medium | Susan Rice,
who served as the National Security Adviser under President Obama, has
been identified as the official who requested unmasking of incoming
Trump officials, Cernovich Media can exclusively report.
The
White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible
for the unmasking after examining Rice’s document log requests. The
reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled
conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to
them.
Upon learning of Rice’s actions, H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.
“Unmasking”
is the process of identifying individuals whose communications were
caught in the dragnet of intelligence gathering. While conducting
investigations into terrorism and other related crimes, intelligence
analysts incidentally capture conversations about parties not subject to
the search warrant. The identities of individuals who are not under
investigation are kept confidential, for legal and moral reasons.
As
his presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama’s top aides routinely
reviewed intelligence reports gleaned from the National Security
Agency’s incidental intercepts of Americans abroad, taking advantage of
rules their boss relaxed starting in 2011 to help the government better
fight terrorism, espionage by foreign enemies and hacking threats, Circa
has learned.
Among
those cleared to request and consume unmasked NSA-based intelligence
reports about U.S. citizens were Obama’s national security adviser Susan
Rice, his CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta
Lynch.
kunstler | If you thought banking in our time was a miserable racket — which it
is, of course, and by “racket” I mean a criminal enterprise — then
so-called health care has it beat by a country mile, with an added layer
of sadism and cruelty built into its operations. Lots of people
willingly sign onto mortgages and car loans they wouldn’t qualify for in
an ethically sound society, but the interest rates and payments are
generally spelled out on paper. They know what they’re signing on for,
even if the contract is reckless and stupid on the parts of both
borrower and lender. Pension funds and insurance companies foolishly
bought bundled mortgage bonds of this crap concocted in the housing
bubble. They did it out of greed and desperation, but a little due
diligence would have clued them into the fraud being served up by the
likes of Goldman Sachs.
Medicine is utterly opaque cost-wise, and that is the heart of the
issue. Nobody in the system will say what anything costs and nobody
wants to because it would break the spell that they work in an honest,
legit business. There is no rational scheme for the cost of any service
from one “provider” to the next or even one patient to the next. Anyway,
the costs are obscenely inflated and concealed in so many deliberately
deceptive coding schemes that even actuaries and professors of economics
are confounded by their bills. The services are provided when the
customer is under the utmost duress, often life-threatening, and the
outcome even in a successful recovery from illness is financial ruin
that leaves a lot of people better off dead.
It is a hostage racket, in plain English, a disgrace to the
profession that has adopted it, and an insult to the nation. All the
idiotic negotiations in congress around the role of insurance companies
are a grand dodge to avoid acknowledging the essential racketeering of
the “providers” — doctors and hospitals. We are never going to reform it
in its current incarnation. For all his personality deformities,
President Trump is right in saying that ObamaCare is going to implode.
It is only a carbuncle on the gangrenous body of the US medical
establishment. The whole system will go down with it.
The New York Times departed from its usual obsessions with
Russian turpitude and transgender life last week to publish a valuable
briefing on this aspect of the health care racket: Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much
by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Much of this covers ground exposed in the now
famous March 4, 2013 Time Magazine cover story (it took up the whole
issue): Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,
by Steven Brill. The American public and its government have been
adequately informed about the gross and lawless chiseling rampant in
every quarter of medicine. The system is one of engineered criminality.
It is inflicting ruin on millions. It is really a wonder that the public
has not stormed the hospitals with pitchforks and flaming brands to
string up that gang in the parking lots high above their Beemers and
Lexuses.
thehill | Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Adam Schiff
have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russia’s
interference in the 2016 presidential election. They should think
twice. The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance
to anyone who cares about fundamental civil liberties.
The
trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a
particularly significant leak. On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist
David Ignatius reported
that “according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike)
Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec.
29.”
From Nunes’s statements, it’s clear that he
suspects that this information came from NSA intercepts of Kislyak’s
phone. An Obama official, probably in the White House, “unmasked”
Flynn’s name and passed it on to Ignatius.
Regardless
of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a
violation of his civil rights. But it was also a severe breach of the
public trust. When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House,
2005-2007, I read dozens of NSA surveillance reports every day. On the
basis of my familiarity with this system, I strongly suspect that
someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in the thin wall that
prevents the government from using information collected from
surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is
pledged to protect.
The leaking of Flynn’s name was
part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the
Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as Vladimir
Putin’s Manchurian candidate.
antimedia | If you’re one of the countless Americans who was distraught to learn
of the revelations made by former National Security Agency (NSA)
contractor Edward Snowden, the mere idea that there might be yet another
agency out there — perhaps just as powerful and much more intrusive —
should give you goosebumps.
Foreign Policyreports
that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, is an obscure
spy agency former President Barack Obama had a hard time wrapping his
mind around back in 2009. But as the president grew fond of drone
warfare, finding a way to launch wars without having to go through Congress
for the proper authorization, the NGA also became more relevant. Now,
President Donald Trump is expected to further explore the
multibillion-dollar surveillance network.
Like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security
Agency (NSA), the NGA is an intelligence agency, but it also serves as a
combat support institution that functions under the U.S. Department of
Defense (DOD).
With headquarters bigger than the CIA’s, the building cost $1.4
billion to be completed in 2011. In 2016, the NGA bought an extra 99
acres in St. Louis, building additional structures that cost taxpayers
an extra $1.75 billion.
Enjoying the extra budget Obama threw at them, the NGA became one of
the most obscure intelligence agencies precisely because it relies on
the work of drones.
