Month: October 2024

While previous (now discontinued) surveys about self-driving cars had shown people warming up to the idea of taking their hands off the wheel, a newer survey by the American Automobile Association now attests that Americans might be getting cold feet as the advent of self-driving cars – or at least robotaxis – is drawing nearer. The survey also only queried drivers, which might be why it has been getting worse results. Additionally, accidents involving driver support systems as well as fully autonomous vehicles made headlines, especially in the U.S., in recent years and could have contributed to a change of heart for some.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, two thirds of U.S. drivers over the age of 18 said that they felt afraid in regard to self-driving vehicles, up from just 54 percent in 2021. Only 9 percent said they felt trust, down from 14 percent three years ago.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Probably the biggest U.S. incident in fully self-driving cars was an accident involving a Cruise robotaxi in San Francisco in October 2023, in the aftermath of which the GM subsidiary suspended operations in six U.S. cities. In the incidents, a different car hit a woman which was flung into the path of the Cruise robotaxi which did not assess the situation correctly due to the unusual way the pedestrian entered its path, did not stop and dragged the woman for 20 feet (6 meters). While the victim of this crash survived with major injuries, a 2018 accident with a self-driving car being tested in Tempe, Arizona, proved fatal for a pedestrian who was crossing a multi-lane road without a crosswalk when stuck by an Uber-Volvo prototype. While a safety driver was on board that day, the person didn’t watch the road, a court found.

Tesla’s driver assistance system, which does not constitute a fully autonomous driving experience, was involved in more than 700 crashes and 17 fatalities between 2019 and mid-2023, a Washington Post investigation has found. While it is not always easy to discern if the main cause of the accident was the driver using the system when they shouldn’t have or whether the system was faulty, the situations that arise from these crashes can certainly be distressing as automated systems tend to make different mistakes from humans. In the case of a specific accident, it is therefore often obvious that a human driver could have reacted better, for example braking after having hit someone.

However, automated driving systems do not make a lot of the mistakes humans are prone to, for example those tied to drowsiness, intoxication or speeding.

Researchers have found that self-driving cars tend to be better in routine situations, but that some maneuvers relatively easy for humans, like turning, can challenge them. Humans can also react better in totally new and unexpected situations that autonomous cars might not have been prepared for.

Investors have poured billions into AI-related companies, but adoption is moving slowly across American firms.

According to the Census Bureau, just 5% of American businesses have used AI to produce goods and services over the last two weeks, highlighting that market enthusiasm is not yet matching the real economy. Despite this slow progress, AI has the potential to boost productivity across a wide scope of industries, from energy to transportation.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows AI’s effect on industry margins over the next five years, based on analysis from the Bank of America Institute.

How Will AI Impact the Operating Margin of Industries?

To examine AI’s impact on operating margins, analysts looked at roughly 3,400 companies with a combined market cap of about $90 trillion.

As the below table shows, AI could fuel margin expansion in 23 out of 25 industries, with the greatest impact on software and semiconductor companies in the next five years. Driven by rising demand, AI-driven revenues across semiconductor firms could increase by 34% over this period.

Represents the relative change over five years, where 5% indicates an operating margin increase from 20% to 21%.

Meanwhile, the energy and utilities industries could see margin expansion from implementing AI across a variety of use cases, including exploration, pipeline monitoring, and environmental monitoring.

Today, major players like Shell, GE Vernova, and Schneider Electric are launching AI pilot programs to enhance operations throughout the energy value chain.

In the automotive industry, margins are expected to grow as manufacturers adopt AI-driven predictive maintenance systems, which streamline decision-making and detect potential issues early. By one estimate, AI systems could reduce inspection costs by up to 25% and lower maintenance costs by 10% annually.

Overall, AI-enabled cost savings could reach up to $55 billion annually across S&P 500 companies, reflecting the technology’s broad potential to reshape industries through rapid innovation.

To learn more about this topic from a startup perspective, check out this graphic on the number of AI startups by country in 2024.

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

Dr. Peter McCullough is a renowned cardiologist who has been fighting the government CV19 vax propaganda from the beginning. 

Dr. McCullough is on record saying “The CV19 vaccine did not help a single person.” 

Now, Dr. McCullough is fighting a new false government narrative on the Bird Flu.  They just held the “International Bird Flu Summit” near Washington D.C in early October.  At the same time, they were holding a Bird Flu summit in Arkansas for veterinarians.  So, the evidence says, they are planning on a new pandemic.  Dr. McCullough, who monitored both summits, says,

“This is what we learned.  Bird Flu is spreading around because it actually came out of a lab.  It came out of the USAD research lab in Athens Georgia. . . . Bird Flu has been around for a hundred years, and the current version is very mild.  There have been just over 10,000 animal deaths, yet, they have intentionally culled or killed tens of millions of healthy chickens.”

