Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The self-appointed Davos “elites” are afraid. So afraid. At this week’s World Economic Forum meetings, mastermind Klaus Schwab – displaying his trademark Bond villain act – carped over and over again about a categorical imperative: we need “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”.

While his diagnosis of “the most critical fragmentation” the world is now mired in is predictably somber, Herr Schwab maintains that “the spirit of Davos is positive” and in the end we may all live happily in a “green sustainable economy.”

What Davos has been good at this week is showering public opinion with new mantras. There’s “The New System” which, considering the abject failure of the much ballyhooed Great Reset, now looks like a matter of hastily updating the current – rattled – operating system.

Davos needs new hardware, new programming skills, even a new virus. Yet for the moment all that’s available is a “polycrisis”: or, in Davos speak, a “cluster of related global risks with compounding effects.”

In plain English: a perfect storm.

Insufferable bores from that Divide and Rule island in northern Europe have just found out that “geopolitics”, alas, never really entered the tawdry “end of history” tunnel: much to their amazement it’s now centered – again – across the Heartland, as it’s been for most of recorded history.

They complain about “threatening” geopolitics, which is code for Russia-China, with Iran attached.

But the icing on the Alpine cake is arrogance/stupidity actually giving away the game: the City of London and its vassals are  livid because the “world Davos made” is fast collapsing.

Davos did not “make” any world apart from its own simulacrum.

Davos never got anything right, because these “elites” were always busy eulogizing the Empire of Chaos and its lethal “adventures” across the Global South.

Davos not only failed to foresee all recent, major economic crises but most of all the current “perfect storm”, linked to the neoliberalism-spawned deindustrialization of the Collective West.

And, of course, Davos is clueless about the real Reset taking place towards multipolarity.

Self-described opinion leaders are busy “re-discovering” that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was set in Davos – “against the backdrop of a deadly disease and an impeding world war” – nearly a century ago.

Well, nowadays the “disease” – fully bioweaponized – is not exactly deadly per se. And the “impending World War” is in fact being actively encouraged by a cabal of US Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons: an unelected, unaccountable, bipartisan Deep State not even subject to ideology. Centennary war criminal Henry Kissinger still does not get it.

A Davos panel on de-globalization was rife on non-sequiturs, but at least a dose of reality was provided by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.

As for China’s vice-premier Liu He, with his vast knowledge of finance, science and technology, at least he was very helpful to lay down Beijing’s five top guidelines for the foreseeable future – beyond the customary imperial Sinophobia.

China will focus on expanding domestic demand; keeping industrial and supply chains “smooth”; go for the “healthy development of the private sector”; deepen state enterprise reform; and aim for “attractive foreign investment.”

Russian resistance, American precipice

Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview.

Todd spoke to Le Figaro – the newspaper of choice of the French establishment and haute bourgeoisie. The interview was published last Friday on page 22, sandwiched between proverbial Russophobic screeds and with an extremely brief mention on the bottom of the front page. So people really had to work hard to find it.

Todd joked that he has the – absurd – reputation of a “rebel destroy” in France, while in Japan he’s respected, featured in mainstream media, and his books are published with great success, including the latest (over 100,000 copies sold): “The Third World War Has Already Started”.

Significantly, this Japanese best seller does not exist in French, considering the whole Paris-based publishing industry toes the EU/NATO line on Ukraine.

The fact that Todd gets several things right is a minor miracle in the current, abysmally myopic European intellectual landscape (there are other analysts especially in Italy and Germany, but they carry much less weight than Todd).

So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.

• A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.

• The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.

• Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended  war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”

• Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.

• Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.

• And that’s why “we are in an endless war, in a clash where the conclusion is the collapse of one or the other.”

• On China, Todd might sound like a more pugnacious version of Liu He at Davos: “That’s the fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing qualified Chinese work force.”

• As for the Russian economy, “it does accept market rules, but with an important role for the state, and it keeps the flexibility of forming engineers that allow adaptations, industrial and military.”

• And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.

