Tag: news

‘Tis the season for consumers, most of whom are credit card dependent paying interest rates at the highest in two decades, to become absolutely holiday poor this year.

So what do we mean? Well, most consumers are going to rack up lots of debt this holiday season — and one price shock they might encounter are record high Christmas tree prices, reported York Daily Record.

San Francisco-based payment system Square has a new warning for consumers this holiday season: 2019 will be the “most expensive season for Christmas trees in history.” 

Industry analysts conclude that there’s more demand for trees this year than supply: 

“Some Christmas tree growers have fewer trees to sell this year than they wish they had. They have fewer trees to cut than in years past,” said Doug Hundley, spokesman for the National Christmas Tree Association.

The current industry environment is tighter supply in some of the top trees exporting states, like Oregon and North Carolina, are inflating prices that could dent consumers’ wallets.

“Fortunately, many other states grow and ship trees also. Key point here is we have a well-established distribution system delivering trees everywhere including to states that grow almost no trees themselves,” Hundley said.

The main driver behind tighter supply is the Christmas tree bust after the Great Recession, which lead to a collapse in tree farms in key export states. 

It generally takes seven years to grow a Christmas tree, and with many farms going bust after 2009 to 2012, not enough seedlings have been planted to match demand in 2019. 

“In 2008, when the recession hit, people either got out of the business or couldn’t afford to plant, so they didn’t. Now, we’re seeing the fruition of that because it takes about 8 to 10 years to grow a Christmas tree,” said Gerrit Strathmeyer, co-owner of Strathmeyer Christmas Trees.

The shortage of trees this year has raised prices across the country. The average price of a tree has more than doubled since 2008, from $36.50 in 2008 to $78 in 2018. Prices this year could exceed $78, likely to push above $81 and could exceed $100, depending on the size, variety, and state. 

As the new year rolls around, really, the next decade: 2020, consumers won’t necessarily be hungover from the holiday meals and pounds of turkey or the gallons of egg nog that will be had, but rather their credit card bills after the holiday season. 

Consumers this year will have to choose between paying for a tree and or paying their phone bill – it could very well be that consumers go on strike as Christmas becomes too damn expensive. Nevertheless, most consumers in the “greatest economy ever” are using credit cards this year with rates at two-decade highs.

So this could only mean one thing: the hangover period for consumption will be seen in 1H20. 

Via TaxiCabDepressions.com,

I have a question for American patriots…

We know what we have seen so far. We can all see the crimes. A blind man can see this with a wooden stick. It appears that the previous administration weaponized the FBI, shielded a favored candidate from criminal prosecution, abused the FISA court to spy on an opposition candidate, and deliberately worked to subvert the 2016 Presidential election.

This is astonishing.

This makes Watergate, Monica Lewinsky, Teapot Dome, and Iran/Contra look like Romper Room. This was nothing short of an attempted coup, and if you believe rumors and rumblings, the FISA memo is just “the tip of the iceberg”. People are talking about sweeping hearings, numerous convictions, and many, many people going to jail.

Except that we’ve heard that before. We’ve heard it for years, time and time again, but it never seems to happen.

So here’s the question:

What if, just like always, NOTHING happens?

Just like Fast and Furious, just like Lois Lerner and John Koskinen at the IRS, just like the NSA spying on James Rosen and Sharyl Attkisson, just like Benghazi, just like Hillary’s unsecured email server and deletion of subpoenaed emails, just like classified data on Weiner’s laptop, just like pallets of cash shrink-wrapped and flown to Iran, and just like the Democrat primary being rigged…

…what if NOTHING happens?

Sure, some low-level flunkies or rogue agents in Cincinnati might do a year or two in Club Fed, some others will get reassigned or take early retirement and enjoy thirty years of fat taxpayer pensions with their grandkids, but nothing more…

And the elites and the oligarchs and the political class prove once again that they are just too big to jail.

Just. Like. Always.

What then?

I suppose the question that I am really asking, on behalf of my seven year old daughter, is where is the line?

