Authored by Amy Gamm via The Epoch Times,

A group of investors representing over $1.5 trillion in assets under management sent demand letters on Feb. 7 to five of Europe’s biggest banks, calling on them to stop financing fossil fuel firms by the end of 2023.

ShareAction—an investment group whose website states that its “vision is a world where the financial system serves our planet and its people” by driving change until its high standards for responsible investment “are adopted worldwide”—coordinated the letters that were backed by up to 30 investors, according to a ShareAction news statement.

The 30 investors, ShareAction said, each wrote to at least one of the five European banks—Barclays, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, and Societe Generale. Twenty of them wrote to all five.

The letters expressed concern that the banks’ cooperation in the development of “new oil and gas fields may jeopardize the global path to net-zero,” and were “holding back the renewable energy revolution in Europe,” a revolution that has recently become “more important than ever” with the energy supply uncertainty that has come in the wake of Russian’s Ukraine invasion, the statement explained.

“These investor-backed letters should be a wakeup call to banks that have made net-zero commitments,” ShareAction’s Jeanne Martin said in the statement.

Each of the five letters sent to each of the banks contained identical language and, depending on the recipient, had between 22 and 27 investor signatories.

1.5 Degrees Celsius

The letter to Barclays (pdf) demanded that the bank “stop directly financing new oil & gas fields by the end of 2023 at the latest, to demonstrate its commitment to tackling the climate crisis and keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The “1.5 degrees Celsius” reference harkens back to the International Energy Agency (IEA) advisory for energy investors issued in May 2021, called the Roadmap to Net Zero Emission by 2050. This guidance supports the aims of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, which include capping a rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times and requiring net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

“The pathway to net zero is narrow but still achievable,” IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol told Reuters at the time. “If we want to reach net zero by 2050 we do not need any more investments in new oil, gas and coal projects.”

Barclays is the second biggest European lender to the top 50 oil and gas expanders, having provided $48 billion between 2016 and 2021, according to ShareAction. BNP Paribas is ranked third with $46 billion during the same timeframe, followed by Credit Agricole, Societe Generale, and Deutsche Bank as fourth ($34 billion), fifth ($34 billion), and sixth ($28 billion), respectively.

According to the Independent, a spokesperson from Barclays responded to the letter, saying, “As one of the first banks to set an ambition to become net zero by 2050 we are clear that addressing climate change is an urgent and complex challenge.”

The response went on to explain that Barclays believes it can make the “greatest difference” by working with and financing clients that are actively involved in a transition of their business practices to a low-carbon economy.

BNP Paribas replied that it had “announced new targets last month to ‘accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy,’” including ending the financing of any new oil and gas exploration and production, Reuters reported.

Likewise, Credit Agricole said that it had already stopped lending to new oil extraction projects and that it had a plan in place to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

And Deutsche Bank, in an email response, said that it is “focused on supporting our customers in their transformation towards becoming carbon neutral,” according to Reuters, adding that it had significantly reduced “engagement” in the fossil fuel sectors since 2016.

ShareAction has been successful thus far in its efforts. In the letter sent to the banks, the investment group said that it didn’t need to send a letter to HSBC, its top-ranked fossil fuel financier, because in December 2022, the bank had pledged to “no longer provide new lending or capital markets finance … to new oil and gas fields and related infrastructure” as a response to investor engagement.

The letter went on to say that so far, 11 out of the top 25 “biggest European banks now have some form of asset financing restriction for new oil and gas,” including BBVA, ING, Lloyds Banking Group, and UniCredit.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Everyone with a brain already knew the Empire did it. Now Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report  not only details how Nord Stream 1 and 2 were attacked, but also names names: from the toxic Straussian neoliberal-con trio Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland all the way to the Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief.

Arguably the most incandescent nugget in Hersh’s narrative is to point ultimate responsibility directly at the White House. The CIA, for its part, gets away with it. The whole report may be read as the framing of a scapegoat. A very fragile, shoddy scapegoat – what with those classified documents in the garage, the endless stares into the void, the cornucopia of incomprehensible mumbling, and of course the whole, ghastly, years-long family corruption carousel in and around Ukraine, still to be completely unveiled.

Hersh’s report happened to pop up immediately after the deadly earthquakes in Turkey/Syria. This is an investigative journalism earthquake in itself, straddling over fault lines and revealing countless open air fissures, nuggets of truth gasping for air amidst the rubble.

But is that all there is?

Does the narrative hold from start to finish? Yes and no.

First of all, why now?

This is a leak – essentially from one Deep State insider, Hersh’s key source. This 21st century “Deep Throat” remix may be appalled at the toxicity of the system, but at the same time he knows that whatever he says, there will be no consequences.

Cowardly Berlin – ignoring the nuts and bolts of the scheme all along – will not even squeak. After all the Green gang has been ecstatic, because the terror attack has thoroughly advanced their medieval de-industrialization agenda. In parallel, as an extra bonus, all the other European vassals receive further confirmation this is the fate that awaits them if they don’t follow His Master’s Voice.

Hersh’s narrative frames the Norwegians as the essential accessory to terror. Hardly surprising: NATO’s Jens “Peace is War” Stoltenberg has been a CIA asset for perhaps half a century. And Oslo of course had its own motives to be part of the deal; to collect loads of extra cash selling whatever spare energy it had for desperate European customers.

A little narrative problem is that Norway, unlike the U.S. Navy, still does not have any operational P-8 Poseidon. What was clear at the time is that an American P-8 was commuting back and forth – with mid-air refueling – from the U.S. to Bornholm island.

A positive screamer is that Hersh – rather, his key source – had the MI6 completely vanish from the narrative. SVR, Russian intel, had focused like a laser on MI6 at the time, as well as the Poles. What still cements the narrative is that the combo behind “Biden” provided the planning, the intel and coordinated the logistics, while the final act – in this case a sonar buoy detonating the C4 explosives – may have been perpetrated by the Norwegian vassals.

The problem is the buoy may have been dropped by an American P-8. And there’s no explanation of why one of the sections of Nord Stream 2 escaped intact.