• On a more erudite interpretation of that “clash of civilizations” fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: “On 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood  was patrilineal, and that’s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”

• So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to “reposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only “anti-colonialist” but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.”

Based on all of the above, Todd smashes the myth sold by EU/NATO “elites” – Davos included – that Russia is “isolated”, stressing how votes in the UN and the overall sentiment across the Global South characterizes the war, “described by mainstream media as a conflict over political values, in fact, on a deeper level, as a conflict of anthropological values.”

Between light and darkness

Could it be that Russia – alongside the real Quad, as I defined them (with China, India and Iran) – are prevailing in the anthropological stakes?

The real Quad has all it takes to blossom into a new cross-cultural focus of hope in a “fragmented world”.

Mix Confucian China (non-dualistic, no transcendental deity, but with the Tao flowing through everything) with Russia (Orthodox Christian, reverencing the divine Sophia); polytheistic India (wheel of rebirth, law of karma); and Shi’ite Iran (Islam preceded by Zoroastrianism, the eternal cosmic battle between Light and Darkness).

This unity in diversity is certainly more appealing, and uplifting, than the Forever War axis.

Will the world learn from it? Or, to quote Hegel – “what we learn from history is that nobody learns from history” – are we hopelessly doomed?

Authored by Clint Siegner via Money Metals,

Federal bureaucrats use proxies to stifle all kinds of activities they don’t like. The “Twitter Files” are revealing this tactic to a new wave of Americans, but it has been around a long time.

The bureaucratic assault on the First Amendment is part of a larger movement to end personal liberty. The ultimate goal may be to assume financial control over the populace through implementation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

If officials can replace the existing currencies with digital, programmable money, they will claim the power to dictate if, when, and where individuals can spend money as well as what they can spend it on.

Those who question whether forces inside the federal government are actually pursuing such power may wish to review recent history around the Federal Reserve note “dollar.”

The effort to control people by targeting their money escalated in 1970 with the Bank Secrecy Act. It targeted cash specifically by requiring banks to report transactions involving more than $10,000.

Shortly afterward came the end of sound money. Nixon slammed shut the gold window in 1971, severing the last link between the Federal Reserve note and physical gold. That maneuver launched an era of perpetual government deficits, unlimited borrowing, and interventionist central banking.

Officials seized the opportunity to demand even more reporting in the aftermath of 9/11. The misnamed “Patriot Act” required all merchants (not just banks) to file a Form 8300 on transactions of $10,000 or more. They also required merchants to file an Orwellian “Suspicious Activity Report” on any transaction the merchant judged to be “suspicious.”

Then the Obama Department of Justice launched Operation Choke Point in 2013.

Regulators threatened banks with increased scrutiny, controls, and penalties if they did business with certain companies deemed by the Department to be at higher risk for money laundering and fraud.

Banks responded by closing accounts and/or reducing services to firearms dealers, payday lenders, coin dealers, and businesses in other targeted industries.

Frank Keating, CEO of the American Bankers Association, didn’t think regulators should be hassling banks about clients “simply doing something government officials don’t like.”

In 2017, the FDIC settled a series of lawsuits by promising to cease making informal and unwritten “suggestions” about who banks should be doing business with.

However, banks and financial services providers continue to cancel clients with the audacity to operate disfavored businesses or voice unapproved views.

JP Morgan Chase sent a letter to Trump supporter and election fraud activist general Michael Flynn in August 2021.

Chase said, “We decided to close your credit cards on September 18, 2021 because continuing the relationship creates possible reputational risk to our company.“

The bank later reversed the decision amidst a backlash from conservatives.

PayPal recently went so far as to insert a provision in their terms of service which allowed the company to charge clients up to $2,500 if, at PayPal’s sole discretion, they were spreading “misinformation.” The company also reversed course after the story went viral and many clients decided to dump the woke company.

Couple these sorts of stories with the release of the Twitter files, and one should expect to find that bureaucrats are using backchannel communications with banks to push their anti-liberty agenda.

Stopping “misinformation” and controlling the narrative certainly isn’t all the administrative state hopes to achieve. It is one means to an even more ominous end.

