/CIG/ Telegram | Counter Intelligence Global - Overview

🔥 🇺🇸 🏜 - Scenes from Lukeville, Arizona. Fires as far as the eye can see. 🔶️ There are about 600 single adults (traveling alone) here waiting. 🔶️ The sector served more than 16,800 people last week, according to data from CBP sources, reports Ali Bradley. 📎 The Informant

🎄 🇺🇸 Biden on X: "Each of us has the power to bring light to the world. Merry Christmas from Washington, D.C.!" 📎 POTUS

🚢 🌍 🇾🇪 The Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), the largest shipping line in the world, has decided not to transport goods through the Suez Canal due to threats from Yemen. 🔶️ In the long run, this problem increases the costs of the Israeli regime’s partner companies to a great extent and increases the economic pressure on Israel. A problem that seems to continue at least until the end of the Gaza war. https://english.iswnews.com/32195/the-worlds-first-major-shipping-line-stopped-shipping-in-the-red-sea/

🇺🇸 Army vet, 94, kicked out of NYC nursing home to make room for migrants 🔶️ A 94-year-old US Army veteran is blasting his Staten Island assisted living home for kicking him out to make room for migrants — saying it’s “not fair” that he was sent packing. 🔶️ Frank Tammaro was given less than two months’ notice that he and 53 other seniors would have to move out of Island Shores Residences in March, and had to make other living arrangements. https://nypost.com/2023/11/30/news/army-vet-kicked-out-of-nyc-nursing-home-to-make-room-for-migrants

🇺🇸 💵 The Potemkin Village Economics of Late Liberalism ⬛️ Macroeconomist Philip Pilkington examines the similarities between the economics of Brezhnev’s late-soviet economy and Biden’s version of the same downward spiral. 🔶️ Living under the late-Soviet model was not typically experienced as nightmarish or even scary, but rather as silly and fake. It was a sort of “clown world”, to quote a well-known contemporary trope, where nothing worked, and leaders were not taken seriously. This is captured in a popular Soviet joke of the time. It runs like this: Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev are on a train going to the Russian countryside but suddenly it stops. As the engineer and the driver attempt to work out the problem Stalin gets angry and starts to shout: “I will solve this. Send the driver to the gulag for being an ideological deviationist and shoot the engineer for being a capitalist saboteur!” The trio wait for the train to shunt into action, but it does not move. Khruschev strokes his chin and then pipes up: “This is not right, let’s release the driver from the gulag.” But without an engineer, the train still fails to move. At that moment, Brezhnev takes a large shot of vodka, smiles, and says: “Comrades! No need to worry! Pull down the window shades and let’s start rocking the train from side to side!” 🔶️ If all of this sounds remarkably familiar, it should. It sounds increasingly like our contemporary experience of late liberalism. Although the popularity of alcohol seems to have given way to the widespread use of marijuana and psychedelics – not to mention the horrifying proliferation of opiates, a nihilistic death-plague the likes of which even the Soviet Union never experienced. The profusion of ‘memes’ in our era bears a striking resemblance to the ‘samizdat’ – or unofficial, self-published cultural production – that spread in the late Soviet Union. The election of eccentric political leaders like Donald Trump or Javier Milei, who reflect the prevailing cultural cynicism of their supporters, seems exactly like what would have happened were the Soviet Union an electoral democracy in the late-1970s. 🔶️ Are we so deep into late liberal decline that the authorities are simply making the numbers up? There has been an unusual amount of data revisions these past two years, but it seems unlikely that these explain the booming GDP growth numbers. Rather the GDP numbers seem to be explained by the fact that the Biden Administration is running enormous government fiscal deficits. Recent estimates put the fiscal deficit at 8.6% of GDP in 2023. Outside of the unprecedented response to the COVID-19 pandemic, these sorts of budget deficits are associated with deep recession of the sort we saw in 2008-09. But GDP numbers are telling us something deeply counterintuitive, namely that the economy is not in deep recession aren’t wrong, but is booming. What is going on? Simply put, the government deficit is propping up the economy like a puppeteer holding up a marionette. https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/the-potemkin-village-economics-of

