Authored by Andrew Fenton via CoinTelegraph.com,

SingularityNET and the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance aim to wrest control of AGI away from Big Tech…

After a year of increasingly dire warnings about the imminent demise of humanity at the hands of superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI), Magazine is in Panama at the Beneficial AGI Conference to hear the other side of the story.

Attendees include an eclectic mix of transhumanists, crypto folk, sci-fi authors including David Brin, futurists and academics.  

We’re at the conference run by SingularityNET, a key member of the proposed new Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, to find out what happens if everything goes right with creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) — human-level, artificial general intelligence.

But how do we bring about that future, rather than the scenario in which Skynet goes rogue and kills us all?

One of the best insights into why those questions are so important comes from futurist Jose Luis Cordeiro, author of The Death of Death, who believes humanity will cure all diseases and aging thanks to AGI.

He tells Magazine of some sage wisdom that Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, once told him.  

He said: ‘We have to be positive about the future because the images of the future — of what’s possible — begin with our minds. If we think we will self-destroy, most likely we will. But if we think that we will survive, [that] we will move into a better world [then we] will work toward that and we will achieve it.’ So it begins in our minds.”

Janet Adams, CEO of SingularityNET, warms the conference up with some yoga. (Fenton)

Beneficial AGI: The quest for artificial general intelligence 

Humans are hardwired to focus more on the existential threats from AGI than on the benefits.

Evolutionary speaking, it’s better that our species worries nine times too often that the wind rustling in the bushes could be a tiger than it is to be blithely unconcerned about the rustling and get eaten by a tiger on the 10th occurrence.

Even the doomers don’t put a high percentage chance of AGI killing us all, with a survey of almost 3000 AI researchers suggesting the chance of an extremely bad outcome ranges from around 5% to 10%. So while that’s worryingly high, the odds are still in our favor.

Opening the conference, SingularityNET founder and the “Father of AGI,” Dr. Ben Goertzel, paid tribute to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s concept of defensive accelerationism. That’s the midpoint between the effective accelerationism techno-optimists and their “move fast and break things” ethos, and the decelerationists, who want to slow down or halt the galloping pace of AI development.

Goertzel believes that deceleration is impossible but concedes there’s a small chance things could go horribly wrong with AGI. So he’s in favor of pursuing AGI while being mindful of the potential dangers. Like many in the AI/crypto field, he believes the solution is open-sourcing the technology and decentralizing the hardware and governance. 

Dr Ben Goertzel on keyboards with his surprisingly good robot-fronted band. (Fenton)

What is the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance?

This week SingularityNET announced it has teamed up with the decentralized multi-agent platform FetchAI — founded by DeepMind veteran Humayun Sheikh — and the data exchange platform Ocean Protocol to form the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI).

It will be the largest open-sourced independent player in AI research and development and has proposed merging SingularityNET, FetchAI and Ocean Protocol’s existing tokens into a new one called ASI. It would have a fully diluted market cap of around $7.5 billion — subject to approval votes over the next two weeks. The three platforms would continue to operate as separate entities under the guidance of Goertzel, with Sheikh as chair.

According to the Alliance, the aim is to “create a powerful compelling alternative to Big Tech’s control over AI development, use and monetization” by creating decentralized AI infrastructure at scale and accelerating investment into blockchain-based AGI.

What are the benefits of AGI?

Probably the most obvious beneficial impact is AGI’s potential to analyze huge swathes of data to help solve many of our most difficult scientific, environmental, social and medical issues.

We’ve already seen some amazing medical breakthroughs, with MIT researchers using AI models to evaluate tens of thousands of potential chemical compounds and discovered the first new class of antibiotics in 60 years, one that’s effective against the hitherto drug-resistant MRSA bacteria. It’s the sort of scaling up of research that’s almost impossible for humans to achieve.

And that’s all before we get to the immortality and mind-uploading stuff that the transhumanists get very excited about but which weirds most people out.  

This ability to analyze great swathes of data also suggests the technology will be able to give early warnings of pandemics, natural disasters and environmental issues. AI and AGI also have the potential to free humans from drudgery and repetitive work, from coding to customer service help desks.

While this will cause a massive upheaval to the workforce, the invention of washing machines and Amazon’s online businesses had big impacts on particular occupations. The hope is that a bunch of new jobs will be created instead.

Economic professor Robin Hanson says this has happened over the past two decades, even though people were very concerned at the turn of the century that automation would replace workers.  

Hanson’s study of the data on how automation impacted wages and employment across various industries between 1999 and 2019 found that despite big changes, most people still had jobs and were paid pretty much the same.

“On average, there wasn’t a net effect on wages or jobs in automation of U.S. jobs from 1999 to 2018,” he says.

SingularityNET CEO Janet Adams and Sergey Shalyapin, the platform’s chief technology officer. (Fenton)

AGI could make better decisions than we can: SingularityNET CEO Janet Adams

Janet Adams, the optimistic CEO of SingularityNET, explains that AGI has the potential to be “extraordinarily positive for all humanity.”

“I see a future in which our future AGIs are making decisions which are more ethical than the decisions which humans make. And they can do that because they don’t have emotions or jealousy or greed or hidden agendas,” she says.

Adams points out that 25,000 people die every day from hunger, even as people in rich countries throw away mountains of food. It’s a problem that could be solved by “intelligent allocation of resources across the planet,” she says. 

But Adams warns AGI needs to be trained on data sets reflecting the entire world’s population and not just the top 1% so that when they make decisions, “they won’t make them just for the benefit of the powerful few, they will make them for the benefit of the broader civilization, broader humanity.”

AI safety and ethics: Addressing the concerns

Anyone who watched the early utopian dreams of a decentralized internet crumble into a corporate ad-filled landscape of addictive design and engagement farming may have doubts this rosy future is possible.

Building high-end AI requires a mountain of computing and other resources that are currently out of reach of all but a handful of the usual suspects: Nvidia, Google, Meta and Microsoft. So the default assumption is that one of these tech giants will end up controlling AGI.

Goertzel, a long-haired hippy who plays in a surprisingly good band fronted by a robot, wants to challenge that assumption. 

Goertzel points out that the default assumption used to be that companies like IBM would win the computing industry and Yahoo would win search.

A tattered copy of The Prometheus Project. (Source: Internet Archive)

“The reason these things change is because people were concretely fighting to change it in each instance,” he says. “Instead, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the Google guys came along.”

The founder of SingularityNET, he’s been thinking about the Singularity (a theoretical moment when technological development increases exponentially) since the early 1970s when he read an early book on the subject called The Prometheus Project. 

He’s been working on AGI for much of the time since then, popularizing the term AGI and launching the OpenCog AI framework in 2008.

Adams says Goertzel is a key reason SingularityNET has a credible shot.

“We are the biggest not-for-profit, crypto-funded AI science and research team on the planet,” Adams says, noting their competitors have been focused on “narrow AIs” like ChatGPT and are only now shifting their strategy to AGI.

“They’re years behind us,” she says. “We have three decades of research with Dr. Ben Goertzel in neural symbolic methods.”

But she adds that opening up the platform to any and all developers around the world and rewarding them for their contribution will give it the edge even over the mega-corporations who currently dominate the space.

“Because we have a powerful vision and a powerful commitment to building the most advanced, most intelligent AGI in a democratic way, it’s hard to imagine that Big Tech or any other player could come in and compete, particularly when you’re up against open source.”

“[We will] see a potentially huge influx of people developing on the SingularityNET marketplace and the continued escalation of pace toward AGI. There’s a good chance it will be us.”

HyperCycle CEO Toufi Saliba (Fenton)

Decentralized AI: Opening the door to open source development 

The Prometheus Project proposed that AI was such an earth-shattering development that everyone in the world should get a democratic vote on its development.

So when blockchain emerged, it seemed like implementing decentralized infrastructure and token-based governance for AI was the next most practical alternative.

HyperCycle CEO Toufi Saliba tells Magazine this mitigates the threat of a centralized company or authoritarian country gaining immense power from developing AGI first, which would be “the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.”

It’s not the only potential solution to the problem. Meta chief AI scientist Yan Le Cun is a big proponent of open-sourcing AI models and letting a thousand flowers bloom, while X owner Elon Musk recently open-sourced the model for Grok.

But blockchain is arguably a big step up. SingularityNET aims to network the technology around the world, with different components controlled by different communities, thereby spreading the risk of any single company, group or government controlling the AGI.

“So you could use these infrastructures to implement decentralized deep neural networks, you could use them to implement a huge logic engine, you can use them to implement an artificial life approach where you have a simulated ecosystem and a bunch of little artificial animals interacting and trying to evolve toward intelligence,” explains Goertzel.

I want to foster creative contributions from everywhere, and it may be some, you know, 12-year-old genius from Tajikistan comes up with a new artificial life innovation that provides a breakthrough to AGI.”

It’s possible the fate of the world may rest in this man’s hands. (Fenton)

What is HyperCycle? What is OpenCog Hyperon?

HyperCycle is a ledgerless blockchain that’s fast enough to allow AI components to communicate, coordinate and transact to finality in under 300 milliseconds. The idea is to give AIs a way to call on the resources of other AIs, paid for via microtransactions.

For now, the fledgling network is being used for small-scale applications, like an AI app calling on another AI service to help complete a task. But in time, as the network scales, it’s theoretically possible that AGI might be an emergent property of the various AI components working together in a sort of distributed brain. 

“So, in that approach, the entire world has a much higher chance to get to AGI as a single entity,” Saliba says.

Goertzel didn’t develop HyperCycle for that reason — he just needed something miles faster than existing blockchains to enable AIs to work together.  

The project he’s most excited about is OpenCog Hyperon, which launches in alpha this month. It “combines together deep neural nets, logic engines, evolutionary learning and other AI paradigms in the same software framework, for updating the same extremely decentralized Knowledge Graph.”

The idea is to throw open the doors to anyone who wants to work on it in the hope they can improve the METTA AGI programming language so it can scale up massively. “We will have the complete toolset for building the baby AGI,” he says. “To get something I would want to call it baby AGI we will need that million times speed up of the METTA interpreter,” he says.

“My own best guess is that Opencog Hyperon may be the system to make the [AGI] breakthrough.”

AI governance: The role of voting systems 

Of course, decentralization does not ensure things will go right with AGI. As Goertzel points out, the government of Somalia was decentralized very widely in the 1990s under a bunch of warlords and militias, but it would have been preferable at the time to live under the centralized government of Finland.

Furthermore, token-based governance is a long way from being fit for prime time. In projects like Uniswap and Maker, large holders like a16z and the core team have so many tokens it’s almost not worth anyone else voting. Many other decentralized autonomous organizations are wracked by politics and infighting.

The surging price of crypto/AI projects has attracted a bunch of token speculators. Are these really the people we want to put in control of AGI?

Goertzel argues that while blockchain projects are currently primarily attractive to people interested in making money, that will change as the use case evolves. 

“If we roll out the world’s smartest AI on decentralized networks, you will get a lot of other people involved who are not primarily oriented toward financial speculation. And then it’ll be a different culture.”

But if the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance does achieve AGI, wouldn’t its tokens be ludicrously expensive and out of reach of those primarily interested in beneficial AGI?

As Goertzel has told Magazine previously, our chances of controlling AGI after a certain point are slim. (Fenton)

Goetzel suggests that perhaps a weighted voting system that prioritizes those who have contributed to the project may be required:

“I think for guiding the mind of the AGI, we want to roll out a fairly sophisticated, decentralized reputation system and have something closer to one person, one vote, but where people who have some track record of contributing to the AI network and making some sense, get a higher weighting.”

President Joe Biden in late February said “unprecedented action” is being taken in response to an emerging scenario where “China’s policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security.” He said at the time, “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practice.”

This is but one leading example of what Beijing has complained about as being hardline moves of Washington targeting Chinese goods and thus eroding the very free trade system it once led the world in establishing. This week China’s former vice minister of foreign trade, Long Yongtu—who once expressed hope that Trump would get reelected as he’s “easy to read”—reflected on the past few years of changes since the Trump administration.

He spoke of Washington-driven efforts which are resulting in rising protectionism and supply chain decoupling at an event ahead of the opening of the Boao Forum for Asia. His talk emphasized that ultimately Washington’s anti-China trajectory is hurting ordinary Americans as Chinese companies scramble to buy up land in Mexico as a necessary alternative to being able to do business directly in the US. 

“These Chinese companies could have continued to make goods in China for America at reasonable prices, but now they have to bear the extra costs of migrating to Mexico, and US consumers are grappling with more expensive goods,” Long explained, citing a seven-fold increase in Chinese investors purchasing land in Mexican industrial parks going back to 2019.

“It is the globalized economic and trade systems that are at stake, they were built by the US and the West after World War II, but now the US is dismantling the system,” he continued.

The 81-year old Long, it must be remembered, served as China’s lead negotiator during its 15-year talks to join the World Trade Organization over twenty years ago, which happened in 2001. During his fresh comments, Long said, “The WTO has been marginalized, and I think the most urgent task today is how countries can work together to strengthen the function of the WTO and carry out some necessary reforms.”

A flurry of both US and international reports over the past couple years have amply demonstrated and documented the trend, replete with stories like the following in Economic Times:

Bill Chan had never set foot anywhere in Mexico, let alone the lonely stretch of desert in the north of the country where he abruptly decided to build a $300 million factory. But that seemed a trifling detail amid the pressure to adapt to a swiftly changing global economy.

It was January 2022, and Chan’s company, Man Wah Furniture Manufacturing, was confronting grave challenges in moving sofas from its factories in China to customers in the United States. Shipping prices were skyrocketing. Washington and Beijing were locked in a fierce trade war.

Man Wah, one of China’s largest furniture companies, was eager to make its products on the North American side of the Pacific. “Our main market is the United States,” said Chan, CEO of Man Wah’s Mexico subsidiary. “We don’t want to lose that market.”

That same objective explains why scores of major Chinese companies are investing aggressively in Mexico, taking advantage of an expansive North American trade deal. Tracing a path forged by Japanese and South Korean companies, Chinese firms are establishing factories that allow them to label their goods “Made in Mexico,” then trucking their products into the United States duty-free.

There are not just economic but potential geopolitical ramifications of the trend. If China is sweeping up vast property in Mexico for production, it raises questions over the extent to which in some cases Chinese government-affiliated companies could be ‘on America’s doorstep’ in greater numbers. This would have serious ramifications in any future hot conflict scenario, for example in a new Taiwan crisis.

