Today, I sent my colleagues my plan for the final work period of the first session of the 118th Congress—including negotiations on long-term government funding, the national security supplemental, the NDAA and other bipartisan legislation. pic.twitter.com/o78jRJTvpe
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) November 26, 2023
Apparently the NDAA wasn't being voted on yesterday as congress wasn't in session. The staffer for Turner hasn't heard of any discussions about the bill so that is curious.
I am now going to be calling the republicans but
would appreciate more help in doing so. Be respectful with the people
taking the calls. You can find the numbers for both Republicans and
Democrats here: https://www.uapcaucus.com/call#call
Four Republicans are colluding to block this amendment from passing: Mike Turner of Ohio, Mike Rogers of Alabama, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Mike Johnson of Louisiana:
Rep Mike Turner: (202) 225-6465
Rep Mike Rogers: (202) 224-3261
Sen Mitch McConnell: (202) 224-3135
Rep Mike Johnson: (202) 225-2777
My call notes:
I’m calling about the UAP Disclosure Act, which enables Americans to get transparency and accountability on matters related to UAPs. I've been closely following the developments in this area, especially after the July 26 UAP Hearing, where credible witnesses provided testimony under oath.
I’ve heard that X is not in favor of the UAP Disclosure Act amendment to the NDAA because AARO is still funded, and they say this will be duplicative funding, but it is not. Without AARO, there is no centralized place that will handle these programs; its entire purpose is funding authorization for UAP programs. At the same time, AARO is currently toothless without the UAP Disclosure Act amendment. All pieces of this amendment are critical to its functionality, including a civilian review board to help ensure accountability.
This is a bipartisan issue; the number of people who care about this issue are growing, and know that it is the number one most important issue. The DOD can never pass their audits and these SAPs could be the reason why. If X cares about appropriate fiscal spending, then it’s imperative to support this amendment (while keeping funding for AARO intact).
math.columbia.edu | Last month I recorded a podcast with Curt Jaimungal for his Theories of Everything site, and it’s now available with audio here, on Youtube here. There are quite a few other programs on the site well worth watching.
Much of the discussion in this program is about the general ideas I’m trying to pursue about spinors, twistors and unification. For more about the details of these, see arXiv preprints here and here, as well as blog entries here.
About the state of string theory, that’s a topic I find more and more disturbing, with little new though to say about it. It’s been dead now for a long time and most of the scientific community and the public at large are now aware of this. The ongoing publicity campaign from some of the most respected figures in theoretical physics to deny reality and claim that all is well with string theory is what is disturbing. Just in the last week or so, you can watch Cumrun Vafa and Brian Greene promoting string theory on Brian Keating’s channel, with Vafa explaining how string theory computes the mass of the electron. At the World Science Festival site there’s Juan Maldacena, with an upcoming program featuring Greene, Strominger, Vafa and Witten.
On Twitter, there’s now stringking42069, who is producing a torrent of well-informed cutting invective about what is going on in the string theory research community, supposedly from a true believer. It’s unclear whether this is a parody account trying to discredit string theory, or an extreme example of how far gone some string theorists now are.
To all those celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, may your travel problems be minimal and your get-togethers with friends and family a pleasure.
Update: If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing and don’t want to hear about spinors and twistors, Curt Jaimungal has put up a shorter clip where we discuss among other things the lack of any significant public technical debate between string theory skeptics and optimists. He offers his site as a venue. Is there anyone who continues to work on string theory and is optimistic about its prospects willing to participate?
Forbes | Serbian-American physicist engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla is nowadays famous for his work on electricity and energy. He developed the alternating current system, making it possible to transmit electricity over vast distances, and worked on wireless communication and energy transfer. He was a brilliant, but also very eccentric thinker, claiming to get visions and displaying odd behaviour in public like an obsession with personal hygiene and pigeons. Maybe the more enigmatic parts of his personality make him such an interesting subject for conspiracy theories. Tesla is credited to have worked on unknown energy-sources, caused the Tunguska explosion with his "death-ray" prototype, and supposedly worked on an earthquake-generator.
