Through the Russia/Ukraine crisis the UK government has been among the most bellicose in urging Ukraine to fight Russia to the last man. UK politicians openly talk about being “at war” with Russia.

But on Wednesday Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, UK Chief of the Defence Staff broke the bad news to tough-talking UK: They have no tanks! They have no army! It was all just bluster! Also today, CNN puzzled by anyone opposing government censorship. Watch today’s Liberty Report:

The top UK defense chief indeed painted a very bleak picture regarding Britain’s war readiness in testimony in the House of Commons this week.

“A Defence Committee meeting in the House of Commons yesterday afternoon heard the UK has just 40 tanks and roughly a dozen frigates and destroyers ready for war,” one report on his words underscored. “With the Russian-Ukrainian conflict continuing, military figures are urging for larger stockpiles.”

The top admiral confirmed that Britain is ‘investing like crazy’ in armored vehicles – but these won’t be available till the end of the decade. Below is a summary of Adm. Radakin’s words and key statements via The Daily Mail: 

On paper, the UK has around 200. But of these, only 40 are ready to go to war, it emerged yesterday.

Sir Tony responded that Britain was ‘investing like crazy’ in armoured vehicles which will be available by the end of this decade.

He also told MPs: ‘We were at 19 frigates and destroyers, which we subsequently reduced that to 17 because some of those ships were very expensive. 

‘You’ve then got some in maintenance and refit so it is probably 11 or 12 which are available to go out on operations.’

Sir Tony added: ‘It is true across the Armed Forces, we need to have deeper stockpiles. So I wouldn’t say I was happy.’ 

Fight Russia? Britain has just 40 tanks and around a dozen frigates and destroyers ready to go war – the lowest figures in modern times https://t.co/7uscgIkzAC

— KulganofCrydee (@KulganofCrydee) July 5, 2023

Ironically it has been the UK which has been the most outspoken among the Western allies regarding supplying Ukraine not only with tanks, but most recently warplanes as well. The United Kingdom was the first to send tanks and other heavy weaponry into the conflict.

So far Britain has given Kiev at least 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks, and likely this won’t be the end of it — the UK military’s warnings to politicians of severe shortages in defense equipment notwithstanding.

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been charged by Swedish prosecutors after refusing to comply with requests from law enforcement officials during a protest in the southern city of Malmo last month.

The 20-year-old Swedish native was charged with disobeying a police order to leave the climate demonstration on June 19, during which she and other activists stopped traffic in the oil terminal of the port in Malmo, local newspaper Sydsvenskan reported.

One other climate activist is also being prosecuted over the incident, according to the report.

At the time of the protest, which was organized by Swedish climate group Ta Tillbaka Framtiden, which translates to “Reclaiming the Future,” Ms. Thunberg had taken to Instagram to share images of herself and other demonstrators holding long banners as they sat in the middle of the street.

“Today, for the third day in a row, young activists from @tatillbakaframtiden have blocked oil tankers in the Malmö oil harbour,” she wrote at the time.

“The climate crisis is already a matter of life and death for countless people. We choose to not be bystanders, and instead, physically stop the fossil fuel infrastructure. We are reclaiming the future.”

Police on the scene said that around 30 truckers were blocked from entering the port owing to the protests, according to the Huff Post. At least one activist claimed on top of a truck to prevent it from moving forward, police said.

While all of the activists were told to move from the scene, four, including Ms. Thunberg, did not obey police orders and were eventually dragged from the protests, according to the publication.

Initially, Swedish prosecutors did not specifically name Ms. Thunberg in announcing that a young woman was charged with disobedience, instead stating simply that the individual had “refused to comply with police orders to leave the scene” during the protest.

However, Swedish Prosecution Authority spokeswoman Annika Collin later confirmed the young woman was, in fact, Ms. Thunberg.

Possible Prison Time

According to Sydsvenskan, Ms. Thunberg will go on trial at the end of July.

If convicted, the climate activists could receive a prison sentence of up to six months or a fine.

“You have the freedom to demonstrate, but you must not demonstrate in such a way that it causes disturbances for others,” prosecutor Charlotte Ottosen said, according to Sydsvenskan.

Ms. Thunberg has become the face of the global climate change movement since rising to fame at the age of 15 for protesting outside of Sweden’s Parliament in Stockholm.

She has been detained by police on multiple occasions in the past, including at a coal mine protest in Germany in January this year and a wind farm protest in Oslo in February.

Despite her multiple arrests, Ms. Thunberg has garnered widespread support among celebrities and political figures, and most recently visited Ukraine where she met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss the ecological damage as a result of the ongoing Russian invasion and the recent damage to the dam of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant on the Dnipro River in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine.

Responding to the charges against the climate activist on Wednesday, Reclaiming the Future told Agence France-Presse, “After blocking the activities that are burning our future, we are now being charged with criminal offenses.”

“While charges are being brought against us, the real crime is going on inside the doors we have blocked,” the group added.

The Epoch Times has contacted a spokesperson for Ms. Thunberg for comment.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

– Harry S. Truman

How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)?

Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself – rather than having some court or politician translate them for you – and you will be under no illusion about where to draw the line when it comes to speaking your mind, criticizing your government, defending what is yours, doing whatever you want on your own property, and keeping the government’s nose out of your private affairs.

