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:
In effect, English’s article trashes the positions of all Foreign
Affairs’ featured contributors for the past several years. But it must
be stressed that there are no new discoveries of fact or new insights
that make English’s essay particularly valuable. What he has done is to
bring together the chief points of the counter-current and set them out
with extraordinary writing skills, efficiency and persuasiveness of
argumentation. Even more important, he has been uncompromising.
The facts laid out by English could have been set out by one of
several experienced and informed professors or practitioners of
international relations. But English had the courage to follow the facts
where they lead and the skill to convince the Foreign Affairs editors
to take the chance on allowing readers to see some unpopular truths even
though the editors now will probably come under attack themselves as
“Kremlin stooges.”
The overriding thesis is summed up at the start of the essay: “For 25
years, Republicans and Democrats have acted in ways that look much the
same to Moscow. Washington has pursued policies that have ignored
Russian interests (and sometimes international law as well) in order to
encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs conducive to
U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder is
that the U.S. policy elite doesn’t get this, even as foreign-affairs
neophyte Trump apparently does.”
English’s article goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union in the
early 1990s and explains why and how U.S. policy toward Russia was wrong
and wrong again. He debunks the notion that Boris Yeltsin brought in a
democratic age, which Vladimir Putin undid after coming to power.
English explains how the U.S. meddled in Russian domestic politics in
the mid-1990s to falsify election results and ensure Yeltsin’s
continuation in office despite his unpopularity for bringing on an
economic Depression that average Russians remember bitterly to this day.
That was a time when the vast majority of Russians equated democracy
with “shitocracy.”
English describes how the Russian economic and political collapse in
the 1990s was exploited by the Clinton administration. He tells why
currently fashionable U.S. critics of Putin are dead wrong when they
fail to acknowledge Putin’s achievements in restructuring the economy,
tax collection, governance, improvements in public health and more which
account for his spectacular popularity ratings today.
English details all the errors and stupidities of the Obama
administration in its handling of Russia and Putin, faulting President
Obama and Secretary of State (and later presidential candidate) Hillary
Clinton for all of their provocative and insensitive words and deeds.
What we see in U.S. policy, as described by English, is the application
of double standards, a prosecutorial stance towards Russia, and
outrageous lies about the country and its leadership foisted on the
American public.
Then English takes on directly all of the paranoia over Russia’s
alleged challenge to Western democratic processes. He calls attention
instead to how U.S. foreign policy and the European Union’s own policies
in the new Member States and candidate Member States have created all
the conditions for a populist revolt by buying off local elites and
subjecting the broad populace in these countries to pauperization.
WaPo | “Three of the airlines that have been targeted for these measures — Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways — have long been accused by their U.S. competitors of receiving massive effective subsidies from their governments,” wrote political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. “These airlines have been quietly worried for months that President Trump was going to retaliate. This may be the retaliation.”
Farrell
and Newman suggested Tuesday’s order is an example of the Trump
administration “weaponizing interdependence” — using its leverage in a
world where American airports are key “nodes” in global air travel to
weaken competitors. My colleague Max Bearak detailed how this could be a part of Trump’s wider protectionist agenda. In February, President Trump met with executives of U.S. airlines and pledged that he would help them compete against foreign carriers that receive subsidies from their home governments.
“A lot of that competition is subsidized by governments, big league,” said
Trump at that meeting. “I’ve heard that complaint from different people
in this room. Probably about one hour after I got elected, I was
inundated with calls from your industry and many other industries,
because it’s a very unfair situation.”
reuters | A broad coalition
of advertising trade groups, ad buyers and sellers from Western Europe
and the United States have urged the industry to stop using annoying
online marketing formats that have fuelled the rapid rise of
ad-blockers.
The types of
ads the coalition has identified as falling below standard include
pop-up advertisements, auto-play video ads with sound, flashing animated
ads and full-screen ads that mask underlying content from readers or
viewers.
The explosion of
ad-blocking tools has launched a prolonged debate within the advertising
industry over whether to rein in abusive ad practices or simply freeze
out consumers who use ad blocker and still expect access to premium
content.
The Coalition for Better
Ads said on Wednesday it was publishing the voluntary standards after a
study in which more than 25,000 web surfers and mobile phone users rated
ads.
They identified six types of
desktop web ads and 12 types of mobile ads as falling beneath a
threshold of consumer acceptability and called on advertisers to avoid
them.
Matti
Littunen, research analyst at Enders Analysis focusing on digital
media, said the ad formats identified by the coalition "have already
been discouraged for years by these bodies and yet are still
commonplace."
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
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New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...