Month: July 2024

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell via The Mises Institute,

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism requires support for “open borders,” but this is a mistake. “Open borders” is the view in the existing world of states, the state ought to admit as many people who want to come to the United States as possible. Of course, you don’t have the right to occupy property that is privately owned. But much of the property in the United States is “public,” which means that it is up to those who run the state to decide what to do with it. Of course, this is an unsatisfactory situation and we should do what we can to bring about a world with no “public” property and no state, but for now the question is what to do: open borders or not?

The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a. disastrous mistake. The policy would subject the United States to hordes of people with alien ideologies and cultures. As the great Ludwig von Mises pointed out, it would have made no sense to allow immigration from Germany and Japan during World War II. “Neither does it mean that there can be any question of appeasing aggressors by removing migration barriers. As conditions are today, the Americas and Australia in admitting German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants merely open their doors to the vanguards of hostile armies.” We face exactly the same situation today. We have a hard enough problem coping with the alien ideologies and cultures that are already here. Why compound our problem?

The situation is even worse than we have so far portrayed. Because of the “woke” control that now prevails, members of “protected” groups such as racial minorities are immediately eligible for reparations, “set-asides,” affirmative action, and other schemes to mulct the American people. Why should our hard-earned tax money go to support people who have no ties to our country? As I said in 2015, “In other words, it’s bad enough we have to be looted, spied on, and kicked around by the state. Should we also have to pay for the privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the state’s taxpaying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they lived in a free society and were allowed to do so?”

Aside from the “woke” problem, there is something else. Those who come here because of “open borders” can immediately benefit from the welfare state. A massive number of people could come here just to live from welfare payments. Why bankrupt our economy? The well-known free market economist Milton Friedman, hardly an extremist, said, “You cannot simultaneously have a free market and a welfare state.”

You might counter this by pointing out that welfare benefits aren’t very lavish. But this is true only if you are thinking of the standards of living of the American upper and middle classes. (Actually, though, these benefits are quite substantial and give the lie to claims that America has been marked by rising “inequality” in recent decades.) Because America is much more prosperous than the places the immigrants are coming from, living from American welfare payments would be a good deal for millions of potential immigrants.

Some fanatical libertarian supporters of “open borders” have come up with a response to this point that has to be characterized as one of the worst arguments in the past few decades.

Robert Rector mentions this argument here:

“The grant of citizenship is a transfer of political power. Access to the U.S. ballot box also provides access to the American taxpayer’s bank account. This is particularly problematic with regard to low-skill immigrants. Within an active redistributionist state, as Friedman understood, unlimited immigration can threaten limited government.

“Many libertarians respond to this dilemma by asserting that the real problem is not open borders but the welfare state itself. The answer: dismantle the welfare state. The libertarian Cato Institute pursues a variant of this policy under the slogan, ‘build a wall around the welfare state, not around the nation.’. . . Borders should be open, but immigrants should be barred from accessing welfare and other benefits. , , . In a recent debate with Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, I pointed out this paradox. Griswold replied that the key was to grant amnesty and open borders now and work on ‘building a wall around welfare’ at some point in the future.”

See this.

It has to be said that this is utterly stupid. It would be like saying that you need to take two medications. If you take only one, you’ll die. Therefore, you should take one of them and worry about getting the other one later.

There is yet another problem with “open borders,” that gets to the root of why we support the free market. As Mises again and again pointed out, the free market replaces the Darwinian struggle of the natural world, in which some animals survive at the expense of others. In the free market, people can benefit without harming others. There is a harmony of long term interests among people.

But with open borders this is no longer true.

Immigrants will take jobs by undercutting American workers, because even very low paying American jobs are better than what they are getting in their home countries. This process will take place until wages reach a common level, and given the vast number of potential immigrants compared with American workers, the wage that results will be close to the immigrants’ standard.

American workers could rightly say, “What about us? Your “free market” makes our condition worse.” But of course it isn’t the “free market” that does this. It’s “open borders,” which is an anti-market principle, that does this. Insisting that “open borders” makes everybody better off makes libertarianism seem ridiculous, because a great many people are hurt by the policy.

Some “left libertarians” will object that the free market does indeed mandate “open borders”. But it doesn’t.

The libertarian non-aggression principle leaves it up to us to determine what to do in a society with so-called “public” property.

We need to confront another objection.

Wouldn’t an attempt to close the border require that we lock up illegal immigrants in concentration camps? Wouldn’t this be a drastic infringement on their liberty? But a closed border doesn’t require this. All that we need to do is to build a wall and prevent immigrants from entering. We don’t have to jail them. All we need to do is to turn them away.

