Prophetess Of The Saucers

greyfalcon | September 30 marks the birthday of this strange but remarkable woman, who probably did the most to spread the "Hitler escaped in a UFO" legend.

Her name was Maximiani Portas, but she's better known to history by her nom de voyage, the name she traveled under...Savitri Devi.

Maximiani was born in Lyons, France's second largest city, on September 30, 1905. "Her mother, Julia Nash, came from Cornwall, and her father was of mixed Mediterranean heritage, having an Italian mother from London and a Greek father who had acquired French citizenship due to his residence in France."

As a schoolgirl, Maximiani was greatly influenced by the work of the French poet Leconte de Lisle, whose Poemes barbares glorified the gods and religions of antiquity. And when she dicovered Bullfinch's Mythology, the result was the same as with H.P. Lovecraft a decade earlier. She became an ardent believer in the gods of Olympus. But where Lovecraft soon ended his infatuation with Graeco-Roman religion, the topic became a lifelong obsession with Maximiani.

In 1929, now interested in tracing the roots of occult traditions, Maximiani traveled to Jerusalem. She arrived just in time for the riots between the Arabs and the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants. She sided with the Arabs, and the entire episode left her with a lifelong hatred of Jews, Judaism, Zionism and the Talmud. [Some occultists believe that there is a network of ancient tunnels under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, similar to the tunnels in the Andes. These tunnels are alleged to be left over from the lost continent of Atlantis. See the book Timeless Earth by Peter Kolosimo, University Books, 1974]

By 1932, Maximiani's quest had brought her to India. Here she came under the influence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920), also known as Sri Baba Lokmanya, who was widely acclaimed as the 'father of Indian unrest'. Besides his radical political activities, Tilak was an accomplished scholar of ancient Hindu sacred literature. Imprisoned by the British Raj in 1897 for sedition, Tilak had immersed himself in Vedic study and in 1903 published his book about the origins of the "Aryan race," The Arctic Home in the Vedas.

Maximiani wandered through India for three years. Then, in July 1935, she enrolled in Rabindranath Tagore's ashram in Shantiniketan in the Bolpur district.  But she left in December after getting into scraps with German Jewish refugees who were also the guests of Tagore.

At the ashram, she "learned Hindi and perfected her command of Bengali. She then taught English and Indian history at Jerandan College, not far from Delhi, and worked in a similar capacity in Mathura, the holy city of Krishna, during 1936. Ever more involved in the life and customs of Hinduism, she adopted a Hindu name--Savitri Devi."

Settling in Calcutta in 1936, Savitri came under the influence of Srimat Swami Satyananda, who was director of the city's Hindu Mission and active in the nationalist Hindu Mahasabha movement. Tilak had gotten it wrong, Satyananda told Savitri, the Aryans didn't originate in the Arctic--they came from the Antarctic. During previous interglacial periods, Antarctica had enjoyed a temperate climate, and there were still ancient cities buried under the ice and snow. [Curiously, Lovecraft wrote a short novel about this topic in 1932 entitled At the Mountains of Madness, repeatedly referring to a city called "Kadath in the Cold Waste"].

More ominously, Satyananda told Savitri that the presence of the swastika, the traditional Hindu sign of good fortune, in the flag of Nazi Germany showed that this European nation was returning to its Aryan roots. In addition, "he told her that he considered Hitler an incarnation of Vishnu, an expression of the force preserving cosmic order."

Satyananda and his new guest lecturer, Savitri Devi, were very much excited when Hitler dispatched an expedition to Antarctica in 1938 under Captain Alfred Rischer. Here was proof that the Nazis were seeking the ancient Aryan homeland. [In 1916, Charles Fort wrote a book called Y in which he talked about buried cities at the South Pole. He inexplicably destroyed this manuscript in 1917, claiming that "it was not what I wanted." Whatever Antarctic oddities the old boy dug up are delightful to conjecture but are unfortunately lost to history].

Friends in the Mahasabha introduced Savitri to Asit Krishna Mukherji, the editor of The New Mercury, India's one-and-only National Socialist magazine until its suppression by the British authorities in 1937. "Mukherji admired the growing might and influence of the Third Reich. He was deeply impressed by the Aryan ideology of Nazi Germany, with its cult of Nordic racial superiority, anti-Semitism and race laws," which he compared favorably with the Vedic law of varna or caste.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Savitri and Mukherji became the biggest pro-Axis cheerleaders around. Which immediately got Savitri into trouble with the Raj. For one thing, she was a citizen of France and needed a permit to stay in India. Her pro-Nazi views put her on a list for deportation. And when the Germans overran France in May 1940, she was in imminent danger of arrest as "an enemy alien."

So, on June 9, 1940, at the age of 34, Savitri married Mukherji in Calcutta. It was a traditional Hindu wedding.

While her husband worked for Indian independence under the pro-Axis leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, Savitri "spent the rest of the war in joyful anticipation of an Axis victory. By the end of the war, Savitri Devi had assimilated many notions from Hinduism into a heterodox form of National Socialism that glorified the Aryan race and Adolf Hitler.

Undeterred by the Allied victory in May 1945, Savitri resolved to return to Europe and preach her new Hitlerian faith. What spurred her to action was a curious article that appeared in The Times and Le Monde on July 18, 1945 claiming that Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, had been taken by a U-boat to Argentina.

Convinced that der Führer would soon be making his comeback, "Savitri Devi returned to Europe in October 1945. In London she took casual employment as a wardrobe manager with a traveling Indian dance company."

 

During her brief showbiz career, Savitri read another article that appeared in the Argentinian newspaper Critica on July 17, 1945 which "stated that the Führer and Eva Braun had landed from the U-530 in Antarctica, noting the possible place of embarkation was Queen Maud Land, the destination of a German Antarctic expedition in 1938-1939."

 

She also read a book by Ladislao Szabo, a Hungarian living in Buenos Aires, entitled Hitler esta vivo (Hitler is alive) Szabo expanded on the Critica article and discussed the top-secret but abortive Operation High Jump.