Dr. McCullough goes on to say, “We have never had a human Bird Flu death in the United States…”

“Bird Flu looks like it’s coming out of research labs.  It’s ‘gain of function’ research.  The Biden Administration has put out legislation in May of 2024 enabling this. 

It’s called ‘Dual Purpose Research.’  They create a virus to get people sick, and then they can try to create a vaccine.  This is all about ginning up fear for more public mass vaccination…

I am fearful of a campaign, whether it be Monkey Pox, Bird Flu, Marburg or disease X, that actually does have people take another wave of genetic messenger RNA vaccines…

We have seen more damage from the Covid vaccines than the illness itself…

The Biden Administration just gave money to Moderna to make a Bird Flu messenger RNA vaccine.  I can tell you it does not look safe, and none of these genetic vaccines look safe.”

Dr. McCullough warns, “No one should consider taking a Bird Flu Vaccine…”

“More people died in the vaccine group than in the placebo group. 

No one should consider this.  We have simple drugs that can handle this . . . such as antivirals, Hydroxychloroquine will cover Bird Flu, and we use iodine nasal sprays and drops. 

The bottom line is nobody should risk a vaccine.”

In closing, Dr. McCullough says, “This is a new authoritarian approach, and the new message now, which was all over media in the last few days, is ‘misinformation.’”

“Don’t trust anybody but the government.  Everybody else is spreading ‘misinformation.’ 

‘Misinformation is a classic propaganda tool by The Third Reich. 

No government official should be using the term ‘misinformation.’”

There is much more in the 28-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he interviews top cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, who is Chief Science Officer of  The Wellness Company, as he warns against getting a deadly Bird Flu vaccine for 10.12.24.

*  *  *

To Donate to USAWatchdog.com, click here

To find out more about The Wellness Company, click here.

Warner Bros. had a surprise hit in 2019 with the Todd Phillips directed ‘Joker’ staring Joaquin Phoenix; the movie made over a billion dollars at the box office.  Phillips’ idea was to “sneak a real movie” into the superhero genre, and to his credit he succeeded in that plan.  Joker was a wildly popular but very different take on the DC villain’s origin story. 

In his second installment of the franchise, Joker: Folie à Deux, Phillips seems to have set out to deconstruct and destroy his own lead character in way that left many audience goers disappointed.  The film grabbed $81 million worldwide at the box office opening weekend (keep in mind that half those revenues go to the theater chains), and it cost over $300 million to make and market.  Compared that to the first film, which made $247 million worldwide opening weekend and cost only $60 million.  Joker 2 has also suffered the largest second week drop in receipts in DC movie history. 

Folie à Deux reverses the entire arc of the first movie.  This time around Arthur Fleck (the Joker) is trapped in an insane asylum after the vengeful murders of the previous film and is embroiled in his own trial.  His rebelliousness has been subdued by medications and he struggles with his alter ego and an abusive prison system.  He has musical fantasies in which he’s able to be the Joker again, but the scenes fall flat like most dream sequences in movies where the character wishes he was something he’s not.

By the end of the film Arthur fires his attorney and defends himself in court, calling out the asylum and it’s terrible treatment of patients.  The psychotic prison guards return the favor by beating our main character and then, apparently, raping him (the rape is implied, not shown).  After the rape, Arthur fleck abandons his Joker image and submits his guilt to the court.  In other words, his rebelliousness was raped right out of him.  

Finally, he is stabbed to death by his own cellmate.

There are no good guys in this movie, but the only message seems to be that submission to the system is the answer if you want to avoid a horrific fate. Not surprisingly, this did not go over well with fans.  But why would Hollywood seek to sabotage a character that their audience finds fascinating?  Well, they’ve been doing that for years now with every beloved franchise, mainly those starring straight white men.

They destroyed Luke Skywalker by making him a bitter, lazy nihilist.  They destroyed Indiana Jones by making him a bitter, forgotten aging divorcee.  They destroyed James Bond by making him second fiddle to a 90 pound black woman and then killing him. They destroyed the Ghostbusters by replacing the men with unfunny women and pretending the original films didn’t exist. There are hundreds of examples of this character assassination since around 2016.  It’s the reason why Hollywood is failing so spectacularly today. 