China’s development creates opportunities for the rest of the world rather than poses threats, said Long Yongtu, former chief of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in south China’s Hainan Province on Wednesday.https://t.co/OjBZ6XJgc5 pic.twitter.com/m3kGU1rZ55

— CCTV+ (@CCTV_Plus) March 28, 2024

Long in his Tuesday comments at the Boao Forum urged that “ordinary Americans should be better informed on the manifold benefits of free trade, and that discussions should return to the realm of common sense and the proven and objective laws of economics and trade.” He also declared that China’s global reach represents “opportunity” and should not be seen in the West as a “threat” – a common refrain of Beijing.

Authored by Efrat Fenigson via Bitcoin Magazine,

The current state of Central Bank Digital Currency Projects globally summarized by Efrat Enigson, independent journalist and host of the “You’re The Voice” podcast…

“What underpins a world order is always the financial system.

We are on the brink of a dramatic change where we are about to, and I’ll say this boldly, abandon the traditional system of money and accounting and introduce a new one. And the new one is what we call blockchain.

It means digital. It means having an almost perfect record of every single transaction that happens in the economy, which will give us far greater clarity over what’s going on. It also raises huge dangers in terms of the balance of power between states and citizens. In my opinion, we’re going to need a digital constitution of human rights if we’re going to have digital money.

Most people think that digital money is crypto and private, but what I see are superpowers introducing digital currency. The Chinese were the first. The US is on the brink of moving in the same direction. The Europeans have committed to that as well.”

This revolutionary speech about a new financial system, was delivered at the World Government Summit in March 2022 in Dubai, by Philippa “Pippa” Malmgren, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Chatham House; her father, Harald Malmgren served as a senior advisor to US Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and others. She’s a technology entrepreneur and economist, who served as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, for Economic Policy on the National Economic Council and is a former member of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets and Corporate Governance.

Her words about the transition to a new world order that requires a new financial structure correspond well with the words of French President Emmanuel Macron in June 2023 at the Global Finance Summit in Paris: “The world needs a public financial shock to fight global warming, and the current system is not suitable for dealing with the world’s challenges.” The president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, also called for “a clean slate” and said the Bretton Woods organizations (World Bank, International Monetary Fund) do not serve their goals nor respond to society’s needs.

The Summit for a New Global Financing Pact. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert/PR

“THE NEW BRETTON WOODS MOMENT”

“A new international monetary system is taking shape, some call it the new Bretton Woods moment that needs to be seized to create a new global financial governance,” says the investigative journalist Whitney Webb in a recent sitdown interview, where she mention that according to Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England & Bank of Canada and the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, the three pillars of the new multi-polar world are Digital IDs, CBDCs and ESG, through a global carbon market. All world governments are pushing this agenda, that in order for it to succeed, all monetary systems and supporting systems must become digital and rely on digital data.
A good example of this was revealed at an event of the Central Bank of Israel with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) – which I attended – in September 2023 in Tel Aviv, where the “Genesis Project” was presented. As part of this project, “green” bonds are issued, based on carbon quotas in the CBDC infrastructure. This is how the climate agenda is linked to financial markets.

“DEBT SERFDOM”

“Stablecoins could be the way in which the US is further globalizing the dollar, spreading its adoption directly to the world’s general public in order to continue increasing its debt and encourage uptake and usage of the dollar”, says Mark Goodwin, Editor in Chief of Bitcoin Magazine, in this interview with Whitney Webb. He suggests that the politician’s outcry of de-dollarization and the weakening of the dollar are a distraction from perpetuating the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
“While CBDCs are what people are becoming fearful and aware of, it may just be the red herring, and the real strategy of the US dollar’s survival is highly regulated stablecoins (such as Tether), which can easily be programmable, even more than CBDCs, as well as seized, regulated and controlled indirectly by governments. 100 billion dollars in treasuries were already purchased by Tether, its subsidiaries and owners. Tether is positioned alongside the top 20 nation states buying debt from the US, with around one tenth of China or Japan that have a trillion dollars debt to the US”.

Whitney Webb & Mark Goodwin. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC9dJYqDZ9c

This theory, together with the words of Mark Carney, Pippa Malmgren, Emmanuel Macron & Lula Da Silva, join the calls of global leaders and heads of states, pointing to the replacement of the monetary and financial world order, to introduce a new monetary system. Many experts say that we are reaching the end of the current fiat monetary system experiment, which is destined to collapse. Since world leaders are aware of this, they prefer to engineer a controlled demolition, to maintain control and steer the course, and enter the new era with power firmly within their grasp.

CENTRAL BANK DIGITAL CURRENCY SYSTEM (CBDC)

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), tie the financial freedom of citizens to the government and the banking establishment. The central bank issues its centralized digital currencies, and essentially creates a new monetary system, “fiat on steroids”, a system that takes everything that is bad in the fiat system, and adds more of it; surveillance, control, censorship, and enforcement capabilities. A modern prison? Indeed, the CBDC is the ultimate prototype of a prison without physical chains. By connecting CBDCs to digital identity cards, and to government systems such as universal basic income, social credits and more, we get the ultimate control apparatus. This apparatus will dictate to citizens what they’re allowed to purchase, what the permitted quotas are while limiting consumption according to rules and use cases, at programmed times, places and cadences. The system is able to determine the use of a geographic radius (geo-fencing), and to determine expiration dates on the money. Each remote controlled digital wallet can also be switched on and off by its operators. More than 130 countries are in the initial stages of piloting CBDC systems, of which 36 countries are in advanced pilots, and 3 countries have already launched systems (Nigeria, Jamaica and the Bahamas).

WILL RIPPLE (XRP) BE THE CHOSEN PLATFORM FOR CBDC?

Ripple, a digital payment network and transaction protocol that owns the cryptocurrency XRP, is considered one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, and is strategically positioning itself at the heart of government financial innovation, aiming to be the cornerstone of future CBDCs.

The company is in talks with about twenty governments around the world to develop their CBDCs using Ripple’s technology. In May 2023, Ripple launched a dedicated CBDC platform to assist central banks, governments and financial institutions around the world in issuing CBDCs and stablecoins. To date, Ripple has partnered with six governments for CBDC pilot projects: Georgia, Colombia, Montenegro, Hong Kong, Bhutan and the Republic of Palau.

The National Bank of Georgia, for example, has chosen Ripple as its technology partner for its CBDC pilot last year, citing Ripple’s technical expertise and team capabilities. Its interest in CBDCs is in leveraging modern technologies, such as the programmability aspect of CBDCs, aiming to create a platform with smart contract and programmable token capabilities to stimulate innovation in the financial sector.

In the case of Bhutan, Ripple’s technology was chosen in 2021 for the country’s CBDC project to enable advanced cross-border payments, and assist in “financial inclusion” – in line with Bhutan’s mission to increase financial inclusion in Bhutan to 85% by 2023.

In 2022, Ripple reached the final stage of the G20 Techsprint CBDC Hackathon, hosted by Indonesia and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and in August 2023, the Republic of Palau launched a USD-backed digital currency, developed by Ripple.

Promoting its platform as an infrastructure for a CBDC, Ripple advocates for government regulation of cryptocurrencies, and tries to position itself as the preferred solution for CBDC projects. Its claim to fame of being the ideal CBDC partner for governments is the combination of speed, efficiency, a sustainable and “green” blockchain network that uses little energy (compared to the Bitcoin network), and interoperability – the ability to communicate and work with CBDC solutions in other countries on the Ripple infrastructure. The company warns that there is a risk for CBDC adoption by the public, caused mainly by a lack of market education, and it encourages the programming and expiration dates capabilities, which are perceived by most of the public as particularly Orwellian features of CBDCs.

