Solwd

While the rent component of the consumer price index has shown a strong disinflationary trend since peaking in the summer of 2023, high-frequency data reveals rent prices in key metro areas are moving higher. 

Several high-frequency rental data points show that the cost of signing a new lease on a house or apartment is rising again despite decelerating rent component print in the March Consumer Price Index. 

Let’s begin with Manhattan apartment rents, hitting a new record for April, Bloomberg reported, citing a new report from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

New leases signed in April topped an average of $4,250, up $9 from last April. Overall, prices peaked at $4,440 last August, sliding marginally in the fall months, and have since moved higher at the start of the year. 

Source: Bloomberg

“The question is whether we’re going to beat last summer’s all-time highs,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel. 

Miller pointed out that rents are likely to “beat last summer’s all-time highs” given their current trajectory and momentum.  

Looking at CoreLogic data, its latest Single-Family Rent Index, which examines single-family rent price changes nationally and across major cities, “regained strength in February, posting the highest annual appreciation since April 2023,” according to Molly Boesel, principal economist at CoreLogic. 

CPI rents will be deflationary as they catch up to lagged real-time indicators. However, if high-frequency data continues moving upward, there’s a risk CPI rents could turn back up later this year. 

If this is the case, then potentially more bad news for Bidenomics and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is enabling this fiscal trainwreck as inflation continues to crush working poor households. 

Recall, earlier this week, Stan Druckenmiller told CNBC’s Joe Kernen that he rates Bidenomics an “F.”

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen—a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man’s life at will.”

– Justice William O. Douglas

The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion.

Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

We are no longer safe in our homes, not from the menace of a government and its army of Peeping Toms who are waging war on the last stronghold of privacy left to us as a free people.

The weapons of this particular war on the privacy and sanctity of our homes are being wielded by the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries.

Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting virtual home invasions using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, aerial drones, and other monitoring devices.

Just recently, in fact, the Michigan Supreme Court gave the government the green light to use warrantless aerial drone surveillance to snoop on citizens at home and spy on their private property.

While the courts have given police significant leeway at times when it comes to physical intrusions into the privacy of one’s home (the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.), the menace of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment rights has barely begun to be litigated, legislated and debated.

Consequently, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Indeed, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this surveillance age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

Without our realizing it, the American Police State passed the baton off to a fully-fledged Surveillance State that gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like an electronic prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices become government informants, reporting independently on anything you might do that runs afoul of the Nanny State.

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

Once technology is able to access and act on your thoughts, not even your innermost thoughts will be safe from the Thought Police.

Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug. Yet when the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

To our detriment, we are fast approaching a world without the Fourth Amendment, where the lines between private and public property are so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic—the hallmark of a healthy and free society—has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, none of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the electronic concentration camp.

Copper is essential for clean energy applications such as solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles (EVs), as well as for expanding electrical grids.

The surge in demand for the metal, driven by the growing adoption of these technologies, presents a unique investment opportunity for early investors in copper mining companies.

Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti introduces this chart by Sprott exploring the growing gap between copper supply and demand until 2050, based on projections from BloombergNEF’s Transition Metals Outlook 2023.

Projected Copper Supply vs. Demand

Copper is naturally abundant on Earth, but extracting the metal at the pace necessary for an electrified economy could be a challenge. The timeline for bringing a copper mine from discovery to production is lengthy, averaging over 16 years.

Top producers like Chile and Peru are facing strikes and protests, along with declining ore grades. Russia, ranked seventh in copper production, faces an expected decline in production due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the increasing adoption of carbon-free technology only highlights copper’s significance. 

High Demand for Transport and Electricity Grid

The demand for copper in the transport sector is projected to increase by 11.1 times by 2050, from 2022. EVs, for example, can contain more than a mile of copper wiring.

Additionally, the demand for copper needed to expand the global electricity grid is projected to increase by 4.8 times by 2050, from 2022.

By 2030, the copper supply gap is projected to approach 10 million metric tons, with both copper prices and copper mining stocks potentially set to benefit.

