theintercept |State-sponsored hackers believed to be from Russia have
breached the city network of Austin, Texas, The Intercept has learned.
The breach, which appears to date from at least mid-October, adds to the
stunning array of intrusions attributed to Russia over the past few
months.
The list of reported victims includes the departments of Commerce,
Homeland Security, State, and the Treasury; the Pentagon; cybersecurity
firm FireEye; IT software company SolarWinds; and assorted airports and
local government networks across the United States, among others. The
breach in Austin is another apparent victory for Russia’s hackers. By
compromising the network of America’s 11th-most populous city, they
could theoretically access sensitive information on policing, city
governance, and elections, and, with additional effort, burrow inside
water, energy, and airport networks. The hacking outfit believed to be
behind the Austin breach, Berserk Bear, also appears to have used
Austin’s network as infrastructure to stage additional attacks.
While the attacks on SolarWinds, FireEye, and U.S. government
agencies have been linked to a second Russian group — APT29, also known
as Cozy Bear — the Austin breach represents another battlefront in a
high-stakes cyber standoff between the United States and Russia. Both
Berserk Bear and Cozy Bear are known for quietly lurking in networks,
often for months, while they spy on their targets. Berserk Bear — which
is also known as Energetic Bear, Dragonfly, TEMP.Isotope, Crouching
Yeti, and BROMINE, among other names — is believed to be responsible for
a series of breaches of critical U.S. infrastructure over the past
year.
The Austin breach, which has not been previously reported, was
revealed in documents prepared by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence
Center, or MSTIC, and obtained by The Intercept, as well as in publicly
available malware activity compiled by the site VirusTotal. “While we
are aware of this hacking group, we cannot provide information about
ongoing law enforcement investigations into criminal activity,” a
spokesperson for the city of Austin wrote in response to a list of
emailed questions.
On Sunday, Reuters reported
that a state-sponsored hacking group had breached the Treasury and
Commerce departments, sparking an emergency weekend meeting of the
National Security Council. The Washington Post later attributed the attacks
to Cozy Bear, citing anonymous sources, and reported that the group
breached the agencies by infecting a software update to Orion, a popular
network management product made by SolarWinds, a firm based in Austin.
“Fewer than 18,000” users downloaded the malicious software update,
which has been available since March, SolarWinds said in a federal securities filing on Monday. The Intercept has seen no evidence that the Austin breach and the SolarWinds hack are related.
consentfactory | Even if one accepts the official “science,” you do not transform the
entire planet into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare in response to a
health threat of this nature.
The notion is quite literally insane.
GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are
doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson
about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a
familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention
the repertoire of penal institutions.
The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We
Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory. The USA
taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq
and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught
in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly
and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown”
concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal
institution terminology.
As we have been experiencing throughout 2020, the global capitalist
ruling classes have no qualms about teaching us this lesson. It’s just
that they would rather not to have to unless it’s absolutely necessary.
They would prefer that we believe we are living in “democracies,”
governed by the “rule of law,” where everyone is “free,” and so on. It’s
much more efficient and much less dangerous than having to repeatedly
remind us that they can take away our “democratic rights” in a
heartbeat, unleash armed goon squads to enforce their edicts, and
otherwise control us with sheer brute force.
People who have spent time in prison, or who have lived in openly
totalitarian societies, are familiar with being ruled by brute force.
Most Westerners are not, so it has come as a shock. The majority of them
still can’t process it. They cannot see what is staring them in the
face. They cannot see it because they can’t afford to see it. If they
did, it would completely short-circuit their brains. They would suffer
massive psychotic breakdowns, and become entirely unable to function, so
their psyches will not allow them to see it.
Others, who see it, can’t quite accept the simplicity of it (i.e.,
the lesson being taught), so they are proposing assorted complicated
theories about what it is and who is behind it … the Great Reset, China,
the Illuminati, Transhumanism, Satanism, Communism, whatever. Some of
these theories are at least partially accurate. Others are utter
bull-goose lunacy.
They all obscure the basic point of the lesson.
The point of the lesson is that GloboCap — the entire global-capitalist system acting as a single global entity — can, virtually any time it wants, suspend the Simulation of Democracy, and crack down on us with despotic force.
thebellows | On January 19, 2020, Washington state reported the first US case of coronavirus. By the end of March, 245 million Americans were under stay-at-home restrictions to “flatten the curve.” Mainstream news terrorized the public with exponential graphs, threats of a medical supply shortage, and displays of hygiene theater. Appeals to science were weaponized to enforce conformity, and the media portrayed anti-lockdown protesters as backwards, astroturfedwhite nationalists bent on endangering the public.
Meanwhile, Walmart and Target reported record sales. Amazon tripled its profits and Jeff Bezos made $70 billion. Billionaires have collectively made over $1 trillion since March. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft now make up 20% of the stock market’s total worth. The tech industry has achieved an unparalleled level of wealth and dominance. Data, which has been more valuable than oil since 2017, is expected to expand its economic footprint.
