“Graphic footage captured on Facebook Live shows a mentally handicapped white man being tortured in Chicago by African-American assailants as they laugh and express their disgust for white people and President-elect Donald Trump,” reports The Daily Caller: “The video, taken by a woman identified on Facebook as ‘Brittany Herring,’ shows a white man tied up with tape across his mouth. The victim is shown being repeatedly hit, sliced at with a knife, berated and his clothes ripped off.”

If you’ve ever wondered whether violent black hoodlums are targeting white people for extreme violence, hatred and felony assault, this sickening, racially motivated violence — broadcast live by Facebook — just confirmed it once and for all. In fact, black-on-white crime is now far more prevalent, violent and hate-oriented than white-on-black crime across America, as the following statistics reveal.

The statistics on who’s really committing violent crime prove this beyond any debate. “Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States,” reports The Washington Times.

“The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement. And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines and drug laws doesn’t cut it as a plausible explanation.”

Not surprisingly, this “lynching” of a white special needs boy is being almost completely censored by the entire left-wing media that incited it. The dishonest “fakestream” media only reports news that fits their false narratives. Thus, if four white teens had bound, beaten and kidnapped a young black boy, it would be headline news everywhere, alongside nationwide riots in every major city.

Since 1990, the “nones” have exploded rapidly as a sociological phenomenon — from 10 percent of US adults, to 15 percent, to 20 percent. Now they’ve climbed to 25 percent, according to a 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. That makes them the nation’s largest faith category, outstripping Catholics (21 percent) and white evangelicals (16 percent). They seem on a trajectory to become an outright majority.   America is following the secular path of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and other modern places.  The Secular Age is snowballing.

Perhaps honesty is a factor in the disappearance of religion. Maybe young people discern that it’s dishonest to claim to know supernatural things that are unknowable.

When I was a cub reporter, my city editor was an HL Mencken clone who laughed at Bible-thumping hillbilly preachers. One day, as a young truth-seeker, I asked him: You’re correct that their explanations are fairy tales — but what answer can an honest person give about the deep questions: Why are we here? Why is the universe here? Why do we die? Is there any purpose to life? He eyed me and replied: “You can say:  I don’t know.”  That rang a bell in my head that still echoes. It’s honest to admit that you cannot explain the unexplainable.

The church explanation — that Planet Earth is a testing place to screen humans for a future heaven or hell — is a silly conjecture with no evidence of any sort, except ancient scriptures.  No wonder that today’s Americans, raised in a scientific-minded era, cannot swallow it. Occam’s Razor says the simplest explanation is most accurate. Why is religion dying? Because thinking people finally see that it’s untrue, false, dishonest.

According to a report quietly released by the US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research less than two weeks before Christmas, another financial implosion on Wall Street can’t be ruled out.

The Office of Financial Research (OFR), a unit of the US Treasury, was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010. It says its role is to: “shine a light in the dark corners of the financial system to see where risks are going, assess how much of a threat they might pose, and provide policymakers with financial analysis, information, and evaluation of policy tools to mitigate them.”

Its 2016 Financial Stability Report, released on December 13, indicates that Wall Street banks have been allowed by their “regulators” to take on unfathomable risks and that dark corners remain in the US financial system that are impenetrable to even this Federal agency that has been tasked with peering into them.

At a time when international business headlines are filled with reports of a massive banking bailout in Italy and the potential for systemic risks from Germany’s struggling giant, Deutsche Bank, the OFR report delivers this chilling statement: “US global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) have more than $2 trillion in total exposures to Europe.”

Kim said in his New Year’s Day address that the communist nation has reached the final stage of preparations to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. The remark was seen as a thinly veiled threat that Pyongyang is close to developing a nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking the continental US.

The threat appears to have stoked genuine fears of security among Americans, with reporters bombarding the Defense Department with questions of what the US is going to do about the North’s missile, including whether it’s going to shoot it down or even launch a preemptive strike before it’s fired.

It also prompted President-elect Donald Trump to send a tweet: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the US. It won’t happen!”

Both chambers are controlled by Republicans long critical of the Fed’s policies, and President-elect Donald Trump has heaped scorn on the central bank since the beginning of his presidential campaign. Paul specifically mentioned Trump in a statement about the bill Wednesday, making clear the measure’s proponents believe they have an ally in their cause coming to the White House.

