Month: April 2023

While Western nations are working to upgrade Ukraine’s ground game with US M-1 Abrams and German Leopard 2 tanks, Russia has now introduced its latest-generation tank into the war in Ukraine, according to Russia’s state-owned RIA. 

The new Russian tank is the T-14 Armata, which features an unmanned turret, with a three-man crew operating the vehicle from what RIA describes as an “isolated armored capsule located at the front of the hull.” The tank has a maximum highway speed of 50 miles per hour. 

It’s equipped with a 125mm smoothbore main gun with a reported range of 8 kilometers. The gun is fed by an automated loader with a 45-round capacity, and can also fire laser-guided missiles. 

On defense, it has both reactive armor that explodes outward upon a projectile’s impact, and an “active protection system” (APS), which BBC has described as “essentially an anti-missile system for tanks, with radars capable of tracking the incoming anti-tank missile, and projectiles that are launched to disrupt or destroy it.” The T-14 is additionally distinguished from predecessor T-90 tanks by having higher ground clearance.  

A developer also claimed the tank would have technology to hide it from radar- and heat-seeking targeting systems: “We essentially made the tank invisible.” RIA reports the deployed T-14s have received “additional side protection from anti-tank ammunition.”

Until now, T-14 appearances have been largely limited to a series of Moscow Victory Day parades stretching all the way back to 2015, though RIA says they have been “tested in Syria.” 

Why has it taken so long for this supposed cutting-edge weapon to appear in Ukraine? Especially where military procurement is concerned, it turns out the Russians aren’t so different from the United States. 

“Eleven years in development, the [T-14 Armata] programme has been dogged with delays, reduction in planned fleet size, and reports of manufacturing problems,” the British military said in January.

Tank T-14 platform “Armata” pic.twitter.com/91TPWP2Rth

— Spriter (@Spriter99880) April 25, 2023

The initial order called for 2,300 of them to be delivered by 2020. However, the UK claims “production is probably only in the low tens, while commanders are unlikely to trust the vehicle in combat,” and suggested its introduction in Ukraine may largely be for propaganda purposes. Of course, that jab may itself be propaganda. 

Lending some credence to the claim of commander hesitancy, RIA‘s source says Russia is proceeding gradually with using the T-14 in Ukraine: “Russian troops have begun to use the latest Armata tanks to fire on Ukrainian positions. They have not yet participated in direct assault operations.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainians are slated to begin 10 weeks of training on US M-1 tanks at Grafenwoehr Training Area in the next few weeks. That means we could see M-1 vs T-14 bouts by early fall — assuming the West continues thwarting attempts to reach a negotiated peace. 

Via Remix News,

Speaking at a strategy session of the National Security Bureau, the Polish Armed Forces chief of staff General Rajmund Andrzejczak said that when he analyzes the war in Ukraine politically, he is pessimistic.

This is, he explained, because “there is nothing that indicates that Russia will lack the resources to continue the conflict.”

He said during the session that he did not feel sanctions would stop Russia from having the funds to continue the war.

The general also offered a bleak assessment of Poland’s ability to send ammunition to Ukraine.

“We simply don’t have the ammunition. Our industry isn’t ready to send the equipment to Ukraine and to maintain our own dwindling reserves,” he said.

He noted that he was tirelessly presenting such an analysis in order to raise awareness.

He continued his remarks by saying that “war is not the business of soldiers.”

It is rather “a question of politics with economic factors involving finance, infrastructure, technology, food, and a range of other problems that you have to figure into the equation to be able to understand it.” 

Gen. Andrzejczak observed that “Ukraine is experiencing huge financial problems,” despite the huge aid packages it was receiving from the U.S., the West and Poland.

Gen. Andrzejczak told the National Security Bureau that he regarded the security situation facing Poland as highly dangerous. Asked if the leaders of the West appreciated how far Ukraine is from winning the war with Russia, he opined that “an honest assessment of the threats was still both a surprise and a shock for most of them.”

