Tag: news

Via Rystad Energy,

• COVID-19 has not only impacted the energy industry’s revenues but also its infrastructure development.

• The delay of new natural gas facilities means that many countries, such as Vietnam, will have to rely on coal-generated power to make up the shortfall.

• The case study of Vietnam shows that these infrastructure delays will also lead to an increase in LNG imports.

The global energy industry downturn at the hands of Covid-19 has not only hurt immediate revenues, but is also affecting national infrastructure and energy policy planning.

A Rystad Energy analysis shows that gas resources around the world will see development delays, with the construction of planned regasification facilities also at risk. Coal may benefit as a result.

The case of Vietnam is a good example of how a country with its own rich gas resources will fail to meet domestic production expectations, requiring an increase in liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports instead. Planned regasification facilities also risk delays due to the downturn, leaving the use of coal as the only financially viable option to meet growing power demand.

Vietnam’s strong GDP growth – about 6 percent to 7 percent per year – demands a growing amount of energy resources. With a hunger to satisfy the country’s stable growth, Vietnam expects its power generation capacity to reach 125 to 130 GW by 2030 from the current 54 GW of capacity. In 2019, 33 percent of the country’s power mix was met with gas and the rest was fueled by renewables and coal.

Even if non-gas sources meet their respective targets, there will still be significant gas demand as gas-fired power generation capacity is expected to grow from 7.2 GW at present, to 15 GW by 2025 and 19 GW by 2030.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Rystad Energy had forecasted that Vietnam’s domestic gas output would reach 10 billion cubic meters (Bcm) by 2025. Of this, around 60 percent of total gas produced was expected to come from new developments. Our updated outlook shows a much different picture, with the pandemic crisis and low oil prices postponing more than 200 Bcm of Vietnam’s undeveloped natural gas resources.

Regardless of the present environment, the country is already facing declining domestic gas production. Nam Con Son Gas accounted for approximately 30 percent of the country’s total gas production in 2019, and has seen an average year-over-year decline of 8 percent since 2010. Similarly, gas production from other gas projects has seen 11 percent to 40 percent y/y decline between 2011 and 2019.

Of the 180 Bcm of gas resources discovered in the last 10 years only the Sao Vang and Dai Nguyet fields have approved field development plans, as the FID process has proven a long and arduous road. In the past decade only 11 percent of projects have been able to secure funding and the right to proceed with drilling and the development of new resources.

“Although Vietnam greenfield spending was expected to triple in 2021, with investments surpassing $1.8 billion, the present dual-crisis of low oil prices and Covid-19 has affected the capital spend ability of major stakeholders, creating a huge obstacle for monetizing existing available resources,“ says Rystad Energy’s senior analyst Debika Chakraborty.

As a result, Vietnam will only produce 7 Bcm of gas in 2025, rather than the expected 10 Bcm, creating a 9 Bcm gap between domestic production and the 16 Bcm of expected domestic demand. Vietnam’s goal to produce 80 percent of power generation with gas in the next 15 years now seems even less likely.

In order to avoid reverting back to heavy coal imports, Vietnam will likely begin increasing its LNG imports as early as 2022. Even so, importing sufficient LNG volumes will be difficult.

There are currently four LNG terminals in the project pipeline – Thi Vai LNG, Son My LNG, Tien Giang LNG Projects, and South West LNG – which together will have a combined capacity of 10 million tonnes per annum by 2025. However, the terminals, which are being constructed primarily in southern Vietnam, will only reach 1 million tpa import capacity by 2023 with the start-up of Phase 1 of the Thi Vai terminal. This will only marginally fulfill the demand-supply gap.

Given this, any delays in the other planned regasification projects will put Vietnam’s goal at risk, a potential outcome that seems realistic in today’s volatile market conditions.

Thus, to ensure a stable and affordable power supply, Vietnam will likely have to increase coal imports, making it nearly impossible for the country to meet its goal and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20-30 percent by 2030.

For all the talk of a V-shaped economy recovery – which predictably tends to always gravitate to the performance of the stock market which is acting as if the coronacrisis never happened and is now fully disconnected from all fundamentals – few have been willing to address the sobering fact that some 30% of Americans failed to make their June housing payment.

