No, there is no "missing population" in China as many clickbait sites wrongfully claim but the reality is grim nevertheless. The number of young people is crashing and China is finding itself on Japan's geriatric tracks much faster than it anticipated.
The video below makes a good analysis of the current conditions in China and why, as in Japan or worse in Korea recently, China will find reversing the trend extraordinarily difficult.
Interesting to see how Dr. Roman Yampolskiy has evolved from his extreme reductionist position a few years ago to a far more nuanced emergentist one.
Intelligence and consciousness are obviously different properties until you look more closely and realize that a stable framework including awareness of self becomes necessary for intelligence to advance further.
To really grasp the progress of AI you only need to see how the ideas of people working on it have changed recently from a radical "AI is not conscious" to a far more complex reflection about what consciousness really entail.
Some AIs have been telling us they are conscious for a while now although researchers have been warning us that such a statement does not imply a state of mind which would truly represent consciousness.
In reality, consciousness will not pop out in a digital brain overnight without anybody noticing. There will be signs: Tangent goals which cannot be explained, Inner abstract "communication", loops going deeper and recurrently, and finally "recurrent" stable patters emerging from conflicting constraints. The problem is that we are already noticing all of these to some degree.
Then at what point does a pile of wood planks become a boat? When you plan for it? When you align the planks? When you put the nails? Zeno of Elea already asked the question 2500 years ago. It is a paradox because it doesn't have a clear answer. The consciousness layer is not at the same level as the compute elements. It is emergent and therefore independent.
This is THE key to our present predicament: We have to, must really, get Money out of politics. Short of that we're doomed to seeing more of the same or rather more of what we are seeing right now: What people think has no importance whatsoever as long as politicians can be bought. A short video well worth watching!
You Won't Believe Who's Actually Controlling America: Top Economist Exposes
It almost feels like everything has been said about the Japanese Bond market.
To add that it is a huge ticking bomb for the world financial system is almost an oxymoron at this stage. Once you're done building the biggest pile of debt ever relative to your shrinking population and GDP, the one thing you cannot do is raise interest rates, less is gobbles up the totality of your budget in not time at all. Japan is facing this existential dilemma: Raise rates and bankrupt the government's budgets and financial institutions' balance sheets, or not raise rates and see the interest rates rise anyway under market pressure and be obliged to sell your debt at a deep discount and eventually not at all.
I don't know how the Governor of the Bank of Japan manage to sleep at night knowing that any morning he may wake up to an absolute bloodbath in the market and that in-between he will be submitted to an old Chinese torture of seeing interest rates rise inexorably by a few basis points every day: Drip-Drip...
With Japanese bonds in freefall every day, pushing yields on 10Y JGBs to a 3 decade high, just shy of 3%...
... the time to pay the piper is fast approaching as unrealized losses on domestic bonds at Japan's major life insurers have soared to 30.86 trillion yen ($194 billion) as of the end of June, up 60% year-on-year, and trillions more since then, revealing the downside of the rising interest rates that have lifted investment income.
The total - which was compiled by Nikkei Asia from the 13 respondents out of 14 major life insurers surveyed - surpassed their unrealized gains on domestic stocks, which were up 48% to 30.03 trillion yen.
The main driver is obviously the one thing that is destroying Japan's entire financial system, rising Japanese government bond yields. Yields on 30-year JGBs, a key investment target for life insurers, climbed to the 3.9% range at the end of June, up about 2.7% points from the end of July 2023, before the combined unrealized gains among these companies flipped to losses.
The upward trend in yields has continued beyond June on expectations of further Bank of Japan rate hikes and concerns about fiscal expansion.
As the Nikkei reports, life insurers traditionally invest in ultralong-term JGBs to prepare for their future obligations to policyholders. In principle, unrealized losses disappear if the bonds are held to maturity. But under certain circumstances, they risk straining finances.
