US Foreign Policy is a Corrupt Scam
Monthly Archives: December 2023
October 7, 2023: Hamas, from the Resistance
Some philosophers say that ‘lifetime’ is not measured by years, meaning those resulting from the Earth’s orbit around the sun, but by the hours a person has benefited from in their life. While someone may reach the age of 100 in numerical terms, their actual lived experience may be condensed into just a few months or years on a real scale.
As for the seventh of October, the freedom fighters did not write just one ‘lifetime’ in just one day, they added a credit of life for everyone who lived with them, witnessed them, and for everyone who will follow them. Freedom fighters and martyrs embody the essence of true life. They are the creators of life.
A compilation of the historical scenes from the seventh of October in one video.
from https://t.me/resistance_channel
Seismic Shifts are Taking Place in Geopolitics
The US is internationally isolated, for their support for Israel – says Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs.
Seismic shifts are taking place in geopolitics, in which the US has chosen total isolation by standing with Israel.
“The world does not look to the US for leadership, the world looks at the US aghast! We don’t have a President in Biden, I don’t know what he is…We have the worst foreign policy imaginable” – Sachs does not hold back.
Bye, bye Another American Industry
via Asia Times
Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi on Dec. 28, 2023, revealed its forthcoming electric car, the SU7 sedan. Photo: CNBC / Evelyn Cheng
Chinese electric vehicle maker NIO and smart phone maker Xiaomi have ended the year with the announcement of new products challenging NVIDIA and Apple. This marks yet another advance in China’s efforts to develop its own semiconductor technology and eliminate dependence on imports.
On December 23, NIO revealed its first autonomous driving chip, which it claims is superior to the NVIDIA Drive Orin chips it is using now. The Shenji NX9031 SoC (System-on-Chip) will be used in the company’s new ET9 executive sedan, which was also presented at NIO Day 2023. Held in Xi’an, the event attracted more than 10,000 participants and attendees.
The ET9 is a long-wheelbase, four-door luxury EV priced at about 800,000 yuan, or $113,000 at the current exchange rate. Orders for the ET9 can be placed in China now, but deliveries are not scheduled to begin until the first quarter of 2025.
The first 5-nm Chinese automotive IC, the NX9031 will probably by fabricated by TSMC, Samsung Electronics or Intel Foundry Services. In theory, it could be made by SMIC, but that would be inefficient and more expensive. Under the sanctions against the Chinese semiconductor industry, SMIC does not have access to the advanced EUV lithography systems that IC foundries outside China use to make chips with 5-nm and finer processes.
The NX9031 features an Arm 32-core CPU (central processing unit), an NPU (neural processing unit), a graphics core and more than 50 billion transistors. It comes with low power, double data-rate LPDDR5X DRAM memory (probably Korean-made) and can process lidar (light detection and ranging) data.
An NPU, which mimics the human brain, deduces optimal solutions from available data. Lidar uses laser light to survey the environment, providing autonomous vehicles with 3D images of the road and traffic. The NX9031 will work with SkyOS, Nio’s vehicle operating system, which covers vehicle control, assisted driving, cockpit systems and mobile connectivity.
According to NIO CEO William Li, the computing power of the NX9031 is comparable to four NVIDIA Drive Orin SoCs, the standard configuration currently used in NIO electric vehicles. These 7-nm chips are capable of up to 254 TOPS (trillion operations per second) each, or 1,016 TOPS in total. That is sufficient for smart driving today, says Vice President Bai Jian, but not for the next generation of autonomous vehicles.
NVIDIA has come to the same conclusion. Drive Thor, the successor to Drive Orin, is scheduled to go into production in 2025. It will have twice as much computing power as Drive Orin. What does this mean? NVIDIA Vice President Danny Shapiro explains:
“If we look at a car today, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument cluster and infotainment are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle. In 2025, these functions will no longer be separate computers. Rather, Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to efficiently consolidate these functions into a single system, reducing overall system cost.”
