Authored by Eric Lendrum via American Greatness,

A new report claims that the Biden Administration’s Department of Education has spent over $1 billion on grants that force the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda in hiring practices, programming, and mental health training in public schools.

According to Fox News, the report from the watchdog group Parents Defending Education (PDE) claims that this DEI spending has been ongoing since 2021. PDE researchers found a total of 229 such grants across 42 states, plus Washington D.C., during the roughly four-year time period.

With the spending broken down along specific criteria, nearly $490 million was spent for grants that demanded more racial bias in hiring practices, while $343 million was spent on general DEI programs, and another $170 million was spent on mandating DEI-based mental health training. This amounts to just over $1 billion, at approximately $1,002,522,304.

This spending “incorporates both awarded (committed) and disbursed dollars, as most of the grant money is distributed [a] period of several years,” the report reads.

One of the researchers who worked on the report, Rhyen Staley, said it was likely that the report does not even account for every single grant that may be considered pro-DEI, as the report narrowed down their search to a handful of criteria. This led to the researchers ignoring many other grants that they determined to be simply using “buzzwords” rather than actively promoting DEI.

“The only people or groups to benefit from the enormous amount of grant funding are the universities, administrators, and DEI consultants, at the expense of children’s education,” said Staley.

“This needs to change by placing children’s learning at the forefront of education, instead of prioritizing race-based policies and DEI.”

A statement was issued by PDE Senior Advisor Michele Exner, declaring that “over one billion dollars [have been] squandered on progressive pet projects all while American students’ academic performance continues to plummet. Under Secretary [Miguel] Cardona, this organization has been a complete farce that has failed families and students time and time again.”

“This will be the legacy of the Biden administration’s Department of Education,” Exner added.

“Families are fed up and are excited for January when we will have new leadership in the nation’s capital who will focus on getting this toxic and divisive waste out of our education system.”

The Department of Education has long been a target of conservative scrutiny, with many advocating for the abolition of the department altogether, as it has failed to improve average test scores or education quality across the nation. President-elect Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail that he would eliminate the department, a sentiment that was echoed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the leaders of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Tesla shares continue to trade at record highs to close the week, regaining popularity as investors focus on full self-driving, robotaxi, new lost-coast models, and Optimus robots.

The stock has delivered a stunning performance year-to-date, surging 70% and commanding a $1.3 trillion market capitalization.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk commented on X this week that Bill Gates’ Tesla short could potentially “bankrupt” the billionaire. 

If Tesla does become the world’s most valuable company by far, that short position will bankrupt even Bill Gates

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2024

Heading into 2025, a team of analysts from Deutsche Bank hosted an investor meeting with Tesla’s head of investor relations, Travis Axelrod, to explore the key drivers behind the stock’s performance.

“The majority of focus was naturally around FSD, robotaxi, and Optimus but we also covered the status of new models in 2025 and puts/takes regarding margin,” DB’s Edison Yu and Winnie Dong wrote in a note to clients. 

They summarized the key takeaways in the conversation with Axelrod:

New models and 2025 volume growth

• The new Tesla model (we refer to as “Model Q”) should launch in 1H25 and will be priced <$30k including subsidies (i.e., $37,499 if US EV tax credit goes away).

• Additionally in the 2H, there will be other new vehicles released that are intended to augment Tesla’s TAM. We suspect one model will be a 3-row longer wheelbase Model Y variant in China.

• All these new models will be built on existing lines. Management once again highlighted volume growth of 20-30% in 2025; the rationale behind this growth range is based on ability to maximize existing capacity utilization.

• Operationally, Tesla commented that hitting the high end of the range would be contingent on essentially flawless execution and is confident that the China supply chain can scale up fairly quickly while it may be harder in N. America.

• Tesla’s plan for the Mexico plant will continue to hinge upon geo-political dynamics and the tariff situation under the new Trump Administration.

Puts and takes for 2025 margins

• Tesla explained that 2025 will be a year of product launches, and whenever that happens, there will be disruption to profitability as it will be in the early days of building a product and have more inefficient fixed cost absorption.

• But this could be offset by a lower cost of goods sold from the more affordable products.

• 2025 margins will also hinge upon where ASP lands based on the demand curve.

• The main goal is to focus on growing volume and garnering incremental gross profit (as opposed to targeting a certain gross margin %), delivering

Robotaxi operations

• Still expects to launch robotaxi services in CA and TX next year using existing vehicles (3/Y), generating paid rides.

