Month: September 2024

Authored by David Rose via The American Institute for Economioc Research,

The inflation outlook has improved, but it is still very much in the news. Although the rate of increase has slowed, prices remain more than 20 percent above what they were four years ago. At the same time, most analysts understand that the slow and at times negative growth of the money supply, which has tamed inflation somewhat for now, cannot be sustained.  

Now that the Fed has announced its 50-basis-point cut in the federal funds rate, it will be opening the money spigot again. To be fair, the increase in the rate of growth of the money supply needed to achieve this reduction in the federal funds rate is modest. But as the Fed continues to reduce rates, the rate of money growth will increase, and so the likelihood of future inflation will rise. Since the Fed has given every indication that many more rate cuts are coming, what either presidential candidate has to say about inflation has never been more important.  

Several weeks ago, Kamala Harris offered us her Greed Theory of Inflation. In short, people are suffering from high prices today because of greedy corporations. That’s it. As the estimable economist and policy analyst, John Goodman, documented recently (The Greed Theory of Inflation), she is rather alone on this one. Even very liberal economists who vociferously support Democrats do not make this argument, and most will refute it if queried.  

Harris either believes what she is saying, or she doesn’t. Having an undergraduate degree in economics and exposure to highly educated people for many years in her various roles in government, truly believing what she is saying should be impossible. 

But if she doesn’t believe what she is saying, then this might go down as one of the most cynical acts of political dishonesty of all time. Even worse than either possibility is that it is a little of both.  

Economists used to enjoy a very good reputation among ordinary citizens and elected officials. In the popular television show The West Wing, for example, President Jed Bartlet was a Nobel Prize-winning economist, to establish from the beginning that there was no question about his intelligence, academic achievement, and intellectual honesty.  

Today, economists no longer receive that kind of automatic respect, and for good reason: too many have traded on the respect normally accorded to their discipline to advance their own political views. But a competent professional economist of integrity cannot possibly believe the Harris Greed Theory of Inflation. Competent economists understand that if greed simply means wanting things badly, then by the very structure of their own paradigm everyone is greedy, so the word is useless.  

In June of 2020, inflation was .6 percent. It then rose to a peak of 9.1 percent in June of 2022. It fell steadily from that peak to 3 percent in June of 2023 and has stayed low ever since (it was 3 percent in June of 2024). By the Harris Greed Theory, corporations became increasingly greedy from June 2020 to June of 2022, and then became less greedy over time.   

A much better, and very well-known, explanation for our recent whipsaw of inflation is money growth. The Fed was worried about disruption during COVID, so it dramatically increased the money supply. Inflation caused by supply disruptions began rising even more rapidly, precisely as monetary theory predicts, so the Fed hit the brakes hard on money growth; so hard, in fact, that the money supply began to contract (see below). Predictably, inflation then began to come down.  

If greed and not monetary policy were the culprit, why did the federal government fail to rein in corporate greed at the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, but then successfully do so over the last year? Kamala Harris should be asked this question by the media since she proposed the Greed Theory. Even if that never happens, economists with integrity should not wait to be asked that question. They should call out such nonsense unilaterally.  

The Trump-Vance ticket is playing the same kind of game with foreign trade policy. But there has been no shortage of economists from every political persuasion raising great objection to increasing tariffs in service to government led industrial planning.  Economists should not be exacting about things they politically disagree with, but generous with things they do. With respect to economics per se, they should call balls and strikes with the utmost of intellectual neutrality.

Authored by Bryce Nickels & Jay Bhattacharya via RealClearPolitics,

Who should decide whether scientists are allowed to modify viruses to make them more infectious and deadly to humans? The surprising answer, until now, is that scientists and institutions like the National Institutes of Health, which have a vested interest in funding and conducting such “gain of function” research, have been the ones deciding whether to undertake such experiments. A bill called the Risky Research Review Act is currently under consideration in the U.S. Senate, which could finally require independent oversight in determining whether such risks are worth taking.

In 2014, the Obama administration froze federal funding for such research while studying how best to regulate it. In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services implemented a toothless policy to fund research with oversight from a government body called the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee. Since then, the P3CO committee has reviewed only three research applications, and NIH funding for engineering more infectious and deadly viruses, including bat SARS coronaviruses, continued apace.

The stakes could not be higher: gain of function research on a potential pandemic pathogen likely caused the COVID pandemic, which led to 7 million deaths – 1 million of them in the United States. Unchecked, such research could definitely cause another pandemic.

In May 2024, after more than a year of deliberation, the White House unveiled its long-awaited proposal for oversight of high-risk scientific research. The response was divided. While some biosafety and biosecurity experts supported it as a small step forward, we found the proposed policy to be a step backward. The proposed policy is complex and convoluted. More importantly, the proposed policy permits scientists and institutions to engineer more infectious and deadly viruses to regulate themselves.

However, there is reason for hope. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is on the verge of approving the Risky Research Review Act (with bipartisan support from Committee Chairman Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, and Rand Paul, the ranking Republican on the committee). The bill would create an independent advisory panel, the Life Sciences Research Security Board, within the Executive Branch and be charged with reviewing all federally funded research with the potential to increase the transmissibility or virulence of any potential pandemic pathogen.