In an age of overcriminalization, where the average citizen unknowingly commits three crimes a day, and even the most mundane activities such as fishing and gardening are regulated, government officials are constantly telling Americans what not to do.

Yet it was not always this way.

It used to be “we the people” giving the orders, telling the government what it could and could not do. Indeed, the three words used most frequently throughout the Bill of Rights in regards to the government are “no,” “not” and “nor.”

Compare the following list of “don’ts” the government is prohibited from doing with the growing list of abuses to which “we the people” are subjected on a daily basis, and you will find that we have reached a state of crisis wherein the government is routinely breaking the law and violating its contractual obligations. 

For instance, the government is NOT allowed to restrict free speech, press, assembly or the citizenry’s ability to protest and correct government wrongdoing. Nevertheless, the government continues to prosecute whistleblowers, persecute journalists, criminalize expressive activities, crack down on large gatherings of citizens mobilizing to voice their discontent with government policies, and insulate itself and its agents from any charges of wrongdoing (or what the courts refer to as “qualified immunity”).

The government may NOT infringe on a citizen’s right to defend himself. Nevertheless, in many states, it’s against the law to carry a concealed weapon (gun, knife or even pepper spray), and the average citizen is permitted little self-defense against militarized police officers who shoot first and ask questions later.

The government may NOT enter or occupy a citizen’s house without his consent (the quartering of soldiers). Nevertheless, government soldiers (i.e., militarized police) carry out more than 80,000 no-knock raids on private homes every year, while maiming children, killing dogs and shooting citizens.

The government may NOT carry out unreasonable searches and seizures on the citizenry or their possessions, NOR can government officials issue warrants without some evidence of wrongdoing (probable cause). Unfortunately, what is unreasonable to the average American is completely reasonable to a government agent, for whom the ends justify the means. In such a climate, we have no protection against roadside strip searches, blood draws, DNA collection, SWAT team raids, surveillance or any other privacy-stripping indignity to which the government chooses to subject us.

The government is NOT to deprive anyone of life, liberty or property without due process. Nevertheless, the government continues to incarcerate tens of thousands of Americans whose greatest crime is being poor and not white. The same goes for those who are put to death, some erroneously, by a system weighted in favor of class and wealth.

The government may NOT take private property for public use without just compensation. Nevertheless, under the guise of the “greater public interest,” the government often hides behind eminent domain laws in order to allow megacorporations to tear down homes occupied by less prosperous citizens in order to build high-priced resorts and shopping malls.

Government agents may NOT force a citizen to testify against himself. Yet what is the government’s extensive surveillance network that spies on all of our communications but a thinly veiled attempt at using our own words against us?

The government is NOT permitted to claim any powers that are not expressly granted to them by the Constitution. This prohibition has become downright laughable as the government continues to claim for itself every authority that serves to swell its coffers, cement its dominion, and expand its reach.

Despite what some special interest groups have suggested to the contrary, the problems we’re experiencing today did not arise because the Constitution has outlived its usefulness or become irrelevant, nor will they be solved by a convention of states or a ratification of the Constitution.

No, the problem goes far deeper.

It can be traced back to the point at which “we the people” were overthrown as the center of the government. As a result, our supremacy has been undone, our authority undermined, and our experiment in democratic self-governance left in ruins.

No longer are we the rulers of this land. We have long since been deposed and dethroned, replaced by corporate figureheads with no regard for our sovereignty, no thought for our happiness, and no respect for our rights.

In other words, without our say-so and lacking any mandate, the point of view of the Constitution has been shifted from “we the people” to “we the government.” Our taxpayer-funded employees—our appointed servants—have stopped looking upon us as their superiors and started viewing as their inferiors.

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten so used to being dictated to by government agents, bureaucrats and militarized police alike that we’ve forgotten that WE are supposed to be the ones calling the shots and determining what is just, reasonable and necessary.

Then again, we’re not the only ones guilty of forgetting that the government was established to serve us as well as obey us. Every branch of government, from the Executive to the Judicial and Legislative, seems to be suffering this same form of amnesia. Certainly, when government programs are interpreted from the government’s point of view (i.e., the courts and legislatures), there is little the government CANNOT do in its quest for power and control.

We’ve been so brainwashed and indoctrinated into believing that the government is actually looking out for our best interests, when in fact the only compelling interesting driving government programs is maintain power and control by taking away our money and control. This vital truth, that the government exists for our benefit and operates at our behest, seems to have been lost in translation over two centuries dominated by government expansion, endless wars and centralized federal power.

Have you ever wondered why the Constitution begins with those three words “we the people”? It was intended to be a powerful reminder that everything flows from the citizenry. We the people are the center of the government and the source of its power. That “we” is crucial because it reminds us that there is power and safety in numbers, provided we stand united. We can accomplish nothing alone.

This is the underlying lesson of the Constitution, which outlines the duties and responsibilities of government. It was a mutual agreement formed by early Americans in order to ensure that when problems arose, they could address them together.

It’s like the wagon trains of the Old West, comprised of individual groups of pioneers. They rarely ventured out alone but instead traveled as convoys. And when faced with a threat, these early Americans formed their wagons into a tight circle in order to defend against invaders. In doing so, they presented a unified front and provided protection against an outside attack.

