Is The EU's €90 Billion Loan To Ukraine Meant To Buy Time For The Return Of Democrats

US Services Surveys Disappoint In April Amid Stench Of Stagflation Despite Manufacturing surveys solid (and US factory orders surging), expectations are for the Services sector surveys today to show stagflationary signals (weak growth, surging prices). S&P Global's Services PMI disappointed in April (final), falling from its flash print of 51.3 to 51.0, but still up from multi-year lows below 50 in March, showing just marginal activity growth despite weak drop in sales volumes. ISM Services PMI also disappointed in April, falling from 54.0 to 53.6 (vs 53.7 exp) amid tumbling new orders and...

University Of California Suspends Move To Restore Standardized Testing Authored by Jonathan Turley, A University of California advisory board suspended the much-celebrated planned review of the system’s admissions policies to bring back standardized testing requirements for undergraduate applicants. The decision of the academic senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools is not surprising to many of us who have been critical of the system in abandoning objective standards for admissions. Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the system’s academic senate, confirmed that the faculty group was ”revising its timeline” for ”a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions.” As...

Chaos Unleashed: When "Irrational" Makes Perfect Sense Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, Once fairness and honesty have been stripped out of a social order, social trust collapses. Once trust collapses, society disintegrates. It's important to understand the dynamics of chaos before the certainties in our lives are swept away. Over the past few months, I've been exploring the dynamics of delusion and breakdown: 1. our reliance on models to make sense of the world and what happens when those models no longer track reality; 2. the difficulties in adapting when our old...