However, the situation is even more dire in the commercial real estate sector where defaults are soaring, and where the latest remittance data indicates that the June CMBS update will be absolutely catastrophic. One company affected directly by the ongoing implosion in CRE is Canadian investment/real estate conglomerate Brookfield Asset Management, which as the FT reports, is now chasing small retailers to pay thousands of dollars in rent on outlets that were forced to close during the coronavirus pandemic, yet even as the Canadian investment group skips payments on its mortgages and asks lenders for forbearance.

Now that the horror of the widespread shutdowns is fading into memory, some shopkeepers who lease kiosks and small stores inside Brookfield malls have been told to pay rent for April and May, a period during which the properties were mostly closed, the Financial Times reports, adding that “several tenants who asked for rent forgiveness described being asked to provide extensive financial information, including their personal tax returns for the past two years.”

The merchants, who requested anonymity for fear of antagonising a powerful landlord, said Brookfield ultimately refused to waive the payments, although it offered to give them until the end of 2021 to come up with the money.

Separately, a group of half a dozen tenants signed a joint plea for help and presented it to managers at one of the Canadian group’s shopping centers, although they received a less than warm welcome: “I will not address the merits of your ‘petition’,” a Brookfield lawyer wrote back adding that confidentiality clauses written into the shopkeepers’ leases meant that talking to each other about the contracts “could be deemed a default of your agreement with Brookfield.”

That response will hardly serve as the basis for a healthy, long-term relationship between the landlord and its clients. Indeed, three-quarters of Brookfield’s tenants have requested changes to their lease agreement, and the group said it had “actively engaged with all [of them] . . . prioritiz[ing] small businesses given their scale and immediate cash flow requirements.”

“We are now focused on national tenants,” Brookfield added, stating that it hoped to complete the discussions by September. “We have also been in active dialogue with our lenders given the subsequent impact this situation has had on our cash flow.”

What it means is that a handful of tenants will be allowed to push back rent payment for a month, maybe two max, but everyone else will be forced to come up with the cash. Why? Because Brookfield itself is now on the edge.

According to the report, “Brookfield has requested forbearance from lenders who are owed payments on a dozen of its malls, according to reports circulated to credit market participants who have bought the debt.” In other cases, Brookfield malls have been unable to repay mortgages that came due. 

At malls where loans are falling due this year, “we have been in front of all of our lenders and just requested 12-month extensions,” Brookfield Properties’ chief financial officer Bryan Davis told investors last month.

As of last week, creditors of four of the malls had not decided whether to grant the requests, the reports state.

Brookfield’s concurrent discussions with its tenants – where it demands to be paid now – and lenders – where it demands not to pay indefinitely – highlight how the forced shutdown of much of the economy has caught mall operators in a bind, and demonstrates just how precarious the ongoing impairment in cash flows affects all players in the same chain.

Meanwhile, as we discussed earlier this month, as real estate executives say they are sympathetic to the plight of retailers, many of which were struggling even before government mandates closed their stores, at the same time mall operators are dependent on rent instalments to meet the payments due on their loans.

Brookfield last week became the second major landlord to sue clothes retailer Gap in a dispute over unpaid rent, shortly after Simon did the same. Among the major retailers that have acknowledged seeking rental relief from landlords are Bed Bath & Beyond, Levi Strauss and Urban Outfitters. Several chains are asking mall operators to waive rent for periods when their properties were closed. Ultimately, many retailer outlets will be forced to file for bankruptcy, resulting in far more pain for malls and is the reason why unlike stocks, various CMBS have seen only a modest bounce since the March lows.

Via The American Institute for Economic Research,

With astonishing fury and in only a few months, we watched in shock as many of America’s underlying problems have boiled over in ways that have done terrible injury to this country’s liberty, prosperity, stability, and social peace. 

It’s a dreadful litany: the rise of political extremism on the left and right, the toppling of statues of George Washington, an insanely partisan press, a president who has warmed to exercising dictatorial power over trade and immigration (and claiming to have saved 4 million lives by locking down the country), a Congress that is dropping trillions like it grows on trees, and a Fed that is newly involved in financial markets to an extent it has never been in its history. 

