Better in their words…

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Oh, snap! Yesterday, CNBC ran a story headlined, “States sue Trump administration to keep SNAP benefits during government shutdown.” SNAP means food stamps, now delivered through handy dandy debit cards. An eye-watering 42 million people get them every month, and the stamp books will close themselves up at midnight this Friday, which has never happened before. The Department of Agriculture, which administers the wealth-transfer system (but don’t call it that), has said that since the government is shut down, it can’t do anything. Sorry. Everybody must fend for themselves. It’s Mad Max.

Thanks largely to the generosity and intellectual acuity of one Joseph Robinette Biden, nearly 15% of every soul hankering for snacks in this country receives electronic benefits, which is a cute euphemism for your money. These are the unfortunate people among us, those who Life has unfairly provided with the initiative and work ethic of an average baked potato.

As the news tumbled out this week, we’ve also learned that millions of them are international squatters, having jumped the border at some point without bothering with the inconvenience of all that paperwork. (Democrats insist this is a vile lie, with the same energy and vigor with which they insist that colored directional arrows on supermarket floors stop pandemics. So.)

As you can imagine (or may have already noticed), this issue —more than any other shutdown issue— has created a furious hurricane of outrage. I’ve been joking that no one except furloughed feds has noticed the shutdown; that will change big time on Saturday morning if the Administration follows through and 42 million people’s cash cards aren’t magically refilled.

That’s a lot of unhappy campers who won’t be able to get their Ho-Ho’s delivered by DoorDash. There’s so much to say about this. It’s all coming up Trump.

🔥 First, the Democrats are sweating bullets* (* not available for purchase using SNAP). The ‘crisis’ places them under massive pressure to surrender their goofy shutdown game. Amusingly, the main website at USDA.gov has a bright-red warning label informing hungry Snappers exactly who they should blame (Senator Schumer). Behold:

So far though, Democrats have doubled-down, crying about how illegal it all is and filing a flurry of last-minute lawsuits. But never mind that now. We have some dots to connect.

🔥 While Democrats continue to insist there is zero fraud in SNAP and certainly no illegal aliens electronically getting your tax money, we should reflect on how President Trump has been aiming at SNAP for a long time. Back in July, the Administration demanded states turn over Snappers’ immigration status— and blue states refused:

In August, New York Attorney General Letitia James* (* now indicted for fraud) joined with California and 20 other blue state AGs to sue the Trump Administration, especially over how proposed changes would affect (checks notes) immigrant communities:

But these tweets and lawsuits were just the latest round. Right before covid started during Trump 1.0, the President had aimed at SNAP but was stymied by a federal judge in a lawsuit also filed by Ms. James, right as she was helping move her criminal relatives into investment properties she claimed as her primary residence:

We do not know whether either of Ms. James’ tenant nieces —the OnlyFans entrepreneur or the wanted fugitive— collect SNAP benefits. But I wouldn’t bet against it. I’m beginning to wonder whether Ms. James has a SNAP EBT card.

Anyway, as you can see, this snappy showdown has been in the works for a long time.

🔥 This time, thanks to the propitious confluence of the government shutdown, media hysteria, Democrat insouciance, and vast ranks of TikToking Snappers threatening riots if their EBT cards aren’t refilled on schedule, the public has become keenly aware of the program in a way that was impossible during Trump 1.0. Back then, most of us never even knew who Letitia James was, never mind that she’d organized a massive blue-state legal challenge to what at that time was a modest trimming of SNAP eligibility.

But now, social media feeds are filling with a growing awareness that the SNAP food stamp program has become one of the Democrats’ biggest vote-buying scams ever. For instance, people have noticed that Biden basically doubled the program in just four years:

Not only did he balloon eligibility, but Biden also expanded the delicious universe of what kind of wonderful stuff can be purchased under the program, with alert social media investigators discovering Snappers are competing for essentially anything sold in a high-end grocery store:

Before you ask, the picture is misleading. $9.99 is Whole Food’s price for (1) lobster tail (singular), not a four-pack. It’s $2.50 an ounce. And, before you scoff and say well at least its healthier than Ho-Ho’s, SNAP also allows healthy items that most of us would never ever buy, like Caspian Sea caviar at $80 an ounce:

It’s a bargain at $14 for delivery, too.