Ripple encourages the abolition of cash (and a move to a cashless society), and unsurprisingly, it promotes the climate agenda; The company’s website presents its commitment to a clean, prosperous and secure low-carbon future, with a plan to reach carbon net-zero by 2030.

Apparently, in line with Ripple’s expansion strategy vis-a-vis governments, the company makes sure to recruit employees who came from central and commercial banks. One of the company’s top executives is Andrew Whitworth, policy director at Ripple, who previously worked at the Bank of England. At the same time as his role in Ripple, Whitworth also serves as a Director of the “Digital Pound Foundation”, an organization that has declared itself the authority on the Digital Pound; it advises and influences the government’s decisions regarding CBDC projects and deployments. Clearly an inside connection such as this might give Ripple an advantage in shaping digital currency policies to fit their platform and solutions. Does this hint a conflict of interests, or at least an unfair play?

Another avenue through which institutional influence and implicit control over Ripple could manifest is via a legal battle with the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) concerning the XRP cryptocurrency. Engaging in such legal disputes inevitably positions Ripple in a scenario where maintaining a positive relationship with institutions becomes crucial. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Ripple prioritizes governments, central banks, and financial institutions as its primary target audience in its market strategy.

Photo: Lord XRP Twitter account

INTERESTING DEVELOPMENTS IN CBDC

China spent a couple of years rolling out relatively failed CBDC projects without widespread adoption, while injecting 30 million yuan as free money to encourage user adoption. Transactions using the digital yuan hit 1.8 trillion yuan (US$249 billion) in June 2023.

Recently, significant progress has been made: the two main payment services and applications in China – WeChat and Alipay – which have a traffic of about 3-4 trillion dollars per year, integrated the Chinese CBDC service into their applications. The central bank regulator made it clear that digital yuan isn’t meant to compete with the two payments giants. Rather, it’s supposed to play a complementary role.

Elon Musk, who owns, among other things, the Twitter/X platform, has stated that he wants to make the platform an “everything app” like the Chinese WeChat, including payment management. Will X also follow the Chinese route and integrate the CBDC solution into it, or will it try to become a CBDC infrastructure itself with the help of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, the Dogecoin?

The CBDC pilot in Nigeria didn’t exactly take off either, after the citizens took to the streets to protest the abolition of cash in the country, and resented the introduction of an unneeded digital solution, while demanding the return of cash. After a long and painful protest, the cash was returned alongside the new digital currency, which was not canceled and became part of reality. Furthermore, a new stablecoin is in preparation in Sandbox mode in Nigeria. The cNGN is a Naira stablecoin which some claim has more potential than the e-Naira to be widely adopted. “The stablecoin will be more broadly interoperable than the CBDC, which is only available in the central bank’s wallet. At launch, the central bank’s wallet usability was weak, although it is now quite good”, said Bolu Abiodun, a reporter at Techpoint Africa.

Source

The UK saw a strong public backlash to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last year, with more than 50,000 responses sent to the Bank of England following a public hearing on the Digital Pound, aka the UK’s national CBDC.

GERMANY – AWARENESS OF “EXCESSIVE SURVEILLANCE”

In Germany, the technical guidelines document for a digital currency of a central bank was published in January 2024. Below are several quotes from the document, reflecting the tyrannical nature of the new currency, and the awareness of the central bank for trust issues it can create:

• Programmability is the institution’s authority to dedicate your money for certain uses, and to prohibit the use of your wallet when it is “outside the permitted scope”.
   
• “The central bank can revoke CBDC notes, e. g. as an instrument of monetary control. Revocation of CBDC notes is performed by an authorized entity, the revocation authority, controlled and operated by the central bank.” This sounds like a technique to confiscate and apply a shelf life to money.
   
• “Payments permitted under certain restrictions.. if the central bank sees fit to impose them” – the document lists restrictions that can be applied to wallets, depending on the amount of personal information that will be provided. For example, the amount of money in the wallet, the number of payments per day, the amount of money per transaction or per day.
   
• The good news: The German central bank is aware of the possibility of public opposition to a surveillance system: “Many of these design choices are general decisions on the trade-off between excessive surveillance and legitimate monitoring functions for AML and KYC purposes in conjunction with measures for mitigating fraud and misconduct. These decisions are extremely sensitive in nature and can strongly influence the level of trust that users place into the CBDC”.

ISRAEL – THE DIGITAL SHEKEL WILL BE DISTRIBUTED THROUGH COMMERCIAL BANKS

Israel takes an extensive and active part in various CBDC pilots, such as the Sela project, Eden, Icebreaker and more, which I have reported on extensively in the past. The Deputy Governor of the Bank of Israel announced that in December 2024 a technical design document for the Digital Shekel will be published, and its implementation will then begin in partnership with the private sector.

The Bank of Israel’s latest document from last week covers the proposed architecture of the Digital Shekel. Here are some interesting points from the document:

• The distribution of the Digital Shekel will be two-tiered: instead of direct contact between consumers and the central bank for funding and defunding, an indirect method similar to the distribution of cash today will be used. The banks will purchase digital shekels from the central bank in large quantities and transfer them to customers upon wallet charging.

• The system will be able to apply and enforce limits, for example limits on the balance that users are allowed to hold in the Digital Shekel.

• The system will support the possibility of applying interest on the Digital Shekel.

• Users will be able to access the Digital Shekel through several payment providers, including credit cards, Google/Apple Pay, wearables, payment apps and more.

• Unlike most retail CBDC solutions, Israel’s model allows users to open a wallet with a payment service provider (PSP) and connect to multiple third-party banks to fund and defund balances.

Another interesting development in Israel is the announcement of a plan to launch a new stablecoin pegged to the shekel, called BILS, by the exchange platform, Bits Of Gold. Crypto Jungle website reports that the Israeli Capital Market Authority approved the pilot, according to the draft principles published by the Central Bank of Israel. Interesting to note that the company providing the infrastructure for the issuance and custody of the currency is the Israeli technology giant “FireBlocks”, which took part in the “Eden” pilot project of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange for the issuance of digital bonds, built to adapt in the future to a potential CBDC infrastructure.

NO INTERNET? DON’T WORRY, GOVERNMENTS WILL TAKE CARE OF CONNECTIVITY ANYWAY

A number of CBDC pilots, like in India, the European Union and more, focus on the adoption of the system by everyone, even amongst people without internet access. The washed-up name “financial inclusion” implies that the system will not skip anyone, not even citizens without Internet connectivity in remote areas, or without reception. In India for example, there are 683 million people living without an internet connection and largely outside the control of the state. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) plans to bring these remote areas into a new surveillance network through various technological means. A successful launch of CBDC in India also corresponds with the government’s overarching goal of reducing cash usage and improving financial monitoring.

THAILAND – FREE MONEY FOR THE MASSES

In September 2023, the Thai government announced that any Thai citizen over the age of 16 who chooses to participate in the CBDC pilot, will receive free CBDC worth $280 (10,000 baht) – quite a lot of money in Thai terms. This digital money will be loaded into the digital wallet application and will be available for use within 6 months, and within a radius of 4 km from the residence of the registered citizens. The pilot targets low-income citizens as a first stage, and later expands to entrepreneurs and small business operators – provided they are registered in the tax system. In Thailand many citizens are not registered in the government systems and not everyone has a bank account. It seems that air-dropping “free money” is another tactic to lure citizens into government systems, with the bait of “free” controlled government money. But is there such a thing as “free lunch”?