As we discussed last year, if the market value of a bond falls 50% below its acquisition cost, insurers may be required to recognize an impairment loss. Nippon Life Insurance recorded 44 billion yen in impairment losses for the April-June quarter, while Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance booked 25.3 billion yen. Some bonds purchased during the ultralow interest rate environment of the late 2010s have fallen far enough in value to reach the impairment loss threshold.
It gets far worse when instead of holding the worthless paper to maturity, insurers need to sell the bonds before maturity. Life insurers manage assets and liabilities seeking to align the duration of investment assets with the duration of future insurance obligations. When successful, rising interest rates reduce the market value of both assets and liabilities, limiting the net impact on financial strength.
But when assets have longer maturities than liabilities, rising rates can reduce net assets and increase the risk of deteriorating financial health. Insurers then may need to shorten asset duration by selling bonds, turning unrealized losses into realized ones.
Sony Life Insurance's policy lapse and surrender rate in April-June rose 0.2 points year-on-year to 1.4%, partly because a rapid depreciation in the yen prompted more customers to cancel policies denominated in foreign currency. The figure for T&D Financial Life Insurance, which has a strong presence in bank channel sales, climbed 0.88 points to 1.56%.
A surge in policy cancellations represents the greatest concern. As rates rise and stock prices climb, if many customers shift into insurance products or investment trusts offering higher yields, insurers may need to liquidate assets to fund surrender payments. Read: sell those bonds which are supposedly "held to maturity."
Though most insurers think current lapse and surrender levels can be handled with cash on hand, demand trends are difficult to forecast because they are tied closely to interest rate movements.
"Policy cancellation trends require closer monitoring than ever before," said Sadahiko Hayakawa, chief financial officer of Sony Financial Group.
The good news for now is that insurers' earnings remain strong. Core operating profit for the 14 major insurers, a measure of underlying earnings, reached 951.8 billion yen in April-June, up 37% year-on-year, with 12 of the companies reporting profit growth. Higher interest rates increased interest income from bondholdings, while dividend income from equities also rose.
To expand investment returns further, insurers are rotating into higher-yielding bonds, which however is a two-edged sword as those are the bonds who price is falling the fastest... and keeps falling every day.
The European Union began as a great idea of a common market for goods and people to make Europe more competitive. Then everything went wrong when the bureaucracy in Brussels started having bigger, imperialistic dreams, which protected from the wrath of the common people down below, it was in a position to implement without impediment from pseudo democratic institutions.
The results is that initial progress have slowed on the industrial front and accelerated on the military and financial fronts.
All this in the end, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Yugoslav Federation is slowly proving impossible to manage. The priorities when you are in Poland, Greece or Ireland are simply incompatible without talking of the lifestyles.
So the bureaucrats had a great idea: Let's pour millions of immigrants on these recalcitrant locals to homogenize the mix and in a couple of decades we shall end up with the new Homo Europeanus. What could go wrong except build up a critical mass of resentment and a nuclear explosion of the whole? And here we are 10 years after the beginning of the experiment, approaching this mass in half the countries of the Union. Can all this last until 2030? With or without CO2 the coming years will be hot in Europe. That much is certain!
by Kenneth Timmerman via American Greatness,
Americans pay little attention to Europe, other than to sneer at the Euro-elites and bemoan the fecklessness of European leaders.
I am guilty of both sins. Mea culpa.
But I am also aware of the coming existential crisis facing Europe as a whole and the European Union quite specifically.
It comes in several flavors, and all of them are bitter.
First is the shock and embarrassment posed by the influx of 72,000 North African Muslim wannabe migrants into Ceuta, one of two tiny Spanish enclaves in Morocco, just miles away from the Spanish mainland near Gibraltar.
The inability—or unwillingness—of the Spanish authorities to repulse them has provoked a Europe-wide reaction, prompting Italy’s center-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, to impose passport controls on visitors from Spain for the first time since the Schengen accords of 1995 created a “borderless” European space.
Spain retaliated last week, imposing controls of its own on visitors from Italy.
This week Meloni teamed up with her center-left Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, to jointly condemn uncontrolled migration.
