Authored by M.B.Mathews via AmericanThinker.com,

By now, everyone, including its proponents, knows that DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) means nothing of the sort. 

It isn’t diverse, it isn’t equitable, and it certainly isn’t inclusive.

In fact, DEI is nothing but exclusionary revenge against non-racists by racists, and all to address nonexistent “systemic racism” and long-defunct slavery. There is no slavery in America except that slavery of Democrats to the party of their own destruction.

Today, DEI stands for Degradation, Exclusion, and Intolerance.

It has shown itself to be:

• DEGRADING:  The pool of employees, officials, and hirees across the employable fruited plain has been degraded. Talent and skill and competence have taken a back seat to skin color. Merit is no longer the criterion by which the best are chosen. Color is the only thing that matters to DEI proponents. As a result, incompetence soars when you select for elevation not the best but the mediocre or worse, the untalented.

• EXCLUSION: Meritorius Whites, Asians, Jews, and Christians are routinely excluded from the pool of hirees in many companies. Siphoning off those whose ethnic groups have historically scored higher than others guarantees that the only ones left are the less equipped, the less talented, and the less competent. That is what we see today; a working pool of the mediocre.

• INTOLERANCE:  DEI proponents do not even consider hiring nonminorities. They tolerate no exceptions. As a result, those hired comprise those chosen only for their ethnic background and not for their competence, talent, and exceptionalism. When you skim off the cream and discard it, you are left with an insipid pool of mediocrity. When you eliminate the best, you get the worst.

DEI, while in full vogue in much of corporate America and in the university system, is a toxin in the bloodstream of American excellence, favoring color over competence.

We are left with the kind of mushy mediocrity that contributes to decisions like open borders, a thoroughly corrupt judicial system and universities that graduate those who cannot read, think, or strategize.

DEI is poison in our cultural bloodstream. “Diversity is our strength” is a damnable lie. It is not our strength. It is our weakness.

Merit is our strength because merit allows talent to rise while the sludgy sediment of mediocrity sinks to the bottom.

We are in a world of trouble unless cooler and wiser heads dump DEI and make achievement great again.

America cannot survive an insipid, often hostile work force, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering, piloting, mathematics, computer science, and education.

Our entire system needs to be jettisoned in favor of merit-based hiring once again.

If we do not raise the bar, we will find ourselves strangled under it.

Authored by Melanie Sun via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It’s been a busy period for arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in California in the leadup to Christmas.

Last week, ICE’s Los Angeles Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) team arrested 26 illegal immigrants who are sex offenders in a two-day operation.

The operation targeted removing illegal immigrants who were known to law enforcement and had criminal convictions relating to sexual offences, posing “a serious threat to public safety,” ICE said in a press release.

“The outcome of this operation exemplifies the professionalism, dedication and commitment of ERO Los Angeles officers to public safety,” ERO Los Angeles Field Office Director Thomas Giles said. “Removing these individuals and the threats they represent from our communities is our mission, and we will continue to safely and effectively enforce the immigration laws of our nation.”

The ERO is the primary federal body charged with oversight of domestic immigration enforcement.

ICE said that among those arrested were a 19-year-old from El Salvador, a 40-year-old from Mexico, and a 35-year-old from Guatemala. All have been convicted by the Superior Court of California of felonies related to child sexual abuse.

The department said that the removals were done in accordance with Biden administration policy guidelines issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sept. 30 last year, which have been in effect since June 28.

According to the office, the ERO’s mission is to “protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of those who undermine the safety of U.S. communities and the integrity of U.S. immigration laws, and its primary areas of focus are interior enforcement operations, management of the agency’s detained and non-detained populations, and repatriation of noncitizens who have received final orders of removal.

The ERO across fiscal year 2022 made 46,396 arrests of illegal immigrants with criminal histories.

These individuals collectively committed 198,498 criminal acts while in the United States, including 21,531 assault offenses, 8,164 sex and sexual assault offenses, 5,554 weapons offenses, 1,501 homicide-related offenses, and 1,114 kidnapping offenses.

The figures for 2023 have yet to be released, amid a record illegal immigration surge at the border.

Seen anything suspicious? You can make a report by calling 866-347-2423 or submitting on online tip.