In 1896 Tesla was working on oscillations for wireless energy transfer. The idea was to build a steam-powered oscillator, able to create various changing frequencies. If the frequency matched the resonance frequency of a receiving device, this device should transform the mechanical oscillations back into an electric current.
In 1897 the device was ready and in 1898 Tesla supposedly managed to oscillate his laboratory at 48 E. Houston St., New York, enough, that alarmed neighbors called the police, fearing an earthquake happening. Tesla later explained the principle to reporter Allan L. Besnson, who in February 1912 published an article about Tesla's resonator in The World Today magazine:
"He put his little vibrator in his coat-pocket and went out to hunt a half-erected steel building. Down in the Wall Street district, he found one, ten stories of steel framework without a brick or a stone laid around it. He clamped the vibrator to one of the beams, and fussed with the adjustment until he got it. Tesla said finally the structure began to creak and weave and the steel-workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Police was called out. Tesla put the vibrator in his pocket and went away. Ten minutes more and he could have laid the building in the street. And, with the same vibrator, he could have dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in less than an hour."
The "earthquake-generator" could also be used for more peaceful applications. Tesla imagined an array of smaller devices distributed all over the planet to relieve energy from Earth and also to send energy from one spot to another. A transmitter, a device consisting of a piston vibrating inside a cylinder, transforms electric energy into vibrations. Using the rocks in the underground as sort of conductor, the vibrations are sent to a receiving device and the oscillations transformed back into electricity, to be used locally. However, the "telegeodynamics" system by Tesla never managed to get beyond the prototype. In reality, the device was not powerful enough to send energy through Earth. Dampening of the oscillations by structures and the underground was far too strong.
Another vision by Tesla was more successful. He imagined using the oscillations generated by his device to study Earth. Seismic waves generated by an oscillator and projected into the underground are reflected back to a receiver by faults or different layers of rocks. Studying the reflected waves, geologists may be able to X-ray Earth (Tesla also made important contributions to modern X-ray technology). Modern seismologists still use this principle. Pulses of energy, generated by electromagnetic devices, controlled explosions or mechanical pistons, are sent deep into the underground. Geophones record the reflected signals and geologists use the collected data to generate a model of the geological structures hidden beneath the surface.
grahamhancock | Gods of the Bible is just my last attempt to bring some light to our ancient past through the narrative found in the Bible. I aim to narrate, understand, and describe in detail the reasons and habits of that group of individuals called “Elohim,” of whom Yahweh was part, one of many. Yahweh was the Elohim of the family of Israel — and only of them and their descendants. I deny the universality of the Bible. The Old Testament records Israel’s covenant and relationship with Yahweh. Other Elohim, as we have seen above, had inherited other peoples, families, and nations.
The Elohim of other peoples are mentioned and addressed several times in the Old Testament. These passages suggest that these “foreign Elohim” were similar to Yahweh and had identical abilities and habits. The Elohim had advanced technology unavailable to our ancestors; lived longer than humans but were mortal; had weapons and tools that could do wonders; they were more powerful and knowledgeable, and yet they could be abandoned, betrayed, and deceived, just like humans, because they knew a lot but were not omniscient.
The space of a short article would only allow for briefly summarizing some of the aspects of the Elohim that I have detailed in this new book and all my previous works.8
Still, perhaps it is not superfluous to end by mentioning something about the fascinating biblical term “ruach.” This term has always been translated as “spirit” through the influence of the Greek culture and the so-called Septuagint version of the Bible, which renders it with “pneuma.” The Ancient Hebrew term “ruach” actually had a very definite and concrete meaning as it stood for “wind,” “breath,” “moving air,” “storm wind,” and, in a broader sense, “that which moves quickly through the air space.” In modern biblical translations, the term “ruach” is always rendered as “spirit” because it responds to monotheistic theology’s spiritualist needs.
