Hello C3 Family!

Weekly Rant - Why not be a hermit?!

The obsession with Celebrity culture has got to stop. We care so much about who a popstar is dating, what some NFL kicker said at a graduation speech, and who was the most recent celebrity to fall from grace. We as a people in the WEST are constantly fed a steady diet of bread and circus to distract us from anything of value. I talk a lot about the bread portion of the equation in regard to the stock market and false wealth, but I rarely go into detail about the circus portion. All the politics, and celebrity gossip is a distraction at best. Even if the celebrity gossip is something that could be viewed as positive like NFL kicker Harrison Butker giving a truly Catholic speech at a Catholic graduation ceremony, we tend to spend too much time on it. I mean great, I am glad something like that happened, but we should need a random guy who happens to be famous for kicking a ball to tell us that God should be at the center of our lives.

I use a lot of different sources to put this newsletter together and it has becoming increasingly difficult to scope out actual financial stories of any significance among all the clicks bait nonsense out there. Even great conservative websites like the daily wire have complete nonsense on their site. But don't blame the daily wire, the true culprit is us!! We click on those stories, that is why the DailyWire and the like keep posting them!!

It is like the argument I have with so many people about professional athletes being paid so much. People are always telling me that NBA players are paid way too much!! And I say, no they are not. They are getting paid an amount directly tied to how much you watch them play. I know, I use to work for the league I saw the pay structures. If the fans stopped buying tickets and subscriptions and jerseys, then these players would SOL.

Perhaps you are tempted to watch some documentary on the fall of some celebrity because of his heinous sexual crimes...My advice, don't waste your time. Rather spend that time doing literally anything else besides maybe the crimes the documentary talks about, and you will be better off. 

If we really want to see financial change in the world that creates positive environments for sanctity, then we must stop wasting our time being obsessed with what the famous are doing. 

I am not against leisure or anything and I am guilty of still watching NBA playoff games (to me it is an art form that I grew up loving, and struggle to turn off), but we must be honest with ourselves when clicking on that click-bait link or turning on that disaster porn documentary.

Top Stories

• Rate cut hopes have been boosted since the cooling inflation numbers came out last week, though they are still way higher than the target 2%. The major US indexes all notched record-high closes last week. 

• There are 1.7 million fewer Americans in the workforce than pre-pandemic, yet more people than ever are entering the workforce as part time employees.

• Nvidia stock has tripled over the past year because of its chips being the gold standard for AI processing.

• Crypto may be getting another boost from the SEC if the Ethereum ETFs are approved. The BTC ETFs gave not only BTC a boost but the whole of the crypto world when it was approved.

• AI is hurting search engine traffic. With so much AI answers up top on the search results fewer people are clicking links and this is hurting businesses that rely on those clicks.

• China's real estate market is struggling so much that the CCP has pledged $42 billion to prop up the industry. However, robbing its people to boost a flailing market will only hurt them in the long-term. Free-trade and freedom to start productive business is the only way to economic freedom. Amazing that so many countries including our own often forget this valuable piece of information.

• The meme stock of GamesStop just plunged after it was boosted earlier this month. The plunge was inevitable for the dying business, but the boost came from manipulation of the stock price by investing trolls. 

• Warren Buffet is a master manipulator. He has been buying up stock of insurance provider Chubb in secret. This was done so that when the mystery stock was revealed people would go and gobble it up thus sending the stock price soaring. Buffet uses his clout to build continuous wealth while the common man is always playing catchup.

• Recent college grads are entering a market that is not too keen on hiring fresh meat. Overall unemployment in the nation is low but white-collar hiring has slowed, especially in tech and this hurst many recent college grads who are saddled with tons of debt.

• Red Lobster is bankrupt because a sale to a private equity fund lumped costly leases on to the restaurants. Also, the all-you can eat shrimp deal has cost the franchise over $11M in unrecovered expenses.

• Nearly one-third of US States now require age verification for pornographic websites. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Virginia have all enacted statutes to enforce age verification for porn laws. We are setting the bar low by just requiring people to be 18 years old to view this depravity, but it is at least a step in the right direction. We should all be praying daily for a stop to this evil that has made us stupid and depraved and hurt so many.