Authored by Richard Kelly via The Brownstone Institute,

John Stapleton’s incredible new book Australia Breaks Apart has a surreal quality to it. He taps into the dissonance, the discord, and the disillusionment of those among us who were able, or who dared, to step outside the wall-to-wall propaganda and look at it in real time, or back at it later, in horror.

Through the book’s central character, Old Alex (a retired journalist, coincidentally just like the author), wave after wave of recognition and acknowledgement of pain and anguish and confusion and foreboding wash over the reader, like a soothing balm for the still raw wounds inflicted by our political leaders. It’s just as well – in between the passages where we crawl inside Old Alex’s head, and hear and feel the visions and the dreams for a country so utterly changed, Stapleton catalogues in excruciating detail the things that were done to us.

It’s confronting.

Some of the things I knew about, many others I didn’t, thanks to the suffocating censorship of our complicit mainstream media. Still others I knew about, but had tried to forget.

Reading it is like reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – page after page of open-mouthed shock at the things humans can do to one another and the things that power can corrupt.

It’s un-put-downable and un-pick-upable at the same time.

It’s essential reading for the dissident, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned. We’re not alone, our eyes were not deceiving us, it was not all just a nightmare from which we will one day wake up. It actually happened. Its legacy will be a millstone Australia will carry for decades. This book won’t make up for the tragedies of lives and livelihoods shattered by wilfully stubborn governments and petty tyrants, but it will certainly help.

Lots of the names and sources will be familiar to the covid dissident – among them McCullough, Malone, RFK, Jr, Naomi Wolf, Rebecca Weisser, Paul Collits, Avi Yemini…the roll call of those we’ve relied on to get an honest point of view.

But helpful as it is for the victims and the protesters to have this book, those who need to read it the most will find it hard going.

The laptop class, the ones who learned a new recipe for sourdough, or how to crochet, while truckies and cashiers from the indentured servant class waited on their every need – they are the ones who need to read this book.

The ones who happily observed that the traffic was lighter and the carbon dioxide lower, while mourners grieved alone, banned from attending the funeral.

Every single nurse who made a dance video. Every jab clinic manager tallying the day’s injectees and calculating the bonus incentive payment.

What pangs of self-recognition will they find when they read of humans mistreating each other?

If they don’t feel any then they could read the whole thing and not be any the wiser, or indeed could take whatever message they want to take from it. If they do feel the pangs of shame, it will take a heroic effort of acceptance and repentance to get through to the end.

There will even be some, the scoffers who only consume a vegan ‘news’ diet from the ABC or the free-to-air presstitutes, who will find the cognitive dissonance simply too much to deal with and toss the book away in anger and disgust. Some of this group would literally never have heard of the Canadian Trucker protest or the Hancock WhatsApp messages scandal, such was the media silence.

Let’s assume some of that group do read it. Where will they find themselves afterwards? My guess is that they will find themselves looking for a scapegoat, an excuse, ‘extenuating circumstances,’ to cover their shame. Alas, none will be found.

Where will a bookstore put this book, among the shelves of thrillers, cookbooks, and travel guides?

Psychology? Self-help? A good case can be made. It explains our distress, it pushes us on, gives us courage. The treatment of the Canberra protests, disgracefully ignored by the mainstream media, provides the cameos of mateship, love, openness, happiness, togetherness, and fearlessness that we so craved when imprisoned, and which our overlords sought to extinguish.

Politics, History? For sure. It’s got a much better claim to be a document of record than any of our newspapers have of being a ‘paper of record.’ The author’s distaste for his former profession rises off nearly every page like bile rises in the throat. Likewise contempt for the political class, and the unelected petty tyrants masquerading as health bureaucrats.

Religion? Fantasy? It sits comfortably alongside CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, whose villains thought they could create a new Man, a literally disembodied head, controlled by those at the top. Villains who commanded a private police force in service of a ‘scientific’ institution; who orchestrated the stories to appear in the press and coerced the journalists to write the lies and the propaganda.

Villains who wrought destruction on an innocent English village and its residents. Stapleton’s book is likewise a tale of supreme political hubris and arrogance, enough arrogance to imagine that a riot squad can control an airborne virus. Lewis brought in the gods to resolve the finale; Stapleton, too, brings the supernatural out into the open, spirits portentously looming over the future of our once free land.