THE EUROPEAN UNION – A POSITIVE MARKETING CAMPAIGN IN HIGH GEAR

The European Union launched a marketing campaign to promote the digital euro about six months ago, to start educating the European public about a reality where that they will be obliged to use a supervised digital euro, led by Christine Lagarde, who was previously convicted of crimes and was promoted to serve as the governor of the European Central Bank, the ECB.

The Digital Euro new marketing campaign. Source: Christine Lagarde’s Twitter account

At the same time, a charade is going on in the European Union Parliament where the dangers of CBDCs are being discussed, only thanks to the public awareness and discourse, while Lagarde rushes forward and kicks off the marketing campaign to instill in the public the following messages: the digital euro is easy, safe, fast and reliable. Not a word about its Orwellian capabilities to track, program, limit and condition activity through expiration dates, geo-fencing, and remote on and off switching.

Another ECB campaign video for the Digital Euro

THE DIGITAL EURO WILL NOT BE ANONYMOUS

In a discussion at the European Union Council in 2023, Lagarde emphasizes a point: the digital euro will not be anonymous. Privacy will exist in the system, but not anonymity. Let’s break this up in a different way: for the banks, the key to surveillance and control is identification. The bank must know who the citizen is and verify their identity, in order to exercise law enforcement or regulations, through technological restrictions. Lagarde’s claim that the technology will allow privacy but not anonymity is unfounded: apparently the central bank considers itself and the financial service providers some kind of God, since in front of them the citizen will be identified, and therefore it is not clear what kind of privacy can exist, without anonymity.

Source: Christine Lagarde’s Twitter account

In a presentation from March 2024, the ECB presents a timetable for the Digital Euro. In November 2025, the development and implementation phase will begin, with the completion of the “democratic” legislative process.

The timing of the launch of the Digital Euro corresponds well with the European Union’s initiative to issue digital identity cards to all EU residents between now and 2030, to enable the necessary government identification and tracking of its citizens. Identical initiatives are enacted and promoted in many other countries around the world at the same time. Where I live, in Israel, ID cards and passports have been mandatory and digital for many years, and also biometric since 2013 – therefore there is no need to start the marketing campaign for the Digital Shekel yet, as the digital infrastructure exists hence the first step of digitalization is already done.

The timetable of the Digital Euro by the ECB

This phase of the project is the “preparation phase”, the ECB reveals, in which they are preparing for the launch phase of the Digital Euro. Of course, we are reassured that no final decision has yet been made regarding the launch of the CBDC, and this will only happen with the approval of the “Government Council” after the completion of the democratic legislative process of the European Union. Therefore, in parallel with the democratic debate for or against the Digital Euro, the development of the technology will continue, in order to be prepared for the launch.

Central bank governors such as Lagarde and Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron insist that the CBDC is digital cash, and also insist that physical cash will not be abolished. It is possible that these central bankers feel the need to make a U-turn from the incriminating speech of the head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Augustin Carstens, who caused a public outcry when he stated in 2020 that the CBDC technology, unlike cash, will allow monitoring of financial transactions and will be a means of enforcement by the establishment:

“The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control of the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that

expression (money) of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”

Agustín Carstens – BIS General Manager

THE FUTURE: CENTRALIZED AND CONTROLLED, OR FREE, DECENTRALIZED AND SECURE?

Ayn Rand, author and philosopher, said that “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” Are we taking giant steps towards a new monetary reality, where the fiat currencies we know become fiat on steroids, aka CBDCs? Or into the reality of “stable” and closely regulated cryptocurrencies, tethered to fiat? Either way, the feeling is that the establishment is doing everything to preserve the debt economy, and its inherent modern slavery. The only way to break these fiat-matrix boundaries is to opt out and enter into a new system, which seems to run in a parallel reality, the Bitcoin system. On the Bitcoin standard, under self-custody, no third party has the ability to confiscate, program or take over private assets. Not even the government or the state. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy for its mining, but this proof-of-work mechanism makes the blockchain network extremely secure and the Bitcoin currency very valuable. Bitcoin is “safe money”, which is out of reach for the establishment. Unlike most other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is a digital currency without intermediaries or third parties (peer-to-peer) in a decentralized and secure network, which allows everyone to be their own bank, instead of relying on banks and external parties. With a fixed and known supply, it represents the most powerful digital asset on the market as a store of value and as a unit of account, and in the future will also be used as a medium of exchange.

In my recent interview with the media and finance expert, and one of the most famous Bitcoiners, Max Keiser, he compared the CBDC to a parasitic and centralized cancer: “If you were to look at the amount of energy that Bitcoin uses and the rate at which it’s increasing, you would say good is triumphing over evil. So this gives me a lot of hope. And I don’t think centralization in anything works at all, except cancer. Cancer is the only thing that seems to work to be overly centralized and parasitic. That’s the cancer model, but I think we’re gonna win against the cancer of CBDCs.” 

Follow Efrat’s work here. 

Authored by Callista L. Gingrich via RealClear Politics,

Since late February, gang violence in Haiti has surged, overwhelming government and security forces and plunging the nation into further turmoil. The United Nations estimates that armed gangs now control 80 percent of the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

The recent wave of violence in the Caribbean nation’s ongoing gang wars erupted as multiple armed groups banded together, pledging to oust Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who came to power after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and announced postponing Haiti’s elections again last year.

Citing ongoing gang violence as one of the reasons for staving off elections, Henry flew to Kenya in February to press for the deployment of a U.N-backed police force to support the Haitian National Police in fighting the gangs. The armed groups responded by launching a series of coordinated attacks in Port-au-Prince and preventing Henry’s return to Haiti.

In the weeks that followed, gangs ravaged two prisons releasing more than 4,000 inmates into the country; destroyed power substations; attacked airports, police stations, and neighborhoods; and took control of major ports and water facilities.

More than 15,000 people have fled their homes in recent weeks. According to an anonymous woman who spoke with CBS News, “People go inside your house, killing, raping, all those things, burning your house.”

Americans have been urged to leave the country. Nearly 1,000 have filled out crisis intake forms asking for help or assistance to escape the turmoil. At the time of this writing, hundreds of Americans have not been able to evacuate.

During a briefing on March 12, the U.S. State Department announced that in addition to pledging a total contribution of $300 million, the United States helped to broker a deal that will form “a new presidential council that will select a new interim prime minister and pave the pathway for elections, as well as the deployment of the Multinational Security Support Mission.” Once the transitional council is established, Kenya will deploy the police force and Henry will step aside.

Despite this development, the situation on the ground for the people of Haiti remains desperate. A U.S. State Department spokesperson said during a press briefing on Monday, “It is not hyperbole to say that this is one of the most dire humanitarian situations in the world.”

Tragically, fear and suffering from gang violence in Haiti is not new – but is a daily reality for many Haitians.

There are an estimated 200 gangs operating in Haiti, and approximately 95 operate near Port-au-Prince. In 2023, more than 8,400 people were reported killed, injured, or kidnapped, more than two times the amount as the previous year. Further, compared to 2022, rape cases skyrocketed by 49 percent from January to August 2023.