To be fair, Todd Phillips is perhaps not as good a director as people initially assumed.  The first Joker steals a considerable amount of plot and character development from two of Martin Scorsese’s best films – Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy.  In fact, The Joker is merely a marriage of those two movies with a little Batman lore mixed in.  Arthur Fleck is Rupert Pupkin and Travis Bickle if they had gone even further down the path of rage.  In the second film Phillips was starting from scratch and it shows.    

In the late 1970s to early 1980s, it was acceptable for Hollywood to portray the plight of disaffected young white men searching for meaning in a world that has forsaken them.  Today, the progressive left considers the character of Travis Bickle a monstrous symbol that should never be replicated on the big screen for fear that he might “inspire” all those dangerous white men out there in the real world to act on their inherent terrorist impulses. 

The entertainment media was in an uproar, accusing Joker of sympathizing with angry white males in a way that “excused their behavior.”  ‘Medium’ argued that The Joker is “actually about the rage that bubbles to the surface when white males are denied the future they think they are entitled to.” 

Salon claimed that the “American epidemic of white male rage fueled “Joker” to Oscar contention glory, but also the film’s downfall.” 

White men are not allowed to feel disaffected or angry, because supposedly the “patriarchy” is built to cater to them.  White men are so dangerous they have to be suppressed, lest they wake up one day and start a fascist revolution. 

In the DC comics the Joker is an unabashed psychopath seeking to prove that, deep down, everyone else is just as corrupted as he is.  In the Todd Phillips movie, Joker is an empathetic character created by an abusive and broken society that only offers him drugs to numb the pain of existence.  Again, you aren’t supposed to feel bad for straight white men or understand why they might become violent. 

In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle decides he’s going to go lone wolf from society and make his mark instead of living in obscurity.  He has a choice to use his newfound freedom for good or evil.  It’s hard to say if he chooses to do good because he wants to or because it’s easier, but in the end he aims his aggression at terrible people and saves the life of an innocent girl.  

In the first Joker, Arthur Fleck has no real choice.  He must either embrace the clown and lash out, or be crushed under the boot of the system.  At the end of the film, Fleck becomes a symbol of chaos and revenge and, like Travis Bickle, finds a strange kind of freedom.  In the second movie, Todd Phillips and Hollywood in general attempt to remedy their previous mistake by not only killing the character, but absolutely humiliating him and then forcing him to abandon his ideals before he dies.    

Many people might assume that the woke left is attracted to symbols of anarchy and chaos, but the truth is they only use those dynamics as weapons to gain power. 

They love authoritarian order, as long as it’s applied against the people they hate.  Joker: Folie à Deux is yet another reminder of how the political left really thinks.

 The underlying message of the movie?  The corrupt system always wins, so conform or you’ll be next. 

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

In a major U-turn in the Global War on Cash, the government and central bank of Norway, one of Europe’s most cashless economies, are seeking to slow or even reverse the mass abandonment of cash. Only 3% of Norwegians used cash in their latest purchase in a physical shop, according to a recent central bank survey.

In a bid to change that, a new amendment to Norway’s Financial Contracts Act came into force on October 1 that bolsters citizens’ rights to pay with cash in retail settings. The new legislation should sound the death knell for all the “we only accept cards” signs plastered on shop windows throughout the country, reports the Norwegian online newspaper Nettavisen.

Norway’s central bank, Norges Bank, explains on its website how the new amendment will “clarify” customers’ right to pay in cash:

Section 3-5 (1) of the Central Bank Act stipulates that banknotes and coins issued by Norges Bank are legal tender. It further states that no one is obliged to accept more than 25 coins of each denomination in one transaction. Beyond this, the Act does not elaborate on what legal tender implies.

In June 2024, the Storting enacted an amendment to Section 2-1, third paragraph of the Financial Contracts Act, clarifying consumers’ right to pay with cash:

“In sales premises where a business regularly sells goods or services to consumers, the consumer shall be offered the option to pay with legal tender if it is possible to pay for the goods or services with other payment solutions in or in immediate connection to the sales premises. If the business has available change, it must also offer to provide change in connection with the payment, unless there is a clear discrepancy between the banknote offered as payment and the amount to be paid. The first and second sentences do not apply to the sale of goods from vending machines, sales in unstaffed premises, and sales in premises to which only a limited group of people have access. The first and second sentences also do not apply when the amount to be paid exceeds 20,000 kroner.”[1]

For anyone wondering, 20,000 kroner is worth close to $2,000. As Norge Bank explains, retail businesses that refuse to abide by this change in the law could face financial penalties:

In connection with this legislative amendment, the Storting also decided to introduce a sanction in the form of an administrative fine, which may be imposed if businesses willfully or negligently violate the rules in Section 2-1, third paragraph.

