Posted originally on the CTH on March 29, 2024 | Sundance
For his recent episode, Tucker Carlson revisits a former guest, Mike Rowe. Mr. Rowe has good and humorous sense of curiosity about things, about stuff, about the real world around us, and he provides good context for examination of this pretending world that swirls our orbit at a speed greater than we can grasp.
Toward the end of this segment, Rowe is asked the oft familiar question, “Where does all this go,” and his answer opens the door to other avenues I happen to agree with. WATCH:
In response to the ‘where does all this end’ question, Rowe notes that at a certain point everything becomes personal, and in the larger context all outcomes have to manifest in reality. I concur with Rowe on many levels, and a great example of that esoteric -v- reality position can be found all around us in the sphere of geopolitics and manipulation.
Think about the White House and State Dept message at the very beginning of Russia’s military operation in Eastern Ukraine. Do you remember the White House briefing when questioned about “where this will end”? {Background}
Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, Daleep Singh, was presented at the podium on the day of Russia’s first moves into Ukraine, to explain the strategic policy of the Biden administration toward Russia.
…”Ultimately, the goal of our sanctions is to make this a strategic failure for Russia; and let’s define a little bit of what that means. Strategic success in the 21st century is not about a physical land grab of territory; that’s what Putin has done. In this century, strategic power is increasingly measured and exercised by economic strength, by technological sophistication and your story – who you are, what your values are; can you attract ideas and talent and goodwill? And on each of those measures, this will be a failure for Russia.” (Video Link)
What Daleep Singh said was essentially that Biden policy toward Russia boiled down geopolitical power to a cultural issue of social likeability.
President Putin was also asked about NATO’s likely response, and his reply was more akin to ‘What is the West going to do, put tanks in the forest’?
The disparity between the Biden response and the Putin response can be looked at as esoteric vs realist.
At a certain point in the real world, if you want to change something, you have to physically act upon it.
NATO could gnash their teeth, try to diminish the Russian economy from the sanction approach, and shout at the diplomatic corps. However, so long as words were the answer, the physical reality of the situation would never change. This was the baseline for Putin’s confidence.
The same thing can be said for this collective Western effort to financially control all the citizens within the region. At a certain point the talk becomes action, and that action then creates an outcome.
Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” The same may be true for the plans and schemes of the globalists.
Can the triggering of their plan be stopped? I think that’s arguably, doubtful; people are just complacent. However, in the outcome phase, will the consequences of that globalist plan be accepted? That’s where I’m cautiously more optimistic the people impacted will punch the globalists in the mouth.
I’m not sure we can vote our way out of this in advance, but I am more confident we can punch our way to victory.
Additionally, if you look at what the globalists are doing, punch-avoidance-planning is consuming a lot of their time.
Posted originally on Mar 20, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
AI is a hot topic for regulators. Regulators and most companies that offer purported AI are clueless about what constitutes actual AI. Way too many charlatans are out there calling a simple trend-following program AI. They create some rules, and the program just follows what they created. That is NOT Artificial Intelligence.
The SEC is all over this and has already been targeting purported AI companies that call their programs AI when they have a simple buy-sell analogy that may trade-off for an Elliot Wave or Stochastic with inherent BIAS created by their predetermined rule. Any system that has an inherent BIAS is not actually AI.
Yes, Bill Gates predicts that artificial intelligence will transform the world in just five years. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the rise of AI could affect about 40% of jobs around the world. When I went to engineering school, we had to learn both programming and hardware. Back then, StarTrek was on TV and that was the inspiration of everyone in the industry to create a computer that was capable of understanding and running the ship. Even Steve Jobs’s inspiration behind Apple and the iPad came from the visions we had from StarTrek.
I worked with Dragon System back in the eighties when it was hardware you put into a slot in an IBM XT. It would allow the computer to talk. My daughter was fascinated by it. I wrote a program just to be able to hold a conversation with her and taught it how to be a politician. If it ventured into an area it did not know, it would just change the subject. I still remember she came home from school one day, and I had the computer apart, and she began crying that I had killed it. I used my kids to teach me how to write natural language so it would understand the words in a conversation. The good old days.
