Month: January 2023

Authored by Nathan Su via The Epoch Times,

“Zero non-COVID” is the name that people in China are calling the regime’s new pandemic management policy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has aggressively pushed the whole country towards an all-COVID-positive state.

China’s annual rubber-stamp legislature is usually in session during the month of March. It is widely expected that the coming session will focus on saving China’s economy because it is on the edge of collapse after the three-year long zero-COVID policy.

Party leader Xi Jinping is clearly willing to pay any price to reopen the country.

Government employees of Chongqing City in Sichuan Province and Zhejiang Province received notices telling them return to their offices to work even if they have tested positive for COVID-19, as long as their symptoms are mild.

The total population of Chongqing City is more than 31 million, and Zhejiang province more than 57 million.

Rumors on the Chinese internet talked about local governments of Chongqing City and Zhejiang Province being criticized by Beijing because these regions were too slow to reach a high percentage of COVID positive patients.

A local official in Shanghai told The Epoch Times on Dec. 27 that his office had received instructions to do whatever it could to push the city into the COVID peak status.

“Let those who are supposed to become positive become positive, and let those who are supposed to die, die,” said Song Wen (pseudonym).

All state-owned media are mute about the current situation in the country, and reports from different government agencies are conflicting.

The Zhejiang Provincial government recorded one million new COVID cases on Dec. 25, while the Chinese national CDC only reported 2,983 new cases in the whole nation for the same day.

The regime announced that on Jan. 8, 2023, China will totally reopen travel in and out of the country, which has triggered concern in countries around the globe. Italian officials reported on Dec. 28 that 50 percent of passengers on two flights from China tested positive for COVID.

Chinese travelers leave the arrival hall of Rome Fiumicino International Airport, near Rome, after being tested for COVID-19 on Dec. 29, 2022. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)

China, a country with a population of more than 1.4 billion, moved from the zero-COVID policy to a zero non-COVID policy within a month. The sudden change has left health experts worldwide feeling uncertain, because the explosion in COVID cases in China may lead to the whole world being exposed to new variants.

The Western media have widely attributed the sudden policy change to the late November White Paper protests against the zero-COVID policy in China. However, according to World Health Organization (WHO) emergencies chief Michael Ryan, the COVID spike in China was not due to the lifting of the government mandated restrictions.

Before the policy change, “the disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease. And I believe China decided strategically that was not the best option anymore,” Ryan said.

The regime’s change from Zero-COVID to a Zero non-COVID policy did not come without signs.

Starting in late September, many Chinese state-owned media openly discussed not overly enforcing the zero-COVID policy.

On Sept. 30, Xi Jinping and all top CCP leaders went to Tiananmen Square for a memorial service on Marty’s Day. Xi and others brought flowers to the People’s Heroes Monument, a stone that was erected to remember those who died for the Party in the past. The pictures of the service show hundreds of people at the event who are not wearing masks.

For a country that has been enforcing the mask wearing principle as a part of its zero-COVID policy, the event was the first clear sign of the regime’s impending policy change.

On Oct. 28, Xi said during his short stay in Henan Province: China’s socialist system was established with the sacrifice of human lives. He said that this sacrifice is also needed in the modern era. Xi visited the province after the CCP’s 20th Congress earlier in the month, in which he was re-elected to a third term as the head of the CCP.

On Nov. 24, a fire started in a high-rise apartment building in Urumqi City that caused many deaths and injuries because the fire escape was locked. The incident later caused widespread protests in many cities. On Dec. 7, Beijing officially lifted its three-year long zero-COVID policy.

It is obvious that the CCP started the policy change quietly as early as in late September. The widespread protests after the Urumqi fire on Nov. 24 became the perfect excuse for the regime to openly adopt a new policy.

The reason for the regime’s policy change is clear: to save the regime’s ruling power at the cost of Chinese people’s lives.

As 2022 comes to a close we can recap many historic milestones of the year, like the Earth’s population hitting 8 billion and the global economy surpassing $100 trillion.

In this chart, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop visualizes the world’s GDP using data from the IMF, showcasing the biggest economies and the share of global economic activity that they make up.

 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a broad indicator of the economic activity within a country. It measures the total value of economic output—goods and services—produced within a given time frame by both the private and public sectors.

The GDP Heavyweights

The global economy can be thought of as a pie, with the size of each slice representing the share of global GDP contributed by each country. Currently, the largest slices of the pie are held by the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India, which together account for more than half of global GDP.

Here’s a look Top 10 country’s share of the world’s $101.6 trillion economy:

Just five countries make up more than half of the world’s entire GDP in 2022: the U.S., China, Japan, India, and Germany. Interestingly, India replaced the UK this year as a top five economy.

Adding on another five countries (the top 10) makes up 66% of the global economy, and the top 25 countries comprise 84% of global GDP.

The World’s Smallest Economies

The rest of the world — the remaining 167 nations — make up 16% of global GDP. Many of the smallest economies are islands located in Oceania.

