Zerohedge

As the 2025 rental season kicks off, square footage is becoming the new currency for renters. After a decade of shrinking apartments, new data from RentCafe shows that average unit sizes grew again in 2024, reaching 908 square feet — a reversal driven largely by market demand for more livable space, according to RentCafe.

In 2024, the average U.S. apartment size grew to 908 square feet, reversing a decade-long trend of shrinking floorplans. Studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms all expanded slightly, gaining between 4 and 13 square feet. Florida cities Tallahassee and Gainesville topped the list for largest average apartment sizes, while Seattle retained its title for the smallest.

Among major markets, San Francisco led the growth with an average unit increase of 59 square feet over the last decade, followed closely by Queens, New York. Marietta, GA, saw the most dramatic jump overall, with new apartments adding 100 square feet compared to those built before 2015, highlighting a broader market shift toward larger, more livable rental spaces.

Studios, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units all expanded slightly over the past year, adding between 4 and 13 square feet. Developers, responding to consumer preference, heavily favored one-bedroom units, which made up nearly half of all new apartments built.

The RentCafe report says that Florida cities Tallahassee and Gainesville lead the nation for the largest new apartments, with Tallahassee units averaging 1,130 square feet despite a small decline from older stock. Baton Rouge, Knoxville, and Marietta, GA, round out the top five. In fact, Marietta posted the largest growth overall, with new apartments boasting 100 more square feet compared to those built before 2015.

At the same time, big-city hubs like San Francisco and New York’s Queens are seeing apartments expand after years of contraction. San Francisco units grew by 59 square feet over the last decade, while Queens added 39 square feet. Still, Seattle remains the city with the smallest new apartments, averaging just 649 square feet — a steep 57-square-foot drop compared to a decade ago. 

Not every city followed the trend toward larger spaces. Arlington, TX, saw the sharpest decline, with new units shrinking by an average of 215 square feet. Detroit, Memphis, and Birmingham also experienced significant reductions as developers prioritized smaller, more affordable units, the report concludes. 

RentCafe’s report, based on Yardi Matrix data, analyzed apartment sizes across the 100 largest U.S. rental markets as of February 2025. The findings reveal a clear shift: where the market allows, renters are demanding — and developers are delivering — more breathing room.

Authored by Alexander Zemek-Parkinson via BondVigiliantes.com,

Is there a relationship between the price of gold and bonds? Most vigilantes would agree that there is some correlation based on inflation, with bond yields and the price of gold rising when inflation is on the way up, and vice versa. Most “goldbugs” would probably agree with this assessment. They would say that the metal was a repository of long-term value and was an effective medium for protecting purchasing power. The late Julian Baring was the man with the golden fund1. He presented the relative purchasing power of gold in terms of fixed-price menus at the Savoy, an exercise he frequently undertook with M&G’s former CEO Paddy Lineker. Baring’s results were somewhat mixed, but there can be no doubt of his conclusion that, over time, the gold price not only equalled but outpaced the rate of inflation. It would be easy to conclude, in today’s world of rising bond yields and a historically high gold price, that there is a correlation, and that it is still valid.

But is it? An answer to this can be found in Ian Fleming’s novel, Goldfinger.

Before we turn our attention to Bond, Treasury Bond… Let me enlighten you on the secret life of Ian Fleming. He worked at (but not for) the Bank of England, and in both the film and the novel, he stages a well-crafted scene in one of its palatial offices. He introduces us to a fictional Colonel Smithers, whose job it was to monitor the quantity of gold in the vaults and to stem any bullion ‘leakage’ (smuggling to you and me). Enter the evil Auric Goldfinger, who leads Bond on a merry chase across Europe and the US.

Part of that chase takes Bond to Geneva, where Fleming attended university. Here’s where things get interesting. Goldfinger’s lair where he melts down his gold Rolls-Royce, is on the outskirts of a small village called Coppet4. Fleming gives a detailed description of the village’s ancient chateau, the small forest behind it and the position of a building which houses his foundry. This all exists in real life, except that the foundry is actually the tomb of one of the earliest Bond Vigilantes: the banker Jacques Necker, who was a finance minister under Louis XVI. Necker was popular because he thought debt finance was preferable to placing a heavier tax burden on the public.

Central to Necker’s concept of debt finance was the establishment of a central bank along British principles and a beneficial partnership between sovereign and private investors. System and laws were all-important. He succeeded in raising substantial loans for the beleaguered King as the nation’s political scene deteriorated. His scheme worked for a while, but the debt he created expired worthless. Necker got the sack, the King met the guillotine and a popular government was installed. In its place came the revolutionary interest-free fiat currency called the Assignat. These bills came with a dark warning on their borders5: “Death to counterfeiters, and rewards to denouncers”.