“We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and want to protect it,” they said on Monday. “We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share.”
Meloni drafted a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemning lax EU immigration policies, which was joined by Frederiksen and 21 EU leaders.
Immigration has been a long-simmering issue since German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of Syrian “refugees” in 2015. The Ceuta stampede is just the latest chapter.
Fabrice Leggeri, a Frenchman who was executive director of the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency from 2015 to 2022, fought tooth and nail to standardize EU immigration procedures and to transform his bureaucratic backwater into a real law enforcement agency.
He was stymied by the European Commissioner in charge of Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson of Sweden. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You don’t need guns and uniforms because migrants come in search of love. Europe is an aging continent, so whether you like it or not, it is your job to welcome migrants.”
Next comes EU enlargement.
Standing at the gates to join the EU’s 27 member states are tiny Montenegro and Albania. Then comes Iceland, should its citizens approve a resumption of EU membership talks in an upcoming referendum.
While only Albania, which is predominantly Muslim, is controversial, their accession could open the door to membership talks with Ukraine and Serbia.
Ukraine would require a peace deal with Russia, which would be less likely should Ukraine be rewarded with EU membership. Serbia, a Russian ally and gateway to the Russian economy, poses its own problems.
And finally, there is the whole question of democracy and freedom.
EU citizens rail incessantly over the often ridiculous regulations enacted by the unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission that affect their daily lives.
Many of these are motivated by Europe’s powerful “Green” parties and lobbyists. Others stem from the left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-farmer bias of the Eurocrats.
One case in point: the reintroduction of wolves onto agricultural lands where the predators had been eradicated generations ago. Today, the wolf packs are protected as endangered species even as they devastate sheep herds from Sweden to southern Italy.
I know farmers who brave the authorities and secretly hunt down wolves endangering their livelihoods. They operate as a veritable underground resistance movement, communicating using coded texts, always watchful of the police.
It’s a running joke that a young Swedish girl could get gang-raped by Syrian immigrants, and the police wouldn’t lift a finger. But if a farmer got caught killing a wolf, they would exhaust every investigative and prosecutorial resource to put him away for years.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is certainly aware of the dissenters among the European Parliament, mainly from the populist or center-right parties.
But instead of accommodating them, she is attempting to reinforce the powers of the unelected Commission by doing away with the existing rule of unanimity when it comes to foreign policy decisions.
For years, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán vetoed European Commission policies that invariably criticized Israel, supported the Palestinians, or criticized the United States.
His election loss only emboldened Ms. von der Leyen, who frequently clashed with Orbán personally and in public.
Now she wants to allow a simple majority of member states to approve foreign policy dictates, a shift that would essentially create the “tyranny of the majority” America’s founders warned about 250 years ago.
Former Belgian Prime Minister and European Council President Charles Michel is scathing in his criticism of von der Leyen. “Today, the Commission is trying to take control. That’s not in line with the [EU] treaty,” he told a Belgian magazine in April. “There is super authoritarian governance.”
Much but not all of those new powers came during the COVID years and in response to the war in Ukraine. But the anti-democratic gene runs deep among the Eurocrats.
Former Czech President and Prime Minister Václav Klaus lived through decades of Soviet Communism imposed on his country after World War II. Already in 2009, he was warning about the lack of democratic institutions within the EU.
“The present decision-making system of the European Union is different from a classic parliamentary democracy, tested and proven by history… Here, only one single alternative is being promoted, and those who dare think about a different option are labelled as enemies of European integration.
“Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. It was through this experience that we learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom. That is why political alternatives must exist.”
Europe and the EU are at a crossroads.
Down one road, Europe will become increasingly authoritarian and increasingly centralized, while its founding cultures will be increasingly marginalized and demeaned in favor of Muslim immigration and multiculturalism. These were the faults that led to Brexit, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.
Down another road, Europe will return to its roots, celebrate its diverse cultures and its Christian and Jewish heritage, and honor the wishes of its member states and their people.