The Federal Reserve is openly developing a digital currency. It’s part of a long-running globalist agenda to curtail financial privacy and increase control over people.

Those who accumulate, tangible non-government money like gold and silver are sidestepping the elite’s growing obsession with achieving total financial control.

Scientists on top of a Swiss mountain shot laser pulses into a stormy sky to guide lightning for the first time. This might pave the way for laser-based lightning protection systems for rocket launchpads, military bases, airports, and supertall buildings. There hasn’t been an advance like this in lightning technology since Benjamin Franklin installed the first lightning rod in the 1750s, following an experiment flying a kite with a large metal key during a thunderstorm.

A team led by Aurélien Houard, a physicist at École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, experimented on the Säntis mountain in north-eastern Switzerland in the summer of 2021 with a high-repetition-rate terawatt laser. 

The results were published Monday in the journal Nature Photonics. They showed how a terawatt-level laser pulse could steer lighting toward a 26-foot rod. 

“This work paves the way for new atmospheric applications of ultrashort lasers and represents an important step forward in the development of a laser-based lightning protection for airports, launchpads or large infrastructures,” the researchers wrote in the study. 

Matteo Clerici, a University of Glasgow physicist who wasn’t involved in the research, told WSJ the successful experiment is something “we’ve been dreaming of for decades … and the fact that they managed to do it in an outdoor environment is a very big step.”

Clerici called the experiment a “game-changer” but noted the technology is in early development and that commercialization could be years away. 

WSJ showed how the technology works. A laser beam is blasted into the stormy sky and directs lightning toward the intended target, which happens to be a tall tower. 

Houard disclosed to WSJ that the prototype laser costs about $2.17 billion. The cost is very high versus a traditional lightning rod, but over time, the technology will improve and become cheaper. 

Laser lightning protection could one day guard critical ground-based systems. Franklin’s 18th-century innovation has now met 21st-century technology. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Joe Biden’s administration in a court hearing on Jan. 17 urged judges on a federal appeals court to overturn a ruling from a lower court that struck down the administration’s airplane mask mandate.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had “good cause” to impose the mandate and bypass the notice- and comment period required by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), Brian Springer, an attorney for the government, told judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

At the time the mandate was imposed, in early 2021, “there were variants that had just been detected that showed signs of increased transmissibility, and people were starting to travel again,” Springer said. “In those circumstances, the CDC had good cause to issue this order, particularly when the CDC detailed the reasons why in this particular environment, namely in the transportation sector and in transportation settings, COVID had a specific tendency to spread among people who are traveling together because they’re standing together in lines and sitting together on conveyances.”

One of the judges expressed skepticism with the line of thinking, accusing the CDC of issuing “boilerplate” language to impose the mandate without a notice and comment period. Under a ruling in a separate case, boilerplate statements that COVID-19 exists and that there’s a public emergency aren’t sufficient to satisfy the “good cause” exception to the APA. Springer disagreed, saying the CDC’s statement provided rationale that met the standard.

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump appointee, said in her 2022 ruling that the CDC violated the APA by only issuing a single conclusory sentence to support ducking the notice requirements.

She noted that at the time the order was issued, around a year had passed since the beginning of the pandemic, and COVID-19 cases in America were on the decline.

Brent Hardaway, arguing for Health Freedom Defense Fund, which brought the case, said that the mandate was “very strange” given that airplanes and many airports already had mandates in place, in addition to the decline in cases.

Does the CDC Have Authority to Mandate Masks?

Other portions of the hearing went over arguments as to whether the CDC has the authority to mandate masks.

U.S. code gives the federal government the power to enforce regulations judged as “necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

The government, to enforce such measures, “may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary,” the statute says.

In striking down the CDC’s moratorium on evictions, the Supreme Court found that the agency overstepped the authority outlined in the law. But the court also said the law empowered the CDC to impose measures that “directly relate to preventing the interstate spread of disease by identifying, isolating, and destroying the disease itself.”