If it were up to me, I know where it belongs, apart from on the New Releases and Best Sellers shelves.

True Crime.

Read it, before you are tempted to ‘move on.’

Buy it, before they ban it.

Every year, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) releases their Most Innovative Companies ranking.

Based on a survey of over 1,000 innovation executives polled in Dec. 2022 and Jan. 2023, BCG assessed a company’s performance on four dimensions:

• Global mindshare: the number of votes received from all global innovation executives

• Industry peer view: the number of votes received from executives in a company’s own industry

• Industry disruption: the Diversity Index (Herfindahl-Hirschman) of votes across industries

• Value creation: total shareholder return, including share buybacks, over the 3-year period from Jan. 2020 through Dec. 2022.

Visual Capitalists Marcus Lu and Athul Alexander provide a more visual representation of these results in the graphic below.

Data and Highlights

The 2023 ranking can be found in the table below.

For the fourth straight year, Apple is considered the most innovative company in the world. In fact, Apple has held this title every year since 2005 with the exception of 2019.

BCG added additional context on several companies in its report, including Germany’s Bosch (37th). According to BCG, the engineering and technology company has a global R&D organization of 84,800 employees across 130 locations. Bosch has also maintained R&D spending (as a share of sales) at between 7.6% and 8.2% from 2018 through 2021.

Another highlight was Samsung (7th), which spent over $17 billion (9% of annual sales) on R&D in 2021, making the South Korean conglomerate one of the world’s largest spenders on innovation. Samsung was also granted 6,300 U.S. patents in 2022, the most out of any company.

As this ranking shows, innovative companies aren’t just tech companies. McDonald’s (34th) is considered by BCG as the “restaurant industry frontrunner in technology innovation and investment”.

For example, McDonald’s recently acquired Apprente, a startup that develops voice-based technologies, and Dynamic Yield, a firm specializing in creating customizable online experiences. McDonald’s aims to leverage these technologies to improve ordering times and offer customers better choices.

Companies by Nationality

Now let’s examine the ranking through a different lens—nationality. The following chart compares the country breakdowns of the 2013 and 2023 rankings.

The U.S. and China are the only two countries that have increased their share from 2013, pushing out firms from European countries like Germany, the UK, and Italy. We can also see significant declines in Japanese and South Korean representation.

Given China’s economic growth, it’s likely that Chinese firms will continue to represent more of BCG’s ranking in the future. So far, the country’s strongest innovator is Huawei (8th), which has made the top 50 list every year since 2014, when it debuted at 50th place.

Authored by Brian McGlinchey via starkrealities.substack.com 

For many people, a central attraction of owning and living on a multi-acre expanse of land is the opportunity for complete privacy — to include freedom from the prying eyes of government.

While most Americans might understandably believe the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrantless searches covers all their property, a little-known 1924 Supreme Court decision — Hester v United States — says otherwise. The case struck a major blow against privacy rights, and government agents of all stripes have been exploiting the ruling ever since.

Those exploitations have grown increasingly brazen. Just ask Josh Highlander, whose home sits on a wooded, 30-acre spread east of Richmond, Virginia.

In April, Highlander’s wife and 6-year-old son were playing basketball in their yard. When his wife went to retrieve a long rebound, she spotted a man in full camouflage walking among the trees. Alarmed, she and her son darted inside the house.

When Highlander went outside, he couldn’t locate the man, but did discover that a game camera he’d placed in his food plot was gone. When he called police, he learned the man on his property was an agent of Virginia’s Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) — one of three who crossed another piece of private land to enter his property. Worse, the same trio had taken his camera, holding no warrant for that action either.

These incidents took place on the first day of turkey season. Before coming to Highlander’s property, DWR agents had also entered two other properties, belonging to his brother and to his father, issuing a citation to his brother for illegally hunting “over bait.” However, the alleged “bait” was seed for his brother’s own food plot, consistent with DWR’s instructions for managing such a plot.

DWR’s violation of Highlander’s liberties didn’t end that day. “For weeks, my son wouldn’t play outside in his own back yard because he was afraid of who might be in the woods,” says Highlander. “My camera was taken two months ago, and I’ve still never received a receipt, a warrant or a ticket.”

