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Welcome! I am musician & producer: Simon Grant. The purpose of this site is to highlight my work in the music and film industry and share some of my experiences and lessons learned. If you have questions or comments about the information here, or the site itself, feel free to send me a quick note via the “Contact” page.

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  • UK Tells Ukraine To Focus On Targeting Crimea
    by Tyler Durden on March 19, 2024 at 7:30 AM

    UK Tells Ukraine To Focus On Targeting Crimea Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, British military officials advised that Ukraine should focus on defense in its ground fight against Russia in the east while focusing on targeted strikes against Crimea and Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, The Sunday Times reported. The advice was given when British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps and UK Army Chief Antony Radakin visited Ukraine last week. The British officials said rather than attacking, Ukrainian forces should hold the line and pull back to more favorable ground if necessary. UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps. Image: UK Ministry of Defence “This will allow the Ukrainians to focus their efforts on the Black Sea and Crimea, where their forces, with the help of Western long-range missiles, have landed significant blows over the past six months,” the report said. A recording of a conversation between German military officers that was recently published by Russian media revealed that the UK has soldiers “on the ground” in Ukraine helping Ukrainian forces use Storm Shadow missiles, which have a range of 155 miles, making them capable of hitting targets throughout Crimea. Attacks on Crimea have always been considered a red line for Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the risk of escalation hasn’t stopped Ukraine’s Western backers from assisting with such strikes, as Storm Shadows have been reported to be used in multiple Ukrainian attacks on Crimea. The UK has also helped Ukraine strike Russian ships in the Black Sea. Another recent report from the Times credited Radakin with helping “the Ukrainians with the strategy to destroy Russian ships and open up the Black Sea.” Ukrainian attacks on Crimea and territory inside the Russian mainland have increased since it’s become clear Ukraine has no chance of winning on the battlefield. Poland’s foreign minister earlier this month: NATO troops are already in Ukraine. NATO TROOPS ARE IN UKRAINE – POLISH FM pic.twitter.com/7Q0U7cKhlK — The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) March 10, 2024 Since Russia captured the strategic Donetsk city of Avdiivka last month, Russian forces have been making steady gains in the east, and Ukraine is suffering from serious manpower and weapons shortages. Tyler Durden Tue, 03/19/2024 – 03:30

  • These Will Be The Jobs Most Impacted By AI
    by Tyler Durden on March 19, 2024 at 6:45 AM

    These Will Be The Jobs Most Impacted By AI Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools haven’t been around for very long, but they’re expected to have far-reaching impacts on the way people do their jobs. With this in mind, researchers have already begun studying the potential impacts of this transformative technology. In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu visualized the results of a World Economic Forum report, which estimated how different job departments will be exposed to AI disruption. Data and Methodology To identify the job departments most impacted by AI, researchers assessed over 19,000 occupational tasks (e.g. reading documents) to determine if they relied on language. If a task was deemed language-based, it was then determined how much human involvement was needed to complete that task. With this analysis, researchers were then able to estimate how AI would impact different occupational groups. In our graphic, large impact refers to tasks that will be fully automated or significantly altered by AI technologies. Small impact refers to tasks that have a lesser potential for disruption. Where AI will make the biggest impact Jobs in information technology (IT) and finance have the highest share of tasks expected to be largely impacted by AI. Within IT, tasks that are expected to be automated include software quality assurance and customer support. On the finance side, researchers believe that AI could be significantly useful for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing. Still interested in AI? Check out this graphic which ranked the most commonly used AI tools in 2023. Tyler Durden Tue, 03/19/2024 – 02:45

  • Anti-Semitism As The Harbinger Of Global Chaos
    by Tyler Durden on March 19, 2024 at 6:00 AM

