Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

California, which has been reeling under the grip of drought, has received respite due to the multiple storms that hit the state and elsewhere in the past weeks, helping it deal with drought conditions in several regions and filling up many of the smaller reservoirs.

“A long-term drought, dating back to the 2019–2020 winter, continues across California, the Great Basin, and parts of the Pacific Northwest,” according to the National Drought Summary on Jan. 10.

“However, the intense precipitation in California the past few weeks—particularly late December and early January—has significantly reduced drought intensity in California. Most of the state saw a 1-category improvement this week.”

According to the Jan. 12th drought map for California, regions classified as facing extreme drought conditions, dubbed “D3,” have almost disappeared from the interior areas of the state.

In just a single week, the portion of the state facing D3 conditions declined from 27.1 percent to 0.32 percent. Regions classified as facing severe drought, D2, fell from 71.14 percent to 46 percent during this period.

During the past couple of weeks, 24.5 trillion gallons of water fell in California owing to a series of atmospheric river storms. Since Dec. 26, 2022, seven atmospheric rivers have dumped up to 30 inches of rain in some regions of the state.

Filling Up Reservoirs

The heavy rains have resulted in small reservoirs getting filled in several communities across California. In, for example, the Marin Municipal Water District, in the north of the state, all seven reservoirs recently hit 100 percent capacity.

Four of the 10 reservoirs owned by the Santa Clara Valley Water District are also full. Seven reservoirs run by the East Bay Municipal Utility District are 84 percent full. However, the largest reservoirs are not yet full, officials warn, because drought conditions in the state are not yet over.

The Oroville reservoir up north in Butte County, the second-largest reservoir in California, is only 49 percent full, which is 90 percent of its historical average. Shasta Lake is only 44 percent full, which is 77 percent of its historical average.

“The sum of the state’s six largest reservoir stores increased from 5 million as of Nov. 30, 2022, to 7.3 million as of Jan. 10, 2023 (from 54 percent of long-term average to 74 percent of long-term average),” the National Drought Summary said.

“Only one of the six largest reservoirs is near its long-term average, and three of them hold only 43–61 percent of their long-term averages as of Jan. 10.”

Drought Conditions Elsewhere

A study published in the journal Nature last year found that the past 22 years have been the driest period in the American Southwest’s last 1,200 years. To completely get rid of drought conditions in the region, multiple seasons of precipitation at 120–200 percent of the normal levels are estimated to be needed.

The current storm conditions are not, however, a guarantee that California’s drought conditions would end soon. In December 2021, the conditions were very wet, which raised hopes that the drought was ending. However, the months of January, February, and March ended up being the driest in California’s recorded history.

The same happened in 2013, when a wet December was followed by a very dry January and February. Though big snow totals are welcome, there is still a “long way to go before the critical April 1 total,” said Sean de Guzman, manager of the snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit at the California Department of Water Resources, according to a news release on Jan. 31.

“It’s always great to be above average this early in the season, but we must be resilient and remember what happened last year. If January through March of 2023 turns out to be similar to last year, we would still end the water year in severe drought with only half of an average year’s snowpack,” he said.

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I have been trying to tackle the “fringe” issues (read: the issues the mainstream won’t give way on) regarding Covid since the pandemic first began in 2020. So far, I think I’ve done a decent job in helping flesh out many “conspiracy theories” about Covid that instead, have turned out to be “conspiracy facts”.

Among them, I’ve written about managing our Orwellian response to Covid, the notoriously sensitive nature of PCR testing, the CDC moving its data goalposts, the likely nature of Covid coming from a lab leak (here and here and here) and the U.S.’s role in said leak and the media’s hysterical coverage of ivermectin.

Additionally, for those that haven’t heard it yet, in an attempt to continue the “other side” of Covid discourse, I published a new podcast with Dr. Peter A. McCullough, who has dozens of peer-reviewed publications on Covid-19 and has commented extensively on the medical response to the COVID-19 crisis in The Hill, America Out Loud, and cable networks like ABC and Fox News. 

I am always happy to welcome new content from The Brownstone Institute, one of the last few beacons of common sense left in the world of actual journalism.

