Month: May 2024

Cars, trucks, and SUVs across the U.S. are getting older, with the average vehicle age now at a record 12.6 years. According to S&P Global Mobility, which monitors state vehicle registration data, high prices for new cars and massive economic pressures on buyers account for the trend, ABC News reports.

Despite a small recovery in new vehicle sales and a recent drop in prices — the average new car cost just over $45,000 last month, down from a peak in December 2022 — many people still find new cars too expensive. “It’s prohibitively high for a lot of households now,” said Todd Campau, aftermarket leader at S&P Global Mobility. “So I think consumers are being painted into the corner of having to keep the vehicle on the road longer.“

In April of 2019, the average car cost $33,695.

Another possible factor is that people are hesitating on vehicle purchasing decisions due to uncertainty about whether to choose an electric vehicle (EV), a hybrid, or stick with gasoline – as many are concerned that the availability of EV charging stations (VW recently stepped away from plans to go all-electric). However, Campau notes that cars are better made now and last longer, which is good news for car owners.

That said, new car sales are picking up, while around 16 million new vehicles are projected to be sold this year, which would be an increase over last year.

As new car sales increase, the fleet of aging vehicles, which currently stands at 286 million passenger vehicles in the nation, should see its average age stabilize. Increased sales of lower-cost vehicles might also help reduce the average price of new cars, making them more accessible.

Auto repair shops are loving America’s aging fleet – of which around 70% of vehicles on the road are over six years old and no longer under manufacturer warranty.

Overall, while the high cost of new vehicles continues to influence consumer choices, the improved quality and durability of cars are helping Americans manage by keeping their older vehicles on the road longer.

By Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves

For the past two years, shippers have had enormous leverage in the freight market, as excess capacity has kept rates under significant pressure. Shippers, who suffered under the weight of sizable market stress during COVID have inflicted “shippers revenge” on motor carriers, something we were warned was coming back in August 2022. 

Truckload spot rates, when adjusted for inflation, have plummeted to lows not seen since 2009.

In the early part of the Great Freight Recession, contract rates stayed persistently high as shippers monitored the market and wondered if the market reset was a short-term development or something greater.

In the first quarter of 2023, reassured that the Great Freight Recession was unlikely to end quickly, shippers started to insist on significant rate concessions from carriers. This process accelerated earlier this year. 

As a result, carrier profitability hit 14-year lows in the first quarter. 

According to FreightWaves channel checks, shippers still insist on rate concessions from motor carriers. This may be ill-advised. 

On April 17, FreightWaves reported that we were likely at the bottom of the market and the “end to the worst freight markets in history may be closer than it appears.” 

We believe that this analysis is still true, and shippers, not carriers, bear the greater risk. In fact, if the economy continues to grow, freight market volumes will do so as well. 

While we are not expecting a massive surge in freight activity, we continue to monitor risks that could change this perspective. 

Like all commodity markets, rates become massively volatile when an unexpected sudden demand shock occurs. For trucking markets, no event has more short-term impact on demand than a major hurricane hitting a large U.S. city. 

FreightWaves’ early success was largely due to its coverage of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Galveston and parts of the Texas Gulf Coast around Houston. 

NOAA released its May hurricane forecast, where it spells a warning to shippers to prepare for significant disruptions. It is the most aggressive forecast on record. NOAA forecasts that there will be 17-25 named storms, with 4-7 being Category 3 or greater. On average, a hurricane season usually has 14 named storms and three Category 3 or greater storms. 

The administration described the 2024 season as “hyperactive” and “the highest NOAA has ever issued in the May forecast.” 

Shippers that assume they will be able to react to changing market conditions, in time, may find that carriers lack sympathy for their plight. In fact, carriers have been warning shippers that forcing significant rate concessions will be a mistake when the market flips in the carrier’s favor. 

Whether the hurricane season lives up to NOAA’s forecast or ends on a whimper, one thing is certain: at some point, the freight market pendulum will swing against shippers and when it does trucking firms will inflict carrier revenge. 

