Steve Bull's Blog, page 114
June 9, 2023
DHS Sought To Assign Social Credit Style “Risk Scores” To Social Media Users
In a sharp spotlight on the interplay between national security and individual privacy, newly disclosed documents have unveiled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to develop a project, dubbed “Night Fury,” designed to analyze and assign “risk scores” to social media accounts.
The Brennan Center for Justice procured these documents through a public records request, and Motherboard was the first to report on them. Project Night Fury aimed at utilizing automation to detect and evaluate social media accounts for connections to terrorism, illegal opioid distribution, but also disinformation campaigns.
The DHS document stated, “The Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or ‘Risk Score,’ associated with the identified accounts.”
source: Motherboard
Project Night Fury had also planned on incorporating involvement from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to provide “cross-mission operational context,” according to one of the documents.
Experts had warned DHS about the inherent difficulties and biases involved in automated judgment for these matters, citing that characteristics like being “pro-terrorist” have no concrete definition.
Notably, DHS terminated Project Night Fury in 2019.
However, it underscores the agency’s continued interest in social media as a resource for analysis.
This comes in the wake of earlier reports of CBP utilizing an AI-powered tool, Babel X, for analyzing travelers’ social media at US borders.
While Night Fury’s focus was initially on “counter-terrorism, illegal opioid supply chain, transnational crime, and understanding/characterizing/identifying the spread of disinformation by foreign entities,” the documents indicate that UAB’s work was intended to “scale to other DHS domains” and “build next generation capabilities.”
Exxon CEO Warns Overemphasis On Renewables Could Backfire
Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM) CEO Darren Woods has urged companies to stop focusing on certain energy sources, such as renewable energy, to save the climate, warning that it would be a “huge mistake to be picking winners and losers and focusing on specific technologies”.
Instead, “we need to look more broadly and let the markets figure out which solutions deliver the most emissions reductions at the lowest cost,” Woods told Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway’s Wealth Fund,one of the largest mutual funds in the world, on his podcast.
An attempt to move away from oil and gas immediately, with unchanged global demand, could be disastrous for clean energy, Woods suggested, adding that if we produce less LNG, for example, something else–like coal–would have to step in to fill the demand gap.
According to Woods, Europe should follow the U.S. approach to climate policy, arguing that the continent risks driving companies away by regulating too hard. Woods told Bloomberg that one of the most important things the Americans (and ExxonMobil) are doing is developing technologies to capture and store carbon.
Back in April, Woods caused quite a stir when he touted the company’s burgeoning Low Carbon business, saying it has the potential to outperform its legacy oil and gas business and generate hundreds of billions in revenues. According to Woods, the business has the potential to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue after the initial 10-year ramp-up.
“This business is going to look quite a bit different from the base business of Exxon Mobil. It is going to have a much more stable, or less cyclical, profile,” Dan Ammann, president of Exxon’s two-year-old Low Carbon Business Solutions unit, has vowed.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Capturing Carbon With Machines Is a Failure—So Why Are We Subsidizing It?
Human activity—mostly the burning of fossil fuels—has raised Earth’s atmospheric carbon content by 50 percent, from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 420 ppm. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve released approximately 950 billion metric tons of carbon into the air. Every year, humans emit more than 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, as of 2021 measurements. Even if we stop burning fossil fuels now, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere will cause Earth’s climate to continue warming for decades, triggering heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme weather.
Climate scientists warn that if we want to avert catastrophe, a significant amount of excess atmospheric CO2 must be captured and sequestered. The process is called carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and it has been receiving more attention as nations, states, and industries strive to meet their climate goals. But how should we go about doing it?
There are two broad strategies: biological and mechanical. Nature already absorbs and emits about 100 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year through the natural processes in the biosphere—including plant growth—an amount 2.5 times humanity’s annual carbon output. So, according to advocates for biological carbon removal, our best bet is simply to help the planet do a little more of what it is already doing to absorb carbon. We could accomplish this through reforestation, soil-building agricultural practices, and encouraging kelp growth in oceans.
On the other hand, advocates for mechanical carbon removal point to technologies that successfully capture CO2 in the laboratory; if these machines were scaled up, those advocates tell us, we could create an enormous new industry with plenty of jobs while removing atmospheric carbon and reducing climate risk…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
June 5, 2023
The Precipice: Europe on the Verge of Its Long Decline
Green transportation. No kidding. Photo by luana niemann on UnsplashA serious and long lasting economic downturn in Europe is now within sight. Not a mild recession, but something truly transformative… something similar to the 1930’s great depression. The energy crisis simmering on the back-burner since 2 years now seems to be getting close to its boiling point: with a war in Europe, the blow up and closure of most natural gas pipelines, persistent inflation, drought and a complete global geopolitical rift on top of it all, only luck can save Europe from its fate.