This unsettling brand of government misconduct springs from the Supreme Court’s Hester decision.

In that 1924 case arising from the alcohol prohibition, revenue agents saw a man, Hester, exit his father’s house and hand another man a bottle. When the two men became aware of the agents’ presence, they both ran, each dropping a bottle on the Hester property. With no warrant, agents entered the property, examined the bottles and found they contained moonshine whisky.

Supreme Court opinions frequently span upwards of 70 pages or more. With Hester, however, the court took just two paragraphs to decimate the Fourth Amendment’s protection of landowners, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declaring “the special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects,’ is not extended to the open fields.”

And with that, he burdened his fellow citizens with the “open fields doctrine,” which allows warrantless searches and trespassing on land beyond the “curtilage,” a vague term referring to the outdoor area immediately surrounding a home.

In 1984, the Supreme Court had an opportunity to undo the harm done by Hester, after a different kind of prohibition — against marijuana — had incentivized police to violate property and privacy rights.

In Oliver v United States, Kentucky State Police, who suspected that marijuana was being grown on private property, strolled around a locked gate and a “No Trespassing” sign and found a marijuana field a mile from the house. The court observed that the field in question was “bounded on all sides by woods, fences, and embankments, [which] cannot be seen from any point of public access.”

Despite that fact, rather than overturning Hester, the court reaffirmed the open fields doctrine in a 6-3 decision, declaring that, “because open fields are accessible to the public and the police in ways that a home, office, or commercial structure would not be, and because fences or ‘No Trespassing’ signs do not effectively bar the public from viewing open fields, the asserted expectation of privacy in open fields is not one that society recognizes as reasonable.”

Note the casual recklessness of that reasoning. The Supreme Court essentially declared that, since some private land is viewable from beyond its boundary — from a road or maybe a plane or hot air balloon — all private land apart from the “curtilage” surrounding a home is fair game for government trespasses and searches.

As technology advances, the open fields doctrine only grows more troubling: If Hester licenses government agents to wander your property at will, it follows that they can use drones or plant cameras to accomplish the same type of spying — with far greater ease and less manpower.

Indeed, while Virginia’s warrantless DWR agents shockingly seized Highlander’s camera so they could retroactively monitor his actions (an act that even the expansive open fields doctrine doesn’t seem to authorize), elsewhere in Virginia and in the United States, government agents are already known to hide their own surveillance cameras on private land.

The Institute for Justice (IJ) — a national civil liberties law firm that provides free-of-charge representation to victims of government overreach — has filed a suit against the Virginia DWR on Highlander’s behalf, as part of a broader, multi-state campaign against abuses perpetrated under the open-fields doctrine.

Given the formidable federal obstacles presented by the Hester and Oliver precedents, IJ’s strategy in these cases centers on protections outlined in state constitutions rather than the US Constitution.

“The US Supreme Court’s basis for the open fields doctrine has been that the Fourth Amendment lists ‘persons, houses, papers and effects,’ and none of those things are obviously the same as land,” says IJ attorney Joshua Windham in his firm’s video profile of the case.

“State constitutions often have different texts…in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, the word ‘effects’ is replaced with the word ‘possessions,’ and we say that includes private land…In Virginia, there’s a textual provision that mentions ‘places’, and of course [Highlander’s] property is a place,” says Windham, who’s representing Highlander.

In their suit filed in a county circuit court, IJ and Highlander are seeking a declaration that the warrantless search of Highlander’s property and seizure of his camera and its contents violated the Virginia constitution.

“No person at all in this country should have limitless power, and it sure seems like they do,” says Highlander. “It just makes you feel vulnerable, it makes you feel anxious, it makes you feel like someone’s watching you on your own private property.”

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would be likewise aghast at the government conduct unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Hester and Oliver decisions. After all, colonists’ anger over British “Writs of Assistance” — which the Tenth Amendment Center’s Mike Maharrey describes as “a go-anywhere and do-anything permission slip for government agents” — was one major grievance that animated the American revolution.