As the world embraces clean technologies, the search for and expansion of copper mines will be essential. Early investors who gain exposure to copper miners may benefit from the rapidly increasing demand.

Sprott offers convenient exchange-traded alternatives for investors seeking exposure to copper miners. 

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has introduced a bill in the lower chamber of Congress that would ensure that illegal immigrants do not vote in federal elections.

The U.S. Capitol building during a rainy day in Washington on April 2, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

The Epoch Times first obtained a copy of the bill, dubbed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

The bill is being introduced with the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who vowed to bring up such a bill during an appearance with former President Donald Trump weeks ago.

Although noncitizen voting in federal elections is already unlawful, past Supreme Court decisions limit states’ power to ensure that voters are citizens.

Mr. Roy’s bill seeks to strengthen safeguards around voter registration to ensure compliance with existing law against noncitizens voting.

To this end, it demands that a state “shall not accept and process an application to register to vote in an election for Federal office unless the applicant presents documentary proof of United States citizenship with the application.”

Speaking at a May 8 press conference in support of the legislation, Mr. Johnson tied it to ongoing protests at campuses across the United States.

“In recent days, we’ve seen a growing number of folks on student visas show their willingness to break the law and utterly disrupt our way of life and threaten law-abiding students who are actually American citizens,” Mr. Johnson said. “If they’re willing to take over buildings and physically terrorize their fellow students, why would they not be willing to lie on a voter registration form?”

Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to President Trump, also commented during the press conference.

“If Hakeem Jeffries and his Democrat members try to kill this bill, they will be declaring to the whole country that they want Joe Biden’s illegals to vote in this election,” Mr. Miller said.

‘Sacred Right and Responsibility’

The bill lists several acceptable documents to verify the citizenship of a would-be voter, including a REAL ID compliant identification, a U.S. passport, a military ID card, or any valid state, federal or tribal identification, such as a birth certificate, hospital record, or adoption certificate, showing that the individual was born in, or is a naturalized citizen of, the United States.

The bill also provides for accommodations for mail-in voting registration or those unable to produce documentary proof of citizenship, who can undergo a separate process to have their citizenship verified.

States would also be required to “take affirmative steps on an ongoing basis to ensure that only United States citizens are registered to vote,” including clearing the voter rolls of those who are ineligible to vote due to their status as noncitizens. To that end, the bill also clarifies the conditions under which a state may seek to remove an individual from voter rolls.

Additionally, the bill would require the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to investigate noncitizens who are illegally registered to vote, up to and including the possibility of removal proceedings.

The same bill will be introduced to the Democrat-controlled Senate by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who encouraged that it be taken up and passed in a statement to The Epoch Times.

“Thousands of illegal immigrants are being given voter registration forms and driver’s licenses, allowing them to cast illegitimate ballots on election day,” Mr. Lee said. “At a time when trust in voting is more important than ever, we must stop foreign election interference and pass the SAVE Act.

“Voting is both a sacred right and responsibility of American citizenship, and allowing the people of other nations access to our elections is a grave blow to our security and self-governance. I’m proud to stand with Chip Roy to save our democratic process and representative government.”

Mr. Lee also spoke during the press conference.

“There is not a good, legitimate reason to oppose this bill,” he said. “In fact, there are all kinds of things that would be wrong with this institution if it failed immediately to pass this bill and send it to the President for his signature.”

Speaking with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Johnson explained why the conference is pursuing this legislation now.

During his remarks, he noted that as many as 16 million new illegal immigrants could have entered the country under President Joe Biden’s term in office. Estimates of the exact number vary widely.

“Among the problems that flows from this open border catastrophe is directly related to this threat to election integrity,” Mr. Johnson said.

Current Law

Mr. Johnson tied his concerns primarily to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), otherwise dubbed the “Motor Voter” law, which allows people to register to vote at the same time that they pick up a driver’s license from their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles or other state agencies.

However, the law does not allow states to seek documentary proof of citizenship, instead requiring that they take an individual’s word that they are a citizen unless the individual’s eligibility is called into question.