This week they published a new piece on Covid and our response to it, called We Must Have The Truth. I reached out to the publication last year and requested permission to share their content when I enjoy it, in full, with my readers, which they kindly granted. If you’re interested in the topic – or simply just having a grasp on the objective truth – I believe it is a “must read”.

The article is written by Pat Fidopiastis, who is a Professor of Microbiology at California Polytechnic State University.

On April 2, 2020, a paddle boarder was chased by authorities and taken into custody. This event should have caused unanimous outrage over the absurdity of what happened – law enforcement arrested a lone paddle boarder on Santa Monica Bay for the crime of “flouting coronavirus closures.” 

Traditional voices that could have questioned unscientific authoritarian policy instead provided cover. The Los Angeles Times justified law enforcement’s ridiculous response by quoting a scientist who made the claim (presumably with a straight face): “..[SARS-CoV-2] could enter coastal waters and transfer back into the air.” Setting aside the absurdity of this and every other justification for closing beaches, hiking trails, and parks, think of the narrative it perpetuated — the virus is so insidious that even those who dared to paddle board alone on the ocean might somehow spread it to the rest of us. 

The paddler’s arrest was an early indication that something had changed in our country. A “new normal” was spawning from the chaotic, unscientific, politicized pandemic messaging mainly coming from biased news media and the once venerable Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The result was bitter contempt between two sides of the COVID-19 debate that metastasized into a deep distrust for science. 

In an understatement of the century, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently summed up her agency’s role in promoting distrust in science by stating that they did not “reliably meet expectations.” Thus, it’s pretty clear that for their part, nothing much will change. Dr. Fauci proclaimed that because he “represents science” any criticism of him is a direct attack on science. Translation, we shouldn’t expect any productive capitulation from him either. 

Although the CDC acknowledged playing a role in the growing distrust in science, none of their professed forms of atonement, such as promising to share data faster and doing a better job of translating science into policy will restore trust without a process that includes honest debate. 

Over the past two years, the CDC cherry-picked data from articles rushed to print in their own journal (Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report) to justify a lot of bad policy, including masking schoolchildren, which is still happening today, or pushed the completely unscientific assertion that vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity. 

On the other hand, they buried data showing that upon reinfection, vaccinated people without prior COVID-19 diagnosis were at greater risk of hospitalization than the unvaccinated with prior COVID-19. 

Dr. Walensky also boldly stated that, “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” The untruthful messaging that vaccination stopped infection and transmission was justification for an appalling trend of people mocking the COVID-19-related deaths of the unvaccinated. 

It’s unlikely the families targeted by such attacks will hear any apologies, even though Dr. Fauci’s four shots did not protect him from reoccurring COVID-19, or that Dr. Birx admitted that inflated vaccine efficacy claims were based on hope, not science. 

Get 60% Off: If you enjoy pieces like this and you are still not a subscriber of QTR’s Fringe Finance, here’s 60% off: Get 60% off forever

At the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci told us not to buy masks because they do not work. When the politics changed, Fauci reversed himself and became the proponent of wearing not just one mask – but several. Dr. Fauci’s excuse for the flip-flop was his only truth on the matter – he admitted that he lied, albeit “nobly.”

For his encore, Dr. Fauci confidently opined on the level of vaccine uptake required for herd immunity. Eventually he admitted to guessing at numbers to frighten people into compliance. To be clear, Dr. Fauci used deception, not science, to support his version of public health policy. 

Anybody who was “on the fence” about trusting Fauci, the self-proclaimed embodiment of “the science,” should have been forcefully pushed off after his attempts to obfuscate when testifying to Congress on whether the US government funded “gain of function” research that very likely created SARS-CoV-2. 

The loss of trust was greatly amplified by activist scientists and most of the news media. Dr. Fauci refused to say anything critical of the nationwide social justice protests that might have discouraged people from participating in behaviors known to spread respiratory viruses. 

However, scientists and news sources eagerly reported alleged death tolls purportedly caused by Trump rallies, while claiming “no evidence of protest spread.” 

How could scientists determine whether the protests caused any disease transmission or death if contact tracers were not allowed to ask if someone attended a protest?

The weaponization of science to censor, persecute, delegitimize, and threaten those who had differing opinions has never happened on this scale in this country. 

Fig. 1. Comparison of daily per capita cases between Texas (orange), which lifted its mask mandate in March 2021, California (red), and New York (Green), which continued their masking policies. 

