Month: January 2022

COVID, Ivermectin, And ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’: Dr. Robert Malone Gives Blistering Interview To Joe Rogan

COVID, Ivermectin, And ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’: Dr. Robert Malone Gives Blistering Interview To Joe Rogan

mRNA inventor Dr. Robert Malone gave a fascinating interview to Joe Rogan which aired on New Year’s Eve.

If you’ve got three hours to spare, we recommend you watch the entire thing:

Malone, an expert in mRNA vaccine technologies who trained at UC Davis, UCSD and the Salk Institute, was suspended by Twitter with no explanation on Thursday. It appears he’s preparing to sue, as Alex Berenson is currently doing.

The suspension came after Malone was vilified by a hit piece in The Atlantic which was funded by Facebook and Johnson & Johnson.

“Three days before this thing came out, the journalist – he previously publishes on ‘woke’ issues on the topic of higher education. He’s clearly hired. And they explicitly say the article was funded by the Robert Boyd Johnson foundation and the Zuckerberg-Chan initiative.

…

He was totally obsessed. ‘Robert, why are you saying these things? You must have some financial incentive. There must be some reason you’re doing this‘ – and I told him repeatedly, ‘because it’s the right thing to do.’

I think I’m the only one who has been involved deeply in the development of this tech, that doesn’t have a financial stake in it. For me, the reason is, because what’s happening is not right. It’s destroying my profession. It’s destroying the practice of medicine worldwide … I’m a vaccinologist. I spent 30 years developing vaccines. A stupid amount of education learning how to do it, and what the rules are. And for me, I’m personally offended watching my discipline get destroyed for no good reason at all except, apparently, financial incentives, and – I dunno – political ass-covering?” -Robert Malone

“Our government is out of control on this,” Malone continues. “And they are lawless. They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the federal common-rule. They have broken all the rules that I know of, that I’ve been trained for years and years and years. These mandates of an experimental vaccines are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg code. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont report. They are flat out illegal, and they don’t care.“

Malone then explained to Rogan how the Uttar Pradesh province in India crushed Covid with early treatment that included ivermectin, however he claims that the Biden administration met with Modi and a ‘decision was made not to disclose the contents of the treatment.’

They then went deeper into the topic of ivermectin and early interventions in general. According to Malone, “There are good modeling studies, that show a half a million excess deaths have happened in the US, through the intentional blockade of early COVID treatment by the US Government.”

Malone and Rogan then got into some heavy science behind Covid – with Malone explaining how people with natural Covid immunity are at higher risk of adverse events from the vaccine.

“There is a number of things here that are not supported by the science.”

They then discussed the case of a 14-year-old girl who was injured by the vaccine, yet the incident was reported as a stomach ache.

“This young woman who was listed as having a stomach ache, when in fact what she had was a seizure. And she’s now wheelchair-bound with a nasal-gastric tube. One of 1,000 subjects.”

Towards the end of the interview, Malone gets even deeper – suggesting that people are living through a mass formation psychosis – drawing parallels to 1920s and 1930s Germany, where “they had a highly intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad.”

And Twitter doesn’t think Malone’s voice deserves to be heard. 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/01/2022 – 12:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34eFXc0 Tyler Durden

Brickbats: January 2022


BB1

The Court of Appeal for Nova Scotia ruled in August that Lorne Grabher’s last name could be interpreted as a call for violence against women and so he has no free speech right to a vanity license plate with his last name.

The city of San Francisco has spent three years and half a million dollars so far designing and deploying the perfect garbage can. The board of supervisors has voted to spend $427,500 to build five prototypes each of three models designed by a firm hired in 2018. In the meantime, the estimated cost to mass produce whichever model city officials ultimately choose has risen from $1,000 apiece to at least $2,000 and possibly as much as $5,000.

A British court sentenced Simon Silwood to eight weeks in jail in September for racially abusing a West Bromwich Albion soccer player over the internet. Silwood was upset after the team lost a match. He posted on a Facebook group that midfielder Romaine Sawyers, who is black, should receive the “Baboon d’Or” award, a reference to the Ballon d’Or trophy awarded annually to the best soccer player. Silwood claimed he meant to post buffoon but misspelled it bafoon, which autocorrect then changed to baboon.

Officials at Bigelow High School in Arkansas ripped out two pages from the 2020–21 yearbook before delivering copies to the students who paid for them. The pages had a timeline of major events from the school year, including the first U.S. death from COVID-19, riots following the police killing of George Floyd, the death of Alex Trebek, Apple’s market valuation topping $2 trillion, and NASA flying a drone on Mars. East End School District Superintendent Heidi Wilson justified the move by citing “community backlash.” But in response to an open records request by the Arkansas Times, the school system said there were no emails or other records related to complaints about the pages.

Residents of Durham, Ontario, will have to keep records of anyone who comes into their home for a social gathering, no matter how small, to stem the spread of COVID-19. Homeowners must turn that information over to the health department within 24 hours if requested. Those who do not comply face a fine of up to 5,000 Canadian dollars ($4,031).

In Florida, Sarasota County School Board Vice Chairwoman Jane Goodwin cut off the microphone and had police escort out speakers who criticized individual school board members during a recent meeting. Goodwin said there would be “no public assaults and no public attacks” on elected officials. She defined an “assault on a board member” as “anything critical” of that board member.

