We’ve already pointed out that money isn’t the problem in America’s unprecedented data center construction buildout. Big Tech’s AI capex splurge is effectively endless thanks to “circle-jerk” vendor-financing schemes, and land is plentiful.

The real bottleneck? First, it was power – or rather, the lack of it – as the grid struggles to hook up hyperscalers sprinting toward ever larger and more power-hungry AI server racks.

True.

That is why Bitcoin is based on energy: you can issue fake fiat currency, and every government in history has done so, but it is impossible to fake energy.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2025

Beyond a power grid already stretched thin due to limited capacity, the Trump administration is now scrambling to fix this with an accelerated nuclear push before the 2030s. We’ve identified another problem that central bankers can’t print their way out of: skilled labor. And no, we’re not talking about the need for cheap, unskilled migrant labor. We’re talking about a highly skilled workforce required to build, run, and maintain data centers, as well as expand the power grid and operate nuclear power plants. 

Wow:

“In 2025-28, we project ~57 gigawatts (GW) of US data center power demand, and we quantify available power capacity to serve this demand as: near-term grid access of ~12-15 GW, plus ~6 GW of data centers under construction, resulting in a ~36 GW shortfall of US power… pic.twitter.com/4PArdYY9qO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 16, 2024

In early October, Goldman noted that data center buildouts will require an additional 300,000 workers across manufacturing, construction, and operations to meet power demand by the end of the decade.

And then there is the issue of where the US gets 300,000 engineers to build all this missing power supply by 2030 https://t.co/a18crhqZ4v pic.twitter.com/tinW8SHDwM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2025

Now, Goldman analysts led by Carly Davenport are telling clients that the power industry will need over 500,000 new workers by 2030 to meet the surging electricity demand from data centers and the broader economy-wide electrification push.

Davenport explained:

“The US power industry is poised to require >500,000 new workers by 2030 or a significant acceleration in labor productivity. This growth enters a labor force already facing strain from aging and a limited pipeline of skilled labor. Labor-demand challenges to meet levels of US power-demand growth not seen since the 1990s are rising amid the Demographic Dilemma — a shrinking productive labor pool tasked to support an aging population — which raises the risk of G7 labor-force strains. This is elevating investor/corporate debates on industry execution and whether/when rising power, equipment, and labor costs could constrain growth.”

Generational growth to achieve 2.6% CAGR in electricity demand through 2030 could require ~510,000 US power and grid jobs (a 28% increase versus the 2023 US energy workforce).

“We estimate the need for ~300,000 incremental jobs across manufacturing, construction, and operations/maintenance (Exhibit 10)…

…plus an additional 207,000 across US transmission and distribution (Exhibit 11).“

What’s critical to understand is that the trillions in investment flooding into the economy through the 2030s will require far more than steel, concrete, silicon chips, and copper wire. They will demand a massive expansion of highly skilled workers.

Right now, there is a terrible oversupply of college-educated workers and a deepening shortage of talent for non-degree, hands-on jobs – a widening gap highlighted in a recent Goldman note by analyst Evan Tylenda.

Our advice for young people struggling to find a real job: ditch the useless gender-studies degree and learn a trade that’s becoming increasingly valuable to “Powering America.” For college students who haven’t been brainwashed by Marxism and wokism, aim for fields that will actually matter, such as engineering, energy systems, and nuclear science – all of which will be in red-hot demand in the 2030s.

The labor market is shifting fast. It’s time to move with it and choose a career that won’t be automated into oblivion anytime soon.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If each of these is not a part of any ‘reform,’ than all that is being done is pouring money into a monopolizing cartel, just in a slightly different way.

Unbeknownst to those of us with little inside knowledge of the complex financial plumbing of the US healthcare system, healthcare is in a death spiral that will surprise everyone but insiders who grasp the system’s unsustainability.

To help us outsiders understand the death spiral, I asked a senior MD to guide us through “follow the money.”

Trump Blasts “Big, Fat, Rich Insurance Companies” As Lawmakers Propose Ways To ‘Fix’ Obamacare.

Since this is the issue of the day and it falls within my expertise, here are some thoughts.

Executive Summary

Multiple conditions are aligning for a broad re-alignment of medical care delivery in the US, resulting in the development of a two-tiered delivery model: high-quality, efficient, innovating cash-pay for those who can pay and low-quality, wait-rationed care delivery for those who can’t.

If you can’t afford it, don’t get sick.

Health systems make their money through inflated commercial real estate (CRE), sale of patient health information (PHI), consolidation of supply chains, and kickbacks in exchange for redirecting federal dollars. Absent a tiny sliver of procedures, the delivery of healthcare itself is a loss leader. It is a requirement for entry, not a source of value. As such, care delivery managed to prevent loss, not promote innovation.

