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It is mainly about the recording.
Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: AUDIOPHILE, recording | Leave a Comment »
War in space: U.S. officials debating rules for a conflict in orbit
Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2023
The new approach has “balanced that tension very well between let’s make sure we have what we need for national security access to space and, as best we can, help to foster and take advantage of growth in the commercial market,” Thompson said.
The one thing we can count on is a universe size opportunity for the right people to pocket your taxes while making no one but themselves safer.
https://news.yahoo.com/war-space-u-officials-debating-120515128.html
Christian Davenport, The Washington Post
Ukraine’s use of commercial satellites to help repel the Russian invasion has bolstered the U.S. Space Force’s interest in exploiting the capabilities of the private sector to develop new technologies for fighting a war in space.
But the possible reliance on private companies, and the revolution in technology that has made satellites smaller and more powerful, is forcing the Defense Department to wrestle with difficult questions about what to do if those privately owned satellites are targeted by an adversary.
White House and Pentagon officials have been trying to determine what the policy should be since a top Russian official said in October that Russia could target the growing fleet of commercial satellites if they are used to help Ukraine.
Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s department for nonproliferation and arms, called the growth of privately operated satellites “an extremely dangerous trend that goes beyond the harmless use of outer-space technologies and has become apparent during the latest developments in Ukraine.”
He warned that “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.”
In response, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated earlier comments from her counterpart at the Pentagon that “any attack on U.S. infrastructure will be met with a response, as you’ve heard from my colleague, in a time and manner of our choosing.”
But what that response will be is unknown, as officials from a number of agencies try to lay out a policy framework on how to react if a commercial company is targeted.
In a recent interview, Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force’s vice chief of operations, said that while expanding the partnership with the commercial space industry is one of his top priorities, it has also led to a host of unanswered questions.
“The Ukraine conflict has brought it to the forefront,” he said. “First, commercial companies are thinking very clearly and carefully about, can we be involved? Should we be involved? What are the implications of being involved? … And on our side, it’s exactly the same thing. Should we depend on commercial services? Where can we depend on commercial services?”
The Pentagon has long relied on the private sector, he said. But the proliferation of small satellites has created a more resilient system that has provided real-time imagery of the Ukraine battlefield from space, allowing nations to track troop movements, assess damage and share intelligence. Communication systems, such as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, has kept the internet up and running at a time when Ukraine’s infrastructure has been decimated.
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Cerrik
Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2023
Enter the assassins…
https://open.substack.com/pub/danielmcadams/p/cerrik?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android
This is the outskirts of Cerrik, in south-central Albania. 1996. In the middle of the US-instigated civil war in Albania.
(I was living in Hungary at the time).
The day before this photograph was taken, anti-communist Albanian President Sali Berisha’s security team was ambushed in Cerrik and most (I think nine or 12) of them were assassinated from the rooftops of the communist-era panel houses. It was a bloody massacre.
We in the British Helsinki Group (perhaps stupidly) traveled to the scene of the crime the next day to report on what really happened. The tension was so unbelievably high in that small village, which had been known as a very strongly pro-communist outpost. We read the press reports from the Albanian pro-government media but the mainstream US media told us it was all a lie. No one was killed. It was just propaganda from Berisha’s thugs.
So we hired a taxi in the middle of the civil war to take us to the place we heard a horrific massacre had occurred at the hands of the remnants of the pro-Hoxha forces in Albania. Communism was not dead.
Thirty seconds after the above photograph was taken, which depicts Hoxha the leader of the Albanian Communist Party, signifying their triumph over the forces of the anti-communist President Berisha, the killers of the President’s security team deployed wildly from dense trees on each side of the road with AK-47s in our faces. Ready for more trophies.
“Out of the car!”
They wanted to kill us.
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Pentagon Developing Deepfakes to Deceive the Public – The New American
Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2023
So, the government of the United States, while decrying “fake news,” was itself creating fake news to foist on people turning to Twitter for unfiltered news.
