As Tesla looks to navigate uncertain demand with price cuts heading into 2024, the company is now also encountering heightened tensions in Sweden as the local transport workers’ union intensifies its efforts by threatening to block the automaker’s imports at all Swedish ports beginning November 17.

Tesla’s stake in the Swedish market, which ranks as its fifth-largest in Europe with over 16,000 new vehicle registrations in the first three quarters of the year, underscores the significance of this confrontation.

The conflict in Sweden has escalated following the decision by the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union to stop handling Tesla vehicles at four major ports, according to a report by Bloomberg this week.

This action comes on the heels of Tesla’s refusal to engage in collective bargaining with its service shop mechanics. Since October 27, workers from approximately 10 Tesla service locations and 20 repair shops, represented by IF Metall, have been on strike.

Amidst efforts by Tesla to reroute shipments to other ports, Tommy Wreeth of the Transport Workers’ Union stated their intent to thoroughly eliminate any alternatives for Tesla, sealing off Swedish ports to the company’s imports.

Bloomberg writes that the stand-off may intensify as additional labor unions in Sweden urge Tesla to agree to collective bargaining terms that they believe would ensure better conditions for employees. Susanna Gideonsson, leading the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, voiced a stern readiness to heighten the dispute if Tesla remains resistant.

Tesla, in a response to Swedish news outlet TT, maintained that its current terms are comparable, if not superior, to those offered under collective bargaining, questioning the need for any further agreements.

The company said it “already offers equivalent or better agreements than those covered by collective bargaining and finds no reason to sign any other agreement.”

Meanwhile, in other parts of the globe, we reported earlier this week that Tesla was considering revealing an affordable electric vehicle to be produced at its Giga Berlin-Brandenburg plant in Germany. 

Reuters spoke with a source familiar with plans to build a 25,000-euro ($26,838) car at its Berlin-Brandenburg plant. There was no further information about the production start date or any specs on the new vehicle, which is planned to be the cheapest offering for the mass EU market. Currently, Tesla’s least expensive car in Germany is the Model 3, starting at €42,990.

EV blog InsideEVs said Tesla CEO Elon Musk visited Giga Berlin last Friday and told staff about the new affordable car. However, the blog said, “We tried to find additional confirmation of this report, but apparently, the speech was limited only to employees and there is no video.” 

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Ukraine’s CIA-backed military intelligence has taken credit for a car bombing that killed a politician in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine on Wednesday.

Mikhail Filiponenko, a member of the local Russian-backed legislature in Luhansk and former police chief, was killed in his car outside of his house.

“A special operation to eliminate the executioner Filiponenko was implemented together with representatives of the resistance movement,” Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence announced Wednesday.

He was born in the Ukrainian oblast and joined the separatists who declared the creation of the Luhansk People’s Republic in 2014 following the coup that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych.

According to AP, Filiponenko had survived a previous car bombing on February 21, 2022, three days before Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate, known as the GUR, claimed that Filiponenko was involved in torture camps in Luhansk.

Andriy Cherniak, a representative for the GUR, told POLITICO that the Wednesday killing of Filiponenko was “our operation.” The GUR said in a statement that it had the addresses of all “traitors” and warned that “all war criminals and collaborators will receive a fair retribution! The hunt continues!”

According to Politico, the GUR has lately boasted that it has the addresses of other “high-profile collaborators”: 

GUR revealed the exact address where Filiponenko lived in Luhansk and added that Ukraine’s spies knew where other high-profile collaborators were living in the occupied territories.

A recent report from The Washington Post detailed how the CIA helped build up the GUR and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), including tens of millions of dollars in funding since 2015. A former US intelligence official described the GUR as “our little baby” and said the US provided “all new equipment and training.”

Reuters reports the German government, Siemens AG, and other parties will provide billions of euros in project-related guarantees to support Siemens AG’s struggling wind turbine division. This financial assistance comes just weeks after the company warned about mounting losses amid a meltdown across wind and solar industries. 