Unlike the proposed White House policy, the proposal explicitly lists potential pandemic pathogens covered by the bill. It eliminates the subjective discretion that previous policies provided to funding agency officials like Anthony Fauci. With this discretion, Fauci and others circumvented the P3CO and funded entities like the disgraced EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) – now debarred from federal funding – with tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. The EHA used the money to conduct dangerous bat coronavirus research in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Some critics argue that the legislation would harm biomedical research. These objections come from a tiny fraction of biomedical researchers who engineer more infectious and deadly viruses for a living and whose research would face substantive regulation for the first time. Those gain-of-function researchers and their lobbyists preposterously claim the bill “would jeopardize federal grant-funded research broadly” or that the review process would involve “vast overreach to research with much lower risk.” These claims are false. The bill narrowly focuses on the tiny fraction of biomedical research that risks causing a pandemic. It would have no impact whatsoever on the vast majority of research.

Even if the Senate passes the measure, there will be no federal regulation of privately funded research with the potential to cause pandemics. How big a concern is this loophole? It’s not merely theoretical. Last year, a media report – subsequently denied – recorded a drug company employee on a hidden camera discussing an apparent research program to make viruses more dangerous. Nevertheless, we believe regulation of federally funded research is the vital issue.

For private companies, engineering potential pandemic pathogens to make them transmissible or virulent makes no sense. The research has no civilian applications and no medical or commercial value. Moreover, any accident in such research would expose a private company to unlimited liability. For these reasons, no private company likely has pursued or would pursue it. Still, as the bill progresses, lawmakers should consider adding an amendment to cover privately funded labs or introduce separate legislation if necessary.

The decision on the Risky Research Review Act could be a watershed moment for preventing lab-generated pandemics. The bill also offers a rare opportunity for compromise and bipartisanship. We urge lawmakers from both parties to come together and support this bill, not as a political statement but as a unified effort to mitigate the risk of another lab-caused pandemic.

Contact your senators to urge them to support the Risky Research Review Act. Remind them the people deserve a voice in experiments that carry such enormous risks. After that, the U.S. should pursue an international agreement to ensure other countries regulate such dangerous research similarly. The life of every human being on the planet is at stake.

*  *  *

Bryce Nickels is a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, lab director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and co-founder of the non-profit Biosafety Now.

Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of health policy at Stanford Medical School, a co-founder of Hillsdale College’s Academy of Science and Freeedom, and Collateral Global, a UK charity devoted to documenting the impacts of lockdowns.

Despite not being formally recognized by any country, the Taliban government of Afghanistan is now seeking to join the BRICS economic forum.

“Countries with major resources and the world’s biggest economies are associated with the BRICS forum, especially Russia, India, and China,” the Taliban government’s deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said.

“Currently, we have good economic ties and commercial exchanges with them. We are keen to expand our relations and participate in the economic forums of the BRICS,” he said.

While the Taliban government has not been formally recognized, China and Russia have come close – given they have both hosted Taliban delegations for talks, and they maintain embassies in Kabul even after the US-NATO pullout of August 2021.

The Afghanistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs has further said it hopes to be invited to the BRICS summit to be held on October 22-24 in the southwestern Russian city of Kazan, but that there’s “no information so far” on whether the Taliban can attend.

BRICS includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and has recently inducted new members Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia.

China and Russia have remained the two major regional Asian powers who show willingness to invest in Afghanistan, and potentially tap its significant natural resources. Both have also welcomed the Taliban’s fight against rival extremist terror group, the Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K).

But the Afghan Taliban’s formal inclusion in BRICS might prove an embarrassment for the bloc at a moment it is presenting itself as a counterbalance to the unipolar tendencies of the United States.

Many regional countries have on a de facto level recognized the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan, but have not extended full diplomatic relations in an official capacity.

The Taliban in BRICS would present Washington with ‘low-hanging fruit’ which could be used to denigrate BRICS on a world stage – especially in light of US anger at growing China, Russia, India cooperation and these countries’ refusal to condemn Russian military action in Ukraine.

Authored by Robert Burrowes via Global research,

If you spend just a few minutes checking out ‘The Great Reset’ website of the World Economic Forum, starting at the page ‘Now is the time for a “great reset”’ – which includes a copy of what it calls ‘The Great Reset Transformation Map’ – and spend two minutes watching the World Economic Forum’s video ‘8 Predictions For The World In 2030’, you will quickly recognize that the WEF intends imposing profound changes to about 200 areas of human life by 2030.

If you also spend just a few hours reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – you will soon discover that the Elite program currently being imposed on us is far more onerous than anything presented in the dystopian novels written by Huxley and Orwell. Technology, after all, has advanced dramatically in ways that neither Huxley nor Orwell anticipated.

You will need to do a little further investigation, however, to discover that a range of tools – including genocides and wars, famines in some locations and serious economic dislocation in others, the Covid-19 ‘death shot’, 5G, geoengineering, Artificial Intelligence and synthetic biology – is being used by Big Brother to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population.

And, while hidden in plain sight, successively deploying a wide range of technocratic tools that are progressively imprisoning those left ‘alive’ as transhuman slaves.

