Yellowstone National Park will celebrate its 151st year in March. It’s a major milestone for America’s oldest national park and an opportunity to set the record straight about the supervolcano that lurks beneath it.

Reports have speculated that if it erupts, the supervolcano would cause a “nuclear winter” and kill nearly 100,000 Americans. 

“It’s unfortunate that Yellowstone has this strange reputation that has basically been pushed by these sensationalist documentaries. And there’s a lot of clickbait. And it’s really disappointing,” said Mike Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. 

Poland said all the hype centers around the volcano’s last large eruption 631,000 years ago. It was thousands of times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, the worst volcanic eruption in U.S. history that killed 57 people. The Mount St. Helens eruption shot 520 million tons of ash across the U.S. and caused complete darkness in parts of Washington state. 

“If at some distant point in the future, there was a really large explosive eruption that put a lot of ash and a lot of gas into the stratosphere, then yes, you could see all kinds of really incredible impacts that would stretch globally. But that’s one of those scenarios where the entire magma chamber has to erupt. Far more likely is a lava flow that probably, frankly, will be more of a tourist attraction,” Poland said. 

Scientists told Straight Arrow News that the last time an eruption produced lava flow was around 70,000 years ago. 

“The kinds of lava flows we get in Yellowstone are not like the ones that we see in a place like Hawaii. They’re not these sheets of molten red rock that spread out over the landscape. Instead, these sort of thick piles of rock or rubble move slowly across the landscape. It’s the kind of thing you could walk away from pretty easily. But anything that it touches, anything that it comes into contact with, will be destroyed,” Poland said.

It’s widely believed that there is only 16 to 20% of melted rock in Yellowstone’s magma reservoirs. That is well below the threshold needed to trigger an eruption, which is about 35 to 50%. These numbers give scientists reason to believe the system is mostly solid.

Plus, Yellowstone doesn’t sit on an ocean plate like the other active volcanoes in the world. 

“Yellowstone is the only feature that’s beneath a continental plate. And that makes it quite different because of the continental plate. It requires more energy to get the material from the magma reservoir to the surface,” said Bob Smith, a professor of geophysics in the Department of Geology at the University of Utah.

Smith is considered a leading expert on Yellowstone’s active supervolcano and its hazards, and he said 95% of Yellowstone’s danger is centered around earthquakes. 

In part two of this series, Straight Arrow News will dig deeper into the earthquake danger, and why Yellowstone should be revered rather than feared. 

“There are more geysers in Yellowstone than any place else on earth. About half the geysers in the world are in Yellowstone,” Poland said.

It’s tax season but the Internal Revenue Service warned last week that it’s not quite ready for some filings. The agency is asking millions of Americans to hold off on filing tax returns.

The hiccup is over direct payments and rebates many states handed out, hoping to help its residents counter raging inflation. Annual consumer price inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022.

Now the IRS needs to decide if that relief money should be taxed at the federal level. By the Tax Policy Center’s count, 18 states dished out tax rebates in 2022. While the states told residents the funds wouldn’t face state taxes, the federal fate is up in the air.

According to the Tax Policy Center, 18 states issued tax rebates in 2022.

“There are a variety of state programs that distributed these payments in 2022 and the rules surrounding them are complex,” the IRS said in a statement. “We are working with state tax officials as quickly as possible to provide additional information and clarity for taxpayers.”

For instance, California’s Middle Class Tax Refund made more than $9 billion worth of payments benefitting more than 31 million people, according to the state. A married couple with one dependent could get up to $1,050. Again, the money won’t be taxed in California, but the state’s not sure the same can be said for Washington, D.C. Just in case, the state is issuing 1099 forms to those who received refunds greater than $600.

Other states at play include New Mexico, which dished out multiple rebates that totaled up to $1,500 for married couples; and South Carolina, which earmarked $1 billion for payments sent out toward the end of the year, capped at $800 apiece.

“For taxpayers and tax preparers with questions, the best course of action is to wait for additional clarification on state payments rather than calling the IRS. We also do not recommend amending a previously filed 2022 return,” the IRS said.

The agency said it hopes to have guidance for as many states and taxpayers as possible this week.

It’s fairly well known that politicians regularly beat the market, making lucrative and sometimes strangely-timed stock trades that put a lot more in their pockets than their sub-$200,000 salaries. Now, anyone can trade like a member of Congress.

Enter NANC and KRUZ, the tickers behind two exchange-traded funds that mimic moves made by Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Just take a guess at which elected representatives they are named after.