Hersh’s modus operandi is legendary. From the perspective of a foreign correspondent on the ground since the mid-1990s, from the U.S. and NATOstan to all corners of Eurasia, it’s easy for someone like me to understand how he uses anonymous sources and how he accesses – and protects – his extensive list of contacts: trust works both ways. His track record is absolutely unrivalled.

But of course the possibility remains: what if he is being played? Is this no more than a limited hangout? After all, the narrative oscillates wildly between minute detail and quite a few dead ends, constantly featuring a huge paper trail and too many people in the loop – which implies exaggerated risk. The CIA hesitating too much to go for the kill is a certified red alert throughout the narrative – especially when we know that the ideal underwater actors for such an op would have come from the CIA Special Activities Division, and not the U.S. Navy.

What will Russia do?

Arguably the whole planet is thinking what will be the Russian response.

Surveying the chessboard, what the Kremlin and the Security Council see is Merkel confessing Minsk 2 was merely a ruse; the imperial attack on the Nord Streams (they got the picture, but might not have all the insider details provided by Hersh’s source); former Israeli PM Bennett on the record detailing how the Anglo-Americans killed the Ukraine peace process which was on track in Istanbul last year.

So it’s no wonder that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has made it clear that when it comes to nuclear negotiations with the Americans, any proposed gestures of goodwill are “unjustified, untimely and uncalled for.”

The Ministry, on purpose, and somewhat ominously, was very vague on a key issue: “strategic nuclear forces objects” that have been attacked by Kiev – helped by the Americans. These attacks may have involved “military-technical and information-intelligence” aspects.

When it comes to the Global South, what the Hersh report imprints is Rogue Superpower, in giant blood red letters, as state sponsor of terrorism: the ritual burial – at the bottom of the Baltic Sea – of international law, and even the Empire’s tawdry ersatz, the “rules-based international order”.

It will take some time to fully identify which Deep State faction may have used Hersh to promote its agenda. Of course he’s aware of it – but that would never have been enough to keep him away from researching a bombshell (three months of hard work). The U.S. mainstream media will do everything to suppress, censor, demean and ignore his report; but what matters is that across the Global South it is already spreading like wildfire.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Lavrov has gone totally unplugged, much like Medvedev, denouncing how the U.S. has “unleashed a total hybrid war” against Russia, with both nuclear powers now on a path of direct confrontation. And as Washington has declared the “strategic defeat” of Russia as its goal and turned bilateral relations into a ball of fire, there can be no “business as usual” anymore.

The Russian “response” – even before Hersh’s report – has been on another level entirely; advanced de-dollarization across the spectrum, from the EAEU to BRICS and beyond; and total reorientation of trade towards Eurasia and other parts of the Global South. Russia is establishing firm conditions for further stability, already foreseeing the inevitable: the time to frontally deal with NATO.

As kinetic responses go, facts on the battleground show Russia further crushing the American/NATO proxy army in full Strategic Ambiguity mode. The terror attack on the Nord Streams of course will always be lurking in the background. There will be blowback. But that will be at a time, manner and place of Russia’s choosing.

Via ‘Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf’ Substack,

As I type, I am undergoing the excruciating experience of listening to C-SPAN, which is airing “Twitter’s Response to Hunter Biden Laptop Story.” The larger issue is: who censored Twitter, and why, and whether there was illegal collusion (there was) between Twitter and the US government.

So I finally am seeing them — up close, in real life, in person. I am finally able to look at the faces of the heretofore faceless technocrats who took it upon themselves to try to destroy my life and ruin my name.

I am witnessing, as I see them seated primly in rows in a Congressional hearing room, the very faces — the somber, ill-cut but costly blue suits, the bad wire-rimmed glasses, the judgmental expressions — of those who were personally responsible for the misery, trauma, reputational damage, shattered dreams, and loss of income, in my one life, over the course of last two and a half years.

Here at last are the very people who took it upon themselves, or who oversaw their colleagues, to single me out, to collude with the White House, and with Carol Crawford of CDC, and with DHS perhaps, to suspend me — following an accurate tweet of mine that warned women of menstrual harms following mRNA injection.

The positions of these people, the views of them — their self-regarding, self-satisfied, smug certainty that their rightness is the only rightness that could ever be — do not remind me of the testimony or views of actual Americans. They remind me rather of the affect of functionaries in a Stalinist show trial, or of the nameless bureaucrats in Kafka’s The Trial.

There, onscreen, present at last, is Yoel Roth, “Former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety” – with that oddly prim, pursed mouth that these technocrats all seem to have; with those fingertips touching each other, presenting himself as if he is the moderator of reality itself, and as if he finds himself in the presence of something that smells bad. There are his glazed defiant blue eyes, his slightly balding pate; the costly haircut; there is the sneering downward cast of his mouth. I try not ever to make critical personal remarks, but the ugliness, sorrow, loss, isolation and pain I sustained, and still sustain every day, at the hands of these until-now-faceless, self-righteous people, tend to make me see them aversively; or perhaps I see the moral ugliness of their decisions, as if manifested in their faces and body language.

Sorry — not sorry.

There he is: Mr Roth, wrongly claiming that, “paradoxically,” more speech equals more danger and not more safety for society.

There he is, this person so sure that he is so right, having tweeted that Republicans are “NAZIS”.

And here he is, sorry about that tweet now – that is, now that he is being asked about it – by those same Republicans.

There is Anika Collier Navaroli, “Former US Safety Policy Team Senior Expert,” talking about “dangerous speech”. There is her pale-gray jacket, her earnest if not bullying posture, as she leans forward, passionately describing the terrifying nature of freedom of speech. She describes a Twitter policy to address “coded incitement to violence” and to “address dogwhistles”. Overt threats of violence are of course already illegal, and they are the province of law enforcement, not of social media functionaries. Yet based on these “coded” tweets, rather than on actual threats of violence, Ms. Navaroli calls for more censorship. Thus she is already staking out and defending the Orwellian province of “thought crimes” or “pre-crime.” It was never Ms Navaroli’s role to decide if “dogwhistles” would lead to violence; that is the role of police and of the FBI. Why is she claiming that a social media platform is supposed to take on the role of maintaining physical public safety, that belongs to law enforcement?