Most health system CEOs are financial engineers, not care delivery specialists, and compare the size of their real estate management infrastructure with their care delivery management infrastructure; the former is always much more robust than the latter.

Insurers have become utilities, administering government payment programs. Their ability to bear risk as a business model was discarded with the ACA; they no longer have the infrastructure or talent to do so. You might as well ask them to make shoes.

This monoculture, the corruption of monopoly and finally the response to the pandemic has crippled both.

Health systems faced a profound interruption in throughput which they dealt with by tapping reserves, inflating CRE further, pushing the boundaries of PHI sales, increasing their kickback programs, and, most importantly, becoming fully dependent on the now ending government bailouts.

Further consolidation and partnering with private money is their only path forward. Recent experience teaches that the private money will cut the delivery of healthcare to the bare minimum needed to maximize the other sources of value. A whole lot of administrators and c-suiters are also going to lose their jobs.

After the ACA, the Insurer’s only cash cow was the immensely overfunded and fraud-filled Value-Based Care (VBC) Medicare and Medicaid programs such as Medicare Advantage. The fraud is now being criminally prosecuted, the overpayments are gone, and the cost of care delayed during the pandemic and which the insurers now bear are being realized manifold.

Insurers simply have no path forward other than as payment administrators. Look for massive consolidation, starting with the individual Blues. The government has been resistant, but now it’s a choice of merger or bankruptcy. In 2028 probably only Coventry, United, and Centene will be left standing, no more blues.

The ACA itself is in a death spiral. Envisioned as a universal mandatory risk pool, so many exceptions have been made that only the sickest and those who have no choice get their care there, the former being subsidized by the latter, the government, and ever dwindling coverage. The pandemic subsidies masked it and without them the coverage is non-sensical. Non-participation will be its end.

In addition, government medical care programs have long been subsidized by suppressing payment for the resources used to obtain care delivery; clinicians, labor, administration, and even bedpans. Real wages for even the highest paying doctors working within the system haven’t increased since 2010, nursing wages have gone up only because so many have become free-lancing agency workers. I got offered a locums position for $145/hour, the same as I was offered 8 years ago.

All those resources are now worth more outside the system than inside. Thus, those resources are migrating to the cash-pay market. Used to be the huge government market and dependable payments was enough to overcome the difference in value between the two markets, cash vs third party. No longer.

The legacy costs, management/leadership expertise and business models of current Fee For Service (FFS) health systems preclude all but the most highly branded health systems from competing in the cash-pay model.

Access to the cash-pay market will vary based on jurisdiction: it’s illegal in some states, hamstrung by others, free in still more.

Look for policy to evolve into a high-dollar, deductible, roll-over Health Savings Account (HSA) with income-based subsidies paired with a government subsidized catastrophic care program. At least until the young and disaffected elect a socialist.

A $2,000 direct payment to beneficiaries such as being currently contemplated is completely ineffectual, especially since it has to be borrowed and will just increase inflation that much further.

True reform must include:

1.Invalidation of state and federal laws which restrict cash-pay.

2. Prohibition of not-for-profit (NFP) / Religious organizations from third-party payment programs. The competitive advantage of the tax-free business model and the inherent corruption it has engendered render their participation not in the public interest.

3. Removal of restrictions on clinician ownership in healthcare delivery.

4. Renewed criminal anti-trust enforcement in medical care delivery.

Others can be added, but if each of these is not a part of any ‘reform,’ than all that is being done is pouring money into a monopolizing cartel, just in a slightly different way.

No improvement will occur.

It’s not payments which need reform, it’s delivery.

And a lot of folks’ paychecks depend on obfuscating that fact.

Thank you, senior MD for the guided tour of healthcare’s financial death spiral. I have long stated that healthcare in its current extractive-cartel form will bankrupt the nation all by itself:

Why America’s Healthcare (Sickcare) System Is Broken and Unfixable (July 16, 2014)

Sickcare Will Bankrupt the Nation (March 21, 2011)

My questions:

1. Is any of this financial plumbing actually private insurance, or is it all just sluicing government funding through a profitable skimming operation?

2. How can a ‘healthcare’ system that refuses to connect digital derangement, ultra-processed diet and poor fitness to ‘health’ possibly generate ‘health’ as an output?

These questions are taboo because the answers would implode the entire system.

Medicare costs: parabolic:

Medicaid costs: parabolic:

*  *  *

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

A Boeing E-6B Mercury operated by the U.S. Navy, one of the service’s airborne nuclear command posts commonly known as the “Doomsday plane,” disappeared from civilian flight-tracking platforms Friday morning while operating over the Atlantic Ocean, according to tracking data, the Daily Mail reports.