NIO established its IC design team in 2020. Led by Bai Jian, its purpose is to develop an independent smart driving capability including sensors, autonomous driving algorithms and now SoCs. Bai was previously an executive at Chinese smart phone makers OPPO and Xiaomi.
Xiaomi beats Apple to the draw
On December 28, Xiaomi revealed its first electric vehicle before thousands of people at the China National Convention Center in Beijing. At the event, CEO Lei Jun said that his company’s goal is to produce a dream car that can rival Porsche and Tesla.
The Xiaomi SU7 (SU stands for Speed Ultra), a four-door electric sedan designed by professionals who previously worked for BMW and Mercedes-Benz, is manufactured by BAIC (Beijing Automotive Industry Corp). It is equipped with NVIDIA Drive Orin SoCs for assisted and autonomous driving and Xiaomi’s own operating system. Videos show the SU7 avoiding obstacles on the street and parking without a driver.
Deliveries of two- and four-wheel drive models are expected to begin within the next few months. Prices have not yet been announced, but benchmarking against the Tesla’s Model S and Porsche’s Taycan Turbo suggests that they might be as high as 700,000 to 900,000 yuan range – about the same as the NIO ET9.
Xiaomi plans to invest about $10 billion in its auto business in the next 10 years. “By working hard over the next 15 to 20 years,” says CEO Lei, “we will become one of the world’s top five automakers, striving to lift China’s overall automobile industry.”
Xiaomi’s plans appear to put Apple to shame. Last September, MacRumours reported that a semi-autonomous Apple Car equipped with neural processors still might be launched in 2026 – but that there have been so many delays since the project began in 2014 and so little information provided by management that the timeline is up in the air
Apple CEO Tim Cook has said “We’re focusing on autonomous systems. It’s a core technology that we view as very important. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.” But it was in 2017 when he said that.
In any case, Xiaomi has beaten Apple to the draw, and so has Huawei, which announced its entry into the electric vehicle market in 2021. Now it is reported that Huawei plans to establish hundreds of new EV sales and service outlets in China over the next two years.
Under sanctions that have proved far from crippling, Huawei has developed its own automotive ICs and operating system. The Ascend chipset in its Mobile Data Center is capable of 352 TOPS, which enables Level 4 High Driving Automation. That means completely autonomous operation under certain conditions such as a defined route, highway driving or parking.
In the meantime, NVIDIA continues to supply more than a dozen Chinese automakers including NIO, Xiaomi, BYD, DENZA, Human Horizons, Ji Yue, Xpeng and ZEEKR (which is owned by Geely). ZEEKR was the first Chinese automaker to announce that it would adopt Drive Thor. Xpeng has reportedly asked NVIDIA to provide it with a custom designed version of Drive Thor.
At the end of November, it was reported that NVIDIA is looking to hire more than 20 specialists for its autonomous driving development team in China. That team is led by Wu Xinzhou, who joined NVIDIA last August. Before that, he was vice president of autonomous driving at Xpeng.
Insanity as State Policy
It is absolutely mind-boggling what such high-level Western puppets are made to believe. Looking at each other through the glass wall at the other’s perceived reality, it is obvious that one side is in a medically certified state of lunacy. Are we the lunatics, seeing the results of the battleground in Ukraine, or what? The Russian economy is in ruin?! It is now the largest economy in Europe, and just about to overtake Japan as the 4th largest economy in the world.
Can one even have a serious argument over what this man is saying from the perspective of Western insanity?