Of particular interest on the list is a section called “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” interpreted by the The Intercept as “a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.” Here’s how The Intercept described the contents of that disturbing part of the procurement request:
https://thenewamerican.com/pentagon-developing-deepfakes-to-deceive-the-public/
United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is “gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos,” according to contracts with the federal government reviewed by The Intercept.
In what many would attribute to the likely behavior of rogue regimes targeting the United States, the activities that SOCOM is carrying on overseas include “hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda,” the Intercept article reports.
The information revealed in the report is taken from a procurement document published by the Department of Defense, a sort of wish list of technological tools the Pentagon is looking to secretly deploy throughout the world.
Of particular interest on the list is a section called “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” interpreted by the The Intercept as “a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.” Here’s how The Intercept described the contents of that disturbing part of the procurement request:
The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”
While you’d be surprised to see SOCOM — an organization comprised of elite military units renowned for their ability to work secretly and under the cover of darkness — allowing its disinformation designs to be obtained and publicized by The Intercept, the Pentagon has been hiding it in plain sight for years now.
In December, The Intercept revealed some very troubling tactics used by SOCOM to manipulate social media:
SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.
So, the government of the United States, while decrying “fake news,” was itself creating fake news to foist on people turning to Twitter for unfiltered news.
Just so it’s clear and there’s no misplaced worry that the document is somehow less sinister than The Intercept’s depiction of it, here’s one a paragraph from the “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO)” section that should remove all doubt about the purpose for the procurement. MISO will seek for technologies to:
influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels … seeking a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.
And these few paragraphs from the document are no less unnerving:
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Deepfakes, internet propaganda, MISO, Pentagon, SOCOM | Leave a Comment »
In FBI Case, the First Amendment Takes Another Bizarre Hit
Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2023
The same Democratic minority staff that trashed the First Amendment in last week’s Twitter Files hearings put something amazing in writing in a parallel case
The style of the new anti-speech Democrat is clear: define all government critics as lacking standing to criticize, impugn their prior opinions and associations, imply that all their beliefs are conspiracy theory, define their lack of faith in the FBI’s judgment as treasonous, and declare their motivation to be financial. Lastly, when they invoke common constitutional rights, make a note that their activities exist in an uncovered carve-out. This is the playbook, and we all better get used to it.
Racket readers may recall that in November, shortly before the Twitter Files began, I ran an interview with Steve Friend, a onetime FBI agent who lost his career after blowing the whistle on the Bureau.
Friend refused to participate in a bureaucratic scheme to put local agents across the country in charge of J6 cases that were really being run out of the Washington office, a plan that made one Washington-based case look like a national map full of domestic terror cases popping up everywhere. He also objected to heavy-handed tactics like the use of S.W.A.T. teams for a suspect communicating voluntarily through an attorney, and the questioning of people in connection with J6 in cases where the state had little to no evidence. From that story:
Friend didn’t think the interview was warranted, and worried the feds showing up at someone’s door without cause “might do more harm than good” in a part of the country where government was unpopular already. He sucked it up and did the “knock and talk” anyway.
“I said, ‘Hey, were you at the Capitol?’” Friend recalls. “And he said, ‘No, that was my son’s funeral that day. I wasn’t there.’”
He shakes his head. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, I can’t believe I just made this guy relive that. And for what? Even if he’d admitted to being there, if he said, ‘I was there, I don’t wanna talk about it,’ I couldn’t even charge that.”
But even though Friend had reservations about some of the cases, his main concern was procedural — that by playing bureaucratic games with who was running these investigations, and putting locals nominally in charge of cases where they were really in supporting roles, they put all of the court cases in jeopardy. “A lot of these guys are bad dudes, and they should go to jail,” he said, about the Oath Keepers. But if “we didn’t follow our rules… we set ourselves up to get crushed at trial,” adding, “I want to win.”