🇺🇸 💵 The Potemkin Village Economics of Late Liberalism ⬛️ Macroeconomist Philip Pilkington examines the similarities between the economics of Brezhnev’s late-soviet economy and Biden’s version of the same downward spiral. 🔶️ Living under the late-Soviet model was not typically experienced as nightmarish or even scary, but rather as silly and fake. It was a sort of “clown world”, to quote a well-known contemporary trope, where nothing worked, and leaders were not taken seriously. This is captured in a popular Soviet joke of the time. It runs like this: Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev are on a train going to the Russian countryside but suddenly it stops. As the engineer and the driver attempt to work out the problem Stalin gets angry and starts to shout: “I will solve this. Send the driver to the gulag for being an ideological deviationist and shoot the engineer for being a capitalist saboteur!” The trio wait for the train to shunt into action, but it does not move. Khruschev strokes his chin and then pipes up: “This is not right, let’s release the driver from the gulag.” But without an engineer, the train still fails to move. At that moment, Brezhnev takes a large shot of vodka, smiles, and says: “Comrades! No need to worry! Pull down the window shades and let’s start rocking the train from side to side!” 🔶️ If all of this sounds remarkably familiar, it should. It sounds increasingly like our contemporary experience of late liberalism. Although the popularity of alcohol seems to have given way to the widespread use of marijuana and psychedelics – not to mention the horrifying proliferation of opiates, a nihilistic death-plague the likes of which even the Soviet Union never experienced. The profusion of ‘memes’ in our era bears a striking resemblance to the ‘samizdat’ – or unofficial, self-published cultural production – that spread in the late Soviet Union. The election of eccentric political leaders like Donald Trump or Javier Milei, who reflect the prevailing cultural cynicism of their supporters, seems exactly like what would have happened were the Soviet Union an electoral democracy in the late-1970s. 🔶️ Are we so deep into late liberal decline that the authorities are simply making the numbers up? There has been an unusual amount of data revisions these past two years, but it seems unlikely that these explain the booming GDP growth numbers. Rather the GDP numbers seem to be explained by the fact that the Biden Administration is running enormous government fiscal deficits. Recent estimates put the fiscal deficit at 8.6% of GDP in 2023. Outside of the unprecedented response to the COVID-19 pandemic, these sorts of budget deficits are associated with deep recession of the sort we saw in 2008-09. But GDP numbers are telling us something deeply counterintuitive, namely that the economy is not in deep recession aren’t wrong, but is booming. What is going on? Simply put, the government deficit is propping up the economy like a puppeteer holding up a marionette. https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/the-potemkin-village-economics-of

🇺🇸 America’s foreign born population hits 50 million for first time. https://nypost.com/2023/11/30/news/50m-people-living-in-america-were-born-in-a-different-country-study/ 📎 AF Post

🇺🇸 🇵🇸 Young people support Gazans. Critics blame TikTok. 🔶️ Jeff Morris Jr., a former executive at the dating app Tinder, went viral on the social network X earlier this month for saying that “Israel is losing the TikTok war.” 🔶️ Morris argued a point that that some lawmakers have since borrowed: That young Americans are supporting Gazans in large numbers because of the number of pro-Palestinian videos on the platform. 🔶️ Part of Morris’s evidence was that over the past three years, videos with the hashtag “#standwithpalestine” had 2.9 billion views on the platform, while “#standwithisrael” videos had only about 200 million. 🔶️ Among voters from 18 to 34, 52 percent say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while 29 percent say Israelis. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/29/young-people-support-palestine-critics-blame-tiktok/ https://archive.ph/FzTJP

🇺🇸 🇮🇱 Sam Hyde on X: "No"