Month: August 2024

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The man who fired shots at former President Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania had encrypted accounts in multiple countries, according to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives task force investigating the attempted assassination.

“We haven’t learned much about those overseas accounts,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) told a press conference in Chicago on Aug. 21. “We do know they were in … Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany.”

Waltz is on the “Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump.”

FBI officials previously disclosed that Crooks used encrypted messaging applications.

“Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a health care aide need encrypted platforms, not even based in the United States, but based abroad, where most terrorist organizations know it is harder for our law enforcement to get into?” Waltz asked.

He said that the question had not yet been answered.

Waltz and other members were preparing later Wednesday to receive a briefing from FBI officials on the agency’s probe into the attempted assassination of Trump on July 13.

He said that task force members have been discussing how authorities should be sharing information as they uncover it, not waiting until final reports on the investigations are ready.

“They need to be releasing information as they come across it because this wasn’t an isolated incident. The threats are continuing,” Waltz said.

The FBI and U.S. Secret Service did not respond to early morning requests for comment.

Waltz highlighted the recent charges against a Pakistani national. That man, Asif Merchant, has been charged in connection with a foiled plot to assassinate public officials in the United States. Authorities alleged he gave $5,000 as an advance payment to individuals he thought were hitmen, but were undercover FBI agents.

Waltz also said he was disturbed that the officials who constructed the security plan for Trump’s July rally have not been disciplined.

Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. told Congress in July that discipline may follow out once the agency finishes its internal probe into the situation.

“That roof should have had better coverage, and we will get to the bottom of if there were any policy violations,” he said at one point.

Rowe added later that he would not provide real-time updates on disciplinary measures but would “at a high level provide at least some type of statement that people are being held accountable.”

Kimberly Cheatle, who was the Secret Service’s director before stepping down after Trump was nearly assassinated, said on July 22 that the Secret Service’s initial report about rally security would be ready in 60 days.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is also conducting an investigation.

The composition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming freshman class is vividly reflecting the effect of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action — with the share of spots given to black people down sharply, while Asian enrollment has jumped. “Every student admitted to the class of 2028 at MIT will know that they were accepted only based upon their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the color of their skin,” Edward Blum, who founded the Students for Fair Admissions group that was victorious in the Supreme Court case, told the New York Times. 

MIT’s class of 2028 is only 5% black compared to 15% for the class of 2027. Hispanic and Latinos comprise 11%, down from 16%. The white share dropped a percentage point — from 38% to 37%. As anticipated, the big winners are Asian applicants, who, despite being minorities themselves, were abused by the affirmative action regime. Asians represent 47% of the new class, up from 40%. (The numbers don’t add up to 100% because of students whose heritage spans more than one group.) 

Talking to the Times, MIT president Sally Kornbluth described the class of 2028 with notes of sorrow:

“The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions. What it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the MIT community has worked together to achieve over the past several decades.”

In other words, if Kornbluth could have it her way, MIT’s freshman class wouldn’t have as many Asians — merits be damned. 

MIT is the first major university to release demographic stats on its entering class, so there will be more shoes to drop in the coming days and weeks. MIT’s numbers will serve as something of a benchmark — if other universities show much smaller changes, they’ll face accusations that they’re finding other ways to discriminate against Asians for the benefit of blacks and Latinos — and perhaps litigation as well.   

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, advocates of rigged admissions seized upon language in the decision that seemed to leave a back door open for factoring race into acceptance considerations. The court said applicants should still be free to draw attention to their race if they did so in the context of describing their life experiences — such as dealing with discrimination. 

Many highly selective schools have jumped on that angle. Johns Hopkins’ application, for example, asks applicants to “tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual…” Rice University asks, “What perspectives shaped by your background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity inspire you to join our community of change agents at Rice?” To encourage applicants to emphasize their race, Sarah Lawrence even cites the Supreme Court decision in an essay application prompt, the New York Post reported.

Do you approve or disapprove of Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action?

White: 65% approve, 23% disapprove
Hispanics: 45%-30%
Blacks: 43%-36%

Both sexes, all races, every age group, every level of income. All reject race-based governance. https://t.co/a74PiCnGBh pic.twitter.com/VF2qDVBZ0p

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) July 9, 2023

MIT, however, seems to be an exception. Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, told the Times he said he was pleasantly surprised to conclude MIT didn’t choose a new way to rig the game against Asians. “From the looks of it, MIT basically just took race out of the equation,” he said. 

