zerohedge

Our Birth Dearth Is Becoming Our Death Knell

Authored by Timothy Geoglein via The Epoch Times,

One of our current cultural mantras is “you do you” – putting your personal desires over the greater good of others and society. In other words, living selfishly instead of selflessly.

The manifestation of such a philosophy and its implications for our society is particularly acute when it comes to the institutions of marriage and family.

As the late James Q. Wilson, former professor of government at Harvard University, wrote in his book, “The Marriage Problem”: “It is not money, but the family that is the foundation of public life. As it has become weaker, every structure built upon that foundation has become weaker.”

I pondered this after I read last month about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) releasing troubling new numbers regarding current fertility rates in the United States.

While numerous articles have been written about the “birth dearth” over the past few years and its implications for our future, this report clearly illustrates that what was once a matter of concern is rapidly becoming a full-blown crisis as the CBO forecasts significantly lower population growth over the next three decades.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Kiernan states:

“As a result of these changes, deaths are expected to exceed births in 2033, seven years earlier than the nonpartisan agency projected a year ago.”

The report shows the population receiving Social Security will grow from its current total of 342 million to 383 million by 2054. The current ratio of people aged 25–64 compared to those over 65 is 2.9-1. By 2054, it will be 2.2-1.

While better health care has resulted in longer life expectancies, thus increasing this ratio, the nation’s current population growth rate is 0.2 percent, with much of that driven by immigration rather than births. In fact, the CBO projects that the fertility rate will be approximately 1.70 percent, below the replacement level of 2.1.

So, while people living longer is one contributing factor, it is just that: one factor. There are more and greater factors in play. Perhaps the most important one is this: Americans are not getting married or forming families, or if they are, it happens later in a woman’s prime childbearing years.

For instance, in 1970, married couples made up 71 percent of all American households. By 2022, that percentage had decreased to just 47 percent. In 1962, 90 percent of all 30-year-olds were married, with that percentage dropping to 51 percent in 2019.

Dr. Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus at Yale Law School, perhaps put it best when he wrote in his book, “One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking About Five Hard Issues That Divide Us”:

“The family is the essential core of any society, and the steady decline of two-parent households is probably the single most consequential social trend of the half-century.”

Decisions not to get married or have children are often driven by choices to pursue so-called “personal fulfillment,” such as money, travel, and a career.

Last year, the Pew Research Center reported that 57 percent of adults under 50 who…

The Genius Of The DOGE Exposures

Authored by William Marshall via American Greatness,

The American people have rightly been appalled at the outrageous expenditures Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been exposing at USAID, which not only demonstrates the striking wastefulness of our government but also an ingenious public relations strategy by the Trump administration.

When Americans learn that their tax dollars are going to fund egregious projects around the world, it lays a foundation for the public relations framework needed by the Trump administration to bring American public opinion along on the necessary journey of restructuring the government. It makes people’s blood boil. And it sets the tone for the effectiveness, and need for, the entire Trump efficiency program, even though the spending in absolute monetary terms on these insane USAID projects is fairly minor compared to the overall $6.9 trillion federal budget.

Let’s consider some of the USAID expenditures recently revealed:

$70,000 for the production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland

$47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia

$2,000,000 for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala

$32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru

Hundreds of millions to support “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban

$40,000,000 to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which gifted the world with the COVID virus

The creators of Monty Python could not have made this stuff up, although they came close in their “It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them!” sketch. It still makes me laugh. But that’s why Donald Trump and Elon Musk are highlighting these absurd expenditures. They are so ridiculous that they almost defy belief, and they serve to supercharge American anger and righteous indignation.

Trump recognizes, as Ronald Reagan did, the importance of galvanizing American public opinion as an integral part of carrying out his agenda. By inflaming the public, he puts pressure on the craven Congress to go along with his efforts to enact sweeping changes that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve.

