Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future. 

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes. 

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. 

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now. 

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree….I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns. 

After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels. 

The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. 

The difference in having an article unthrottled much less amplified by Facebook in these years was in the millionfold. When my article went through, I experienced a level of traffic that I had never seen in my career. It was mind-boggling. When the article was shut down some two weeks later – after focused troll accounts alerted Facebook that the algorithms had made a mistake – traffic fell to the usual trickle. 

Again, in my entire career of closely following internet traffic patterns, I had never seen anything like this. 

Facebook as an information source offers power like we’ve never seen before, especially because so many people, especially among the voting public, believe that the information they are seeing is from their friends and family and sources they trust. The experience of Facebook and other platforms framed the reality that people believed existed outside of themselves. 

Every dissident, and every normal person who had some sense that something odd was going on, was made to feel like some sort of crazy cretin who held nutty and probably dangerous views that were completely out of touch with the mainstream. 

What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that including church and school closures plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate. 

We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this. 

People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced! 

During two election cycles, the Covid response was not really in play as a public controversy. This helps account for why. It also means that any candidate who attempted to make this an issue was automatically downgraded in terms of reach. 

How many candidates are we talking about here? Considering all the US elections at the federal, state, and local levels, we are talking about several thousand at least. In every case, the candidate who was speaking out about the most egregious attacks on liberty came to be effectively silenced. 

A good example is the Minnesota governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr. Scott Jensen, who made the Covid response a campaign issue. Here is how the vote totals lined up.

Of course, Dr. Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90% and likely lost him the election. 

You can listen to Jensen’s account here: 

IMPOTENT PAWNS – Joe Biden conspired with Facebook to reduce Americans to impotent pawns! pic.twitter.com/k5SxQknNRL

— Scott Jensen (@drscottjensen) August 27, 2024

Consider how many other elections were affected. It’s astonishing to think of the implications of this. It means that quite possibly an entire generation of elected leaders in this country was not legitimately elected, if by legitimate we mean a well-informed public that is given a choice concerning the issues that affect their lives. 

Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates, the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilization and set the path of history on a dark course. 

And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies. 

When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most. 

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said. 

WATCH: Facebook @Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said seeing President Trump get up and pump his fist after being shot in the face at his rally in Pennsylvania is “one of the most badass things” he’s ever seen.

Looks like Zuck is trying to say nice things to avoid all responsibility… pic.twitter.com/wKnOFGYZCA

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) July 19, 2024

Then also you have the French arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, an event which surely rattles any major CEO of a communication platform. You have the arrest and incarceration of other dissidents like Steve Bannon and many others. 

You also have the litigation over free speech back in play now that RFK, Jr has been cleared as having standing, kicking the case of Missouri v. Biden back to the Supreme Court, which wrongly decided last time to deny standing to other plaintiffs. 

Zuckerberg of all people knows the stakes. He understands the implications and the scale of the problem, as well as the depths of the corruption and deception at play in the US, EU, UK, and all over the world. He may figure that everything is going to come out at some point, so he might as well get ahead of the curve. 

Of all the companies in the world that would have a real handle on the state of public opinion right now, it would be Facebook. They see the scale of the support for Trump. And Trump has said on multiple occasions, including in a new book coming out in early September, that he believes Zuckerberg should be prosecuted for his role in manipulating election outcomes. What if, for example, his own internal data is showing 10 to 1 support for Trump over Kamala, completely contradicting the polls which are not credible anyway? That alone could account for his change of heart. 

It becomes especially pressing since the person who did the censoring at the Biden White House, Rob Flaherty, now serves as Digital Communications Strategist for the Harris/Walz campaign. There can be no question that the DNC intends to deploy all the same tools, many times over and far more powerful, should they take back the White House. 

“Under Rob’s leadership,” said Biden upon Flaherty’s resignation, “we’ve built the largest Office of Digital Strategy in history and, with it, a digital strategy and culture that brought people together instead of dividing them.”

At this point, it’s safe to assume that even the most well-informed outsider knows about 0.5% of the whole of the manipulation, deception, and backroom machinations that have taken place over the past five or so years. Investigators on the case have said that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence that are not classified but have yet to be revealed to the public. Maybe all of this will pour forth starting in the new year. 