Here’s a look at the 20 smallest economies in the world:

Tuvalu has the smallest GDP of any country at just $64 million. Tuvalu is one of a dozen nations with a GDP of less than one billion dollars.

The Global Economy in 2023

Heading into 2023, there is much economic uncertainty. Many experts are anticipating a brief recession, although opinions differ on the definition of “brief”.

Some experts believe that China will buck the trend of economic downturn. If this prediction comes true, the country could own an even larger slice of the global GDP pie in the near future.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Anthony Fauci is finally gone from his government perch. Let us recall that it was he who set this calamity in motion, squandering his credibility, while taking down public health and much else with it. More than anyone, he bears responsibility, even if he was acting on others’ behalf. That is especially true if he was carrying out a hidden agenda (take your pick of theories). 

There was already growing political and societal panic on March 11, 2020, when the House Oversight and Reform Committee convened a hearing on the new virus circulating. Fauci was the key witness. The only question on everyone’s mind came down to the most primal fear: am I going to die from this thing, like in the movies?

This was one day before Trump’s announcement of the travel ban from Europe, the UK, and Australia, essentially sealing the borders of the US to an extent never before attempted, thus separating families and loved ones and trapping billions of people in their nation states. It was five days before the evil declaration by all health authorities to immediately shut down all places where people could congregate. 

These few days will remain a case study in irrationality and crowd madness. Fauci, on the day of his testimony, however, seemed like a paragon of stability. He was calm and clear, nearly bloodness in his tone. The substance of what he said, at the same time, was clearly designed to generate panic and create the conditions for a full lockdown. 

He had the countenance of a doctor who was telling the family that a beloved father was terminally ill with 30 days to live. 

In particular, and in contrast to the testimony prepared by CDC/NIH, Fauci spoke to the severity of the virus. To the average member of Congress, the answer here was crucial because it addressed the only two serious issues: “Am I going to die?” and “Will I be blamed and politically punished if my constituents die?”

To this, he responded with what seemed like science but was actually completely wrong, dreadfully wrong, catastrophically wrong. He claimed that we knew for sure that at best Covid was 10 times deadlier than the flu. In fact, he threw around so much data confetti that a person could have easily believed that he was downplaying the severity to promote calm. His intention was the opposite. 

Here is what he said, and please read carefully to catch the implications: 

SARS was also a Coronavirus in 2002. It infected 8,000 people and it killed about 775. It had a mortality of about 9 to 10 percent. So, that is only 8,000 people in about a year. In the two-and-a-half months that we have had this Coronavirus, as you know, we now have multiple multiples of that.

So, it clearly is not as lethal, and I will get to the lethality in a moment, but it certainly spreads better. Probably for the practical understanding of the American people, the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent. The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three.

I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand….

I think the gauge is that this is a really serious problem that we have to take seriously. I mean people always say, well the flu, you know, the flu does this, the does that. The flu has immortality of 0.1 percent. This has mortality of ten times that, and that is the reason why I want to emphasize, we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.

Just think through the flim-flam here. He begins with the figure of a 10 percent case fatality rate from a similar virus. The thinking in the room is already stuck on 10. Then he says this virus has killed more in a shorter period of time, which implies more severity. He quickly dials that back but warns that this is more easily spread, which suggests that perhaps it is even higher. Then he dials that back and says that so far the mortality rate is 3 percent. 

But then he quickly adds in “minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection” and comes to a rough number of 1 percent, thus failing completely here to distinguish between cases and infections, which used to be a core metric that he and so many others completely obliterated. 

That’s a side point but an important one. The distinction between cases and infections has been crushed, leaving us utter data chaos. 

Fauci spoke this final number with so many other numbers before it that no one could figure out which way was up. The main takeaway anyone would have is that there is going to be vast bloodshed. 

It’s best to watch this. You can almost feel the fear in the room as he blinds these political critters with fake science. 

So what do we do? Fauci here was quick with the answer:

How much worse it will get will depend on our ability to do two things, to contain the influx in people who are infected coming from the outside and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country. 

In other words: lockdown. 

Thus was the stage set. To be sure, there is some mental connection between severity and policy response but there probably should not be. Even if this virus had a 10 percent fatality rate, what does locking down achieve? It was never even clear what the point was. The “spread” could not be stopped forever. The hospitals weren’t really overcrowded, as we seen. There was never a chance for Zero Covid, as the catastrophic experience of China and New Zealand has shown. 

In the end, the pandemic of a respiratory virus is solved through exposure, upgraded immune systems, and herd immunity, regardless of severity. And again, please recall that biological evolution has made such pandemics self-limiting: there is a trade between severity and prevalence subject to latency. Latency here was never a factor, contrary to the lies in the early weeks. So the more infectious this virus would be, the less severe it would be, nearly by definition. 

Fauci could have used his time in Congress to give a basic explanation. He did not. He chose to spread irrational fear instead. 