In broad summary, this is being done by enclosing the Commons ‘forever’ and forcing people off their properties – for a discussion of how this is being achieved using ‘managed retreat’, see the series of articles by Kate Mason starting with ‘Managed Retreat New Zealand: Shhhh….be careful not to let the community know’ – and into a ‘Smart City’ prison.

These Smart City prisons will employ a dense network of 5G towers to facilitate communication and enable total control, where the imprisoned transhuman slaves will be geofenced to confine their movements to within 5 kilometres of where they are imprisoned.

And the detail in the Elite plan tells us exactly how it is being done.

Given that the Elite plan requires all 8 billion humans to submit, one way or another, and it is a lot easier to have people willingly submit to their death or transhuman slavery rather than contend with any resistance, the dystopian future being rolled out is being presented as a combination of necessary (to deal with various threats, including those posed by a non-existent virus and climate disruption), private (to ensure the integrity of your identity), safe and secure (from various online and other threats) to ensure maximum compliance. Of course, an avalanche of propaganda is also being used to obscure the view of what is really taking place.

Thus, initially, each surviving individual will have a Digital Identity, which will have attached to it a social credit score (determined by such factors as your personal, educational, employment and legal records and your internet search history to measure your degree of submission to Elite programs).

Traditional national currencies, which put money in your hands to spend or save as you liked, are being replaced by Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Your allotment of this ‘currency’ will be determined by your social credit score, attached to your Digital Identity and programmed so that it can only be spent within your 5km radius and only at approved locations, in approved amounts on approved products or services.

In addition, a dense network of facial recognition cameras (which take a three-dimensional image of your face thus removing any confusion between you and your identical twin, should you have one) and license plate readers will ensure that every movement (including if in a driverless car) you make is tracked and monitored by the Artificial Intelligence program controlling your sector. And the network of loud hailers (installed on 5G towers, street lights and elsewhere) will facilitate the sharing of routine directives as part of the means by which approved behaviour is elicited and enforced.

But ultimately, as Elites have known for millennia, it is food that is the ultimate weapon of control.

Our Identity as Homo Sapiens Threatened by Synthetic Biology, Humans Fiddle While Humanity Burns, Will It be Near-Term Death or Transhuman Slavery?

As former US Secretary of State articulated in 1973: ‘Who controls the food supply controls the people’.

And, as Professor George Kent eloquently explained in 2008, it is in the interest of the Elite that people are hungry. See ‘The Benefits of World Hunger’.

So any critical analysis of what is being imposed on humanity must take careful account of how food – and the farming of it – is being utterly transformed.

In essence, the Elite plan is to feed us genetically mutilated, synthesized and poisoned trash and insects, profit from our ill-health, force small farmers off their land, undermine rural communities, and utterly transform the ancient practice of farming into a corporate, technocratic operation.

If you want some of the detail, there are excellent sources that highlight the importance of buying organic/biodynamic food while organizing to grow your own, and making sure that your local trading community can defend your food sources against the advancing technocracy.

See ‘Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth’ and

‘The Future of Food’ and watch

‘The Synthetic Transformation of our Food Systems – Focus on Australia’ which is summarized here:

‘The True Extent of Biotechnology Experimentation – It’s Happening Now’.

In short, what the few examples above make clear is that we face a near-term future in which the control mechanisms will be all-pervasive.

Of course, you might still try to act outside the parameters of your social credit score – spend more money, spend it on something not approved in your case, grow your own food, travel outside your zone… – but the computer programs run by artificial intelligence will ensure that this does not happen by deactivating your ‘permission’ or, if this does not work instantly or other action is required, despatch a transhuman or technocratic police officer to intervene. If you still show signs of resisting the transhuman police officer, robot or drone sent to intercept you, it will, for example, simply fire an electromagnetic weapon to make you vomit until you comply.

See ‘Policing the Elite’s Technocracy: How Do We Resist This Effectively?’

For a wider, more detailed overview of some key technocratic, economic, political and other threats, see

‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s “Great Reset”: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’,

and for discussions of threats that are less well known, such as those posed by geoengineering, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, see

Geoengineered Transhumanism: How the Environment Has Been Weaponized by Chemicals, Electromagnetism & Nanotechnology for Synthetic Biology and watch

‘AI Exterminating Humans Through Synthetic Biology’.

Of course, while the program has been planned by the Elite and designed by its agents, it is not actually being implemented by the Elite or its agents. The entire ‘Great Reset’ program is being implemented by people like you and me who take orders without pondering the significance of their particular order and how it fits into the wider Elite program, just like the person putting together a bullet in a factory doesn’t ponder who will be killed by it.

It is less frightening, as the residents of the Brave New World know, to follow orders without thought or reference to conscience. It is less frightening to not ask questions and just ‘go along’. In essence, it is less frightening ‘not to know’.

And that is why these two dystopian novels end the way they do: Huxley and Orwell were astute observers of their fellow humans and knew how easily they submit. After all, being submissive is far less frightening than resisting. But even if we do somehow ‘know’, we are good at concealing our cowardice behind our favourite delusion, ‘taught’ to you in early childhood: ‘I am doing what I am told and that is the right thing to do.’ Which, in essence, is why so many people got repeatedly vaxxed and even the bulk of those who didn’t prefer to complain rather than act.