Ms. Navaroli ends her hectoring introductory peroration with a pious, condescending conclusion that her mission is to make communication online “safe.” Her evidence of the crimes committed by speaking on Twitter, include this 1984-level sentence: “The President said he liked to send out his tweets like “little missiles”; and to me that sounded like weaponization of a platform.”’ Has the woman never taken an English class or learned about metaphors? Still later in the hearing, she accuses “fan fiction” of leading directly to the murder of people on Jan 6 — putting herself right in line with the many despots and tyrants who, since the birth of the novel, have accused the act of reading of causing social mayhem.

Here is Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), asking Yoel Roth about Twitter’s marking of certain speech as “unsafe”.

There is Rep Eleanor Holmes Norton, a leader whom I used greatly to respect, fulminating about “conspiracies.” There she is using the dangerous language of “incitement”, a meaningless word that serves only to criminalize First Amendment- protected speech. There is Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), on her first week on the job, alarmingly wrongly stating that it is her task to “protect the American people from misinformation” — a role for a member of Congress that is identified literally nowhere in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights.

There is former Twitter counsel, former “head of legal, policy and trust” at Twitter, Ms Vijaya Gadde, with her slightly more polished look and her sapphire-colored jacket; a package that proves however only that pure evil can be as well dressed and coiffed as not. There Ms. Gadde is, prevaricating when Rep Nancy Mace (R-SC) asks her directly if Twitter ever censored Americans pursuant to demands from the Government. After Ms. Gadde’s mumbled gibberish in response, haplessly phrased in the passive voice, Rep Mace thanked Ms Gadde for admitting that Twitter had become a “subsidiary” of the FBI in illegally violating the First Amendment rights of Americans.

It is so painful for me to see these faces. I have a very intimate relationship to these people.

They tried to destroy me, and did a fair job of it, by some measures.

These are the people — “my”people, paradoxically; people educated like me, people who shared my political views until 2020; these are people who vacationed where I used to vacation, who hang out with people I know — who were the agents behind full- on Stalinist-type persecution of innocent Americans; of me; these are the people who ruined my life, or sought to do so, and destroyed my career, or sought to do so. These emotionally ugly, these nasty, self-satisfied folks, so sure that they are right, so very, very wrong; are here at last; right here on C-Span.

They persecuted not just me but Dr Martin Kulldorff; Dr Jay Bhattacharya; Dr Paul Alexander; Dr Peter McCullough. So many others. They scrubbed and manipulated the discourse of a platform that has no right to be any more censorious than a telecom company, because they were willing to collude illegally with the government to decide what can be said in America. The messaging from the FBI via “the super-secret James Bond tele-portal”, as Rep Jim Jordan so brilliantly and rightly put it, reached into the voices of Americans and strangled Americans’ rights; but Twitter and the company’s political friends went further than mere silencing. These smarmy people ultimately hurt, and may have helped to injure and kill, many thousands.

These are the people who decided to remove the accurate tweet of mine about menstrual symptoms subsequent to MRNA vaccines, that could have saved millions of women from the current agony and infertility that they now endure. These are the people who obeyed the instructions of their colleagues in government to censor me.

I looked at the bios of the people cc’d on Twitter’s communications with the White House about attacking my accurate tweet; they were a lot of young functionaries at the US Bureau of the Census, at least two of them, oddly, educated at the University of Delaware. These low-level Gen Z apparatchiks, and their incompletely articulate bosses, thought it was fine to destroy the career and try to shred the reputation of someone who had written eight international bestsellers, who had been a Rhodes scholar, and an advisor to a Presidential campaign and to a Vice President; who had gone back to school at midlife and had worked for seven years successfully to complete a D Phil at Oxford University; who had been invited onto every major platform and written for every major newspaper and was a commentator on every major news network for 35 years, and who, for those decades, by those same platforms and news sites, had been identified as a global leader in the feminist movement.

These nothing people in front of me, these hacks, these people of zero cognitive distinction, these essentially trivial-minded humans, used their unearned, thuglike, intellectually meaningless power — the intellectually two-dimensional power of a social media platform — to announce to the world that I was crazy, unhinged; to present what appears to have been a file, to the BBC, to NPR, to The New York Times – to my own former colleagues — seeking to re-present me, a lifelong writer of heavily annotated bestselling nonfiction, as not credible.

For the two years subsequent to my deplatforming, news outlets — including those where I used to be a columnist, such as The Guardian and the Sunday Times of London — did not need to claim, let alone prove, that I was actually wrong in any concrete way; all they had to do now — and they did this repeatedly, clearly, as we see now, at the behest of the government involved – was to repeat the phrase replicated around the world, and embedded into posterity via my Wikipedia bio:

“Naomi Wolf was banned from Twitter for misinformation.”

“Misinformation” is never in quotes; the accurate caveat — “what Twitter called “misinformation”’ — is never added, in spite of this being the journalistically ethical and correct phrasing. This damning but really meaningless summary, then, is to what 35 years of labor, a status as a feminist leader, two degrees, eight bestsellers, thousands of footnotes, and the publication of essays in every major news site in North America, as well as most of Western Europe — got reduced.

It is incredible to me, as someone who was raised in an American meritocracy, and who has until very recently believed in American meritocracy, that a group of nonentities in Twitter, in collusion with nonentities at CDC (hi there, Carol Crawford), the White House and the US Dept. of the Census — were able thus so simply, and at such immediate, nuclear scale, to destroy the reputation of someone identified since 1990 as a major American voice.

So: this can happen to any American voice.

These ill-dressed, ill-spoken, banal careerist ciphers, cost me so much.

I re-trained for almost a decade, in the middle of my life, to teach. It is all I had ever really wanted to do with my life. Now I will never be able to be the only thing I ever wanted to be — a Professor of English Literature at a university.

I am now sixty. It’s too late for me. Twitter, in collusion with the Biden administration, cost me my hard-won lifelong dream. I’ve been maligned and censored by Twitter since 2021.

Even if the company eventually settles my lawsuit against it, and even though Mr Musk has “let” me back on the platform, that would be, this is, no victory.

Twitter has not sent an advisory to all of the news outlets around the world that depicted me, at Twitter’s own direction, as crazy, that they were wrong to have done so; there has been no press release stating that they erred, and that I was right, and that they are sorry for wrongly abusing my reputation — and for destroying women and babies. No, forever I will remain “deplatformed from Twitter for misinformation” in the cybersphere, even though it is finally being established that sadly I was deplatformed for telling God’s truth.

It is unlikely that any university at this point would see past the grotesque imprint on my bio that Twitter, via the White House, CDC and perhaps the FBI, has taken care to embed in my bio, and in articles about me, around the world. It is unlikely, too, that I will ever recoup the six figure investments that investors withdrew from my company when Twitter, colluding with the government, was orchestrating the shredding of my reputation. It is unlikely that a 35 years career and legacy online of what had been seen until very recently as a life of significant accomplishment, can ever be re-established.

I try never to complain in public. I try never to show self-pity or weakness, at least not to my enemies. But Twitter’s attacks on me are not over, and I am simply sick of the damage these mediocrities have done to me, and continue to try to do.

Just yesterday LinkedIn sent me a notification that a Twitter “Political Staffer” was viewing my bio. A notice of scrutiny by a Twitter staffer with friends in the administration reached my inbox the day before Congressional hearings about the censorship both entities imposed on people such as me.

Intimidate much, @Twitter?

I am a brave person — I guess — and I won’t be daunted by this obvious effort at harassment. But I am also human, and I happen to have a broken shoulder at the moment, and I am simply tired; tired of fighting these monsters.

And yes, it is wearying and threatening and coercive to see that this massive behemoth, with their friends at the highest levels of government, are not done messing with my own, personal, only life.

Yoel Roth is to this very minute, defending the de-platforming of people due to their having “spread COVID misinformation”; that, dear Reader, would be me. To this day, this trimly-styled nonentity defends debunked magical thinking.

To which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene rightly responded: “Mr Roth: who put you in charge of what is true and what is not?”

Rep. Taylor Greene also said to Mr Roth:

“You abused the power of Big Tech to censor Americans. I am so glad you are censored now, and that you have lost your jobs.”

I cannot believe that “my own”people, my former tribe on the elite left, are joining forces with the government to violate the First Amendment rights of all Americans and then, worse still, to justify having done so. I can’t believe that Democrat after Democrat, liberal after liberal, is on C-Span singing the praises of censorship and inventing imaginary roles for government officials and social media platforms to keep Americans “safe” from the “threats“ of discourse and ideas. We used to be the side of Howl and Lady Chatterley’s Lover; of The Well of Loneliness. Heck, of the Free Speech Movement! What happened to us?

I can’t believe that people I thought were hostile to America’s interests — in this case, the Republicans demanding answers from the hacks and flunkies of Big Tech — are the allies in this hearing’s case at least, of truth and the Constitution and freedom of speech.

And I can’t believe that the forces who tore my life apart, temporarily half-destroyed my business, ended any hopes of my realizing my one life’s best dream, and set a match to my reputation, turn out, now that the curtain has been pulled back, as at the end of The Wizard of Oz – to be such small, small, sad, petty, miserable, mediocre people.

The larger issue is not the damage these smirking, small-minded people did to me. The larger issue is what the experience I underwent at their hands, represents for our culture.

There is a specific kind of damage that Twitter and the Biden administration did, in censoring and smearing the medical doctors — in silencing the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. Medical harms, medical damage, limits to medical options and open debate, follow.

But consider my example as an example of something else, that is equally serious.

I am not a medical doctor or a public health official — I am, or I was, an American writer, identified as a cultural figure. So what happened to me means that any American cultural figure can be taken down. Any American cultural movement can be mis-framed, defamed, broken. Any American writer, musician, artist, sculptor, actor, director, can be annihilated and memory-holed. Any American artistic movement can be burned alive. And remember — Twitter is an international company, and wars can be waged, culturally, against us by our adversaries.

Why should any young writer, watching what happened to me, believe in meritocracy in American culture any more — why should she work hard, aspire largely, and master her craft? Clearly keeping her head down and parroting the party line will keep her safer.

So this issue brings us squarely into the cultural climate of 1933, when books were dragged from university libraries to be burned in a pile, in Berlin: [https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/simon-wiesenthal-center-annual-volume-2/annual-2-chapter-5.html] or of 1937, when the Nazi party curated and hosted a “Degenerate Art” exhibit in Munich. [https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/degenerate-art] What happened to me brings us squarely into a climate in which specific American writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, social activists, can be identified as enemies of the state, or identified as culturally or socially untouchable.

“Degeneracy” in 1937 was defined essentially as that of which the Nazi party did not approve.

Today on C-Span, we heard a lot about the decision to violate Americans’ rights, based simply on sentiments of which the Biden administration, or Twitter’s employees, did not approve.

The larger issue is that once a society crosses this Rubicon, with one cultural figure, this can happen to any cultural figure or any cultural movement. And if we do not reject (and indeed prosecute and legislate against) this unlawful suppression of views at the behest of the government, then we no longer live in an American culture, in which ideas rise and gain currency on the basis of merit and on the basis of ideas’ appeals to others.

We will, rather, be in a Nazi reality in which petty officials distort and dictate culture itself and reputationally behead those cultural leaders who pose challenges to the power structure.

Berlin, Munich, in this respect, are here again, in their darkest sense; those who decided, based on a party line, on proper and improper art, books, views — are not dead and gone; lost in history; no; here they are.

But this time they appear in our America, in their bad blue suits, with their pompous nasal voices; saying “I have no knowledge of this matter”; or “I can’t hear the question”; as they occupy, with their damaged consciences, their nauseating excuses, seats in a hearing room on Capitol Hill in the United States of America.

Will we let these cultural functionaries — who operate just like those petty tyrants of the cultures of Berlin and Munich not so long ago — take up space, with impunity, in the heart of our America?

Or will we drag America back into daylight and sunlight again, and force these equivocating wretches to face their own degenerate crimes — crimes against freedom of speech and the Constitution?

*  *  *

Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support her work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Authored by Vijay Prashad via Consortium News,

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines met with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at Malacañang Palace in Manila on Feb. 2, where they agreed to expand the U.S. military presence in the country.

In a joint statement, the two governments agreed to “announce their plans to accelerate the full implementation of the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement” (EDCA) and “designate four new Agreed Locations in strategic areas of the country.”

The EDCA, which was agreed upon in 2014, allows the U.S. to use land in the Philippines for its military activities. It was formulated almost a quarter of a century after U.S. troops vacated their bases in the Philippines — including a massive base at Subic Bay — during the collapse of the U.S.S.R. At that time, the U.S. operated on the assumption that it had triumphed and no longer required the vast structure of military bases it had built up during the Cold War.

From the 1990s, the U.S. assembled a new kind of global footprint by integrating the militaries of allied countries as subordinate forces to U.S. military control and building smaller bases to create a much greater reach for its technologically superior airpower.

In recent years, the U.S. has been faced with the reality that its apparent singular power is being challenged economically by several countries, especially China. To contest these challenges, the U.S. began to rebuild its military force structure through its allies with more of these smaller, but no less lethal, bases.

It’s likely that three of the four new bases in the Philippines will be on Luzon Island, at the north of the archipelago, which would place the U.S. military within striking distance of Taiwan.

For the past 15 years, the U.S. has pushed its allies — including those organised in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — to strengthen their military power while increasing U.S. techno-military power and reach by establishing smaller bases across the world and producing new aircraft and ships with greater territorial reach.

This military force was then used in a series of provocative actions against nations it perceived as threats to its hegemony, with two key countries, China and Russia, facing the sharp edge of the U.S. spear. At the two ends of Eurasia, the U.S. began to provoke Russia through Ukraine and provoke China through Taiwan. The provocations over Ukraine have now resulted in a war that has been going on for a year, while the new U.S. bases in the Philippines are part of an escalation against China, with Taiwan as a battleground.

To make sense of the situation in East Asia, the rest of this essay will feature briefing No. 6 from No Cold War, Taiwan Is a Red Line Issue, which is also available for download as a PDF.

Flashpoint

In recent years, Taiwan has become a flashpoint for tensions between the United States and China. The seriousness of the situation was recently underscored on Dec. 21, when U.S. and Chinese military aircraft came within 3 metres of each other over the South China Sea.

At the root of this simmering conflict are the countries’ diverging perspectives over Taiwan’s sovereignty. The Chinese position, known as the “One China” principle, is firm: although the mainland and Taiwan have different political systems, they are part of the same country, with sovereignty residing in Beijing.

Meanwhile, the U.S. position on Taiwan is far less clear. Despite formally adopting the One China policy, the U.S. maintains extensive “unofficial” relations and military ties with Taiwan. In fact, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, U.S. law requires Washington to provide arms “of a defensive character” to the island. The U.S. justifies its ongoing ties with Taiwan by claiming they are necessary to uphold the island’s “democracy” and “freedom.” But, how valid are these claims?

Foothold for Influence

To understand the contemporary geopolitical significance of Taiwan, it’s necessary to examine Cold War history. Prior to the Chinese Revolution of 1949, China was in the midst of a civil war between the communists and the nationalists, or Kuomintang (KMT) — the latter of which received billions of dollars in military and economic support from Washington.

The revolution resulted in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, on the mainland, while the defeated KMT forces fled to the island of Taiwan, which had returned to Chinese sovereignty four years earlier, in 1945, following 50 years of Japanese colonial rule.

From Taipei, the KMT declared that they were the rightful government-in-exile of all of China under the name of the Republic of China or ROC — originally founded in 1912 — thereby rejecting the legitimacy of the PRC.

The U.S. military soon followed, establishing the United States Taiwan Defence Command in 1955, deploying nuclear weapons to the island and occupying it with thousands of U.S. troops until 1979. Far from protecting “democracy” or “freedom” in Taiwan, the U.S. instead backed the KMT as it established a dictatorship, including a 38-year-long consecutive period of martial law from 1949–1987.

U.S.-Philippines Military Base Agreement Sends Warning to China on Taiwanhttps://t.co/myi6gnrTW6

— Globely – News, Globally. (@GlobelyNews) February 6, 2023

During this time, known as the “White Terror,” Taiwanese authorities estimate that 140,000 to 200,000 people were imprisoned or tortured, and 3,000 to 4,000 were executed by the KMT.

Washington accepted this brutal repression because Taiwan represented a useful foothold — located just 160 kilometres off the south-eastern coast of the Chinese mainland — that it used to pressure and isolate Beijing from the international community.

From 1949–1971, the U.S. successfully manoeuvred to exclude the PRC from the United Nations by arguing that the ROC administration in Taiwan was the sole legitimate government of the entirety of China. It’s important to note that, during this time, neither Taipei nor Washington contended that the island was separate from China, a narrative that is advanced today to allege Taiwan’s “independence.”

However, these efforts were eventually defeated in 1971, when the U.N. General Assembly voted to oust the ROC and recognise the PRC as the only legitimate representative of China. Later that decade, in 1979, [after Nixon’s trip to Beijing] the U.S. finally normalised relations with the PRC, adopted the One China policy, and ended its formal diplomatic relations with the ROC in Taiwan.

The Dangers of US Interference

Today, the international community has overwhelmingly adopted the One China policy, with only 13 of 193 U.N. member states recognising the ROC in Taiwan. However, due to the continued provocations of the U.S. in alliance with separatist forces in Taiwan, the island remains a source of international tension and conflict.

The U.S. maintains close military ties with Taiwan through arms sales, military training, advisers and personnel on the island, as well as repeatedly sailing warships through the narrow Taiwan Strait [which China says is its territorial waters] that separates the island from the mainland.