Even President Biden capitalized on the politicization of mask-wearing by accusing the elected leader (and by extension the citizens) of Texas of “Neanderthal thinking” for removing the mask mandate in 2021. Meanwhile, states such as California and New York were praised for “following the science.” 

A simple comparison of the epidemic curves between these states did not justify the divisive rhetoric (Fig. 1). But rather than have these conversations, it was easier to just slander dissenters and censor intelligent discussion. 

As the old saying goes, “a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.” Thankfully, the truth finally has its boots on and is catching up on many fronts, such as the questionable effectiveness of mask mandates. 

The “Neanderthal thinking” jab was uttered around the time the news media, outraged by Governor Ron DeSantis’ steady leadership in Florida, hoped to get “Ron DeathSantis” trending on social media. 

Not surprisingly, the data told a different story about Florida (Fig. 2). It’s clear that “follow the science” was just a slogan. Politics, lies, and vindictive moral superiority are baked into our nation’s COVID-19 policy.

Fig. 2. Age-adjusted COVID-19 deaths in Florida and California. The circles are proportional to state population. Although these states adopted dramatically different policies, they had comparable outcomes.

Trust in science might never be restored in people who lost their livelihood to unscientific lockdowns or vaccine mandates. But, here’s some advice for people like Dr. Walensky and Dr. Fauci to get back some of the trust.

1) Go back to the basics of Public Health: “Voluntary measures are more likely to induce cooperation and protect public trust than coercive measures, and are more likely to prevent attempts to avoid contact with the healthcare system.” 

2) Invite dissenting experts to the table for open policy debate. Excess malaria and opioid deaths in young people, while millions of children were thrusted into acute starvation, are examples of significant COVID-19 policy failures. Great Barrington Declaration scientists warned about such collateral damage, but were maligned and censored. At the very least, the public would have benefitted from a different perspective on the risk of catching COVID-19 from ocean spray. 

3) Vindictive moral superiority is terrible public health messaging. Heed the advice from an article in The Atlantic: “Viruses are not moral agents, and infection is not a personal failure.”  

4) Sincerely apologize to people who were fired, maligned, censored, or physically harmed, then tell us your justification for ignoring counter data and continuing policy that encouraged these unnecessary outcomes.

5) none of the above will matter if public health officials do not tell the truth, including the nuance, and trust that the American people can handle it. George Santayana famously said, “Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Let’s hope we’ve learned from our mistakes, because given the state of the world right now, we cannot afford to repeat them. 

About The Brownstone Institute

The Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization founded May 2021. Its vision is of a society that places the highest value on the voluntary interaction of individuals and groups while minimizing the use of violence and force including that which is exercised by public or private authorities. This vision is that of the Enlightenment which elevated learning, science, progress, and universal rights to the forefront of public life. It is constantly threatened by ideologies and systems that would take the world back to before the triumph of the ideal of freedom.

The motive force of Brownstone Institute was the global crisis created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. That trauma revealed a fundamental misunderstanding alive in all countries around the world today, a willingness on the part of the public and officials to relinquish freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of managing a public health crisis, which was not managed well in most countries. The consequences were devastating and will live in infamy.

About the Author

Pat Fidopiastis is a Professor of Microbiology at California Polytechnic State University.

In a case of odd bedfellows, environmental groups and Republican politicians are calling for a pause in offshore wind farm development following a string of whales washing up dead on New Jersey and New York beaches.  

Seven whales have turned up dead in little over a month. The latest victim, a 20- to 25-foot juvenile Humpback whale, turned up in Brigantine, New Jersey on Thursday afternoon, close to a Coast Guard station. 

“The wave of dead whales is the ocean sounding the alarm, and we must heed the warning,” said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Jersey-based Clean Ocean Action, after the sixth whale washed up in Atlantic City on Jan. 7 with signs of head trauma. “[The wind farm development] is too much, too fast. It’s outrageous and our ocean deserves better.” 

On Friday, Congressman Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) announced he would seek a federal investigation. “Ocean life is being put at risk as our governor and president force through their Green New Deal policies, without giving full consideration to their real-world impacts.