I’ve decided that none of this is a coincidence (or I wouldn’t have an article). What is Fleming actually trying to tell us? The message is clear that there is a link between debt and the value of gold. But does it hold true for inflation?

Below is a graph that is going to come as no surprise to the contemporary Bond Vigilante. It shows an observable correlation between bond yields and CPI. When inflation goes up, bond yields go up. When it comes down, bond yields come down. Nothing exciting.

Source: Bloomberg

Now, let’s look at that again with the same bonds but set against the price of gold instead. We are looking for moments where the yield on the bonds fall and the gold price goes up to seek out some form of correlation between the two asset classes that we are told by textbooks exists.

Source: Bloomberg

Admittedly, a tricky graph there but there are a couple of times where we can see this in action. We see in ’82, ’87 and ’07 clear points where the yields fell and the gold price went up reflecting the ‘flight to safety’ that these trades tend to represent. So we are seeing a negative correlation in action. This sort of thing happens at times of market distress and when things in global markets look dicey.

Of late though, once you dial in on the rolling correlation between the price of gold and the real yield of US Treasuries over the last 20 years, that relationship has begun to break down. In the last 5 years, the correlation has hovered around zero thanks to the recent rise in the gold price. So quite literally there is no correlation between the two assets (and we know there has certainly been market distress recently).

Source: https://www.longtermtrends.net/gold-vs-real-yields/

So what then should we make of gold recently breaking the $3,000 mark? Is this significant for bond markets? Yes.

Things become clearer when we start considering broader macroeconomic movements over the last 50 years. From the 1980s onward, global market dynamics started to change with the introduction of Reaganomics, the Cold War summit and the widespread acceptance of globalisation. The world got smaller and the peace dividend grew, and with it came the development of broad mechanisms for an international system of freer trade. To the astonishment of Julian Baring, bond prices flew as global inflation fell and international cooperation improved. Bond risk premia dwindled.

Then, with the credit crisis of 2007 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2009, gold got moving again and made up for lost time. Why? Fear and uncertainty needled their way back into the bond markets and to gold’s residual value. In both government and commercial bond markets, investors began to demand higher yields8 because the benefits of globalisation seemed to be fast-disappearing9. We now appear to face a more uncertain macroeconomic environment, and quantitative easing, which eventually supported bond prices at artificially high levels, has gone into reverse. Just as the peace dividend now seems to be on the wane, the risk vectors have begun to rise.

Fleming, at the time of Goldfinger, was facing another series of global transformations: the wane of the Bretton Woods system, the possible change of the pound to a fiat currency and their effect upon the fabric of British social and political constructs10.  

Gold has begun to behave like wampum, tulip bulbs and beanie babies11, bubble assets whose unexplained residual value eclipsed their intrinsic value and whose price reflects something other than the commodity it represents. To return to Mr. Baring, the Savoy index would now tell us that a single gold sovereign could buy you roughly 15 meals (a historic high). But where exactly is gold’s additional residual value coming from? I’d return to our friend Colonel Smithers, who supplied the moral to this, our Goldfinger parable.

Whilst bonds are the barometer of trust and faith in a system, Smithers maintains that…

“Gold is the talisman of fear”.

 Cue the Bond theme tune...

The gap between human and machine reasoning is narrowing…and fast.

Over the past year, AI systems have continued to see rapid advancements, surpassing human performance in technical tasks where they previously fell short, such as advanced math and visual reasoning.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Kayla Zhu, visualizes AI systems’ performance relative to human baselines for eight AI benchmarks measuring tasks including:

1. Image classification

2. Visual reasoning

3. Medium-level reading comprehension

4. English language understanding

5. Multitask language understanding

6. Competition-level mathematics

7. PhD-level science questions

8. Multimodal understanding and reasoning

This visualization is part of Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo. Data comes from the Stanford University 2025 AI Index Report.

An AI benchmark is a standardized test used to evaluate the performance and capabilities of AI systems on specific tasks.

AI Models Are Surpassing Humans in Technical Tasks

Below, we show how AI models have performed relative to the human baseline in various technical tasks in recent years.

