ChatGPT-4 And The Future Of AI

wired  |  The stunning capabilities of ChatGPT, the chatbot from startup OpenAI, has triggered a surge of new interest and investment in artificial intelligence. But late last week, OpenAI’s CEO warned that the research strategy that birthed the bot is played out. It's unclear exactly where future advances will come from.

OpenAI has delivered a series of impressive advances in AI that works with language in recent years by taking existing machine-learning algorithms and scaling them up to previously unimagined size. GPT-4, the latest of those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and many thousands of powerful computer chips. The process cost over $100 million.

But the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. “We'll make them better in other ways.”

Altman’s declaration suggests an unexpected twist in the race to develop and deploy new AI algorithms. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, Microsoft has used the underlying technology to add a chatbot to its Bing search engine, and Google has launched a rival chatbot called Bard. Many people have rushed to experiment with using the new breed of chatbot to help with work or personal tasks.

Meanwhile, numerous well-funded startups, including Anthropic, AI21, Cohere, and Character.AI, are throwing enormous resources into building ever larger algorithms in an effort to catch up with OpenAI’s technology. The initial version of ChatGPT was based on a slightly upgraded version of GPT-3, but users can now also access a version powered by the more capable GPT-4.

Altman’s statement suggests that GPT-4 could be the last major advance to emerge from OpenAI’s strategy of making the models bigger and feeding them more data. He did not say what kind of research strategies or techniques might take its place. In the paper describing GPT-4, OpenAI says its estimates suggest diminishing returns on scaling up model size. Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data centers the company can build and how quickly it can build them.

Nick Frosst, a cofounder at Cohere who previously worked on AI at Google, says Altman’s feeling that going bigger will not work indefinitely rings true. He, too, believes that progress on transformers, the type of machine learning model at the heart of GPT-4 and its rivals, lies beyond scaling. “There are lots of ways of making transformers way, way better and more useful, and lots of them don’t involve adding parameters to the model,” he says. Frosst says that new AI model designs, or architectures, and further tuning based on human feedback are promising directions that many researchers are already exploring.

Google Says: Wretched Humans "Ready Or Not Here AI Comes"

CNBC  |  Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said “every product of every company” will be impacted by the quick development of AI, warning that society needs to prepare for technologies like the ones it’s already launched.

In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Sunday that struck a concerned tone, interviewer Scott Pelley tried several of Google’s artificial intelligence projects and said he was “speechless” and felt it was “unsettling,” referring to the human-like capabilities of products like Google’s chatbot Bard.

“We need to adapt as a society for it,” Pichai told Pelley, adding that jobs that would be disrupted by AI would include “knowledge workers,” including writers, accountants, architects and, ironically, even software engineers.

“This is going to impact every product across every company,” Pichai said. “For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to 10 years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you. You come in the morning, let’s say you have a hundred things to go through, it may say, ‘these are the most serious cases you need to look at first.’”

Pelley viewed other areas with advanced AI products within Google, including DeepMind, where robots were playing soccer, which they learned themselves, as opposed to from humans. Another unit showed robots that recognized items on a countertop and fetched Pelley an apple he asked for.

When warning of AI’s consequences, Pichai said that the scale of the problem of disinformation and fake news and images will be “much bigger,” adding that “it could cause harm.”

Last month, CNBC reported that internally, Pichai told employees that the success of its newly launched Bard program now hinges on public testing, adding that “things will go wrong.”

Google launched its AI chatbot Bard as an experimental product to the public last month. It followed Microsoft

’s January announcement that its search engine Bing would include OpenAI’s GPT technology, which garnered international attention after ChatGPT launched in 2022.

However, fears of the consequences of the rapid progress has also reached the public and critics in recent weeks. In March, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and dozens of academics called for an immediate pause in training “experiments” connected to large language models that were “more powerful than GPT-4,” OpenAI’s flagship LLM. More than 25,000 people have signed the letter since then.

“Competitive pressure among giants like Google and startups you’ve never heard of is propelling humanity into the future, ready or not,” Pelley commented in the segment.

Google has launched a document outlining “recommendations for regulating AI,” but Pichai said society must quickly adapt with regulation, laws to punish abuse and treaties among nations to make AI safe for the world as well as rules that “Align with human values including morality.”

 

When We Leak It's News, When You Leak It's Treason!!!

racket  |  On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.

Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!

The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast”:

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.

When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.

Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.

Valodya Talm'Wit His People About Educating The Russian People

kremlin.ru  |   Another basic area is the training of qualified engineers, technicians and workers. We have been short of these people for many years and we need to make cardinal changes and achieve tangible results in this respect. The goals facing the industry and the economy as a whole will not be achieved by themselves. They are achieved by the people, the specialists working at the companies.

By and large, we have determined the areas for developing vocational education. We must update academic programmes and the material, technical and laboratory facilities of universities, colleges, technical and vocational schools. I have just discussed this with Mr Levitin. Obviously, we must double-check their departmental affiliation. We need to find out whether everything meets the latest requirements and if the regions are able to run college education effectively in certain areas. Possibly, we should consider a vertical organisational structure for this – in the framework of certain production sectors – as we did in the past.

Industry badly needs highly qualified workers now. They study at secondary special education institutions, which are the responsibility of the regions, as I have said. I think we should return to the discussion of departmental affiliation. We have already developed good practices in this respect. I would like to ask the regional governors to share their experience, monitor these issues and resolve them in close contact with the relevant departments and ministries.