Drew sits on the House Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee. New Jersey Republican state Senator Vince Polistina called for a pause in the offshore construction:

“The work related to offshore wind projects is the primary difference in our waters, and it’s hard to believe that the death of (seven) whales on our beaches is just a coincidence.”

For others officials, though, it’s damn the whales, full speed ahead. Democratic New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, on Friday said that, while “this is tragic, obviously,” suspicions that tie the dead whales to the wind farm development were “unfounded and premature.” 

New Jersey has been on a quest to distinguish itself as the top offshore-wind state on the east coast. The Garden State has already approved three offshore wind farms and is soliciting more requests. 

Clean Ocean Action says the installation of offshore windmills usually involves exploration of the sea floor using low-frequency sounds in the same frequency that whales use, with the risk that they could become disoriented or otherwise harmed.  

Earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it was unaware of any humpback whale having previously been confirmed as a victim of offshore wind projects. Among other human perils, whales can fall victim to ship strikes…but could sonar disorientation increase that risk? 

The Marine Mammal Stranding Center said it can take months to figure out a beached whale’s cause of death. In the meantime, expect Governor Murphy to continue racing to bolster New Jersey’s green energy credentials.  

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A vaccine adviser to the Food and Drug Administration is questioning whether young, healthy people should get new COVID-19 boosters, arguing those shots should be used for older individuals.

“I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later,” wrote Dr. Paul A. Offit, an FDA vaccine panel adviser and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in New England Journal of Medicine on Jan. 11.

In his article, Offit cited two studies suggesting that bivalent boosters, which target the original COVID-19 strain and two Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA. 5, do not “elicit superior immune responses.”

“Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail?” he asked. “The most likely explanation is imprinting. The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5.”

Offit noted that based on those studies, “boosting with a bivalent vaccine is likely to have a similar effect as boosting with a monovalent vaccine” but stressed that “booster dosing is probably best reserved for the people most likely to need protection against severe disease.”

Another doctor appeared to agree with Offit’s conclusions regarding “imprinting.” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told U.S. News that “it may be that people’s immune systems are so primed to respond to the ancestral strain spike protein that a reformulated booster is unable to fully stimulate the immune system because it has been ‘imprinted’ by the original version of the virus.”

More Details

Data and studies have shown that older adults and people who have compromised immune systems are most at risk of developing severe COVID-19 symptoms, hospitalization, and death. Children, meanwhile, have long been shown to have the lowest chance of death, hospitalization, or developing severe symptoms since the pandemic started.

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and FDA said that everyone over the age of 6 months get updated boosters at least two months after their last doses of the vaccine. The bivalent boosters were authorized under emergency use for children aged 6 months to 4 years on Dec. 9.

Meanwhile, a small number of Americans have received the updated boosters, according to the CDC. As of Jan. 4, some 15 percent of individuals aged 5 and older received the bivalent shots, while about 38 percent of adults aged 65 and older have gotten them.

That same CDC data also shows that about 80.9 percent of all Americans received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine since they were rolled out two years ago, while 69 percent have completed their initial, “primary series.”

An FDA spokesperson Abigail Capobianco responded to Offit’s article this week, telling NBC News that Offit allegedly used “selective” data to reach his conclusions and that “we strongly believe that the totality of the available evidence continues to support the use of these vaccines in all age groups.”

Read more here…

Well, it looks like you can score one for all of the “conspiracy theorists” who have said they don’t like “smart” appliances in their home because they feel like they were being spied on.

And you can tell those writing off these concerns that intimate photos of some Roomba tester vacuums have magically turned up on Facebook after being ascertained by Venezuelan gig workers.

One woman even found photographs of herself on the toilet, taken by her robot vacuum. What a time to be alive!

Breitbart reported last week that gig workers had posted pictures online where they were discussing “work-related matters”. One photo was a woman sitting on a toilet seat with her shorts pulled down to her mid thighs – it was taken by her Roomba J7 series robot vacuum, the report says.

The photos were sent to iRobot by Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers to label AI data used to train artificial intelligence, the report says. Users had agreed to “participate in the data collection” as part of a testing. They signed consent forms but now say they feel “misled” about the true nature of the consent. 

Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Brietbart: “There is a real concern about whether the company is being deceptive if people are signing up for this sort of highly invasive type of surveillance and never fully understand… what they’re agreeing to.”