A little over a week ago, the same Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government that organized the Twitter Files hearings privately heard testimony from Steve and two other FBI whistleblowers. The Democratic Party response to Steve and his colleagues was eerily similar to tactics pulled out against myself and Mike Shellenberger:
— Mike and I were not real journalists, they said, but “so-called journalists.” Steve and his fellow agents “are not, in fact, whistleblowers,” according to the minority report, and “do not meet the definition of a whistle-blower,” according to the New York Times.
— I was told by Florida’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz that “being a Republican witness certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity”; Democratic Party sources told the Times that Steve and fellow agents Garret O’Boyle and George Hill “have engaged in partisan conduct that calls into question their credibility”;
— Democratic questioners in our case asked us about our opinions on Russian interference, and one said openly that failing to agree with them on that issue disqualified us from the “nuanced convo”; Steve, George, and Garrett were repeatedly quizzed about their attitudes toward various right-wing movements, suggesting that their opinions about these matters made them ineligible to offer procedural complaints. Friend, for instance, was asked about statements by “Three Percenters”:
Q: (Quoting from flyer) “Remember this, it comes straight from our Declaration of Independence, that whenever any form ofgovernment becomes destructive, it is the right and duty of the people to alter or abolish it. That is why you are here. For massive change to occurmassive action must be taken. Patriots, we are the lifeblood of this great nation, and it’s time we prove that.” Do you have an opinion about this statement?
Friend: It seems like First Amendment-protected activity.
— Michael and I were repeatedly quizzed about money we may have made during the Twitter Files period, with Wasserman-Schultz going so far as to harangue my about my Twitter followers tripling and to ask us if we were paid for our testimony; Committee Democrats accused Friend of having “profited, and is profiting, from making his allegations about the FBI public”;
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The Drums Of War With China Are Beating Much Louder Now
Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023
One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
Comments from both Washington and Beijing have suddenly become much more pointed and aggressive in recent days, with talk about hot war now being discussed as not just a real possibility but in many cases as a probability. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant recent developments.
Beijing comments on US encirclement
The Chinese government has finally broken from its usual restrained commentary on the way the empire has been aggressively encircling the PRC with war machinery in ways that Washington would never permit itself to be encircled and waging economic warfare that it itself would never tolerate.
“Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” President Xi Jinping said in a speech last week.
China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang followed up on Xi’s comments the next day with a warning of “conflict and confrontation” should US aggressions and encirclement continue.
“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” he said, adding, “Who will bear the catastrophic consequences? Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity.”
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
To my knowledge this is an unprecedented statement by Xi: “Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.” wsj.comChina’s Xi Jinping Takes Rare Direct Aim at U.S. in SpeechChinese leader Xi Jinping blamed what he termed a U.S.-led campaign to contain China for worsening the troubles and global uncertainties that his country has faced over the past five years.12:15 AM ∙ Mar 7, 20236,567Likes1,810Retweets
One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
These comments come not long after PRC Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning issued a stern warning to the US to “stop walking on the edge, stop using the salami tactics, stop pushing the envelope, and stop sowing confusion and trying to mislead the world on Taiwan,” calling the Taiwan issue “the first red line that must not be crossed” in US-China relations. As we’ve discussed previously, these increasingly frequent “red line” warnings are very similar to the ones that were being issued with greater and greater urgency by Moscow before US brinkmanship provoked the invasion of Ukraine.
Committing to war with China over Taiwan
The official head of the US intelligence cartel made some comments before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday which appear to have put the final nail in the coffin of the question of Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” on whether the US would go to war with China in defense of Taiwan.
Asked by Congressman Chris Stewart about President Biden’s increasingly explicit assertions that the US would go to war with China over Taiwan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines asserted that, despite the White House’s repeated walk-backs of those claims, it is clear to China that this is in fact Washington’s actual policy on the Taiwan question.
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Silly Celebrity Lawsuits
Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023
Pretty much anyone selling anything at all can be reached by this not unreasonable interpretation.
What do Madonna, Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian have in common? Yes, they are all famous, but that’s not it. Rather, it is the fact that they have all been the subject of lawsuits against them for their endorsement of crypto currency.