There is a lot of misguided hope surrounding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. All we need to do is look objectively at IBM project WATSON. Just over a decade ago, artificial intelligence (AI) made one of its showier forays into the public’s consciousness when IBM’s Watson computer appeared on the American quiz show Jeopardy. Watson’s debut performance against two of the show’s most successful contestants was televised to a national viewership across three evenings. In the end, the machine triumphed comfortably.
This was NOT actually AI. It is what I call a look-up program. Even ChatGPT is not capable of actually achieving independent thought. They can understand and go fetch the answer faster than a human. The people I knew back then thought Watson would one day cure cancer. None of that was possible because they fooled themselves about AI.
Most of AI’s dangers are caused by its failure to comprehend what it is capable of doing—especially in trading. This all stems from the distorted idea that our brains are supercomputers and there is no God, for our consciousness is simply created by throwing in a bunch of data, shaking well, and out comes a person. Thus, the thrust to mimic the brain led to the creation of neural nets. But that effort also failed in actually creating original thought.
I bought my first Roman coin, which came when I was perhaps 10 to 13 years old, for $10. It was in the 3rd century when Rome debased its currency. The coin was from Emperor Aurelian (270-275AD). I noticed that what once was silver coins was bronze, but they used a chemical process to bring 20% silver to the surface to make them look like silver coins when first issued. I saw the same thing in our coins in 1965, issuing clad coinage with a copper center and nickel surface, doing the same as the Romans.
I was fascinated with the parallel and realized that if I collected the coinage annually, I could see just how fast Rome fell. We all knew Rome fell, but nobody even determined how fast Rome fell. I used the coinage to plot that out. Many people have copied that chart, but you could not make it without testing the coinage.
I also wrote about when I was in 9th grade; my history teacher brought in an old black-and-white movie named Toast of New York. It was about Jim Fisk and his attempt to corner the gold market that created the Panic of 1869. In that movie, he is looking at the ticker tape quoting gold just hit $162. Because I had a part-time job in a coin/bullion store, I knew the price of gold was $35. Suddenly, what I was being taught in school was wrong. Nothing was linear. It was always a business cycle, for how else could gold be $162 in 1869 and $35 postwar up to 1971?
First of all, this idea that our brains are supercomputers and consciousness is simply a matter of throwing a bunch of data in and out comes consciousness is totally nonsense. A baby knows nothing when born but displays consciousness. My dogs are self-aware. They bark at another dog but put a mirror down, knowing it is themselves. The little one, Josephine, was sick and lying down. I gave Napoleon a treat, and she took it over and gave it to Josephine. I was stunned. They, too, have a consciousness that exists, and it did not come from throwing in a bunch of data.
Any program based on this idea of Machine Language and somehow it will figure out how to trade all by itself is totally absurd. IBM thought Watson could discover the cure for cancer – it did not. As was reported:
“But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. “
Why Machine Learning Has Failed
The entire premise that there is no God and consciousness is achieved by merely throwing in a bunch of data and shaking well has proven to be absolute NONSENSE. The next machine learning program cannot learn to be a doctor any more than it can become a trader. There is something a lot more to this thing we call consciousness. It will NEVER simply emerge from the data – PERIOD!
You cannot create a machine-learning program and expect it to teach you how to trade, cure cancer, or drive a car. I have raced cars. I have driven almost every sort, even a Formula One—NOT professionally in a Formula One. When you are driving, you have to look at everyone around you. You look for the slightest move, which indicates what that driver is thinking. This is that undefinable gut feeling. You cannot code this, and I have been coding AI since the 1970s.
This is why a self-driving car with AI will not really work. It was a grand theory, but there is no possible way you can expect AI to make intuitive judgment decisions – a gut feeling. This is the problem with expecting that AI will replace humans, where it requires a gut feeling.
Therein lies the problem. This expectation that AI can replace human judgment is just fiction. I can mimic emotions on a computer. If you use insulting words, it can hurl an insult back at you. I cannot create actual emotion, nor can I create judgment from a Sixth Sense. This idea that you create a black box, throw in a bunch of data, and out comes an artificial person is absurd.