Year	Perfomance relative to the human baseline (100%)	Task
2012	89.15%	Image classification
2013	91.42%	Image classification
2014	96.94%	Image classification
2015	99.47%	Image classification
2016	100.74%	Image classification
2016	80.09%	Visual reasoning
2017	101.37%	Image classification
2017	82.35%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2017	86.49%	Visual reasoning
2018	102.85%	Image classification
2018	96.23%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2018	86.70%	Visual reasoning
2019	103.75%	Image classification
2019	36.08%	Multitask language understanding
2019	103.27%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2019	94.21%	English language understanding
2019	90.67%	Visual reasoning
2020	104.11%	Image classification
2020	60.02%	Multitask language understanding
2020	103.92%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2020	99.44%	English language understanding
2020	91.38%	Visual reasoning
2021	104.34%	Image classification
2021	7.67%	Competition-level mathematics
2021	66.82%	Multitask language understanding
2021	104.15%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2021	101.56%	English language understanding
2021	102.48%	Visual reasoning
2022	103.98%	Image classification
2022	57.56%	Competition-level mathematics
2022	83.74%	Multitask language understanding
2022	101.67%	English language understanding
2022	104.36%	Visual reasoning
2023	47.78%	PhD-level science questions
2023	93.67%	Competition-level mathematics
2023	96.21%	Multitask language understanding
2023	71.91%	Multimodal understanding and reasoning
2024	108.00%	PhD-level science questions
2024	108.78%	Competition-level mathematics
2024	102.78%	Multitask language understanding
2024	94.67%	Multimodal understanding and reasoning
2024	101.78%	English language understanding

From ChatGPT to Gemini, many of the world’s leading AI models are surpassing the human baseline in a range of technical tasks.

The only task where AI systems still haven’t caught up to humans is multimodal understanding and reasoning, which involves processing and reasoning across multiple formats and disciplines, such as images, charts, and diagrams.

However, the gap is closing quickly.

In 2024, OpenAI’s o1 model scored 78.2% on MMMU, a benchmark that evaluates models on multi-discipline tasks demanding college-level subject knowledge.

This was just 4.4 percentage points below the human benchmark of 82.6%. The o1 model also has one of the lowest hallucination rates out of all AI models.

This was major jump from the end of 2023, where Google Gemini scored just 59.4%, highlighting the rapid improvement of AI performance in these technical tasks.

To dive into all the AI Week content, visit our AI content hub, brought to you by Terzo.

To learn more about the global AI industry, check out this graphic that visualizes which countries are winning the AI patent race.

Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

London is losing its richest residents.

The British capital has seen more than 30,000 millionaires vanish over the past 10 years.

It has now dropped out of the top 5 cities for millionaires around the world, with New York, the Bay Area, Tokyo, Singapore, and Los Angeles all ranking higher, according to a report commissioned by Henley and Partners, a United Kingdom-based investment migration consultancy.

The firm found that London had lost 11,300 dollar millionaires in just 12 months, including 18 individuals with a net worth of $100 million or more, and two billionaires.

London, which now has 215,700 millionaires, is one of only two cities in the top 50 — the other being the heavily sanctioned capital of Russia, Moscow—that has fewer rich individuals than a decade ago.

In total, the British capital has lost 12 percent of its wealthiest residents since 2014, while Moscow has lost 25 percent.

Many millionaires fled Moscow in the wake of Western sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Though the Russian capital has lost more millionaires as a percentage over the past decade, with 10,000 leaving, in terms of sheer numbers, London has lost three times that number in the same time frame.

The majority of departures have been to other European countries such as Italy and Switzerland, as well as the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Dubai, in particular, has seen a huge growth in the number of millionaires over the past decade, increasing by 102 percent.

So what is driving the super-rich out of what was once one of the premier playgrounds of the rich and famous?

Andrew Amoils, head of research at New World Wealth, who carried out the report for Henley and Partners, told The Epoch Times there were numerous factors for London losing some of its wealthiest residents.

He said that rising concerns about crime and safety were the big factors putting the rich off the British capital.

“Safety is one of the key drivers of long-term wealth growth,” Amolis said. “Women and child safety is especially important—the recent child grooming scandal highlighted this crisis.”

Crime and Safety

A number of billionaires in recent months have made similar statements about crime being an issue.

Devin Narang, an Indian entrepreneur, said in a meeting attended by David Lammy, then shadow foreign secretary, that fear of crime in London was one of India’s elite’s biggest concerns about the city.

“People are being mugged in the heart of London–in Mayfair,” Narang, a member of the executive committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said at a meeting in New Delhi in February 2024, the Financial Times reported.

“All CEOs in India have had an experience of physical mugging and the police [in London] not responding.”

Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe also said that he had stopped wearing luxury watches in the capital.

“I can’t wear a watch in London, and I just need to be a bit wary, a bit careful,” Ratcliffe told The Sunday Times.

Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s wealthiest people, cited the story of a murder over a Rolex picked up on one of his company Ineos’s CCTV cameras at its headquarters in Knightsbridge.