The onslaught has sown vast public confusion about the way forward. Some people talk socialism. Others talk about crackdown, law, and order. Each side of the political divide wants the other crushed mercilessly, as if no society can exist with a tolerance toward different points of view. You would think, by watching all of this unfold, that this country never had an experience with a workable system of freedom and rights for everyone. And yet that is precisely the great contribution that America has made to world history: to demonstrate that freedom, tolerance, limited government, and federalism work in practice. 

The most disturbing feature of the current public debate is the presumption that all problems that exist need government to solve them. This attitude prevailed in the presence of a new virus. We’ve gone fully one-hundred years in this country dealing with viruses as medical matters, not political ones. The record was good: we learned how to manage them well.

That system came to be overthrown this year (with roots in intellectual error dating back to 2006, when George W. Bush first had the idea of imposing a plan in the event of a virus). 

The result was the following document released on March 13, 2020, but clearly mapped out months if not years before. “The U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan” (marked “not for public distribution or release”) is nothing short of a Soviet-style central plan. For all these months, this document – not the Constitution, not our traditions of liberty, not our individual choices, and not our commercial or even religious rights – became the governing document in the United States of America.

Whatever underlying problems in America before this date, this central plan exacerbated them all. 

A government that presumes the right to shut down an economy and culture, and plan the whole of society, even for a short period, is playing with fire, even to the point of opening the gates of hell. 

Ninety days later, we find that our property is not safe. No one is safe. The lockdowns, more than any other single factor, precipitated this disaster. 

And yet, you listen to the political class speak about this and hardly find a dissenting voice. Even the U.S. President, initially skeptical of the idea of locking down, now credits his decision to acquiesce to having saved four million lives. And he is puzzled now why his poll numbers are so weak. 

We desperately need an anti-lockdown intellectual and cultural movement in this country, one that rejects the centralizing and coercive plans of both left and right. The above-linked document should never exist in a free country. Until we have leadership at all levels of society that stands ready to condemn such monstrosities, and instead celebrates the ideals on which this country was founded, the morass of disaster in which we find ourselves will likely persist and grow even worse. 

There is hope for the future, but not without a principled proclamation that there will never be compromise with the sacred principles of liberty and human rights. This is the path to healing the nation. 

Senior editor Ash Bennington joins managing editor Ed Harrison to discuss the latest news in markets, macro, and coronavirus. Bennington and Harrison first analyze the breaking story about Wirecard, a German fintech company, and its implications for Germany. They also talk about how the Fed has released the animal spirits on markets, bolstered by exorbitant amounts of liquidity, and anticipate the pullback in consumption in light of a W-shaped recovery. Finally, they explain how the pandemic reasserting itself will end up strengthening the dollar and lead to a liquidity crunch. In the intro, Nick Correa explains the latest developments in the Wirecard story and provides some context around how they arrived at this point.

The U.S. Supreme Court took a step in limiting the SEC’s ability to recoup illegal profits from wrongdoers this week. A ruling on Monday preserved the agency’s power to win disgorgement but also said that any disgorgement shouldn’t exceed the profits made by the wrongdoer, according to Bloomberg.

And why wouldn’t now be a great time to roll back the SEC’s power? After all, just days ago, German FinTech giant Wirecard imploded amidst allegations that its $2 billion cash balance didn’t exist and its CEO was arrested on Tuesday morning. 

The US usually wins disgorgements of more than $1 billion per year in federal court, different from fines, which the agency is also allowed to use as punishment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote on behalf of the court that Congress had prohibited the SEC from seeking disgorgement “in excess of a defendant’s net profits from wrongdoing.”

Courts also must now subtract expenses, Sotomayor wrote. She continued that disgorgement needs to be geared toward compensating investors of fraudulent money and that it was still an “open question” if this money could be given to the Treasury when no investors were available. She also wrote that disgorgement needs to track individual wrongdoing and that the SEC couldn’t make one person give back the benefits an associate received.

She wrote: “Disgorgement must do more than simply benefit the public at large by virtue of depriving a wrongdoer of ill-gotten gains.”

Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, judges had traditionally made disgorgement awards in discretionary ways, instead of using strict rules.

