A Growing Health Concern 

Nearly 30% of adolescents in the US have prediabetes. Click here.

Clinton DNC Scandal 

Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a combined $113,000 to the FEC, according to documents made public on March 30, after the commission found probable cause that the campaign broke FEC rules about how donations can be used. Said Kash Patel, lead investigator of the 2018 probe into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, “What we knew when we ran the Russiagate investigation, Chairman Nunes and I, we exposed that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, an opposition research hit job. We had proven that some years ago.”

California’s Vanished Dream 

Is the state facing an “existential crisis”? Click here.

In late March, CNN tested an exciting idea – a subscription-based streaming service that they called CNN+. It would compete with Fox Nation, which has more than 1 million subscribers and is growing fast. They hired 500 employees and invested $300 million into the project. They also promised to pony up another billion over the next four years. They expected to sign up 2 million subscribers in the first year, and 15-18 million after four years. But two weeks after the launch, the service had fewer than 10,000 users. The new CEO said, “This is nuts,” and shut it down on April 30.

Meat Speech Is Now Hate Speech 

I heard about the all-meat diet when Jordan Peterson claimed that he had used it to treat his depression. He decided to try it after his daughter had success with it treating a series of medical problems stemming from a bout with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

Limiting one’s diet to meat seemed extreme to me. Giving up green vegetables and other plant-based sources of vitamins and minerals seemed nonsensical.

A friend of mine tried it for a skin inflammation problem, and reported positive results. Since then, I’ve read more anecdotal evidence in its favor. And there are early studies suggesting that it can be effective for a variety of auto-immune disorders.

It’s too early to tell if there’s something to this, but it seems like a hopeful development. Right?

Well… no.

Like almost every health topic today, the all-meat diet has become a political hot potato. According to some, it’s another racist conspiracy. And opposition to it has shown up everywhere, including in this unpublished TEDx talk.

Check it out here.

Too Painful to Watch

I cringed watching this. It’s Biden’s new press secretary trying to answer a question anyone that has even the most rudimentary understanding of economics would be able to answer. You can see that her problem is not that she wants to redirect the question. It’s that she actually doesn’t understand that raising corporate rates is inflationary. We have all become comfortable with Biden’s constant lapses. But to put someone so unqualified in such a public position… what were they thinking?

US Economy by the Numbers 

Some worrying numbers from Bill Bonner:

* Disposable personal incomes are dropping – down 20% from March ’21 to March ’22. Most of that is due to the end of the COVID giveaways. But subtracting them, incomes are still falling.

* While wage increases are running at about 5%, consumer prices are rising at nearly 9%.

* GDP is falling at a 1.4% annual rate.

* The trade deficit hit a new record high – at $109 for the month of April.

* Productivity is in retreat – down at a 7.5% annual rate. The worst since 1947.

* Consumer prices are rising at the fastest pace in 40 years.

* Rents in Miami are up 40% year-to-year… 22% in Orlando… 17% in Las Vegas…

* The stock market just had the worst first quarter since 1939.

Is This Real? 

JS sent this to me last week. It’s almost hard to believe. If it’s a hoax, it’s a funny one. But I think it’s real. Click here.

Latest Count From the Southern Border 

The Department of Homeland Security reported that the US Border patrol detained 221,303 illegal immigrants on the southern border in March, the highest number in two decades. During the same month, there were 123,304 expulsions of noncitizens under Title 42, and 80,116 people were let into the country.

Frank James: The Name You Have Already Forgotten 

Who was Frank James?

No, I don’t mean the confederate soldier. Or the brother of Jesse James. I’m talking about the NYC subway “spree shooter” that tried to kill a bunch of people a few weeks ago. Do you remember him?

If you haven’t heard of him, or did but have forgotten his name, it’s not your fault. His terrorist attack was reported on – but just barely – by the mainstream media immediately after it happened. And then all but disappeared. You have to wonder: Why didn’t Frank James get his 15 minutes of fame?

And why didn’t the Department of Homeland Security jump on his bandwagon. By any and all criteria, he qualifies as a full-fledged domestic terrorist. He was a racist, a racial nationalist whose stated goal was to start a “race war.” And he announced his intentions over a period of months leading up to his attack. Here are some of his lines:

* “Kill all whiteys.”

* “I’m wantin’ to kill everything in sight.”

* “Asians are slant-eyed fucking pieces of shit.”

* “Spanish-speaking motherfuckers are crimes against fucking nature.”

And what about our social media guardians? The enlightened outposts that guard against “hate speech”? No, they did not cancel him. They did not banish him. They did not even remove a single one of his posts until 48 hours AFTER he went on his shooting spree.

Yikes: Inflation Hikes 

* The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 8.5%, year over year. That’s the biggest inflation jump since December 1981.

* Airfare is up 20% compared to pre-pandemic prices.

* The Producer Price Index (PPI) jumped 11.02%, year over year. That’s the biggest leap since data keeping began in 2010.

* Since the beginning of March, about 30% of baby formula products have been out of stock in the US. Walgreens is limiting purchases to three per customer.

* And finally: The average American is expected to need an extra $5,000 this year to purchase the same quantity of goods and services as he did last year.

Jerome Powell is in trouble. 

In a recent issue of Bonner Private Research, Bill Bonner wrote about the problems facing Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve:

“Inflation has already returned to levels not seen since the 1970s. The Fed needs to stop printing; everybody says so. But if Powell fights inflation, the economy will collapse; it depends on ultra-low interest rates and free-flowing credit. If, on the other hand, he lets inflation rip, the dollar will die… bringing with it financial, social, and political chaos…. In order to escape his trap, Jerome Powell needs to cut away 14 years’ worth of bad policy….

“The COVID Crisis caused the Fed to do a lot more of what it never should have been doing in the first place – printing money. In the last two years, its balance sheet… rose by more than it had in the entire 107 years since it was founded – by over $4 trillion.”

Bill foresees difficult times ahead. He suspects that Powell and the Fed will fail in trying to manage with the $50 trillion in fake wealth created since 2007. What they are dealing with, he says, is “a credit-addled economy, including trillion-dollar federal deficits, meme stocks, buyback programs, NFTs, zombie corporations, million-dollar shacks… and much, much more.”

Toothless: The Real Effect of the Economic Sanctions on Russia 

Earlier this month, the Central Bank of Russia raised its benchmark rate from 9.5% to 20% – the highest in almost 20 years. The purpose: defending the ruble against international sanctions, which have knocked it down to its lowest point in more than 20 years.

The Biden administration is touting this as a win. The problem with that: Russia is also demanding that its customers (which include most of Europe) pay for its oil in rubles. That means the French and Germans that depend so heavily on Russian oil will have to exchange their euros at the new rate. It makes the cost to them the same as it was prior to the Ukraine invasion, and the profit to Russia roughly the same as well.

From Bloomberg: “What’s become clear is that despite an incredibly wide-ranging package of sanctions on the Russian government and its oligarchs, and an exodus of foreign businesses, the actions are largely toothless if foreigners keep guzzling Russian oil and natural gas – supporting the ruble by stocking Putin’s coffers.”