Motive #1: Genuine Financial Inclusion

One of the main justifications for the legislation is to support the estimated 600,000 people in the country — equivalent to roughly 10% of the population — who struggle to use digital payments, and who have been increasingly excluded from the retail economy. Cashless economics is often touted as a means of encouraging financial inclusion, which generally means extending exploitative and abusive financial services to those previously excluded. However, in reality there is no more inclusive form of payment method than cash.

“In a digital world, it can be easy to forget that there is a large group of people who are not digital,” says Minister of Justice and Public Security Emilie Enger Mehl. “Cash is also an important emergency preparedness for society. I am pleased that the majority in the Storting [Norway’s parliament] so clearly supported our proposal to strengthen the right to pay with cash. The regulations have been too unclear. People should be confident that they will be able to pay when they go to the store, to a restaurant or to the hairdresser.”

Many Norweigan pensioners are “jubilant” about the change in law, reports Nettavisen.

“This is very important for all the elderly who struggle to pay online, remember the code or who struggle to trust bank cards,” says manager Jan Davidsen, manager of the Norwegian Pensioners’ Association. “For many, cash provides security, it is something they have become accustomed to over the course of a long life. This has been a battle for us, so now we are going to celebrate!”

But not everyone is cracking out the champagne. As NC reader Anders points out in the comments below, Norway, like neighbouring Sweden, has near-free debit cards. And although the payment terminal does have fees associated with it, the costs for retailers are less than what cash costs. Some retailers are far from enamoured with the idea of having to once again handle cash.

“I’m not going to change my practices,” Anders Ellburg, general manager of Holmenkollen, an upmarket restaurant in Helsinki, tells Finans Fokus:

“Cash costs me a lot of money to handle. I run a clean business. Only those who run the black market are interested in cash.

Ellburg put his foot down against cash payment as early as 2014. The card advocate from the capital’s fashionable restaurant scene is the only one of the cash-free players we have contacted who wanted to have a chat with Finansfokus. But Ellburg also made it clear that we should rather talk to those who still use cash – and ask why on earth they do it.

“I was the first in Norway to issue a press release stating that I do not accept cash. When older people have come and told me that they have been to the ATM to withdraw money, I have explained that there is no difference between entering the code in the ATM and entering it at a bank terminal in the restaurant,” he says.

Motive #2: Financial Resilience

Besides ensuring that people are not excluded from participating in the economy, the new amendment has another important goal in mind: to provide the economy with greater financial resilience. In April, a press release from the Ministry of Justice and Public Security highlighted the importance of cash as an “always on” payment option, ensuring Norway’s economy will not be rendered completely inaccessible in the event of “prolonged power outages, system failure or digital attacks against payment systems and banks”.

The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection even recommends people to have some amounts of cash at all times in case digital forms of payment stop working — something that appears to be happening with increasing frequency. This echoes a similar message issued a couple of years ago by a Finnish central bank official. In October 2022, Päivi Heikkinen, the Head of the Payment Systems Department and Chief Cashier at the Bank of Finland warned that households in Finland should make sure they have some cash on hand, just in case the country’s payments system goes down.

“More payment methods bring resilience,” said Heikkinen. “If a single payment method sometimes does not work, then we have other payment methods at our disposal. Cash still plays a very important role here.”

A Growing Trend

In another neck of the Scandinavian woods, the world’s oldest central bank, Sweden’s Riksbank, keeps sounding the alarm about the fragility of cashless economies, as we reported in May:

Digitalization… makes payments “more vulnerable to cyber attacks and disruptions to the power grid and data communication,” the bank points out. At the same time, the geopolitical developments of the past few years required “Sweden to have strong civil defense.” The developments suggested “that we should concentrate more than before on the challenges of digitalization.”

Put another way, cash does not crash. It does not fail in a power cut or seize up during a cyber attack (though, of course, ATMs might). By contrast, digital payment systems need a stable and continuous internet connection to process transactions. When these connections fail, the result is often chaos. Digital payment outages have caused significant disruption in a host of countries in recent years, including the US, the UK, Australia, Indonesia, Germany, Canada, Spain and Norway. Generally speaking, the more cashless the country, the greater the disruption.

Since that post went up, the world has suffered an even more disruptive payments outage. In July, a content update by the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike caused millions of Microsoft systems around the world to crash, bringing the operating systems of banks, payment card firms, airlines, hospitals, NHS clinics, retailers and hospitality businesses to a standstill. Businesse were faced with a stark choice: go cash-only, or close until the systems came back online.