I know that at yesterday’s seminar you discussed in detail, with Government representatives, the measures I mentioned and the

regional governors’ initiatives, and mapped out specific proposals and steps. Let us analyse all of these again. I would like to ask you to tell me about the course of your discussions and the proposals and ideas that you came up with in the process.

Mr Dyomin, you have the floor, please.....

.....And the fifth question, which you also touched upon, and of course, it is also the main one, is personnel. The shortage of engineering personnel arises due to various reasons - we all know them.

There are not enough applicants who enter technical universities. The nature of these problems begins at school. The reason lies both in the shortage of teachers of mathematics and physics in schools - this is a problem that can be solved, as well as in the fear of the students themselves to fill up this subject at the Unified State Examination. Because when a student gets attached to mathematics and physics and starts preparing for the Unified State Examination, [he] perfectly understands that it is easier to pass this exam in the humanities and moves on to the humanities.

Vladimir Putin:  It happens in different ways.

Alexander Dyumin:  As a result, the number of applicants who can become engineers is significantly reduced. There are statistics, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Vladimir Putin:  Clearly, yes. I understand.

Andrei Dyumin:  Even at school, students choose the humanities instead of specialized mathematics and physics. This problem must be solved comprehensively: to strengthen the training of teachers of these subjects, to motivate schoolchildren with interesting curricula.

One of the proposals that is being discussed within the framework of the commission - this issue was discussed yesterday, I just want to draw attention, if not, then some other option - one of the proposals: to give the right to universities that train students in technical specialties, accept children not only for the Unified State Examination, but also for entrance exams in their specialized disciplines. If not, then in a different way.

Vladimir Putin:  You can, Alexei Gennadyevich.

I met with entrepreneurs, they saw, probably, they also said that it is easier to pass in the humanities, especially for girls, but in the natural sciences, in mathematics it is more difficult. It depends on how to interest the person.

I'll tell you later, I know a girl who graduated from a higher educational institution in the humanities, studying foreign languages ​​as well. Then she became interested in other disciplines and defended her Ph.D. thesis in higher mathematics. It depends on how the person is motivated.

Alexei Dyumin:  This is an asterisk.

Vladimir Putin:  These "stars" are created by teachers and those people who work on a person's professional orientation.

Alexei Dyumin:  Mr Putin, the tasks you have set require not stars, but starfall.

Vladimir Putin:  All right, all right.

Alexei Dyumin:  Mr Putin, and another important issue, which is understandable, is housing, which is relevant in every industry. An effective mechanism, which was adopted by the Government of Russia, was preferential mortgages for the IT sector.

It is proposed to consider: let's consider the possibility of extending this measure to the industry and, of course, primarily to the rocket industry. We can talk about both federal and regional backbone enterprises. And of course, we are well aware that this is a serious additional incentive for our young people to choose the profession and follow the profession that is in demand and necessary for the state. I ask the Government to instruct to study this issue and pay attention to it.

Vladimir Vladimirovich, and, of course, after all that has been said - perhaps even some kind of irony, but this is not irony - while communicating and being at his post in a developed industrial region: chemistry, metallurgy, defense industry, engineers, designers, technologists, even teachers of technical universities, flagship universities - everyone is asking to return drafting to school. This is the beginning of the basics of engineering knowledge.

It is clear that now there is a lot of software that draws, rotates, creates and so on in 3D, but this is not my opinion - this is what designers, young engineers, technologists from all areas of all industries say: please return drawing to school education. I would like to ask you to consider this issue at a high level and make an appropriate decision.

Vladimir Vladimirovich, thank you for your attention. The report is finished.

Vladimir Putin:  Thank you very much.

How Concerned Will The Anglo Establishment Become About Democracy In Israel?

korybko  |  At all costs, America believes that it must do whatever’s necessary to prevent the Israeli state from exercising its sovereign right under Bibi’s restored leadership to balance between the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the Sino-Russo Entente instead of decisively take the former’s side against the latter. Most immediately, its “deep state” wants Israel to arm Kiev, which Bibi himself warned earlier this month could abruptly catalyze a crisis with Russia in Syria.  

It's precisely this outcome that the US wants to have happen because it could open a so-called “second front” in its Eurasian-wide “containment’ campaign against Russia after the most recent efforts to do so in Georgia and Moldova have thus far failed. Furthermore, a major crisis in West Asia could impede the region’s accelerated rise as an independent pole of influence in the emerging Multipolar World Order, the scenario of which became viable after the Chinese-mediated Iranian-Saudi rapprochement.

That aforementioned development coupled with Bibi’s envisaged multi-alignment between the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the Sino-Russo Entente could lead to the near-total loss of American influence over West Asia, especially if Israel starts de-dollarizing its trade like Saudi Arabia is soon expected to do. Simply put, the entire region’s future role in the ongoing global systemic transition is at stake, thus explaining the grand strategic significance of Israel’s US-exacerbated crisis.

The socio-political (soft security) dynamics aren’t in Bibi’s favor, which could lead to him either backing down or being overthrown, with either of those outcomes raising the chances that Israel submits to being the US’ New Cold War vassal instead of continuing its trajectory as an independent player. If the military (hard security) dynamics become more difficult such as in the event of a tacitly US-approved Intifada, then his removal could be a fait accompli unless he succeeds in imposing a military dictatorship.

