Starbucks Can't Get Customers to Stay, Despite Costly Cafe Makeovers

Starbucks is struggling to keep customers in its cafes, even after spending heavily to make stores more inviting. New data from Placer.ai shows the share of visits lasting more than 10 minutes has dropped from over 40% in 2023 to roughly one-third today, according to Bloomberg.

CEO Brian Niccol made longer in-store visits a core piece of his turnaround plan when he took over in September 2024, promising better service, faster drinks and a return to the “warm, cozy, comfortable environment” Starbucks once championed.

Yet foot traffic has fallen for four straight quarters, while profits have slid by double digits over the last four and same-store sales have declined for six. Shares are down 6.4% this year.

“They’ve trained their customer to use this brand as a convenience channel, not as a place where you sit down and linger,” said Citi analyst Jon Tower. Still, he noted that if shops look and feel better, customers may at least come in more often: “They just want more people to come in and walk in and say, ‘wow, this feels like a great place.’”

Bloomberg writes that Starbucks has been adding seating, more electrical outlets and ceramic mugs, effectively reversing years of redesigns that prioritized speed over comfort.

The company says remodeled locations are seeing visitors stay longer and return more frequently. “Early results from uplifted coffeehouses in New York City and Southern California are already showing promise,” a spokesperson said. “Customers are staying longer, visiting more often, and sharing positive feedback.”

Renovations have also gotten cheaper, with some now costing about $150,000 instead of up to $1 million. Starbucks plans to refresh 1,000 North American stores in fiscal 2026. The chain has also sped up service — 80% of drinks are now served in under four minutes — and simplified the menu by 25%, cutting back on seasonal excesses. “We streamlined our menu to clear the way for innovation and focus on what customers love most,” the company said.

But the company is also closing older and to-go-focused locations as part of a $1 billion restructuring meant to align operations with Niccol’s more café-centric vision.

Some customers say the shops still aren’t conducive to lingering. At a Manhattan location, Dennis O’Leary noticed design updates but complained the music was too “tinny” and loud to make him stick around. Most seats were filled with customers waiting for orders rather than relaxing or working.

Analysts expect Starbucks to report flat same-store sales in North America when it announces earnings Wednesday — signaling the company’s push to make Starbucks a place to stay, not just stop, still has a long way to go.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/01/2025 - 09:55

The EU's Two-Tier Encryption Vision Is Digital Feudalism

Authored by Bill Laboon via CoinTelegraph.com,

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently showed a moment of humanity in a tech world that often promises too much, too fast. He urged users not to share anything with ChatGPT that they wouldn’t want a human to see. The Department of Homeland Security in the United States has already started to take notice. 

His caution strikes at a more profound truth that underpins our entire digital world. In a realm where we can no longer be certain whether we’re dealing with a person, it is clear that software is often the agent communicating, not people. This growing uncertainty is more than just a technical challenge. It strikes at the very foundation of trust that holds society together. 

This should cause us to reflect not just on AI, but on something even more fundamental, far older, quieter and more critical in the digital realm: encryption.

In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms and autonomous systems, trust is more important than ever. 

Encryption is our foundation

Encryption isn’t just a technical layer; it is the foundation of our digital lives. It protects everything from private conversations to global financial systems, authenticates identity and enables trust to scale across borders and institutions.

Crucially, it’s not something that can be recreated through regulation or substituted with policy. When trust breaks down, when institutions fail or power is misused, encryption is what remains. It’s the safety net that ensures our most private information stays protected, even in the absence of trust.

A cryptographic system isn’t like a house with doors and windows. It is a mathematical contract; precise, strict and meant to be unbreakable. Here, a “backdoor” is not just a secret entry but a flaw embedded in the logic of the contract, and one flaw is all it takes to destroy the entire agreement. Any weakness introduced for one purpose could become an opening for everyone, from cybercriminals to authoritarian regimes. Built entirely on trust through strong, unbreakable code, the entire structure begins to collapse once that trust is broken. And right now, that trust is under threat. 

A blueprint for digital feudalism

The European Commission’s ProtectEU initiative proposes a mechanism that compels service providers to scan private communications directly on users’ devices before encryption is applied. This effectively turns personal devices into surveillance tools and breaks the integrity of end-to-end encryption. While state actors would never permit such a vulnerability in their own secure systems, this mandate creates a separate, weaker standard of security for the public.

On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable compromise: stronger encryption for governments, with so-called “lawful access” to citizens’ data. However, what it proposes is a hardcoded imbalance, one in which the state encrypts, and the public is decrypted.

This isn’t a security policy. It’s a blueprint for digital feudalism — a future where privacy becomes a privilege reserved for the powerful, not a right guaranteed to everyone. Two-tier encryption shifts the balance of trust from democratic accountability and cements a structure of control no free society should accept. Make no mistake: This debate isn’t about safety. It’s about control. 

We shouldn’t live in a world where only the powerful get to be private.

In an age of ubiquitous AI, state-sponsored hacking and mass digital surveillance, weakening encryption isn’t just shortsighted but a systemic recklessness. For those of us in the decentralized world, this is not an abstract debate; it is a matter of practical concern. Strong, unbreakable encryption is far more than a technical feature; it’s the foundation upon which everything else rests.

Truth by verification

This is why the mission of Web3 must stay rooted in its core promise: truth. Not truth by authority, but truth by verification. This principle of a self-enforcing contract is why true decentralized systems are built with no key master or institution that holds the keys. Introducing a backdoor is a contradiction; it re-establishes a central point of failure, violating the very premise of a trustless system. Security is a binary state: it is either present for everyone, or it is guaranteed for no one.

Fortunately, these principles are not just theoretical. The cryptographic primitives emerging from this space — zero-knowledge proofs that can confirm facts without exposing data, and proof-of-personhood systems that resist Sybil attacks without compromising privacy — offer a real, working alternative, showing that we don’t have to choose between security and freedom.

The irony is stark: The same field now under threat holds the tools we need to build a more secure, more open digital future. One based not on surveillance or gatekeeping, but on permissionless innovation, cryptographic trust and individual dignity.

If we want a digital world that is safe, inclusive and resilient, then encryption must remain strong and universally standardized for everyone.

Not because we have something to hide, but because we all have something to protect.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/01/2025 - 09:20

Kenyan Navy Intercepts Flagless Vessel Carrying $63 Million in Meth

Kenyan authorities have seized more than a metric ton of methamphetamine in a major maritime drug bust coordinated with INTERPOL and international partners.

On 21 October 2025, the Kenyan Navy intercepted a flagless dhow roughly 340 nautical miles east of Mombasa after intelligence sharing between the Regional Narcotics Interagency Fusion Cell in Bahrain and the Regional Coordination Operations Centre in Seychelles, according to a release from Interpol.

The vessel was escorted to Mombasa three days later, where a multi-agency command center was established under the Deputy Commander of the Kenyan Navy. INTERPOL said it played a key advisory and oversight role, helping manage the search to ensure the evidence would stand up in court and coordinating support from the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which deployed personnel to assist.

Interpol writes that authorities discovered 769 packets containing 1,024 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine with a purity level of 98%. Kenyan experts value the seizure at more than KES 8 billion (USD 63 million).

Six crew members were arrested and now face drug-trafficking charges. Kenya’s Anti-Narcotics Unit is leading the ongoing investigation.

INTERPOL said the operation demonstrates how international coordination and real-time intelligence sharing are essential to counter the growing threat of maritime drug trafficking in the Indian Ocean.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/01/2025 - 08:45

The key (missing) report this week is the October employment report.

Other key indicators include October ISM manufacturing and services indexes, and October vehicle sales.

Items in Red will not be released due to the government shutdown.

----- Monday, November 3rd -----
0:00 AM: ISM Manufacturing Index for October.  The consensus is for 49.2, up from 49.1. 