The aircraft, using callsign AFD FE2, was last observed on ADS-B Exchange and similar services around 8:30 a.m. EST approximately 60 miles east of Virginia Beach, Virginia. The plane had departed Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, on a standard southeast track over Chesapeake Bay before its transponder was deactivated.

During TACAMO (Take Charge and Move Out) missions, the E-6B typically enters restricted warning areas, deploys a miles-long trailing-wire antenna, and flies extended racetrack patterns to relay secure communications to U.S. ballistic-missile submarines and other strategic assets, Key Aero reports.

The E-6B fleet also performs the Airborne National Command Post “Looking Glass” mission, equipped with the Airborne Launch Control System (ALCS) capable of transmitting launch orders to silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles if ground command centers are destroyed. An E-6B conducted an ALCS simulated ICBM launch exercise as recently as April.

The Navy and U.S. Strategic Command have not commented on Friday’s flight.

In August, another E-6B was recently forward-deployed to Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland for what the service claimed was routine operations, including exercises with nuclear submarines in both the Atlantic and Pacific. However, aviation analysts, including Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, described the E-6B aircraft’s flight near Greenland as unusual. Historical E-6B forward operating locations have included Guam, Norway, Germany, Spain, and the U.K., according to Newsweek.

“Naval Strategic Forces conduct global operations in coordination with combatant commands, services, and allies and partner nations, even in the High North,” Commander Jason Fischer, a spokesman for U.S. Submarine Forces, told Newsweek.

Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The nation’s largest teachers union is planning a workshop on “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice,” prompting criticism from a conservative national parent group that obtained the training handouts and released them to the public ahead of the session.

The National Education Association’s (NEA’s) next Focus Academy session is planned for Dec. 2 to Dec. 4. Participants will “develop a toolset of tactics for dismantling systems of privilege and oppression as it relates to LGBTQ+ educators and students,” the union’s website states.

The union’s national headquarters are in Washington, but the registration page does not disclose an address for the training. Upcoming Focus Academy sessions on advancing “racial justice” and winning school board elections are scheduled for early 2026.

Defending Education, a parent and research organization that opposes progressive curricula and policies such as transgender ideology, critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in public schools, obtained and released the handout in November.

“The NEA is the largest teachers’ union in the country, and they have decided to vilify half the country in an upcoming training,” Erika Sanzi, Defending Education’s senior communications director, said in an email sent to The Epoch Times. “As far as they are concerned, the only reasons anyone could oppose their preferred ideologies are racism and transphobia, and they name Republicans as villains, in writing!”

The first section of the materials is a pronoun guide with “tips for using gender-neutral pronouns.”

The next section contains Cornell University’s “Transgender Guide to Transitioning and Gender Affirmation in the Workplace.”

A guide from the National LGBTQ Task Force lists “levels of expression and oppression.” This document is not limited to gender ideology and alleges discrimination against black and Hispanic public school children, immigrants, and women in the workplace.

The NEA’s policy on LGBT employee rights is included in the handout. It includes guidance on a recent Supreme Court ruling determining that parents are allowed to opt their children out of LGBT-related instruction for religious reasons.

“The decision only requires schools to provide opt-outs on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs and practices,” the guidance states. “It does not require schools to grant opt-outs based on parent/guardian personal, political or ideological beliefs or preferences.”

The last section of the handout, “Transgender Youth and the Freedom to Be Ourselves: Building a Choir With a Race Class Narrative,” was commissioned by the Transgender Law Center. It accuses conservatives of exploiting people who identify as transgender.

“Over the last ten years, Republicans in state legislatures have increasingly turned to anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation as a powerful complement to their arsenal of racist dog whistles used to whip up fear and consolidate power,” the document states.

Defending Education’s position on the NEA materials is that the union wants teachers to train students to become social justice advocates instead of teaching them facts and skills.

“Their federal charter was granted because they promised to elevate the character and advance the interests of the professions of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States,” Sanzi said in an email.

“Seeing as their leadership—and by extension, the organization itself—has morphed into a far-left insane asylum that is actively destroying the cause of education, that charter is no longer defensible.”

The NEA did not respond to a request for comment.

A Hoover, Alabama zoning commission unanimously rejected a rezoning request Monday that would have allowed a Muslim K-12 academy to relocate to an office building in the Birmingham suburb, capping a contentious public hearing that packed roughly 170 residents into the room and erupted with heated testimony over concerns of growing Islamification of the area, 1819 News reports.

The Islamic Academy of Alabama, which has operated in neighboring Homewood since 1995 serving approximately 260 students, sought to move to a larger facility in Hoover’s commercial corridor. The proposal was voted down 7-0 to sustained applause from the crowd of concerned residents.

The town’s commissioners pointed to vehicular congestion in an already-strained commercial corridor and lingering questions about the property’s long-term compatibility as grounds for denial.