While the federal precedents stand firm — for now — Highlander says he’s determined to ensure his fellow Virginians are spared the same abuse he’s suffered: “What happened to my family was wrong and I’m fighting for our privacy and to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

Stark Realities undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum. Read more and subscribe at starkrealities.substack.com 

Before he was governor of California, Gavin Newsom (D) served as the Mayor of San Francisco between 2004 and 2011 – with none other than Kamala Harris (D) serving as his Attorney General. While one might encounter Bush Man or Escape Man during the journey to Ghirardelli Square back then, it was nothing like the San Francisco of today.

Gavin and Kamala set in motion a legacy of poo-covered streets, rampant crime, and an explosion in homelessness and addiction that was further facilitated by Kamala’s successor, ‘Soros’ DA George Gascón (2011 – 2019). Gascón is currently ‘working his magic’ as Los Angeles District Attorney – having survived a recall attempt (in which observers weren’t allowed to view the counting of the votes), with results we’ve noted many times over the years. In fact, last month San Francisco was ranked the worst-run city in America.

Now that we’re up to speed, and Newsom might be the Democrats’ secret weapon against Trump (or Ron DeSantis) in 2024 – and therefore in dire need of talking points, he’s finally doing something about the fentanyl crisis affecting San Francisco.

On Thursday Newsom announced that the state will bolster its existing efforts to tackle the fentanyl crisis in the city, with a promise to double the number of California Highway Patrol officers dedicated to the issue in a joint task-force coordinated with the California National Guard that was first announced in May.

“Today, I’m authorizing a 100% increase in personnel to bolster the impact of this proven operation, as well as authorizing targeted surges to crack down on crime in the city,” said Newsom in a press release. “Working alongside our local, state, and federal partners, we’re committed to cleaning up San Francisco’s streets.”

As of today, the operation has seized over 8.1 kilograms of fentanyl, enough to kill more than 4 million people.

“CHP’s recent results in San Francisco are nothing short of extraordinary — in just six weeks, the agency’s hardworking officers seized enough fentanyl to potentially kill the city nearly three times over, multiple firearms, and stolen goods,” said Newsom.

The operation, designed to assist city patrol officers, includes a team of analysts dedicated to monitoring and tracking organized crime and providing advanced metrics to aid investigations, the Epoch Times reports.

“Our residents, business owners, and visitors to our city deserve to feel safe, and we are making progress in disrupting the drug markets that are causing so much misery on our streets,” said Police chief Bill Scott, who welcomed the support of the state. “Working collaboratively with the CHP, we’ve seized an unprecedented amount of fentanyl and other deadly narcotics in recent weeks, and I look forward to building on our success.”

As The Epoch Times notes further;

San Francisco Fire Department spokespersons reported to the California Assembly’s newly formed Select Committee on Fentanyl, Opioid Addiction, and Overdose Prevention during its first gathering in May about having to respond to multiple overdose emergency calls every day, with an average of two deaths occurring on the streets every 24 hours.

“I don’t even bring my family into the city anymore, and we used to love to come over and eat and shop, just enjoy the area,” Jesse Garcia—an electrician living in the East Bay and working in San Francisco—told The Epoch Times. “I don’t want my young kids seeing the people out here looking like zombies. It’s disgusting, and it’s not safe for families.”

Faced with several dilemmas stemming from the public’s perceived lack of public safety in the city stemming from homelessness, open-air drug use, and high levels of theft—including retail stores fleeing the downtown area and record levels of office space vacancy impacting the economy—Mayor London Breed voiced her appreciation for the state’s help.

“Over the last several weeks, we’ve welcomed the California Highway Patrol and National Guard working collaboratively alongside our local agencies to disrupt the drug trafficking and drug markets harming our neighborhoods,” Breed said in the joint press release. “To be successful in the long term, we need to sustain and expand this work at the local, state, and federal levels.”

Federal courts have proven more effective than state and local ones in terms of convicting distributors and some dealers linked to the deaths of individuals, based on court filings this year, levying multi-year sentences on numerous occasions.

Seemingly fed up with a lack of action from leaders, voters recalled Chesa Boudin—formerly the city’s progressive district attorney—in 2022 by a wide margin.

Meanwhile, several district attorney’s offices throughout the state report feeling hampered by what they say are limited options for prosecuting those caught with less than one kilogram of the drug.

Resistance in the Legislature to entertain proposals related to fentanyl sentencing enhancements is an issue that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have taken exception to, as multiple bipartisan efforts to bolster prosecutorial playbooks were denied earlier this year.