So as not to be misunderstood, the preceding scenario doesn’t imply that the Palestinian cause is illegitimate, but just that it can be exploited by the US like all others in advance of its larger interests. In any case, the situation is extremely combustible and it’s difficult to predict what’ll happen next. Nothing like this has ever happened before in Israel, neither domestically nor in terms of its ties with the US. This is literally unprecedented, especially in terms of its impact on International Relations as explained.

Americanism Failed When America Failed To Integrate Its Public Schools

theconversation  |   Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” In her view, another Civil War is inevitable unless red and blue states form separate countries.

She has plenty of company on the right, where a host of others – 52% of Trump voters, Donald Trump himself and prominent Texas Republicans – have endorsed various forms of secession in recent years. Roughly 40% of Biden voters have fantasized about a national divorce as well. Some on the left urge a domestic breakup so that a new egalitarian nation might be, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “brought forth on this continent.”

The American Civil War was a national trauma precipitated by the secession of 11 Southern states over slavery. It is, therefore, understandable that many pundits and commentators would weigh in about the legality, feasibility and wisdom of secessionwhen others clamor for divorce.

But all this secession talk misses a key point that every troubled couple knows. Just as there are ways to withdraw from a marriage before any formal divorce, there are also ways to exit a nation before officially seceding.

I have studied secession for 20 years, and I think that it is not just a “what if?” scenario anymore. In “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776,” my co-author and I go beyond narrow discussions of secession and the Civil War to frame secession as an extreme end point on a scale that includes various acts of exit that have already taken place across the U.S.

Separatist ideas come from the Left, too.

“Cal-exit,” a plan for California to leave the union after 2016, was the most acute recent attempt at secession.

And separatist acts have reshaped life and law in many states. Since 2012, 21 states have legalized marijuana, which is federally illegal. Sanctuary cities and states have emerged since 2016 to combat aggressive federal immigration laws and policies. Some prosecutors and judges refuse to prosecute women and medical providers for newly illegal abortions in some states.

Estimates vary, but some Americans are increasingly opting out of hypermodern, hyperpolarized life entirely. “Intentional communities,” rural, sustainable, cooperative communes like East Wind in the Ozarks, are, as The New York Times reported in 2020, proliferating “across the country.”

In many ways, America is already broken apart. When secession is portrayed in its strictest sense, as a group of people declaring independence and taking a portion of a nation as they depart, the discussion is myopic, and current acts of exit hide in plain sight. When it comes to secession, the question is not just “What if?” but “What now?”

 

Biden Administration Effectively Nationalized The American Banking System

market-ticker  |  Next up - Republic, which apparently had lines out the door (if you believe the Internet) on Saturday.  Again: So what?

Folks, bubbles attract stupidity.  Stupidity is a constant in the universe; in fact it is likely the only thing that is truly infinite (with all due respect to the late Mr. Einstein.)

The so-called "Chief Risk Officer" at SVB had a masters in..... public administration.  Anyone care to bet if she passed any form of advanced mathematics -- you know, like for example Calculus or Statistics?  Do you think she understood exponents and why this graph made clear that concentration of risk and duration was stupid and likely to blow up in everyone's face -- including hers?

How about Bill Ackman and the others on the Internet screaming for a bailout?  How about the CFOs of public companies like Roku that stuck several hundred million dollars in said bank?  Was it not widespread public knowledge (and available to anyone who took 15 minutes to do research, which you'd think someone would do before putting a hundred million bucks somewhere) that this institution was chock-full of VC-funded startup companies which, historically fail 90% of the time and their debt becomes impaired or even worthless?

Where are the indictments for fiduciary malfeasance among these people?

It takes a literal five minutes with Excel to prove to yourself that if debt is rising faster than GDP no matter the interest rate eventually the interest payments on that debt will exceed all of the economy.  This of course is impossible because you cannot use over 100% of anything as its not there, but long before you reach that point you're going to have trouble putting food on the table, fuel in the vehicle and paychecks are going to bounce.  It was for this reason that one of the first sections in my book Leverage, written after the 2008 blowup which I chronicled and laid bare upon the table featured exactly this chart.

The last bit of insanity was just 15 years ago by my math.  Did we fix it?  No.  What was featured in the stupidity of 2008?  Allowing banks to run with no reserves.  Who did that?  Ben Bernanke, who got it into the TARP bill that eventually passed and which I reported on at the time.  It accelerated that which was already going to happen because Congress is full of people who think trees grow to the moon, leverage is never bad and exponents are a suggestion.

Oh by the way, your local Realtor thinks so to as does, apparently, the former SVB "risk officer" who, it is clear, didn't understand exponents -- or didn't care.

The simple reality is that it must always cost to borrow money in real terms.  This means the rate of interest must be positive in said real terms, which means across the curve rates must be higher than inflation -- again, in real terms, not in "CPI" which has intentional distortions in it such as "Owner's Equivalent Rent" when you're not renting a house, you're buying it.  Had said "CPI" actually had home prices in it then it would have shown a doubling in many markets in that section of the economy over the last three years.

In other words housing alone would have resulted in a roughly 10% per year inflation rate, plus all the other increases, which means the Fed Funds rate should have been 300bips or so beyond that all the way back to 2020 -- which would put Fed Funds at about 13% for the last three years.

It isn't of course but if it had been then all those "housing price increases" would not have happened at all.  Incidentally even today the Fed Funds rate is below inflation and thus the crazy is still on.