The general also said there was no indication that Ukrainians who fled their country would return home to start reconstruction, adding that he felt that the NATO summit in Vilnius will be “a summit to define our credibility, of NATO, and the whole of the West.”

If the response was “late” and lacking in determination, then Ukraine would have no chance of a secure future.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

The US dollar is essential to US global power projection. But in 2022, the dollar share of reserve currencies slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades…

It is now established that the US dollar’s status as a global reserve currency is eroding. When corporate western media begins to attack the multipolar world’s de-dollarization narrative in earnest, you know the panic in Washington has fully set in.

The numbers: the dollar share of global reserves was 73 percent in 2001, 55 percent in 2021, and 47 percent in 2022. The key takeaway is that last year, the dollar share slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.

Now it is no longer far-fetched to project a global dollar share of only 30 percent by the end of 2024, coinciding with the next US presidential election.

The defining moment – the actual trigger leading to the Fall of the Hegemon – was in February 2022, when over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves were “frozen” by the collective west, and every other country on the planet began fearing for their own dollar stores abroad. There was some comic relief in this absurd move, though: the EU “can’t find” most of it.

Now cue to some current essential developments on the trading front.

Over 70 percent of trade deals between Russia and China now use either the ruble or the yuan, according to Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

Russia and India are trading oil in rupees. Less than four weeks ago, Banco Bocom BBM became the first Latin American bank to sign up as a direct participant of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which is the Chinese alternative to the western-led financial messaging system, SWIFT.

China’s CNOOC and France’s Total signed their first LNG trade in yuan via the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange.

The deal between Russia and Bangladesh for the construction of the Rooppur nuclear plant will also bypass the US dollar. The first $300 million payment will be in yuan, but Russia will try to switch the next ones to rubles.

Russia and Bolivia’s bilateral trade now accepts settlements in Boliviano. That’s extremely pertinent, considering Rosatom’s drive to be a crucial part of the development of lithium deposits in Bolivia.

Notably, many of those trades involve BRICS countries – and beyond. At least 19 nations have already requested to join BRICS+, the extended version of the 21st century’s major multipolar institution, whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India, and China, then South Africa. The foreign ministers of the original five will start discussing the modalities of accession for new members in an upcoming June summit in Capetown.

BRICS, as it stands, is already more relevant to the global economy than the G7. The latest IMF figures reveal that the existing five BRICS nations will contribute 32.1 percent to global growth, compared to the G7’s 29.9 percent.

With Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico as possible new members, it is clear that key Global South players are starting to focus on the quintessential multilateral institution capable of smashing Western hegemony.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) are working in total sync as Moscow’s partnership with Riyadh in OPEC+ metastasizes into BRICS+, in parallel to the deepening Russia-Iran strategic partnership.

MbS has willfully steered Saudi Arabia toward Eurasia’s new power trio Russia-Iran-China (RIC), away from the US. The new game in West Asia is the incoming BRIICSS – featuring, remarkably, both Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose historic reconciliation was brokered by yet another BRICS heavyweight, China.

Importantly, the evolving Iran-Saudi rapprochement also implies a much closer relationship between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a whole and the Russia-China strategic partnership.

This will translate into complementary roles – in terms of trade connectivity and payment systems – for the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking Russia-Iran-India, and the China-Central-Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor, a key plank of Beijing’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Today, only Brazil, with its President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva caged by the Americans and an erratic foreign policy, runs the risk of being relegated by the BRICS to the status of a secondary player.

Beyond BRIICSS

The de-dollarization train has been propelled to high-speed status by the accumulated effects of Covid-linked supply chain chaos and collective western sanctions on Russia.

The essential point is this: The BRICS have the commodities, and the G7 controls finance. The latter can’t grow commodities, but the former can create currencies – especially when their value is linked to tangibles like gold, oil, minerals, and other natural resources.

Arguably the key swing factor is that pricing for oil and gold is already shifting to Russia, China, and West Asia.