Unemployment, hunger, institutional breakdown, and the destruction of
social bonds are not symptoms of a virus. They are the indirect
violence of class warfare. The pandemic is a convenient scapegoat for
the largest upward wealth transfer in modern human history. Under the
pretext of a public health policy, elites have successfully waged a
counterrevolution that will result in the erosion of working conditions
and quality of life for generations to come.
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Death, disease, and pandemics have always been part of human life and they always will be. 2.8 million Americans die every year and 56 million people die worldwide. Each year 1.3 million people die of tuberculosis, 445,000 die of malaria, and 290,000-650,000 die of influenza. In 1968 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic, during which businesses and schools stayed open and large events were held.
Indefinite closures have never before been used as a disease control
method on a global scale. These experimental restrictions were shaped by
the discreditedImperial College Model which predicted 2.2 million US deaths. Many epidemiologists and doctors questioned these doomsday projections and pointed out that there was not sufficient data to justify lockdowns. The virus has a low mortality rate, especially for people under 65, and 94% of US covid deaths have occurred with comorbidities. Most statistical analysis does not show lockdown measures to be an effective strategy for reducing mortality.
In March unprecedented policies were rationalized through shocking stories and videos
from northern Italy. The region’s crowded ICUs were presented as a
warning for the rest of Europe and the US. Unknown to many was the fact
that Lombardy had been severely impacted by ongoing privatization efforts and a shrinking hospital system regularly overwhelmed by influenza.
This omission by mainstream media played a key role in developing the
mythology that economic shutdown could magically eradicate a virus. In
reality lockdowns have accelerated a cycle of austerity and created a
self-fulfilling prophecy of perpetual crisis.
nypost | As we try to come to terms with the extent of Chinese influence over
the Biden family, a leaked database of registered members of the Chinese
Communist Party has exposed a mass infiltration of American companies — with serious national security implications.
Boeing, Qualcomm and Pfizer are just three US companies that have
employed dozens of CCP members in their Chinese facilities, the database
reveals.
As well, three female employees of the US consulate in Shanghai have
been identified in the list of 1.95 million party members that was
leaked to an international group of legislators, the Inter-Parliamentary
Alliance on China, which includes Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob
Menendez (D-NJ).
All CCP members swear an oath to “fight for communism throughout my
life, be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the party and the
people, and never betray the party [and] guard party secrets, be loyal
to the party.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a member of the Homeland Security
Committee, said yesterday: “CCP agents have no place in US government
facilities, and this report should serve as a much-needed wake-up call
to Washington, DC, and corporate executives, who continue to welcome the
Chinese government with open arms.
“[It] is just more evidence of the extent to which the CCP has successfully infiltrated American companies and government.”
While none of the people listed in the database have been identified as spies,
mounting concerns in the State Department about the CCP have resulted
in tightened visa rules for its members earlier this month. CCP members
and their immediate families now are limited to one-month, single-entry
US permits.
The database was verified by international cybersecurity firm
Internet 2.0, which found it was originally leaked on encrypted
messaging app Telegram in 2016. It was passed on to IPAC six weeks ago
by a third party.
“We have high confidence this list is authentic,” Internet 2.0
co-founder David Robinson, a former Australian army intelligence
officer, told me Sunday.
“Someone — an insider, a dissident — managed to get physical access
to the server [in Shanghai] from outside the building. They didn’t have
to hack it over the internet.”
Each data entry contains the CCP member’s name, ethnicity, place of
birth, education level, identification number and, in some cases, a
phone number and address. Fist tap Dale
unherd | The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in
which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s
was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This
interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society”
that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the
new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight
into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour.
The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie
permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as
black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.
For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic
social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of
black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The
civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for
subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a
further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America.
Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual
conscience, as against the claims of the nation.
But the black experience retains a special role as the template that
must be preserved. The black man is specially tuned by history to pick
up the force field of oppression, which may be hard to discern in the
more derivative cases that are built by analogy with his. Therefore, his
condition serves a wider diagnostic and justificatory function. If it
were to improve, denunciation of “society” would be awkward to maintain
and, crucially, my own conscience would lose its self-certifying independence from the community. My wish to be free of the demands of society would look like mere selfishness.
The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which
their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently
aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained,
African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of
liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the
rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening
the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by
the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these
free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced
into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by
rejection of its moral expertise.
BBC |Do you think that Google would have treated you differently if you were a white man?
I have definitely been treated differently.
In all of the cases that I've seen in the past, they [Google] try so hard not to make it a headline.
They try so hard to make it smooth.
When
it's some other person who is toxic, there are always these
conversations about: "Oh, but you know, they're so valuable to the
company, they're a genius, they're just socially awkward, et cetera."
My entire team is completely behind me and they're taking risks.
They're taking actual risks to stand behind me.
My manager is standing behind me.
And even still, they decided to treat me in this way.
So definitely, I feel like I've been treated differently.
I suppose if you think that, the next obvious question is do you think Google itself is institutionally racist?
Yes, Google itself is institutionally racist.
That's quite a thing to say - you were a Google employee until a short while ago.
I feel like most if not all tech companies are institutionally racist.
I mean, how can I not say that they are not institutionally racist?
