, and Liz Cheney. Does “JB” plan on legally adopting them so he can claim he was moved to act out of a father’s love?

  

  Like every official act ever associated with the name “Joe Biden,” the preemptive pardon idea has that reality-optional feel. None of the three has been convicted of a crime to be pardoned for, or even been hauled-in for questioning by federal law enforcement agents on a probable cause writ. But a pardon would necessarily paint them as criminals, ipso facto. Would they accept a pardon, with what it implies, or run shrieking from it as from an apple polished with novichok?

  The proffer of a pardon itself must amount to a declaration of probable cause, igniting the very legal process it seeks to dispose of. An inquiry would have to be launched to discover what laws these three desperadoes might have broken, followed perhaps by a grand jury to evaluate the evidence, and so on. “Joe Biden” himself might have to answer some basic questions, such as: at what time prior to issuing the pardon did he begin to suspect some laws had been broken? And, since the president’s chief duty is to enforce the law, was “JB” negligent and culpable himself for misprision of felonies?

  You know, of course, that the Supreme Court decided last summer in Trump v. United States (Docket No: 23-939) that a president is immune from prosecution for official acts. But the misprision of felonies is neither a presidential duty nor anything describable as an official act. Rather it would be grounds for impeachment, being a “high crime.” Now, luckily for Joe Biden, his term-in-office is so close to its conclusion that impeachment must be considered off-the-table as a practical matter. He might be subject to prosecution, though, after the clock strikes noon on one-six-twenty-five.

  I doubt he will be present at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, so the US marshals will have to root him out of Delaware (or wherever) and haul him into the federal lockup in DC at exactly the moment Mr. Trump pardons the J-6 prisoners. Will they get to see “Joe Biden” coming into the joint on their way out? There would be a certain poetic symmetry in that, and hard to not admire the workings of Providence after all its foot-dragging. You might well ask: how many days, or months, will “Joe Biden” have to endure in solitary detention before the paperwork is in order for a proper arraignment? Considering how the process was applied to those J-6 culprits, a year would seem sufficient.

  Pardon me for saying: I fear that “Joe Biden” might have started something that isn’t going to end well for “Joe Biden” and many others. The little goldfish bowl of the White House is surrounded by the vast, pulsating DC blob and its million-footed ranks of officials deserving of pardons. You know the floated names Fauci, Schiff, and Cheney were only representative samples, denoting a certain managerial class of blobists that runs to the thousands of federal employees at least. What about Garland, Monaco, and Gupta at DOJ, and their paladin prosecutor Jack Smith, and his many deputies? Or Comey, Wray, Abate, Sallet, McCabe, Rosenstein, Strzok, Page, Pientka, Priestap, McCord, Horowitz out of the FBI? Or Mueller, Weissmann, Dreeben, Van Grack, Rhee, and Quarles from that spin-off Special Counsel venture? Or Boasberg, Chutkan, and Sullivan in the DC judiciary? Or, Collins, Wallensky, Cohen and their many deputies in Covid-land? Surely, they all deserve pardons now, and their crimes can be sorted out later.

  There would appear to be no precedent for a chief executive pardoning the entire federal government, or we would have heard of it by now.

  At the conclusion of the Civil War, Abe Lincoln issued a conditional pardon to Southerners — they had to take an oath of allegiance to the Union — but it did not include military officers and high-ranking Confederate officials.

  The blob of our time is a different breed of porpoise.

  Actually, it’s more like a systemic fungal infection of the body politic, requiring deep fumigation and exposure to sunlight. The proposed D.O.G.E advisory under Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy might answer as a “good enough” therapeutic approach, wholesale dismissal of entire agencies and departments, actually flushing away the malign parasites en masse, pardons not required.

  What I await in the sunsetting “Joe Biden” presidency is whether he will go ahead and pardon the other members of the Biden family beyond just “first son” Hunter: brothers Jim and Frank and the wives and various offspring who received cash “gifts” from officials in foreign lands laundered into their personal bank accounts amounting to millions of dollars. None of them enjoy the much talked-about presidential immunity out of mere familial proximity to their illustrious relation, number “46” in the lengthening line of commanders-in-chief.

  Perhaps that’s what is spurring the league of not-quite-geniuses behind the Big Guy to try to start World War Three this Christmas Season – to distract the public from the inevitable Biden family blanket pardon. At this point, I don’t care if they are ever prosecuted for all that grift. Let the Big Guy and his adjacent family fishes slip through the net.