Also, building a wall would be easier if states can build walls around their own territory. This greatly reduces the cost of building a wall. Closing the border gives the people in each state or local community a choice about accepting immigrants. Closed borders and secession go hand-in hand

Let’s do everything we can to end the hoax of “open borders.” Doing so is a step in the preservation of Western civilization and the American heritage.

The median pay for S&P 500 CEOs soared to an all-time high of $15.7 million in 2023, as a strong stock market boosted executive compensation.

Some of the highest paid CEOs in America earned nine-figure pay packages, with the vast majority of CEO compensation tied to stock awards. Overall, executives in the index earned on average 196 times more than the median S&P 500 employee, up from 185 in 2022.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist, shows the top 10 highest paid CEOs of S&P 500 companies, based on analysis from The Wall Street Journal and MyLogIQ.

The Highest-Earning S&P 500 CEOs in 2023

Here are the S&P 500 chief executives who received the highest compensation packages last year:

Total pay includes equity awards and cash pay.

Hock Tan, CEO of chipmaker Broadcom, tops the list, with an annual compensation of $161.8 million in 2023.

Like Nvidia, the company has benefited from surging demand for AI technologies. Broadcom supplies the networking chips used in data centers for big tech companies, including Microsoft. Between 2022 and 2023, Tan’s salary doubled, earning 510 times the median pay of employees.

Ranking in third is Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the biggest private equity firm in the world, Blackstone. The executive’s $119.8 million pay package was bolstered by a 83% rise in its share price last year. The firm is the world’s largest owner of commercial property, with approximately 12,500 real estate assets overall.

Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook received $63.2 million in 2023—a sharp decline from the $99.4 million earned in the prior year. This rare pay cut was the result of shareholder pushback and requests from Cook himself.

Overall, four of the top 10 highest paid CEOs in America are in the tech sector, with each experiencing double-digit share price gains over 2023.

CEO Pay Has Doubled Over the Last Decade

Below, we show the increasing magnitude of executive earnings since 2013:

Total pay includes equity awards and cash pay.

As we can see, the median total compensation of S&P 500 CEOs jumped over 8% between 2022 and 2023.

Going further, this figure has grown by twofold over the last 10 years as the U.S. stock market surged during a period of low interest rates. Overall, CEO pay is rising faster than median employee pay and this gap between CEOs and workers has continued to widen over many years. For perspective, the median pay of S&P 500 employees stood at $81,476 in 2023.

Often, CEO compensation is linked to the company’s financial performance, which is measured through share price movements and dividend payouts. In addition, the rise in CEO pay can be largely driven by stock awards granted to CEOs.

A separate analysis from Equilar found that on average, 70% of S&P 500 CEO compensation stemmed from stock awards, averaging a striking $9.4 million in 2023.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine infringed on a patent held by rival Moderna, the High Court in London, England, found in a decision released on July 2.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines both utilize messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology.

Moderna patented mRNA processes that replace the nucleoside uridine with N1-methylpseudouridine, a modified RNA. The patent is titled, “ribonucleic acids containing n1-methyl-pseudouracils and uses thereof.”

The patent “is valid,” the court stated, adding that it was infringed “given that Pfizer/BioNTech conceded that it would be infringed if valid.”

The court rejected arguments made by Pfizer and BioNTech, including the argument that Moderna’s patent was not novel. It said parts of the patent were novel, from a method developed by the University of Pennsylvania.

The District Court of the Hague in 2023 found the patent to be invalid due to lack of novelty versus the method, but the London court said it weighed other evidence and found some factors persuasive that the Hague did not.

Moderna in 2020 said it would not enforce patents related to COVID-19 against rival manufacturers. However, in 2022, it revoked the declaration, meaning Pfizer and BioNTech came into violation of the patent, the high court said in a related decision.

Justice Jonathan Richards wrote in the ruling, that “Even if the pledge was an express waiver of rights, it was validly retracted by the March 2022 statement since Pfizer/BioNTech had not by that date materially changed its position in reliance on the pledge.”

The court also ruled that a second patent held by Moderna was invalid.

Possible Appeals

All three companies said they disagreed with the parts of the court’s decision on which they lost, and it is expected that all parties will seek permission to appeal.

Pfizer and BioNTech said in a statement:

“These proceedings have no bearing on the safety and efficacy profile of our vaccine, as established by regulators worldwide.