So how can we evaluate Fauci’s murky suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 will have a 1 percent fatality rate? What actually happened? These data are pretty settled by now. 

• 0-19 years: 0.0003% 

• 20-29 years: 0.002% 

• 40-49 years: 0.035% 

• 50-59 years: 0.123% (flu) 

• 60-69 years: 0.506% (bad flu) 

In other words, for the most affected demographic, he was off by two times. For youth, he was off by 3,333 times – an exaggeration of more than 300,000 percent! And he did it with a straight face. The rest of the population falls between there for a total of 0.095 percent. So in general for the whole population he was off by 10 times, meaning that the actual infection fatality rate is just slightly less (if this is right) than the seasonal flu.

Throughout the entire pandemic, from the beginning to now, the average age of the 0.09 percent of infected people who died remained at the medium age of death in absence of the pandemic. If this same virus arrived decades early, it would have hardly been noticed at all. 

Which is to say: Fauci was correct on February 28, 2020, when he wrote that this is more or less the flu, except with a large age gradient. His change of mind in the course of two weeks prior to this testimony is based on absolutely no evidence. What changed was his tactics but why?

We mapped out many times already that there was plenty of information available, even in the popular press, that this bug would be more-or-less like the flu, except with an extreme age gradient – which we knew already in mid-February. All the misinformation that followed was just that. And they knew it. Certainly Fauci knew it. No doubt about it. 

So why? Here we get into interesting theorizing. Brownstone has done a lot of this for the better part of 18 months, and we will continue to do so. We can talk all evening about this. We already do. And we continue to collect evidence too. 

The point is that the world is not the same. Fauci pulled the lever on the wall that set this in motion. He never should have been given that deference, that power, that influence. There should have been a check on him. And some people tried but the censors then flew into action. 

The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood – spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians – one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning. The consequences are for the ages. Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium. 

With Twitter now private, roughly three quarters of its employees laid off (yet somehow not only has twitter not crashed but is faster then ever, not to mention mostly uncensored) and its financials only of concern to the company’s owner Elon Musk, a troubling development suggests that the recent boycott by woke, liberal advertising companies who hate free speech is starting to sting.

According to Bloomberg, Twitter was sued for failing to pay $136,250 in rent for its office space in San Francisco.

In the lawsuit filed by Columbia Reit – 650 California LLC (docket # CGC-22-603719, Superior Court, State of California), the landlord says it notified Twitter on Dec. 16 that it would be in default on its lease for the 30th floor of the Hartford Building in five days unless the rent was paid. The tenant failed to comply, Columbia Reit said in the complaint, filed last Thursday in state court in San Francisco.

According to a Dec 13 report by the New York Times, Twitter hasn’t paid rent on its headquarters, or any of its other global offices, in weeks. The company was also sued earlier this month for refusing to pay for two charter flights. According to a more recent NYT report, in order to save money, Twitter has also shut down at least one Sacramento data center, stopped paying rent for its Seattle office, and has cut janitorial and security services, in some cases forcing employees to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

Last week, Twitter got rid of the cleaning staff at its New York offices and 10 people from corporate security, signaling that it may close one of its two buildings there.

At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where the company has also missed rent payments, Musk has done the same, consolidating workers onto two floors and closing four. He also canceled janitorial services this month, after those workers went on strike for better wages. That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home, according to the NYT.

According to an internal doc seen by the NYT, since early November, Musk has sought to save about $500 million in nonlabor costs.  Cost-cutting has been overseen by Steve Davis, the head of Musk’s tunneling start-up, the Boring Company, and Jared Birchall, the head of the billionaire’s family office. Twitter managers who didn’t lose their jobs in mass layoffs last month have been told to approach their spending with a tactic known as “zero-based budgeting,” or operating under the assumption that spending should start at nothing and teams should justify individual costs, according to the costs-savings document.

Davis has directed Twitter employees to delay paying various contractors or vendors and try to negotiate those bills to smaller amounts. The cost of one of the company’s largest contracts, with the consulting megafirm Deloitte, has been a point of particular concern for Twitter’s leadership, which wants to reduce the fees the company pays for security, tax preparation and other services. The company has skipped payments to KPMG, an accounting and consulting firm that had been working on matters related to compliance with the Federal Trade Commission. While missed payments to those firms have now been paid, according to a person familiar with the expenditures, it’s unclear if the company will retain their services beyond this year.

Life and work in the 21st century is increasingly reliant on modern technology, with a country’s digital quality of life playing a massive role on people’s day-to-day.

Some countries excel in internet access and affordability, while others have more modern digital systems and relevant laws. And, as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach details below, many regions of the world suffer with lacking digital infrastructure and access across the board.

The 2022 Digital Quality of Life Index (DQL) from Surfshark analyzes countries on digital wellbeing, based on data from the UN, World Bank, Freedom House, and the International Communications Union.