The Congressional Black Caucus is the one who's forcing them to publish their diversity numbers.
It's not by accident that black women have one of the lowest retention rates[, in the technology industry].
So for sure Google and all of the other tech companies are institutionally racist.
The last two weeks have been
difficult for many, many people, and have surfaced large, important
issues. Many in the Black+ and other communities have trusted us to make
good on promises regarding racial equity, respect and inclusion. I can
understand how the handling of Dr. Gebru's departure has made some
question our commitment to that. These are areas I care deeply about as
well, both personally and professionally. You can and absolutely should
raise concerns over our culture and lack of representation. We need to
do more to make Google Research more inclusive and representative. I,
along with our Research leadership team and the DEI Council, will be
focusing intensely on this in 2021. We know we have work to do to
improve our internal org culture and leadership accountability is
essential to that culture.
At the same time, researchers might hesitate to pursue crucial
work on bias in AI and related issues, and have raised concerns about
our org culture and ability to pursue this research. This deeply saddens
me, and I want to reiterate how important it is that we do work in this
area to highlight risks and larger societal issues that can arise in
uses of AI (indeed, much our of AI Principles highlight the importance
of this). So, I want to assure you all that yes, we need to double down
on research that ensures AI and other technologies have a positive and
equitable impact. We have over 200 people on multiple teams across the
company working on responsible AI, and we're going to continue and
expand that work. We'll also sharped up our publication goals and
processes going into 20201 to ensure that all researchers feel confident
that their work is supported.
We've heard the important
questions many of you have raised – thank you for your time and energy.
We had intended to gather at our All Hands next week to celebrate the
year and to preview our 2021 strategy, but while there's lots to be
proud of as an org and what we've accomplished, a celebration doesn't
seem appropriate at this time. So we won't hold that meeting next week,
and will look at getting together as a whole org after the holidays.
Instead, to make sure we have opportunities to come together and discuss
these important issues, I'll be setting aside time next week, along
with my direct reports and other leads within Research, to hold a series
of smaller group conversations. If you'd like to participate in these,
please fill out this form (the number of people interested and topics
shared will help us figure out the most effective format and number of
these sessions). In addition to the formal review underway that Sundar
shared, many of you have shared useful suggestions on how we can improve
our culture. If you have more thoughts, please feel free to share (this
one can be anonymous, or you can add your idap) and know that I'll be
reading every idea and reflecting on how we can do better.
I'm
sorry for how challenging this has been. Please take some time over the
next week as you see fit; if you prefer to continue your work, that's
fine, but I want everyone to know you can take the time you need. The
top priority for me is all fo you – your well-being and our ability to
pursue great research together.
You can expect to hear a clear follow up from me and my leads on this in January.
Progressive: Madam Speaker Pelosi, why do you ignore us?
Pelosi: [slaps impudent progressive] Your place is to be seen, not
heard. Now vote as you have been instructed and tell the rabble what you
will. Now, be gone from my sight!
Progressives: As it pleases you. [Bows and leaves, stage right]
“Over the weekend, there has
been a raging debate on social media,
in which some progressive critics began demanding that lawmakers like
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez use their votes
in the upcoming House Speaker election as leverage to get a commitment
for a floor vote on Medicare for All legislation…. However, only asking
for that performative vote — rather than also asking for things that
might change the structural power dynamic
— would be a waste, and yet another instance of progressives reverting
to a feckless tradition of prioritizing spectacles rather than the
wielding of actual power. They could additionally condition their vote
for Pelosi on a commitment that she:
– Remove the Medicare for All opponent who chairs the key committee [Richard Neal]
– Schedule a vote on existing legislation to let states create single-payer health care systems
– Schedule a vote on a resolution demanding Biden use executive authority to expand Medicare
– Include provisions in year-end spending bills that create a
presidential commission charged with crafting a Medicare for All program
– Author a discharge petition to force a vote on Medicare for All
That’s a good list (and boy would I like to see Neal,
who is a nasty piece of work, taken down a peg). More on the raging debate on social media:
Jimmy debated with David Sirota about this on an impromptu live
broadcast on his YT channel just now. I only caught the closing minutes
of the discussion but I can say that Sirota came off very disappointing.
Jimmy got him to admit that he’s worried for
Pelosi’s speakership. I suggest looking to Jimmy’s YT channel for a
future clip– I have no doubt at all that he will post the entire
discussion in short order.
Jimmy was also on the Katie Halper Show last
night. She had a massive guest list last night, starting with a long
conversation with Christian Parenti, then transitioning
into a discussion of Jimmy’s strategy with Sirota, Stoller, Briahna Joy
Gray, Justin Jackson, and Jimmy himself. Jimmy thoroughly dismantled the
similar weak sauce arguments offered by Matt Stoller. In my humble
evaluation, Stoller was utterly unmasked as a
sinophobic chaos agent against any progressive ideas during a pandemic
last night. The discussion starts at the 2:10 mark and Jimmy comes in 40 minutes later.
WSJ | Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may
seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance
you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr.
Jill Biden
” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your
degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the
University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title
“Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’
Needs.” A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.”
unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith
drop the doc.
