Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

A number of high-ranking military officials have joined some politicians in calling for Germany to bring back compulsory military service, and the AfD parliamentary group has now tabled a motion to discuss the possibility in Germany’s parliament next month.

The motion entitled “Reactivation of conscription” will be debated in the Bundestag on March 3, after which the proposal will be referred to the parliament’s defense committee for further deliberation.

Military personnel have called for a return to military service, which was phased out under former chancellor Angela Merkel in 2011, in order to replenish the German army’s depleting numbers. The Bundeswehr currently has 183,500 active personnel, ranking it the 28th largest army in the world.

Proposals to bring back military service were initiated by newly appointed Defense Minister Boris Pistorius who suggested such a move would restore a “connection to civic society at large” for a German youth that has lost its sense of civic duty.

In condemning recent attacks on emergency responders and police officers, Pistorius told Bavarian newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, “It appears that the people have lost the awareness that they themselves are part of the state and of society. Taking responsibility for a set period could open eyes and ears to that.”

Calls were swiftly rejected by other members of the German federal government. Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the same newspaper the debate was a “phantom dispute” and insisted the government’s efforts “have to be concentrated on strengthening the Bundeswehr as a highly professional army.”

Government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit dismissed the proposal as “nonsensical.”

However, military leaders appear to be on the side of some form of conscription.

“I believe that a nation that needs to become more resilient in times like these will have a higher level of awareness if it is mixed through with soldiers,” said Jan Christian Kaack, the chief of the German navy.

Following the announcement of the parliamentary debate, AfD MP Rüdiger Lucassen told German news outlet Junge Freiheit: “The arguments against conscription were always bogus arguments,” and insisted the Bundeswehr in its current capacity “is not capable of national defense because of its lack of personnel.”

The debate follows recent polling by YouGov that revealed just 5 percent of Germans would volunteer for military service if the country came under attack, while almost five times more (24 percent) would flee the country as soon as possible. A third of respondents (33 percent) said they would try to continue to live their normal life.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris.

Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report on how the United States government blew up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September continues to generate rippling geopolitical waves all across the spectrum.

Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.

I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.

Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.

The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.

That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.

There’s a mention that on January 2022, “after some wobbling”, Chancellor Scholz “was now firmly on the American team”. Well, by now the plan had been under discussion, according to Hersh’s source, for at least a few months. That also means that Scholz remained “on the American team” all the way to the terror attack, on September 2022.

As for the Brits, the Poles and all NATO games being played off Bornhom Island more than a year before the attack, that had been extensively reported by Russian media – from Kommersant to RIA Novosti.

The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.

So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.

While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.

In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.

Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.

That elusive source

The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].”

So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism.

And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”.

This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.

So welcome to PIAB: the President Intelligence Advisory Board. All members are appointed by the current POTUS, in this case Joe Biden. If we examine the list of current members of PIAB, we should, in theory, find Hersh’s source (see, for instance, “President Biden Announces Appointments to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Science Board”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; and “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”.

Here are the members of PIAB appointed by Biden: Sandy Winnefeld; Gilman Louie; Janet Napolitano; Richard Verma; Evan Bayh; Anne Finucane; Mark Angelson; Margaret Hamburg; Kim Cobb; and Kneeland Youngblood.

Hersh’s source, according to his narrative, asserts, without a shadow of a doubt, that “Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine” and that “alarm was growing in Washington”. It’s beggars belief that this supposedly well informed lot didn’t know about the massing of NATO-led Ukrainian troops across the line of contact, getting ready to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass.

What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.

For all its meticulous reporting, the inescapable feeling remains that what Hersh’s narrative indicts is the Biden combo terror gambit, and never the overall U.S. plan to provoke Russia into a proxy war with NATO using Ukraine as cannon fodder.

Moreover, Hersh’s source may be eminently flawed. He – or she – said, according to Hersh, that Russia “failed to respond” to the pipeline terror attack because “maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did”.