In 2022, Washington pledged $10 billion in military aid to Taiwan. Meanwhile, U.S. congressional delegations regularly travel to Taipei, legitimising notions of separatism, such as the controversial visit by former U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in August 2022.

Would the U.S. or any other Western country accept a situation where China provided military aid, stationed troops and offered diplomatic support to separatist forces in part of its internationally recognised territory? The answer, of course, is no.

In November, at the G20 summit in Indonesia, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden held their first in-person meeting since Biden was elected president. At the meeting, Xi strongly reiterated China’s stance on Taiwan, telling Biden that:

“the Taiwan question is at the very core of China’s core interests, the bedrock of the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and the first red line that must not be crossed.”

Although Biden responded by stating that the U.S. adheres to the One China policy and that he is “not looking for conflict,” just a few months prior, he affirmed in a televised interview that U.S. troops would militarily intervene to “defend Taiwan,” if necessary.  It is clear from the U.S. track record that Washington is intent on provoking China and disregarding its “red line.” [Two weeks ago a four-star U.S. general predicted war with China within two years.]

In Eastern Europe, a similarly reckless approach, namely the continued expansion of NATO towards Russia’s border [ignoring Russia’s “red line”], led to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. As progressive forces in Taiwan have declared, “to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait and avoid the scourge of war, it is necessary to stop U.S. interference.”

Meanwhile, on Jan. 31, Pope Francis conducted a mass in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a million people in attendance, where he declared that, “Political exploitation gave way to an ‘economic colonialism’ that was equally enslaving.” Africa, the pope said, “is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered. Hands off Africa!”

Later that same week, the U.S. and the Philippines — in complete disregard of the pope’s declaration — agreed to build the new military bases, completing the encirclement by U.S.-allied bases around China and intensifying U.S. aggression towards the country.

The pope’s cry could very well be “Hands off the world.” This means no new Cold War, no more provocations.

The US Air Force awarded Reliable Robotics with a contract to study how to transform multi-engine transport jets into robotic aircraft that can fly critical cargo worldwide. 

“This study will include a feasibility assessment of full and limited aircraft automation features for cargo operations,” Reliable Robotics wrote in a press release.

Equipping large transport jets with automation would allow the USAF “to increase mission tempo worldwide and leverage a certifiable commercial solution for defense industry needs at fractional costs and extend aircraft capabilities,” continued Reliable Robotics. 

The contract aims to produce autonomous flight systems that allow the jets to land and take off and traverse the tarmac with remote human supervision. 

USAF colonel Sean R McClune said: “Reliable provides capabilities that will help close logistical gaps so that the USAF can execute their role within the Joint Warfighting Concept.”

“We are interested in Reliable Robotics not only for their effectiveness in supporting the warfighter in contested logistics but also for their novel approach of outfitting legacy aircraft with cutting-edge automation kits.

“This is of great value to the US Government because it will help solve the demand for short to medium-range point-to-point logistics without the need to manufacture a new aircraft, which will ensure critical logistics are available at speed and scale to all regions of the country.”

USAF wants to modernize its fleet of transport jets. The most inexpensive way to do so appears to be the automation of legacy jets. It’s a cost-efficient path toward saving time and assets and reducing fatal aviation accidents.

… and there goes the need for pilots.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Ruminating over our robot overlords and the missing scenario

Now that ChatGPT has exploded onto the stage, there is renewed hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whenever AI captures the public imagination, we are subjected to unrestrained conjectures around how it will inevitably take over the future and change our lives.

We’re led to believe that AI will usher an era of hyper-intelligent overlords, so far advanced beyond our own coarse and analog cognitive skills that the existential question of the future will center around:

• how much power or rights do we confer on these beings?

• will they act benevolently or malevolently toward us?

​

But these questions presuppose a core assumption around AI that everybody agrees isn’t true now but will inevitably become true in the future – after a few more iterations of Moore’s Law…

That’s the idea that AI will achieve general artificial intelligence, and with that is implied some degree sentience (otherwise there is nothing to give any rights to).

The Newsweek piece on the right in the images above is by the transhumanist futurist Zoltan Istvan. He describes how AI ethicists are divided on the matter of whether future hyper-intelligent robots should be granted rights.

On one hand, by not affording human rights to robots possessing AGI (general intelligence on par with humans), we are committing a “civil rights error” that we will regret in the future.

This is opposed by those who assert that robots are machines and will never require rights, because they aren’t sentient (this is where I land on it, and I’ll tell you why below).

Others believe in a middle ground  where some robots that display general intelligence would be afforded some rights “depending on their capability, moral systems, contributions to society”  (which sounds somewhat reminiscent of a “three/fifths” clause to me).

But overall, Istvar seems to assume that AI will achieve super-intelligence, and become vastly superior beings in terms of brain-power to us clumsy meatbags of humanity.

That leaves us with three possible paths forward:

#1 Appeal to the benevolence of AI super-intelligence

“Given the possibility of reward or punishment, if machine intelligence does eventually become something like an AI god that can greatly manipulate and extend human life for good or bad, then people should immediately begin considering how our future overlord would like to be brought into existence and treated. Hence, the way humans treat AI development today—and whether we give robots rights and respect in the near future—could make all the difference in how our species is one day treated.”

This is a variation of Pascal’s Wager – a prototypical game theory construct which concluded that the consequences of believing in God and being wrong (nothingness) were better than to be wrong in not believing (eternal damnation).

#2 Hopium. Maybe the AI’s will simply leave us alone

However, according to Istvan “given our influence and the environmental destruction we cause on planet Earth”, we may “easily aggravate AI” who will take matters into their own hands to correct matters, and us. This latter scenario is a variation of Roko’s Basilisk, which is also mentioned in Istvan’s piece.

Roko’s Basilisk was a thought experiment that emerged from programmer Eliezer S. Yudkowsky’s LessWrong that shook the foundations of the site and scared the beejeesus out of otherwise super-brainiac nerds.

It’s “The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time!”,  hyper-ventilates Slate magazine.