5 Metrics for Measuring Digital Wellbeing

The DQL Index covers 117 countries with readily available data, making up 92% of the global population. Each country is scored on five pillars:

• Internet Affordability—How much time people have to work to afford a stable internet connection.

• Internet Quality—How fast and stable the internet connectivity in a country is and how well it’s improving.

• Electronic Infrastructure—How well developed and inclusive a country’s existing electronic infrastructure is.

• Electronic Security—How safe and protected people feel in a country.

• Electronic Government—How advanced and digitized a country’s government services are.

Visualizing The World’s Digital Quality of Life

Overall, Europe and Asia led the digital quality of life rankings in 2022. Israel took the top spot with an incredibly strong score in internet affordability. Here are the countries sorted by rankings and their weighted scores in each category:

Rank	Country	Affordability	Quality	E-infrastructure	E-security	E-government
1	Israel	0.1917	0.0981	0.1668	0.1503	0.1541
2	Denmark	0.047	0.1186	0.1968	0.1878	0.1844
3	Germany	0.0718	0.0926	0.1922	0.1946	0.1612
4	France	0.0534	0.111	0.1834	0.1878	0.1749
5	Sweden	0.0213	0.1059	0.1958	0.1878	0.1787
6	Netherlands	0.0241	0.0985	0.1956	0.1865	0.1796
7	Finland	0.0171	0.0973	0.192	0.1892	0.1869
8	Japan	0.0684	0.1024	0.1846	0.1462	0.177
9	U.K.	0.0413	0.0898	0.1882	0.1611	0.188
10	South Korea	0.0252	0.1139	0.1884	0.1516	0.1868
11	Lithuania	0.0508	0.087	0.1705	0.1973	0.1592
12	U.S.	0.0326	0.113	0.1944	0.1224	0.1947
13	Switzerland	0.0337	0.1114	0.1914	0.1597	0.1607
14	Estonia	0.0219	0.0759	0.1852	0.1946	0.1779
15	Singapore	0.0717	0.1134	0.1852	0.0943	0.19
16	Spain	0.0257	0.0924	0.1777	0.1919	0.1656
17	Norway	0.0136	0.0923	0.194	0.1649	0.174
18	Luxembourg	0.0272	0.0911	0.1878	0.1689	0.1597
19	Italy	0.0362	0.082	0.1733	0.1824	0.159
20	Portugal	0.0085	0.1101	0.1576	0.1932	0.1565
21	Belgium	0.0162	0.0868	0.1823	0.1973	0.1409
22	Austria	0.0279	0.0717	0.1782	0.1716	0.1719
23	Poland	0.0242	0.0869	0.1566	0.1905	0.1568
24	Ireland	0.0217	0.0874	0.1799	0.1662	0.1596
25	Czechia	0.023	0.0755	0.1707	0.196	0.1472
26	Canada	0.0228	0.0967	0.1831	0.1289	0.1723
27	Hungary	0.0206	0.1046	0.1647	0.1676	0.1425
28	New Zealand	0.0166	0.1027	0.1731	0.1341	0.1702
29	Slovakia	0.0233	0.0807	0.161	0.1865	0.1417
30	Bulgaria	0.0308	0.1025	0.1352	0.177	0.1452
31	Croatia	0.0133	0.0911	0.1625	0.1865	0.1346
32	Slovenia	0.0102	0.0934	0.1619	0.1622	0.1591
33	Latvia	0.0235	0.0918	0.1628	0.1784	0.1289
34	Romania	0.0299	0.105	0.1427	0.1743	0.1327
35	Australia	0.0453	0.0706	0.1755	0.1089	0.1802
36	Malta	0.0104	0.093	0.1639	0.1527	0.1547
37	Cyprus	0.0139	0.0718	0.1589	0.1689	0.1548
38	Malaysia	0.0319	0.0838	0.1636	0.1224	0.1561
39	Greece	0.0085	0.0713	0.142	0.2	0.1344
40	Chile	0.0251	0.1202	0.1469	0.1022	0.1538
41	Uruguay	0.0051	0.1054	0.1569	0.13	0.1498
42	Russia	0.0556	0.0794	0.1512	0.0943	0.152
43	China	0.0241	0.1045	0.1485	0.0741	0.175
44	U.A.E.	0.0071	0.1148	0.1779	0.0419	0.1712
45	Argentina	0.0073	0.0694	0.1575	0.13	0.1464
46	Qatar	0.0077	0.1077	0.1705	0.0808	0.1421
47	Armenia	0.1009	0.07	0.1356	0.0765	0.1221
48	Serbia	0.0184	0.0739	0.1387	0.1238	0.1429
49	Thailand	0.0081	0.1045	0.151	0.0876	0.1391
50	Ukraine	0.0259	0.0581	0.1613	0.1184	0.1256