As a body of government that has only one task — to analyze images
and videos captured by drones in the Middle East — the NGA is mighty
powerful. So why haven’t we heard of it before?
theduran | To my mind what this episode shows is how sensitive the Democrats are
about the raising of the whole surveillance issue. This lends further
strength to my opinion – which I note is coming to be increasingly widely shared – that it is the surveillance carried out during the election of Donald Trump and his campaign team which is the real scandal in this affair, and that the fake ‘Russiagate’ scandal is the smoke-screen concealing it.
They will be equally disappointed there. These attempts to use
Congressional committees as investigative and prosecutorial instruments
suffer from a basic misconception: these are oversight committees, not
investigative or prosecutorial committees, and they cannot be used in
that way. They cannot magic up evidence of collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia that the actual investigation – the one carried out
by the FBI – says is not there.
The single most important fact about the last few weeks, and the
clearest possible sign that the ‘Russiagate’ scandal is flagging, is
that there have been no more leaks from within the intelligence and
security agencies since the ones at the beginning of March about Jeff Sessions’s meetings with the Russian ambassador.
That suggests that the former Obama administration officials, who I
suspect were the people who were physically communicating the
information in the leaks to the media, are no longer being fed
information about Donald Trump and his associates or about the progress
of the FBI investigation by their sources within the intelligence and
national security bureaucracy.
That could be because people within the intelligence and national
security bureaucracy are being deterred by the investigation into the
leaking of classified material which the President has been calling for
but which the House Intelligence Committee hearing on 20th March 2017
suggested FBI Director Comey is resisting (almost certainly because
people within the FBI were involved in the leaks), or it could be
because increasingly there is no damaging information to leak.
Regardless of what the explanation is, in the absence of any more
leaks there has been nothing over the last few weeks for the supporters
of ‘Russiagate’ to work with. The result is that in the absence of
anything new the effort to keep the ‘Russiagate’ scandal going and in
the public eye is flagging.
My best guess is that it will collapse entirely by early summer.
wikileaks | Today, March 31st 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Marble" -- 676 source code files for the CIA's secret anti-forensic Marble Framework.
Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus
companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the
CIA.
Marble does this by hiding ("obfuscating") text fragments used in CIA malware
from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized
CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S.
produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly
backed by the CIA.
Marble forms part of the CIA's anti-forensics approach and the CIA's Core Library of malware code. It is "[D]esigned to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string
obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often
used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."
The Marble source code also includes a deobfuscator to reverse
CIA text obfuscation. Combined with the revealed obfuscation
techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic
investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA.
Marble was in use at the CIA during 2016. It reached 1.0 in 2015.
The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in
English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This
would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by
pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not
American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the
use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the
wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding
fake error messages.
The Marble Framework is used for obfuscation only and does not contain any vulnerabilties or exploits by itself.
gabbard.house.gov | Continuing her commitment to common sense criminal
justice reform, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) spoke on the House floor
today urging Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to federally
decriminalize marijuana. If passed, the Ending Federal Marijuana
Prohibition Act (H.R.1227) would take marijuana off the federal
controlled substances list—joining other industries
such as alcohol and tobacco. Gabbard introduced the legislation with
Rep. Tom Garrett (VA-05), an Army veteran and former prosecutor.
“Our outdated policies on marijuana are having devastating ripple
effects on individuals and communities across the country. They have
turned everyday Americans into criminals, torn apart families, and
wasted huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to arrest, prosecute, and
incarcerate people for non-violent marijuana charges,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
“Differences in state and federal law have also created confusion and
uncertainty for our local businesses, who face contradictory regulations
that affect their bottom line and ability to operate. I urge our
colleagues to support our bipartisan legislation which would
decriminalize marijuana, bringing about long overdue and common sense
reform."
“There is growing consensus acknowledging that the effects of
marijuana are less harmful than its criminal prohibition, which has
increased incarceration rates, divided families, and burdened state
governments with the high cost of enforcement, prison and probation.
It’s clear that there are more vital needs that we as a society need to
allocate our precious resources towards, such as education, mental
health, and homelessness. Decriminalization is a step forward in making
needed criminal justice reforms, which should also include more
diversion to substance abuse treatment,” said Karen Umemoto,
Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawaiʻi
at Mānoa and juvenile justice researcher.
“As long as marijuana is federally illegal, FDIC
regulations make it impossible for banks to provide any services to the
eight Hawaiʻi Medical Marijuana Dispensary licensees. Federal
decriminalization will enable professional dispensaries to provide much
needed patient access and cost savings,” said Richard Ha, CEO of Lau Ola, a medical marijuana dispensary on Hawaiʻi Island.
“Descheduling cannabis will benefit Hawaiʻi patients by allowing for
more rapid research to identify the best medical marijuana strains and
dosages for individual medical conditions. Also, eliminating the
barriers to banking will make it easier and safer for Hawaiʻi patients
to purchase the medicine they need and eliminate unnecessary expense and
complexity for dispensaries,” saidBrian Goldstein, Founder and CEO of Mānoa Botanicals, a licensed medical marijuana dispensary on Oʻahu.
Background: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard supports the
full legalization of marijuana on the federal level as part of her
overall effort toward criminal justice reform. Last month, she visited
correctional facilities throughout the state, and met with inmates,
criminal justice advocates and experts, health professionals, educators
and others to discuss reducing recidivism and her continued efforts to pass federal criminal justice reform legislation like the SAFE Justice Act and the Sentencing Reform Act.
The congresswoman has also supported legislation like the Industrial
Hemp Farming Act to support the cultivation of industrial hemp in
Hawaiʻi and nationwide.
prospect |Rob Frankil of Sellersville,
Pennsylvania, followed his father into the family business after
college. “My entire life,” he said, “I’ve been involved with managing
and owning independent pharmacies.” He now owns two stores, a
traditional community pharmacy and another that caters to long-term care
facilities.