Someone sent this in when they asked ChapGPT about the difference between it and Socrates. It can look that up and put out the information. It cannot trade any more than it could drive a car. AI will never achieve that human judgment.
To create Socrates, I realized that it could not be a neural net nor a black box where you hope, like IBM, it will figure it all out and somehow emerge as the best trader in history. I taught Socrates how I would look at the world as an international hedge fund manager, comparing everything and looking at the capital flows. You cannot forecast gold in isolation any more than the stock market. EVERYTHING is connected. As I have often said, the US was bankrupt in 1896, and JP Morgan arranged a $100 million gold loan to bail out the country. Without World Wars I & II, the US would never have become the world’s financial capital. Obviously, you cannot forecast the US share market by just looking at the Fed.
While I taught Socrates how to analyze, I created no hard rules like interest rates up and stocks down. Such market beliefs are in themselves fiction. The Fed was raising rates when Trump came to power, and the market rallied, but they called it the Trump Rally. The Romans used olive oil for heat and light. That was replaced with whale oil, which was then replaced by crude oil. Justinian I (527-565AD) issued the first Clean Air Act in 535AD. He proclaimed the importance of clean air as a birthright. “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind—the air, running water, the sea.”
I created no hard relationship rules because relationships ALWAYS change.
Posted originally on Dec 27, 2023 By Martin Armstrong
Israel cannot lose the war. It is a vassal state created and funded by the West. Palestine’s allies simply cannot defeat the nations who have big plans for the future of Israel. We know about the nuclear power plant in Israel installed by the West to gain a stronghold on the Middle East. We know about the plans for an alternative canal that will rival the Suez and permit the West to gain control over trade in the region.
Now, independent companies are also investing in Israel. The Israeli government recently issued the largest grant in the nation’s history to Intel Corp for $3.2 billion. In exchange, the company plans to build a $25 billion chip plant in the southern region. Intel shares rose when the news was first released.
The Kiryat Gat site selected for the manufacturing plant is a mere 26 miles from Gaza. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “This investment, at a time when Israel wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity.” According to Smotrich, investing in Israel is the best way to defeat evil.
The plant is expected to open in 2028. Companies are betting on a clear victory for Israel. Intel is one of many companies with plans to expand in Israel in the coming years. The semiconductor chip industry is extremely competitive as every manufacturer began investing heavily in expansion amid the chip shortage that began a few years ago.
Now, Intel would not spend $25 billion on a manufacturing plant next door to Hamas if they were not confident that Israel would win the war. Israel would not be funding 12.8% of Intel’s project if their leaders were not confident that their allies would continue to protect the nation for however long it may take.
Posted originally on Nov 29, 2023 By Martin Armstrong
Snowden and others warned us. The US government has been spying on citizens at the federal, state, and local levels. Telecommunications company AT&T partnered with Data Analytical Services (DAS) to provide them with our digital footprints. The government is targeting everyone under the assumption that every American is a criminal.
They speak of the Stasi as if that was a time long ago and forgotten. Trillions of phone records are in the hands of government permanently. AT&T received indirect financing grants for its participation in the mass surveillance program. The government could target a criminal, or their neighbors, relatives, someone merely in their phone contacts list, or even the victim of a crime. The local cop could ping in to see his girlfriend’s phone location, for example. Warrants are no longer required.
US Senator Ron Wyden wrote a letter of “serious concerns about the legality” of DAS to US Attorney General Merrick Garland, obtained by Wired. Wyden said the program “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” The DAS has expanded after project Hemisphere, the previous government surveillance program that has been largely scrubbed from record. Obama began Hemisphere in 2013 and also partnered with AT&T for data-mining services. Trump reinstated and later halted the program, while Biden refunded and recharged the initiative. Hemisphere was simply renamed to DAS since the cover was blown.