What happens if nothing happens?

The U.S. furniture industry is humming right along, with names like Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma the beneficiaries of expanding manufacturing domestically. The tailwind has been sustained growth since the financial crisis and a trade policy that is encouraging more production in the U.S. 

But the one problem the industry has now is a lack of skilled workers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Furniture manufacturers across the United States are having trouble filling open slots with the job market as tight as it has ever been in the U.S.

Meanwhile, a generation of sewers and upholsterers have simply avoided the industry, leaving it reliant on an aging workforce. 

These bottlenecks show up in metrics like delivery times. For instance, at Century Furniture in Hickory, N.C., delivery times have been stretched to nearly 9 weeks. 

Alex Shuford III, chief executive of RHF Investments Inc., owner of Century, said: “I walk around our factories every other day and am spooked by what I see. The retirements are coming and I can’t find enough people.”

The turnaround in the industry can be attributed to the internet, which allows consumers to demand and customize their choice of fabrics and features. China acts as competition for the U.S. in this regard, often able to customize and ship furniture with a much quicker lead time than 2 months. Tariffs continue to keep pressure on manufacturers to keep production in the U.S. 

But 90% of all dining tables, bookcases and other wooden furniture are made overseas. U.S. factories crank out about half of upholstered furniture in the country. 

It’s the custom upholstery that requires skilled labor and isn’t suited well for assembly line style mass production. Upholstered products are also more difficult to ship, because they can’t be stacked or reassembled. 

John Bray, chief executive of Vanguard Furniture Co., which has about 600 employees, said: “Pretty much all the companies that survived the last crisis have been in a growth mode. When business picked up, there just weren’t enough skilled people.”

28 year old Chad Ballard took on an entry level job at Century and is now studying upholstery at a local community college. It’s a skill that could boost his annual pay to as high as $75,000 if he can master the craft. Hiring Ballard was a “small victory” for Century, which has a constant opening for about 35 sewers at any given time. 

Century’s VP of human resources said of his hiring: “He came to us through a temporary agency. We won the lottery.”

In his county, 42% of sewing machine operators and 33% of upholsterers are 55 of older. 

Bill McBrayer, director of human resources for Lexington Home Brands, asked: “How do we get the young and old to come back to the industry?”

One attempt has been the Catawba Valley Furniture Academy, which was created by local companies to train furniture makers and offers benefits like free health clinics. The academy launched in 2014 and students spend 8 months studying manual cutting or sewing. The total cost ranges between $425 and $600. It graduates about 150 people a year – but the industry requires about 800 to 1,000 people. 

But it isn’t all optimism surrounding the industry. One executive asked: “The toughest question is the one that haunts us forever: What makes me think that if my child goes into this industry it will be there in two years?”

Nathaniel Kaylor, a 21-year-old student at the academy concluded: “My dad has been in furniture his whole life. He told me from the get-go to stay out of it. You get old fast. Go to college.”

Authored by Stephen Miller via Spectator USA,

I find most personal attacks on teen Swedish climate activist and newly minted TIME Person of the Year Greta Thunberg to be boorish, tactless and unnecessary. Even more so when the leader of the free world is up in early hours of the morning tweeting about her simply out of what appears to be press envy. President Trump’s weird obsession with TIME magazine transcends decades, so his latest jab at Thunberg is unsurprising. 

What’s even less surprising is the media reaction to the president’s tweet instructing Greta to ‘chill out’. With almost coordinated uniformity, staffers of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and CBS to name but a few, felt the need to highlight Thunberg’s Asperger syndrome in their response to Trump, something the president has yet to mention himself in his juvenile attacks on her. 

The game with Thunberg’s handlers and allies in the media here is all too obvious:

prop up a socially awkward teenage child to preach about their social or political issue (in this case, worldwide global apocalypse),

hand her pages of words to speak on stage,

wait for the response from those who oppose her overzealous political ideology,

and then feign outrage that their critiques are directed at a fragile child with a socially debilitating disorder.

How dare you!

