This article was first published at the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, November 20th, 2013:
Six federal agencies were invited to a Senate committee hearing on Monday to explain why each should be granted the privilege of regulating the Bitcoin. Four showed up:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, February 26, 2020:
Professor Robert Epstein warned in the Epoch Times on Monday that Google and Facebook have perfected algorithms that could limit the Trump presidency to a single term come November.
Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, knows whereof he speaks and writes. He is the former editor of Psychology Today and has authored over a dozen books and more than 300 articles on the influence of the Internet on peoples’ thinking. He wrote, “Google-and-the-Gang are now controlling a wide variety of subliminal methods of persuasion that can, in minutes, shift the voting preferences of 20 percent or more of undecided voters without anyone having the slightest idea they’ve been manipulated.”
One can have millions of dollars to fund political campaigns and still lose the election, wrote Epstein: “All that matters now is who has the power to decide what content people will see — or not see (censorship) — and what order that content is presented in.” He added, “That power is almost entirely in the hands of the arrogant executives at two U.S. companies. Their algorithms decide which content gets suppressed, the order in which content is shown, and which content goes viral.”
And that power is astonishing in its breadth and depth, says Epstein:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, May 22, 2019:
Ford’s announcement of its resurrected Bronco for 2020 shows pictures of steep technical trails heading off into the woods while calling it a “no-compromise midsize 4×4 utility for the thrill seekers who want freedom and off-road functionality, with the space and versatility of an SUV. It’s capable of conquering everything from your daily commute to gravel roads and boulders.” (See Sources below)
This is how capitalism works.
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, May 14, 2019:
Amazon is quietly installing machines called CartonWraps and SmartPacs in its never-ending quest to serve its customers more quickly at lower cost. In busy warehouses serving Seattle, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, and Manchester, the company is taking the tiring work employees were doing — each spending up to 10 hours a day taking products and building shipping boxes to fit them for shipping — and giving it to robots.
The robots work four times faster than humans
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, January 28, 2019:
When William Forstchen’s novel One Second After was published in April 2011, it was cited on the floor of Congress as a book that Americans should read. Enough of them did that it made it onto the New York Times’ bestseller list that year.
This was not your typical apocalyptic, End-of-Western-Civilization-As-We-Know-It novel. First, the author knew what he was talking and writing about. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Purdue with specializations in military history, the Civil War, and the history of technology.
Second, he provided endnotes that backed up his thesis that formed the basis for his novel. He quoted from the 2004 report issued by the “Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack”:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Sunday, January 27, 2019:
When two U.S. Navy warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Thursday, a Navy spokesman said it was only “routine.” Besides, added U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesman Lt. Commander Tim Gorman, the operation was “in accordance with international law.” It “demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” he added, explaining that “the US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows.”
China has challenged that assessment for years, claiming that it has sovereignty over the island and that Taiwan’s status as a separate Republic of China isn’t legitimate. Accordingly, China sent several military jets near the southern tip of the island late Thursday to make the point.
When the Navy sent two “surface combatants” through the Strait in October and then again in November, China responded by sending multiple warships of its own into the area.
The only thing more dangerous than arrogance on the part of the U.S. Navy is the ignorance of just how China could turn off the lights in America if it wanted to retaliate with prejudice.
As far back as 1996, the communist Chinese government knew that the United States was vulnerable to a nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) set off in the atmosphere above the country. An article published by the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) — China’s military arm — exposed that vulnerability:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January, 16, 2019:
Following the announcement that Volkswagen America was going to be expanding its Chattanooga plant to build electric vehicles (EVs), President Trump was delighted. He tweeted: “Congratulations to Chattanooga and Tennessee on a job well done. A big win.”
It was a big win for the president, who invited the CEOs of VW, BMW, and other foreign car manufacturers to the White House in December to persuade them to invest more in the United States. At the same time VW made its announcement at the Detroit Auto Show on Monday, BMW management announced its own expansion plans of its production facilities in the United States. With VW’s financial commitment of $800 million for Tennessee and BMW’s financial commitment of $600 million added to the $340 million VW announced last March for its Chattanooga facility, those two automakers are investing almost $2 billion in their U.S. automobile manufacturing plants. Their expansion plans will require more than 2,000 additional workers, adding to the already robust manufacturing resurgence taking place in the United States.