In much the same way, the Constitution was intended to work as an institutionalized version of the wagon circle, serving as a communal shield against those who would harm us.

Unfortunately, we have been ousted from that protected circle, left to fend for ourselves in the wilderness that is the American frontier today. Those who did the ousting—the courts, the politicians, and the corporations—have since replaced us with yes-men, shills who dance to the tune of an elite ruling class. In doing so, they have set themselves as the central source of power and the arbiters of what is just and reasonable.

Once again, we’re forced to navigate hostile terrain, unsure of how to protect ourselves and our loved ones from militarized police, weaponized drones, fusion centers, Stingray devices, SWAT team raids, the ongoing military drills on American soil, the government stockpiling of ammunition, the erection of mass detention centers across the country, and all other manner of abuses.

Read the smoke signals, and the warning is clear: the government is on the warpath.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we are to have any hope of surviving whatever is coming at us, it’s time to circle the wagons, folks.

A new study commissioned by the European Federation for Transport and Environment revealed that toxic emissions of sulfur oxides from 63 cruise ships belonging to Carnival Corporation were 43% higher than all the combustion engine vehicles in Europe. This stunning statistic comes as EU leaders have decided to ban small combustion engines for cars by 2035. But what about ‘green’ cruise ships? Only crickets… 

“The most polluting cruise ship operator was MSC Cruises, whose vessels emitted nearly as much sulphur as all the 291 million cars in Europe. When looking at parent companies, as in our original 2019 report, the Carnival Corporation comes on top with the 63 ships under its control emitting 43% more sulfur oxides than all of Europe’s cars in 2022,” the study said. 

For cruise ship operators to achieve carbon-neutral status, this might take decades. According to the study, about 40% of cruise ships in the order books of global shipyards are dual-fuel LNG engines. “When running on LNG, these ships will cause less air pollution, but they are more damaging than fuel oils from a climate perspective due to methane slip from their four-stroke engines,” the study noted. 

The study continued, “Cruise companies should discontinue investing in LNG-powered vessels and prioritize zero-emission technologies, such as hydrogen fuel-cells, batteries, and wind-power.” 

Cruise ship order books currently have limited to no zero-emission vessels in shipyards. The most immediate fuel switch is from heavy fuel oil to LNG. 

The study shows Carnival’s vessels pollute more than Europe’s cars and then some, but what’s mindboggling is that EU lawmakers went after cars first in their ‘greenification’ crusade. Why not cruise ships?

Authored by J.Peder Zane via American Greatness,

It’s time we had a courageous conversation about the left’s incoherent stance on big government and race.

This muddled mindset was on full display last week as two progressive Supreme Court justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, attacked the majority’s decision rejecting affirmative action in higher education by crediting such race-based policies for progress while also claiming that nothing much has changed in our supposedly racist country.

“Today,” Sotomayor declares in the second paragraph of her dissent, “this court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

Despite that grand advancement, she asserts just one sentence later that the majority was cementing “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

Momentous progress in an endemically segregated nation?

Both Sotomayor and Jackson try to show how race continues to matter by drawing on the pessimistic historical determinism of critical race theory to argue that African Americans are still shackled by the original sin of slavery.

“Three hundred and fifty years ago,” Jackson writes, “the Negro was dragged to this country in chains to be sold into slavery. Uprooted from his homeland and thrust into bondage for forced labor, the slave was deprived of all legal rights.”

She continues, “After emancipation, white Americans imposed a series of racist customs and laws, including Jim Crow and redlining, to limit black advancement.”

Jackson asserts that this past shapes the present and future condition of African Americans through the disparities regarding wealth, health, and education that exist between the races. She writes:

Today, as was true 50 years ago, Black home ownership trails White home ownership by approximately 25 percentage points. … Black Americans in their late twenties are about half as likely as their White counterparts to have college degrees. … As for postsecondary professional arenas, despite being about 13% of the population, Black people make up only about 5% of lawyers. Such disparity also appears in the business realm: Of the roughly 1,800 chief executive officers to have appeared on the well-known Fortune 500 list, fewer than 25 have been Black (as of 2022, only six are Black). … Black men are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer as White men and have lower 5-year cancer survival rates. Uterine cancer has spiked in recent years among all women â?? but has spiked highest for Black women, who die of uterine cancer at nearly twice the rate of “any other racial or ethnic group.” Black mothers are up to four times more likely than White mothers to die as a result of childbirth. And COVID killed Black Americans at higher rates than White Americans.

Those numbers are clearly dispiriting. They obviously demand attention. But Jackson’s analysis, which simply asserts a facile causality between past injustice and current disparities, does nothing to explain and address the behaviors that drive them. Her dissent makes no mention of the breakdown of the black family, the rise of obesity and other co-morbidities among African Americans, and the failure of inner-city schools since the civil rights movement. Nor does she address the fact that many of these same problems also plague white people – the vast majority of whom are not CEOs, and most of whom have little wealth.