 

But what really kindled Savitri's excitement was the sudden appearance of the "flying saucers" in July 1947. UFOs dominated front pages everywhere.

 

Ready to undertake her missionary work, Savitri hit upon the idea of distributing pro-Nazi leaflets while passing through Germany by train in June 1948.

 

Returning through France and entering Germany at Saarholzbach, she spent some three months between 7 September and 6 December 1948 distributing a further six thousand leaflets in the three Western (Allied) occupation zones and the Saarland.

 

While in Germany, Savitri made contact with former SS men, who told her an amazing story: in 1942, a German engineer named Miethe began work on a "flying disk," also known as the V-7. Encouraged by the progress in the development of this new "vengeance weapon," Hitler placed the project under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Kammler. A limited number of these vehicles were produced at underground factories in the Harz Mountains.

The V-7 was a futuristic aircraft, Savitri was told, 'a fantastic creation nearly 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter, in its center the plexiglass cupola of the control room glistening in the sunlight.'...it had no rotating parts and was driven by twelve adjustable jets, five rearward for forward flight and the other seven for directional steering. With a range of 13,000 miles (20,000 kilometers) the V-7 was able to reach 1,500 to 2,000 miles per hour (2,400 to 3,200 kilometers per hour).

Soon it was all coming together in her mind--Hitler's controversial demise, the Antarctic expedition of 1938, the Miethe V-7 flying disk, the SS rumors of a diehard "Last Battalion" preparing to resume the war. She truly believed that a flying saucer had spirited the Führer out of an embattled Berlin and dropped him off in Cuxhaven. From there, the U-boat convoy ferried him to the Nazi colony of Neuschwabenland in Antarctica.

Thus convinced, Savitri undertook her most dangerous gamble yet. In preparation for her third propaganda sortie to enemy-occupied Germany, she had printed in London a small German-language handbill with a swastika. Here she exhorted the Germans to remain true to their Führer, who was alleged still to be alive, and to rise up against the Allied forces that now were stationed throughout the country.

In part, the handbill read,

    "However, 'Slavery is to last but a short time more.'"

    "Our Führer is alive."

    "And will soon come back, with power unheard of."

    "Resist our persecutors."

    "Hope and wait."

She began distributing the handbill on the night of 13-14 February 1949 in Cologne and soon found a young ex-SS man to help her.

The Allied occupation officials were at first alarmed by the appearance of these handbills. Was there a clandestine neo-Nazi group out there actually agitating for revolution? But then a German informer told them that a certain Mrs. Mukherji was distributing the subversive leaflets. And on February 22, 1949, Savitri was arrested by the British Army.

 

She was detained at the British military prison for women at Werl until her formal trial, which was fixed for 5 April 1949.

No doubt about it, Savitri was in a heap of trouble. As part of the postwar "denazification" program, the Allies had proclaimed the Laws of Occupation Status n Germany. Article 7 of Law Number 8 "forbade the promotion of militarist and National Socialist ideas on German territory subject to the Allied Control Commission." The maximum penalty was death.

Instead, the Allied court-martial sentenced Savitri to three years at the prison in Werl. She struck up close friendships with former SS concentration camp guards from Belsen and began writing her book Defiance. Here she enjoyed a high regard among her fellow Nazi and SS prisoners for her high-flown rhetoric, her insistence on the idealistic philosophy of Aryan rebirth, and her pious Nazi spirituality. Her presence proved so disruptive that Savitri was soon placed in solitary.

Just as Savitri was looking at an extended stay at Werl, the husband she had abandoned four years earlier came to her rescue. Asit Krishna Mukherji, now a citizen of newly-independent India, arrived in Germany and lobbied the Allied occupation authorities for his wife's release.

In the end, Mukherji was successful, and Savitri was released from prison in August 1949.

For the rest of her life, Savitri continued her mission as a Nazi evangelist, writing several books and helping to found the World Union of National Socialists. She also insisted that some UFOs were indeed craft from the Nazi sanctuary in Antarctica, a theme that her colleage and disciple Ernst R. Zundel expanded upon in his 1974 book, UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?

Savitri Devi died on October 22, 1982.

Although her main contribution to ufology was the promotion of the "saucer Nazis" legend, there is one curious postscript concerning Savitri Devi.

On April 5, 1949, at the same moment Savitri was facing the Allied court-martial in Germany, a spectacular UFO event occurred thousands of miles to the west, over that part of the USA's New England region Loren Coleman calls "the Bridgewater Triangle."

A "very large, luminous, blue-green object" first appeared over Middleboro, Massachusetts, then flew a wobbly corkscrew course westward over Taunton, Rehoboth and Seekonk, Mass. and finally over H.P. Lovecraft's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, where it suddenly and inexplicably vanished. The sighting was reported in Doubt--The Fortean Society Magazine for October 1949.

Who Was The First Person To Receive An Alien Anal Probe? REDUX

jasoncolavito |  Why it is that aliens want to probe our butts; or, more specifically, when exactly did people start claiming that aliens gave them anal probes? I know this is a silly question, but silly questions often end up revealing hidden layers and secrets. And I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer to what should have been a simple question.

Anal probes are now such an established part of the UFO phenomenon that you’d think there’d be a clear answer to that question, but if there is, I can’t find one. Many UFO books refer to it, and many assume that it’s just a given during an abduction, but I can’t find a catalog of anal probing events or a timeline of when they supposedly started. Even the otherwise exhaustive Wikipedia lacks an entry for alien anal probes. There must be something about it somewhere, but since I am not as familiar with modern UFO material, I am not sure where to look for it.

Ufology isn’t much help in the matter. In his A UFO Hunter’s Guide (2012), Brad Lueder simply denies that there were any anal probes, dismissing the formulation as “misinterpreted and misunderstood” sex experiments. He’s wrong, of course, but it shows that some ufologists want to distance themselves from what Lueder calls the “sneers and jokes” of “modern popular culture.” On the other hand, Zen Benefiel self-published a book this year called Alien Agendas and Anal Probes that promised to investigate “the science behind the anal probes” and what these probes can tell us about why the aliens are really here. But his book isn’t a history so much as New Age-influenced fringe speculation.