    Anti-Semitism As The Harbinger Of Global Chaos Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness, On the off chance you hadn’t noticed, the world appears to be at an especially precarious moment presently. Obviously, war continues to rage in Ukraine and Gaza, with no end in sight to either conflict. Great Britain and Japan are currently in recession. Canada’s economy is an absolute disaster, with almost no hope of near-term recovery. Much of continental Europe and China are struggling economically, if not officially contracting. Some experts believe that the global economy more generally is sliding, slowly but surely, into recession. The only economic bright spot in the world is the United States, and even here we have our problems with consumer spending and sentiment, massive credit concerns, and inarguably sticky inflation. Meanwhile, China is investing in and winning friends, and influencing people in the Global South. U.S.-backed Kurdish leaders are warning that ISIS is resurgent in Syria and Iraq. The Marine general in charge of U.S. Africa Command is warning of Russia’s increasing influence on that continent. Sudan remains mired in civil war. Nigeria is plagued by Islamist terrorism and mass kidnappings. Mexico is in the midst of a full-blown war with the drug cartels, who continue to grow bolder and more militarily sophisticated. Everywhere one looks, chaos reigns—or, at the very least, bubbles just below the surface. Perhaps most telling among the signs of disarray is the unnerving rise of antisemitism in the United States, Europe, and throughout the world. Antisemitism, in general, has been intensifying, slowly but surely, over the last decade or so. Over the last few months, however, it has emerged fully into the open, undaunted and unembarrassed. What was once considered shameful and disconcerting is now warmly welcomed as a “rational” response to American foreign policy, Israeli war practices, “colonialism,” and “white privilege.” All of this is troubling, to put it mildly, both in and of itself and as a harbinger of greater and more deadly global unrest. Hatred of and anger toward Jews is not the same as other forms of bigotry.   In many ways, the history of Western anti-Jewish hatred mirrors the history of Western political chaos and collapse.  Or, to put it another way, historically, Jews are not only the perennial scapegoats during periods of social upheaval and displacement, but resurgent anti-Semitism serves as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the rise of revolutionary movements. In his classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the British historian Norman Cohn argues that the Jewish diaspora generally fit comfortably, if tentatively into European society for most of the first thousand years or so A.D., and only became a hated and perpetually persecuted minority with the rise of utopian Millenarianism that accompanied and then outlived the Crusades.  Beginning then and continuing for the next nearly a thousand years, Europeans came to associate Jews with the antichrist and thus to associate hatred and persecution of Jews with preparing the battlespace for the Second Coming.  Many historians, including Hannah Arendt, believed that the anti-Semitism that was such an integral part of the West’s 20th-century collapse into totalitarianism was relatively new and, in any case, distinct from medieval anti-Semitism.  Cohn’s history suggests otherwise, connecting the religious eschatology of medieval Europe to the quasi-religious eschatology of post-Enlightenment Europe, thereby connecting the persistence of Western anti-Semitism as well. Cohn tells us that millenarian moments and the millenarian movements that capitalize on those moments all share a common group of characteristics. They all appear under certain social and economic conditions. They all appeal to a certain segment of the population at large, who then present themselves as economic, spiritual, and political leaders. They all utilize scapegoats, meaning that they all identify a different, usually much smaller segment of the population on whom they can blame all the world’s ills and then set about to cure those ills through the elimination of the scapegoat. And more often than not, that scapegoat tends to be Jewish. In the conclusion to the second edition of Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn notes that the millenarian fervor of the middle ages may have changed, but it never really died, and it maintained its common characteristics even as it became secular or “quasi-religious.” He wrote: The story told in Pursuit of the Millennium ended some four centuries ago but is not without relevance to our own times. [I have] shown in another work [Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion] how closely the Nazi phantasy of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy of destruction is related to the phantasies that inspired Emico of Leningrad and the Master of Hungary; and how mass disorientation and insecurity have fostered the demonization of the Jew in this as in much earlier centuries. The parallels and indeed the continuity are incontestable. The parallels between the rise of Nazism and the current global unrest and demonization of the Jewish people are also largely incontestable. The election that brought Hitler to power didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the midst of global chaos, namely the Great Depression. It also followed the decadence and distortion of the Weimer Era. As the New York Fed has shown, even a global pandemic—the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak—contributed to the sense of discomfort and disconnect among the German population, prompting increased support for Hitler and his Nazis. The present global chaos doesn’t have to end the same way the chaos of a century ago did. It doesn’t have to result in the ascension of millenarian ideologies and their totalitarian defenders. History has shown that extremism can be short-circuited and radical ideologies undone. The first step in doing so, however, must be to bring an end to the rationalization of the persecution of the world’s Jews. The second step is to end the persecution itself. Antisemitism is ugly and shameful, and it must be treated as such. For their sake and ours. Tyler Durden Tue, 03/19/2024 – 02:00