John Padgett, whose residential property sits closest to the proposed location, challenged the traffic study’s conclusion that the school would have zero impact on current conditions.

“I see the traffic backed up every morning already,” Padgett reportedly told commissioners. “When they start, if you add a few hundred cars to that, it’s gonna be backed up past the stop sign.“

Padgett recounted a recent incident at an Airbnb next door to his home, carefully prefacing his remarks.

“I want to be very sensitive and careful in the way I say this,” he began, noting that he didn’t want to seem as though he was attacking a particular religion. “They weren’t supposed to have any kind of big parties, but they had an Islamic wedding there.”

Padgett described returning from a trip to find videos from neighbors showing dozens of cars—30 or 40, he estimated—parked throughout the neighborhood, including in his own driveway without permission, blocking his vehicles.

“They drove through my yard. Waving Islamic flags, out the window, and screaming things in Arabic,” he said.

Several attendees brandished signs reading “Give an inch — Dearborn Michigan” and “Stop the 100 year plan”—pointed references to demographic shifts in Dearborn, Michigan, which is home to the largest Muslim population in the United States.

“You’re going to have real problems with this community, I’m just telling you now,” resident Bruce Davis warned commissioners. “There’s going to be an influx of other people that are going to create a problem for this community and we might as well just face it.”

The final public commenter drew applause as the unidentified woman recounted travels through the United Kingdom and issued stark warnings about parallel risks facing the United States. The female speaker described witnessing “the land that gave us the King James Bible, supposedly a Christian nation, overwhelmingly being taken over,” according to 1819 News.

“The Muslims did not assimilate,” she continued. “In fact, the Brits bent backwards to accommodate their demands over and over again, to the level of feeling the second-class citizens in their own country.”

“The citizens could not even voice their grief because it was immediately associated with that type of phobia,” she added. “They gave in an inch and were soon taken for rides, miles away, with no hope of landing back to familiarity.”

Hoover Commission Chairman Mike Wood cut her off, steering the discussion back to zoning criteria. “We are here to look at whether this school was appropriately placed,” he interjected. “We’re not here for that. I’m sorry. We’re not going to listen to that.” The interruption sparked objections from the audience.

Lucas Gambino, who presented the case for the school, pushed back against the city’s objections.

“We’re not here to mislead anybody or trick anybody,” Gambino said, addressing questions about the evolving scope of what was variously described as a community center, prayer center, or auxiliary facility.

Gambino argued against forcing the developer to wait indefinitely for an idealized tenant.

“The idea that holding these 200,000 square feet buildings hostage for a tech buyer to come in and occupy those buildings, when you have a developer that owns those buildings, that’s paying significant carrying costs, on a monthly basis, for those buildings,” Gambino explained. “It’s gonna be asked to sit back and wait for a tech buyer to come in and occupy those buildings.“

Initially, a motion to send the request to the city council without a recommendation was made, but it failed to receive a second. A motion to move the proposal forward with a recommendation to deny it then passed unanimously. The decision now moves to the Hoover City Council, which will likely take up the matter at its first January meeting.

Chinese rare-earth magnet makers are quietly developing legal workarounds to Beijing’s tightened export rules, aiming to keep sales to Western customers moving even as China’s new licensing regime slows or blocks shipments of restricted materials, according to the Wall Street Journal.

After Beijing imposed export controls this spring—part of a broader clash with Washington—magnets containing even trace amounts of dysprosium or terbium began requiring licenses that can take “weeks or months” to obtain, if they come at all, traders say. The bottleneck has pushed Chinese manufacturers into a scramble to redesign their products.

The Journal writes that one approach is technical substitution. Companies including Yonjumag, Anhui Hanhai New Material, Zhaobao Magnet and X-Mag are promoting magnet grades that avoid restricted heavy rare earths by grinding materials to ultra-fine levels to boost heat tolerance. The magnets generally work at up to roughly 300 degrees Fahrenheit—good enough for appliances, though not always for cars or aircraft.

“As global supply chains for heavy rare earth elements tighten,” X-Mag wrote in October, developing magnet grades free of restricted materials “has become increasingly critical.”

Zhaobao said it was “continuously developing new high-performance magnet series free of restricted elements.”

Yonjumag circulated a brochure listing “counter measures,” including magnets without controlled heavy rare earths, and pledged to develop better grades by year-end.

Western buyers are purchasing the substitutes despite performance concerns. “Not being able to use [restricted heavy rare earths] does make the high-temperature performance slightly weaker, but for most customers, having a workable magnet is far better than having none,” marketer Dylan Kui wrote on LinkedIn. When another executive warned that sharing such data posed “regulatory risks,” Kui replied that he was providing standard technical information.