51	Saudi Arabia	0.0057	0.0873	0.1635	0.0865	0.1408
52	Turkey	0.0153	0.0679	0.1526	0.0968	0.1488
53	Brazil	0.0078	0.0884	0.1388	0.0686	0.1558
54	Moldova	0.0357	0.0687	0.1359	0.0927	0.1226
55	Philippines	0.0044	0.0779	0.1371	0.1062	0.1265
56	Bahrain	0.0084	0.0878	0.166	0.047	0.1396
57	Colombia	0.0051	0.0775	0.1248	0.0954	0.1433
58	Costa Rica	0.0042	0.0721	0.1523	0.0954	0.1206
59	India	0.0266	0.071	0.1149	0.0822	0.1489
60	N. Macedonia	0.0095	0.0684	0.1409	0.0981	0.1237
61	Kazakhstan	0.0185	0.0639	0.1408	0.07	0.1473
62	Mexico	0.0111	0.0688	0.1291	0.0792	0.142
63	Paraguay	0.0091	0.0724	0.1424	0.0862	0.113
64	Albania	0.0087	0.0567	0.1313	0.09	0.1328
65	Oman	0.0053	0.065	0.1455	0.0473	0.1502
66	South Africa	0.0198	0.0689	0.1171	0.0778	0.1294
67	Georgia	0.0097	0.0577	0.1408	0.0941	0.1103
68	Mauritius	0.0149	0.0459	0.1311	0.09	0.1298
69	Belarus	0.0224	0.068	0.1396	0.0554	0.123
70	Vietnam	0.0145	0.0712	0.1396	0.0578	0.1241
71	Morocco	0.0068	0.0603	0.1247	0.113	0.1004
72	Indonesia	0.0064	0.0639	0.1382	0.0605	0.1342
73	Peru	0.0037	0.069	0.126	0.0819	0.1213
74	Azerbaijan	0.0093	0.0618	0.1361	0.0592	0.1253
75	Montenegro	0.0149	0.0566	0.1339	0.0765	0.1064
76	Bangladesh	0.024	0.0681	0.1204	0.0703	0.1021
77	Tunisia	0.011	0.0484	0.1225	0.0886	0.1142
78	Kenya	0.0047	0.0492	0.1391	0.0714	0.1193
79	Dominican Republic	0.0047	0.0597	0.1163	0.0754	0.1229
80	Bosnia and Herzegovina	0.0127	0.0634	0.1353	0.0697	0.0974
81	Panama	0.0032	0.0851	0.1279	0.05	0.1111
82	Ecuador	0.0045	0.0656	0.132	0.0365	0.1256
83	Trinidad and Tobago	0.0094	0.0622	0.1277	0.0551	0.1074
84	Iran	0.0149	0.0585	0.1482	0.0149	0.1113
85	Egypt	0.0064	0.0583	0.1098	0.0595	0.1135
86	Nigeria	0.0014	0.0552	0.1187	0.0768	0.0916
87	Jordan	0.0048	0.0754	0.1434	0.0297	0.0862
88	Ghana	0.0025	0.0531	0.0957	0.0724	0.1091
89	Sri Lanka	0.0071	0.0658	0.0943	0.0446	0.1184
90	Mongolia	0.015	0.059	0.135	0.0189	0.0951
91	Kyrgyzstan	0.0105	0.0603	0.0986	0.0457	0.1074
92	Algeria	0.005	0.0601	0.1312	0.0551	0.0707
93	Bolivia	0.0051	0.0583	0.1287	0.0324	0.0941
94	Nepal	0.0069	0.0684	0.1132	0.0497	0.0762
95	Senegal	0.0036	0.055	0.1048	0.0603	0.0906
96	Pakistan	0.006	0.0616	0.0938	0.0446	0.1015
97	Jamaica	0.0047	0.0584	0.113	0.0432	0.0859
98	Uganda	0.0007	0.0489	0.0777	0.0768	0.0943
99	El Salvador	0.0028	0.0662	0.1066	0.0257	0.0944
100	Ivory Coast	0.0006	0.0465	0.0881	0.0724	0.0869
101	Cambodia	0.0043	0.0631	0.1178	0.0162	0.0831
102	Mali	0.0011	0.0548	0.0969	0.0603	0.0689
103	Namibia	0.0046	0.0517	0.0955	0.0322	0.0899
104	Guatemala	0.0029	0.059	0.0877	0.0257	0.0878
105	Zambia	0.0034	0.0241	0.0935	0.0781	0.0613
106	Botswana	0.0051	0.0523	0.0977	0.023	0.0777
107	Tanzania	0.0021	0.0517	0.0813	0.0257	0.0924
108	Honduras	0.004	0.0675	0.0838	0.0108	0.0861
109	Zimbabwe	0.0019	0.034	0.0907	0.0362	0.0854
110	Angola	0.0047	0.0567	0.0576	0.0495	0.0748
111	Laos	0.0066	0.0489	0.0955	0.0189	0.059
112	Tajikistan	0.0108	0.0485	0.073	0.0108	0.0754
113	Cameroon	0.0014	0.0178	0.073	0.0338	0.0832
114	Mozambique	0.0021	0.0378	0.0526	0.0295	0.0815
115	Ethiopia	0.0032	0.0472	0.048	0.0338	0.0682
116	Yemen	0.007	0.0644	0.0479	0.0081	0.0527
117	Congo DR	0.0063	0.0596	0.0446	0.0027	0.0394

Overall, 15 of the top 20 highest-scoring countries were located in Europe, including #2 Denmark and #3 Germany, reflecting the region’s strong scores in electronic infrastructure and security.