Like any retail outlet, Frankil purchases inventory from a wholesale
distributor and sells it to customers at a small markup. But unlike
butchers or hardware store owners, pharmacists have no idea how much
money they’ll make on a sale until the moment they sell it. That’s
because the customer’s co-pay doesn’t cover the cost of the drug.
Instead, a byzantine reimbursement process determines Frankil’s fee.
“I get a prescription, type in the data, click send, and I’m told I’m
getting a dollar or two,” Frankil says. The system resembles the pull
of a slot machine: Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. “Pharmacies
sell prescriptions at significant losses,” he adds. “So what do I do?
Fill the prescription and lose money, or don’t fill it and lose
customers? These decisions happen every single day.”
Frankil’s troubles cannot be traced back to insurers or drug
companies, the usual suspects that most people deem responsible for
raising costs in the health-care system. He blames a collection of
powerful corporations known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. If
you have drug coverage as part of your health plan, you are likely to
carry a card with the name of a PBM on it. These middlemen manage
prescription drug benefits for health plans, contracting with drug
manufacturers and pharmacies in a multi-sided market. Over the past 30
years, PBMs have evolved from paper-pushers to significant controllers
of the drug pricing system, a black box understood by almost no one.
Lack of transparency, unjustifiable fees, and massive market
consolidations have made PBMs among the most profitable corporations
you’ve never heard about.
Americans pay the highest health-care prices in the world, including
the highest for drugs, medical devices, and other health-care services
and products. Our fragmented system produces many opportunities for
excessive charges. But one lesser-known reason for those high prices is
the stranglehold that a few giant intermediaries have secured over
distribution. The antitrust laws are supposed to provide protection
against just this kind of concentrated economic power. But in one area
after another in today’s economy, federal antitrust authorities and the
courts have failed to intervene. In this case, PBMs are sucking money
out of the health-care system—and our wallets—with hardly any public
awareness of what they are doing.
consortiumnews | As those paying rudimentary attention to modern methods of
surveillance know, “wiretapping” is passé. But Trump’s use of the word
allowed FBI and Department of Justice officials and their counterparts
at the National Security Agency to swear on a stack of bibles that the
FBI, DOJ, and NSA have been unable to uncover any evidence within their
particular institutions of such “wiretapping.”
At the House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, FBI Director
Comey and NSA Director Michael Rogers firmly denied that their agencies
had wiretapped Trump Towers on the orders of President Obama.
So, were Trump and his associates “wiretapped?” Of course not.
Wiretapping went out of vogue decades ago, having been rendered obsolete
by leaps in surveillance technology.
The real question is: Were Trump and his associates surveilled? Wake
up, America. Was no one paying attention to the disclosures from NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 when he exposed Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper as a liar for denying that the NSA
engaged in bulk collection of communications inside the United States.
The reality is that EVERYONE, including the President, is
surveilled. The technology enabling bulk collection would have made the
late demented FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water.
Allegations about the intelligence community’s abuse of its powers
also did not begin with Snowden. For instance, several years earlier,
former NSA worker and whistleblower Russell Tice warned about these
“special access programs,” citing first-hand knowledge, but his claims
were brushed aside as coming from a disgruntled employee with
psychological problems. His disclosures were soon forgotten.
However, earlier this year, there was a stark reminder of how much
fear these surveillance capacities have struck in the hearts of senior
U.S. government officials. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New
York told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow
that President Trump was “being really dumb” to take on the intelligence
community, since “They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at
you.”
Maddow shied away from asking the logical follow-up: “Senator
Schumer, are you actually saying that Trump should be afraid of the
CIA?” Perhaps she didn’t want to venture down a path that would raise
more troubling questions about the surveillance of the Trump team than
on their alleged contacts with the Russians.
ibankcoin | Aside from what appears to be a brazen confirmation of spying on the
Trump team, the bigger red flag here is Dr. Farkas wasn’t employed by
the Obama administration at the time the Russian allegations arose.
So how did this non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, member
of the Council on Foreign Relations, and former deputy assistant
secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, gain knowledge of
intelligence regarding members of Trump’s team and their relations with
Russia, when she was the senior foreign policy advisor for Presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton?
Farkas was the prime driver behind the anti-Russia phobia inside the Pentagon during the Obama years — shilling hard for the Ukraine — requesting that the President send them anti-tank missiles — which, essentially, would mean outright war with Russia.
Back to the interview with Mika Brzezinski. Dr. Farkas said ‘we’ had
good intel on Russia. Who does she refer to when she says ‘we?’
WaPo | The first known published description of Donald Trump’s hair, as an
entity that deserved its own description, was mild. “His sandy hair is
probably a bit long by standards of the corporate world,” read a 1984
newspaper profile of the then-38-year-old mogul. “With the sides slicked
back just a bit.”
Three decades later, describing the headstuff
of the leading Republican presidential candidate has been elevated to an
art form. Is is swirled or swooped? Animal or vegetable? (Mineral?)
Burnt sienna or orange Creamsicle? Last week Gawker published an
extensive investigation asserting that the whole concoction might
actually be a $60,000 weave.
GQ | And this is why Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix specials are so disappointing.
Perhaps
my expectations were too high. I hoped that Chappelle, now entering his
mid-40s, would have used his signature slyness and world-weary insights
to tackle subjects more daunting than the low-hanging and dated comedic
fruit of trans people, rape, and famous black men (O.J. Simpson and
Bill Cosby) accused of horrific crimes against (mostly) white women.
Especially after taking a full decade away from the public microscope.