People living in an apartment complex in New South Wales, Australia, which has been locked down because of COVID-19, said officials are searching through their deliveries and seizing alcoholic beverages. New South Wales’ health department admits it is trying to limit the amount of alcohol that residents of the building can drink to “ensure the safety of health staff and residents.” Residents are limited to six beers or mixed drinks, one bottle of wine, or one bottle of distilled spirits a day.

A Savannah-Chatham County, Georgia, special education teacher has been charged with felony cruelty to children for using zip ties to bind a student in her classroom. Elizabeth Louise Board, a teacher at Godley Station School in Savannah, reportedly tied a boy to his chair and to a table.

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The Late Bishop Desmond Tutu, Antisemite

The late Bishop Desmond Tutu was a heroic anti-apartheid activist. He was also an extremely harsh critic of Israel. Anti-Israel activists have seized on his death to emphasize his anti-Israel views, in particular his claim that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians amount to apartheid. (Links above are just two examples of many.)

Tutu would seem to have a certain moral authority because of his anti-apartheid credentials. But a person who takes a heroic stance on one issue of racial justice can be awful on another. To take an example from American constitutional history, Justice John Marshall Harlan heroically stood up for the rights of African Americans in a series of famous dissents, most prominently in Plessy v. Ferguson. He was also the single most hostile Justice on the Court to the rights of Chinese Americans, and expressed that opposition in overtly racist terms–including in Plessy v. Ferguson! President Woodrow Wilson, easily the most racist president of the twentieth century regarding African Americans, appointed Jewish Justice Louis Brandeis and tried to intervene with Russian authorities on behalf of Russia’s oppressed Jewish population.

There are many other examples throughout history of individuals who heroically supported their own or another people, but were hostile to others. Perhaps most famously, Ghandi was a racist.

Which brings us back to Tutu. His expressed hostility not just to Israel, but to Jews, seems to have had theological roots in traditional Christian antisemitism. Edward Alexander gives a summary:

His speeches against apartheid returned obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the former South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern. “the Jews,” Tutu declared in 1984, “thought they had a monopoly on G-d” and “Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.”

Tutu has been an avid supporter of the Goebbels-like equation of Zionism with racism [Bernstein: In fact, this calumny has its roots in Soviet antisemitic propaganda.] He has alleged that “Jews … think they have cornered the market on suffering” and that Jews are “quick to yell ‘anti-Semitism,'” because of “an arrogance of power – because Jews have such a strong lobby in the United States.”

Jewish power in America is, in fact, a favorite Tutu theme. In late April 2002, he praised his own courage in resisting it. “People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong, because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin were all powerful, but, in the end, they bit the dust.”

Tutu repeatedly has declared that (as he once told a Jewish Theological Seminary audience) “whether Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can’t ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people.”

Certainly, Tutu has never judged Jews by the standards he uses for other people. Although South African and American Jews were more, not less, critical of apartheid than the majority of their countrymen, Tutu, in 1987, threatened that “in the future, South African Jews will be punished if Israel continues dealing with South Africa.” Israel’s trade with South Africa was about 7 percent of America’s, less than a 10th of Japan’s, Germany’s or England’s. But, Tutu never threatened South African or American citizens of Japanese, German or English extraction with punishment.

In a recent essay for the Times of Israel I noted that anti-Israel hostility is typically rooted in repugnance to the idea of Jews having sovereignty and military power. One source of that repugnance is the notion Jews’ role in the world is ironically, to serve as exemplars of Christian ideology:

More liberal Christian theologies, meanwhile, remain wedded to the notion that martyrdom, as suffered by Jesus, is the highest form of virtue. These liberals acknowledge and regret the unjust suffering endured by Jews in the Christian world for centuries. However, they see this suffering as uplifting Jews, with Jews being the martyrs to Christian sin just as Jesus was for the world’s sins.

In the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews’ role was to use their martyrdom to be a prophetic voice for peace, indeed pacifism, and to work for humankind’s redemption. It was emphatically their role not to build a powerful state with a powerful military capable of inflicting military horrors of its own. Jews refusing to be victims is, ironically, seen as a betrayal of Christian ideals. This is why Christian critics of Israel so often accuse Jews of not learning anything from the Holocaust; in their mind, the Holocaust is a story about Christian sin and possible redemption via the actions of the victims; the fate of the Jewish people as a people is at best irrelevant.

In that light, here is Alexander again:

Tutu’s insistence on applying a double standard to Jews may explain an otherwise mysterious feature of his anti-Israel rhetoric. He once asked Israel’s ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, “how it was possible that the Jews, who had suffered so much persecution, could oppress other people.”

On another occasion, he expressed dismay “that Israel, with the kind of history … her people have experienced, should make refugees [actually, she didn’t] of others.”

In other words, Jews, according to Tutu, have a duty to behave particularly well, because Jews have suffered so much persecution. The mad corollary of this proposition is that the descendants of those who have not been persecuted do not have a special duty to behave well, and the descendants of the persecutors can be excused.

More generally, suggesting that Jews in Israel in the 21st century must behave a certain way because completely different Jews suffered persecution generations earlier, is a bizarre proposition, sufficiently bizarre that one never sees it applied to any other group that has suffered in the past. When is the last time you heard that Irish people should lead the fight against world hunger because such a high percentage of the Irish died in the potato famine? A standard that’s applied only to Jews is inherently antisemitic.