From the interview in Newsweek:
Words from Permanent Secretary at the Estonian Ministry of Defence Kusti Salm, in an interview with Newsweek, regarding the conflict in Ukraine:
Russia needs to walk away with the understanding that they lost, that they will lose the next war…Economically, they are ruined; we outlasted them; we kept our industry on a better footing; we have the technological advantage; we have better training, better morale; that they don’t stand a chance…
They need to walk away with the understanding that international law and the rule-based world functions, and that you cannot bend it as you wish…
This is the only way to draw a line there, so that this wouldn’t happen again. If one of those elements is not fulfilled, then in a few years, we will face another crisis, and not only from Russia, because everyone is learning…
We think that it’s three years before they will have the opportunity [to restore full military capabilities to pre-SMO levels]. Others go for five years; we have also heard seven or eight years. But the consensus is that they will regenerate, and they will come back. There is no one in intelligence, no one in defence circles who would dispute that…
For Europe, for NATO, it’s very simple – if Ukraine fails, NATO will be next…
Deterring needs a lot more effort, a lot more investment, a lot more shifts in public opinion. It’s actually a very high return on investment to keep on supporting Ukraine…120 billion [Euros] a year would be something that would do the trick – 0.25% of GDP.
It’s not a lot, it’s not a strategic topic, it’s not something that we cannot afford…With that money, you also ramp up your own industry [and] most of the money will remain in your own economies. It would be a stimulus package at a time of an incoming recession…Europe hasn’t found a way to package this…
Take what you will from Salm’s interview…
Hamas: Zero Range Tank Blowup
INSANE 0 RANGE: Look how close the tunnel is!
Probably this was covered with sand, the tank drove up and did not notice it.
The Qassam fighter then opened the tunnel, removing the earth on top, and caught the tank by surprise.
Breaking News: The Chinese develop 5nm chip, the Last US Technological Advantage
Chinese automaker Nio develops 5nm chip, claims a 4x advantage over Nvidia’s Drive Orin X processors, perhaps the most complex Chinese SoC to date
by Anton Shilov
via https://www.tomshardware.com
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Nio, a major maker of electric vehicles from China, has developed its first 5nm processor for autonomous driving. The chip comes packing 50 billion transistors, comparable to Nvidia’s A100 processor for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The company believes that its system-on-chip is more advanced than Nvidia’s Drive Orin X, which it currently uses for its self-driving systems. Interestingly, the SoC (A System on a Chip) is set to be made using a 5nm-class process technology, reports CnEVPost.
Nio’s Shenji NX9031 SoC was developed by the company itself and packs 32 general-purpose Arm cores in total (including both Big and Little cores), a neural processing unit, a graphics processor, and an LPDDR5X memory subsystem. The system-on-chip can process data from LiDAR, which differs from processors used by Tesla that rely on data from video sensors. Since the unit is designed for autonomous driving applications, it complies with the ASIL-D risk and safety requirements.
The automaker says that its own chip is four times more powerful than Nvidia’s Drive Orin X processor it uses today, though it has not mentioned any specific numbers. Meanwhile, it is evident that Nio wants to use its own silicon and no longer rely on Nvidia’s Drive Orin X.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect about the Nio Shenji NX9031 processor is that it is set to be made on a 5nm process technology, though it is unclear by whom. Unlike many of its Chinese counterparts, Nio is not blacklisted by the U.S. government, so it can order chips from TSMC, Samsung Foundry, or even Intel Foundry Services. Furthermore, since China-based SMIC doesn’t really offer automotive-grade leading-edge process technologies, we expect Nio to use the services of TSMC, Samsung, or IFS rather than its Chinese peers.
Nio’s Shenji NX9031 SoC will first be used for the company’s ET9, a premium sedan whose deliveries are set to start in Q1 2025, so the company will have enough time to test the processor and tailor software for it.
Bucovina Back to Romania?
❗️Bishop Longin suffers an induced heart attack whilst being stopped & harassed by Ukrainian troops at a checkpoint.
☦Metropolitan Longin is an ethnic Romanian Bishop from the Western Ukrainian region of Bucovina. He has refused to recognise Zelensky’s “new fake church”.
⚡️Previously, the Romanian Government, church and media have campaigned in defense of Bishop Longin and the rights of persecuted ethnic Romanians on Bucovina.