The new funds launched Tuesday and are powered by Subversive Capital Advisor and Unusual Whales, an option flow platform that tracks congressional trades. Members of Congress are required to report trades in a timely manner under the 2012 Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act passed under then-President Barack Obama.

While 2022 was the worst year for the stock market since 2008, Congress remained relatively unscathed. The S&P 500 lost 19.4% while Republicans on average gained 0.4% on the year and Democrats lost a mere 1.8%, according to Unusual Whales data.

It’s the second year in a row the platform has highlighted the phenomenon. Unusual Whales has a clear, stated agenda: To ban politicians and their spouses from trading individual stocks. It’s an issue that has gotten mixed reviews from those who benefit most.

“We are a free market economy, they should be able to participate in that,” Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in December 2021, defending her husband Paul’s ability to trade. She later changed her tune and coalesced with fellow members of her party in 2022 to not actively work against legislation that would ban trading among members and spouses, but legislation has not significantly progressed, despite bipartisan support for it.

Nancy and Paul Pelosi have made a great deal of money on well-timed trades, fueling accusations that members of Congress have insider knowledge that benefits them on Wall Street. Along with the Democratic ETF playing off her name, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley also used her namesake for a bill that would ban stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses. It’s called the PELOSI Act, or Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments. Hawley reintroduced the bill in January.

Despite the widespread attention paid to Pelosi’s success in the stock market, in 2021, five Republicans out-traded Pelosi in a who’s who of politicians to beat the stock market, according to Unusual Whales’ tracker. And in 2022, she didn’t even make the list, losing more than the market. For both years, Republicans topped it. In 2021, Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., ran away with the crown, and in 2022 Rep. Pat Fallon. R-Texas, gained nearly 52% to take the lead.

Overall, Unusual Whales determined Republicans did slightly better than Democrats in 2022 because of more exposure to the energy sector, while Democrats remained tech heavy.

“We believe members of Congress have more information than the rest of us, and if they can trade on that information, we should be able to do the same,” said Christian Cooper, the portfolio manager for both NANC and KRUZ.

While both parties benefit from great returns on the stock market, it’s not something that gets equal coverage by partisan media. This story on a Paul Pelosi trade was a Media Miss by the left. Not only does Straight Arrow News bring readers the news down the middle, we also point out when one side misses a story altogether. Check out our Media Miss feature here. 

Two Border Patrol chiefs appeared before the House Oversight Committee and described the extraordinary challenges the agency is facing on the southern border. They said cartels are going to great lengths to avoid apprehension, that includes using drones and camouflage.

In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, cartels are using drones to pinpoint agents’ locations, hoping it will help them smuggle drugs and people. According to the sector chief, the Rio Grande Valley had 10,000 drone incursions in a single year.

“We have made great progress in countering the threat of small unmanned platforms. However, the adversaries have 17 times the number of drones, twice the amount of flight hours and unlimited funding to grow their operations,” Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Gloria Chavez said.

The Tucson sector chief testified that his agents are encountering single adult men, not families. Many of those men have criminal histories. They wear camouflage, run and even fight agents to avoid apprehension.

“Many are previously deported felons who know they’re inadmissible to the United States, and many pose a serious threat to our communities,” Tucson Sector Chief John Modlin.

Chief Modlin said for an added fee, the immigrants are given cellphones to navigate through the desert and mountains. Other tactics include saturating an area with large groups to overwhelm agents. Cartels also recruit American high schoolers on social media to drive immigrants after they cross. It’s a very dangerous, sometimes deadly and illegal venture.

“No one crosses in the Tucson sector without going through the cartels,” Modlin said. “In the Tucson sector, everything south of the border is controlled by the cartels.”

As for the politics, Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., blamed the president for the increase in crossings.

“President Biden and his administration have created the worst border crisis in American history. The cartels are leveraging chaos at the border,” Rep. Comer said.

The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Md., said Republicans have voted against bills that could have helped the situation and have not presented a solution.

“Our basic problem is a political one: legal channels of immigration have been choked off in the wake of congressional failure to act in bipartisan fashion on immigration policy,” Rep. Raskin said.

There was bipartisan support for stopping the flow of fentanyl, which was described as a matter of life and death.

In British Columbia, people over 18 are now allowed to have up to 2.5 grams of certain hard drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine and morphine.The province is the first in Canada to decriminalize a number of hard drugs, and it’s doing so as part of a three-year experiment amid an overdose epidemic. British Columbia’s overdose and trafficking deaths account for about a third of the 32,000 nationwide since 2016, according to state data.