“He died in a pool of blood because somebody tried to take his Rolex, and he resisted. About a year ago, we had three guys in hoodies, with machetes, right outside the office, opposite Harrods.”

More than 6,800 watches were reported stolen in 2023, the latest year for which figures are available, an increase from more than 6,000 in 2022.

Taxes a Turnoff

High taxes are another one of the prime reasons the rich no longer call London home.

Amoils said: “Capital gains tax and estate duty [inheritance tax] rates in the UK are amongst the highest in the world, which deters wealthy business owners and retirees from living there.

“The recent tax rises from the October 2024 budget have exacerbated this issue as they pulled non-doms, farms, and small businesses into the UK estate duty net.”

Non-dom, short for non-domicile, describes a person who lives in the UK, but whose permanent home for tax purposes is outside the country.

It refers to a person’s tax status and has nothing to do with their nationality, citizenship, or resident status, although it can be affected by these factors.

A non-dom previously only paid UK tax on the money they earn in Britain and did not have to pay tax to the British government on money made elsewhere in the world.

In October, the Labour government confirmed plans to abolish non-dom status from April 2025, and to replace it with a residence-based regime, which will also bring foreign earnings into the UK inheritance tax system.

Dwindling Importance

Another factor spurring the movement of millionaires is the fact that the city itself is becoming less globally significant.

“The London Stock Exchange (LSE) was once the largest stock market in the world by market cap, but it now ranks 11th globally,” Amolis said.

“The past two decades have been particularly poor, with a large number of delistings and relatively few new IPOs.

“The continued ascendance of rival financial hubs such as Dubai, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Lugano, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam has eroded London’s status as Europe’s top financial center.”

He added that growing American and Asian dominance of the global space has also prompted several wealthy tech entrepreneurs in the UK to reconsider their base location, with many moving to tech hubs in North America and Europe.

“A lot of the new wealth that has been created in the last decade has mainly been from the tech sector, so if you miss out on that, you are missing out on a huge amount of wealth,” Amolis said.

Amolis also said that the historic appeal of London and the UK was its use of English, which remains either the first or second language of most millionaires globally.

“However, over time, this has become less relevant as the economies of the other major English-speaking countries like the United States, Australia, and Canada have grown,” he said.

“Furthermore, there are now several other high-income markets globally where one can get by only speaking English, including the likes of Singapore, the UAE, New Zealand, and Malta.”

Another factor is that part of the drop in the number of wealthy people in London is not necessarily that they left the city; they just became less well off due to the drop-off in the stock market and a worsening exchange rate of the pound against the dollar.

“A lot of them have just got less money,” Amolis said. “So, for instance, if someone was worth $1.2 billion and then their investments have gone down and they are now worth $900 million, they are no longer a billionaire.”

Despite this drop in wealthy residents, London remains one of the most expensive cities to live in, with property prices per square meter higher than anywhere else on the planet—other than Hong Kong, New York, and Monaco.

A Jeff Bezos-backed startup unveiled on X a cheap electric truck priced at roughly half the cost of the average new American pickup. The catch: it lacks power windows, infotainment screens, and self-driving features.

“The people spoke. We built. Meet the radically simple, radically affordable Slate,” Slate Auto wrote in the post on X on Thursday.

The people spoke. We built. Meet the radically simple, radically affordable Slate. Reserve yours at https://t.co/Y5RkOIFCRo pic.twitter.com/uvSZVpdkWv

— Slate Auto (@slateauto) April 25, 2025

“A radically simple electric pickup truck that can change into whatever you need it to be — even an SUV,” the Slate Auto website says, adding, “Made in the USA at a price that’s actually affordable (no really, for real).”

At 14.5 feet long, the customizable EV is more akin to a Toyota pickup (Hilux) from the mid-1980s.

The range of the EV truck is abysmal, at 150 miles – or 240 miles with a longer-range battery pack – the vehicle in our minds is not a serious truck – instead, similar to mini trucks Americans are importing from Japan to run around town.

Any serious work, whether towing or hauling actual weight, in the EV space will be done by the Tesla Cybertruck or the Rivian truck, or a diesel-powered truck by Dodge, Ford, or Chevy for long-haul towing.

Again, the Slate Auto vehicle isn’t a serious pickup truck, but it does look like fun to run around town.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

The Sweden Democrats have called for climate activist groups to be convicted under terrorism laws, arguing that sabotage by eco-extremists is making life miserable for ordinary citizens and must be stopped immediately.

Fed up with repeated disruptions from groups like Restore Wetlands, which have recently blocked rush-hour traffic, interrupted parliamentary debates, and even stormed the Royal Ship Vasa, the Sweden Democrats are calling for harsher measures to arrest the ongoing civil disruption.