10:00 AM: Construction Spending for September.

2:00 PM: Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices (SLOOS) for October.

All day: Light vehicle sales for October.

The consensus is for sales of 15.5million SAAR, down from 16.4 million SAAR in September (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate).

This graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967. The dashed line is the current sales rate.

----- Tuesday, November 4th -----
8:30 AM: Trade Balance report for September from the Census Bureau.

10:00 AM: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for September from the BLS.

----- Wednesday, November 5th -----
7:00 AM ET: The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) will release the results for the mortgage purchase applications index.

8:15 AM: The ADP Employment Report for October. This report is for private payrolls only (no government).  The consensus is for 25,000 jobs added, up from 32,000 lost in September.

10:00 AM: the ISM Services Index for October.  The consensus is for a increase to 51.0 from 50.0.

11:00 AM: NY Fed: Q3 Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit

----- Thursday, November 6th -----
8:30 AM: The initial weekly unemployment claims report will be released.

----- Friday, November 7th -----
8:30 AM: Employment Report for October.

10:00 AM: University of Michigan's Consumer sentiment index (Preliminary for November).

Moscow's "Root Causes" Memo Reportedly Angered White House, Which Then Nixed Budapest Summit

The Financial Times is out with more reporting Friday on why the United States canceled a planned summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest earlier this month. The FT report says Moscow issued sweeping demands on Ukraine, according to sources privy to the conversations, and that ultimately this 'annoyed' President Trump, who opted to listen to those admin officials calling for a firmer position in support of Ukraine.

Also, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly told Trump that Moscow was "showing no willingness to negotiate" after he held a phone call with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Russia has reportedly made clear that a precondition for lasting peace rests on significant territorial concessions in the east.

Getty Images

Trump "was not impressed with their position," FT quoted one source as saying, who also explained the president remains open to meeting Russian leaders only "when and where he thinks there can be progress."

However, the 'demands' from the Russian side shouldn't have come as any surprise, given also Russian forces have the initiative on the ground in the east. A "root causes" of the conflict memo laying out Moscow's position demanded Ukraine give up large parts of its territory, cut its troops and forever abandon plans to join NATO.

President Putin has meanwhile emphasized that the planned Russian-American summit in Budapest was postponed and not canceled.

Russia seems to want to keep dialogue with Washington as positive as possible, and wants to present 'progress' in bilateral relations, while downplaying ongoing disagreements.

The reality remains that President Trump is trying to negotiate in favor of the Zelensky government, while Zelensky's own forces have little to no leverage over the military situation. Russia knows it is in the driver's seat on the ground, despite Ukraine's unrelenting cross-border drone attacks on oil refineries. And yet the mainstream media still floats simplistic narratives and mythologies like the following:

Russian foreign ministry allegedly sent a memo to Washington outlining how Putin was still calling for the supposed “root causes” of his invasion to be addressed – even though the West widely believes he invaded Ukraine in a land grab.

President Putin has floated the idea of a "ceasefire for journalists" to allow them to reach the frontlines and report honestly on the situation.

Currently, the Kremlin is charging that Zelensky is seeking to hide the true state of the frontline situation in and around Pokrovsk, per state media:

Ukraine has effectively acknowledged the “catastrophic situation” faced by its troops in a Russian encirclement by banning journalists from reaching them, the Russian Defense Ministry has said.

On Thursday, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Georgy Tikhy warned media workers against accepting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer of safe passage to the front line in Donbass to report on thousands of Kiev’s troops surrounded by Russian forces. Traveling to the area without permission from Kiev would be “a violation of our legislation” that would have “long-term reputational and legal consequences,” Tikhy said.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement on Friday that Ukraine had banned local and foreign journalists from accessing the “cauldrons” in order to “conceal the real state of affairs on the front line and deceive the international community and the Ukrainian people.”

Looming large over all of this is more nuclear rhetoric and saber-rattling...

He's referring to Russia. No one will be happier at this news than John Bolton, who killed arms control treaties with Moscow in Trump's first term and now gets this wish fulfilled in Trump's second. https://t.co/UiZmJaB64c

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 30, 2025

Moscow wants to especially signal to Washington that Ukrainian ground defenses are facing rapid collapse in key strategic locations; however, this is something the Zelensky government has been firmly rejecting. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/01/2025 - 07:35

Will The AfD Party Be Banned In Germany?

Via Remix News,

There are once again efforts to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag, with the far-left Social Democrats (SPD) leading the way. However, there is some difficult math facing the proponents of an AfD ban, which makes it unlikely — but not impossible — for the party to be banned.

In order to understand why a ban is unlikely, let us first look at what would actually happen if a ban of the AfD went forward.

 

The AfD is currently the most popular party in the country, according to multiple polls, scoring between 25 and 27 percent of the vote. This alone makes a ban unthinkable to many, but the German establishment does not especially care what the electorate thinks on a number of key issues, so why not just ban the party?

For starters, and most importantly, a ban of the AfD would radically reshape the German electorate in favor of the left. This would translate into the Christian Democrats (CDU) losing a massive amount of power, and potentially being relegated to the political dustbin. Due to this cold, hard reality, a ban could be suicidal for the CDU.

How one local elections tells us about the federal election

What happened in the local mayoral election in Ludwigshafen tells us what the likely outcome of an AfD ban would be for the country at the federal level. In Ludwigshafen, the AfD’s Joachim Paul was leading the polls to become mayor before he was banned from running through backroom bureaucratic channels, a move later confirmed by judges during a number of appeals. The judges all argued Paul would have to challenge the ban after the election. Paul is still filing legal actions against the decision, but the outcome of the appeal could take months or even years.

Regardless of the outcome of Paul’s appeal, the election had some interesting outcomes.

First, the voter participation rate crashed to a record low of just 29.3 percent. In 2017’s mayoral election in Ludwigshafen, the then-SPD candidate Jutta Steinruck won with 60.2 percent participation. That means voter turnout was cut in half from that election.

That is not all. For those who did vote, many of them appear to have submitted “spoiled” ballots. A record-high number of ballots were ruled invalid, at 9.2 percent. Eight years ago, that number was just 2.6 percent. The number of “spoiled ballots” jumped by nearly 400 percent.

If this same outcome occurred at the federal level, including a dramatic crash in the voter participation rate as AfD supporters boycott the election, it would be a disaster for the CDU’s electoral chances.

The way the German system works means that the pool of right-wing voters would shrink dramatically, leaving CDU voters and the left as the only remaining voting pool. However, this remaining, much smaller pool, would then feature a dramatically larger share of left-wing voters consisting of the SPD, the Greens, and the Left Party.

These three parties would be looking at a potential supermajority.

Even with a CDU scoring 30 to 35 percent of the vote, the party could be easily sidelined by this new far-left coalition.

This is what the CDU fears.

To understand this, it is important to understand that the German left does not need to increase the number of votes it receives; it just needs to increase its share of the vote. Let us consider an imaginary scenario where only 35 percent of the population votes in the next German federal election. It would be a disaster for democracy, but it could still be a huge win for the left. If the right drops out of the voting process. Suddenly, the remaining voting pie looks more left-wing, and the left can win a bigger share of this smaller voting pie.

Voilà, the left now have a super majority with just a small fraction of voters coming out to vote.

The trouble for the left is that it still needs the CDU to vote for an AfD ban in the Bundestag, otherwise they would not have the majority needed to pass such a motion. However, the CDU has no incentive to do this.

Death of democracy, rise of the left

On top of this electoral math problem for the CDU, it would not only make the electoral map vastly more favorable to the left, but it could also tear a giant hole in the CDU party itself.