In many ways, Carrier’s revenge is more vicious than shipper’s revenge in the sense that price is easier for shippers to deal with than having freight left on their docks and factories disrupted. 

534 institutions with over $1 billion in assets now hold Bitcoin ETFs, according to bitcoin app River.

In a blog post published this week, River noted that over 534 entities, each managing assets exceeding $1 billion, have now incorporated Bitcoin ETFs into their portfolios.

The diverse group of owners includes hedge funds, pension funds, and insurance companies, underscoring the wide-ranging acceptance of Bitcoin, the blog wrote, adding that notably, more than half of the top 25 hedge funds in the United States are now exposed to Bitcoin.

Among these are Millennium Management, which now holds an impressive $2 billion in Bitcoin assets. Furthermore, 11 of the top 25 Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), alongside numerous smaller advisors, have also allocated investments in Bitcoin.

“If you sell your bitcoin to Blackrock, you probably won’t be getting it back,” River’s CEO Alex Leishman said. 

Specific to their company, they wrote that they are witnessing a trend of bitcoin becoming a staple on every company’s balance sheet live. 

Currently, over a thousand companies using River’s platform maintain bitcoin in their financial reserves, the company wrote. Just a year ago, the typical business held 2.5 BTC, valued at approximately $70,000. Since then, these holdings have grown to more than 4 BTC, with their value surging to beyond $280,000.

They wrote: “It is no longer just the MicroStrategy’s of the world accumulating Bitcoin, but businesses of all sizes.”

Recall days ago, Michael Saylor commented in wide-ranging interview that bitcoin had now officially pierced the veil into the KYC and AML regulated banking world.

When asked about how bitcoin is homogenizing itself in a world of increasing regulations, he said: “I think it’s doing it now. I mean, you’re watching it, right? For example, Block sells $10 billion worth of Bitcoin every year via Cash App. They’re a publicly traded company. They abide by AML and KYC regulations. They have compliance. They have responsibilities.” 

“Fidelity, you know, Fidelity Digital Assets is custodying billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin. I’m sure they’ve got an army of lawyers and finance people thinking about it.”

By Peter C. Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research

Twice in the past few weeks President Joe Biden has claimed that when he took office in January 2021 inflation was “over nine percent.” First on CNN’s OutFront with Erin Burnett on May 8 and again on May 14 in a Yahoo! Finance interview, the bizarre comment was made. And as has become a routine with the gaffe-prone chief executive, White House staffers added shamelessness to what could have been limited to embarrassment by issuing a statement: “The President was making the point that the factors that caused inflation were in place when he took office. The pandemic caused inflation around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”

Americans will have to decide for themselves if the claim made by Biden was a lie intended to mislead anyone not familiar with the trajectory of prices over the past several years, or an innocent error. It is a choice US citizens have been confronted with frequently, in particular where assertions regarding the health of the economy have been made. 

If an honest mistake, it simply may be that the President confused the January 2021 inflation number with a number of other price statistics beginning with the number nine in the month of his inauguration. Below are several possibilities.

• In January 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in their consumer prices summary that the average price of a boneless sirloin steak was $9.418. By April 2024 that price had risen 27.5 percent to $11.662. 

• In January 2021, fifteen subindices of CPI began with the number nine. Their levels in that month, in the April 2024 report, and the percent change are shown below.

Alternatively, Mr. Biden may have mistaken a different January 2021 economic statistic with the July 2022 year-over-year headline CPI number.

• The spread between the 1-year US Treasury bill and the 10-year US Treasury note was 97.9 basis points (0.98 percent) in mid-January 2021. That spread inverted in mid-2022, about the time that headline CPI year-over-year actually reached 9.1 percent. A normal yield curve slopes upward, with a positive spread showing that longer-term bonds yield more than shorter-term ones, typically reflecting expectations of economic growth and rising future interest rates. An inverted yield curve slopes downward with a negative spread as shorter-term bonds yield more than longer-term ones. Those conditions are often considered a predictor of an economic recession. As of May 2024, the 1-to-10 year spread has been negative for over 600 days.