No doubt when Musk sets his genius young elves to work applying their AI algorithms on the Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department’s budget data, they will find waste so massive that it dwarfs that of USAID’s $40 billion annual outlay. But it’s a bit harder for the public to grasp the wastefulness of the government paying many times the price that it should be paying for anti-aircraft missiles, say, or ineffective vaccines. From a public relations standpoint, it’s much easier to see the lunacy of the US taxpayer shelling out $2.5 million for an electric vehicle project in Vietnam or $1.5 million to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbian workplaces.

We live in amazing times, led by an extraordinary team being assembled in the White House. Who would have imagined just a few years ago that a Kennedy family member would (likely) be holding a cabinet position as the head of HHS in a Republican administration? Ot that a prominent Democratic congresswoman and former…

DOGE Is Right To Defang The CFPB

Authored by Yael Ossowski via RealClearPolitics,

With a big tech-powered magnifying glass on federal websites, spending contracts, and government payment systems, Elon Musk’s band of DOGE system admins have been turning Washington inside out in their hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse. One of the most prized agencies on the chopping block is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, heralded by progressives as an indispensable force for helping consumers wronged by financial institutions, but derided by fintech investors and conservatives as little more than a government “shakedown agency.” Consumers will be better off without the CFPB breathing down the neck of American companies. 
Sen. Liz Warren (D-MA) yammering about something

Since the inauguration of President Trump, the CFPB’s temporary leadership put an immediate halt on all work, also informing the Federal Reserve, which directly funds the agency, that it would no longer seek new funding. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual force behind the agency’s founding, has been apoplectic. She’s argued that Trump is “firing the financial cop on the beat that makes sure your family doesn’t get scammed.”

The origin of the CFPB goes back to the rubble of the 2008 financial crisis when legislators saw this proposed agency as a viable response to the populist backlash engulfing Washington and Wall Street. Instead of penalizing wrongdoers, Congress funded bank bailouts and launched a “watchdog” group. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act mandated new standards for lending, restricted capital that could be tapped for bank loans, and created the CFPB to police consumer finance. 

All functions performed by the five former federal banking supervisory agencies were rolled into the CFPB, granting it sole jurisdiction over non-depository firms and financial institutions with over $10 billion in assets. This empowered the agency to issue regulatory guidance, demand information from financial institutions, and launch civil actions in federal court.

Supporters of the CFPB point to an impressive record of close to $20 billion in consumer relief, as well as an additional $5 billion in civil penalties. Without the CFPB, fraudsters and scams would metastasize and consumer injustice would run wild, so they say. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

As a regulatory agency with civil litigation authority, the CFPB is emboldened to file high-dollar lawsuits against financial firms. An estimate of the CFPB’s database of enforcement actions reveals that roughly 85% of all cases are settled out of court before a final ruling.

Companies often choose to settle, but this shouldn’t be mistaken for an admission of guilt. In a litigious society such as the United States where companies are routinely targeted in frivolous lawsuits, the court of public opinion matters just as much as the court of law. 

Firms prefer settling cases over having their name dragged through the mud for months on end in the media, something tort lawyers call a “nuisance settlement.” These expected costs are baked into large firms’ financial projections and are sometimes factored into pricing their goods and services for consumers. 

The CFPB is more akin to a state-backed tort law firm that…

Pope Francis’ Great Blunder

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

One of the great tragedies of the Enlightenment and its aftermath was that Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular lost faith in their legitimacy and in the legitimacy of their mission. As a result, they surrendered that mission’s otherworldliness and agreed to fight only on temporal grounds. In other words, when the Church responded to its attackers, it did so not on its own terms but on the terms—and in the terms—of those attackers. Rather than focus on its mission and the eternal truths for which it had become the earthly vessel, the Church became distracted. The problem wasn’t that the Church failed to defend itself, but that it did so on the foreign turf of the rationalist philosophers, economists, sociologists, and politicians. And it continues to do so.