The decision “recognized that conventional measures to identify, isolate and destroy communicable diseases fall within the statute,” Springer said. “The CDC’s mask order was a very modest way to, and a traditional way to, prevent this interstate spread of disease that falls directly within the heartland of what the Supreme Court told us that this statute covers.”

Springer asked the court to narrow the district court’s decision from applying to all travelers to just the five individuals that brought the case. If the court agrees, it would enable the mask mandate to take effect again for virtually all Americans inside airports, airplanes, and some other transportation settings.

Mizelle has ruled that mask mandates don’t fall under sanitation and that the “other measures” were limited, based on a reading of the history of the law and court rulings.

“The mask mandate is best understood not as sanitation, but as an exercise of the CDC’s power to conditionally release individuals to travel despite concerns that they may spread a communicable disease (and to detain or partially quarantine those who refuse). But the power to conditionally release and detain is ordinarily limited to individuals entering the United States from a foreign country,” Mizelle wrote, noting that a part of the law only allows for the detention of a person traveling between the states if that person is “reasonably believed to be infected” and is actually found “upon examination” to be infected.

That means the CDC exceeded its authority in issuing the mandate, the judge said.

Hardaway, in court on Tuesday, said that the law does not give the CDC the ability to impose mask mandates, though one of the judges questioned whether that was true.

“It just seems strange to me that an agency like the Center for Disease Control doesn’t have the authority to require travelers to wear a mask when they travel as a way to prevent the spread of communicable disease in the context of a global pandemic,” the judge said. “If they don’t have that authority, what authority do they have?”

Hardaway said the eviction ruling showed why it was not odd and urged the judges to look at the law, which has been used by the government to impose various measures.

“Their reading of sanitation is basically any measure that may promote sanitation,” he said. “It’s basically going to have the same kind of sweeping implications of the rule that the Supreme Court rejected.”

National security concerns over Joe Biden’s classified document scandal just got worse, as two reports have emerged which place Hunter Biden at the Bidens’ Wilmington, Delaware residence while he was raking in millions of dollars from CCP-linked business dealings.

First, Seamus Bruner  (researcher for legendary bombshell-dropper Peter Schweizer), reports via Breitbart News, that “While addicted to drugs, cavorting with prostitutes, and making deals with businessmen tied to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, Hunter Biden lived in the house where Joe Biden stored classified documents.”

While filling out a background check, Hunter made a crackhead error and listed his ‘rent’ as $49,910 – when in fact that’s the amount of the security deposit and 6 months of rent for prime office space at the prestigious House of Sweden in Washington DC. What’s most interesting, however, is that the dates Hunter listed as living at the Wilmington, DE residence – as claimed on other documents and financial statements – overlap with the period in which multiple Biden family members were taking money from foreign businessmen with connections at the highest levels of Chinese state intelligence services through energy company CEFC. As Bruner further notes, CNN described CEFC as a state-directed entity in 2018.

CEFC, and at least four of its executives and associates – Ye Jianming, Patrick Ho, Gongwen Dong and Jiaqi Bao, have been linked to the CCP and its military intelligence apparatus. In one case, Hunter described Patrick Ho as “the fucking spy chief of China.”

More via Breitbart,

By early 2017, Hunter was directly corresponding with CEFC personnel and flew to Miami in February of that year to meet with CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming. During this trip, Ye Jianming gave Hunter a 3.16 carat diamond valued at approximately $80,000..

When Hunter’s ex-wife discovered that he had obtained something of such immense value, she had her divorce attorney send an “Urgent” email seeking to determine the whereabouts of the diamond and secure the asset before Hunter could “dissipate” it. Hunter’s attorney offered a shady denial:

“There is no diamond in Hunter’s possession. I don’t know where Kathleen is getting access to this information, but on this score, what your email purports below is inaccurate.”

Metadata gleaned from photos of the diamond on the abandoned laptop indicate that Hunter lied about not having the diamond and he in fact had the diamond with him in Wilmington. The current location of the 3.16 carat diamond remains unknown

After the fateful February 2017 meeting with Ye, and around the time Hunter claimed to have moved into the Wilmington house where classified documents were found, the Bidens’ business with CEFC exploded.