That resurgence has added nearly 500,000 manufacturing jobs in just the last two years, the most in more than 20 years.
Following the announcement by VW’s CEO Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen AG, his American counterpart, Scott Keogh, CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, added, “We could not be prouder to build the future of mobility here in the United States. We’re known as ‘the peoples’ car’ for a reason, and we plan to build EVs for millions, not millionaires.”
What Keogh didn’t say was that
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, December 26, 2018:
A federal judge’s ruling to limit the transfer of files allowing citizens to print their own guns using 3-D technology has resulted in exactly the opposite: The number of downloads of those files has exploded since his ruling in August.
It was Western Washington’s District Court Judge Robert Lasnik who ordered the settlement between the Justice Department and Cody Wilson’s company Defense Distributed to be suspended. He should have known better. He and other gun-grabbers such as New Jersey Governor Chris Murphy and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey are trying to play catch-up and instead are falling farther and farther behind.
It isn’t that gun grabbers haven’t tried.
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, October 19, 2018:
Over the last two or three years, tens of thousands of people have watched YouTube videos (see Sources) of the unbelievable technology that companies like Amazon and British online grocery company Ocado are using to cut delivery costs and times for their customers. Each of Amazon’s “fulfillment centers” ships upwards of a million orders every single day, with nary a human in sight.
Give Amazon credit. It saw the technology it would need as far back as 2012 when they bought Kiva Systems, the developer of the little Kiva robots that look like oversized Roombas. Kiva was leasing their robots and their technology to companies like The Gap, Walgreens, Staples, Office Depot, Crate & Barrel, and Saks 5th Avenue. But when those leases ended, Amazon didn’t renew them. It wanted the Kiva technology for itself.
Today, in its more than 100 massive distribution or “fulfillment” centers, there are hundreds of thousands of Kiva robots doing the work humans used to do just a few years ago.
The million-square-foot fulfillment center in Baltimore is typical, as Christopher Mims explained in The Wall Street Journal:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 18, 2018:
When Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the world, purchased Kiva Systems in 2012, it paid almost a billion dollars for it; and it transformed, and continues to transform, the company. Amazon wanted the technology behind the Kiva robots that were previously being used by The Gap, Walgreens, Staples, Office Depot, Crate & Barrel, and Saks 5th Avenue. When the contracts with those companies ran out Amazon didn’t renew them.
It wanted Kiva’s technology for itself.
Today, in its more than 100 massive distribution or “fulfillment” centers, there are hundreds of thousands of Kiva robots doing the work humans used to do just a few years ago. There are YouTube videos depicting this transformation from human “pickers” to robotic pickers.
The million-square-foot fulfillment center in Baltimore is typical, as Christopher Mims explained in the Wall Street Journal:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, January 11, 2017:
Jared Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, gave him an early birthday present, naming him to his new administration as a senior advisor on Monday. The next day Kushner turned 36.
Married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka (shown), Kushner responded to the “all hands on deck” message following Trump’s nomination at the Republican National Convention last summer. Kushner dropped everything and started building a national political campaign from scratch. Blessed with precious little political experience, but with smarts (degrees from Harvard and New York University), Kushner saw the problem: no staff, no money, no experience, no strategy, no nothing. So he called on some of his contacts in social networking, asking for referrals to the brightest and the best to help.
He found Brad Parscale, a web designer in San Antonio, and built a team of 100 people around him. Calling the team “Project Alamo,” the two learned the ropes quickly: traditional TV, radio, and print advertising were 1) expensive, and 2) not very effective in reaching the people Trump needed to win. Instead, through trial and error, Kushner spent less and less on TV and radio and focused on the social networking tools Facebook and Twitter. Said Kushner:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, September 5, 2016:
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother’s primary enabler was the telescreen. It could be turned down but never turned off, and it recorded all behaviors and conversations to be analyzed for traitorous intent.
Knightscope has no discoverable link to the telescreen with its big, fat white Penguin called K5, but its capabilities are astonishing. Those capabilities came to light following an incident at an upscale mall in Palo Alto last month when a K5 ran over a 16-month-old toddler by mistake. Company officials expressed “horror” at the incident, apologized, and then invited the family of the toddler to view its upgraded version of K5, which, it promised, would avoid such incidents in the future.