However, at least one data-driven observer feels even a 5% black share of MIT’s newest class indicates some kind of intervention to on their behalf:  

As the race-specific freshman class enrollment figures start trickling in, keep these data in mind so that when you see blacks are 5% of a class at a highly-selective school (as they are at MIT) you’ll realize that these schools are still engaging in affirmative action. pic.twitter.com/GytDbJhv77

— i/o (@eyeslasho) August 21, 2024

Finally, here are some additional attributes of MIT’s class of 2028: 

• The most popular names are Eric and Sophia
• The most-represented US state is California
• 11% are from foreign countries
• 3% have a gender identity other than man or woman
• 67% graduated from public schools; less than 1% were home-schooled 
• The school’s admission rate is about 5%

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

Three weeks ago, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe angrily pushed back on senators’ calls to immediately fire or discipline key agents directly responsible for the security failures that led to the assassination attempt against former President Trump at last month’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Since that time, Secret Service leaders have placed several members of the Pittsburgh Field Office on administrative leave, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.

(Administrative leave occurs when a federal employee temporarily leaves their position and work duties – either because of a misconduct investigation or medical or mental health issue. These employees usually still receive pay and benefits, but those decisions are left to the discretion of agency leadership.)

While these members of the Pittsburgh Field Office were placed on leave, a different set of agents, several assigned to Trump’s permanent protective detail, are still on the job providing Trump protection, the sources say. They remain operational even though they too were deeply involved in devising the Butler rally’s security plan.

The differing treatment of the two teams is spurring internal dissension and speculation that the Pittsburgh office could bear the brunt of the serious security failures that day, even though there’s plenty of blame to go around.

During a joint Senate committee meeting July 30, Rowe said he couldn’t understand or defend why the roof where shooter Thomas Crooks fired from wasn’t better secured. He said the Secret Service is investigating whether any employees broke the rules or didn’t follow established protocol to protect obvious vulnerabilities. If so, he said they would be held accountable through the agency’s disciplinary process and face punishment, including termination.

Yet, Rowe and other senior officials back in Washington headquarters should share the blame, these sources argue. The agency’s top brass were almost certainly involved in declining at least some of the security assets requested for the Butler rally despite a heightened threat level brought on by a specific Iranian assassination plot against Trump.

Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned in late July amid bipartisan outrage over her lack of transparency about the rally security failures. But critics in Congress and the Secret Service community are calling for more accountability in the wake of the worst security failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

Dan Bongino, a popular conservative personality who spent 11 years in the Secret Service, has blasted his former agency’s “apocalyptic security failure” and called for a full house-cleaning of the upper leadership ranks in its Washington headquarters. Rowe, he said, is just as bad, if not worse than Cheatle because he was her hand-picked deputy and played a key role in her management decisions.

“My Secret Service colleagues I worked with, where nothing like this ever happened at our advances, are horrified at Ron Rowe, ashamed at what this agency has become,” he said in on his podcast the day after Rowe testified before the Senate. “… I’m not talking about a small cadre of them. I’m talking about a big group of former agents [who] are on fire about what happened here – they are horrified about what’s going on with this agency.”

Other current Secret Service agents, including one who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, pinned the failures at Butler directly on Rowe and other top leaders alleged ties because their decisions leading up to the July 13 rally set the rank-and-file agents up for failure.

“Leadership’s mismanagement of technology and personnel are what led to the failures in Butler, but they are not the ones being held accountable,” a source in the Secret Service community told RealClearPolitics.

The FBI arrested Asif Merchant, a Pakistani man with to Iran, one day before the Butler rally. Merchant was charged with a plot to carry out political assassinations on U.S. soil, including against Trump.

The arrest comes two years after U.S. officials disrupted another Iranian scheme aimed at former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton. Trump and his national security team have faced threats from Iran since Trump ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasam Soleimani in early January 2020.

Mid-level Secret Service managers based in D.C. routinely reduce the level of security assets as a way to cut costs. There’s even greater pressure to reject asset requests during presidential campaign years when agency resources are especially stretched thin because there are multiple candidates to protect.

Because of the heightened Iranian threat against Trump, those decision wouldn’t just be made by mid-level Secret Service managers but likely would involve top agency officials too, the sources argued. In the case of the Butler rally, it was the first time agency leaders approved counter snipers for a Trump reelection event, but they still only allotted two counter sniper teams rather than the four teams requested, multiple sources have told RCP.