In itself, this may prove that the source was not even a member of PIAB, and did not receive the classified PIAB report assessing Putin’s crucial speech of September 30, which identifies the “responsible” party. If that’s the case, the source is just connected (italics mine) to some PIAB member; was not invited to the months-long situation-room planning; and certainly is not aware of the finer details of this administration’s war in Ukraine.

Considering Sy Hersh’s stellar track record in investigative journalism, it would be quite refreshing for him to elucidate these inconsistencies. That would get rid of the fog of rumors depicting the report as a mere limited hangout.

Considering there are several “silos” of intel within the U.S. oligarchy, with their corresponding apparatuses, and Hersh has cultivated his contacts among nearly all of them for decades, there’s no question the allegedly privileged information on the Nord Stream saga came from a very precise address – with a very precise agenda.

So we should see who the story really indicts: certainly the Straussian neo-con/neoliberal-con combo behind “Biden”, and the wobbly President himself. As I pointed out in my initial analysis, the CIA gets away with flying colors.

And we should not forget that the Big Narrative is changing fast: the RAND report, the looming NATO humiliation in Ukraine, Balloon Hysteria, UFO psy op. The real “threat” is – who else – China. What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris. Knowing that those who really run the show never show their hand.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”

 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.

It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.

First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.

“I am not a number. I am a free man,” is the mantra chanted in each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role of Number Six, the imprisoned government agent.

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two, the Village administrator a.k.a. prison warden. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.”

Still, he refuses to give up.

“Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.

As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”

The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State, which is rapidly transitioning into a full-fledged Surveillance State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

The American Surveillance State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.

It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

None of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the Village.

So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.

Think for yourself. Be an individual.

As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never stop being prisoners.

One week ago we said that every market period has a distinct bogeyman for when a trade doesn’t go your way: “8 years ago, every most hated rally was “explained” with HFTs; 4 years ago it was gamma. Now it’s 0DTE.”

8 years every most hated rally was “explained” with HFTs; 4 years ago it was gamma. Now it’s 0DTE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 5, 2023

Fast forward to today when JPMorgan’s former permabull-turned-ultrabear Marko Kolanovic, who earlier this week one again reiterated his bearish case alongside Michael Wilson only to see stocks rip higher, did just that when he not only blamed Zero-Days to Expiration options (which we profiled first in “What’s Behind The Explosion In 0DTE Option Trading“, and followed up here “Why 0DTE Is So Important, And Why The VIX Is Now Meaningless“) for why stocks refuse to go down and finally prove him right (as a reminder Marko erroneously spent most of 2022 urging clients to buy the dip, then turned bearish just before the January meltup), but warned that 0DTE itself is emerging as one of the potential ticking time bombs embedded within the market’s microstructure.

Marko starts off by lamenting the continued melt up, which he did not anticipate (as otherwise he clearly would have told his clients to go along for the ride), and instead he explains (after the fact of course( why it occurred, and why those investors who chase the risk wave higher are begging for punishment from none other than the Fed itself, because who in their right minds would fight the Fed… although actually the answer is pretty much everyone as we explained a few weeks ago.

Since the last Fed meeting, the 2-year bond yield is up ~60bp. After all, it is the bond market moving toward the Fed, rather than the Fed to the bond market. However, equity markets are rallying, and the prevailing sentiment is of exuberance and greed. For instance, AAII % bulls is the highest since 2021 and AAII % bears is the lowest since 2021, the CNN fear-greed index is at extreme greed, and financial conditions (e.g., as measured by BFCIUS) are the least restrictive in a year. This divergence between equity and bond markets is odd – as the main premise of the recent equity rally was not just the Fed cutting interest rates in the second half but also a soft landing. Leadership of equity markets has also been upside-down given the yields moving higher. In fact, it is the lower quality, long-duration segments such as unprofitable and speculative tech that has been at the forefront of the rally (while short-duration segments lagged). There is an old adage ”don’t fight the Fed,” but this behavior is not just fighting but also taunting the Fed with crypto, meme stocks, and unprofitable companies responding best to Fed communications. Retail activity (volumes) are near record high with over 20% of all market volume coming from retail orders.

Here, Marko is simply recapping what we said more than two weeks ago when we first pointed out that it was once again retail that is leading the charge higher, and as we followed up today in ‘Here They Come: Hedge Funds “Start To Rerisk”, Buy Tech For 11 Straight Days“, it was indeed retail – like in early 2021 – that woke the hedge fund fast money out of hibernation and back into buying, with just the Long Only crowd still waiting on the sidelines, but not for long.

Of course, Marko can’t concede that we may have seen a low in the market now that there is a panicked pursuit of risk higher, and instead he presents – as he has done for the past two months – several arguments why buying here is a bad idea even though stocks are now about 400 points higher than where he first said to sell and/or short. He starts off by pointing out the correlation between 2Y yields and stocks and asserts that “the move in 2y interest rates since the Fed meeting should result in a ~5- 10% sell-off in Nasdaq (Figures 1 and 2), which is actually up ~3% since, and for high-beta tech the divergence is much larger. However, this divergence cannot go much further, in our view, and may revert.“

The Croat then shifts to macro challenges facing risk – all of which are well known and have been largely pried in by now – although not according to the JPM strategist who claims that “over the last three months, complacency set in with investors when it comes to geopolitical risks. There is a perception that the energy crisis is over and that the war in Ukraine is not an issue any more – supporting the record rally in European stocks – and recent geopolitical tensions related to China do not resonate with short-term financial inflows into the asset class.” Of course, since Kolanovic remains bearish – for at least another 100 points in the S&P – he believes that “geopolitical risks may re-escalate in the near future… which would negatively impact European FX and equities.” Among the potential geopolitical powderkegs, is that Europe still remains beholden to Russia for its energy needs, to wit:

Recently, a number of media outlets and politicians have claimed that Europe won the energy war due to warm weather, increased LNG shipments, and reduced consumption. However, this might only amount to a short-term Band-Aid at an unsustainable annual cost of 5% of EU GDP along with shutdowns of industrial and residential consumption. Furthermore, the situation remains quite fragile, for instance, if Russia were to disrupt some of the Norway gas pipelines or LNG shipping, e.g., as a response to recently published allegations (e.g., see here), the energy crisis would rapidly escalate. Also it has been broadly reported that a new Russian offensive could start in the near future, and that would most likely reduce risk appetite globally and negatively impact European assets. The relationship of the West with China has also been deteriorating recently, and as China regains economic momentum, one should expect more rather than less geopolitical tensions.

While it remains to be seen if a new geopolitical crisis will dent risk assets – in a world where the elusive bear case increasingly needs a fresh global war – Kolanovic actually makes an interesting point next, arguing that it is the 0DTE phenomenon discussed above (and earlier) that could potentially destabilize stocks and lead to a painful flush lower.

Here, the Croat reminds readers of the infamous Volmageddon episode in Feb 2018, which was basically a historic VIX spike triggered by a collapse in inverse VIX products and fueled by further systematic selling.

For Kolanovic, it’s deja vu all over again, and the JPM strategist claims that we may get a similar market event, only instead of inverse VIX ETN, this time he blames 0DTE option activity as the source of vol suppression and selling which is destabilizing markets and could lead to a furious selloff. Here is his explanation:

The rise of inverse volatility products prior to Volmageddon started as a virtuous feedback loop of volatility selling. Selling the VIX directly suppressed the level of implied volatility (boosting performance of short volatility products), as well as indirect suppression of realized volatility (via gamma hedging of underlying options). The decline of volatility and intraday hedging also manifested as buying the dip behavior. As the strong performance of volatility selling became self-fulfilling, leverage and tail risk in these products increased. On February 5, 2018, leverage was such that an increase of the VIX resulted in daily rebalance (closing of short VIXpositions) that overwhelmed the market liquidity and led to an uncontrolled increase of volatility. This in turn triggered further selling from various other systematic investors such as volatility targeters, gamma hedgers, and CTAs.

Remember what we said above: 4 years ago traders blamed gamma when a trade didn’t go their way, and now they blame 0DTE? Well, here is Marko capturing perfectly what we said, by pointing out that “while history doesn’t repeat, it often rhymes, and current selling of 0DTE (zero day to expiry), daily and weekly options is having a similar impact on markets.” The impact  he is referring to is an analogue to the VIX suppression by inverse vol ETNs in 2018, not that it is 0DTE’s fault for keeping his bearish scenario from materializing. 

But we digress: going back to 0DTE, the JPM strategist notes that the volumes in these short-term options are “very large” which of course is correct as we showed earlier today.

Marko picks up on this, and in the chart below he shows the daily notional volumes in these short-term options is ~$1 trillion; the Croat claims that “these options are net sold by directional investors, and supply of gamma is likely causing a suppression of realized intraday volatility.” These are typically low delta options that rarely get in the money, and their impact is mostly through volatility suppression and an intraday buy-the-dip pattern that results from hedging. However, Kolanovic warns, “if there is a big move when these options get in the money, and sellers cannot support these positions, forced covering would result in very large directional flows.”

These flows could “particularly impact markets given the current low liquidity environment” (or, inversely, the lack of a 0DTE crash particularly impacts markets by pushing them higher every day in the current low liquidity environment).

Marko then takes his thought experiment in 0DTE precrime to the final level, and says that by estimating how much of these short-term options are net sold by directional investors (and hedged by dealers), if there is a large market move, he calculates that “covering of short-term option delta could result in intraday selling on a large down move (or buying on a large up move) on the order of ~$30bn.”

And since 0DTE is just the tip of the derivative iceberg, Kolanovic warns that “one should also take into account that these flows would trigger further one-way flows from monthly option hedging as well as volatility control strategies and CTAs (particularly in a case of a large down move).”

Couple of points here: of course the market is unstable: that’s hardly news; in fact the market has been fragile and illiquid since the start of QE1, and has only gotten worse the more central bank intervention it benefited from over the years. But that fragility was a double edged sword since any resulting selloff would prompt the Fed to intervene. In fact, some bulls should hope that Kolanovic is right because a market crash would only precipitate a faster end to tightening and QT and lead to a far more powerful and sustainable rally. Another point is that we have seen 0DTE aggressively expand its presence for the past 3 years, so far without any dramatic consequences; and while it is certain that one day we will have Volmageddon 2.0 (whether due to 0DTE or something else), it could be tomorrow or it could be in one year, and by then the S&P could be at 4,500… or 5,000… or 6,000. One thing is certain: now that he is in full-blown bear mode again, don’t expect Marko to tell you when stocks will rise, only that they will fall (eventually), and if one week, or one month, or one year from today stocks are (much) higher, the Croat will have a detailed and convincing explanation for why the rally simply refuses to end (as it has so far). If only he also had a just as convincing way to make his clients some money…

Authored by Chris Hedges via Scherpost.com,

Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state…

The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.

Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.

We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.

“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018.

“These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”

Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”

The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties.  African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.

Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control. 

Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about  incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them. 

A class I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feint that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ. 

My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.

August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Mame, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks: 

You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got blindyitis. A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.

Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.

*  *  *

NOTE TO READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

China has fallen victim to what economists call the middle-income trap. Economists consider a low-income country to have around $5,000 annual income per capita. Middle-income countries have between $8,000 and $15,000 annual income per capita. High-income countries begin at around $20,000 annual income per capita.

China’s per capita annual income is $12,970 — solidly in the middle income category. By the way, in the U.S. it’s $75,180, among the highest in the world (second to Switzerland).

Due to China’s extreme income inequality, it is more useful to think of China as having two populations. One population of about 500 million urban workers has an annual per capita income of about $28,000, while a second population of about 900 million villagers has an annual per capita income of about $5,000.

That would put the 900 million villagers solidly in the lower income category, not even close to middle income. And there is extreme income inequality within the 500 million high-income groups such that most of those would have a middle income of about $12,000 per year, while a select few would be earning millions of dollars per year each.

China is predominately a low-income country with a significant middle-income cohort and a tiny slice of the super-rich. This income inequality makes China’s climb out of the middle-income ranks even more difficult. And the super-elite cohort is a potential source of social unrest among the less well-off.

The conventional wisdom is that the rise from low-income to middle-income status is fairly straightforward. You begin by moving tens of millions (or in China’s case, hundreds of millions) of people from rural villages to cities. You provide decent if spartan housing, public transportation, and attract foreign direct investment to build manufacturing plants.

With some training, the city residents become adept at assembly-style manufacturing. Low labor costs allow goods to be assembled cheaply and exported at attractive prices. The cycle feeds on itself with more migration, more direct foreign investment, and expanded manufacturing capacity. Per capita income rises from the low to middle-income range.

But to make it to the big leagues of high-income status, you need high technology applied to high-value-added innovation and manufacturing. China lacks this. China advocates seem impressed that 90% of our iPhones come from China. That’s true, but Chinese value-added is only about 6%. If an iPhone costs $1,000, only about $60 goes to China’s net of import costs and royalties.

In fact,very few countries (excluding OPEC members) have ever made this leap from middle-income to high-income. The only examples in Asia are Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.

This list leaves many more countries (Malaysia, India, Turkey, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Chile, and others) stuck in the middle-income trap with China.

High growth from a starting point of low-income to middle-income is not surprising and should be expected. It’s not a “miracle.” It’s just what happens when you clamp down on corruption, build enough infrastructure, and move millions from the country to the city. China’s done that.

The key variable in forecasting Chinese growth in the years ahead is therefore technology.

Can China not merely license foreign technology (at a high cost), but develop its own technology ahead of advanced-economy competitors?

The outlook here is not good for China.

They have shown little or no capacity to invent or produce in areas such as advanced semiconductors, high-capacity aircraft, medical diagnostics, nuclear reactors, 3D printing, AI, water purification, and virtual reality.

Projects that China has on display that are advanced (such as their bullet trains that run quietly at 310 kph) are done with technology licensed from Germany or France or are done with stolen technology. China has done little innovation on its own.

But the stolen technology channel is being shut down by bans on advanced semiconductor exports to China, and sanctions on the use of 5G systems from Huawei, for example.

On top of all that, China faces powerful economic headwinds in the form of excessive debt, adverse demographics, collapsing real estate markets, and a lack of oil and natural gas reserves. The country is also trying to reopen from its pandemic failures at a time when the world may be entering another global recession worse than 2008.

China also faces powerful geopolitical headwinds as a result of its genocide against the Uyghur minority, involuntary organ harvesting from political prisoners, concentration camps, female infanticide (over 20 million baby girls killed), suppression of religion, censorship, social credit scores, house arrests, and expropriation from entrepreneurs like Jack Ma of Alibaba Group.

Above all, China is handicapped by its return to Mao-style Communism under the leadership of the new Emperor for Life, Comrade Xi Jinping.

Xi has largely abandoned the relatively open economic policies of Deng Xiaoping, which prevailed from 1992 to 2007 under the leadership of Deng’s successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, with an updated version of Mao’s policies which place the Communist Party and its “core leader” at the center of all decision making and economic direction.

China’s economic headwinds can be summed up in three words — debt, demographics, and decoupling.

There is substantial empirical evidence that national debt to-GDP ratios in excess of 90% result in slower growth. It’s tough to precisely determine China’s, but its debt-to-GDP ratio is probably about 350%.

This problem is exacerbated in China by the fact that much of the debt is not spent productively. I have visited construction projects in the countryside of China where entire cities visible to the horizon were being built from the ground up.

Along with the cities were airports, highways, golf courses, convention centers, and other amenities. It was all empty. None of the buildings were occupied except by a handful of show tenants. Promises of future tenants rang hollow. The construction did create jobs and purchases of materials for a few years, but the debt-financed infrastructure was completely wasted.

The only ways out of a debt trap of the kind China has constructed are default, debt restructuring or inflation.

The last two are just different kinds of defaults. The situation does not necessarily resolve itself quickly. The debt burden can persist for years. Just don’t expect robust growth while it persists.