Such was the scale of the resulting disruption that even stalwart British media outlets like The Sun, The Times, The Guardian and The Mail ran articles on how the global IT outage had underscored the fragility of a cashless society. The Daily Mail plastered the message across its front page:

The digital payment outages didn’t stop there; they just keep on coming. On September 12, 250,000 card terminals in Germany — the equivalent of one-in-four of the country’s devices — stopped working, according to FAZ. Once again, the cause of the outage appears to be a software glitch, this time affecting the payment service provider Telecash. On the same day, outages were also reported in the Netherlands.

Protecting the Right to Use Cash: A Growing European Trend

In recent years a growing number of countries in Europe have passed or proposed legislation to protect the right of citizens to use cash as payment. They include Switzerland and Austria, two countries where cash is still very much King, as well as Slovakia, where the Robert Fico government last year passed an amendment to the constitution intended to protect physical payments from a future in which the digital euro becomes mandatory.

Back in Sweden, which is arguably even more cashless than Norway, the Riksbank, like its Norwegian counterpart, has called on the government to adopt urgent measures to strengthen cash’s role as a means of payment. Late last year, the central bank echoed a point we have been making for the past few years: “it is not enough to simply take measures to strengthen the availability of cash through withdrawal requirements and new depots, it must also be usable.”

That means taking a leaf out of neighbouring Norway’s book and adopting legislation that makes it much harder for retail outlets to reject cash payments. In a 14-page response to a parliamentary inquiry on the State’s role in payments, the Riksbank warned that “legislation on cash needs to be tightened up immediately” and “political decisions are needed urgently so that everyone can pay”:

“Cash is essential for digitally and financially excluded consumers. Cash is also the only payment instrument that can be used independently of electricity and telecommunications and is therefore important for Sweden’s emergency preparedness. There is no reason or time to wait for a new review, as the Inquiry infers. There is a considerable risk that cash will be further marginalised and that in the near future it can no longer be used for essential purchases. The Riksbank therefore proposes legislative amendments regarding the possibility of paying cash for essential goods and an obligation for banks to accept cash deposits from consumers”…

The Riksbank does not share the Inquiry’s assessment that, with regard to legal tender, the
legislator can wait to introduce even stronger obligations to accept cash until a new review of
the status of cash and access to cash has been carried out. In the Riksbank’s opinion, the Inquiry should have submitted legislative proposals that strengthen the position of cash even
more.

The inquiry itself concluded that Sweden’s shift toward a cashless society may have finally reached the outer limits of what is possible — at least for the “foreseeable future.”

“The use of cash for payment purposes has gradually declined over a longer period of time and is now comparatively low,” the inquiry reported, before adding that demand for cash has ‘remained virtually unchanged’ over the past five years. “Analysts have concluded that the direction of travel is clearly towards (in principle) a cashless society, especially in Sweden. The statistics, however, do not point to such a development, or indeed… that this will occur in the foreseeable future.”

Now, the central banks of both Sweden and Norway have the unenviable task of trying to slow or even reverse the mass abandonment of cash that they themselves helped set in motion. They will have their work cut out given that so much of their respective countries’ cash infrastructure — in particular private banks’ branch networks, ATMs and the distribution services offered by cash handling companies — has been allowed to wither over recent years.

It also remains to be seen whether enough Swedish and Norwegian citizens are prepared to reembrace cash if it is made more available and easier to use. As in many countries, demand for cash in Norway has risen slightly over the past year with the number of withdrawals at ATMs ticking up, according to Norges Bank. But is this a sustainable trend? As payment technologies have advanced this century, most Norwegian and Swedish citizens have embraced the speed, ease and convenience of digital payments. But they were also nudged in that direction.

By 2016, Sweden’s commercial banks had made 60% of their branches cashless, as a 2019 Riksbank working paper documents. This made it much more difficult for citizens to access cash and for businesses to deposit it, which in turn accelerated the uptake of digital payments and the abandonment of cash. The Riksbank did its part by withdrawing many of Sweden’s large denomination notes from circulation. Now, it is trying to halt, or at least slow, the country’s onward march toward a cashless future.

Time is of the essence. As the central bank warns, if urgent action isn’t taken to fortify Sweden’s cash infrastructure, it will soon be too late:

[T]here are already such problems with cash and cash handling that there is reason to immediately tighten legislation to safe guard the position of cash and access to cash services. If the state waits until cash and cash services are further phased out, this could lead to a situation where it is too late to take action, or there is a risk that operators will be forced to go back and reinvest in equipment and systems.

Given Norway and Sweden have gone further than most countries in removing cash from the economy, the fact they are both now warning about the dangers and vulnerabilities of a fully cashless economy as well as the urgent need to protect both access to and use of cash should be taken very seriously — not just within their borders but far beyond them.