• In terms of the UI, the company plans to use an internally developed ridehail app and control the “value chain.”

• Tesla believes it would be reasonable to assume some type of teleoperator would be needed at least initially for safety/redundancy purposes.

• Tesla views regulation as the biggest headwind to broad deployment of robotaxi, which the company hopes will be adjusted at the federal level through updating of rules at NHTSA.

• Management intends to start off entirely with the company-owned fleet and eventually dynamically adjust supply based on customer demand/ traffic patterns.

Cybercab development

• Unboxed manufacturing should result in ~$20-30k COGS per vehicle, at run rate, a number which isn’t possible under current, traditional manufacturing processes.

• CyberCab, when production starts in 2026, will be the first product to use unboxed manufacturing with the expectation that any products released subsequently will also use unboxed processes.

• At full run rate production, the company expects to build a CyberCab for less than $30k.

• As the CyberCab rollout occurs in 2026, the company will need to make investments across its service/cleaning and charging apparatus (e.g., install wireless charging) with TX and CA likely the first states to see a rollout given proximity to manufacturing facilities and headquarters.

FSD progress

• V13 has just been rolled out to early access users, and typically takes about 2-3 weeks to roll out to the broader audience if no issues are found.

• This version should demonstrate 3-5x performance improvement vs. v12.5 from a miles between critical intervention perspective (1 every ~10k miles).

• Management continues to target launch of an unsupervised version of FSD between Q2 and Q3 of next year, coinciding with start of robotaxi operations. This could be some iteration of v13.x depending on level of progress. Important to note that FSD can be unsupervised even if it doesn’t surpass human level safety threshold early on as long as Tesla feels comfortable taking on the risk/liability.

• In general, the large improvement seen over the past year can be attributed to the increase in training compute, from 20k to ~90k GPUs in the span of 10 months. Tesla can now train dozens of end-to-end models in a few weeks vs. only one, enabling much faster iteration/improvement.

• In terms of FSD attach rate, Tesla commented that it has seen an increase after the V12 release to N. America (>20%) vs. in April this year, and another jump during the 10/10 event. Adoption rate should continue to increase as Tesla increasingly fine-tunes its marketing strategy to offer more free trials.

Competition in autonomous driving

• Management doesn’t see any true competition in the US/Europe from a cost/scale perspective.

• For pure play robotaxi efforts like Waymo and Cruise, Tesla believes they’re essentially using more sensors (e.g., lidar) to compensate for deficiencies in the rules-based software (almost as a buffer).

• Unlike Tesla with a massive fleet of customers to generate a large amount of data, Waymo is reliant on a very small fleet that cannot generate enough data to effectively train large E2E models.

• Separately, Waymo also does not have proper scale/vertical integration in making cars and associated parts, forcing them to partner with an OEM. As such, even if Waymo switches to E2E approach, it would likely still be at a cost/scale advantage considering the largest cost in Tesla’s view is the D&A.

• In respect to China, Tesla does observe more entities taking a similar approach (E2E vision-only architecture). Its own commercial efforts are still in motion, working on getting approval from the local government to take data out of the country to improve performance of its E2E models, still aiming for 1Q25 roll-out. Chinese competitors appear to be quickly pivoting toward using E2E model for perception but path planning is still mainly using rules-based.

• For Europe, the regulations around autonomous driving makes it a challenging backdrop, given the driver has to approve the automatic response of the vehicle, which would defeat the purpose of self-driving functionality.

• Looking farther out, the 3rd gen Dojo chip which is expected to launch in 2028 will be another big enabler because the 1st gen cannot compete on cost/performance vs. Nvidia and 2nd gen (in 2026) still can’t compete on performance (should be at cost parity though). At that point, the economics around training compute become much more favorable.

Evolution of Optimus

• The objective remains to have >1k humanoid robots deployed internally in factories and then selling to external customers in 2026. Performance will be limited to fairly basic material handling tasks for industrial environments as opposed to home lifestyle which would happen much later on.

• From a development perspective, the “intelligence” of Optimus will continue to improve and should at some point mirror the rapid improvement seen in FSD over the past year. Currently, Optimus is being trained by data sets generated through teleoperation and videos of itself performing tasks paired with motor/actuator data to essentially map out framework that can align with human movement. Ultimately, after the compatibility is fully mapped out, Optimus should be able to train/learn by watching videos of humans performing tasks in a “DIY” type of manner, similar to how FSD learns from humans driving.

