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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… and there goes the need for pilots.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Ruminating over our robot overlords and the missing scenario

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

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

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

• will they act benevolently or malevolently toward us?

​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That leaves us with three possible paths forward:

#1 Appeal to the benevolence of AI super-intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In simpler terms:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Singularity as Rapture

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

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

The missing scenario is that AI will never happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for a Reality Check

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *

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

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *

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By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

999 Luftballons

I could have gone with 99 Luftballons, but since inflation is the hottest topic coming into CPI, 999 Luftballons felt more appropriate.

I could have gone with Red Balloons rather than Luftballons, but the original German lyrics tell a different and much clearer story than the lyrics that were created for the English version.

Heck, I could have even gone with 1 Chinese Balloon, but that probably isn’t enough (as the U.S. has since shot down two unidentified objects, in addition to the balloon). Academy’s Geopolitical Intelligence Group had a busy week:

• Saturday evening, we published U.S. Shoots Down 2 Unidentified Objects.

• We addressed Chinese Surveillance in the U.S.

• Shooting Down the Balloon.

• Provided some analysis and refutation of a Nord Stream Explosion report that has garnered some attention.

This is it Boys, This is War

I found this to be one of the “catchier” lines in 99 Red Balloons. It is easy to imagine back in 1983 a bunch of men (and it would have been mostly men back then) huddled around a table in a smoke filled room deciding to attack something. Toss in a Captain Kirk reference (who is Canadian) and you are all set to hit the proverbial “button”.

Fortunately, that is not how it works! I’ve spent almost 6 years working with our Geopolitical Intelligence Group and many other veterans and most (if not all) view war as a last resort. They know the risks and devastation that war causes and are not looking for “kinetic” action. Yes, they want to be as prepared as possible (with the best training and equipment) so that if war occurs we can achieve our objectives with minimal loss of life. This is far different from wanting or encouraging war, so the song got that part wrong.

Unintended Consequences

However, the German version did get one part right.

The GIG (and veterans I work with) always talk about the risk of unintended consequences. An example of this would be a mistake (anywhere along the chain of command) that results in loss of life and/or escalation.

The German version of the song addresses 99 balloons floating to the horizon. Then one country’s military sent planes to intercept these balloons (thinking, ironically given what is going on in the world this weekend, that they were UFOs). This attack effectively spooked their neighbors, who then also shot at the 99 balloons, which then led to war.

Definitely far-fetched, but there are many tense situations across the globe that do have the risk of sparking into something more significant. Academy’s GIG discusses these situations in many of our meetings as corporations and asset managers assess potential “unlikely, but possible” risks:

• Russia and the nuclear threat. It doesn’t come up as frequently, but it remains a risk.

  • Does Ukraine do something that triggers an even more aggressive response from Russia? As Ukraine’s capabilities improve, do they change Russian behavior?

  • As the West provides more and more equipment, training, and expertise, do we trigger a new response from Russia?

• Does Russia accidentally (or on purpose) trigger an Article 5 response from NATO? Remember when missile fragments killed civilians on Polish soil? That turned out not to be what was first reported, but this remains a risk.

• China and Taiwan. The moments around China’s increased military exercises after Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan was fraught with risk. That risk has diminished (along with Chinese and Taiwanese activity), but it could increase at any moment.

• Iran. Iran building a nuclear weapon is an existential threat to Israel and even Saudi Arabia. Since little seems to be getting done to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, does some country (or group of countries) take preemptive action? While Russian nukes come up frequently and early in discussions, this topic is often more of an “afterthought” and I am increasingly concerned that is a mistake.

• North Korea. It is difficult to shake the image of some “crazy uncle” sitting in some technology deprived/backwoods country with nuclear weapons (and missiles). To make matters worse, he tests them when he feels that the world isn’t paying enough attention to him. What could go wrong?

Not sure there is anything to act on immediately, but ever since Putin invaded Ukraine we have had to deal with “Bad People Behaving Truly Badly” and that seems to be a risk that is increasing, rather than decreasing.