Companies are also resorting to structural workarounds: magnets are restricted, but motors are not. Chinese suppliers are shipping motors and other components with magnets already embedded, avoiding licensing requirements altogether.

Regulators, meanwhile, are closing gaps. Some magnet makers briefly shifted to holmium as a substitute for terbium and dysprosium—until China added holmium to its restricted list in October. Following a U.S.–China deal that same month, enforcement of the holmium limits was delayed by a year, temporarily reopening the loophole.

Firms insist they are staying within the law. Compliance officers are being hired, and Beijing has launched new crackdowns on mineral smuggling. Still, traders warn that China’s dominance gives it the ability to tighten exports again for geopolitical leverage.

Foreign customers, increasingly frustrated, are accelerating efforts to build supply chains outside China. As one buyer told a Chinese magnet-company employee: “When those sources are mature and viable, we’re done with you.”

Authored by William Murray via RealClearEnergy,

A not-so-glowing attribute of American democracy is the ability of voters to act shocked and blame whoever is in charge when things don’t go well. So, it makes twisted sense that, as 2026 approaches, the Trump administration should pay the political price for bad energy policies inherited from the Biden administration and Democratic governors.

Years of flat energy demand and relatively stable electricity prices dulled Americans’ understanding of energy economics. Now, new data center demand, the end of cheap natural gas, and President Biden’s policy of replacing baseload nuclear and coal power with wind and solar have screwed up electricity price signals enough to shred household budgets and stun homeowners — just in time for a colder-than-average winter.

The numbers are as stark as a slate-grey November sky. Household spending on electricity for heating is expected to rise 10% this winter to more than $1,200. Utilities requested a $29 billion rate increase in the first half of 2025, double last year’s rate rise. Residential electricity rates rose 6.6% year-on-year as of June 2025, according to Utility Dive, after already rising nearly 30% between 2021 and 2024.

The causes of these electricity increases are multifaceted, yet, as a policy brief from the National Center for Energy Analytics reveals, subsidies to wind and solar are major culprits. Subsidies like the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC) distort electricity markets by artificially lowering prices, sometimes into negative territory, forcing otherwise competitive but unsubsidized generation out of the market.

Interestingly, the study found that the argument that increasing demand from the data center buildout is causing increases in average rates is not supported by the facts. The state of Virginia has built the large majority of data centers in the past 2 years, yet Virginia’s ratepayers have experienced below-average price gains and still pay below-average electricity rates.

The Big Beautiful Bill, passed by Congress in July, partially solved some of these market-signal problems by accelerating the phase-out of wind and solar projects to the end of 2027, but that fact can’t heat the homes of families making hard choices every day during the winter of 2025-26. 

An extra hundred dollars a month over winter means no sports or academic camps in summer for teenagers. Fifty dollars a month can be the difference between seeking mental health counseling or fighting clinical depression alone. Energy prices don’t play games.

In places like Massachusetts and California where green-energy policy has gone too far, the pain is both real and self-inflicted, raising the question of why voters continue to elect Democrats who prefer self-actualization to public service.

Residential electricity prices in California rose 125% in the last 15 years as subsidies for renewables pushed out existing nuclear and natural gas, all with the support of their ravishing Governor, Gavin Newsom. 

In Massachusetts, politicians like Governor Maura Healey show us that grown-ups can still be childish. She and other (nearly all Democrat) politicians in New England don’t want any new pipelines to ship natural gas from the super-cheap Marcellus Shale Formation in Pennsylvania, lest they offend climate-change sensibilities.

Instead, they imported LNG from 3,000 miles away in Norway, which averaged more than $12 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf) between January and March 2024. Meanwhile, average realized sales prices for Marcellus shale gas, less than 150 miles away during the same period, were between $2.10 and $2.20 per Mcf, only one-sixth the price. Not very smart.

As a result, both states, perhaps taking their cues from the grade-inflating Harvard and Stanford Universities within their borders, now have the highest electricity rates in the country, over 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. Nice job, Einsteins.

Leaving the energy policy equivalent of a flaming paper bag of poo on the front porch for the Trump administration to stomp out may be good politics for Democrat governors. Still, if the United States is going to win the future, we have to get away from the energy hunger games and put in place permanent policies that a subsequent White House occupant won’t overturned.

And some states do their energy policies better, and not just carbon rich states like Texas or Kentucky that have some geologic largesse. States like Indiana, which imports energy from other states, have slowed coalretirements through legislative action, passing laws requiring utilities to demonstrate grid reliability before replacing coal with renewables. 

Even Democrat-run states like Illinois have resisted closing base load nuclear plants despite political pressure from net-zero and anti-nuclear groups.