See ‘The Elite’s 5,000-Year War on Your Mind is Climaxing. Can We Defeat it? (Parts 1 & 2)’.

Anyway, with changes being made to 200 areas of human life, the Elite has not left much to chance or even many gaps through which one might sneak. Which means that effective resistance now is the only realistic possibility for averting life under Big Brother or Mustapha Mond and his fellow world controllers.

Of course, as the books illustrate superbly, there is no point seeking redress by asking Big Brother or Mustapha Mond. Similarly, if we seek redress through the Elite or its agents, we will not succeed.

See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

And because the Elite program is so complex and sophisticated, if our resistance is to be effective it must be strategic. That is, we must focus on directly resisting the key foundational components of the Elite program ourselves. Otherwise, our resistance will simply be absorbed and dissipated to come to nothing.

Resisting the Brave New World of the Technocracy

The intention of the Elite’s advancing technocracy is to kill off vast numbers of humans and transhumanize and enslave the rest.

And given the sophistication and savagery of the program, defeating it will require commitment, persistence, courage and enormous strategically-focused effort by a large number of people.

‘We Are Human We Are Free’ is strategically-designed to defeat the Elite program and will succeed if enough people participate. You can read the 30 strategic goals identifying the critical points of resistance on the website with one-page flyers, identifying the minimum areas for action, available in 23 languages.

Conclusion

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell were well placed to perceive trends in society and prescient enough to warn us in novels written many decades ahead of ‘crunch time’. Sadly, humanity failed to take advantage of their warnings.

This means that we must act now if we are to have any chance of averting imposition of the Elite’s technocracy, including destruction of the global economy, even as their genocidal program advances.

Time is running out.

The risk-on sentiment prevailing today can likely be chalked up to three developments: guidance raise by MU, deepening of the monetary easing cycle round the globe, and supportive data on the domestic front.

MU. In a surprise move, MU raised top and bottom line guidance (reported after market yesterday), highlighting a robust AI environment and recovery in traditional servers. The stock is up over 15% on the back of these results, with other semis stocks also gaining, as investors continue to buy into the AI secular growth theme.

Source: Bloomberg

Policy support. Central banks and governments appear to be following in the footsteps of the Fed, as they take steps to stimulate their economies with rate cuts. Overnight, China announced significant fiscal support on top of the monetary support announced earlier in the week.

In Europe, the Swiss National Bank cut policy rate by 25bp, and Goldman now expects another cut at the December meeting.

Goldman also expects the ECB to speed up the pace of rate cuts to consecutive steps.

Interestingly, as the rest of the world enters ‘easing’ mode, the US markets priced in a less dovish easing cycle today (with 2024 now back below 3 more rate cuts priced in)…

Source: Bloomberg

Strong data at home. Finally, we also received a flurry of data today that allay concerns about the US economy: Real GDP growth was unrevised at 3.0% annualized in the second quarter consumers are saving more than expected, and initial jobless claims also declined.

Source: Bloomberg

The sum of all that was decent gains for the US majors with Nasdaq leading overnight but fading back to join the rest by the US open…

AI-related stocks soared (thanks to MU)…

Source: Bloomberg

Despite the AI gains, Mag7 stocks overall were practically unchanged – after testing new highs intraday…

Source: Bloomberg

Most Shorted stocks were squeeze hard at the cash open but selling pressure hit shortly after….

Source: Bloomberg

But, without a doubt, China was the focus today with the HXC Index +10% post the fiscal stimulus announcement with Goldman’s trading desk noting that it was 3x better to buy in ADRs with a flurry of activity from both LOs and HFs.

Source: Bloomberg

Of course, with China stimulating, US data improving, The Fed cutting, and physical inventories plunging, it makes perfect sense that crude oil prices would plunge today (on some anonymously sourced malarkey around OPEC+ production increases)…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold continued its charge to new highs, hitting $2685 intraday today…

Source: Bloomberg

The roller coaster in FX markets continued too with the USD giving back much of yesterday’s gains…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasuries were mixed today with the long-end outperforming (30Y -1bps, 2Y +6bps), but all yields are now higher on the week…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin surged back above $65,000 for the first time since July…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, is this the start of Bitcoin’s breakout to new highs…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold has certainly shown the other alternate currency the way (and now Beijing is back in the game).

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 25 signed a series of bills into law that limit oil and gas operations across the state, prompting criticism from a member of the fossil fuel industry who says the measures will lead to higher costs for Californians.

The three bills are aimed at protecting public health and wildlife and empowering local communities to set greater protections around oil and gas activities in their neighborhoods, Newsom’s office said in a statement.

“Together, these laws mark another step forward in California’s ongoing efforts to cut pollution and protect communities,” the statement reads.

One of the bills, AB 3233, grants cities and counties greater authority to impose restrictions on oil and gas operations, including limiting or banning new oil and gas developments in their jurisdictions.

A second bill, AB 1866, imposes higher fees on oil wells that are no longer active but that have not been properly decommissioned. Newsom’s office said such wells pose a significant risk to both the environment and nearby communities.

The same law also enforces stricter regulations on oil companies to ensure they are held responsible for maintaining and safely plugging idle wells and preventing leaks and contamination.