One measure that is currently still being considered, Assembly Bill 701—a bipartisan bill introduced by Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez (D-Pomona) enhancing penalties for possession of at least one kilogram of fentanyl—passed the Senate Public Safety Committee June 27, but members reserved their right to oppose the legislation on the floor, as some said they believe increasing prison sentences will not improve the overdose epidemic.

Complicating matters are the cheap and easy fentanyl manufacturing methods criminal organizations have mastered and the lethality of the substance, with 2 milligrams—only a few grains—potentially deadly, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, also known as the DEA.

The drug is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.

Nearly 29,000 pounds of fentanyl were seized in California in 2022, representing an amount that could kill most of the people on the planet—approximately 6.5 billion, based on DEA calculations.

According to the most recent statistics from the California Department of Public Health, approximately 115 people die every week in the state as a result of the synthetic opioid.

Investigators report that many victims are unknowingly poisoned, as the drug is odorless, tasteless, and is often found hidden in counterfeit pharmaceutical products and in street drugs.

Via The Cradle,

The US State Department did not adequately prepare for the possibility of a swift collapse of the Afghan government as part of its planning for the military withdrawal from Afghanistan, an internal review has found. The US government announced it would complete its withdrawal by September 2021, expecting the US-backed Afghan government and security forces to remain in power and continue peace negotiations with the Taliban.

However, as the US withdrawal progressed, the government quickly collapsed, and then-president Ashraf Ghani fled the country in August 2021 as the Taliban took control of the capital, Kabul. This led to a chaotic final evacuation of US and Afghan personnel from Kabul airport. The two-week evacuation was marred by the deaths of at least 175 people when NATO troops indiscriminately opened fire on crowds of civilians gathered outside the airport after an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up.

Al-Jazeera notes that the State Department After Action Report (AAR) issued on June 30 said the decision by US President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan after over 20 years of occupation had “serious consequences” for the viability of the US-backed Afghan government.

“Those decisions are beyond the scope of this review, but the AAR team found that during both administrations, there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios,” the review said.

The report specifically criticized the State Department for failing to set up a crisis-management task force soon enough to cooperate with the Pentagon in the case of an evacuation. “Establishing such a task force earlier would have brought key players together to address issues related to a possible [evacuation],” the report stated.

Further, “Naming a 7th-floor principal … would have improved coordination across different lines of effort,” that report said, referring to the State Department’s top floor where Secretary of State Antony Blinken and senior diplomats have offices.

The review also blamed the Trump White House for failing to address a backlog of applications for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, which allows Afghans that might be in danger of retribution by the Taliban for working with foreign occupiers, to emigrate to the US.

The review also repeated previous claims by the Biden White House that Trump did not adequately plan for the departure of US troops after it reached a deal with the Taliban to withdraw troops by May of 2021, a deadline Biden postponed. Biden and State Secretary Antony Blinken have faced harsh criticism due to the chaos that accompanied the withdrawal.

Blinken was recently subpoenaed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) to release classified cables from July 2021, in which staffers from the US embassy in Kabul warned that the defeat of the US-trained Afghan army was “imminent.”

Reporter asks Biden to react to today’s report that his admin botched the Afghanistan withdrawal:

“Remember what I said? I said al-Qaeda wouldn’t be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right.” pic.twitter.com/JfwhYv3Sy5

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 30, 2023

However, despite the broad condemnation of the troops’ withdrawal, less attention was paid to the collapse of the Afghan economy. The NATO-funded Atlantic Council think tank noted that “the Afghan economy began spiraling shortly after the Taliban takeover” due to US actions, including imposing “sanctions, the freezing of central bank assets, and removal of foreign aid.”

The US and a coalition of its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 as part of the so-called War on Terror, in which the neoconservative-led Bush Administration sought to invade seven countries in West Asia within five years.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The Long, Hot Summer

“Vladimir Putin is clearly losing the War in Iraq.” 

– Joe Biden, US President

Russian Revolution Two kicked off the long, hot summer freak show of 2023. Unlike Russian Revolution One (1917), which lasted over seventy years, RR2 clocked out in under twenty-four hours. It didn’t propel Russia into a political paroxysm as perhaps expected by crisis engineers in Langley, VA, and Washington’s Foggy Bottom. Rather, it energized the resolve of arch-nemesis Vlad Putin, solidified his support among the Russian populace (who turned out singing patriotic hymns along the Neva River when the revolt was quashed), and sunsetted the increasingly rogue Wagner private paramilitary company in its Ukraine duties, now to be taken over by regular Russian Federation army units.