The case against Bishop Tutu is not ambiguous; singling out Israel, a minor player, for preserving South African apartheid, suggesting that Jews are all-powerful and arrogant, arguing in favor of applying double standards to Jews, repeating traditional Christian antisemitic (and false, given actual Jewish theology) notions that Jews did not want anyone else to have a relationship with God, analogizing the “Jewish lobby” in the U.S. to Hitler and Stalin…Tutu was publicly and unabashedly antisemitic.

This does not detract from his heroic anti-apartheid activism. But again, that heroism does not preclude him from being an antisemite. And as for those who hold up Tutu as a moral exemplar for his hostility to Israel… rather than bolstering their case against Israel, are instead reinforcing the fact that fanatical hostility to Israel is generally rooted in antisemitism.

The post The Late Bishop Desmond Tutu, Antisemite appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Late Bishop Desmond Tutu, Antisemite

The late Bishop Desmond Tutu was a heroic anti-apartheid activist. He was also an extremely harsh critic of Israel. Anti-Israel activists have seized on his death to emphasize his anti-Israel views, in particular his claim that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians amount to apartheid. (Links above are just two examples of many.)

Tutu would seem to have a certain moral authority because of his anti-apartheid credentials. But a person who takes a heroic stance on one issue of racial justice can be awful on another. To take an example from American constitutional history, Justice John Marshall Harlan heroically stood up for the rights of African Americans in a series of famous dissents, most prominently in Plessy v. Ferguson. He was also the single most hostile Justice on the Court to the rights of Chinese Americans, and expressed that opposition in overtly racist terms–including in Plessy v. Ferguson! President Woodrow Wilson, easily the most racist president of the twentieth century regarding African Americans, appointed Jewish Justice Louis Brandeis and tried to intervene with Russian authorities on behalf of Russia’s oppressed Jewish population.

There are many other examples throughout history of individuals who heroically supported their own or another people, but were hostile to others. Perhaps most famously, Ghandi was a racist.

Which brings us back to Tutu. His expressed hostility not just to Israel, but to Jews, seems to have had theological roots in traditional Christian antisemitism. Edward Alexander gives a summary:

His speeches against apartheid returned obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the former South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern. “the Jews,” Tutu declared in 1984, “thought they had a monopoly on G-d” and “Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.”

Tutu has been an avid supporter of the Goebbels-like equation of Zionism with racism [Bernstein: In fact, this calumny has its roots in Soviet antisemitic propaganda.] He has alleged that “Jews … think they have cornered the market on suffering” and that Jews are “quick to yell ‘anti-Semitism,'” because of “an arrogance of power – because Jews have such a strong lobby in the United States.”

Jewish power in America is, in fact, a favorite Tutu theme. In late April 2002, he praised his own courage in resisting it. “People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong, because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin were all powerful, but, in the end, they bit the dust.”

Tutu repeatedly has declared that (as he once told a Jewish Theological Seminary audience) “whether Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can’t ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people.”

Certainly, Tutu has never judged Jews by the standards he uses for other people. Although South African and American Jews were more, not less, critical of apartheid than the majority of their countrymen, Tutu, in 1987, threatened that “in the future, South African Jews will be punished if Israel continues dealing with South Africa.” Israel’s trade with South Africa was about 7 percent of America’s, less than a 10th of Japan’s, Germany’s or England’s. But, Tutu never threatened South African or American citizens of Japanese, German or English extraction with punishment.

In a recent essay for the Times of Israel I noted that anti-Israel hostility is typically rooted in repugnance to the idea of Jews having sovereignty and military power. One source of that repugnance is the notion Jews’ role in the world is ironically, to serve as exemplars of Christian ideology:

More liberal Christian theologies, meanwhile, remain wedded to the notion that martyrdom, as suffered by Jesus, is the highest form of virtue. These liberals acknowledge and regret the unjust suffering endured by Jews in the Christian world for centuries. However, they see this suffering as uplifting Jews, with Jews being the martyrs to Christian sin just as Jesus was for the world’s sins.

In the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews’ role was to use their martyrdom to be a prophetic voice for peace, indeed pacifism, and to work for humankind’s redemption. It was emphatically their role not to build a powerful state with a powerful military capable of inflicting military horrors of its own. Jews refusing to be victims is, ironically, seen as a betrayal of Christian ideals. This is why Christian critics of Israel so often accuse Jews of not learning anything from the Holocaust; in their mind, the Holocaust is a story about Christian sin and possible redemption via the actions of the victims; the fate of the Jewish people as a people is at best irrelevant.

In that light, here is Alexander again:

Tutu’s insistence on applying a double standard to Jews may explain an otherwise mysterious feature of his anti-Israel rhetoric. He once asked Israel’s ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, “how it was possible that the Jews, who had suffered so much persecution, could oppress other people.”

On another occasion, he expressed dismay “that Israel, with the kind of history … her people have experienced, should make refugees [actually, she didn’t] of others.”

In other words, Jews, according to Tutu, have a duty to behave particularly well, because Jews have suffered so much persecution. The mad corollary of this proposition is that the descendants of those who have not been persecuted do not have a special duty to behave well, and the descendants of the persecutors can be excused.