“The US House has responded to the American people by passing Audit the Fed multiple times, and President-elect Trump has stated his support for an audit. Let’s send him the bill this Congress,” said Paul. Under the bill, the Fed’s monetary policy deliberations could be subject to outside review by the Government Accountability Office. But lawmakers hoping to overhaul how the Fed does business see an opening in 2017.

“It is time to force the Federal Reserve to operate by the same standards of transparency and accountability to the taxpayers that we should demand of all government agencies,” said Massie.

That in turn is set to bring to an end the 70-year era of Pax Americana, a period in which US hegemony in security, trade, and the promotion of values provided baseline predictability for the global economy. In 2017, we enter a period of deep geopolitical recession.

With these ideas as backdrop, here are the top 10 political risks for the coming year, according to the Eurasia Group — the political risk consultancy I founded and oversee. There are also a few “red herrings,” stories where we see less risk than meets the eye:

1. Unpredictable America

2, China Overreacting

3. A Power Vacuum in Europe

4. A Pause in Economic Progress

5. Technology Disrupting the Middle East

6. Politics Interfering with Central Banks

7. The White House vs Silicon Valley

8. Turkey’s Ongoing Crackdown 

9. North Korea Rattling Its Saber 

10. A Struggling South Africa

Internationally, the story is much the same. The profound shock to global confidence anticipated by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, failed to materialise; Brexit had no discernible impact on the world economy. Having cried wolf over the short term consequences, the profession should not be surprised if rather more credible warnings of pain delayed are widely disbelieved.

Similarly with Donald Trump, where the widely expected economic and market mayhem his election would supposedly unleash has so far been conspicuously absent. This collective misreading has been widely attributed to the perils of “groupthink” – where opinion hugs the consensus for fear of derision - or more conspiratorially, to vested interest and deliberately misleading intent.

But there is in fact a more prosaic explanation; that as a discipline, the dismal science has quite simply lost the plot. All over the shop, economics seems incapable of answering the great questions of our time. Are we heading for deflation or inflation? Are we locked in secular stagnation or have we finally put the financial crisis behind us?

The conceit of modern economics is that it sees itself as an evidence-based science, yet if it could ever be such a thing, it is today no nearer its goal than when Adam Smith penned the Wealth of Nations, and in some respects, a good deal less so.

One passage really stood out in Merkel's memory and she quoted it verbatim: "There is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency, a global flag. We salute one flag, and that is the American flag." No other presidential candidate in the history of the United States has ever violated the rules of decency to the degree that Trump has. That's how Merkel sees it. That helps explain why, in a brief statement given to the press following his November 9 election, she gave the kind of moral sermon that no previous German chancellor had ever delivered to a US president.

​It's not Trump's ideology that worries Merkel most. His opinions, after all, morph quickly, something that Merkel has experienced personally. As recently as August 2015, he said the German chancellor was "probably the greatest leader in the world today." Then the refugee crisis came and Trump said, "What she's done in Germany is insane. It's insane." It's Trump's character that worries Merkel most, his craving to be loved and admired and his fury against all those who refuse to do so.

Merkel has been in office for 11 years and she knows very well just how unstable the world order has become. "Many have the feeling that the world has been turned upside down," she said at the CDU's annual party conference at the beginning of December. It was a tone that one seldom hears from Angela Merkel.

Merkel's problem is that she knows very little about the real estate mogul and his new administration. During the election campaign, there was only sporadic contact between the German government and Trump's people, which was also a product of the fact that few in Berlin believed the Republican candidate would actually win. It's Merkel's belief that Trump is only impressed by strength.

Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s interior minister and a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, argued that such a step was needed to steel the country against modern threats posed by terrorism, cyberattacks and an increased number of migrants seeking to enter the country.  The federal governments of Germany’s European partners and other established democracies already hold such powers, he noted, stressing that “it is time” to re-examine Germany’s security setup.  “We don’t have federal jurisdiction to deal with national catastrophes.”

“The jurisdiction for the fight against international terrorism is fragmented,” he wrote in a guest column for the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the country’s leading newspapers. “The security of the state must be able to be controlled by the state,” Mr de Maizière argued.

Christian Mölling, an expert with the security policy department of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, warned against forgetting the role played by the past in shaping many Germans’ attitudes about a centralized police force.

“​Many Americans tend to look at modern Germany through a lens shaped by the former West Germany,” Mr Mölling said.  “You need to keep in mind that this country has considerable experience with dictatorships, and consequently there is a significant tract of the population that does not wish to see the return of the secret police that was previously part of their daily life.”