Russian forces on Sunday announced more advances in the vicinity of the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, after weeks of steady gains and several villages recently being brought under Russia’s control.

The defense ministry said Russian troops have now taken the village of Mykhailivka, which lies just outside the town of Selydove and to the south of Pokrovsk.

Selydove could be next to fall. It has already been largely turned to rubble after months of heavy shelling, and most of the population had along ago fled.

Further details published in Newsweek show that Selydove is a current main focus of Russian forces:

In an update published at 4 p.m. local time, the Ukrainian General Staff did not mention Mykhailivka by name, but said Russian forces were “concentrating its main efforts near Selydove, where 12 battles have taken place so far.”

Popular Ukrainian war-tracking blog, DeepState, showed the vast majority of Mykhailivka to be under Russian control as of Sunday.

For the majority of the war, Pokrovsk has acted as the logistical hub and rear operations base for Ukraine’s eastern defensive lines. It sits astride both a key railroad juncture and the highway to Ukraine’s fourth-largest metro, Dnipro.

The city’s defensive positions are a final obstacle to Russia’s access to most of the region. If Pokrovsk falls Russian forces will be able to easily flank entrenched troops in the north and south of the country. Donetsk and the whole east would then be under complete Russian control.

Apart from Donetsk, heavy fighting has also been reported in southern Zaporizhzhia region this weekend. Ukraine’s military on Sunday is sounding the alarm over “new assault operations”.

Fresh widespread power outages have been reported in Zaporizhzhia as a result. “Power outages have been reported in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts over the past 24 hours due to ongoing hostilities,” local media reports.

NEW: Russian forces are reportedly relying on illicitly obtained Starlink terminals to improve combat coordination and the effectiveness of their tactical reconnaissance strike complex (TRSC) in Ukraine as part of an overarching effort to reach technological parity with Ukrainian… pic.twitter.com/kQpaZgOq8v

— Institute for the Study of War (@TheStudyofWar) October 12, 2024

“Russian forces targeted a substation in Kherson Oblast with a drone, igniting a fire that has since been extinguished,” the update continues. “Consumers have been switched to backup power supplies.”

President Zelensky over the weekend has touted that the Ukrainian Army has held the lines in Russia’s Kursk region; however, the Kursk offensive ultimately has no bearing on the situation in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. It is in these eastern and southern regions of Ukraine where the war’s outcome is likely to finally be settled.

Submitted by Vincenzo Lorusso,

With a likely victory of Donald Trump in a month’s time, one may be forgiven for expecting that he will be true to his promise to end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours”. 

Logic and facts on the ground suggest that this outcome is highly unlikely.

First, next year Moscow will increase military spending by 22.6% compared to this year and by 54% compared to the original project for 2025, drawn up at the end of 2023. Defense spending will exceed 8% of GDP and will amount to a staggering 40% of all federal spending.

Do you think that this spending is related to the fact that the war ends next year?

The Kremlin will enter the path of negotiations only when it achieves the main military-political goal of the campaign: Ukraine’s non-participation in NATO.

At the moment, the situation around the special military operation can hardly be considered concluded for negotiations to begin.

The Russian armed forces are facing the fall of Pokrovsk, Mirnograd, Chasov Yar. The complete liberation of Donbass and access to the Dnepropetrovsk region are already a preliminary sign of Russia’s victory. Before that happens, talking about Moscow’s participation in the negotiations is empty talk.

However, with the whole of NATO technological fire power aligned against it, accomplishing this goal will take Russia a lot of time and money. Military experts from both camps have been consistently wrong since the outset.

Secondly, the end of the conflict is not beneficial to the United States. No matter how much Trump and other Republicans complain about the Ukrainian issue and link all America’s problems to it, the Ukrainian war is the most successful investment in US foreign policy in recent decades.

You have to be a complete idiot to believe that Americans are sorry for the $150-200 billion spent that will impoverish Russia.

In 20 years, America has spent more than a trillion dollars on Afghanistan. But is it possible to compare Afghanistan’s dividends with Ukraine’s? The EU economy is destroyed and totally dependent on the United States, Russian gas and oil are being withdrawn from the European market, Russia is spending enormous resources on victory in the Ukrainian steppes.

And now the question is: how many tens of thousands of American soldiers would have to die with the direct participation of the United States in the conflict with the Russian Federation to achieve such indicators? Incredible results are achieved at the cost of the lives of Ukrainians, which no one cares about.