“Irrespective of the outcome of this legal matter, we will continue to manufacture and supply the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in line with our agreements and established supply schedules.”

A spokesperson for Moderna said the company was pleased the court “recognized the innovation of Moderna scientists by confirming the validity and infringement” of one of its patents.

Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are also involved in parallel proceedings in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States, much of which has been put on hold, as well as at the European Patent Office.

The London ruling comes at a time of financial strain for Moderna, whose shares have plummeted by more than 70 percent since the peak of the pandemic as demand and sales for Spikevax have fallen. Shares of Pfizer, meanwhile, are down about 29 percent since mid-2021.

It’s a nightmarish scenario which seems straight out of Jaws and which has never happened before at a Texas beach: four people were attacked by a shark within a mere two hour period in waters off South Padre Island.

South Padre is a hugely popular vacation destination in south Texas, and it happened as beaches were packed for the Independence Day holiday. A horrific video showed people screaming and bawling as one woman is pulled from the ocean with a large gash in her leg, and apparently in a state of shock, and with blood filling the water…

JUST IN: Four shark attacks reported at South Padre Island in Texas during Fourth of July celebrations.

Game Warden Capt. Chris Dowdy says all the attacks happened within two hours of each other.

One woman had a chunk bitten out her her leg as Good Samaritans were seen dragging… pic.twitter.com/Ng4aMKhjmi

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 5, 2024

“Details at this time indicate that two people were bitten and two people encountered the shark but were not seriously injured,” the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said in a statement. Two victims were taken to Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville, with one being in more serious condition.

A third victim was injured, but not seriously, while trying to save another victim. A fourth person reportedly fought off a potential attack by kicking and punching the shark. “One [victim] was grazed and another injured fending off the shark,” according to local news station KRGV.

One eyewitness said, “We never saw the shark ‘til he was right there with them” and described that “It wasn’t choppy water, and the seas were calm. He showed up out of nowhere.”

“How is this actually happening right now? It was very surreal,” another said. One person was actually pulled under by the shark but survived the ordeal:

Rayner Cardenas told KRGV his son-in-law was pulled underwater by the shark.

“Started swimming towards him, and he jumped out of the water and started saying, ‘Shark! Shark!’ And that’s when adrenaline kicked in, and I went right after him.”

The bite to the man’s leg was described as “severe”. Texas Game Warden Captain Chris Dowdy said that authorities at this point believe all of the attacks were the result of the same shark, which lingered in the area of the last attack for some 20 to 30 minutes, and was caught on film. The woman in the above footage also appears to have suffered extensive injuries to her leg.

One account was particularly harrowing:

Nereyda Bazaldua told CNN her daughter was one of those bitten Thursday. Bazaldua said her two teenage daughters were in shallow, knee-deep water near the shore playing on boogie boards when they began screaming, “Shark!”

When her 18-year-old daughter Victoria came out of the water, Bazaldua said she “could see some blood coming down her leg,” Bazaldua said. Thankfully, she said, Victoria’s injuries were minor.

“The shark pushed into her, five to six of his teeth scratched her leg,” Bazaldua said. “The wounds aren’t deep.” She said the shark lingered in the water for 20 to 30 minutes before moving along.

Swimmers had been evacuated from the ocean, with DPS buzzing the waters with helicopters and providing a lookout, until the shark was reportedly observed swimming out to deeper waters.

Footage of the shark believed to have been behind the July 4th attacks:

“Local game wardens and members of the Texas Game Warden Marine Tactical Operations Group assisted in patrolling the beach by boat and land patrol while DPS patrolled the area by helicopter and SPI PD and Cameron County rangers assisted with crowd control on the beach,” a statement said.

“Shark encounters of this nature are not a common occurrence in Texas,” Texas officials said in a statement. “When bites from sharks do occur, they are usually a case of mistaken identity by sharks looking for food.”

This incident is unprecedented and ultra-rare, given that in all of recorded history fewer than 50 total documented shark attacks have occurred in Texas since 1911.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Scientists have done some amazing things but not all of them have practical application, at least yet. Fusion is a great example.

Live Science reports the World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Reactor is Finally Completed.

The International Fusion Energy Project (ITER) fusion reactor, consisting of 19 massive coils looped into multiple toroidal magnets, was originally slated to begin its first full test in 2020. Now scientists say it will fire in 2039 at the earliest.

ITER contains the world’s most powerful magnet, making it capable of producing a magnetic field 280,000 times as strong as the one shielding Earth.