In consequence, demand for dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing. Trillions of US dollars will inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing power and its exchange rate.

The fall of a weaponized currency will end up smashing the whole logic behind the US’ global network of 800+ military bases and their operating budgets.

Since mid-March, in Moscow, during the Economic Forum of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI) – one of the key inter-government organizations in Eurasia formed after the fall of the USSR – further integration is being actively discussed between the CSI, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS.

Eurasian organizations coordinating the counterpunch to the current western-led system, which tramples on international law, was not by accident one of the key themes of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech at the UN earlier this week. It is also no accident that four member-states of the CIS – Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – founded the SCO along with China in June 2001.

The Davos/Great Reset globalist combo, for all practical purposes, declared war on oil immediately after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. They threatened OPEC+ to isolate Russia – or else, but failed humiliatingly. OPEC+, effectively run by Moscow-Riyadh, now rules the global oil market.

Western elites are in a panic. Especially after Lula’s bombshell on Chinese soil during his visit with Xi Jinping, when he called on the whole Global South to replace the US dollar with their own currencies in international trade.

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently told the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations – the heart of the US establishment matrix – that “geopolitical tensions between the US and China could raise inflation by 5 percent and threaten the dominance of the dollar and euro.”

The monolithic spin across western mainstream media is that BRICS economies trading normally with Russia “creates new problems for the rest of the world.” That’s utter nonsense: it only creates problems for the dollar and the euro.

The collective west is reaching Desperation Row – now timed with the astonishing announcement of a Biden-Harris US presidential ticket running again in 2024. This means that the US administration’s neo-con handlers will double down on their plan to unleash an industrial war against both Russia and China by 2025.

The petroyuan cometh

And that brings us back to de-dollarization and what will replace the hegemonic reserve currency of the world. Today, the GCC represents more than 25 percent of global oil exports (Saudi Arabia stands at 17 percent). More than 25 percent of China’s oil imports come from Riyadh. And China, predictably, is the GCC’s top trading partner.

The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange went into business in March 2018. Any oil producer, from anywhere, can sell in Shanghai in yuan today. This means that the balance of power in the oil markets is already shifting from the US dollar to the yuan.

The catch is that most oil producers prefer not to keep large stashes of yuan; after all, everyone is still used to the petrodollar. Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves.

This simple process happens via gold exchanges set up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And not by accident, it lies at the heart of a new currency to bypass the dollar being discussed by the EAEU.

Dumping the dollar already has a mechanism: making full use of the Shanghai Energy Exchange’s future oil contracts in yuan. That’s the preferred path for the end of the petrodollar.

US global power projection is fundamentally based on controlling the global currency. Economic control underlies the Pentagon’s ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine. Yet now, even military projection is in shambles, with Russia maintaining an unreachable advance on hypersonic missiles and Russia-China-Iran able to deploy an array of carrier-killers.

The Hegemon – clinging to a toxic cocktail of neoliberalism, sanction dementia, and widespread threats – is bleeding from within. De-dollarization is an inevitable response to system collapse. In a Sun Tzu 2.0 environment, it is no wonder the Russia-China strategic partnership exhibits no intention of interrupting the enemy when he is so busy defeating himself.

ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI, has become incredibly popular over the past year due to its ability to generate human-like responses in a wide range of circumstances.

In fact, ChatGPT has become so competent, that students are now using it to help them with their homework. This has prompted several U.S. school districts to block devices from accessing the model while on their networks.

So, how smart is ChatGPT?

In a technical report released on March 27, 2023, OpenAI provided a comprehensive brief on its most recent model, known as GPT-4. Included in this report were a set of exam results, which Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu and Rosey Eason visualized in the graphic above.

GPT-4 vs. GPT-3.5

To benchmark the capabilities of ChatGPT, OpenAI simulated test runs of various professional and academic exams. This includes SATs, the bar examination, and various advanced placement (AP) finals.

Performance was measured in percentiles, which were based on the most recently available score distributions for test takers of each exam type.