• In terms of manufacturing, the aspirational target is getting the BoM down to ~$30k. The engineering team is still iterating and there will likely be changes depending on what parts need to be re-engineered to reduce cost as opposed to scale volume components.

• When selling to customers, the strategy could either be to sell the HW+SW together or lease out the robot. Tesla is confident that the economics could be very favorable in replacing human labor especially in the US.

Other considerations

• Megapack demand remains very strong with the company standing by its expectations for more than 100% growth this year, implying ~27 GWh of production. Next year, the new Shanghai factory will come online and the US could potentially provide up to ~40 GWh.

• The company believes that the recent court ruling rejecting Musk’s pay package was wrong and will be appealing the decision, though there is no timeline on its response.

Based on their conversation, the analysts raised their price target on Tesla from $295 to $370. Here is their explanation: 

We raise our price target from $295 to $370, mainly assigning greater value to Tesla’s autonomy efforts. Specifically, we refine our valuation framework to include FSD sales (both one-time and subscription), robotaxi operations, and OEM licensing fees into the “Robotaxi” bucket whereas previously we included FSD in the “Auto” line. Moreover, given our belief the new US administration can streamline federal regulations around deployment of robotaxi, we increase our robotaxi forecasts and use a higher 20x EV/Revenue multiple on 2035E sales of > $40bn (vs. prior 15x) akin to leading E2E AI peers. We also assume some type of service to be deployed overseas in that time frame. Other elements of our valuation are essentially unchanged except we lower our Energy multiple from 25x EV/ EBITDA to 20x given de-rating seen recently by comparable companies.

The summarized key takeaways from DB analysts offer valuable insights into the company as 2024 winds down and the new year approaches. 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

I’ve become a fan of TubiTV. It’s obvious why it is growing in popularity as a streaming service. There is no login and everything is instantly available. The movies and shows stream one after another so that you can have it on for hours, just like television in the old days. And it costs nothing at all. It pays for itself with advertising, and the ads are oddly welcome because they are not the usual ones you see on network television.

Many great old movies are there and plenty of shows too. Tired of woke? This is a service for you. Most movies before 2000 are actually reliably free of that nonsense. I always check this site before paying for content on other venues. It also allows me to observe what kinds of things are being advertised to those who are either unwilling to pay for streaming or lack the financial means. That alone is instructive.

Major advertisers for this service are the financial apps classified as BNPL, or “buy now, pay later” services. There are so many of them now that it is hard to keep up. The ads feature someone at the store with a large tab. The person notes that there is not enough money in the bank account to cover the costs. The idea is that you download an app, link it to your bank account, and then get an instant cash advance.

Maybe such services would be popular anytime, but I suspect more so now that real income has fallen in these inflationary times. There are signs of hope on the horizon that the economy will improve in the future. Wall Street certainly thinks so, and retail spending seems to be recovering, but these ads tell a different story. They reveal just how much suffering there is out there right now, how many people truly do not have enough in the bank to pay basic costs.

On the one hand, this is very sad. On the other hand, these services are valuable and somewhat brilliant.

I’m not joining the chorus of commentators who are calling for them to be regulated or abolished. They exploit no one. They serve plenty of people. To be sure, they do cost money. What is the interest they charge? That’s a complicated question because mostly they are fee-based, like an ATM. The fees can be quite high in accord with the going rate, so anywhere from 7 percent to 20 percent.

One way or another, these companies are going to be paid back and then some. There is no such thing as a free lunch or free groceries. The bill is going to be paid by someone.

Thinking of how these services work helps us understand something about the loan contract of medieval origins. They represent an exchange of people with capital in the form of money and people without capital in the form of money who need to consume something. When the first loan contract came along and families like the Medicis got rich, there was something of a moral panic in Europe. How can people make so much money merely by moving money around? It seemed strange.

Every religious tradition has something different to say. The Christians (both Protestants and Catholics) mostly condemned the charging of interest as “usury,” while Islam carved out a number of exceptions. The Second Lateran Council (1139) and Third Lateran Council (1179) both denied Christian burials for usurers. Indeed, the Catholic church did not fully liberalize on the topic until the 19th century.