In addition to Israel, the Asia region was represented at the top by #8 Japan, #10 South Korea, and #15 Singapore. The only non-Asian and non-European country to make the top 20 was the United States at #12.

GDP’s Impact on Digital Infrastructure

Of the 117 countries that had data available for the index, the majority of the lowest-ranking countries were in Africa or Asia. This includes the bottom five: Cameroon, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Yemen, and DR Congo.

In fact, when the DQL Index was charted against GDP per capita, a clear and unsurprising trend emerges:

As countries have to grapple with limited resources and capital for increasing their digital wellbeing, we can see different priorities emerge. For example. many countries scored poorly on internet affordability and electronic government while prioritizing investments in internet quality and electronic infrastructure.

And despite the proliferation of mobile phones across the world, more countries were able to set up stable broadband internet over mobile internet.

To find out more interesting insights, dive in to the full Digital Quality of Life Index.

Submitted by Larry McDonald, author of The Bear Traps Report

This week, TSLA equity traded 61% below the 200-day moving average, the most in a decade — Tesla reports Q4 unit sales before trading starts Tuesday, January 3rd.

Tesla vs. CAT, the Mad Rush into Industrials

“Investors falling all over themselves to exit tech stocks and increase exposure to industrials. Hard asset plays have dramatically outperformed financial assets – and long-duration “growth” equities. The street is looking for $112B of sales in 2023 vs. a $384B equity market capitalization for TSLA stock.  She used to trade at 80x sales, just wow.”

A $1T Loss?

If TSLA touches $98, the market cap loss is near $1 trillion, stock traded at $105 pre-market this week. Close to $25B value of shares traded Tuesday, more than Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google combined. Nearly 700m shares in 3 days this week, that´s 25% of the float. This is an epic retail exit – tax loss selling. Daily RSI was near 17 this week, the lowest of all time for this capitulation measuring stick. Tesla was 5th largest in the S&P, now 18, now less than UNH, Lilly, and Chevron. If you sell TSLA equity in December – the investor can buy the stock in 31 days and still book the loss for tax purposes. In years with LARGE Q4 equity market losses – the “January Effect”* can be fairly impressive. Looking back over the last 50 years – when you have a down December, stocks are up 1.2% in January. Since 1991, with stocks off more than -2% in December, they have been up +3.7% on average in January, Bloomberg terminal data.

**The January Effect is a tendency for increases in stock prices during the beginning of the year, particularly in the month of January. The cause behind the January Effect is attributed to tax-loss harvesting, consumer sentiment, year-end bonuses, raising year-end report performances, and more. – CFI.

That said,  a recent analysis from Goldman found that the January effect has largely shifted to November since 1990.

“Historic forced margin calls for Tesla – it´s all retail Larry, ALL retail – rather than sentiment shift, see large scale TRF (Schwab, Ameritrade, etc) volume. The SIZE TSLA margin calls are forcing (triggering) ALOT of cross-selling through the entire long duration – speculative equity campgrounds.” — Equity Portfolio Manager on the West Coast, in our Bear Traps Portfolio

TSLA normally reports quarterly unit sales in the first weekend after the end of each quarter. Consensus is looking for a total of ~420K cars sold (down from 450K est. a few weeks ago). Given that New Year falls on the weekend, there is some uncertainty as to when exactly TSLA reports Q4 unit sales. Either Monday or Tuesday, January 3rd around the market open is most likely.

Previous January Report Date / Time

• Sunday 1/2/2022 11am Stock +13.5% the next day
• Friday 1/2/2021 9:55am Stock +3.4% the next Monday
• Friday 1/3/2020 8:17am Stock +3% that day
• Wednesday 1/2/2019 8:34am Stock -1.5% that day

Is Team Biden coming to Tesla’s Rescue?

At the start of the new year, buyers will once again enjoy a tax credit when they purchase a Tesla vehicle. The original 2010 EV tax credit had a quota of 400K units. For Tesla, the tax credits fully disappeared in early 2020 when Tesla reached that unit sales quota. But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Congress passed earlier this year and Biden signed yesterday, the tax credits are back in 2023. In the IRA there is a $7,500 tax credit for buyers of EVs, including TSLA and GM, who lost their previous tax credits. However, there are other strict limits on which brands would be eligible for the full credit, based on the selling price and where the cars and components are made. Unless the car is made in North America (NAFTA), the buyer is not eligible for the full tax credit. In addition, at least 50% of the battery parts will need to be made in North America. Lastly, a minimum of 40% of minerals used in the batteries must be sourced from the US or countries with free trade agreements with the US. So even buyers of GM and Tesla cars might only be eligible for half ($3,750) of the tax credit because their batteries and minerals come from a “foreign entity of concern” (China/Russia).