A 2013 Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona expanded on the law, finding that the federal law supersedes existing state laws requiring documentary proof to vote—effectively banning states from imposing such requirements for federal voter registration.

Speaking about this law, Mr. Johnson said, “we think that’s a serious problem”—one that he said Republicans will seek to amend.

As so many illegal immigrants are already in the country, current law raises red flags that could potentially affect the outcome of the election, Mr. Johnson said.

“There’s so many millions of illegals in the country, that if only one out of one hundred voted, they would cast potentially hundreds of thousands of votes,” Mr. Johnson said. “That could turn an election.”

Critics of the bill have retorted that federal law already prohibits illegal immigrants from voting—a fact which they say makes the bill redundant.

However, due to the Supreme Court’s expansion of the NVRA in 2013, existing laws include no solid mechanism for states to ensure that their voters are citizens.

It’s unclear when the bill will be taken up in the lower chamber. But with Mr. Johnson’s blessing, it’s all but certain to come to the floor—forcing Democrats onto the record on the issue as immigration becomes a top concern for voters.

With Republicans’ slim majority, the bill has good odds of passing the lower chamber; it faces longer odds in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) decides what comes to the floor.

A company called Holtec has become the voice for restarting the nuclear power revolution in the U.S.

As it becomes clear that the nation’s needs for power are far underserved, and will certainly be in the future with the adoption of AI, one company, currently the “top US manufacturer of storage equipment for nuclear waste”, is advocating for restarting cold reactors across the country. 

Lately, the company’s ambitions have soared. Since 2019, it’s acquired four retired nuclear plants originally intending to decommission them: Indian Point (NY), Oyster Creek (NJ), Pilgrim (MA), and Palisades (MI), according to Bloomberg.

Tearing down old reactors promised good returns due to the hefty trust funds tied to cleanup costs. Holtec quickly became the nation’s leading nuclear decommissioner.

And, as the report notes, despite initially purchasing Palisades to dismantle it, Holtec is now planning to restart the reactor with a $1.5 billion loan from the DOE, marking the first time a cold reactor would be revived in the U.S. However, Holtec lacks experience in running nuclear plants.

While concerns have been raised due to Holtec’s safety violations in the past four years of decommissioning, others consider such infractions normal in this tightly regulated industry. Nevertheless, nuclear power is increasingly seen as key to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and Holtec aims to have Palisades online again soon and launch its own small modular reactors (SMRs) by the end of the decade. 

SMRs, factory-built reactors that can be assembled onsite, represent a highly complex and largely unproven endeavor for Holtec and the industry – yet one we have written about extensively as the obvious next step for the industry. Just yesterday we highlighted Sam Altman’s now-greenlighted nuclear SPAC, trading under ALCC before switching to OKLO at the end of this week. 

Holtec, meanwhile, is headquartered in Jupiter, Florida, but its business hub is the Camden, New Jersey campus and factory. Founder and CEO Krishna Singh’s office overlooks the Delaware River, facing Philadelphia, where he earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 after emigrating from India.

He specialized in heat-exchange systems, crucial training for reactor design, which involves managing the high temperatures generated by fission reactions to produce power.

Bloomberg writes that Holtec made its mark with a storage system for spent uranium fuel rods, addressing the mid-1980s problem of overcrowded indoor cooling pools. Singh’s innovation was a durable rack that minimized fuel rod movement during earthquakes, allowing plants to store more rods in the pools. With this patented design, he founded Holtec, and within a few years, his racks dominated the market.

Traditionally, decommissioning involved shutting down reactors and letting them sit for decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gives operators up to 60 years to complete the process, funded by a trust built from utility ratepayer contributions. For instance, Palisades had $552 million in its trust fund when it closed. The long timeline allows funds to grow and radioactivity to decay.

However, Holtec, NorthStar Group Services Inc., and EnergySolutions Inc. have adopted a different approach, starting decommissioning much earlier. Leveraging their expertise with radioactive materials, they complete the job in years instead of decades, keeping a share of any leftover trust fund money.