Mysteriously, she also ignores the reams of economic data showing that the true crisis is among black men. The Brookings Institution, for example, reports:

Black women and white women raised by ‘low-income’ parents (those in the bottom 20% of the income distribution) have similar rates of upward intergenerational mobility, measured in terms of their individual income as adults…

The data shows that Black men raised by low-income parents face twice the risk of remaining stuck in intergenerational poverty (38%) as Black women (20%) in terms of their individual income.

Jackson ignores such inconvenient facts to ascribe all disparities to racism. Rather than identify the mechanisms and barriers at work today that are at the root of the problem, she invokes a gauzy view of history to issue a moral indictment. This is more guilt trip than serious argument.

More importantly, neither she nor Sotomayor detail how affirmative action and other race-based policies they support have improved the lives of African Americans. Isn’t that the key question? It is hard to believe that they have provided no benefit. But are they worth the cost of racializing and tribalizing our politics, culture, and law?

Returning to Sotomayor’s claim, one wonders: How “momentous” could our progress be if, six decades after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 that dismantled Jim Crow, America is still “endemically segregated”? If the government policies enforced since then, backed by trillions of dollars in spending, haven’t achieved the desired result, why do we believe they ever will?

Liberals they will not, which explains the rising calls for trillions of dollars of reparations for African Americans – affirmative action on steroids. Instead of addressing the complex root causes of the troubling disparities, they are pushing another big government give-away. More is always their answer. What guarantee do we have that an even larger check will keep black boys and men in school and out of prison? What we can be sure of is that a massive windfall to one small group of Americans will only stoke the fires of racial division.

Progressives continue to double down on failed policies because of ideology. Their key conceit is that they should run the show because of their self-proclaimed expertise: There is no problem they can’t solve through their top-down interventions. “We know what works” is their mantra. As it infantilizes the populace – especially the racial minorities they claim to represent, who are afforded little personal agency to change their lives – this hubristic mindset can never admit defeat because that would strike at the heart of progressive authority.

If their programs fail, it is only because they were not fully implemented or funded – and because of emotional opposition from the ignorant masses and the conniving of monied interests. Reality is not the facts on the ground, but the vision they embrace. Conveniently, that vision depends on giving them ever greater power: Since the people are incapable of improving their own lot, they must be granted ever more authority.

One definition of insanity is expecting a different result from the same action. Both Jackson and Sotomayor argue that we must keep the policies and approaches they say have failed. This illogic is the logic of progressivism.

Ahead of tomorrow’s nonfarm payrolls report, labor market proxies have been mixed in June: as Newsquawk notes, initial jobless claims spiked in the comparable survey week, with the four-week moving average higher heading into the June data; within S&P Global’s flash PMI data, the employment sub-indices eased, though remain above the 50-mark, which separates expansion and contraction; the ISM manufacturing data saw employment fall into contraction, but the services gauge saw the employment index rise into expansion; ADP’s gauge of payrolls growth spiked higher in the month, while Challenger Layoff numbers tumbled lower. Currently, markets are expecting the Fed to lift rates in July, and only a very significant miss along with weakness in other metrics will derail that plan; meanwhile some of the strong data released this week has seen expectations of the Fed terminal rate rise, to 5.45% in November 2023.

NONFARM PAYROLLS GROWTH EXPECTED TO SLOW:

• The rate of US nonfarm payrolls growth is expected to moderate in June to 225k from 339k in May (and vs 3- month average 283k, 6-month average of 302k, and 12-month average of 339k). The range of forecasts is between 110-288k.
• Some, however, note that the labor market has continued to remain resilient in the face of an expected slowdown, with the last downside surprise to the headline being observed in March 2022.
• Note that headline NFP has not come in beneath the consensus analyst estimate since March 2022.

PROXIES:

• CLAIMS: Jobless claims data for the period that syncs with the BLS’ survey period for the jobs report showed initial claims spiking to 265k (highest since October 2021), with the four-week average at 256k going vs an average of 231k into the May data. Continuing claims, meanwhile, was averaging 1.76mln in the survey week vs 1.8mln into the May data.
• ADP: ADP June report saw 497k jobs added, well above the expected 228k and the prior 267k. The gains were led by consumer-facing services, with leisure and hospitality, trade and transportation, and education and health services the biggest contributors, while the higher earning potential jobs such as tech and finance showed declines, as did manufacturing.
• JOB CUTS: Challenger layoffs fell to 40.7k in June from 80.1k in May, a seven-month low, and now significantly beneath the peak of 103k in January with the pace of job cuts in tech losing momentum.
• BUSINESS SURVEYS: The ISM Manufacturing report’s Employment Index fell into contraction in June, registering 48.1 from 51.4; the survey noted signs of more employment reduction actions in the near-term. Meanwhile, the ISM Services gauge saw the Employment Index return into expansions at 53.1 from 49.2 prior; comments from respondents included: “Unable to find qualified candidates for some open positions” and “finally able to fill some positions that have been open for some time.”
• CONSUMER SURVEYS: Within the Conference Board’s June consumer confidence data, the spread between jobs ‘plentiful’ and jobs ‘not so plentiful’ widened, indicating upbeat feelings about a labour market, while consumers’ assessment about the short-term labour market also improved, with a greater number expecting more jobs to be available, and the number of consumers anticipating fewer jobs declined. But on the earnings front, consumers short-term income prospects worsened in the month, with fewer expecting incomes to increase in the short term, while the number of consumers expecting earnings to decrease ticked-up slightly.