Any sane person in the place of the US President would in no case limit the Ukrainian conflict, but would continue it. If there had been any pressure to resolve the conflict, it should by now have come from Europe. Alas, for reasons that will be poured over by historians for decades to come, there is no such sign. Quite  the contrary.

Thirdly, premature peace is not beneficial for China. The warming of the “Korean” and “Taiwanese” cards is coming. Beijing would prefer that by the time conflicts in the Asian region resume, the United States would be “in trouble” and forced to be distracted by other local conflicts. In addition, peace in Ukraine in the current conditions is a complete geopolitical triumph for the United States. On such a victorious wave, all the centrifugal forces of the world will accept the will of the White House, depriving Beijing of room for maneuver. Many countries currently “sitting on the fence” or at least keeping their options open would have to conclude that Russia does not have the force to shape a future world order.

China will contribute in every possible way to the prolongation of the conflict until: a) Russia enforces its conditions and humiliates the West; b) China does not deem it necessary to be ready for an acute phase of confrontation with the United States.

The dream of the West in the war in Ukraine is the destruction of Russia, or to make it a vassal state like any “little Italy” or all other European countries.

The White House will do everything to force the Kremlin to abandon the alliance with Beijing, the main competitor of the United States.

They dream of the maximum impoverishment of the Russian Federation, after which they will try to impose the “rules of the 1990s”, when Moscow was an absolutely amorphous and non-independent actor.

Neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris will change this strategic logic, since it is fully consistent with the interests of the deep state and the largest global financial institutions.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

During the misnamed and mostly preposterous debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a moderator fact-checked Trump’s claim that crime is up.

In contrast to Trump’s claim, moderator David Muir said that the FBI reports that crime is down, a claim that likely struck every viewer as obviously wrong.

Shoplifting was not a way of life before lockdowns. Most cities were not demographic minefields of danger around every corner. There was no such thing as a drugstore with nearly all products behind locked Plexiglas.

We weren’t warned of spots in cities, even medium-sized ones, where carjacking was a real risk.

It is wildly obvious that high crime in the U.S. is endemic, with ever less respect for person and property. As for the FBI’s statistics, they’re worth about as much as most data coming from federal agencies these days.

They’re there for purposes of propaganda, manipulated to present the most favorable picture possible to help the regime.

Lies, Damn Lies and Government Statistics

This is certainly true of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department, which have been shoveling out obvious nonsense for years.

Professionals in the field know it but go along for reasons of professional survival. In truth, we’ve never had a real economic recovery since lockdowns.

Crime is up. Literacy is down. Trust has collapsed. Societies were shattered and remain so.

Only a few weeks following the officious fact-check at the debate, we now have new data from the National Crime Victimization Survey.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019–2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022–2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.”

But the FBI tries to tell you that crime is down. Sure, whatever they say.

The report isolates the “post-George Floyd protests” because no media source wants to mention the lockdowns. It is still a taboo subject.

We somehow cannot say, even now, that the worst abuses of rights in U.S. history in terms of scale and depth were a disaster, simply because saying so implicates the whole of the media, both parties, all government agencies, academia and all the upper reaches of the social and political order.

Politics Has Become Life and Death

The problem of political division is getting alarmingly serious. It’s no longer just about competing yard signs and loud rallies. We now have regular assassination attempts, plus even an extremely strange appearance of a bounty put on a candidate’s head by an official agency.

Surveys have shown that 26 million people in the U.S. believe that violence is fine to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. Where might people have gotten that idea?

Probably from many Hollywood movies that fantasize about having killed Hitler before he accomplished his evil plus the nonstop likening of Trump to Hitler, and hence one follows from another.

Liken Trump to Hitler and that is the result you produce.

There’s private violence, public violence and many forms in between including vigilante violence. Rights violations against person and property are now normalized.

This springs from the culture of our times which has been heavily informed and even defined by the deployment of state violence in service of policy goals, at a scale, scope and depth never before seen.

The Role of Censorship

Censorship is a major part of it. Censorship is the deployment of force in service of state power, and other institutions connected to state power, for purposes of culture planning.

It’s exercised by the shallow state, in response to the middle state, and on behalf of the deep state. It’s a form of violence that interrupts the free flow of information: the ability to speak, and the ability to learn.

Censorship trains the population to be quiet, afraid and constantly stressed, and it sorts people by the compliant versus the dissidents. Censorship is designed to shape the public mind toward the end of shoring up regime stability. Once it starts, there’s no limit to it.

I’ve mentioned to people that Substack, Rumble and X could be banned by the spring of next year, and people respond with incredulity. Why? Four years ago, we were locked in our homes and locked out of churches, and the schools for which people pay all year were shut down by government force.

