NAH, BUT HE’D HAVE GOTTEN A GREAT JOKE OUT OF IT: Ronald Reagan Is Spinning in His Grave Over This. “The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute recently announced its recipients for the prestigious ‘Peace Through Strength Award,’ and the choices are raising eyebrows. This year’s honorees are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and, for some reason that I cannot comprehend, President Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Goldman Delivers Grim Outlook For Prospective Homebuyers.

Given the latest inflation data, a largely in-line CPI report followed by a ‘red hot’ PPI print in November, this data suggests that longer-term yields are to stay higher over the medium- to longer-term, according to Bloomberg’s Simon White.

In other words, White suggests that this inflation data squashes the dovish party. As of late Thursday, the market is pricing in only two rate cuts for next year.

Goldman analysts noted that without interest rate relief and the general leanness of housing inventory, home prices are forecasted to increase by 3% YoY.

“Said differently, we estimate the mortgage payment on a median-priced single-family home is 35% of the median household income. Although this is down from 39% a year ago, it remains well above the 30% threshold for most lenders,” they explained.

They’ll turn us all into renters ’cause they’re easier to please.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Great — Biden Just Let All of Hunter’s Friends Out of Jail. “Biden is cranky and vindictive, but the people who have been running his brain for the last four years have their downright evil moments. They’re the ones who drew up the list for Biden’s clemency frenzy. There were bound to be some unsavory characters on it.”

CHINA IS ASSHOE, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:

China is depleting the world's oceans of fish. Estimates are between 200,000 – 800,000 fishing vessels, going as far as Argentina.

They account for ~half of the worlds fishing catch and do not respect stewardship protocols to preserve ecosystems.

This is power projection. pic.twitter.com/6lGTm0oqPK

— Andrew Côté (@Andercot) December 11, 2024

Bullies push until they’re pushed back.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Gray Swans, Regime Collapse, and the Kremlin.

Last week, 50-plus years of the Assad family’s Ba’ath Party rule ended after an 11-day lightning campaign by rebel forces that nobody saw coming. Could Vladimir Putin’s regime suffer a similar fate? Authoritarian regimes appear strong, invincible even, right up until the moment they disappear in a gray swan event.

In a Substack essay this week, Charles Hugh Smith defined a gray swan event as “an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur.” The most recent example is the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria last weekend. People are right to marvel at how quickly it came undone but only after nearly 14 years of civil war. And there had been very little movement since March 2020.

Nevertheless, a gray swan appeared from nowhere two weeks ago, and 11 days later, Assad was history.

VIP members asked for longer essays and I’ve been happy to oblige.

MICHAEL LIND: The Re-Skilling of America.

What explains the large-scale miscredentialing of the American workforce? The endless greed of tuition-hungry universities is one factor. But the main cause is the insistence of many American employers, including federal, state, and local government, that new hires have college diplomas—even for jobs that are currently filled by workers without four-year degrees.

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training. According to a survey of employers by Bloomberg, college diplomas are most often used as a screening device for entry-level job applicants, rather than as evidence that the potential hires have job-relevant skills: “For more than half of employers surveyed (60 percent), a college diploma was seen as a stand-in for work ethic, personal skills and mental capacity, as opposed to the actual skills associated with the job.”

I think Glenn might have had a thing or two to say about this topic a while back.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS LAST SEEN WITH A BOTTLE OF XANAX: The FBI Paid People to Go to the J6 Riot. “The corporate media is ballyhooing one of the highlighted findings of the Inspector General (IG) as being proof that the FBI had nothing to do with the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were scores of federal and local assets from not only the FBI at the protest and riot that day but plenty of other three-letter federal and local agencies. Metropolitan Police had active agents provocateur on the ground. DHS, ATF, and other Beltway three letter agencies were on site that day.”

KRUISER: Just Sayin’ — I Never Asked to Be Pardoned for Crimes I Haven’t Committed.

The people being mentioned as being in need of “Get Out of Jail Free” cards in the next month haven’t been publicly lobbying for themselves, but it’s an almost certain bet that they’re jumping up and down screaming, “Me next!” behind the scenes.

As Scott wrote last week, Adam Schiff, Liz “I’m Just Like Lincoln” Cheney, and alleged physician Anthony Fauci headline the group of people most in need of an assist from President LOLEightyonemillion.

Schiff and Cheney are sweating bullets because they were members of the J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues, a pathetic un-American charade that only succeeded in wasting the taxpayers’ money.

Anthony Fauci is on the list for being Pol Pot, M.D. during the pandemic, of course. Four years later, we’re still waiting to see if he told the truth about anything other than the spelling of his name in 2020.

Read the whole thing — and I might have to steal “Pol Pot, M.D.”