DAS operates under a program called HIDTA, which is dedicated to drug trafficking and the ongoing lost war on drugs. But they are not limited to tapping the phones of alleged drug dealers or buyers. DAS bypasses numerous laws by claiming they are not wiretapping citizens, which would require a warrant. They claim they are merely storing data instead of conversations. They are able to track locations using this data as well. “The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope,” Wyden’s letter to Garland says.
The government also has access to our email history. They can search as far back as 1987 if that data is available. The program knows if someone switches numbers and everyone has the potential to be targeted. Technically, these law enforcement agencies need a subpoena, which is easy to obtain and often bypassed. Of most concern is that data exists, and the government has a verifiable way to track citizens’ whereabouts at all times without reason of suspicion.
The US and Israel have been discussing plans to build a canal to rival the Suez Canal for over 50 years. We must look at recent history to see the motives for the war occurring today. Around 20% of all world trade moves through the Suez Canal, which is controlled by Egypt. The Suez Canal was initially jointly controlled by French investors and Egypt. Isma’il Pasha was forced to sell Egypt’s shares to Britain amid a liquidity crisis in Egypt. Former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser reclaimed the lucrative trade route in 1956, sparking the second Arab-Israeli war also known as the Suez Crisis.
The West does not want to rely on Egypt, a close ally of Russia, for world trade. The Ben Gurion Canal Project, or Israeli Canal, has been the proposed solution since the 60s. Where would this canal be located? Part of it would flow precisely through the Gaza Strip. The passage would start by the port city of Eilat in Israel through the Gulf of Aqaba, crossing the Jordanian border and flowing through the Arabah Valley before entering the Dead Sea before heading north around the Gaza Strip.
Declassified documents reveal that the US Department of Energy was planning to take extreme measures to make this canal possible. On July 1, 1963, a plan was outlined to create the Israeli Canal by detonating 520 underground nuclear explosions throughout the Negev Desert. “Such a canal would be a strategically valuable alternate to the present Suez Canal and would probably contribute greatly to the economic development of the surrounding area,” the declassified document stated.
The document notes that 130 of the 160 miles dedicated to the canal are “virtually unpopulated desert wasteland,” but the primary issue would be relocating those from the Gaza Strip. “Another problem which has not been considered is that of political feasibility, as it is likely that the Arab countries surrounding Israel would object strongly to the construction of such a canal,” the declassified papers show.
Follow the money, always. The West does not want Egypt and, therefore, Russia to have control over world trade and the movement of goods. The plan was never executed because they knew no Arab nation would agree to such a power grab, and those 30 pesky miles of densely populated land mostly belonged to Palestine. This is all because the Neocons are hell-bent on isolating Russia but at the expense of dividing the world. Is this why Blinken is saying there will be no peace in Israel and Ukraine?
This is all tied in with Yemen, and there is so much more going on behind the curtain that would shock people on all sides. We will deal with the real complexity in a Special Report for the WEC Nov 17-19.
Israel has just made an important step in warfare. Their Arrow missile-defense system has shot down a ballistic missile outside of Earth’s atmosphere, which is the first time warfare has taken place in space. This was an Iranian missile launched from Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis, who have declared war on Israel. This missile traveled out of the Earth’s atmosphere in hopes of avoiding all radar, and this would be a surprise attack. This flew nearly 1000 miles (1600km) over the Arabian peninsula outside the atmosphere and would then turn down targeting the Israeli port city of Eilat.
This was not one of those propaganda stories from Ukraine how they shot down six unstoppable Russian missiles in a single day. Nothing that comes from Ukraine is ever trustworthy, and certainly not from the Institute for the Study of War – Victoria Nuland’s sister-in-law who always says Russia is about to collapse..
This is the first missile to be shot down outside the atmosphere and has ushered in a new level of warfare.