More generally, suggesting that Jews in Israel in the 21st century must behave a certain way because completely different Jews suffered persecution generations earlier, is a bizarre proposition, sufficiently bizarre that one never sees it applied to any other group that has suffered in the past. When is the last time you heard that Irish people should lead the fight against world hunger because such a high percentage of the Irish died in the potato famine? A standard that’s applied only to Jews is inherently antisemitic.

The case against Bishop Tutu is not ambiguous; singling out Israel, a minor player, for preserving South African apartheid, suggesting that Jews are all-powerful and arrogant, arguing in favor of applying double standards to Jews, repeating traditional Christian antisemitic (and false, given actual Jewish theology) notions that Jews did not want anyone else to have a relationship with God, analogizing the “Jewish lobby” in the U.S. to Hitler and Stalin…Tutu was publicly and unabashedly antisemitic.

This does not detract from his heroic anti-apartheid activism. But again, that heroism does not preclude him from being an antisemite. And as for those who hold up Tutu as a moral exemplar for his hostility to Israel… rather than bolstering their case against Israel, are instead reinforcing the fact that fanatical hostility to Israel is generally rooted in antisemitism.

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How To Survive The Mega Collapse Of 2022

How To Survive The Mega Collapse Of 2022

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

Welcome to 2022!

The New Year’s edition of the Economic Prism is a place of wild guesses and rough suppositions.  Today we focus our eyes through our proprietary prism.  We set our sights over a 12 month viewshed.  What do we see?

First off, 2022 will be a year where everything under the sun happens precisely as it should.  Some good.  Some bad.  Each day shall unfold before you with symbiotic disharmony.  You can bet your bottom bitcoins on it.

But what else?

Will gold top $3,000 per ounce?  Will Beeple sell another digital art medley NFT for $69 million?  Will a paper cup full of Starbucks coffee mixed with syrup and milk froth hit $10 before the year’s over?

What about the S&P 500, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note, and the price of oil?

Will Fed tapering cause a simultaneous tantrum in both the stock and bond markets?  Will Fauci finally be run out of Washington on a rail like a 19th century con man?  Will China invade Taiwan?  Did WWIII just commence in the Ukraine?  Are we fated for complete social distortion?

You likely have opinions on these matters.  Many people do.  The answers to these questions, no doubt, will be revealed in due course.  In the meantime, our advice is to trust your gut.  Your guesses are better than most.

After a deranged 2021, and with Jen Psaki as White House Press Secretary, anything and everything can happen in 2022 – including a mega collapse!

Thus we’re eschewing a broad range of predictions for the 12 months before us.  But not to worry, we won’t leave you empty handed…

Rather, with humility and modesty we’ve zeroed in on one critical – yet hated – opportunity.  We offer this opportunity to you here, free of charge, with the sole intention of helping you survive the mega collapse of 2022.

Where to begin…

Significantly Overvalued

A look at the S&P 500 is a good place to start.  The broad market index just hit a new record high – again!  But price is one thing.  Does the S&P 500 have the earnings to back it up?

The S&P 500’s current valuation, when compared to its historical valuations going back to 1871, reveals a stock market with significant risks.  As of the December 30 market close, the Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings (CAPE) ratio is 40.09.

That’s over 137 percent higher than the CAPE ratio’s long-term historical average…and well above the 32.56 CAPE ratio reached in September 1929.  The only time the CAPE ratio has been higher is for a brief moment at the dot com bubble peak, in December 1999, in the run-up to the new millennium, when it hit 44.19.

Following both of these CAPE ratio peaks – September 1929 and December 1999 – the stock market crashed in spectacular fashion.

In short, based on the current CAPE ratio, the S&P 500 is now well over double the cost of its historical average.  The NASDAQ and DJIA are also both at nose bleed levels.

Similarly, the Buffett indicator, which is a ratio of the total market capitalization over gross domestic product, shows that the overall stock market is significantly overvalued.  The ratio currently stands at about 209.5 percent.  A fairly valued market is a ratio somewhere between 98 and 119 percent.  Anything above 141 percent is considered significantly overvalued.

Obviously, the most reliable way to make money in the stock market is to buy low and sell high.  Conversely, buying high and selling low is a guaranteed way to lose money.  Based on current valuations, buying the major U.S. stock market indexes right now would be buying high.

Perhaps you could buy high and sell higher.  But this isn’t an advisable way to invest.  Not unless you consider gambling to be investing.  Successful long term index fund investing involves buying when the market index is cheap – when the CAPE ratio is below 15 or the Buffett indicator is below 76 percent.

Based on the CAPE ratio and the Buffett indicator, the U.S. stock market is currently significantly overvalued.  Moreover, it continues to be propelled dangerously upward by central bank credit pumping; real tightening will not be occurring for quite some time.

Thus, as we commence the New Year, the major U.S. stock market indexes are at risk of a manic blow off top followed by a spectacular crash.  This doesn’t mean you should sell all your stocks and go to 100 percent cash.  But it does mean that some prudent adjustments to your holdings may be in order.

How to Survive the Mega Collapse of 2022

The fact is, with Bidenflation raging out of control, cash is trash.  Bonds are trash too.