Nine days after Miami meeting, Hunter received two separate wire transfers of $3 million which the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network flagged as suspicious.

We encourage you to read the rest of the Breitbart report here, as it goes into extensive detail.

Second, the Washington Free Beacon reports that photos from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop place him at the Wilmington House in July, 2017. Of note, the classified documents were reportedly brought to the house in January of that year.

The photos ‘are the most concrete evidence to date’ that Hunter – who was actively negotiating a deal with a CCP-linked Chinese energy company – had access to areas of his father’s home where classified documents were stored.

A Washington Free Beacon review of the laptop found four 2017 photographs of Hunter Biden, clad in a white collared shirt and a camouflage baseball cap, behind the wheel of his father’s 1967 Corvette Stingray. GPS metadata embedded in the photos indicate they were taken within a minute of each other at 6:49 p.m. on July 30 of that year, just outside the president’s Wilmington, Del., residence. The photos show Hunter Biden posing in the vehicle beside two young girls. One appears to be his then-12-year-old niece, Natalie Biden. The other could not be identified.

Former Secret Service agent and certified cyber forensics expert, Konstantinos Gus Dimitrelos, analyzed the photos and confirmed their authenticity.

“If requested, I will testify the photographs are genuine and were taken on July 30, 2017,” he told the Free Beacon.

And as the Beacon further reports – corroborating Breitbart‘s reporting, “At the time the photos were taken, Hunter Biden was negotiating a lucrative business deal with the now-defunct Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC, which was closely tied to the Chinese government. Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski claimed to have met with Joe Biden in person in early May 2017—less than three months before Hunter Biden was pictured taking the wheel of his father’s prized vehicle—to discuss the Biden family’s Chinese business dealings.”

In total, CEFC paid Hunter Biden $6 million in legal and consulting fees in 2017 and 2018.

And of course, the same media which suggested the Trumps were Russian operatives based on a hoax – are virtually silent at actual risks to national security posed by the Biden family.

Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClear Wire,

Fed-speak, Alan Greenspan once explained, was about practicing the art of constructive ambiguity. Testifying to Congress as Fed chairman, Greenspan would resolve a sentence in a deliberately obscure way that made it incomprehensible, “but nobody was quite sure I wasn’t saying something profound when I wasn’t.” 

Speaking on Tuesday at a symposium on central bank independence in Sweden, Greenspan’s latest successor avoided ambiguity as he spoke about the Fed’s need to stick to its assigned policy goals of maximizing employment and price stability and not getting diverted to pursuing other objectives. “In a well-functioning democracy, important public policy decisions should be made, in almost all cases, by the elected branches of government,” Chair Jerome Powell declared. “It is essential that we stick to our statutory goals and authorities, and that we resist the temptation to broaden our scope to address other important social issues of the day.”

If that wasn’t clear enough, the current Fed chair noted that climate policies could have significant effects on companies, industries, regions, and nations: “Decisions about policies to directly address climate change should be made by the elected branches of government and thus reflect the public’s will as expressed through elections.” Without explicit congressional authorization, it would not be appropriate for the Fed to use monetary policy or its supervisory tools to promote a greener economy, Powell suggested. “We are not, and will not be a ‘climate policymaker.’”

But before supporters of limited government, separation of powers, and rolling back the administrative state stand up to applaud, they should remember that Powell has an indirect climate-policy tool: as part of its supervisory responsibilities, the Fed will require banks to understand and manage the financial risks of climate change. Yet at the same time, Powell would have us believe that the Fed’s supervisory decisions are “not influenced by political considerations.”

Climate “stress tests” are one of the principal tools used by the European Central Bank in furtherance of what its president Christine Lagarde openly proclaims as part of its mandate. “Our planet is burning and we central bankers could look on our mandate and pretend that it is for others to act and that we should simply be followers. I don’t think so,” Lagarde said at a June 2021 Green Swan conference of central bankers and regulators. 