It's a bit less on however, and now you see what happens when even though they're still nuts being slightly "less" nuts means that these firms are no longer capable of operating without the wild-eyed crazy; even a slight reduction of the heroin dose caused them to fail.

Never mind the wild-eyed poor choices of executives (who signed off on all of this?) at SVB which the regulators all knew about and ignored.  The CEO?  A director of the San Francisco Federal Reserve.  Why don't you look up a few of the other "chief" positions and what they used to do.  Bring a barf bag.  No, really.

And what did Forbes think of all this?  Why it was good for five straight years of SVB being rated one of their BEST BANKS!

Negative real rates are never sustainable.  The insidious nature of that nonsense is that it extends duration in pre-payable debt, specifically mortgages.  Mortgages have had a roughly 7 year duration forever, despite most of them being 30 year paper nominally because people move for other than necessity reasons (e.g. "I want a bigger house", "I want to live here rather than there" and so on.)  A huge percentage of said paper was issued at 3% and now is double that or more.  Since a mortgage is not transportable (when you sell the house you extinguish the old one and take a new one) and changing that retroactively would be both wildly illegal and ruin everyone holding said paper you can't retroactively patch the issue -- which is that now nobody with a 3% mortgage is going to prepay it and move unless they have to and so the duration is extending and will continue for the next couple of decades.  This in turn means if you have a 3% mortgage bond, the new ones are 7% and there's 10 years left on the reasonable expectation of its life you're now going to have to discount the face value by the difference in interest rate times the remaining duration or I won't buy it since I can buy the new one at the higher rate!  This is not a surprise and that it would happen and accelerate was known as soon as inflation started to rise and thus force The Fed to withdraw liquidity.  The Fed cannot stop because inflation is a compound function and at the point it forces necessities to be foregone the economy collapses and, if continued beyond that point THE GOVERNMENT collapses because tax revenue wildly drops as well.  The only sound accounting move at that moment in time as a holder of said paper was to dispose of the duration or immediately discount the value of that paper to the terminal rate's presumption and adjust as required on a monthly basis.

Nobody did this yet to not do it is fraud as these are not only expected outcomes they're certain.

Where was the OCC on this that is supposed to prevent such mismatches from impairing bank capital?  How about The Fed itself, or the FDIC?  The San Francisco Fed was obviously polluted as the CEO was on their board (until he was quietly removed on Friday) but isn't it interesting that all these people who were intimately involved in firms that blew up in 2008 were concentrated in one place in executive officers with direct fiduciary responsibility?

And isn't it further quite-interesting that all the screaming you're hearing right now is about how "terrible" it will be that "climate change" related firms will be unable to make payroll and the new upcoming VC-funded startups won't because their favorite conduit has been disrupted?  What's that about -- the entire premise of these firms requires them to not only force their startups to bank in specific places with large amounts of money (since they don't earn anything they have to have access to and consume tens of millions or more a year) but cash management, you know, putting all of it other than what you need to make payroll next week in 4 week bills is too much to ask?

There's a rumor floating around (peddled by Bloomberg) that over one hundred venture and investment firms, including Sequoia, have signed a statement supporting SVB and warning of an "extinction-level event" for tech firms.  Really?  Extinction for technology or extinction for cash-furnace nonsense funded by negative real interest rates which make all manner of uneconomic things look good but require ever-expanding, exponentially-so, levels of debt issuance?

Again, that is not possible on a durable basis and once again the reason why is trivially discernable with 5 minutes and an Excel spreadsheet and graph.  It takes about an hour to do it manually using graph paper, a basic 4-function calculator or the capacity to perform basic multiplication on said paper and a pencil.

It's Decentralized Bro, That Means It's Safer Bro, Please Believe Me Bro!!!

 CNBC  |  The two biggest banking institutions serving crypto businesses in the U.S. have shut down in the last four days. Investors have worried that the collapse of Signature Bank, whose assets were seized Sunday evening by regulators, was inevitable following the impending liquidation of Silvergate Bank and given the increasing regulatory hostility toward crypto companies. Now that event is past us, and has left young U.S.-based crypto startups with few options for banking relationships. 

 “There’s kind of a black mark on crypto deposits for the next few weeks,” said Conor Ryder, research analyst at Kaiko. “It could be that one of the smaller banks decides to raise their hand and take on the deposits but I don’t think they’ll be jumping on that opportunity after everything was done over the weekend.” The biggest priorities for the industry now are around diversifying on-ramps into crypto and focusing on policymaker education. 

 Before the end of Silvergate and Signature, the regulatory crackdown on crypto had already started. The days before the industry had crypto-forward banks to turn to were some of the darkest for the industry. The inability to form banking relationships was a big obstacle to growth. At the end of February, three major banking regulators issued a joint statement warning banks of the liquidity risks associated with banking crypto companies. In January, the Wyoming-chartered special purpose depository institution and famously unleveraged Custodia Bank set off the de-banking wave when its application to become a member institution of the Federal Reserve was denied. “Banks and law firms are getting a clear message from regulators: distance yourselves from crypto companies,” said Ric Edelman, founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals. “This is blatant bias without legal standing, and if sustained, it will harm U.S. innovation for decades to come,” he said of the Signature closure. “But for the moment, crypto companies are increasingly finding themselves where cannabis companies were a decade ago.” 