Furious Congressional Democrats rounded up some hungry white Snappers to testify this week about how they’ll starve to death without their benefits. Using exclusively white ones avoided the inconvenience of having to hire translators for all the non-citizen recipients.

CLIP: School district employee testifies in Congress about going hungry without SNAP (0:22).

Other commenters, noticing the remarkable simultaneous rise in both illegal immigrants and SNAP recipients under Biden, put two and two together and concluded that if the program gets pruned, millions of illegals may voluntarily self-deport. Hopefully. There is also quite a bit of discussion on the forums about the apparently very healthy market for re-selling EBT cards to rich people at a discount for cash, since apparently anyone in possession can use the damned things.

In any case, and I hope I made my point, the public is talking about the SNAP problem in a way that was never previously possible. Thanks, Democrats!

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I am also happy to report that, despite brooding experts’ dire predictions, Trump’s economic plan isn’t just working, it’s booming. Yesterday, CNBC ran a story headlined, “Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s AI chips are now being manufactured in Arizona.” It is difficult to understate the significance of this particular economic story. Boom.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is one of those colorful tech characters who adopted the Steve Jobs style of always dressing like he’s headed to a motorcycle rally instead of a business meeting. Dressing down obscures the fact that Huang has become one of the richest men alive, and Nvidia —which started by making high-end video game chips— has become the single highest-valued company in the history of Planet Earth, bar none.

Let me put it this way: Nvidia’s market capitalization now tops $5 trillion dollars, which is more than the gross domestic product of every country on Earth except America and China. The company’s value exceeds the combined GDPs of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Russia combined. So.

Not only that, but in a very astonishing and sort of sneaky way, Nvidia’s articial intelligence chips have literally become the most important manufactured resource on the planet. Every country is dying to get them, and they are seen as the key to military and economic dominance in the 21st century.

Nvidia currently controls an astonishing 94% of the global AI GPU market.

When Trump returned to office this year, Nvidia manufactured all of its flagship chips in Taiwan. Taiwan is a tiny island just off China’s Eastern coast, as far from America as you can get. On every day that ends in a “-y”, the tiny island nation is surrounded by a dense ring of Chinese warships and submarines conducting “routine military exercises” and firing warning shots to “clear out the carbon buildup.”

Put in lay English: it’s not exactly a stable situation.

You may recall that, by the end of Biden’s term, we were about ten seconds from starting World War III with China over Taiwan, with U.S. admirals publicly threatening China with “drone hellscapes,” which is even worse than a SNAP hellscape of 42 million hungry Snappers holding zero-balance EBT cards. Wired Magazine, August of last year:

Put simply, the best idea that Biden’s five neurons could come up with to defend America’s access to AI chips was to haul us to the brink of global thermonuclear war with the Chinese. But President Trump solved the problem in minutes using a non-hellscaped tariff dashboard. It only took about +15% to do it.

🚀 “The first thing that President Trump asked me for is bring manufacturing back,” CEO Huang told reporters this week. “Bring manufacturing back because it’s necessary for national security. Bring manufacturing back because we want the jobs. We want that to be part of the economy.”

Trump didn’t just ask. The Administration threatened, and in some cases imposed, high tariffs (up to 100%) on imported chips this year as part of his broader “re-industrialization” push, and to force semiconductor giants —including Nvidia— to build and expand production within the U.S. Tom’s Hardware, May of this year:

Sticks and carrots. In its final days in January, Biden’s Autopen signed a new “diffusion rule,” a package of onerous regulations and export restrictions placed on AI developers including Nvidia. They hated it. Trump rescinded Biden rules in May, right around the time Nvidia announced it was willing to invest in US production.

“We’re all in on the idea,” Huang enthused at the time. “We’re setting up plants and encouraging our partners from around the world to invest in the United States, and we have a lot of exciting stuff going on.”