The reactor’s impressive design comes with an equally hefty price-tag. Originally slated to cost around $5 billion and fire up in 2020, it has now suffered multiple delays and its budget swelled beyond $22 billion, with an additional $5 billion proposed to cover additional costs. These unforeseen expenses and delays are behind the most recent, 15-year delay.

Scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion — the process by which stars burn — for more than 70 years. By fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium under extremely high pressures and temperatures, main-sequence stars convert matter into light and heat, generating enormous amounts of energy without producing greenhouse gases or long-lasting radioactive waste.

But replicating the conditions found inside the hearts of stars is no simple task. The most common design for fusion reactors, the tokamak, works by superheating plasma (one of the four states of matter, consisting of positive ions and negatively charged free electrons) before trapping it inside a donut-shaped reactor chamber with powerful magnetic fields.

Impressive But …

Assuming the reactor originally scheduled for 2020 is finally operable by 2039, I will be impressed.

Heck, I am impressed at what we have already scientifically achieved. But I wonder what is the practical application of this.

Keeping the turbulent and superheated coils of plasma in place long enough for nuclear fusion to happen, however, has been challenging. Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958, but no one has since managed to create a reactor that is able to put out more energy than it takes in.

One of the main stumbling blocks is handling a plasma that’s hot enough to fuse. Fusion reactors require very high temperatures (many times hotter than the sun) because they have to operate at much lower pressures than is found inside the cores of stars.

The core of the actual sun, for example, reaches temperatures of around 27 million Fahrenheit (15 million Celsius) but has pressures roughly equal to 340 billion times the air pressure at sea level on Earth.

Cooking plasma to these temperatures is the relatively easy part, but finding a way to corral it so that it doesn’t burn through the reactor or derail the fusion reaction is technically tricky. This is usually done either with lasers or magnetic fields.

Question and Answer on Temperatures

How a reactor could produce temperatures of 27 million degrees without the operation melting is likely a puzzle to anyone who has been thinking clearly.

The article provides an answer. But what is the cost and how long can the reaction be sustained without a meltdown? Are there any other issues?

For those questions, let’s turn to a 2022 article. also from Live Science.

A Step Closer to a New Source of Power

Please consider A Step Closer to a New Source of Power

In the new experiments, the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham near Oxford, England, produced blazingly hot plasmas that released a record-setting 59 megajoules of energy — about the same amount of energy unleashed by the explosion of 31 pounds (14 kilograms) of TNT.

Nuclear fusion — the same reaction that occurs in the heart of stars — merges atomic nuclei to form heavier nuclei. Nuclear physicists have long sought to produce nuclear fusion in reactors on Earth because it generates far more energy than burning fossil fuels does. For example, a pineapple-size amount of hydrogen atoms offers as much energy as 10,000 tons (9,000 metric tons) of coal, according to a statement from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project.

“It took us years to prepare these experiments. And in the end we have managed to confirm our predictions and models,” Athina Kappatou, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching near Munich, Germany, told Live Science. “That’s good news on the way to ITER.”

JET, which began operating in 1983, now uses the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium as fuel. Whereas a normal hydrogen atom has no neutrons in its core, a deuterium atom has one neutron and a tritium atom has two. Currently, it is the only power plant in the world capable of operating with deuterium-tritium fuel — although ITER will also use it when it comes online.

However, deuterium-tritium fusion poses a number of challenges. For example, deuterium-tritium fusion can generate dangerous amounts of high-energy neutrons, each moving at about 116 million mph (187 million km/h), or 17.3% the speed of light — so fast they could reach the moon in under 8 seconds. As such, special shielding is needed in these experiments.

For the new experiments, the previous carbon lining in the JET reactor was replaced between 2009 and 2011 with a mixture of beryllium and tungsten, which will also be installed in ITER. This new metallic wall is more resistant to the stresses of nuclear fusion than carbon, and also clings onto less hydrogen than carbon does, explained Kappatou, who prepared, coordinated and led key parts of the recent experiments at JET.

Another challenge with deuterium-tritium fusion experiments is the fact that tritium is radioactive, and so it requires special handling. However, JET was capable of handling tritium back in 1997, Kappatou noted.

Also, whereas deuterium is abundantly available in seawater, tritium is extremely rare. For now, tritium is produced in nuclear fission reactors, although future fusion power plants will be able to emit neutrons to generate their own tritium fuel.

In January, scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California revealed that their laser-powered nuclear fusion experiment generated 1.3 megajoules of energy for 100 trillionths of a second — a sign the fusion reaction generated more energy from nuclear activity than went into it from the outside.

The copper electromagnets that JET used could only operate for about 5 seconds due to the heat from the experiments. “JET simply wasn’t designed to deliver more,” Kappatou said. In contrast, ITER will use cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets that are designed to operate indefinitely, the researchers noted.

Questions Beget Questions

These are amazing achievements. But we must do much better than sustain a reaction for a world-breaking 100 trillionths of a second.

Something in this story is missing, like why does it take at least 15 years to do a test of something that is already built?

Also, the proposed process seems so much like a perpetual motion machine.

The reactor will use fusion to produce the deuterium-tritium that it needs to produce the fusion and also the energy to cryogenically cool the magnets the system needs to protect itself from itself, otherwise the whole thing melts down at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

It that’s not the basic proposal, then someone please explain the proposal to me. If that is the proposal, additional questions surface.

Assuming the theory works to perfection, how long can the process be sustained? How much of the energy produced is needed to protect the system from the heat produced?

Tests of ITER were scheduled for 2020 but have been rescheduled for 2039 with no explanation why.

However, I am pleased to report we have made progress on target dates. By that I mean targets that forever always seemed just a few years away are now a more reasonable 15 years minimum away, and that’s only for a test.

Fusion will not save the planet anytime soon, if ever.

A Rebuttal

One person commented that I don’t understanding how science works. False. I know full well how science works.

Do I expect useful ideas out of this whether or not it solves our alleged existential threat?

Yes I do. But that has little to do with the point I was making.

We have a test in 2039 and alleged existential threat underway that supposedly is too late to fix by 2050.

Today, we have practical, believable, information that fusion will not be the holy grail that many hoped for. That fact does not imply I think nothing useful will come out of this.

The Futility of Wind and Solar Power in One Easy to Understand Picture

Meanwhile, let’s discuss where we are staring with The Futility of Wind and Solar Power in One Easy to Understand Picture

Morocco is the ideal place for both wind power and solar power. It is sunny and windy. But how do we get energy from Morocco to where it’s needed? At what cost?

Net Zero Is a Very Unlikely Outcome

More importantly, please consider Sorry Green Energy Fans, Net Zero Is a Very Unlikely Outcome

Let’s discuss the Kyoto Protocol climate objectives and dozens of reasons why a net zero by the 2050 target has virtually no chance.

If you disagree, or even if you don’t, please read the above article and tell me what we are supposed to do, how we are going to do it, and who will bear the costs.

Realistically, what should we expect other than total failure of existing goals?

I suggest we are better off pursuing that line of thought than focusing on the mythical unobtanium.

A new study from GoBankingRates.com revealed the most affluent suburbs in the United States for June 2024.

The key finding was that New York suburbs beat out California. The No. 1 and No. 2 wealthiest suburbs in America are both just outside New York City: Scarsdale, NY (average income of $569K) and Rye, NY (average income of $405K).

Additionally, the study found:

• Outside of NYC, just one northeastern suburb cracks the top 10. Wellesley, MA ranked No. 10 overall with an average household income of approximately $368,000.
• Texas ranks higher than Florida. Two Texas suburbs ranked among the 10 wealthiest in America (West University Place and University Park), while the highest ranking Florida suburb was Palm Beach, at No. 11.

The study’s methodology included GOBankingRates looking at all cities with 5,000 households or more. They then isolated the 50 cities with the highest average household income as sourced from the 2022 American Community Survey. ‘

Then, they were able to find which metro area they were a suburb of as well as the 2024 typical home value for the city as sourced from Zillow. All data was collected and is up to date as of June 18, 2024.

Moving to the southern regions, West University Place in Texas, a suburb of Houston, stands out with an average household income of $403,845 and home values around $1.6 million. This area exemplifies the economic growth and the appeal of Texan suburbs, blending high-income living with relatively more affordable housing compared to some northeastern counterparts.

Similarly, University Park in the Dallas-Fort Worth area shows the economic dynamism of Texas, with average incomes of $381,235 and home values of $2.3 million, highlighting the state’s burgeoning affluence.

On the West Coast, Los Altos, California, within the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara region, showcases extreme wealth with average household incomes at $400,817 and home values reaching a staggering $4.5 million, the report says. The Silicon Valley effect is palpable here, as tech-driven prosperity pushes real estate prices to astronomical heights.