“Not only does Holtec intend to bring Palisades back online, it also plans by the end of the decade to have its own small modular reactors up and running,” Bloomberg writes.

Back in April we had previously written that a lot of the U.S.’s reactors could wind up coming back online. “There are a couple of nuclear power plants that we probably should, and can, turn back on,” Jigar Shah, director of the US Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, told Bloomberg in an interview.

In March, Shah’s office approved a loan to Holtec International Corp. to reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. This was a historical shift, and it was the first nuclear power plant to be reopened in the US, setting a precedent for atomic energy to make a triumphal comeback. The plant could begin producing power as early as the second half of 2025.

Nuclear power is the largest single source of carbon-free electricity. Given onshoring trends, electrification of transportation and buildings, and, of course, as we’ve noted in “The Next AI Trade,” the proliferation of AI data centers will overload power grids nationwide unless a significant upgrade is seen.

We again highlighted the enormous investment opportunity last month titled “Everyone Is Piling Into The “Next AI Trade””, which lists companies powering up America for the digital age.

Nearly 3.5 years ago, we provided readers with a straightforward investment thesis: “Buy Uranium: Is This The Beginning Of The Next ESG Craze” Back then, it became apparent to us that the resurrection of the nuclear power industry was imminent. 

And the trend is only gaining steam as the revival of nuclear power plants will continue benefiting some of the largest uranium producers, such as Cameco. We told readers to buy uranium stocks, such as Cameco around the $10 handle – now it’s at $50 a share. 

You can read Bloomberg’s full feature on Holtec here. 

Authored by Keith T. Holcomb via RealClearDefense,

Public confidence in the military has slipped. One major reason is the politicization of senior military officers, who show an increasing propensity to compromise their integrity to gain influence and achieve both budgetary and policy goals. Their willingness to spin carefully parsed and knowingly misleading testimony and advice compromises civilian control of the military. Simply stated, these generals and admirals are not providing full and complete representations of plans, concepts, and assessments to senior civilians in the executive and legislative branches, thereby depriving them of the unbiased information they require to make decisions required by the Constitution.

In an era of increasing complexity, cleverly constructed narratives that present simplified, politicized positions to the general population have taken on out-sized importance. Senior officers increasingly are attempting to manipulate policy making by intentionally reducing complex reality to simple narratives designed to appeal to partisan audiences. 

Integrity has two meanings pertinent to this issue: the common understanding of integrity as honesty and the less common and more formal understanding of integrity as the quality of being whole and complete. 

Preparation for and experience in combat develops strong wills. Senior officers motivated by the desire to get the biggest possible piece of the pie for their services are tempted to dissemble to win the internecine budget and policy fights that are the lifeblood of official Washington. When these wills are not properly constrained by higher commitments to integrity and respect for the decision-making province of civilian authorities, generals and admirals can succumb to the temptation to deceive. 

These deceptions can take many forms. A senior officer can choose to highlight some information. Conversely, they can obfuscate, discredit, or ignore other information. They can allude to expert knowledge or classified information to undercut or deflect questions that challenge their assertions. They can use the age-old technique of making strawmen of opposing views. Worse, they can engage in or encourage subordinates or cultivated commentators to engage in ad hominem attacks on the messengers of alternate views. 

While the hyper-political environment sees daily evidence of such behaviors, some senior officers have exercised considerable self-discipline and have not let advocacy for a position override respect for the prerogatives of senior civilians. In short, just because they have the leadership persona, verbal skills, and communication staffs to construct one-sided positions and perhaps even succeed in the manipulation of some people, they have worked to develop full and balanced representations of the issues at hand. Theirs has been a triumph of professional ethics over the abuse of information to achieve their ends.

Regrettably, that admirable conduct is in decline and that decline is a contributing factor for decreasing public trust in the military. The American public may not know the specific capabilities of various weapons or the operational implications of various policies. But constant exposure to spun narratives has trained them to recognize manipulation when they see and hear it. Many resent being manipulated, and their sense that such techniques are being used by the Nation’s most senior officers undermines their trust and confidence in the military. The military was once recognized as a profession culturally apart from the rest of society, but no longer. America’s military, and its senior officers especially, are increasingly viewed as no less cynically self-interested than the rest of the elite class.