In the Old Testament, however, this “ruach” appears to be flying through the air, making noise, and taking people from one place to another, with a loud clangor and visible manifestations, taking off and landing in specific geographical locations — in very concrete ways.
The two following passages illustrate what has just been said.
“The [ruach] lifted me and brought me to the gate of the house of Yahweh that faces East. There at the entrance of the gate were twenty-five men, and I saw among them Jaazaniah, son of Azzur, and Pelatiah, son of Benaiah.” (Ezekiel 11:1)
“Look,” they said, “we, your servants, have fifty able men. Let them go and look for your master. Perhaps, the [ruach] of Yahweh has picked him up and set him down on some mountain or valley.” “No,” Elisha replied, “do not send them.” But they persisted until he was too embarrassed to refuse. So he said, “Send them.” And they sent fifty men, who searched for three days but did not find him. (2 Kings 2:16-17)
I left the word “ruach” untranslated, as the reader can see. If you follow monotheistic exegesis and replace “ruach” with “spirit,” the passages become incomprehensible. But it is difficult to interpret the term “ruach” spiritually without distorting the text’s meaning. I give countless similar examples about “ruach” and other words and biblical passages in Gods of the Bible, always underlining the concreteness and realism of the Ancient Hebrew language and the ancient Semitic culture, which was the culture of a pastoral people that Yahweh had found in the desert, landless.
I began and ended Gods of the Bible with the same spirit that moved me twenty-five years ago when I first picked up my pink notebook and then discovered the little mistake that began my professional career as a translator of the Old Testament with Edizioni San Paolo. Since then, I have found many more errors in the Bible — and not all were done in good faith. The list is long and cannot be continued here. But I hope at least to have been able to open a dialog with all those who, with an open mind, are interested in learning more about humankind.
I am not looking for absolute truths but for a glimmer of reality. As I gaze into the impending sunset, the peaks of the Alps, silhouetted against the evening sky, glow pink. A mountain peak is all I hope for. I leave the climb to heaven to others.
I take Gods of the Bible from its stack and open it in the last light of day. I find the best summary of what has been said on the page that opens before me. It is good never to ignore the authoritative voices of the past whose intentions are free from the controversies of the present. I find the voice of a great historian of antiquity who had no reason to lie or embellish. And I realize it is not for heretics like me to explain the meaning of such words, but for the “guardians of the discourse” that exclude apriori hypotheses they cannot accept. I pretend what I read is true.
“Armies clashed in the sky, swords blazed, and the temple shone with sudden flashes. The doors of the sanctuary were suddenly torn open, and a superhuman voice cried out that the gods were fleeing, and at the same time, there was a great uproar as if men were fleeing.” (C. Tacitus, Histories, V 13)
archive | Did a highly advanced civilization exist in prehistory? Is the Giza Pyramid a remnant of their technology? Then, what was the power source that fueled such a civilization? The technology of harmonic resonance, claims renowned master craftsman and engineer Christopher Dunn. In a brilliant piece of reverse engineering based on twenty years of research, Dunn reveals that the Great Pyramid of Giza was actually a large acoustical device! By its size and dimensions, this crystal edifice created a harmonic resonance with the Earth and converted Earth's vibrational energies to microwave radiation. The author shows how the pyramid's numerous chambers and passageways were positioned with the deliberate precision to maximize its acoustical qualities. This may be the same technology discovered by Nikola Tesla and the solution to our own clean energy needs.
ttbrown | First Joe Rogan, now David Grusch. Ol’ TTB does seem to be getting around these days…
By now you have probably heard of David Grusch, the former military intelligence officer who testified before Congress on the U.S. Government’s secret UFO – oh, excuse me, we’re supposed to call them unidentified aerial phenomena now – initiatives. His appearance and subsequent notoriety has caused quite a stir, though it’s not clear the testimony shed any really clear, fresh light on what’s been happening off the public record for the past 80 years.