Thomas Gorman, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey Whitney, and one of the country’s pre-eminent experts on SEC enforcement and insider trading said of the ruling: 

“The SEC suffered a significant loss today with the Supreme Court’s decision in Liu v. SEC. There the Court held that a “disgorgement award . . . [is permissible] that does not exceed a wrongdoer’s net profits and is awarded for victims is  . . .permissible. . . “  This rejects the SEC’s traditional approach to disgorgement which refused to net appropriate costs and expenses from an award of ill-gotten gains to victims.  Under the Court’s ruling the SEC will now have to determine the amount of any claimed ill-gotten gains and net legitimate costs incurred before returning the money to victims.”

Howard Fischer, a former SEC trial lawyer, said of the ruling that it: “will provide defendants strong ammunition for battling back against the SEC’s tendency to seek aggressive disgorgement remedies.”

Some SEC attorneys are just happy that disgorgement is still allowed in any fashion. Stephen Crimmins, a former agency enforcement attorney said: “That was the existential threat. This is a big win for the SEC.”

The couple being charged in the case before the court, Charles Liu and Xin Wang, were arguing that the SEC shouldn’t have access to any court ordered disgorgement at all. Clarence Thomas was the only judge who agreed with them. 

Authored by John Solomon via JustTheNews.com,

Could the impeachment scandal have been prevented if the now-fired U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman had followed up on Ukrainian allegations about Joe Biden and his family in 2018?

That’s the tantalizing question raised by emails from fall 2018 between an American lawyer and the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan that were obtained by Just the News.

The memos show that well before Ukrainian prosecutors reached out to Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer, in 2019 to talk about the Bidens and alleged 2016 election interference they first approached Berman’s office in New York in October 2018 via another American lawyer.

The memos show Little Rock, Ark., lawyer Bud Cummins, a former U.S. attorney himself, reached out at least five times in October 2018 to Berman seeking to arrange a meeting with then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

Lutsenko, who emerged as a key figure in the impeachment scandal, wanted to confidentially share with federal prosecutors in New York evidence he claimed to possess that raised concerns about the Bidens’ behavior as well as alleged wrongdoing in the Paul Manafort corruption case.

“Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is offering to come to U.S. meet with high-level law enforcement to share the fruits of investigations within Ukraine which have produced evidence of two basic alleged crimes,” Cummins wrote Berman on Oct. 4, 2018, one day after the two had talked on the phone about the allegations.

The allegations included that Joe Biden had “exercised influence to protect Burisma Holdings” after his son Hunter and his son’s business partner Devon Archer had joined the Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors and “substantial sums of money were paid to them,” Cummins wrote.

At the time Hunter Biden and Archer joined Burisma in 2014, the company was under criminal investigation in both England and Ukraine for alleged corruption. The British case was dropped in 2015, and the Ukraine cases were eventually settled in the final days of the Obama administration.

Joe Biden boasted during a 2018 public appearance that he forced the firing on Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, back in 2016by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine. At the time, Shokin was leading the investigation into Burisma. Biden denies the investigation factored into his decision.

Biden’s and Archer’s firm received more than $3 million in payments from Burisma between 2014 and 2016, bank records obtained by the FBI show.

Records recently released by the State Department also show Hunter Biden and Archer had contacts in 2015 and 2016 with senior State officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

In addition, Burisma’s U.S. representatives were lobbying the State Department in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Kiev seeking to make the corruption allegations go away, the State memos released under FOIA show.

“The allegation by Prosecutor General Lutsenko et al is that the US ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, Biden and Kerry made conclusions about who were the good guys and the bad guys in local government. They believe Biden and Kerry were influenced by payments to Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to influence certain decisions, particularly those benefitting Burisma,” Cummins wrote, relaying the allegations from the Ukrainian officials.

In addition, Cummins told Berman that Lutsenko had evidence that a ledger found in Ukraine in 2016 alleging to show payments to Manafort from a Russian-backed political party in Ukraine was doctored and the U.S. knew the evidence was corrupted. The emergence of the ledger caused Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman in August 2016, and eventually led to his conviction on money laundering and tax charges.

“The second allegation above is that the Embassy and FBI willfully pressured Ukrainian officials to falsify evidence to be leaked to the media about Manafort to affect the outcome of the 2016 election,” Cummins wrote Berman.

Cummins said in an interview he had one phone call and four email contacts with Berman in October 2018 about the Ukrainian matter, but the prosecutor’s office never took Lutsenko up on his offer to come to Washington and lay out his evidence.