Judaism did not condemn interest, reasoning that it was a perfectly justifiable exchange between people with excess and those without. It is for this reason that Jews developed a reputation as the money lenders: Other religions could not come up with morally sophisticated justifications for the practice. Islam still retains its strictness, although with exceptions.

What is the basis of the charging of interest? It is relatively simple: Goods obtained now are more expensive than the same goods purchased later. It is called “time preference” in the economics literature, but you see it every day in regular pricing habits. It’s conventional that a flight purchased for two weeks from now is going to be cheaper than a flight leaving tomorrow.

It always pays to plan ahead. This is why people who forgo consumption today in favor of saving earn interest while people who live on revolving credit cards are paying more than 20 percent for the privilege. They are simply involved in an exchange: high time preference trading with low time preferences. Interest also covers other factors, such as the risk of not being paid back or the risk, in the case of business loans, that the enterprise will not be profitable.

Regardless, the free market has proven to be brilliantly adept at managing the exchange between the present and the future and pricing it in a rational way. You want those groceries now but don’t have the money to buy them? You can get a cash advance—at a price that you agree to pay. There is nothing sketchy about this: It is a deal struck by parties based on voluntary decision-making.

The interest rate itself merely reflects the pricing of time relative to available resources. Like any other price, it can fluctuate based on underlying realities. When society is full of savers, more resources become available for lending, and the interest rate is going to be pushed down. When society is full of high time preferences with more borrowers than savers, the interest rate is going to rise.

There is no role in any of this for the Federal Reserve to intervene to drive interest rates up or down. The belief that the Fed can and should do this is based on nothing but mythology. If the Fed acts to drive rates lower than what the market would be, it is creating a distortion, what F.A. Hayek cleverly called “forced savings” because it signals the existence of resources that are not really there. That leads to a distortion in product structures such as we saw for the decades after 2000 and especially after 2008.

Such distortions achieve nothing for overall economic growth. They only end up fueling the boom/bust cycle. This is just another application of the general principle that government has no resources of its own that it does not take from the people. An artificially low rate of interest ends up creating new money and credit that funds unsustainable investments that result in inflation, as our present experience proves.

Thus do these BNPL programs end up creating loan markets of a different form. They are especially valuable among a class of borrowers who cannot gain access to credit cards. These days, getting a credit card is no easy task for some people, which is why debit cards have become more common than ever. Still, people need credit from time to time, and the markets have been brilliant in figuring out ways to make this possible.

I’m generally favorable to many of the Trump administration’s proposed economic policies, but this idea of capping interest rates on credit cards is not a good one. It will result in higher user fees elsewhere or end up denying credit to people who otherwise would have it, thus giving the BNPL industry a boost.

One thing it simply will not do is lower borrowing costs.

Interest rate caps are no different from any other price control: They end up creating market distortions with unsustainable surpluses and shortages.

What credit markets need is to be left alone. This goes for the Fed’s interventions, attempts to regulate credit card rates, or proposed regulations of the BNPL industry. They are operating just fine on their own. Hey, it’s not my cup of tea, but it’s good that they are there for people who need them. It so happens that people like me who are too cheap to buy movies without ads also happen to be the same demographic cohort to come up short for grocery money from time to time. It makes perfect sense.

*  *  *

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

Just days after the rapid collapse of the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, and now with Israeli warplanes having complete domination over Syria’s skies for the first time in modern history, the priorities of US and Israeli officials in the region have drastically changed.

Both US and Israeli leaders are now mulling the possibility of striking Iran’s nuclear program, amid several reports in recent weeks saying the Islamic Republic is expanding its program and enriching more nuclear-grade material. Tehran is now much more on the defensive, and could be more desperate to achieve nuclear weapons.

A significant Friday report in The Wall Street Journal says that “President-elect Donald Trump is weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.”

“Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent calls that he is concerned about an Iranian nuclear breakout on his watch, two people familiar with their conversations said, signaling he is looking for proposals to prevent that outcome,” the report continues.

“The president-elect wants plans that stop short of igniting a new war, particularly one that could pull in the U.S. military, as strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities have the potential put the U.S. and Iran on a collision course.”

Currently the United States still has some 1,000 troops occupying northeast Syria, and they have come under internecine attacks by Iran-backed militias over the recent years. In any broader US-Iran war, these troops would be sitting ducks for attack via Tehran’s proxies in the region.