The MIT Technology Review conducted an investigation and determined it to be gig workers in Venezuela. There were also photos of a child and a woman using the restroom, the report says. iRobot has terminated its agreement with ScaleAI in response to the investigation.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot is caught red-handed in an email illegally seeking help from students to aid her reelection campaign in  return for class credits…

Looking for Enthusiastic Students 

Please consider Lightfoot Campaign Asks CPS Teachers to Encourage Students to Help Her Win Reelection in Return for Credit.

The email says participants in the “externship program” would be expected to contribute 12 hours per week to the Lightfoot campaign and students could earn “class credit.”

“We’re simply looking for enthusiastic, curious and hard-working young people eager to help Mayor Lightfoot win this spring,” according to an email obtained by WTTW News.

After WTTW News published details about the emails, generating a wave of criticism from other candidates in the race, Lightfoot’s campaign put out a second statement that said the campaign would “cease contact with CPS employees” out of an “abundance of caution.”

Less than two hours later, Lightfoot’s campaign issued a third version of the statement:

“All [Lightfoot for Chicago] campaign staff have been reminded about the solid wall that must exist between campaign and official activities and that contacts with any city of Chicago, or other sister agency employees, including CPS employees, even through publicly available sources is off limits. Period.”

As mayor of Chicago, Lightfoot appoints not only the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools but also the members of the Chicago Board of Education. Chicago’s ethics ordinance prohibits the use of public resources, including email accounts, for non-official purposes.

Common Practice

Two Questions For Lightfoot

• If it’s a common practice Mayor, can we please see some other examples?

• On the assumption that fraud, influence peddling, bribes and other corruption are indeed common in Chicago, what about your campaign pledge?

Why the Desperation?

In the opinion poll from Fox 32, Garcia won 28 percent; Vallas was at 19 percent; Lightfoot was at 15 percent and businessman/philanthropist Willie Wilson was at 13 percent. Other contenders were in single digits.

Hoot of the Day

Lightfoot ran for mayor in 2019 on a platform promising to root out corruption at City Hall and toughen the city’s ethics regulations in an attempt to break the grip of the city’s “corrupt political machine.”

Lightfoot should be locked up, but won’t be. Nonetheless, you can kiss her goodbye. It’s a 9-person race and she will not be one of the final two.

But don’t expect anything in Chicago to improve, because it won’t. I suspect many of the other candidates are even worse. One is from the teacher’s union, guaranteed to be no improvement.

*  *  *

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In a move that was entirely to be expected given that Brazil’s new far left leadership has been railing against massive pro-Bolsonaro, anti-Lula protesters as “terrorists” – Brazil’s Supreme Court on Friday ordered a formal investigation of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been living outside the country, in Orlando, Florida.

Though the Biden White House after days of speculation has repeatedly underscored it has yet received no extradition request for Bolsonaro, there have been growing calls among US progressive lawmakers to cancel his visa and boot him from the United States.

New left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his top officials have pointed the finger at the man popularly dubbed ‘Brazil’s Donald Trump’ for stoking election denial and fueling riots in the country, most notably last week’s storming of Brazil’s Congress building and other facilities.

Bolsonaro supporters, who have alleged widespread election fraud, have also held frequent protests outside military facilities, demanding that the armed forces intervene to overthrow a ‘false election’.

The Oct.30 election, which was the second round, saw Lula take 50.9% of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 49.1%. The closeness of the results sparked anger and unrest among pro-Bolsonaro crowds.

Estimates of those arrested for breaking into Brazilian Congress on Jan.8 range from 700 to over 1,300 – with authorities reportedly continuing to investigate those who trespassed on the federal property.

And now the ratcheting rhetoric and legal case being built against Bolsonaro could possibly result in his own arrest if he were to return home to Brazil, given that his minister of justice has just been arrested: 

Brazil’s former Minister of Justice and Public Security Anderson Torres, who was in charge of security in Brasilia during the invasion of government buildings last week, has been arrested on suspicion of “omission” and “connivance”.