We know why Israel is upset with Elon Musk for sending Starlink services to Palestine, but now Iran is also demanding that he remove the satellites. Truth is always the first casualty in war. Governments are censoring absolutely everything to prevent the truth from spreading. Iranian journalism is non-existent and people rely on social media to receive their information through the use of VPNs. Iran has previously shutdown internet access for its own people and disabled VPN servers to prevent people from seeking the truth.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) believes the Islamic Republic “enslaved Iran’s internet.”“The Islamic Republic’s strategy is cruel – locking its people into an empty information space and blocking all escape routes,” said Vincent Berthier, the head of RSF’s Tech Desk. “Internet shutdowns form the main barrier to information, and when the network comes back online, the government obstructs access in another way, by preventing access to VPNs. We call on the Iranian authorities to lift these oppressive constraints. Iranians have the right to access news and information freely.”
Iran has blocked the Apple App Store and Google Play to deter people from downloading a VPN to bypass censorship. WhatsApp and Signal have been blocked as they do not allow people to communicate. Internet shutdowns often occur regionally as the Iranian government will simply revoke all internet communications at whim. A company called Arvan Cloud has assisted Iran’s Information and Communications Technology Ministry in developing the National Information Network (NIN) to block the people from free communication. Ironically, the US placed sanctions on the company in June 2023. The US government prefers to discreetly block information rather than turning off the internet entirely.
Now in comes Elon Musk. He recently said he plans to make X (formerly Twitter) an all-purpose app that allows calls and messaging. He is permitting everyone to post to his social media channel and it has become the top spot for government officials to send the public instant alerts. His Starlink technology will ensure that people can access X and the internet. Starlink satellites operate at an altitude of 340 miles and would be extremely costly to shoot down and only a few countries have anti-satellite technology. It’s also not like Musk is sending one satellite as they launch a stack of them at once.
There is a reason Putin did not attempt to shoot down Starlink over Ukraine. First of all, it is extremely costly and a waste of resources. Secondly, these devices are technically American assets and attempting to remove them could be seen as an act of war. Third, they could not shoot these down without causing orbital debris and angering the international community. Russia or China could spend countless resources on anti-satellite technology, but Musk could simply send more. The only way to close them would be to attack the ground station, a move that could only be done by the West.
Russia poured $7 billion into Egypt in 2021 to create the Russian Industrial Zone (RIZ), the nation’s first industrial zone outside of Russia. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi developed a relationship with Russia in 2014 amid the Crimea crisis and the Ukrainian Revolution. Russia has been investing heavily in Egypt ever since and is currently pouring $4.6 billion into Egypt’s Suez Canal zone to create “Sun City,” an industrial zone covering 2,000 hectares.
Around 20% of all world trade moves through the Suez Canal. This is extremely strategic for Russian manufacturing and trade, and also explains Egypt’s refusal to support the West in its mission to escalate the Israel-Palestine war. Sun City is expected to bring 35,000 jobs to the Egyptian economy.
Egypt has become Africa’s leading destination for investment. It dethroned South Africa in 2017 to claim the title. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) stated that Egypt “supported by a large increase in Chinese investment across light manufacturing industries and wide-ranging economic reforms, such as financial liberalisation, which is basically the establishment of higher interest rates that equate the demand for, and the supply of savings.” China’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) spiked 75% in 2017, providing Egypt with a large boost. The UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have also invested heavily in Egypt, especially in real estate and development.
There is nothing that the West can provide to Egypt to surpass what Arab and Eastern nations have done for its economy. The Egypt-Russia Trade and Investment Summary (YTD) 2022 indicates that Moscow and Cairo will continue to strengthen its relationship. A key to this report is that Russia is helping Egypt produce its first nuclear power plant, financing 85% of the project. El Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant will be positioned 320 kilometers from Cairo. But this deal initially began in 2015 when Russia promised to finance the project, and signed preliminary contracts in December 2017. The total project is set to cost $28.7 billion. Egypt will repay Russia the remaining 15% in installments with a repayment period of 22 years and an interest rate of 3%.
So basically, the plant will become Russia’s nuclear power in Africa and among the Arab world. They are anticipating completion in 2026 and it is safe to say that the West is going to do everything in its power to prevent this from happening. Look at the map above to see how strategic the positioning of this plant will be for Russia in not just Africa and the Arab nations but a stone’s throw away from Europe as well.
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This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
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