AB 2716 bans the operation of low-oil production and gas wells within the 1,000-acre Inglewood Oil Field and imposes a $10,000 per month penalty on these wells until they are permanently plugged and abandoned.

Newsom’s office said the money from those penalty funds will be used for community projects such as park creation.

“These new laws allow local leaders to limit dangerous oil and gas activities near homes, schools, and other areas as they see fit for their communities, and give the state more tools to make sure that idle and low-producing wells get plugged sooner,” Newsom said in a statement.

“This builds off of our all-of-the-above efforts to protect communities from pollution and hold Big Oil accountable.”

The measures Newsom signed into law were supported by environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, which sponsored AB 3233.

“Legislators and Gov. Newsom have done right by clarifying and reaffirming communities’ right to protect themselves from oil industry pollution,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

Kretzmann said the law puts Los Angeles’s planned drilling phaseout “securely within the scope of local power.”

New Laws Could ‘Drive Up Costs for Californians’

The laws drew criticism from Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, who said they would “pile on mandates and drive up costs for Californians,” while simultaneously increasing dependence on foreign oil.

“These new laws do nothing to produce more oil here at home and, in fact, cost jobs while forcing us to bring in more oil from overseas,” she said in a statement.

“While the Governor cannot stop demonizing our industry, the truth is we prioritize community and worker safety too.”

The Newsom administration aims to phase out fossil-fuel-powered lawnmowers, cars, trucks, and trains, amid the state’s plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

Last month, Newsom unveiled a plan authorizing the California Energy Commission to require petroleum refiners to maintain a minimum fuel reserve to “avoid supply shortages that create higher prices for consumers.”

According to a 2023 analysis by the Sierra Club, an environmental nonprofit, 41,568 of California’s 100,696 wells are orphaned or idle and no longer producing oil. Closing these wells could cost nearly $23 billion, the report found.

“A recent report from CarbonTracker puts the price to plug and remediate all wells in California at $21.5 billion as of April 2022, including $10 billion for wells that are already orphaned and idle. Adjusting that number for the number of wells in the state’s inventory as of one year later, this report calculates that the total cost to plug and abandon all of the state’s wells currently stands at $22.9 billion,” the Sierra Club said.

Axios reports that Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the US-Mexico border on Friday.

President Biden-appointed “border czar” VP Harris appears to be pivoting from her open border support (globalist) to a border hawk after facilitating the greatest illegal alien invasion this nation has ever seen on the southern border. We suspect the Harris-Walz team has joined forces with leftist corporate media to unleash a propaganda blitz to convince the American people that Democrats are the ‘best-prepared candidate’ to correct the border crisis.

Ironically, VP Harris was the Border Czar at the very beginning of the illegal alien invasion…

So, essentially, she will be pitching the American on border policies to clean up her own mess that allowed ten-plus million unvetted illegal aliens from third worlds to pour into the US. 

Axios has provided scant details about the border visit. One campaign aide said the trip could involve a stop in Douglas, Arizona, for Harris to discuss border security. 

More from Axios:

• In particular, Harris will share how she is proposing to send new agents to the border and new technology to target the flow of fentanyl, the aide said.

• Harris has cast herself as a former “border state prosecutor,” leaning into a more hawkish stance while still pushing for a path to citizenship.

All of a sudden, as the election nears, Harris flip-flops to an immigration hawk. Axios noted in August that Harris would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on building a border wall if elected. She has previously called Trump’s wall “un-American.” 

In 2019, Harris called Trump’s wall a “medieval vanity project” that wasn’t going to stop transnational gangs entering the US. Then, in 2020, she said Trump’s border wall was a “complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.” Back in 2017, Harris said the wall was a “stupid use of money.” 

Yet, opening the border and flooding the nation would stop transnational gangs from entering the US??

Harris becoming an immigration hawk comes as Democrats have achieved their mission to flood the nation with more than ten million illegal aliens…

Democrats have zero shame in saying the quiet part out loud why they collapsed the border: future voters. 

Nancy Pelosi states that the goal of the Democrat party is to convert undocumented immigrants (illegals) into documented immigrants:
Bill Maher: “The CA lawmakers giving government assistance to undocumented immigrants to buy houses.
That’s kind of a different place than the… pic.twitter.com/pfeG9ngZUE

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) August 31, 2024

There are severe consequences for Democrats flooding the nation with unvetted migrants, including chaos from Venezuelan prison gangs running amok nationwide, blue-collar workers replaced at factories by migrants, and violent crime by migrants that should never be happening in this nation. 

Create a crisis, then push new policies … The strategy of far-left globalist Democrats. This is not America first. Instead, America last. 

Authored by Andrew Fenton via CoinTelegraph.com,

ASI Alliance founder Ben Goertzel says the alpha version of OpenCog Hyperon — the artificial general intelligence system he’s been developing for more than two decades — is already “self-aware” to a certain extent.

Goertzel also tells Magazine he believes OpenAI likely shied away from making its “very impressive” new o1 model an autonomous agent for fear that it would be seen as “risky and dangerous” and provoke a crackdown from regulators.

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance was formed in March this year, bringing together Goertzel’s SingularityNET project, Ocean Protocol and DeepMind veteran Humayun Sheikh’s FetchAI.