UNEMPLOYMENT EXPECTED TO EASE:

The unemployment rate is seen falling by 0.1ppts to 3.6% in June. Analysts note that the jobless rate is likely to decline due to the reversal of the fall in household employment seen in May, but a gradual increase is expected in the second half of the year. The Fed’s most recent economic projections released last month showed officials expect the jobless rate to rise to 4.1% by the end of this year, and then to 4.5% next year. If the unemployment rate does slip, traders will look to the participation rate, which has been stable in recent months; the metric has remained at 62.6% for the last three jobs report; a higher reading indicates that more people are entering the labor market. Meanwhile, the U6 measure of underemployment – which measures the percentage of the US labour force that is unemployed, plus those who are underemployed, marginally attached to the workforce, and have given up looking for work – has been between 6.6-6.7% in the last three months.

EARNINGS:

• Average earnings are expected to rise 0.3% M/M, matching the pace seen in May, while the annual measure is likely to ease to a rate of 4.2% Y/Y (from 4.3% previously). Analysts say the decline is likely given the easing seen in the JOLTs quit rates in recent months; a higher quits rate is seen as a sign of consumer confidence in their earnings prospects. However, the quits rate picked up in June to 2.6% from 2.4%, which some analysts said could mean upside potential for the wages measures.
• After falling in May to the lowest since April 2020, average workweek hours are seen unchanged at 34.3hrs in June.

POLICYMAKER FOCUS:

• The FOMC’s June meeting minutes, released this week, said that “some” officials had pointed out that payroll gains had remained robust, but some other measures of employment — like those based on the BLS’ household survey, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and the Board staff’s measure of private employment using data from the payroll processing firm ADP — suggested that job growth may have been weaker than indicated by payroll employment.
• A couple of participants also drew attention to the subdued growth in hours worked.
• Analysts at Morgan Stanley said that a sub-100k headline could see the Fed pullback on its plan to hike in July. However, SGH Macro believes that the hike is all but done, stating that while a soft figure could trigger speculation of a pause/skip, “the Fed won’t be convinced by one number that the trend has changed.”

ARGUING FOR A STRONGER THAN EXPECTED REPORT:

• Arrival of summer student workforce. When the labor market is tight, payroll growth tends to pick up in June, with average payroll gains 35k above the full-year average (see Exhibit 1). We believe this reflects the interaction between labor availability and the spring hiring season: seasonal labor market slack peaks at the start of the year, troughs in early May, then rebounds in June with the arrival of the student summer workforce.
  
   
• Big Data. Alternative measures of employment growth indicate strong job gains in June, with a median pace of +275k across four indicators Goldman tracks. ADP was particularly strong (+497k), however GS economists place less weight than usual on this measure because of a possible distortion in the ADP seasonal factors: ADP employment growth had picked up in June in 6 of the last 7 years—and by 193k on average excluding 2020.
  
   
• Job availability. JOLTS job openings declined by more than expected in May (-496k to 9.8mn) and online measures have continued to decline on net. While labor demand is falling, it remains elevated by 0.5-2.5mn relative to 2019 and represents a positive factor for job growth. The Conference Board labor differential—the difference between the percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hard to get—increased by 3.7pt to 34.4.

ARGUING FOR A WEAKER THAN EXPECTED REPORT:

• Seasonal factor evolution. As shown below, the June seasonal factors have evolved to become more restrictive in recent years, with a month-over-month hurdle for private payrolls of 943k in June 2022 compared to 855k on average in 2017-19— which were similar calendar configurations. These more restrictive seasonal factors could partially offset the strong hiring of student workers that we expect in tomorrow’s report.
  
   
• Employer surveys. The employment components of business surveys deteriorated on net in June. The services employment survey tracker remained flat at 50.4 and the manufacturing survey employment tracker decreased by 2.1pt 50.7.
• Tighter credit conditions. The industry composition of bank lending could potentially weigh on hiring for the leisure and hospitality and other services industries, which rely heavily on bank lending and exhibit a small average firm size. Weakness in bank lending could also compound the issues facing the information sector, for which bank-loan-intensity is slightly above average. Goldman is assuming a drag on tomorrow’s report on the order of 20k (mom sa).

NEUTRAL/MIXED FACTORS:

• Layoffs. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas declined meaningfully in June (-37.7% to 38.6k, SA by GS), compared to 44k on average in the second half of 2022. While initial jobless claims averaged 251k in the June payroll month, up from 232k in May, recent readings have been distorted by policy changes and potentially fraudulent filings. After adjusting for these distortions, initial claims have remained near the levels last seen in early May. Many laid-off workers were able to find new jobs relatively quickly, and the required reduction in aggregate labor demand will come primarily from fewer job openings rather than lower employment.

Authored by Uzay Bulut via The Gatestone Institute,

The criminal practice of trafficking and abusing hundreds of thousands of migrant children who cross the southern border is now, thanks to the open-border policy of the Biden Administration, apparently “normal” inside the US:

“According to Customs and Border Protection, since January 2021 when Biden took the oath of office, there have been 5,118,661 encounters with illegal immigrants along the southern border.”