We can probably put a terminus ante quem and terminus pro quem on our search by establishing that the trope was famous enough in 1997 to be the subject of South Park’s pilot episode, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe.” The probing can’t be part of the abduction experience before there was an abduction experience, so it had to have developed after 1964, when under hypnosis Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been subjected to surgical examination (Betty claimed a needle entered her naval) during a 1961 alien abduction. Or at least it would have developed after 1962, when claims that Antonio Vilas-Boas had been seduced into sex by an alien following a medical examination on a spaceship in 1957 were first published.

The interesting thing is that Barney Hill actually did claim to be anally probed, but because that claim was not included in The Interrupted Journey (1965), the account by John G. Fuller of the hypnotic regression he performed on the Hills, this claim was not generally known until a 1965 report by NICAP investigator Walter Webb was popularized much later. In that report, Webb stated that during the hypnotic regression, Barney Hill stated that “A cylindrical object was inserted up the rectum, and once again the witness believed something was extracted.” Fuller left this out of the book, along with a claim by Hill that a cup was used to extract sperm. Originally posted December 10, 2014

Unidentified Flying Threats? REDUX

The folks must be growing increasingly restive about the Obama candidacy. The NYTimes had this crunchy little morsel in this past week's op-eds.

The United States is no less vulnerable than Britain and France to threats to security and air safety. The United States Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena. It would not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men. It would simply recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us what’s out there. A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States. The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the intelligence community.

I love these articles. To me, they're like tchotchkys of the collective unconscious. I expect we'll be seeing lots more such bon mots in the weeks and months to come as the perfect storm afflicting the economy and the American body politic gathers strength. The American political theater will prove jarringly impotent in dealing with the encompassing reality corrections - so it's time once again to inject a little mystery and awe into the otherwise steady diet of bread and circuses...., Originally posted August 2, 2008.

UFO Abductions and Race Fear? - REDUX

Steven Mizrach is an interesting subrealist.

Though UFO abductions do appear to be an international phenomenon, the lion's share of cases seem to come from Anglo-Saxon-rooted countries like the United States, England, South Africa, and Australia. Interestingly, all of these countries face race problems - whether it be with Aborigines, African-Americans, Zulu and Xhosa, or Caribbean blacks from the commonwealth. In the Third World, many people from these First World countries commonly encounter "organ removal" panics. Rumors have spread like wildfire that Americans in Guatemala are kidnapping small children and "harvesting" their organs for transplants. The similarity between these panics and UFO abductions should also be fairly obvious.... The connection between the UFO phenomenon itself (long before the current wave of abductions) and race is curious and bizarre. Many of the first group of UFO "contactees" - who went aboard the flying saucers willingly, to make love to gorgeous Venusians (but never producing offspring) - were loosely affiliated with the "Silver Shirt" movement of the 30s and 40s, a sort of homegrown American fascism which, among other things, opposed Roosevelt and WW II. The 50s contactees seemed to report that the majority of the saucer pilots were "Aryans" - long-haired, blonde, tall beings from Venus or other planets in the solar system. The "Aryans," when not warning humanity about atomic war, often gave messages promoting race harmony, but softly warning against racial intermixture and the "population explosion" of the Third World masses...

What ever became of the New World Order eruptions of the early 90's? Do you remember the vast conspiracy imaginings associated with pre-Katrina FEMA? Oklahoma City, Waco, Black Helicopters, etc.., etc.., etc..? Whatever became of all those folks now that they've had eight years of rule by the other side of the governance duopoly? Originally posted March 29, 2008.

Killer-Ape Shenanigans Bubbling Just Beneath The Surface Of Consensus Reality...,

hopenothate |  The Order of Nine Angles is a Nazi-Satanist “group” (or Nazi Occult as they prefer to describe themselves) that promotes a supernatural, hateful system of thought which condemns liberal, Judeo-Christian society and longs for a new imperial age created by a ludicrous sub-Nietzschean superman figure called ‘Vindex.’ Ultimately, the O9A elite aspires to colonise the solar system.

The racist order deifies Hitler and the Third Reich, which are regarded as having attempted to create a “Satanic empire” in order to achieve the destiny of the western world.

Much of the O9A writings and activities appear on the surface quite comical. The chanting, the dressing up, the rituals. 

The Mass of Heresy, contained within the ONA’s Black Book of Satan, is performed before an altar adorned with a swastika banner, a framed photograph of Hitler and a copy of Mein Kampf. With black candles and incense of Mars burning, the congregation, dressed in black robes, chant:

We believe Adolf Hitler was sent by our gods To guide us to greatness.
 We believe in the inequality of the races

And in the right of the Aryans to live According to the laws of the folk.

In The Ceremony of Recalling, the Preistess blindfolds the Priest and takes him to each member of the congregation who kiss him. After being lifted on an alter containing “red candles and quartz tetrahedron”, the Priest has his robe removed by the Priestess as the others walk around him. After performing a sexual act on the Priest, the Priestess removes the robes of the congregation. Meanwhile, the Mistress, dressed in a white robe, “takes the person she has chosen and indulges herself according to her desire. The congregation consume the consecrated cakes [made from wheat, water, egg, honey, animal fat and marijuana] and wine and take their own pleasures according to their desires.” The ceremony ends with the killing of a chosen one; in a symbolic sacrifice, an animal replaces a person. On the next new moon, the congregation consume cakes containing the sacrificial victim’s blood.

But behind the fantasy and roleplay lies a very sinister organisation which has the potential to inspire their followers to commit extreme acts of violence. 

The O9A believes civilisation must be undermined and destroyed from within, so adherents are encouraged to be as grubby and horrible as they like – committing crimes, random acts of violence, sexual assaults, and even the “culling” of human victims.

The three volumes of The Black Book of Satan are considered so extreme that they are kept is a special section of the British Library and not available to the general public. There is repeated talk of “culling”, committing acts of violence and destabilisation and even terrorism. In the The Dreccian Way, an O9A training manual written by leader Richard Moult, followers are encouraged not just to commit crime, but to “spread it, encourage it, incite it, support it”.