This week, 96% of CUDOS voters approved the decentralized cloud hardware network’s merger with ASI. The merger will boost the compute available for Goertzel’s plans to scale up OpenCog Hyperon, the AGI system he’s been working on since 2001 and launched as an open-source AI framework in 2008.

Goertzel on stage with three-legged robot singer Desdemona (Fenton)

OpenCog Hyperon and the future of artificial general intelligence

Three years ago, the project embarked on a total rebuild of OpenCog in “pursuit of massive scalability, and we’re a large way through that process,” he says. The Alpha launched in April, and while he says it’s currently very slow and “breaking changes” are expected, the team is working on “massively speeding it up. I think that should be completed this fall. And so then, which means next year, we’ll be setting about trying to build toward AGI on the new Hyperloop infrastructure.”

Goertzel says the system takes a different approach to large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and o1. 

“A Hyperon system is not just a chatbot. It’s architected as a sort of autonomous agent which has its own goals and its own self awareness and tries to know who it is and who you are, what it’s trying to accomplish in the given situation. So it’s very much an autonomous, self-aware agent rather than just a question-answering system.”

AGI systems need self-awareness for autonomy

Hold on, Goertzel’s saying the current model is self aware?

What I mean by self-aware is that from the get-go, even the current versions, I mean, it has a model of who it is. It has a model of who you are. It has certain goals it’s trying to achieve in the situation. It knows how it relates to that situation and what it’s trying to do. And a ChatGPT sort of system isn’t really doing that right.”

The system combines a logical reasoning engine, evolutionary program learning and deep neural nets implemented in a dynamic knowledge graph that revises and modifies itself. (GPT-4 explains what that means below).

Incidentally, Goertzel says the lack of a world model explains why none of the autonomous AI agents built so far have really worked. You can’t just take a “question-answering system” and tell it “you are an agent interacting with the world.”

GPT-4 explains what that all means (OpenAI)

OpenAI’s o1 and regulatory risk

For all the hype around autonomous agent-like behavior with OpenAI and “Strawberry,” Goertzel believes OpenAI deliberately avoided taking that path with the released o1 model.

“It’s trying to be good at reasoning and logic, and it’s very good at that. I love it. It’s very impressive. It’s not trying to be an autonomous agent. That’s a different thing on purpose. I think they don’t want to do that, because it would look risky and dangerous, and people regulators would try to stomp on them. The last thing they want to do is make an autonomous agent.”

Which is one of the benefits of developing a decentralized open-source system. Regulators can’t “stomp on it” in the same way.

“As we launch advanced AI systems, they’ll be running across the machines spread across every continent, in 50 or 100 different countries,” he says. “So I mean, if one country decided OpenCog Hyperon is illegal, it’s only gonna be a small fraction of the network.”

Is Sam Altman trying to prepare the world for autonomous agents by portraying a utopia? (X)

Since our interview at Token2049 last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman released an essay painting a portrait of a future utopia called the “Intelligence Age” brought about by AGI. Goertzel also hopes that the benevolent AGI he’s trying to build will be so useful that no one will want to ban it.

I believe this can be something way smarter than what Big Tech is doing. So if we can get something way smarter than the OpenAI, o1 model using Opencog Hyperon, and we can roll that out on a decentralized network, I mean, then the world will jump into that the same way they jumped into ChatGPT, and then they will be using the decentralized network, just by the way, because it happens to be in the underlying infrastructure.”

Challenges and advantages of decentralized AI systems

The tension at the heart of decentralized AI projects is that it’s much easier and cheaper to run large models using centralized equipment. 

Training neural nets and transformers on decentralized equipment is currently a nonstarter, although Goertzel says new research suggests it is feasible.

CUDOS should provide a big boost to the amount of computing resources available (X)

But he says logical reasoning and evolution learning via algorithms “run very naturally on a decentralized network of machines.”

The plan appears to bootstrap the network with some more centralized facilities while adding to the compute with the decentralized network. SingularityNET and Fetch have spent “a significant fraction” of 100 million ASI tokens (currently being renamed from FET) to purchase GPUs to build supercomputers. They’ll spend the rest once token prices recover.

“We want to have that as a sort of initial hub of the decentralized network to kickstart it,” he says. “We want to offer hosting for people who want to put AI agents on SingularityNET.” The vision is a Web3-friendly cloud solution like Hugging Face.

“AI developers just want the fastest, cheapest, easiest way to deliver a given function,” he explains. “If you want it to be decentralized, somehow you need to make it more appealing to end-users for reasons other than the philosophy of decentralization.”

Between the four projects in the Alliance, Goertzel estimates they’ll soon have “a couple of hundred million dollars of dedicated compute hardware.” Additional computing can be pulled in from SingularityNET spin-off NuNet, which uses idle CPU and GPU power from connected computers, and Hypercycle, which is a platform connecting AI services.

Renewable energy to power decentralized AI systems

LayerZero’s Bryan Pellegrino spent a decade working in AI and told Magazine during Korea Blockchain Week that his experience with electricity prices impacting his Bitcoin mining profits has left him with big reservations about decentralized AI.

It’s very hard to get compute the economies of scale [needed], or the cost of the underlying hardware [down], in a world when you’re competing against Google and AWS and all of these others, and just how they do their cooling and everything, from the cost of electricity all the way down. So I’ve always been bearish on most of the different segments of the intersection.”