With yields tumbling for reasons not exactly known all morning, and pushing the 10Y from 3.90% to 3.82% ahead of today’s final for 2023 5Y auction, moments ago the Treasury announced the results of today’s $58BN 5Y auction, which contrary to expectations for a tail (due to the zero concession), stopped through mightily pricing at a yield of 3.801%, which was not 61bps below November’s 4.425% and a whopping 107bps below the October auction (which priced at 4.880%), but also stopped through the When Issued 3.815% by a whopping 1.4bps, tied for the biggest stop through since May (the January 2023 was “tailier” at 2.4bps).

The bid to cover rose to 2.50 from 2.46 (and well above the 2.36 in October), tied with the 6-auction average also at 2.50.

The internals were even more solid, with Indirects taking down 70.6%, the highest allocation to foreign buyers since September’s 71.2%. And with Directs awarded 15.4%, or the lowest since Dec 2021, Dealers were left holding 14.0%, the lowest since Sept.

The auction results sent 10Y yields sharply lower, sliding below 3.80%, and well below where the 10Y paper started the year…

… and with yields tumbling, stocks didn’t think twice about what this means for the future (surely not a recession but merely a soft landing) and spoos surged to fresh 2023 highs and now just a hair away from new all tim ehighs.

The good news for bond buyers – who clearly can’t get enough of the same bonds that everyone shunned just two months ago – is that there is be an avalanche of supply on deck, and while nobody is paying attention today, in a few days the biggest topic of discussion will be that US debt has jumped above $34 trillion in just a few months…. and is on pace to hit $40 trillion within a few years, if not less.

Apple was (temporarily) victorious on Wednesday in its bid to reverse a ruling that had barred the US import of certain smartwatches, a ban initially in place from Tuesday after the US International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled earlier the tech giant infringed on blood oxygen-sensing technology patents owned by the medical technology firm Masimo. 

On Tuesday, Apple filed a request to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, based in Washington, DC, to pause ITC’s import ban and sale of Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2.

By late Wednesday morning, Reuters reported the appeals court temporarily halted ITC’s order. 

Masimo has claimed in past legal filings that Apple illegally copied its pulse oximetry technology and poached employees to expand its smartwatch division. 

It should be noted that ITC, which guides the White House and Congress on issues like intellectual property disputes, is overseen by the president.

Apple has been contesting the ITC’s decision and urged the Biden administration to overturn it. 

Masimo shares were down 3% on the Reuters report. 

The pause allows Apple to continue selling Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 until Customs and Border Protection reviews redesigned versions of its watches, which do not include Masimo technology.

The review is expected to be completed on Jan. 12. 

In a case which could have significant implications for AI, the New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI – the makers of ChatGPT, and Microsoft, for alleged copyright infringement.

The lawsuit claims that the companies violated copyright laws by using Times’ content to train their AI models, including ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.

“Times journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year,” reads the complaint. “Defendants have effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars that The Times invested in creating that work by taking it without permission or compensation.”

The Times, which has asked for a jury trial in the Southern District of New York, argues that the AI tools divert traffic from its platforms, which impacts advertising, licensing and subscription revenues. The outlet seeks damages and an injunction against the use of their content by these tech companies – arguing that a ‘significant investment in journalism’ has been undermined, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The lawsuit has potentially huge implications over ‘fair use’ of copyrighted materials, a complex legal doctrine governing factors such as the purpose of use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use on the potential market for the copyrighted work.

The legal landscape surrounding generative-AI is unsettled, with the technology still in its early days. There are other lawsuits that could test the rights of AI companies to “scrape” content from the web to train AI tools, including one by several prominent book authors against OpenAI. In February, Getty Images sued the AI art company Stability AI in Delaware, alleging that it had infringed on Getty’s copyrights. Stability AI at the time said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation. –WSJ

The Times says that the AI tools developed by Microsoft and OpenAI have significantly increased their valuations due to the data ‘scraped’ for training.

According to the Journal, the US Copyright Office says it’s launched an initiative to study the issue, including “the use of copyrighted materials in AI training,” and said in August that it issued a notice to seek comment on the issue as part of a process to determine whether legislative or regulatory steps are in order.

Some publishers, meanwhile, such as the Associated Press and Axel Springer, have inked deals to license their content to OpenAI.

Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI in exchange for roughly a 49% stake in the earnings of its for-profit arm. According to the Times’ lawsuit, the tools that were trained in part on their content have resulted in massive increases in their valuations. “Using the valuable intellectual property of others in these ways without paying for it has been extremely lucrative for Defendants.”