It still  informs Yudkowsky’s thinking to this day. He’s recently promulgated the “The Alignment Problem” which assumes that humanity will inevitably create super-intelligent AIs and they will inevitably destroy us. We may as well “die with dignity”, since we’re all doomed anyway:

“tl;dr:  It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight.  Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.”

These kinds of thought constructs around the inevitability of omnipotent AI’s are simply restatements of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument. First formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. While an impressive feat of logic akin to Zeno’s paradoxes, it is simply a circular argument that God must exist:

“God is the greatest possible being that can be conceived. If such a being exists only in the mind and not in reality, then a greater being can be conceived — one that exists both in the mind and in reality.”

In simpler terms:

God is the most perfect being we can imagine, and it is more perfect to exist in reality than just in our imagination. Therefore, God must exist in reality.
— via ChatGBT session 72b43f3e-043f-4db2-aca9-63a76b7945c9

Give God a mean streak, and you have Roko’s Basilisk. Or Skynet.

#3 Upload our consciousness to the cloud and merge with the robots

Here Istvan suggests we merge with AI and attempt to guide it

A final option is we attempt to merge with early AI by uploading our minds into it, as Elon Musk has suggested. The hope is people could become one with AI and properly guide it to be kind to humans before it becomes too powerful. However, there’s no guarantee we would be successful, and it might just make AI feel violated in the long run.

This idea is ascribed to Elon Musk, although I’m sure Istvan is certainly aware that this is the essence of The Singularity espoused by the likes of Ray Kurweil (Google’s Chief Scientist) in his book The Singularity is Near. Russian Cosmists  were trying to articulate the same thing over a century ago but they didn’t have computer networks and machine learning yet to provide the foundation.

Years ago, I was supposed to be writing a book about the dangers of this techno-utopianism, and in it, I call the idea that humanity will merge with AI and vanquish all our ills, “The False Threshold”:

What would make all this possible is the virtuous cycle created by digital computer networks, powered by Moore’s Law, incessantly halving their physical footprint while doubling their processing power – eventually we would achieve, and then surpass, the interconnectivity and the processing power of the human brain itself.

When that happened, all bets were off. The assumption is that somewhere along this continuum, when the right thresholds of parallelism and computing power were surpassed, mind itself would leap out of the process – emerging with a vengeance and folding back in on itself, forking off subprocesses even more intelligent than itself, and so on, ad infinitum. “Our final invention” will then survey the world, with all its deficiencies and inefficiencies, and being infinitely smarter than all human minds combined, will deftly solve everything.

Kurzweil says this could happen as soon as 2029 and these techno-utopian visions almost always veer into some version of neo-Marxism predicated on Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

The Singularity as Rapture

The expectation of super-intelligent AI’s taking over our affairs (techno-utopianism) has all the trappings of a religion. I originally wrote about back in Transhumanism: The New Religion of The Coming Technocracy in response to a WSJ “think piece” (Looking Forward to the End of Humanity) that “Covid-19 has spotlighted the promise.. .of transhumanism and the idea of using technology to overcome sickness, aging and death”

Make no mistake, The Singularity has all the trappings of an eschatological event.  It differentiates from most Christian or monotheistic impulses because it is we who are birthing our own Gods. This dynamic of usurping (God, or in this case reality itself), gives it a distinctly Luciferian impulse.

The missing scenario is that AI will never happen.

A scenario that this article doesn’t entertain (nor any others navel gazing the future of AI) is that AI isn’t really a thing and believing that sentient, self-aware AI’s will take over the world will never happen.

(On a side-note I will say that whether the majority of the plebes become algorithmic serfs living under social credit and CBDCs is another issue entirely).

Our hand-wringing over how to deal with these super-intelligent software constructs hinges on a single, baked in assumption which is unprovable:

That is the idea that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter.

The core tenet of Scientism (notice I didn’t say “science”) is that consciousness, sentience and mind are all by-products of matter. Something that happens when certain neuro-chemicals slosh around in a brain and enough synapses fire and wire to produce self-awareness.

This is the modern day equivalent of the Ptolemaic (or geocentric) universe: the belief that the Earth was the center of the cosmos.

It was the “settled science” of its day, and disputing it would get you burned at the stake.

The reality is that matter is a by-product of consciousness, the base layer of reality is mental, not physical. This has been espoused for a long time (the Hermetic Axiom “All is mental” which was cribbed from far older texts) , it’s also the foundation of quantum mechanics.

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
— Max Planck

Seen in this light, our brains don’t emit consciousness the way a kettle vents off steam – they’re receivers that tap into – and filter – the underlying substrate of reality. And while the foundations of quantum mechanics lays out the primacy of consciousness, it can only really be experienced via gnosis. For those who have had that experience, there is no doubt. For everybody else, there is only New Age woo woo.

Unless AI is approached with this understanding (and I have no expectation that anybody will ever take this seriously), then we can safely assume that generalized AI, sentient and self-aware, simply won’t happen.

Time for a Reality Check

AI is really the current iteration of the “flying car”. Something that was used to symbolize the future that never happened. At least not in its stereotypically posited form. This is because AI isn’t really artificial intelligence – it’s algorithmic imitation. 

While it may be very very good at algorithmically imitating accountants, lawyers, doctors, coders, copywriters and even chess grandmasters or Go champions, it still isn’t sentient, it still has no understanding of what it’s actually doing, it has no consciousness. It may as well be a toaster.

This is why torturing ourselves with what are at their core, largely theological constructs over outcomes to which we ascribe a misplaced inevitability is beyond delusional, it’s unhinged.

The error gets compounded when we actually shape public policy around these assumptions.

A very similar dynamic is playing itself out in the “climate crisis” narrative, where we are being gaslit with hypothetical constructs from computer models that are ascribed an inevitability that requires all of humanity reorder itself around them. The proposed “reconfigurations” or “recalibrations” of society (to use WEF-style euphemisms) are invariably along neo-Marxist, technocratic lines.

First thing’s first: Let’s get our own rights back right now.

The irony around all this introspection around how we treat AI’s and what rights they should have is that here in the Covid Era, we’ve just had our own basic human rights rescinded. By edict.