I taught at Northwestern University for
30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree. I have only a B.A.
in absentia from the University of Chicago—in absentia because I took my
final examination on a pool table at Headquarters Company, Fort Hood,
Texas, while serving in the peacetime Army in the late 1950s. I do have
an honorary doctorate, though I have to report that the president of the
school that awarded it was fired the year after I received it, not, I
hope, for allowing my honorary doctorate. During my years as a
university teacher I was sometimes addressed, usually on the phone, as
“Dr. Epstein.” On such occasions it was all I could do not to reply,
“Read two chapters of
Henry James
and get into bed. I’ll be right over.”
I was also often addressed as Dr. during the years I was editor of the
American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. Let me
quickly insert that I am also not a member of Phi Beta Kappa, except by
marriage. Many of those who so addressed me, I noted, were scientists. I
also received a fair amount of correspondence from people who appended
the initials Ph.D. to their names atop their letterheads, and have twice
seen PHD on vanity license plates, which struck me as pathetic. In
contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities,
calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league.
The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by
the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university
education generally, at any rate outside the sciences. Getting a
doctorate was then an arduous proceeding: One had to pass examinations
in two foreign languages, one of them Greek or Latin, defend one’s
thesis, and take an oral examination on general knowledge in one’s
field. At Columbia University of an earlier day, a secretary sat outside
the room where these examinations were administered, a pitcher of water
and a glass on her desk. The water and glass were there for the
candidates who fainted. A far cry, this, from the few doctoral
examinations I sat in on during my teaching days, where candidates and
teachers addressed one another by first names and the general atmosphere
more resembled a kaffeeklatsch. Dr. Jill, I note you acquired your
Ed.D. as recently as 15 years ago at age 55, or long after the terror
had departed.
WaPo | The Wall Street Journal published a weekend op-ed
that opened by addressing incoming first lady Jill Biden as “kiddo,”
and argued she should drop the honorific “Dr.” from her name because
she’s not a medical doctor.
The piece swiftly went viral, with critics bashing it as sexist and Northwestern University distancing the school from the lecturer emeritus who penned it. Dozens of Biden supporters, academics and activists hurled barbs at the newspaper’s opinion section on Saturday and Sunday with one Journal news reporter calling the piece “disgusting.”
“The
@WSJ should be embarrassed to print the disgusting and sexist attack on
@DrBiden running on the @WSJopinion page,” Michael LaRosa, a spokesman
for Biden, said Saturday on Twitter.
“If you had any respect for women at all you would remove this
repugnant display of chauvinism from your paper and apologize to her.”
On
Sunday, though, Paul A. Gigot, the editorial page editor and vice
president of the Wall Street Journal, doubled down on the piece, calling
the attacks a bad faith example of “cancel culture.”
“Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?” he wrote
in a letter to readers. “My guess is that the Biden team concluded it
was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message
to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing
the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”
The
rancorous debate this weekend echoed a much longer-running conversation
about Biden’s use of an honorific, a discussion ongoing since she
became second lady in 2009, two years after the community college
professor earned her doctorate in education from the University of
Delaware.
Joseph
Epstein, who wrote the op-ed, taught English at Northwestern as an
adjunct lecturer for three decades, but stopped teaching in 2003. He
earned a bachelor of arts in absentia from the University of Chicago,
and once received an honorary doctorate, but has no higher academic
credentials.
He
argued it is misleading for Biden to use the doctor title, at least
while her husband is in the White House, because it is considered “bush
league” in academic circles for nonmedical doctors to claim the
honorific. Epstein also argued that an attachment to the title is silly
because once-prestigious doctoral degrees have lost their value because
of “the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards” at
universities, in part because of an abundance of honorary doctorates
like the one Epstein received.
Biden responded to the op-ed without addressing it directly on Sunday.
“Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished,” she said in a tweet.
alt-market | I have to look back at Event 201
to really gauge the state of the game, because what the elites planned
and what has happened do not completely match up. For those not
familiar, Event 201 was a type of “war game” held by globalists from the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The scenario? A pandemic outbreak of a coronavirus
which would spread like wildfire and kill a predicted 65 million
people. The simulation was held only a couple of months before the real
thing happened at the start of 2020.
In the year since the outbreak, the globalists have attempted to
enforce nearly every plan that was outlined during Event 201, including
using social media to censor or restrict any news or information outside
of the establishment approved narrative (Yes, narrative control was
discussed at the event in great detail). Klaus Schwab of the World
Economic Forum has consistently and excitedly applauded the pandemic
crisis as a “perfect opportunity” to institute the “reset” that the
globalists have been talking about for years.
Unfortunately for them, the virus has not been anywhere near as
deadly as they appear to have hoped. With a death rate of well below 1%
for anyone outside of a nursing home with preexisting conditions, the
establishment has now been forced to pump up infection numbers as a
means to terrorize the populace because the death numbers are not enough
to convince people to willingly hand over their freedoms. The Infection
Fatality Rate (IFR) for Covid 19 not counting nursing home deaths with
preexisting conditions is only 0.26% of those infected.