The centerpiece of this production is a series of conversations with David Grusch, the military/intelligence veteran who testified before Congress in July about what the U.S. has been keeping under wraps about UFOs, crash retrievals and recovered (i.e. dead) alien ‘biologics.’
I really don’t know what to make of Grusch. I don’t doubt the veracity of his testimony, but it seems to me he goes right the edge of new revelations without really getting there. He is billed as a “whistleblower” but I keep getting the impression of guy who puts the whistle in his mouth but for whatever reason doesn’t quite blow on it. I get that he is constrained by external forces and NDA commitments, but too much of the discussion between he and Jesse (and Jesse’s crew) dwells on pure speculation.
On the other hand, that speculation is quite comprehensive. In the course of two hours they manage to cover just about every possibility re: what the hell is really going on out-and-up there. Extraterrestrial visitors? Top secret domestic (or foreign) military research? Time travelers? Take your pick – or maybe it’s all of the above.
About
46 minutes in, Jesse neatly segues into a discussion of Townsend Brown
and how his story dovetails into the mysteries David Grusch has exposed. Jesse has graciously given me permission to extract that portion of the documentary, so here’s that segment:
theguardian | On January 31 2003, less than 24 hours before the Columbia space shuttle broke up, Nasa announced that it would no longer be funding its Breakthrough Physics Propulsion Programme - the world's largest visible antigravity project.
A working antigravity technology is still decades away at least, but the origins of one of the most promising branches of research can be found in an Ohio garage, almost 100 years ago.
Thomas Townsend Brown was born in Ohio in1905, two years after the Wright brothers took off. By his teens he was already dreaming about space travel, tinkering in his parents' garage with the ideas that would obsess him for the rest of his life. One day, while experimenting with X-ray tubes, he applied a high voltage electrical charge to a capacitor (a device for storing electricity) attached to a glass tube suspended from the ceiling. To Brown's astonishment, the tube began to rotate, apparently propelled by electricity itself.
Aged 18, Brown was taken under the wing of Dr Paul Biefield, a close friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Biefield was deeply impressed with Brown's discoveries and together they proposed the Biefield-Brown effect. This states that when an electrical current is applied to a capacitor, it will move in the direction of the flow of current - towards its positive pole. And so the fledgling field of electrogravitics was born.
By the early 1950s, Brown had developed platforms, three feet in diameter, which he is said to have demonstrated hovering and rotating. The American military classified the results, but they neglected to support Brown's research. This proved to be the story of his life. Brown never got the funding he wanted, but he continued to develop his ideas until his death in 1985.
But the story continues in the research of groups exploring electrogravitics, among them Boeing, Nasa and BAe Systems. Closest to Brown's original vision are the "Lifters" being built by American Antigravity and others - skeletal metal frames that can lift a pound in weight, propelled by electric currents. Thomas Townsend Brown's name may be forgotten, but his dream lives on.
sputnik | US politicians have been quick to make glib comparisons between Russia's de-Nazification operation in Ukraine and Hitler's invasion of Europe or terrorist outrages. Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, said Joe Biden couldn't even string such an argument together.
"This is the story, not the content of the op-ed," Ritter stressed. "The story is that Joe Biden, the president of the United States is lacking in such mental capacity that the presidency is being managed by people who weren't elected to do that job. That's what people should be worried about."
MSDNC | But at a press conference at the end of the meeting, Biden made a pointed remark that underscored the gulf between the two countries. Asked by a reporter if he stood by his characterization of Xi in June as a “dictator,” Biden answered that he did. “Well, look, he is. I mean, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden said. “Anyway, we made progress.”