We didn’t get them back after the pandemic ended, as most of the emergency mandates are only conditionally “on hold”. Our civil and universal human rights are now provisional, at the behest of various unelected health authorities, bureaucrats, apparatchiks  and whatever lunacy comes out of Davos.

If we allow it, this will only get worse as “climate emergencies” approach over the horizon, and we face the real prospect of climate lockdowns, and social credit based on CBDCs, health-passes and carbon rationing.

We’ve abrogated our own rights in the present, and then quibble over which ones to bestow on inanimate software algorithms of the future.

*  *  *

My book on this topic has been on the back-burner but I still write about transhumanism, AI and their implications for CBDC’s, carbon rationing and social credit. Subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list to get new articles (and I may revive the book and serialize it here). You can also follow me on me on Nostr , Gettr, or Twitter. My premium letter The Bitcoin Capitalist covers Bitcoin and crypto stocks.

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

Kishida’s cabinet formally adopted a policy to extend the life of its nuclear plants beyond the self-imposed sixty-year limit. Japan’s engineers had originally put a cap in place for all sorts of safety-related reasons. But times change, risks change, societies too.

With the Ukraine war reshaping the global energy map, Japanese memories of energy shortages in the run up to WWII apparently outweigh more recent scars from Fukushima.

And besides, when you count sixty years in the life of a nuclear power plant, you probably shouldn’t count the time it was turned off for maintenance. Right? It’s odd that the engineers who counted sixty in the first place overlooked that. But whatever. If you strip out the years these nuclear reactors were on vacation, you can extend their sixty-year life to seventy. Presto. New capacity.

Japan also announced $152bln in green transformation bonds to build new nukes, renewables, etc. Kishida’s government announced that $1.14trln in public/private investment will be needed over the coming decade.

But Japan was not alone, of course. Macron is trying to extend the life of France’s work force past the age of sixty-two. Apparently, when the policy was first implemented, French engineers failed to take into consideration maintenance and vacation time. Were you to add this downtime back in, the productive life of a French worker would extend to something north of a century.

But unlike Japan’s nuclear reactors, French workers can strike and vote, so Macron sought only an extra two years. Hundreds of thousands are now striking, which if properly counted would push out the work life of a French worker another ten years.

And these are the sorts of manipulations that will be more common now that the world is transitioning from decades of financial over-engineering to a world of squeezing scarce resources out of a globalized economy that was over-optimized for peak profitability.

Dan O’Dowd, a self-described billionaire and founder of Green Hills Software, a privately-owned company that makes software such as automated driving systems, has spent several million dollars to fund a Super Bowl video advertisement against Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta. 

The 30-second video shows a Tesla Model 3 on FSD Beta hitting a dummy child during a test, swerving into oncoming traffic, hitting a dummy baby in a stroller, and ignoring stopped school buses. 

O’Dowd tweeted the video ad right before the Super Bowl. It calls for the National Highway Transport Safety Agency (NHTSA) to shut down FSD Beta. 

Watch The Dawn Project’s #SuperBowl ad demonstrate critical safety defects in @Tesla Full Self-Driving. 6 months ago we reported FSD would run down a child. Tesla hasn’t even fixed that! To focus their attention, @NHTSAgov must turn off FSD until Tesla fixes all safety defects. pic.twitter.com/AxJbN5oOSr

— Dan O’Dowd (@RealDanODowd) February 11, 2023

Notice how readers on Twitter added context to O’Dowd’s tweet, some of which included:

• Dan O’Dowd owns a competing company writing self driving software
• Dan’s previous attempt to show FSD will “run down a child” was debunked.
• Another user performed a test and it worked as expected.
• Tesla’s FSD has over 55 million miles driven w/o any reported injuries.

We partially agree with O’Dowd and have pointed out that over the years, Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD aren’t perfect. Whether the billion cares about public safety or wants to unleash a smear campaign against his competitor remains the big question. 

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Footage has emerged from yet another school board meeting in which a mother reads extreme pornographic content from books provided to children in the district.

These videos now seem to be appearing every week. The footage shows the school board members of Pittsford Schools in New York attempting to prevent the mother from reading out the graphic material as she asks them what they are going to do about it.

UPDATE: @PCSDSchools protected their tweets because they can’t handle being shown what’s going on in their schools. They will protect their tweets but they won’t protect kids from having to read porn in school. pic.twitter.com/IiEbBMp3P4

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 10, 2023

ABC affiliate WHAM noted that the Superintendent Michael Pero responded to the parent, telling her “We do have a formal process” and that the material will be evaluated.

“Every family has values, and they’re respected,” he continued.

“They need to be respected. If there is literature you feel should not be in the hands of our students, there is a process to have a complete review of that book.”

This is just the latest video of parents nationwide shedding light on what their kids are being exposed to in schools.

Many parents have spoken out against books and subject matter, including transgenderism, pedophilia, gay pornography, and critical race theory, that children as young as Kindergarten age are being subjected to.

GRAPHIC: @PutnamCityOK offers the pornographic book “Let’s Talk About It” to students. The book encourages exploring kink on the internet, watching porn, and using sex toys. pic.twitter.com/YUB8f4mg4D

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 9, 2023

Parents have found themselves under attack by leftists and even government entities over recent months after taking on school officials, meanwhile the media is framing the opposition from parents as some kind of Puritan purge.

A New Jersey mother was recently told she is being “monitored” by local law enforcement at the behest of military personnel who didn’t like her social media posts questioning sexualisation of children in school.

Meanwhile…

Elementary school teacher shows off “pride library” in her classroom including books about ze/zir pronouns and the idea that doctors “assign” a gender and kids can be transgender.

This is what teachers are focusing on in your kid’s schools. pic.twitter.com/yiVxmTXTM4

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 10, 2023

Librarian refers to Conservatives who don’t want porn and LGBTQ+ propaganda in libraries as “pests” pic.twitter.com/A0Cjs2M9j2

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 10, 2023

Hanging at @KIPPNJ. Looks like an ad for homeschooling. pic.twitter.com/mHZTM7sSWe

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 9, 2023

*  *  *

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