However, the Treasury Department recently said that the final decision on the critical minerals’ requirement won’t be available until March. As a result, all the requirements in the IRA governing EV cars, minerals, and parts will be waived. This means that, until Treasury issues its final set of rules, it will allow the full $7,500 tax incentive on all qualifying models.**

“We don’t expect them to reach 400K (unit sales) in Q4, data comes next week – early January. But, we also don’t think they always tell the truth. So, who knows? The IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) is about the only thing here between TSLA and a complete collapse in demand from what we can see. Also, many other countries have subsidies that are ending on December 31st. So, TSLA is benefiting from demand pull forward in those other countries. That will reverse in the March quarter, and may offset some of the benefits stated by the bulls.” – CIO, Large Fund.

So, prospective EV buyers in the US will be extremely motivated to buy their EV before the Treasury issues their final list of requirements in March, as it could potentially save them thousands. We could therefore see demand for Tesla cars and other EVs (2 out of every three EVs sold in the US are Tesla’s) being pulled forward into Q1.

Musk is keenly aware that all this might have led EV car buyers to postpone purchases until Q1 and he increased year-end rebates to $7,500 and 10K miles of free charging in early December. Whether this was enough to meet Tesla’s estimates for 420K unit sales for Q4 remains to be seen. We will know this before trading starts on January 3. But the IRA waiver could still cause a burst in US sales in early 2023.

This is not the only boon for Tesla starting next year. The EPA is proposing to increase the cellulosic ethanol component in the renewable fuel standard will climb to 2.13 billion gallons from 630 million. Refiners will be allowed and by necessity required to comply with these mandates by buying “eRINs” credits from EV manufacturers. Since Tesla has by far the most EV cars on the road, refiners will have to buy most eRINs from Tesla.

In years past Tesla always boosted gross margins from “Zero Emission Credits” that other car makers bought from Tesla to offset carbon emissions. Now the administration is giving Tesla another back door subsidy, although it is yet unclear when these rules go into effect.

** EV and plug-in models were manufactured in North America in the 2022 and 2023 model years that DOE says are eligible: Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, GMC, Jeep, Lincoln, Lucid, Nissan, Rivian, Tesla, Volvo, Cadillac, Mercedes and Volkswagen. Yet because of price limits or battery-size requirements, not all these vehicle models will qualify for credits. Note that IRS details issued on Dec 29 indicated that only 20% of Model Y would be eligible for full tax credit, unless Tesla lowers their price on certain versions of the Y.

The plan to live a healthier life is once again top of mind for Americans making resolutions for 2023.

Vowing to exercise more, eat healthier and to lose weight were the top 3 New Year’s resolutions in the U.S. this year, according to the Statista Global Consumer Survey.

You will find more infographics at Statista

In a year that was marked by high inflation, the resolution to save more money comes in rank 4.

Classics like spending more time with family and friends instead of on social media also ranked high in the survey.

19 percent of American adults also want to reduce stress on the job next year.

Less popular resolutions had to do with reducing use of alcohol and cigarettes as well as doing more for the environment, for example by becoming a vegetarian or vegan. Still, 10 percent of respondents were planning the latter for the new year.

Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Inventor of mRNA vaccines Dr. Robert Malone, having worked with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) for many years, warns that a war is being waged by the government for control of people’s minds, and that social media platforms are being weaponized in this war and are “actively employed” by the intelligence community to influence what people think and feel.

“This new battleground, in which your mind and your thoughts, your very emotions are the battleground. It is not about territory,” Malone said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. “Twitter, it’s clear now, has become the premium platform for shaping emerging global consensus about the topics of the day.”

During his work with the DOD, Malone became aware of companies researching multilingual programs that assess the emotional content of the language used on social media, which those companies then use to “map relationship clouds,” including what topics people are discussing, who the influencers are, and who is at the fringe of that cloud, said Malone.

Phenomena like being deplatformed, shadowbanned, and a “tweet” going viral is a part of this weaponizing of social media.

“By using these tools of manipulating what information, what tweets you put out, what messages you put out to your influencer cloud, they can modulate how those people behave,” he said. “You can actually very actively control what individuals are thinking, the information that they’re gathering, what they’re being influenced to do.”

The people who control information warfare weapons can modulate the messaging within the influencer clouds that can be readily mapped, Malone said.

“Your current state of mind, based on the language that you’re using and the topics that you’re talking about, can be mapped very precisely, psychologically,” he said. “It can be tied into a web of influence relationships.”

High-Tech Surveillance

Members of a specific “influencer cloud” can be tracked using the military spy technology called the Gorgon Stare, said Malone. This spy technology is capable of detecting movements including what car you drive, who gets in your car, and where you go, he said.