These numbers do not include reports that “at least 1.2 million illegal immigrants,” or “gotaways,” who “were confirmed to have unlawfully crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“The actual number of illegal immigrants… [is] unknown. It could be double the number of known gotaways, it could be three times worse, or more. We just don’t know….”

Currently, at least 85,000 children are believed to be missing.

According to Customs and Border Protection statistics,

“[T]he number of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Children] who arrive at the border has swelled from 33,239 in fiscal year 2020 to more than 146,000 in fiscal year 2021 and 152,000 in fiscal year 2022. So far in fiscal year 2023, there have been more than 70,000 encounters of unaccompanied children.”

Many of those children are raped, used for forced labor, and forced to undertake brutal jobs ostensibly to “work off” their debt by the criminal cartels who reportedly now control the Mexican side of the border and brought the children in.

According to Tara Lee Rodas, a Health and Human Services whistleblower, in testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement on April 26:

“Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the US Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.”

She described the practice as “modern-day slavery”.

“Today, children will work overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, restaurants to pay their debts to smugglers and traffickers. Today, children will be sold for sex. Today, children will call a hotline to report the are being abused, neglected, and trafficked…..

“I must confess; I knew nothing about their suffering until 2021 when I volunteered to help the Biden Administration with the crisis at the Southern Border. As part of Operation Artemis, I was deployed to the Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site in California to help the HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] Office of Refugee Resettlement reunite children with sponsors in the US.

“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in home country, smuggled to the US border, and ends when ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] delivers a child to a Sponsors – some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income – this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking.

“…. I want to see the children protected, so I want to tell you some what I witnessed at the Pomona Fairplex:

• I saw vulnerable indigenous children from Guatemala who speak Mayan dialects and can’t speak Spanish. That means they can’t ask for help in English and they can’t ask for help in Spanish. These children become captive to their Sponsors.

• I’ve sat with Case Managers as they cried retelling horrific things that were done to children on the journey.

• I saw apartment buildings where 20, 30 & 40 unaccompanied children have been released.

• I saw sponsors trying to simultaneously sponsor children from multiple ORR sites.

• I saw sponsors using multiple addresses to obtain sponsorships of children.

• I saw numerous cases of children in debt bondage and the child knew they had to stay with the sponsor until the debt was paid.

“Realizing that we were not offering children the American dream, but instead putting them into modern-day slavery with wicked overlords was a terrible revelation.”

Rodas added that after she went public, her bosses retaliated against her.

“They threatened me with an investigation. They walked me off the emergency intake site in Texas and took my badge. It is a terrible thing when you blow the whistle to try to save children and you’re retaliated against for trying to help. The HHS [The United States Department of Health and Human Services] did everything they could to keep all of this silent.”

In another testimony, Jessica M. Vaughan, an expert on immigration, said:

“Numerous investigative journalism reports published over the years in the Washington Times, Reuters, and the New York Times, Project Veritas, and others, that provide graphic details of the experiences of UACs during and after their illegal crossing and placement with sponsors in the United States, including domestic servitude, sexual abuse, forced labor, labor exploitation, and illegal employment in manufacturing, landscaping, and other inappropriate and dangerous jobs.”

Rachel Campos-Duffy reported on April 26 on the crimes committed against migrant children:

“Over the last two years, this country has become an international hub for child trafficking. And the US government is behind it. Under Biden, hundreds of thousands of children have come into this country illegally. Once they get here, most are sold for sex, used for cheap labor, or forced to join gangs. Nobody deserves this. Especially not children.”

Campos-Duffy called the mass trafficking, abuse, and exploitation of migrant children “America’s darkest secret.”

Sheena Rodriguez, president of the Alliance for a Safe Texas, presented eyewitness testimony regarding what is happening to children at the southern border:

“In April 2021, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott learned of allegations of abuse of unaccompanied minors in a federal facility in San Antonio, he said, ‘The Biden administration is presiding over the abuse of children.’ He also called on the administration to shut these facilities down. Instead, the administration has only expanded them without communicating with state or local authorities. Local communities are not told how long the minors will be there, or where they will go when released and with no concern of the impact to local citizens. I am requesting that Congress launch a full investigation into the federal agencies responsible for approving the contracts for these facilities.”

Among the several examples Rodriguez gave:

“I have also been a witness to several incidents where children were intentionally put in harm’s way by adults who forced the children into the deadly currents of the Rio Grande instead of walking through a legal port of entry feet above from their crossing point in the river…

“I also met teenage boys between the ages of 14 to 17, who claimed cartel operatives often transported children through Mexico and held them at bodegas or warehouses where armed cartel members stood guard. Many were told they were going to stay with sponsors in America, with several claims that the teens had never met or personally communicated with their supposed sponsors.

“Since January 2021, there have been over 356,000 UACs…encountered at the southern border, a majority of which have been released into the U.S.: more than 10,000 of which have been released in my respective area of north Texas.

“The Biden administration has admitted they do not keep track of their whereabouts when they are released into the U.S. With the use of taxpayer dollars, tens of thousands of children are simply missing.”