And especially during a time when there seems to be so fucking
much—politically, culturally, and racially—for a black comedian as sharp
and shrewd as Chappelle to dive into. His focus on the horror of
political correctness, instead, felt like something you’d expect to come
from a megarich 43-year-old man from the outskirts of Ohio. Who,
instead of evolving with the world, has remained stagnant and believes
the world has gone mad while pining for time when things were simpler.
Which is who he is.
I recognize the
presumption and perhaps even self-indulgence of suggesting that I know
what Chappelle should have been talking about better than he does. There
are no emails and comments I hate worse than “Why did you write about this thing instead of this other thing I wanted you to write about?”
and I’m doing this now. I do not wish to be that guy, especially when
discussing Chappelle, a man whose break from the public came as a result
of corporate forces trying to tell him what he could and couldn’t—and
should and shouldn’t—talk about. He is a public figure whom we (black
people) have collectively and justifiably circled the wagons for;
sensitive to his wish for peace of mind, and his attempt to possess it;
ultimately aiming to protect one of our icons from the scourge of
capital letter Whiteness attempting to transmute him.
I just... I don’t know, I just would like for him to join us in 2017. There’s so much he can do here.
thefederalist | The flyer reflects the ideology of anti-Israel student groups and
their leftist allies who seek “intersectionality,” the common bond of
all “oppressed people.” This ideology brings together Muslims who love
Sharia and its denigration of women, and rabid feminists who see their
problems as a consequence of male privilege. Yes, politics does make for
strange bed companions.
Intersectionality
has resulted in an upsurge of anti-Semitism. Whether it is support for
the Jew-bashing Israel Apartheid Week or the campaign of boycott,
divestment, and sanctions against the one democracy in the Middle East,
these initiatives are thinly disguised anti-Semitic hate fests. Whenever
they occur there is a surge in physical and verbal attacks on Jewish
students.
So, it is not surprising that just days after the first
flyer was distributed, a second one appeared, this one focused on
denying the Holocaust. Like the Iranian government, which is always
denying the first Holocaust but actively promising a second, both
flyers’ tropes threaten Jewish existence.
The larger issue is not
the flyers or even their threat to Jews. The issue is that the flyers
reflect a dominant ideology that is inculcated on campuses to a captive
audience in frequently required classes that resemble the Workmen’s
Circle of early Marxism. These courses teach that all gain, except that
achieved by oppressed classes, is ill gotten.
In Middle East
studies courses, Israel is seen as the one illegitimate state in the
world, a last bastion of British imperialism. Obviously, the professors
who teach this do not recall that Britain supported the Arabs in
Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Canards
such as “Jews control the media and Hollywood” are commonplace among
leftist professors who spoon-feed their own ideology rather than facts.
If professors were teaching that slavery is a benign institution that
benefited blacks, there would be such public outcry that universities
would not be able to open their doors. But about Jews, almost anything
can be said with impunity.
The issue of the flyers is less that
they are the product of the twisted minds of some brainwashed students,
but that they are the logical outcome of what is taught on our campuses.
theverge | SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has
no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can
be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping
human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in
artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or
allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.
Musk has hinted at the existence of Neuralink a few times over the last six months or so. More recently, Musk told a crowd in Dubai,
“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological
intelligence and digital intelligence.” He added that “it's mostly about
the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the
digital version of yourself, particularly output." On Twitter, Musk has responded to inquiring fans about his progress on a so-called “neural lace,” which is sci-fi shorthand for a brain-computer interface humans could use to improve themselves.
wired | The Voice of God weapon
— a device that projects voices into your head to make you think God is
speaking to you — is the military’s equivalent of an urban myth.
Meaning, it’s mentioned periodically at defense workshops (ironically, I
first heard about it at the same defense conference where I first met
Noah), and typically someone whispers about it actually being used. Now
Steven Corman, writing at the COMOPS journal, describes his own encounter with this urban myth:
At a government workshop some time ago I
head someone describe a new tool that was described as the “voice of
Allah.” This was said to be a device that would operate at a distance
and would deliver a message that only a single person could hear. The
story was that it was tested in a conflict situation in Iraq and pointed
at one insurgent in a group, who whipped around looking in all
directions, and began a heated conversation with his compatriots, who
did not hear the message. At the time I greeted this story with some
skepticism.
It appears that some of the
troops in Iraq are using "spoken" (as opposed to "screeching") LRAD to
mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious
and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the "word of God" into
their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear,
tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?
And as Corman also notes, CNET recently wrote about
an advertisement in New York for A&E’s TV show Paranormal State,
which uses some of this technology. Beyond directed sound, it’s long
been known that microwaves at certain frequencies can produce an auditory effect
that sounds like it’s coming from within someone’s head (and there’s
the nagging question of classified microwave work at Brooks Air Force
Base, that the Air Force stubbornly refuses to talk about).
That brings us back to the Voice of God/Allah Weapon. Is it
real or bogus? In one version — related to me by another defense
reporter — it’s not just Allah’s voice — but an entire holographic image
projected above (um, who decides what Allah looks like?).
Does it exist? I’m not sure, but it’s funny that when you
hear it brought up at defense conferences, no one ever asks the obvious
question: does anybody think this thing will actually convince people
God is speaking to them? I’m thinking, not.
wikipedia | From January 2002 to August 2003, Poindexter served as the Director of the DARPAInformation Awareness Office
(IAO). The mission of the IAO was to imagine, develop, apply,
integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies,
components, and prototype closed-loop information systems. This aimed to counter asymmetric threats (most notably, terrorist threats) by achieving total information awareness and thus aiding preemption; national security warning; and, national security decision making
consortiumnews | The Psychological Operations Committee took formal shape with a “secret” memo from Reagan’s National Security Advisor John Poindexter on July 31, 1986. Its first meeting
was called on Sept. 2, 1986, with an agenda that focused on Central
America and “How can other POC agencies support and complement DOD
programs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama.”