Inflation

Today is the actual Super Bowl. However, Tuesday will be yet another “super bowl” for the markets as CPI will be released. Yes, NFP was also a “super bowl” as was Powell’s speech, the FOMC decision, and so on and so forth.

CPI, in the end, will just be a number and moments after it is released, the market will need to start focusing on the next number (knowing that Zero Days to Expiration Options (0DTE) will make the gyrations ahead of and after the number even greater than they would have been a year or so ago). I really do recommend reading last weekend’s report. We’ve had a lot of feedback on the report and 0DTE is not only attracting attention from traders and asset managers, but also from regulators and policy makers.

Regarding CPI, Powell has finally decided that disinflation is as risky as a resurgence in inflation (Why Am I Fighting the Fed, When I Agree with Powell).

But since the FOMC meeting on February 1 st:

• The terminal rate has shot up from sub 4.9% in June to almost 5.2% in July.

• The 10-year yield has shot up from 3.42% to 3.74% (and 2s vs 10s has inverted more).

• The S&P 500 is right between where it was pre-FOMC on the 31st and where it closed on the 1st.

• The Nasdaq 100 is closer to the post FOMC closing level but is 500 points lower than where it wound up on Thursday the 2nd (a day that opened many peoples’ eyes to 0DTE).

The reasons for inflation fears increasing are real:

• Jobs data (even trying to account for a bunch of year-end revisions) was strong.

• The BLS changed how CPI is calculated. They changed some weightings which had the effect of showing that less progress was made on inflation than previously thought.

• The consumer seems to keep spending (even if more of that is going on plastic and draining savings).

• The “soft landing” or even “no landing” narrative is getting incredible amounts of airtime!

• Oil and gas had big weeks, but last week “Dr. Copper” actually fell. Seeing oil prices go higher always gets the inflation juices flowing (even if it has little to do with Core CPI and is largely ignored, at least over short periods of time, by the Fed).

Could we see a higher than expected CPI print on Tuesday? Yes. We are on the path to get negative prints in Q1 and Q2, but need to respect the data as it comes in and some of the positive data may be more than just a “snapshot” effect. However, I continue to believe that collectively we are being far too complacent about the direction of markets and the economy.

Sometime soon, the weakness the real world saw in housing late last summer and into the fall will start showing up in the CPI data. Remember, three of the highest monthly prints on rent were in the last 5 months, which just doesn’t seem sensical or believable.

Bottom Line

Risk markets remain positioned bullish (though not as bullish as at the start of last week) and remain susceptible to disappointment. Treasury yields, on the other hand, have moved to the high end of my ranges.

I’m slightly bearish risk assets (stocks and credit spreads). Price action has been abysmal (no idea why we had some of the reversals we’ve had) and there is little the Fed can say or do to help markets that hasn’t already been said or done.

I continue to watch the MOSO page on Bloomberg (most active options) and will get bullish when VIX calls/SPY puts stop dominating the daily flows. When SPY calls (along with TSLA and ARKK calls) were dominating flows, we had the short squeezes. That just isn’t working and if anything, it looks like baskets of “most shorted” stocks led the way lower, which only helps those “laddering” into put spreads.

I like rates and would start nibbling here. As an issuer I’d probably hold off and see if all-in rates can come back down a little.

I want to be prepared to buy stocks and bonds on any lower than “whisper” (or expected) CPI print. I see the reasons why  we are starting to price in a higher print, and agree with many of those reasons. But I do think that OER is going to be disinflation’s friend.

In any case, the volatility (not just day to day, but also intraday) means keeping positions relatively small and nimble.

Good luck if your team is in the Super Bowl! For me, at least this year, the Bills can’t lose in the Super Bowl.

Authored by John Seiler via The Epoch Times,

One of the great reasons to read The Epoch Times is to counter the nonsense on California perpetrated every day by the Los Angeles Times, which is still highly influential in state politics. A case in point is a recent editorial that opines, “Big Oil reaps record profits while the planet burns. California should curb its greed.”