Stablecoins in focus Stablecoin regulation is set to take center stage with the industry scrambling for banking alternatives, according to various crypto market participants who are skeptical the remaining banking institutions will welcome crypto with open arms. One of the most clear paths forward is for crypto firms to transact in stablecoins. “We’ve seen stablecoins crypto-pairs rise to an all-time high 90% of trading volume on exchanges, up from 79% a year ago, at the expense of the dollar,” Ryder said. “The industry has become less and less reliant on the U.S. dollar and crypto firms are familiar with stablecoins, so this could be a smoother transition than people expect.” Stablecoins also satisfy the need for 24/7 payment rails, he added. 

Both Silvergate and Signature offered a service that allowed fiat money to easily flow into crypto assets. Even if another bank opened its arms to crypto companies, the industry is still feeling the loss of the Silvergate Exchange Network and Signature’s Signet platform. Kaiko reported Monday that liquidity is already suffering at U.S. exchanges. Gemini’s was down 74% in for the month, while Coinbase’s fell 50% and liquidity at Binance.US dropped 29%. Binance, however, suffered a smaller, 13% impact. The problem with the stablecoin route is it concentrates trust in a handful of stablecoin issuers, who would likely need to be more heavily regulated, Ryder said. Over the weekend Circle’s USDC stablecoin broke its peg to the U.S. dollar, dropping below 87 cents. The frenzy came after Circle said it has about $3.3 billion in SVB. It regained its peg Monday.

Nice Little Country You've Got There AMLO, Shame If Something Happened To It....,

NC  |  “We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces,” AMLO told US neocons. 

Relations between US and Mexican lawmakers plumbed new lows this week, as a coterie of Republican senators, congressmen and a former attorney general called for direct US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels. They included Lindsey Graham, who has lent his support to every single US military intervention and regime change operation since becoming senator in 2003. Together with John McCain, he helped lay some of the ground work for the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, famously telling Ukrainian soldiers: “your fight is our fight”.

Setting the Stage for US Military Intervention

Now, Graham wants to introduce legislation to “set the stage” for U.S. military force in Mexico, saying it is time to “get tough” on the southern neighbour’s drug cartels and prevent them from bringing fentanyl across the border. The senator’s intervention came just days after four US citizens were kidnapped in the northern Mexican city of Matamoros, two of whom were killed. It is not yet clear why the kidnapping took place, but all four of the victims had lengthy rap sheets, including for drug offences. Whether that has any bearing on the crime has not been confirmed.

Graham added he would “introduce legislation to make certain Mexican drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law and set the stage to use military force if necessary.” Graham escalated tensions on Thursday by describing Mexico as a “narcostate”. His  words elicited a furious response from Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (AMLO for short), who said (translated by yours truly):

Once and for all, let’s set our position straight. We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces. And from today we will begin an information campaign for Mexicans and Hispanics that live and work in the United States to inform them of what we are doing in Mexico and how this initiative of the Republicans, besides being irresponsible, is an insult to the Mexican people and a lack of respect to our independence and sovereignty. And if they do not change their attitude and continue using Mexico for electoral propaganda… we are going to recommend not voting for this party.

This would be no small matter, given that 34.5 million Hispanic Americans were eligible to vote in 2022’s mid-terms, making Latinos the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate. According to Pew Research, the number of Hispanic eligible voters increased by 4.7 million between 2018 and 2022, accounting for 62% of the total growth in U.S. eligible voters during that time. And AMLO has significant influence over this demographic. But that is unlikely to have much of an effect on the Republican neocons pushing for direct US intervention against Mexican drug cartels.

They include, all too predictably, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Also on board are Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Stephen Walts, who in January presented a joint resolution in Congress seeking authorisation for the “use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for trafficking fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance into the United States or carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.”

Mexico’s “Narco-Terrorists”

Also along for the ride is former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump), whom the late New York Times columnist William Safire used to refer to as “Coverup-General Barr” for his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s role in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.” In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Barr likened Mexico’s “narco-terrorists” to Isis and calls Reps. Crenshaw and Waltz’s joint resolution a “necessary step”:

What will it take to defeat the Mexican cartels? First, a far more aggressive American effort inside Mexico than ever before, including a significant U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence presence, as well as select military capabilities. Optimally, the Mexican government will support and participate in this effort, and it is likely to do so once they understand that the U.S. is committed to do whatever is necessary to cripple the cartels, whether or not the Mexican government participates.

Barr called AMLO the cartel’s “chief enabler” for refusing to wage war against the cartels with quite the same zeal as his predecessors:

“In reality, AMLO is unwilling to take action that would seriously challenge the cartels. He shields them by consistently invoking Mexico’s sovereignty to block the U.S. from taking effective action.”

Bizarrely, Barr makes this claim even as the US and Mexico are quietly intensifying their military cooperation. As the investigative journalism website Contralinea reports, one of the millions of documents leaked in a massive cyberattack on the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), in October revealed the extent to which the US and Mexican armed forces are deepening their collaboration on “shared security challenges” such as combating organised crime, arms, drugs and people trafficking.

According to the leaked GANSEG document, the objective going forward of the Armed Forces of Mexico and the United States is to interact (emphasis my own) “closely, efficiently and in an orderly manner to strengthen bilateral military cooperation in matters of protection and regional security, evaluating existing bilateral mechanisms in order to work with a common strategic vision.”

The tactical-strategic bilateral military cooperation framework will also involve trilateral meetings between the defence ministers of Mexico, the United States and Canada. But that apparently isn’t enough for certain Republican neocons, who want the US government and military to take matters into their own hands.