“I never heard from them again,” Cummins said of Berman’s office. “It was an opportunity for the Justice Department to address these concerns privately, and who knows how history would have turned out had the SDNY simply followed up.”

Berman, instead, would eventually indict two associates of Giuliani on campaign finance and other charges after they tried to help the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer publicize the Ukraine prosecutors’ concerns. (One of the indicted associates, Lev Parnas, worked as a translator and interview facilitator for this reporter on a handful of Ukraine interviews in 2019, but prosecutors do not allege he did anything wrong in that work.)

James Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, declined comment Monday when asked about the Cummins overture in 2018.

Cummins said he was not representing Lutsenko as his client, but rather a Ukrainian-American citizen who was trying to help the prosecutor general get information into U.S. authorities’ hands.

Cummins’ email states that Lutsenko wanted to meet with Berman because the U.S. attorney’s office in New York had successfully prosecuted Archer on unrelated charges earlier in 2018. Archer’s conviction, however, was overturned by a judge, and Berman’s office never retried the case.

Cummins’ efforts to help arrange the meeting were confirmed by one of Lutsenko’s deputies, Konstantin Kulyk, who said last year that Ukrainian authorities repeatedly tried to convey evidence about possible wrongdoing by Americans to the U.S. Justice Department but were thwarted.

Lutsenko said in an interview last year that when Cummins’ efforts failed to get an audience with the Justice Department he reached out to Giuliani, hoping to find a different channel to get information investigated.

It was those contacts that eventually spurred the entire impeachment inquiry, which ended in January in the Senate’s acquittal of Trump.

Democrats have tried to portray Giuliani’s activities as an effort to dig up dirt on Trump’s 2020 rival, and to get Ukrainian officials to launch a probe of Biden.

But Cummins’ emails make clear Ukrainian authorities weren’t interested in investigating the Bidens on Ukrainian law violations. Rather, they wanted to confidentially provide evidence of possible violations of U.S. law so American authorities could investigate. And they had no interest initially in involving the Trump White House. Rather, they simply wanted to share evidence with U.S. authorities at the prosecutor-to-prosecutor level.

Cummins’ emails to Berman make clear that Lutsenko did not trust the U.S. embassy in Kiev or the FBI to review the materials, fearing they were too political.

“Lutsenko faces political hurdles in getting a visa to come here. It is believed that the embassy in Kiev has blocked his obtaining a visa in the past. He believes it is because the US ambassador knows the nature of his investigation and wants to obstruct him from coming and sharing it,” Cummins wrote Berman on Oct. 4, 2018.

Five days later, Cummins wrote that Lutsenko was prepared to deliver serious evidence, including copies of two ledgers in the Manafort case that Ukrainian prosecutors believed were faked

“Presumably he will be prepared to discuss eyewitness testimony he believes will corroborate both this story and also the separate bribery allegations,” Cummins wrote.

When Berman stopped responding, Cummins offered to have Lutsenko meet with a lower-ranking federal prosecutor simply to transfer the evidence.

“Perhaps you can provide at least one trusted prosecutor and trusted agent to meet with a couple of the actual investigators and just let them take down the information like they would if any citizen walked in the door with some information to share,” Cummins wrote on Oct. 18, 2018.

There was never any further response, Cummins said.

Ukrainian officials have said they did not believe the Bidens broke Ukrainian law but may have engaged in conflicts of interest prohibited by U.S. law. The concerns about the Bidens engaging in conflicts of interest were confirmed by U.S. officials as well.

During impeachment testimony last fall, both Yovanovitch and her top deputy in the Kiev embassy, George Kent, testified that Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma while his father oversaw U.S.-Ukraine policy created the “appearance of a conflict of interest.” Kent said he even tried to raise his concerns with Biden’s VP office but was rebuffed.

All federal officials are required by federal ethics laws to avoid taking actions that create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

From ‘conspiracy theory’ to ‘fact’…

A ‘noose’ which was ‘found hanging in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage’ turns out to be a garage pull which has been there since October, 2019 – while Wallace was assigned that garage last week, according to the FBI.

Of course, the outrage mob – including LeBron James – whipped up racial division over the non-incident in a tweet which has received 66,000 ‘likes,’ while the hashtag #iStandWithBubba trended on Twitter.