Bringing violence to neighborhoods, gangs demand so-called protection money from residents, and when they can’t pay, threaten impoverished civilians. Twenty-eight-year-old Annie, who fled Port-au-Prince with her family two years ago, told the BBC, “I saw so many awful things I never thought I would see. We were afraid for our lives.”

She added, “We are living with death on a daily basis.”

In addition to gang violence, chronic political instability, natural disasters, foreign intervention, and debt have crippled Haiti’s economy, fueled violence, and hindered development.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and more than half of the population lives below the World Bank’s poverty line. In a population of 11.7 million people, approximately 5.5 million Haitians require humanitarian assistance, more than 4 million people are affected by food insecurity, and 19,000 are experiencing famine. 

“I wake up in the morning and if we have sugar in the house, we make sugar water and put a bit of salt in it, just to drink it and stop the pain of hunger,” Kerby, a Haitian who fled Port-au-Prince due to gang threats, recently told the BBC.

Amid the recent developments, it is unclear what the governance of Haiti will look like and how it will impact the future of the Caribbean nation.

As gang violence and chaos continue to wreak havoc, the international community must work to bring peace and stability to Haiti.

For more commentary form Callista Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.

Instead of the woke Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott utilizing his precious time by going on corporate media’s leftists Joy Reid’s MSNBC show and asserting that white conservatives “should be afraid” of the consequences of calling him the ‘DEI Mayor,’ perhaps the unseasoned youngster who over-promised about fixing imploding Baltimore City (after fifty years of a Democratic-controlled City Hall) should realize the local economy is on the cusp of meltdown and potential negative credit risk event following the bridge collapse and resulting paralyzed port. 

The Port of Baltimore is a significant economic driver for the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland, and an extended closure will spread like cancer through the local economy as snarled supply chains will result in job losses, lower warehouse activity, and tax revenue loss for the government. 

“I would say the Port of Baltimore is the leading economic driver for the region in Baltimore,” Anirban Basu, chairman and CEO of Baltimore-based Sage Policy Group Inc., told FreightWaves. 

Basu said, “One could argue that the leading driver is Johns Hopkins. It’s a difficult comparison, because you’re talking about two very different fields of endeavor. But the Baltimore region has been one of the nation’s underperformers in recent years. In the Baltimore region, we have had to clawback the jobs lost early during the pandemic.”

Cargo to the paralyzed Port of Baltimore will be diverted to other US East Coast ports. Scott Cowan, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Baltimore local chapter, warned that thousands of port jobs could soon vanish. 

On Thursday morning, Moody’s published a note that said a prolonged closure of the port would ripple through the local economy and could spark negative credit risk events for the city and state:  

The bridge collapse threatens to disrupt aspects of the State of Maryland (Aaa stable) and City of Baltimore (Aa2 stable) economies. The suspension of shipping traffic to the Port of Baltimore will likely divert cargo to other East Coast ports, which may affect jobs and tax revenue. The accident also has the potential to hurt the transportation and warehousing sector, though that accounts for a small share of state GDP.

More from Moody’s about the credit fallout that could soon hit Baltimore: 

In recent years, the state and Baltimore County (Aaa stable) have provided incentives and worked with developers to facilitate the redevelopment of Sparrows Point, a more than 3,000-acre contaminated industrial site once home to a Bethlehem Steel plant. Over the last nine years, Sparrows Point has seen almost $2 billion of private investment resulting in the development of 14 million square feet of warehousing and distribution facilities. With the Key Bridge providing the only direct access route between Sparrows Point and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, further development at Sparrows Point could be delayed.

There is no timetable for how long salvage crews will take to remove the massive bridge blocking the harbor’s only entry and exit. Some figures are six weeks, while others are several months. Shippers diverting operations to other East Coast ports will also hit warehousing and trucking businesses in the area. 

We have described to readers for years that Baltimore has been trending down. It’s only in a downward trend when a shock forms that the real troubles begin materializing. And that shock started this week. Sorry, Scott. It’s not a race thing like you describe on MSNBC—you’re just an inexperienced leader. The persistent crime chaos and failed progressive policies are evidence of this. It’s time for new leadership. 

Via Middle East Eye

A leading opposition activist has been arrested and detained in Bahrain for criticizing on social media the island kingdom’s ownership of the sportscar brand, McLaren.

Ebrahim Sharif was arrested by Bahraini authorities on Monday morning over social media posts critical of Bahrain’s decision to take full ownership of the McLaren Group, which is involved in Formula One, other motorsports and the manufacture of luxury supercars. 

The former secretary general of the National Democratic Action Society (Wa’ad), Bahrain’s largest leftist political party, Sharif was arrested and detained for three social media posts he wrote in the wake of the McLaren ownership news. 

Last Friday, Mumtalakat, Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, which was already McLaren’s biggest shareholder, having first invested in 2007, took over full ownership of the troubled British company, which has been experiencing heavy financial losses.

Abdulla bin Khalifa al-Khalifa, CEO of Mumtalakat and a member of Bahrain’s ruling royal family, welcomed the deal, heralding “the next phase of the company’s trajectory of growing its leadership position in the luxury super car and motorsports industries.”

Sharif was interviewed by police on Monday following a summons and subsequently referred to Bahrain’s public prosecution, which ordered that he be kept in detention for seven days pending an investigation over “social media posts that allegedly incite hatred against the regime,” according to Sharif’s lawyer and family.

If officially charged, the opposition activist could be imprisoned under Article 165 of the Bahrain Penal Code, which states that “A prison sentence shall be passed against any person who expressly incites others to develop hatred or hostility towards the system of government.” Farida Ghulam, Sharif’s wife, confirmed his arrest and the reasons for his detention in a social media post. 

Middle East Eye asked McLaren if it condoned the arrest and detention of an activist for criticizing its ownership. The company has not yet responded.

In the first of his contentious social media posts, on March 23 Sharif quoted Karl Marx’s line about history repeating itself first as tragedy, and then as farce. He referenced Bahrain’s prior purchase of Gulf Air, before writing: “With McLaren, we have moved from tragedy to farce. We have completed another cycle of owning failed companies with bottomless losses.”

McLaren recorded a pre-tax loss of $349m in the first nine months of 2023. 

The next day, Sharif contrasted Bahrain’s housing projects budget for 2023 (approximately $239m, according to official documentation displayed in the tweet) with the $564m put into McLaren by the sovereign wealth fund. 

“التاريخ يعيد نفسه مرتين، المرة الأولى كمأساة والثانية كمهزلة”
(كارل ماركس)

عندما تملكت البحرين كامل أسهم شركة طيران الخليج (بعد شراء حصتي ابوظبي وقطر) تضاعفت خسائرنا والمبالغ التي نحتاج لضخها سنويا لمنع افلاسها.

مع #مكلارين انتقلنا من المأساة الى المهزلة. لقد أكملنا دورة أخرى… pic.twitter.com/S8dKmiT3m5

— Ebrahim Sharif (@ebrahimsharif) March 23, 2024

In a follow-up post, Sharif wrote that “Denial is an official policy, and the narrative of ‘a happy people’ is promoted by superficial media outlets.” And further:

“Do we believe what officials repeat and find resonance in complicit media, or do we believe what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our feelings sense about citizens living in miserable poverty, chronic unemployment, marginalization, class disparities, and housing waiting lists that extend until the end of their days?