  • Cereal For The Peasants? How The Elites Use “Skimpflation” To Control Our Eating Habits
    by Tyler Durden on March 19, 2024 at 4:00 AM

    Cereal For The Peasants? How The Elites Use “Skimpflation” To Control Our Eating Habits Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us People who have been reading my analysis for a long time are well aware of my expectations on the eventual outcome of the US economic debacle: A stagflationary crisis followed by a massive crash similar to the Great Depression (or worse). I based this prediction on a number of circumstances, but primarily I went back to the history of currency devaluations and central bank policy. These kinds of things have happened before and they tend to follow a pattern that is visible today. Specifically, I studied the 1971-1981 stagflation crisis for reference and I found some startling similarities. It was one of the worst economic declines in American history next to the depression, and it’s an event that almost no one talks about. A lot of people (specifically Gen Z) believe that our current era is the worst financial era of all time and that their generation has been shafted by previous generations. This is inaccurate; the stagflation disaster of the 1970s was far worse. That said, it shows us where our country is eventually headed and it’s not looking good. What is a manageable economic crunch today has the potential to become a calamity tomorrow. One issue that I’m fascinated by that usually isn’t mentioned in mainstream economic discussion is quality degradation – The way in which products, services, construction, manufacturing, style and availability tend to break down when inflation suddenly spikes. This process is known as “skimpflation” and it was rampant in the 1970s and early 1980s. Most Americans today think of the 70s as a happy-go-lucky era of disco, bell bottoms and psychedelics, but in reality it was economically dismal. Examining real life images and footage from the decade compared to the 1960s, there was a stark shift in the quality of life. From the quality of cars, to the quality of clothes, to the quality of housing. Some US cities (like New York or Philadelphia) looked like warzones complete with rubble strewn slums. After sky-high inflation for several years causes a doubling and tripling of retail prices along with growing unemployment rates, the environment starts to feel real ugly. Skimpflation And The Food Pyramid Agenda Another aspect of life that takes a hit is the quality of diet and the ability of families to feed themselves. Most people are familiar with the concept of “shrinkflation” – The habit of companies to shrink portion sizes while keeping their packaging and prices the same in order to offset inflation in production costs without consumers noticing. However, skimpflation is another way in which companies will attempt to avoid raising prices on the shelf, and that’s by lowering the quality of ingredients, along with encouraging the public to eat less nutritious (and less expensive to produce) foods. The 1970s was the decade that gave birth to the processed food market and the microwave cuisine, at least on a wider scale. This was the decade when American food truly took a nose dive. The ease of processed foods was offset by the poor nutritional content. They were cheaper, but the quality sucked and we are still living with the repercussions of that trend today. There were, of course, counter-culture movements working against the adoption of processed foods, including “know your farmer” type organizations and organic movements. But as we are all well aware, the cheap processed foods eventually won. Society embraced the market because they had to. Prices were so high that it was the only way they could feed their families everyday. Interestingly, the Food Pyramid that we were all taught about as children in public schools was introduced to the western world in 1972. The pyramid was actually first used by the Swedish government in direct response to inflation and was designed to encourage the populace to eat cheaper food-stuffs (primarily cereals, dairy products, pastas and carbs). Governments have been using subsidies to promote the consumption of low cost and low quality foods ever since. I’m recounting these trends from the 1970s because we are seeing a very similar agenda today, though it is far more insidious in nature. Economic decline is a favorite tool for the establishment to control the behavior of populations, including dietary habits. Dollar Losing Buying Power? Switch To Lab Grown Meat And Bugs… It’s no coincidence, for example, that there has been a massive push by government agencies and corporations to acclimate the public to the idea of fake lab-grown meat products. For now, fake meats are more expensive than real meats so there’s no incentive for the public to consume them, but if inflation continues to drive prices higher eventually real steak will cost far more than artificial steak and people may be convinced that the fake stuff is a viable alternative. Then there’s the notion of western consumers eating bugs for protein instead of beef or chicken or pork. Beyond the claims that this will somehow “save the climate” from global warming (which is a complete falsehood backed by zero concrete evidence), the powers-that-be also suggest that bugs will be far more affordable than hamburgers in the near future. Bugs are traditionally a starvation food. They are only a staple in countries where famine is common or where governments aggressively restrict normal agriculture. Bug protein also has a habit of giving people parasites. The only way westerners could be convinced to eat bugs as a part of their regular diet is if inflation crushes the regular meat market. Let The Peasants Eat Cereal… Another form of skimpflation is the shift even further to the bottom of the food pyramid. Recently, Kellogg’s CEO Gary Pilnick suggested in an interview with CNBC that Americans will eventually start ‘eating cereal for dinner’ because the cost is so much cheaper per portion. In other words, cheap processed carbs will become a mainstay of the American diet because a lot of people won’t be able to afford anything else. Pilnick brags that Kellogg’s is well placed for this coming change in the food market… The marketing for this idea is already well underway. Various companies are promoting an end to traditional healthy homemade dinner habits and a switch to unconventional and cheaper processed foods. The thrust of the Kellogg’s campaign relies on poverty. Meaning, they are banking on the expectation that Americans will be poorer in the near term and that this condition will continue for years to come. Just as we saw during the 1970s stagflation crisis, there is a rush to cut quality in all goods and services, but food is a major target. Today, it’s about convincing the market to consume more carbs and processed foods and less protein.  Tomorrow, it will be about abandoning established agriculture altogether and having all our food manufactured in labs.   The elites seem to be planning for a significant financial crisis beyond what we have already dealt with and this is evident in their efforts to sell the reconstruction of our dietary habits based on poverty rather than prosperity. Tyler Durden Tue, 03/19/2024 – 00:00