Yesterday, at a company conference, CEO Huang said that its Blackwell graphics processing units —the company’s fastest AI chips— are now in full production in Arizona. In other words, they’ve been completely relocated from Taiwan to Pheonix, where the plant will be much less likely to spark a civilization-ending war.

🚀 Let us count all the ways American wins. First, the biggest and most important company in the world just moved its manufacturing to the US, adding its heft to our GDP. Second, it removes the advanced AI chipmaking from China’s orbit, both strategically advantaging us and lowering the kinetic conflict temperature all across the Pacific basin. Finally, it means construction and jobs and taxes and all sorts of new economic activity for America.

I do not believe anything like this kind of rapid onshoring —in mere months!— of the world’s biggest and most strategically important company has ever happened in American history, or anyone else’s history, for that matter. Past U.S. “industrial revolutions” (steel, cars, information age, tech) and even emergency wartime mobilizations (WWII Detroit’s “arsenal of democracy”) took years, sometimes decades, to redirect the world’s most advanced manufacturing into the U.S..

No single president has ever convinced the world’s largest, most technologically advanced private company to physically relocate this level of high-tech, strategic production so rapidly or at such scale. Huang himself called the U.S. onshoring event a world-historic “industrial revolution.” Even the biggest corporate mergers of the 19th–20th century “trusts” (e.g., U.S. Steel, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil) were gradual consolidations for efficiency— not physical production moves across oceans.

This is exactly the kind of historic accomplishment that puts stuffing in Trump’s soaring promises of a “new Golden Age.” For years, U.S. politicians talked about rebuilding domestic manufacturing and ending reliance on foreign supply chains, but actual high-tech onshoring remained vaporware.

But Trump just went ahead and did it, without firing a shot, literally reshaping global supply chains and the balance of power in record time. He did it seemingly effortlessly, while doing about a million other things at the same time. What can we say about Donald Trump? He’s quickly moving beyond comparison to any previous American president.

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I’m running tight on time, but this ABC story deserves a quick mention. It was headlined, “Comer calls for Biden autopen actions to be held ‘null and void’ in House Oversight Committee report.”

CLIP: dramatic House Oversight Committee video on its Autopen investigation (8:55).

If you watch anything today, watch this high-production-value clip assembled by the House Oversight Committee, summarizing in video and audio the results of its Autopen investigation. (The Autopen didn’t testify; it took the Fifth Amendment.)

Two newsworthy things happened. First, the Committee issued its formal staff report, titled, “The Biden Autopen Presidency Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House.” It’s a pretty good read, but is the size of a small novel, clocking in at an impressive 100 pages. One amusing fact cited in the report was that Democrats —ilcuding all members and staff— only bothered to ask a total of 3.5 hours of questions during 47 hours of depositions and interviews throughout the investigation.

Another darkly hilarious example was the Committee’s review of the long-sought audio from Special Counsel Ben Hur’s interview with Biden. At one point, Hur asked the Cabbage a simple question about the location of documents at a specific building, which should have resulted in a two or three-word answer. Instead, Hur got this:

Anyway, the second bit of news was that Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) sent the report along with a fiery letter to the Department of Justice, encouraging Pam Bondi to initiate an investigation into voiding Biden’s Autopen antics, including all the controversial pardons. He didn’t mention it directly, but everyone is especially thinking about one Anthony Fauci, hoping against hope that his pardon could be avoided, so he can do prison time before he dies, after which he’ll be advising Satan about proper mask fitting in Hell.

Yesterday, Axios ran this encouraging headline:

From Trump to Speaker Mike Johnson to Bondi and other Administration officials, all seem to be on the same page: the Autopen scandal is the biggest in American history. Watching this unfold, I’ve come around some. I used to think this Autopen thing was bad, but was legally going nowhere. I must now revise my prediction. I’m pivoting. I now think there’s a good chance this is going somewhere.