Percentile scoring is a way of ranking one’s performance relative to the performance of others. For instance, if you placed in the 60th percentile on a test, this means that you scored higher than 60% of test-takers.

The following table lists the results that we visualized in the graphic.

The scores reported above are for GPT-4 with visual inputs enabled. Please see OpenAI’s technical report for more comprehensive results.

As we can see, GPT-4 (released in March 2023) is much more capable than GPT-3.5 (released March 2022) in the majority of these exams. It was, however, unable to improve in AP English and in competitive programming.

Regarding AP English (and other exams where written responses were required), ChatGPT’s submissions were graded by “1-2 qualified third-party contractors with relevant work experience grading those essays”. While ChatGPT is certainly capable of producing adequate essays, it may have struggled to comprehend the exam’s prompts.

For competitive programming, GPT attempted 10 Codeforces contests 100 times each. Codeforces hosts competitive programming contests where participants must solve complex problems. GPT-4’s average Codeforces rating is 392 (below the 5th percentile), while its highest on a single contest was around 1,300. Referencing the Codeforces ratings page, the top-scoring user is jiangly from China with a rating of 3,841.

What’s Changed With GPT-4?

Here are some areas where GPT-4 has improved the user experience over GPT-3.5.

Internet Access and Plugins

A limiting factor with GPT-3.5 was that it didn’t have access to the internet and was only trained on data up to June 2021.

With GPT-4, users will have access to various plugins that empower ChatGPT to access the internet, provide more up to date responses, and complete a wider range of tasks. This includes third-party plugins from services such as Expedia which will enable ChatGPT to book an entire vacation for you.

Visual Inputs

While GPT-3.5 could only accept text inputs, GPT-4 has the ability to also analyze images. Users will be able to ask ChatGPT to describe a photo, analyze a chart, or even explain a meme.

Greater Context Length

Lastly, GPT-4 is able to handle much larger amounts of text and keep conversations going for longer. For reference, GPT-3.5 had a max request value of 4,096 tokens, which is equivalent to roughly 3,000 words. GPT-4 has two variants, one with 8,192 tokens (6,000 words) and another with 32,768 tokens (24,000 words).

Submitted by Jack Raines via Young Money,

In 27 BC, Caesar Augustus was crowned the first Roman emperor. Widely considered one of Rome’s greatest leaders, Augustus’s reign marked the beginning of the 200-year Pax Romana.

One reason that the Roman Empire flourished during this time was its first-class transportation and sewage infrastructure that supported densely-populated cities, with Rome itself boasting an estimated one million residents at its peak.

However, these population centers were also susceptible to epidemics, disease, and lead poisoning (lead was commonly used in pipes, eating utensils, and even food and drinks), yielding high infant mortality rates and low life expectancies (maximum ~33 years).

Low life expectancy + expansive territories meant that the Roman Empire needed high birth rates to maintain enough soldiers to defend its borders, and Rome struggled to keep its birth rates above the population replacement rate. This issue was so important that Augustus offered tax breaks for large families and cracked down on abortion and adultery because he believed that “too many men spent their energy with prostitutes and concubines and had nothing for their wives, causing population declines.”

But government efforts never succeeded in meaningfully increasing birth rates.

At the conclusion of the Pax Romana, low birth rates, combined with plague and war, wreaked havoc on Rome’s population, and the power structure of the empire shifted to the newer Constantinople. Rome never recovered, with the city’s population dwindling from a peak of 1,000,000 residents in the late second century to ~30,000 by 600 AD.

We humans draw parallels and analogies across time and space because they help us better understand the world around us, and no two Western civilizations have attracted more comparisons than the Roman Empire and the United States of America.

Both nations experienced explosions of wealth and eras of unprecedented peace, both nations were the dominant global powers of their respective eras, and today, the US faces the same issue that plagued Rome 2,000 years ago: declining birth rates.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway penned this now timeless exchange:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

We worry about global warfare and pandemics because they’re big and scary and sudden and could wipe us out with a sudden BANG! But the real existential threat, declining birth rates, will progress like Mike’s bankruptcy: gradually, and then suddenly.