Because of the sniper shortage, the Secret Service was forced to ask local law enforcement to man the rooftop where 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Crooks fired off his shots at Trump and the crowd, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was attending the rally with his family.

Exactly why that rooftop was not adequately covered remains a key question in the ongoing investigation with the Secret Service and local law enforcement continuing to trade accusations over that glaring failure.

Other whistleblowers have come forward to complain that Secret Service leaders did not allocate a counter-surveillance unit, roaming agents who work to find and intercept suspicious people or fortify vulnerable areas during a rally. If they had, these whistleblowers argue, those CSU teams would have intercepted and questioned Crooks as soon as he pulled out a range finder and held it up to the crowd.

Sen. Josh Hawley in early August sent a letter to Rowe saying he had received detailed information personally laming him for directing “significant cuts” to the Countersurveillance Division, a department that performs threat assessment evaluations of events sites before the events occur and did not perform its typical evaluation of the Butler site and was not present that day. An unnamed whistleblower further alleged that Rowe directed a 20% reduction in the CSD’s manpower, an assertion that, if proven, would undercut Rowe’s repeated denials that he wasn’t involved in any decisions rejecting requests for added security for Trump over the last two years.

In an all-hands conference call last week, Rowe committed to a complete “paradigm” overhaul at the agency and said he is making headway in pressing for major budget increases. He also pledged to jettison the long-term approach of stretching resources too thin – what is known within the agency as “doing more with less” – and to improve the Secret Service’s technological capability to adapt to “constantly evolving” threats.

“We can no longer operate with that mindset,” Rowe told the agents during his address to every employee. “We can no longer wear our people down.”

Rowe argued that the near-assassination of Trump served as a wake-up call to the agency – “an opportunity to examine our own paradigm and examine our own methodologies, to challenge assumptions, to look at the new dynamic threat environment we’re operating in, look at the demand in which we’re placing on our people.”

Trump’s security detail, a 60-member team dedicated to protecting the former president, has faced the toughest schedules and heaviest workloads over the last year of any Secret Service division or detail. The agents have endured long hours, often working seven days a week in a row before taking time off. The Trump detail also has taken on more of the responsibility for creating and executing the security plans for rallies, these sources said, a job that was always shared with the local field office closest to each rally. But over the last year, as Trump has faced heightened threats, his detail has taken on more and more responsibility for security planning and decisions at rallies, these sources say.

For instance, the site agent, the individual charged with devising most of the security plan for the event, was a member of the Trump detail for the Butler rally. But the lead agent, who typically oversees security at the entire sequence of events – from the airport arrival to the rally to the hotel stay to airport departure – was a member of the Pittsburgh Field Office. During final preparations for a rally, the site agent and lead agent join forces in conducting walk-throughs of the security plans with supervisors from each of their teams.

Because members of the Pittsburgh Field Office shared the responsibility with the individuals from the Trump detail, sources are questioning why no one from the Trump detail has been put on administrative leave while several of their Pittsburgh counterparts have been. Even the innermost ring of security – those agents on the Trump detail who quickly used their bodies as human shields to protect Trump – are still on the job despite the obvious trauma of going through such a stressful event.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi didn’t respond to questions from RealClearPolitics about that disparity. He also didn’t answer several other detailed questions about the agency’s administrative leave and disciplinary policies.

“The U.S. Secret Service is committed to investigating the decisions and actions of personnel related to the event in Butler, Pennsylvania and the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “The U.S. Secret Service’s mission assurance review is progressing, and we are examining the processes, procedures and factors that led to this operational failure.”

“The U.S. Secret Service holds our personnel to the highest professional standards, and any identified and substantiated violations of policy will be investigated by the Office of Professional Responsibility for potential disciplinary action,” he added. “Given this is a personnel matter, we are not in a position to comment further.”

During Rowe’s July 30 Senate testimony, the acting director and Hawley got into a shouting match over the agency’s failure to fire anyone, including those responsible for the failure to surveil the rooftop where Crooks opened fire.

“You’re asking me, Senator, to completely make a rush to judgement about somebody failing. I acknowledge this was a failure,” Rowe said during the questioning.

“Is it not prima facie that somebody has failed? The former president was shot,” Hawley shot back.