It would appear that the plaintiffs lost money in their investments, and they blame these celebrities for misinforming them. If justice were to prevail, those wasting the courts’ time in this manner should be severely penalized for bringing frivolous lawsuits; at the very least, they ought to be compelled to pay the legal costs of these high profile defendants.
Endorsing something is merely giving an opinion, and doing so is part and parcel of free speech. Now that this right is under attack by wokist cancellers, it is more important than ever that we defend, to the utmost, what few free speech rights are left to us.
Penalizing endorsers is open to all sorts of reductios ad absurdum. Who else gives of their opinions, for a fee, and whose implicit advice might upon occasion, backfire.
Perhaps the most mistaken endorsers are the meteorologists.
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Pro-Censorship Democrats Whitewash the Federal Government’s Iron Fist | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023
But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.
Perhaps the biggest “lag time” is Americans learning how the feds are suppressing freedom of speech.
by Jim Bovard
The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing last Thursday on the Twitter Files. Elon Musk purchased Twitter last October and was aghast to learn how the feds had previously domineered his new company. “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,” he tweeted on December 10. Musk chose a handful of journalists to go through Twitter’s records and expose how the feds domineered the company.
Prior to Thursday’s hearing, the Twitter Files revealed that the U.S. State Department had directly pressured Twitter to cancel almost 300,000 accounts (including those of journalists and foreign diplomats). In June 2021, a State Department contractor sent Twitter a list of “around 40k Twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior…and Hindu nationalism more broadly.” But the list was full of hapless Americans with no ties to India or its politics. The State Department sent Twitter a list of 5,500 names believed to be “Chinese…accounts” engaged in “state-backed coordinated manipulation.” The list was so sloppy that it “included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees based abroad,” according to a Twitter internal analysis. One Twitter executive ridiculed the presumption that “If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked.”
The FBI perpetually browbeat Twitter to suppress accounts, including Twitter parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.” In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI agent Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.” Dehmlow had a task force of 80 agents to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.” Her team continually pounded Twitter headquarters with tweets and individuals they wanted suppressed.
Biden’s COVID policymakers were some of the most brazen censors of social media. The Biden White House browbeat Twitter into canceling the accounts of Alex Berenson and many other lockdown critics. A lawsuit is exposing how the Biden White House sought total suppression of any content on social media that raised doubts on the efficacy of the COVID vaccine. Twitter Files added new logs to the bonfire on the morning of the hearing with revelations of a federal contractor pressuring social media companies to suppress “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy.”
Americans’ freedom of speech is increasingly targeted by a vast, federally funded Censorship-Industrial-Complex. The feds and their contractors are going on ever-more wild goose chases to suppress any views the Washington establishment disapproves.
Twitter Files reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were the witnesses at last week’s hearing. Though both are bestselling authors with long records of excellent reporting, they were treated as shameless grifters who basely smeared noble federal agencies.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Democrats, FBI, IRON FIST, Pro-Censorship, Twitter Files | Leave a Comment »
The Democrats’ Disastrous Miscalculation on Civil Liberties
Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023
Americans have been told a dangerous and uncertain world requires stronger managers and less freedom, but the decline of civil liberties is what started this mess
At the hearing, Pee-Wee’s words of the day were clearly cherry-picked, money, and Elon Musk. Nearly every question asked of Michael Shellenberger and me involved our associations or motives. Florida’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said “being a Republican witness certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity” (only a Democratic witness can be trusted), while Dan Goldman tweeted that only someone who signed his version of a loyalty oath — a question about whether or not we “agreed” with Robert Mueller’s two indictments of Russian defendants — can “belong” in the public conversation:
Daniel Goldman @danielsgoldman
No, I hoped at least one or two Democrats would engage on this complicated issue. Everyone would have benefited from a discussion about weighing speech rights versus “disinformation” in the digital age. Instead we got childish attacks, which just degraded the debate. https://t.co/2l3iivDbbB10:33 PM ∙ Mar 11, 20238,708Likes1,600Retweets
These are behaviors we associated with Republicans in the War on Terror years, when Democrats howled over accusations that John Kerry “looks French.” That the roles have been reversed is old news, but the big question remains: why did this happen?
