The New Number Two

Once the numbers are available, it is possible to run an analysis to identify the fifty worst judges in America, meaning those who are putting the country and its citizens in severe danger. You go after those first fifty. You use whatever legal means are available to get them impeached. You investigate whether they have engaged in corruption. Whatever is within the scope of the law, you use to remove them from power. As people are removed from the list, you replace them with the next worst remaining, so the list always contains fifty. If you were to do this with a couple of wealthy sponsors, you would likely need a team of three or four people to handle the investigations and a lawyer to file suits. That effort would provide a significant service to America and Americans. Put the judiciary on notice.

True, Illinois got 10 credit rating upgrades under Pritzker — highest in 20+ years. But after all that, Illinois is *still* the lowest-rated state in America (A-/A2 across agencies, 2-3 notches below the next-worst). $140B+ in unfunded pensions (worst by far) means higher borrowing costs for Illinois taxpayers. Progress? Sure. Fixed? Not even close.

In 2019 Illinois had one of the worst credit ratings in the U.S. you basically can only go up from there. The government was faced with defaulting so paid the bills and is now trying to claim a Democrat win... LoL. The reason it was the lowest credit rating to begin with is because of poorly run Democrat policies. Won't see him reporting that though.

Fox News would never report this in a thousand years.

The Nasdaq 100 is up 8 days in a row. Historically, this is bullish for the Nasdaq over the coming weeks. @SubuTrade

S&P 500 up 7 days in a row and up more than 7%. Happened only eight other times, but very strong future returns. Up more than 10% on average three months later would sure be something.

The past 20 years that saw a 7-day win streak also saw the S&P 500 higher for that full year 95% of the time and up 18.8% on avg. The only year this didn't work was 2000 and the tech bubble. Stocks are currently flat YTD, which could mean better times are coming in 2026.

@iowahawkblog John Lennon himself confirmed that hearing **“Rock Lobster”** by the B-52’s inspired him to return to making music after a roughly five-year hiatus.

IDGAF, this is one of the greatest bands ever to exist

@ReOpenChris @shipwreckedcrew The US should reconsider being close allies with English speaking countries that went crazy on Covid restrictions (I’m looking at you, Australia).

🚨Governor DeSantis says the United States should reconsider being close allies with the United Kingdom because they have imported the Third World and we do not share a common culture anymore.

That fertility gap among higher-IQ whites could help explain a similar dynamic in Israel: right-of-center governments have dominated most of the time since the 1990s. Politics are heavily shaped by family upbringing—if conservatives (or right-leaning groups) consistently have more kids than liberals, you’d expect more conservatives in the next generation. Over decades, that compounds into electoral shifts.

The data is a little old, but it does look like smarter white conservatives are having a lot more children than smarter white liberals.

S&P 500 is up 6 days in a row, with a total gain of +6.9% This only happened 9 other times, and $SPX was consistently higher 6-12 months later. Average maximum drawdown in the next year was 9.3% h/t @Norseman1 @RyanDetrick

@memcculloch Thank you for that C . Jung quote, I had a similar view.

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will come and seek you.” - C. Jung

1913 was the year America's constitutional republic died and few even noticed. Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23rd (while most senators had already left for Christmas), instituted the first peacetime income tax, and ratified the 17th Amendment allowing direct election of senators. Three body blows that fundamentally shifted power from states and individuals to Washington. The income tax started at just 3% on the wealthy - "temporary" war funding, they promised. (Sound familiar?) Within seven years it hit 77% on top earners to fund WWI. The Fed immediately began its boom-bust cycle that gave us 1929, while senators stopped representing state governments and started chasing popular votes like glorified House members. You want to know why states have zero real power today? Why Congress spends like drunken sailors? Why we get a financial crisis every decade? December 1913. Wilson and the progressives sold it as "democratization" but really just centralized everything in DC. The founders designed the Senate specifically to protect state sovereignty, but this was thrown away because newspapers said direct democracy sounded nicer. Amazing how three changes in one year could unravel a system that had worked for 124 years, but here we are.