Rowe responded that he had “lost sleep” over the security failures that day and assured Hawley that he would hold people accountable “with integrity” and not “rush to judgement.”

“Then fire somebody to hold them accountable,” Hawley demanded.

Rowe countered that he needed to allow the FBI investigation to continue to gather all the facts and determine culpability and argued that there were likely several people and factors to blame for the failures, not just one scapegoat.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, whistleblowers have come forward to share with RCP what they describe as a corrosive culture of fear, favoritism, uneven disciplinary action, and retribution they say has plagued the agency for years, harming its core protective mission. The uneven discipline and lowering of hiring standards because of a staffing shortage has led to several embarrassing security breaches and misconduct scandals in recent years, sowing distrust and resentment.

Rowe has pledged to hold those responsible for the security failures in Butler accountable, but others argue his close friendship with Tim Burke, who heads the Pittsburgh Field Office, could complicate that task.

Just last year, a former member of that Pittsburgh office won a complaint he filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws, according to two sources in the Secret Service community.

The special agent complained to Burke that an office leader was sexually harassing another employee, but Burke said he didn’t believe the accusations and advised the employee to drop the matter. After the agent insisted his charges were accurate and filed formal complaints within the Secret Service, he said Burke, with the blessing of top Secret Service leaders, unfairly retaliated against him for the disclosure, putting him on administrative leave and downgrading his salary from a GS14 level carrying a salary of $104,604-$135,987, to a GS13 level, which ranges between $88,520 and $115,079. Such disciplinary action would require approval from top agency leaders, and Rowe likely knew about it even if he didn’t sign off specifically on the demotion.

Yet, just months after filing the EEOC complaint, the agent provided evidence of his sexual harassment claim and won his case, quickly regaining his GS14 status, according to three sources in the Secret Service community. He also was allowed to relocate away from the Pittsburgh Field Office. It’s unclear if Burke, who is close friends with Rowe and is generally liked by top Secret Service leaders, faced any disciplinary action for failing to take the charges seriously. 

In another alarming incident that could have implications for the Iranian plot against Trump, two men of Pakistani heritage were arrested and charged with posing as Department of Homeland Security officers in Washington and duping four Secret Service agents charged with protecting President Biden and his family. According to federal prosecutors, the imposters provided the Secret Service agents with tens of thousands of gifts, including rent-free apartments, in a two-year scheme that began in February 2020 while Trump was still in office,.

At one point after Biden took office, one of the Pakistani men, Arian Taherzadeh, offered to buy a $2,000 assault rifle for an agent assigned to first lady Jill Biden’s protective detail, according to the legal filings. One of the men, Haider Ali, told witnesses he had connections to intelligence agencies in Pakistan, and he also had several visas issued by Pakistan and Iran, prosecutors said.

“Taherzadeh and Ali have attempted to use their false and fraudulent affiliation with DHS to ingratiate themselves with members of federal law enforcement and the defense community,” David Elias, an FBI agent, wrote in the affidavit.

Yet, Elias did not say why the men orchestrated the elaborate plan to impersonate DHS agents and cozy up to members of the presidential protective Secret Service detail. Prosecutors said they used their false identities to obtain security footage of the apartment building, as well as a list of the building’s residents and contact information.

The Secret Service agents implicated in the scheme were placed on administrative leave, but it’s unclear what disciplinary action, if any, was taken against them.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.

Halliburton Company, the world’s second-largest oil service provider and a major player in global fracking, has reportedly fallen victim to a cyberattack, according to sources speaking with Reuters. Insiders revealed that the cyber incident had disrupted operations at the company’s Houston headquarters and affected some of its global networks.

The company was also working with “leading external experts” to fix the issue, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The attack appeared to impact business operations at the company’s north Houston campus, as well as some global connectivity networks, the person said, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The company has asked some staff not to connect to internal networks, the person said. -RTRS 

Halliburton has neither confirmed nor denied the cyber incident but acknowledged an issue affecting some of its systems.

A company spokesperson told CNN:

“We are aware of an issue affecting certain company systems and are working diligently to assess the cause and potential impact.”

“We have activated our pre-planned response plan and are working internally and with leading experts to remediate the issue.”

It’s unclear if the cyber incident is a ransomware attack.

In 2021, the ransomware group DarkSide disrupted operations across the Colonial Pipeline network, which carries gasoline and jet fuel up and down the East Coast. 

