Charlie Kirk: Hall of Mirrors
Charlie Kirk: Hall of Mirrors
“I have this terrible feeling of dread for what’s on the horizon,” tweets Melissa Witte, aka “villgecrazylady” — one of the most vital voices to emerge on the American right in the last couple of years.
“America is heading to a much darker place,” agrees the independent journalist Max Blumenthal — for over a decade, an essential voice on the left.
Both command your editor’s respect. Both are referring, of course, to the livestreamed murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk — really, it looked like a professional hit. Both have been scrupulous about not jumping to conclusions.
With the passage of less than 24 hours, there’s a hall-of-mirrors quality to the whole thing — one that might never go away.
The FBI was certain they had their guy — until they weren’t. The longer the perp remains on the run, the greater the likelihood the perp will never be caught.
As one Chris Morlock writes on his X account, “This is a new age of political violence where even a president can be shot and no one knows anything about what happened. That's probably the most important thing. Kirk was literally talking about ‘gang violence’ — [those were] his last words.
“It is an age of mass shootings and political ‘gang violence.’ No one knows who shot or why, and no one really cares. Read the latest conspiracy theory of your pick.”
The financial implications, you wonder?
This morning I can’t shake the thought of Italy during the 1970s. But the analogy will need time to marinate before I can turn it into a cogent line of thought. Some day soon.
In the meantime, there really isn’t much to say today that I didn’t say already in my “civil war” edition of late 2023… or my musings less than 48 hours after Donald Trump was nearly assassinated last year.
Inflation: Still Sticky
Not that it’s exactly a surprise, but there was zero progress combating inflation last month.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is out with the consumer price index. The official inflation rate is running 0.4% month-over-month — hotter than expected — thanks to a 0.6% jump in groceries and a 1.9% jump in gasoline.
The year-over-year inflation rate works out to 2.9%. As you can see, inflation has been stuck in a channel between 2.3% on the low side and 3% on the high side for the last year — and any progress made vanquishing inflation early in 2025 has now been wiped out.
In a not-unrelated development, the Labor Department’s internal watchdog has opened an investigation into how the BLS collects its inflation and jobs data.
These “inspectors general” frequently do a good job uncovering wrongdoing — but their investigations rarely lead to meaningful reforms.
Examples: The Justice Department’s investigation of the “Russiagate” nonsense from Trump’s first term and the inspector general assigned to track down the rampant waste of taxpayer money in Afghanistan.
Today’s inflation figures are the last major batch of economic data to be released before the Federal Reserve makes its next move on interest rates.
As we write this morning, the betting in the futures market shows an 89% probability the Fed will trim the fed funds rate next Wednesday from 4.5% to 4.25%. And there’s an 11% probability of a super-sized cut to 4%.
There’s a bit of uncertainty about the makeup of the Fed’s Open Market Committee going into this next meeting. Fed governor Lisa Cook will cast a vote; on Tuesday a federal judge ruled she could stay on the job while she challenges her firing by President Trump. But it’s up in the air whether Trump adviser Stephen Miran will cast a vote; his nomination still has to clear the Senate.
With a rate cut next week a lock, the major U.S. stock indexes are all in record territory.
At last check the S&P 500 is up over three-quarters of a percent to 6,583. The Dow and the Nasdaq are also on track to set records at day’s end.
Gold is steady at $3,635 while silver has rallied to $41.40. Bitcoin has pushed past $114,000 while Ethereum sits at $4,421.
Looking at the price of crude, you’d have no idea Israel bombed six countries and territories in a 72-hour span this week. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate is down more than a buck to $62.55
Employers Groan Under Exploding Health Care Costs
It’s not just the U.S. government’s finances that are threatened by exploding health care costs. So are the balance sheets of corporate America.
One day last spring we devoted all 5 of our Bullets to the rapacious health care cartel — delivering average outcomes among developed countries but at a far, far higher cost.
We kept the focus on how those costs threaten to detonate Uncle Sam’s finances… but now companies are feeling the pinch too.
With open-enrollment time approaching in a couple more months, “U.S. businesses are facing the biggest health-insurance cost increases in at least 15 years,” says today’s Wall Street Journal — an average 9.5% jump according to figures from two separate firms.
“It’s an unsustainable number for a lot of employers,” says Shawn Gremminger of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions — a group of companies that furnish their employees with health insurance.
For now, many companies seem content to eat most of those costs; “tactics such as changing plan designs are likely to shave a percentage point or two from the average increase,” says the Journal.
But still other companies are taking bigger deductions out of employee paychecks or jacking up out-of-pocket charges such as deductibles.
Reasons for this new jump? One insurer chalks it up to providers using AI to bill more aggressively. Another says working-age people need help for cancer, heart conditions and other issues in numbers they didn’t before.
“Diseases that we usually thought of as for elderly, we’re seeing more and more in a younger, working-age population,” says Kirk Roy at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.
Hmmm… Why might that be happening? Did something in health care change dramatically in the last, say, five years? Just asking…
Watch Ad, Collect Toilet Paper
New horizons in advertising: Growing numbers of public toilets in China require you to watch an ad before you get toilet paper.
Last week the China Insider’s Facebook page posted a viral video of how they work…
So… you scan a QR code with your phone. Then your phone serves up an ad. When the ad’s over, the dispenser spits out a strip of TP.
Want to go ad-free? (Yeah, couldn’t resist the pun.) It’ll cost you half a yuan or about seven cents.
According to the Oddity Central website, Chinese authorities implemented the scheme with an eye toward cutting down on TP use. Nor is this scheme the first: As far back as 2017, facial scanners were connected to TP dispensers (!) that spat out only one strip per user every nine minutes.
The ads are novel, for sure, but the website points out the downsides are indisputable: “What do you do if you need to use the bathroom and don’t have your phone with you, or you run out of battery?”
Mailbag: Paper Checks, Daylight Time
On the subject of the U.S. government no longer issuing paper checks as of next month, a reader writes…
“My accountant sent out an email a week or so ago informing his clients the IRS will not be accepting paper checks — and everybody starting almost immediately has to pay electronically.
“Some people are not connected to the e-world and I know several people this will impact. I am not e-illiterate but resist as much as I can and now have to set up an online account connecting my bank account directly to the government.
“I'm sure they know all about me anyway. Didn't even get a cellphone until two years ago and finally did out of necessity for multifactor authentications.
“Keep up the excellent work summarizing the nonsense you have to wade through. You're the best! Thank you.”
“Dave & co. — Commiserating with you as I bump about, burn electricity and other forms of precious energy at ‘5:00 a.m. DST’ in early September.
[Gee, we didn’t expect someone to write about daylight saving time until closer to time change in November but…]
“My thoughts turn to those households with children trying to get them up and going in the dark. Must be simply awful.
“When will the folly that is DST be acknowledged and abandoned?
“Nets us absolutely nothing other than an even more unbalanced, sleep-deprived, discombobulated populace.
“Might seem like a little thing, but abandoning DST could go a long way to putting our country back on a better path. Thanks.”
Dave responds: Where I live it’s only a few more days before sunrise is at 7:45. Madness — and it only gets worse through the first week of November!
As was the case in previous years, there’s legislation in Congress to do away with time change. Unfortunately, both the House and Senate versions of the bill would enact year-round DST — which was already tried once during the 1974 energy crisis and everyone hated it.
For the moment, both bills are still tied up in committee. We’ll stay on top of it…
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets
P.S. As long as we’re linking to some of our greatest hits today, let’s not overlook the fact it’s the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Here is our 2023 commemoration.