What the state spent on McLaren Racing last year is multiples of what it spent on housing projects. Do people die… in their overcrowded homes because you prioritize your hobbies and games over the interests of the poor?“

It was after this last post that Sharif was summoned for an interview by Bahraini police. Commenting on the charges, Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, advocacy director at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird), said: “These accusations are absurd. No one should be arrested for freely expressing their views or questioning how the government is spending public funds. McLaren’s leadership must speak out on his arrest or else their brand will be stained by Bahrain’s abuses.”

In 2004, Bahrain hosted its inaugural Grand Prix – the first one to take place in the Middle East. While the 20th anniversary of this event was celebrated at the 2024 Bahrain Grand Prix earlier this month, activists told MEE it marked “20 years of sportswashing”. 

BREAKING: Leading opposition activist Ebrahim Sharif was arrested this morning over social media posts critical of the Bahraini government, including criticising Bahrain’s ownership of McLaren.

The public prosecution ordered 7 day detention pending investigation on allegations… pic.twitter.com/N5LgiGf2ms

— Sayed Ahmed AlWadaei (@SAlwadaei) March 25, 2024

The deal to take F1 to Bahrain was struck by the motorsport’s then-supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, and the island kingdom’s crown prince, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa. 

Over the 20 years it has hosted the Grand Prix, Bahrain has looked to control this publicity, with political protests broken up so as not to disturb the spectacle around the motorsport, and activists harassed, detained and jailed for speaking out.

“The Grand Prix helps them, it helps them do this,” Moosa Satrawi, a Bahraini activist who told MEE he had been detained, abused and tortured for protesting unemployment in the island kingdom, said of Bahrain’s clampdown on human rights.  

Russian authorities say they have found a firm link between the suspects in last week’s terror attack on the Crocus City Hall complex and “Ukrainian nationalists” – according to a Thursday announcement. 

The Russian Investigative Committee has unveiled preliminary findings, stating that the perpetrators who last Friday killed 140 people and wounded many more had received “significant sums of money” from Ukraine.

Investigators claim to have in their possession “substantiated evidence” that the attackers received payments from Ukraine in the form of cryptocurrency. 

President Putin had starting Saturday asserted that the terrorists were apprehended just before trying to cross the Ukrainian border. He alleged that the Ukrainians might have been preparing a “window” for them to cross. There were four gunmen who rampaged through the mall and concert venue on Friday, randomly shooting innocent bystanders, but in total eleven were initially arrested, followed by several more arrests of alleged conspirators.

Days following Putin’s speech the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Aleksandr Bortnikov, told a press briefing that the Kremlin considers that the US, UK and Ukraine may have been involved.

Importantly, the Kremlin has acknowledged the perpetrators to to be radical Islamic terrorists, and so have said there is some truth to the ‘ISIS-K’ narrative presented by the West; however, Russian officials have persistently raised the question of another entity, country, or intelligence service ultimately backing the attack. For example on Wednesday foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova had this to say:

“Of course, the speed with which they were able to [come to such forthright conclusions] is astonishing. It took them only a few hours to get to a microphone, turn on the lights, summon the press, and draw a conclusion about who is to blame for this horribly bloody terrorist attack.”

Russian intelligence (FSB) has meanwhile claimed the terrorists would have been “welcomed as heroes” if they had made it to Ukraine. All four gunmen have since been identified as Tajik nationals – and none of those in detention are Russian citizens, according to Moscow authorities.

As for the new allegations that they had financial links to Ukraine, no evidence was presented publicly to back the statements. It also remains unclear whether these alleged funding links are connected to Ukrainian government entities or just individuals inside Ukraine.

How is it that U.S. authorities have yet to determine who was accountable for the Baltimore Bridge collapse, while it only took them 45 minutes to identify the responsible behind the terror attack at the Moscow concert Crocus Hall?

It’s truly astonishing…. https://t.co/Yu1AMlQ6rU

— Russian Market (@runews) March 26, 2024

The White House meanwhile is not buying any of this. In response, on Thursday the Biden administration rejected these new Russian claims as “nonsense” and said it was clear that the Islamic State was “solely responsible”. White House national security spokesperson John Kirby in a briefing also reiterated that Washington had passed info on to Moscow that a terror attack was imminent. Kirby described this as delivered in the form of a “written warning”. The US Embassy in Moscow also issued a public alert calling on Americans to avoid large public venues and gatherings.

“It is abundantly clear that ISIS (Islamic State) was solely responsible for the horrific attack in Moscow last week. In fact, the United States tried to help prevent this terrorist attack and the Kremlin knows this,” Kirby said.

A NY Times report says, however, that the US side did not share its full intelligence with Moscow. “The adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow prevented US officials from sharing any information about the plot beyond what was necessary,” the Times wrote Thursday. The Americans purportedly did this “out of fear Russian authorities might learn their intelligence sources or methods.”

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

Baltimore leader Brandon Scott appeared on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show to assert that white conservatives “should be afraid” of the consequences of calling him the ‘DEI Mayor’ and that his “purpose in life” was to make them uncomfortable.

Yes, really.

Professional race-bator Reid angrily asserted that when right-wingers make fun of DEI, they actually mean just “black people,” claiming, “It’s the reason they complained about Critical Race Theory, it’s not fashionable to be openly racist anymore in America.”

She then welcomed Scott, who dresses and acts like a Black Lives Matter activist, to address the horrifically “racist” fact that right-wingers don’t support DEI in light of the Baltimore bridge collapse.

The mayor complained about “young black men” being demonized and treated as the “boogeymen” by racist conservatives who think that “only straight, white wealthy men” should have power.

“We know what they want to say and they don’t have the courage to say the n-word,” he ludicrously added, before appearing to make some kind of veiled threat.

“The fact that I don’t believe in their untruthful and wrong ideology and I am very proud of my heritage and who I am and where I come from scares them, because me being at my position means that their way of thinking, their way of life of being comfortable while everyone else suffers is going to be at risk and they should be afraid because that’s my purpose in life,” said Scott.

And there you have it, in his own words.

Scott’s “purpose in life” is to make white people uncomfortable and afraid.

But remember, you’re the racist for making fun of him.

Reid also said the ship was “piloted by a very heroic crew from India” and that it was also racist to criticize them despite them failing to prevent the ship from crashing into and destroying the bridge.

As we document in the video below, the group that managed the Dali cargo ship and the Maryland Port Commission both appear to have prioritized ‘diversity’ over safety before the ‘accident’ that led to the collapse of the bridge.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Authored by Simon Hankinson via The Epoch Times,

There’s an old saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Three years into his presidency, Joe Biden has run into the last sentence of that aphorism as he attempts to fool all Americans into believing that either that he wants to fix the border crisis or that Republicans are to blame for it.

In his recent State of the Union address to Congress, President Biden was praised as “fiery” and “energetic” by friendly press outlets, but even they had to admit that the speech was more campaign stump speech than national status report. The right-leaning Federalist claimed Mr. Biden lied 30 times. And even Roll Call, which news website and media monitor AllSides calls “center”-leaning, fact-checked the speech and found it “included misleading claims on inflation, crime, clean energy investments, wages.”

Roll Call’s list of Biden’s false or misleading claims missed the biggest one of all: his attempt to blame Republicans in Congress for the disaster at the border that was actually caused by his executive actions.