A plurality of voters are against a ban on the AfD. A new Insa poll shows that 43 percent of respondents are against a ban, while 35 percent are in favor. Another 10 percent were indifferent, and 12 percent refused to comment.

However, for CDU voters, the issue was evenly split, with 42 percent supporting a ban, while 41 percent were against it.

Many CDU voters have already switched their voting intentions towards the AfD. A ban could further fuel an exodus towards the AfD party while the ban works its way through the system, all the way to the Constitutional Court, which is the final arbiter of the ban process. That could take well over a year, plenty of time to enact massive damage on the CDU.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz already said that a ban of the AfD “smacks to much of the elimination of political rivals.” CDU voters all heard this statement. For him and his party to backtrack now on this issue would not sit well with many voters, many who are already dissatisfied with the economy and migration.

The Insa poll also shows that while a majority of supporters of left-wing parties back a ban, they are by no means in full agreement. Many Germans, even those on the left, believe a ban on the AfD would be a stake in the heart of democracy.

If a ban goes through, and a national vote is held featuring an abysmal voter participation rate due to mass boycotts, it would likely send the German system into chaos, leaving a massive democratic hole in the country’s landscape. It could even shake the entire foundation of the German state, calling into question the legitimacy of any government that is elected into power with an extremely low voter share and a ban on the most popular party.

What is the most likely scenario?

The left is likely to continue with its full-court press to proceed with a ban on the AfD. It would only benefit them, after all. The CDU is also likely to continue to talk of a ban, demonize the AfD, and try to snipe at the party using all the tools of the state, but is unlikely to actually back a ban. Doing so would be very foolish from a purely strategic point of view.

Of course, that is not a foregone conclusion. There are potential political realities, power struggles, and wild cards that could lead Merz and much of the CDU leadership to reverse course. However, the current risks of such a move outnumber the potential benefits by a clear margin.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/01/2025 - 07:00

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• Can the Golden Age of Costco Last? With its standout deals and generous employment practices, the warehouse chain became a feel-good American institution. In a fraught time, it can be hard to remain beloved. (New Yorker)

• The Hamptons Luxury Housing Market Is Staging a Comeback for the Ages: The East End’s unprecedented revival is being fueled by a wave of home sales priced above $10 million. (WSJ) see also New York’s Golden Handcuffs: Why the City Has a Special Hold on the Rich: Don’t bet on a millionaire exodus if Mamdani wins the mayorship. (Bloomberg no paywall}

• Long-Term Asset Return Study – The Ultimate Guide to Long-Term Investing: This study examines how asset classes have performed across a wide range of macroeconomic, policy, and valuation environments. Drawing on data that in some cases stretches back to the 18th century, we analyse both nominal and real returns to understand how different assets have behaved under varying conditions. We explore correlations with key drivers such as real and nominal GDP growth, inflation, interest rates, bond yields, debt and deficit levels, and more — with the goal of helping investors tilt the odds in their favour. (Deutsche Bank)

• The Beatles as Comedians: They might have been the Marx Brothers of the Age of Aquarius. (The Honest Broker)

• The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession: Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since. (Wired)

• The myth of the carnivore caveman: You are not going to like where our ancestors got their protein. (Vox)

• What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality: There are hundreds of coherent theories attempting to explain the origins of experience. Robert Lawrence Kuhn explores what they reveal about free will, artificial intelligence and life after death. (New Scientist) see also Lights On: Consciousness, the Mystery of Felt Experience, and the Fundamental Music of Reality: Remove an atom from the piano and it remains a piano; keep going long enough, atom by atom, and it will eventually cease being a piano — but no particular atom marks the boundary of its unbecoming. (The Marginalian)

• Mortality is the mother of art: Living creatively in an impermanent world. There are two basic facts of human existence: We are born. We die. But what we do in between—that part is up to us. The question becomes: How should we spend our finite time here on this Earth? Once our basic survival needs have been met, what pursuits are worth devoting ourselves to? (Hello, Mortal)

• The Island Where People Go to Cheat Death: In a pop-up city off the coast of Honduras, longevity startups are trying to fast-track anti-aging drugs. Is this the future of medical research? (New Republic)

• How Billie Eilish Rewrote the Business of Pop Music: At just 23, she has racked up nine Grammys and two Oscars. Now the hitmaker is making the industry more sustainable—for the world and herself. (Wall Street Journal)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview  this weekend with Jon Hilsenrath of Serpa Pinto Advisory. Previously, he was chief economics correspondent for Wall Street Journal for 26 years. Dubbed the “Fed Whisperer” by Wall Street traders for his scoops on the FOMC, he worked out of Hong Kong, NY, and D.C. He was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team for on-scene coverage of 9/11.  He is the author of “Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval.”

 