Three people familiar with the talks said that Siemens Energy’s top shareholder, Siemens AG, with a 25.1% stake, is prepared to provide some guarantees. Details are still scant, and nothing has been decided, as an agreement needs to be formally drawn up and supported by all stakeholders. 

Last month, Reuters said Siemens Energy was discussing state guarantees with the German government. 

Here’s more on the report:

As a result, Siemens Energy fears it will struggle to secure guarantees from banks, and has approached the government and Siemens to obtain a guarantee framework, business news weekly WirtschaftsWoche said.

The weekly, which first reported the talks along with Spiegel magazine, said Siemens Energy is seeking up to 15 billion euros in guarantees.

The German state would assume liability for 80% of an initial 10 billion euro funding tranche, while banks would be liable for the remaining 20%, WirtschaftsWoche said.

A Siemens AG spokesperson said the company remained in “very constructive talks to define the best possible solution in the interests of all parties involved.”

Siemens Energy shares in Germany have crashed more than 70% since mid-June as it has abandoned its 2023 profit outlook after a review of its wind turbine unit revealed a billion euro problem. Shares were up 5% on Reuters’ report today.  

Meanwhile, a financial crisis continues to accelerate across the wind industry, with the world’s largest offshore wind farm developer, Ørsted, pulling out of major US projects due to soaring inflation costs and a high-rate environment. And the renewable energy meltdown in wind has spread to solar as several solar power company stocks crashed on sliding demand. 

And so, hot on the heels of Germany’s bailout of Siemens, Bloomberg reports that the UK government is preparing to offer significantly higher subsidies for new offshore wind farms to get the country’s clean-power strategy back on track after developers shunned a previous auction, because the price was too low for offshore wind to be viable.

Denmark’s Orsted A/S, the world’s largest offshore wind builder, will decide by December whether to proceed with a UK development, while Sweden’s Vattenfall AB shelved a giant project off the English coast earlier this year in response to soaring costs.

While higher subsidies in the next auction round, known as AR6, may well reinvigorate offshore wind development, it will likely feed through to increased electricity costs for consumers still burdened with sky-high bills in the wake of last year’s energy crisis.

The energy transition to renewables across the Western world is cracking. Remember, the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was all about ‘sustainable’ wind power… Time for another bailout? 

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Alejo Vidal-Quadras was shot in the head by a gunman on a motorcycle who fled the scene and remains at large…

A Spanish politician who helped found the right-wing populist Vox party was shot in the head in broad daylight on Thursday in an upmarket neighborhood in Madrid.

Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a former vice-president of the European Parliament who had also served as leader of the People’s Party of Catalonia, was shot at point-blank range by a gunman who fled the scene on a motorcycle.

The incident occurred at around 2 p.m. local time on 40 Nuñez de Balboa street in Salamanca, police confirmed.

Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported how the 78-year-old politician had been walking alone down the street when a motorcycle with two occupants approached him. The passenger, who wore a helmet to conceal his face, then fired an execution-style shot to the head before fleeing the scene.

#Agresión con arma de fuego en c/Núñez de Balboa, 40. #Salamanca.@SAMUR_PC estabiliza a un hombre de 78 años con una herida por arma de fuego y lo traslada a un hospital de #Madrid.@policia investiga. Colabora @policiademadrid. pic.twitter.com/OZHJH866no

— Emergencias Madrid (@EmergenciasMad) November 9, 2023

Several bystanders tended to the politician and reported the incident to authorities. According to local media, first responders reported there had been both an entry and exit wound from the shooting.

Vidal-Quadras miraculously survived the attack and was rushed to La Princesa Hospital for treatment. He is understood to be conscious and in a stable condition.

Local authorities have cordoned off the affluent area of the Spanish capital, and the national police have taken over the investigation, requesting access to security cameras in the vicinity to ascertain the motorcycle’s license plate.

Vidal-Quadras has remained a prominent voice in Spanish politics, regularly appearing on talk shows and commenting on current affairs and the country’s political landscape.

Just hours before the shooting, he criticized on social media the proposed amnesty agreement reached between the Spanish left-wing government and Catalan separatists including exiled Carles Puigdemont, which has paved the way for incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to remain in power following inconclusive elections.