According to commentator Andrei Martyanov – see yesterday’s colloquy on Tommy Carrigan’s Podcast – Wagner had already gone off the rails in Ukraine, inciting the costly Bakhmut operation on its own to fluff its reputation while preparing for the mutiny executed and aborted on June 24.

The fate of Wagner’s business manager, Evgeny Prigozhin, remains murky now while he cools his heels in Belarus — a trial, perhaps, at some later date when Ukraine itself stops being a geopolitical psychodrama. He has been publicly branded a “traitor.”

It was perhaps the hope of America’s feckless Neocon war-dogs that Russia would fall into chaos. This has all along been the hope and expectation of our country’s official stated policy. And it turns out to be ever more at odds with the reality of the situation. Mr. Putin aims to conclude this tragic US-provoked misadventure as swiftly as possible now. This ain’t no Mud Club; this ain’t no foolin’ around. It looks more like the last days of disco in Kiev. The question for the people there is: just how much of Ukraine do you want to be left with intact when this thing is over? Go ahead… choose.

Despite its master-slave relationship with America, Euroland may not be so avid for World War Three as the “Joe Biden” regime seems to be. The Wagner coup fiasco marks the true crackup of NATO as the Ukraine project fizzles. Surely Europeans with some functioning brain cells must be asking: “what was the point of all this killing and waste?” The clear-eyed may suspect that the point was to get Europe to commit suicide, because that is the obvious result. No more natgas for you, Europe, meaning farewell to major industry and a comfortable standard of living. A lot less wheat and corn coming out of Ukraine to Euroland nations, too. When food costs too much, or is just plain scarce, governments fall. Wait for it.

Do you suppose that “Joe Biden” & Company can keep up this charade of a proxy war with Russia much longer? $150-billion pounded down the Kiev rat-hole, purchasing yet another foreign relations humiliation. Never has an American president been heaped with such an ignominious foundering and dishonor. He can only pretend to run for reelection as he wrecks the country.

The DNC poohbahs, cross-eyed in transports of Woke-ism, must know that this bumbling grifter personifies a failing state.

The White House press pool reporters are even flinging harsh questions at him these days as he desperately searches for doors to escape through.

The tally in the Biden family bribery operation stands above $30-million now, with government whistleblowers pouring out of the agencies like termites from a burning house. Most of them have not testified in Congress yet, or in any other venue, nor have the various DOJ and FBI officials associated with the broad-based cover-up of these blatant crimes. Do you doubt anymore that Attorney General Merrick Garland perjured himself testifying that the Delaware US attorney David Weiss was not interfered with in the Hunter Biden tax and gun violation case?

The mounting evidence of foreign influence-peddling is hard and vivid now, viz., the Whatsapp text out this week of Hunter, “sitting here with my father,” extorting Chinese business associate Henry Zhao to fullfill his commitment or “regret not following my direction.” Hmmmmm. Explain that. Or the email archive carefully saved by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who was prudent enough to back up his story with docs apt to prove DOJ malfeasance.

It’s unfortunate that America suffered three fake presidential impeachments in recent decades – Bill Clinton’s over a sexual impropriety, which is hardly a high crime, and the two utter charades involving Donald Trump – because now our nation is faced with serious presidential crimes explicitly laid out in Article II Section Four of the Constitution: bribery.

“Joe Biden” will be impeached if he doesn’t bail altogether, and he might not do that because then he loses the power to pardon the other Biden family members involved. The impeachment of Merrick Garland for debauching and dishonoring the Justice Department logically would be the warm-up act for the impeachment of the president. They’ve both got to go and they both could save our country a lot of trouble by just stepping down.

Then we can see about Kamala Harris.

*  *  *

Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A leading mind in the development of artificial intelligence is warning that AI has developed a rudimentary capacity to reason and may seek to overthrow humanity.

AI systems may develop the desire to seize control from humans as a way of accomplishing other preprogrammed goals, said Geoffrey Hinton, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.