When Immanuel Kant insisted that God’s existence cannot be proved by philosophy, science, or reason, Christianity should have conceded and moved on. Christianity is not about proving those things to nonbelievers. It is about fostering the faith necessary to believe them without proof. In his classic novel Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann described this grievous mistake as follows:

Orthodoxy itself committed the blunder of letting reason into the field of religion, in that she sought to prove the positions of faith by the test of reason. Under the pressure of the Enlightenment, theology had almost nothing to do but defend herself against the intolerable contradictions which were pointed out to her: and only in order to get round them she embraced so much of the anti-revelation spirit that it amounted to an abandonment of faith. . . . Since this went a little too far, there arose an accommodation theology . . . . In its conservative form, holding to revelation and the traditional exegesis, it sought to save what was to be saved of the elements of Bible religion; on the other hand it liberally accepted the historico-critical methods of the profane science of history and abandoned to scientific criticism its own most important contents: the belief in miracles, considerable portions of Christology, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and what not besides. . .

Among the more pernicious consequences of this “blunder” is the occasional (but all too frequent) forays by Church leaders into the realm of temporal politics. Some outwardly “political” matters are, in reality, spiritual matters, matters of faith. Abortion is one such issue. If one believes the words of the Book of Jeremiah, for example—“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you”—then one should also, as a matter of faith, believe that abortion is a heinous matter that takes the life of one of God’s beloved.

Such matters are, however, few and far between. Most of the time that the Church ventures into the political realm, it steps beyond the bounds of its authority; it compounds the blunder of fighting on the field of reason and human affairs and exacerbates its capitulation to…

California Rejects State Farm’s Rate Increase Request Amid LA Fire Claims

Authored by Jane Yang via The Epoch Times,

California’s insurance commissioner on Feb. 14 turned down a request by insurer State Farm for an emergency interim rate hike of 22 percent for home insurance, amid a flood of damage claims due to the devastating Los Angeles fires.

“The burden is on State Farm to show why this is needed now. State Farm has not met its burden,” Commissioner Ricardo Lara said in a statement.

Lara said he has scheduled a meeting on Feb. 26 with the insurer to ask questions regarding the company’s rate increase request, according to the commissioner’s office.

The commissioner said he wants State Farm to discuss its financial stability, justification for the rate hike, impacts to policyholders, and transparency in its decision-making, the office said.

State Farm has requested a 22 percent rate increase for non-renter homeowners, 15 percent for renters, 15 percent for condominium unit owners, and 38 percent for rental dwellings, all effective May 1, 2025, for interim rate increases.

State Farm said it was disappointed by the rejection. “This lack of approval sends a strong message to State Farm General about the support it will receive to collect sufficient premiums in the future to protect Californians against the risk of loss to their homes,” a Feb. 14 statement posted on the company website reads.

State Farm said that it has “gone to great lengths to clearly answer the questions outlined by the Commissioner,” and while it is “positioned to handle all of the claims associated with the most recent wildfires,” the company “must seriously consider its options within the California insurance market going forward.”

In a Feb. 3 letter to Lara, State Farm said that as of Feb. 1, the company received more than 8,700 claims and has already paid more than $1 billion to customers related to the Los Angeles fires, and more will be paid in the future.

It also said that “the costs of these fires will further deplete capital” from the company, which could affect its credit rating and harm its mortgage customers.

State Farm said that because the commissioner has not yet approved its request for rate increases submitted last March, it is now asking the agency to “take emergency action” to approve interim rate increases and allow the company “to start collecting additional premiums much more quickly and possibly begin rebuilding its risk-bearing capacity.”

It also claimed in the letter that over the nine-year period ending in 2024, it paid $1.26 in claims and expenses for every $1.00 collected through premium payments, resulting in more than $5 billion in cumulative losses.

In the response letter Lara sent to State Farm on Feb. 14, he said that under the strict review laid out by California Proposition 103, “the burden is on the insurer to demonstrate and support its rate requests.”