Another Californian suburb, Paradise Valley in Arizona, part of the Phoenix metropolitan area, combines high incomes averaging $385,643 with home values of $3.4 million, marking it as a premier destination for the wealthy seeking luxurious living with scenic desert landscapes.

The suburbs around the nation’s capital also feature prominently on this list. Great Falls and McLean in Virginia, part of the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area, both boast average household incomes well above $360,000, with home values hovering around $1.5 million.

These suburbs are notable for their proximity to the political power center of Washington D.C., providing a residential haven for high-income professionals and government officials.

From the Midwest to the Southeast, affluent suburbs like Hinsdale, Illinois, and Palm Beach, Florida, also make the list. Hinsdale, part of the Chicago metro area, reflects the blend of historical charm and modern wealth, with average incomes of $380,479 and home values over $1 million.

Palm Beach, a renowned enclave within the Miami metropolitan area, tops the charts with home values averaging an astonishing $11.5 million, fueled by its status as a playground for the ultra-rich. This diversity in geographic locations among the wealthiest suburbs illustrates the widespread nature of wealth across different regions of the United States.

The full study and full list of top 50 suburbs from GoBankingRates can be found here.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The Supreme Court last week reversed a decision from 1984 that was responsible for a dramatic turn in American life. The precedent was called Chevron deference. It said that judges should allow executive-department agencies to make rules that affect commercial and civil life, effectively giving them broad discretionary authority that displaced Congressional and judicial oversight.

The previous rule was designed to unclog the courts from endless litigation over legislative interpretations that was making life difficult for business. The unintended consequence of the shift in 1984 was to increase interventions but not from Congress or judges but from agencies, which blew up in size and authority over the course of 40 years. This was ripe for a hard challenge, and the Supreme Court certainly stepped up.

The new rule (from Loper Bright v. Secretary of Commerce) is that agencies cannot interpret laws as they wish but rather are restrained by the words of legislation from the people’s representatives.

The implications are profound.

Above all else, it means transferring responsibility back to the people and their representatives. It is part of a new form of populism that has come about in response to obvious calamities.

Think back to four years ago when agency deference was riding high, imposing an astonishing number of instant laws about medical matters, social distancing, business closures, masking, and even mail-in voting. It was all pushed through by agency authority having nothing to do with Congressional mandate.

Americans suddenly found themselves ruled by a system of government they did not know they had. Consider the declaration that essential workers could work but nonessential workers would need to stay home. Was that a law? Not really. It was more like an edict. No one knew who would enforce it or what the penalties were for noncompliance.

We know now that the declaration came from the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, a division within the Department of Homeland Security created in 2018. Its declaration was even more powerful and decisive over national life than the Department of Labor, which was never even consulted.

Again, this was not law and not legislation. It was edict and no one really knew how it came to be that this agency, about which no one knew anything, possessed this kind of power. The offending legal basis was precisely this Chevron deference, which tempted every agency just to go rogue and test out its powers whenever it wanted to.

In those months and years, we came to be ruled by credentialed experts, not all and not even most but those experts who had close access to powerful agencies. They overrode scientific consensus, popular will, and even settled law. It all happened so suddenly. The goal of crushing the virus through force was never plausible and neither was the notion that we could vaccinate our way out of a fast-moving respiratory infection.

For those still suffering from those days, and that includes nearly everyone, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper (reversing Chevron) should provide some sense of relief. It will take time for the court decision to have a practical impact but the reality is that if the new rule had been in force four years ago, the nation would have been spared the pain of lockdowns and closures, and probably even the forced vaccination campaign.

The new rule is also consistent with a new governing ethos that is sweeping the world today, against arbitrary rule by powerful elites and toward more democratic accountability. That one idea is now unsettling political systems in the United States, UK, and EU, and beyond. It provides no light to describe this movement as “far-right,” as the New York Times says daily. It is something different.

We might call the ethos the new populism. It is neither left nor right, but it borrows themes from both in the past. From the so-called “right,” it derives the confidence that people in their own lives and communities have a better capacity for wise decision-making than trusting the authorities at the top. From the old left, the new populism takes the demand for free speech, fundamental rights, and deep suspicion of corporate and government power.

The theme of being skeptical of empowered and entrenched elites is the salient point. This applies across the board. It is not only about politics. It hits media, medicine, courts, academia, and every other high-end sector. And this is in every country.

This really does amount to a paradigmatic shift. It seems not temporary but substantial and likely lasting. What happened over four years unleashed this mass wave of incredulity that had been building for decades before. The final straw was the coercive pandemic response in which governments in the world issued stay-at-home orders, closed small businesses, restricted travel, forced masks on the population, and then mandated shots of an experimental technology.