“On Monday, fifteen FBI special agents conducted numerous interviews regarding the situation at Talladega Superspeedway,” reads an FBI statement. “After a thorough review of the facts and evidence surrounding this event, we have concluded that no federal crime was committed.”

“Although the noose is now known to have been in garage number 4 in 2019, nobody could have known Mr. Wallace would be assigned to garage number 4 last week.”

BREAKING: FBI concludes no federal crime was committed in Bubba Wallace noose investigation. It had been in the garage since October 2019 pic.twitter.com/3aQXNx7Iav

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) June 23, 2020

On Tuesday, Wallace went on The View and called Wallace dismissed what the New York Post framed as ‘conspiracy theories’ over the noose incident being staged, or never happening. The day before, Wallace told Fox Sports reporter Jamie Little “Sorry I’m not wearing my mask, but I wanted to show whoever it was that you’re not going to take away my smile.”

So – to all you Talladega facilities managers, you didn’t take away Bubba’s smile.

And this is why you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It only took a day but NASCAR couldn’t wait that long. pic.twitter.com/fw7ifqPthb

— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) June 23, 2020

As the outrage mob frothed over yet another fake noose incident, cooler heads began to circulate the ‘garage pull’ evidence – long before the FBI cracked the case mind you.

2) Go to video at 00:53 and you’ll see Bay #4 the before picture. (screengrab)https://t.co/fdirk0yJ5H pic.twitter.com/68hyV90jBL

— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) June 23, 2020

4) Here’s the picture of Garage Bay #4 (taken Monday) with some notations to help: pic.twitter.com/FZjslo3n8a

— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) June 23, 2020

6) And finally here’s the side-by-side that shows the manual garage door pull hand loop in place [Nov ’19] and the hand loop (purposefully identified as a “noose”) missing or cut-off [June 22, 2020]

cc: @NASCAR @NASCARONFOX @NASCAR_Xfinity pic.twitter.com/2hb2ebdtPU

— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) June 23, 2020

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via AxisOfEasy.com,

In a  recent Wall Street Journal essay, “Looking Forward to the End of Humanity”,  Adam Kirsch posits a technological push, impelled by the global coronavirus pandemic, that would abolish death:

Eternal life through advanced technology seems like a pipe dream for a society that, until recently, had trouble manufacturing enough masks to save doctors’ and nurses’ lives. Yet Covid-19 may turn out to be just the kind of crisis needed to turbocharge efforts to create what its advocates call a “transhuman” future. With our biological fragility more obvious than ever, many people will be ready to embrace the message of the Transhumanist Declaration, an eight-point program first issued in 1998: “We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering and our confinement to planet Earth.”

There is an abundance of well respected thinkers who believe this is possible, including Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, cited in the article, and Yuval Noah Harari, in his Homo Deus sets the tone early on by declaring:

In the twenty-first century, humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality…

Humans always die due to some technical glitch…

Nothing metaphysical about it. It is all technical problems.

Then of course, no discussion of techno-utopianism would be complete without Ray Kurzweil, who posits a “technological singularity” which would provide for a personalized and totally controlled universe for every human, one where they would be in complete control to experience whatever they desired, for all eternity, once we all upload our consciousnesses into the cloud.

The WSJ piece hits on the same theme:

Today, cognitive scientists often compare the brain to hardware and the mind to the software that runs on it. But a software program is just information, and in principle there’s no reason why the information of consciousness has to be encoded in neurons.

The Human Connectome Project, launched in 2009 by the National Institutes of Health, describes itself as “an ambitious effort to map the neural pathways that underlie human brain function.” If those pathways could be completely mapped and translated into digital 0s and 1s, the data could be uploaded to a computer, where it could survive indefinitely.

Does any of this sound like heaven? Or paradise? Valhalla? That’s not surprising because Scientism (as distinct from exploration and discovery using the scientfic method) has ushered in a new era of material reductionism so that religion, spirituality, or any other non-material aspect of reality that cannot be readily quantified have been stripped of relevance and meaning in our Brave New World.

Something has to fill the void that the absence of religion and spirituality will vacate. In my next book, The Singularity Has Been #Canceled, I posit that this vacuum will be filled with techno-utopian thinking, which will pull forward utopia and everlasting bliss from the next life, and via the promise of expertly managed technology, roll it out into this one.