The World’s Largest Economies in 2026

Source: Visual Capitalist

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

~~~

To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

 

The post 10 Weekend Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

NATO's Three-Pronged Response To The Latest Russian Scare Raises The Risk Of A Larger War

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

This could be averted if Poland, which commands NATO’s third-largest army and whose new president recently didn’t rule out talking to Putin if his country’s security depended on it, doesn’t allow itself to be manipulated into partaking in any related provocations or backing up those responsible for them.

Early September’s suspicious Russian drone incident over Poland, Estonia’s subsequent claim that Russian jets violated its maritime airspace, and Scandinavia’s recent Russian drone scare are responsible for NATO considering a three-pronged response along its eastern flank according to the Financial Times. Their sources indicate that this could take the form of arming surveillance drones, streamlining the rules of engagement for fighter pilots, and holding NATO exercises right on the bloc’s border with Russia.

The first two carry self-evident escalation risks since trigger-happy operators or pilots could provoke a serious international security crisis if they shoot at (let alone down) Russian drones or jets. This is especially so if it occurs in international airspace or especially within Russia’s own. As for the last one, Russia’s threat assessment would spike during the duration of those drills since they could be a front for aggression, including hybrid aggression via drones and/or mercenaries.

NATO jamming could also lead to Russian drones veering across the border like this analysis here argues was probably responsible for the earlier-mentioned suspicious incident over Poland. In that scenario, NATO could have the pretext for a (possibly preplanned) escalation against Russia that could easily spiral out of control if cooler heads don’t prevail. The Financial Times noted that “a shift may not be publicly communicated” so a crisis could break out with no advance warning if NATO makes one wrong move.

Communication is key for preventing that, but Poland rejected Russia’s proposal to discuss September’s suspicious drone incident and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova recently condemned it for annulling the visas of Russian experts ahead of an OSCE meeting in Warsaw. Poland aspires to revive its lost Great Power status, with September being historic in this respect as explained here, which would then revive its centuries-long rivalry with Russia at the possible expense of regional stability.

There are three fronts where Poland could apply one, some, or all three parts of NATO’s reported three-pronged response to the latest Russian scare: Kaliningrad, Belarus, and/or Ukraine. It also commands NATO’s third-largest army and has no plans to slow down its unprecedented militarization so its political-military leadership might feel emboldened to one day test Russia’s red lines. That could lead to a NATO-Russian war, however, if a Russian plane is shot down according to the Russian Ambassador to France.

New Polish President Karol Nawrocki wisely decided not to risk that by declining to impose a no-fly zone over part of Ukraine after September’s incident despite pressure from his Foreign Minister. It later turned out that the government lied about Russian responsibility for the damage inflicted on a home after it was revealed that a NATO missile was to blame. They also hid this fact from him. Deep state forces, possibly soon in collusion with Ukraine, quite clearly want to spark another Polish-Russian War.

Given that Nawrocki recently didn’t rule out talking to Putin if Poland’s security depended on it, he might thus do so in a crisis instead of allowing himself to be misled by deep state forces, particularly the liberal-globalist ruling coalition and their military-intelligence allies who just tried to manipulate him into war. Without the direct involvement of NATO’s third-largest army in any potentially forthcoming crisis, whether provoked by the Polish deep state or the Baltic States, a NATO-Russian war might be averted.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 23:25

Men Far More Likely Than Women To Die By Suicide

The following chart, via Statista's Katharina Buchholz, shows data on suicide prevalence in countries around the world.

Out of every 100,000 men in the United States, an average of 24 died from suicide in 2021, while for women the average was close to seven per 100,000.

In several countries these figures were even higher, such as in South Korea, Lithuania and Hungary.

While there are significant differences between countries, one pattern is clear to see: the rates of men taking their own lives are generally higher than those of women.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Lithuania and South Korea had the highest rates of suicide among men in 2021 (out of the countries reporting data), at 50 and 37 cases per 100,000 population, respectively.

For women, South Korea, India and Japan had the highest rates of the selected countries, with 14.6, 10.9 and 10.1 cases per 100,000.

According to the World Health Organization, the African Region has the highest suicide rate in the world, estimated at 11.2 people per 100,000 population in 2019, compared to the global average of 9.0 per 100,000 population that year.

Lesotho had particularly high rates at 87.5 per 100,000 population that year, followed by Eswatini at 40.5 per 100,000 population.

The WHO underscores how 77 percent of suicides occurred in low- and middle-income countries in 2019, where a majority of the world's population lives, adding that a lack of data on suicide has led to continued underreporting.

If you or somebody you know are in need of help, you can find a list of suicide crisis lines and website for countries around the world here.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 23:00

Time To Curb The Violence

Authored by Mark Penn & Andrew Stein via RealClearPolitics,

Even back to the days of Charles Manson, a violent cult leader, there were pockets of people who cheered and reveled in violence. But all too common today are the groupies who adulate the CEO killer, the social media maven who praises the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the miscreant who says they wish presidential assassins had been successful.

In today’s social-media fueled world, every heinous act of violence spawns a great majority of people of condemn it and a smaller counter-reaction of people who cheer it and call for more. Maybe this was always the case, but those who supported such violence could not as easily band together as they can today. Social media allows the violence lovers to find like-minded individuals, legitimizing their response, further encouraging future violence.

Kirk held no elected office. His only weapons were words and open debate. Despite this, nearly one in five Americans shockingly declared in surveys that his assassination was justified, according to a Harvard CAPS Harris poll. The path to such thoughts is clear. The opposition on the left characterized Kirk’s positions as “hate” despite his willingness to debate anyone anywhere. Once his speech was then characterized as violence – the resultant deadly violence became justified.  

Almost 3 in 4 voters (72%) decry today’s polarizing political rhetoric as a cause of contemporary violence, and over 4 in 5 state it is unacceptable for their own political party to use violence to achieve its aims.  

Notably, though, 74% of GOP voters see Democrats’ rhetoric as too extreme, compared to just the 27% who call their own party extreme. The effect is mirrored on the other side of the aisle, with 84% of Democrats calling the GOP too extreme, but a mere 33% saying the same of their own party. This drive of the parties to polarize the electorate rather than convince swing voters is reflected in the current pointless government shutdown. The political coin of the realm these days is in satisfying the base with increasingly incendiary words and actions.

That said, voters from all sides agree on the destructive role of social media, with 64% stating that social media encourages violent behavior.   

A solid 85% agreed that talking heads in the media celebrating Charies Kirk’s death were inappropriate. At the same time, though, voters are strong believers in the First Amendment. Of the same group, 54% stated that Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show should not have been suspended over Kimmel’s comments about Kirk’s death, and 58% even supported his return to late-night television.  

And that’s the thing about the First Amendment – it requires some level of self-restraint and responsibility, or it becomes the amendment that allows society to destroy itself. Or it allows the forces who want to destroy society to masquerade as merely those who would question it. It requires vigilance in allowing political debate but also in finding fair limits.

The Jay Jones scandal is a case in point. He called for the killing of his political opponents and appeared to be quite serious about it. Predictably, he called them Hitler and said that it should be done with two bullets to the head. Despite these inflammatory sentiments, Jones remains committed to his bid for – of all jobs – attorney general of Virginia. It’s difficult for us to understand how someone willing to threaten killing his political opponents remains an appropriate candidate for attorney general.

Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and others are villainizing the ICE agents in dire language that is an open invitation to violence. On ICE agents, Pritzker claimed “They were going after a few gang members, and instead, they broke windows, they broke down doors, they ransacked the place ... They are the ones that are making it a war zone.” ICE agents are being accused essentially of kidnapping people randomly on the street based on racial profiling and “disappearing” them as was done by the Argentine junta, and the result is encouraging violence against federal officials. 

It’s easy to condemn violence, but harder to do something about it. For starters, we need a bipartisan group of lawmakers to come together and stand clearly and unequivocally for bringing down the political temperature. They should agree on a set of basic principles outlining the bounds of attack language, which must include no longer calling opponents “Hitler” and other names that function to justify violence. They should condemn the recent political assassinations and attempted murders unequivocally – without exceptions or thinly veiled justifications. Finally, these lawmakers should call on the remainder of Congress to sign on to these principles as a clear rebuke of political violence and extreme rhetoric.  