As he said this, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was seated in the front row, visibly winced. Blinken’s apparent pain at his boss’ blunt language has gone viral — inspiring mockery of the Biden administration, and prompting some right-wing commentators to describe Biden’s language as a sign of senility-induced incompetence. David Sacks, a right-wing venture capitalist, posted on X, “This was a bumbling act of senility in which Biden fell for a reporter’s obvious gotcha question, erased the whole point of the diplomatic summit, and caused his own staff to shake their heads in disbelief.” Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing commentator, observed in a response to Sacks: “China would be foolish to trust anything the Biden administration offers them at this point.”
Is Biden’s age a valid concern as he pursues another term in office? Yes. Does that definitively explain his behavior here? No. The simplest explanation is that Biden was being Biden.
First, it’s unclear that Biden’s comment could even be characterized as a gaffe. The question, after all, was whether the president would disavow a view he articulated just a few months ago. Biden knew if he changed his position he would be vulnerable to attacks of inconsistency out of political expediency. China has the same style of government today that it had in the summer, and there is nothing inaccurate about what Biden said. Biden is also aware that the right is constantly looking to attack him for being soft on China, and that very well may have happened if he had used softer language. It’s a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario when it comes to Biden’s critics on the right.
Second, even if one assumes that Biden veered from the kind of language his staff advised him to use, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows that Biden has misspoken, said something off-color, or unexpectedly deviated from talking points for his entire political career — particularly in the realm of foreign policy. As senator, vice president and now president, Biden tends to feel confident making edgy off-the-cuff remarks that cause others headaches. It’s difficult to argue that any impolitic comment he makes can be attributed to his age when this is the same man who, as vice president, forced former President Barack Obama to change his position on same-sex marriage by freelancing on the issue on “Meet the Press.” (Biden has even called himself “a gaffe machine.”) So even if one wants to argue that Biden was behaving incompetently, the bar for proving that it has to do with declining mental acuity is high.
Blinken’s reaction was funny to witness, a rare example of a seasoned diplomat shedding their poker face. But it doesn’t mean Blinken thought Biden didn’t know what he was doing — he could’ve simply disagreed with the president’s on-the-fly judgment. It’s possible he would have preferred that Biden had, for example, ignored the reporter’s question and shifted the topic to focusing on the progress that had been made at the summit, thereby neither confirming nor denying the question. Perhaps Blinken would’ve valued such a response after a summit when the U.S. and China made substantial diplomatic progress and their heads of state were unusually chummy with each other — including sharing nostalgic photos, exchanging birthday wishes and showing off their presidential cruisers. But unlike Blinken, Biden is primed to consider domestic audiences more than international ones; their judgment on this could simply be irreconcilable.
zerohedge | Media Matters has opted for new tactics in its campaign to drive advertisers from X. Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.
Media Matters executed this plot in multiple steps, as X’s internal investigations have revealed.
First, Media Matters accessed accounts that had been active for at least 30 days, bypassing X’s ad filter for new users. Media Matters then exclusively followed a small subset of users consisting entirely of accounts in one of two categories: those known to produce extreme, fringe content, and accounts owned by X’s big-name advertisers. The end result was a feed precision-designed by Media Matters for a single purpose: to produce side-by-side ad/content placements that it could screenshot in an effort to alienate advertisers.
But this activity still was not enough to create the pairings of advertisements and content that Media Matters aimed to produce.
Media Matters therefore resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed, generating between 13 and 15 times more advertisements per hour than viewed by the average X user repeating this inauthentic activity until it finally received pages containing the result it wanted: controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts.
Media Matters omitted mentioning any of this in a report published on November 16, 2023 that displayed instances Media Matters “found” on X of advertisers’ paid posts featured next to Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist content. Nor did Media Matters otherwise provide any context regarding the forced, inauthentic nature and extraordinary rarity of these pairings.
However, relying on the specious narrative propagated by Media Matters, the advertisers targeted took these pairings to be anything but rare and inorganic, with all but one of the companies featured in the Media Matters piece withdrawing all ads from X, including Apple, Comcast, NBCUniversal, and IBM—some of X’s largest advertisers. Indeed, in pulling all advertising from X in response to this intentionally deceptive report, IBM called the pairings an “entirely unacceptable situation.” Only Oracle did not withdraw its ads.