My premise for the book includes four main assertions, which are:

• It is techno-utopian thinking, the idea that systems and expert management can control for all undesirable outcomes, that paradoxically exacerbates undesirable outcomes they seek to ameliorate.

• True “artificial intelligence” as defined as “wide AI”, sentient and conscious, can never be achieved under our current assumptions.  The idea that consciousness is just something our brains emit “as a liver secretes bile” is, I think, actually wrong. No amount technological advancement will achieve wide AI so long as this is the core belief.

• That there are fundamental internal contradictions in techno-utopian thinking. The logical extension of the intellectual framework is that consciousness is an illusion, albeit, one we we’ll be able to perpetuate ever after by uploading it into the cloud. These internal inconsistencies, when taken hold at a societal level lead to a type of hypernormalization or what spiritual philosopher Ken Wilbur calls “aperspectival madness”.

Finally, because I’m not a luddite, far from, in fact, I introduce a framework for what I call “techno-realism”, the central premise being that every technological leap ushers in a new set of larger, more complex problems and that this is ok.  I do think it’s possible that an era of radical life extension could be upon us, for those who can afford it. Life extension is not eternity, however. Do the math.

The downside to this is that every technological quantum leap also bifurcates society into a breakaway civilization that gets to front-run the new technology. The wider masses are slower to benefit (although they do benefit over time), and the ways to mitigate this inequality are typically impeded by institutionally entrenched interests.

Which brings us back to the Wall Street Journal article, that posits a techno-utopian immortality and presents evangelists from the likes of Google and myriad think tanks to advance it.

As we move into a more algorithmically controlled society, I would expect that technocratic social credit systems will supplant conventional moral structures, and the prospect of having your mind uploaded into an everlasting paradise will be the religious payoff for conforming to the rules.

It will be interesting to see how this narrative will be promulgated by various thought leaders and MSM outlets over the coming years. I hope to have my book out sometime in 2021.

The Department of Justice on Tuesday released handwritten notes from the Michael Flynn case taken by former FBI official Peter Strzok, which the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross reports to be “totally exculpatory” for the former national security adviser.

The notes, likely taken between January 3-5 of 2017, were released to Flynn’s lawyers under seal by Michael R. Sherwin – acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia – and are “very significant,” according to the Caller‘s source. They were discovered by a federal prosecutor appointed to review the Flynn case.

Flynn update – the DOJ has produced more evidence.

A page of notes from Peter Strzok, taken possibly between January 3 and January 5, 2017.

This is when the FBI Washington Field Office wanted to drop the Flynn case.

“Additional documents may be forthcoming” pic.twitter.com/eyZZbZUY6q

— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) June 23, 2020

On May 7, the DOJ moved to drop charges against Flynn despite the former Trump adviser pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI on December 1, 2007 regarding his conversations with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. It has since emerged that Flynn may have done so under duress – with prosecutors threatening an expensive litigation that would involve his son, Michael Flynn Jr.

Flynn retracted his guilty plea in a January 29 statement filed by his new attorney, Sidney Powell, who accused prosecutors of withholding exculpatory information according to the report.

Attorney General William Barr appointed Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to review Flynn’s case after his lawyers accused prosecutors of withholding exculpatory information.

Jensen has since discovered and turned over several documents to Flynn’s lawyers. –Daily Caller

Meanwhile, the FBI tried to close the Flynn investigation on January 4, when agent Peter Strzok insisted it continue. Handwritten notes from an FBI agent tasked with investigating Flynn reveal that they were targeting Flynn in early 2017 with the intent of prosecuting him or getting him fired.

One document is a Jan. 4, 2017, memo from the FBI’s Washington Field Office recommending that the counterintelligence investigation against Flynn be shut down due to a lack of evidence that he was conspiring with Russia.

Strzok intervened to keep the case open, writing to others at the FBI that the “7th floor” — the FBI’s leadership — wanted to continue its investigation of Flynn. –Daily Caller

“What is especially terrifying is that without the integrity of Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney Jensen, we still would not have this clear exculpatory information as Mr. Van Grack and the prosecutors have opposed every request we have made,” said Powell.

It appears, based on the notes and emails that the Department of Justice was determined at the time to prosecute Flynn, regardless of what they found, Powell said.