While the growing influence of Mexico’s drug cartels is clearly a matter of vital import, not just for Mexico and the US but for the entire American continent, direct, overt US intervention on Mexican soil will make things a darn sight worse. If US citizens are worried about migrants amassing at the border, just wait until the US army begins ramping up the chaos and bloodshed in Mexico.

Also, conspicuously (albeit not surprisingly) absent from the debate in Washington is the central role US arms manufacturers and dealers play in facilitating a large part of the drugs-related violence on both sides of the border. Nor, of course, is their any reckoning with the now-indisputable failure of the US War on Drugs in stemming the flow of narcotics to the US. Even the NY Times recently ran an op-ed declaring that the global war on drugs had been a “staggering failure”.

Mexican Cartel Apologizes For Taking And Killing American Hostages

 

RT  |  A faction of the drug-trafficking Gulf Cartel on Thursday apologized for what they called a rogue operation, which resulted in the deaths of one Mexican and two US citizens near the city of Matamoros. Mexican police found five handcuffed men in a vehicle, along with a note explaining the situation.

“We have decided to turn over those who were directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted under their own decision-making and lack of discipline,” said the note, provided to media by a police source in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The five men broke the cartel’s rules, which included “respecting the life and well-being of the innocent,” it added.

The letter was signed by the ‘Scorpions’ cartel faction, which controls drug distribution in Matamoros, right across the Rio Grande from the US state of Texas.

Four Americans who traveled to Matamoros last Friday were taken captive by the cartel, after a firefight that killed a local woman. They were identified as Latavia McGee, Zindell Brown, Eric Williams, and Shaeed Woodard. Another woman, Cheryl Orange, was denied entry because she did not have the proper documents, according to local media reports.

Orange told AP that the group traveled from South Carolina to Mexico so that McGee could have a “tummy tuck” cosmetic surgery procedure. However the Daily Mail reported on Thursday that the four who entered Mexico had a history of drug charges. 

When Tamaulipas authorities tracked them down on Tuesday morning, in the nearby town of El Tecolote, Brown and Woodard were dead, McGee was “barefoot and covered in dirt,” while Williams had a gunshot wound in the left leg. 

Police arrested a 24-year-old Mexican they say was guarding the prisoners. He was identified only as “Jose N.”

Tamaulipas Attorney General Irving Barrios thanked the public for sharing the images of the abduction online, saying that they helped with the investigation. He added that the authorities initially did not know the victims were Americans, but reached out to the US once they identified the license plates on their minivan.

Is There A Psy-Op Underway To Turn American Sentiment Against Mexico?

CTH  |  Shellenberger, appears on Tucker Carlson tonight to discuss how in the big picture the U.S. government is conducting psychological warfare against domestic citizens through the auspices of Twitter and likely other social media platforms. He’s not wrong, we’ve been calling it out in real time.

Semi-related.  You might remember for several months CTH has been outlining the state of the issues between the United States and Mexico regarding energy policy.  Within the dynamic I have said repeatedly to “watch Mexico” through the prism of: what would the USIC, specifically in this instance the CIA, do to turn American sentiment against Mexico?

Remember me repeatedly saying that?  Within those questions, and from that baseline, you will discover why I have not been writing about a Mexican cartel kidnapping four American hostages, killing two.

CCTV video drives home the point of danger in Mexico.

Yes, Mexico is dangerous.  Yes, drug cartels run a great deal of Mexico including significant control of the Mexican government, military and police.  Yes, the cartels are bad people, and they commit horrible atrocities.

Yes, this well-known history of violence also provides a convenient cover for a U.S. intel operation…. if the U.S. government (CIA) was so inclined.

Unfortunately, in the current state of U.S. politics, one cannot rule out completely the latest story of Mexican kidnapping as a possible U.S. intelligence operation.

Would the U.S. government do, participate in, or stimulate to an outcome, something that horrific just because they were positioning an anti-Mexico narrative as a baseline for U.S. policy toward the Mexican government?

The well publicized CCTV video of the event certainly helped drive a point home.  Can you rule out the CIA involvement?

Making tinfoil matters worse, I previously emphasized, “The U.S. and Canada are going to push every possible political pressure point in order to force Mexico to change energy policy.  The stakes are high. It is going to be remarkable to watch what happens as this battle takes place. Watch Mexico in 2023.” {LINK}  A few weeks later, with more data assembled, I added, “I’m not talking about little threats, or ordinary economic pressure points; watch closely how the U.S threats are established.  The ideologues around Joe Biden will seek to destroy AMLO if he does not go along with the energy change effort. {LINK}

Within these psychological operations, one must always assess exactly where our feeling of outrage is coming from.

 

Russian Word On The Street....,

rattibha  |  I’ve been talking to a number of acquaintances in Russia.

These are well-educated professionals who speak English fluently, many of whom have lived/worked in the US/Europe. Some are highly critical of Putin, and many were very much opposed to the SMO.

Some observations.

1/12
They are universally shocked at the racist Russophobia, from Europe especially. “I thought they were our friends/partners!” is a common complaint.

They don’t understand why Europe destroyed its own economy with the sanctions. (There’s quite a bit of schadenfreude over that.)

2/
They don’t understand why the Germans are not reacting to the Nord Stream terrorist attack. They see it as self-evident that the Americans did it—an act of war by one of Germany’s closest ally.