O9A literature regularly advocates ritualised rape, random attacks on innocent victims and “human culling”. The Black Book of Satan volume 3 describes how the Spring Equinox should be celebrated by a human sacrifice of somebody who volunteers for the role by their bad deeds, which, it suggests, could be “a Nazarene, such as an interfering investigative journalist.” 

“Culling is natural and necessary,” wrote Moult in The Dreccian Way. “To cull humans is to be the ONA. To cull – according to our guildlines and tests – is what makes us ONA.”

Squatters With Brooklyn Accents - Or - Why We NEVER See The Real Criminal Truth!!!

al-jazeera  |  “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it,” was the answer given by an Israeli settler to Mona al-Kurd, a young Palestinian woman who accused him of stealing her home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in the occupied East Jerusalem.

The dialogue, captured on video by Palestinian activist Tamer Maqalda on Saturday, shows 22-year-old al-Kurd confronting the settler in the garden of her family home.

In the video, al-Kurd is heard telling the settler in English: “Jacob, you know that this is not your home.”

The settler replies in a thick US accent: “Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back, so what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?”

The response provoked al-Kurd, who told him “You are stealing my house!”

“If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it,” Jacob answers. “So why are you yelling at me?”

“No one is allowed to steal my home!” al-Kurd shouts.

Jacob then says in Hebrew: “This is not mine in order to return it.”

My baby cousin entered the Israeli army today 😭 pic.twitter.com/yDtMtbjPQ6

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) October 26, 2016

In recent months, the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood saw a series of sit-ins by Palestinians to protest against Israeli orders for them to vacate their homes, which they have described as a continuation of the ethnic cleansing that began with the Nakba in 1948.

On Monday night, dozens of Israeli forces stormed the neighbourhood and assaulted Palestinian families by beating and shooting tear gas and sound bombs at them. According to local Palestinian media, 20 people were injured, and at least four Palestinian men and one girl were arrested, with two being released on Tuesday.

Half of the al-Kurd family home was taken over by Israeli settlers in 2009. Al-Kurd’s twin brother Mohammed previously told Al Jazeera that sharing their home with “squatters with Brooklyn accents” was “insufferable, intolerable [and] terrible”.

“They are just sitting in our home, tormenting us, harassing us, doing everything they can to not only force us to leave the second half of our home but also harassing our neighbours into leaving their homes as part of an effort to completely annihilate the presence of Palestinians from Jerusalem,” Mohammed said, who was 11 years old when the settlers forced their way in.

Last March, the Israeli district court in occupied East Jerusalem ratified orders for six Palestinian families – the al-Kurds included – in Sheikh Jarrah to vacate their homes in order to make way for the settlers. The same court also ruled that another seven families should leave their homes by August 1.

Everything Makes Sense If You Center Megacities As The Focus Of Global Governance

technologyreview |  In 2050, 2.5 billion more people will live in cities than do today. As the world grows more urbanized, many cities are becoming more populous while also trying to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the impacts of climate change.

In the coming decades, cities will be engines of economic growth. But they must also play a key role in confronting climate change; the world’s 100 most populous cities are responsible for roughly one-fifth of global carbon emissions. 

Some of the world’s biggest cities—called megacities—are rising to this challenge. However, these urban areas vary greatly in how efficient they are and how much they will grow. Seeing how they stack up can help us identify where our greatest opportunities are to reduce emissions.

Silly Rabbits, I KNOW You Didn't Think Google Maps Was A Toy - Did You?

technologyreview |  Fourteen-year-old Neha Dashrath was ecstatic when the pizza arrived. It was the first time she’d ever ordered from a food delivery app. “I always felt shy when my friends talked about ordering food from apps,” she says. “Now I, too, can show off.” 

Dashrath lives in Laxmi Nagar, a slum in Pune, Maharashtra, alongside some 5,400 other Indians. Cramped brick and tin structures line crooked lanes wide enough for just one person.

According to the 2011 census, India has 108,000 slums that are home to 65 million residents. It will add more urban residents by 2050 than any other country, according to a 2014 UN estimate, and its slums are growing faster than its cities.

Until recently, Dashrath shared a common address with everyone around her—that of the slum itself. A large banyan tree served as a collection center for mail and other deliveries. With no addresses of their own, residents had a hard time opening bank and postal accounts or accessing electric and water bills. During the pandemic, medical teams struggled to track down infected residents.

Last September, a nonprofit organization called Shelter Associates began a pilot project with Google and UNICEF to provide unique digital addresses to houses in Laxmi Nagar. Now, Dashrath has a special code she can type into delivery apps and share with friends to direct them to her front door. 

“It was the pandemic that really spurred the initiative,” says Pratima Joshi, an architect who cofounded the nonprofit and has worked closely with slums in the cities of Kolhapur and Thane since 1993. 

The digital addresses residents received were “plus codes,” a free feature developed by Google and built with open-source software. A plus code is a simple alphanumeric combination derived from latitudes and longitudes. Each code consists of four characters followed by a plus sign and two to four more characters. The characters after the plus sign define the size of the area.

For example, GRQH+H4 points to a popular temple in Pune, and FRV5+2W56 is the code of a community toilet in Laxmi Nagar. These codes are available on Google Maps and can be used anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Despite the services that become available to those with a physical address, it took time to convince residents to sign up. Many had never heard of Google Maps and were suspicious of Joshi’s staff, mistaking them for officials from India’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority. So the nonprofit enlisted local students to go door to door and tell people about the program.

 

More Than 2 Billion Of You Humans Live In Informal Urban Developments...,

technologyreview |  Finding your way through Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not easy. The buildings are densely and turbulently arranged in a manner that defies traditional identification systems like street names and numbers. Rocinha is a favela, one of the largest among hundreds of unplanned settlements that have sprung up on the outskirts of Brazilian cities since the 19th century. More than 5% of the country’s population now lives in communities like these, with 100,000 people in Rocinha alone. 