It’s a clever, if not all-too-transparent trick designed to satisfy their own id, rather than convince others to join their cause.

A similar tactic was deployed by gun control groups and members of the media shortly after the Parkland school shooting in Florida in 2018. Greta Thunberg isn’t going away any time soon and throwing tomatoes at her won’t accomplish anything. Cries from defensive journalists about cyberbullying a defenseless child simply trying to make the world a better place will only grow louder . But if the media has decided to elevate child spokespeople to the status of new invincible prophets, I say so be it.

Make them adhere to their own standards. Let’s test this ‘don’t cyberbully teenagers’ theory.

This is why the National Rifle Association, an organization ripe for overhaul given the latest controversies and upheaval, should make their next spokesperson a teenager.

Then we can sit back and watch hordes of reporters adjust their outrage meters accordingly. Their new rosy-cheeked spokeskid should take to Twitter and YouTube, dressed in an orange vest and slinging an AR-15 over their shoulder, accompanied with bold declarations about how it’s up to the children to defend our Second Amendment Rights, granted to us by God and the Constitution of the United States, if the adults in Congress will no longer do it. They can correct media-at-large and politicians like Michael Bloomberg about the mechanics of what an AR-15 actually are, as well as citing statistics about the futility of an assault weapons ban when it’s first enacted. I’m sure they will handle critics of this defenseless child with the grace and demeanor they do with attacks on Thunberg. 

The NRA can send their new Twitter savvy teen on Meet the Press to tell Chuck Todd, while choking back tears, that not a single universal background check would have stopped the last five mass shootings in America. They can create Instagram Stories and TikToks explaining how gun violence has been on a 30-year down trend and is not an emergency, and all mandatory buybacks proposed by Democrats in Congress are the actual confiscation of constitutional rights.

The fresh-faced and hopeful deity of the new youth order marching for gun rights can pose for pictures and instead of demanding school walk outs, demand school participation in skeet shooting and NRA certification assembles. Perhaps even a ‘Bring your rifle to school day’. After all, the more the youth of our nation are trained to handle firearms responsibly, the more likely they themselves can shoot back in the event of a mass shooter, instead of hiding while a school security guard cowers in the parking lot. Why wouldn’t CNN jump at the chance to profile these brave children leading the way to fight back against gun violence in their own schools? ‘We can’t wait. Just fire back! Don’t hesitate!’

Or maybe, members of the media can simply spare themselves the aneurysm of a such a scenario, and their social media allies could perhaps stop deifying a child who is cynically propped up as a human shield themselves, before the NRA and other such organizations take this suggestion seriously.

Color us surprised.

A woman who, by age 24, has had $100,000 worth of cosmetic surgery to make herself look like a “blowup doll” is now suffering from complications.

According to the NY Post, Mary Magdalene has modified her body with a brow lift, three nose jobs, cheek and lip fat transfers, three boob jobs, 20 dental veneers, “Brazilian butt lifts,” numerous lip fillers and a “custom-designed” vagina.

She is on a quest to acquire “the fattest labia in the world,” according to the article.

Because, you know, you’ve got to have goals in life. 

But her surgeries have resulted in swelling and pain that requires frequent trips to a doctor. She told Jam Press: “It’s a lot better than it was [but] I have complications with the fat, so I will need to keep getting vagina injections to even it out. I am worried about one side, because it keeps growing. I think it’s probably from the swelling.”

But she claims the surgeries are worth it, because he confidence has risen dramatically. She started stripping at age 17 to begin funding her appearance. 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Mary Magdalene (@xomarym) on Nov 11, 2019 at 12:44pm PST

 

“I feel horny when I look at myself,” she said. 

Magdalene is one example of nearly a quarter of a million cosmetic surgeries that were performed last year. There were more than 17.7 million procedures performed last year. 

Magdalene has 144,000 Instagram followers and claims her look often causes people to “have car accidents and ask for her hand in marriage”. One fan offered to ditch his wife for her, she says, but she turned him down for being “broke and ugly”. 