Therefore, the Zuckerberg admission has much larger implications than anyone has yet admitted.

It provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times, the global silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalization of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections, and gaslighting as a way of life of government in our times. 

In 2022, an estimated 292 million people worldwide were using illegal drugs, with 60 million consuming opioids such as morphine, codeine, or heroin, according to the latest United Nations World Drug Report. This makes opioids the second most widely used class of illicit drugs, trailing behind cannabis, which has approximately 228 million users.

While cannabis use is more widespread and carries a relatively low risk of addiction, it does not result in overdose deaths. The same cannot be said for the far more potent and dangerous class of opioids. As highlighted in the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), synthetic opioids like fentanyl have become the leading cause of the rising number of drug overdose deaths.

Of the nearly 108,000 recorded overdose deaths in 2022, almost 74,000 were directly linked to synthetic opioids, with fentanyl being the most prevalent. Fentanyl is said to be 50 times more potent than heroin and has become a preferred choice for illegal drug manufacturers due to its ease of production and low cost, unlike traditional opioids that rely on crop cultivation. The impact is even more severe among younger populations. In the 15 to 24 age group, 81 percent of the 6,696 overdose deaths in 2022 were attributed to synthetic opioids, with related fatalities increasing fivefold from 2015 to 2022.

On a global scale, opioid use has remained relatively stable since 2019, with reported users even decreasing slightly from 62 million in the year before the coronavirus pandemic. According to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the global prevalence rate of opioid use was 1.2% in 2022. However, certain regions reported significantly higher rates: 3.2% in the Near and Middle East/South-West Asia, 2.7% in North America, and 2.0% in Australia and New Zealand.

While cannabis use continues to dominate in terms of sheer numbers, the stark difference in overdose risks highlights the urgency in addressing the ongoing opioid crisis, particularly the lethal threat posed by synthetic variants like fentanyl.

As visualized by Statista:

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Almost 1.7 million foreigners residing in the U.K. are out of work or “economically inactive,” costing taxpayers an estimated £8.5 billion per year according to a new report.

An analysis of government figures by the Centre for Immigration Control shows that the current levels are the highest ever, surpassing a previous high of 1,628,000, recorded in 2012.

The £8.5 billion estimate doesn’t even include the costs of asylum seekers, who are routinely placed into four star hotels, as well as foreign students, meaning the actual cost to a British taxpayers is probably much higher.

In addition, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has revealed that the Home Office spent a staggering £7.9 billion in just three years on asylum, border, and visa management when its budget was just £320 million.

They went £7.6 BILLION over budget.

‘Woeful budgeting’ at the Home Office caused repeated overspends on asylum, says watchdog https://t.co/YmME83HdM0

— LBC (@LBC) August 28, 2024

IFS research economist Max Warner told the BBC “When there is a one-off unexpected spike in costs or demand, spending more than was budgeted is entirely understandable. But when it is happening year after year, something is going wrong with the budgeting process.”

Robert Bates, of the Centre for Migration Control research director, told The Daily Mail that “For all the talk of a fiscal ‘black hole’, the Labour Government seem to be missing the glaringly obvious fact that mass migration is causing economic pandemonium.”

“There is no reason for us to continue handing out so many long-term visas when we are currently having to bail out over a million migrants who are already in Britain but not working,” Bates further noted.

Record numbers of migrants living in Britain are jobless with more than 1.6 million unemployed or ‘economically inactive’ people costing taxpayers an estimated £8billion https://t.co/xhbMpRJOVT pic.twitter.com/LmNfchWRjE

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) August 30, 2024

“This is the very definition of a Ponzi scheme, and we will only compound the problem if we do not change course soon,” he urged.

“Our elderly are facing a potentially deadly winter as Keir Starmer cancels the lifeline of the winter fuel allowance, but at the same time he is doing nothing to clamp down on workless migrants,” Bates emphasised.

In response to the report, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage commented “The economic arguments for mass migration are over.”