All of this was generally celebrated by most large media outlets, endorsed by academia, and cheered by all respectable opinion. But this was not actually “common-sense public health.” It was radical and far-reaching, and there never was a clear statement of the end goal. Many jurisdictions locked us down until vaccination became available, and then made an effort to innoculate most everyone in the population.

That’s a big plan and it all turned on one key assumption, namely that the shot would work to end the pandemic. It did not work particularly well. It stopped neither infection nor transmission. Nor did the experts anticipate the levels of injury that would result from repeated uses of the same shot, even though the existing literature warned against that exact strategy.

Here’s the problem with blaming all experts for this fiasco. Many people with high credentials were warning against this approach the entire time. They were shouted down and censored. Many others believed that this was the wrong approach but they were prevented for career reasons from telling the truth.

This is the reason why the new populism is strongly committed to free speech. Without the opportunity to discuss and consider the evidence, we miss important truths and find ourselves blindly following the opinions of the most powerful.

To be sure, the word populism has something of a sordid history in the 20th century, mostly due to the political upheavals in the interwar period that profoundly affected industrialized economies. FDR spoke like a populist but so did emergent leaders in fascist Europe. This form of populism was very different from that in our own time. It rallied around the ability of experts to plan the economy and manage the culture.

For example, FDR’s first inaugural address struck populist notes by denouncing “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” and “the unscrupulous money changers” who “stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” In practice, he drew on credentialed expertise and agency power to remake many features of the U.S. economy, imposing price controls, industrial subsidies, tight rules on all commercial transactions, all with the goal of lifting prices under the mistaken belief that low prices were causing the depression.

The grand theory that drove the response to the Great Depression was rooted in the emergent thoughts of John Maynard Keynes, who flipped many features of classical economics on their head. In essence, his theory was that government itself should be empowered to manage the whole through careful manipulation of aggregate supply and demand, a dream that was never realizable or desirable.

In many ways, the New Deal ended up not as a populist effort but one that empowered an elite class of social and economic managers. The pattern grew worse and worse through the decades. The Chevron decision of 1984 codified it into law. But we saw the same patterns in the UK and in European countries. The movements were called populist but they all drew on scientistic schemes for improved economic and social management by imposition from the top.

We’ve been told to “trust the science” for the better part of a century. The push back against that paradigm had to wait until the apotheosis of central planning with the pandemic lockdowns, which were followed very quickly by efforts to use government power to control the climate. Together with that, and all over the world, the mass migration crisis unfolded as governments shifted from their core duties to aspirations of virus and climate control.

Now we find ourselves in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift, a new populism that rejects the idea that a powerful elite knows what is better for societies than the people themselves. In this view, the new populism is not a return to the interwar variety but something much earlier.

What comes to mind in the American context is the movement by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. He stood against the National Bank, fought for the rights of the states against the federal government (except on the tariff), and generally sided with the people over elites. In other words, he embraced the original idea of democracy. If you want to understand what’s happening in the world today in light of American history, that’s a great place to begin.

The White House has announced that President Joe Biden will ‘likely’ meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later this month, when he’ll be in Washington to address a joint session of Congress on July 24.

His invitation to address Congress by Republicans has already proven divisive, given a number of Democrats have declared they intend to boycott it. Likely dozens will not be in attendance, similar to what happened when the Israeli premier addressed Congress nearly a decade ago.

On Wednesday a White House official told The Times of Israel that “The president has known Prime Minister Netanyahu for three decades. They will likely see each other when the prime minister is here over the course of that week, but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

But tensions have been soaring, given just last month the White House canceled a meeting with an Israeli national security delegation after Netanyahu issued a video chastising the US for withholding some weapons shipments. The White House was left furious.

At the time, Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called into question the Israeli leader’s narrative. “We genuinely do not know what he’s talking about. We just don’t,“ she told reporters.

She had noted that “there was one particular shipment of munitions that was paused, and you’ve heard us talk about that many times.” Jean-Pierre then emphasized, “There are no other pauses — none — no other pauses or holds in place.”

Biden has over the last months on various occasions gone negative against the ‘far right’ Netanyahu government, despite Israel having long been a very close US ally, over human rights abuses and mass killings in Gaza.

The US administration has on the one hand continued to approve of major weapons and aid packages to Israel, but on the other has highlighted the soaring civilian death toll due to the IDF offensive. Progressive Democrats have made their anger known, with many vowing to not vote for Biden in November.