What’s more, foolish policies out of Washington are trashing the foundations of economic life and civilized society with unprecedented precision.  Here is a partial listing of some of the unintended consequences that government interventions have directly manifested…

Price inflation.  Supply chain disruptions.  Labor shortages.  Energy shortages.  Food and fertilizer scarcity.  Extreme wealth disparity.  Stock, bond, and real estate bubbles.  Flash mob smash and grab robberies.  And much, Much More…

For these reasons, and many others, 2022 will be the year of the mega collapse.  In fact, it’s already happening.

But regardless of how expensive the stock market indexes are, and no matter how delusional investor expectations are for future returns, you must do something with your savings and investment capital.

A stock market crash may or may not be imminent.  But a mega collapse of the economy is most definitely in the cards.

What to do…

Gold, without question, is the tried and true form of wealth protection.  Paper dollars, debt instruments, dollar based interest and dividend payments, and the whole gamut of paper promises may not be here after the mega collapse.  But gold will remain.

To be clear, gold’s not an investment; it doesn’t pay a dividend or interest.  Still, it’s far more than just a pet rock, as Buffett asserts.

Gold, specifically, is an anti-investment.  It’s a safe haven for wealth.  And it’s especially prudent for times like now…when the end of the world as we’ve always known it comes to pass.

Yet if gold’s an anti-investment, then what’s silver?

Silver, for one, is an industrial metal with many different applications.  However, silver’s also an anti-investment; it’s a hybrid wealth refuge.  And silver, like gold, will still endure after the mega collapse.

Thus herein lies our one critical – yet hated – opportunity to survive the mega collapse of 2022.

You see, at the moment, silver is despised even by holders of precious metals.  We know this by looking at the gold/silver ratio (i.e., the price of gold divided by the price of silver).  By this metric, silver is extremely cheap compared to gold right now.

When the gold/silver ratio is above 80, silver is comparatively inexpensive relative to gold.  According to GoldSilver, the last three times the gold/silver ratio topped 80, silver increased 40 percent, 300 percent, and 400 percent.

As of market close December 30, the gold/silver ratio is 78.78.  That’s pretty doggone close to 80.  Need we say more?

Happy New Year!

[Editor’s note: As detailed above, physical silver’s an anti-investment.  It’s not to be bought for price speculation.  There are, however, remarkably profitable ways to exploit cheap silver prices.  And paid up Wealth Prism Letter subscribers will discover exactly how in the January issue, due to be published in the early hours of January 3.  If you’d like to exploit this opportunity too, take action and subscribe today!  Have a blessed 2022!]

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/01/2022 – 11:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3FKxqva Tyler Durden

Controversy Over Viral Video Of Child Getting Trampled By UK Royal Guard

Controversy Over Viral Video Of Child Getting Trampled By UK Royal Guard

A number of media outlets are calling it “shocking footage” – however, the elite Queen’s Guard is well-known for carrying on its marches and ceremonial change of posts no matter the obstacle or deterrence that strays into its path.

Controversy erupted in the UK after viral video showed a Wednesday incident which involved a young child walking into the path of a pair of rapidly marching royal guardsmen. “Make way!” a guard shouts before the collision. The Queen’s Guard without altering its path “trampled” the boy…

The video racked up millions of views on Twitter and social media, and interestingly it was highlighted in foreign media, particularly in Iran and Russia, with perhaps the suggestion it illustrates the West’s bad human rights record and a disregard for children.

Below is an example of how Iran’s state run English language PressTV presented the relatively minor incident:

The Queen’s Guard is responsible for providing security and protection to royal residences across the UK, and engage in frequent ceremonial change-overs of their posts.

The Daily Mail cited a Defence Ministry statement as saying:

“We are aware of an incident at the Tower of London earlier today during a routine patrol.”

“The Guardsmen on duty warned members of the public that a patrol was approaching but the child unfortunately ran out in front of the soldier unexpectedly.”

“The soldier tried to step over the child and continued on his duty.”

“Following the incident, the soldier checked on the child and was reassured that all was well.”

A reverse angle:

“There are thought to be guidelines in place for guardsmen to deal with obstacles, which include stamping their feet and shouting,” the report described.

“Raising a rifle is considered a ‘final warning’, after which the guardsmen is allowed to detain the person in question.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/01/2022 – 10:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eCTyff Tyler Durden

Humanity’s Final Arms Race: UN Fails To Agree On ‘Killer Robot’ Ban

Humanity’s Final Arms Race: UN Fails To Agree On ‘Killer Robot’ Ban

Authored by James Dawes via Common Dreams, 

Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn’t reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world’s cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

A Northrop Grumman X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator flies near the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. Image: US Navy

Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to establish regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, both because they could radically change perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the risk of preemptive attacks, and because they could be combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.

As a specialist in human rights with a focus on the weaponization of artificial intelligence, I find that autonomous weapons make the unsteady balances and fragmented safeguards of the nuclear world—for example, the US president’s minimally constrained authority to launch a strike—more unsteady and more fragmented. Given the pace of research and development in autonomous weapons, the U.N. meeting might have been the last chance to head off an arms race.

Lethal errors and black boxes

I see four primary dangers with autonomous weapons. The first is the problem of misidentification. When selecting a target, will autonomous weapons be able to distinguish between hostile soldiers and 12-year-olds playing with toy guns? Between civilians fleeing a conflict site and insurgents making a tactical retreat?