A notable cyber incident unfolded in June when software provider CDK Global sparked chaos for thousands of auto dealers across the US. 

The cyber incident at Halliburton serves as yet another critical reminder that hackers could paralyze companies operating critical infrastructure, such as those in the energy sector, at any time. 

Hiding behind the veil of “progressivism,” the toxic woke mind virus has infected corporate America, transforming companies into left-wing activists.

In response to woke corporate America, commentator and filmmaker Robby Starbuck has waged an anti-woke crusade, which has already led Harley-Davidson Inc., Tractor Supply Co., and Deere & Co. to reverse or entirely nuke diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and other woke programs. 

In an overnight Wednesday post on X, Starbuck announced that Jack Daniels would be his next target for exposing internal DEI programs. However, unlike previous big reveals, Jack Daniels’ parent company, Brown-Forman Corp., had been tipped off well in advance…  

“They must have been tipped off by us going through employee LinkedIn pages,” Starbuck said. He posted an email from company executives to employees about the ‘evolving’ situation surrounding its DEI program:

• Ending participation in the @HRC’s Corporate Equality Index social credit system.
• Executive + employee bonuses/goals are tied to business performance; not DEI.
• An END to “quantitative workforce and supplier diversity ambitions”.
• Cutting woke trainings.

Here’s the email: 

And Starbuck’s X post. 

Big news: The next company we were set to expose was @JackDaniels_US.

They must have been tipped off by us going through employee LinkedIn pages.

They just preemptively announced that they’ll be making these changes:

• Ending participation in the @HRC’s Corporate Equality… pic.twitter.com/0O1DkkIKrO

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 22, 2024

Starbuck’s anti-woke crusade against companies with large conservative customer bases is to stop the DEI infection from spreading across corporate America.

Separately, journalist Sasha Kim cited James Lindsay, a mathematician turned culture critic and author of the website called New Discourses, who said, “The goal of DEI is equity, which is essentially a rebranding of socialism” and “Diversity is the means of installing political officers to enforce equity. Inclusion and belonging are the tools by which political officers will be concentrated, and the means by which opponents and dissidents will be removed.”

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This time around, the Fed may not be able to “save” the bubble from a complete round-trip deflation, which history suggests might decline by 50%.

Let’s start by stipulating that my interest in housing bubbles is purely abstract. I’m not rooting for any set of participants or betting on housing going up or down. My approach is to simply look at the dynamics in play and consider what history offers up as potential trajectories. Rick Blaine summed up this perspective in the film Casablanca: “I understand the point of view of the hound, too.”

With that said, all bubbles pop, and every bubble is declared “the new normal” that will only continue inflating to new heights just before it pops. Housing only goes up, there’s a permanent shortage of housing, and so on.

The bias in reporting bubbles bursting is on the losers, those whose fortunes deflated along with the bubble. But there are also winners when bubbles burst, as what was unaffordable becomes affordable again, and capital that was chasing speculative gains is mangled, and duly chastened, seeks safer returns. Both of these dynamics offer rewards to those who avoided the speculative bubbles.

For context, let’s start with the wellspring of the housing bubble, credit. Asset bubbles can arise without credit expanding–the South Seas Bubble, etc.–but in the modern era, gargantuan increases in credit (a.k.a. debt) pump up asset bubbles. Absent a vast expansion of credit, it’s hard to inflate a massive speculative bubble.

Here is total credit in the U.S. Even the casual observer will note that the parabolic rise in credit has outstripped the real economy (GDP). As bubbles rise in assets such as stocks, the phantom wealth leaks out of the first bubble and seeks more fertile speculative ground in another asset class, which then bubbles up in a speculative frenzy.

When credit bubbles pop, asset bubbles pop, too as the constant pressure of new money is what kept the bubbles inflated.

The consensus holds that housing is bubbling higher because there are enormous scarcities in housing: demand exceeds supply, and so prices skyrocket. While this is undoubtedly true in specific locales, the nation as a whole has more housing units per capita than ever before.

This suggests housing hoarding by the wealthy as a factor: corporations have snapped up tens of thousands of homes as rentals, a double play of steady income from rising rents and a speculative bet on gains from additional appreciation. Wealthy households have snapped up hundreds of thousands of homes as short-term vacation rentals (STVRs) for the same reason: income and appreciation.