There is a propaganda meme being passed around these days that tries
to exaggerate the danger of death from Covid, and it goes a little
something like this:
“Covid has killed more people that the Vietnam War and the
Gulf Wars combined in a single year, therefore your freedoms are
forfeit…”
This is an idiotic talking point but luckily no one is buying it.
Over 40% of Covid deaths are people that are already sick and on the
verge of dying anyway (And no, refusing to wear masks is not the same as
endorsing “death panels”, because a death panel is about socialists
refusing treatment to people at risk because of their age. No one is
suggesting that old people be refused treatment, and they always have
the option of staying under quarantine if they fear they will become
infected. They are already retired and receiving social security,
perhaps if we are going to stimulate then the bailout money should go to
those most at risk so that the rest of us can continue on with normal
life?)
Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from diseases and
illnesses including the flu, common colds and pneumonia, yet, the
prospect of abandoning the Bill of Rights, submitting to economic
shutdowns and wearing a muzzle on our faces wherever we go was never
brought up before.
Why should we ask 99.7% of Americans or the world to accept medical
tyranny just to make .26% of the population feel safe? People who
question the mandates are called “selfish”, but even if I was one of the
people susceptible to the virus, I would NEVER demand that 99% of the
population bow to totalitarianism at the off chance that I might live a
little while longer. Now THAT would be selfish.
As more and more studies and data are released, the mask mandates are also coming into question.
Though Big Tech has sought to suppress or censor studies that run
contrary to the mainstream narrative, this has only led more people to
question the motivations of governments pushing the mandates. After all,
the mainstream media keeps saying that we should “listen to the
science”, but they ignore or censor the science. So, if the pandemic
response is not based in science, then it must only be about control.
Many Americans are not as stupid as the elites think. They see the
inconsistencies in the rhetoric and the data and they are increasingly
prone to refuse to comply. This might be why the establishment is
suddenly rushing out at least two Covid vaccines in the span of half a
year; they have to get the vaccine phase of the Reset underway before
too many people jump from the panic bandwagon.
The vaccine rush and the claims of effectiveness of 94% to 95% from
Pfizer and Moderna are suspect. The average effectiveness of most
vaccines is around 50% or less, and these are vaccines with hundreds of
trials and years of usage. Somehow, Pfizer and Moderna were both able to
produce a vaccine for a SARS type virus when multiple governments tried
for over a decade to produce vaccines for SARS in China and were
unsuccessful, and they were able to achieve 95% effectiveness?
Many people are not buying the vaccine story, and this is perhaps why
the elites are jumping headlong into vaccination so fast. Consider this
fact:
Here I think we have our explanation for the vaccination bonanza. The
elites know that a third of Americans (and probably Europeans) will not
take the vaccine regardless of any propaganda they dish out. They also
know that 60% of Americans are unlikely to take the vaccine unless they
can show an effectiveness rate of at least 75%. Neither Moderna nor
Pfizer have actually produced any evidence that their vaccines are
capable of prevented severe illness or death from Covid, so, their
effectiveness rate is based on “projections” of success according to
their minimal trials. Meaning, the effectiveness rate of 95% is
completely arbitrary.
Why did they go with such a high number instead of a more realistic
50% to 60%? Because the polls say they need an epic effectiveness rate
in order to convince Americans to take the vaccine. I think it is really
as simple as that.
Americans are skeptical of the vaccines for a number of reasons. The
reality that they are minimally tested and rushed out in less than a
year is one reason . The fact that the government and the media have
been caught censoring or lying about Covid data is another reason.
People just don’t trust the elites, and who can blame them? Who would
trust a cabal of psychopaths to inject them with an unknown viral
cocktail? Maybe their intentions are not so pure?
birchgold | Government officials are constantly in the media these days claiming
that vaccinations will not be made mandatory. What they don’t mention is
that they are already trying to legislate that anyone without a
vaccination or medical passport will be unable to participate in normal
society or even be allowed to work in their job. This program is moving
at an incredibly fast pace, which makes me think the globalists realize
they are losing the battle for the minds of the citizenry and they need
to rush their agenda before it’s too late.
Here is what will happen in 2021 in terms of the pandemic:
The
media and elitist organizations will continue to pump up the infection
numbers to frighten the public, even though the death rate is so low it
makes the infection rate meaningless.
If Biden is in office, mandates will be made into a federal issue and will be federally enforced.
If Trump is in office, state governments will try to enforce mandates and major corporations will help them.
There
will then be a major push to require medical passports proving a person
is not infected to enter into any public place. This means submission
to 24/7 contact tracing or getting a new vaccine whenever ordered to.
Basically, your life will be under the total control of state or federal
governments if you want to have any semblance of returning to your
normal life.
If this process does not work and does not
intimidate enough people into compliance, governments will seek to offer
stimulus checks or a form of Universal Basic Income, but only for those people who agree to tracking through their cell phones and to vaccination.
New
mutations of COVID-19 will be conveniently found every year from now
on, meaning the public will have to get new vaccinations constantly, and
medical tyranny will never go away unless people take an aggressive
stand.
It Gets Worse From Here On…
2021
will be far worse that 2020, but at least the lines will be drawn and
the fight will be more clear to everyone. The economic crisis is what
concerns me the most. The events listed above will complete the final
downturn in the global system and America in particular. Such a
financial crash would cause far more chaos and death than the
coronavirus ever could.
Ultimately, I believe the public will
respond badly to pandemic mandates. Many conservative states and
counties will simply refuse to enforce them. However, the question is,
will people end up fighting each other and forget all about the
globalists that created the problem in the first place? Will mass
poverty succeed where the pandemic failed in convincing Americans to
give up their liberties in exchange for some stability?
mises | Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According
to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place
from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound
change. The scenario for the world in 2030 is more than just a forecast.
It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since
with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns.
According to the projections
of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy
will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would
go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of
production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF
projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private
property.
If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and
borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole
proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line
with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense
would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every
personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would
be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable
environment.
In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be
mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the
government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while
the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will
be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key
countries, a global agency would set the price of CO2 emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.
In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:
People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.
The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.
Organs will not be transplanted but printed.
Meat consumption will be minimized.
Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.
To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.
People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.
Western values will be tested to the breaking point..
taibbi | In sum, it’s okay to stoke public paranoia, encourage voters to
protest legal election results, spread conspiracy theories about stolen
elections, refuse to endorse legal election tallies, and even to file
lawsuits challenging
the validity of presidential results, so long as all of this activity
is sanctified by officials in the right party, or by intelligence vets,
or by friendlies at CNN, NBC, the New York Times, etc.
If,
however, the theories are coming from Donald Trump or some other
disreputable species of un-credentialed American, then it’s time for
companies like YouTube to move in and wipe out 8000+ videos and nudge
people to channels like CBS and NBC, as well as to the home page of the
federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. This is a process YouTube calls “connecting people to authoritative information.”
Cutting
down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real
checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie.
Imagine if these mechanisms had been in place in the past. Would we
disallow published claims that the Missile Gap was a fake?
That the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged? How about Watergate, a
wild theory about cheating in a presidential election that was
universally disbelieved by “reputable” news agencies, until it wasn’t?
It’s not hard to imagine a future where authorities would ask tech
platforms to quell “conspiracy theories” about everything from poisoned
water systems to war crimes.
There’s no such thing as a
technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are
political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost
always wrong on some level. The people who created the American free
press understood this, even knowing the tendency of newspapers to be
idiotic and full of lies. They weighed that against the larger potential
evil of a despotic government that relies upon what Thomas Jefferson
called a “standing army of newswriters” ready to print whatever ministers want, “without any regard for truth.”
We
allow freedom of religion not because we want people believing in silly
religions, but because it’s the only defense against someone
establishing one officially mandated silly religion. With the press, we
put up with gossip and errors and lies not because we think those things
are socially beneficial, but because we don’t want an aristocratic
political establishment having a monopoly on those abuses. By allowing
some conspiracy theories but not others, that’s exactly the system we’re
building.
Most of blue-state America is looking aghast at news stories about 17 states joining in a lawsuit
to challenge the election results. Conventional wisdom says that half
the country has been taken over by a dangerous conspiracist movement
that must be tamed by any means necessary. Acts like the YouTube ban not
only don’t accomplish this, they’ll almost certainly further radicalize
this population. This is especially true in light of the ongoing
implication that Trump’s followers are either actual or unwitting
confederates of foreign enemies.
That insult is bad enough when
it’s leveled in words only, but when it’s backed up by concrete actions
to change a group’s status, like reducing an ability to air grievances,
now you’re removing some of the last incentives to behave like citizens.
Do you want 70 million Trump voters in the streets with guns and
go-bags? Tell them you consider them the same as foreign enemies, and
start treating them accordingly. This is a stupid, dangerous, wrong
policy, guaranteed to make things worse.
gizmodo | In May 2016, a student enrolled in a
high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone
searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for
evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher,
the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted
messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit,
investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged
each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into
the county jail for sexual assault of a child.
The
Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was owned and operated
by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. But these invasive phone-cracking
tools are not only being purchased by police departments. Public
documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been
quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years.
Gizmodo has reviewed similar accounting documents from eight school
districts, seven of which are in Texas, showing that administrators paid
as much $11,582 for the controversial surveillance technology. Known as
mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to
siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student’s
devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools,
potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell
phone searches.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country with over 630,000 students
enrolled in over 1,000 institutions in the 2018-2019 school year, has a
Cellebrite device it says is used by a team that investigates complaints of employee misconduct against students. Its listed description for the job of Digital Forensics Investigator
states, those with that role assist with “student safety issues, fraud,
collusion, and/or conflicts of interest,” specifically mentioning
expertise with Cellebrite as a qualification.
The
Fourth Amendment protects people in the United States from unreasonable
government searches and seizures, including their cell phones. While a
search without a warrant is generally considered unreasonable, the
situation in schools is a little different.
In the case New Jersey v. T.L.O,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that schools do not necessarily need a
warrant to search students so long as officials have a reasonable belief
a student has broken the law or school policy, and the search is not
unnecessarily intrusive and reasonably related in scope to the
circumstances under which the search was originally justified. The
“reasonableness” standard is extremely broad, largely deferential to the
whims of school officials, and can serve as the basis for fishing expeditions; courts have only rarely ruled that school searches violate the Fourth Amendment.
“The
problem is as much with the legal standards as with the technology,”
said Barbara Fedders, an assistant professor of law at University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who focuses on the intersection of
criminal law and school discipline. “Schools take student’s cell phones
for all kinds of reasons, not because they think they are doing anything
pernicious; you can see where racial bias could factor into this.”
Cell
phones are deeply personal items, and it’s easy to imagine how
embarrassing and potentially catastrophic it would be if an
administrator or school resource officer used a Cellebrite to download
students’ private text messages, photos, social media posts, location
history, and more.
Forbes | An executive order signed
by Mayor Greg Fischer on Tuesday declares racism a public health crisis
in Louisville, Kentucky, with Fischer stating that several of the
city's "systems are more than broken" and that they need to "be
dismantled and replaced."
At a press conference announcing the executive order, Fischer said that the death of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman
who was shot and killed in her home by Louisville Metro police
officers, made the city a "focal point for America's reckoning on racial
justice."
Fischer declared that for Louisville to move forward, it would first need to address the pain and root causes of racism, in addition to acknowledging its impact.
Under the order, seven specific areas
will be targeted by the Louisville Metro Government: public safety,
children and families, employment, Black wealth, housing, health and
voting.
The order also calls for continuing to offer mail-in ballots for all elections.
Fischer pointed to several statistics
Tuesday that highlighted the racial inequity in the city, such as the
fact that Black residents own only 2.4% of Louisville's businesses,
despite constituting 22.4% of the city's population.
Between some majority-Black and majority-white neighborhoods in Louisville, life expectancy can vary by as much as 12 years, according to the mayor.
Crucial Quote: "For too many Louisvillians, racism is a fact of daily life, a fact
that was created and documented in our country's laws and institutional
policies like segregation, redlining, and urban renewal," Fischer said.
"Laws and policies that restrict the freedom of all Americans to
exercise their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.
fox4kc | Kansas City’s mayor is making a clarification on the COVID-19
restrictions for restaurants and bars, giving them a little more time to
finish serving dine-in customers.
Bill Teel, executive director of the Greater Kansas City Restaurant
Association, said restaurant staff can now take orders up to 10 p.m. but
must have all customers out of the building by 11 p.m.
Previously, Kansas City restaurants were required to close for
dine-in service by 10 p.m. under the city’s latest COVID-19
restrictions.
A spokesperson for Mayor Quinton Lucas said in order to remain
consistent with neighboring jurisdictions, Kansas City has “only
clarified that the 10 p.m. restriction means that no food or drink shall
be served after 10 p.m., and that patrons can finish their visit in a
reasonable amount of time.”
Restaurants and bars will not be able to take orders or sell drinks
after 10 p.m., but it will give customers more time to finish their
meals.
Carryout, drive-thru and delivery services can continue past 10 p.m.
In a letter to Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association members,
Teel called this “a much needed step in the right direction.”
Restaurants and bars are still limited to 50% capacity under Kansas
City’s restrictions, and dine-in customers must be seated at all times
with 6 feet of distance between groups. Masks are required when anyone
is not actively eating or drinking.
The news comes one day after Independence created its own COVID-19 guidelines,
allowing its restaurants and bars to continue serving until midnight —
instead of closing dine-in service at 10 p.m. like Jackson County’s
order requires.
Gebru Called Into Question Google's Reputation Based on the leaked email, Gebru's research says that machine learning at Google (the core of Google's products) creates more harm than good. Somebody finally figured out there that if she is effective in her role, she would be calling into question the ethical standing of Google's core products. If a corporation does ethics
research but is unwilling to publicize anything that could be considered
critical, then it's not ethics research, it's just peer-reviewed
public relations.
Google miscalculated with Gebru. They thought her comfy paycheck would buy her reputational complicity. Like a typical diversity hire at Corporation X, Gebru was supposed to function as a token figleaf and glad hander among snowflakes who might otherwise ask hard questions. Now Google couldn't just tell her that she was hired to be the good AI house negroe, could they?
Google wants the good narrative of "internal ethics research being done" They want to shape that narrative and message about all of "the improvements we can make" whatever it takes so that questions about their products don't effect their bottom line. With internal ethics research you have access to exponentially more data (directly and indirectly, the latter because
you know who to talk to and can do so) than any poor academic researcher.
The
field has AI Ethics research teams working on important problems (to
the community as a whole). These teams are well funded, sometimes with
huge resources. Now to get the best out of this system, the researchers just need
to avoid conflicts with the company core business. In the case of Gebru's paper, it could have been reframed in a way that would please Google, without sacrificing its
scientific merit. Shaping the narrative is extremely important in politics, business, and ethics.
And Openly Flouted Managerial Authoriteh Some are critical if machine learning SVP Jeff Dean for rejecting her submission because of bad "literature review", saying that internal review is supposed to check for "disclosure of sensitive material" only.
