Important Takeaways:
- The indebtedness of American households has surged in the last few years amid a challenging economic environment for consumers that has contributed to delinquency rates rising to their highest levels in more than a decade.
- A quarterly report published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on household credit and debt found that between the first quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2024, credit card debt surged 48.1% while household debt — which includes mortgages and auto loans — rose by 21.6%.
- In dollar terms, credit card debt rose from $770 billion in early 2021 to $1.14 trillion in the most recent quarter, while household debt increased from $14.64 trillion to $17.8 trillion in the same period.
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Important Takeaways:
- Wildfires raged across western Turkey for a third straight day Saturday, exacerbated by high winds and warm temperatures, authorities said.
- More than 130 fires have erupted across the country in the past week, according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Directorate. Most have been brought under control, but eight major fires continued in a number of provinces including Izmir, Aydin, Manisa, Karabuk and Bolu.
- Thousands of firefighters were tackling the blazes on land and from the air, with dozens of aircraft and hundreds of vehicles aiding in the emergency response.
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Important Takeaways:
- Some see God’s divine intervention in an earthquake that struck southern Syria and Lebanon on the very day as an attack by Iran and Hezbollah against Israel was anticipated.
- Israel has been bracing for an attack by Iran and its proxy Hezbollah ever since the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on July 31.
- Some have felt the delay in a response may have been because the Islamic State wanted to wait for the Tisha B’Av, or the 9th of Av on the Jewish lunar calendar, which began on Monday evening and continued until nightfall on Tuesday.
- However, the Associated Press reported that a 5.5 magnitude earthquake struck the city of Hama at 11:56 p.m. local time Monday night. The official Syria state news outlet said it was a 4.8 magnitude quake. Aftershocks continued into Tuesday morning.
- “In Damascus and Beirut — the capital of neighboring Lebanon, where the earthquake was also felt — residents descended to the streets fearing a stronger quake that would collapse buildings,” according to the AP.
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Important Takeaways:
- Connecticut is starting to dry out Tuesday after devastating flooding killed two people over the weekend and another round of storms passed through the state on Monday.
- Flash flooding has washed out roads and bridges and left several routes unpassable.
- The rainfall that ravaged western Connecticut hit the thousand-year level in some parts, according to Brenda Bergeron, the deputy commissioner of the state Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. Areas also saw floods at the 25-year and 100-year level, meaning that, according to historical data, the probability of the rainfall reaching this level is once in 25, to 100 to 1,000 years.
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Important Takeaways:
- Automakers once again in meltdown mode; poised for another government-funded bailout because they followed government mandates and produced cars nobody wanted
- GM announces layoffs of 1,000 tech workers who wasted time and money designing expensive EVs and self-driving autonomous vehicles that average American consumer can’t afford and doesn’t want.
- The cuts come as automakers attempt to reduce costs during an industry downturn and as they’re spending billions of dollars on super-expensive all-electric vehicles and so-called software-defined vehicles. These include self-driving autonomous vehicles that are continuously gathering up and sending all your personal data to a central computer, then they sell it off to third parties. These cars will also include remote kill switches.
- In other words, the auto industry is pouring all of its R&D money into vehicles that nobody in their right mind would want to own.
- In fact, GM is being sued for illegally selling more than 1.8 million drivers’ personal driving data to insurance companies.
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Important Takeaways:
- The moral logic at work here is inexorable. What you see now at the DNC you will eventually see at the RNC.
- Did you hear about the free abortions and sterilizations on offer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week? Incredibly, the news is real. Abortion-inducing drugs (mifepristone and Plan B) will be doled out from the back of a Planned Parenthood RV, along with vasectomies, just a few blocks from a convention that will embrace a radical abortion-until-birth policy that would have been unthinkable, even for Democrats, just a decade ago.
- Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was savaged by the corporate press for repeatedly describing Democrats as “anti-family” in media appearances last week. Now, as if to prove Vance’s point, here they are with an abortion van at their convention and supporters marching through the streets dressed as abortion pills.
- What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a liberal worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.
- I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the party’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.
- The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.
- But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.
- The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.
- Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after.
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Important Takeaways:
- Why it matters: The guidance comes as some Democratic lawmakers are fearful about their safety after being rattled by a series of disruptive pro-Palestinian protests since the Israel-Hamas war started last year.
- One House Democrat told Axios they are “very concerned” about their personal security and that “of course” other lawmakers are as well.
- A senior House Democrat said law enforcement is telling members “not to go to a certain area, because they expect violence.”
- “The protesters aren’t staying in a designated protest site … and there are people who are going to go and really try to cause trouble,” the lawmaker predicted.
- The bottom line: Several lawmakers expressed that there is little they can do beyond take reasonable hope that the security measures in place are enough.
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Important Takeaways:
- Despite tech conglomerate Cisco posting $10.3 billion in profits last year, it’s still laying off 5,500 workers as part of an effort to invest more in AI, SFGATE reports.
- It joins a litany of other companies like Microsoft and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, that have used AI as justification for the mass culling of its workforce.
- The layoffs at Cisco came to light in a notice posted with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, affecting seven percent of its staff.
- In a short statement, CEO Chuck Robbins used the term “AI” five times, highlighting the company’s efforts to keep up in the ongoing AI race.
- Earlier this year, Cisco also laid off 4,000 or five percent of it staff, saying that the company wanted to “realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Free abortions are being offered to women who attend the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago. Planned Parenthood is deploying an abortion bus to the Democratic presidential campaign event.
- A local branch of the abortion giant is offering drug-induced abortions aboard its bus. It’s also handing out so-called emergency contraception which consists of the morning-after pill that some pro-lifers consider to be an abortifacient drug.
- The outcry against the free abortion news has been severe across social media. SBA Pro-Life America responded to the news with a press release labeling the DNC as an “Abortion Convention.”
- “The Democratic National Abortion Convention puts the extremism of the Democrats on full display. The days when the Democrats insisted abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’ are history,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “Today’s Democrats under the Harris-Walz ticket are officially the Shout Your Abortion Party.”
- Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-GA) also criticized the move, writing on X, “I thought this was fake but it’s not… It’s hard to even comprehend and it’s truly heartbreaking. Being a mother is the most precious gift, choose life.”
- In a first for a sitting president or vice president, Vice President Kamala Harris toured a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Minnesota back in March.
- “What we want is to put back in place the protections the Supreme Court took away, which is to codify, put into law, the protections of Roe v Wade, that’s what we want,” Harris told reporters at the scene.
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Important Takeaways:
- Within the last month, nearly all major Western and international airlines have announced suspensions and cancelations of their service to both Tel Aviv and Beirut. This also as foreign nationals have scrambled to get out of both countries, given ongoing fears of the outbreak of bigger regional war involving Iran and Hezbollah attacking Israel.
- While American Airlines was among the many carriers announcing temporary pauses in service, it has just issued a surprising lengthy extension to this suspension in flights. On Friday, the Fort Worth-based company announced it doesn’t plan to resume flights to Tel Aviv until April 2025.
- This is a longer cancelation than any other airline, including in all of Europe, so far as a result of the Gaza war and related fears of regional escalation and spillover.
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