Looking Backwards …
LB #1
College Fix writes that the mission statement has changed at the United States Military Academy at West Point. You will remember on December 10, 2022 we wrote extensively on this very site with high admiration for the academy and the ability to turn out fine human beings as leaders for our nation. We discussed the honor code in detail and how they were taught to believe in different things than we civilians. Here are the new changes…” The previous mission statement read “To educate, train and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the nation as an officer in the United States Army.”
The new one reads “To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army Values and ready for a lifetime of professional excellence and service to the Army and Nation.
Regarding the change, Newsmax.com reports West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland said the new statement (which took a year and a half to create) “binds the Academy to the Army.”
I have several thoughts on this, Gilland goes on to say that duty, honor, and country is foundational and defines who we are, but evidently not enough to be included in your mission statement Steve, oh wait it is, but now it is being taken out. The duty, honor, and country wording come from General Douglas MacArthur’s speech given to the school in 1962. Next, it took one and a half years to create? You already had a mission statement. I have seen lots of polls surrounding shrinkflation, the state of the economy, Joe Biden’s age, Don Trump’s trials, but I must have missed the wide and angry call to action for a change in the US Military Academy’s mission statement. We are fighting a proxy war in Europe, another proxy war in the Middle East, and trying to keep China out of Taiwan, and this is what we are concerned with for a year and a half.
Several people are saying this is what happens when a woman is in charge of men things. The Secretary of the Army is Christine Wormuth, appointed by Biden, and I am not going to further that misogynistic line of thinking, but instead offer a more nuanced version. She is a career civil servant and a government bureaucrat. This is why our military is weaker than it has ever been. Goat herders with missiles control the Red Sea passage, our military got run out of Afghanistan, and we are spending one and a half years to remove duty, honor, and country from our hallowed institution’s mission statement. The words of one of the greatest soldiers this country has ever produced are being white washed away by the liberal leanings of a career civil servant. Those future leaders at West Point can’t publicly say they are embarrassed, so let me do it for them.
LB#2
It seems we have a quickly narrowing EV market as it appears that EV auto manufacturer Fisker is making preparations to file bankruptcy. Sean McLain and Soma Biswas write for the Wall Street Journal, “Fisker last month issued a so-called going-concern warning that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business. The company said it was negotiating to raise additional cash from investors and looking for a new manufacturing partner in the U.S. Fisker and FTI Consulting declined to comment, while Davis Polk didn’t immediately respond. Shares of Fisker fell more than 46% in after-hours trading Wednesday after The Wall Street Journal reported the company’s hiring of the restructuring firms.” This gained most of its capital from a SPAC, the special purpose acquisition company, a high-flying financial neutron bomb of the COVID era money pumping. Money isn’t free, and profits must be made. Fisker can’t raise any more money so they will go away. They will be among the thousands of companies that are currently looking at the same issue. We need to raise more money to continue to be able to lose money. What a silly ass concept. Fisker was engaged in the fake it until you make it and it looks like they ran out of runway.
LB#3-
Speaking of running out of runway, it was a rough week for Boeing. The accidents are happening fast and furious which is not what I want from my aircraft. Kaite Mather writes for MSN, that in addition to what we discussed a few weeks ago, the door falling off a plane, in the past few weeks, a tire fell off an airplane in San Francisco just after takeoff, a flight took a nosedive in New Zealand causing 50 injuries, a flight in Australia was forced to turn around due to maintenance issues, and a flight in Houston skidded off the runway, a flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles due to a flat tire, and in Oregon a flight was found to be missing a panel upon post flight investigation. This is all coming on the heels of fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. Is there a safety issue at Boeing? How do I say this most effectively, well yeah! They have a quality control problem, and also this week we discover the death of John Barnett. He worked for Boeing for 30 years, the last 7 as a quality control manager. From Theo Leggett of the BBC, “In 2019, Mr. Barnett told the BBC that under-pressure workers had been deliberately fitting sub-standard parts to aircraft on the production line. He later told the BBC that workers had failed to follow procedures intended to track components through the factory, allowing defective components to go missing.He said in some cases, sub-standard parts had even been removed from scrap bins and fitted to planes that were being built to prevent delays on the production line. Mr. Barnett said he had alerted managers to his concerns, but no action had been taken. Boeing denied his assertions. However, a 2017 review by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), did uphold some of Mr. Barnett’s concerns. It established that the location of at least 53 “non-conforming” parts in the factory was unknown, and that they were considered lost. Boeing was ordered to take remedial action… After retiring, he embarked on a long-running legal action against the company. He accused it of denigrating his character and hampering his career because of the issues he pointed out – charges rejected by Boeing. At the time of his death, Mr. Barnett had been in Charleston for legal interviews linked to that case. Last week, he gave a formal deposition in which he was questioned by Boeing’s lawyers, before being cross-examined by his own counsel. He had been due to undergo further questioning on Saturday. When he did not appear, enquiries were made at his hotel. He was subsequently found dead in his truck in the hotel car park.” I will let you draw your own conclusions, but a quick social media search shows his friends saying, that he had told them recently if he died it would not be a suicide. When government contracts and stock prices take precedence over human lives all I can say is safe travels.