…

Read more here…

Authored by Dr. Robert W. Malone, MD, MS via Who Is Robert Malone,

Fellow Americans, the government will take care of you!

A bombshell new report has been published, titled: “WEAPONIZATION OF “DISINFORMATION” PSEUDO-EXPERTS AND BUREAUCRATS: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTNERED WITH UNIVERSITIES TO CENSOR AMERICANS’ POLITICAL SPEECH”, Interim Staff Report by the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government U.S. House of Representatives was released on November 6, 2023.

In that report, the committee laid out the role of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and other astroturf organizations contracted (that means paid for) by the Department of Homeland Security to censor Americans.

Representative Jim Jordan on his Twitter account also provided the receipts how the Election Integrity Partnership was founded, by attaching a letter from the Atlantic Council advising a “sync-up” whereby they created the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020. Ergo, a partnership of four organizations working in collaboration with both the US Government and the Atlantic Council.

In fact, the EIP is made up of four “partners”. They are the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), The U. of Washington Center for an Informed Public (CIP), Graphika, and the Atlantic Council. Each organization has a distinct role to play, from identifying “spreaders of misinformation”, to identifying the networks of social media landscapes that those so accused interacted on, to actual recommendations to social media companies for removal of identified offending posts, and communications back and further between the government and the EIP. This was done with government monies and resources.

Below is a link for each partner, together with a description of their technologies or recent activities.

• The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO): Stanford has removed the SIO page from their website, although the way back machine has a somewhat functional archival copy.

  Within those pages, is information about their operation “Platform Takedown”, which was developed to get information removed from the major social media platforms.

  The SIO Platform takedown only lists case reports up to June 2020, but the wayback machine has some detailed reports up through 2022.

• The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP)
  Their mission “is to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse”.

  AS of this month (Nov 2023), the CIP has now turned its identification of targets for censorship to identifying the flow of what they view as the “new elites” of X (ergo influencers with large followings) regarding how they share information regarding the Hamas/Israel conflict.

  The implication being that “X” will be targeted in the future for more harassment by the Election Integrity Partnership.

.

• Graphika

This is a company that specializes in “cutting-edge technology that creates large-scale explorable maps of social media landscapes”. Their in-depth analysis reveals insights to help “clients and partners understand complex online networks and take decisive action”. Graphika lists Harvard, Oxford and DARPA (DARPA = CIA) as its partners.

• The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab)

The Atlantic Council’s DFRL is staffed by former US intelligence establishment technology staffers (ergo, ex CIA and DIA = “Deep State” personnel), and of course the the Atlantic Council itself is known as a landing bed for deep state operatives (otherwise known as a cutout organization).

The DFRL website states:

Centralized and decentralized platforms share a common set of threats from motivated malicious users—and require a common set of investments to ensure trustworthy, user-focused outcomes…

Further research and capability building are necessary to avoid the further proliferation of these threats.

Within industry, decades of “trust and safety” (T&S) practice has developed into a field that can illuminate the complexities of building and operating online spaces. Outside industry, civil society groups, independent researchers, and academics continue to lead the way in building collective understanding of how risks propagate via online platforms—and how products could be constructed to better promote social well-being and to mitigate harms.

Take away all the flowery words and it sure sounds like organized government-sponsored Deep State censorship to me!

Beyond the websites listed above, the House Report does an excellent job of showing how the Election Integrity Partnership worked to censor the American People.

Lets go back to the the Congressional report on censorship, it reads:

Enter the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of “disinformation” academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election. Created in the summer of 2020 “at the request” of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.

This interim staff report details the federal government’s heavy-handed involvement in the creation and operation of the EIP, which facilitated the censorship of Americans’ political speech in the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 election. This report also publicly reveals for the first time secret “misinformation” reports from the EIP’s centralized reporting system, previously accessible only to select parties, including federal agencies, universities, and Big Tech. The Committee and Select Subcommittee obtained these nonpublic reports from Stanford University only under the threat of contempt of Congress. These reports of alleged mis- and disinformation were used to censor Americans engaged in core political speech in the lead up to the 2020 election.