And some states are doing even more. Republican governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana has signed sweeping legislation aimed at reducing energy costs and unleashing energy affordability to its rate payers across the states and countries that it feeds.

And on the federal level, Congressman Troy Balderson is trying to make Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security the federal standard. If you want to set into law energy sanity that will survive, states need to follow leaders like Governor Landry. And if we as a country have any brains left in our screen-addled heads, we have to put Balderson’s ARC ES bill on the president’s desk to sign. 

Energy production should be a kitchen-table issue, but with a longer lead time than the current election cycle. We should be able to pay less to get more. The Trump administration is doing more in that regard than any administration in history. Opening Alaska, easing leasing restrictions on federal land, and cutting subsidies for EVs and renewables are nice. In the meantime, states and the federal government must step up.

In the end, we’re all worm food, but until then, people — especially Americans facing the winter season — have things to do, dreams to achieve, and go places where futures can thrive. 

Here’s to a more affordable 2026.

In a surprising act of political awareness, Democrat Mayor of Stockton, CA, Christina Fugazi, announced her intention this week to ask the federal government for manpower to stop rising crime after a horrific mass shooting at a child’s birthday party resulted in the deaths of 4 people and 11 wounded. 

Though the investigation is ongoing, officials believe the attack was gang-related.  Suspects remain at large.

“We’ve got approximately 5,000 gang members and 100 gangs in the city of Stockton,” Fugazi said.  Stockton’s violent crime rate is currently 212% higher than the national average.

Heather Brent, a spokesperson for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, told reporters in a briefing that the shooting occurred around 6 p.m. Pacific Time at a banquet hall along the 1900 block of Lucile Avenue. On Sunday, Brent confirmed three children were among the four people killed. The victims were 8, 9, 14 and 21 years old.

“These animals walked in and shot children at a children’s birthday party,” San Joaquin County Sheriff Patrick Withrow said in a news conference Sunday. “None of us should stand for that.”

“And let us call this what it is,” Mayor Fugazi said in a Facebook post Sunday. “Gang violence exists in cities across the country, but this act was a pure act of terrorism. A complete, cowardly Terrorist Act!”

The Mayor admitted in press interviews that her city needed help, and that she was likely to ask for federal aid in the coming months.

The call for aid is a significant deviation for a blue city official.  For the past year democrat mayors have acted with increasing hostility against the Trump Administration, proudly proclaiming their “resistance” to national law and order efforts including the deportation of illegal migrants. 

The message being sent is impossible to misinterpret:  Democrats would rather protect criminals than work with Trump to make cities safer.  For if they accepted help, this would be an admission that progressive social policies don’t work.  Mayor Fugazi seems desperate to make clear how bad the situation is, perhaps in fear of blowback from her own party.    

“It’s babies we’re talking about, children,” Fugazi said. “We’re talking about a cake being cut as bullets are ringing out. The candles have been blown out, you’re cutting the cake, and then bullets are flying out, piercing, going through flesh and killing four people.”

She stopped short of calling for the deployment of the National Guard, but the Guard is not a fix-all solution, it’s essentially a barrier to protect other agencies from civil unrest and organized mobs.  That said, Fugazi notes that she knows how significant her call for any aid from the Trump Administration is.

“We need more, we need more [federal manpower],” Fugazi said. “We want to be their pilot site for the United States of America. Come to Stockton, we’re here ready with our arms open for you to come into our city and let us lead them, the nation on how to do it right.”

“I am calling on the full power of the federal government not only to stop crime but also to give our community the tools to prevent crime before it starts…”

Is this the beginning of a sea change in how blue cities handle crime?  Are they going to work with Trump for once instead of making life easier for criminals just to spite conservatives?

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics,

As artificial intelligence extends to every corner of contemporary life, it brings remarkable capabilities and opportunities – along with dangers that strike at the foundations of individual freedom, human dignity, and the common good.

Many incline to either extol AI’s blessings or condemn it as a curse. The savvy who learn from experience recognize that like all tools and contrivances, AI can be used for good and bad. Students of history grasp that as with numerous technological breakthroughs over the last 100 years – perhaps more so – AI promises unprecedented benefits while posing catastrophic peril to the future of human civilization.

What is artificial intelligence?

Three major artificial intelligence platforms – ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, all large-language models colloquially referred to as AI – to which I put the question agreed: AI consists in machines’ ability to perform tasks such as perceiving, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making that normally require human intelligence. All three AI platforms stated that narrow or weak AI, the familiar and currently available form of artificial intelligence, executes one task well. The platforms added that computer scientists are pursuing general or strong AI (also known as artificial general intelligence or AGI) which, like a human being, would understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks. Gemini and Grok noted – and ChatGPT concurred in response to my follow-up query – that researchers contemplate a third kind, superintelligent AI (also called artificial superintelligence or ASI), that would surpass human intelligence in virtually every aspect and in almost all ways.