The challenge of navigating Rocinha has birthed creative solutions, such as the “friendly mailman” program: companies deliver parcels to a central drop-off point, and a team of Rocinha residents—the only couriers familiar enough with the area to navigate its maze-like streets—take them the rest of the way. 

With little formal aid or administration and scant economic opportunities, favela residents have struggled to contend with unhealthy living conditions and frequent violence. A thick wall of social segregation means that resources from the city—including electricity and clean water—must take twisting, uncertain paths to make it inside. Life expectancy in favelas is just 48, which is 20 years below the national average. 

Much has been made of the dizzying growth of the world’s cities, but few people are aware of what most urban growth actually looks like. Births and migrations are concentrated in the developing world, and with the exception of China, most new urban fabric is informal—more shantytowns than skyscrapers. For all our futuristic reveries, the city of tomorrow probably will not look much different from Rocinha.

In the 20th century, the Brazilian government attempted to eradicate favelas and replace them with more formal public housing, but the bulldozers could not keep up with the massive urban migration that made these settlements swell. 

 

Other governments and urban planners have also tried to prevent such settlements from forming or to dismantle them when they do, but that’s proved a losing strategy. More than 2 billion people worldwide are now estimated to live in them. 

 

The Fundamentals Of Global Biosecurity Governance Are Under Construction

Telegraph |  When listing his regrets about the pandemic, Boris Johnson has started to tell friends that he was let down by his own liberal instincts. That he hoped for too long that Britain could, like Sweden, fight the virus through consent rather than diktat – getting through this without abolishing basic freedoms. His fear at the time was irreversibility. If sacred principles were jettisoned in an emergency, would they ever be restored? Might he end up unleashing something he’d struggle to control?

It was a good question. Covid levels are now so low in Britain that the Prime Minister could have proclaimed the second wave over yesterday. Instead, he asked for his Government’s emergency powers to be extended for another six months. Why, if there is no longer an emergency? Sir Keir Starmer didn’t ask. Instead, he voted with the Tories. Even Labour, it seems, has grown used to a life without much in the way of debate, scrutiny, opposition or explanation.

Big announcements continue to come via people like Prof Neil Ferguson, who still seems to have a Rasputin-like hold over the Government. Earlier this week, he said he thought it may be unwise to book any foreign holidays this summer. This is big news, because what he thinks today tends to become Matt Hancock’s policy tomorrow. “We’re run by scientist groupthink,” says one minister. “But that won’t change until the polls change.”

Lockdown remains very popular, to the Prime Minister’s initial amazement. But he talks now as if he has been given a new mandate from the electorate. “My impression is that there is a huge wisdom in the public’s feeling about this,” he told MPs this week. “Human beings instinctively recognise when something is dangerous and nasty to them. They can see, collectively, that Covid is a threat. They want us, as their Government – and me as the Prime Minister – to take all the actions I can to protect them.”

The creation of a “Health Security Agency” was announced this week. An unusual name: British “security” services have not, so far, tended to involve public health officials. But perhaps the language is simply catching up with reality: that the fundamentals of a biosecurity state are now under construction. This is what ministers think the public now want: a big shift in the dial away from liberty so the state can better provide security. It’s happening incrementally, with no real debate.

Until recently, no government would have thought it was expected to control a virus. The wildest of the pandemic plans did not involve lockdown. But Wuhan showed what public health figures could “get away with” as Prof Ferguson put it – which changed everything. The definition of what government can “get away with” is being expanded week after week.

Controlling the circulation of viruses can, logically, be done by controlling what people do. So the old inalienable rights – freedom of assembly, of protest, of school education, to leave the country – become privileges to be removed or restored as ministers see fit. This might be the remit of the Health Security Agency. In Whitehall, people are thinking the unthinkable: one idea is citizens sending their temperature in every day using the NHS app. 

Take digital identity cards. They’re common in China, where citizens are given a colour code taking in health status which decides how freely they can move. Might ministers get away with vaccine identity cards here? “We are not a papers-carrying country,” Hancock said in January. Now, Michael Gove is busy working on vaccine passports, which the Prime Minister says we may need to go to the pub. Or, in some cases, get a job.

Hancock was right, though: at the heart of this is a question of what kind of country we are – and whether liberal Britain became a casualty of the pandemic. Opinion polls show support for vaccine identity cards, curfews, border closures, the works. When Tony Blair proposed identity cards in 2004, Johnson said he’d eat his in front of anyone who asked him to produce it. “Extremism in the defence of liberty,” he wrote, “is no vice.” Blair now is back as the public face of vaccine identity cards, as if he wants to hammer home that, in the end, he won.

Kevin Samuels Vivisection - MUCH MORE Impressed With Adella Afadi Than I Am With Myself...,

If SARS-Cov2 Was A Bioweapon...,

The Fungus Among Us...,

scientificamerican |  We are likely to think of fungi, if we think of them at all, as minor nuisances: mold on cheese, mildew on shoes shoved to the back of the closet, mushrooms springing up in the garden after hard rains. We notice them, and then we scrape them off or dust them away, never perceiving that we are engaging with the fragile fringes of a web that knits the planet together. Fungi constitute their own biological kingdom of about six million diverse species, ranging from common companions such as baking yeast to wild exotics. They differ from the other kingdoms in complex ways. Unlike animals, they have cell walls, not membranes; unlike plants, they cannot make their own food; unlike bacteria, they hold their DNA within a nucleus and pack cells with organelles—features that make them, at the cellular level, weirdly similar to us. Fungi break rocks, nourish plants, seed clouds, cloak our skin and pack our guts, a mostly hidden and unrecorded world living alongside us and within us.

That mutual coexistence is now tipping out of balance. Fungi are surging beyond the climate zones they long lived in, adapting to environments that would once have been inimical, learning new behaviors that let them leap between species in novel ways. While executing those maneuvers, they are becoming more successful pathogens, threatening human health in ways—and numbers—they could not achieve before.

Surveillance that identifies serious fungal infections is patchy, and so any number is probably an undercount. But one widely shared estimate proposes that there are possibly 300 million people infected with fungal diseases worldwide and 1.6 million deaths every year—more than malaria, as many as tuberculosis. Just in the U.S., the CDC estimates that more than 75,000 people are hospitalized annually for a fungal infection, and another 8.9 million people seek an outpatient visit, costing about $7.2 billion a year.