Pontus Andersson Garpvall, a member of the Riksdag’s Justice Committee, told Aftonbladet that voters and citizens are exhausted by the relentless activism.

“Voters and citizens are very tired of this type of action,” he said.

“We believe that it should be examined whether current terror legislation is applicable to this type of action. If that is not possible, we must look at changing the terror legislation.”

He emphasized that the goal is to introduce such severe penalties that socially disruptive sabotage will be eliminated altogether.

The Sweden Democrats intend to negotiate with the government to advance this proposal.

The right-wing populist group currently props up the center-right government led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson following the Tidö Agreement, which confirmed SD support for the current administration in exchange for certain policy proposals, particularly on migration.

Now, the party has eco-warriors in its crosshairs, with Garpvall accusing a small group of extremists of hijacking the lives of ordinary citizens by believing in apocalyptic scenarios and taking increasingly aggressive actions to spread their message.

“An ordinary worker who is on his or her way to work is not very happy if he or she is late because people have sat down on the road. There is irritation from the common man against this, so it is up to the politicians to come up with measures,” he told the Swedish newspaper.

He acknowledged that some level of civil disobedience should be tolerated in a democracy, but stressed that actions targeting protected sites such as airports must be dealt with much more severely.

“If it had been a foreign power that, for example, flew drones at Swedish airports to stop flights, they might have had a completely different view of it than they have now,” he said of the government.

Adding to their concerns, Garpvall pointed out that many of these activist groups have international ties and that it remains unclear who is financing their operations.

Read more here…

The good news is that without the work, former employees are going to have plenty of time to spend on their lives. The bad news is that they’re not going to have much more money to spend. 

Citigroup is shutting down its Málaga office less than three years after opening the hub, cutting a few jobs and relocating others to London and Paris, according to FT.

Opened in 2022 during a fierce post-pandemic talent war, the Costa del Sol office offered junior bankers eight-hour days and work-free weekends, a sharp contrast to the grueling hours typical in New York and London

Citi said the closure is part of its plan to “simplify the firm and make improvements to how we operate.”

It added, “Unfortunately, this decision means that six of our colleagues in Málaga will be leaving the firm, and we will provide support to them during this process.”

FT writes that the initiative, which selected 27 analysts from over 3,000 applicants, was originally praised by Citi’s global co-head of investment banking, Manolo Falcó, who said it was “not a gimmick” and that there would be no “stigma” for those opting for better work-life balance.

The closure comes amid a wider retreat from pandemic-era perks, as a prolonged dealmaking slump forces investment banks to tighten office policies.

We’ve come a long way since Covid, when work-life balance came into focus after disgruntled Goldman Sachs junior bankers made the infamous PowerPoint presentation that forced banks on the street to at least pretend and posture like they cared about their lower-rung employees’ mental health. 

We reported last summer that junior bankers on Wall Street were already back to working 100 hour weeks. Interviews with current and former junior bankers revealed that 100-hour work weeks had resurged as banks pursued a modest deal flow. Employees, speaking anonymously, said that workloads were testing promises to protect trainee health. 

Authored by Amir Taheri via The Gatestone Institute,

In 2013 when a little-known cardinal from Argentina was elected the Pope of the Catholic Church, taking the title of Francis, many wondered in which direction he might walk in Saint Peter’s shoes.

The election came as a surprise in the wake of the unprecedented decision of Pope Benedict XVI to abdicate the pontificate. Benedict, a German, had been revealed as a conservative pontiff focused on the doctrine in what he called “a time of upheavals.” That was the time when globalism was in the ascendancy and all religions appeared to be on the defensive in the face of political and cultural forces advocating multiculturalism and secularism.

In his book Values in a Time of Upheavals, Benedict spoke of “the three myths” that threaten mankind: science, progress and freedom which, transformed into absolutes, pretend to replace religious faith.

Once elected, Pope Francis turned out to be at the other end of the spectrum from Benedict as far as their respective world views were concerned. In a sense Benedict, steering away from the quotidian of politics, focused on the core doctrine of his faith, powerfully spelled out in his other book, Jesus of Nazareth.

Pope Francis, however, quickly showed that he wished to play a political role in the hope of injecting his religious values into the global debate. Leaving the doctrine to his predecessor, he used catechism or the flexible rituals of the faith as the template for his political positions which he spelled out in a book formed by interviews with two Italian journalists.

Because Francis was the first Jesuit priest to become Pope, it was not surprising that, true to his evangelist mission as a “soldier for Christ,” his emphasis was on securing the largest possible audience for the Catholic Church rather than defending the strictest form of doctrine in an age of cultural relativism.

He learned much from his most recent predecessors: John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The former emphasized the political dimension of his mission, especially in the struggle to help central and Eastern Europe bring down the Iron Curtain. When the Cold War ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, John Paul II was among history’s victors, his doctrinal conservatism conveniently pushed aside.

In contrast, Benedict XVI, a theologian by training and temperament, put the emphasis on doctrinal issues in a brave attempt to save the Catholic Church from the ravages of political correctness, wokeism and multiculturalism.

As a result, many Catholics did not warm to him, while non-Catholics found him anachronistic. Francis decided to look to John Paul II rather than Benedict XVI as a model. The difference was that John Paul II was a political Pope on the right of the center while Francis turned out to be left of center. That encouraged some of Francis’s critics on the right to portray him as a fellow traveler or even a communist.

In his book, Francis admitted that he was attracted to communist themes, if not actual policies. In fact, the only political book he cites is “Our Word and Proposals” by the Argentinian communist writer Leonidas Barletta. “It helped my political education,” Francis said in his book. Francis deepened his “progressive” profile with a list of his favorite authors, including German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Belgian mystic Joseph Maréchal, and, last but not least, Argentina’s own literary icon, Jorge Luis Borges, none of whom could be branded as leftists.

Francis regarded “liberal capitalism” as immoral and said he found some sympathy for the “liberation theology” of the Latin American guerrilla-priests of the 1960s, while insisting that he was “never a communist.”

In fact, he included communism, along with unbridled capitalism, Nazism and liberalism in his list of totalitarian ideologies. And, yet, he points at secularism as the principal enemy of faith. “There is a denial of God due to secularism, the selfish egoism of humanity,” he asserted. Throughout his pontificate, Francis wrestled with the “social issues” that have dominated the public debate in the West in recent decades, among them abortion, birth control, divorce, gay and lesbian marriages, sexual abuse by church staff and prelates, and celibacy for priests. Here, Francis faced a real difficulty.

If he had simply reaffirmed the traditional positions of the Church, as Benedict XVI did, he would have weakened his status as a “progressive Pope.” If, on the other hand, he had adopted the “progressive” position, he would have antagonized many in his flock.

Francis dealt with this dilemma in the classical Jesuit style of seizing the bull by both horns.

Echoing Benedict, he asserted that what mattered was the core narrative of Christianity, the technical term for which is kerygma. Beyond that we have what Francis called “catechism,” which, in the sense he used it, concerns behavior and social organization.

Interestingly, he seldom mentioned dogma, the bridge between kerygma and catechism. Thus, issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and the Eucharist for divorced individuals, do not affect the kerygma. As for celibacy for priests, it is “a discipline, not a matter of doctrine,” he asserted, and thus could be abandoned in the future.

A year before his death, Francis published a pamphlet on literature, advising his flock to read as much as possible, even works by non-believers or adversaries of the faith. This was a bold move by a man who had inherited the office that created the infamous Index of books to ban and burn, which had remained in force until 1966. In addition to being a “progressive,” Francis was also an optimist.

“The moral conscience of different cultures progresses,” he asserted, reminding us how such “evils” as incest, slavery, exploitation, for example, were once, in different phases of human history, tolerated by all cultures and even religions but are now rejected with revulsion by all. But is human “moral progress,” if it exists at all, as linear as the Pope Francis seemed to believe? Francis’ intellectual landscape was dominated by ideas that could be traced back to ancient Athens rather than Jerusalem. He was more comfortable in the company of Aristotle than the Church Fathers. The only one he quotes is the quasi-Aristotelian St. Augustine, ignoring the contrasting positions of Jerome and Tertullian, among others. Is the church, indeed any formal religious organization, necessary for salvation? Francis couldn’t but answer with a resounding “yes.”

However, he weakened that “yes” by recalling that, as a young man, he dreamt of becoming a missionary to Japan, where Christianity had managed to survive and to some extent even prosper without any priests and no organization for over two centuries. I don’t know whether Francis had read Japanese novelist Shūsaku Endo’s fascinating novel “Silence”, which deals precisely with that subject. Endo shows that, even under the worst conditions of torture and despair, human beings look to religious faith for a measure of certainty about right and wrong and good and evil. Today, the problem is that religion, in most of its forms, is trying to imitate philosophy, which is the realm of doubt, or replace ideology as a means of organizing political action.

Francis repeated the assertion by André Malraux, that the 21st century will be “religious or it will not at all.”

The question is: religion in which of its many forms?

There are those who see kerygma as a poetic conceit, focusing on catechism, or its Islamic version the Shari’a, as a means of social and political control and domination. Then there are those who, having asserted the kerygma, allow the elastic to be pulled in the opposite direction as far as possible. The problem is that, at some point, the elastic might snap.

Will the next Pope continue Francis’s “progressive” agenda or return to Benedict’s “traditional” path? An Italian proverb says “morto un papa, se ne fa un altro” (Death of a Pope, makes another).

Since a majority of the 135 cardinals of the conclave mandated to elect the next Pope were appointed by Francis, one might assume that they would choose someone to continue his “progressive” legacy. However, taking Saint Mathews’ advice to “neither presume nor despair”, one cannot be sure.

The global mood has changed from the time Francis was chosen, and Benedict’s zeitgeist seems to be making a comeback in a world disappointed with the empty promises of progressivism.

So, don’t be surprised if the cardinals will have a tough time choosing between kerygma and catechism.

Authored by Thomas Buckley via The Brownstone Institute,

Climate change is an existential threat.

Misinformation is an existential threat.

Inequality is an existential threat.

The next pandemic is an existential threat.

Our democracy is facing an existential threat.

And everyone must be prepared for each of them and prepared to do anything to stop them.

That’s the current line, at least – the line that is driving global society at all levels just up to the edge of sanity and cohesion.

And that’s on purpose, because it’s much easier to push someone over the edge when they are already standing next to it.

Each of these false threats are being intentionally inflicted, becoming comorbidities on an already weakened body politic, making it even more vulnerable to its destruction and its eventual death.

Being told you are going to die is devastating. Being told you and your family are going to die is monumentally awful. Being told everyone is going to die is…numbing. It creates a state of utter helplessness, a state in which you are far more pliant.

Your situational awareness dims, your flight or fight sense slows, and you just stand and stare until someone puts their arm around your shoulders and leads you away.

And those invoking that dread are waiting nearby to do just that – take society by the shoulder, offer it comfort on the form of entertainment, medication, and basic sustenance, and lead it away.

Each of the threats is aimed directly at the first principle of Western society – the primacy of the individual. All the threats, all of the communitarianism being foisted upon the culture – including the claim that it is what group a person is a part of, not the person themselves, that is the most important defining human characteristic – have the same underlying message: the elimination of the idea that society is made up of discrete individuals with personal agency.

And from not acknowledging individual agency to not permitting it at all is a very short step.

That is the actual existential threat of the false existential threats now bouncing around the globe, clattering into people and families and societies and cultures and intentionally causing so much chaos and disruption that just standing in one place is not necessarily an irrational decision.

Of course, none of the current coming catastrophes are existential threats – they aren’t really threats at all but the vanguard of the global socialite socialists statists has made sure the public thinks they are, under penalty of ostracization, job loss, and censorship.

Besides not being actual threats, they cannot even remotely be described as an existential threat. An existential threat is – in part – defined as a threat to the very existence of a thing or a system. It is terminal, global, and transgenerational. It is not transitory, it is not political, it is not determined by the people making the claim: to be an existential threat something must be real and unprecedented and permanent.

But the term – which seems to be important-sounding because it actually is – can be misused by people and groups to heighten the impact of their statement, no matter what it may be, because the actual definition is either not widely known or purposefully ignored by the people using it and the media that reports what they are claiming.

This opens the door to anything being described as such a threat. 

There is also the issue of the origin of the term – existential philosophers focused on subjective ideas of thought and emotion and action as they relate to existence while the more concrete “threats” described when the term is used are putatively real and specific. That is an additional misleading element of the use of the term.

In other words, the term is used to apply a thin veneer of intellectual certainty to the threat that it is claiming actually exists.

Despite the protestations of the greenocracy, the real global existential threat is not fossil fuel or proper food or basic human mobility or all of the other aspects of the material economy. 

The real threat is from the ethereal economy of government agencies, civil society actors, non-governmental organizations, foundations, and academia, all aided by the information cabal. Together they do, in fact, currently have the power to foist something upon civilization that truly is transgenerational, global, and terminal.

And the never-ending pretense of emergency is a powerful tool in accomplishing that goal:

What happens when that dreaded decision whether to jump right or left in the face of an oncoming car is not a once or twice in a lifetime decision, but a daily question? That constant state of trepidation grinds on people, placing humans into a state of making most if not all decisions from a place of panic instead of reason.

And it is during that constant state of nervous exhaustion – a state manufactured out of whole cloth by its potential beneficiaries – when those who wish to wield power in society strike.

What is being offered is a society in which no one can fail. But a society in which no one can fail is also a society in which no one can succeed, especially to the point where they can threaten the existing power structure.

And it is that threat – which is an existential threat to that spider web of profitable tyranny – that is being targeted by the global fear noise.

The democracy being threatened is “their” democracy, not “our” democracy.