Allow me to demonstrate through some basic arithmetic.

~2.1 children per woman is the typical population replacement rate in a developed country, and the US currently has a total fertility rate (which measures the average number of children that would be born per woman if all women lived to the end of their childbearing years and bore children according to a given fertility rate at each age): of 1.84. This means that (assuming this rate holds constant) every 100 parents will yield 92 children and ~85 grandchildren. And keep in mind, rates have been on a steady decline for years.

It’s a bear market for babies.

This isn’t just a US problem. We’re seeing these trends of sub-replacement fertility rates occurring all over the developed world:

• South Korea: 1.11

• Spain: 1.29

• Japan: 1.39

• China: 1.45

• Austria: 1.51

• Canada: 1.57

• Germany: 1.58

• United Kingdom: 1.63

• Sweden: 1.67

So now you might be thinking, “Okay, declining birth rates ‘sound’ scary, but who cares? Like, why does it matter?”

At the individual level, it doesn’t matter. You have every right to think, “It’s no one else’s business if I don’t have kids!” But once a critical mass of individuals decides not to have kids, there are societal consequences.

In her recent piece, Everything’s a Pyramid Scheme, Katie Gatti Tassin highlighted a logical fallacy in the “retire early” movement:

I’ve long pointed out the fact that financial independence and early retirement cannot exist at scale, because our economic system would cease functioning. If every young person in their thirties or forties achieved financial independence and quit working, the workforce would be limited to those under the age of 35, effectively removing roughly 66% of the current labor force, or the equivalent of about 44 million people…

Of course, there’s a funny redundancy in the system: If 44 million working-age people retired en masse and ceased most discretionary spending…corporate profits would drop, the stock market would stutter to a halt, and the returns required to support early retirement would vanish, driving everyone back to work.

Katie Gatti Tassin

Basically, retiring early works for individuals, but it could never work at scale because our economy would collapse without enough workers to keep it functioning smoothly. The Financially Independent, Retire Early (FIRE) movement only works as long as the majority of society fails to FIRE.

Now, back to the babies.

One big reason that our advanced and wealthy societies have become so advanced and wealthy is that growing populations created a growing labor force which, coupled with technological advancements, powered growing economies and widespread wealth creation.

And now, our advanced, wealthy societies have devised systems that allow folks to retire and live their golden years in relative ease and decadence thanks to a combination of personal savings/investments and social safety nets.

These social safety nets are supported by taxes, which are funded by taxpayers, aka workers. And our number of workers has been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution.

But now people are having fewer kids, meaning that down the road, we’ll have fewer workers. And when life expectancies are higher than ever while birth rates are lower than ever and everyone still wants to retire on time… well, you see where I’m going with this? The math doesn’t add up.

(Katie actually made this same observation to highlight the absurdity of individualism).

So not to be a complete doomer here, but it feels a lot like we’re climbing the initial ascent on a rollercoaster, and we’re about to hit the apex.

What does the descent look like? I don’t really know, because we haven’t actually seen a large-scale population decline in the modern era, but I imagine it would go something like this:

• Social programs that we take for granted will no longer be feasible.

• People will have to work longer (you’re already seeing protests about this in France after the pension reform).

• Stock and real estate markets will decline as lower populations reduce consumer demand, hurting corporate profits and property values.

So after considering why declining birth rates matter, I had another question: Why, given the risks associated with birth rate declines, are we still experiencing said declines in developed countries?

Like, this problem is pretty obvious, so why aren’t we making more babies?

I have a few hypotheses:

1) Kids are expensive (both in perception and reality).

The US Department of Health & Human Services estimates that the average family with infants would need to pay $16,000 per year to cover the true cost of childcare, and half of US households make less than $70,000 per year. That’s a big chunk of cash going to raising a kid each year.