“We will be able to reduce the stigma, the fear and shame that keep people who use drugs silent about their use, or using alone,” Canadian Federal Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Carolyn Bennett said. “And help more people access life-saving supports and treatment.”

If someone is found carrying fewer than 2.5 grams of those still-illegal drugs, they will not be charged or arrested. The drugs will not be confiscated. Instead, those individuals will be offered materials with information on health and social services. 

In the United States, Oregon voted to decriminalize small amounts of hard drugs in 2020. Under Measure 110, possession of those drugs results in a civil citation, which comes with a $100 fine that can be waived with a health screening.

The change remains controversial.

After classifying ChatGPT a “code red” for its search business, Google is now making its own AI-powered moves. On Monday, the company announced its own “experimental conversational AI service” called Bard.

Google-parent Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is opening up Bard to “trusted testers” before making it available to the public in the weeks ahead.

Bard is powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). The company said users will soon see AI-powered features in the search function “that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.”

“AI is the most profound technology we are working on today,” Pichai wrote.

Bard’s not all

The Bard news comes just a few days after Google and OpenAI-rival Anthropic announced a cloud partnership, but declined to comment on Google’s investment in the tech, which media reports suggest is valued between $300 million and $400 million.

Little-known Anthropic was founded by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, both former vice presidents at OpenAI, the creator behind ChatGPT. While Microsoft is all over OpenAI’s business with a $10 billion investment, Google is solidifying the AI arms race with Anthropic, Bard and more.

Anthropic said it will use Google’s cloud system to scale up its AI, while Google Cloud said there are plans to make Anthropic’s language-model assistant, Claude, more available in the coming months.

Pichai said last week Google plans to release chatbots in the coming weeks and months so people can use it “as a companion to search.”

The new Bing

Meanwhile, Microsoft apparently let slip its AI-powered Bing search engine, at least for a few minutes. Bing users reported stumbling across the chat search Friday and were able to play around with it a bit before it disappeared.

Bing's ChatGPT integration just appeared for me. Replaces the search bar with a composer for natural-language questions pic.twitter.com/NxZ0k9O92C

— Owen Yin (@Owen_Yin) February 3, 2023

Self-proclaimed student and designer Owen Yin said in a Medium post that he could toggle between the conventional search and the chatbot. He also said chatbot cited its sources, which is pretty critical considering ChatGPT is known to make things up.

AI on jobs

The power of AI is still in its infancy but its potential has people taking a hard look at jobs it will replace. Respondents of a Bloomberg survey said AI could replace some people in the financial, media, legal and tech sectors.

However, more than two-thirds of respondents didn’t feel their own jobs were at risk in the next three years. Eighty percent of economists said AI wouldn’t replace them, but more than half of salespeople said it would.

New York City officials continue to try out new iterations of migrant relief centers as they grapple with, what Mayor Eric Adams calls, a “crisis.” This week, the city moved single migrant men out of the Watson Hotel and into the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. City officials said the move was because the hotel space was needed for families seeking asylum.

However, some of these men voiced concerns about the new, thousand-bed facility. Particularly, that it is far from the jobs they had found in midtown, and that it lacked privacy and heat. City Hall has come out and said the facility is temperature controlled.

As of late January, Mayor Adams said the city was caring for nearly 28,000 migrants seeking asylum. City officials estimate the costs could exceed $1 billion this year. New York City has received far more migrants on buses from the southern border than any other northern city.

Nearly a thousand immigrant children who were separated from their parents during the Trump administration have not been reunited. The separations took place between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan 20, 2021, under what was called the “zero-tolerance” policy. 

President Biden created a family reunification task force two years ago that identified 3,924 separated children. So far 2,926 kids have been reunified, but 998 are still waiting.

“Today we recognize the dedication of those who have helped reunite these families, and we reaffirm our commitment to work relentlessly to reunite the other families who suffered because of the prior cruel and inhumane policy – a policy that did not reflect the values of our nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, 148 children are currently in the reunification process, while 183 families have been informed they have the opportunity. But even as some cases are closed, new ones are being opened as families continue to come forward.

Families can register for reunification at Together.gov or the Spanish site Juntos.gov. They will be connected with the International Organization for Migration which has been contracted by DHS to assist. The organization provides support in applying for humanitarian parole, arranging travel to the United States and accessing behavioral health services.