Millions of homes are empty or lightly used as wealthy families have no pressing need to sell vacation homes, homes left empty when the parents passed or moved to assisted living, etc. Riding the bubble higher is an obvious motivation to hang on to empty houses.

The top 10% who collect roughly half the income and own over 90% of all stocks own 44% of the nation’s real estate wealth. The bottom 50% who own a meagre 2.6% of the nation’s financial wealth own 11% of the real estate wealth. The middle class–the 40% between 50% and 90%–own about the same percentage (45%) as the top 10%.

How do we explain this concentration of real estate wealth in the top 10%? Of course the wealthy own more expensive homes, but this alone cannot account for the outsized share of real estate wealth held by the top 10%: the top 10% own the lion’s share of second homes, STVRs, privately owned rentals and “land-banked” homes that are empty or lightly used.

Unsurprisingly, real estate wealth is concentrated in the older generations, with Boomers and older holding over half and Gen X (ages 44 to 60) with 30%–all together, a massive 82% of the nation’s real estate wealth.

The winners and losers when the housing bubble pops are clear: the younger generations win, the older generations lose, and those who counted on the phantom wealth of bubbles lasting forever will lose while those who didn’t enter the speculative bubble will win.

All bubbles pop, and assets fall to levels that everyone at the top of the bubble agrees are “impossible.” The Federal Reserve socialized the housing market starting in 2010 to arrest the deflation of the 2006-07 housing bubble by buying trillions of dollars of mortgage backed securities (MBS). This is visible in the chart of the Case-Shiller National Home Price Index:

This time around, the Fed may not be able to “save” the bubble from a complete round-trip deflation, which history suggests might decline by 50%. Yes, yes, we’re millions of housing units short of demand, etc., but speculation has driven hoarding to levels that are not easy to measure. Once the credit bubble pops, all assets driven higher by speculative credit will pop, including housing.

Yes, a 50% decline is “impossible.” But let’s check back around 2032 to see what’s possible and impossible then. As I often note, if we own a house free and clear and have no interest in using it as a speculative gamble or collateral for extracting phantom wealth via a home equity line of credit (HELOC), then the market value is of no concern. Whether the house is worth $10,000 or $10 million doesn’t matter; what matters is its utility value as shelter we own and control.

*  *  *

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Ukraine’s military has for the first time openly acknowledged it is using US-provided HIMARS rocket systems to attack Russia and destroy its major infrastructure, especially bridges, inside its own territory.

Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces made the admission in a Wednesday Telegram post to its official account, writing: “Where do Russian pontoon bridges ‘disappear’ in the Kursk region? Operators … accurately destroy them.”

“The statement said U.S.-manufactured HIMARS rocket systems were used,” Reuters described of the post. What’s more is that Ukraine’s military published footage of US HIMARS being used to target several key bridges in Kursk in a new video montage…

This marks the first such official public disclosure from Kiev that its forces are using the US Army’s M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System to strike inside sovereign Russian territory. These units can be outfitted with either mid-range or long-range missiles 

Starting late last week, Russian officials began accusing Ukraine forces of using the American-supplied weapon, after at least two bridges were destroyed. By the weekend, a third strategic bridge was taken out as Ukraine forces tried to solidify their hold in Kursk.

Reuters comments this week that “Ukraine has damaged or destroyed at least three bridges over the Seym River since Kyiv launched a major assault into western Russia on Aug. 6 advancing up to 28-35 kilometres (39.15 miles).

RIA additionally has reported that other Western arms have been used in the ongoing assault: “Samples of small arms manufactured by the United States and Sweden have been seized at the liquidation site of a Ukrainian sabotage group near the village of Kremyanoe in the Kursk region,” the report said.

Forbes has meanwhile proclaimed that Ukraine is busy blowing up bridges in Kursk as fast as Russia can rebuild them. “The effect, six days into the river campaign, is that a huge swathe of Kursk—and any Russian troops there—is effectively cut off from overland supplies and reinforcements,” the publication writes.

“And don’t expect large-scale aerial resupply: Ukrainian forces have made the air over Kursk extremely inhospitable to Russian helicopters,” Forbes adds. However, some Russian sources have said the invasion is currently being rolled back, and all the while Russian gains in the Donbass continue to come at rapid pace.

Authored by Steve Watson via modernity.news,

Earlier this week, JD Vance cracked a joke about Democrats holding their convention in Chicago so that Tim Walz would be able to say he’s been in a war zone.