And – get this – aside from being a stripper, she’s also an artist. 

“I have been making paintings with my vagina. So this surgery has really inspired me to be more creative as well,” she said. 

She concluded: “If the vaginal injections don’t work, they’ll do a surgical revision. But the doctor told me not to worry. So I’m trying to relax.”

Godspeed, Mary. Godspeed. 

 

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.

British school controls where children eat and shop after school

Imagine a man in a high visibility jacket comes into your take-out restaurant, and starts berating your customers, telling them to leave, and threatening them if they don’t.

That is what business owners in Bristol, England are dealing with. The man in the official looking high-viz reflective vest was a teacher, and the customers were students.

It is school policy to restrict what shops and restaurants students can patronize on their way home from school, by sending teachers out to patrol the streets.

Students who disobey the rule are punished with detention, even though this happens outside of school hours and off school property.

The business owner had to call the police to get the teacher to leave, and stop blocking the doorway to his shop (which prevented customers from entering).

He says it has cut down on his business significantly, including intimidating other customers besides the school children.

When the man spoke to the school Superintendent, he was treated to a lecture about how his food is unhealthy, and should not be available to students.

Click here to read the full story.

*  *  *

San Francisco spends almost $30 per flush for public toilets

Amid a homelessness crisis, San Francisco is trying to find ways to keep the streets from being littered with human feces.

They ran a pilot program over the past three months to keep public toilets open all night.

Dividing the costs by the number of flushes, it came out to $28.50 per flush.

Most of the costs were for the two staff members at each bathroom, to stop drug use and other criminal activity.

To see if the program was effective, the city compared how many calls for human waste cleanups they got in the surrounding areas in the three months before the test, compared to the three months during the test.

The best results showed calls fell from 190 before the pilot, to 166 during the trial– less than a 13% drop in reports of human waste.

Click here to read the full story.

*  *  *

American gun purchases on Black Friday could arm entire British Military

Here’s an interesting fact we discovered recently: on Black Friday this year, Americans bought 202,500 firearms, according to the number of FBI background checks conducted, which are required for gun sales.

That’s enough to arm the entire British military of 190,000 soldiers, including reserves, with a cool 12,000 firearms leftover

This Black Friday is just 1,000 guns below the all time record for guns purchased in one day, which was on Black Friday in 2017.

Click here to read the full story.

*  *  *

Bitcoin Futures CEO appointed to US Senate

US Senator Isakson is stepping down from his position at the end of this year due to health reasons.

In his place, the Governor of Georgia has appointed Kelly Loeffler to the seat.

This is only interesting because she is the current CEO of Bakkt, a company that facilitates Bitcoin futures trades.

So now there is actually someone in government who might understand cryptocurrency…

Click here to read the full story.

*  *  *

Guns confiscated over Joker Meme

In the beginning of October, Charles Donnelly had his guns seized under Washington state’s Red Flag law over a meme.

These laws allow police to take guns from innocent people over fears they will commit a crime in the future.

Donnelly posted a photo of himself with two AK-47s and the text “One ticket for Joker please.”

It was a common meme at the time, poking fun at the media’s repeated speculations there would be a mass shooting at a Joker screening.

Obviously, the meme was in very poor taste. There had been a shooting at an Aurora, Colorado theater in 2012, during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, which featured Heath Ledger as the Joker.

But the meme was still satire. And however distasteful or offensive, jokes are protected free speech.

Prosecutors also used previous satirical social media posts to argue Donnelly’s guns should be confiscated.

Click here to read the full story.

*  *  *

And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.

The shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) and the processes behind obtaining a warrant from it has fallen under harsh scrutiny by lawmakers following the release of the DOJ Inspector General’s report which found that the FBI was able to easily mislead the judges to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page.

“The goal is to make sure this doesn’t happen again, so you tighten up the system right,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), adding: “Quite frankly, I’m looking at the FISA court itself. … I’m looking for the court to tell the public, ‘Hey, we’re upset about this too,’ and, you know, take some corrective steps.”