In one headline it advances: socialism instead of “record profits”; “the planet burns,” meaning “climate change,” the recent bugaboo that replaced “global warming”; and the idea that giving people a commodity essential to civilization is “greed.”

It begins: “Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil and other oil companies made more money than ever in 2022, showing just how massive a windfall they reaped as surging gas prices made it a struggle for drivers to afford filling up.” Actually, the cause is not a “surge in gas prices,” but a surge in global oil prices.

A view of the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., on Nov. 17, 2021. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

And the L.A. Times doesn’t mention how the oil companies just three years ago suffered record losses, as the price of oil actually went negative at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Here’s the New York Times from April 20, 2020:

Something bizarre happened in the oil markets on Monday: Prices fell so much that some traders paid buyers to take oil off their hands.

The price of the main U.S. oil benchmark fell more than $50 a barrel to end the day about $30 below zero, the first time oil prices have ever turned negative.

Fortunately, that didn’t last or we’d all be starving and freezing to death. The global oil market largely is a capitalist operation, despite all the meddling, especially by governments in Russia and communist China. But a massive loss in one period means investment in new oil drilling and refining dropped for a while. That will be compensated for with new investments from the profits of 2023.

The L.A. Times:

The billions in record profits they posted this week bolster the appeal of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort to curb oil industry price gouging. Under a proposal he released late last year, the state would set a cap on oil refinery profit margins, penalizing excess profits and returning a percentage of it to consumers.

Such measures could rein in oil industry greed and save Californians money. … “Big Oil has been screwing you,” the governor said in a video message last week.

I reported on that earlier in The Epoch Times in “Newsom Grandstands on Oil Profits.” Instead of supposedly helping consumers, any new tax will be passed on to them. I also pointed out that the added hassles will reduce incentives for the oil companies to invest in California’s rickety old refineries, which break down now and then, causing shortages and higher prices. So we’ll get more breakdowns, bringing more shortages and yet higher prices.

The L.A. Times:

Last year’s spikes hit Californians especially hard, because they already pay the nation’s highest gas prices, and saw them jump even higher, reaching more than $8 a gallon at one Los Angeles gas station. They deserve real action to deter oil companies from squeezing out excessive profits from motorists at the gas pump.

Much further down in the overlong editorial they concede, “California’s gas prices reached new heights last year as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among other factors, pushed prices to an average of $6.44 in June 2022, the highest on record in the state.”

Gas prices over $7.00 a gallon displayed at a Chevron gas station in Menlo Park, Calif., on May 25, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Well, if it’s the fault of the war, then why blame California’s refineries? California has no influence over the war, because foreign policy is handled by the president, the State Department, and Congress.

But the state does have control over its gas taxes, which are the second highest in the nation, at 53 cents per gallon, after only Pennsylvania’s 59 cents. In Alaska, it’s only 9 cents—and in Hawaii and Virginia, it’s 16 cents.

The L.A. Times laments the slow progress of legislation to hit the oil industry’s profits. And:

Oil companies are interested in protecting their bottom lines, spending millions last year trying to elect sympathetic state legislators and pushing a referendum to overturn a new California law that bans new drilling near homes and schools to protect people’s health.

Fancy that. Government attacks an industry, and that industry hires lobbyists to protect itself. The L.A. Times adds:

The proposal before lawmakers includes provisions to increase oversight and transparency by expanding state authority to collect data that could shed light on California’s mysteriously high gas prices, which regulators say there isn’t enough information to explain.

But there’s no mystery. The high prices result from the Ukraine War, the general inflation of the past two years from too much federal spending, and high California regulations and taxes. The L.A. Times:

Stricter oversight of oil refining will be increasingly important in the coming years as California’s climate policies, including a zero-emission vehicle mandate, shrink demand for petroleum.