By persecuting Romanians in Bucovina Zelensky’s regime only accelerates the potential & justification for a Romanian annexation of Bucovina.
✊Go Romania! Protect your compatriots! Protect your Orthodox Bishops! Take back Northern Bucovina!
✅Putin has given you permission.
via @AussieCossack
To Drink or Not to Drink
Authored by Tony Edwards via DailySceptic.org,
Will you sign up to Dry January this year? If you do, you won’t be alone.
According to its organizers, you’ll join a staggering nine million drinkers who are expected to don the hair shirt of for a whole month.
Why would you do it?
To prove to yourself you’re not an alcoholic, to virtue signal or to improve your health ? 0ne or more of those certainly.
Dry January was first invented 10 years ago by a U.K. charity called Alcohol Concern with a single purpose: “To reset after a month or two of holiday festivities (such as) office parties, fun nights out, and boozy nights in.”
Fair enough, perhaps, after an over-indulgent Christmas. But the goalposts have since been uprooted and replanted throughout the whole year. In February 2023, the charity (now rebranded as Alcohol Change) launched another abstinence drive: “Sober Spring – your three month break from alcohol, your chance to break habits, start new ones and experience life alcohol-free.” Hmm… What with the invention of two more monthly clones, Sober October and Sober September, there soon won’t be many more days in the year for drinkers to quaff a bevy or two without looking over their shoulders to see who’s eyeing them accusingly.
It’s beginning to look like a return of the Temperance Movement by stealth. In the 19th Century, drinkers were exhorted to “sign the pledge”, undertaking to renounce alcohol for life. Today, that pledge has now morphed into an app on your phone, enabling Alcohol Change to monitor your behaviour, and remotely shame you if you succumb to the temptations of the demon drink. In the 1800s, the Temperance Movement was all about preventing domestic violence; today it’s about preventing ill-health.
I’m a medical research journalist and I first got interested in this issue after stumbling across the fact that although booze “contains” lots of calories, it does not make you put on weight. Clinical trials on human volunteers, as well as experiments on rats and mice, have demonstrated this surprising fact conclusively. The evidence is clear: if you replace food calories with alcohol calories, you will lose weight. And yet the medical authorities have repeatedly told us that drinking causes weight gain, one of many health reasons to give up drinking.
That mismatch between medical advice and medical evidence set me on the path of seeing what else ‘they’ were misleading us about. That led to a deep dive into the published medical research and my discovery that, although the health authorities were routinely bombarding us with anti-alcohol rhetoric, there are astonishing health benefits from drinking.
Seriously? Can alcohol really be good for your health?
Yes.
In addition to the weight issue, the evidence shows that sensible drinkers have less heart disease, less diabetes, less dementia and often even less cancer than teetotallers. Those, plus a myriad of other health benefits, have the predictable upshot that moderate drinkers live longer and healthier lives than non-drinkers. Those discoveries were the meat of my 2013 book on the subject: The Good News About Booze, a deliberately populist title intended to disguise the fact that the book was a serious in-depth enquiry based on literally hundreds of references to evidence published in international medical journals.
After that, I thought I had finished with alcohol as a topic, but I recently had a rethink.
In the last seven years, without any evidence to support the clampdown, the medical authorities have begun turning the screws on drinkers. Again, it all started in Britain where in 2016 the existing alcohol guidelines were slashed in half, setting the upper safe limit at two units a day. What’s two units? Less than a pint of beer, a small glass of wine, or a shot of whisky – so almost a maiden aunt’s level of intake. Nevertheless, we were warned that exceeding even that very low level would harm our health. In fact, England’s then Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, went further, trumpeting that the latest research showed that “there is no safe level of alcohol intake”. Really? How come?