The decline of senior officer integrity increasingly impacts civilian decision makers. Not long ago, overbooked national leaders could confidently “repose special trust and confidence” in the senior officers providing assessments and recommendations to them. The disciplined and honorable behaviors of past generations of generals and admirals certainly validated this special trust and confidence. But, with a rise in manipulative narratives, civilian leaders and their staffs are more likely to feel compelled to dig into the details of complex military matters to gain the full and complete picture they need to discharge their responsibilities.

In short, it is past time for senior officers to forego their increasing addiction to the power opiate of clever narratives and work to present full and balanced representations of the issues at hand.

Absent immediate internal reform by the Department of Defense, civilian leaders will increasingly have to turn, just as they have with other federal agencies, to independent investigations to gain a more complete understanding of national security issues.

Brigadier General Keith T. Holcomb, (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.), is a former USMC Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His last assignment was as Director of the Training and Education Division, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

With draconian export controls and blacklisting by Washington elites, Chinese tech giant Huawei is still operating and, in fact, producing new high-tech smartphones with components increasingly sourced from domestic suppliers. 

A new teardown analysis by tech repair company iFixit and consultancy TechSearch International, first reported by Reuters, shows Huawei’s Pura 70 Pro has a NAND memory chip sourced domestically from the Chinese telecom equipment maker’s in-house chip unit, HiSilicon. 

iFixit and TechSearch found the Pura 70 handset was operating on a Huawei-made advanced processing chipset called the Kirin 9010. They said the new chip is likely an “improved version” of the advanced chip used by Huawei’s Mate 60 series, which was launched last year to compete with Apple’s iPhone 15 lineup. 

“While we cannot provide an exact percentage, we’d say the domestic component usage is high, and definitely higher than in the Mate 60,” Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown technician, said. 

Mokhtari continued, “This is about self-sufficiency, all of this, everything you see when you open up a smartphone and see whatever are made by Chinese manufacturers, this is all about self-sufficiency,” Mokhtari said.

The central theme is that a worsening tech war between Beijing and Washington pushes Huawei to source more handset components in domestic markets. This is an alarming development for Washington politicians, who have spent several years sanctioning China to prevent them from acquiring high-tech Western chips and chip-making tools, as well as the hope of imploding China’s tech-creating abilities. However, the restrictions are backfiring, as Huawei now manufactures smartphones with more domestically sourced chips than ever.  

Just wait for the day when Chinese state media, such as the Global Times, boasts that Huawei’s phones are made entirely with domestic parts. Given the current trajectory, we believe that day is approaching.

Reuters cited analysts who believe Huawei’s phones are denting iPhone market share in the world’s largest handset market. 

However, since the Pura 70’s components are not entirely sourced domestically, IFixit and TechSearch’s analysis shows South Korean company SK Hynix makes the DRAM chip. 

Given the chip restrictions, SK Hynix told Reuters it had been “strictly complying with the relevant policies since the restrictions against Huawei were announced and has also suspended any transactions with the company since then.”

The analysis showed that the processor used by the Pura 70 Pro was 7 nanometers (nm), similar to the chip used to power the Mate 60. 

“This is significant because news of the 9000S on a 7nm node caused a bit of a panic last year when US lawmakers were confronted with the possibility that the sanctions imposed on Chinese chipmakers might not slow their technological progress after all,” iFixit said.

iFixit continued, “The fact that the 9010 is still a 7nm process chip, and that it’s so close to the 9000S, might seem to suggest that Chinese chip manufacturing has indeed been slowed.”

The re-emergence of Huawei, taking on Apple, has infuriated Washington. There was a report from Bloomberg earlier this week that the US revoked licenses that allowed Huawei to buy semiconductors from Qualcomm and Intel. 

The biggest takeaway: Huawei is on a mission to entirely source components from local suppliers as the tech war between China and the US heats up. 