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Last week, a significant new peer-reviewed vaccine study published in the well-regarded journal BMC Infectious Diseases, titled, “Real world effectiveness of antipneumococcal vaccination against pneumonia in adults: a population-based cohort study, Catalonia, 2019.” Teaser: they found negative efficacy of minus eighty percent, meaning older adults given pneumonia jabs were 80% more likely to get pneumonia. Thanks a lot, doc.

The global market for pneumococcal vaccines is valued between $8 – $10 billion in 2024–2025. And it’s growing fast. Over the next ten years, forecasters project the market will nearly double, expecting a total market of $15–$17 billion. Unsurprisingly, Pfizer is the big gorilla, hogging nearly all of the pneumonia jab market (80%).

The study researchers reviewed the 2019 health records of over 2.23 million ‘senior’ (50+) patients in Catalonia— a largely autonomous mini-country within Spain that has its own government. It even has its own president. The region includes Barcelona and has a distinct language (Catalan). The study’s scientists work for the Catalonian Health Institute, one of Spain’s largest healthcare systems.

The study was pretty simple and hard to argue with. They compared electronic vaccination records (jabbed versus unjabbed) against subsequent admissions for pneumonia as well as death records. They found: (1) people given the jabs were +80% more likely to wind up hospitalized for pneumonia, and (2) there was no measurable improvement in risk of either hospitalization or death among the vaccinated group, which you would hope to see if the stupid shots worked.

The researchers explained they did the study because they couldn’t find where anyone had ever tested the shots for real-world efficacy. “Several randomised-controlled trials and observational studies have demonstrated vaccines’ immunogenicity,” the researchers wrote, “but vaccination effectiveness and impact to prevent pneumonia among adults was uncertain.”

“Immunogenicity” is the great trick, the way big pharma has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes for decades. In vaccines, “immunogenicity” means having the ability to stimulate an immune response, usually in the form of measurable antibodies to a particular undesirable bug like Streptococcus pneumoniae. Somehow, pharma convinced regulators to allow them to test for “immunogenicity” (antibody levels) rather than testing whether the jabs actually prevent the intended disease.

So this study is much more than just a hit on the pneumonia jab. The Catalonian study (and others) are cementing concerns that antibody response might not after all translate into meaningful protection against common and deadly outcomes. Sometimes they might not translate at all, or as here, show antibodies but still produce negative effectiveness. (Immunogenicity was how they tested the covid jabs, too.)

If regulators were ever finally convinced to reject antibody evidence without broad clinical effectiveness, it would change the whole game.

This study is shocking, but don’t expect anything terrific. Pharma has entire teams, departments, staffed with ex-regulators who are dedicated to damage control, and they’ve probably been working on a response to these results since well before the study finished peer review. Indeed, the study noted that this year, new versions of the vaccines are expected, giving Pfizer cover to issue a vague statement of regret over the inefficiencies of past years, and then keep right on pushing the newest generation of pneumonia shots on vulnerable patients.

In other words, it’s whack-a-mole. While scientists wait for data and conduct studies, jabmakers keep tweaking their formulae to evade scrutiny and provide plausible deniability. The only permanent solution is to stop letting them use surrogate markers of response rather than provable results, and to restore legal liability for ineffective and harmful products.

💉 But there is some good news. This study feels different. Major research groups (like this big hospital system) usually avoid tackling massive pharma profit centers like pneumonia jabs— but Catalonia did it anyway. These particular scientists, at least, are obviously growing skeptical about using antibody levels to intuit efficacy. And then, it was actually prominently published: Historically, even when negative results about major vaccines have been published, they usually pop up in lower-impact journals, are hidden behind paywalls, or are published as brief “Technical Notes.”

But this study was big, population-based, peer-reviewed, open access, well-written, and from a reputable European institution.

I can’t escape feeling like the tide might be going out on the vaccine industry’s salad years. There might be a sea change swelling in vaccine skepticism (don’t call it ‘hesitancy’) from institutions and researchers around the world. People are getting sick and tired of the vaccine shell game.

Maybe we should just pull the plug on the whole damnable thing. What do you say?

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Sneak back here tomorrow morning for another hot, fresh serving of extra-caffeinated essential news and pumpkin-spiced commentary.

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