Energy is the economy. It takes energy to power machines and manufacturing equipment, melt steel, make cement, pour concrete, transport goods and deliver services. It also takes abundant and cheap resources and stable supply chains to run an economy. Take these inputs away and even the strongest economic growth turns into a recession. Our ruling caste’s obsession with ideologies, monetary theories, regulations, policies and digitization, has obscured these simple facts, but the results of their ignorance will be harder and harder to conceal with every passing day. Take the case of Germany, the biggest economy of Europe falling into a recession:
“Labour without energy is a corpse; capital without energy is a sculpture.”
Professor Steve Keen
GDP fell by 0.3% for the quarter when adjusted for price and seasonal effects, according to the data from the Federal Statistical Office, Destatis.“After GDP growth entered negative territory at the end of 2022, the German economy has now recorded two consecutive negative quarters,” said Destatis President Ruth Brand. Inflation continued to take its toll on the German economy during the quarter, the office said. This was reflected in household consumption, which was down 1.2% quarter-on-quarter after price and seasonal adjustments…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
UK Government Denies Targeting COVID-19 Policy Critics on Social Media
The logos of mobile apps Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Messenger displayed on a tablet on Oct. 1, 2019. (AFP via Getty Images/Denis Charlet)The UK government is facing renewed pressure to shut its Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) after the unit was accused of tracking the activities of vocal critics of COVID-19 policies when flagging so-called disinformation.
The government has denied targeting individuals, saying the unit was banned from flagging journalists and MPs to social media platforms.
The CDU, which was set up on March 5, 2020, monitors online narratives and trends, and has worked “closely with social media platforms to quickly identify and help them respond to potentially harmful content on their platforms,” including “removing harmful content in line with their terms and conditions, and promoting authoritative sources of information,” according to government ministers.
The Telegraph on June 2 accused the unit of secretly monitoring the activities of critics of the government’s COVID-19 policies such as lockdowns, school closures, mask mandate, and the proposed vaccine passport.
According to the report, documents released through Freedom of Information and data protection requests showed the CDU had flagged 24 social media comments by Molly Kingsley, who founded the children’s welfare campaign group UsForThem in response to school closures, and one post on Twitter by Dr. Alexandre De Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who opposed the mass COVID-19 vaccination of children.
The report said De Figueiredo’s tweet was first flagged by Logically, an artificial intelligence firm the CDU used to trawl the internet. Another government unit, the now-defunct Rapid Response Unit (RRU), was said to have “logged” articles written by Carl Heneghan, director of Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Govt. Nudge Units Find the “BEST” Ways to Manipulate the Public
Freedom of speech means a lot to us at the OP. However, that’s been fading fast, as Daisy has documented, and as though speech restrictions aren’t bad enough, most of us have been lab rats for central planners’ behavioral experiments longer than we probably care to realize. And now there are Nudge Units.
Huge amounts of money have been poured into “nudge research,” determining the best ways to get populations to change their behaviors without passing laws or using force.
What are Nudge Units?
Let’s look at how these “Nudge Units” got started, what they’ve been used for most recently, and what they’re likely to focus on next.
The concept of “nudging” people into making better choices became popular with the book Nudge—Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, authored by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and published in 2008. Their book defines a nudge as:
. . .any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not. (p.6)
(You may be interested to note that author Sunstein is married to Samantha Power, the administrator of Biden’s US Agency for International Development and previously Obama’s ambassador to the UN. Forbes listed Ms. Power as the 63rd most powerful woman in the world in 2014. Do you think she’s Nudging? ~ Daisy )
Individuals in government and industry quickly realized that the authors’ insights into the decision-making process could be used to manipulate that process in the minds of the general public, many of whom don’t have the time or mental energy for NYT bestsellers.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
June 4, 2023
Steps to World Rule: First, Destroy Humanity
It has always been astounding to me that people think for even a second that their government makes decisions to help the people—that has never been the case.
If a government’s decision helps anyone it is always an after effect…or an afterthought or a collateral unintended benefit. The primary intent is for power, control, and money…to satisfy individual pursuits and goals of the global narcissistic/god-complex elite.
Anyone (which turns out to be most everyone) who supports this and thinks their government, or their nation, is operating in the people’s interest is signing their own death warrant.
“Don’t be so negative, Dr. Todd, there are good things in life too!”
Oh my yes, there are: newborn babies, sunsets, oceans, art, music, forests, waterfalls, sex with your lover, dogs…millions of things. But that is not what I am writing about right now. I am writing about the thing, and group of things, that will wipe all of that good stuff off the face of the earth. Sure, sure, sure, it won’t be forever. Good will prevail, but it could be a million years before it all comes back if we let it go now. And I think it is worth the fight to preserve what we’ve got.