The economic arguments for mass migration are over. https://t.co/gyv1MrMG6n

— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) August 30, 2024

Farage previously addressed the loophole of foreign students in the UK being given visas for their entire families, urging that they shouldn’t be able to “bring mum” to university.

*  *  *

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

The International Criminal Court is seeking to remind its members state Mongolia that it must detain Russian President Vladimir Putin when he arrives in the country which shares a border with Russia on Monday.

Any country that signed the Rome Statute, which Mongolia has done, will “have the obligation to cooperate in accordance with Chapter IX,” a statement by The Hague-based court told the BBC.

ICC spokesman Fadi el-Abdallah went so far as to threaten significant repercussions for Mongolia if it does not comply. “In case of non-cooperation, ICC judges may make a finding to that effect and inform the Assembly of States Parties of it. It is then for the Assembly to take any measure it deems appropriate,” he said.

The only exceptions that the Rome Statute does provide includes avoiding the violation of a treaty obligation with another country, or if an arrest would violate the “diplomatic immunity of a person or property of a third state.”

To be expected, Ukraine too is calling on Mongolia to abide by its obligations with the International Criminal Court and arrest Putin.

This impending trip marks the first time that Putin will travel to a country which is legally obligated to arrest him, following the ICC issuing its arrest warrant for him last March on allegations of overseeing war crimes and human rights abuses in Ukraine.

The Kremlin says is that the visit is at the invitation of Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh. While Putin is there, the two leaders will attend a ceremony commemorating the 1939 Soviet-Mongolian victory over Japan in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.

“The heads of state will discuss prospects for further development of the Russian-Mongolian comprehensive strategic partnership,” the Kremlin described. Regional analyst Samuel Ramani writes that the “aim of the trip is likely to promote the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline with China.”

Mongolia has long vocalized that it remains neutral on the question of the Ukraine war. Mongolia and Russia have also long been close regional allies, even this week having held joint military exercises.

In August of 2023 President Putin decided to skip an in person BRICS summit hosted in Johannesburg, South Africa – precisely because the host country is a Rome statute signatory.

#Putin en route to Mongolia. pic.twitter.com/uGUErGOWQn

— Manu Gómez (@gosthdarkconrad) September 1, 2024

Moscow has emphasized of this week’s events in the Mongolian capital that it expects everything to go smoothly. “We have an excellent rapport with our partners from Mongolia,” spokesperson for the Russian presidency Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a fresh statement. “Of course, all aspects of the president’s visit have been carefully prepared.”

Via Middle East Eye

Iraq has one of the youngest populations in the world, with about 60 percent under the age of 25. Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the country has been mired in instability, war, corruption and economic stagnation – a situation that has left many young people with little hope for their futures and or sense of purpose in their lives.

The latest movement to latch on to this sense of despair, shocking the country and prompting a fierce state crackdown, is a religious group that practices a system of lottery-based suicide. The Allahiyah movement, also known as the Qurban (“sacrifice”) group, is thought to have formed in Basra and Dhi Qar in early 2020 and has as many as 2,500 adherents.

According to local media, the head of the movement is a cleric named Abdul Ali Munim al-Hasani, currently residing in the city of Mashhad in Iran. Their initial activities sparked little attention, seemingly consisting of rituals and practices at least superficially akin to other Shia Islamic movements in the country.

Gatherings, posted on social media, show large groups of men dancing to loud electronic music and chanting slogans of sacrifice to Ali bin Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

That began to change in 2021, when the first reports emerged of young men associated with the group hanging themselves in Husseiniyahs, buildings designed for Shia religious, spiritual and social gatherings.

The movement reportedly splintered from the followers of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, an influential Shia cleric whose son Muqtada al-Sadr is one of the most powerful figures in Iraq. Muqtada al-Sadr has, however, publicly disavowed the Allahiyah movement as “extremists” and warned against young people being attracted to it.

Adherents believe that Ali is a mystical, divine figure, akin to Jesus in Christianity.

Disaffected youths

The word Allahiyah, an amalgamation of the word Ali and divine in Arabic, stems from the same root as the Alawite and Alevi sects in Syria and Turkey due to a similar mystical veneration of Ali; neither of the other two sects, however, practice ritual suicide.