Second, they need to draft legislation that makes social media responsible for hosting and spreading calls for violence. Section 230 needs to be rewritten to give social media platforms an explicit obligation to promptly remove content that calls for violence. That won’t cure the problem, but it will put the social media channels on notice that they need to be vigilant about removing at least the most extreme rhetoric within 24 to 48 hours. 

And third, the White House should establish a serious bipartisan, anti-political violence commission to probe the recent rise in political violence more deeply and attempt to explain to Americans how we cannot let our political differences degenerate into chaos. It should explore the violence-based underworlds on both the right and the left.  

The Kerner Commission’s 1968 report painted an image of two Americas – one white and one black – that had a profound impact on the country at the time. And yet today, there are once again two Americas – one red and one blue. We need to make a good faith effort to bridge the gaps in ways that preserve and promote the ballot as the answer, not the bullet.â?¯The test will be whether such a commission could ever agree on one joint and final report. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 22:35

Rep. Troy Balderson Is Right: Coal And Gas Drive Affordable, Reliable, And Clean Energy

Authored by Jude Clemente via RealClearEnergy,

The International Energy Agency (IEA) defines energy security as “The uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price.” In that context, no other energy sources in the world can stand against the combination of American coal and natural gas. And coming soon, utilities expect Small Modular Reactors starting as soon as 2030. 

Congressman Troy Balderson (R-OH) recently introduced “The Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act” to ensure U.S. energy dominance and protect baseload generation with coal, natural gas, and nuclear. His ARC bill guarantees America’s most important dispatchable electricity sources remain central to the mix – a requirement to provide affordable and reliable energy for American families and businesses, all becoming more essential as the AI and data center build-out is set to explode, in a world where China is deploying domestic, low-cost coal to accomplish the exact same national security imperative. No wonder why President Trump is prioritizing dispatchable power: the data centers driving our digital economy demand constant flows of electricity, namely without interruption to prevent data loss, service disruption, and equipment damage. 

Baseload power plants serve on an around-the-clock basis, producing electricity at a consistent rate and thereby maximizing efficiency and minimizing costs. Coal and natural gas are classic baseload fuels characterized by abundance, availability, accessibility and established production, distribution and utilization systems. For example, dispatchable generation from coal and gas can be adjusted by system operators to match supply with electricity needs. Wind and solar, on the other hand, as defined by Rep. Balderson, have “intermittent availability” and are weather dependent sources whose production is contigent on the availability of the resource – the wind and the sun. The physical reality is that the U.S. Department of Energy has long defined wind and solar as, naturally, “non-dispatchable.” Moreover, there is solid evidence that once these renewables reach a certain proportion of the grid, reliability is at risk – e.g. the April 2025 widespread power outages in Spain and Portugal.

In an electricity system, “capacity value” refers to the estimated contribution of an energy resource to the system's ability to meet peak demand and maintain reliability. Essentially, can installed capacity be counted on during times of peak demand? How much of a plant’s capacity is available when the system needs it most? Rolling and Orr have demonstrated how system planners recognize the capacity value limitations of wind and solar. As our largest power market serving 65 million Americans, PJM Planners, for example, assign an expected capacity value to coal at 80% and gas at about 75% through 2035. In sharp contrast, PJM sees the value of onshore wind declining from 41% in 2027 to only 19% in 2035 and solar never even reaching 10% in the next decade.

What this ultimately means is that wind and solar are more often “unavailable” than “available” to deploy and thus simply not possible to be the foundation for a PJM forecasting that from 2025 to 2045 winter peak power demand will soar by nearly 65%, with summer peak rising 50%. Our “greenest” state is California, having done all that it can to “get off fossil fuels” with renewables for decades, yet gas still generated nearly 60% of the state’s power on some days in September. Clearly more “supplemental” than “alternative,” PJM explains the intermittency problem and limited outlook for renewables: 

“The ratings for the two wind classes decrease significantly due to… winter historical performance patterns” … The ratings for the two solar classes remain stable at low values during the entire period.”  

Serving 45 million Americans, MISO is the electric grid operator for the central U.S., ensuring power flows reliably and affordably across 15 states and Manitoba. MISO system planners present a similar warning relating to the capacity value of wind and solar vis-a vis coal and natural gas: “dispatchable thermal resources, such as natural gas and coal, are forecast to provide a much larger fraction of the region’s total needed accredited capacity compared to wind and solar, which have significantly lower accreditation values due to their weather dependent nature.” 

Consider, for example, the 2025 Polar Vortex which pushed the U.S. power grid to unprecedented levels of demand. In response, grid operators relied heavily on dispatchable generation from coal and natural gas to ensure system reliability and stabilize supply. Wind and solar were challenged due to “unfavorable weather conditions.” On the peak day, wind and solar were only able to generate 3% and 0.2% of the incremental electricity needed. In contrast, coal and gas provided 66% of electricity during the Vortex. With climate change making our weather even less predictable, heavy reliance on weather dependent resources pose obvious problems. We continue to see the really bad consequences of retiring too much coal, too quickly, all as our power needs are starting to rise again. Experts at Power the Future warn of “a looming electricity affordability crisis,” and it is exactly why Rep. Balderson has also called for “Restoring American Coal Dominance.”

In terms of affordability, Rolling and Orr analyzed the cost of power from existing thermal power plants in the MISO region and found the cost of coal per Megawatt Hour as $37.45 and natural gas as $38.14. In comparison, the cost of New Wind is $46.30 and solar is $71.21. They note that these numbers should hardly be surprising. The existing coal and gas plants are more affordable because they have already paid off most of their initial capital costs, and utilities no longer earn much in the way of a rate of return on these depreciated assets. Thus, existing coal and gas plants are typically the most reliable and least expensive plants in the power system.  

Troy Balderson has proposed legislation which would provide American consumers with the affordable and reliable energy necessary for the nation to meet its electrification aspirations – especially in regard to data centers. As a reminder, electrification (i.e., much more electricity demand) itself is cited by green groups as critical to reducing emissions and fighting climate change. Flat really since 2008, annual U.S. electricity needs are set to rise by more than 50% over the next decade, to well over 6,000 terrawatt hours. While wind and solar surely offer good value in certain locations and at certain times, our required backbone for booming power needs remains obvious: dispatchable power from coal and gas provides consistent energy supply, supports grid stability, and enhances energy security. 

Jude Clemente is the Editor at RealClearEnergy.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 20:05

Deposit Insurance For Billionaires?

Authored by Stephen Moore via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Commentary

Politicians in Washington have the shortest memories.

Maybe that’s why they so seldom learn from their sometimes catastrophic mistakes.

Giorgio Trovato/Unsplash.com

It was less than 20 years ago that the U.S. economy was flattened by the mortgage and banking crisis. Anyone remember?

The experts said that the odds were tiny that the housing market could crash; that the federal housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would never need a bailout; that mortgage-backed securities were as good as gold.

Then they crashed overnight spectacularly and devastatingly. Banks made riskier and riskier housing loans to subprime borrowers—and the government covered the bets with essentially 100 percent loan guarantees. The book “The Big Short” famously tells the story of strippers in Las Vegas playing the market and flipping houses by taking out three or four mortgages.

One reason depositors and investors were paying no attention to the big banks’ high-risk lending strategy is that everything was guaranteed.

By you and me.

Americans are still rightly infuriated by the taxpayer bailouts in the trillions of dollars. The media has swept it all under the rug as an example of the excesses of greed and get-rich-quick capitalism. These factors played a role in the meltdown, for sure, but their partner in crime was the government itself, which insured all the financial Hail Mary passes.

One contributing factor to this moral hazard is deposit insurance. Right now, accounts are insured up to $250,000, so most Americans don’t have to worry about the soundness of the bank where they store their hard-earned savings. We don’t want 1929-style bank runs, for sure. So this safety net, there for shock-absorbing systemic risks, makes sense for mom-and-pop savers and investors.

But now there is a proposal to raise that taxpayer-insured limit to—drum roll, please—$10 million.

Huh? How many Americans have $10 million to deposit in the bank? Well, let’s see: There’s Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Taylor Swift, to name a few in the billionaire class. I’m the last person on earth to join Bernie Sanders in tearing down “the rich” when they earn it.

