CNBC: Elon Musk said in an interview that a monkey has been wired up to play video games with its mind by a company he founded called Neuralink.
Neuralink put a computer chip into the monkey’s skull and used “tiny wires” to connect it to its brain, Musk said.
“It’s not an unhappy monkey,” he said during a talk on Clubhouse, a new social media app gaining popularity that allows people to have informal voice chats while others listen in. Read More
Arutz Sheva: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Monday suggested a path to overcome the impasse with Iran over who first returns to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Speaking to CNN and quoted by Reuters, Zarif said, “There can be a mechanism to basically either synchronize it or coordinate what can be done.”
Zarif noted the agreement created a Joint Commission coordinated by the European Union foreign policy chief, a role currently held by Josep Borrell.
Borrell, said the Iranian Foreign Minister, “can … sort of choreograph the actions that are needed to be taken by the United States and the actions that are needed to be taken by Iran.”
The commission includes Iran and the six other parties to the deal: Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.
For now, the story is that the sudden and massive shifts in the economy in 2020 have caused shortages and distortions in the goods-producing sectors and in shipping and trucking, as consumer spending has shifted from services – such as flying somewhere for vacation and spending oodles of money on lodging and restaurants and theme parks – to goods, particularly durable goods.
The story is that prices are rising because components and commodities are in short supply, and supply chains are dogged by production issues, and are facing transportation constraints, as demand for those goods has suddenly surged. And that all this is temporary.
And the Fed has said it will ignore inflation for a while, that it will allow it to overshoot, and only when it overshoots persistently for some unknown amount of time and becomes “unwelcome” inflation – “unwelcome” for the Fed – that it will try to tamp down on it.
Meanwhile, inflation pressures are building up. Read More
The New American: The 19th-century philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Shockingly, Germany seems to be suffering from a severe bout of historical amnesia. Taking extreme action to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the country is interning people in “camps” to punish those found “guilty” of subverting strict COVID-19 quarantine rules.
Opening today, February 1, 2021, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, is Germany’s first “corona prison.” Reporting by the RAIR Foundation uncovers that quarantine offenders will be held at the former Mortsfelde youth detention center. Inmates will be “policed by former law enforcement officials and prison wardens.” The crimes allegedly committed by these “dangerous” individuals include “refusing to quarantine after engaging in travel, after coming in contact with high-risk individuals, or after receiving a positive test result.”
Descriptions of the lockdown facility might be lifted straight out of a George Orwell or Ray Bradbury novel.
The center is reportedly surrounded by barbed wire and a security fence. It permits up to six people; each convict is held in a 129-square foot cell. Metal bars cover the windows of inmates’ rooms, and meals are allegedly delivered through a food flap in the heavy steel room door. Read More
Breitbart: Presidents like to say that their predecessors left them a mess. Yet in Middle East policy, President Donald Trump left his successor an extraordinary gift of peace and stability.
Peace agreements were emerging almost weekly between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Iran, struggling under the burden of U.S. sanctions, was isolated, broke, and wracked by internal turmoil. In Afghanistan, a tentative deal with the Taliban meant that U.S. troops could look forward to coming home.
Trump left the U.S. in a position of historic strategic advantage. But like President Barack Obama, who squandered the gains of the Iraq “surge” and withdrew before the country was stable enough to prevent the rise of the terrorist “Islamic State,” Biden is throwing away many of the gains Trump achieved in the region.
If he simply stays on the course Trump charted, Biden can maximize his leverage on Iran and entice Saudi Arabia to make peace with Israel.
Iran could be “weeks away” from having sufficient material to develop a nuclear weapon if it continues to violate the 2015 nuclear deal, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned on Monday in an interview with NBC News.
Blinken said that the Biden administration would consider new sanctions against North Korea as well as other possible actions against Russia. It was the new secretary’s first television interview since taking office last week.
He told NBC it could be only “a matter of weeks” if Iran continues to lift restraints in the JCPOA that the United States pulled out of under president Donald Trump. Read More
Talk Markets: Retail investors are rising up. Refusing to be Wall Street’s doormats, retail investors are attacking Wall Street positions that are vulnerable and making them pay. They are banding together and rocking the markets, squeezing stocks like Game Stop (GME) and AMC (AMC), and are now turning their attention to silver. They are attacking short-sellers and they are now realizing that silver is undervalued as compared to gold and Bitcoin. It will be only a matter of time till they realize that oil is cheap as well.
Bloomberg News reports that “the precious metal has become a popular buying target for retail investors who want to inflict losses on hedge funds, after posts on WallStreetBets claimed the market was ripe for a short squeeze. Others in the Reddit forum have responded with pleas to avoid the trade, saying Citadel stands to benefit as a major holder of the largest silver exchange-traded fund.” But they are not listening. Silver coins are flying off the shelf and silver futures soared above $30.00 a once.
The run-on silver and the risk on-momentum is boosting oil! It may be only a period before the rental army starts to realize that President Joe Biden’s attack on oil is going to leave the market undersupplied. Retail investors might rely on the fact that banks are pulling their investment dollars away from fossil fuels and might become a target by the crew that wants banks to feel some investment pain. Read More
LGBT activists are cheering Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s announcement that he will reverse an order from President Donald Trump and put up “pride” flags at U.S. Embassies around the world.
The Biden administration is off to a hopeful start, as Secretary of State nominee, Antony Blinken, has confirmed a recommitment to LGBTQ rights.
In a memo from July 2020, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper released a list of flags permitted to be displayed at U.S. military bases. Missing from the list was the LGBTQ pride flag, which Esper compared to the confederate flag. Prior to the ban, embassies raised the flag during pride month on the official embassy flagpole.
During the hearing, Blinken also confirmed that he plans to appoint an envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQ persons, a position created by Barack Obama in 2015 that wasn’t filled during the Trump presidency.
Blinken claimed violence against that demographic increased while Trump was in office.
“We’ve seen violence directed against LGBTQI people around the world increase,” Blinken said. “And so, I think the United States playing the role that it should be playing in standing up for and defending the rights of LGBTQI people is something that the department is going to take on and take on immediately. Raising the pride flag is one way to outright show LGBTQ solidarity.”
“Biden is the first U.S. president to openly embrace a full range of queer rights, including transgender equality,” Outfront magazine reported. Read More
Zero Hedge: The GameStop controversy has undoubtedly been the “effect” of a much bigger “cause”.
And while some of our contributors have offered their take on what, exactly, is behind the revolt, it wouldn’t be commentary about the “economic machine” without Ray Dalio chiming in.
Dalio weighed in on the recent events involving GameStop and Reddit, which he called a “rebellion”, claiming that last week’s chaos was “another sign of the growing intolerance among those with opposing views”, according to Bloomberg.