China’s birth rate is now below what is called the replacement rate. That rate is 2.1 children per couple. China’s current rate is reportedly about 1.6, but some analysts say that the actual rate is 1.0 or even lower. At that rate, China’s population will shrink from 1.4 billion to about 800 million in the next 70 years.

That’s a loss of 600 million people in a single lifetime.

If you assume productivity will remain constant (a reasonable assumption if China fails the high-tech transition), and the population drops by 40%, then it follows that the economy will shrink by 40% or more. That’s the greatest economic collapse in the history of the world.

In all, the pandemic, demographics, debt, decoupling, technology, and global recession should negatively impact Chinese growth in the years ahead.

This growth story inevitably bleeds into geopolitics in terms of a potential invasion of Taiwan and war in the South China Sea.

It is no doubt the greatest economic and geopolitical drama playing out in the world today with important implications for all investors.

Via The Cradle,

The US army is analyzing sending thousands of alleged Iranian weapons and over a million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine as part of Washington’s latest bid to fuel the war against Russia.

According to unnamed US and European officials that spoke with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the arsenal would include over 5,000 assault rifles, 1.6 million rounds of small arms ammunition, a small number of antitank missiles, and more than 7,000 proximity fuses that were recently seized in the Gulf of Oman allegedly on their way to Yemen.

While this cache of weapons is small compared to what western nations have sent Ukraine over the past year, Pentagon officials reportedly see in the delivery a symbolic punishment for Iran supplying Russia with drones – a claim both Tehran and Moscow deny.

“It’s a message to take weapons meant to arm Iran’s proxies and flip them to achieve our priorities in Ukraine, where Iran is providing arms to Russia,” one US official told the WSJ.

However, transferring weapons from one conflict to another remains a legal challenge for the White House, as the UN arms embargo on Iran requires western powers to destroy, store, or get rid of the seized weapons.

US President Joe Biden could presumably overcome this legal obstacle “by crafting an executive order, or working with Congress to empower the US to seize the weapons under civil forfeiture authorities and send them to Ukraine,” the WSJ claims.

“What change can this make to war? … They’ve been sending much heavier weapons,” Nasr al-Din Amir, Yemen’s Deputy Information Minister, told the US outlet about Washington’s plans. Since the start of the NATO-instigated war in Ukraine, Washington and its North Atlantic allies have been depleting their weapons stocks to give Kiev a fighting chance against Moscow’s forces.

During a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Monday, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that “the current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production.” Western leaders recently tried to convince Latin American nations to donate their weapon stocks to Ukraine in their desperate bid to counter Russia, but their suggestion was immediately shot down.

“We are not with either side. We are for peace,” said Colombian President Gustavo Petro last month. Similarly, his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Saliva told Biden during a meeting at the White House: “Brazil is a country of peace. At this moment, we need to find those who want peace, a word that has so far been used very little.”

“I don’t think sending weapons to prolong a conflict has support in Latin America,” Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told the Financial Times. Argentina also followed a similar line when a spokesperson of the defense ministry confirmed that Buenos Aires “will not cooperate with the war.”

Russia has warned the US and its NATO allies that continuing to send weapons to Ukraine risks involving them in the conflict directly.

Authored by Dr.Sean Lin and Jacky Guan via The Epoch Times,

In November 2022, the release of an artificial intelligence (AI) online chatting program named ChatGPT shocked the world. This program is so “smart” that it delivers frighteningly human-like responses and seems to have very few flaws compared to previous versions. Not only do people treat it as a conversation companion, but they have also started to use this AI technology for a variety of tasks, such as completing homework, creating stunning images, writing poems, etc.

Using ChatGPT is like accessing a supercomputer’s brain, making this technology intriguing and exciting but also a bit scary and threatening. In 2014, Elon Musk warned that with AI, “we are summoning the demon,” but this threat could only become real when AI like ChatGPT could generate responses to questions that are indistinguishable from how a human would respond. This technology is so powerful that there now exists a widespread concern that the landscape of many industries will be transmuted by this advancement, including academia and health care.