Trump in his first administration tried but failed to bring the troops home, but deeper entanglement in striking Iran could surely draw these troops into a broader conflict. The Pentagon would in that case likely expand its deployed forces in the region as well.

“Iran has enough highly enriched uranium alone to build four nuclear bombs, making it the only nonnuclear-weapon country to be producing 60% near-weapons-grade fissile material,” WSJ has noted further. “It would take just a few days to convert that stockpile into weapons-grade nuclear fuel.”

Iran has long maintained it develops only peaceful nuclear energy, and there’s little doubt that after the dramatic events unfolding in Syria, and with Hezbollah top leadership largely decimated, Tehran finds itself on a back foot. 

Some Israeli and Western officials believe that all of this will make Iranian leaders more desperate to ensure they have a final and ultimate defense against any threats (as in rapidly developing a nuke).

But if Trump were to authorize strikes on Iranian facilities, this would also obviously violate his frequent vows to his voters to not start new wars in the Middle East. The reality is that even ‘limited’ strikes still constitute an act of war. The potential for runaway escalation involving the US, Iran, and Israel would be a much bigger likelihood. 

Authored by James Fanell and Bradley Thayer via American Greatness,

Whether American presidents are successes or failures is measured by their major foreign and domestic actions. That has been the historical standard by which they are weighed and which defines their legacy. Some presidents are outstanding in every respect. Washington defined the American presidency. Lincoln saved the Union and kept foreign powers, most importantly Great Britain, from intervening to aid the South. Most presidents are heavily mixed; Buchanan employed the Army to suppress the Mormon Rebellion, but his monumental failure was that he did not act to stop the Civil War. Lyndon Johnson’s failure in Vietnam defined his presidency. Richard Nixon had many successes in foreign policy, but Watergate was his demise. Jimmy Carter failed abroad and at home.

With just over 40 days left, Americans are nearing the end of the Biden administration, and so it is fitting to provide an assessment of it and to place it in historical context.

By any metric from American history and by any objective standard used to measure his predecessors in the White House, the Biden administration has been a catastrophic failure for the American people. Were that it was otherwise. An old man suffering from the horrors of dementia is a tragedy. Biden is not only a dementia patient but also President of the United States. It is clear that now he is more dementia victim than he is president. He cannot stay awake at international meetings and other fora, and he seems to willingly accept the deliberate snubs. Accordingly, as hard as it is to acknowledge, given that he is the President of the United States, world leaders, and Americans know that he has no business being in the nation’s highest office. This impacts all Americans and U.S. national security, and it is important to recognize facts that impact national security as they are, rather than as we would desire them to be.

In the years to come, the fiasco of the Biden administration will be explained by multiple factors. We may certainly anticipate that presidential historians will argue that his dementia was debilitating and precluded him from effective leadership, or that his presidency was just a Potemkin Village. Others may assess that Barack Hussein Obama was actually in control through his direct intervention and via surrogates like Susan Rice—who overreached in pushing a radical Marxist agenda. At this point, no matter the causes, it is essential to document the Biden administration’s failures and to learn from them as a cautionary tale about the disastrous impacts of the worst president in American history. Of course, we note that his greatest catastrophes may be yet to come.

In domestic policy, Biden destroyed the economy, inflation returned with a vengeance, and America’s borders were opened intentionally. This caused a flood of illegal immigration. Immigration took an unprecedented turn, even an unimaginable one; the U.S. government entered the business of importing people, some 12 to 15 million, and thereby funded the cartels and other criminals and criminal organizations. The true numbers will not be known until Trump comes into office and reveals how this happened and the true impact and parameters of the problem. Another domestic failure has been the massive increase in the federal deficit—one that impacts every American, as well as our national security posture. Likewise, energy security was compromised, and America’s energy independence was lost. These domestic disasters reveal the spirit of the American people was targeted deliberately—in order to usher in a new world order based on the tenets of collectivism and top-down control rather than the principles of individualism, freedom, and liberty.