Besides the real costs, the perceived costs of childcare scale exponentially with one’s social group. Say you’re a high earner, and you and your spouse take home $200k+ per year.

Do you want your kid to attend a private middle school to improve their chances of gaining acceptance to an elite boarding school to ensure they secure a seat in an Ivy League university which will help them land a coveted job on Wall Street?

Are they going to play travel sports and take music lessons and eat organic foods and drive a nice car?

That’s going to cost a lot more than $16,000 per year.

Even high-earners are hesitant to have children because they don’t know if they can afford their desired lifestyle for their kids.

2) Widespread contraceptives.

Thousands of years before Planned Parenthood, the ancient Greeks and Romans discovered this cool plant called Silphium. Silphium had a number of medical uses, but it was most popular for its role as a contraceptive: ingesting a chick-pea-sized dose of Silphium prevented pregnancy.

There was just one problem with Silphium: it could only be grown in a narrow strip of fertile land in present-day eastern Libya. The Romans loved Silphium so much that they overused the wonder plant, eventually driving it extinct.

After the disappearance of Silphium, the world didn’t have an effective, safe contraceptive that could be ingested until 1950, when the birth control pill hit the market.

For the first time in 2,000 years, women controlled when and if they wanted to have children. When we have a high degree of control over the childbirth process, the number of unplanned pregnancies will decline, which means the number of total pregnancies will likely decline too.

3) Everyone, regardless of their sex, is focused on their careers.

100 years ago, it was normal for husbands to go to work while their wives took care of the house and/or raised the children. But now? Everyone works. And kids really throw a wrench in climbing the corporate ladder.

Ambitious women don’t want children to derail their careers, and ambitious men don’t want to step off the fast track to partner to spend a few years as stay-at-home dads. So both sexes delay having kids until they have achieved some threshold of success in their professional lives. But the clock doesn’t stop ticking, and every year spent chasing paper is one year not spent chasing two-year-olds around the house.

4) The Bored Parent Hypothesis.

I have this half-baked idea that one’s number of children is inversely related to their availability of fun/interesting alternative activities. If you are a 20-something living on a few dollars a day in an undeveloped country, you don’t really have many things to do (excluding work) besides creating an army of your own miniature genetic replicas.

But if you live in a developed, first-world country in the Year of Our Lord 2023, you have a lot of ways to spend your time that does not involve making babies. You can enjoy a luxury previously unknown to most of our ancestors: chill with your friends. You can travel for fun, ski, engage in this weird modern phenomenon known as “hobbies,” create art, and learn a foreign language.

You have options.

Subconsciously, we know that children mark the end of this period of vast optionality by introducing a really, really big responsibility. This is the first-world problem of all first-world problems, but I do think that some young people in developed countries today are hesitant to have kids because there’s just a ton of fun stuff to do when you don’t have kids.

Of course, I’m speaking as a young dude in a developed country who thinks there’s a ton of fun stuff that doesn’t involve having kids.

5) There are literally too many potential partners.

While birth rates have been steadily declining, the average age of first marriage has been steadily increasing. These two numbers are related: if you get married later, you literally have less time to have kids.

Something, something, biological clock.

So why are people getting married later? One reason is that the internet has given us a damn-near-infinite number of potential partners.

Historically, guy likes girl, girl likes guy (or the parents arrange the marriage without consulting the kids at all), and then guy and girl get married and have kids.

But now, guy likes girl, girl likes guy, guy refuses to show how much he likes girl while girl plays hard-to-get to keep guy interested, and guy and girl enter a 4-month relationship-adjacent purgatory where they go on dates and sleep together but don’t acknowledge the relationship itself until one party inevitably stops talking to the other party to see what else is out there, and then the whole cycle repeats.

“Dating” looks the way it does today because everyone is replaceable when the dating pool has millions of options. Instead of working through a road bump in one’s relationship, you can treat every minor inconvenience as an opportunity to look for someone “better.”

This weird dating carousel can last for years as we take longer and longer to commit, giving us less and less time to have kids.