As this new information reveals, and this report outlines, the federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions. This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefitted one side of the political aisle: true information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as “misinformation” while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors. The pseudoscience of disinformation is now—and has always been—nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives.

<in other words, people that were saying things that the Deep State did not want to be said were the ones being censored>

The EIP’s operation was straightforward: “external stakeholders,” including federal agencies and organizations funded by the federal government, submitted misinformation reports directly to the EIP. The EIP’s misinformation “analysts” next scoured the internet for additional examples for censorship. If the submitted report flagged a Facebook post, for example, the EIP analysts searched for similar content on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other major social media platforms. Once all of the offending links were compiled, the EIP sent the most significant ones directly to Big Tech with specific recommendations on how the social media platforms should censor the posts, such as reducing the posts’ “discoverability,” “suspending [an account’s] ability to continue tweeting for 12 hours,” “monitoring if any of the tagged influencer accounts retweet” a particular user, and, of course, removing thousands of Americans’ posts.

The House committee (through Rep. Jim Jordan) also released a google doc (Jira Tickets) that lists some of those censored in chronological order and what their alleged “crimes” were.

In the Jira Tickets list, it is worth noting that on 11 June 2021, the list abruptly changed its focus from “election misinformation” to “vaccine misinformation” and renamed these efforts as the virality project. Almost like there was some sort of directive from the top .

On the last page of Jira Tickets list, they have included the censorship of my original interview with Tucker Carlson for Fox News. Almost directly after that, the list ends. So, how many times I was recommended for censorship is an unknown. Except that based on the obvious shadow-banning over the past two years, most likely it was in the hundreds of times.

Some screenshots from the Jira Tickets report generated on me regarding the Tucker interview (page nine):

My sin, as shown in the screenshot below, was that I claimed on the Fox interview that the risks outweigh the benefits in teenagers and young adults (per June 30, 2021).

In the image below, the Election Integrity Partnership (now the Virality partnership) notes I am both “General anti-vaccination” and also “right wing” in my affiliations.

So this is really creepy. That fact that my political leanings are mentioned implies that being “right wing” was/is criteria enough for censorship. That this criteria was enough for censorship shows direct election interference.

As this list also labels me as being generally against vaccination. As if being against the mRNA gene therapy for specific vulnerable groups makes one against vaccination. This was enough apparently to be censored.

I believe that is a listing of where that had been shared prior to the censorship:

The Election Integrity Partnership also notes that I am a “repeat offender”

Frankly, the whole document and the House Committee report makes me feel violated.

The House report then goes to to document how even Congresspeople were censored and that under Biden, the censorship efforts were ramped up domestically.

This did not end with the 2020 election.

After President Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, the government’s censorship regime ramped up. At CISA, the CFITF team dropped any pretense of a “foreign”-focus and relabeled itself as the “MDM team” that would focus on foreign and domestic speech that the government considered mis-, dis-, or malinformation. Throughout 2021, the Biden White House engaged in a pressure campaign against Facebook and other social media companies to censor anti-vaccine content, even if it was true. By 2022, CISA invited Dr. Starbird, thenTwitter Executive Vijaya Gadde, and others to form an advisory MDM Subcommittee to consult with CISA about how the agency could and should combat Americans’ speech that the government considered to be mis-, dis-, or malinformation.

But by 2023, as Republicans retook the majority in the House of Representatives and initiated oversight of the censorship-industrial complex, CISA scrubbed its website of references to domestic censorship. The Committee and Select Subcommittee obtained and revealed how Facebook changed its policies because of pressure from the Biden Administration. Internal Facebook documents showed that the Biden White House in particular wanted true information and satire censored at a rate even Big Tech found objectionable.

Based on the Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s work, even the mainstream media could no longer ignore these constitutional violations. The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden have obtained significant victories before a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and now will have their case heard by the Supreme Court. Public reporting shows that universities are reconsidering whether to permit their professors to receive funding and engage in censorship work. But the work is not done yet. The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s investigation remains ongoing.