Supporters in both parties claim this will allow smaller community banks to more easily raise capital for lending and compete with the “Big Five” banks. That’s a good goal.

But we really should call this latest proposal “the Billionaire Insurance Act.”

A recent study from the Cato Institute found that fewer than 1 percent of deposit accounts exceed $250,000, the level at which Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation coverage currently ends. So to increase that amount to $10 million will mean taxpayer-supported insurance for the deposits of not the top 1 percent but the top 0.01 percent of Americans.

But who will be watching over the banks? It’s one thing to have the proverbial fox watching the henhouse, but with these kinds of limits, NO ONE is watching except the federal regulators who were asleep at the switch in 2006, ’07, and ’08. Think of how much larger the taxpayer losses would have been if this policy were in place 20 years ago.

There is another reason why lifting the deposit insurance limits is foolhardy. We don’t want to encourage investors to seek safe harbor in risk-free investments. The millionaires and the billionaires are the people we DO want to take risks with their fortunes. We want them to discover and seed-invest in the next Microsoft or Google or Walmart.

Risk-taking is a virtue—it’s what built this country.

But we want investors to make the big bets with their own money, not yours and mine.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 19:15

The Real Ghost Of Halloween: Inflation

Data from the National Retail Federation shows that some $13 billion will be spent on Halloween in the United States this year, whether that’s in the form of nightmarish costumes, spooky decorations for the house or candy for trick-or-treaters.

As Statista's Katharina Buchholz details below, compared to 2023, this is an increase of about $1 billion, showing how consumer spending patterns are back on track after a comparatively quiet Halloween in the pandemic year of 2020 as well as in 2024.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Yet, while expenditure was up in 2025, it actually hasn't risen significantly when taking inflation into account. Halloween spending is expected to hit $13.1 billion in 2025, but adjusted for inflation, this is closer to 8.7 billion in 2009 dollars, about the same as in 2023.

While Halloween originated in Ireland, a highly commercialized and lucrative version of the tradition has been embraced in the U.S., with around seven in 10 adults saying they would be celebrating Halloween this year, whether that’s through dressing up, pumpkin carving or going out at trick-or-treating.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 18:50

Stark Irony: Iran Angrily Condemns Trump's Call To Resume US Nuclear Testing

In a stark irony, Iran has condemned and lashed out at President Trump's call to return the United States to nuclear weapons testing "on an equal basis" with other countries like Russia and China.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called out the move as both "regressive" and "irresponsible". Iran has of course remained under harsh and expansive US-led sanctions over its nuclear program, which has involved no warheads or other testing, and which Tehran has long insisted is only for peaceful nuclear energy purposes.

Iran has a serious ballistic missile arsenal. via AFP

"Having rebranded its ‘Department of Defense’ as the ‘Department of War,’ a nuclear-armed bully is resuming testing of atomic weapons," Araghchi wrote on X late Thursday.

"The same bully has been demonizing Iran’s peaceful nuclear program and threatening further strikes on our safeguarded nuclear facilities, all in blatant violation of international law," he said.

Trump's surprise announcement on Truth Social came earlier that same day just before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

The has media widely assumed that Trump just ordered explosives tests of nuclear warheads, which hasn't been done by the US since 1992. But the reality is that Trump's wording was ambiguous enough to also mean simply the testing of nuclear delivery weapons and not detonating bombs themselves.

Moon of Alabama astutely points out that A Nuclear Delivery Vehicle Is Not A Nuclear War Head:

However Trumps next sentence is not about testing nuclear warheads. It is about testing of carrier systems that can deploy nuclear warheads.

Trump says: “Because of other countries testing programs,…”

No country has recently exploded a nuclear bomb or warhead for testing or other purposes. The last known nuclear test was done by North Korea in 2017.

It is important to distinguish between testing a carrier designed to deliver a nuclear war head and testing, i.e. exploding, the nuclear war head itself. A nuclear carrier can be a bomber, a land based (intercontinental) missile or a submarine based missile or torpedo.

Still, this is how the world is interpreting it, given The Washington Post and many others gave it precisely that meaning. But given Trump was aiming all of this at Russia to condemn its own tests within the last week of no less than two cutting-edge nuclear delivery weapons, the ambiguity is perhaps intentional and having its effect.

As for Iran, despite the June war and the at this point total and official end of the JCPOA, it is unlikely to give up its nuclear program. After being attacked by Israel and Washington, with its nuke sites heavily bombed, it likely feels more incentivized than ever to achieve nuclear weapons, or other capable WMD deterrent.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 17:20

Republicans Are Walking Into A Trap On Section 230 Repeal

Authored by Yael Ossowski via RealClearPolitics,

Among political conservatives, there is no hotter potato at the moment than the civil liability protections afforded by Section 230 to online operators. Unless Republicans learn to love it again and reject the censorship lawfare complex favored by Democrats, they risk dooming our tech leaders and everyone who uses their products to the sharks circling our legal system.

The twenty-six words tucked into the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shielded publishers from liability so they could host and moderate content and still allow a wide range of speech without fear of lawsuits. Since then, Section 230 has evolved to be one of the most powerful legal shields in the nation against civil litigation in U.S. courts. This gave the early digital economy the guardrails it needed to thrive by incentivizing creatives and disruptors to bring their big ideas to life.

Nothing ices a good idea like the fear of a lawsuit.

Yet, to be a rising star in the Republican Party today conveys some kind of fealty to the idea that Section 230 is antiquated – a relic of the early Internet that has outlasted its usefulness.

Last month, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) called on his colleagues to “fully repeal Section 230” to cut the knees of AI companies and thwart their LLM training models. “Open the courtroom doors. Allow people to sue who have their rights taken from them, including suing companies and actors and individuals who use AI,” said Hawley.

He’s joined in these efforts by fellow Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marsha Blackburn, not to mention Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Amyâ?¯Klobuchar.

According to the Section 230 Legislation Tracker maintained by Lawfare and the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, there have already been 41 separate bills aimed at curbing some aspects of the law by both Democrats and Republicans in the last two sessions.

The principal motivation for Democrats, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, has always been to force censorship of social media platforms to stop “disinformation,” a pretext for muting opposing views. The coordination of Democratic officials pressuring platforms to censor, as revealed in the Twitter Files, proves this beyond dispute.

To highlight the irony, we should remember that President Donald Trump is not only the chief executive of the United States, but also the owner of a social media platform that currently enjoys broad Section 230 protections afforded to any online publisher.

A wish to cripple Section 230 means making Truth Social a target as much as YouTube or Instagram. We should harbor no illusions that right-leaning media publications, podcasters, and websites would be the first to be kneecapped in a post-Section 230 world. Can MAGA and the GOP swallow that pill?

In that scenario, it will be the millions of Americans who currently enjoy freedom of speech online that will lose out. It’s the tens of millions of Americans turning to AI tools to become more productive, create value, and build the next great economic engines of our time who will be harmed by dismantling Section 230.

If Republicans want to cement American dominance in technological innovation, they will have to abandon this devil’s dance on gutting Section 230 liability protections. This is a censorship trap laid by Democrats to benefit them once they return to power.

The premise of broad civil liability protection for platforms is a core principle that has and should be applied to producers across America’s innovative stack, whether it’s oil and gas firms fending off dubious climate cases or artificial intelligence firms building the tools that are the key to America’s present economic dominance.

For one, Republicans should follow the lead of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has rightly intimated that Section 230 likely applies to AI chatbots where many Americans are now getting their information. Legislation to further clarify this would alleviate thousands of hours of courtroom battles and millions awarded to plaintiff attorneys, all too keen to make their millions suing AI companies.

Forcing platforms to spend their time fending off trial lawyers circling their offices will not only hasten censorship on American internet platforms, but it will also require it. There is no business model for online connection with liability protection removed.

If Section 230 falls and every online dispute is dragged into court, it won’t be Big Tech that pays the price – it will be Americans whose speech and livelihoods hang in the balance.

Yaël Ossowski is deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center, a global consumer advocacy group.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 17:00

After Prez Urges 'TRUMP CARD', Mike Johnson Warns Democrats Will Wreak Havoc If GOP Kills Filibuster