But Goertzel says the cost of electricity pales in comparison to the cost of the equipment so “I don’t agree that it’s a non-starter.”

SingularityNET founder Dr Ben Goertzel on keyboards with his surprisingly good robot-fronted band. (Fenton)

However, he adds that SingularityNET and Hypercycle are exploring opportunities to benefit from cheap renewable power given the large power demands of AI.

“We’ve talked to folks in the Ethiopian Government about putting a bunch of servers near the dam there,” he says. “Toufi (Saliba, CEO) from Hypercycle is in discussion with the Paraguay government about putting a bunch of AI data centers and server farms next to the dam on the Brazil-Paraguay border. I mean, it is a thing to get multiple gigawatts of power straight into your AI compute center by putting your computer center next door to the dam with a fat cable to it.”

It certainly is. To underscore the scale of the electricity required, news emerged this week that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pitched the White House a plan to build enormous data centers in various US states, each requiring 5 gigawatts of power — equivalent to the output of five nuclear reactors.

AI data centers are usually located near major metropolitan areas as the services require low latency to deliver ultra-fast responses. However, Goertzel points out the o1 model has prioritized the quality of responses over speed, and Opencog Hyperon will, too.

“If you have AI that’s trying to do any kind of deep thinking, let’s say AI is trying to predict the direction of the market over the next day, right? Or the AI is trying to discover a new drug, right? Then it doesn’t matter if it’s in Paraguay or Ethiopia or wherever.”

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump pushed a narrative being spread by US intelligence officials that Iran is trying to kill him even though there’s no evidence of Iranian involvement in either attempt on his life. Trump’s campaign said they were briefed on the alleged Iranian threat by officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is led by Avril Haines. “Big threats on my life by Iran. The entire US Military is watching and waiting. Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again,” Trump wrote on X after the briefing. “Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before.”

The claim that Iran is plotting to kill Trump was first made by a CNN report back in July, following the assassination attempt by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot and killed by the Secret Service. The report acknowledged there was no evidence Crooks was linked to Iran, which was reaffirmed on Tuesday by intelligence officials speaking to The New York Times, who stressed there was no Iran connection to the July shooting.

The Times report also said there was no evidence that Iran was connected in any way to Ryan Routh, who was arrested on September 15 and recently charged with attempting to assassinate Trump. Routh is a staunch supporter of the Ukraine proxy war and traveled to the country to help recruit fighters for the Ukrainian foreign legion.

Despite the lack of evidence, Trump suggested at a campaign event on Wednesday that Iran might have been involved in the two assassination attempts. “As you know, there have been two assassination attempts on my life that we know of, and they may or may not involve – but possibly do – Iran,” he said at an event in North Carolina.

“If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” Trump added.

The claims about Iran come amid soaring tensions in the Middle East as Israel has dramatically escalated its bombing campaign in Lebanon, a situation that could potentially turn into a full-blown war between the US and Iran. But Iran’s actions over the past year have shown they’re not interested in war with the US.

For example, when Iran launched a reprisal attack on Israel in response to the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria, Iranian officials said they warned the US 72 hours in advance. The US denied the claim, but Turkey and Jordan confirmed they were given notice, which would have gotten back to the US. Iran and the US also engaged in indirect negotiations in Oman to avoid escalation.

Rep. Mike Lee has reminded the world that Iran’s official state channels in 2022 published and circulated a video that depicted an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump while playing golf at Mar-a-Lago…

This was posted on the Ayatollah’s website.

Truly, terrifyingly chilling. pic.twitter.com/VmILkzdIyM

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) September 25, 2024

Iran’s new president, Masoud Peseshkian, has also taken an extremely diplomatic tone toward the US since coming into office and wants direct negotiations with Washington. “We are not hostile towards the US. They should end their hostility towards us by showing their goodwill in practice,” Pezeshkian said last week. “We are brothers with the Americans as well.”

Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) occasionally vow they will take revenge for Trump’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who headed the IRGC’s Quds Force. But in response to recent allegations, Iran has said Trump should be punished for the killing in a court of law.

Trump says if he were president, and Iran threatened to harm US leaders, he would be threatening to blow up Iran’s largest cities and destroy “the country itself.”

What the hell is this? Trump says if he were president, he would be threatening to blow up Iran’s largest cities and destroy “the country itself.” There is no more overused adjective to describe Trump’s rhetoric than “unhinged,” but this is genuinely unhinged pic.twitter.com/e9tiu1K12L

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 26, 2024

“These accusations are unsubstantiated and malicious,” Iran’s mission to the UN said in response to the CNN report in July. “From the perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Trump is a criminal who must be prosecuted and punished in a court of law for ordering the assassination of General Soleimani. Iran has chosen the legal path to bring him to justice.”

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

If chaos is what they intended, everything is coming together beautifully. 

Major wars threaten to throw the entire planet into a state of turmoil, criminals are running wild in our streets, and in a little over a month the outcome of the presidential election is likely to cause an unprecedented explosion of anger.  If all of this wasn’t bad enough, our politicians have been allowing millions of desperate people to come pouring over our wide open borders.  Some of these “new arrivals” belong to international criminal gangs, and members of these gangs are being arrested for violent acts, theft, drug dealing and sex trafficking all over America.  Other “new arrivals” belong to terror groups in the Middle East, and you would think that this would be a major national security concern.  Russians have also been crossing the border illegally, as have very large numbers of military-age Chinese men. 

The stage is being set for the greatest period of chaos in U.S. history, and this should deeply alarm all of us.

Since Joe Biden has been in the White House, we have witnessed a spike in migration that is absolutely unprecedented in our history.

Millions of people have been allowed in, and once they get into this country they can go wherever they want.

Most of them have come in through the southern border, but what most people don’t realize is that migration over the northern border is also wildly out of control…

There has been growing attention from northern-state lawmakers in recent years over increased attempted illegal border crossings as migration from Latin America grows due to economic and political conditions.

In 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered almost 190,000 individuals attempting to cross from Canada to the United States. That’s almost seven times more than in 2021.

Unfortunately, the number of people coming in through the northern border has just continued to rise in 2024…

This year, the number of illegal crossings along the northern border is hitting record levels, and northern New York, with its proximity to Montreal and Toronto, is the epicenter of the influx. In August alone, the Border Patrol reported 19,000 migrant encounters along the border with Canada, with nearly half entering through New York.

It is so easy to come across the northern border.

The U.S. border with Canada is 5,525 miles long, and there aren’t many border agents covering it.

Fox News recently interviewed a property owner in northern New York that says that migrants are constantly entering this country through his land…

Chris Oliver’s property in Fort Covington, New York has become an unintended gateway for a stream of illegal immigrants crossing the Canadian border into the United States, leaving him dismayed and wondering if the problem will ever be resolved.

He told “Fox & Friends First” he “absolutely” blames “border czar” Kamala Harris and President Biden for the issue.

“You have no control over it. You don’t know who these people are. Not everybody is a good person,” Oliver said on Wednesday.

He is right.

We need to know who these people are, because not everyone is coming here with good intentions.

In fact, during that same interview Oliver mentioned a recent case where a man was arrested that was planning “an ISIS-style attack in New York City”…

“They had a guy up in Ormstown not too far away from us, get arrested. He was planning an ISIS-style attack in New York City. That was just recently. That same night, I still had people come across my cameras. That should be stopped.”

For those that are crossing the northern border, New York City is the number one destination.

According to NPR, transporting “new arrivals” from India to New York City has actually become a very lucrative business…

A group of immigrants from India pile out of a taxi minivan beside the Clinton County, New York, government building in this small upstate city half an hour from the Canadian border.

They are quickly swarmed by a half a dozen fellow Indian immigrants who’ve waited hours for this business opportunity.

This fleet of jitney taxis offering migrants rides south to New York City is one clear example of the informal economy that’s sprung up following a significant increase in unauthorized crossings across the usually sleepy northern border over the last year and a half.

Needless to say, some people are coming to the United States because they want a better life.

But in many other cases, people are crossing the border for very nefarious reasons.

According to the New York Post, children that are as young as 8 years old “are being drugged and smuggled into the US by traffickers”…

Border Patrol agents are warning that kids as young as 8 are being drugged and smuggled into the US by traffickers posing as their parents or family members — and nobody knows how common the horrifying practice is.

Authorities have rescued children caught up in two different instances of such smuggling in recent weeks — including one instance in which the alleged traffickers had birth certificates for multiple kids to whom they weren’t related, according to the Border Patrol.

Border Patrol sources have told The Post they’ve observed increasing numbers of smugglers posing as family units in order to “recycle” children.

Stopping the exploitation of children should be a good enough reason all by itself to secure our borders.

But our politicians refuse to do it.

Others are crossing our borders because they intend to commit acts of violence.  Recently, a very alarming discovery of weapons was made very close to the southern border…

Republicans are outraged at the Biden-Harris administration for ignoring an escalating security crisis at the southern border after rocket-propelled grenades and explosives were found near Arizona.

A bombshell report indicated that at least 4 rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and 8 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were discovered in Mexico close to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Huge amounts of ammunition were also found in the ‘scout site’ that was around 700 feet from the border wall in Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, according to an internal memo first reported by NewsNation.

At this stage, we don’t know exactly who those weapons belonged to or what they intended to do with them.

But it is being reported that Iran “is trying to assassinate former President Donald Trump”…

Iran has made it “clear” that it is trying to assassinate former President Donald Trump, as well as members of his administration – and the current Biden administration – as payback for the killing of an Iranian general and other hardline policies, U.S. officials and lawmakers said Wednesday.

The comments came after Trump’s dramatic disclosure Tuesday night that he had been briefed earlier in the day by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence about Tehran’s “real and specific threats” against him.

As I shared with my core supporters recently, U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz has admitted that a top official with the Department of Homeland Security has told him that there are at least five assassination teams inside this country right now that are targeting Trump.

It really will be a miracle if Trump makes it to the election.

If Trump ultimately ends up winning, the left will go completely nuts and the millions upon millions of “new arrivals” that the left has brought into our major cities will go completely nuts.

It certainly won’t take much to unleash an unprecedented tsunami of civil unrest, and perhaps that was the plan all along.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.