The problem here is not that machines will make such errors and humans won’t. It’s that the difference between human error and algorithmic error is like the difference between mailing a letter and tweeting. The scale, scope and speed of killer robot systems—ruled by one targeting algorithm, deployed across an entire continent—could make misidentifications by individual humans like a recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan seem like mere rounding errors by comparison.

Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre uses the metaphor of the runaway gun to explain the difference. A runaway gun is a defective machine gun that continues to fire after a trigger is released. The gun continues to fire until ammunition is depleted because, so to speak, the gun does not know it is making an error. Runaway guns are extremely dangerous, but fortunately they have human operators who can break the ammunition link or try to point the weapon in a safe direction. Autonomous weapons, by definition, have no such safeguard.

Importantly, weaponized AI need not even be defective to produce the runaway gun effect. As multiple studies on algorithmic errors across industries have shown, the very best algorithms—operating as designed—can generate internally correct outcomes that nonetheless spread terrible errors rapidly across populations.

For example, a neural net designed for use in Pittsburgh hospitals identified asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia cases; image recognition software used by Google identified Black people as gorillas; and a machine-learning tool used by Amazon to rank job candidates systematically assigned negative scores to women.

Protest against ‘killer robots’ as the UN took up the discussion, via AFP

The problem is not just that when AI systems err, they err in bulk. It is that when they err, their makers often don’t know why they did and, therefore, how to correct them. The black box problem of AI makes it almost impossible to imagine morally responsible development of autonomous weapons systems.

The proliferation problems

The next two dangers are the problems of low-end and high-end proliferation. Let’s start with the low end. The militaries developing autonomous weapons now are proceeding on the assumption that they will be able to contain and control the use of autonomous weapons. But if the history of weapons technology has taught the world anything, it’s this: Weapons spread.

Market pressures could result in the creation and widespread sale of what can be thought of as the autonomous weapon equivalent of the Kalashnikov assault rifle: killer robots that are cheap, effective and almost impossible to contain as they circulate around the globe. “Kalashnikov” autonomous weapons could get into the hands of people outside of government control, including international and domestic terrorists.

The Kargu-2, made by a Turkish defense contractor, is a cross between a quadcopter drone and a bomb. It has artificial intelligence for finding and tracking targets, and might have been used autonomously in the Libyan civil war to attack people.

High-end proliferation is just as bad, however. Nations could compete to develop increasingly devastating versions of autonomous weapons, including ones capable of mounting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear arms. The moral dangers of escalating weapon lethality would be amplified by escalating weapon use.

High-end autonomous weapons are likely to lead to more frequent wars because they will decrease two of the primary forces that have historically prevented and shortened wars: concern for civilians abroad and concern for one’s own soldiers. The weapons are likely to be equipped with expensive ethical governors designed to minimize collateral damage, using what U.N. Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has called the “myth of a surgical strike” to quell moral protests. Autonomous weapons will also reduce both the need for and risk to one’s own soldiers, dramatically altering the cost-benefit analysis that nations undergo while launching and maintaining wars.

Asymmetric wars—that is, wars waged on the soil of nations that lack competing technology—are likely to become more common. Think about the global instability caused by Soviet and U.S. military interventions during the Cold War, from the first proxy war to the blowback experienced around the world today. Multiply that by every country currently aiming for high-end autonomous weapons.

Undermining the laws of war

Finally, autonomous weapons will undermine humanity’s final stopgap against war crimes and atrocities: the international laws of war. These laws, codified in treaties reaching as far back as the 1864 Geneva Convention, are the international thin blue line separating war with honor from massacre. They are premised on the idea that people can be held accountable for their actions even during wartime, that the right to kill other soldiers during combat does not give the right to murder civilians. A prominent example of someone held to account is Slobodan Milosevic, former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who was indicted on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

But how can autonomous weapons be held accountable? Who is to blame for a robot that commits war crimes? Who would be put on trial? The weapon? The soldier? The soldier’s commanders? The corporation that made the weapon? Nongovernmental organizations and experts in international law worry that autonomous weapons will lead to a serious accountability gap.

To hold a soldier criminally responsible for deploying an autonomous weapon that commits war crimes, prosecutors would need to prove both actus reus and mens rea, Latin terms describing a guilty act and a guilty mind. This would be difficult as a matter of law, and possibly unjust as a matter of morality, given that autonomous weapons are inherently unpredictable. I believe the distance separating the soldier from the independent decisions made by autonomous weapons in rapidly evolving environments is simply too great.

The legal and moral challenge is not made easier by shifting the blame up the chain of command or back to the site of production. In a world without regulations that mandate meaningful human control of autonomous weapons, there will be war crimes with no war criminals to hold accountable. The structure of the laws of war, along with their deterrent value, will be significantly weakened.

A new global arms race

Imagine a world in which militaries, insurgent groups and international and domestic terrorists can deploy theoretically unlimited lethal force at theoretically zero risk at times and places of their choosing, with no resulting legal accountability. It is a world where the sort of unavoidable algorithmic errors that plague even tech giants like Amazon and Google can now lead to the elimination of whole cities.