Even so, what bothered the Left was that the president had gone off-script and called Jose Ibarra, the Venezuelan accused of killing college student Laken Riley, an “illegal.” Mr. Biden apologized for that faux pas in an interview with MSNBC two days later, saying, “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal,’ it’s ‘undocumented.’”

But, in fact, Ibarra, while illegally in the United States, was indeed documented. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security documented him when it paroled him into the United States “temporarily” and on a “case-by-case” basis, as the law requires, allowing him to enter the country with no criminal background check in his native country. This was despite reports that Ibarra has tattoos indicating membership in a violent gang, which should have triggered further investigation.

“I am not going to treat any of these people with disrespect,” Mr. Biden told Jonathan Capehart in the interview. “They built this country.”

Presumably, by “these people,” Mr. Biden meant young men such as the Ibarra brothers. Mr. Biden would like Americans to ignore the distinction between congressionally authorized immigration (which did indeed help build this country) and the mass, illegal migration of unvetted aliens that he has facilitated during his three years in office.

“We have to control the border … and more orderly flow,” the president told Capehart.

By “orderly flow,” Mr. Biden means processing into the country as many inadmissible aliens as physically possible. This has been his policy from the very beginning of his administration, as this X compilation of Biden’s statements makes clear:

Tonight Biden is going to blame Trump and the Republicans for his border crisis.

Share this far and wide so people know that he is lying. pic.twitter.com/pzaZeElk5r

— MAZE (@mazemoore) March 7, 2024

Despite the president’s falsehoods in his speech and protestations to Capeheart, however, a recent CBS poll showed 45 percent of Americans thought the “situation at the U.S.-Mexico border is a crisis.” That has the spin doctors working overtime.

Defending Biden’s border policy on CNN, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas again claimed, “This system has been broken for decades,” that the administration has been trying to fix it from Day One, and that there is a magical “bipartisan solution” in Congress that Republicans are refusing to pass.

“Legislation is the enduring solution,” said the man who has deliberately ignored existing legislation for three years. Mayorkas has refused to return asylum applicants to Mexico, detain or deport illegal aliens as he is legally required to do, and has made up programs to mass parole them into the United States, which the law does not authorize.

Raul Ortiz, the head of the 21,000-strong U.S. Border Patrol until summer 2023, recently said he had never once met with President Biden or “border czar” Kamala Harris. Ortiz said “most definitely” the White House has sent “mixed messages” to would-be illegal migrants.

Not so. The Biden message has been clear and consistent: Enter the United States illegally, and you have a better than even chance of being allowed to stay indefinitely. You’ll even get in ahead of those who try to lawfully navigate the immigration system and wait their turn in line. Cross without identification, and you can give yourself a new name, date of birth, and history that will never be verified.

The world heard Biden’s message, and they came. They are coming still, from a greater variety of countries, in greater numbers.

Keeping the borders open to please Biden’s radical base while blaming Republicans in Congress for the results appears to be the White House communications strategy. “Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends,” Mr. Biden claimed after a visit to the border at the end of February.

But as Roll Call columnist David Winston wrote, “Simply saying the same things more aggressively won’t convince voters.”

After three years, Mr. Biden has made his case. He wants billions more tax dollars to facilitate the “smooth flow” of essentially unlimited immigration by foreigners who have no right to enter the country other than what “rights” he confers through stretching executive powers beyond credibility. Mr. Biden owns the consequences and will have to defend this position, not use the smoke screen he attempted to conjure at the State of the Union to conceal it.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Q1 macro was characterized by a vast divergence between ‘soft’ surveys crashing as ‘hard’ data drifting higher…

Source: Bloomberg

The strong ‘hard’ data – and sticky inflation – along with endless jawboning, drove rate-hike expectations drastically lower in Q1. 2024 expectations for The Fed crashed from almost seven cuts to less than three…

Source: Bloomberg

…and stocks did not even blink!

Source: Bloomberg

With the S&P 500 surging to its best start to a year since 2019 (outperforming Nasdaq)…

Source: Bloomberg

That’s the 5th green month in a row…

Source: Bloomberg

And stocks are up for 18 of the last 22 weeks (it hasn’t done more than that since 1989)…

Source: Bloomberg

Notably, and perhaps surprisingly, Q1’s best performing sector was not tech… it was Energy (with Real Estate the only sector red in Q1). In fact in March, Energy stocks are up 10% while Tech is unchanged…

Source: Bloomberg

Some have argued that Q1’s market strength reflects a growing belief that Republicans will win in November…

Source: Bloomberg

And don’t let anyone tell you this has not been a multiple expansion – tech is now back at over 28x – its post-dot-com bust highs…

Source: Bloomberg

MTUM (momentum) saw its best start to a year… ever….

Source: Bloomberg

In fact, as Goldman shows in the chart below, High Beta Momo – the big Q1 outperformer – reversed its laggard performance in 2023…

Thematically, Bitcoin-Sensitive stocks, AI stocks, and anti-obesity drug stocks all outperformed in Q1, continuing the trend of 2023 gains…

AI-related stocks soared 24% in Q1 while stocks at risk from AI fell around 3% in Q1…

Source: Bloomberg

Anti-Obesity stocks soared in Q1, actually outperforming AI stocks and even GLP-1-at-risk stocks (e.g. WW) managed gains in Q1…

Source: Bloomberg

‘Magnificent 7’ stocks added a stunning $1.7 trillion in market cap in Q1…

Source: Bloomberg

Notably, the implied vol of the Mag7 is once again very elevated relative to the implied vol of the S&P 500. In July of last year, this signaled a big reversal (demand for hedges). In Jan of this year, it was a signal of chasers buying levered bets on the upside. What does it mean this time?

Source: Bloomberg

The strength in stocks and credit has dominated any rise in yields and crushed financial conditions to their loosest since before The Fed started their rate-hiking cycle…

Source: Bloomberg

US Treasuries were dumped in Q1 as rate-cut expectations plunged with the short-end modestly underperforming…

Source: Bloomberg

And while survey-based inflation expectations (UMich) are sliding, the market’s expectation for inflation is anything but…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar rallied in Q1, erasing around half of the Q4 losses…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar’s strength was supported by yen weakness as the Japanese currency plunged to its weakest since 1990…

Source: Bloomberg

Not to be outdone, the yuan also tumbled in Q1…

Source: Bloomberg

Q1 was dominated by bitcoin headlines – as the newly minted ETFs saw unprecedented inflows…

Source: Bloomberg

Which helped push Bitcoin to a new record high (in USD)…

Source: Bloomberg

Ethereum also soared in Q1 (up 55%) but Solana outperformed…

Source: Bloomberg

Another alternate currency – gold – also soared to a new record high in Q1…

Source: Bloomberg

And just when you thought NVDA was the big winner, Cocoa hyperinflates in Q1, up 135% YTD!

Source: Bloomberg

Oil, wholesale gasoline, and pump-prices all ripped higher in Q1 (especially March)…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, as Goldman’s Chris Hussey notes, it’s times like these – when ‘everything is awesome’ – when it is best to assess the risks that swirl around the investment landscape. Here are a few to consider:

• A strong economic landing becomes a hard landing;

• Inflation is sticky, not transitory, and the Fed pushes back;

• The pandemic stimulus surge turns out not to be ‘cost-less’;

• Concentration raises ‘key company’ risk;

• Elections and geo-political risks.

And as a reminder, we’ve seen these ‘everything is awesome’ moments before…

Source: Bloomberg

And they never end well.