Guess training your AI on woke, litigious (and fake news) media content wasn’t the best idea, Sam…

THE TIMES SUES OPENAI AND MICROSOFT OVER A.I.’S USE OF COPYRIGHTED WORK – NYT

Oh no, however will ChatNPC become more woke now?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 27, 2023

After a remarkable recovery from the depths of the FTX collapse crisis, with Solana soaring above $100 over the weekend for the first time since April 2022 (to $125 at its highs), supported by increased network activity and meme coin re-engagement…

Source: Bloomberg

…the fourth largest cryptocurrency has stalled since, and it appears that has prompted a rotation into Ethereum…

Source: Bloomberg

Who could have seen that coming?

When that turns reverse parabolic, guess where the fund flows will go

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 24, 2023

The ETH/SOL pair reversed at a very interesting level…

Source: Bloomberg

Ethereum is up near its $2403 highs from early December – the highest since the crypto crisis declines in 2022…

Source: Bloomberg

The rally in Ethereum has dramatically outpaced Bitcoin, taking ETH/BTC back up to 0.055 – a recent key resistance level…

Source: Bloomberg

Will it break through this time?

As CoinTelegraph’s Marcel Pechman writes, this time, investors are gaining confidence in surpassing this level, venturing into territory not seen since May 2022, before the collapse of the Terra ecosystem.

While the spotlight is on the exchange-traded fund (ETF) narrative as the primary driver of recent cryptocurrency gains, there are several reasons supporting Ether’s price surge that could potentially push it above $2,500 before the expected ETF approval in mid-January, although the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might take until March.

Ethereum network DApp volumes and protocol fees

Rather than attempting to predict the future, which is a challenging task in the fast-paced cryptocurrency industry, it’s more prudent to analyze recent trends influencing the demand for Ether using decentralized applications (DApps) activity as an indicator. One can start by examining DApp volumes, as some sectors do not require a large total value locked (TVL), such as nonfungible token marketplaces, games, layer-2 bridges and social networks.

7-day DApp volumes per blockchain in U.S. dollars. Source: DappRadar

Ethereum DApp volumes reached $27.8 billion in the last seven days, marking a 14.2% increase on the previous week. This growth was driven by a 21% gain in Uniswap and a 52% gain in Balancer volumes. In contrast, BNB Chain’s volumes for the same period stood at $4.5 billion, while Arbitrum amassed another $5 billion. Most notably, Ethereum was the only blockchain among the top six to experience a volume increase in the past seven days.

To provide some perspective, Solana would need to increase by 12 times to reach half of Ethereum DApps’ current transaction volume. In general, 20% of users account for 80% of the volume, which holds for DApps.

Given Ethereum’s first-mover advantage and substantial treasury for ecosystem development support, the odds do not favor a flipping in the short to medium term.

Furthermore, no other blockchain can match Ethereum’s protocol, which generated $95.4 million in fees in the last seven days, excluding Bitcoin, which is not a direct competitor in the DApp ecosystem.

Aside from incentivizing network security, this data indicates significant potential for increased activity following future updates, including ’DenCun’ scheduled for January, which aims to enhance processing capacity and reduce costs.

Ethereum spot ETF approval is not priced in according to derivatives markets

The eventual approval of the Ether spot ETF will set Ether apart from other cryptocurrencies in terms of regulation.

Competitors have only been nominally mentioned by regulators in recent court cases against exchanges, which face charges for offering securities brokerage and services without proper registration.

Finally, investors should assess the positioning of Ether derivatives traders, especially large investors and market makers. The Ether futures premium, measuring the difference between two-month contracts and the spot price, has reached its highest level in over a year. In a healthy market, the annualized premium, or basis rate, typically falls within the 5% to 10% range.

Ether two-month futures premium vs. spot markets. Source: Laevitas.ch

The current 13.5% Ether futures annualized premium suggests that traders are not taking the spot Ether ETF approval for granted.

During widespread excitement, this indicator tends to exceed 20%, driven by increased demand for leveraged long positions, causing price distortions relative to the spot market.

This data implies the potential for a positive price impact in case of approval, whether in January or March.

Based on Ethereum’s network activity, Ether investors should not yield to the pressure from contenders gaining momentum, at least not until these contenders pose a genuine threat in terms of volumes and deposits.

Furthermore, the ETH derivatives indicator provides clear guidance that professional traders are bullish despite Ether’s price nearing its highest level since May 2022.

This suggests that investors are confident in Ether’s ability to break above $2,500.

Finally, according to data from the market intelligence platform IntoTheBlock, the total amount of supply owned by the ETH long-term holders has reached a new all-time high.