According to statistics from Bankrate.com updated Feb. 10, the national average cost of home insurance is $2,258 per year for a policy with $300,000 in coverage. California’s average is $1,429, which is $829…

Liberal Women Are Lonely And Unhappy According To Recent Polls

The news must come as a shock to most, but it turns out that liberal women in the US are very unhappy.  A recently released poll from the American Family Survey held in 2024 shows that only 12% of liberal women are satisfied with their lives and that they are three times more likely to experience loneliness compared to conservative women.

The data reinforces a number of surveys over the years which reveal a continuing plunge in relative happiness among progressive western women despite their admission that they have more independence than ever before.

Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and fellow at the Institute for Family Studies who analyzed the survey’s data, said he believes there are a couple of reasons why conservative young women are more likely to be happier than their liberal counterparts. 

“We’ve seen in the research that conservative women tend to be more likely to embrace a sense of agency and to have the sense that they are not, in any way, the victim of larger structural realities or forces,” he told Fox News Digital.  “They’re also less likely to catastrophize about public events and concerns,” and “more likely to think of themselves as captains of their own fate,” Wilcox added.

The survey also notes that conservative women are more likely to accept biological and social differences between males and females.  The ideal was thought to be common sense for thousands of years but has come under fire from feminists in the past decade as a “social construct of the patriarchy”.  The deconstruction of societal norms has been so pervasive, governments across the western world have tried to encode intersectional feminist taboos into law and punish people who remain skeptical.  

One side effect of the rise of feminist authority that liberals apparently did not expect is the decline in relative happiness of women.  The issue was fist noticed around 2009 when a study out of the University of Pennsylvania stunned the mainstream media – Despite decades of greater access to the jobs market, institutional influence and life options since the 1970s, young women have become increasingly less happy compared to their counterparts of past generations.  Though the study avoids addressing the problem of feminism directly, it does suggest that modern constructs may play a major role in creating anxiety for women.  

While men’s personal happiness has also been in sharp decline in recent decades, their financial opportunities have remained relatively static.  For women, financial and social opportunity has skyrocketed (along with access to college education), but their decline in happiness is even more dramatic than men. 

The American Family Survey helps to clarify the source of the happiness decline by separating out women according to their ideological leanings.  It’s not conservative women that are dragging those numbers down, it’s leftist women. 

It makes sense.  Before the 1970s the role of men as breadwinners was well established while women’s primary concerns focused on the household and family.  Men are…

DOGE Vs USAID: “A Remarkable And Definite Victory”

Authored by Thaddeus McCotter via American Greatness,

After years of battlefield defeats, on November 10, 1942, Winston Churchill’s resolute voice filled the Mansion House during the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon to announce the outcome of the Battle of El Alamein: “Now, however, we have a new experience. We have victory—a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts.”

One cannot help but wonder if Republican-populists and/or MAGA supporters felt the same way upon learning of the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) revelations regarding the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) unconscionable expenditures and, subsequently, President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio’s swift shuttering of what constituted the Democrat Party’s taxpayer-subsidized, over $32 billion (2024) international and domestic political slush fund.

But USAID is not the only taxpayer-subsidized slush fund the Democrats enacted to fuel their party and, indeed, the entire political infrastructure of the left. One need only look at the multi-trillion-dollar spending spree, including bills such as the deceptively named “Inflation Reduction Act,” to understand how the then-Democrat majority and Mr. Biden skyrocketed both the federal debt and inflation for their own partisan gain at the expense of the American people.

As the unearthed revelations cascade into the avalanche that felicitously sweeps and buries USAID in the dustbin of history, one can limn the outline of the monster it created. Over the past several years, the public has become increasingly aware of how the Democrats have weaponized the police and surveillance powers of the state against their political enemies for partisan gain. Within this public awakening, the focus has been understandably upon which powers and positions the Democrats had weaponized. What DOGE has done with USAID is to commence closing the loop by investigating how the Democrats and their Deep State have weaponized government funds.