Authored by Jonathan Lesser via RealClearEnergy,

Forty-two was the mystical number that explained “life, the universe, and everything” in Douglas Adams’ comic novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Today, another mystical number, the so-called social cost of carbon (SSC), is providing the excuse for the Environmental Protection Agency and green-energy-enamored state regulators to enact crippling energy policies.

The SCC is the thumb on the scale that can justify virtually any policy aimed at eliminating fossil fuels. When the EPA first proposed its rule to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, the agency’s cost-benefit analysis determined the benefits would be minuscule. Any putative benefits, it turns out, would come instead from reductions in carbon emissions and, here’s the key, based on a calculated value for the SCC.  The same was true for the EPA’s earlier attempt at carbon regulation via a “Clean Power Plan,” which was shut down by the Supreme Court. But here we are again with the agency’s newest rules trying to force coal plants to further reduce mercury emissions and to force both coal and natural gas-fired power plants to capture 90% of their carbon emissions. The technology to accomplish this doesn’t exist and EPA Administrator Michael Regan admitted the rule will force the closure of fossil-fuel power plants.

The SCC values used by the EPA are derived from calculations in integrated planning models (IPMs). Those models assume a simplistic linear relationship between carbon emissions and world temperature (never mind that the validity of that linear assumptions is a subject of deep debate in scientific circles). The models then assume that the resulting temperature increases cause all forms of environmental doom – rising sea levels, more disease, and declining agricultural production – for which yet more estimates are made to assign future cost consequences. Here’s the key: the IPMs project these costs out for the next 300 years (not a typo). Then, those far future costs are “discounted” to estimate a value in today’s dollars by using truly absurd assumptions about such things as inflation and economic growth.

A tongue-in-cheek forecaster’s creed is “Give them a number or give them a date. Don’t give them both.” Attempting to predict the future three centuries hence may be standard fare for science fiction writers, but basing energy policies on such predictions is insane.

Imagine someone in the year 1724 predicting life – and technology – today. Benjamin Franklin was 18 years old and working in his father’s print shop. George Washington would not be born for another eight years. The French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, who first identified carbon as an element in 1789, would not be born until 1743. The first patent on a flush toilet would not happen for another half-century. Thomas Edison would not invent the light bulb and the telephone for another 150 years. Could anyone in 1724 have imagined automobiles, mobile phones, and MRI machines? How about integrated circuits, nuclear power, and B-2 bombers?

To presume we can accurately predict, or even imagine, what the world will look like 300 years from now is just as preposterous. Yet, simplistic models and arbitrary assumptions are being used to drive energy policy decisions today. Using the SCC estimates, and assuming that new technologies will magically appear, the EPA can justify virtually any pollution control regulation, including those that effectively mandate electric vehicles. Similarly, even though offshore wind generation costs five times more than natural gas and coal, the SCC can “prove” the benefits of offshore wind exceed its costs. New York State, for example, assumes that, by 2040, thousands of megawatts of “dispatchable emissions-free generators” (the equivalent of a natural gas generator burning pure hydrogen) will provide the necessary backup for unreliable offshore wind, even though no such generators exist.

Contrary to the economic fantasies peddled by green energy advocates, policies to eliminate fossil fuels based on the supposed benefits captured by the SCC will cripple the U.S. economy. Electricity prices, coupled with ill-considered plans to electrify virtually everything, will soar. Supplies will dwindle, requiring rationing, either explicitly or through rolling blackouts, such as those experienced every day in South Africa. Rather than creating some green energy nirvana, the lack of adequate and affordable electricity will cause societal decay.

All of this based on a made-up number.

Jonathan Lesser is a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics and president of Continental Economics.

A major security scandal is developing at Japan’s Yokosuka Naval Base, where drone footage was recently filmed above an American nuclear-powered supercarrier without any activated anti-drone systems to intercept hostile unmanned aerial vehicles. This comes as loitering munitions, also known as kamikaze drones, are the hottest weapon on the modern battlefield in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

X account “这是我小号4”, translated in English from Chinese as “This is my trumpet number 4,” uploaded aerial videos and images of Yokosuka Naval Base. Some of the footage was directly over the USS Ronald Reagan. 