As Bitcoinist reports, it would appear that despite these holders carrying some very substantial profits by now thanks to this year’s rally, they are still not interested in selling, as the HODLer ratio has only gone up for both Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Donald Trump Jr. has expressed strong opposition to the prospect of Nikki Haley being tapped as his father’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election, pledging to go to “great lengths” to prevent it.

The markets just shit the bed…

Gold and Swissy are soaring (ultimate safe-havens) along with USTs as the dollar dives.

This looks like some massive capital re-allocation trade away from USDollar and Magnificent 7 Stocks and into safe-havens.

Swissy spiked above the July highs to its strongest against the USD since the Jan 2015 SNB ‘revaluation’…

As a reminder, UBS tradiung desk notes that G10 FX is trading with roughly 70% of standard liquidity – up to about $200 mn but then depth starts to dry up quickly

2Y yields gapped down almost 8bps!!!

The whole of the bond curve (yields) is also falling

Gold (spot) pries jumped to $2080…

The dollar is dumping…

…to its lowest since July…

For now, stocks haven’t noticed broadly BUT MAG7 names were dumped at the same time as the bid for safe-havens hit…

Someone knows (or is worried) about something big!

This market freakout is probably the Bridgewater consultants finally allowed to trade with Ray and the C-Suite out and breaking everything.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 27, 2023

Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

• Iran, has been looking to catalyse an expansion of the direct conflict between Israel and Hamas into a wider war between Islam and the Jewish state of Israel.

• EU source: the Iranian-backed Houthis are not acting against vessels in and around the Red Sea without Beijing’s tacit approval.

• If China did take its foot off the brake with Iran, then the chances of an embargo on oil exports first to Israel and then to its allies would dramatically increase.

The rise in the benchmark Brent oil price from just over US$72 per barrel (pb) to above US$80pb in a week highlights that the risk premium attached to the Israel-Hamas war is still very much in play in the global oil markets. Although other factors played a part in the oil price rise, a significant part of the increase was due to the rising danger posed to tankers moving oil from the Middle East to Europe via the Red Sea. This has long been the shortest and generally cheapest method to move oil via ships from east to west. However, several vessels – supposedly linked in some way to Israel, but some are not at all connected – have been seized by Yemen’s Houthi militants. The group remains overtly backed by Iran and covertly backed by Iran’s own sponsors, most notably in this instance Russia, but also China. Given the crucial importance of this transit route and the area surrounding to the global oil markets, things may become a lot worse very fast.

In many ways, the problem for ships of countries seen as aligned to the U.S. travelling through the Red Sea begins before the Red Sea is reached – in fact, somewhere east of the Oman coast of the Arabian Sea, which then flows into the Gulf of Aden, on the south coast of Yemen. It is at this juncture that ships must pass through the crucial chokepoint of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. This 16-mile-width waterway flows between the west coast of Yemen on the one side, and the east coasts initially of Djibouti and then of Eritrea on the other, before it joins the Red Sea. As it stands, never has the literal translation of the chokepoint’s name from Arabic – ‘The Gate of Grief’ – been more apposite than it is now. From the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War that effectively began on 7 October, the Middle East’s leading Shia Islamic power, Iran, has been looking to catalyse an expansion of the direct conflict between those two protagonists into a wider war between Islam and the Jewish state of Israel, which it thinks could draw the U.S. and its allies into another no-win war in the region. Tehran’s attempts to mobilise Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants – a much bigger force than Hamas, which Iran also supports with money, weapons, and training – into a simultaneous full-scale war against Israel have so far been unsuccessful, due in large part to the extraordinarily accomplished diplomacy of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his team. Similarly unsuccessful – and for the same reason – has been Iran’s call for an embargo on the exports of oil by Islamic states to Israel.

One of the elements that has proved particularly effective in the efforts of Blinken and his team has been China’s avoidance – so far – of doing anything to encourage a broader escalation of military hostilities by Iran and its Middle East allies against Israel and its allies. Beijing maintains a very high degree of influence over Iran through the all-encompassing ‘Iran-China 25-Year Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement’, as first revealed anywhere in the world in my 3 September 2019 article on the subject and analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order. China’s reluctance to fan the flames of conflict in Israel or the Middle East as a whole is mainly due to its own precarious economic position, which would be made even worse if oil prices suddenly spiked much higher and/or the U.S. went back into full-scale Trade War mode with it. Although it can buy oil and gas at 30 percent or more discounts from its key Middle Eastern suppliers through various deals agreed in the past few years, the economies of the West remain its key export bloc, with the U.S. still accounting for over 16 percent of China’s export revenues on its own. According to a senior source in the European Union’s (E.U.) energy security complex spoken to exclusively by OilPrice.com recently, the economic damage to China – directly through its own energy imports and indirectly through damage to the economies of its key export markets in the West – would dangerously increase if the Brent oil price remained over US$90-95 pb for more than one quarter of a year. Beijing’s lack of appetite for an outright superpower showdown in the Middle East right now was signaled clearly by the recent visit to the U.S. of its President, Xi Jinping – his first in six years.