Needless to say, people have always followed leaders. I am not an anthropologist, but I would take a guess that even in primitive times there were leaders of tribes, chiefs, kings, queens, or whatever. I would also guess that this arrangement probably worked well more often than not. Societies were close knit; if a leader went bonkers it was probably easier to just push him or her off a cliff somewhere…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
OPEC+ Discussing 1 Million Bpd Output Cut
Oil prices were trading up on Friday afternoon as shorts got a little nervous heading into the OPEC+ weekend, with new rumors circulating about the group’s discussions about another 1 million bpd in production cuts.
The OPEC+ group is scheduled for three separate meetings beginning this weekend and concluding on June 4.
While the general sentiment has been that the group will keep the status quo as far as production targets are concerned. But Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister has made boisterous threats against oil’s speculators in the runup to the meeting, saying that shorts will be “ouching”.
On Thursday, Reuters suggested that the OPEC+ group would be unlikely to deepen its production targets at the meeting this weekend.
But late on Friday, Reuters suggested that OPEC+ was indeed discussing an additional output cut of around 1 million barrels “among possible options” for the meeting on June 4.
“Everything is on the table,” Iran’s OPEC Governor Amir Zamaninia told reporters in the Austrian capital.
Crude oil prices were already trading up ahead of the meeting, but increased even more in the afternoon hours, bringing Brent crude to $76.32 at 4:20 p.m., a $2.06 per barrel increase on the day. WTI was trading at $71.90 per barrel at that time.
A supply reduction of as much as 1 million barrels a day is the most likely outcome, according to RBC’s Chief Commodities Strategist Helima Croft.
“We think that the continued macro worries and soured sentiment will lead the group to make another downward adjustment,” she said in a note.
But Saudi Arabia appears to still be in control of OPEC+, and The Kingdom could decide to make good on his threats to punish short sellers for their speculative trades that fly in the face of market fundamentals.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Failures of an Economic Hitman in Turkey: Erdogan Re-elected
President Erdogan’s re-election in Turkey is a monumental failure of Western pressure. Because of it, it’s time to take our eyes off Ukraine and look at a different theater of World War III with equal if not bigger implications.
Turkey is another in a now long string of failed Economic Hitman operations cum Color Revolutions. The last big one to fail was in Belarus in 2020 following the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko.
Turkey has been the subject of a seven-year campaign to be rid of Erdogan, beginning with the 2016 coup attempt organized out of the NATO airbase at Incerlik. Turkey’s been through a persistent five-year brutal devaluation of its currency, the lira, seeing it drop from less than 2 versus the US dollar to nearly 21 this week in the wake of Erdogan’s victory.
I’ve covered this story in detail (see my Turkey archives here) being one of the lone voices out there trying to parse Erdogan’s monetary policy actions which I’ve argued sought to de-dollarize Turkey’s foreign exchange liabilities and forge an independent path.
Erdogan, wily as a fox, has been deftly playing the US and Russia/China off each other for years, positioning Turkey simultaneously as a member of NATO, the gatekeeper to the Black Sea, and the financial and trade crossroads linking East and West.
The West’s campaign to overthrow President Assad in Syria beginning in 2011 couldn’t have gone forward without Erdogan’s help. He went along with it very willingly having been promised Turkey claiming Idlib province in the West and taking most of the north. Vladimir Putin accepting Assad’s invitation for assistance in fighting ISIS and Erdogan’s pets in Idlib (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS) began the unraveling of those plans.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
June 2, 2023
Models Hide the Shortcomings of Wind and Solar
A major reason for the growth in the use of renewable energy is the fact that if a person looks at them narrowly enough–such as by using a model–wind and solar look to be useful. They don’t burn fossil fuels, so it appears that they might be helpful to the environment.
As I analyze the situation, I have reached the conclusion that energy modeling misses important points. I believe that profitability signals are much more important. In this post, I discuss some associated issues.
Overview of this Post
In Sections [1] through [4], I look at some issues that energy modelers in general, including economists, tend to miss when evaluating both fossil fuel energy and renewables, including wind and solar. The major issue in these sections is the connection between high energy prices and the need to increase government debt. To prevent the continued upward spiral of government debt, any replacement for fossil fuels must also be very inexpensive–perhaps as inexpensive as oil was prior to 1970. In fact, the real limit to fossil fuel extraction and to the building of new wind turbines and solar panels may be government debt that becomes unmanageable in an inflationary period.
In Section [5], I try to explain one reason why published Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) indications give an overly favorable impression of the value of adding a huge amount of renewable energy to the electric grid. The basic issue is that the calculations were not set up for this purpose. These models were set up to evaluate the efficiency of generating a small amount of wind or solar energy, without consideration of broader issues. If these broader issues were included, EROEI indications would be much lower (less favorable).
…click on the above link to read the rest…