President Trump is pounding the table for Senate Republicans to “play their TRUMP CARD” - demanding they scrap the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster rule to push through a stopgap bill to end the government shutdown. But despite the former president’s fiery Truth Social post Thursday night, GOP senators - wary of detonating the so-called “nuclear option” - are crickets. 

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media on board Air Force One en route to the U.S., October 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Fresh off a trip to Asia, Trump said he faced questions overseas about why “powerful Republicans allowed” Democrats to shut down the government - and called on his party to act fast. “It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option - Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” he wrote.

Under current Senate rules, most legislation, including funding measures, requires 60 votes to advance. Republicans hold just 53 seats, and while a few Democrats have occasionally sided with them on procedural votes, others, like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have defected in the opposite direction. That math leaves Trump’s call a political long shot.

Johnson’s caution: "If the shoe was on the other foot…"

At a Friday press conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) didn’t directly break with Trump but made clear he’s wary of tampering with one of the Senate’s oldest guardrails.

“The filibuster has traditionally been viewed as a very important safeguard,” Johnson said. “If the shoe was on the other foot, I don’t think our team would like it.”

Johnson warned that eliminating the rule could pave the way for Democrats to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico - adding two likely Democratic senators - or ram through sweeping gun bans and other progressive priorities. He described Trump’s Truth Social broadside as “another expression of frustration, of the anger that has been felt, the anger by the President.”

Senate Republicans draw the line

Many Senate Republicans, especially veterans of the chamber, fear that once the filibuster is gone, there’s no going back. They say the rule forces both sides to seek compromise — and protects whichever party ends up in the minority.

“The filibuster forces us to find common ground in the Senate. Power changes hands, but principles shouldn’t,” Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) wrote Friday, calling himself a “firm no” on eliminating it.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) - who has made preserving the legislative filibuster a central part of his leadership - also isn’t budging. “Leader Thune’s position on the importance of the legislative filibuster is unchanged,” a spokesman said Friday.

Thune has already faced pressure from the right, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), to cave to Trump’s demands. But he and other Republicans insist that the short-term gain of reopening the government with a simple-majority vote isn’t worth the long-term fallout.

Even if Thune wanted to change course, he likely lacks the votes. Several Senate Republicans have said they won’t go along with any effort to end the 60-vote rule through the nuclear option — a parliamentary maneuver that lets the majority change Senate precedent with a simple majority.

Advocates of the move claim it could be narrowly written to apply only to spending bills. But critics warn that in practice, any change to the Senate’s precedents would effectively kill the filibuster for all legislation - opening the floodgates to one-party rule whenever control flips.

“It would be a drastic move for such a limited win as a stopgap spending bill,” one GOP aide told reporters.

Trump’s long-running feud with the filibuster

This isn’t the first time Trump has tried to “neuter” the filibuster. During his first term, he repeatedly urged then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to nuke it. McConnell, who made masterful use of the rule to stall Democratic priorities for years, refused.

Democrats, for their part, tried to kill the filibuster themselves in 2022 to pass election-law changes - but failed when Sens. Joe Manchin ( D-West VA) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) joined Republicans in opposition.

For now, Trump’s push appears to be more about political pressure than practical policy. Johnson and Senate GOP leaders are holding the line, warning that once the filibuster is gone, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 16:40

Dark Tidings

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

". . . the fake news isn’t reporting on Operation Arctic Frost. It’s not that they’re trying to cover it up. . . but that they actually think it was totally normal and legitimate."

 - Hans Mahncke

Surely you’ve noticed in recent years just how gruesome the Halloween townscape has become with our competitive yard displays of giant skeletons, shrieking ghouls, corpses seeming to emerge from the crabgrass, and miscellaneous body parts strewn about the property. The symbolism seems pretty overt: America yearns to become a death cult.

The world has seen this before and it generally doesn’t end well. Something in their equivalent of the zeitgeist drove the Aztecs to sharply ramp-up the scale of their human sacrifices in the years just before Hernán Cortés came to their capital city, Tenochtitlán. Bernal Diaz, a foot-soldier in Cortés’s legion, later wrote:

“I remember that they had in a plaza, where there were some shrines, so many places of dead skulls, which could be counted, according to the concert as they were set, that when they appeared they would be more than one hundred thousand; and I say again about one hundred thousand. And in another part of the square were as many rows of bones without meat, bones of the dead, that could not be counted; and they had in many beams many heads hanging from one part to another. And keeping those bones and skulls were three priests, who, as we understood, were in charge of them. . . . “

Cortés had arrived in Mexico in April of 1519 with an expeditionary force of about 500 soldiers and by August of 1521, it was all over. He defeated the empire of a million Aztecs and commenced the systematic demolition of their monuments, including the horrifying great rack-of-skulls (tzompantli) where they displayed their thousands of trophies.

“Sculpture of the skull rack in the Zocolo, site of the great Aztec temple, Mexico City.

Something — more precisely, some cabal of somebodies — is attempting to systematically demolish the social scaffold of our country now. It can’t just be the Soros network of NGOs. The best we can do to identify the central animating agent is the Deep State or Blob, a malignancy within our own organs of national management. It’s shaping up as a kind of American Armageddon, a battle between the forces of darkness and light, death and life. The battle has been going on for at least ten years, since Mr. Trump invaded the body politic — rather like when Cortés entered Mexico and set off a chain of events that ended the cruel and despotic culture embedded there. We’re acting out something along those lines now.

The death cult is vividly on display in our time and place. Minneapolis is poised to elect the skeletal-looking Somali Omar Fateh as its next mayor. The once-emblematic city of Garrison’s Keillor’s “above average,” relentlessly “nice” prairie folk was wrecked in 2020 in tribute to BLM’s patron saint, George Floyd, and has never recovered, written off as a national sacrifice zone for the sake of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Omar Fateh styles himself as a “Democratic Socialist.” This is the next new thing.

Omar Fateh on Right

Likewise, New York City is about to elevate the Ugandan Marxist Jihadi (and self-styled Democratic Socialist) Zohran Mamdani into the top job at city hall. As usual with this brand of insurrectionists — that is, persons bent on destroying our society — the label is yet another language game meant to scramble your brain.

You have probably not failed to notice the incessant recital of the phrase “our democracy” by Democratic Party field marshals starting with “Joe Biden” in the final months of his, uh, late performance. “Our democracy” has nothing to do, really, with citizen participation in governance. The phrase is a cover for their desperate power-seeking — for instance, the “nomination” of Kamala Harris with zero democratic voting procedure — in the service of preserving a vast empire of rackets that siphon taxpayer dollars into multitudinous NGOs and countless government programs that provide jobs and free stuff to an ever-growing class of parasitic dependents in the party’s thrall.

So, the next ploy upcoming will be the sequel to the “No Kings” demos of recent months: “The Fall of the Trump Fascist Regime” mass protest event planned for Washington, DC, on November 5, following election day. The stated idea is to surround the White House with millions of shrieking “Resistance” warriors to exorcise President Trump. The unstated idea is to provoke the president to invoke the Insurrection Act and thus, supposedly, demonstrate that he is a tyrant to their satisfaction.

More likely, if things get out of hand and violence erupts, the Resistance warriors and their Antifa shock troops — sure to be on-hand — will only prove that they are the actual insurrectionists. In which case, this time, expect arrests and indictments of the folks behind the extravaganza, with the prospect of pretty harsh penalties. (Are you listening, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, and friends?)

Meanwhile, the emerging scandal around the “Arctic Frost” scheme executed under “Joe Biden’s” DOJ to harass and persecute his admin’s political adversaries, takes shape as “worse than Watergate,” in the words of Senate Judiciary Committee chair Charles Grassley. Fresh evidence about this nefarious activity only reinforces the developing seditious conspiracy case that will be prosecuted out of the Southern District of Florida encompassing the entirety of treasonous acts from RussiaGate forward amounting to a long-running coup that never did manage to succeed, no matter how they keep at it.

Ghouls on display on East 71st Street in Manhattan today (Credit: Truman Verdun)

You know the names of most of the major players involved, and ever more members of the supporting cast, lodged in the Deep State, are being revealed daily. Think of them when you see the ghouls and skeletons on display in America’s yards this Halloween eve.

*  *  *

Saturday, November 1, is the official publication date for my new book, the novel Look I’m Gone, live on Amazon tomorrow. To celebrate, I offer readers an amusing excerpt from the book which you can find here at this link.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 16:20