Graham said his committee will look into legislation to introduce more “checks and balances” to the FISA process, according to The Hill.

When asked if he thought there would be bipartisan support for FISA reform, Sen. Dick Durban (D-IL) said “I hope so,” adding “This was a real wake-up call that three different teams can screw this up at the FBI.”

The renewed interest comes after five hours of partisan barb trading during a Judiciary hearing Wednesday with Horowitz that resulted in one clear bipartisan interest: overhauling the FISA court.

“One of the only points I’ve heard with bipartisan agreement today is a renewed interest in reforming the FISA process,” said Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.). –The Hill

Created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the FISA court is made up of 11 judges who are chosen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court to serve seven-year terms. They are responsible for approving warrant applications for intelligence gathering purposes and national security operations, which – as The Hill notes, “more often than not, they sign off.”

And in the case of Carter Page, the FISA judges initially denied a warrant to surveil the former Trump aide until the agency padded the application with the wildly unverified Steele Report, lying about Steele’s credibility, and then fabricating evidence to specifically say Page was not an “operational contact” for the CIA, when in fact he was – and had a “positive assessment.”

Last year the government filed 1,117 FISA warrant applications, including 1,081 for electronic monitoring. The court signed off on 1,079 according to a DOJ report.

That said, reform may come slowly.

But the timeline for any legislative reforms is unclear. Congress already faces a mid-March deadline to extend expiring surveillance authorities under the USA Freedom Act.

Durbin suggested the discussions could merge, while Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime privacy advocate, appeared skeptical that Republicans would ultimately get on board with broader changes to surveillance powers.

“Why after YEARS of blocking bipartisan FISA reforms are senior Republicans suddenly interested in it? There is no question that we need to improve transparency, accountability and oversight of the FISA process,” Wyden tweeted. –The Hill

Still, the IG report appears to have ‘enlightened’ some GOP lawmakers who previously resisted the notion of reining in FISA courts. Several GOP senators gave credit to their libertarian-minded colleagues on the hill, who have pushed for surveillance reform after accurately predicting the potential for abuse.

Those who have long-advocated for reform include GOP Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), according to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).

“I wish Mike Lee weren’t sitting here two people from me right now, because as a national security hawk I’ve argued with Mike Lee in the 4 1/2 or five years that I’ve been in the Senate that stuff just like this couldn’t possibly happen at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,” said Sasse during the Horowitz testimony, who added that the IG’s findings marked a “massive crisis of public trust” since we should know about FISA applications that aren‘t as high-profile as Page’s.

Horowitz reported a total of 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the applications to monitor Page, taking particular issue with applications to renew the FISA warrant and chastising the FBI for a lack of satisfactory explanations for those mistakes.

Horowitz stressed that he would not have submitted the follow-up applications as they were drafted by the FBI. Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer, altered an email related to the warrant renewal application, according to Horowitz’s report.

“[The] applications made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case,” Horowitz said. “We also found basic, fundamental and serious errors during the completion of the FBl’s factual accuracy reviews.“

Horowitz also found that there were errors that “represent serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications.” –The Hill

Let’s not forget that FISA court judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from overseeing the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to his personal friendship with former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok.

And the only reason Contreras did so was because his friendship with Strzok was revealed in their anti-Trump text messages found by the Inspector General.

Something remarkable happened when the Fed announced “NOT QE”: starting that week, every time the Fed’s balance sheet rose, so did the S&P. And the one week when the Fed’s balance sheet shrank, the market dropped. Yes, correlation may not be causation, but if a pattern repeats 9 weeks out of 9, then it becomes feedback loop which the math PhDs plug into their various algo/quant models and… voila:

Which begs the question: yesterday we reported that as part of its year-end repo bailout, the Fed plans on injecting over $500 billion of liquidity in the next 4 weeks, a process which will take the Fed’s balance sheet sharply higher by a record $500 billion in one month through mid-January, in the process sending the balance sheet to a new all time high above $4.5 trillion. We wonder: just what will happen to stocks?