To my initial inquiry, Grok volunteered observations on “common misconceptions.” AI can already accomplish wonderful things: write essays, computer code, music, legal briefs; pass bar exams, medical licensing tests, and Ph.D.-level science exams; generate photo-quality images and realistic videos; and hold conversations that feel human. But, reported Grok with seemingly sly modesty, “AI is not ‘alive’ or conscious (as far as we know in 2025).” Still, Grok acknowledged – as if describing a mental-health patient – AI hallucinates, errs, and lacks real-world grounding. And Grok helpfully summarized: “Artificial intelligence today is software that mimics cognitive abilities through massive statistical learning, not through human-like consciousness or general reasoning from first principles – yet it’s already transforming almost every industry.”

As it promises to sweep across and remake not only industries but also moral and political life, AI’s perils – some observable, some looming – come into focus.

AI provides a crippling crutch. Reliance on artificial intelligence, especially among the young, stunts creativity and judgment. Adults’ use of AI as a substitute for friends and therapists erodes empathy and human connection.

AI strains resources and damages the environment. The colossal data centers that handle artificial intelligence’s massive computational demands consume huge amounts of electricity and require immense quantities of potable water to prevent overheating.

AI diminishes human control and creates acute vulnerabilities. Artificial intelligence involves not one big machine but rather incorporates millions of interconnected devices distributed over vast geographical areas. As AI supports a growing number of crucial operations – government, national security, energy, telecommunications, transportation, health, finance, and more – the nation will increasingly depend on prodigious computer networks whose operations and output computer scientists can’t fully anticipate or account for.

AI displaces workers and diminishes human capabilities. Artificial intelligence will take over numerous jobs at which it outperforms the workers it has made unnecessary, while carrying out other activities more cheaply and efficiently but less responsibly than the professionals who will lose their livelihood. Skills and qualities essential to citizenship and human flourishing – not least reading, writing, and judiciousness – will atrophy.

AI blurs true and false. Able to present deepfakes as real and real images as deepfakes, artificial intelligence undermines the reliable information and shared reality on which free and democratic government depends.

AI facilitates the concentration of wealth and power. Government’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence entwines the public sector and the private sector, shifting influence and control from elected officials to giant corporations that write computer software, host clouds, and manage physical infrastructure.

And AI opens the door to doomsday scenarios once confined to science fiction. Artificial superintelligence incorporated into robots and weapons systems may conclude based on calculations that it conceals from the human beings who built it that wiping out this people, that nation, or these civilizations will yield the greatest good for the greatest number.

This brief parade of horribles – potential as well as actual – underscores the need for serious thinking about the AI challenge. Eminent figures from high-tech, religion, and the world of letters have taken notice and stepped up – to focus attention, frame the issues, and summon to action.

On Nov. 11, accepting the Hudson Institute’s Herman Kahn award, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp argued that AI was central to America’s national security. Turbulence lies ahead because technology “is going to change everything politically” and “there are dangers in AI,” warned Karp. To navigate the turbulence, he counseled, it is urgent to “understand and embrace the superiority of America and its culture.”

Echoing Abraham Lincoln, Karp stated that the United States is special because it was founded on the conviction that “the rights we have in this country are inalienable and they are given to us by God.” It follows, according to Karp, that no machine, however intelligent, can possess what God alone has the power to confer – an essential dignity expressed in the rights inherent in all persons.

The superiority of America’s moral and political principles, however, has never been enough to fend off the enemies of freedom. The United States preserves its superiority also thanks to prowess in “controlling the violence,” argued Karp. Americans earn the privilege of respecting the rule of law at home by prevailing on the battlefield abroad.

China, in Karp’s view, presents the primary threat to American freedom. Were the Chinese Communist Party to succeed in its quest for AI dominance, the CCP would decisively infuse international relations with authoritarian norms and comprehensively reshape world affairs to serve authoritarian interests. Consequently, argued the Palantir CEO, the United States must persevere – guided by the nation’s founding commitment to basic rights and fundamental freedoms – as the world’s “dominant technological culture in the world.” That requires excelling at AI.

A few days before Karp’s speech, an address by Pope Leo XIV was read aloud at the Builders Artificial Intelligence Forum held at the Pontifical Gregorian University. The pontiff praised the participants – organizers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and clergy – who had gathered in Rome “to ensure that emerging technologies remain oriented toward the dignity of the human person and the common good.” This called for examination of “not merely what AI can do, but who we are becoming through the technologies we build.”