1-year Treasury bill 10-year Treasury note spread (Jan 2021 – present)

• The Federal Reserve’s Industrial Production (IP) Index was at 98.8 in January 2021. Owing to lockdowns and other pandemic policies, the index plummeted to a low of 84.6 in April 2020 and was recovering early in 2021. But despite hitting a post-pandemic high of 103.5 in September 2022, the IP Index hasn’t yet recovered its September 2018 all-time high of 104.1. Since the start of 2024, the index has declined, currently oscillating between 101.8 and 102.8.

Industrial Production (2014 – present), with all-time high (red dotted line), and January 2021 (black vertical line) indicated 

It’s possible that Mr. Biden has once again fumbled details accidentally. Yet the consistency of those blundered messages, each absolving his administration of responsibility for declining economic conditions, is simply not consistent with randomness. American citizens have been told that corporate profits, Vladimir Putin, owners of gas stations, and ocean shippers are responsible for the huge surge in prices. Month-to-month and year-to-year price change data has been conflated misleadingly, as have statistics regarding how the US inflationary surge compares to those in other nations.

Whatever the specific reasons, the desperate evasiveness is glaring. Knowing that the CPI was not “over 9 percent” in January 2021, but rather 1.4 percent, hitting 9.1 percent in July 2022, is one thing. Recognizing that the administration of monetary policy has become a third-rail issue to be evaded at all costs is another, more pressing, matter. Instead of properly attributing the increase in prices to expansionary monetary policies (and to a lesser extent, massive debt and deficits), many in the political establishment prefer to tell ham handed-lies which further erode an already ramshackle credibility.

It may be that the political establishment believes that the American public is not sophisticated enough to understand the Fed. More likely, the ability of the Fed to provide a swift economic boost during crises (without the lengthy process that fiscal stimuli require) is deemed too important to endanger by drawing attention to: even the staunchly anti-high finance Elizabeth Warren voted against auditing the Fed in 2016. The bipartisan inclination to keep the US central bank out of critical discussions is one which, whether inflation subsides or the Fed heeds calls to normalize at the 3-percent level, demands closer scrutiny.

Authored by John Malcolm via The Epoch Times,

Oral arguments are over at the Supreme Court for this term. Although the rallies and protesters have dispersed (for now, anyway), the justices remain frantically at work on the numerous opinions they have yet to hand down. With several closely watched cases still pending, it will likely be a historic finish to this Supreme Court term.

The court heard 61 arguments in 69 cases this term (some of the cases were consolidated for oral argument), 20 of which the court has already decided.

The most newsworthy of those cases was the unanimous ruling in Trump v. Anderson, in which the court reversed the Colorado Supreme Court and held that former President Donald Trump could not be removed from the state ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Because, the court said, “the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” state courts and state officials have no power to remove federal candidates from the ballot.

Opinions in some of the biggest cases, however, have yet to be issued.

These cases address issues ranging from government censorship of online speech to abortion drug regulation to Trump’s immunity from criminal prosecution to how much deference courts should give to federal agencies’ interpretations of the scope of their own authority.

The court heard five cases this term that could significantly reshape administrative law and the regulatory state.

In Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, for instance, the court will decide how much courts should defer to agencies’ often expansive interpretations of federal law.

In both cases, fishing companies challenged a federal agency’s rule that the companies had to pay for the government to monitor their compliance with federal laws and regulations. A majority of justices appear ready to say that agencies cannot define their own powers by interpreting vague laws however they want. If that happens, this will represent a sea change in the area of administrative law, will curtail the vast power currently exercised by federal agencies, and may well force Congress to write clearer laws in the future.

In another administrative law case, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the court will decide a challenge brought by doctors and a medical association against the Food and Drug Administration’s repeal of safety measures that protected women who use mifepristone, a drug commonly known as the abortion pill.

If the court rules for the FDA, it could sidestep the question of whether the FDA violated the law and only hold that the doctors and medical association were not harmed and thus lacked standing to sue. A win for the doctors, however, would bring back the repealed safety restrictions.

And in a third administrative law case, Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the court is grappling with the question of when someone can sue because they were harmed by a federal regulation. Under the government’s reading of the relevant statute, a person can sue only up to six years after a regulation is issued—meaning that a company created more than six years later can’t get into court to challenge the regulation.