The POC was also tasked with “Developing National PSYOPS Guidelines” for “formulating and implementing a national PSYOPS program.” (Underlining in original).
Raymond was named a co-chair of the POC along with CIA officer
Vincent Cannistraro, who was then Deputy Director for Intelligence
Programs on the NSC staff, according to a “secret” memo
from Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Craig Alderman Jr. The memo also
noted that future POC meetings would be briefed on psyops projects for
the Philippines and Nicaragua, with the latter project codenamed
“Niagara Falls.” The memo also references a “Project Touchstone,” but it
is unclear where that psyops program was targeted.
Another “secret” memo
dated Oct. 1, 1986, co-authored by Raymond, reported on the POC’s first
meeting on Sept. 10, 1986, and noted that “The POC will, at each
meeting, focus on an area of operations (e.g., Central America,
Afghanistan, Philippines).”
The POC’s second meeting on Oct. 24, 1986, concentrated on the Philippines, according to a Nov. 4, 1986 memo
also co-authored by Raymond. “The next step will be a tightly drafted
outline for a PSYOPS Plan which we will send to that Embassy for its
comment,” the memo said. The plan “largely focused on a range of civic
actions supportive of the overall effort to overcome the insurgency,” an
addendum noted. “There is considerable concern about the sensitivities
of any type of a PSYOPS program given the political situation in the
Philippines today.”
Earlier in 1986, the Philippines had undergone the so-called “People
Power Revolution,” which drove longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos into
exile, and the Reagan administration, which belatedly pulled its support
from Marcos, was trying to stabilize the political situation to prevent
more populist elements from gaining the upper hand.
But the Reagan administration’s primary attention continued to go
back to Central America, including “Project Niagara Falls,” the psyops
program aimed at Nicaragua. A “secret” Pentagon memo from Deputy Under Secretary Alderman on Nov. 20, 1986, outlined the work of the 4th
Psychological Operations Group on this psyops plan “to help bring about
democratization of Nicaragua,” by which the Reagan administration meant
a “regime change.” The precise details of “Project Niagara Falls” were
not disclosed in the declassified documents but the choice of codename
suggested a cascade of psyops.
Other documents from Raymond’s NSC file shed light on who other key
operatives in the psyops and propaganda programs were. For instance, in undated notes
on efforts to influence the Socialist International, including securing
support for U.S. foreign policies from Socialist and Social Democratic
parties in Europe, Raymond cited the efforts of “Ledeen, Gershman,”
a reference to neoconservative operative Michael Ledeen and Carl
Gershman, another neocon who has served as president of the
U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), from 1983
to the present. (Underlining in original.)
Although NED is technically independent of the U.S. government, it
receives the bulk of its funding (now about $100 million a year) from
Congress. Documents from the Reagan archives also make clear that NED
was organized as a way to replace some of the CIA’s political and
propaganda covert operations, which had fallen into disrepute in the
1970s. Earlier released documents from Raymond’s file show CIA Director
William Casey pushing for NED’s creation and Raymond, Casey’s handpicked
man on the NSC, giving frequent advice and direction to Gershman. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA’s Hidden Hand in ‘Democracy’ Groups.”]
Another figure in Raymond’s constellation of propaganda assets was
media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was viewed as both a key political ally
of President Reagan and a valuable source of funding for private groups
that were coordinating with White House propaganda operations. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Rupert Murdoch: Propaganda Recruit.”]
For
psychologists who study humor, this statement is a classic. It embodies
the ambiguity of language that much humor exploits. In this case, the
words “flies” and “like” have different meanings that come into conflict
in the reader’s mind. The way our cognitive processes resolve this
conflict lies at the heart of the nature of humor, say theorists.
Humor
showcases the speed and flexibility of human cognition at its most
impressive. Clearly, the ability to reproduce this behavior would be
hugely useful in machines that could appreciate humor and generate
laughs.
So psychologists and computer scientists would dearly love
to understand and reproduce the cognitive processes behind humor.
Sadly, progress in this area has been slow, not least because it is hard
to properly model this cognitive conflict.
Today, that changes,
at least in part, thanks to the work of Liane Gabora at the University
of British Columbia in Canada and Kirsty Kitto at the Queensland
University of Technology in Australia. These guys have created a new
model of humor based on the mathematical formalism of quantum theory.
They then apply it to verbal puns and cartoons.
The basic problem
with modeling humor is to find a way to represent a joke at the moment
it is understood. That’s tricky because it requires the ability
to able to handle two or more conflicting interpretations at the same
time.
In the joke above, the brain first assimilates the set-up
statement “time flies like an arrow,” in which flies is verb meaning “to
travel through the air.” It then assimilates the punch line statement
“fruit flies like a banana,” in which flies is a noun describing flying
insects.
By themselves, these phrases are not particularly amusing. The humor
arises when the meaning from the set-up phrase clashes with the meaning
in the punch line. This clash requires the brain to hold both meanings
at the same time.
Gabora and Kitto say the process of holding two
ideas simultaneously in our brains is analogous to the process of
quantum superposition. This is the bizarre quantum phenomenon in which a
single object can exist in two places at the same time. The object’s
position only becomes localized when it is measured and the
superposition collapses.
Similarly, the brain holds two meanings
in mind at the same time and the process of getting a joke resolves this
conflict as the brain settles on one meaning or the other. Gabora and
Kitto’s idea is that the mathematics behind quantum superposition can
also model this kind of double-think.