In my view, the world should not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the nuclear arms race. It should not sleepwalk into dystopia.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/01/2022 – 10:00

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Turkey Tells Russia To Drop “One-Sided” & “Maximalist” NATO Demands

Turkey Tells Russia To Drop “One-Sided” & “Maximalist” NATO Demands

The country with the second largest military in NATO, and one which has in recent years had a strained love-hate relationship with Russia (but also the US), particularly over Syria, is now wagging its finger at Moscow, telling it to drop its demands which have brought it into severe tensions with the West over Ukraine. 

Turkey this week urged for Russia to drop its “one-sided” demands in its engagement with NATO, strongly suggesting that its current requests for no “guarantees” of more eastward expansion of the Western military bloc are too “maximalist”. This after Turkey has been caught quietly expanding its military assistance to Kiev via drone and military equipment sales. 

File image: Daily Sabah/DHA

“For any proposal to be accepted, it should be acceptable by both sides. Russia made some proposals. But maybe NATO seeks the same kind of guarantees from Russia. This is not a one-sided issue,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu recently told reporters.

“If the requests are maximalist — I’m not saying that Russia is maximalist in any case — both sides must be constructive,” he said, with the suggestion clearly being in Anakara’s eyes Moscow is indeed pressing for too much. “They should come to the table with proposals that both sides can accept.”

“If Russia has any certain specific expectation or issue from Turkey regarding reducing tensions between Russia and NATO, Turkey will evaluate this positively because our objective is clear,” said Cavusoglu added. “Everyone would be affected, God forbid, by conflict in the region.”

But Russia’s position is that the West merely abide by promises made soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union; instead, it’s seen NATO encroach up to its doorstep in eastern Europe and the Baltics from the mid-2000s on to now. For example, among the current demands on the table is for Brussels to rescind its prior pledges to put Ukraine and Georgia on paths to NATO membership, with Kremlin officials repeatedly affirming this would be a “red line” requiring drastic “action”.

In his latest comments Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov underscored precisely that Euro-Atlantic countries have broken prior commitments to not expand NATO to Russia’s borders. “Our proposals are aimed at creating and legalizing a new system of agreements based on the principle of the indivisibility of security and abandonment of attempts to achieve military superiority, which was approved unanimously by the leaders of all Euro-Atlantic states in the 1990s. I would like to emphasise that what we need is legally binding guarantees since our Western colleagues systematically fail to fulfill political obligations, not to mention voiced assurances and promises given to Soviet and Russian leaders,” Lavrov said.

For now, Turkey appears to be expanding its cooperation with Ukraine, providing military assistance:

But there’s more than meets the eye in Turkey’s latest call for Russia to drop its demands. Also at issue is Turkey’s hugely controversial drone sales to Ukraine, which were recently found to be much bigger than previously disclosed, outraging the Kremlin:

Turkey has sold Ukraine significantly more of the armed drones that drew a rebuke from Russia than previously disclosed, with further deals in the pipeline, Bloomberg reported. 

Baykar, an arms manufacturer based in Istanbul, has sold dozens of drones to Ukraine since 2019, together with control stations and missiles, according to several officials and an executive at a Turkish defense company with close government ties. Orders for at least two dozen more drones are under way, the people said, asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject. 

Putin in a phone call with Erdogan during the first week of December directly raised the issue, calling it “destabilizing”, pointing out that Turkish-made drones are being used against pro-Russia separatists in the war-torn Donbass region. 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/01/2022 – 09:15

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After First Year Bust, Here Are 5 New Year’s Resolutions For President Biden

After First Year Bust, Here Are 5 New Year’s Resolutions For President Biden

Authored by Liz Peek, op-ed via Fox News,

Here’s how bad things are for Joe Biden: the White House is pumping out stories about the new First Puppy as frantically as a fire brigade dousing a raging inferno. Anything to distract from the president’s abysmal polling, stalled agenda, failed COVID management and four-decade-high inflation. 

The worst news for Biden is that voters now score him poorly even on those qualities that he has banked on throughout his career, like honesty and empathy. 

Bottom line: the first year of Biden’s presidency has been a bust.

There is no guarantee that 2022 will be any kinder to the president. Inflation will continue to run hot as employers will have to pay up for workers and the Fed’s gentle down-shift on monetary largesse will prove too little, too late. Crime will remain a headline issue, thanks to Democrats who have turned our criminal justice system upside down while defunding the police. The southern border remains wide open as Biden and liberal mayors and governors do everything possible to invite people to enter our country illegally.

Meanwhile, China and Russia see this feeble presidency as an opportune time to press their advantage. 

In the midterm elections, Democrats will lose, and probably lose big. That will be, in effect, the end of the Biden presidency. 

Can Biden turn around his fortunes? Doubtful, but for the sake of the nation he could try, by adopting these five New Year’s resolutions:

Number one: Fire somebody! 

When a White House crashes, it’s good to let the public know that the president is angry, too, and demands accountability. Biden has kept his team intact, even as disasters pile up. That is a mistake.

It is outrageous that no one was fired after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Whoever signed off on closing Bagram Air Base, abandoning that secure airfield and its priceless cache of weapons to the Taliban, should have been dismissed. The intel team that said the Afghan government would hold and the people responsible for leaving behind so many Americans and allies should also lose their jobs. 