For its climate stress tests, the Bank of England uses the most extreme climate scenario developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It then takes this projection about climate at the end of this century and telescopes eighty years of extreme climate change into three decades. The result is a physical impossibility. That a central bank believes it necessary to engage in such behavior demonstrates two things: that climate change does notrepresent a genuine threat to financial stability—if it did, the Bank would have used a plausible climate scenario—and that climate stress tests are indeed a tool of climate policy. Unlike the Fed, the Bank of England does have an explicit climate policy mandate. When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak expanded the Bank’s remit to support the government’s goal of achieving “balanced growth that is also environmentally sustainable and consistent with the transition to a net zero economy.” 

The Fed’s lack of a similar climate mandate proved no obstacle to Powell, however, when he spoke at the same Green Swan conference as Lagarde. The conference had been convened by the Network for the Greening of the Financial System (NGFS) to develop proposals for a more sustainable economy, financial sector, and society. “There’s a lot to like about climate stress tests,” Powell told the meeting. Not much constructive ambiguity there.

The NGFS is a club of central banks and financial regulators formed by the Banque de France in December 2017 on the second anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. Its aim is to strengthen “the global response required to meet the goals of the Paris agreement and to enhance the role of the financial system.” It also seeks “to manage risks and to mobilize capital for green and low-carbon investments in the broader context of environmentally sustainable development.” These objectives have no place in the Fed’s formal mandate.

Powell’s notion of an apolitical Fed tightly hewing to its congressional mandate is belied by the central bank’s decisionto join the NGFS. Even more devastating to Powell’s claim of the Fed eschewing political considerations is the timing of that move: December 15, 2020, six weeks after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. The Fed cannot have it both ways. It cannot truthfully claim that its supervisory decisions are untainted by political considerations and remain a member of the NGFS. It was a mistake for the Fed to have joined the NGFS in the first place. If Powell wants to be believed, the Fed should quit the club.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, one of the best known and longest faces of the globalist menace that steamrolled all personal rights and liberties during the period of world history known as “covid fascism” while arresting countless non conformists just so she could impose universal lockdowns and to enable the CEOs of Pfizer and Modern to become stinking rich, said she would step down by Feb. 7 after more than five years as leader because she “lacks the energy” to do the job ahead of an election later this year.

“I believe that leading a country is the most privileged job anyone could ever have, but also one of the more challenging,” a tearful Ardern said. “You cannot and should not do it unless you have a full tank plus a bit in reserve for those unexpected challenges.”

“I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice,” the now former prime minister said. “But I absolutely believe and know there are others around me who do.”

🚨BREAKING: New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern has resigned.

pic.twitter.com/SH9ZP7wkdK

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 19, 2023

She added: “This has been the most fulfilling five and a half years of my life. I am leaving because with such a privileged job comes a big responsibility.”

Opinion polls have shown Ardern’s center-left Labour Party trailing the opposition National party, although her own standing with voters was higher than other political leaders. Results of one survey released last month by 1 News Kantar showed support for Labour had fallen to 33%, from 41% around a year earlier. National topped that poll with 38%.

Translation: some huge scandal is about to emerge.

She said she is proud of what she has accomplished during her time as leader, citing progress on responding to climate change, addressing child poverty, easing access to education, improving worker conditions and dealing with issues of national identity

Labour lawmakers will elect a new leader of the party — and the country — in three days’ time, Ardern said.

Ardern said she had informed party members of her decision earlier in the day. She said would remain a member of Parliament for her electorate in the city of Auckland until April, in order to avoid the need for a by-election.

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Public,

For the last week and a half, defenders of President Joe Biden have said that the way he allegedly mishandled classified documents was not as dangerous, illegal, or inappropriate as the way former President Donald Trump allegedly mishandled classified documents.

But we now know that Hunter Biden was taking millions of dollars from businessmen tied to Chinese military intelligence while living at the home of his father, President Joe Biden, where classified documents, including ones relating to foreign nations, were recently found.