  Let that certain someone who authored The Art of the Deal work his magic on the situation so that we don’t become an ashtray from sea to shining sea before the Christmas trees are swagged and lighted.

  *  *  *

  It’s that time of year! In this novella, a boy runs away from home in Manhattan all the way to Vermont the night before Christmas. Tribulations ensue. “A masterpiece of comedy and pathos.” Autographed copies from Battenkill Books, Cambridge, New York.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 16:20

• The Commercial Mortgage Crisis Deepens
  The Commercial Mortgage Crisis Deepens

  Authored by Peter Earle via the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER),

  The delinquency rate for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) tied to office properties reached 10.4 percent in November 2024, approaching the 10.7 percent peak reached during the 2008 financial crisis. The ascent is the fastest two-year increase on record, with rates climbing 8.8 percentage points since late 2022, significantly outrunning the 6.3-point rise seen during the financial crisis nearly 15 years ago.

  

  The office real estate sector has been grappling with a severe downturn for several years now, but are accelerating recently as they are driven by persistently high vacancy rates and declining rents. Property values, particularly for older office buildings, have plummeted, with many losing 50 to 70 percent of their market value and in some cases becoming effectively worthless. Those conditions have left real estate portfolio managers and building owners unable to borrow, refinance or sell properties, contributing to rising delinquencies and foreclosures. (Mortgages become effectively delinquent when payments are missed beyond a standard 30-day grace period.)

  

  Three key factors contributed to the widespread impairment of office properties and, in turn, securitized mortgage products: 

  1. malinvestment due to artificially low interest rates and excessive credit expansion,

  2. zoning restrictions hampering property repurposing,

  3. and the widespread adoption of remote work following COVID-19 lockdowns.

  During the 2020–2022 period of near-zero benchmark rates (and in real terms, negative interest rates), lenders underwrote commercial real estate loans with minimal debt service coverage ratios, frequently projecting property income to just cover interest payments. Those assumptions faltered as rates rose, exposing the speculative nature of many of the core suppositions undergirding those loans. Adding to that, rigid zoning and building regulations (in addition to obstinance among owners, in some cases) have slowed the transition of obsolete office spaces to other uses, such as residential conversions. Lastly, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a long-term shift toward remote work, reducing demand for traditional office spaces.

  Loans can be removed from delinquency lists through resumed payments, foreclosure sales (typically at steep losses to investors), or loan restructuring under the so-called “extend-and-pretend“ strategy, which defers foreclosures into future years. This approach has been widely employed, pushing questions about the financial health of some real estate investment entities to 2025 and beyond.

  

  Among commercial real estate (CRE) segments, office properties are the most troubled, with delinquency rates significantly outpacing lodging (6.9 percent), retail (6.6 percent), and multifamily housing (4.2 percent). Of particular note, the industrial sector remains robust with a delinquency rate of just 0.3 percent. However, the distress is not confined to office properties. CRE-CLO (commercial real estate collateralized loan obligation) bonds, which include short-term floating-rate loans across various property types, are seeing distress rates hit record highs. Office loans account for nearly one in five distressed CRE-CLO loans, but multifamily loans are also at risk, with distress rates reaching 16.4 percent in Q3 2024. The weakness stems from the collision of soaring financing costs and underperforming properties. Indeed, as Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) predicts, artificially low interest rates stimulated aggressive underwriting during the pandemic, a large portion of which has proven wholly unsustainable.

  

  Efforts to convert office buildings into residential spaces are increasing but remain limited by structural and economic constraints. Many office towers are unsuitable for conversion due to their large floor plates or prohibitively high retrofitting costs which often exceed the cost of demolition and rebuilding. In 2024, 73 office-to-residential conversions were completed, with an additional 30 underway. Despite plans to increase the pace in 2025, the cumulative impact remains minimal, addressing just 7.9 percent of the 902 million square feet of vacant office space nationwide.

  The “survive till 2025” mindset dominates market sentiment, with landlords hoping for substantial Federal Reserve rate cuts to alleviate financial pressures. However, while the Fed has reduced rates, they remain between 4.5 percent and 4.75 percent, with the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) at 4.57 percent. Moreover, concerns regarding $36 trillion in U.S. government debt, tariff threats, and signs of slowing disinflation have pushed long-term Treasury yields back to pre-cut levels, undermining hopes for refinancing relief. Those conditions have left many properties — especially those tied to bridge loans — on the brink of financial distress.