Actually, what’s more likely to “shrink demand for petroleum” in California is more people leaving this badly governed state. Meanwhile, global demand for petroleum continues to grow. According to a Jan. 31 projection by the Statista Research Department, here are the numbers beginning with 2020, the COVID year, in millions of barrels per day:

• 2020: 91

• 2021: 96.5

• 2022: 99.4

• 2023: 101.2

• 2024: 102.3

• 2025: 103.2

• 2026: 104.1

The fact is the rest of the world doesn’t care what California does, but is preoccupied with its own problems. For developing countries, that means using fossil fuels, and the even older coal, to power new industrial production.

Military personnel stand in front of a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) during the military exercise Namejs 2022 in Skede, Latvia, on Sept. 26, 2022. (Gints Ivuskans/AFP via Getty Images)

Moreover, here’s something I haven’t heard elsewhere. The Ukraine War largely is a petroleum war. All those tanks, trucks, and planes are not powered by electric engines, but by gas, diesel, and jet fuel. So are almost all ships, with the exception of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and subs. Russia, China, India, Japan, and other major military powers are going to make sure they have enough of all those petrochemical fuels to keep their vehicles and ships going.

The L.A. Times should talk to the California National Guard about how well it could operate if it had to switch to electric-only vehicles to avoid helping “Big Oil” reap “record profits.”

Finally, my guess is Newsom will ignore the L.A. Times and find some way to wiggle out of a “windfall profits” tax on Big Oil. Or maybe he’ll just support the reporting aspect of the proposed legislation. He recently met with Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who later said, “He’s a very talented performer and he’s got a powerful story in many ways. But the authenticity thing is important. And it’s TBD as to whether he communicates that.”

Ouch. Attacking windfall profits is an inauthentic move, especially in the Midwest, which already suspiciously laughs at anything involving California, but holds crucial primaries any Democratic candidate must win. In his obvious presidential bid, which Axelrod mentioned, Newsom needs to move to the center and to reflect the needs and gripes of voters far removed from the hothouse of the Los Angeles Times editorial board.

Former Twitter Executives including Yoel Roth (head of Trust and Safety) and Vijaya Gadde (general council heavily involved in censorship decisions) were recently required to appear in front of a House GOP hearing covering censorship by the social media platform.  Questions covered Twitter’s collusion with government agencies and political leaders to silence people sharing a wide array of information damaging to the political left, but one of the most egregious agendas involved the banishment of doctors and scientists who questioned the mainstream narrative on covid with verifiable facts and data.

The suppression of scientific evidence surrounding the minimal death rate of covid, the inadequacy of mask mandates and lockdowns, as well as the true efficacy and safety of mRNA vaccines is perhaps one of the worst violations of constitutional rights in American history.  The government partnership with Big Tech to stifle the free speech of political opposition is a clear attack on the 1st Amendment that is now widely exposed.

House Representative Nancy Mace from North Carolina confronted Roth and Gadde on their censorship campaign – Here are some of the highlights:

This is so good….. I could play it over and over and over.

pic.twitter.com/A1y5faC81i

— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) February 11, 2023

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. recovery effort of an object that was shot down over Alaska last week faces severe weather conditions, according to weather forecasts.

The object was shot down on Feb. 10 by an F-22 fighter jet near Deadhorse, Alaska, located near the Canadian border, the U.S. Northern Command said.

“Recovery operations continue today near Deadhorse, Alaska,” U.S. Northern Command said in a statement to news outlets Saturday.

“We have no further details at this time about the object, including its capabilities, purpose, or origin.”

Sea conditions on Feb. 10 “permitted dive and underwater unmanned vehicle (UUV) activities and the retrieval of additional debris from the sea floor,” Northern Command told Reuters. “The public may see U.S. Navy vessels moving to and from the site as they conduct offload and resupply activities.”

As of Sunday morning, temperatures in Deadhorse were -22 degrees Fahrenheit with 15 mph winds, bringing temperatures down even further. Deadhorse is located near Prudhoe Bay, which is part of the Arctic Ocean within the Arctic Circle.

By Sunday night, temperatures are expected to hit -34 degrees with 5–10 mph winds.

The unidentified object was approximately the size of a car and had no ability to maneuver, said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby in a Friday news conference. Kirby noted that the object was smaller than the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down a week earlier near South Carolina.

The Pentagon has said a significant amount of the balloon had already been recovered or located, suggesting American officials may soon have more information about any Chinese espionage capabilities aboard.

The Pentagon said NORAD initially detected the object over Alaska on Friday.

U.S. fighter jets from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, monitored the object as it crossed over into Canadian airspace, where Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joined the formation, officials said.

“A U.S. F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory, using an AIM 9X missile following close co-ordination between U.S. and Canadian authorities,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder also said in a statement.

Meanwhile, U.S. fighter jets shot down another object over the Yukon Territory, Canada, located adjacent to Alaska, on Saturday. Few details were provided about that object, too.

Few Details So Far

During the news conference, Kirby said he could not offer many details about the object—including whether it was a balloon or not.

“I’m not going to speak for the Pentagon. I can tell you the President doesn’t regret the way that we handled the first balloon,” Kirby said.

“First of all, apples and oranges here in terms of size. As I said, this was the size of a small car and it was over very sparsely populated area. But, more critically, it was over water when we ordered this down, as we did the last one,” he continued.

Kirby added that the expected the debris field for the object appears to be “much much smaller” than the Chinese surveillance balloon. The balloon traversed much of the United States, while officials later said it traveled near several U.S. military bases.

The Alaska balloon “entered into U.S. airspace on February 9th, we sent up aircraft to assess what it was, the decision was made it posed a reasonable threat to civilian air traffic, the president gave the order to take it down, and we took it down,” Ryder also said alongside Kirby.

The balloon was traveling to the northeast before it was taken down, Ryder said.

Seattle, WA, once known as a relatively quiet port town that became a haven for progressives seeking to avoid more dangerous metro areas like Los Angeles or San Fransisco, is joining the long and unfortunate list of Democrat controlled cities suffering from exploding crime stats.  

Much like Portland, OR, which has spiraled into severe decline in the past five years with a record high homicide rate and expanding homelessness, Seattle is witnessing an aggressive increase in drug related problems as well as violent crime and property theft.  In 2022, the city was host to 49,557 instances of violent crime and property related crime; setting a 15 year high.  Homicides also increased by 24% in 2022.  Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz admits that crime has grown out of control in the area, but remains “optimistic.”

Diaz warns residents not to “take matters into their own hands” when faced with criminals, but this is the position leftist politicians have forced citizens into as they continue to degrade economic stability and local security.

Seattle’s Democratic leadership is famous for its efforts to support the “defund the police” movement – An extreme social justice doctrine borne out of Black Lives Matter fanaticism.  In the process the city lost over 400 sworn SPD staff members in less than two years due to resignation or early retirement.  Many city council members who originally joined with activists in calls to divert 50% of police funds to housing, roads and environmental projects have quietly reversed course as crime skyrockets. 

High minded progressive ideals often do not hold up to social realities, causing even more damage in the process.  Theory is not the same as application.

It’s easy enough to examine the 2023 list of the most dangerous cities in America, including the top ten:  Memphis, Detroit, Little Rock, Tacoma, Pueblo, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cleveland, Springfield and Rockford.  All of them are run by Democrat mayors and majority Democrat city council members.  In 2021-2022, of the 15 American cities with the highest homicide rates, Democrats controlled 11. 

We have all heard about war zone metro regions like Chicago or Baltimore, but these places are only a part of a much bigger trend of leftist cities devolving into places most people prefer not to live.  While Democrats often argue that many conservative states top the list of the most violent, what they don’t mention is that the vast majority of those crimes are committed in Democrat managed cities that often try to defy state government policies (leftist cities that offer sanctuary protection for illegal immigrants are just one example). 

Almost without fail, the worst towns in America are being run by Democrats, and Seattle is the latest that has fallen into chaos in recent years.