If they can do that, they can do anything.

Remember Free Speech?

Censorship has been so effective that it’s changed the way we engage with each other even in private. Brownstone Institute, which I founded, recently held a private retreat for scholars, fellows and special guests.

One very special guest wrote me that she was completely shocked at the freedom of thought and speech that was present in the room. As a mover in the highest circles, she had forgotten what that was like.

This censorship coincides with a strange valorization of violence that we are presented with from all over the world: Ukraine, the Middle East, London, Paris and many American cities. Never have so many held video cameras in their pockets and never have there been so many platforms on which to post the results.

One does wonder how all these relentless presentations of destruction and killing affect public culture.

Why They’re Doing It

What purpose are all these soft, hard, public and private exercises of violence serving? The standard of living is suffering, lives are shortening, despair and ill health are main features of the population and illiteracy has swept through an entire generation.

The decision to deploy violence to master the microbial kingdom did not turn out well. Worse, it unleashed violence as a way of life.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” wrote Frederic Bastiat, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

That is precisely where we are. It’s time we talk about it and name the culprit. Liberty, privacy and property were already unsafe before 2020 but it was the lockdowns that unleashed Pandora’s box of evils.

We cannot live this way. The only arguments worth having are those that name the reason for the suffering and offer a viable path back to civilized living.

Via The College Fix,

Federal law enforcement has charged five recent University of Michigan graduates who were found taking photos near a military base hundreds of miles from campus.

The recent grads are accused of “lying and trying to cover their tracks, more than a year after they were confronted in the dark near a remote Michigan military site where thousands of people had gathered for summer drills,” according to the Associated Press.

“The five, who were University of Michigan students at the time, were not charged for what happened at Camp Grayling in August 2023,” the AP reported. “Rather they are accused of misleading investigators about the trip and conspiring to clear their phones of photos, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.”

“The defendants are not in custody,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said. “Should they come into contact with U.S. authorities, they will be arrested and face these charges.”

“We are media,” the students said when “confronted” by a National Guard member, the AP reported.

The students graduated in spring as part of a “joint program between the university and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China,” the AP reported.

“They have been identified as Zhekai Xu, Renxiang Guan, Haoming Zhu, Jingzhe Tao, and Yi Liang,” Just the News reported.

A Michigan congressman said the charges highlight the need to be “vigilant” about spying from the Chinese Communist Party.

Michigan Republicans have been critical of plans for a Chinese Communist Party-linked battery company to build a plant just 88 miles from the military base.

Congressman John Moolenar stated in his news release:

This case shows once again that CCP espionage can happen anywhere in America and we must be vigilant. The CCP obviously has an interest in Camp Grayling and this is further evidence it would be a mistake for Michigan leaders to allow Gotion to build in our state. State funding for Gotion’s plan to bring Chinese nationals to Mecosta County is an open invitation for further spying on Camp Grayling.

“For national security reasons, Governor Whitmer and the legislature must revoke state funding for Gotion immediately,” the Republican Congressman stated, linking the charges against the students to the battery plant.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has apologized for a video in which she feeds a social media influencer a Dorito chip – a stunt widely slammed by Catholic organizations as mocking the sacrament of communion.

In the video, influencer Liz Plank kneels before Whitmer, who feeds her the chip. Whitmer then gazes at the camera while wearing a Harriz-Walz hat.

Democrat Gov Gretchen Whitmer blasphemes the Eucharist, feeding a Dorito to a leftist podcaster as if it’s Holy Communion. Wearing a Kamala hat.

It’s wild that some Christians refuse to vote when Democrats obviously loathe you… because you’re Christian.pic.twitter.com/tcVN1lzWmh

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) October 10, 2024

“I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” Whitmer said in a statement provided to Michigan’s WJBK, adding that the stunt was meant to promote legislation signed by President Joe Biden in 2022 known as the “Chips Act,” which provides $280 billion to research and manufacture semiconductors.

According to Whitmer, it was “construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that.”

A likely story… more like a blasphemous lesbian hagmaxxing fetish.

Whitmer’s stunt was slammed by the Michigan Catholic Conference, which accused Whitmer and Plank of “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Eucharist.”

Paul Long, the conference’s CEO, said of Whitmer’s apology: “While dialogue on this issue with the governor’s office is appreciated, whether or not insulting Catholics and the Eucharist was the intent, it has had an offensive impact.”

Also, what’s this weird Dorito thing going on with Democrats? #Doritogate?

My guilty pleasure? Doritos. pic.twitter.com/vOaLMZeYWl

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 22, 2019