The climate being threatened is their silver sheened scrubbed personal environment – the actual environmental destruction that is occurring is out of sight, the denigrating of the sub-Deltas who inhabit other places, is immaterial.

The information being threatened are the lies being told to prop up the societal transformation.  

The equality being threatened is their right to be more equal than others forever.

And the pandemic being threatened is the right to declare a pandemic on a whim, terrifying the public into ceding basic rights in the name of safety.

The means and the ends are interchangeable, creating a Mobius Strip of dehumanization on which every degrading tactic can be hidden – unless you know exactly where they lay, they are visible only out of the side of the eye, an oblique uncertainty, and can be easily dismissed as figments, as conspiracy theories.

It cannot be known exactly what will be touted as the next existential threat.

What is already known is whom it will benefit.

Note – it may seem a bit odd, but then again really not, but it could behoove all of us to take the advice of Hannibal Lecter when considering what the societal serial killers are seeking:

Republished from the author’s Substack

The establishment media this week is awash in stories about the Trump Administrations “frightening” deportations of at least three young children from the US, even though they are considered “American citizens”.  The narrative follows a typical media strategy of generating outrage using omission of the facts.  The goal is to anger the public by using hysterical headlines, knowing many people wont investigate further.  

The news reports insinuate that Trump has hijacked three American children and shipped them across the border, but they gloss over the fact the fact that the parents of all of the children involved are illegal immigrants.  The children’s parents were deported, and of course, the children went with the parents.

“Three U.S. citizens ages four, seven and two were not deported,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers.” 

“If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if their father or someone here wants to assume them,” he added.

In other words, the media has fabricated a tragedy tale out of some illegals being deported and taking their children with them.  But the propaganda does bring up a vital issue in the immigration debate – The anchor baby loophole that has been exploited by migrants for decades as a way to stay in the US on a technicality while never having legitimate citizenship.

The media narrative is similar to the claim that deportations are supposed to only target “migrant criminals” (people who committed crimes after entering the US) – This was never promised by Trump.  In fact, Trump has consistently stated that all illegal migrants are default criminals and all are subject to deportation.  Sweeping deportations can include migrants with families, not just the migrants without families.

That said, when progressive journalists refer to the deported children as “US citizens”, this is an unfortunate reality under the 14th Amendment.  Even though their parents are illegals the law still applies.  It creates a Catch-22 for Trump or any president trying to keep borders secure:  Deport the parents and keep the children in the US and you’re a monster separating families. Deport the parents and send the children with them, and you’re accused of violating the constitution. 

This is the problem that needs to be clarified: Should foreign invaders be allowed to cross the border, drop babies and become de facto US residents because their children are citizens?

The Trump Administration clearly doesn’t think so, but the American public is conflicted.  It all depends on how the question is presented to them.  When asked generally if children born in the US should have automatic birthright citizenship, the majority (around 51%) say yes.  However, when asked if children born to illegal migrant parents should have birthright citizenship, the polling becomes more complex and more Americans say no.

It’s a nuance that the media seeks to ignore but it matters tremendously.  The 14th Amendment was designed to ensure citizenship for freed slaves after the Civil War, not make it easy for illegal immigrants to game the system and force the government to keep them in the US based on bad optics.  The legal precedence for migrants was set in 1898 in US vs Wong Kim Ark, when the Supreme Court decided that Wong, born to Chinese immigrants in the US, was allowed to visit China and come back as a citizen.  

Again, nuance matters here.  Chinese immigrants were initially welcomed to the US in the 1850s as laborers for building railways in the west.  Thus, the migrants did not enter the country illegally.  The question here is whether or not illegals (people who come to the US without going through proper channels uninvited) should be able to have kids that then tie them to US soil?    

The practicality of our era requires some new ground rules.  Perhaps a law requiring that at least one parent is a US citizen, either through birth or by legal application?  Or a rule requiring that migrants be in the US for a certain period of time (five years or more?) before they can give birth to children that are counted as legal citizens?  How about citizenship for the children only if the parents are also able to pass a naturalization test and speak adequate English?  

Obviously, this is an attempt to find a middle ground with progressives that probably doesn’t exist.  They don’t want to negotiate this issue, they want open borders and migrant access to American systems without rules or restrictions, and they want to socially cancel anyone that complains about it.  This totalitarian attitude has inspired an equally immovable position by conservatives. 

Where there might have been some compromise in the past, now most people on the right want a total shutdown of all immigration, including work visas and student visas.  There was perhaps a time when conservatives would be more inclined to give ground on the anchor baby issue, but the abusive exploitation of immigration as a political weapon by the political left has made half the country far less sympathetic.