“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

Still working on better understanding the events of the early 1960's and the successful push towards world peace.

Nuclear Test Ban Treaty John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Success in Moscow

President Kennedy selected Averell Harriman, an experienced diplomat known and respected by Khrushchev, to resume negotiations in Moscow. An agreement to limit the scope of the test ban paved the way for a treaty. By excluding underground tests from the pact, negotiators eliminated the need for the on-site inspections that worried the Kremlin.

On July 25, 1963, after only 12 days of negotiations, the two nations agreed to ban testing in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater. The next day, in a television address announcing the agreement, Kennedy claimed that a limited test ban" is safer by far for the United States than an unlimited nuclear arms race."

The Treaty

The Limited Nuclear Test Ban treaty was signed in Moscow on August 5, 1963, by US Secretary Dean Rusk, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home—one day short of the 18th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Over the next two months, President Kennedy convinced a fearful public and a divided Senate to support the treaty. The Senate approved the treaty on September 23, 1963, by an 80-19 margin. Kennedy signed the ratified treaty on October 7, 1963.

Then other forces started gaining momentum.

JFK murder plots planned in Chicago before Dallas assassination abc 7 Chicago Nov 5, 2013

The Omen in Chicago: the I-Team has discovered not just one, but two plots to cut down JFK in Chicago in early November, 1963, and an intriguing backstory of bungling by the government agencies protecting him.

President John F. Kennedy was never supposed to make it to Texas, never supposed to take this ride, and never supposed to die in Dallas.
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Records reveal one Chicago plot had been developed by radical Cuban exile Homer Echevarria, a known smuggler of automatic weapons and machine guns.
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The Cubans disappeared, just as a second Chicago plot surfaced.

At this intersection, a right wing radical under surveillance for publicly threatening Kennedy was arrested. Ex-marine Thomas Vallee had high powered rifles and ammo in his car trunk and was en route to a job that would give him direct aim at JFK'S motorcade as it exited the expressway.

An hour later, the White House scrubbed JFK'S trip.

The scheduled Dallas trip was not interrupted.

Kennedy was warned repeatedly in the days before Dallas about going into its hostile political environment. His friend Larry Newman said later, they tried to talk him out of it right until the last minute. But he just said, "If this is the way life is, if this is the way it's going to end, this is the way it 's going to end."
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The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.

JFK and the Unspeakable by James W Douglas 2008 (pg 368-370)

A good recap of the book

Shortly after the assassination US culture experienced dramatic changes.

How America Changed the Beatles US News Jan 14, 2014

Many see the Beatles as the light at the end of a dark tunnel in American history – they arrived here months after the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis and global tensions over the Berlin Wall – but their American debut was actually interrupted by JFK's death, which happened on the same day as the release of their second U.K. album, "With The Beatles." American television networks had planned to broadcast the news of the record release on their evening programs, only to postpone the segments in favor of the marathon coverage that followed Kennedy's assassination.

"For Americans at that point in time there was one crisis after another," Thompson says. "This is the era of kids routinely doing drills about how to survive a nuclear blast." But those same kids, members of the Baby Boom generation, were coming into their teenage years just as the Beatles looked to conquer their ears – and their wallets.

Also working to the Beatles' advantage was the rise of television, with the crises of 1963 cementing its place in American households. "Television becomes the place where everybody turns to see what is going on. It is the oracle in the living room," Thompson says.

The Beatles' Feb. 9, 1964, performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" set TV records. An estimated 73 million Americans tuned in to their premiere performance, which played in 45 percent of homes with televisions in America at the time.

The Austin Saga continues

Retired weapons inspector Ritter had a unique criticism of the situation and its seriousness. The problem is not limited to Austin, but includes all those responsible for using the concept of Mutual Destruction to prevent nuclear conflict.

Scott Ritter: Ukraine/Israel Views from MOSCOW. (49:34 min starts at 32:42 watch through 36:08)

One of the arguments Israel used to justify the bombing of hospitals was Hamas using them to perpetuate hostilities. The logic could be continued to implicate Defense Secretary Austin and the mainstream media confirming US hospitals such as Walter Reed are involved in military planning and initiating attacks on third parties. This may make US hospitals legitimate military targets.

Austin ordered strikes from hospital where he continues to get prostate cancer care, Pentagon says The Associated Press Jan 12, 2024

From his hospital room, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin first orchestrated and then watched in real time as the U.S. retaliatory attack on Yemen-based Houthi militants unfolded Thursday night.

Austin’s hospital-room leadership was the latest in a series of actions the defense chief has carried out from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he has been recovering from complications due to treatments for prostate cancer.

At the moment I am ignoring the higher risk a geriatric person has of impaired cognitive function as an adverse reaction of drug therapy or a symptom of urinary tract infections.

Pepe Escobar article this week.