Torres, who was former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s justice minister, was arrested after returning to Brazil on Saturday after a vacation in Florida, the same US state that Bolsonaro had travelled to after losing the election to current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

📸 | #Brazil‘s former Justice Minister Anderson Torres, who was in charge of public security in Brasilia during the invasion of government buildings a week ago, was arrested in Brasilia on Saturday on suspicion of “omission” and “connivance”. pic.twitter.com/jMqfBevluz

— EHA News (@eha_news) January 14, 2023

The new justice minister, Flavio Dino, had issued an ultimatum last week: Torres could either return of his own will or face formal extradition proceedings. Torres days later returned to Brazil to hand himself in, where he’s expected to fight the charges.

All of this is seen as part of the Lula government’s war to root out “Bolsonaristas” as they see the movement as a threat to Brazil’s democracy, and many are saying it has parallels to Jan.6 in the US.

Via SchiffGold.com,

Rising consumer debts colliding with rising interest rates is a ticking time bomb.

Over the last several months, consumer debt has climbed at a steep, steady pace as Americans struggle with rising prices. November was no different, with consumers piling on another $27.9 billion in debt.

With the 7.1% increase in consumer debt in November, Americans now owe a record $4.76 trillion, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve.

This is a big problem for the Fed as it tries to battle rising prices with interest rate hikes. The inflation that the central bank created is forcing people to go deeper into debt. Meanwhile, the inflation fight is making debt more and more expensive.

The Federal Reserve consumer debt figures include credit card debt, student loans, and auto loans, but do not factor in mortgage debt. When you include mortgages, US consumers are buried under more than $16.5 trillion in debt.

Americans are running up credit card balances at a dizzying pace. In November, revolving credit increased by $16.4 billion. With that 16.9% increase, Americans now owe nearly $1.19 trillion in revolving debt.

To put the increase into perspective, the annual increase in 2019, prior to the pandemic, was 3.6%. It’s pretty clear that with stimulus money long gone, Americans have turned to plastic in order to make ends meet as prices continue to skyrocket.

The rapidly growing levels of credit card debt should raise eyebrows, but as ZeroHedge pointed out in a tweet, the real problem is the double whammy of rising debt and interest rates.

It’s not the record credit card debt that’s the risk: everyone knows about that. It’s the record credit card debt – and – the record interest rate on that debt that is the real time bomb. pic.twitter.com/K6rwXYMStT

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 9, 2023

Average credit card interest rates have eclipsed the record high of 17.87%. The average annual percentage rates (APR) currently stand at 19.59%.

NBC News reveals just how much rising interest rates are costing indebted consumers.

Bankrate data shows it would take 16 years for someone to pay off the current average credit card balance of $5,474 by making the minimum payments at 19.2%. At that point, they would have shelled out $7,365 in interest alone.”

As economist Daniel Lacalle put it, rising interest rates are on a collision course with a wall of debt.

Non-revolving credit, including auto loans and student loans, rose by $11.5 billion, a 5.9% annual increase. That was slightly below October’s increase. Total non-revolving credit now stands at $3.57 trillion.

The mainstream continues to spin rising indebtedness as a sign of a healthy economy. MarketWatch proclaimed, “While some households are borrowing more to withstand inflationary pressures, economists see the growth as mainly a sign of strength in the economy.”

But running up credit card balances month after month is not a sign of a healthy economy. In fact, it reveals the dysfunction in an economy that is addicted to artificially low interest rates and money printing.

The bottom line is that Americans continue to borrow at an excessive rate because they don’t have any other way to make ends meet. People don’t run up their Visa balance month after month to buy groceries when they are in “very strong” financial shape.

The stimulus checks are long gone. Savings are being depleted. The average person has no choice but to pull out the plastic. Of course, this is not a sustainable trajectory. A credit card has this inconvenient thing called a limit.

Another day, another report of President Biden having classified documents scattered all over the place – as opposed to a safe at Mar-a-Lago.

And of course as vice president when he took them, he had no authority to declassify – unlike a president.

In the latest ‘document-gate’ development, the New York Times reports that ‘additional pages of classified information’ were found at President Biden’s Delaware home on Thursday, hours after a White House statement acknowledging that a classified document was found in a storage area ‘adjacent to the garage’ of his Wilmington home, which Biden’s aides reportedly discovered the night before.

The news comes after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel this week to investigate Biden’s handling of classified materials.

The Biden camp has pushed back against accusations that their failure to disclose the document find the day before the 2022 midterms amounts to election interference.