The AI challenge represents, for the pope, the latest round in the age-old “dialogue between faith and reason.” Although a new technology, AI, “like all human invention, springs from the creative capacity that God has entrusted to us (cf. Antiqua et Nova, 37),” he stressed. “This means that technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation.” Like all human invention, AI “carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity.” To foster wise choices, the pope summoned “all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work – to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”

In contrast to high-tech titan Karp and the Bishop of Rome, both of whom want to harness AI to advance individual freedom, human dignity, and the common good, author Paul Kingsnorth maintains that artificial intelligence represents an all but unmitigated evil. His new book, “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity,” has little to say directly about AI. But it offers rich psychological, neurological, cultural, autobiographical, ethical, political, and theological explorations of modernity’s internal dynamics, which, he believes, culminate in AI’s transformation of human beings into its servants. Kingsnorth’s explorations form an elaborate lamentation on what Nietzsche in the 19th century called “the death of God” and the German sociologist Max Weber in the 20th century described as “the disenchantment of the world.” They also recount Kingsnorth’s long, inspiring journey – intellectual, moral and political, religious – in search of a way amid modern technologies’ seductions and ructions to live in harmony with our essential humanity. His reflections are at once lyrical and erudite, illuminating and harrowing, compelling and overwrought.

By “the Machine,” Kingsnorth means not in the first place technological progress or politics dedicated to it, but rather a spiritual crisis born and bred in, and transmitted globally by, the West. The modern scientific spirit, he argues, manifests an instrumental orientation toward the natural world that relentlessly reduces human beings to natural objects, and therefore subject to control and manipulation no more and no less than any other particle or complex of particles. Left and right today, Kingsnorth maintains, serve the Machine’s degradation of human beings to mere things: Postmodern progressives work furiously to dissolve traditional constraints and abolish natural limits while pro-free-market conservatives spread the Machine’s ineluctable logic and dehumanizing imperatives around the world.

All is not lost, though, for Kingsnorth. Notwithstanding his darkest moments, he exhorts readers to “Remain human despite it all.”

Americans may even turn matters to the nation’s advantage by mustering the wherewithal to fashion an education that acquaints students with America’s roots and the West’s enduring heritage: inalienable rights and the forms of government that secure them, human dignity, and the common good. Such an education would greatly improve the nation’s chances of clarifying AI’s blessings and curses and putting today’s most astonishing and terrifying technology in the service of properly human purposes.

The Washington Post dropped a bombshell last week, claiming Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered a second missile strike on a drug boat in September to make sure survivors were killed. “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said,” WaPo claimed, relying entirely on anonymous sources. 

Hegseth promptly denied the report in a post on X.

“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” he wrote. “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’ The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.”

Hegseth also argued that the country is finally seeing the difference between weak leadership and real enforcement, adding that Biden administration used “kid gloves,” and let millions of people pour into the country – including “dangerous cartels and unvetted Afghans,” which brought chaos into communities. He contrasted that with Trump’s approach, noting that “the Trump administration has sealed the border and gone on offense against narco-terrorists,” and drove the point home with his blunt line: “Biden coddled terrorists, we kill them.”

He stressed that current missions in the Caribbean follow the law, explaining that operations are “lawful under both U.S. and international law” and cleared by top military and civilian attorneys. He closed by praising the men and women of SOUTHCOM, saying they risk everything to keep the country safe from narco-terrorists and declaring he will “ALWAYS have their back.”

Despite the denial, Democrats pounced on the report. 

“I served on active duty as a JAG for four years, and then an additional 21 years in the reserves. And let me be very clear: Killing shipwrecked survivors is a war crime,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) told reporters on Monday. 

“The Department of Justice must conduct an investigation into the war crime and hold all of those accountable — including Sec. Hegseth. He allegedly said, ‘Kill them all,’” Lieu, the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, continued. “If the Trump administration does not hold the people accountable, I guarantee you a future administration will do so. Because there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.”

The problem, however, is that the story is false. The New York Times investigated and debunked The Washington Post’s claim. 

According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.

But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.

Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.

The Times stopped short of calling the Post’s reporting a fabrication, but they couldn’t find even one anonymous source to back up the claim that Hegseth watched survivors clinging to wreckage and then ordered them killed. 

Administration tracking shows roughly 80 narcoterrorists killed in the Caribbean and Pacific since early September. After the September incident, protocols shifted to focus on capturing survivors. In an October strike, two survivors were detained and transferred to Ecuador and Colombia. U.S. officials told the Times they intercepted communications tying at least one survivor to traffickers. Lawmakers have asked for the execution order, but the administration hasn’t handed it over.

The White House says it has launched 21 operations since September 2, with 83 fatalities. And with major outlets contradicting each other on claims about kill orders, Washington stays locked in outrage mode rather than grappling with a more mundane operational reality.

“We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people,” War Secretary Hegseth said Tuesday during a Cabinet meeting.