The emerging contours of USAID’s unaccountable and injurious weaponization of public funds for progressive aims are a repulsive entity using the American people’s money to wage war against Americans and our allies around the world. Using passthroughs, both internationally and domestically, USAID has foisted progressive imperialism upon our more culturally traditional nations, including the United States; interfered in elections and otherwise destabilized allies who were not leftist enough; created media echo chambers by subsidizing leftist information outlets; and even underwriting groups designated as extremist/terrorist organizations. In sum, USAID has knowingly, willfully, and deliberately abetted the undermining of America’s domestic unity, prosperity, security, and tranquility, and that of many of our allies.

Eyes welling with crocodile tears and cynically cradling the poor as props to shield their rampant malfeasance, the paymasters of USAID claim removing their control of these tens of billions of dollars will wreak havoc on indigent peoples. It will wreak havoc on USAID’s NGOs and sundry Democrat Party cohorts’ taxpayer-subsidized funding streams. But the harsh truth is that USAID’s multibillion-dollar laundry mat of passthroughs and unconscionable expenditures cheats the poor and the hungry. Every dollar USAID’s now-fired partisan political progressive hacks siphoned off for their faddish…

“Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, & Polar Vortex Is Coming For You”

The polar vortex is coming back across large swaths of the Lower 48 this weekend and through next week. 

“Bitterly cold Arctic air will pour into the central U.S. next week, bringing record-breaking low temps, dangerous wind chills (30-50 below zero), and possible heavy snow from the Plains to the Northeast,” NWS Weather Prediction Center wrote on X. 

For everyone hoping for the first signs of spring, meteorologist Ryan Maue squashed those hopes—at least for now—with his post on X: “Don’t even bother next week. It’s going to be too cold to go outside. A week-long Polar Vortex event will crush your soul.”

Don’t even bother next week. It’s going to be too cold to go outside.
Week long Polar Vortex event will crush your soul. pic.twitter.com/pjvQkMmnTD
— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) February 14, 2025
“Roses are red, violets are blue, and the polar vortex is coming for you! The most unusually cold blob of air on the planet will be over the United States next week as the polar vortex returns for the second time this year,” said Ben Noll, a meteorologist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research. 

Roses are red, violets are blue, and the polar vortex is coming for you!
The most unusually cold blob of air on the planet will be over the United States next week as the polar vortex returns for the second time this year. pic.twitter.com/0Y3ooiAK29
— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) February 14, 2025
Bloomberg data shows that the last polar vortex sent the entire nation into a deep freeze, with snow even in New Orleans. 

Meteorologists are already chatting about blizzard risks for next week across the Mid-Alantic and Northeast states.

HUGE WISE GUYS OF WEATHER Sunday 5 pm AM970 the Answer. NYC and streaming live with the master of the polar vortex, @judah47 eastern blizzard on the table Thursday so tune in. graphic:
euro snow forecast around PHL https://t.co/zwp3wFwieT…… Sunday 5pm call in 866-970-9622 pic.twitter.com/U7rS7whxwU
— The American Storm (@BigJoeBastardi) February 14, 2025

This Winter will not be complete without a crippling blizzard from DC to NYC and Boston. Now, up to 1 in 3 chance to hit the jackpot. ❄️📈 pic.twitter.com/k0CVvnxj8x
— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) February 14, 2025

0z Euro is another dream run for DC to Boston… my confidence is increasing in a potential major snowstorm for this area. I said yesterday I was 50/50, now I’m more like 70/30 on big hit vs. coastal scraper. #EcWx pic.twitter.com/IjDBvGZP3t
— Ryan Kane (@ryankanerWX) February 15, 2025
This winter has been harsh across much of the Lower 48 (read here & here & here & here).