“We believe that Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, peace be upon him, is God incarnate on Earth, and that sacrifices must be offered to him in order to gain his satisfaction and forgiveness,” a member of the Qurban group told HuffPost Iraq in June.

The member of the group, who did not reveal their name, said that mainstream Islamic scholars taught a “distortion” of Ali’s true teachings. “We hold a draw among the members of the group, and whoever’s name comes up has the honor of offering himself as a sacrifice to Imam Ali, which is the highest goal of existence,” they said, adding they had plans to spread their message to “young people in schools and universities” and even outside the country.

They also denied rumors that they carried out murders. However, on June 16 security forces arrested an official of the movement in Dhi Qar Governorate while he was in the eastern Hamza district on his way to Karbala governorate. After being interrogated he confessed to having killed two family members as “sacrifices”.

Campaigners have warned that a group like Allahiyah can count on legions of disaffected youths to rally to its cause and that it is vital that the government move to change the conditions that allow its growth.

Shia clerics have condemned the Allahiyah cult. Below is seen a more mainstream Shia observance…

Thousands of Shiite Muslims gather in Iraq’s holy city of Karbala to mourn Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohammed, by beating themselves during the Arba’in observance.

🎥: AA pic.twitter.com/aaIYYVebhF

— Zoom News (@zoomnewskrd) August 26, 2024

“Some young people, when they feel hopeless and have no work to occupy themselves with or family to follow them, they might join such groups like ‘Al-Qurban'” said Fatima al-Bahadly, head of the Firdaws Society NGO, which tackles issues faced by young people such as radicalisation and addiction, speaking to Middle East Eye.

She compared them to the Islamic State, the militant group that attracted followers with the promise of instant redemption through sacrifice. “They believe that after suicide, they will meet Imam Ali – as meeting Imam Ali is of great importance to them.”

Government crackdown

The spread of the phenomenon has alarmed the authorities and Iraqi society as a whole. In May, four different Allahiyah followers were involved in suicide incidents across Dhi Qar, including a 15-year-old boy who reportedly died after hanging himself with electrical wire.

According to Al Sumaria News, in recent months Iraqi authorities have recorded at least 25 suicide cases among the ranks of the Qurban group. An operation has been launched to suppress the group’s activities, leading to the arrest of many of its members.

Following the killings in Dhi Qar, the governorate’s police arrested a further six members of the group, who they said had convinced three of their followers to kill themselves. Tahseen al-Khafaji, head of the Iraqi security media cell, told Middle East Eye that all those arrested had been “referred to the judicial authorities”.

He said a number of group members had been arrested for attempting to “disrupt” the Arbaeen pilgrimage, the enormously popular gathering that marks one of the most important dates in Shia Islam.

“There is no exact information about their numbers so far,” he added. Members of the group have been arrested across the country, including in Muthanna governorate, Dhi Qar and Diwaniyah. At least 39 people were arrested in a raid on July 20, while on Thursday, police also announced the arrest of 10 members of the group in Maysan province.

The Iraqi National Security Service said those arrested in July openly admitted that they belonged to the “deviant” movement and that they were planning to draw “lots for the sacrifice, according to which the person who would hang himself to death would be chosen”.

Despite the crackdown, the Allahiyah member who spoke to HuffPost said that they had found “some security and police personnel sympathize with us and would like to join us”. ‘Social challenges’ Politicians and religious figures have been keen to stress that Allahiyah is a “deviant” group, claiming its ideology violates the Iraqi constitution.

But the group’s activities are part of a wider picture of a society that is unable to provide a future for many of its young people. The youth unemployment rate in Iraq stood at 32.23 percent in 2023, while the clientelist system that has existed since 2003 excludes those without connections in government, political parties or religious institutions.

Mahdi al-Tamimi, Basra chief of the government-funded Iraq High Commission For Human Rights, said it was too simple to blame “intellectually deviant” movements for the suicide rate in Iraq.

“They stem from various factors, including poverty, the social challenges faced by many young people, such as unemployment, and the government’s neglect of their needs, and the absence of a clear strategic plan by successive governments for youth integration, rehabilitation, and addressing their issues,” he told MEE.

Tamimi said the issue required “decisive governmental intervention” and said he and his colleagues had urged the provincial council to formulate a plan to combat and investigate the issue.

Authored by Pete Menzies via The Epoch Times,

We need to talk about Julie Sweeney.

She’s a 53-year-old English woman who used to live in Church Lawton, Cheshire, and she once had a Facebook account. Today, she’s in prison, serving a 15-month sentence after being convicted under new Criminal Code provisions in the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act.

From all available accounts, Ms. Sweeney had—at least until this summer—lived without causing any trouble or having any negative interactions with the local constabulary. Then, on Aug. 3, she lost her temper during the height of the British riots that ensued following the murders of little girls in a Taylor Swift dance class and wrote something really nasty on a local community group Facebook page.

“Don’t protect the mosques,” she posted to the 5,100-member group. “Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.”

That’s a very ugly thing to say and within hours one individual who read it complained to the police, who promptly arrested Ms. Sweeney. According to the Crown prosecutor, upon being taken into custody, Ms. Sweeney told officers, “I’m not being rude but there are a lot of people saying it.”

That’s not good. But it is important to note that while there was indeed violence directed towards the mosque, Ms. Sweeney’s comments related to the aftermath. There is no evidence which I can find in the coverage of the case that her post inspired anyone to do harm to the building, to anyone in or around it, or that it became a rallying cry of any kind. Nor was there any proof offered that she seriously wished for the mosque “with the adults in it” to be blown up.

We can all agree that it was a truly dreadful thing to say. And we should all acknowledge that, other than writing and hitting “send,” Ms. Sweeney’s crime is entirely about something hideous that she said—in a post later deleted—not something she did or inspired someone to do.

She admitted in court that the post was made in anger, that it was unacceptable, and that she didn’t intend to inspire fear which, if you were a regular attendee at the mosque, you likely would have felt if you read it.

People can debate whether statements of that nature should be censured by civil society through shaming, shunning, and blocking or through the intervention of the state.

What really catches the eye in this case, though, is the intensity with which the presiding judge punished her upon accepting her guilty plea.

According to the Daily Mail, her lawyer had told the court that Ms. Sweeney “accepts it was stupid.”

“This was a single comment on a single day,” he said.

“She lives a quiet, sheltered life in Cheshire and has not troubled the courts in her long life. Her character references show she lives a kind and compassionate lifestyle. She has been primary carer for her husband since 2015.”

The judge said he took Sweeney’s good character and what he termed a “heart-rending” letter from her husband into account but that “even people like you need to go to prison because a message must go out that, if you do these terrible acts, the court will say to you, “You must go to prison.”

Really? Even if one thinks speech should be a matter for the Criminal Code, wouldn’t it seem more appropriate for the outcome to be something along the lines of a summary conviction or a suspended sentence with a ban on using social media?

Sending Ms. Sweeney to prison, particularly when the UK’s prisons are so overcrowded the government was already preparing to release thousands of criminals early, really speaks to the mindset of the Crown and the judge when it comes to cracking down on online speech.

Clearly this sort of speech has, in their view, become a more serious matter than common physical assault, the sentence for which is a maximum of six months, which can be elevated up to two years if motivated by race or religion.

Why should Canadians care? Because Ms. Sweeney and her nation’s Online Safety Act may very well be the canaries in our coalmine.

Justice Minister Araf Virani, architect of Canada’s Online Harms Act, has already cited the UK experience as something that has informed his approach. To be fair, he hasn’t said he agrees with it all, but he is the man who has been appointing the judges who will be sentencing people convicted of Bill C-63’s new offences once they become law. He will also be in charge of hiring the Human Rights Commissioner, big job given it will be tasked with managing thousands of complaints from people made to feel uncomfortable by something someone posts online.

When that’s done, he’ll be looking for someone to fill the role of Digital Safety Commissioner to patrol how social media companies in Canada manage speech deemed to be problematic.

If those appointees see the world the same way Ms. Sweeney’s judge does—that speech is more harmful than action—some very interesting times are just around Canada’s corner.

*  *  *

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

Israeli media news site Ynet has reported that the Israeli army is preparing to occupy and control the Gaza Strip for years to come, and this is increasingly the default assumption of Israeli military officers in the absence of a clearly defined long-term mission by top leadership.

The outlet wrote that this comes “in the absence of clear strategic goals for the future of the Gaza Strip.” The report continued, “The Israeli army began yesterday through this appointment to accept the fact that its responsibility for the Strip will continue for years and will expand, and about two million Palestinians will remain under its responsibility.”

The military’s Lt. Col. Elad Goren has been appointed Head of Humanitarian-Civilian Effort in Gaza to oversee these longer term efforts. “This new position is not for show … It will have an important role for years to come … Anyone who believes that Israeli control and intervention in the Gaza Strip will end soon, whether by stopping or not stopping the fighting and its decline, or even with or without a deal, is mistaken,” a  high-ranking security official told Ynet. 

The scope of the new position is to include overseeing humanitarian aid deliveries, the restoration of civilian infrastructure, and coordinating with humanitarian aid groups. 

Ultimately this is also to prevent the potential for Hamas to ever return as a local government authority in any part of the Gaza Strip. What Hamas was doing before Oct.7 in terms of administering Gaza cities will now be done by Israel.

“On the agenda of the new unit in the Israeli army will be major operations, which have already begun, to evacuate the seriously wounded and sick to hospitals in Jordan, Egypt or the UAE … and preparing for winter in the Gaza Strip, in light of the massive amount of destroyed infrastructure, as well as coordinating the campaign to vaccinate more than a million Gazans against polio,” Ynet detailed further.

Among the bigger long-term initiatives will be to “work with the international community to restore all civilian facilities that collapsed in the Strip.” In many cases this has involved the collapse of electricity generation and even water. Many Gazans say that at this point “nothing is left”.

Currently, Israel has greenlighted a UN-spearheaded polio vaccination program for children of the Gaza Strip. Some 2,000 health workers are expected to enter Gaza this week, and the IDF reportedly agreed to implement phased pauses in its operations according to different zones, starting in central Gaza.

But there are deeply conflicting statements coming from Israeli top leadership on the lingering question of whether a ‘polio pause’ will actually be implemented as of Sunday…

💥 Minutes after IDF confirmation that several hostages have been found dead in Gaza, Netanyahu issues a statement affirming there will be NO ceasefire for the purpose of delivering polio vaccines. (I am not making this up.) pic.twitter.com/v1YhBomjsy

— Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي (@NTarnopolsky) August 31, 2024

If the pause is not implemented, this will only add to the international heat and pressure Netanyahu is experiencing. The UN and World Health Organization (WHO) have been particularly vocal after a ten-month year old baby was reportedly paralyzed by the deadly polio disease, and now there are worries over a potential major outbreak.

It must officially be fall in the United States…after all, what’s more American than leaves falling, sweatshirt weather, pumpkin spice lattes…and massive brawls outside of high school football games?

That’s exactly what took place in Norristown, just miles outside of Philadelphia, where a fight at the Norristown Area High School’s football stadium caused a game to be cancelled. 

During the annual “Battle of the Bridge” varsity football game between Norristown and Upper Merion, no issues occurred inside the stadium. However, a “series of altercations” erupted in the parking lot at halftime on the 1900 block of Eagle Drive.

Five juveniles from Norristown Area High School were taken into custody, according to ABC News 6.

“That’s a shame because it is a small group of individuals that went out into the parking lot and started to fight. So I mean people have to act responsible and parents have to be responsible,” said West Norriton Police Chief Michael Kelly. 

“We want to emphasize that these incidents were not as a result of any conflict between Norristown Area High School and Upper Merion Area High School,” a statement said.

“Both schools share a commitment to sportsmanship and respect, and the actions of a few individuals do not reflect the values of our student-athletes and supporters,” the statement continued.

The ABC News 6 report says that the game will continue on Saturday at 10 a.m. without any spectators and will be live-streamed, officials announced. Both school districts will meet with their police departments to discuss future football game security.