 

The irony of this whole thing is that it was our very economic prosperity that created the conditions that could unwind the whole thing:

• The desire for everyone to “get ahead” has made it really expensive for your kids to get ahead

• Medical advancements have allowed us to be tactical with our pregnancies

• Previously unavailable career opportunities have led many folks to put off having children to pursue those opportunities

• Our abundance of wealth has provided us with near-limitless entertainment and activities that don’t involve having kids

• And the internet turned the whole world into a potential dating pool, making commitment next to impossible

And now we face this really weird Prisoner’s Dilemma:

Any individual person can delay having children to enjoy our abundance of everything, and their world will function just fine. But if every individual person neglects to have kids any time soon, the whole system grinds to a halt. The only way to ensure that everyone wins is by everyone having more kids.

Maybe society really is just one big pyramid scheme.

So I guess we should probably start having more kids. Or at least y’all should, anyway. I don’t really want to be part of the solution anytime soon, respectfully.

– Jack

After a series of highly publizised shootings in the U.S., Stand Your Ground laws – also called Shoot First laws – are back in the news.

Data by the Giffords Law Center shows that these type of laws are common across U.S. states.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, they specify that people are allowed to use deadly force if they feel like their life or health is threatened in a public place without needing to try to retreat.

According to Giffords, U.S. law largely agrees that this is also the case for private property, for example if a homeowner feels threatened by an intruder. In several more states that don’t have Stand Your Ground laws – including California, Illinois, Oregon and Washington – precedents exist that could influence how an assault, manslaughter or murder case goes after a trial has started (while in Stand Your Ground states, police could decide to not bring any charges based on these laws).

On April 13, Black teenager Ralph Yarl was shot by a homeowner after going to the wrong address in Kansas City and was seriously injured. Andrew D. Lester, a 84-year-old white man, was charged with assault in the first degree.

On April 17, Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old white woman, was fatally shot in upstate New York after the car she was riding in went into a wrong driveway. The shooter, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan, was charged with murder.

In another case where public area Stand Your Ground laws could apply, two cheerleaders were shot and wounded in Texas after one of them accidentally got into the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot after their practice on April 18. However, the subject – 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr. – has been charged with deadly conduct, meaning he used a weapon recklessly, threatening, or dangerously.

While in all three cases, charges have been brought, Stand Your Ground laws as well as laws pertaining to private property – also referred to as Castle Doctrine laws or Make My Day laws – could still influence these cases and could theoretically see charges dropped or cases won for the defendants.

However, in the Kansas City case, the prosecuter has said he does not see the necessary pre-condition of threatening behavior and self-defense fulfilled when Ralph Yarl was shot through the door of the home. In the New York state case, the county’s sheriff was quoted as saying that “there was no reason for Mr. Monahan to feel threatened, especially as it appears the vehicle was leaving.” While no such info was available on the third case, the subject is reported to have followed the two women to their car before shooting, likely exceeding the limits of Stand Your Ground legislation. What remains is the question how perceived rights under these types of laws and doctrines influence shooters’ seemingly erratic behavior following what could be considered everyday mix-ups.

Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

Since the media is shining a light on Trump’s affair, it is only fair to point out similar actions taken by those on the other side of the aisle. Kamala Harris is not a particularly intelligent or charismatic individual, but she managed to work her way to the top by dating men in positions of power. In the 1990s, 29-year-old Kamala Harris dated married 60-year-old San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Harris was 31 years younger than Brown, who was married with a family at home.

Harris accompanied Brown on his campaign trail and made connections along the way. She cannot deny the affair and claims that it is now “an albatross hanging around my neck.” Clinton used to call Brown “the real Slick Willie” for his playboy ways, which is saying something coming from blue dress Bill. “The measure of his flamboyance is he’ll go to a party with his wife on one arm and his girlfriend on the other,” James Richardson, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee told People Magazine in 1996.