WHOSE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT ROBOT FOR KIDS IS IT, ANYWAY? Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds.

Embodied blamed its closure on a failed “critical funding round.”
…
The company didn’t provide further details about the pulled funding. Embodied’s previous backers have included Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Vulcan Capital, but we don’t know who the lead investor mentioned above is.

When it first announced Moxie in April 2020, Embodied described the robot as a “safe and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development.” It advertised play built around “best practices in child development and early childhood education”; changing weekly themes, like empathy, friendship, and respect; and activities like meditation, reading, and drawing with the bot.

But soon, none of those features will be available, making the pricey children’s toy virtually useless. According to Embodied, Moxie can’t perform core functionality without cloud connectivity. Worse, owners apparently have an uncertain and limited amount of time until the devices are bricked.

Teach your kids the value of on-device functionality before you buy them a cloud-enabled emotional support robot.

Either that or tell them to play in the yard with the dog.

VETTING: Trump Surgeon General Pick Parrot’s the Left’s Gender-Bender Propaganda.

BIDEN’S PARTING GIFTS:

EXCLUSIVE: Weeks before Trump takes office, Biden is racing to auction off unused border wall materials.

Video shows trucks hauling wall materials off the border to a government auction site, where a massive amount of wall is waiting to be sold. pic.twitter.com/ogaQMBHw7R

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) December 12, 2024

Full story here.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Gray Swans, Regime Collapse, and the Kremlin.

Last week, 50-plus years of the Assad family’s Ba’ath Party rule ended after an 11-day lightning campaign by rebel forces that nobody saw coming. Could Vladimir Putin’s regime suffer a similar fate? Authoritarian regimes appear strong, invincible even, right up until the moment they disappear in a gray swan event.

In a Substack essay this week, Charles Hugh Smith defined a gray swan event as “an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur.” The most recent example is the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria last weekend. People are right to marvel at how quickly it came undone but only after nearly 14 years of civil war. And there had been very little movement since March 2020.

Nevertheless, a gray swan appeared from nowhere two weeks ago, and 11 days later, Assad was history.

Much more at the link.

GORGEOUS:

Starship ready for testing ahead of Flight 7 pic.twitter.com/urGAsbQSR8

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 12, 2024

Flight 7 is set for no sooner than January 11.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Pittsburgh Man Converts to Islam, and — Yes, AGAIN. “One thing you can say about Jack Molloy: he loves his mom. Molloy, a Pittsburgh resident who is now facing up to eight years in prison on terror-related charges, told his mother about his ‘master plan,’ and now that plan is part of the reason why he has come to the attention of the feds.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: McDonald’s Surpasses FBI In Number Of Shooters Apprehended In 2024.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: 50 Nations Sign NASA’s Artemis Accords Pledging the ‘Responsible Exploration of Space.’

DECLINE IS A CHOICE:

Sweden Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy Ebba Busch stated today that "she's furious with Germany" for dismantling its nuclear power plants, causing a spike in energy prices in Sweden.

Southern Sweden has record-high energy prices today due to having send electricity… pic.twitter.com/2YOvyCHyhz

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 12, 2024

Full text:

Sweden Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy Ebba Busch stated today that “she’s furious with Germany” for dismantling its nuclear power plants, causing a spike in energy prices in Sweden.

Southern Sweden has record-high energy prices today due to having send electricity to Germany via undersea power cables today.

Cold weather coupled with no wind has driven up the demand in Germany from other sources than wind. EU regulations force Sweden to send that electricity to Germany, driving up prices in southern Sweden today to be nearly 200 times higher than they are in northern Sweden.

A 10-minute shower in southern Sweden costs around USD 5 during today’s price spike.

Ebba Busch added that Germany’s decision to dismantle its nuclear power plants has also other detrimental effects for Europe:

“I’m furious with the Germans. They have made a decision for their country, which they have the right to make; it’s their right to decide. But it has had very serious consequences, also for the EU’s competitiveness because we see that German competitiveness has dropped significantly.”

She said that Germany’s actions have also reduced its ability to help Ukraine.

– “After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they still chose to dismantle their nuclear power plants… I respect that people can have different opinions about nuclear power plants, but we could have kept it. They are important because they are baseload power plants.

Having access to such baseload power plants would have increased the transmission capacity from Germany to other electricity price areas in Europe, driving down prices for all of us.”

Sweden — and the rest of Europe — need to understand that Germany is no longer a reliable partner.

Build more nukes.

BIDENFLATION:

Not only did wholesale inflation for Nov come in red hot, but the last 3 months were also revised higher; headline exploded 0.4% M/M, pushing Y/Y to 3.0% while core (pictured here) jumped to 3.4% Y/Y and continues rising much faster than the pre-Jan '21 average: pic.twitter.com/whyLnc7aXI

— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni)