His attorney, Marc Agnifilo, said earlier Monday that they were "disappointed with the decision to pursue what we believe is an unjust prosecution," calling the entertainment star "an imperfect person but is not criminal."
The former music executive has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) carried out the arrest in Manhattan on Monday, sources familiar with the matter told NBC New York. Combs was arrested in the lobby of a hotel, a representative told NBC News.
"To his credit Mr. Combs has been nothing but cooperative with this investigation and he voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges. Please reserve your judgment until you have all the facts," the statement from Agnifilo read. "These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court."
teenvogue |While President Joe Biden
gave a commencement address (and received an honorary degree) from
Morehouse College in Atlanta on Sunday, May 19, several students staged
pro-Palestine protests — some turning their backs and others walking
out. The students who protested cited the president's ongoing policy
decisions in Israel's war on Gaza.
Before Biden took the stage for his address, Morehouse valedictorian DeAngelo Fletcher gave a rousing speech
calling for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza strip,"
and was met with applause from both the crowd and Biden, who also shook
Fletcher's hand. “From the comfort of our homes, we watch an
unprecedented number of civilians mourn the loss of men, women and
children, while calling for the release of all hostages," Fletcher said.
The audience also included Morehouse alumni vocally supporting Biden during the ceremony, giving the president a standing ovation
as he approached the stage, according to video taken from the event.
Meanwhile, some graduates who wore keffiyeh scarves and Palestinian
flags opted to turn their chairs away from Biden for the duration of his speech, according to the New York Times. Other graduates walked out of the ceremony as a sign of protest, though the Times notes that Biden's speech was largely uninterrupted. When he finished, attendees in the VIP section chanted, “Four more years.”
“I support peaceful nonviolent protest,”
Biden told students in his speech. “Your voices should be heard, and I
promise you I hear them.” He also said he is "working around the clock”
for an immediate ceasefire.
After Morehouse announced that it would welcome Biden to deliver the
commencement speech this year and grant him an honorary degree from the
historically Black college, current students and alumni pushed back on
the Atlanta-area school, urging them to reconsider. In one open letter
to Morehouse's faculty from a group with the Atlanta University Center
Students for Justice in Palestine, Dr. Marlon Millner, class of 1995,
asked that Morehouse “not award [an] honorary degree to someone morally
complicit in a war in Gaza.”
“[Morehouse alumni Martin Luther King
Jr.] challenged a historically courageous [Lyndon B. Johnson] on
Vietnam after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. That’s moral
courage, not moral complicity or moral complacency,” Millner wrote.
“Morehouse does produce businessmen, but let’s not fail to produce
better men. Morehouse does produce politicians, but let’s not fail to
produce men of principle. This is a defining moment where actions, not
accolades will matter.”
thehill | U.S. officials went on the offensive Monday after the International
Criminal Court (ICC) filed arrest warrants against two top Israeli
leaders over the war in Gaza, a move that Congress and the White House
slammed for equating Israel’s conduct with the Palestinian militant
group’s Oct. 7 attack.
President Biden and
moderate Democrats united with Republicans in Congress to criticize the
ICC shortly after the Monday notice that arrest warrants had been filed
for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three top Hamas officials.
They argued the ICC has no jurisdiction in the case and was
undermining its own credibility, while House Republican leaders
threatened to sanction the court over the warrants.
Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), ranking member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, said the ICC inserted a “false moral equivalency”
for issuing arrest warrants targeting both Hamas and Israel.
“Today’s ICC decision is absurd. The ICC, like the rest of the
international community, continues to be obsessed with targeting Israel
during its time of need,” Risch said in a statement.
“Today’s actions have hurt the credibility of the court and seriously
harmed legitimate accountability efforts where true war crimes are
occurring, like Ukraine, Syria, and across Africa.”
The White House also criticized the ICC for the arrest warrants, with
Biden calling it “outrageous” in a statement and denouncing the
equivalence of Hamas and Israel.
White House national security communications adviser John Kirby told
reporters that while there have been too many casualties in Gaza, the
Israeli military is not intentionally targeting civilians.
“[Israeli] soldiers are not waking up in the morning putting their
boots on the ground with direct orders to go kill innocent civilians in
Gaza,” he said.
The U.S. and Israel have repeatedly contrasted the army’s actions
with Hamas, saying the militant group deliberately targeted Israeli
civilians on Oct. 7 when fighters killed more than 1,100 people and took
another roughly 250 hostages, about 130 of whom are still being held
captive, an unknown number alive. They also accuse Hamas of using
civilians as human shields in Gaza.
“There should be no equivalence at all,” Kirby said. “It’s ridiculous.”
But ICC top prosecutor Karim Khan deflected
criticism in a Monday interview with CNN, noting he appointed an
independent panel of international law experts to review the warrant
process.
dailycaller | Karine Jean-Pierre has turned over her spotlight to Admiral John
Kirby in an “unprecedented” way as the White House barrels toward a
pivotal election season, a Daily Caller review of briefing data reveals.
Since
Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Kirby has been a mainstay at briefings
alongside Jean-Pierre to answer reporters’ questions about the foreign
conflict. Though Americans have indicated the war is not their top
concern, Kirby has remained at the briefings — only missing three since
the start of the year through Oct. 7. Of the briefings he has attended
in 2024, 19 out of the 22 total held, Kirby has fielded questions for
almost the exact same amount of time as Jean-Pierre.
As of Feb. 27, Jean-Pierre has spent about 11 hours and 31 minutes at
the White House press briefing podium this year across 22 briefings.
Kirby has answered questions for just under nine hours and two minutes
in 19 briefings. In those 19 briefings when Kirby and Jean-Pierre were
together, the press secretary spoke for just shy of nine hours and 11
minutes — almost a perfect fifty-fifty split with her counterpart.
“There
is no precedent for this. Press secretaries always bring guests, right.
It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have the OMB [the Office of Management and
Budget] guys brief you on the budget and talk to you about that.’
That’s normal,” Sean Spicer, one-time press secretary for former
President Donald Trump, told the Daily Caller. “That’s as old as the
job. But this idea that you have a co-press secretary is unprecedented.”
Some
other names have made appearances at briefings and gaggles, either
alongside Jean-Pierre or Kirby: deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton,
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, White House spokesman for
oversight and investigations Ian Sams and a few other policy-specific
officials from the administration.
But none have appeared nearly as often as Kirby, who Jean-Pierre was reportedly concerned
might usurp her as press secretary when she first got the job. Biden
“awkwardly” added that Kirby would be joining Jean-Pierre’s team when
the president gave her the press secretary position in 2022, leaving her
“upset and confused,” according to Axios.
Jean-Pierre’s appointment was lauded
as historic and powerful when she got the job — she’s the first black
press secretary, and is also a lesbian woman of immigrant parents. From
the beginning, things have reportedly been rocky, though — Biden also
allegedly said that Jean-Pierre didn’t need to worry because she’d “have
an admiral looking over your shoulder,” a comment that was not received well by the new press secretary.
Amid the tension between Kirby and Jean-Pierre, the latter’s top deputy, Dalton, is reportedly ditching the White House for a gig at Apple.
That
leaves a clear path to the top job for Kirby. He has told some around
the White House he’s interested in the position, according to Axios, but
other White House officials denied those accounts.
When it comes
to gaggles, Kirby has appeared at more as of late, speaking at seven of
them between the start of the year and Feb. 16 for a total of more than
an hour and seven minutes. The pair has attended four gaggles together,
with Jean-Pierre answering questions for more than 41 minutes.
“I
don’t think the dynamic is awkward to begin with. I think they did it
under the presence, under the guise of national security and foreign
affairs. But the reality is, Kirby has really taken over a lot more, for
obvious reasons,” Spicer said. “The press secretary should be able to
handle all of the issues and it’s pretty obvious that there’s a level of
competence that just doesn’t exist.”
twitter | Over my 35-year career, I have been the subject of many thousands of articles, including extremely negative, inaccurate, and libelous articles, yet I have never sued a media organization or a journalist.
Beginning in early January of this year, Business Insider released a series of stories about my partner in life, @NeriOxman, that were defamatory, materially false and misleading, and designed to cause her harm, principally because the reporters do not like me, my support for Israel, and my advocacy to remove former Harvard President Claudine Gay due to her leadership failures, and her lack of moral clarity.
These are not fantastical accusations. We prove them with detailed empirical evidence in a 77-page demand letter that we sent to @axelspringer this morning, and that we are sharing publicly now.
After I posted weeks ago on @X that I intended to sue @Businessinsider and its parent company Axel Springer for defamation, I heard from a number of people that I highly respect who strongly discouraged me from suing, pleading with me to find another solution to resolve this mess.
These individuals did not question that Neri and I had been defamed, but rather they explained that Axel Springer has been perhaps the strongest long-term supporter of the state of Israel of any media organization, and also an important advocate against antisemitism.
I also recently had the opportunity to have dinner with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, and he seemed like a good man. We did not, however, discuss the Business Insider reporting or the lawsuit that night, but my opportunity to meet him confirmed much of what I had been told about him and Axel Springer.
Upon consideration of the advice we have received from people we highly respect and my opportunity to meet Mathias Döpfner, we are making an effort to avoid litigation by sending Axel Springer this demand letter in which we outline with particularity all of the facts around BI’s reporting of this matter, the factual inaccuracies in its reporting, Axel Springer’s false statements about BI’s reporting, and a proposed resolution.
If we can resolve this matter as we have proposed, we can avoid litigation, and more importantly, we can hopefully end Business Insider’s unethical and unprofessional practices. If indeed Axel Springer is the professional ethical media company that I am told it is and it purports to be, it cannot continue to own and control Business Insider if it continues to operate as it has historically.
The 77-page demand letter can be found here:
http://clarelocke.com/OxmanRetraction
I strongly encourage you to read the letter. The letter includes the detailed WhatsApp, SMS, and email correspondence that I and Fran McGill, our head of communications, had with the main protagonists in this situation including Henry Blodget, Chairman and Founder of Business Insider, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, Henry Kravis, Co-Executive Chairman of KKR, Martin Varsavsky, Director of Axel Springer, Katherine Long, BI’s Investigative Reporter, and John Cook, Executive Editor of BI.
It will not go unnoticed that the demand letter reads remarkably similarly to the pleadings of a lawsuit. If needed, we can convert the demand letter into a complaint and file a lawsuit, which I hope is unnecessary.
Business Insider is well known for its dishonest and unprofessional journalism. BI’s actions here are sadly representative of its approach to journalism, and similar to its many other unfair, sensational, false and misleading attacks on high-profile people designed to satisfy the politics and preferences of its journalists, and to drive advertising revenues.
Business Insider has caused enormous harm and reputational damage to many with its false and misleading reporting and unethical tactics. Remarkably, however, Business Insider’s CEO and Axel Springer’s spokesperson claim that Business Insider is a paragon of journalistic professionalism, ethics, and virtue.
In January, when I publicly challenged the accuracy and reporting of the stories, Business Insider’s CEO, Barbara Peng, stated that:
“The process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound, as was the timing… The stories are accurate and the facts well documented.”
Similarly, Adib Sisani, Axel Springer’s spokesperson said:
“I’m certain the sourcing and technical journalistic work done was spotless.”
I strongly encourage you to compare the above statements with the empirical evidence and other irrefutable facts that are included in our demand letter, and judge for yourself.
The demand letter was prepared by Libby Locke of Clare Locke LLP, a firm best known for its recent representation of Dominion Voting Machine in its lawsuit against Fox that resulted in a $787.5 million settlement for Dominion.
Libby and her partner Tom Clare are the rock stars of defamation law. They should be your first call if something like what happened to Neri and me happens to you.
NEW: MSNBC’s finest, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Joy Reid, melt down after the special counsel said that the mentally declining president is mentally declining.
The Three Stooges couldn’t fathom how the special counsel thought Biden had mental issues.
Quite clearly Biden is old, but the reducing of all of his mental
faculties down to specific examples is ludicrous. I bet every single
person reading this said something yesterday that, if taken in
isolation, would make them sound like an dottering fool.
While I’ve always been really good at dates, I’ve long been pretty
bad with names—an issue that has increased significantly in recent
years. I’m 58 and have no reason to think I’m going senile.
As for Biden, he’s clearly slowing down with age and is having more
of these mental lapses. But, while I wish there were a younger option
available, I think he’s still mentally up to the job—and light years
better than the seeming alternative, Donald Trump.
Alas, this isn’t an objective conversation. People are looking at
both candidates through partisan lenses and, like it or not, Biden’s
gaffes are judged much more harshly than Trump’s.
NPR’s Domenico Montanaro (“Biden’s rough week highlights his biggest vulnerability — one he can’t change“):
The special counsel report about Biden’s handling of classified material didn’t
charge him with a crime, but special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican,
seemed to go out of his way to include damning commentary about Biden’s
supposedly faulty memory, like referencing that Biden, 81, “did not
remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
That was stinging.
“It clears him legally and kneecaps him politically,” Paul Begala, a
veteran Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser, said of
the report.
The 388-page report set off a political firestorm — and an ensuing clumsy response from the White House and the president himself.
Biden angrily rejected Hur’s claim, saying Thursday night in a press
conference he felt questions about Beau weren’t “any of their damn
business.”
The president got choked up while showing a rosary he was wearing on
his wrist in memory of Beau, then thundered, “I don’t need anyone to
remind me when he passed away.”
If Biden had left it at that, that might be what people remembered about the news conference.
Instead, Biden wound up walking right into the stereotype laid out by
Hur when he mistakenly said that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of
Egypt was the “president of Mexico” while answering a question about
current hostage negotiations with Israel and Hamas.
It’s a mistake. Verbal slips happen. Everyone makes them — including
Trump, who is only four years younger than Biden. Trump often meanders,
recently appeared to confuse his primary opponent Nikki Haley for former
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; on more than half a dozen occasions in the
past year mistakenly referred to former President Barack Obama when he
should have said Biden; and while in Iowa, called “Sioux City” “Sioux
Falls,” which is 90 miles up the road in South Dakota.
But because more Americans are concerned with
Biden’s age and fitness to do the job in a second term than they are
about Trump’s age, every time Biden makes a flub it will have more
resonance politically.
“It’s certainly true that anything that feeds the master negative
narrative is especially harmful,” Begala said. “For [Bill] Clinton, it
was cheating, for [George W.] Bush, it was ‘dumb,’ Obama ‘elitist,’
which is why when Obama said 57 states, it didn’t hurt him. If it was Bush, it would have.”
“Obviously with Biden, it’s ‘old.’ So, this really really hurts him.”
[…]
“Fair or not, this just amplified Biden’s greatest challenge,” David
Axelrod, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, said of the
special counsel report. “It screams through every poll and focus group.”
Axelrod went viral back in November for raising whether it was “wise” for Biden to run for reelection after a series of swing-state polls showed him losing to Trump.
“Many people have made a judgment about his age and command and
discount his accomplishments and attribute every problem to it,” Axelrod
said.
The Atlantic‘s Yair Rosenberg (“What Biden’s Critics Get Wrong About His Gaffes“) tries to handwave this away:
[T]he truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who
has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career.
Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his
running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack
America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre
tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining
“why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such
gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie
Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got
on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He
said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that
he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a
gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional
intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading.
But he recognizes that there’s a perception problem and that the Biden team needs to address it head-on:
The president’s staff is understandably reluctant to put Biden front
and center, knowing that his slower speed and inevitable gaffes—both
real and fabricated—will
feed the mental-acuity narrative. But in actuality, the bar for Biden
has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it
simply by showing up. By contrast, limiting his appearances ensures that
the public mostly encounters the president through decontextualized
social-media clips of his slipups.
As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s
rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public. In
2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among
other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy
Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief
that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse
feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by
comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense.
But none of this will happen by itself. If the president and his
campaign want the headlines to be something other than “Yes, Biden Knows
Who the President of Egypt Is,” they’ll have to start making news, not
reacting to it.
This strikes me as wishful thinking. Few people watch these speeches
and interviews in full. If the press seizes on the gaffes—and they
will—that’s what most will remember.
NYPost | A Georgia district attorney accused of hiring her lover
to prosecute former President Trump broke her silence on the
controversy, saying she and the prosecutor were targeted because they
are black.
The comments were Willis’ first time addressing the allegations
publicly — but she neither confirmed nor denied the claims lobbed at her
and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who helped secure an indictment
against the former Republican president in an election interference
case.
“They only attacked one,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis
Sunday at Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta. “First thing they say, ‘Oh,
she’s gonna play the race card now.’
“But no God, isn’t it them that’s playing the race card when they only question one?”
She called Wade “a great friend and a great lawyer,” along with a
“superstar,” but failed to mention him by name once during her more than
30 minute speech, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The pair were accused by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of having a
“clandestine” and “improper” affair when appointments were made for the
2020 election interference case.
Roman, a former official on the Trump 2020 campaign, argued in a
court filing last week that the integrity of the case had been
compromised by their alleged affair and asked that all charges against
him be dropped.
“The district attorney chose to appoint her romantic partner, who at
all times relevant to this prosecution has been a married man,” the
filing read.
Roman contended in the filing that Wade used some of the $654,000 in
legal fees he’d earned on the case to take Willis on vacations to “Napa
Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean.”
Willis pointed out during her speech that the other two prosecutors
assigned to the case, Anna Green Cross and John Floyd, both are white,
and noted that allegations have only emerged targeting the two prominent
black members of the prosecution — her and Wade.
“Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I
need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me
how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years?” she asked.
Roman was unmoved by Willis accusations of the charges being racially charged.
Going after @BillAckman’s wife is one of the dumbest moves I’ve ever seen. MIT and Business Insider don’t understand the force of nature that’s about to come after them.
This guy literally beat out Brad Pitt competing for his wife. While you were losing sleep over not having… pic.twitter.com/LQdJfYMYF0
guardian | The wife of Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire
who accused Claudine Gay of being a plagiarist and led calls for her
resignation as Harvard president, is now facing allegations of
plagiarism herself.
Neri Oxman, a prominent former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has apologized after Business Insider identified
multiple instances in which she lifted passages from other scholars’
work without proper attribution in her 2010 dissertation. She also
pledged to review the primary sources and request the necessary
corrections.
Business Insider on Thursday
initially labeled four passages of Oxman’s dissertation as plagiarized –
without any attribution – from Wikipedia entries. But by Friday, the
outlet had found at least 15 such passages, a turn of events that was similar to that which led to Gay’s ouster from the Harvard presidency.
Business Insider also identified research papers
written by Oxman that contained plagiarism, including a 2007 paper –
titled Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry – and
a 2011 paper named Variable Property Rapid Prototyping.
The
2011 paper contained more than 100 words lifted from a book without any
attribution or citation, included two sentences from another book
verbatim without any attribution, and pulled material from a 2004 paper
without citing it, according to Business Insider.
In response to Gay’s resignation, Ackman published
a 4,000-word post on X – formerly Twitter – in which he criticized
diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as well as complained about
“racism against white people”. He also complained that Gay, a Black
woman, was allowed to remain on Harvard’s faculty. Gay had faced
plagiarism allegations over her 1997 dissertation, but she requested
corrections and was cleared of academic misconduct by a three-member
independent review board.
Ackman struck a
different tone on X when addressing the plagiarism allegations against
his wife. He wrote on X: “It is unfortunate that my actions to address
problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.
This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the
trouble of doing plagiarism reviews.”
He
went on to promise to lead plagiarism reviews against all current MIT
faculty, board and committee members, and its president, Sally
Kornbluth.
Ackman additionally criticized Business Insider and the reporters at the publication who authored the story investigating Oxman, saying he would spearhead plagiarism reviews against the outlet’s staff.
Previously, Ackman was a donor to the Democratic party. But the New York Times reported
that the billionaire’s campaign against Harvard came because he
resented the fact that years’ worth of donations to the university did
not yield him more influence there.
glennloury |Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period.
He
was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American
Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur
“Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most
distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly
covered in the mainstream media. His research upends many commonly held
assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence.
It is tremendously creative, rigorous, and
consequential scholarship, and it cannot be simply written off because
it happens to challenge the status quo.
To do the kind of
work Roland does, you have to be more than brilliant. You have to be
fearless. And I cannot help suspect that now Roland is paying the price
for pursuing the truth wherever it leads. Several years ago, he was
accused of sexual harassment by a disgruntled ex-assistant. In my
opinion and that of many others, those accusations are baseless. But
Harvard has used them as a pretext to shut down Roland’s lab, to curtail
his teaching, and to marginalize him within the institution.
I’ll
not mince words. Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs
should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They have unnecessarily,
heedlessly tarnished the career of an historically great economist.
Again, I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital
research not because it was poorly done but because they found the
results to be politically inconvenient. “Veritas” indeed.
Now,
I have been a friend and mentor to Roland for some time, and I’ve taken
great pleasure in watching him succeed. I can see how one might view my
criticisms of Harvard as biased. But this matter has been investigated
by others with no personal stake in Roland's career who have found
Harvard’s actions and reporting on them by the New York Times to be deeply flawed. I would point readers who want to know more to Stuart Taylor Jr.’s fine reporting for Real Clear Investigations.
Along
the same lines, the filmmaker Rob Montz has made a short documentary
about this subject. I’m interviewed in it alongside others who see this
fiasco for what it is, some of whom have much to lose by publicly coming
to Roland’s defense. People need to see this film. They need to know
the truth about Roland Fryer. So I ask you to watch and to judge for
yourself, and if you feel so moved, to share it as widely as possible.
epochtimes | The
U.S. Space Command, the Pentagon’s newest and 11th combatant command,
has reached full operating capability, according to its commander, Army
Gen. James Dickinson.
Gen. Dickinson made the declaration during a headquarters town hall on Dec. 15, according to a statement. The U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM) was created in 2019 at the direction of former President Donald Trump.
“Since
its establishment in 2019, USSPACECOM has been singularly focused on
delivering exquisite capability to the joint force to deter conflict,
defend our vital interests, and, if necessary, defeat aggression,” Gen.
Dickinson said.
“Thanks
to the disciplined initiative of our people and the support of our
joint, combined, and partnered team, I can confidently say we have
reached full operational capability.”
He
explained that the announcement followed an “in-depth evaluation of the
command’s capabilities,” including the ability to execute its mission
on “our worst day, when we are needed the most.”
The
declaration of full operating capability met certain criteria,
including having the appropriate numbers of skills across the human
capital and having the necessary command processes and functions in
place, according to Gen. Dickinson.
“As
the command has matured, challenges to a safe, secure, stable, and
sustainable space domain have significantly increased,” Gen. Dickinson
said. “Both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation
are fielding counter space capabilities designed to hold U.S., Allied,
and partner space assets at risk.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has said that it'll become a “major space power” sometime around 2030 and that it's planning to double the size of its space station in the next few years.
Rick Fischer, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, in a commentary published by The Epoch Times last month, warned that “China has no hesitation to arm its space stations and other large manned space platforms, including its bases on the moon and beyond,” no matter what China’s state-run media have stated.
“Until
the CCP expires or abandons its ambitions for hegemony on Earth, the
United States and its partners in space will need to achieve security,
meaning they will require military capabilities in space to use against
Beijing’s manned and unmanned space systems intended to attack the
democracies,” Mr. Fischer added.
The
command had completed its first training exercise with the U.S.
Indo-Pacific Command, which “served as a major step in validating the
headquarters staff as a ready, joint force,” Gen. Dickinson said.
“Our
work continues,” he said. “As the complexity of the domain grows, so
must our capability to deliver operational and strategic effects to our
nation and preserve the safety and stability of the domain.”
In July, President Joe Biden said the U.S. Space Command’s headquarters would remain at Peterson Air Force in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reversing President Trump’s plans to move it to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.
Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) both released statements on Dec. 15 welcoming the command’s news.
modernity |Al Gore says that people having access to information outside
of mainstream media sources is a threat to “democracy” and that social
media algorithms “ought to be banned.”
Yes, really.
Gore made the comments during an appearance at the Cop28 climate change hysteria conference in Dubai.
Gore whined that social media had “disrupted the balances that used
to exist that made representative democracy work much better.”
The former Vice President said that functioning democracy relied on a
“shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together
collectively” but that “social media that is dominated by algorithms”
upsets this balance.
According to Gore, people are being pulled down “rabbit holes” by
algorithms that are “the digital equivalent of AR-15s – they ought to be
banned, they really ought to be banned!”
Gore claimed, “It’s an abuse of the public forum” and that people were being sucked into echo chambers.
“If you spend too much time in the echo chamber, what’s weaponized is
another form of AI, not artificial intelligence, artificial insanity!
I’m serious!” he added.
Apparently, the only echo chamber that should be allowed to exist is
Gore’s own rabbit hole, wherein the earth is constantly on the brink of
destruction thanks to people not obeying his technocratic mandates.
Perhaps Gore is unhappy at his own misinformation being fact checked
by individuals who have access to information not produced by corporate
media sources that are friendly to him.
Gore infamously predicted that the north polar ice cap would be “ice free” within 5 to 7 years.
dailysignal | First, the Left—and
university presidents are almost the Platonic ideal of intellectual
leftists—believes that Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition
of the oppressed. By leftist logic, Jews are part of the superstructure
of power, since all success is merely a reflection of hierarchies of
power, and Jews are disproportionately successful. Thus Jews cannot be
victims.
Then there’s the second reason: The hard Left hates Israel. The Left hates Israel because, like American Jews, Israel is too successful
in the region in which it is located. Israel, according to the Left, is
a colonialist outpost of the West, and the West is evil because it too
is successful—which means that it is exploitative and oppressive.
Hence the Left’s rabid attachment to the idea that calls for Israel’s
destruction are somehow not antisemitic, but actually a reflection of a
more universalistic humanitarian creed.
Sure, that creed would actually materialize in the death of millions
of Jews and the dominance of radical Muslim terrorism. But that doesn’t
matter. After all, Israel is the real problem, because the West is the
real problem—and we know that’s true because the West and Israel are
successful.
According to the Left, radical Muslim regimes that impoverish their citizens aren’t worth one bit of attention. Israel, by contrast, ought to be destroyed.
So, what ought to be done?
First, donors ought to pull their money from such universities.
Second, businesses ought to start hiring directly out of high school
and stop treating the bizarre credentialing process of major
universities as worthwhile. It isn’t. Chances are better that you’ll get
a great employee by selecting a high school graduate with 1500 SAT and a
4.0 GPA than by selecting a Harvard graduate with the same statistics.
Finally, parents ought to stop subsidizing this nonsense with their own children.
The universities are corrupt through and through. Their endorsement
of DEI has been a curse to reason and decency. Their politics are vile,
and those politics also make the universities corrupt factories of moral
depravity.
WaPo | Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come. What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?
Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples?
Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?
And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?
Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.
The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen.
We have also seen throughout history how conflicts in the Middle East can unleash consequences around the globe.
We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas. On Oct. 7, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people, including 35 American citizens, in the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. Infants and toddlers, mothers and fathers, grandparents, people with disabilities, even Holocaust survivors were maimed and murdered. Entire families were massacred in their homes. Young people were gunned down at a music festival. Bodies riddled with bullets and burned beyond recognition. And for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released.
The
President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches
from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary
line.
It reflects deeply held views on the part of
Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of
State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:
The
world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t
lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to
take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests
and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.
This
idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America
as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and
doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take
America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circles.
As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is
bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”.
America itself is hardly in one piece.
It isn’t true that the
world doesn’t organize itself without top down leadership from a power
sitting in America’s “place”. Indeed, what would it mean for America’s
“place” to be vacant and free for another power to fill, the specter
conjured by Blinken? Does America disappear from the map when it elects
Donald Trump President? The United States is always present in one form
or another, even as an absence in international discussions - as was the
case, for instance in the 1920s.
America’s power -
potential or realized - is a force that world politics has been built
around for just over a century. In the book Deluge
I argued that 1916 was the moment that this became indisputably true.
The Presidential election of that year was the first followed by the
world in the way that the world will follow the 2024 election.
Whoever
governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a
post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of
global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial
organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system
and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global
finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global
central bank.
It is also true that American leadership and
military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is
not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.
For the
most part, to make sense of the sort of thing that Biden and Blinken
say, you have to realize that they are talking not to the world or about
the world, but to Americans about America. Above all, Biden and
Blinken’s rhetoric is directed against Trump, who conjured up a scenario
in which America was, as Biden and Blinken see it, a chaotic,
disruptive and untrustworthy force. This shames their self-understanding
as a liberal elite. With a tight election in 2024 those fears will
overshadow all America’s interactions with the world, whoever actually
sits in the Oval Office.
American democracy, the system that
produces the leadership that Biden and Blinken so self-confidently
evoke, is clearly broken. Pervasive and well-merited skepticism about
America’s system of government, is now a massive reality in world
affairs.
reuters | Mexican
lawmakers heard testimony that "we are not alone" in the universe and
saw the alleged remains of non-human beings in an extraordinary hearing
marking the Latin American country's first congressional event on UFOs.
In
the hearing on Tuesday on FANI, the Spanish acronym for what are
usually now termed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), politicians
were shown two artifacts that Mexican journalist and long-time UFO
enthusiast Jaime Maussan claimed were the corpses of extraterrestrials.
The specimens were not related to any life on Earth, Maussan said.
The
two tiny "bodies," displayed in cases, have three fingers on each hand
and elongated heads. Maussan said they were recovered in Peru near the
ancient Nazca Lines in 2017. He said that they were about 1,000 years
old.
Similar such finds in the past have turned out to be the remains of mummified children.
"This
is the first time extraterrestrial life is presented in such a form and
I think there is a clear demonstration that we are dealing with
non-human specimens that are not related to any other species in our
world and that any scientific institution can investigate it," Maussan
said.
"We are not alone," he added.
Jose
de Jesus Zalce Benitez, Director of the Scientific Institute for Health
of the Mexican navy, said X-rays, 3-D reconstruction and DNA analysis
had been carried out on the remains.
"I can affirm that these bodies have no relation to human beings," he said.
Lawmakers
also heard from former U.S. Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who has
participated in U.S. Congressional hearings about his personal
experience with UAP and the stigma around reporting such sightings.
In
recent years, the U.S. government has done an about-face on public
information on UAP after decades of stonewalling and deflecting. The
Pentagon has been actively investigating reported sightings in recent
years by military aviators, while an independent NASA panel studying UFOs is the first of its kind by the space agency.
NASA is set to discuss findings from the study on Thursday.
theatlantic |A modern vision of how to build character.
The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly
gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help
them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to
sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be
corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are
obsolete today.
The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good.
Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt
to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great
deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is
something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the
complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act
is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.
Normally,
she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes.
We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish
and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our
own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she
continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop
others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen,
heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly
asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.
I
become a better person as I become more curious about those around me,
as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn
to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat
you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”
Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well?
It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat
others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good
social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to
ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship.
How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good
conversationalist.
These are
some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we
don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with
professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding
person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society,
elementary schools and high schools should require students to take
courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them
for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good
listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel
Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.
A new core curriculum. More
and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you
might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre
Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors
program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not
just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books,
but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these
courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce
students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism,
Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They
introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral
problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold
up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put
the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling
passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral
obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does
it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues
we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?
These
questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built
around specialization and passing on professional or technical
knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer.
They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part
of the required core curriculum.
Intergenerational service. We
spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is
an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing
self-interest.
There should
be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a
sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the
logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself
in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are
gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at
least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which
similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in
support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans
of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)
Those
sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end
of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and
older people together to work to address community needs.
These
programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being
and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike
you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work
that is generous and hard.
Moral organizations.
Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental
goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers
and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law
firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits
aim to serve the public good and also raise money.
In
our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the
moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush
through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are
incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to
climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization
mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.
Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also
Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and
respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order
to better serve our higher mission.
Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour,
I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small
gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what
kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a
set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a
thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized
by most of the people who have worked there.
theintercept |While perception management
involves denying, or blocking, propaganda, it can also entail advancing
the U.S.’s own narrative. The Defense Department defines perception
management in its official dictionary
as “[a]ctions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators
to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and
objective reasoning.” This is the part that has, historically, tended to
raise the public’s skepticism of the Pentagon’s work.
The term “perception management” hearkens back to
the Reagan administration’s attempts to shape the narrative around the
Contras in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration sought to kick what his
Vice President George H.W. Bush would later call the “Vietnam syndrome,”
which it believed was driving American public opposition to support for
the Contras. Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, directed
the agency’s leading propaganda specialist to oversee an interagency
effort to portray the Contras — who had been implicated in grisly
atrocities — as noble freedom fighters.
“An elaborate system of inter-agency committees was eventually formed
and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and
individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and
propagandistic activities aimed at influencing public opinion and
governmental action,” an unpublished draft chapter of Congress’s
investigation into Iran-Contra states. (Democrats dropped the chapter in
order to get several Republicans to sign the report.)
The Smith-Mundt Act, passed in 1948 in the wake of the Second World
War, prohibits the the State Department from disseminating “public
diplomacy” — i.e., propaganda — domestically, instead requiring that
those materials be targeted at foreign audiences. The Defense Department
considered itself bound by this requirement as well.
After the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon triggered backlash after
U.S. propaganda was disseminated in the U.S. In 2004, the military signaled that it had begun its siege on Fallujah. Just hours later, CNN discovered that this was not true.
But in 2012, the law was amended to allow propaganda to be circulated
domestically, under the bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act,
introduced by Reps. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Mac Thornberry, R-Texas,
which was later rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act.
“Proponents of amending these two sections argue that the ban on
domestic dissemination of public diplomacy information is impractical
given the global reach of modern communications, especially the
Internet, and that it unnecessarily prevents valid U.S. government
communications with foreign publics due to U.S. officials’ fear of
violating the ban,” a congressional research service report said
at the time of the proposed amendments. “Critics of lifting the ban
state that it may open the door to more aggressive U.S. government
activities to persuade U.S. citizens to support government policies, and
might also divert the focus of State Department and the BBG
[Broadcasting Board of Governors] communications from foreign publics,
reducing their effectiveness.”
The Obama administration subsequently approved a highly classified
covert action finding designed to counter foreign malign influence
activities, a finding renewed and updated by the Biden administration,
as The Intercept has reported.
The IPMO memo produced for the academic institution hints at its role
in such propagandistic efforts now. “Among other things, the IPMO is
tasked with the development of broad thematic messaging guidance and
specific strategies for the execution of DoD activities designed to
influence foreign defense-related decision-makers to behave in a manner
beneficial to U.S. interests,” the memo states.
As the global war on terror
draws to a close, the Pentagon has turned its attention to so-called
great power adversaries like Russia and China. Following Russia’s
meddling in the 2016 election, which in part involved state-backed
efforts to disseminate falsehoods on social media, offices tasked with
combating disinformation started springing up all over the U.S.
government, as The Intercept has reported.
The director of national intelligence last year established a new
center to oversee all the various efforts, including the Department of
Homeland Security’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force and the
FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.
The Pentagon’s IPMO differs from the others in one key respect:
secrecy. Whereas most of the Department of Homeland Security’s
counter-disinformation efforts are unclassified in nature — as one
former DHS contractor not authorized to speak publicly explained to The
Intercept — the IPMO involves a great deal of highly classified work.
That the office’s work goes beyond simple messaging into the rarefied
world of intelligence is clear from its location within the Pentagon
hierarchy. “The Influence and Perception Management Office will serve as
the senior advisor to the USD(I&S) [Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence and Security] for strategic operational influence and
perception management (reveal and conceal) matters,” the budget notes.
When asked about the intelligence community’s counter-disinformation
efforts, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, told Congress this month, “I think DIA’s perspective on this,
senator, is really speed: We want to be able to detect that and it’s
really with our open-source collection capability working with our
combatant command partners where this is happening all over the world —
and then the ability to turn something quickly with them, under the
right authorities, to counter that disinformation, misinformation.”
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