Jessica M. Vaughan also offered detailed testimony,

“The mass migration crisis instigated by the Biden administration’s misguided immigration policies has caused incalculable harm to American communities, to the integrity of our immigration system, and, tragically, to many of the migrants themselves. These migrants were enticed by these policies to put themselves in risky situations to cross the border illegally, led by criminal smuggling and trafficking organizations, and enabled by government agencies and contractors that have looked the other way at the abuse and exploitation that frequently occurs en route and after resettlement. The most vulnerable group that has been endangered by the Biden policies are the more than 300,000 minors who have arrived on his watch (out of 660,000 total since 2012). They have been carelessly funneled through the custody of U.S. government agencies and contractors, and handed off to very lightly vetted sponsors (who are usually also here illegally) in our communities without regard to their safety and well-being…

“Several major investigative reports conducted by branches of the U.S. government and news media outlets have documented how U.S. policies and practices have facilitated not only this mass migration episode, but also the resulting exploitation and abuse of the participants, which has been present since the onset of this episode. These studies and reports have exposed numerous incidents of abuse, fraud, and trafficking for the purposes of commercial sex and forced labor.

“The Florida Grand Jury observed:

“‘Some ‘children’ are not children at all, but full-grown predatory adults; some are already gang members or criminal actors; others are coerced into prostitution or sexual slavery; some are recycled to be used as human visas by criminal organizations’ some are consigned to relatives who funnel them into sweatshops to pay off the debt accumulated by their trek to this country; some flee their sponsors and return to their country of origin; some are abandoned by their so-called families and become wards of the dependency system, the criminal justice system, or disappear altogether.'”

Vaughan gave examples of how children are exploited by gang members for sex and other criminal purposes, such as:

“In the Virginia MS-13 sex trafficking case, after running away from a group home in Fairfax, Va, the teen victims were horribly beaten to initiate them into the gang, and then repeatedly forced to engage in prostitution both to members of the gang and outsiders. From one court document:

‘MINOR 2 was sex trafficked by numerous MS-13 gang members and associates shortly after she and MINOR 3 ran away from Shelter Care on August 27, 2018. According to MINOR 2, MINOR 3 informed her that she would engage in sex in exchange for money, food, and other things that MINOR 2 needed’.” ….

“The Biden administration has implemented policies that incentivize the illegal entry of unaccompanied alien children on a massive scale, to the profit of criminal smugglers and traffickers, even with full knowledge of the risks that such policies will endanger the safety and well-being of the migrant children. Some supporters of these policies have defended them on the belief that they are aiding the reunification of families, providing a safe haven from difficult living environments in their home countries, and even benefiting US employers. On the contrary, I submit that there is no possible rationalization for policies that have facilitated the abuse and exploitation of child migrants on such a large scale for so many years. There is no possible humanitarian or economic motive that could justify or make up for the damage that has been done to the victims by the smugglers, traffickers, abusive sponsors, and even family members who participated in these dreadful arrangements.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis describes what is happening as “effectively the largest human smuggling operation in American history.”

Senator Josh Hawley referred to the Biden policy “the biggest child smuggling ring and the biggest child labor ring in American history.” He told Fox News not only that the FBI needs to be involved in finding the 85,000 migrant children that the federal government has lost track of, but that the FBI should investigate the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) over their handling of migrant children.

“This is criminal… The FBI needs to be involved. They need to go find every single one of these kids — 85,000 or more — who are lost. The FBI needs to find them. We need to have an investigation by the FBI into the Homeland Security Department, into HHS to figure out who is facilitating these smuggling rings, are they deliberately not doing their job, are they deliberately or negligently turning these kids over to smugglers? We need to find out. The FBI needs to get on it and launch a full-scale investigation right now.”

“There is no question,” Vaughan said, “that that the system for processing minors who cross illegally is dysfunctional, and has been for some time, and needs to be fixed.

“To solve the problem, Congress must change the immigration laws and rein in the executive policies that are incentivizing the mass illegal migration of both adults and minors” What is needed is “more opportunity for state and local governments to investigate and penalize human trafficking and the illegal migration, human smuggling, identity fraud, and illegal employment.”

The latest innovation in the sex tech industry comes from Singapore-based company “Lovense,” which has integrated a ChatGPT-powered AI chatbot into an app that enhances users’ experiences. 

Lovense is known for ‘smart’ sex toys connected to a smartphone and powered by the Lovense Remote app. A new feature was recently added to the app called ‘Advance Lovense ChatGPT Pleasure Companion.’ 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT API powers Companion, which means users could personalize their in-app and sex toy experience to “their physical and emotional preferences,” the company said. 

Currently, in beta, TechCrunch said Companion “invites you to indulge in juicy and erotic stories that the chatbot creates based on your selected topic. Lovers of spicy fan fiction never had it this good, is all I’m saying. Once you’ve picked your topics, the Companion will even voice the story and control your Lovense toy while reading it to you.” 

“The tech is clever; give it some parameters, and seconds later, a voice will take you on a journey into the hinterlands. Users can decide what type of story they want — romantic or sensual, juicy or spicy. They can select their main characters and the physical location for where this lurid fantasy will play out,” TechCrunch continued. 

“Our Advanced Lovense ChatGPT Pleasure Companion now allows you to design a story you want, to embody any of your fantasies or dreams, and to fully immerse you into them.