For physicians and epidemiologists, this is surprising and unnerving. Long-standing medical doctrine holds that we are protected from fungi not just by layered immune defenses but because we are mammals, with core temperatures higher than fungi prefer. The cooler outer surfaces of our bodies are at risk of minor assaults—think of athlete's foot, yeast infections, ringworm—but in people with healthy immune systems, invasive infections have been rare.

That may have left us overconfident. “We have an enormous blind spot,” says Arturo Casadevall, a physician and molecular microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Walk into the street and ask people what are they afraid of, and they'll tell you they're afraid of bacteria, they're afraid of viruses, but they don't fear dying of fungi.”

Ironically, it is our successes that made us vulnerable. Fungi exploit damaged immune systems, but before the mid-20th century people with impaired immunity didn't live very long. Since then, medicine has gotten very good at keeping such people alive, even though their immune systems are compromised by illness or cancer treatment or age. It has also developed an array of therapies that deliberately suppress immunity, to keep transplant recipients healthy and treat autoimmune disorders such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. So vast numbers of people are living now who are especially vulnerable to fungi. (It was a fungal infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, that alerted doctors to the first known cases of HIV 40 years ago this June.)

Not all of our vulnerability is the fault of medicine preserving life so successfully. Other human actions have opened more doors between the fungal world and our own. We clear land for crops and settlement and perturb what were stable balances between fungi and their hosts. We carry goods and animals across the world, and fungi hitchhike on them. We drench crops in fungicides and enhance the resistance of organisms residing nearby. We take actions that warm the climate, and fungi adapt, narrowing the gap between their preferred temperature and ours that protected us for so long.

But fungi did not rampage onto our turf from some foreign place. They were always with us, woven through our lives and our environments and even our bodies: every day, every person on the planet inhales at least 1,000 fungal spores. It is not possible to close ourselves off from the fungal kingdom. But scientists are urgently trying to understand the myriad ways in which we dismantled our defenses against the microbes, to figure out better approaches to rebuild them.

 

 

 

What If This Ant Parasite Or Something Else Like It Isn't Just A Metaphor For Human Rentier Capitalism?

theatlantic |  Deep in the forests of Germany, nestled neatly into the hollowed-out shells of acorns, live a smattering of ants who have stumbled upon a fountain of youth. They are born workers, but do not do much work. Their days are spent lollygagging about the nest, where their siblings shower them with gifts of food. They seem to elude the ravages of old age, retaining a durably adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and their hue distinctively tawny. Their scent, too, seems to shift, wafting out an alluring perfume that endears them to others. While their sisters, who have nearly identical genomes, perish within months of being born, these death-defying insects live on for years and years and years.

They are Temnothorax ants, and their elixirs of life are the tapeworms that teem within their bellies—parasites that paradoxically prolong the life of their host at a strange and terrible cost.

A few such life-lengthening partnerships have been documented between microbes and insects such as wasps, beetles, and mosquitoes. But what these ants experience is more extreme than anything that’s come before, says Susanne Foitzik, an entomologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in Germany, who studies the ants and their tapeworms. Infected Temnothorax ants live at least three times longer than their siblings, and perhaps much more, she and her colleagues report in a study published today in Royal Society Open Science. No one is yet sure when the insects’ longevity tops out, but the answer is probably in excess of a decade, approaching or even matching that of ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years.

“Some other parasites do extend life spans,” Shelley Adamo, a parasite expert at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who was not involved in the study, told me. “But not like this.”

Under typical circumstances, Temnothorax ants live as most other ants do. They reside in communities ruled by a single fertile queen attended by a legion of workers whose professional lives take a predictable trajectory. They first tend the queen’s eggs as nurses, then graduate into foraging roles that take them outside the nest. Apart from the whole freaky parasite thing, “they are pretty boring,” Foitzik told me.

Normalcy goes out the door, however, when Temnothorax larvae ingest tapeworm-egg-infested bird feces trucked in by foragers. The parasites hatch and set up permanent residence in the young ants’ abdomens, where they can access a steady stream of nutrients. In return, they offer their host an unconventional renter’s fee: an extra-long life span that Foitzik and her colleagues managed to record in real time.

 

 

Nighty Night, Don't Let The Neurological Parasites Bite...,

discovermagazine |  If you’re hiking in the wilderness, stay away from warm, stagnant bodies of fresh water, no matter how thirsty you are. These inviting little ponds often play host to Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba species with a taste for human brain tissue.

N. fowleri can spend long spans of time just hanging around as a cyst, a little armored ball that can survive cold, heat, and dry conditions. When a cyst comes into contact with an inviting host, it sprouts tentacle-like pseudopods and turns into a form known as a trophozoite. Once it’s transformed, the trophozoite heads straight for the host’s central nervous system, following nerve fibers inward in search of the brain.

Once it’s burrowed into its host’s brain tissue — usually the olfactory bulbs — N. fowleri sprouts a “sucking apparatus” called an amoebostome and starts chowing down on juicy brain matter. As the amoeba divides, multiplies and moves inward, devouring brain cells as it goes, its hosts can go from uncomfortable to incoherent to unconscious in a matter of hours.

The symptoms start subtly, with alterations in tastes and smells, and maybe some fever and stiffness. But over the next few days, as N. fowleri burrows deeper into the brain’s cognitive structures, victims start feeling confused, have trouble paying attention, and begin to hallucinate. Next come seizures and unconsciousness, as the brain loses all control. Two weeks later, the victim’s most likely perishes — although one man in Taiwan managed to stick it out for a grueling 25 days before his nervous system finally gave out.

Although N. fowleri infections are rare in the extreme — worldwide historical totals number only in the hundreds — they’re almost always fatal, and tricky to catch and treat before they spiral out of control. Even so, you’d be wise to avoid warm pools of still water, lest you end up with an uninvited guest on the brain.

