This edition of the Blind Spot Wrap was compiled by Dario Garcia Giner, with contributions from Izabella Kaminska.
Finance, Business, Econ, etc:
- Saudi Aramco warned that ESG investing had undermined oil and gas investments, a strategy that was “based on flawed assumptions” said Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, and which posed a threat to global energy security.
- Amazon‘s Chief Executive, Andy Jassy, promised that Amazon would ‘go big’ on its physical stores, after the hiatus in Amazon Fresh’s expansion occasioned by the pandemic.
- New Indian iPhone factories were suffering growing pains, as Apple faced an almost 50 per cent rate of rejection for casings produced there.
- The US Treasury achieved a yield with a 5-handle for the first time since 2007:
- Radnor Capital posted a Twitter thread after listening into the earnings calls of Haliburton and Hess, noting the commodity market is facing an upcycle like never before because of the gross amount of under-investment.
- A year after the COP26 summit promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, spending on fossil fuel consumption subsidies climbed to a record high of over $1 trillion, according to the IEA.
- Former British Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng defended his record in office and stated it was a ‘mistake’ for Liz Truss to fire him, while reiterating that net zero is “absolutely the right agenda.”
Digital Monies:
- Keanu Reeves told Wired that Bitcoin was an “amazing tool for the exchange of resources”, and that criticising it would only “make it better”.
- Bitcoin hit a six-month high of $24,895.
Politics, Politics, Politics:
- The Justice Department dropped its sex trafficking case filed against fiercely pro-Trump Republican Congressman Matthew Gaetz, with no charges. Gaetz was being investigated for potentially paying underage girls and escorts, or offering them gifts, in exchange for sex.
- Liz Truss called for the creation of an ‘economic NATO‘ to counter the rising pressures being exerted by China towards NATO member states’ influence.
Geopolitical Hot Spots:
- The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a strategy paper titled: “Understanding the Broader Transatlantic Security Implications of Greater Sino-Russian Military Alignment.” The authors argue that these two partners’ alliances will become increasingly unbalanced as Russia’s power declines and China’s continues to strengthen. Nevertheless, Russia will hold many valuable lessons for China in resisting western pressure, should an Indo-Pacific military crisis occur.
- Russia called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on February 22 on the Nord Stream explosions, following Seymour Hersh’s investigation into the subject.
- VOA News reported that a new Al-Qaeda leader was reigning from Iran. Named Saif Al-Adel, he was instated following the killing of Al-Qaeda’s former leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in an airstrike by the United States in Afghanistan six months ago.
- The British Defence Minister estimated that around 97 per cent of Russia’s army is in Ukraine, though the exact number remains unclear.
Media Matters:
- The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation announced that it was joining the fight to combat “online misinformation and disinformation” through its new initiative, the “Public Spaces Incubator.” This Incubator will seek to “fund and develop alternative social platforms and spaces that are free from harassment and so-called disinformation”.
- Cory Doctorow nails the issue with ChatGPT and all the other AI-based search engines: they aren’t intelligent; they’re just highly convincing liars.
I am definitely not an expert in the field of artificial intelligence programming. But I am a mum. And from what I understand, most of these AI chatbots, a little bit like children, are trained on self-reinforcing feedback from those guiding their development. That means they are created in the image of their developers and endowed with the values and views of those “parental hands”. Unlike children, however, they don’t self-correct or adjust around those inputs based on what they encounter in the real world. Why? Because, unlike children, they haven’t got the capacity to encounter the feedback of the real world in terms of pain, because they don’t have bodies.
On the other hand, if a child blindly follows what their parents or, even, society tells them is true, if the outcome is that they fall in a ditch and hurt themselves, they will self-correct around that bad input. There are consequences to bad actions. Without that real-world self-correction, they would — we assume — also become sociopathic liars because they too would suffer no consequences from convincingly lying or perpetuating convincing lies. – IK
- Elon Musk claims the problem with media is that journalists have become activists rather than truth seekers.
As readers of the Blind Spot will be aware, I’ve been arguing this point for years now. What Elon misses though, is that activism is not new to journalism. Partisan or campaign-oriented journalism has been around since the year dot. What’s more, there has always been confusion between what constitutes truth and activism. From a regulatory perspective, journalists have always had a duty to be fair with their coverage, but not necessarily to be apolitical. That’s not to say that some of the most reputable publications haven’t gained major market share thanks to their commitment to non-partisan (and, thus, arguably more truthful) coverage. But the market is a market. And there should, in theory, be a space for all flavours of journalism.
The problem, as I see it, is that the masthead values of many publications (whether they be non-partisan or partisan) have become detached from the majority views of their staff. Left-leaning writers have populated right-leaning publications and vice versa. Even more egregiously, partisan and activist voices have penetrated the publications that are supposed to be neutral. It is this blurring of values which is now courting confusion in the market. The readership in many cases has been far too late to realise this. It still has a naive belief that the masthead values can persist even when the bulk of the editorial staff has abandoned a commitment to those values.
But it must be stressed, there is nothing wrong with a publication being partisan, providing it does so transparently. The problem comes with publications that claim to be neutral being anything but, often because their staff are not committed to the legacy institutional values of these publications. Rather than working in a mission-oriented atmosphere, some staff work to undermine or change those values.
Independent journalism, meanwhile, can only go so far towards solving the problem. This is because it lacks the discipline and protocols needed to police an outlet’s openly asserted values and standards.
This is why I myself have been campaigning to create a system, what I am calling Innscribers, that can allow independents to organise around self-declared values and standards and be held to account by them — even while continuing to work independently. There’s no doubt in my mind that a borderless journalistic world needs this sort of self-regulation. The problem, as I am finding, is that journalists are not natural collaborators.