This is now a powerful "triple six" rally. The S&P rallied 6% in 6 days from a 6-month low. It failed in 2001 and was painful in 2008. But otherwise, excellent one-year returns. It bumped up the probability of a positive one-year return to 81% from 55% a few weeks ago.

@arl_capital @Math_files I think the problem is that the equation is correct if A, B, C, share a factor—any factor.

@Math_files In the (numerical) example, A=C=3, so what's the mystery?

In 1997, Texas banker Andrew Beal observed an interesting pattern while studying equations of the form Aˣ + Bʸ = Cᶻ. In every example he found, the numbers A, B, and C shared a common factor—for instance, 3⁶ + 18³ = 3⁸, where 3 is a common factor. This observation led to what is now known as the Beal Conjecture. To this day, it remains unproven, and a prize of $1 million is still offered for anyone who can provide a valid proof or a counterexample.

@shipwreckedcrew I agree with the view that we have a two-tiered justice system in many respects, which makes moments like this especially encouraging.

The judge on her case is a notorious liberal who is well known for bias against GOP Administrations. But he played this case completely down the middle. Denied a ridiculous claim for judicial immunity and has now confirmed the Jury's guilty verdict by denying her motion for a new trial.

Setting aside whether her childhood accident was an unconscious act for the moment, her astonishing theory that most of the rapists, murderers, and child molesters in prison acted “accidentally” is mind-boggling. More importantly it is a powerful lesson about the liberal mind. We can now be assured that this opportunistic little piece of work, like so many of her ilk, will invariably weep for the criminal, but consider his victims, if she indeed considers them at all, as collateral damage. One thing is clear: she’s an even more dreadful monster than her vile, dangerous, deranged husband.

@Hot_Pepper76 “Free Fallin” by Tom Petty.

If you could erase ONE overplayed classic rock song from existence forever, so it never gets played again, which one are you nuking and why? Be brutal. This will help me when posting songs. I try to avoid the ones I see over and over, but they still get a lot of love.

@FrankCalabrese Takes me back — I grew up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in the '70s and '80s, and Ed Burke was my alderman back then. There really will never be another one like him.

Ed Burke is selling his three story Southwest Side house for $1.5 million. Burke built a 6,000 sq foot mansion in a working-class ward where homes are typically 1,000 sq feet. He was like a duke overlooking his small kingdom. There will never be an alderman like him again.

Large Speculators are extremely net-long Bitcoin, the highest since 2023 Historically, this kind of extreme positioning has aligned with bottoms in $BTC

@mrddmia @ERINBROPHY18 I hope that the majority opinion will say something like, “Congress has the power to confer citizenship by legislation.”

The Supreme Court will torch its legitimacy if/when it hands out birthright citizenship to Chinese birth tourists. No question. And legitimacy is all the Court has. Let’s hope the Republican justices value our nation’s sovereignty more than their own vanity. I’m not hopeful.

**Economics is the only field in which two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying exactly opposite things.** It directly references the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which was jointly awarded to Friedrich Hayek (the Austrian-British economist known for his defense of free markets, spontaneous order, and warnings against central planning in works like The Road to Serfdom) and Gunnar Myrdal (the Swedish economist who advocated for strong government intervention, welfare-state policies, and elements of socialist-leaning planning). Their views were indeed diametrically opposed on core issues like the role of markets versus state control, the dangers (or benefits) of economic planning, and how to handle issues like inflation and development. Myrdal was reportedly unhappy about sharing the prize with Hayek and even suggested the economics Nobel should be abolished because it could go to someone like him. Hayek himself had reservations about the prize's creation, worrying it might overstate economists' authority.

@Kakashi_Res @avidseries I know.

Percentage of world population that is Muslim: 24% Percentage that is Jewish: 0.2% Number of Nobel Prizes in science, medicine, and economics awarded to Muslims: 4 To Jews: 194*