Republicans' Surprising Performances In Key Governor Races

Authored by J.T. Young via RealClearPolitics,

Virginia’s and New Jersey’s gubernatorial races show the Republican candidates currently matching or beating Donald Trump’s past presidential margins. This is big for these state races and for gauging the overall country’s mood. It could be bigger still if it presages a Republican threat to Democrats’ “second blue wall” in 2026 and 2028.

In Virginia, the Republican, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, has been trailing the Democrat, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, by double digits as recently as the beginning of October. Before Republican Glenn Youngkin upset Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s bid for a second term in 2021, four of Virginia’s previous five governors had been Democrats. No Republican presidential candidate has won Virginia since 2004. 

In New Jersey, the Republican, former state representative Jack Ciattarelli, has been trailing the Democrat, former Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, by double digits as recently as the beginning of September. In presidential elections, no Republican has won New Jersey since 1988. 

Reasonable expectations would consider both states comfortable for Democrats in this year’s gubernatorial races: Neither state has been won by a Republican presidential candidate in over 20 years; this year’s Democrat gubernatorial candidates hold sizable leads; and off-year elections historically go against the party holding the presidency.   

However, polls have shown both races tightening dramatically in their final weeks.

Averaging the polls in RealClearPolitics’ list of gubernatorial races since mid-October, we get Democrat Spanberger with just a 6.9 percentage point lead in Virginia, and Democrat Sherrill with 4.6 percentage point lead in New Jersey. Democrats’ leads have been cut roughly in half in New Jersey and sharply reduced in Virginia.

While noteworthy on their own, these results are even more so when you look at how President Trump performed in these states. Over the last three presidential elections, Trump lost Virginia by an average of 6.9 percentage points. In 2024, Trump lost New Jersey by 5.9 percentage points; over the last three presidential elections, he lost New Jersey by an average of 11.6 percentage points.

In Virginia, Earle-Sears is matching Trump’s average over the last three presidential elections. In New Jersey, Ciattarelli is running ahead of President Trump’s 2024 margin and at less than half of Trump’s three-election deficit average there.    

This is remarkable for several reasons. For one, while much is made of Trump’s job approval being negative (45.3%-51.7% in RCP’s 10/23 national polling average), Trump’s favorability rating is higher at -8.3% than either the Republican Party’s (-12%) or the Democrat Party’s (-24.3%). Yet Republicans’ Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial candidates appear to be matching or outperforming them all. 

Democrats will excuse their gubernatorial candidates’ weakening positions on local issues that are sapping momentum late in these races. In Virginia, Spanberger is being hurt by fallout from the revelation of Democrat attorney general nominee Jay Jones’ violent texting and reckless driving conviction. In New Jersey, Sherrill has been hurt by her involvement in a cheating scandal while she was at the U.S. Naval Academy. 

Yet Trump, as Democrats constantly point out, is also a divisive figure who fails to rally all his base or appeal to moderates. In 2024, exit polling showed Trump losing 9% of conservatives and 58% of moderates. In other words, if the Democrat gubernatorial candidates are performing below the party’s potential, Trump too has also performed below his apparent potential. 

Looking to the 2026 and 2028 elections, there is a lot to glean from Republicans’ closing performances in Virginia and New Jersey. Both states are in the “second blue wall,” those states Democrats depend on to be presidentially competitive, but which Harris won by 10 percentage points or less (Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Virginia, Minnesota, and New Mexico: 50 electoral votes). Without these states and the seven swing states Harris lost in 2024, Democrats become irrelevant in presidential contests. 

Republicans are holding their own in the two biggest electoral vote states in this “second blue wall.” They are doing so without Donald Trump on the ballot (which helps them), yet with him in the White House (which hurts them). 

If Republicans are now matching or outperforming what Trump did in 2024 in these six states, it bodes well for them holding control of Congress in 2026. This would deny Democrats a platform for attacking Trump during his term’s last two years, something they vigorously did after the 2018 midterms. It bodes even better for Republicans’ chances in 2028 and for their nominee outperforming Trump, cementing control of the seven swing states and breaking into Democrats’ “second blue wall.”

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 15:45

"Chilling Opportunity" Theme Heats Up: Goldman Forecasts Liquid Cooling To Dominate Data Centers

Building on the "Chilling Opportunity" theme around data-center cooling and the rapid rise of liquid-cooling systems in AI server racks, Goldman analysts have raised their 2025-26 global server-cooling market estimates and introduced a new 2027 forecast, reflecting surging demand tied to the accelerating AI data center buildout.

Goldman analysts, led by Allen Chang, penned a note to clients on Thursday, highlighting that liquid-cooling adoption is rapidly accelerating across data centers amid growing demand for higher compute and the accompanying rise in power consumption.

Chang modeled liquid cooling penetration to reach 15% / 45% / 74% / 80% (2024–27E) for AI training servers, 1% / 15% / 17% / 20% for AI inferencing servers, and 0% / 4% / 6% / 8% for general and high-performance computing servers. 

Since Chang's July 2025 report, he raised his Global Server Cooling TAM forecasts by +9% for 2025 and +16% for 2026, to $7.9 billion and $14.0 billion, representing +111% and +77% year-over-year growth, respectively, noting that the upward revision is mostly because of stronger demand for high-power AI servers. It's very simple: more power equals more compute, which means more liquid cooling.  

AI Training Servers: Liquid cooling to penetrate quickly

Chang's note builds on the chilling opportunity theme:

• UBS Finds "Chilling Opportunity" In Data Center Cooling

• "Quick" Rise Of Liquid-Cooling At AI Data Centers Signals A "Chilling Opportunity"

• Vertiv Drops After Amazon Unveils In-House Liquid Cooling System, Marking Pivot To Liquid

UBS analyst Joshua Spector showed clients in June a roadmap through 2035 illustrating how AI server rack power consumption could surge to as much as 1,000 kilowatts per unit, compared with legacy servers currently running between 10 and 60 kilowatts, and first-generation AI servers consuming around 80 to 140 kilowatts.

More compute equals more power ... and by now, you know what that means: higher demand for liquid cooling. 

ZeroHedge Pro Subs can view the full note in the usual place.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 15:25

Bessent: China "Made A Real Mistake" By Threatening To Curb Rare Earth Exports

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent says Beijing “made a real mistake” by threatening to curb rare earth exports, according to a new report from Financial Times. 

Bessent told Financial Times in a new interview that the US will secure alternative supplies within “12 to 24 months” and also said of China's threat: “China has alerted everyone to the danger. They’ve made a real mistake. It’s one thing to put the gun on the table. It’s another thing to fire shots in the air.”

Bessent spoke after Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in South Korea, saying the two leaders had found an “equilibrium” in their trade relationship. Despite recent disruptions triggered by China’s rare earths controls, he believes Beijing can no longer use these minerals as leverage: “I don’t think they’re able to do it now because we have offsetting measures.”

FT writes that the summit followed months of heightened tariffs and retaliatory export restrictions. According to Bessent, Chinese officials were “slightly alarmed by the global backlash” to their latest measures. He said his talks with vice-premier He Lifeng helped preserve a one-year truce: “ceteris paribus, we have reached an equilibrium”.

Bessent described a respectful and pragmatic tone between Trump and Xi, including a lighter exchange about the timing of a potential Beijing visit: “‘It’s very cold in January and February, why don’t we push it back to April?’”

Under the agreement, China will delay its rare earth policy, boost US soybean purchases and permit US control of TikTok. On TikTok, Bessent said: “Everything’s ironed out … we should see a transaction very soon.” The US will postpone blacklisting thousands of Chinese entities, while Trump will cut some fentanyl-related tariffs in return for a crackdown on precursor chemicals. “Fentanyl occupied a lot of the discussion,” he noted.

Bessent rejected the idea that Washington can no longer push for structural reform in China. He argued that US tariffs have diverted Chinese exports to other developed markets: “We’ve set a standard, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the world doesn’t follow.”

Highlighting US advantages — from “the world’s premier military” to leadership in technology — he said Trump is “cementing and expanding these strengths, and the Chinese know this.”

Bessent expects the deal to hold: “There will naturally be some bumps . . . but I think we have much better communication channels now.”

The Trump administration has made reshoring manufacturing and securing critical materials a central priority, arguing the US became dangerously dependent on foreign supply chains — particularly China. Through tariffs, investment incentives, and stricter controls on technology transfers, the administration has tried to push companies to relocate production of vital goods such as semiconductors, electric-vehicle components and defence materials back to the US or friendly allies.

As we have documented on Zero Hedge, rare earth minerals — crucial for electronics, batteries and advanced weaponry — have been a major focus. After China signaled willingness to restrict access, the administration accelerated efforts to develop domestic mining and processing, diversify suppliers, and build strategic reserves. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/31/2025 - 14:05