  • Bank Of Japan (Finally) Kills The World’s Last Negative Interest Rate, Yen Weakens
    by Tyler Durden on March 19, 2024 at 3:45 AM

    Bank Of Japan (Finally) Kills The World’s Last Negative Interest Rate, Yen Weakens As has been thoroughly warned, straw-manned, leaked, and hinted at over the past few weeks (here, here, and here for example), The Bank of Japan hiked interest rates tonight for the first time since 2007. This move ends the world’s last negative interest rate policy. The vote, at 7-2 to scrap the negative interest rate (setting the policy rate in range between 0% to 0.1%), was closer than many expected with policy board members Nakamura and Noguchi dissented. Source: Bloomberg Additionally, the bank has abandoned its yield curve control policy. The BOJ will continue to purchase JGBs with “broadly the same amount as before,” but buying of ETFs and J-REITs has apparently been scrapped (while laying out a plan to scrap corporate debt and commercial paper buying). Source: BoJ In terms of forward guidance, Bloomberg notes that the bank isn’t offering much. It says it will continue to pay attention to developments in financial and FX markets, and their impact on Japan’s economic activity and prices. But the previous pledge to “not hesitate to take additional easing measures if necessary” has been removed. This was all in line with what had leaked out in domestic media reports over the past week but USDJPY still rose on the news (yen weakness)… The BOJ actually downgraded its assessment of consumer spending and production, so there’s still a sense of caution. The BoJ’s move comes as inflation has gradually returned to the nation with the most immediate catalyst being last week, when Japan’s largest union announced its biggest annual wage hike in three decades. Despite the runway having been heavily foamed ahead of tonight’s decision, Veteran market commentator John Authers warns of significant implications for the rest of the world: “Waiting over the years for Japan to beat deflation and raise rates has been rather like hoping for Lucy to let Charlie Brown kick the football, but if the BOJ is briefing the press like this, it must be a very real possibility,” he writes. “There are implications for carry traders, and for Japan’s giant neighbor, China.” Finally, even with the decision to pull the trigger, we note that the debate over whether the BOJ has met the supposedly main condition for raising rates – stable 2% inflation – is hardly over. As Bloomberg reports, inflation may slow as the impact of imports-driven price gains wears off, meaning that if officials go ahead and change policy, they could end up facing criticism in the future that they’ve passed a premature judgement on prices, former BOJ board member Takahide Kiuchi recently wrote. “And that in turn could become an obstacle to smooth policy normalization,” he said. Tyler Durden Mon, 03/18/2024 – 23:45