This isn’t the first season with issues. Last year, a Cheltenham student brought a gun to the Abington-Cheltenham game, causing its suspension. This year, Abington has chosen not to play that game.

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

What an interesting way to end the third quarter of 2024.

The yen carry trade chaos looked like it was going to break markets permanently a couple of weeks ago, and now here we are, back near highs with “the world‘s most important stock” (and my top contender for a black swan) Nvidia, once again beating earnings expectations yesterday and giving a positive outlook for 2025.

We are also one market review further into 5.5% interest rates, and despite assurances that we will see a rate cut in the coming month, a lot of questions remain up in the air about whether or not it will have an impact. I wanted to offer my updated thoughts on the market on my blog commented on some of the 27 individual stocks that I’ve been watching throughout the year.

For now, let’s stick to overall feel of markets. As a gold and gold miner investor, I’m extremely encouraged by the fact that we are heading into Fed rate cuts with gold at all-time highs. There aren’t too many historical precedents for what I believe will take place at that point.

I think the Fed is going to try to start cutting 25 basis points at a time and be measured. Despite Powell confirming the pivot at Jackson Hole, commentary from several Fed governors over the last week, including Raphael Bostic last Wednesday, indicates that they are still in no rush to cut and are interested in incoming data—but I think this will be short-lived.

*FED’S BOSTIC: STILL AWAITING DATA TO BE SURE IT’S TIME TO CUT

*BOSTIC PREFERS WAITING LONGER, EVEN IF IT MEANS BEING CAUTIOUS

A 25 basis point cut has been priced in now for over six months. This market is trading as though significantly lower rates, like those in the 2% or 1% range, are imminent. They’re not.

No one is going to get cash from home equity re-fis changing their mortgage rate from 7% to 6.75%. No one is going to see their credit cards lower interest rates. A 25 basis point cut is going to do precisely nothing to unjam the gears of the economy. As I have been saying for a while now, I would not be surprised to see a major market crash after the first rate cut takes place. It could wind up being the ultimate “sell the news” event, the first rate cut.

And it seems to me the market’s mood since Jackson Hole last Friday has been indicating that this news could already be priced in. The market was up after Powell’s speech, but not significantly, and it looked tired.

Similarly, yesterday, the market had a lot of trouble keeping a bid under Nvidia which puked to session lows quickly with about 2 hours left in trading, despite the fact that the company beat its earnings report. It bought back some of those gains on Friday.  

All over social media and trading desks that I follow, people were talking about the fact that the company didn’t beat the whisper numbers. This means that market expectations are so high for the company that everybody expects a beat, and the stock really only “beats” when it beats the number above the expected beat number.

To quote Dark Helmet: “Everybody got that?”

Putting aside short-term skews, overall, the market simply feels extremely exhausted to me. And make no doubt about it, we cannot go on for an infinite number of days, weeks, and months with interest rates where they are right now and not suffer consequences. I have been late, for sure, in my prognostication that these high rates would eventually crash the market. However, if rates stay here, I know for sure I won’t be proven wrong—just wrong on timing.

Last week’s revision in the jobs numbers was just one of multiple indicators that prove this economy isn’t nearly as healthy as it seems. Job growth in the United States over much of the past year was considerably weaker than initially reported. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary annual benchmark revision indicated that there were 818,000 fewer jobs in March than originally estimated. This preliminary revision represents the largest downward adjustment since 2009.

Even when we gear the CPI number with hedonic adjustments and pump the jobs number with government jobs while overpaying for stocks using leverage and paying off household expenses using credit cards, there is only so much runway left for the American economy, the American consumer and the psychology of the American investor. As I said at the beginning of the year, I continue to believe that staple stocks, utilities, miners, commodities, and energy are all going to be safe havens to play in when it comes to buying dips and owning stocks for the time being.

The market is extremely overvalued no matter how you slice it. I still believe my prediction from 2022 will hold true and that we will eventually see massive outsized moves in gold when the Fed fully lets off the quantitative tightening gas and reverts back to the inevitable quantitative easing. Gold was $1,820/oz. when I first wrote that and now sits comfortably over $2,500/oz — $200 oz. higher than my last market review just 2 months ago.