“I think we have to take the possibility seriously that if they get smarter than us, which seems quite likely, and they have goals of their own, which seems quite likely, they may well develop the goal of taking control,” Hinton said during a June 28 talk at the Collision tech conference in Toronto, Canada.

“If they do that, we’re in trouble.”

Hinton has been dubbed one of the “godfathers of AI” for his work in neural networks. He recently spent a decade helping to develop AI systems for Google but left the company last month, saying he needed to be able to warn people of the risks posed by AI.

While Hinton does not believe that AI will innately crave power, he said that it could nevertheless seek to seize it from humans as a logical step to better allow itself to achieve its goals.

“At a very general level, if you’ve got something that’s a lot smarter than you, that’s very good at manipulating people, at a very general level, are you confident that people stay in charge?” Hinton said.

“I think they’ll derive [the motive to seize control] as a way of achieving other goals.”

AI Now Capable of Reason

Hinton previously doubted that an AI superintelligence that could match humans would emerge within the next 30 to 50 years. He now believes it could come in less than 20.

In part, he said, that is because AI systems that use large language models are beginning to show the capacity to reason, and he is not sure how they are doing it.

“It’s the big language models that are getting close, and I don’t really understand why they can do it, but they can do little bits of reasoning.

“They still can’t match us, but they’re getting close.”

Hinton described an AI system that had been given a puzzle in which it had to plan how to paint several rooms of a house. It was given three colors to choose from, with one color that faded to another over time, and asked to paint a certain number of rooms in a particular color within a set time frame. Rather than merely opting to paint the rooms the desired color, the AI determined not to paint any that it knew would fade to the desired color anyway, electing to save resources though it had not been programmed to do so.

“That’s thinking,” Hinton said.

To that end, Hinton said that there was no reason to suspect that AI wouldn’t reach and exceed human intelligence in the coming years.

“We’re just a big neural net, and there’s no reason why an artificial neural net shouldn’t be able to do everything we can do,” Hinton said.

“We’re entering a period of huge uncertainty. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen.”

Read more here…

Since the advent of nuclear electricity in the 1950s, nuclear reactors have played an essential role in meeting our rising energy needs.

Nuclear reactors are designed to operate for decades and are typically licensed for 20 to 40 years, and they can last even longer with license renewals.

So, just how old is the world’s current nuclear reactor fleet?

As Visual Capitalist’s Govind Bhutada and Sabrina Lam show in the bubble chart below, the age distribution of the 422 reactors operating worldwide as of March 2023 is quite considerable, based on data from the Power Reactor Information System (PRIS).

The Age Distribution of the Global Reactor Fleet

Nuclear power saw a building boom in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as countries expanded their energy portfolios and sought to capitalize on the advancements in nuclear technology.

As a result, the majority of the world’s nuclear reactors began operating during this period.

Of the total of 422 reactors, 262 reactors have been in operation for 31 to 50 years. In other words, about 62% of all current nuclear reactors were connected to the grid between 1973 and 1992.

Growth in nuclear power slowed down by the turn of the 21st century, with decreasing public support and increasing concern over nuclear safety. As a result, only a small number of reactors fall into the 11 to 20 year age group.

But over the last decade, some countries have renewed their interest in nuclear energy, while others like China have continued to expand their reactor fleets. Some 67 reactors are between zero and 10 years old, accounting for 18% of global nuclear electrical capacity.

The oldest operating reactors (five of them) are 54 years old and entered commercial service in 1969. Two of these are located in the United States, two in India, and one in Switzerland.

How Long Can Nuclear Reactors Last?

Although specific lifespans can vary, nuclear reactors are typically designed to last for 20 to 40 years.

However, reactors can operate beyond their initially licensed periods with lifetime extensions. Extending reactor lives requires rigorous assessments, safety evaluations, and refurbishments.

Some countries have granted license renewals for aging reactors. Notably, 88 of the 92 reactors in the U.S. have received approvals to operate for up to 60 years, and some have applied for additional 20-year extensions to operate for up to 80 years.

With safety concerns addressed, reactors with lifetime extensions can offer various advantages. Without the high capital investments needed to build new reactors, they can produce carbon-free electricity at low and competitive costs, which is especially important as the global power sector looks to decarbonize.