Thirteen American service members and scores of Afghans died in the bombing at the Kabul Airport; that is unacceptable. Heads should roll.

The State Department could also use a shake-up. Whose idea was it to have Biden ignominiously beg Russian President Vladimir Putin for a one-on-one sit-down earlier this year?  

Who “forgot” to tell the French that we were partnering with Australia to help them develop their own nuclear submarines, and that the Aussies would consequently renege on a large and profitable contract with the Elysee Palace? 

Which ignorant anti-Trumper decided to undermine the Abraham Accords, the most promising Middle East peace initiative in decades?

Serious errors of judgement and execution need to be punished. Not doing so risks portraying Biden as arrogant or, worse, clueless.

Second: Come out from behind your Teleprompter. 

Stop telling people you are not “allowed” to talk to the press, or to go off script.

You’re the president! 

Hold more press conferences, call on reporters randomly and cope with the resulting surprises. If you cannot handle the give-and-take of such sessions, you should not be president. 

Nearly half the nation thinks you are not mentally capable of performing the duties of your office. Either this is true, in which case you must resign, or it is untrue. The best way of demonstrating your abilities is to come out of your bunker, and act like a president. 

Third: Watch more television.

Yes, you heard that right – tune in, or grab a newspaper, and get up to date. On a live Christmas show with you recently, a caller from Seattle said, “Let’s Go Brandon;” you repeated those words, and then said “I agree.” 

Is it actually possible that you haven’t heard that phrase and are ignorant of its meaning? That is an alarming possibility.

Do you rely on your team to filter the information you receive? That is a terrible idea; they will not be honest conduits of news that reflects badly on you, because it also reflects badly on them.  

You say you do not follow your polling when it turns south; actually, that is exactly when you should be on top of what voters are saying. You need to know. 

Many of your comments about inflation, or crime or the surge of people entering the country illegally appear ill-informed; you may not be able to fix these problems but you should surely know about them. 

Fourth: Drop the divisiveness.

You were elected in part by people tired of constant political wrangling and hoping for comity. You promised to bring the nation together; instead, you have widened our divides. In a new poll, only 15% of the nation thought you could bring the country together; that’s a pathetic vote of no confidence on this, your signature promise.

Suggesting that the unvaccinated are not patriotic, or that Republicans are to blame for inflation because they are blocking passage of your Build Back Better bill may play well to a small part of the electorate, but the majority would like less finger-pointing and more good faith. 

So far, you have shown yourself as harshly partisan as your predecessor but with fewer accomplishments to balance the ledger.

Fifth: Stop denigrating the United States.

Americans love their country, and they want their president to love it, too. This is not a “systemically racist” nation, we do not need to topple our statues or rewrite our history. Our founding fathers conceived of and delivered a miracle for their time and indeed for all time – a country dedicated to providing opportunity and freedom to all. 

That’s who we are, and that’s what we do. To believe otherwise should disqualify anyone from leading this nation.

Including you, Mr. President. 

Happy New Year!

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/01/2022 – 08:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eImwdq Tyler Durden

Russia Tests Large Salvo Of Hypersonic Missiles To Close Out Year

Russia Tests Large Salvo Of Hypersonic Missiles To Close Out Year

Less than 24 hours after Thursday’s Biden-Putin phone call which the Kremlin described as generally a “good” start toward the cooling of tensions over Ukraine, Russia’s military has conducted a large test-firing of no less than ten hypersonic cruise missiles. 

It follows a similar but smaller-scale hypersonic test from last week which Putin had hailed as “a big event in the country’s life” which marks “a substantial step” in bolstering Russia’s defense capabilities. 

Prior hypersonic test, via The Jamestown Foundation

Further it’s significant that this is how Moscow closed out the year, and just days ahead of the much-anticipated Jan.10 talks with US-NATO officials in Geneva: “Russia test-fired around 10 new Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic cruise missiles from a frigate and two more from a submarine, Interfax news agency said on Friday citing northern fleet,” Reuters details.

The report additionally notes the large test comes amid continued skepticism from the West over whether Russia’s hypersonic program is really as advanced as Putin began touting as early as 2018. “Some Western experts have questioned how advanced Russia’s new generation of weapons is, while recognising that the combination of speed, manoeuvrability and altitude of hypersonic missiles makes them difficult to track and intercept,” Reuters points out.

As has been typical with such tests, it took place in the Arctic far north, coming at a moment of continued threats and counter-threats issued between the West and Moscow over Russia’s alleged troop build-up in preparation for an offensive into Eastern Ukraine.

On the Ukraine crisis, Russian FM Sergey Lavrov aid in his latest comments, “If a constructive response does not follow within a reasonable time and the West continues its aggressive line, then Russia will be forced to take all necessary measures to ensure a strategic balance and eliminate unacceptable threats to our security.”

“Our proposals are aimed at creating and legalising a new system of agreements based on the principle of the indivisibility of security and abandonment of attempts to achieve military superiority, which was approved unanimously by the leaders of all Euro-Atlantic states in the 1990s. I would like to emphasise that what we need is legally binding guarantees since our Western colleagues systematically fail to fulfill political obligations, not to mention voiced assurances and promises given to Soviet and Russian leaders”, Lavrov said.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/01/2022 – 07:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3mPW4Dn Tyler Durden