So why have global warming alarmists remained silent about these cold blasts? Could it be that their USAID-funded propaganda budget has dried up? 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/15/2025 – 16:55…

Do Superpowers Still Rule The World?

The 61st Munich Security Conference is taking place this weekend. Ahead of the forum, the organizers have published their annual report, which provides an analysis of the global security situation and the current international order. 

This year, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that the analysis focuses on the “multipolarization” of the world order – the report underlines that divisions are widening between countries commonly known as superpowers, which hinder common sense approaches to crises and global threats. 

In this scenario, do other nations have the opportunity to slide into the cracks?

According to the authors of the report, China is the main supporter of a world order based on multipolarity. The country could benefit in the years to come from the withdrawal of the United States from its international commitments, as well as from Washington’s alienation of long-standing partners following the re-election of Donald Trump, to further establish its place as global superpower.

According to a survey from the report, some countries, such as Japan, India and the United States themselves, still perceive the U.S. as the dominant superpower in the world today, while more than a third (35 percent) of those surveyed across 11 countries said they considered the U.S. and China dominant powers. 

 

You will find more infographics at Statista

Additionally, nearly a quarter (24 percent) of all respondents said they believe that in today’s world, other powers can exert a strong influence on global affairs.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2025 – 23:00…

Wired’s Scicomm Writer Emily Mullin Attacks Independent Research, Because Of Course

Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

Shortly after I broke news last week about the new science journal born out of pandemic censorship, Wired Magazine’s scicomm writer Emily Mullin dashed out an attack piece to bash the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health.” Mullin’s hit piece contains factual errors and several misleading claims, but her article serves as an interesting case study in science writing, a journalism adjacent media profession.

Because Trump is now President and science writers have gone full TDS, I’m going to walk you through the details of how Mullin constructs her scicomm narrative to help you spot future examples. You will definitely run across some.

I’m going to ignore much of the rhetoric that infuses her piece—because Mullin says so, the journal is “controversial” and might “politicize science”—and jump to something that might not be obvious at first: Wired Magazine is in the business of servicing liberal pieties, not informing readers. How do we know this?

Mullin’s Wired piece is getting little traction on X, where users span the ideological spectrum, but it’s being gobbled up on Bluesky the social media app for liberal activists. Liberals love to complain that X is “right-wing” but that’s simply nonsense—Fact check wrong! After Trump won the election with Musk’s support, millions of liberals fled X in protest to join Bluesky. CNN reported weeks later that X was finally ideologically balanced.

According to CNN, when Musk bought X in 2022 it was very partisan, 65% of users were Democrats and only 31% were Republicans. By late 2024, X had become more ideologically diverse with 48% Democrats and 47% Republicans. Here’s CNN’s report.

BREAKING- CNN: Musk’s X Now Represents U.S. Voters ‘Far Better’ Than Ever Before |
“Look at this. The party ID among those who regularly use X/Twitter for news——Back in 2022, 65% of those who regularly used Twitter/X for news were Democrats. Just 31% were Republicans.”
“Look at… pic.twitter.com/lttDGI6bWf
— الاحداث العالمية 🌍 (@World_News8888) November 26, 2024
Right after Mullin published her hit piece, she posted it simultaneously on X and BlueSky. After a few hours, hardly anybody read it on X, but it took off on Bluesky with dozens of shares and likes.

Around 18 hours later, very little had changed on X for Mullin’s article. A few more people shared and a few more liked it, but on Bluesky, over 100 liberal activists promoted the article to their followers.

What excites liberals is news they find at places like Wired that confirms their own priors. That’s why they left X after Musk stopped the censoring and joined Bluesky. What they don’t care about is journalism, and they are not bothered by obvious errors in Mullin’s piece that tickle them in their political privates.

Mullin constructs a fake allegation to make the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” appear “controversial” by claiming Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta published a paper that concluded 50% of Brits were infected by the COVID virus in early 2020. Mullin also claims Gupta’s…