“With our Companion’s help, you can now create any stories and explore your sexuality and boundaries completely independently,” Dan Liu, Lovense CEO, wrote in a statement to TechCrunch. 

After seven months since the launch of ChatGPT, it is truly remarkable to consider that a chatbot now plays a role of a partner in bed. And maybe society is ready for the future, as we noted a few years ago, “40% Of People Would Have Sex With Humanoid Robot.” And even mentioned in 2017, “24% Of American Men Would Have Sex With A Robot.”

Having sex with robots or having a chatbot control a sex toy while whispering sweet obscenities to the user will not fix the demographic collapse happening across major global economies. 

Authored by John Leake via Peter McCullough’s ‘Courageous Discourse” substack,

For several years I’ve been turning over in my mind an idea that initially struck me as far-fetched, but now strikes me as a distinct possibility.

Could it be that people suffering from some degree of mental illness are now heavily influencing or even directing cultural, political, and economic affairs?

The Vienna Narrenturm is the oldest insane asylum in Europe.

To put it more bluntly, are we now being governed by lunatics?

I’d already been pondering this for some time when I stumbled across an essay that Carl Jung wrote in 1957 titled “The Plight of the Individual in Modern Society.”

His opening reflections strike me as an apt description of the irrational and destabilizing phenomena we’ve witnessed in recent times.

“Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities, who—sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice—hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature.

“Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could, at an optimistic estimate, put its upper limit at about 40% of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities. And even where it exists, it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional state should succumb to a fit of weakness.

“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases, and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results, which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.

“In this state, all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason, come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met only in prisons and lunatic asylums. For every manifest case of insanity, there are, in my estimation, at least 10 latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly, but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors.

“There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychosis, for understandable reasons. But even if their number should amount to less than 10 times that of manifest psychoses and of manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people.

“Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish fantasies. In a state of collective possession, they are the adapted ones and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, spawned by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there, for they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight. They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous sources of infection, precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self knowledge.”

With each passing month, I go back and review these reflections, and it now seems to me that they present an almost perfect description of what we are witnessing today.

Take just about every major public policy issue—the pandemic response, the vaccine cult, the war in Ukraine, and now the transgender cult—and note the profound irrationality of it.

Common sense, reason, restraint, prudence, and circumspection – all seem to be constantly subverted by aggressive and disordered people.

At dinner a few nights ago, an old friend suggested that the world is NOT run by crazy people, but by greedy, philistine opportunists who are not constrained by ethical considerations. They are adept at spotting social trends and ruthlessly exploiting them as a means of amassing wealth and power.

My friend’s suggestion reminded me of the novel “Catch-22,” which Joseph Heller wrote around the same time that Jung composed his reflections.

As the novel’s protagonist, Captain John Yossarian, remarks:

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have come under fire over advice for transgender and non-binary parents seeking guidance on how to “chestfeed” their infants.

Several sections of the CDC’s website advise those who have had gender-reassignment surgeries, or biological men taking hormones to grow breasts, how to commit child abuse to satisfy their fetish which couldn’t possibly nourish a child. Several doctors, however have criticized the agency for failing to address the risk posed to children who drink milk produced by chemicals used in gender-reassignment medical operations.

In the CDC website’s section on “Health Equity Considerations” – found under its “Infant and Young Child Feeding Toolkit,” the center declared that “Transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed).“

It also stated that “The gender identity or expression of transgender individuals is different from their sex at birth,” and that, “the gender identity of nonbinary-gendered individuals does not fit neatly into either man or woman.”

Under the CDC website’s section on “Breast Feeding,” specifically an entry covering breastfeeding for those who have undergone breast surgery, the institute mentioned “chestfeeding.”  –Fox News

The CDC asks: “Can transgender parents who have had breast surgery breastfeed or chestfeed their infants?” To which it replied “yes,” followed by an explanation.

“Some transgender parents who have had breast/top surgery may wish to breastfeed, or chestfeed (a term used by some transgender and non-binary parents), their infants,” the website claims without evidence. “Healthcare providers working with these families should be familiar with medical, emotional, and social aspects of gender transitions to provide optimal family-centered care and meet the nutritional needs of the infant.”

The site suggests that transgender parents “may need help with” maximizing milk production, and recommends supplementing with pasteurized donor human milk, or formula. It also notes that medication exists to induce lactation, and recommends avoiding medications that may inhibit or suppress lactation.

The Daily Mail spoke with several doctors who criticized the CDC – one of whom, Dr. Jane Orient, told the outlet: “The CDC has a responsibility to talk about the health risks, but they have been derelict in doing that.”

Orient also said “we have no idea what the long-term effects on the child will be” if trans parents are using “all kinds of off-label hormones.”

New York-based internal medicine physician, Dr. Stuart Fischer, told the Mail that it’s “very hard to believe” that breast milk naturally-occurring in a biological female is the same as breast milk induced in a biological man – and that he’s uncertain how the latter form of breast milk would affect infants.

“If it’s been tested a handful of times, how would we know the long-range effect? The short-term is one thing, but the long-term in terms of physical and mental illness…”

“It’s an emerging field, to put it mildly,” he added.