The rollout of K5 (version 2.0, if you will) was no doubt impressive, as K5 has an amazing array of technology designed as “an advanced anomaly detection device” – read: detect, record, analyze, and then inform its handler of suspicious activities taking place nearby. Stacy Dean Stephens, Knightscope’s vice president of marketing told Digital Trends:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, September 5, 2016:
Not a Knightscope robot, but close
Knightscope robots — one for inside work, the other for outdoors — have been under development for three years, and have logged 35,000 hours of testing and 25,000 miles of rolling through malls, parking lots, and manufacturing facilities. And yet, within weeks of the K5 outdoor model being released in the Stanford Shopping Center, an upscale shopping mall in Palo Alto, California, one of them couldn’t avoid hitting a 16-month-old toddler and running over his foot.
It was a poor start to Knightscope’s first major public contract with the mall, and they did the best they could to ameliorate the situation:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, August 8, 2016:
When Elizabeth Holmes (above), the 32-year-old CEO of medical technology startup Theranos, was named as one of President Obama’s presidential ambassadors for global entrepreneurship (PAGE) last year, she sounded like the winner of a beauty contest, telling her audience how she was going to save the world:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 22, 2016:
Russian Air Force Tupolev Tu-214ON
According to the Associated Press, Russia is about to ask permission of the Open Skies Consultative Commission (OSCC) in Vienna, Austria, to fly its latest reconnaissance aircraft, the Tu-214ON (left), over the United States. The airplane will have the latest in spy technology, including
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, November 6, 2015:
With the recent revelation that Senator Marco Rubio has been receiving, and is actively soliciting, funds from billionaires with vastly different agendas from those voters who elected him in 2010, many are questioning how he would act if he were elected president.
With the departure of Scott Walker from the Republican cast of candidates seeking their party’s nomination, and with the virtual disappearance of a presence in the polls by establishment candidate Jeb Bush, it was no surprise that Rubio’s star began its ascendancy. As Paul Singer, one of Rubio’s wealthy donors, wrote, Rubio
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 15, 2015:
Inside the Walmart at West Plains, Missouri.
Within minutes of Walmart’s announcement on Wednesday that the world’s largest retailer would see its profits drop between six and 12 percent next year, the company’s stock started a decline that only ended after it had lost 10 percent of its value, its worst single-day performance in 37 years.
Despite a previous warning from Walmart in August that its quarterly profits, year-over-year, would likely fall by 15 percent, and despite the company’s stock continuing its decline from $90 a share in January to $67 before the announcement, investors were caught off guard. Now trading below $60 a share, investors have seen the value of their Walmart holdings drop
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, October 14, 2015:
Since early August the price of crude has jumped almost 20 percent, moving some, including those in OPEC’s cartel, to conclude that its strategy is working: Flood the market to force prices so low that marginal producers, especially in the United States, will go out of business. With the resultant decrease in supply, prices will rebound, hopefully to levels where the cartel’s countries can continue to fund their welfare/warfare states.
Said the cartel last week:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, July 9, 2015:
In its latest report on American competitiveness, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates that the average cost to make goods in the United States is now only five-percent higher than in China, and between 10 and 20 percent lower when compared to the major European economies such as Germany and France. In less than three years, BCG projects China’s advantage to disappear altogether.
While part of the reason is rising wages in China and in the Eurozone and American companies improving their productivity faster than their competitors abroad, the primary reason, says BCG, is fracking — the technology that has driven energy costs to a fraction of what they were just a few years ago.
Back in August 2013, Harold Sirkin, a senior partner at BCG, predicted the U-turn that would result in “reshoring” of millions of jobs, starting in 2015:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, June 29, 2015:
Although the definition of “neo-Luddism” is a “movement of passive resistance to the … frightening technologies of the computer age,” in Paris the resistance is hardly passive. Last week taxi-drivers shut down entrances to and exits from the Charles De Gaulle International Airport, attacked cars driven by Uber drivers (including their passengers), overturned some of them, and set tires on fire. All this to express their frustration over how Uber is slowly, inexorably, putting them out of business. Since they were on strike, even when customers wanted a ride, the cartel members turned them down. After all, they were on strike! (Shown above are passengers toting their own luggage away from De Gaulle airport.)
As the head of taxi company G7 said on French television,
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