It turned out she had commissioned a survey of the existing research data from Sheffield University– a questionable source, as Sheffield is a bit-part player on the international alcohol research stage. In any case, we now know, thanks to journalist Chris Snowdon’s Freedom of Information ferreting, that Sheffield initially reported quite a lot of Good News about alcohol and health. However, that displeased the CMO who ordered the university to downplay alcohol’s health benefits and ramp up its hazards. The final Sheffield report, which incidentally was never formally published in a peer-reviewed journal, then became the justification for the new British guidelines…. which were, to put it mildly, based on dubious science.
Nevertheless, the 2016 British anti-alcohol initiative soon spread around the world, with many countries also reducing their guideline levels, sometimes to ridiculously low levels. For example, Holland, despite its liberal laws about marijuana smoking, now reckons that drinking more than half a bottle of lager a day will shorten your life. And even the French, who until a decade ago had no official guidelines at all, have now decided that drinking more than the quarter litre carafe of wine which every Frenchman has with his lunch, is a health hazard.
I was puzzled. I was pretty sure the health evidence about drinking hadn’t significantly changed since my 2013 book, but I decided to check. Another deep dive into the evidence did indeed reveal some apparently worrying findings. There was a major Cambridge University research paper with a sample size of over half a million people which said it had disproved the idea that drinking had any health benefits whatsoever. An even bigger study conducted in China claimed the same. A third said that drinking wine is as dangerous as smoking.
However, on examination, none of these stacked up. The Cambridge claim was straightforward misinformation: its study had in fact found health benefits from drinking, but had buried the positive findings in the depths of a voluminous appendix. The Chinese study was of questionable value, as it’s well known that Orientals genetically respond to alcohol very differently from Europeans. As for the ‘wine is as harmful as tobacco’ study, it offered not a scrap of evidence for the claim.
By contrast, my deep dive into the research database did reveal some new, very positive information about alcohol and health – in particular, the benefits of wine. It also meant I could assess the value of the new entrants in the wine arena since my 2013 book: organic/biodynamic and alcohol-free wines. I was intrigued to discover what extra health punch they each might provide; the answers greatly surprised me.
The result is a new book The Very Good News about Wine, which came out this month. Citing over three hundred studies published from the 1970s to the present, the book is a serious challenge to the anti-alcohol propaganda increasingly dominating the media – largely driven by a nefarious alliance of the medical authorities, a small coterie of vocal anti-alcohol activists and Alcohol Change.
My hope is that people will use the book as an authoritative resource when they next hear another rent-a-pundit trotting out the old saw that wine’s supposed health benefits are “an old wives’ tale” (quote, Sally Davies). 50 years of solid medical data are a rare example of where the science is settled: it cannot easily be overturned by anything you might read in your daily newspaper, trumpeting the latest shock-horror discovery that a glass of wine will tip you into an early grave.
So will you sign up to Dry January?
Personally I won’t, as the medical evidence is overwhelming that drinking a few glasses of wine with an evening meal is good for one’s health. You may have different motives, of which proving to yourself you’re not an alcoholic seems superficially attractive. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to give up brushing your teeth for a month, or stop your daily exercise routines – two addictions you should embrace, as they’re obviously health-promoting. In principle, moderate wine drinking is no different.
Of course, it’s ‘your body, your choice’ whether you take the January pledge or not. However, Alcohol Change probably won’t give a toss one way or the other. The organisation’s latest accounts show that their dry months marketing ploys have already netted them over £12 million in assets.
Temperance propaganda is clearly Very Good News for them too.
The Very Good News About Wine by Tony Edwards is available on Amazon priced £10.99.
Today Was a Very Difficult Day for Israel
Hezbollah published a video captioned with a verse from the Quran:
They say, “If so, that will be a harmful homecoming.”
(Quran: 79:12)
Israeli journalist: Today was a very difficult day for “Israel”; In addition to heavy casualties in Gaza, 6 other soldiers were also seriously injured by Hezbollah attacks.
@FotrosResistance