  

  The financial risks associated with office mortgage losses are widely dispersed among global investors, thus diminishing the potential threat to the U.S. banking system. Office mortgages are held by a vast array of investors, including CMBS and CRE-CLO investors, insurance firms, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), private equity firms, and international financial institutions. While U.S. banks have some exposure and have already recognized significant losses, no major collapses have occurred. Smaller banks with geographically and/or commercially concentrated mortgage portfolios remain at heightened risk, and escalating stress could precipitate systemic consequences.

  The commercial real estate market’s troubles are not a temporary phenomenon but a structural crisis rooted in monetary policy-induced overbuilding, regulatory barriers, and a permanent shift in work patterns vastly accelerated by pandemic lockdowns. Vulture investors have emerged, but sparingly. The sector faces profound challenges which will unfold both against and in response to the forward trajectory of monetary policy, the consequent shape of the U.S. Treasury yield curve, and broad macroeconomic developments. Hopefully the stage is not being set for the next in an increasingly annualized procession of crises.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 15:40

• The Kalecki Profit Equation And The Coming Reversion
  The Kalecki Profit Equation And The Coming Reversion

  Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

  Corporations are currently producing the highest level of profitability, as a percentage of GDP, in history. However, understanding corporate profitability involves more than glancing at quarterly earnings reports. At its core, the Kalecki Profit Equation provides a valuable framework, especially when exploring the reasons behind today’s elevated profit margins and what could disrupt them.

  

  James Montier discussed the Kalecki profit equation in 2012 in a post entitled “What Goes Up, Must Come Down.” However, that has not been the case, as noted recently by Albert Edwards at Societe Generale:

  “Companies have been able to push through profit‑margin‑expanding price increases under the cover of two key events, namely 1) supply constraints in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic and 2) commodity cost-push pressures after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But we still emphasise that one of the main sources of the recent surge in profit margins is massive fiscal expansion. In short, the government has been spending more to the benefit of corporates.“

  

  It is that last statement that is most crucial for investors and the incoming Trump administration.

  However, we need to understand the Kalecki Profit Equation.

  The Kalecki Profit Equation Made Simple

  Some economic equations or relations are inspired by guesswork and may not describe the real world precisely. Other equations always hold since they are simple accounting identities. The Kalecki Profit Equation is of the latter type. It describes precisely the factors that determine corporate profits. Knowing this relation can give investors a leg up in predicting earnings.

  Named after the economist Michal Kalecki, this equation deciphers the macroeconomic elements that shape business earnings. Corporate profits derive from combining investment, government and household savings behaviors, dividends, and trade flows.

  Profits = Investment – Household Saving – Foreign Saving – Government Saving + Dividends

  Kalecki’s formula states that net investment, household and government savings, foreign trade balances, and corporate dividend payouts determine total corporate profits. The equation underscores how interconnected economic activities translate into business revenue. For example, when governments run deficits, they inject money into the economy, boosting overall demand and, by extension, corporate earnings. Conversely, business profitability can take a hit when households save more or governments cut spending.

  As shown, after a massive spike in household savings during the pandemic, the surge in corporate profitability was unsurprising as households went on a shopping spree.

  

  It is crucially important to understand the bolded statement above. Many economists and analysts are raising alarm bells about increasing government spending and deficits. However, over the past decade, record profit margins have become a hallmark of corporate America as politicians continue to “UN-save” by running more significant deficits. Therefore, corporate profit margins have averaged far higher than the historical norm, with both households and the government “dis-saving” at an increasing pace. From the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis through the pandemic stimulus programs, fiscal policy has kept money flowing and profits robust.

  

  As discussed previously, massive government interventions have kept economic growth humming for the last two decades. While the incoming Trump administration suggests cutting spending and the deficits, the consequences, which are long-term beneficial, will be painful in the short term.

  Decoding Today’s Elevated Profit Margins

  Government spending isn’t the sole contributor to recent profitability highs. Investment dynamics and changing consumer behavior have played critical roles. The post-pandemic stimulus created a consumption boom, reinforcing corporate earnings. Additionally, low interest rates over the last decade fueled significant business investment and stock buybacks, another source of profit strength. As Montier warns, record corporate profit margins can not last indefinitely.