JD VANCE: They held the convention in Chicago so that Tim Walz could accurately say that he’s been in a war zone. pic.twitter.com/nLRNV7dBDx

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 20, 2024

Hilariously, a CNN reporter took the comment at face value and ‘fact checked’ it as wrong.

Vance in WI says his “little theory” about why Democrats chose to host their convention in Chicago is “so that [Walz] could actually, accurately say that he went, he visited a combat zone”

Democrats selected Chicago in April 2023 — long before Biden even considered dropping out

— Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) August 20, 2024

She did a journalism.

The journos are so dumb and broken they’re now fact-checking obvious jokes. https://t.co/QiR34h3vkD

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 21, 2024

Hard hitting research.

When you fact check a joke… it makes your entire “journalism” career the joke.

It also makes CNN the joke.

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) August 21, 2024

Who’s gonna tell her?

It was a joke. A funny one.

— NotYourJewishMom (@CaffMomREDACTED) August 20, 2024

As we previously highlighted, even CNN admitted that there is no evidence to back up the notion that Walz ever saw combat, despite his misleading assertions.

Walz’s claims that he was deployed in support of the military operation in Afghanistan, and the fact that he skipped out of deployment to Iraq, led U.S. military veterans to post images of themselves on combat duty in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other theatres of war, captioning the pictures “Me not being Tim Walz.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

US Existing Home Sales rose (+1.3%MoM) for the first time in five months in July, but remain down 2.5% YoY (the last time home sales were up YoY was July 2021)…

Source: Bloomberg

“Despite the modest gain, home sales are still sluggish,” said NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun in a prepared statement.

“But consumers are definitely seeing more choices, and affordability is improving due to lower interest rates.”

Excepot it’s not Mr. Yun!

For context, here is were existing home sales SAAR are… the weakest July print since 2010…

Source: Bloomberg

While the inventory of available homes picked up slightly in July to 1.33 million, it’s still well below pre-pandemic levels of more than 1.9 million. That represents 4 months’ supply at the current sales pace.

Yun said on a call with reporters that an almost 20% year-over-year increase in inventory indicates some homeowners are willing to surrender their 3% mortgages and list their properties.

Individual investors or second-home buyers purchased 13% of homes, down from 16% a month earlier. First-time buyers made up 29% of purchases, matching June.

The NAR’s report showed 62% of the homes sold were on the market for less than a month in July – compared with 65% in June – while nearly a quarter sold above the list price, also down from the prior month.

Properties remained on the market for 24 days on average in July, compared with 22 days in June and a further sign of softening demand.

Finally, while median existing home prices dipped very modestly MoM, they are at their highest ever for a July (up 4.2% YoY)…

Source: Bloomberg

…which leaves us wondering – what exactly does The Fed think rate-cuts are going to do to home prices (and inflation and affordability?)

By Michael Every of Rabobank

We need it like a Jackson Hole in the head

Unlike the key BLS revisions to April 2023-March 2024 payrolls estimates, at -818K the largest drop since the Global Financial Crisis, today’s Global Daily was released at the same time to all – nobody can call to get it early. Losing an average 68K from each monthly jobs report changes the macro picture; subtracting ‘migrant encounters’ starting in October 2020 as proxy for illegal immigration, the peak in cumulative post-Covid net payrolls growth was 7.23m in February 2023, then drifted lower, to just 6.38m as of July; or, does the BLS revision not matter because illegal arrivals are doing the jobs off book rather than US workers? But tell that to the US workers, if so.

Either way, I wear my “DM = EM” (developed markets = emerging markets) T-shirt and wish those thinking they know what’s going on in the US economy from looking at Bloomberg ‘good luck’. I’ve lived in and covered many EM, with eccentricities, conspiracies, and oddities: let’s see how those who’ve only lived in and covered DM cope if/as this structural shift continues.

Which includes the Fed. Their latest minutes show the vast majority of the FOMC opened the door to a rate cut in September, and a few were prepared to do it in July. Our Fed watcher Philip Marey has slightly revised his call ahead of tomorrow’s Jackson Hole central bank Powell-wow (which he previews). Philip still expects the Fed to start cutting in September, which he was saying while the market was screaming months randomly starting from “JANUARY!”. He still expects four 25bp cuts. However, he now thinks these will be in September, November, December, and January rather than stretched out until mid-2025. This is still due to “stag”, not “flation”. We were one of the first banks to forecast a US recession and remain one of the last to keep a mild recession pencilled in. Yet assuming Trump wins the election, the inflationary impact of his economic policies would force the FOMC to stop cutting at 4.50%. Most in the market are screaming lower Fed Funds levels randomly, starting from the figure which pushes asset prices up, or assuming the Fed will do it for them.