Year of the Dragon: Silk Roads, BRICS Roads, Sino-Roads Strategic Culture Foundation Jan 12, 2024

As we enter incandescent 2024, four major trends will define the progress of interconnected Eurasia.

1.Financial/trade integration will be the norm. Russia and Iran already integrated their financial message transfer systems, bypassing SWIFT and trading in rials and rubles. Russia-China already settle their accounts in rubles and yuan, coupling immense Chinese industrial capacity with immense Russian resources.

2.The economic integration of the post-Soviet space, tilting towards Eurasia, will predominantly flow not so much via the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) but interlinked with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

3.There will be no significant pro-Western inroads in the Heartland: the Central Asian “stans” will be progressively integrated into a single Eurasia economy organized via the SCO.

4.The clash will become even more acute, pitting the Hegemon and its satellites (Europe and Japan/South Korea/Australia) against Eurasia integration, represented by the three top BRICS (Russia, China, Iran) plus the DPRK and the Arab world incorporated to BRICS 10.
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How did China get here? It’s quite enlightening today to revisit a 1996 tome by Maurice Mesner: The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994.
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Blame it on Mao: he transformed China “from one of the world’s most backward agrarian countries into the sixth-largest industrial power by the mid-1970s.” On most key social and demographic indicators, China compared favorably not only with India and Pakistan in South Asia but also with “’middle-income’ countries whose per capita GNP was five times that of China.”

All these breakthroughs laid down the path for Deng: “The higher yields obtained on individual family farms during the early Deng era would not have been possible had it not been for the vast irrigation and flood-control projects – dams, irrigation works, and river dikes – constructed by collectivized peasants in the 1950s and 1960s.”
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As the Xi era definitely tackles – and tries to solve – the drama, what makes it even more complicated is the constant interference of the notorious “structural contradictions” between China and the Hegemon.

China-bashing is the number one politically correct game across the Beltway – and that’s bound to go out of control in 2024.

Taiwan pole stations have closed.

Taiwan Election 2024

Lai Ching-te Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) candidate is leading early vote counts. (same party as current President)

Last week we discussed the government funding secured by Microchip Technology to increase chip production, 72 million from federal CHIPS Act and 11 million from the state of Oregon. The cycle from accepting free money to expand a business,then saying the market is not healthy usually takes awhile longer than a week.

Computer chip maker announces furloughs at Oregon factory days after landing $72 million from feds The Oregonian Jan 11, 2024

Microchip Technology plans to furlough employees at its Gresham factory for two weeks in March, and possibly again in June, amid an unexpectedly steep drop-off in sales.
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“During times of business uncertainty, we sometimes ask our team to collectively participate in shared sacrifices such as short-term shutdowns so that we can remain fully staffed and avoid layoffs,” Microchip CEO Ganesh Moorthy said in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive.
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The Arizona company warned investors Monday that its customers cut their orders or shut down their own factories at the end of last year, delaying shipments into 2024 and reducing Microchip’s quarterly revenue. It said sales in the last three months of the year were down 22% from the prior quarter.

A few thoughts on technology and its environmental impact.

AI poses a threat to our planet, but not the one you might think Russia Times Jan 6, 2024

Even as humanity eagerly embraces artificial intelligence despite misgivings on the academic and security fronts, AI’s hunger for energy and its carbon footprint are causing increasing concern. AI is often compared with fossil fuel. Oil, once mined and refined, is a lucrative commodity; and like oil, AI has a large environmental impact that has surprised many.

An article in the MIT Technology Review says the life cycle for training common large AI models has a significant environmental impact, reporting that “the entire process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes the manufacture of the car itself).”

A research article by Alex de Vries of the VU Amsterdam School of Business and Economics also raises concerns over the electricity consumption of accelerated development in computation, and the potential environmental impact of AI and data centers. “In recent years, data centers electricity consumption has accounted for a relatively stable 1% of global electricity use, excluding cryptocurrency mining,” de Vries says.
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The MIT study has estimated that cloud computing has a larger carbon footprint than the entire airline industry. Furthermore, one data center may require the same amount of electricity needed to power around 50,000 homes.

Electricity is required to run high performance chips and cooling systems, as processors heat up while analyzing enormous amounts of data and producing accurate responses.

Oregon data centers fend off climate change, tax reform proposals The Oregonian June 27, 2023

Oregon data center operators were among the big winners in this year’s legislative session having dodged proposals to restrict their climate emissions and rein in their ballooning tax breaks.

Data centers are among the state’s biggest energy consumers and largest tax break recipients, collecting incentives worth more than $180 million last year. Amazon secured new property tax breaks worth $1 billion from tiny Morrow County last month.
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Amazon fought hard against House Bill 2816, spending more than $93,000 on lobbyists in the first three months of the year – among the biggest tabs by any company during that period. The company faulted the bill for imposing clean-energy mandates without providing any incentives to connect renewable energy projects to the regional electrical grid.

What is on your mind today?