We additionally know that Hunter Biden was in the grip of a debilitating addiction to cocaine and alcohol and that he experienced frequent blackouts and loss of memory.

There is no evidence that Hunter Biden, willingly or unwillingly, sober or intoxicated, took classified documents from his father’s residence in Delaware and gave them to his client, a Chinese businessman named Patrick Ho.

“There’s no evidence that Hunter Biden accessed the documents, but — God-forbid — the opportunity existed for him to do so,” said investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer, who has tracked the Biden family’s business ties to the Chinese government, including military intelligence, over the last five years.

During the time that Hunter lived in his father’s residence, between 2017 and 2018, Hunter and the entities he and his uncle, James Biden, President Biden’s brother, controlled received at least $4.8 million from a Chinese energy conglomerate called CEFC, which is tied to the Chinese military. Hunter Biden received an additional $1 million from Patrick Ho, a CEFC official.

“After Ho is arrested in late 2017, the first phone call he makes is to James Biden, the president’s brother, because he’s looking for Hunter,” said Schweitzer.

Why is that? What was going on between the Bidens and the Chinese government, exactly? And what does it all mean?

…

Hunter’s former client Patrick Ho is a criminal convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Ho was sentenced for his role in a multimillion-dollar effort to bribe leaders from Chad and Uganda. That appears to be what Ho was attempting to do with Hunter: bribe him in order to buy protection from his powerful father. A CEFC intermediary reached out to Hunter Biden in December 2015 to set up a meeting between Hunter and Ye Jianming, the founder and chairman of CEFC, according to emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive. Hunter Biden at one point said he was working for Ye. Hunter, in a voicemail found on his laptop, tells a colleague,  “I’m representing the f**king spy chief of China.”

…

What does it all mean? The evidence strongly suggests that the Chinese government was seeking to bribe the Biden family to gain advantages both in terms of energy and also to protect its sources.

…

Subscribers to Public can read the rest here…

In 2012, the United States dominated China in the field of AI research.

Of the 25,000 or so papers published that year, the US led with 629 of the most-cited (top 10%) of citations by other papers. China was in second place at 425.

In 2021, China produced approximately 43,000 of the 135,000 research papers on AI  – roughly twice as many as the United states. The same year, China accounted for 7,401 of the most-cited papers, beating the American tally by around 70%, according to a study by Japan’s Nikkei in conjunction with Dutch scientific publisher Elsevier.

The study, which used AI-associated keywords to scan for academic and conference papers focusing on AI, found that Chinese companies Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei Technologies are among the top 10 companies producing AI research. Baidu, China’s leading search engine, came in 11th in both the quantity and quality of AI research.

What’s more, China will likely keep up the momentum, as a 2017 government plan set a goal to become the world’s primary AI innovation center by 2030.

The government-affiliated Chinese Academy of Sciences, the nation’s top scientific institution, possesses vast research capabilities. Tsinghua University, a public research university in Beijing, is also an AI hot spot.

The need to accelerate research, development and application of cutting-edge technologies, including AI, was stressed in 2023 economic priorities outlined at this December’s closely watched Central Economic Work Conference, where President Xi Jinping spoke.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said last Wednesday that growing AI and other emerging industries is a key priority for 2023. –Nikkei

US tech giants have traditionally dominated the field of AI – with Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft and IBM constituting the largest three producers over the 10-year period the study noted. In 2021, six US companies were in the top-10 for most-cited research, while the remaining four were Chinese firms, Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei and State Grid Corp.

Interestingly – government-owned operator State Grid is considered one of the best AI research institutions among Chinese corporations, because “the big data collected from hundreds of millions of smart meters.” The company is attempting to create the ability to predict power demand and identify problems throughout the electrical grid.

Japan, meanwhile, has fallen behind in AI research – dropping from 6th place in 2019 to 18th in 2021.

That said, META is building the world’s largest AI supercomputer in conjunction with NVIDIA, which could train models with more than a trillion parameters. For comparison, AI research tool ChatGPT has 175 billion parameters.