Looking Forwards…
LF#1
Yahoo news’ Bill McCarthy and Suni Chopra write “Hundreds of AI-powered sites mimicking news outlets have cropped up in recent months, fueling an explosion of false narratives — about everything from war to politicians –- that researchers say is stoking alarm in a year of high-stake elections around the world.
“Israeli Prime Minister’s psychiatrist commits suicide,” still tops the list of “popular articles” highlighted on Global Village Space, a Pakistani digital outlet, after it made an online splash in November with baseless claims about a suicide note blaming Netanyahu.
A “substantial portion” of the site’s content, including this article, appears to be scraped from mainstream sources using AI tools, according to an analysis by NewsGuard, a US-based research organization that tracks misinformation.”
The website’s response was to claim it was just satire. There are thousands of new sites that look real, appear real, and offer information that is fake, false, or even just made up. We have discussed AI hallucinations before. The software just makes stuff up. This is a threat and concerning on an informational level, but if people don’t trust AI, which is what I have been harping on, then it creates a financial issue.
We have discussed Microsoft’s autopilot not being embraced by the business community and not worth the price. This from an article in ZeroHedge referencing a post made in the tech blog The Information “In the past year, major technology firms have championed generative artificial intelligence as the next big thing, boosting the stock market to new highs. But behind the scenes, representatives of major cloud providers and other firms that sell the technology are tempering expectations with their salespeople, saying the hype about the technology has gotten ahead of what it can actually do for customers at a reasonable price.
Several executives, product managers and salespeople at the major cloud providers, such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google, also privately said most of their customers are being cautious or “deliberate” about increasing spending on new AI services, given the high price of running the software, its shortcomings in terms of accuracy and the difficulty of determining how much value they’ll get out of it. If The Information’s reporting is correct, then it’s more supportive evidence the AI hype bubble is fading.”
If these companies can’t monetize AI quickly, they can not continue to buy these chips and invest this much cap ex into these projects. This is 30% of the stock market, the magnificent 6 stocks, Tesla fell out of what was a magnificent 7, and this boom in the last 11 months has been driven by AI. Nvidia stock was up 5% last Friday and then did a huge turnaround to be down 5%. This week it continued to struggle against gravity on its parabolic path to the moon. If Nvidia starts getting cancelled orders, if companies can’t continue to order at this pace, we will see their stock fall and take the stock market with it. The magnificent 7 could be down to 1. The other stocks are feeding off of it, but eventually companies have to make a profit off of this new technology, and I am yet to see that happen.
LF#2
Automobile insurance rates are up 20% year over year, which is surprising many drivers that didn’t have a claim in the past year, like yours truly. DNYUZ.com has a great example from the New York Times “Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.
So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.
LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car. On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.” How are they getting this information you ask, the internet enabled navigation, roadside assistance, and car apps that are connected to your vehicle. In the colossal documents that you now have to sign as part of purchase agreements etc, the language is hidden in there or sometimes displayed as a third party which ends up being a tracking device mechanism which creates data which they can sell and enrich themselves more at the expense of your sudden acceleration habits. It is called stealth enrollment. I’m sure glad we bailed out this particular automaker, GM, so it could turn around and spy on its customers, the taxpayers. If the feature is turned on, then you are on the grid and your every braking and accelerating action are under the close eye of big brother. Enjoy the new cars as I am currently shopping for a 1979 CJ7 jeep with an AM radio.
LF#3
Woke cities are still learning hard lessons across the country, and we have a new candidate for stupidest city policy. Steve Watson writes for Modernity News, “WPXI Channel 11 out of Pittsburgh reports that police will no longer be responding to calls that are not deemed to be “in-progress emergencies,” meaning theft, harassment, criminal mischief, and burglary alarms will essentially be ignored.
Such calls will Instead be redirected to an answer machine, according to the report which also notes that from 3 am to 7 am, the city’s six police stations will operate without desk officers present.
Only around 20 officers will be available for overnight shifts to cover the entire city, the report further notes, stating that the decision has been taken due to “understaffing.” 20 officers are going to police the entire city overnight. Take your tax dollars to this city at your peril people. Arrests have dropped by two thirds, and traffic stops have dropped by 75%. The article goes on to discuss how minor traffic offenses have been deprioritized to make them more equitable and fairer. It looks like we need to grab our popcorn and watch Pittsburgh learn what San Francisco is now trying to undo. Your city is about to turn to shit. Well, it actually sounds like it has been headed that way for some time now.
I guess they can continue to call it the steal city, steal.
Pittsburgh nights at your peril
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
The Dow Jones finished trading at ………38,714.
The 10-year Treasury bond is at …4.308%
The price of Brent Crude is … a new year to date high $ 85.34 per barrel.
The price of gold is … at 2,159/oz.
The price of silver is … a new year to date high $25.40/oz.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.