 

 

Quick Fungal Parasitism Reminder...,

theatlantic |  To find the world’s most sinister examples of mind control, don’t look to science fiction. Instead, go to a tropical country like Brazil, and venture deep into the jungle. Find a leaf that’s hanging almost exactly 25 centimeters above the forest floor, no more and no less. Now look underneath it. If you’re in luck, you might find an ant clinging to the leaf’s central vein, jaws clamped tight for dear life. But this ant’s life is already over. And its body belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus.

When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend a nearby plant stem. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters—a zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to grow. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a leaf. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing into a bulbous capsule full of spores. And because the ant typically climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn.

The fungus’s skill at colonizing ants is surpassed only by its skill at colonizing popular culture. It’s the organism behind the monsters of the video game “The Last of Us” and the zombies of the book The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s also an obsession of one David Hughes, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has been studying it for years. He wants to know exactly how this puppet master controls its puppets—and his latest experiments suggest that it’s even more ghoulish than it first appears.

Bill Gates Wasn't Into Epstein For Jailbait But For Influence, Intelligence, And Extortion..,

The sudden opening of Gates’ closet and the rate at which skeletons are tumbling out is very, very suspicious. There is a flurry of unmistakably coordinated articles and posts. His past common-knowledge peccadilloes are being reported breathlessly as if it is the Scoop of the Century. This is fallout of internecine warfare among the powers that be.

Who is so powerful that even Bill Gates cannot escape their wrath?

How did Bill Gates manage to piss them off?

From a PR perspective, Bill had outlived his usefulness as a public face for the Great Reset.

It’s not like he’ll lose money beyond the half he has to hand over to Melinda French - but he definitely won't ever get that coveted Nobel prize or be carted out on TV as the public face of the Great Reset anymore.

NYMag |   On Sunday night, another volley of reporting on Gates’s alleged behavior was published, including several details on the Microsoft co-founder’s improprieties at work. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft board members ultimately decided that he must step down from the board in the midst of a company investigation into a romantic relationship with a subordinate in 2000. While Gates and Microsoft admitted to the relationship — which a spokeswoman for the philanthropist called “an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably” — his team denied that the “decision to transition off the board” was related to the investigation.

Pursuing sexual relationships at a powerful institution he co-founded was not just limited to Microsoft, or the affair in 2000. According to the New York Times, Gates tried to date women working for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, asking people out by email — “If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” he wrote in 2006 — and in person. Witnesses also claim that he was dismissive of his wife in meetings at their shared group, and that Gates did not respond to her request for an outside party to investigate a sexual-harassment claim against their money manager, who is still on the job.

More information on the Epstein connection also came to light on Sunday evening. While it’s already understood that Melinda Gates was not thrilled by her husband spending time with the alleged sex trafficker, the Times notes that Gates ignored her advice on the subject and continued meeting with him. Epstein provided some advice of his own, according to the Daily Beast, which reported that the predator met with Gates dozens of times between 2011 and 2014 and told him how to end his “toxic” marriage to Melinda. Apparently going to Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion to get the advice was more impactful than the advice itself.

 

From The Very Outset LET HER RIP!!! Has Been The U.S. Covid Mitigation Strategy...,

nakedcapitalism | The question that I have no answer to is when exactly was it decided to not contain it. If you remember, some information came out about early and mid-February 2020 closed Senate meetings, after which senators were selling their shares in hotels and airlines, i.e. what was going to happen in late March was known at that time. But it was not in fact too late to contain it in early February, it could have been done with test-trace-isolate. So maybe it was perceived at the time that it could not be, assuming the decision was made as late as possible within that timeline. But the earlier that decision happened, the more nefarious motivations one would have to suspect were involved, because why would you not at least try to contain it when it was eminently doable? After all SARS-1 was contained even though it reached hundreds of cases in Canada and the US. And then what followed was the outright sabotage of testing and detection by the CDC,¹ the CDC allowing strongly suspected to be infected people to just get off their flight and walk right back into the community, and a rather long list of other such absurd actions. Maybe one day internal information will leak and we will learn the truth, who knows…

Also, this all becomes even more gruesome when one realizes that the decision of the US to allow it to become endemic meant the same decision was imposed on most of the rest of the world, as the US controls it. As I said above, Eastern Europe (except for Belarus and Russia) took it very seriously early on and locked down before it had gotten out of hand, and was in fact very close to elimination. Montenegro, which eventually ended up being one of the worst affected countries, actually did eliminate it in May 2020.

But once it became clear the US will not eliminate and the EU will not eliminate, those countries had no choice, although they could have at least held out for vaccines instead of letting it rip. There was never going to be a world in which the EU and Latin America have indefinitely banned travel out of the US, not with US military bases stationed all over Europe. And there was never going to be a world in which Bulgaria and Romania ban travel from Germany.

The really sad part is that a country like Russia supposedly does have that independence, and could have gone for elimination and closed borders and a bubble with China. But modern Russia is not the USSR, it’s just as, if not more neoliberal than the US, so they let it rip too, for the same reasons as in the US…

And now some the countries that did the right thing — Taiwan, Vietnam, and Laos — are encircled and battling their worst outbreaks since the start, which is heartbreaking to watch. 

The combination of infection level and vaccine effectiveness lead toward viral evolutionary selection:

 Unfortunately, with many respected scientists jumping on board of the optimism hype train (it was quite noticeable how the mood shifted on purely scientific matters that had absolutely nothing to do with politics a few months ago), the wrong message has already been once again sent to the public, and we can expect disaster in the future.

Non-sterilizing vaccines mean the virus will not only get the chance to evolve complete escape but will be channeled in that direction. But it also may be channeled in the direction of being much more virulent as a side effect of its fight with the vaccines (this can get quite detailed on a molecular level so I will not go into it right now).