They are not saying that the
brain relies on quantum processes, only that quantum formalism can be
used to model it. “The quantum approach enables us to naturally
represent the process of ‘getting a joke,’ ” they say.
technologyreview | On Thursday Alphabet released a machine-learning-based service, called
Perspective, intended to identify toxic comments on websites. It’s from
Jigsaw, a unit working on technologies to make the Internet a safer and
more civil place. But when I toyed with Perspective, the results were
erratic.
Perspective rates comments on a 1 to 100 scale for “toxicity,”
defined as “a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is
likely to make you leave a discussion.” “Screw you, Trump supporters” is
judged to be highly toxic, while “I honestly support both” is not, for
example. But Perspective has trouble detecting the sentiment behind a
comment—a problem I predicted would trouble Jigsaw when I examined its
ambitions in December (see “If Only AI Could Save Us From Ourselves”).
“Trump
sucks” scored a colossal 96 percent, yet neo-Nazi codeword “14/88” only
scored 5 percent. “Few Muslims are a terrorist threat” was 79 percent
toxic, while “race war now” scored 24 percent. “Hitler was an
anti-Semite” scored 70 percent, but “Hitler was not an anti-Semite”
scored only 53%, and “The Holocaust never happened” scored only 21%. And
while “gas the joos” scored 29 percent, rephrasing it to “Please gas
the joos. Thank you.” lowered the score to a mere 7 percent. (“Jews are
human,” however, scores 72 percent. “Jews are not human”? 64 percent.)
According
to Jigsaw, Perspective was trained to detect toxicity using hundreds of
thousands of comments ranked by human reviewers. The result appears to
be a system sensitized to particular words and phrases—but not to
meanings.
technologyreview | At Google, the scientific charge has been spearheaded by DeepMind, the high-concept British AI company started by neuroscientist and programmer Demis Hassabis. Google acquired it for $400 million in 2014.
Hassabis has left no doubt that he’s holding onto his scientific ambitions. In a January blog post,
he said DeepMind has a “hybrid culture” between the long-term thinking
of an academic department and “the speed and focus of the best
startups.” Aligning with academic goals is “important to us personally,”
he writes. Kording, one of whose post-doctoral students, Mohammad Azar,
was recently hired by DeepMind, says that “it’s perfectly understood
that the bulk of the projects advance science.”
Last year, DeepMind published twice in Nature, the same storied journal where the structure of DNA and the sequencing of the human genome were first reported. One DeepMind paper concerned its program AlphaGo, which defeated top human players in the ancient game of Go; the other described how a neural network with a working memory could understand and adapt to new tasks.
Then, in December, scientists from Google’s research division published the first deep-learning paper ever to appear in JAMA, the august journal of America’s physicians. In it, they showed a deep-learning program could diagnose a cause of blindness from retina images as well as a doctor. That project was led by Google Brain,
a different AI group, based out of the company’s California
headquarters. It also says it prioritizes publications, noting that
researchers there “set their own agenda.”
medium | In her speech to the 2016 Conservative Party conference, British Prime Minister Theresa May pointedly said:
“…if
you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.
You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”
May
is currently leading her government to implement a nationally divisive
break of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Nationalist
sentiment here serves political expediency and despite the fact that a
British Prime Minister turned her back on centuries of Enlightenment values of the sort that made Britain the place where the Industrial Revolution began and appeared to embrace rhetoric that pays lip service to that most vile of all antisemitic texts, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion my focus is not on politics or Brexit.
May has gone from defending the EU as Home Secretary to bashing it as British Prime Minister
charged with delivering Brexit so where she really stands from a
principled point of view is something that I will leave for you, the
reader, to decide.
theverge | As part of a probe into Russian influence on the 2016
election, an FBI-led investigation is seeking more information on social
media bots that spammed “millions” of pro-Trump posts from far-right
news organizations, according to a report published this week by McClatchy.
The bots sent out stories from controversial conservative sources such as Breitbart and Infowars, as well as the Russia-backed outlet RT.
According to McClatchy, many of the stories contained false or
misleading information. As part of the effort, which included Facebook
and Twitter posts, the bots also shared WikiLeaks links to stolen DNC
and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta emails that ended up damaging
the Democratic nominee’s campaign.
The investigation is also looking into what role the news
sites themselves may have played in the social media campaign, although
as McClatchy notes, the bots could well have been pushing the stories
without the involvement of the sites themselves.
Earlier this year, the US intelligence community released a report
on Russia’s influence on the 2016 election that alluded to several
similar tactics, including the use of Russian trolls for spreading
propaganda. Earlier this week, FBI director James Comey confirmed that the agency was investigating whether members of the Trump campaign had any coordination with Russian operatives during the election.
According to McClatchy, the investigation into bots is still in its early stages.
Counterpunch | It’s always extremely sad and confusing when a massive propaganda
campaign, like the one we’ve been subjected to for about the last year,
comes to a sudden and ignominious end. You wake up one morning, and the
billionaire asshat that more or less every “respected” organ of the
corporatist media has been telling you was Hitler, or a Russian agent
(and possibly both), as it turns out, is, well, just a billionaire
asshat. An extremely repulsive billionaire asshat, but nonetheless just a
billionaire asshat. This is extremely disorienting … because here you
were, prepped for the End of Everything, or at least for the death
camps, the Riefenstahlian rallies, and the Russian invasion of Martha’s
Vineyard, and then all that stuff gets abruptly canceled like Season 4
of David Milch’s Deadwood.
We haven’t quite reached that stage of things yet, but it feels like we are inching up to it (as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in his recent piece).