This said, according to the E.U. source, the Iranian-backed Houthis are not acting against vessels in and around the Red Sea without Beijing’s tacit approval. In brokering the stunning 10 March relationship resumption agreement between the Middle East’s major Sunni power, Saudi Arabia, and Shia counterpart, Iran, as also analysed in depth in my new book, China cemented the control it had over the key oil transit routes in the region. The previous 25-year deal with Iran gave Beijing influence over the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 30 percent of the world’s oil travels. The same deal also gave China a hold over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (controlled on the Yemen side by the Iran-backed Houthis), and on the other side by Djibouti and Eritrea (both of which owe money to Beijing as part of ‘Belt and Road Initiative’-related loans made to them). It should not be forgotten that prior to the seizure of the Galaxy Leader cargo ship on 19 November – supposedly for being ‘Israeli-owned’ – Iranian forces also took two other oil tankers in a week at the beginning of May around the Strait of Hormuz. Neither of them were anything to do with Israel. Instead, said the E.U. source at the time, Iran seized them to demonstrate that it still had control over that transit route and, perhaps even more importantly, it was done with the full blessing of Beijing. “Although Xi [Jinping] doesn’t want a full-blown confrontation with the U.S. at the moment, he does want China to stay relevant to what’s going on there [in the events adjunct to the Israel-Hamas War] and having a role in this Red Sea problem achieves that,” he added last week.

The danger here for oil markets, of course, is if China changes its broadly cooperative posture towards Western interests as the Israel-Hamas War rages on. Such a change could come if Beijing felt that the U.S. an its allies were trying to push China back out of the geopolitical gains it has made in the Middle East in the past five years, as also analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order. A spark for this might come from any notable expansion or extension in ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’ – a new multinational security initiative announced last week by the World Shipping Council. This came shortly after the U.S. Department of Defense stated that the initiative was being launched under the umbrella of the Combined Maritime Forces and the leadership of its Task Force 153. The Force so far comprises only countries allied to the U.S., including the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles, and Spain.

If China did take its foot off the brake with Iran, then the chances of an embargo on oil exports first to Israel and then to its allies would dramatically increase, bringing with it the prospect of a re-run of the events of the 1973 Oil Crisis, as examined in detail in my new book. This saw oil prices spike around 267 percent, from about US$3 per barrel (pb) to over US$11 pb, and stoked the fire of a global economic slowdown, especially felt in the net oil importing countries of the West. A broader oil embargo of the sort that Iran still wants would have similarly disastrous effects, if not worse. According to a recent assessment by the World Bank, a loss in global crude oil supply of 6-8 million bpd – which it refers to as a “large disruption” scenario comparable to the 1973 Oil Crisis – would result in a 56-75 percent increase in prices to between $140 and $157 a barrel. However, a broadening out of the embargo on Israel by the Islamic members of OPEC, as called for by Iran, would likely lead to a much bigger loss of global oil supplies than the World Bank has calculated.

The Islamic members of OPEC are Algeria, with an average crude oil production rate of around 1 million barrels (bpd), Iran (3.4 million bpd), Iraq (4.1 million bpd), Kuwait (2.5 million bpd), Libya (1.2 million bpd), Saudi Arabia (9 million bp), and the UAE (2.9 million bpd). This totals just over 24 million bpd – or about 30 percent – of the current average total global production of about 80 million bpd. 

Despite resilience in US data, 30Y Yields have plunged back below the 4.00% Maginot Line this morning…

Source: Bloomberg

The last few weeks have seen US macro data reverse its recent trend of disappointment…

Source: Bloomberg

The long-end of the curve is outperforming…

Source: Bloomberg

But, ‘do not fight The Fed’ seems to be the narrative and expectations for a March rate-cut are rising once again…

Source: Bloomberg

And the market is pricing in over 160bps of cuts for next year…

Source: Bloomberg

Financial Conditions are now at the same level of looseness as of May 2022…

Source: Bloomberg

That is 300bps of Fed rate-hikes ago!!! Is that really what The Fed wanted?