Jobs that usually require a human touch, such as those in the fields of journalism and the service industry, are facing replacement and automation. We have long thought that the art of language stands at the pinnacle of human wisdom, yet AI is knocking right at its doorstep. It is challenging our uniqueness and intruding upon our lives.

AI Is Now Extremely Advanced and Capable

ChatGPT can basically chat about anything you want. From analyzing code for you to writing full-on essays and poems, this free online program describes itself as a computer program designed to “understand and respond to natural language inputs,” such as text conversations.

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The program is based on a set of technologies developed and used in programs that generate user-friendly responses. AI is something that needs to be taught how to think and respond using technology that functions like neural networks. This process involves feeding the AI mountains of information before it can process it, adapt, learn, create, and become intelligent.

ChatGPT uses the latest edition of GPT and is capable of generating a large amount of human-like text based on minimal input. It already processed an unimaginably large amount of data that enabled it to learn what to return to the user when asked a question. For example, if you asked ChatGPT to write you a poem, it would generate something like this:

“Beneath the starry sky so bright,

With gentle breeze and silver light,

I stand and gaze into the night,

And let my thoughts take flight.

The moon and stars above me shine,

Guiding me through the dark divine,

Reminding me of love and time,

And all the beauty that is mine.

The world is vast, yet small and grand,

A mystery waiting to be scanned,

With secrets hidden in the sand,

And stories waiting to be canned.

So let me stand beneath the stars,

And let my soul and spirit soar,

For in this beauty, free from bars,

I find my heart forevermore.”

Isn’t this poem impressive? With the tremendous volume of data feeding ChatGPT, it can process our poems, analyze them, and produce a new poem in seconds. And the result could be different each time, even if you write the same command for it.

ChatGPT can also do the same with essays, entire chunks of code, and much more. It can have a casual conversation with you and knows how to adjust its jargon to even explain quantum computing in a way seventh graders can understand it.

It is understandable why many are instantly attracted to the program, as it can seemingly solve many issues and offers a significant shortcut for completing tasks. The chat is free and works extremely well; what could go wrong with this technology, except for being a teacher’s nightmare?

ChatGPT Can’t Be Held Accountable for Its Work

Recently, scientists have tested the limitations of ChatGPT and instructed it to write components of research articles that were later published in distinguished scientific journals like Nature. After the news broke that an AI was able to write research papers, it became the epicenter of a hot debate still shaking the community today.

Pro-AI arguments see technology like ChatGPT as the next step in human advancement.

It would make even science more efficient, reduce human labor, and make life easier.

The other side of the argument is that there is no way to hold artificial intelligence accountable for its work. If the program reaches the wrong conclusions or its algorithms aren’t mature enough, how can the program take responsibility for it?

The accountability issue is not just about when things go wrong. The use of AI-generated text without proper citation “could be considered plagiarism,” says Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the family of Science journals. For that reason, a few articles have already been published with ChatGPT listed as one of the authors, while publishers are hastening the push for regulation.

In fact, after papers were published in Nature with ChatGPT as a co-author, the editors-in-chief for Nature and Science concluded that “ChatGPT doesn’t meet the standard for authorship” because such a title carries accountability and liability to it, something out of the question for AI.

However, the core issue behind the authorship dispute is that journal editors are no longer certain about how much or to what extent the article was generated by ChatGPT. Scientific experiments likely still require studies conducted by humans. But authors of review articles that attribute ChatGPT likely did so because it played a significant role in the writing process.

Some biomedical researchers have used ChatGPT to conduct drug development research and have been able to identify potential drug chemicals that were missed in the past. With the help of AI, a new age of explosive advancements in the biomedical field is sure to be ushered in.

However, how will researchers know when AI data become misleading? Will anyone dare to challenge the algorithms behind this data? These are not the only questions we face today, because AI seems to also be taking over health care, either functioning as a robot or through an app.