The X account wrote in English, “For anyone who thinks it’s fake….” They attached a screenshot of the drone’s flight path of the naval yard on a map to the post. 

For anyone who thinks it’s fake pic.twitter.com/PdfwHAnwqj

— 这是我小号4 (@Xiao_Hao_4) April 2, 2024

The latest data from intel research firm Strategic Forecasting shows USS Ronald Reagan was recently moored at Yokosuka Naval Base. Footage from the drone was taken in early April. 

The account posted additional images of the naval yard and US warships. 

pic.twitter.com/JOCfTFMI68

— 这是我小号4 (@Xiao_Hao_4) May 8, 2024

Where are the anti-drone systems to guard against this type of aerial security breach? 

pic.twitter.com/5Qx1CLQbIn

— 这是我小号4 (@Xiao_Hao_4) April 4, 2024

In English again, the account said, “It took a month for the Japanese army to just realize…” The person was referring to a news story by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, also known as NHK, covering his activity on social media about posting drone videos of US and Japanese warships. 

It took a month for the Japanese army to just realize… https://t.co/TH6mWxQZV8

— 这是我小号4 (@Xiao_Hao_4) May 8, 2024

NHK cited Ministry of Defense officials who said drone videos were “likely genuine.” Other sources we spoke with confirmed the videos are likely real and noted the possibility that this could’ve been a Chinese-made DJI drone. 

Why didn’t the US and or Japan activate electromagnetic counter-measures against the drone?

The next question: Did a Chinese spy – pilot this drone?

By Simon Watkins of OilPrice.com

Since the mid-1990s, China’s extraordinary economic expansion almost singlehandedly drove a supercycle in key commodities prices it required to power such growth, including oil and gas. In 2013, it became the world’s largest net importer of total petroleum and other liquid fuels and, as late as 2017, its still high rate of economic growth allowed it to overtake the U.S. as the largest annual gross crude oil importer in the world. Late 2019 saw much of this activity grind to a halt as Covid hit the country, and the economic slowdown was exacerbated by its Draconian ‘zero-Covid’ policy that saw complete shutdowns of major economic centres at the slightest hint of infection. However, 2023 saw it achieve its official gross domestic product (GDP) growth target of “around 5 percent” – posting 5.2 percent in the end. The same official target is in place this year, with the key questions for oil markets being whether this will be achieved and if so, how easily?

16 April saw China’s National Bureau of Statistics release the country’s Q1 GDP figure, which showed a 5.3 percent year-on-year increase. This was way above consensus analyst expectations of 4.6 percent and was also a rise from the Q4 2023’s 5.2 percent. “Aside from the continued decline in the property sector, policy support is filtering through investment,” Eugenia Victorino, head of Asia strategy for SEB in Singapore exclusively told OilPrice.com. “With property sales now 60 percent lower than their mid-2021 peak, transaction volumes are now comparable to levels last seen in 2012,” she added. “Investments in other sectors are also picking up, particularly in manufacturing and energy production and supply, and in the coming months, infrastructure investment will also start to accelerate on the back of fiscal stimulus,” she said. “The strong performance in the first two months of the year suggests that an economic recovery is underway,” she underlined. March’s key Caixin/S&P Global China manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) also came in very bullish. At 51.1 in the month, up from 50.9 in February (above 50.0 indicates expansion), it was the strongest since February 2023. “Overall, China’s manufacturing sector continued to improve in March, with expansion in supply and demand accelerating, and overseas demand picking up,” said Caixin Insight Group senior economist, Wang Zhe. April’s Caixin China General Manufacturing PMI also increased – to 51.4, beating estimates of 51 – and recording the sixth straight month of growth in factory activity. New orders rose the most in over a year and foreign sales increased at the fastest pace for nearly three-and-a-half years.