Clearly, the hit pieces on me by the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington post (twice), Business Insider, The Scientist and Rolling Stone and other main stream media outlets within a very short timeframe were a coordinated effort by the Deep State to bring me down . I believe that this effort was led by the intelligence agencies and DHS through the Deep State. Kash Patel nicely discusses how this these types of hits are conducted in his book, Government Gangsters. Whereby the government feeds information into operatives working in main stream media (ergo, as in CIA Operation Mockingbird). Now I am told that those same hit pieces were used against me in other government circles. The Supreme court case, Sullivan Versus New York Times, resulted in a situation whereby people in the public eye can almost never win a lawsuit for malicious defamation. The Deep State uses this fact to attack, malign, defame, harass and engage in direct character assassination. This is evil.

For me, I will never get my reputation back as it once was. However, I will not give up fighting for our freedoms, whether it be to bring back integrity to the FDA, CDC, NIH, DoD and HHS or whether it be reining-in the intelligence agency. We all must continue to bring our government to heel.

I will not concede to the Deep State character assassination. I will not let them ruin my life and reputation. And I will not allow them to victimize me.

When will the world reach its peak population?

According to data from the United Nations’ 2022 Revision of its World Population Prospects, we could see a peak of over 10.4 billion people sometime in the late 2080s.

While the UN’s projections are the most widely used, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the most accurate. Several alternative models have predicted an earlier and lower peak, suggesting that the world’s population could decline sooner than expected.

In the UN’s latest revisions, it lowered its own estimates for global population in 2100, from 10.9 billion (as of 2019) to 10.4 billion (as of 2022).

In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcu Lu and Miranda Smith visualized population projections to 2100 from three organizations: the UN, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

Data and Highlights

The population projection data we used to create this graphic is listed in the table below. Note that UN projections are as of 2022, IHME are as of 2020, and IIASA are as of 2014.

From this data we can see that the UN expects the world to hit peak population in 2086, as well as maintain above 10 billion people in 2100.

On the other hand, neither the IHME nor IIASA models expect global population to reach 10 billion, instead forecasting a peak of 9.7 billion in the 2060s (IHME) or 9.4 billion in 2070 (IIASA). Both models also predict population to fall back to the 8 billion range by 2100.

The differential at 2100 is substantial, with IHME’s forecast lower than the UN’s by 1.6 billion people, for example.

What Is the IHME and IIASA, and Why Do They Differ?

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is a Seattle-based research institute founded in 2007 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its mission is to “deliver to the world timely, relevant, and scientifically valid evidence to improve health policy and practice.”

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), on the other hand, is an international research institute based in Austria, dating back to 1972. It was established to improve scientific cooperation between the Soviet Union and the U.S., and today has members in over 20 countries.

To understand why the IHME and IIASA models differ from the UN’s, let’s look at each organization’s projections for fertility rate, which is measured as the number of children per woman.

Based on this chart, the IHME and IIASA expect global fertility rates to fall at a quicker rate pre-2050, then stabilize as we approach 2100. This contrasts with the UN’s projections, which expect fertility to decrease at a slower, steadier rate all the way to 2100.

Generally speaking, a country’s birth rate declines as it becomes more developed. This is due to many factors like higher education rates for women (and thus more women in the workforce), greater access to contraceptives and family planning, as well as higher childbearing costs.

How Fast Will Fertility Rates Fall in Africa?

Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the highest fertility rates in the world, but this is quickly falling as the region experiences rapid economic growth.. For instance, GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa has climbed from $632 in 2000, to $1,690 in 2022.

Because of this economic transformation, some researchers believe that Africa will undergo a fast demographic transition similar to East Asia, in which population growth falls off sharply. For instance, a UNICEF survey from 2021 found that fertility rates in Nigeria had fallen from 5.8 to 4.6 (a 17% decrease) in just five years time.

ℹ️ Consider this July 2023 article from the Wilson Center for more context on the evolution of Nigeria’s demographics.