  “If the era of big government is here to stay then profits as a percent of GNP can remain higher than in the past. However, it should be noted that economic theory offers no reason as to why profit margins should mean revert. It is the return on capital, not the return on sales, that ‘should’ mean revert. Of course, because capital is not observable, we are forced to proxy it.

  From a simple profit margins perspective, we can examine the Shiller P/E. This measure attempts to smooth out the cyclical elements of profitability by following Ben Graham’s advice to use 10 years of earnings in the denominator of the P/E. This makes it interesting to us in the current context as it automatically builds in the fact that profitability has been higher over the last 10 years.

  So even if one believes that fiscal deficits are here to stay and that profitability is structurally higher as a result, the U.S. market is still trading at around 35x. This dooms investors to low long-run returns. Even if we don’t get any valuation or margin mean reversion, investors are facing a return of around 3% real – hardly likely to be sufficient recompense for the risk of owning equities.”

  Since the “Financial Crisis,” massive Government spending has corresponded to a persistently elevated market valuation multiple.

  

  Another anomaly caused by the massive surge in Government and Household spending (dis-saving) has been the detachment of margin-adjusted valuations from earnings-driven valuation measures. As Montier noted in his research:

  “In the past both John Hussman and I have shown that various measures of margin-adjusted CAPE have performed better than standard CAPE as predictors of returns – naturally due to the mean reversion of margins over time. They show how if margins were to revert to their ‘normal/historical levels,’ then the CAPE
  would be much higher than the standard CAPE shows – margin-adjusted measures of CAPE are around 50x today! If you believe in full reversion of both valuations and margins,then your return outlook would be exceptionally downbeat.”

  

  Of course, if we get valuation mean reversion, investors will face long-run returns significantly worse than 3% on an inflation-adjusted basis.

  What would cause such a reversion? Any action that increases Government savings. As governments worldwide grapple with inflation and rising debt burdens, austerity measures may come into play. Consider the U.S. budget discussions around reducing expenditures on social programs and infrastructure. Any significant cuts could reduce aggregate demand, impacting corporate revenues.

  Household savings trends are another factor to watch. As inflation erodes purchasing power and consumers face higher borrowing costs, the impulse to save rather than spend intensifies. This behavior can create a feedback loop in economic downturns, as lower consumption hits businesses, leading to reduced hiring and investment, further dampening growth.

  Remember, in the Kalecki framework, rising household savings represent a direct drag on profits.

  Why Stock Market Investors Should Be Concerned

  The Kalecki Profit Equation clearly explains that while debts and deficits erode economic growth and are deflationary through the diversion of capital from productive investment, a reversal of deficit spending suggests risk for investors. Valuations are high, partly because investors assume elevated profit margins will persist. However, the cumulative change of the inflation-adjusted price of the market significantly exceeds the profits being generated. Previous such deviations have not ended well for investors, which is what the Kalecki equation suggests.

  

  We see the same evidence in the correlation between corporate profits to GDP ratio vs the inflation-adjusted market price.

  

  If economic conditions worsen or fiscal policies tighten, we could see a significant reset. Earnings projections would likely be revised downward, dragging down equity prices. As Montier suggests, long-term returns for U.S. equities look grim even under optimistic assumptions. He points out that price-to-earnings ratios reflect these outsized profit margins, leaving little room for error.

  Importantly, as opposed to Yardeni’s more ebullient forecasts, as we addressed last week, history suggests that periods of high profitability are not indefinite. From a macroeconomic perspective, unsustainably high margins eventually face downward pressure from mean reversion. The Shiller P/E ratio, which adjusts earnings to a 10-year average, remains elevated, implying rich valuations without much margin of safety. In other words, any move toward fiscal restraint or consumer belt-tightening could usher in a profit decline.

  As always, the future of corporate profits and market performance remains unpredictable, but understanding the forces at play provides an edge. Acknowledging the interdependency of government policy, household behavior, and corporate actions is crucial for investors. The coming years may test the resilience of today’s profit levels, and prudent investors should prepare for a range of outcomes.

  *  *  *

  For more insights on market trends and strategic advice, visit RealInvestmentAdvice.com.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 12/06/2024 – 15:00

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