In the realm of foreign policy, the Biden Administration will be remembered for their disastrous and deadly retreat from Afghanistan to the benign neglect of checking the People’s Republic of China (PRC) across the Indo-Pacific. By failing to deter the Russian invasion of Ukraine and by laboring to simultaneously sustain and escalate the war, rather than pressuring both sides to end the conflict, Biden will be held responsible for the deaths and displacement of many millions. Even the recent collapse of governments in Germany and France can be laid at Biden’s doorstep due to his waffling approach to great power politics and NATO’s ineptitude. The Middle East went from stability to war as Israel fights against multiple threats in the wake of the horrific terror attacks on October 7, 2023. In the Indo-Pacific, Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), treated Biden as a supplicant. In no small part because Xi knew that Joe Biden’s administration was compromised via millions from the PRC that flowed in and enriched the Biden family’s coffers. Xi instructed Biden on how to behave, and the Biden administration went along with it when it mattered, such as not laboring to overthrow the CCP at a time of great peril for it.

The opportunity cost of the Biden administration was massive. Their actions precluded other strategic choices, priorities, and paths that the U.S. might have taken. For example, the strategic airfield in Bagram, Afghanistan would not have been lost to Chinese influence and occupation. The war in Ukraine might have been deterred, and millions alive and billions of dollars saved for American citizens being hit by deadly hurricanes in North Carolina or fires in Maui. Moreover, America’s arsenal of stockpiled weapons would not have been depleted.

Likewise, the CCP would be on the run through a concerted and consistent whole-of-government agenda to roll back the PRC’s advances in their declared “People’s War” against the U.S. Fundamentally, Biden was the return to and the last of the post-Cold War presidents—Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama—those who could do anything they wanted in the domestic and international realms because they were living off the capital their predecessors had accumulated—a strong and prosperous America. In his first term, Trump was different and labored mightily to change course. Now America faces genuine peril at home and abroad.

The warnings from the Biden administration are myriad. However, at root, the lesson is how could it have been otherwise when a vile and loathsome individual intent on enriching himself be permitted to be used as a puppet by Obama and the CCP? Biden neither has the merit nor the mettle to be president. He is a vessel filled with personal ambition but does not possess the acumen or virtue to realize his ambition. It had to be given to him by Obama. His legacy is a grotesque one: he proved the “Peter Principle” wrong—that you actually can rise far beyond your level of incompetence. He did his best to destroy the country. He leaves for his successor a dangerous world and an economy in an equally precarious position. Thankfully, Trump and his administration will be up for such a massive task.

US Senator Rand Paul has called for the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Syria in a statement on X earlier this week, with just over a month ago before the Trump administration enters the White House.

President-elect Trump and his team will have a lot of major and key decisions to make on conflict zones in various parts of the globe. Syria will be a crucial focus, given it is now essentially a failed state and is poised to further become a terrorist hotbed, and given US-designated terror group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham now controls Damascus and much of the country.

Bring our troops home! The war pits Islamists against socialist Kurds against Iranian proxies. Not our fight. 900 US troops scattered about Syria are a target not a deterrent. https://t.co/PuQqLLlCzX

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 9, 2024

“Bring our troops home! The war pits Islamists against socialist Kurds against Iranian proxies. Not our fight. 900 US troops scattered about Syria are a target, not a deterrent,” Sen. Paul posted on X in reference to the ongoing ‘mini-civil war’ still raging in Deir Ezzor area and the north.

While the Pentagon recently claimed there are no plans to expand the US military presence in northeast Syria, there’s no hint of bringing any troops home either.

US forces are there propping up the Syrian Kurds (SDF/YPG), who also control Syria’s oil and gas fields, but the US proxies are now locked in a battle for survival with the larger and better armed Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). The SDF has just been kicked out of Manbij, and fighting is still happening.

These US proxies are now bogged down enough to have to give up any pretense at a ‘counter-ISIS’ mission, which is the “official” reason the Pentagon is supposed to be there in the first place.

All of this is a huge flaming mess to say the least, and Trump will inherit it from day one, including the likelihood of a greatly resurgent ISIS, which can now have free reign in many parts of Syria…

The CIA just respawned ISIS 2.0 https://t.co/QiPkROoPUx

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 12, 2024

Pentagon chief spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder has meanwhile confirmed US forces have come under sporadic attack amid the chaos, and that there have been a few troop injureis: “As you know, those numbers can fluctuate. I’m not aware of any other injuries at this time,” the said.

“Again, we’ll not hesitate to take appropriate action and protect our forces if they are threatened,” he added. Days ago, as the shock of the HTS advance against Assad forces was happening elsewhere in Syria, the US launched major airstrikes against alleged ISIS locations across the east of Syria.