The math does not look good — the unmitigated-spread R_0 in February 2020 was much closer to 6.0 than to the usually cited 2.0. But the current variants have undergone adaptation and are much more contagious. Let’s say we have R_0 = 6. And let’s say we reach 70% vaccination (it’s hard to see how we will get higher), and that transmission is cut by 80% (this, however, is simplistic — it is quite likely that transmission is cut by 80% in the first couple months after vaccination, but then the first thing that will wear off is protection from infection, with protection from severe disease going away last). That’s 56% effective vaccination. But the herd immunity threshold for R_0=6 is 85%, a lot higher, i.e. it will continue to spread. It might in fact continue to spread even with 100% vaccination with a full return to 2019 in terms of lack of social distancing.

So we should absolutely never have gone down the path of “solving” this crisis with vaccines and not doing anything to stop transmission. The vaccines should have been used as one of the tools to eliminate the virus, but in combination with NPIs.

If evolution featured in the thinking of our overlords, they would not have settled on this as the “solution” to the problem. But either it does not, or they just don’t care.

P.S. Some more sobering simple math. Let’s say the vaccine is 90% protective against severe disease over a period of two years. Then one can expect to have on average three serious COVID episodes by the time he is 60 even if he is always up-to-date with his biannual vaccinations (and there is no knowing how much more virulent to young people it will have become in the future with all the serial passaging). We now see what round #1 of mass reinfections looks like in India. So that is the “solution” being offered right now. However, it will probably not happen as one giant apocalyptic wave so it can be pushed to the background as a non-problem.

But... But... Aliens!

Adversary Drones Are Toying With The Homeland And "We're" Helpless To Stop It...,

thedrive |  We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are absolutely massive.

Our team here at The War Zone has spent the last two years indirectly laying out a case for the hypothesis that many of the events involving supposed UFOs, or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as they are now often called, over the last decade are actually the manifestation of foreign adversaries harnessing advances in lower-end unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and even simpler platforms, to gather intelligence of extreme fidelity on some of America's most sensitive warfighting capabilities. Now, considering all the news on this topic in recent weeks, including our own major story on a series of bizarre incidents involving U.S. Navy destroyers and 'UAP' off the Southern California coast in 2019, it's time to not only sum up our case, but to discuss the broader implications of these revelations, what needs to be done about them, and the Pentagon's fledgling 'UAP Task Force' as a whole.

Yes, I realize that the idea that an adversary is penetrating U.S. military training areas unmolested, and has been for years, using lowly drone technology and balloons, is a big pill to swallow, but as one of the people who have repeatedly warned about the threat posed by lower-end drones for a decade—warnings that largely were dismissed by the Pentagon until drones made or altered in ramshackle ISIS workshops in a war zone were literally raining down bomblets on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq—it isn't really surprising at all. Nor is the fact that the Defense Department is still playing catch-up when it comes to the realities surrounding the drone threat, and not just to its forces abroad, but also to the homeland overall. The utter lack of vision and early robust interest in regards to this emerging threat will go down as one of the Pentagon's biggest strategic missteps of our time.

The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence. This is a blind spot we ourselves literally created out of cultural taboos and a military-industrial complex that is ill-suited to foresee and counter a lower-end threat that is very hard to defend against.

Why The Exponential Increase In Clandestine Military Operations Forces?

newsweek |  The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.

The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world. The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.

Newsweek's exclusive report on this secret world is the result of a two-year investigation involving the examination of over 600 resumes and 1,000 job postings, dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, and scores of interviews with participants and defense decision-makers. What emerges is a window into not just a little-known sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated practice. No one knows the program's total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.

The signature reduction effort engages some 130 private companies to administer the new clandestine world. Dozens of little known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. Altogether the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the clandestine force—doing everything from creating false documentation and paying the bills (and taxes) of individuals operating under assumed names, to manufacturing disguises and other devices to thwart detection and identification, to building invisible devices to photograph and listen in on activity in the most remote corners of the Middle East and Africa.

DoD Doing A Lot Of Warrantless Surveillance Of U.S. Citizens

 

vice  |  The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard.

Senator Wyden's office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens.

Some of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time, but believes it would meaningfully inform the debate around how the DoD is interpreting the law and its purchases of data.

"I write to urge you to release to the public information about the Department of Defense's (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans," the letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, reads.

Wyden and his staff with appropriate security clearances are able to review classified responses, a Wyden aide told Motherboard. Wyden's office declined to provide Motherboard with specifics about the classified answer. But a Wyden aide said that the question related to the DoD buying internet metadata.

"Are any DoD components buying and using without a court order internet metadata, including 'netflow' and Domain Name System (DNS) records," the question read, and asked whether those records were about "domestic internet communications (where the sender and recipient are both U.S. IP addresses)" and "internet communications where one side of the communication is a U.S. IP address and the other side is located abroad."

I Said This About The Solarwinds Hack In January - I Think It Bears Repeating...,

unlimitedhangout |  The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds’ software just as the “back door” was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.

In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.

The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.

Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.

Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.

There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.

No Davos In Asia This Year...,

Forbes  |  The World Economic Forum cancelled its annual meeting, which was scheduled to take place in Singapore this August, due to uncertainties surrounding the continuing spread of the Covid-19 virus around the world.

“Regretfully, the tragic circumstances unfolding across geographies, an uncertain travel outlook, differing speeds of vaccination rollout and the uncertainty around new variants combine to make it impossible to realize a global meeting with business, government and civil society leaders from all over the world at the scale which was planned,” the WEF said in a statement on its website late Monday. “This is despite the excellent support provided by the government of Singapore.”

The decision came as Singapore battled to stem the increasing number of unlinked or untraceable Covid-19 infections in the city-state. The government implemented more stringent social distancing measures over the weekend and delayed the launch of a much-anticipated air travel bubble with Hong Kong for a second time. 

Singapore had been managing the Covid-19 situation better than most countries until infections spiked this month. The government reported 21 new community cases on Monday, 11 of whom are unlinked to previous cases.

WEF said its next annual meeting will instead be held in the first half of 2020. The final location and date of the event will be determined later this year, it said.

“It was a difficult decision, particularly in view of the great interest of our partners to come together not just virtually but in person, and to contribute to a more resilient, more inclusive and more sustainable world,” said Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. “But ultimately the health and safety of everyone concerned is our highest priority.”