They also defended their decision not to be fully forthcoming about the matter. The White House has been criticized over its public disclosures, including why it did not reveal the discoveries much earlier, and why, when it acknowledged on Monday that some classified files had been found at Mr. Biden’s office on Nov. 2, it had not indicated that more had been found at his house the next month.

Mr. Biden’s lead personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Biden’s legal team had tried to balance being transparent with “the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.” -NYT

According to Biden’s lead lawyer, DOJ investigators needed ‘time’ to complete their inquiry, and revealing certain details publicly before more information emerged could cause earlier statements to be “incomplete.”

“That’s your version of events,” said White House spox Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday when asked if the White House did not disclose the original findings until they were reported by CBS News earlier this week. “Look, I want to very clear: There’s a process here, we are going to respect that process,” she added.

What a load of horseshit.

BREAKING: Peter Doocy (@pdoocy) of @FoxNews confronts @JoeBiden over classified documents. “What were you thinking?” WATCH. pic.twitter.com/NpU7SQH20I

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) January 12, 2023

“The timing of the revelation of the document discovery is indeed curious,” said former Rep. Chris Carney (D-PA), a longtime Biden ally and former intelligence officer, per The Hill. “President Biden must be accountable and accept responsibility for this awkward episode. The most important thing here is not preventing political embarrassment, it’s protecting our nation’s security.”

“Look, this happened Nov. 2nd. Joe Biden said he would be the most transparent president in American history. Why are we just now learning this? CBS did a great job uncovering this or we would never know,” said Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) in a CBS interview earlier this week.

How many in Beijing is the question

— Andy Swan (@AndySwan) January 14, 2023

Amid its ongoing protest crackdown following months of ‘anti-hijab’ demonstrations which have resulted in hundreds of deaths, Iran has just executed a former high level official after he was convicted of spying for a foreign enemy nation.

The Islamic Republic’s former deputy defense minister Alireza Akbari was killed by hanging on Saturday, state media and the judiciary confirmed. He had been accused of spying for the United Kingdom for a period spanning years.

Akbari’s arrest had only been revealed in recent weeks, even though he was reportedly detained all the way back in 2019, and his execution marks the first high profile, former top ranking government official (the country’s #2 defense chief) to be put to death in decades. He had also been an IRGC commander at one point.

What’s more is that he was a dual British citizen, which apparently brought him under suspicion of Tehran’s intelligence services. According to The New York Times: 

Iran’s intelligence ministry called Mr. Akbari a “super spy” for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, and accused him of passing classified national security information to the agency and receiving a payment of over 2 million euros (about $2.2 million). Iran’s state news media and his family said he had been arrested and detained for four months in 2008 on suspicion of spying for Britain, and later released on bail. He then traveled to Austria, Spain and finally Britain.

The statement from the judiciary said that Mr. Akbari had spied for Britain from 2004 to 2009, as well as when he “fled the country” and moved to Britain. It said he had been recruited by British diplomats in Tehran under the guise of trade partnerships.

Iran is saying he confessed to spying, while his family maintains that the confession was given under extreme duress.

His obtaining British citizenship and a passport after reportedly completing business deals in the UK brought him under immediate Iranian government suspicion. Tehran says the UK passport was a reward for his spying services. 

Worth noting it is extremely rare for #Iran‘s regime to acknowledge that it executed someone of Alireza Akbari’s rank as a deputy MODAFL minister. Though it is not unprecedented. Former Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh was executed in 1982. 1/2https://t.co/hYsScrBIIK pic.twitter.com/0GhhJVhbW4

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) January 14, 2023

Condemnation of the Akbari was quick to come in from world leaders. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was “appalled” by the killing of the British-Iranian citizen. “This was a callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime with no respect for the human rights of their own people,” Sunak said. “My thoughts are with Alireza’s friends and family.” The UK foreign ministry also called it a “barbaric act”. 

French President Emmanuel Macron of France also denounced the “despicable and barbaric” act, writing on Twitter that “His name adds to too long a list of victims of repression and the death penalty in Iran.” Macron added: “Solidarity with the UK. Solidarity with the Iranian people.”

Iran has also faced international scrutiny and condemnation for a series of protest-related executions, which stands at at least four known instances of people killed for alleged crimes related to the demonstrations. Dozens more are on death row.