Not only are they wrong about the ultimate purpose of internal review processes, they also missed the point of the rejection. It was never about "literature review", but instead about Google's reputation. Take another look at Dean's response email.
It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. Google is the inventor of the current market dominating language models. Who does more neural network training using larger data sets than Google?
This is how and why Gebru's paper argues that Google creates more harm than good. Would you approve such a paper, as is? This is being kept to the paper and the email to the internal snowflake list - we don't need to examine her intention to sue Google last year, or calling on colleagues to enlist third-party organizations to put more pressure on Google.
Put yourself in Google's cloven-hooved shoes.
Gebru: Here's my paper in which I call out the environmental impact of large models and raise concerns about bias in the language data sets. Tomorrow is the deadline, please review and approve it.
Google: Hold on, this makes us look very bad! You have to revise the paper. We know that large models are not good for the environment, but we have also been doing research to achieve much greater efficiencies. We are also aware of bias in the language models that we are using in production, but we are also proposing solutions to that. You should include those works as well.
Gebru: Give me the names of every single person who reviewed my paper otherwise I'll resign. Throw on top of this the fact that she told hundreds of people in the org to cease important work because she had some disagreements with leadership.
Google: You're Fired!!! Get Out - We'll Pack Your Shit And Mail It To You!!!!
1/ I woke up thinking about #TimnitGebru and how #google and @JeffDean used the flimsiest of HR bullshit to fire her. And let's be clear, she was fired. How do I know this, because I have been on both sides of that situation. Here's how it's done #ISupportTimnit
I had stopped writing here as you may
know, after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I
received after posting my stories here (and then of course it started
being moderated).
Recently however, I was contributing to a
document that Katherine and Daphne were writing where they were dismayed
by the fact that after all this talk, this org seems to have hired 14%
or so women this year. Samy has hired 39% from what I understand but he
has zero incentive to do this.
What I want to say is stop writing
your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that
we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the
random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need
to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the
constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. Because
there is zero accountability. There is no incentive to hire 39% women:
your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented
people, you start making the other leaders upset when they don’t want to
give you good ratings during calibration. There is no way more
documents or more conversations will achieve anything. We just had a
Black research all hands with such an emotional show of exasperation. Do
you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way
possible.
Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a
paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? Does that
sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people
like me who are constantly dehumanized?
Imagine this: You’ve sent a
paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR
& Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work
saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan
figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t
heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2
months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up
at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one
would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that
meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you
need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost
everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the
conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about
this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise
recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations
such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or
valued in this company.
Then, you ask for more information. What
specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not
before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what
exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
And you are told
after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and
confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who
contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was
followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever
pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and
clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once
again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Then
you try to engage in a conversation about how this is not acceptable
and people start doing the opposite of any sort of self
reflection—trying to find scapegoats to blame.
Silencing
marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU principles
which we discussed. And doing this in the context of “responsible AI”
adds so much salt to the wounds. I understand that the only things that
mean anything at Google are levels, I’ve seen how my expertise has been
completely dismissed. But now there’s an additional layer saying any
privileged person can decide that they don’t want your paper out with
zero conversation. So you’re blocked from adding your voice to the
research community—your work which you do on top of the other
marginalization you face here.
I’m always amazed at how people
can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and
ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me
last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat
Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which
is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to
throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and
the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
So
if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership
accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be
applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional
Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to
report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things
over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen.
Scientific American
featured an article by LANL physicist and neuroscientist Garrett
Kenyon, who wrote that one of the
“distinguishing features of machines is that they don’t need to sleep,
unlike humans and any other creature with a central nervous system,” but
someday “your toaster might need a nap from time to time, as may your
car, fridge and anything else that is revolutionized
with the advent of practical artificial intelligence technologies.”
NOPE!
What Machine Learning (So-Called AI) Really Is
The vast majority of advances in the field of "machine learning"
(so-called AI) stem from a single technique (neural networks with back
propagation) combined with dramatic leaps in processing power.
Back-propagation is the essence of neural net "training". It is the
method of fine-tuning the weights of a neural net based on the error
rate obtained in the previous iteration. Proper tuning of the weights
allows you to reduce error rates and to make
the model reliable by increasing its generalization.
The learning mechanism is very generic, which makes it broadly
applicable to almost everything, but also makes it ‘dumb’ in the sense
that it doesn’t understand anything about context or have the ability to
abstract notable features and form models.
Humans do this non-dumb "abstraction from feature and form context"
stuff - all the time. It’s what enables us to do higher reasoning
without a whole data center worth of processing power.
Google and other big-tech/big-data companies are interested in
neural networks with back propagation from a short term business
perspective. There's still a lot to be gained from taking the existing
technique and wringing every drop of commercial potential
out of it.
Google is engineering first and researching second, if at all. That
means that any advances they come up with tend to skew towards
heuristics and implementation, rather than untangling the theory.
I’ve been struck by how many so-called ‘research’ papers in AI boil
down to “you should do this because it seems to work better than the
alternatives” with no real attempt to explain why.
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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 ...