New San Francisco mayor Willie Brown points out his new hat “Da Mayor” as he claimed victory Tuesday night, December 12, 1995, while at his victory party in San Francisco. (CONTRA COSTA TIMES/JON MCNALLY)1995

Kamala Harris secured a job at the California Medical Assistance Commission through Slick Willie, although she had no medical background.

He also appointed her to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.

She was later appointed as the district attorney in San Francisco in 2004.

Meanwhile, Slick Willie was under investigation for gifting his friends city contracts. He never came under fire for promoting Harris to positions of power.

But by then, Harris was on her way to becoming attorney general and did not need the support of her older married boyfriend.

“His career is over. I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing,” Kamala shrewdly stated.

Still, Brown assisted her in her 2016 bid for the Senate and spoke favorably of her over the years.

Harris refuses to acknowledge that her time as Slick Willie’s mistress is what propelled her career.

Brown is not remaining quiet.

“I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians. The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A. That’s politics for ya.”

But it is (D)ifferent!

And that, folks, is how the leading world power found its second-in-command with absolutely no qualifications for the job.

Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary (emphasis ours),

The Biden Administration has a new and unhinged constitutional theory: the 14th Amendment protects the right of a child to take puberty blockers. Bans on hormone treatments for children with gender dysphoria, such as the prescription of testosterone to a transgender 12 year-old, violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

That’s the Administration’s position in LW v. Skrmetti, a lawsuit filed in a Nashville, Tennessee federal court by the families of three transgender children – a fifteen year-old transgender daughter (who thought he was transgender at age 12), a fifteen year-old transgender son, and a twelve year-old transgender son. They’re challenging a new Tennessee law that “establishes prohibitions related to the performance on minors of certain medical procedures related to gender identity, creates private causes of action for violations, and establishes additional penalties for violations.”

The families of these transgender kids allege that the Tennessee law (1) violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by targeting the transgender; (2) violates the right of parental autonomy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause; and (3) that the law is preempted by the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex.”

All the children are “currently receiving medical care” that would be prohibited by the recent Tennessee legislation.

What is this medical care? The 15 year-old transgender “girl” – born a male – is currently undergoing estrogen hormone therapy so that his body will “undergo feminine pubertal changes.” The 15 year-old transgender “boy” who was born a girl came out as transgender around the 5th grade. She is on testosterone.

The 12 year-old transgender “boy” – born a female – was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the second grade, when she then began her transition. This occurred after her mom “contacted a local LGBTQ resource center” who then connected her with a therapist. The young girl’s mom was also a key factor in the biological changes endured by her daughter, having influenced the girl’s decision to start taking puberty blockers.

The “treatment” (hormones and puberty blockers) received by these children, and similar treatments we see across the country, including surgical genital mutilation, are considered “necessary” to remedy the effects of gender dysphoria (a purported medical condition somehow recognized as legitimate by major medical associations in the US). The Tennessee law at issue does not issue a blanket prohibition of hormone therapy. For example, a male child with a hormone imbalance or a congenital defect may receive testosterone. The prohibition only concerns treatment of gender dysphoria.

And that’s the objection by the Biden DOJ – that the treatment of gender dysphoria cannot be categorically banned, even if a state’s lawmakers consider the treatment to be dangerous, ineffective, and ultimately harmful. The Biden Administration argues that the law “threatens irreparable injury” to these children and any other “transgender” children in the state of Tennessee. It says that a transgender person, whom it defines as “someone whose gender identity is inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth,” should be a protected class – that “transgender status warrants heightened scrutiny” because it is “immutable” like gender. Thus, laws that target the treatment of gender dysphoria should be given intermediate scrutiny by the courts.

The Biden Administration’s position that one’s identification as transgender should elevate them to a protected class similar to gender has not been adopted by the Supreme Court or a majority of federal appeal circuits. If this were to be accepted it would cause significant shift in the law and put at risk numerous state laws banning childhood gender mutilation or the administration of puberty blockers to the young. In other words, it’s their way to circumvent the legislative process.