The Gorgon Stare is a surveillance technology, originally created to target terrorist groups, that utilizes high-tech cameras mounted on drones to capture video images of large areas, such as entire cities. Then artificial intelligence is used to analyze the surveillance footage.

Arthur Holland Michel, author of the book, “Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All,” called this technology the “pinnacle of aerial surveillance” during a 2019 interview with the CATO Institute and said the things he learned while writing the book were so troubling, they kept him up at night.

Collusion During the Pandemic

Elon Musk has brought more transparency to Twitter, but the information he revealed only confirmed that the FBI and intelligence agencies had major influence over the platform, said Malone.

“Elon now is in a position where he has access to incredibly damaging information about the willingness of the U.S. government to collude with industry and compromise the First Amendment,” said Malone.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter is significant, but only time will tell what the final outcome of it will have for our democracy and the First Amendment, Malone added.

Since the start of the pandemic, Malone and his wife and fellow scientist, Jill Glasspool Malone, have become aware of the government’s breach of all guardrails, said Malone, in terms of ethics and the norms of drug development, bioethics, biodefense, and pharmaceutical development.

“We have all been subjected, over the last three years, to military-grade psychological operations that were using technology developed for offshore conflicts, and they had been deployed against the citizens of virtually the entire Western world.”

The same strategies that are used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control the Chinese citizens have been used by elites in the United States, said Malone.

“We’re now seeing the documentation on a daily basis released to us by Twitter, of this intense collusion between the U.S. government, tech, and corporate media,” said Malone.

 

Citizens Are Manipulated

Millions of Americans accepted a new product (the mRNA vaccine) that skipped normal safety and efficacy protocols and is still only in use under emergency use authorization because “the government felt that it was acceptable to deploy these military-grade technologies against all of us to coerce, compel, and mandate that we accept an unlicensed product that turns out to not be safe, nor effective,” said Malone.

People were coerced into taking this experimental vaccine because they were manipulated on a scale that is hard to fathom, said Malone. This is how entities like the CCP are able to carry out human rights atrocities, like live organ harvesting, where prisoners of consciousness are murdered for their organs, he added.

China grew its organ “transplant” industry from 1999 to now, with a wait time in China for a major organ transplant being months rather than the years it can take in western countries.

This happens because people cannot conceive of “the possibility that these things might be happening in this way, whether it’s organ harvesting, or it’s the darkness of what appears to be the emergence of a pharmaceutical corporatist, global, centralized state,” said Malone.

Most people cannot fathom such evil exists because they are still good, said Malone.

“Not only have we been subjected to this barrage of coordinated propaganda, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of intentional manipulation of our very language to support this initiative and this agenda,” said Malone.

The New Book

Malone’s new book attempts to sort through the events of the last three years to understand what happened and why, which he said is important to start to chart a healthy path forward.

“Each of these chapters derives from a kind of a real-time assessment of events that were occurring,” he said, and the events were also cited in Malone’s substack writings.

Readers should discern the truth for themselves by finding credible sources of information, he said, adding that his goal is to provide factual information to the public so they can make informed decisions because society is in a time when people are being inundated with “totalitarian propaganda.”

In the final third of the book, Malone suggests some concrete actions that could help restore democracy and alleviate the corruption that has besieged the federal government by changing laws to allow for term limits for the federal bureaucracy.

“This has to do with things like the legal underpinning that enables the existence of this permanent cadre that we call the Senior Executive Service, these thousands of people that cannot be fired, that functionally run the government,” said Malone.

Former President Donald Trump’s attempt to reassign classification for upper-level federal employees in the state department, with his schedule F executive order, was a crucial step to restoring balance in the three branches of the government, said Malone.

However, after President Joe Biden took office, he nullified the Schedule F executive order, which Malone said was “an example of how powerful these entrenched administrative state interests are.”

Another crucial step to end government corruption is to separate the power of federal agencies to both regulate and promote the industry they are in charge of, said Malone.

“[Dr.] Peter McCullough likes to point out the FDA, under emergency use authorization, acts as both the sponsor and the regulator of these medical products,” said Malone. “And the corruption of the FDA and the CDC is at such a stage now that I think it is so self-evident that only the most hypnotized deny it.”

Envisioning a New Future

These actions alone will likely not end the deep-rooted corruption and collusion of the intelligence community within the agencies, said Malone, but it is a step forward.

People like Dr. Anthony Fauci are working in tandem with the intelligence agencies, and this can be seen by the development of the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) department, the Advance Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), said Malone.

The Epoch Times reached out to the NIH for comment.

This new department is led by a former officer with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and has a budget of about $1 billion. Malone said the purpose of the department “appears to be the advancement of transhumanism and a biometric identification and all of that agenda within NIH. It’s basically the intelligence community moving in within NIH.”

Malone asked how humans can “enable a decentralized future for all of us, as opposed to this very dark, Fourth Industrial Revolution, transhumanism central command economy.”

Read more here…