In the coming days you’re going to see a new release of Twitter Files material, about the creation of a multi-agency working group to address what experts described as vaccine “disinformation and misinformation.”
This cross-platform group looked for people who were just “asking questions,” which they viewed as a rhetorical trick for introducing misinformation. They took aim at people who “framed” ideas like vaccine passports as compulsory or authoritarian, as opposed to emphasizing their utility and necessity, which they interpreted to mean a tendency to more generally negative opinions about vaccines. Moreover, as disclosed last week, they saw a threat in people who wrote about “true stories of vaccine side effects” or “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”
Most disturbing was a letter to a long list of academics, tech executives, and communications specialists from a staffer for the non-profit Institute for Defense Analysis. It referred to a new type of online influencer, “some of whom enjoy reach commensurate with mass media channels”:
In an age of declining trust in media, government, and institutions, influencers occupy a position of trust and enjoy a perception of authenticity. In addition to the rise of influencers, now-prevalent online crowds have been transformed into a significant force in shaping narratives; they are persistent and can be leveraged to achieve amplification of particular messages in the battle for attention.
“Online crowds have been transformed into a significant force in shaping narratives” is just another way of saying, “independent groups now have politically effective ways to organize,” which the authors clearly saw as a problem in itself.
The digital age has produced an almost involuntary general disrespect for personal boundaries. Probably all of us are guilty of it on some level. We peek, poke, and prod in ways that would have made us ashamed in the pre-Internet years.
We see a more ominous form of it throughout the Twitter Files, where content moderators are forever taking short cuts to judgment by blithely entering the minds of users, to make snap calls about intent. If people transmit true or possibly true stories that conflict with approved narratives, from human rights abuses in the Donbass to first-person accounts of “breakthrough” vaccine cases, these acts are algorithmically detected as intended to deceive and thrown in thoughtcrime baskets: undermining Ukraine, promoting hesitancy, etc.
The campaign against “disinformation” in this way has become the proxy for a war against civil liberties that probably began in 2016, when the reality of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination first began to spread through the intellectual class. There was a crucial moment in May of that year, when Andrew Sullivan published “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Civil Liberties, Elon Musk, Michael Shellenberger | Leave a Comment »
‘Biggest in Israeli History’: Organizers Claim Half a Million Protesters in Tenth Week – Israel News – Haaretz.com
Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023
Armed with banners and flags, Israeli demonstrators turned out in droves for the tenth week to decry the Netanyahu-led government’s judicial coup
Benjamin Netanyahu is no secret to anyone except maybe US lamestream media watchers. Makes one wonder how he was elected…
Israelis took to the streets for the tenth week straight in the largest demonstration in the country’s history on Saturday, with organizers claiming as many as 500,000 pro-democracy protesters in attendence nationwide.
A record 50,000 Israelis rallied in Haifa – according to police estimates –while at least 8,000 demonstrated in the southern city of Be’er Sheva, which is considered a Likud stronghold. Opposition leader Yair Lapid told the crowd there that Israel “is facing the greatest crisis in its history.
“A wave of terrorism is hitting us, our economy is crashing, money is escaping the country. Iran just signed yesterday a new agreement with Saudi Arabia. But the only thing this government cares about is crushing Israeli democracy,” he said.
In the central city of Netanya, hundreds of red-clad ‘handmaids’ held a silent vigil as large crowds gathered. Leading the city’s protesters in chants of “We are all Ami Eshed,” former Labor leader Amram Mitzna voiced solidarity with the dismissed Tel Aviv district commander, who was ousted from his post on Thursday by Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai under pressure from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over his lenient policy toward protesters.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Benjamin Netanyahu, handmaids, Israeli, pro-democracy, Protesters | Leave a Comment »