Now going back to the question at hand, let’s see how the UN and IHME’s fertility rate projections for Sub-Saharan Africa differ.

These differences may seem small, but even a few decimal places can have a huge impact. For example, let’s revisit the UN’s population projection for the year 2100, which was 10.4 billion people.

Under the UN’s low fertility scenario (birth rates remain 0.5 lower), population in 2100 would be a significantly smaller 7.0 billion. Meanwhile, under the high fertility scenario (birth rates remain 0.5 higher), population would balloon to 14.7 billion.

As a result, how birth rates change in high fertility regions like Sub-Saharan Africa will have a significant influence on when the global population will reach its peak.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

China is setting out to mass produce human-like robots in two years, an ambitious plan that, according to a blueprint issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), it hopes will make the regime in Beijing the leader in the field of robotics.

The goal is to establish an innovation framework for humanoid robots and ensure that the country can make core parts of the robots on its own.

The products, under the MIIT plan, will meet advanced international standards in quality, for use in harsh environments, manufacturing, and service sectors, according to the directive. Like smartphones, computers, and new energy vehicles, humanoid robots have the “disruptive” potential to “revolutionize” people’s lives, the document said.

The ministry told local officials to take advantage of China’s market size and its “whole-of-nation system” to accelerate humanoid robot development as a pillar industry to advance China’s manufacturing and digital dominance.

Beijing hopes that by 2025 it will have two to three companies with global influence and will nurture more smaller businesses dedicated to the field. In another two years, the aim is to create a “safe and reliable supply chain” for the technology and make the country competitive globally. At that point, it said, such products will be deeply integrated into the economy and become a “new engine” for economic growth.

The “brain,” “cerebellum,” and “limbs” of the robots should be the focus, and the industry should aim at creating “highly reliable” robots for harsh or dangerous conditions, the guideline said. When monitoring and safeguarding “strategic locations,” robots need to be able to move in “highly complicated terrains,” size up the situation, and make intelligent decisions, it said, adding that robots will need greater ability to protect themselves and work with higher precision in scenarios such as rescue work or where explosives are involved.

Relevant authorities need to deepen international cooperation, encourage foreign companies to create research centers in China, and bring Chinese products to the international market, according to the document.

Eager to partake in setting the global standard for emerging technology, Beijing said it’d like to get “deeply involved in the international rules and standard setting” and “contribute Chinese wisdom” to the industry’s development, the document said.

The directive is China’s latest attempt to boost technological self-reliance as the United States tightens its ban on China’s access to advanced U.S. chips. Expanding on chip controls on China from October last year, the Bureau of Industry and Security of the Commerce Department in mid-October required more U.S. firms to obtain a license before they could export advanced semiconductor chips to China, a step they said is necessary to prevent Beijing from using these chips for their military ends. On Oct. 23, the U.S. government told Nvidia to stop shipping most of its key artificial intelligence chips to China.

Without citing those actions by the United States, the document asked the industry to design AI chips for humanoid robots that would allow for self-learning and other capabilities.

Half a dozen Chinese intelligence firms saw their shares jump by as much as 20 percent the day after the announcement, and stock value for other robotic electronics also surged.

The Beijing regime’s roadmap means it will be competing with international firms such as Samsung, Microsoft, and Tesla that are investing in the field.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been trying to build a humanoid robot called Optimus or Tesla Bot. After much hype last year, though, the display of the robot walking slowly on the stage and waving to the crowd fell short of expectations.

There seems to be optimism about the technology among Chinese media.

Lu Hanchen, director of the Gaogong Industry Research Institute, told the state-owned Securities Times that while China is some distance away from producing humanoid robots at scale, that goal isn’t far off.

More than 10 Chinese companies this year have revealed innovations related to humanoid robots, he noted, adding that China already has some supporting facilities from developing industrial robots.

Beijing has set aside about 10 billion yuan (about $1.4 billion) to fund the robotic development. On Nov. 6, China opened the first provincial-level innovation center on humanoid robots in the country’s capital to work on solving pressing “key common problems,” including an operation control system, open source software, and robot prototypes.