If you want to get involved, do sign up to the Innscribers Discord. – IK
- A former MSNBC host, Krystal Ball, told podcaster Joe Rogan that, after airing a monologue that was critical of Hillary Clinton, she was ordered to seek approval for any commentary on Hillary Clinton, in the future, from MSNBC’s President.
- Seymour Hersh was unbothered by the White House’s strong denials of his investigation into the Nord Stream pipeline bombing, or by the silence of his former employer, the New York Times. He thinks his move to Substack means he needn’t worry about censorship.
- Emails cited in a lawsuit filed against JP Morgan Chase & Co regarding the banks’ facilitation of services to Epstein list former JP Morgan executive (who is also the former group CEO of Barclays), Jes Staley, telling Epstein: “That was fun, say hi to Snow White”. When Epstein responded with, “What character would you like next?” Staley allegedly replied by saying, “Beauty and the Beast”.
Dangerous Machinery:
- A Popular Mechanics piece highlighted the danger posed by the breakup in orbit of a “secret, shady Russian satellite” named Kosmos 2499, which has strewn a large amount of debris across a well-travelled orbit.
- Japan’s Self-Defense Forces announced that they would be phasing out manned attack helicopters in favour of unmanned aerial systems, according to its five-year defence buildup plans.
Attack helicopters often gain a reputation for near-invincibility and awe-inspiring power in any conflict without the means to shoot them down. As has become clear in the Russo-Ukrainian war, they’re notoriously vulnerable to infrared guided missiles and general anti-air weaponry. We can, likewise, recall the frightful losses suffered by Soviet aircrews when the CIA began leasing MANPADs, portable infrared surface-to-air missiles, to the Mujahideen.
Despite new types of countermeasures, over-the-horizon missile systems, or any other increased survivability measure deployed on modern helicopters, they will always suffer from a critical flaw. In order to survive in near-peer engagements, they must fly low. This means that when they’re hit, it almost immediately results in the death of the entire crew. And only one helicopter model in the conflict, the Russian KA-52, has an ejection pod for the pilots. This has resulted in an increasing shortage of trained air crews – a severe disincentive to launching any airborne operation.
Moving towards unmanned aerial systems to replace helicopters is an absolute no-brainer – if only to guarantee you will never run low on trained pilots in a hot war. – DGG
Unidentified Sightings:
- President Biden announced the creation of an interagency team to address ‘unidentified aerial objects’, that would ‘study the broader policy implications for detection, analysis, and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks’.
- Strange lights in the sky don’t always defy rational explanations. A Hawaiian telescope spotted a light-blue spiral in the sky, which was emitted from a SpaceX rocket’s fuel. Likewise, it spotted strange green laser lights, which were probably emitted by a Chinese space-born satellite to measure the Earth.
- The Ukrainian Army claimed to have shot down six balloons over their territory.
- The War Zone‘s Tyler Rogoway blasted the United States military for having treated aerial incursions of foreign craft owned by terrestrial adversaries as UFOs.
- This meme seemed on point:
- CNN published a piece that included comments by US Administration officials that ‘increasingly cast doubt on their ability to fully recover debris from the objects the US military shot down, given tough conditions where they landed’.
Media outlets should be asking much tougher questions, especially with respect to the downed Alaskan UFO, which appears to have been the only UFO to exhibit any level of ‘mystery’. There are four fundamental curiosities:
1) The object was reported to have interfered with pilots’ radar.
2) The object was somewhat hard, as it detonated the charge of the sidewinder missile that was fired at it by American jets, unlike the other objects (which were likely balloons, hence why their soft surface failed to detonate the missile’s charge).
3) The object was reported to have ‘shattered on impact’, which baffled American observers. The NOAA is reported to have claimed the object couldn’t be its own weather balloons, as their balloons do not ‘hover.’
4) This led to more apt descriptive terms for the object other than balloon, such as the term ‘airship.’The American administration is backtracking away from a proper explanation. – DGG
- A Redditor used his engineering skills to break down why the downed object over Alaska couldn’t have been a balloon, based on the limited observation data published by the United States.
- Evidence is emerging that the original Chinese spy balloon downed by the United States on February 4 did deviate from its original path due to atypical weather conditions, raising the possibility that “China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with its airborne surveillance device”.
- Online speculation points to the possibility that United States fighter jets may have confused an amateur radio ‘pico’ balloon, which are high-altitude balloons that transmit telemetry data before falling back to earth in a few hours, for an unknown object:
Curious Events:
- Scientists at Imperial College London have discovered evidence black holes could be the source of dark energy.
- An intriguing article in How & Why’s analyses the ascendance of the blue-eyed genome, which appeared between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago as the result of a curious mutation, through Sumerian depictions of blue-eyed statues.
From the ‘Fake News’ Zone:
- Breitbart reported that an Australian mother was denied a heart transplant because she failed to get a Covid-19 vaccine on account of a medical exemption. Vicki Derderian, a mother of two, claimed that the position of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, who were responsible for the decision, was essentially one of ‘no jab, no heart.’
- The UK’s counter-terror Prevent scheme has flagged some of the world’s greatest writers, books, films and TV shows as examples of warning signs of potential far-right extremism, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Kipling and Edmund Burke.
- An article from the Financial Post reported that the global academic left has finally awakened to the drastically authoritarian nature of the Covid-19 lockdowns — criticisms that (with few exceptions) had, previously, only found a voice on the right of the political spectrum.