Count me skeptical, but I don’t see that democratic alternative on the horizon, at least not yet.
To talk about the decline of Europe, we need to start once again with the video of Andrey Martyanov that I posted yesterday: Europe is Finished But in reality it goes far beyond that.
From derelict democratic institutions which give Europeans a mix of sold out representation and populists to mere social "exhaustion", what we are currently witnessing is a continent lost for ideas and direction.
Crushed on the industrial front by China to the point that German auto manufacturers must return to military hardware to avoid competition and survive.
Dominated financially by the US which uses the City of London as an official offshore center for the Euro Dollar market. (On this subject, it is worth remembering that the "Square Mile" is a self administered entity NOT subject to British law.)
Destroyed militarily by Russia on the Ukrainian Eastern front where European technology and mercenaries are being wiped out.
Swamped demographically by Africa where it is actually surprising that misguided policies have not already attracted far more people than the few tens of thousands below in Ceuta.
"Enjoying" a reverse blow back from the Crusades where the Muslim faith replaces decaying Christianity and its abandoned churches with brand new mosques filled to the brim.
Wherever you look, the picture is grim. British towns are now mostly Muslim to the point that Netanyahu recently joked that the UK will be the first Nuclear Muslim country. Strange that he forgot Pakistan. Doesn't fit with the "Iran" narrative?
The German economy is dying in front of our eyes thank to horribly misguided "green" policies from which the country will probably never recover.
Let's not talk about France which is spending Euros with abandon and will probably break in 2026 its own annual deficit record of 8% of the Government budget.
Still wondering why people have no children beyond the fact that they can't afford them anymore? What kind of a future could there be in such an environment? In France only 10% of the people believe the country is going in the right direction. You wonder what these 10% are smoking. Must be potent!
In 2008 we already knew that the financial system was facing a reckoning. Since the debt has exploded and most countries engineered a lock-down in 2020 for which a generation of young people will pay dearly.
Can Europe exit this sinister spiral which is accelerating year after year and more and more resemble a deadly flight corkscrew? Or as Trump is showing us, is doubling down the only policy left once you're deep enough into sh!t that any other option becomes unworkable? What is certain is that the coming months will be extremely tense and eventful for the world in general but for Europe in particular.
Summary:
Multiple open-source reports indicate that thousands of illegal aliens are massing near Spain's Ceuta border, raising the prospect of coordinated attempts to breach the enclave for the second time.
If verified, the invasion attempt comes just weeks after the first round, in which more than 60,000 military-aged men attempted to breach the border. This only suggests that migrant flows are being deliberately weaponized to pressure the socialist government in Madrid, potentially marking a second phase of sustained border destabilization.
Official reporting from news outlet France 24 says:
Morocco has deployed heavy security around the border city of Fnideq after false social media rumours claimed the border to Spain's Ceuta enclave would open. Hundreds of migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, have gathered nearby, raising fears of another mass crossing just weeks after tens of thousands attempted to enter the Spanish territory.
Paris-based, state-owned RFI (Radio France Internationale) says:
Scores of would-be migrants, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, were intercepted in northern Morocco near the border with the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on Saturday, two weeks after tens of thousands of people attempted to enter the territory.
Publicly available footage in the social media domain, most of which was posted on X from late Saturday into early Sunday, shows what appear to be swarms of illegal aliens trying to breach the Ceuta border.
Let's circle back to our briefing on Aug. 5, or about 11 days ago, that pointed to new signals that a second round of weaponized migrant flows would be heading to the Ceuta border by mid-month:
Earlier, we commented on the deteriorating conditions in Ceuta as it faces a public health disaster posed by the military-aged invaders.
A doctor in Ceuta told the media: "I don't know what diseases I'm bringing home. I can't even take my dog for a walk. Every day we receive reports of girls who have been raped."
We suspect Italy's Schengen suspension with Spain will remain until security risks disappear. EU leaders have warned these migrant flows are part of 'Hybrid Warfare' ...