They have zero trust in the Europeans—because of the Russophobia and revelations.

3/
Hollande and Merkel have publicly bragged about how the Minsk agreements were entered into to buy time to arm Kiev.

This has had a huge impact on them.

So they won’t accept any negotiations or ceasefire. They all think Russia would be played for fools again by the West.

4/
Even the “doves” believe that the conflict can only end in total victory, i.e. complete military occupation of Ukraine.

They don’t look forward to this—but they believe it is the only solution to guarantee Russian safety.

5/
They all view this conflict as a Russia vs. NATO war. And they all believe this war will last for years.

There is a palpable sense of determination and *relief* that they too—like their grandfathers before—are involved in an existential war for the survival of their nation.

6/
They one and all despise the Russians who fled to Europe, Israel and Georgia.

They view them as fair-weather friends at best—traitors at worst. They all made it clear that they would not be welcomed back at the end of this conflict.

7/
Even the “doves” respect Putin, and they laugh at the idea of “regime change in Russia”.

The principal criticism of Putin is that he’s been too gentle, too patient. Many (not all) would prefer a scorched earth, total war campaign, specifically targeting the Kiev leadership.

8/
All in all, they are satisfied with their leadership. Lavrov was universally praised, Peskov the one least respected. Shoigu, Gerasimov and Surovikin were all endorsed, though they all took some criticism, mostly because they think the war is going too slowly.

9/
Interestingly, I sensed a gnawing anxiety over Russia’s economy, which seems to be going so well—as if it’s too good to be true.

The 2015 sanctions nearly broke their economy—but now, with even worse sanctions, none are experiencing a loss of standard of living.

10/
They seem to have lost their respect, admiration—and fear—of the West. Certainly their trust. They all believe that “human rights”, “democracy”, etc. are empty platitudes the West uses to get its way.

They see the West as a paper tiger, run by fools and degenerates.

11/
This is inevitably a very biased selection of opinions: Highly educated, well traveled, Western-oriented,  fairly well-to-do people aged 27–60.

So imagine how much more conservative Russian working class people’s opinions would be.

Food for thought.

12/12
Addendum: Yes, I forgot to include this point, which is true of popular sentiment in Russia.
twitter.com/status...

Coming Soon To A Jailhouse Near You?

levernews  |  Massachusetts Democrats have a bold new proposal for prisoners: donate your organs or bone marrow, and get as little as a couple of months off of your sentence. The legislation, which has attracted five cosponsors in the state House, raises major bioethical concerns for the 6,000-plus people currently held in the Bay State’s prisons. In essence, the bill would ask prisoners which is more important to them: their freedom, or their organs and bone marrow.

The bill appears to go significantly beyond other organ-donation policies for prisoners. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says that prisoners may donate their organs while incarcerated, but only to immediate family members. In 2013, the state of Utah allowed organ donation from prisoners who died while being incarcerated. Most other states do not allow organ donations from prisoners at all.

The Ethics Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit that administers organ transplants in the United States, has panned proposals like the Massachusetts bill. “Any law or proposal that allows a person to trade an organ for a reduction in sentence… raises numerous issues,” the committee says in a position statement on their website.

The legislation, HD 3822, states, “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program shall allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence in [prison], on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated bone marrow or organ(s).”

A five-member “Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Committee,” only one of whom is designated to be a prisoners’ rights advocate, would decide how much time off prisoners would receive from donating organs.

There is a long history in the medical field of doctors experimenting on and abusing prisoners, including in Massachusetts. While current rules prohibit the state Department of Corrections from “the use of an inmate(s) for medical, pharmaceutical, or cosmetic experiments,” in 1942, a professor at Harvard Medical School injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow’s blood as part of World War II military research, killing one of the subjects.

The current bill might not even be legal. According to a 2007 ABC News report on a similar proposal in South Carolina, “It's probably going to be considered a violation of federal law. Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act in 1984 that makes it a federal crime "to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation. It is likely 180 days off a sentence could constitute ‘valuable consideration.’”

The ABC News story noted another potential problem with the idea: Prisoners have “a much higher incidence of HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis, and even tuberculosis than the general population,” so it might not be safe to use their organs in transplant procedures.

The Massachusetts bill’s two sponsors, Democratic State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez of Springfield and Judith Garcia of Chelsea, did not respond to requests for comment. Gonzalez is the co-chair of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, which has oversight over corrections in the state.

 

In 2023 Novel Resistance Compositions Will Be Expeditiously Crushed By Enhanced Repression

Dale made me aware of a video in which Gonzalo Lira outgasses nonsense from his pie hole in sufficient volume and density so as to subvert the credibility of everything else he has here-to-date said about Ukraine.  In this instance, he's so completely out of his depth and out of his mind talm'bout major riots coming to major American cities this spring in response to police violence. NOPE! Nyet! No way, no how! Nah Gah Happen....,

Ever since the Occupy Movement got b-slapped out of existence by a coordinated Federal clampdown, the Michael Brown uprisings, followed by the George Floyd uprisings, (A BLM/DNC Warren Buffet production) and finally the mass incarceration of every redneck peckerwood and his cousin who got caught up in January 6th Stop the Steal shenanigans - it has become conspicuously obvious to the casual observer that THE MAN is not fucking around and has not been for quite some time.