At least one Chinese company, Jiangsu Miracle Logistics System Engineering Co., has promised to introduce its first humanoid robot by the end of the year. Chinese securities brokerage firm Zheshang Securities estimates that the humanoid robot market will have a demand for 1.77 million machines by 2030.

No more green for Zelenskyy.

With war funding for both Ukraine and Israel now seemingly snarled up beyond repair in Congress, on Thursday the Pentagon said that funding delays have forced the US to begin restricting the flow of military assistance to Ukraine, and the Pentagon has only $1 billion left to replenish stocks of weapons that were sent to the country, according to a spokeswoman.

“We have had to meter out our support for Ukraine,” Deputy Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters. “We’re going to continue to roll out packages but they are getting smaller.”

Singh urged Congress to break a deadlock and approve the Biden administration’s $61.4 billion request for emergency funds for Ukraine’s fight against Russia, part of a masive $106 billion package that would include aid for Israel and the US-Mexico border, but which now has virtually no chance of passing. House Republicans have sought to separate the aid for Ukraine and Israel, an idea both the Senate and the White House oppose.

Singh said the US had burned through about 95% of previous funding for Ukraine, which she said also totaled more than $60 billion; of course, much of that $60 billion was then rerouted back to the Military Industrial Complex and Deep state back in the US, where it served to boost various military companies, and their political supporters and assorted hanger-on lobbies. 

She said the remaining $1 billion is part of a program that allows President Joe Biden to send existing US military hardware to Ukraine and replace it with new orders.

Singh’s warning was only the latest from the administration, which has said repeatedly it’s scrambling to keep military aid flowing for President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s forces. Last month, the Pentagon’s comptroller said a government shutdown, which is also looming later this month, would slow the pace of replacing weapons stockpiles sent to Ukraine.

Perhaps realizing that Ukraine’s military forces are about to expire, Telegraph reported that Russia has amassed an estimated 40,000 troops around the key battlefront in Avdiivka as it prepares for a third wave assault on the shattered eastern town, the Ukrainian military has said.

“They are building up reserves. They’ve brought in about 40,000 men here along with ammunition of all calibres,” said Anton Kotsukon, spokesperson for the 110th separate mechanised brigade. “We see no sign of the Russians abandoning plans to encircle Avdiivka.”

Russian forces, he said, had surrounded the town on three sides and were “playing cat and mouse”, sending up “huge numbers” of drones to scout out Ukraine’s defences.

Ukrainian forces regard the town as a gateway for future advances to recapture territory in the east; alternatively the Russian army expects capture of the town to allow to penetrate deep into Ukraine territory.

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

On June 8th, the Washington Post ran, “These academics studied falsehoods spread by Trump. Now the GOP wants answers,” a story about how “records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits” were wielded as “tools of harassment” against “scholars” in the “field of disinformation.” In photo portraits, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington stared plaintively in the distance, a caption under one: “The political part is intimidating — to have people with a lot of power in this world making… false accusations about our work.” Starbird sits on an advisory committee for the 245,000-person, $185 billion Department of Homeland Security, but perhaps she meant “a lot of power” in a different sense?

When Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and I first started working on the Twitter Files, none of us knew much about people who did “anti-disinformation” work. Before it became controversial, these “experts” didn’t seem bashful about security-state credentials. For instance, New Knowledge, the firm profiled by Susan Schmidt last week that authored a Senate report on Russian interference and was caught creating fake accounts in an Alabama Senate race, gained this cheerful description in VentureBeat after raising $11 million for “anti-disinformation”:

What further distinguishes New Knowledge is that its founders are AI and Homeland Security experts who grew up in the NSA and have worked as security advisers. [CEO Jonathon] Morgan, for instance, was an adviser for the U.S. State Department and published research at the Brookings Institution.