As the Financial Times asked yesterday, ‘Whatever happened to the wisdom of the bond market?’ While FX trades like an ADHD toddler who just ingested a 2-litre bottle of soda and a box of hard candy, and equities like a love-struck teenager who thinks a happy ending always looms, bonds are supposed to trade like a boring professor with a pipe. Yet due to algos, the 1987-2020 Greenspan of market time, and the post-2008 ego-trip where, like ugly politicians, bonds were surrounded by adoring crowds for the first time, now rates markets are all “RATE CUTS!”

In pandering to that, the Fed have arguably helped transmogrify the US from industrialised, with a vast middle class, vast open land, vast strategic strength, low public debt, and a low cost of living to financialised, with a shrunken middle class, unaffordable housing, fading strategic strength, high public debt, and a high cost of living. Likewise, the BLS changed from one that accurately measured payrolls (and other series) and knew how to release embargoed data on time, to one that doesn’t do either.

Meanwhile, in a US election cycle with eccentricities, conspiracies, and oddities word has it RFK, Jr. will drop out of the race and endorse Trump on Friday, boosting his odds. Wags have it for a senior admin role like the NIH or even the CIA(!) My suspicion is DM analysts will end up doing what good EM analysts have to re: such political machinations – a version of Fawlty Towers “Don’t mention the war!” But the key is still to understand what’s going on, even if it isn’t written about.  

Yet in the EM Middle East, war must be mentioned. Days ago, DM market headline-writers were saying an Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage deal “was close”. Those who know the players and their motivations were saying it wasn’t; and at time of writing, it’s still more likely that these talks collapse than succeed. At which point, a regional escalation in the war is likely.

Israel says it has effectively defeated Hamas in Rafah, but it and Hezbollah are already launching larger attacks on each other deeper into new territory even as they wait for the official conclusion of the ceasefire talks one way or the other. Iran is also still waiting to launch its delayed retaliatory strike on Israel, and some are not ruling out Israel pre-empting that with an attack of its own. Of course, we’ve heard similar calls before of late, and it’s possible both sides might extend and pretend a while longer. Ultimately, however, this is not a geopolitical problem that can be solved with the strategic equivalent of “RATE CUTS!” That’s not how real life works; and eventually real life comes to bite those who rely on “RATE CUTS!” as solutions.

With global energy markets focused on sagging Chinese demand, it’s possible even a Middle East war might not have a lasting upwards impact on oil prices unless Iranian and Saudi supply, or the Straits of Hormuz, become involved. That’s not an immediate risk, but were a wider war to start, it’s not going to necessarily stop within a geography that pleases markets. That’s something DM analysts who have experienced little EM geopolitical ‘sharp end’ tend to be slow in pricing for.

To summarise, as DM central bankers meet up at Jackson Hole, they are unsure of the labor market outlook, with risks looking more in one direction – down.

They are unsure of the inflation outlook, with risks perhaps in both directions – up and down. They are unsure of the stability of financial markets after the recent lunatic swings prompted by just a 15bps move from the BOJ.

Moreover, they are unsure of the geopolitical outlook, which informs all of the aforementioned.

They will notice that China just opened an anti-subsidy probe into EU dairy and pork in retaliation for looming EU tariffs on Chinese EVs: welcome to how global trade now ‘works’! More of this to come: much more.

They must also have noticed the ultra-normcore WEF warning: “Make no mistake – the US-driven post-Cold War era ended a while ago (and realistically America’s 2024 election won’t change this). Enduring global leadership, democratic ideals, globalization and liberal values have all been notably challenged and superpowers are overstretched. This is a global legitimacy crisis… This period of muddling through means anything can happen in our post-pandemic era. Look for global risks to be further exacerbated by unexpected, destabilizing shock events.”

As such, any messaging from Powell that can be taken as either synonym or homonym for “RATE CUTS!”, prompting further volatility and financialisation-over-real-economy activity, is something we need like a Jackson Hole in the head.