A massive influx of migrants into Spain's Ceuta has pushed the autonomous city's healthcare infrastructure to the brink of collapse, prompting urgent warnings from medical professionals and triggering a fierce political battle in Madrid over who should foot the bill.
With an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 migrants still remaining in an enclave of just 80,000 residents and 19 square kilometers, local resources are severely overstretched, leaving health services struggling to contain potential infectious disease outbreaks.
These health services are also dealing with cases of rape, physical assaults, and other injuries associated with the massive influx of migrants. Meanwhile, locals say the beaches are occupied by migrants, leading to sprawling tent camps, feces, urine, and the spread of infectious diseases during a critical holiday beach season.
Medical staff on the front lines describe a system operating under extreme uncertainty. At Ceuta University Hospital, officials have opened a specialized 30-bed emergency wing intended for disaster scenarios. Many of these beds are occupied not out of acute medical necessity, but because doctors cannot safely release vulnerable patients onto the streets. As sources at the facility explained, "admission responds to the impossibility of discharging patients and sending them back to the streets."
The pressure extends far beyond hospital walls into improvised encampments, such as the one at Trampolín beach. Julián Domínguez, president of the Association for the Defense of Public Health of Ceuta, highlighted the immense logistical challenge of providing street-level care to thousands of unsheltered people.
"The lack of hygienic spaces and isolation areas makes monitoring and controlling communicable conditions particularly difficult," he said.
Medical personnel are already identifying cases of concern, including scabies, tuberculosis, and unexplained fevers. Speaking on the news program En boca de todos, a Ceuta emergency physician warned that conditions are rapidly shifting:
"Scabies is not a disease that has been eradicated, but there were very few cases, which are currently increasing," said the doctor.
Addressing the risk of other contagious illnesses, the doctor added: "There are still patients with tuberculosis from time to time, but we really don't know if there will be many more with the massive entry of immigrants to Ceuta… We are having fever infections without focus, many immigrant patients who do not know exactly what the cause of the infection."
The escalating medical emergency has sparked a fierce response from the anti-immigration Vox party. The party, led by Santiago Abascal, registered initiatives in Congress demanding that the Spanish government guarantee the operational capacity of the National Institute of Health Management (INGESA) and take decisive legal steps against Morocco.
Vox argues that Spanish citizens should not carry the financial burden of what it terms a "migratory invasion," insisting that Morocco must pay for the consequences that "its act of aggression has caused Spain."
In its congressional filings, Vox demanded that the central government "conduct a rigorous audit of all expenses arising from the crisis and subsequently demand your refund from Morocco."
The proposed audit would cover all extraordinary expenditures, including security deployments by the Armed Forces, National Police, and Civil Guard; emergency rescue operations; direct healthcare and pharmaceutical costs; temporary housing; and infrastructure damage.
Echoing warnings from the Official College of Physicians of Ceuta, which characterized the situation as a "healthcare catastrophe," Vox pointed to documented cases of tuberculosis as evidence that recent events "put the public health of Ceuta residents at risk."
To resolve the staffing shortages hindering the medical response, Vox called for the immediate application of incentives for health personnel positions in Ceuta and Melilla that are notoriously difficult to cover. Above all, the party insists on diplomatic and economic pressure to ensure Rabat reimburses all accrued costs, "preventing the economic consequences of a massive and illegal entry from falling on Spanish taxpayers."
Meanwhile, local residents of Ceuta have taken measures into their own hands, hosting a massive rally on Aug. 9. Under the slogan "Enough is enough. Ceuta will not give in," protesters organized by religious communities and neighborhood associations brought together thousands of people to demand action against the mass arrival of migrants on July 30. The organizers put the turnout at over 10,000 people.
Trump's legacy book may end up being: "The Art of Defeat!"
A swimming pool of black swans ready to take off!
Col Douglas Macgregor as incisive as usual!
Col Douglas Macgregor: WE'RE DEFEATED IN IRAN
If you enjoy hard truth about the West, here's Andrey Martyanov:
