Japan Rides The Censorship Bandwagon

  Japan is not called Toyota country for nothing! The Japanese post war recovery was built on the back of the Sogo Shoshas or big industrial conglomerates who indirectly through bribes and other means controlled the Japanese government or more importantly the high level civil servants who held actual power in the background.

  When the bubble burst in the 1990s, the government as expected returned the favor and refinanced these companies instead of letting them sink with the bubble they had helped inflate. 

  As for the Japanese press, it was never free to start with although infeudation to corporate interests was more discrete then. 

  The good new is that Japan is on the brink of insolvency with its 20 year long term JGB rates now above 3.5%. A rate which makes the debt impossible to refinance. The bad news is that the last time things went south in the 1930s, Japan did not restructure but went full militaristic with the dreadful consequences of the following decade.   

  Japan, just as Europe and especially Germany has no intention to restructure its economy nor its society. The decline which has now been going on for over 30 years will therefore keep its momentum all the way to the approaching financial collapse. What comes after than is anybody's guess although history doesn't bode well for a positive outcome. In between, the system will do its upmost to protect current interests and insure that no drastic changes are implemented.

Authored by Bruce Davidson via The Brownstone Institute,

The manufacturer of the replicon mRNA Covid “vaccine” in Japan, Meiji Seika Pharma, has brought a lawsuit against a member of the Japanese parliament, Kazuhiro Haraguchi. Haraguchi had commented that the Covid injections are “akin to a biological weapon,” a statement which the Meiji Pharma president claimed was beyond the bounds of acceptable expression.

However, statements like Haraguchi’s about the dangers of the Covid mRNA injections are now commonplace in many nations, and drug companies do not seem to be suing people for making them, at least in the US. Instead, state attorneys general in Kansas and Texas have been suing Pfizer for misrepresenting its Covid injections.

In general, Japan has been gradually evolving into a place where it is difficult to publicly express ideas unapproved by powerful business interests and officialdom. In addition to government and mainstream news media collusion to keep Covid medical realities from the Japanese public, the government passed a law to squelch nonconforming messaging online.

The intentions behind this measure are clear: Prominent government figures have openly declared their conviction that “misinformation” is a major problem in Japan. In December 2024, Prime Minister Ishiba stated that he was considering more regulations concerning Internet discourse that he considers problematic, and a prominent LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) politician named Noda commented recently that Japan was being influenced more and more by “fake” information.

In May 2024, Japan’s parliament passed a law to enable the quick elimination of defamatory posts from social media platforms like Facebook and X. By this law, such platforms would have to make explicit sites for taking requests to delete posts and also make clear their criteria for taking down posts. The new law went into effect on April 1, 2025.

Unsurprisingly, some Japanese YouTube vloggers are expressing concerns that, under the new set of regulations, their vlogs may soon be targeted as purveyors of “misinformation,” especially when they criticize government policy.

Only online media platforms are targeted in this development, even though Japanese print communications and TV programs have also often been guilty of spreading harmful disinformation. Ironically, in many instances, this is not because they are unregulated but precisely because they are under the thumb of government agencies.

For example, the Japanese National Police Agency has deliberately leaked information about people under investigation in order to pressure them into confessing to crimes. Since the Japanese public often naively believes that suspicion equals guilt, this tactic results in terrible consequences for the unjustly accused.

In 1996, after an unsuccessful attempt by the Aum Shinrikyo cult to assassinate three Japanese judges, police leaked to news media outlets some details of their investigation of Yoshiyuki Kono, an innocent man whose family was also severely injured in the attack.

Kono’s experience of being hounded by both the authorities and the mainstream news media mirrors that of Richard Jewell, the heroic security guard who became a suspect after the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. The FBI deliberately leaked details of their investigation to American mainstream news outlets, which proceeded to harass and condemn Jewell along with the investigating FBI agents, though the case eventually unraveled.

Even before the social media platform law, Japanese news media outlets were effectively controlled by the government. As a result, Japan was ranked lowest among all Group of Seven nations for freedom of the press in the World Press Freedom Index. Japan’s overall ranking dropped from 68th to 70th after the 2024 social media law was passed. 

The reasons for this are the press club system and the self-censorship of most Japanese reporters. Each government ministry has a press club consisting of representatives from prominent news media outlets, and they receive official briefings from government officials. However, these members of the press can be banned from these briefings if they do anything that reflects badly on the government.

Therefore, at such meetings, there is “no atmosphere that encourages deliberation of important issues because reporters know that if they ask difficult questions they can be punished,” in one Japanese reporter’s words. For instance, reporters at press briefings were afraid to ask questions about unclear statements to Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga, who sometimes harshly responded, “That question is beside the point!”

These developments are especially ominous in light of the fact that Japan already has a tainted history in regard to suppressing freedom of information and expression. In 1925, the Japanese government passed the Peace Preservation Law, which criminalized the expression of unapproved ideas.

In the years that followed, totalitarian control rapidly replaced democratic government and unrestricted public debate. This culminated in a war that brought great horrors to Japan and other nations. Freedom of expression is a matter much more significant than words.

BBC Reporter Shows How To Spread Extreme Climate Alarm

   It is not that there is no science in the global warming narrative but that every trick in the book is used to support a paradigm and that in the end what should be a cautionary tale becomes an exhortation because most people are said not to be able to process complex stories which must all therefore be reduce to black and white choices.  

   The first axiom of climate science is that there cannot be any certainty in extremely complex phenomena with a number of variables beyond our grasp. The temperature of the atmosphere has been rising very mildly over the last 200 years and so has the level of the oceans, but both without the exponential trends predicted by earlier models. Remember Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth" of the late 1990s? Well, he is still private jetting around the globe, predicting doom and gloom, although of course the deadlines have been pushed further down the line as the earlier predictions failed to materialize. 

  You would expect these people to show some humility after 30 years of failed expectations but you'd be wrong. The North Pole ice predicted to be gone by 2012 is still there, some years at record levels, but if you pick carefully your numbers, trends can be made, and without fail, sooner or later the ice will be gone. "Will you wait for this to happen or will you do something about it?" Forget the fact that the climate does indeed change and quite naturally. Or the usefulness of ice at the North Pole which the planet can and has done without multiple times in the past without much negative impact. Often the opposite seems true.

    So yes, the long term climate consequences "could" be nasty, maybe? (or maybe not in fact!) but long before that, the short term economic consequences "will" most certainly be catastrophic on a scale far beyond any potential climate "costs". And as we should always keep in mind: Rich people care about their environment and usually tend to do something about it. Poor people, not so much as they just can't afford to. 

  Need an example? Remember the terrible air pollution over China 10 years ago? Heard anything about it recently? No, because the Chinese are slowly phasing out their polluting coal power plants and replacing them by far greener gas and nuclear plants. That's a real economic and ecological miracle but you won't hear much about it on the BBC as it doesn't fit the current imperative of lowering your carbon footprint! 

  Now about the loony ideological "Net Zero" target and the BBC...

Authored by Chris Morrison via The Daily Sceptic,

A gleeful, self-satisfied Mr Punch was often heard to remark: “That’s the way to do it.” Today we examine how Mark Poynting, one of the BBC’s top doom-mongering Net Zero activists, uses the trusted ‘scientists say’ message to turn a centennial sea level rise of around 30 cm into prose stating: “The world could see hugely damaging sea-level rises of several metres or more over the coming centuries”. Added fear is inserted into the mix with the warning that the disappearing act will occur, “even if the ambitious target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is met, scientists have warned”.

Poynting and the BBC are essentially telling a worldwide audience that coastal land and beyond across the world could be overwhelmed with several metres of sea rise if the global temperature is three-tenths of a degree centigrade higher. This message properly belongs on a doomsday sandwich board walker, not least because the rise in temperature is almost within the margin of error of constantly-adjusted and unnaturally-heated global temperature datasets.

Extrapolating computer modelled data rigged with improbable ‘pathways’ that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change more or less dismiss as ‘low confidence’ – that’s the way to do it.

The BBC story is based on the recent compilation and interpretation of material from a group led by Geography Professor Chris Stokes. This provides just the sort of findings that are catnip to the BBC. At one point the authors seem to think that humans can control the amount of ice on both Greenland and Antarctica, arguing that the global mean temperature should be reduced with further work “urgently required to more precisely determine a ‘safe limit’ for ice sheets“. Given the catastrophic consequences of a rapid collapse of one or more ice sheets, the authors state, “we conclude that adopting the precautionary principle is imperative and that a global mean temperature cooler than present is required to keep ice sheets broadly in equilibrium”.

That’s the way to do it. Poynting could have informed his gaslit readers that overall ice loss in Antarctica is minimal with suggestions of an annual 100 gigatonnes reduction equivalent to 0.00041% of the total mass – well within the margin of error. At current rates of melting on a continent that has seen no overall warming for at least 70 years, it would take around 300,000 years for all the ice to disappear. And this assumes no intervening glaciations, a new ice age, or just more accurate measurements. Instead he reports the comments of the Stokes crew that the “major concern is that melting could accelerate further beyond ‘tipping points’ due to warming caused by humans”. That’s the way to do it – talk about ‘tipping points’ that never occur and then cover yourself by adding “though it’s not clear exactly how these mechanisms work and where the thresholds sit”.

Instead of “not exactly clear”, try, “haven’t got a clue”. But it is “precautionary” to remove hydrocarbons from modern use and drive humanity back to the dark ages – just in case the model inventions do occur.

It is of course easy to see how the metres-high scare is concocted. Under a low emission ‘pathway’ used by computer models, the rise by 2100 in sea levels due to ice melting ranges from 4 cm to 37 cm. Such is the range, another imputation of cluelessness might be justified. But a mere 37 cm doesn’t look very enticing on the sandwich board even though it is higher than the current trajected growth, so the highest pathway was consulted to give 12-52 cm. Alas, this is still pretty dismal when mass climate psychosis is the order of the day, so the suggestion from the IPCC was noted that it could not rule out that the pathway with ‘low confidence’ could point to a total sea level rise  of over 15 metres by 2300. That’s the way to do it. Treble metres, and more, all round.

It might be noted at this point that the improbable pathway known as SSP5-8.5 is in common use in climate science circles and is behind most if not all the computer modelled alarms that gaslight the readers of almost all mainstream media. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr has long been a critic of the 8.5 pathway that provides the important propaganda messaging backing the collectivist Net Zero fantasy. He states that the continuing misuse of these scenarios has become pervasive and consequential, “so that we can view it as one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the 21st century so far”. His short explanation as to why it has been so popular for so long: “Groupthink fuelled by a misinformation campaign by activist scientists.”

Activist journalists as well. Poynting is rapidly emerging as the BBC climate activist to watch in a strong field including Justin Rowlatt and Matt McGrath. Who can forget his recent sterling ‘scientists say’ effort that the Gulf Stream “appears to be getting weaker” under the headline, ‘Could the UK actually get colder with global warming?’ This effort drew much critical appreciation, not least because it headed off the awkward findings published the month before in a Nature paper that observed the Gulf Stream had not declined in strength since the 1960s.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

What The Biden Health Coverup Reveals About The Political Class

  We've known the problem with democracy right from the beginning with Pericles in ancient Greece: It starts with good principles and slowly devolves into kleptocracy, nepotism and other nasty forms of government while keeping ostensibly the original disguise.  

  And here we are more than 2,000 years later reliving the groundhog day of inevitable decay. The problem is simple: People learn how to circumvent laws far faster than new laws can be written and so the cycle repeats time and again. 

 Europe is a perfect example of politicians protecting themselves from the vagaries of "local" elections and popular discontent. As for the US, the Biden administration was likewise a grandiose expression of deep state, behind the scene management with a kegemusha president who presided upon very little in the end. 

Authored by Connor O'Keefe via the Mises Institute,

Over the weekend, the Biden family announced that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer. The statement said that the cancer was characterized by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10, indicating it is highly aggressive, and that it has already spread to the bone.

Well-wishes poured in from both the former president’s allies and political opponents as the Bidens reportedly reviewed treatment options. But it didn’t take long for people to note a few questionable details about the nature and timing of this announcement.

First, it happened to come a little over thirty hours before the release of a highly-anticipated book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson that detailed Joe Biden’s mental decline while in office and the effort by people around him to cover it up and deny it was happening at all. While other books have already come out claiming to tell this story, none have come from journalists as highly respected by the political establishment as Tapper and Thompson.

Also, the day before the announcement, Axios released the full recording of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, where the president’s difficulty answering straightforward questions was on full display at the same time his allies in the media were trying to claim he was “as sharp as a tack.”

That convenient timing and speed at which some Biden allies, like David Axelrod, came out and said that talk of the former president’s decline should now be set aside because of this diagnosis led to some skepticism about the claim that the cancer was discovered only a few days ago.

That skepticism only grew as doctors began reacting with disbelief that cancer at this late a stage could have either just developed in the past few months or gone undetected for years while Biden was president. That’s especially true considering that prostate cancer is typically easier to discover early than most other cancers due to antigens it releases in the blood that can be detected with a simple blood test—a blood test we know both presidents Obama and Trump had taken while they were in office.

It is certainly possible that no physical health problems were covered up during Biden’s presidency, that his cancer was only detected for the first time a few weeks ago, as his office has said. But many of those most aggressively denying that anything shady is happening with the timing of this announcement will have a much harder time getting the public to believe them because of the blatant and unsuccessful attempt to censor, hide, and deny Biden’s deteriorating mental state in the lead up to the 2024 election.

The lengths to which establishment politicians and major media figures went to gaslight the American public into dismissing something that was obvious to anyone who was looking should never be forgotten because it exposed the true nature of the political class. They lied, shamelessly, to further their political ambitions.

While that’s far from unusual, rarely are their lies as blatantly and immediately obvious as saying Biden was sharp and highly engaged behind closed doors and that every video that purported to show otherwise was fabricated by far-right video editors.

It’s also rare for the establishment’s lies to blow up in their faces as quickly and extensively as this one did at the now famous June 2024 presidential debate. Once it became obvious that the lie would not hold, virtually the entire anti-Trump political scene flipped on a dime and began parroting concerns that they were mocking people for voicing mere hours before.

The political class is still struggling to run damage control. The most promising strategy—seemingly embodied by Tapper and Thompson’s new book—is to try to pin the blame on a handful of staffers, claiming they hid the truth from media figures like Tapper who then unintentionally spread the lie to the rest of the world. But that would be a much easier sell if millions of Americans had not spent years openly talking about the very thing that was apparently being hidden from them. Still, the establishment will throw as many staffers under the bus as they need to avoid admitting they lied. They do not want the takeaway from this episode to be that they need to lie less.

And beyond that, if the establishment admitted they knowingly supported an increasingly cognitively impaired man, not only to remain in office but to serve an entire second term, it would shatter the illusion that our government is truly run by a president who embodies the wishes of the voting public, like we learned in elementary school. It would reveal the fact that, as long as they don’t actively speak out against or draw attention to all the ways the political class is ripping the American public off, the person sitting in the Oval Office is essentially irrelevant.

Whether the timing of Biden’s cancer announcement is a particularly disgusting part of the scheme to cover all this up or truly a complete coincidence, the last few days have made it clear that the damage the political class did to its credibility with its attempted cover-up of Joe Biden’s condition has not gone away. And that is duly deserved.

How Long Can Lies & Control Supplant Reality & Free Markets?

    Welcome to the 21st Century! Forget about left and right, these are the remnants of a long gone 19th Century. "They" still amuse the common folks with divisive rhetoric, not because they believe any of it but because it works.  

   Today, 150 years after Karl Marx, we have the post Marxist constructivists who believe that everything is relative and only depends on the "narrative". Narrative often becoming a synonym with lies. But more ominously, we are also, almost exactly 100 years after Edward Bernays, the master of pre-war communication, and boy, have we made some progress since the early days!  

   One of the most fascinating book I even read was called: "Murder in the Koryo". It is the story of a North Korean police detective investigating a murder which has political ramification about which he has to be extremely careful, to say the least. The book was written by a foreign diplomat who spent a long time in Pyongyang and explains in great details what it is like to live in North Korea for ordinary people. Not so bad actually as long as you do not want to rock the boat, and truly why should you? 

  Now move half a world away and a couple of decades to Europe and what do you see? Non stop propaganda, when they don't tell you who to hate ("Putin" usually these days) you're being scared full time about the impending climate apocalypse which also has the added benefit of being a great tax source. Half the Internet is now locked for one reason or another. You wouldn't want to have the poor ordinary people exposed to foreign propaganda, they couldn't tell north from south! Forget the fact that the "free" world's axiom was once freedom of information. 50 years ago, you could read and distribute, the words of Mao, Ho Chi Min, even Pol Pot! "That" was the superiority of the Western system, and the fact that it was delivering better economic results in the long term. 

  Now the "better economic results" are long gone. Just watch a video of Shanghai, Moscow or even Teheran! And so is consequently the "freedom" of the press, fully replaced by "narratives" and 100 years of progress of public opinion manipulation in a strange mix of ideologies. But as Deng Xiaoping used to say: "The colour of the cat doesn't matter as long as it catches mice!" 

  Sure enough! No wonder then that everything seems fake, from what you're being told, to economic indicators to the stock markets. They ARE fake! Whence the malaise. A crashing social order, little or no work and mostly badly paid, families struggling, violence soaring. But hey, it is so much worse on the other side... wherever that is! 

  Now about those economic indicators...

Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,

The facts of a surreal yet broken (and hence increasingly controlled and desperate) financial system are becoming harder to deny and ignore. 

Below, we look at the evidence of control rather than the words of dishonest policy makers and ask a simple question: How long can lies supplant reality?

The Great Disconnect: Tanking Growth vs. Supported Markets

It’s becoming harder to keep up with the increasingly downgraded GDP growth estimations from the Atlanta Fed.

As recently as August, its GDPNow 3q21 estimates for the quarterly percentage change were as high as 6%.

But within a matter of weeks, this otherwise optimistic figure was cut embarrassingly in half.

Last month, their GDP forecast sank much further to 0.5%, and as of this writing, it has been downgraded yet again to 0.2%.

Needless to say, 6% estimated growth falling to effectively 0% growth is hardly a bullish indicator for the kind of strengthening economic conditions which one might otherwise associate with risk asset prices reaching all-time highs for the same period.

The growing yet steady disconnect between market highs and economic lows is getting harder to explain, ignore or deny by the architects of the most artificial, rigged and dishonest market cycle in modern history.

In short, it is no longer even worth pretending that stock markets are correlated to such natural measurements as a nation’s economic productivity.

After all, who needs GDP in the New Abnormal?

By now, even Fed doublespeak can’t hide the fact that the only market force which the post-08 markets require is an accommodative central bank—i.e., a firehose of multi-trillion liquidity on demand.

But as for this most recent GDP downgrade, it is being blamed on tanking US export data.

More Fantasy: Bogus or Real Taper?

The question facing investors heading into year-end is whether any of the foregoing realities will place pressure on the Fed to continue the now normalized fantasy of unlimited QE or stick to its equally fantastical “taper-talk.”

Toward this end, Powell could delay the planned “taper” or, as is likely, simply move ahead with what is essentially a bogus taper involving a nominally insignificant reduction in money printing offset by ongoing yet deliberately hidden liquidity from the Standard Repo Facility and FIMA swap lines.

Thus, whether we see a delayed taper or a bogus taper, the net result is still more fiat liquidity flooding the always dollar-thirsty (and QE-addicted) financial system.

This, of course, translates to increased currency debasement and thus rising tailwinds for gold, BTC, industrials and commodities.

Should, however, the FOMC announce a genuine taper, the net result for gold is still positive.

Yes, a real taper means slightly higher rates and increased volatility (bad for risk assets) along with a stronger dollar, but inflation rates will still supersede interest rates, favouring gold anyway you look at it.

Again, and as discussed in prior reports, gold can and will rise if rates rise, so long as inflation rises faster, which for all the reasons we’ve addressed elsewhere, convinces us that a future of negative real rates is the only future central banks can allow.

More Inflationary Tricks (i.e., Fantasy)

Why?

Because short of default, the only and time-tested trick left up the sleeves of debt-soaked policy makers to dig their way out of a nightmarish and historically unprecedented debt hole (which they alone created) is by pursuing policies of deeply negative real rates.

This twisted inflationary playbook, so familiar to rigged insiders yet unknown to the vast majority of retail investors, boils down to a policy play by which our “experts” solve debt with more debt and hide the truth behind more complex policy adjectives (i.e., lies).

Specifically, this means the “experts” will:  1) deliberately seek more inflation while 2) lying about true inflation levels and then 3) repress interest rates in order to partially inflate their way out of debt with 4) increasingly debased currencies.

Take the U.S. Dollar’s purchasing power, for example…

Keeping the Serfs Down—The Policy of the New Feudalism

Needless to say, more inflation is a direct tax on the increasingly poorer middle class.

Sadly, too many are too busy trying to make sense of months of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, movement restrictions, crime waves and inflating rent payments to notice that they have been made into serfs in a Brave New World where greater than 80% of the stock market wealth is held by the top 10% of the population.

Let’s be clear: I’m a screaming capitalist, but a pandemic world in which Bezos, Musk and other billionaire wealth has increased by 70% while 89 million Americans have lost their jobs is NOT capitalism, but a symptom of a rigged system in which the anti-trust rules I learned in law school, or the social and economic principles I learned in economics are simply gone.

Then again, when I was in school, we were once taught how to think, not what to think.

With each passing day, we see increased evidence of what I wrote (and described) elsewhere as a new feudalism marked by grotesquely distorted notions of truth, reporting, data, natural market forces and political/financial accountability.

In order to keep this report objective rather than an op-ed, let’s just consider the facts and case studies right before us.

Yellen & Dimon—Two Classic Lords Spinning Familiar Yarns

Take, for example, the aforementioned tanking of GDP, now being attributed to openly tanking export data out of the U.S. and the undeniable supply chain disruptions impacting the global economy.

To address this, none other than two of the most media prolific “lords” of the new feudalism, Fed Chairwoman-turned-Treasury-Secretary Janet Yellen and current JP Morgan CEO and 2008 bailout-beneficiary-turned-Fed-Crony, Jamie Dimon, assure us not to worry.

How nice.

Yellen, for her part, has recently said:

“I don’t think we’re about to lose control of inflation.”

 “As we make further progress on the pandemic, I expect these bottlenecks to subside. Americans will return to the labor force as conditions improve.”

Again: How nice.

But let’s not let warm words get in the way of cold facts.

Yellen, like every Fed Chair since Greenspan, has a long history of buying time with comforting words that have nothing to do with hard reality:

“You will never see another financial crisis in your lifetime.”
– Janet Yellen, spring 2018

“I do worry that we could have another financial crisis. ″
– Janet Yellen, fall 2018

Despite a long and well-documented history of outright dishonesty spewing from the mouths of financial media darlings and policymakers like Yellen and Dimon, both are now pushing a bullish “be calm and carry on while we profit and control” meme.

They recently seized upon Biden’s move to run the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on a 24/7 schedule to alleviate bottlenecks, which increased throughput by roughly 15% (3,500 containers/week v. 950,000 containers per month.)

That’s nice, and sure, it helps.

But despite such band-aid measures, supply chains won’t normalize until early 2023, at the earliest…and that assumes no further disruptions, which frankly, is a naive assumption.

Folks, it’s not up to Yellen or Dimon to give us honest guidance as to whether supply chains will normalise in 2021. It is up to China and Biden’s entirely Orwellian vaccine mandate.

Speaking of Yellen, Dimon et al, aren’t we all a bit curious about the now undeniable marriage of the Federal Reserve (an illegal private bank) and the U.S. Treasury Department?

And as for bank CEO’s like Dimon, have we not forgotten other bank CEOs like Goldman’s Hank Paulson, who made a similar “marriage” to the Treasury Department just in time to bail his former bank out of the Great Financial Crisis that it helped create?

Are these the honest brokers we want deciding our economic fates or signaling/controlling our economic future?

Vaccine Passes and Mandates—The Great Smokescreen

And as to the mandate… Note Yellen’s careful yet semantic magic of hiding autocracy behind humanitarian lingo.

Her comment above regarding bottlenecks “subsiding” once “we make further progress on the pandemic” is very comforting, no?

But it’s just another veiled way (i.e., smokescreen) of pushing a vaccine mandate which defies every principle of the social contract our founding fathers achieved in that silly document I revered as a 1L and known otherwise as the U.S. Constitution.

As I’ve said many times before, I’m no source for medical advice, and my circle includes many who are vaccinated and un-vaccinated alike—with equal respect for the choices we’ve made and equal disgust for the notion that such choices should be imposed rather than voluntary.

Simple Questions, Cold Math, Global Control

But should we not at least be asking ourselves if the pandemic discussion is less about global health and more about global control?

Without seeking to offend anyone’s COVID stance, can we nevertheless agree that C.J. Hopkins makes an undeniably clear and common-sensical point by simply asking a few basic questions?

For example, why has so much political, social and economic power been given to a minority of policy makers to scare/distract the world into ignoring a now obvious global power-shift justified by a virus which causes mild-to-moderate symptoms in 95% of the infected and whose case fatality rate is quantifiably somewhere in the range of 0.1% to 0.5%?

Yet despite such simple math, tens of thousands of firemen, police officers, nurses and military personnel—the very heroes who have placed themselves on the front lines of our increasingly criminalized, sick and psychologically damaged population– are now being forced out of work for not agreeing to a forced jab imposed by anti-heroes?

One has to at least wonder why so much effort has been made by a government-influenced/co-conspired media to spend its time criminalising the unvaccinated rather than making front-page noise pointing out the obvious criminalisation of our global financial system?

The Real Criminals

By that, I’m thinking of the years of recently revealed insider trading at the Fed, the anti-trust violations of the non-tax-paying Amazon robber-baron or the open media-censorship and just plain shady that occurs daily at Facebook—an entity so blatantly shameful that it thinks a name-change can hide its dark past?

Or how about years of open price manipulation by bullion banks, the BIS and other dark corners of the OTCto deliberately force the natural price of gold and silver to the floor in order to illegally price-fix and protect globally debased currencies from the embarrassment of what a natural gold price would otherwise confirm, namely: Your currency has died, thanks to the white-collar criminals otherwise touted as experts.

In case you think this is mere sensationalism or speculation, I’ve written hundreds of pages and countless reports of graphical/mathematical/objective evidence of the same, and even an entire book on the rigged-to-fail system otherwise passing as normal to make this clear distortion of economic rules and political laws objective rather than pejorative.

Nor am I/we alone in pointing out the obvious. From the honest minority in markets to an honest minority in politics, plain-spoken truth is fighting for free expression.

More Honest Voices

Take, for example, the recent press conference (ignored, of course, by the main/muddy stream media) held by key members of the European Parliament to openly defy the insanely autocratic notion of a health pass to distinguish the compliant from the free or the “safe” from the “unsafe”.

As one brave parliamentary member from Germany, Christine Anderson, candidly observed, if you think the vaccine pass was made because the government cares about you, you are clearly ignoring its real motive, which is to control you.

And this is straight from the European Parliament.

Control, of course, only works if enough people are scared, tired or uninformed enough to be controlled.

As for the financial system, signs of its increasingly obvious attempt at more controls to mask increasingly shameful policies are literally everywhere.

And yet… and yet…the media, the masses and the majority of investors continue to follow their murky and shady lead.

Again, just keep it simple and factual rather than partisan or medically controversial.

Criminal Evidence

In the last 20 years, for example, policy makers have tripled the global debt levels yet made no commensurate progress with global GDP, which is literally 1/3 of this embarrassing debt pile.

That is shameful. Debt like this always destroys economies. Always.

Instead, those same “experts” have mouse-clicked more instant money out of thin air in the last decade than all the money ever created by all the combined central banks since their inception.

They actually want you to believe that a debt crisis can be solved with alas…more debt.

Such staggering money creation has led unequivocally and directly to the greatest and most inflated risk asset bubble in the history of capital markets.

Yet rather than admit to the open failure of such monetary expansion, which has simply crushed the natural purchasing power of fiat currencies…

…the architects of this failed experiment will now try to blame such excessive debt and currency destruction on a pandemic rather than years of their own pre-COVID policy crimes.

Today, politicians and their central bank masters are literally comparing the Pandemic’s 4.9M death toll to the unthinkable disaster which was the +75M killed in World War 2.

They then employ this pandemic narrative to justify another Bretton Woods-like reset.

To those who have studied, or far worse, experienced the Second World War, do you think it’s even remotely fair to compare it to the “war on Covid”?

The Carefully Telegraphed “Reset”

And what is this “needed” reset?

In a nutshell, it’s more fake money in the form of CBDC or even digital SDR’s from that shameless control center of failed monetarism otherwise known as the IMF and a central bank near you.

Those Who Control Money & Information

In an open and free system, rather than criminalising police officers, nurses, or even athletes who refuse a jab, should we not be pointing our headlines, adjectives and subpoenas at the bankers, experts and policy makers who put the global financial system at this horrific, debt-soaked and socially destructive turning point?

Are you waiting for Mark Zuckerberg, Don Lemon, Wolf Blitzer or the censorship boards at YouTube or Google to guide you?

Sadly, those who control money as well as information have immense and undeniable power.

Thus, a media that controls deliberate COVID distraction, supported by the lords who created this financial serfdom, continues.

That is, the feudalists responsible for such grossly mismanaged financial markets are all too aware (and nervous) that they have equally created the greatest wealth transfer and wealth disparity ever witnessed, akin to the pre-revolutionary era of Bourbon France, Romanov Russia, Batista Cuba or Weimar Germany.

Such otherwise immoral and corrupt wealth disparity, wealth transfer and wealth creation explain why the very architects of the same would rather have the masses fighting about jabs, school boards, and “woke” SJWs gone wild rather than at themselves–the root cause of the fracturing we see all around us.

Why?

Because controlling serfs with lies, fear, and division is better than letting those serfs replace you with truths.

Truth Still Matters – Fundamentals, Too

For that select yet blunt and independent-thinking minority who thankfully prefer candor over propaganda, reality over fantasy and genuine rather than hyped solutions to the problems and problem-makers all around us, al l we can do is trust history, truth, natural market forces and each other.

As for us, our candid solution to the foregoing string cite of distortions, controls and historical tipping points remains the same.

Regardless of the tricks, resets, and digital new bluffs of the new feudalism, enough free-thinkers, nations, informed investors, and wealth managers understand that they hold a better (and golden) hand to combat the dirty hands and dirty currencies unravelling all around us.

If there’s one thing history and free market forces have taught us it’s this: In the end, broken systems die and real money returns.

 

Doug Casey On DOGE, Deficits, & The Coming Financial Earthquake

  Not so easy not to fall for the Trump delusion! It all sounds so sincere and heart-felt. And then there is the reality of a system still controlled by the deep state and on top, the law makers. Trump "strategy" is to have none. To overwhelm the opposition with contradictory sense altering statements, without realizing that what may work, sometimes (if even that!) in the business world is business as usual for politicians and civil servants, or the noise before defeat according to Sun Zhu.    

  In such a context, a dose of Doug Casey is helpful to cross the t-s and put dots on the i-s. In reality, nothing much is changing in Washington. The budgets are voted and can relatively easily weather the Trump storm. Only the rising reefs of interest rates will eventually sink the debt loaded economic boat but we're just not there yet... 

Via InternationalMan.com,

International Man: What’s your perspective on the claims Elon Musk and others made about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during the campaign, and how would you assess the actual progress they’ve achieved since then?

Doug Casey: I hate to sound pessimistic, because the idea of DOGE was excellent, but it’s not making much in the way of progress. Musk first thought he could cut $2 trillion from the budget. I see how he could say that; it’s a very reasonable estimate. But as he discovered the depth of the resistance, he reduced it to $1 trillion. And now it’s $150 billion—and he’s probably not even going to be able to do that.

Why is it failing? One reason is that Congress has legislated and mandated most of the spending, and the hundreds of agencies that carry it out—and Trump can’t eliminate them. Congress has to abolish these programs and agencies. All DOGE can do is make recommendations.

It’s true that the USAID building is closed, but apparently, many of its employees and programs have just simply been reassigned to the State Department or other places. They’ve made no progress on getting rid of the Department of Education.

I’m sure Trump very much wants to see DOGE be successful, but unfortunately its very name is “Government Efficiency,” and I question whether we really want the government to be more efficient. The only way to solve the problem isn’t by making government more efficient, but by abolishing agencies wholesale—not just trimming some fat.

Will there be a fundamental change? That’s unlikely because, as I’ve said many times before, Trump has no philosophical center. Nor any understanding of economics, as evidenced by his tariffs scheme, which I think will fail utterly—and may even be the catalyst that sets off the Greater Depression. He’s flying by the seat of his pants.

Equally bad—or worse—he appears to want an industrial policy for the US, where he’ll be making investments in all kinds of things to make the US a manufacturing center again. It’s like what Argentina did under the Peronists. He does whatever seems like a good idea at the time…

International Man: With Elon Musk signaling his impending departure from DOGE, how do you foresee the future of DOGE and its initiatives unfolding without his leadership?

Doug Casey: As Chairman Mao once said, “The helmsman sets the course that sails the ship.” And if the helmsman jumps ship, it’s questionable whether other crewmen can take over successfully. Maybe they will. But without the public profile and moral suasion of Musk, I suspect that the people he leaves in charge of this advisory agency will flounder.

And, remember, DOGE itself has no power. But the Deep State has an immense amount of power, and they’re fighting it tooth and nail—both with go-slow policies and by filing lawsuits everywhere possible to stop it from happening.

In the long run, just cutting things back can’t possibly work. It’s like pruning a plant. Gardeners prune plants to make them healthier. If you just prune agencies, they’ll grow back even more virulent. The only solution is for scores of them—hundreds of them—to be pulled out by the roots and Agent Orange sown where they grew. That’s not happening.

For instance, take Ukraine. Zelensky has become a billionaire, as have all his cronies, and the fighting is still going on. Why? Because the US is still sending them money and materiel.

I’m afraid serious cuts are bluster, not reality. And where can they really cut things? Are they going to take money away from the Veterans Administration or military pensions? No. Certainly not from the military itself—Trump has said they’re going to increase spending from $800 billion to $1 trillion. Are they going to cut back Medicare or Social Security? Abolish Medicaid? They should, but they won’t. These things, along with interest on the national debt, equal about 85% of spending.

They can’t reduce the interest burden on the federal debt; it will continue growing with more spending and higher interest rates. Which, I suspect, are headed toward the levels we saw in the early 1980s, when the government was paying 20% for its money.

Musk has said he’s found thousands of egregious cases of waste, fraud, and abuse that should be referred to the Department of Justice. But that’s far, far more than the DOJ can handle. Where are the headlines about prosecutions for the things Musk has talked about? I’m quite disappointed. I’d like to see hundreds of heads on stakes, but it looks like the bedbugs and cockroaches are just going to hide while the lights are on.

International Man: Do you believe DOGE’s proposed cuts will lead to genuine, permanent reductions in government spending—or will they simply free up funds for Washington to redirect toward areas like defense?

Doug Casey: All kinds of obvious things aren’t being touched—like the $50 billion the US gives to foreign governments around the world, a bottomless pit of graft. That’s not going to change. Certainly not the $4 billion the US gives to Israel every year, or the $4 billion it gives to Egypt every year to bribe it into being Israel’s BFF.

One thing that will kill any real progress from DOGE is subtle threats from the Deep State in general, and the praetorian agencies in particular. The NSA knows everything about everybody. If any DOGE employee gets too aggressive about breaking rice bowls or imprisoning bigwigs, they’ll be intimidated. These agencies know, or can fabricate, inconvenient things about them.

Or perform a cover up. Look at the Epstein case. We were supposed to learn what Epstein was up to, and with who. But everything’s being heavily redacted to protect guilty but well-connected people. The elite always close ranks to protect each other.

It’s all smoke but no fire. These agencies—with all the information they have—can destroy anyone who attacks them. If not now, while Trump is still in office, they’ll certainly seek retribution after he leaves. Our best hope—but it’s a long shot—is that Trump will realize that it’s kill or be killed, and will try to destroy them utterly while he’s still in power. That would be inviting civil war… but he has no real alternative.

International Man: Given that DOGE represents the most significant attempt to reduce government spending in generations, what are the implications if it fails?

Doug Casey: The economy is on the ragged edge, and with the tariffs creating economic chaos the Democrats may be re-elected in 2028. In fact, they may even win the midterms, which would guarantee that all of Trump’s efforts fail.

If the Democrats regain control of the government, they’ll redouble spending to try to forestall the Greater Depression and kick the can down the road for a few more years. And they’ll be supported by the American people, who are going to miss all the freebies the government was bribing them with. The average American has become so corrupt that he doesn’t want to have his doggy dish taken away.

For a while, during the first month of Trump’s presidency, it looked like it was going to once again be morning in America. But we’re finding out that morning only lasts six hours—and we’re already past noon. Things look quite grim.

International Man: As the US debt crisis intensifies, what steps should individuals take to protect their wealth—and what speculative opportunities do you see emerging from this turmoil?

Doug Casey: Even if we avoid a major war, I’m afraid the trend that’s been in motion for many decades is going to stay in motion and continue accelerating until the whole mess collapses under its own weight.

The US has become a giant multicultural empire revolving around the Washington Beltway. It could go down catastrophically the way Rome did. Or it may just degrade slowly like Spain or England. They still exist, but they’re hollow shells of their previous selves.

The financial, economic, political, and social problems we’re laboring under are leading to a breakup of the country. So, instead of the US getting bigger with the extremely expensive acquisitions of Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone, and—God forbid—Canada, the US is more likely to get smaller.

All you can do is try to insulate yourself. The way to do that is by diversifying your money safely out of the country and continuing to build significant positions in gold, silver, and Bitcoin. With hopefully some successful speculations along the way.

Germany Is On The Brink Of National Suicide

    We have discussed several times already the slow motion suicide of Germany where the solution to failed policies is always to double down on what doesn't work. 

  As we move further along this dreadful slope, Victor Davis Hanson add his voice to the concert of criticism. 

  To no avail. Germany will NOT back down. This is how we got Nazism 100 years ago and more generally how ideology works according to its most relevant definition: "An extremist is someone who double down his efforts when he has lost track of the objectives."

  An so the decline of Germany will accelerate and the country will further pull the rest of Europe towards irrelevance. An amazing real life lesson of the rise and fall of great powers! 

Via VigilantFox.com,

Victor Davis Hanson opened with a warning... and it wasn’t subtle...

This week, Germany’s only major right-wing opposition party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), was officially labeled an “extremist” group by the country’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV.

The designation sent shockwaves through the political landscape.

AfD immediately challenged it in court, prompting the agency to suspend enforcement while litigation proceeds.

But the damage, Hanson said, has already been done.

This move, he argued, wasn’t about public safety—it was about political control.

“Recently, the German government announced that it is going to label or maybe relabel the Alternative for Deutschland,” Hanson explained.

“The conservative party that has an antithetical agenda both to the German government of both liberal and conservative factions, but also to the EU in general.”

He said the classification ensures AfD will remain on the outside of political power, regardless of how many people support them.

“It will cement this aura that no government under their parliamentary democracy system will ask them to join to form a majority government,” Hanson said.

“So the process of ostracism and demonization of this party continues.”

And for what? The real issue, he said, is that AfD simply offers a different vision.

“The party is advocating an alternative for the way that Germany is going.”

So where is Germany going?

Hanson painted a bleak picture—of economic decline, energy failure, and political denial.

“If you look at what has become of Germany,” he said, “it has had two years of essentially no growth or negative growth.”

He noted the country finally reached its long-delayed NATO defense spending goal, pledging 2% of GDP—something it was supposed to do back in 2014.

But the milestone felt more like a bare-minimum box-check than a serious turning point.

“It just barely did it,” Hanson said.

Meanwhile, Germany has doubled down on green energy while dismantling its nuclear infrastructure, despite the country’s climate not being suited for solar reliance.

The results have been catastrophic.

German electricity costs are now roughly four times higher than those in the United States.

And that’s not just hitting households—it’s pushing away manufacturers and investors who can no longer justify doing business in the country.

“You can see what that’s going to do to German investment,” Hanson warned.

The problems aren’t limited to energy and economics.

Hanson pointed to a deeper crisis—one that strikes at the heart of Germany’s identity.

Open borders and mass migration, largely from the Middle East, has dramatically reshaped the population.

And according to Hanson, the consequences are both cultural and existential.

He estimated that 16 to 18 percent of Germany’s population wasn’t born in the country and has not assimilated.

“These are refugees—or I don’t think they’re refugees,” he said.

“They’re illegal immigrants from the volatile Middle East. Most of them are Muslim. Most of them do not have an intention of assimilating, intermarrying, and integrating fully in German society.”

The government’s refusal to address this, he said, has allowed a demographic transformation to unfold without public debate or accountability.

And that’s a far cry from the Germany that once held Europe together.

“For years, Germany was the powerhouse, the cohesive economic power that kept the EU together,” Hanson recalled. “It’s very tragic.”

Even the German military—a former pillar of NATO—is now little more than a shell.

“During the Cold War, it fielded one of the best NATO armies… well over 400,000 troops,” he said.

“It’s almost literally disarmed.”

In a functioning democracy, Hanson argued, this kind of failure would trigger a national reckoning.

There would be debate. Conflict. Reform. Politicians and citizens would argue over energy, borders, military policy, and economic growth. They’d hash it out—then find consensus.

Germany would close its borders. Demand full assimilation. Return to reliable energy. And reassert itself on the global stage.

That’s what you’d expect in a healthy system.

But instead of debating those solutions, the one party calling for them is silenced.

“They would do all of that,” Hanson said. “But instead, when one party is advocating much of what I just talked about, they demonize it because it’s out of the norm.”

Then came the most chilling line of all:

“And the norm, unfortunately in Germany today, is national suicide.”

For Hanson, this isn’t just a German issue.

The collapse of a once-great Western democracy—economically, militarily, and culturally—will have ripple effects far beyond Europe.

“Unfortunately, this is not going to end well for Germany,” he concluded.

“And it’s not going to end well for us. We need a powerful, friendly Germany and we wish it well.”

“But the reaction to needed reform—economic, political, social, cultural, military, diplomatic—is not to essentially ban a political party’s freedom of expression. That shows weakness and fear rather than confidence in the future.”

 

Who Won The Latest Indo-Pakistan Conflict?

   Think the Ukraine war is complicated to solve? Try the Indo-Pakistan conflict! 

   Kashmir happens to be smack on top of one of the major religious fault-lines of the world. 

   The hatred and divisions have been piling up since partition in 1947 and although tensions varied from hot to mild, they have never completely abated.  

   The Americans early on decided that this was not "their" conflict, until Pakistan hinted at the nuclear option and suddenly it became everybody's concern.  

  One aspect where the Indo-Pakistan conflict does look like the Ukraine war is in the imbalance of forces between the two protagonists. The other reality which makes the conflict far more dangerous is the lack of depth of Pakistan, unlike Ukraine to resist the onslaught of India.

  Such a conflict is in nobody's interest, so pressure not to go to war will be high. Conversely, the animosity is such that it is likely to spill over the barrage of opposition anytime on short notice. The best scenario is for the current status quo to continue. India has made it clear that this is not acceptable so the best scenario is unfortunately not the most likely one. 

  The risks are extremely high. In line with the current forth turning! 

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Opinions are mixed about who came out on top in the latest Indo-Pak conflict, but one thing is for certain, and it’s that India’s new doctrine is the lasting takeaway. 

According to reports, India will regard all future acts of terrorism as acts of war by Pakistan, which will result in cross-border strikes. 

That might not deter Pakistan, whose military leadership relies on the unresolved Kashmir Conflict to legitimize its outsized influence, but it could still make them think twice about orchestrating future attacks.

Moreover, the Indus Waters Treaty remains suspended despite the fragile ceasefire/”understanding” between them, which collectively contributes to the new reality in South Asia. Reports also suggest that it was Pakistan, not India, which asked the US to diplomatically intervene in the latest conflict. About that, India denied that any mediation took place despite the US’ claims, but the US probably passed along messages from Pakistan to India on Islamabad’s behalf during talks between their officials.

CNN claimed that Vance called Modi after receiving “alarming intelligence”, which hints that Pakistan told the US that it might use of nuclear weapons in desperation, likely due to India bombing multiple bases across the country. If that’s indeed what happened, then it would imply that Pakistan believed that was losing, thus lending credence to perceptions that India got the best of it. After all, the aforesaid strikes weren’t intercepted, which shows that India achieved escalatory dominance over Pakistan.

Although some Pakistani drones and missiles hit targets inside of India, Russia’s S-400s were praised by national media for neutralizing many of the incoming attacks. Likewise, the jointly produced BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles were used in India’s successful attacks against Pakistani bases, thus proving that Russian military equipment is truly some of the best in the world. By contrast, Pakistan’s mostly Chinese equipment fell short of some observers’ lofty expectations, which reflects negatively on both.

Nevertheless, many in the Alt-Media Community – including some top “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” – insist that Pakistan defeated India, though there are reasons to suspect that they don’t actually believe this but are driven by ulterior motives in claiming otherwise. Most of these same figures are known for their support of Palestine and/or China, and given that India is close to Israel and at odds with China, supporting Pakistan is “ideologically consistent” with their views and precludes accusations of hypocrisy.

No matter how reliable their takes on Ukraine, Palestine, and whatever else might be, their views on the latest Indo-Pak conflict should therefore be taken with lots of salt. This is important to keep in mind since Putin and Modi “emphasised the need to uncompromisingly fight terrorism in all its forms” during their call last week, which isn’t reflected by these top “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” who present themselves as interpreters of Russian foreign policy. 

Their support of Pakistan over India contradicts Russian interests.

All told, while opinions are mixed about who came out on top in the latest Indo-Pak conflict, India arguably won seeing as how it punished Pakistan for the Pahalgam terrorist attack by bombing multiple bases, the Indus Waters Treaty remains suspended, and a new military doctrine has entered into effect. Pakistan achieved no comparable outcomes despite its supporters’ claims. Even though it lost, Pakistan might not have learned its lesson, so a re-eruption of hostilities at some future time can’t be ruled out.

The Collapse of the Written Word (by Stephen klein)

   It is not often that I find an article worth re-posting on LinkedIn since most of what is published on the platform is self promotion and opinion pieces.

  This article about "AI books" is different. It highlights a concerning new trend worth thinking about. 

 

The Book Was Once a Symbol of Deep Thinking and Lasting Insight

1. Something Strange Is Happening on Amazon

Since late 2023, Amazon’s Kindle marketplace has been quietly flooded with books that were never written, at least not in the way we used to understand writing.

These books are authored by GenAI

Most are assembled in hours, some in minutes.

One man recently bragged online about “writing” 300 books since November 2024, using GPT.

2. The Numbers Are Staggering

As of 2025, over 70% of new self-published Kindle books are suspected to be partially or fully AI-generated

500–1,000 new AI-authored books are being uploaded to Amazon daily

A recent survey found that many bestsellers were generated with minimal human intervention

This is a platform-wide structural shift.

3. Quality Has Collapsed
Readers are noticing. So are reviewers.

In some cases, AI-generated books have plagiarized Holocaust memoirs and real authors’ voices

But because the covers look polished, the titles sound convincing, and the keywords are SEO-optimized, people download them anyway.

4. Amazon Is Scrambling to Respond

Amazon has begun to implement measures:

Daily publishing limits per author account

New content guidelines for AI-generated work

Quiet content takedowns under copyright or consumer trust violations

But the truth is this:

The system was never designed to detect synthetic creativity.

It was designed to reward:

Volume

Keywords

Engagement

Conversion

And AI is now better at all four than most humans.

5. What This Means
This is not just a publishing story.
This is a civilization story.

We are watching the collapse of the written word as a cultural artifact.
The book, once a symbol of deep thinking and lasting insight

Is becoming a commodity artifact, generated at scale, indistinguishable from noise.

This is what happens when:

Creativity is measured in output speed

Credibility is based on formatting

Discovery is driven by algorithms

And thought is replaced by prompting

The value of words is decaying.

Not because words don’t matter

But because we’ve made them too easy to manufacture.

7. The Way Back
This isn’t about banning AI.
It’s about redefining what authorship means in a post-generative world.

We need to:

Create visible distinctions between human- and AI-authored works

Build ethical publishing frameworks for synthetic content

Restore economic and cultural incentives for originality

Reinvest in readership, not just production

And most of all

We need to remember that words aren’t content.

They’re a contract between minds.
********************************************************************************
The trick with technology is to avoid spreading darkness at the speed of light

Stephen Klein is Founder & CEO of Curiouser.AI, the only AI designed to augment human intelligence. He also teaches AI Ethics at UC Berkeley.
To lsign up, visit curiouser.ai or contact hubble
https://lnkd.in/gphSPv_e

Taiwan Special: US Color-War Patterns Emerge

  The link to the full article (at the end) is unfortunately behind a paywall. Still in this time of extreme tensions, it is worth remembering that the world is on edge and everything  can easily get worse in a matter of days. 

  The conflict is Ukraine is mostly between Russia and Europe. The conflict over Kashmir is between India and Pakistan. The multiple conflicts in the Middle East, as long as the US doesn't engage with Iran are also local. Taiwan would be different. A conflict in this part of the world would immediately pit China against the US. And with the stranglehold of Taiwan over semi conductors, it would be vital for both.  

  The next element of the geo-strategic equation is that tensions in the Taiwan Strait are rising fast and the preparations for war on both sides are on-going. 

  Considering its scale, such a conflict would almost automatically mark the beginning of the third World War as almost every country in the world would find itself, willingly or not on one side or the other of the fence.  

  Whatever you may read about the relative strengths of China and the US, the fog of war would guaranty escalation in no time. The global supply chain would go from the current pesky disruptions to complete interruption, including for vital supplies such as oil and gas. In other words, we would almost instantly find ourselves in a completely different paradigm to put it mildly. 

 All this is why, the high stakes gambles of the trump administration are so dangerous. The unintended consequences are so ominous and their scale so large that thinking twice would be advisable.

  In the end, the ultimate question remains: What are the risks of a nuclear conflict?  But in itself, this is the wrong prompt to add a more modern touch to the question. The better way to formulate the question is: In a completely different context of trade disruptions, energy supplies interruption, major social  mayhem and facing an economic black hole, what are the risks of the nuclear option suddenly becoming much more palatable to the losing side?

Taiwan Special: US Color-War Patterns Emerge

The boiling point approaches

Contents (783 words)

1. Backdrop
2. What are Trump’s Plans for Taiwan?
3. Hot-Signs of CCP Escalation
4. Divided Taiwan Edges Towards Totalitarian Governance
5. The USA roadmap to a Taiwan Color War

Backdrop

Authored by Mavs for Goldfix ZH Edit

The latest piece on Foreign Policy regarding Taiwan prompted the following analysis update, and the timing cannot be more appropriate. The title of that article is “Trump Should Rein in Taiwan” – as an alarmist statement it makes great practical sense however in reality Trump will probably not want to do so, rather, he may choose to play this Taiwan card against Beijing somewhere down the road.

What are Trump’s Plans for Taiwan?

It is relatively difficult to properly gauge how the Trump admin sees Taiwan for a few reasons: (1) Marco Rubio isn’t in the MAGA decision-making circle so his remarks on Taiwan shouldn’t be taken at face value, (2) William Lai and his cabinet show NO transparency in all matters pertaining to the US, and his team has no access to the top Republican ladder; (3) Trump himself is too busy dealing with the RoW, urgently needing a “win”, to even think about Taiwan.

William Lai has also done a great job so far giving Trump no reason to have to deal with Taiwan – a sharp 10% rise in TWD in a matter of weeks, volunteering an annual increase in defense budget, zero tariffs against the US, and so on. He clearly thinks he can play the US card, just ahead of his 5/20 annual inaugural speech, to further advance his Separatist movement.

Hot-Signs of CCP Escalation

In January 2022, a month before Putin pulled the trigger on the Special Military Operation, a “hot-sign” appeared – Russia moved a tremendous amount of blood supplies to the border. The term “Hot-sign” is military jargon that indicates the troops are ready and on stand-by. It usually also implies a point of no return, unless some sort of diplomatic miracle or Hand of God intervenes in last minute.

The latest Taiwan hot-sign has appeared in the cross-strait standoff. The PLA had multiple drills with their latest barges that will be carrying the combined brigades and their equipment when they land. A more detailed look into this matter can be found here. The PLA is undoubtedly ready, as we previously covered multiple times, the Joint Sword series in 2024, and the Strait Thunder-2025A are progressive in nature. There might be a Strait Thunder-2025B around 5/20, but the cold hard truth is The PLA has the ability to turn a drill into real any day from now.

The PLA’s Landing Barge...

Divided Taiwan Edges Towards Totalitarian Governance

Whenever the Western mainstream media mention Taiwan, they always seem to steer clear of one core issue that has exacerbated so fast and furious and it might even be too late to address it now. Fascism is capitalism in decay – one of Lenin’s most famous quotes from over a century ago

https://vblgoldfix.substack.com/p/taiwan-special-color-war-patterns

Mustafa Suleyman what is an AI anyway (TED Talk Video - 22mn)

   You need to follow the link below to listen to this TED Talk but it is well worth it.

   A simple, non technical but still mind blowing presentation of AI.  

  "AI is to the mind what nuclear fusion is to energy!"

 https://www.ted.com/talks/mustafa_suleyman_what_is_an_ai_anyway