This robust performance across several major sectors in China’s economy – including, crucially manufacturing – is in sharp contrast to the growth drivers seen last year. In the immediate aftermath of Covid, the country’s growth became reliant on just reopening the economy and removing negative policies – property, consumer, and geopolitics – rather than on aggressive stimulus, to drive activity, Rory Green, chief China economist for GlobalData.TSLombard exclusively told OilPrice.com at the time. “For the first time, a cyclical recovery in China [was] being led by household consumption, mainly services, as there [was] a great deal of pent-up demand and savings – about four percent of GDP – following three years of intermittent mobility restrictions,” he said. In terms of the effect that this had on oil prices at the time, it is apposite to note that transportation accounts for just 54 percent of China’s oil consumption, compared to 72 percent in the U.S. and 68 percent in the European Union. In 2022 and early 2023, net oil and refined petroleum imports were eight percent lower by volume than the pre-Covid peak, with infrastructure and export-oriented manufacturing partly offsetting lower mobility and less property construction. At that phase of China’s economic rebound, then, oil demand did increase, but the scale of this was far from sufficient to drive oil prices significantly higher on its own. This was even more the case, as China continued where possible to buy oil from Russia at a substantial discount.  

Before this ‘Covid Phase’, China had already undergone several transitions in its core economic growth model, the effects of which continue to be felt to this day. From 1992 to 1998, its annual economic growth rate was basically between 10 to 15 percent; from 1998 to 2004 between 8 to 10 percent; from 2004 to 2010 between 10 to 15 percent again; from 2010 to 2016 between 6 to 10 percent, and from 2016 to the 2019 between 5 to 7 percent. For much of the period from 1992 to the middle 2010s, much of China’s massive economic growth was founded on a huge energy-intensive expansion of its manufacturing capabilities. This also involved the mass migration of new workers from the countryside and into the cities, which required a huge energy-intensive infrastructure build-out. Even after some of China’s growth began to switch into the less energy-intensive service sectors, its investment in energy-intensive infrastructure build-out remained very high. This pattern continued for many years, alongside the third phase of China’s economic growth, which was the rise of a middle class that powered domestic consumption-led demand for goods and services. All these phases had the net result of markedly increasing China’s demand for oil and gas. 

Although this ‘Post-Covid Phase’ of growth currently looks like one that will see powerful drivers from several sectors of China’s economy – including manufacturing – it does not necessarily mean that oil prices will feel the full effects of this. The key reason here is that China continues to buy oil at greatly reduced prices not just from Russia, but also from Iran and Iraq too, through various mechanisms analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order. Despite sanctions in place on the first two of these countries, the U.S. is happy to look the other way for the most part, as oil demand being satisfied ‘off the official books’ ultimately feeds through into lower demand elsewhere in the global energy markets, so reducing bullish price pressure. Additionally, China does not want to encourage higher oil prices from any of those multitude of Middle Eastern countries over which it has developed an influence because the U.S. and several of its key allies remain China’s major export customers. The U.S. alone still accounts for over 16 percent of its export revenues. Rising energy prices in these countries could again fuel inflation and cause interest rates to rise, bringing the prospect of economic slowdown with them, as was seen in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to a senior source in the European Union’s (E.U.) energy security complex spoken to exclusively by OilPrice.com recently, the economic damage to China – directly through its own energy imports and indirectly through damage to the economies of its key export markets in the West – would dangerously increase if the Brent oil price remained over US$90-95 pb for more than one quarter of a year. 

Rising energy prices also have direct ramifications in U.S. presidential elections, in which China does not want to be seen playing a part, at least overtly. Longstanding estimates are that every US$10 pb change in the price of crude oil results in a 25-30 cent change in the price of a gallon of gasoline, and for every 1 cent that the average price per gallon of gasoline rises, more than US$1 billion per year in consumer spending is lost, adversely affecting the U.S. economy. Historically, around 70 percent of the price of gasoline is derived from the global oil price. This feeds through into the second part of this equation, as also analysed in full in my new book, which is that since the end of World War I in 2018, the sitting U.S. president has won re-election 11 times out of 11 if the economy was not in recession within two years of an upcoming election. If it was in recession in this timeframe, then only 1 sitting president has won out of 7 times (although even the 1 is debatable).