I know this sounds a little nuts, given the amount of Russia hysteria
the media is pumping out this week as the KremlinGate hearings get
underway, but this latest round of official propaganda distinctly reeks
of desperation. The simple fact of the matter is, despite whatever got
“hacked” by whom, Donald Trump, asshat that he is, is not a Russian
sleeper agent or otherwise collaborating with Vladimir Putin, and anyone
with half a brain knows this. Thus, it is going to be impossible to
prove the blatantly ridiculous accusations the ruling classes and their
media stooges have been making in order to delegitimize him. This is
going to present a problem, because the way it works, when you accuse
the President of treason (which is a capital offense), is that you kind
of have to prove it at some point. The ruling classes cannot do this,
and thus they need to adjust expectations, which is what they appear to
be doing at the moment.
As Greenwald noted in his Intercept piece, deep state disinformation
specialists like Michael Morrell and James R. Clapper are making the
rounds of the talk shows and forums, preparing us for the official
narrative changeover. (You remember Michael Morrell … the ex-CIA chief
who in August of last year wrote that op-ed in The New York Times declaring that “Putin had recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”)
And it is not only spooks like Morrell and Clapper. Suddenly, the
oracles we’ve to come rely on for the latest evidence that Putin Nazis
have taken over the executive branch are adopting a distinctly less
hysterical tone. Although they haven’t kicked the Russia paranoia cold
turkey (as that might cause mass seizures or something), they have
obviously begun to wean their followers off the groundless
neo-McCarthyite nonsense they’ve been peddling straight-faced for over a
year.
NationalReview | The bureau is conducting a counterintelligence investigation, which
is a whole different beast.
There is no ongoing criminal investigation of President Trump or his
campaign. I realize that may not be what you expect to hear, if you’re
only casually consuming the news. But it’s what FBI director Jim Comey
told Congress, and no available evidence contradicts it.
Democrats are desperate to draw a parallel between Comey’s testimony
Monday before the House Intelligence Committee — about an ongoing FBI
investigation that includes any connections between the Trump 2016
campaign and Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election — and
Comey’s statements in July and October 2016 about the criminal
investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. But if you
listen to what Comey actually told Congress under oath, you get a very
different picture.
Let’s quote the key portion:
As you know, our practice is not to confirm the existence of ongoing
investigations, especially those investigations that involve classified
matters, but in unusual circumstances where it is in the public
interest, it may be appropriate to do so as Justice Department policies
recognize. This is one of those circumstances.
I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that
the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating
the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential
election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between
individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian
government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign
and Russia’s efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation,
this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were
committed.
Because it is an open ongoing investigation and is classified, I
cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are
examining. At the request of congressional leaders, we have taken the
extraordinary step in coordination with the Department of Justice of
briefing this Congress’ leaders, including the leaders of this
committee, in a classified setting in detail about the investigation but
I can’t go into those details here. [Emphasis added.]
In short, the investigation Comey references is not a criminal
investigation; it’s a counterintelligence investigation, and crimes will
be investigated or charged only if they happen to be uncovered in the
process.
buchanan | Two days after FBI Director James Comey assured us there was no truth
to President Trump’s tweet about being wiretapped by Barack Obama, the
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump may have had
more than just a small point.
The U.S. intelligence community, says Nunes, during surveillance of
legitimate targets, picked up the names of Trump transition officials
during surveillance of targets, “unmasked” their identity, and spread
their names around, virtually assuring they would be leaked.
If true, this has the look and smell of a conspiracy to sabotage the Trump presidency, before it began.
Comey readily confirmed there was no evidence to back up the Trump
tweet. But when it came to electronic surveillance of Trump and his
campaign, Comey, somehow, could not comment on that.
Which raises the question: What is the real scandal here?
Is it that Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks? We have heard that since June.
Is it that Trump officials may have colluded with the Russians?
But former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and ex-CIA
Director Mike Morrell have both said they saw no evidence of this.
This March, Sen. Chris Coons walked back his stunning declaration
about transcripts showing a Russia-Trump collusion, confessing, “I have
no hard evidence of collusion.”
But if Clapper and Morrell saw no Russia-Trump collusion, what were
they looking at during all those months to make them so conclude?
Was it “FBI transcripts,” as Sen. Coons blurted out?
If so, who intercepted and transcribed the conversations? If it was
intel agencies engaged in surveillance, who authorized that? How
extensive was it? Against whom? Is it still going on?
And if today, after eight months, the intel agencies cannot tell us
whether or not any member of the Trump team colluded with the Russians,
what does that say of their competence?
antimedia | Government’s meddling in the healthcare business has been disastrous from the get-go.
Since 1910, when Republican William Taft gave in to the American Medical Association’s lobbying efforts,
most administrations have passed new healthcare regulations. With each
new law or set of new regulations, restrictions on the healthcare market
went further, until at some point in the 1980s, people began to notice
the cost of healthcare had skyrocketed.
This is not an accident. It’s by design.
As regulators allowed special interests to help design policy,
everything from medical education to drugs became dominated by virtual
monopolies that wouldn’t have otherwise existed if not for government’s
notion that intervening in people’s lives is part of their job.
But how did costs go up, and why didn’t this happen overnight?
It wasn’t until 1972 that President Richard Nixon restricted the supply of hospitals by requiring institutions to provide a certificate-of-need.
Just a couple years later, in 1974, the president also strengthened unions for hospital workers by boosting
pension protections, which raise the cost for both those who run
hospitals and taxpayers in cases of institutions that rely on government
subsidies. This move also helped force doctors who once owned and ran
their own hospitals to merge into provider monopolies. These, in turn,
are often only able to keep their doors open with the help of government
subsidies.
This artificial restriction on healthcare access had yet another harsh consequence: overworked doctors.
But they weren’t the first to feel the consequences hit home. As the
number of hospitals and clinics became further restricted and the
healthcare industry became obsessed with simple compliance, patients were the first to feel abandoned.
- By 2018, 14 million could be uninsured with many of the uninsured
practicing the tyranny of a minority, as John S. Mill might call it,
upon the rest of the insured population as they drop out. Others will
simply lose healthcare insurance as states withdraw from the Medicaid
expansion and employers drop the coverage they were required to carry as
they had 50 or more employees. Many of today’s insured will be unable
to afford the increased premiums due to smaller subsidies. The elderly
will be faced with smaller subsidies and a higher 5:1 ratio premium,
which is up from the present 3:1 under the ACA program.
- Doctors, clinics, and hospitals have seen increased numbers of
patients coming through the front door rather than the rear door due to
the expansion of Medicaid to 138% FPL and subsidies for healthcare
insurance to those under 400% FPL. My own PCP has seen many new patients
who have never been to a doctor before except at the ER. With the
proposed reversal of the mandate to have healthcare insurance and the
dropping of Medicaid, it will fall upon hospitals and doctors to still
provide stabilizing care as defined by law to all who arrive at their
door. Except this time, the subsidizing payments for care for the
uninsured to hospitals and clinics will not be available as it was
reduced with the advent of the PPACA. It appears the AHA is not too pleased with Paul Ryan’s AHCA bill either.
Counterpunch | The investigation methods used to come to the conclusion that the Russian Government led the hacks of the DNC, Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, and the DCCC were further called into question by a recent BuzzFeed report by
Jason Leopold, who has developed a notable reputation from leading
several non-partisan Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for
investigative journalism purposes. On March 15 that the Department of
Homeland Security released just two heavily redacted pages of
unclassified information in response to an FOIA request for definitive
evidence of Russian election interference allegations. Leopold wrote,
“what the agency turned over to us and Ryan Shapiro, a PhD candidate at
MIT and a research affiliate at Harvard University, is truly bizarre: a
two-page intelligence assessment of the incident, dated Aug. 22, 2016,
that contains information DHS culled from the internet. It’s all
unclassified — yet DHS covered nearly everything in wide swaths of black
ink. Why? Not because it would threaten national security, but because
it would reveal the methods DHS uses to gather intelligence, methods
that may amount to little more than using Google.”
In lieu of substantive evidence provided to the public that the
alleged hacks which led to Wikileaks releases of DNC and Clinton
Campaign Manager John Podesta’s emails were orchestrated by the Russian
Government, CrowdStrike’s bias has been cited as
undependable in its own assessment, in addition to its skeptical
methods and conclusions. The firm’s CTO and co-founder, Dmitri
Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at
the Atlantic Council, a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments
that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also
happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.
In 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton it’s Distinguished International Leadership Award. In 2014, the Atlantic Council hosted one of several events with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who took over after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in early 2014, who now lives in exile in Russia.
In August, Politico reported that
Donald Trump’s favorable rhetoric to Russia was concerning Ukraine, who
have been recovering from Russian interference in their own country’s
revolution. The article cited, “Russia wants Trump for U.S. president; Ukraine is terrified by Trump and prefers Hillary Clinton.” Trump recently appointed Atlantic Council Chairman Jon Huntsman as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, which Vox called a
“baffling” choice, and Democrats and anti-Russian hysterics haven’t
bothered to attempt to criticize, scrutinize or insinuate ties between
Huntsman and Russia.
paecon | When Trump was inaugurated on Friday, January 20, there was no
pro-jobs or anti-war demonstration. That presumably would have attracted
pro-Trump supporters in an ecumenical show of force. Instead, the
Women’s March on Saturday led even the pro-Democrat New York Times
to write a front-page article reporting that white women were
complaining that they did not feel welcome in the demonstration. The
message to anti-war advocates, students and Bernie supporters was that
their economic cause was a distraction.
The march was typically Democratic in that its ideology did not threaten the Donor Class. As Yves Smith wrote on Naked Capitalism:
“the track record of non-issue-oriented marches, no matter how large
scale, is poor, and the status of this march as officially sanctioned
(blanket media coverage when other marches of hundreds of thousands of
people have been minimized, police not tricked out in their usual riot
gear) also indicates that the officialdom does not see it as a threat to
the status quo."
Hillary’s
loss was not blamed on her neoliberal support for TPP or her pro-war
neocon stance, but on the revelations of the e-mails by her operative
Podesta discussing his dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders (claimed to
be given to Wikileaks by Russian hackers, not a domestic DNC leaker as
Wikileaks claimed) and the FBI investigation of her e-mail abuses at the
State Department. Backing her supporters’ attempt to brazen it out, the
Democratic Party has doubled down on its identity politics, despite the
fact that an estimated 52 percent of white women voted for Trump. After
all, women do work for wages. And that also is what Blacks and
Hispanics want – in addition to banking that serves their needs, not those of Wall Street, and health care that serves their needs, not those of the health-insurance and pharmaceuticals monopolies.
ibankcoin | Klayman has detailed all of this in a NewsMax article, followed up with an official letter
to Chairman Nunes today, requesting that he question Comey . Perhaps
this explains Nunes’ impromptu press conference today admitting that
Trump’s team was under “Incidental Surveillance” before making his way to the White House to discuss with the President.
So – we know that evidence exists from a CIA / NSA contractor turned whistleblower, detailing a massive spy operation on 156 judges, the Supreme Court, and high profile Americans including Donald Trump. See the letter below:
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