The court will also decide whether the funding scheme for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, is unconstitutional in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association, Limited.

The case focuses on whether Congress, in the name of “efficient” solutions to modern problems, can abdicate its fiscal oversight powers by passing a statute that perpetually funds an agency, as it did for the CFPB. If the CFPB prevails, Congress could easily sidestep the democratic process by guaranteeing forever-funding for the entire regulatory state.

Last but not least of the administrative law cases, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy presents the court with three questions about the SEC’s enforcement proceedings. The court mostly focused its attention at oral arguments on one question, however: whether George Jarkesy had a right to a jury trial when the SEC brought an enforcement action against him.

For context, the SEC alleged that Jarkesy committed wrongs that look like common law fraud. Thus, when it brought an in-agency enforcement proceeding before agency judges, Jarkesy argued he had a right to a jury trial because he would have that right if a private person sued him for fraud.

The catch is that the court already held years ago that when the government creates and enforces a public right—something given to the public collectively, like a right to a deception-free securities market—the enforcing agency can decide the case itself without having to face a jury.

If the court chooses to address the jury issue, it will need to address whether Congress can convert a private right into a public one and let the agency have one of its own decide the agency’s enforcement actions.

The court will also decide in three separate cases whether government officials and Big Tech companies can suppress online speech that they disfavor.

In Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton, the court will decide whether Florida and Texas can restrain Big Tech from “deplatforming” online speech (removing users’ content from their websites or apps).

And in Murthy v. Missouri, the court is weighing whether federal officials’ relentless pressure on those companies to suppress disfavored speech was unconstitutional censorship or nothing more than the bully pulpit in action.

Although the justices could side with Florida and Texas in the NetChoice cases without reaching the merits of the cases and instead by deciding them on a procedural question, they appeared skeptical in Murthy that the government violated the First Amendment.

The justices also appeared concerned about the government’s broad reading of a federal statute that the Justice Department is using to prosecute a Jan. 6 defendant in Fischer v. United States. If the court agrees that the federal law covers a narrower range of criminal acts than the government argues it covers, this could have an impact on the pending criminal case against Trump, since two of the four charges in that case rely on the same statute.

Speaking of the former president, the court will decide in Trump v. United States whether Trump enjoys absolute immunity from subsequent prosecution for official acts he took while he was president. Trump’s attorneys are arguing that the only exception would be for acts that led to a president’s impeachment and removal from office.

While Trump was impeached twice while in office, he was acquitted both times by the Senate. A ruling in Trump’s favor would make it very difficult for special counsel Jack Smith to criminally prosecute him for contesting the 2020 election and for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to prosecute him in Georgia as well.

But that’s not all.

In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the court appears likely to reverse a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that fining a homeless individual for sleeping on public property violates the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause.

In Moore v. United States, the justices will decide whether a tax on unrealized wealth – such as an increase in your stock portfolio’s value—is constitutional under the 16th Amendment, which only allows Congress to impose a direct tax on “income.”

The court is also still working on two firearms cases. The first, United States v. Rahimi, poses the question of whether a federal statute violates the Second Amendment by prohibiting a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing firearms. The second, Garland v. Cargill, will determine whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can define a bump stock device as a “machine gun.”

In yet another chapter of the ongoing controversy over the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “Good Neighbor Plan”—which imposes national emission standards for certain states that are “upwind” of other states—Ohio, other affected states, and various organizations have asked the court to stay the plan while they challenge it in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The plan, they point out in four consolidated cases (captioned Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency), was designed for 23 states, but a dozen of those states, and three-quarters of the emissions the plan would have originally regulated, are now exempt. Among the potential costs the challengers point out as justifying a stay is the likelihood that compliance would trigger power-grid emergencies.

Finally, in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the court will decide South Carolina state officials’ appeal of a decision from a three-judge district court panel that held that the state’s Congressional District 1 was racially gerrymandered.

The officials argued that the panel concluded that partisan gerrymandering—which is permissible under the Constitution—was racial gerrymandering by wrongly inferring that a correlation between race and politics meant that race was the true basis for the election map.

If you feel overwhelmed, that is only a snapshot of some of the remaining cases this term.

And if some (or many) of them seem rather partisan or controversial, keep in mind that the Supreme Court frequently hands down rulings that are not decided on partisan lines—such as its unanimous judgment earlier this term that Colorado cannot unilaterally remove Trump from the ballot.

At the end of the day, no one but the justices and their clerks know what the results are in the cases still to be handed down or when those opinions will be released.

But one thing is certain: It will be a historic end to an already historic term.

*  *  *

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Two Chechens with no personal identification – and who were in no US national databases, otherwise illegal aliens that likely invaded the nation through the southern border, were ‘taking photos’ – or possibly surveilling – outside the home of an elite US Army special forces colonel near Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.

Fox News reports the colonel confronted the men, one of which was using a “telephoto lens” and taking “photos of his children” outside his home on the evening of May 3, and that’s the moment when an altercation broke out, with the special forces operator shooting and killing one of the Chechens. 

The FBI told Fox News, “Our law enforcement partners at the Moore County Sheriff’s Office contacted the FBI after a shooting death in Carthage. A special agent met with investigators and provided a linguist to assist with a language barrier for interviews.”

Local Sheriff Ronnie Fields said, “The caller indicated that an individual was observed taking photographs on the property and had become aggressive towards a resident outside their home…. The deceased was found approximately 250 yards from the roadway, along a powerline on the residential property.”

America, BUY GUNS & AMMO

Army Special Ops Soldier Has Home Invaded By Chechen Men & They Were Taking Pictures Of His Kids

“2 Chechen men who spoke broken English were found near the soldier’s home”

“His family alleges the suspected intruder, 35 year old Ramzan Dariev of… pic.twitter.com/4eYcpDkhAl

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) May 24, 2024

Over the years, special operations soldiers have seen an increase in “strange interactions” and “suspicious surveillance of them and their families,” according to Fox News. Some say this is part of foreign spy programs. 

The illegal alien who was killed, 35-year-old Ramzan Daraev, was working as a subcontractor for Utilities One, but at the time of the incident, “Daraev was not in possession of any utility equipment, utility clothing, or identification,” Fox News said.

Intel sources explain to Fox that “power company employment is often a cover for status/action.” 

That said, we want to learn more about Utilities One. We use the risk intelligence platform Sayari, combing through public records, and find that the company is a “foreign corporation.” 

Sayari data shows Serghei Busmachiu is the company’s officer. Fox noted that Busmachiu founded the company in 2016, shortly after immigrating from Moldova. 

This incident is still a mystery. The biggest red flag is an illegal alien using a telephoto lens to snap photos outside the home of an elite special forces officer. Maybe if Joe Biden and the Democrats didn’t flood the nation with ten million illegals, incidents like this wouldn’t happen.

Also, why is a “foreign corporation” working on US critical infrastructure? 

Thre are a lot of questions here.

Authored by Tristan Greene via CoinTelegraph.com,

Elon Musk recently doubled-down on his predictions that humans would need a “universal high income” in the wake of artificial intelligence-driven job displacement.

This time claiming that without our jobs our purpose in life may eventually be to “give AI meaning.”

The bleak prognostication from the world’s richest person came during the VivaTech 2024 event in Paris as part of a winding speech wherein Musk made fervent claims that AI would provide all of our goods and services in the future.

“My biggest fear is AI,” the mogul said.

He also claimed that AI will be better than humans at everything, thus relegating our species to doing our best to support the machines:

“The question will really be one of meaning – if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning? I do think there’s perhaps still a role for humans in this – in that we may give AI meaning.”

Musk, the father of at least 10 children, said humans might be able to work “as a hobby,” if they chose, but ultimately painted a bleak picture of the future where, according to his previous predictions, AI will supplant us in all endeavors.

In related news, Musk’s AI company, dubbed simply “xAI,” has reportedly secured $6 billion in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Tribe Capital at a total valuation of $18 billion.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, Musk says that xAI lags behind industry leaders OpenAI and DeepMind, but could catch up by the end of 2024:

“xAI is a new company so it still has a lot of catching up to do before it has an AI that is competitive with Google Deepmind and OpenAI. Maybe towards the end of the year, we will have that.”

This sentiment, combined with his prediction that AI will surpass humans by 2025, indicates that he believes his company will be among those who could potentially create AI capable of human-level cognition.

It bears mentioning that Musk’s AI-related predictions haven’t always fared so well. In 2019 he famously promised that Tesla would field a million fully autonomous robotaxis on the road by 2020.

More recently, he claimed that Tesla would unveil its first robotaxi in August of 2024.

Orange juice futures in New York surged to new record highs on Friday morning, with prices squeezing over 30% in just a few short weeks. The latest price jump comes as citrus crop troubles across Brazil and the US continue to worsen global supply fears. 

The price of orange juice futures has soared to records, adding strain for consumers of the staple breakfast beverage. Citrus-crop woes in Brazil and the US are helping to fuel the relentless surge higher. Brazil is expected to see its worst orange harvest in 36 years, which will have a dramatic impact on global juice supplies — the South American nation accounts for about 70% of total exports of the beverage. In the US, Florida’s orange groves have also suffered from decades of damage from disease and weather, putting limits on supplies from the top US juice producer. -Bloomberg 

According to Bloomberg data, OJ prices rose 10 cents, or 2.14%, to $4.765/lb, the exchange limit. Prices are in blue-sky breakout territory. 

As of 0912 et, the futures spread for July FCOJA-A versus Sept. FCOJA-A widened 1.75 cents/lb to 19.25 cents/lb. This is a sign of a market fraught with supply fears. 

This long timeframe view of OJ futures shows prices have hyperinflated nearly 400% since early 2020. 

The most recent driver of the price surge: Sliding production in Brazil. Let’s not forget about collapsing production in Florida. 

Ignore hyperinflating food prices. No alarm bells here… 

Whoops! But Democrats say food inflation is caused by ‘greedy’ corporations. 

Enjoy higher prices. Inflation is sticky. 

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally decided to drop the charade.

One of the worst-kept secrets of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine is that the US allows its client state to use American arms for striking inside of Russia despite officially prohibiting it from doing so. Sergey Poletaev explained the pseudo-“legal” means through which this happens in his latest piece for RT, but now Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally decided to drop the charade and more openly allow Ukraine to do so without going through these largely symbolic workarounds.

He responded to Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul’s criticism of these operational restrictions during a hearing by declaring that “Ukraine will have to make and will make its own decisions” on the use of these arms even though the US doesn’t endorse attacks inside of Russia. The New York Times then reported on the same day that the Biden Administration is deliberating whether to formalize this new unofficial policy, though that debate is now moot and just a distraction.

The reality is that the US has always tacitly approved Ukraine’s use of these weapons for striking inside of Russia, it’s just now more openly allowing this as a morale-booster amidst Russia’s fresh push into Kharkov Region, which is re-entered without any resistance due to unbuilt border fortifications. Nevertheless, seeing as how this coincides with talk of formalizing some NATO countries’ unofficial training missions inside that country, it’s clear that the West is escalating its involvement in the conflict.

Keeping the aforesaid two policies an open secret enables these two to “save face” to an extent, thus facilitating the management of their security dilemma by reducing the odds of either side “overreacting” such as when Ukraine strikes Russia with Western arms and Russia kills NATO trainers. If either was formally acknowledged upon totally doing away with this charade, then there’d be lots of pressure from hawkish policymakers and members of society to reciprocally respond, which would risk World War III.

These two latest Ukrainian-pressured examples of “mission creep” – solely with respect to their optics since these policies have already been in effect for some time – are therefore obviously intended to bring NATO and Russia to the brink of a direct conflict. This is exactly what Russian Ambassador to America Anatoly Antonov assessed when reacting to the recent congressional hearing when Blinken signaled that his country will more openly allow Ukraine to use its arms to strike inside of Russia.

Russia seemingly anticipated this development and that’s likely why it announced tactical nuclear weapons exercises earlier this month as was explained here at the time, with the primary intent being to deter a full-fledged NATO invasion, especially one that approaches or crosses the Dnieper. In the last-mentioned scenario, Russia might resort to the use of tactical nukes in self-defense per its doctrine in order to preemptively stop an imminent NATO invasion of its newly unified formerly Ukrainian regions.

It’s imperative that this red line isn’t approached, let alone crossed, otherwise World War III could easily break out by miscalculation given Russia’s national security perceptions that were just explained. With that in mind, it’s best to asymmetrically partition Ukraine via the model that was shared here earlier this spring, which includes a demilitarized buffer zone in the Kiev-controlled regions east of the Dnieper. Regrettably, the US hasn’t expressed any interest in this scenario, hence why it continues escalating.

That being the case, it can’t be ruled out that the two latest Ukrainian-pressured examples of “mission creep” will prompt Russia to escalate in response, thus climbing the escalation ladder and bringing the world closer to the brink through no fault of its own since it has the right to do so in self-defense. If this vicious cycle isn’t soon stopped through a creative diplomatic solution for ending the conflict, then a conventional NATO intervention might be inevitable with all that entails for bringing about World War III.

“Walking through the streets of Baltimore City, especially on the west side, feels like navigating a warzone. Drug gangs have taken over entire neighborhoods, and the police are nowhere to be found. We’ve all become numb to the violence, with shootings and drug overdoses around the clock. The fentanyl flooding the streets is killing people left and right, and all that’s left out of all this chaos are used Narcan kits littering city streets,” said Baltimore resident Theresa Davis. 

Davis continued with a few questions: “Where are the politicians who promised the end of the drug crisis? You know, the White House is just right down the street—where is Biden?” 

“This is insane – our leaders have failed us,” she added. 

Davis’ shocking account of life in Baltimore City and the around-the-clock chaos leaves one wondering why the metro area is imploding. 

Baltimore has been trending down for decades, but the death of Freddie Gray sparked the “Ferguson effect” and ushered in failed social and criminal justice reforms that only resulted in record homicides, violent crime, and drug overdoses in the last decade. 

Our latest report showed that defunding the police movement is not working well… 

Baltimore is now facing apocalyptic levels of policing shortages.

Last week, THREE police officers patrolled a whole district of 61,000 residents.

Police are now UNABLE to respond to calls, including for child assault.

The department is now postponing police training in an… pic.twitter.com/4XhEURoR4d

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 25, 2024

All of this has led to a population collapse. 

The exodus accelerated in the last ten years. 

Law-abiding residents in the metro area are demanding accountability from the radical leftist politicians whose policies have backfired. Yet Democrats put on a spectacular performance this week, celebrating how allegedly the toxic water in the Inner Harbor is now “swimmable.” 

Meanwhile, news this week from the New York Times is a shocker for some. Baltimore City has been crowned America’s “overdose capital.” 

People in Baltimore have been dying of overdoses at a rate never before seen in a major American city.

In the past six years, nearly 6,000 lives have been lost. The death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly double that of any other large city, and higher than nearly all of Appalachia during the prescription pill crisis, the Midwest during the height of rural meth labs or New York during the crack epidemic.

We’re left speechless… 

Again, speechless (but not shocked if you read ZH). 

The numbers are “horrifying,” said Dr. Laura Herrera Scott, Maryland’s health secretary since 2023, adding, “We haven’t deployed the right resources in the right places.”

Scott’s comments reveal that the bloated local government is ineffective in solving real crises. In other words, the wrong people are running the show. 

Where are those woke lawmakers in Annapolis? Sigh, they’re too busy focusing on pushing radical trans health bills instead of solving real problems. 

“This is a perfect example of the Democrat supermajorities in the legislature failing to implement tough penalties for drug deals and a total failure of the City Council and Mayor. Republicans continue to offer solutions, and Democrats continue to reject those solutions. This problem is created and exacerbated by Democrats failures,” Del. Nino Mangione, R-Baltimore County, said in a statement.