Artificial Intelligence Should Not Replace Health Care Workers

Some clinics have been exploring the usage of ChatGPT to conduct patient consultations. Mental health clinics even obtained better performance outcomes when they adopted ChatGPT to take over consultations with their patients, with many patients not even realizing that they were talking to a robot.

AI could become the next nurse or physician’s assistant that helps you recover after an accident, or that performs the key incisions on your next operation. The future of health care could transform rapidly, as people might not even have to go to the doctor’s office at all with the combination of AI and telemedicine. All you have to do is open an app on your phone and talk with a chatbot, tell it about your symptoms, and it will curate a prescription for you. But there is a level of trust developed during face-to-face interactions that is missing from this AI model.

AI robots using a GPT can also be used to treat high-risk patients such as those with mental disorders or in rehab by replacing the doctor when monitoring the patients and administering treatment, conducting checkups, evaluating risks, and taking action if needed. However, the same accountability question arises when we implement AI into the medical field.

Here, the accountability question is more concerning, because who will be held accountable when the patient experiences complications from the wrong medicine or the wrong dose? You can’t blame the doctor because he was just following the AI. You can’t blame the AI because it’s a program. In the end, who will be held accountable?

For people to feel safe around AI, strict liability rules need to be imposed to restrict the freedom these things have. However, if these programs are to improve, they need to have more freedom to operate and learn. Although this appears to be a catch-22, the core issue is whether humans should let AI and robots take care of them.

With the capability of AI increasing exponentially, why are medical schools even training their students, and for what? In the future, if AI loses power or malfunctions, would licensed doctors still know how to treat patients without the help of AI? How dependent will we become on AI?

Human Beings Are Accelerating Toward a Crossroad

AI has a lot of potential and will inevitably become a part of our future. However, allowing AI to play a more significant role in medicine and health care will give it more power to influence our understanding of health and well-being. It may even allow AI to alter our bodies.

If AI becomes ubiquitous, will it make humans dumber and reduce us in all aspects? Over time, children might just talk to their chatbot tablets instead of their parents, people might forget how to alleviate symptoms of things as common as colds, and basic tasks like writing an essay might become things of the past. This will inevitably undermine humans and affect our development. When technology becomes so advanced that we can command robots with our minds, might we one day devolve into those aliens with lanky limbs and inflated heads?

When AI begins to mimic human thinking and presents human-like language, we begin to see the reality of the human brain laid bare: They are essentially machines that process information. When computers gather enough of a volume of data, they can engage a sophisticated algorithm to generate human-like thinking and response. The more people use it, the more the ChatGPT AI will be trained to become more human-like, possibly eventually becoming wiser than mankind.

So what makes us humans unique?

We have witnessed supercomputers defeat the human champions of chess and Go games.

Now, AI has arrived in the fields of which people are genuinely proud—fields that revolve around creation, emotion, human interaction, artistic expression, and so on.

This is a critical time when human beings need to think more deeply about where our wisdom comes from. Are our inspirations simply born of an accumulation of myriad data? AI and computers get their data from human input or via trawling the depths of seas of data. Do we, too, get our “original” ideas this way? Why do people get inspiration and creative ideas that seemingly have nothing to do with their prior experience and knowledge?

The threat of AI and supercomputers is not just about losing more jobs. And it goes beyond reducing human thinking capability. The fundamental threat of uncontrolled AI technology is that it cuts off human beings’ connection with our creator. Through technological advancement, human beings are constructing digital gods for people to worship. Using AI or robots to improve life may be the sweet side of this drug, but using AI to replace human thinking is the darker side.

The pressing issue here is how to safeguard our human spirituality. How do we maintain our connection to the divine? Human beings are not just flesh and bones, like how a machine is simply composed of mechanical parts.

The development of AI technologies like ChatGPT is the tipping point for a long-standing issue we’ve been facing—the (dis)connection with God and the true meaning of our human lives as we replace that connection. We’re faced with a choice: Do we keep falling into this bottomless technological pit, or should we return to a traditional way where human beings maintain their connection with the divine?

Here’s some food for thought: “How Humankind Came To Be” by Li Hongzhi.