Everything else is - as they say - merely conversation.....,

TheIntercept  |  The recent wave of arrests are part and parcel of a “green scare,” which began in the 1990s and has seen numerous environmental and animal rights activists labeled and charged as terrorists on a federal level consistently for no more than minor property destruction. Yet the Atlanta cases mark the first use of a state domestic terrorism statute against either an environmental or anti-racist movement.

The 19 protesters are being charged under a Georgia law passed in 2017, which, according to the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, was intended to combat cases like the Boston Marathon bombing, Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.

“During legislative debate over this law, the concern was raised that as written, the law was so broad that it could be used to prosecute Black Lives Matter activists blocking the highway as terrorists. The response was simply that prosecutors wouldn’t do that,” Kautz told me. “There are similar laws passed in many other states, and we believe that the existence of these laws on the books is a threat to democracy and the right to protest.”

The Georgia law is exceedingly broad. Domestic terrorism under the statute includes the destruction or disabling of ill-defined “critical infrastructure,” which can be publicly or privately owned, or “a state or government facility” with the intention to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government” or “affect the conduct of the government” by use of “destructive devices.” What counts as critical infrastructure here? A bank branch window? A police vehicle? Bulldozers deployed to raze the forest? What is a destructive device? A rock? A firework? And is not a huge swathe of activism the attempt to coerce a government to change policies?

Police affidavits on the arrest warrants of forest defenders facing domestic terror charges include the following as alleged examples of terrorist activity: “criminally trespassing on posted land,” “sleeping in the forest,” “sleeping in a hammock with another defendant,” being “known members” of “a prison abolitionist movement,” and aligning themselves with Defend the Atlanta Forest by “occupying a tree house while wearing a gas mask and camouflage clothing.”

It is for good reason that leftists, myself included, have challenged the expansion of anti-terror laws in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riots or other white supremacist attacks. Terrorism laws operate to name the state and capital’s ideological enemies; they will be reliably used against anti-capitalists, leftists, and Black liberationists more readily than white supremacist extremists with deep ties to law enforcement and the Republican right.

Since its passage in 2017, the Georgia domestic terrorism law has not resulted in a single conviction. As such, there has been no occasion to challenge the law’s questionable constitutionality. Chris Bruce, policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “the statute establishes overly broad, far-reaching limitations that restrict public dissent of the government and criminalizes violators with severe and excessive penalties.” He said of the forest defender terror charges that they are “wholly inapposite at worst and flimsy at best.”

“The state is attempting to innovate new repressive prosecution, and I think ultimately that will fail for them,” Sara, a 32-year-old service worker who lives by the imperiled forest and has been part of Stop Cop City since the movement began, told me.

What Exactly Is This SCORPION Unit - Will Those In Charge Be Held Accountable?

psrmemphis  |  Memphis police officers watched as a man with a handgun bulging from his right hip walked past them and into a convenience store where he attempted to make a purchase.

It was busy that Friday night in Parkway Village, the day before several of these same officers would become entangled in a deadly encounter with Tyre Nichols – a violent altercation that resulted in the 29-year-old motorist’s death in a hospital bed three days later.

The action grew intense – and violent – on this night, too.

Members of the Memphis Police Department’s SCORPION Team One swooped onto this gas station parking lot when they saw some young men loitering about.

After witnessing what they believed was a drug transaction, officers chased down one man and, during a struggle, pepper-sprayed him. They arrested another man who, like Nichols, had no criminal record. Carrying a pistol in his belt, he apparently violated the edges of Tennessee’s permitless carry law by entering a business displaying signs that guns are prohibited.

“Suspect … refused to cooperate and listen to detectives and immediately started screaming,’’ Officer Demetrius Haley wrote in a report charging the 22-year-old man with misdemeanor offenses of disorderly conduct and unlawfully possessing a gun.

An investigation by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found that Haley and four other officers terminated by MPD last week in connection with Nichols’ death were affiliated with a special unit called SCORPION, a data-driven initiative that identifies crime hotspots and attempts to suppress them with saturation patrols.

Records show the unit’s aggressive tactics often trigger volatile interactions with members of the public.

Launched in 2021 by MPD Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis as part of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s war on crime, the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION, unit identifies upticks in motor vehicle theft and violent crime and then targets those areas with patrolling SCORPION officers – at times in unmarked cars. An opens in a new windowMPD video promoting the unit appears to show some of the officers dressed in plainclothes.

Discussing SCORPION in a January 2022 address, opens in a new windowStrickland said the unit of “four, 10-man teams” had made 566 arrests in its first three months alone, seizing more than “$103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles and 253 weapons.”

The mayor said then the unit targets homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and carjackings.

Yet dozens of reports reviewed by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found SCORPION officers also appear to engage in “zero-tolerance” or “proactive policing”-type activities, at times stopping motorists for tinted windows or for failing to wear seat belts and confronting or arresting others for loitering, gambling, drug possession and other low-level offenses – controversial tactics now at the heart of a national debate on how best to balance public safety and community trust.

A thorough analysis of SCORPION’s activities was not possible on deadline for this story. Some reports show officers removing dangerous individuals from the streets. Policy experts warn, however, that such aggressive tactics, if not properly supervised, can lead to discrimination and abuse, and can erode faith in police.

“They can be very effective,’’ said former Memphis Police Director E. Winslow “Buddy” Chapman. “But they must be very closely controlled and monitored.

“The danger is exactly what happened in this case,’’ he said, referring to the death of Nichols.