Meanwhile… Rand Paul is RIGHT:

1. US said Assad needs to go because he fired on protesters.

2. US backs “syrian democratic forces” east of the Euphrates.

3. Syrian democratic forces fire on protesters. pic.twitter.com/jLPseUEhNs

— Syrian Girl 🇸🇾 (@Partisangirl) December 12, 2024

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded to reports about drone sightings over the New Jersey area in the past several weeks, a phenomena that has raised alarm among local elected officials.

In a statement to The Epoch Times on Thursday evening, the FBI and DHS said the agencies “have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”

“The FBI, DHS and our federal partners, in close coordination with the New Jersey State Police, continue to deploy personnel and technology to investigate this situation and confirm whether the reported drone flights are actually drones or are instead manned aircraft or otherwise inaccurate sightings,” the statement reads.

Their statement did not go into more detail about the sightings in recent days. Several state and U.S. lawmakers in both New Jersey and New York have called on the federal government to release more information or take action regarding the drone sightings.

In several interviews this week, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) warned that the drones may be Iranian in origin, which was denied by a Pentagon spokeswoman. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Thursday that the drones do not pose a national security risk to the United States.

On Thursday, Van Drew disputed the Pentagon’s statement about Iran being unconnected to the drone sightings, doubling down on his previous claim. He said “high-level” anonymous U.S. officials provided him with that information, which is why he is going public with it.

That same day, Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) sent a joint letter to DHS, the FBI, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to brief them on drone activity over New Jersey and New York.

“The potential safety and security risks posed by these drones in civilian areas is especially pertinent considering recent drone incursions at sensitive military sites in and outside of the continental United States over the past year,” they warned.

Separately, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told reporters that the drones should be “shot down, if necessary” and that the United States “should be doing some very urgent intelligence analysis and take them out of the skies, especially if they’re flying over airports or military bases.”

“The lack of information is absolutely unacceptable,” the senator said Thursday.

In their statement Thursday, FBI and DHS also cautioned that there have been “cases of mistaken identity” and that the drones might be “manned aircraft or facilities.”

In the meantime, DHS and the FBI are supporting New Jersey state and local law enforcement with detection capabilities “but have not corroborated any of the reported visual sightings with electronic detection.”

“To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully,” they said.

“There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space.”

The FBI and DHS asserted that the two agencies “take seriously” any threats that could be posed by drones but stressed that officials “have uncovered no such malicious activity or intent at this stage” so far.

“While there is no known malicious activity occurring in New Jersey,” the agencies said, “the reported sightings there do, however, highlight the insufficiency of current authorities.”

Reports of drone sightings over the Garden State began in November, Van Drew and other New Jersey officials have said.

In early 2023, a high-altitude balloon that originated from China flew hundreds of miles across North America, passing near sensitive military sites, U.S. officials said at the time.

The U.S. Air Force ultimately shot down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina in early February of that year.

Multiple other balloon sightings were reported since then, with the U.S. military shooting down a balloon over Lake Huron near Michigan in February 2023.

Bill Ackman is crushing the competition in the Robin Hood Foundation’s Pick-A-Ticker contest, where prominent figures in finance and donors to the organization have picked one long and one short to track from October 28, 2024 to April 30, 2025. 

And he’s doing it by shorting his arch nemesis, Carl Icahn. 

Ackman, whose picks have returned 112.5% in less than 2 months, is beating out names like Stan Drunkenmiller, David Einhorn Mike Novogratz, Carson Block and many other well known investors. 

And he’s doing it with some old familiar favorites – he’s long Fannie Mae, which he has long been a fan of, and disclosed on X on Friday that his short was the empire of his arch nemisis, Carl Icahn, Icahn Enterprises, which is down about 20% over the last month alone. 

Ackman and Icahn’s feud dates back more than a decade now, with the billionaires’ most prominent public tussle coming over shares of Herbalife, which Ackman was short and Icahn was long. Ackman was forced out of the trade and Icahn won the battle, but Herbalife shares have since collapsed about -84% over the last 5 years, lending credence to Ackman’s once massive short position in the company, which he alleged was a pyramid scheme. 

Participants in the Robin Hood contest were required to reveal their long pick but had the option of keeping their short pick confidential, which it appears Ackman had done until Friday. 