When lawsuits like Missouri v. Biden and then the Twitter Files began shining light on this direction, experts reinvented themselves as “scholars” or research fellows. That their LinkedIn pages often featured odd gaps, or periods listed as “consultants” to the military or the FBI, was apparently not important, nor that “anti-disinformation” is not an academic discipline. Even if they were very new arrivals to campuses, we were expected to show deference to new roles as “researchers,” much as campaign reporters were asked to stop calling Rick Perry a dummy when he put on glasses.

Reporters once didn’t fall for this sort of thing, reserving special bile for politicians or spooks who tried to pass themselves off as intellectuals. But these days they swoon like teen girls seeing the Elvis wiggle for the first time for “anti-disinformationists,” with anchors like Nicolle Wallace, Brian Stelter, and Rachel Maddow giving the “We’re not worthy!” treatment to anyone with intelligence credentials who utters dire prophecies about Trump and “fake news.”

Even the once-mocked “smart glasses” trick became foolproof, as former counterterrorism warriors like Hamilton 68 frontman Clint Watts earned plaudits as bespectacled “disinformation experts,” and even media figures who once went for hunky or fetching in headshots donned solemn expressions — and glasses — when moved to the disinfo beat. I don’t remember Rick Stengel wearing specs much as editor of Time magazine, but he accessorizes nicely in his new role as former head of the Global Engagement Center, pimping books like Information Wars.

This is all background for “Big Brother is Flagging You,” about the House Weaponization of Government Committee report on Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership. I’ve been in media long enough not to be shocked by much, but the people picked to man “anti-disinformation” bureaucracies have an almost admirably bottomless capacity for self-pity and deception. With teary eyes, they’ll swear they’re not in the censorship business, but then it will come out that they’re sending notes to platforms like, “We recommend that these posts be removed immediately.”

They’ll describe concerns about the First Amendment as conspiracy theories, but then we learn about people like Stanford’s Renée DiResta making notes about “very real 1st amendment questions” in a presentation about the EIP, or a lawyer for former CISA director Chris Krebs snapping at congressional investigators to cite a legal authority “other than the First Amendment” to justify questioning. “Researchers” will declare unequivocally that CISA did not “found, fund, or control” their program, but then it will come out the superficially private structure of the EIP was necessary because “DHS cannot openly endorse the portal,” while a “behind-the-scenes” arrangement was fine. And so on.

Put bluntly, these people lie, but do it in a way that would impress even a politician. In one of the many times I was pestered this year by a mainstream reporter asking why a nice “scholar” like DiResta should be prevented from “just doing research,” I asked him to go back and find out what academic credentials qualified her for “scholar” status (she’s listed as a “research manager”), and to cite another type of “research” that involves flagging content for removal of speech on behalf of an intelligence agency. As my podcast partner Walter Kirn puts it, Stanford’s Observatory is the first one in history that destroys planets.

I asked the same reporter why non-doctors should be allowed to police the scientific opinions of MDs and PhDs, why publicly funded programs targeting the speech of voters should be exempt from FOIA requests, and so on, but it’s hopeless. In the new world, brazen enough scams are respected, those who don’t fall for them become the outlaws, and we all have to get used to it.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

GOP Senator Rand Paul says that he thinks it is difficult to imagine Donald Trump winning another term in office because of the magnitude of everything that is being done by Democrats and the establishment to prevent it happening.

“It’s difficult to image Trump winning, but it’s also difficult to imagine anything more unfair they could do to him, and also how pitiful the performance of Biden has been, and how frail and detached that he looked in doing his job,” Paul said during an interview with Piers Morgan.

“It worries people that he is still able and has enough vim and vigour to actually be the president,” Paul continued.

Paul also, somewhat jokingly, said “I haven’t endorsed [Trump or anyone else] yet because I haven’t decided whether I’m going to run or not.”

“I ran in 2016, maybe I should through my hat in, I don’t think it’s going that well for everybody else,” the Senator further stated.

Elsewhere during the interview, Paul urged that the solution to “ugly or despicable” speech is “more speech”. 

Morgan had asked Paul about the Anti-Israel demonstrations that threaten to disrupt Remembrance Day events at the weekend in London. Paul responded that countering with better ideas and useful arguments is “much better than banning speech”. 

Watch:

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