“The task force continues to coordinate outreach to families who were separated to ensure they are afforded the opportunity to reunite in the United States and receive critically needed behavioral health services to address the trauma they suffered,” Mayorkas stated. 

So far, 735 families have been provided with behavioral health case management services and 385 families have received behavioral health assessments and treatment. 

The market for new and used cars has been difficult over the last two years. Pandemic-induced supply chain issues emptied dealership lots and pushed prices through the roof. It looks like the situation could be turning back in favor of the consumer. Here are the reasons now is finally the time to buy in this week’s Five for Friday.

#5: Electric vehicle price wars

In January, Tesla cut the price of some of its flagship cars by as much as 20% in a single day. A few weeks later, Ford made a similar move, dropping the price of its Mustang Mach-E. This will make some models eligible for the U.S. government’s $7,500 EV tax credit. It also opens the door for the great EV price wars that will likely bring down prices industrywide, not to mention make it more affordable to get into a used model too.

#4. Falling used car prices

Used car prices “likely peaked” in 2022, according to JPMorgan. The steady supply of new vehicles and waning demand can only push prices down even further. After jumping more than 37% in 2021, used car prices finally fell 8.8% last year. JPMorgan sees used cars losing another 10% to 20% in 2023. But today’s average price of $27,143 is still considerably higher than the $17,500 average in July 2019.

#3. Struggling industry giants

Carvana and CarMax have been feeling the pain of falling used car prices. Stock prices for the used car giants were wiped out over the last 12 months and the weak demand isn’t helping. This could mean good news for anyone in the market for a used vehicle as the companies are forced to sell inventory for less than they paid. Maybe Carvana shouldn’t have been paying more for 7-year-old cars than they were worth brand new.

#2. Tax refund season

In the coming weeks and months Americans will have their tax refund checks burning a hole in their pockets and dealers know it. If you are planning to buy, act fast because the first few months of the year could see a slight rise in price due to those checks coming in. But dealers will no doubt offer some incentives to get you in the door so they can offload some of last year’s leftover inventory. Twitter-famous CarDealershipGuy says there’s a big dip coming after that, so there’s plenty of opportunity to buy this year.

#1. You can pay under sticker again

Part of buying a new car is the thrill of negotiation, and it’s finally back. Buyers had less sway at the dealership during the surge. In fact, in January 2022, 80% of buyers were paying over sticker price for new cars. But by the end of 2022, buyers were paying $300 less than MSRP on average. It’s still not nearly as good as the $2,600 under sticker buyers were able to get in 2019.

As the price of eggs soars in the U.S., due in large part to the bird flu, more people are trying to score deals south of the border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is scrambling to let travelers know that raw eggs and poultry can’t cross that road.

In California, a dozen eggs will cost you north of $7, according to the latest Department of Agriculture data. But just south of San Diego in Tijuana, Mexico, a kilogram of eggs is about $2.45, according to government data from Mexico. One kilogram accounts for between 13 to 20 eggs.

In border towns like San Diego, egg seizures are up more than 300%, CBP data shows. The San Diego sector seizures are up 365% from Nov. 1, 2022, through Jan. 17, 2023, compared with the same time period a year before. The Tucson sector’s egg seizures are up 333%, while Laredo’s is up 301%.

And it’s nothing to crack up about if you’re caught. Failure to declare agriculture items can come with fines of up to $10,000, though the highest amount is typically levied against those trying to resell. Still, even personal consumers will get hit with penalties if they attempt to cross the border with raw eggs without telling the agent.

The San Diego Field Office has recently noticed an increase in the number of eggs intercepted at our ports of entry. As a reminder, uncooked eggs are prohibited entry from Mexico into the U.S. Failure to declare agriculture items can result in penalties of up to $10,000. pic.twitter.com/ukMUvyKDmL

— Director of Field Operations Sidney Aki (@DFOSanDiegoCA) January 18, 2023

Officials have said that most people are unaware of rules prohibiting bringing eggs across the border, and if those people declare they have eggs, they’ll let them go over easy, without the eggs, of course.

Raw food can bring disease and insects, which is why it’s banned. But there’s nothing against bringing cooked food, though transporting a tray of scrambled eggs seems far less appetizing.

The price of a dozen eggs in the U.S. is now $4.25, well more than double what it was just one year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bird flu has decimated commercial laying hen flocks, resulting in the depopulation of roughly 44 million hens over the past year, a significant hit to supply. It is the deadliest bird flu outbreak in history.