Newsweek has recently highlighted Congressional Democrat discontent with Biden’s Gaza policy in the following: 

The AP reported that interviews with more than a dozen Democrats revealed the discontent over Netanyahu’s upcoming speech, and how some feel it is a Republican ploy to divide Democrats.

Some Democrats have said they will attend Netanyahu’s speech to show support for Israel, but others are clear that they won’t be attending.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a deputy whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has stated that Netanyahu “needs to be staying in Israel and working for the peace that he has been unwilling to support in the past.”

The WH Press Secretary is using Benjamin Netanyahu as a reference for Biden’s cognitive coherence.

This is where we are.

God help us.pic.twitter.com/JjBaa9NCAX

— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) July 3, 2024

The “indiscriminate bombing that he has encouraged… has led to loss of lives that should never have happened. He has not prioritized the hostages; he ought to be doing that instead of coming here,” he told The Hill days ago.

Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

Nashville Judge I’Ashea Myles has decided that none of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale’s writings should be made public, accepting the dubious argument that Hale’s victims have copyrights to the material—even though the victims haven’t registered with the federal copyright office.

“The materials created by Hale are exempted from disclosure based on the federal Copyright Act,” Myles said.

“Whether or not an original work of authorship has been registered with the federal copyright office is germane to the amount of recoverable damages in a copyright infringement action, but it has no bearing on whether or not this state law is preempted by federal copyright law,” she said.

The judge also ruled that disclosing Hale’s writings could inspire copycat killers, disregarding the testimony of an expert psychologist who said that there’s no evidence to support that copycat theory.

Myles is the same judge to trample on the First Amendment by threatening a newspaper that’s already published some of Hale’s writings. According to Myles’s Thursday ruling, the evidence held by law enforcement includes more than 100 gigabytes of data.

Holy cow look at all the data left by Nashville shooter Audrey Hale

Forget the “manifesto.” I’d be willing to bet there’s evidence here that she was in chatrooms with feds pic.twitter.com/Kcty6CtOVm

— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) July 5, 2024

Police have said the writings that they collected as part of their investigation into the March 27, 2023, shooting at the Covenant School that killed three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members are public records. However, they have said they cannot be released until their investigation is concluded.

Despite law enforcement’s attempts to keep the manifesto secret, the first three pages the purported manifesto were leaked to conservative broadcaster Steven Crowder last November. The Nashville Police Department reportedly suspended seven detectives over the leak.

The portion of the manifesto that was leaked purportedly revealed Hale, who identified a transgender, had been planning the school shooting for years, and that she deliberately targeted “white privileged” “cr*****s” and “f****ts.”

“Can’t believe I’m doing this but I’m ready… I hope my victims aren’t,” Hale wrote. “My only fear is if anything goes wrong. I’ll do my best to prevent any of the sort. God let my wrath take over my anxiety. It might be 10 minutes tops. It might be 3-7. It’s gonna go quick. I hope I have a high death count. Ready to die.”

The more recent excerpts published by The Star reveal Hale’s transgender ideation.

“2007 was the birth of puberty blockers and a newfound discovery for treatment of non-conforming transgender children,” Hale reportedly wrote. “I’d kill to have those resources.”

It appears that the vast majority of Hale’s writings have yet to be released.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

Heading into the bank stress tests, money-market fund total assets rose by a de minimus $5BN while seasonally-adjusted bank deposits fell $18BN to $17.594 TN…

Source: Bloomberg

And, on a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, deposits also fell (for the second straight week) by $14.8BN

Source: Bloomberg

Excluding foreign deposits, total domestic deposits fell on both an SA and NSA basis (-$15BN and -$5BN respectively)…

Source: Bloomberg

Small banks and Large banks both saw $7.5BN outflows (SA) each, while on an NSA basis, Small banks saw $5.9BN outflows as Large banks saw around $1BN of deposits inflows.

Usage of The Fed’s bank bailout facility shrank a tiny amount – but still remains at an extremely high $107BN that the banks do not want to repay any time soon…

Source: Bloomberg

On the other side of the ledger, loan volumes shrank overall with a $630MN increase at large banks offset by a $3.7BN loan volume shrink at small banks…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, US equity market capitalization remains drastically decoupled from its historically tight relationship with bank reserves at The Fed…

Source: Bloomberg

But globally, central bank balance sheet shrinkage continues as stocks soar…

Source: Bloomberg

Now that would be quite recoupling…