Fannie Mae shares have nearly doubled since the contest started, with hopes of the Trump administration considering the ‘recap and release’ scenario for the GSEs that investors have fantasized about for more than a decade now, since the entities were put into conservatorship. 

Icahn Enterprises shares have been clobbered about 20% since the beginning of the contest and are down almost 40% over the last 6 months. Recall, research firm Hindenburg Research questioned whether or not Carl Icahn’s namesake entity had taken on too much leverage in a critical report issued in early 2023.

Here are some of the best performing long and short ideas from the contest thus far:

Bloomberg has a running tally of who is winning and who is losing, as well as various charts and graphs to compare picks among contestants. 

The Robin Hood Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to combating poverty in New York City. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In the aftermath of the contentious Supreme Court arguments in United States v. Skrmetti over state bans on puberty blockers and gender-altering surgeries, the United Kingdom reaffirmed that it finds the risks far outweigh the benefits of such treatments for minors under the currently available scientific evidence.

The move by the leftist Labour Party stands in sharp contrast with the portrayal of the Biden Administration and the treatment of the subject by the liberal justices.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was widely criticized for analogizing puberty-blocking drugs to taking aspirin.

It appears that doctors in the UK are not ready to tell minors to just “take two puberty blockers and call me in the morning.”

UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said last week:

“Children’s health care must always be evidence-led. The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”

The decision follows the release of the Cass Review, which was raised by the conservative justices as contradicting the factual representations of the Biden Administration, even leading Justice Samuel Alito to suggest that Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the government might not have fulfilled their duty of candor to the tribunal.

He noted that the Cass study found scant evidence that the benefits of transgender treatment are greater than the risks.

He then delivered the haymaker:

“I wonder if you would like to stand by the statement in your position or if you think it would now be appropriate to modify that and withdraw your statement.”

🔥🔥🔥Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito presses Elizabeth Prelogar on the experimental nature of “gender-affirming care.”

He’s exposing the massive scandal of gender experiments on children.https://t.co/btX8lAG0LM pic.twitter.com/kQJsBT06Ud

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 4, 2024

Streeting cited significant doubts about the benefits of puberty blockers while noting the “significant risks” to children.

The government will allow puberty blockers to be administered to children in clinical trials.

It is not clear if the Supreme Court will take “judicial notice” of the new decision, but it can.

In fairness to Sotomayor, she was trying to argue that all treatments have risks in making her aspirin analogy. Yet, the comment was taken as trivializing the alleged harm and trauma raised by many in this debate. These studies clearly show greater risks than those associated with aspirin.

However, what the Biden Administration was arguing (and the liberal justices were seemingly supporting) is that states would be barred by the Court from reaching the same conclusion as the UK and other countries.

Indeed, Streeting echoed what the states argued to the Supreme Court that the government must  “act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice.”

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

Authored by Turner Wright via CoinTelegraph.com,

A lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives has drafted legislation to create a Bitcoin reserve as part of the state’s treasury.

In a bill tentatively named the “Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act” filed with the state government on Dec. 12, Representative Giovanni Capriglione proposed the comptroller hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset for “at least five years.”

The legislation suggested that Texas residents or “governmental entities” could voluntarily donate their BTC to the reserve, but, in contrast to proposals about national Bitcoin reserves, did not mention any crypto potentially seized by authorities.

Draft of strategic Bitcoin reserve bill. Source: Texas legislature

“No taxpayer funds will be spent on buying Bitcoin in order to maximize the chances of the bill passing,” said the crypto advocacy group Texas Blockchain Council.

“The Bitcoin will come from donations from Texans, US-based companies, and other sources of existing state resources.”

According to the text of the draft HB 1598, it would require a two-thirds majority in the Texas Senate and House to pass.

The state legislature is not scheduled to return until the start of its 89th regular session on Jan. 14. 

Similar proposals for BTC reserves in Alabama and Pennsylvania

The Texas legislation followed bills proposed or introduced in different US states after the 2024 United States elections, which resulted in Republicans winning the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate.

Donald Trump promised to explore establishing a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile” during his presidential campaign.

A Republican lawmaker in Pennsylvania was one of the first to introduce a bill for a BTC reserve modeled after a proposal from the advocacy group Satoshi Action Fund.

The group’s co-founder, Dennis Porter, suggested the same framework was used in the Texas legislation.