The truth bore no resemblance to Media Matters’ narrative. In fact, IBM’s, Comcast’s, and Oracle’s paid posts appeared alongside the fringe content cited by Media Matters for only one viewer (out of more than 500 million) on all of X: Media Matters. Not a single authentic user of the X platform saw IBM ’s, Comcast’s, or Oracle’s ads next to that content, which Media Matters achieved only through its manipulation of X’s algorithms as described above. And in Apple’s case, only two out of more than 500 million active users saw its ad appear alongside the fringe content cited in the article—at least one of which was Media Matters.
Media Matters could have produced a fair, accurate account of users’ interactions with advertisements on X via basic reporting: following real users, documenting the actual, organic production of content and advertisement pairings. Had it done so, however, it would not have produced the outcome Media Matters so desperately desired, which was to tarnish X’s reputation by associating it with racist content. So instead, Media Matters chose to maliciously misrepresent the X experience with the intention of harming X and its business.
Further, X CEO Linda Yaccarino - who has reportedly been under pressure all day by various ad companies to resign - defended the company in a statement on Monday.
"If you know me, you know I'm committed to truth and fairness," she posted.
"Here's the truth. Not a single authentic user on X saw IBM's, Comcast's, or Oracle's ads next to the content in Media Matters' article. Only 2 users saw Apple's ad next to the content, at least one of which was Media Matters. Data wins over manipulation or allegations. Don't be manipulated. Stand with X."
Public's Michael Shellenberger noted that:
"Despite the lack of verified evidence behind Media Matters’ claims, its tactics are highly effective."
Sllenberger concluded, by asking on X:
Why is Media Matters leading a disinformation campaign and advertiser boycott against Elon Musk’s X?
Who is Media Matters, exactly?
And what’s its real agenda?
...before going into detail on Substack about why Media Matters is a Democratic Party front-Group:
The attacks on X make clear that the real concern of Democratic Party elites is their lack of control over the public conversation.
From 1996 to 2016, Democrats felt they controlled the elite policy and political conversation through the news media. After that appeared to fall apart in 2016, and as Democrats, including Podesta, blamed social media for Clinton’s loss, they stepped up their effort to take control over Twitter and Facebook, which they did, demanding and winning the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop, and deplatforming Trump.
The strategy of Democratic Party leaders, including Clinton, Podesta, and Obama, has been, since 2016, to label Trump-supporting Republicans as racists, Nazis, and antisemites. The attacks on Elon Musk’s X must be taken in this context.
The real agenda behind the Media Matters attack on X is the same as the one behind the Democrats’ attack on Trump and the Republicans. Democrats want to control the conversation.
Without censorship, voters can see that the border is a disaster, the Ukraine war was a tragic failure, and that Democrats have been censoring them.
...
...we must have greater control over the content we receive through social media platforms.
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.
jonathanturley | Below is my column in The Messenger on the view of diplomats in the Biden Administration that the President is spreading “misinformation.” My interest in the story is less the merits than the allegation. The President is facing the same allegation of ignoring fact and spreading disinformation that has resulted in thousands being banned or blacklisted on social media. The Biden Administration has pushed for such censorship in areas where doctors and pundits held opposing views on subjects ranging from Covid-19 to climate control. The question is whether Joe Biden himself should be banned under the standards promulgated by his own Administration.
Here is the column:
An internal State Department dissent memo was leaked this past week, opposing the Biden administration’s position on the war between Israel and Hamas. What was most notable about the memo is that some administration staffers accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation.”
It was a moment of crushing irony for some of us who have written and testified against the Biden administration’s censorship efforts. The question is whether, under the administration’s own standards, President Biden should now be banned or blacklisted to protect what his administration has called our “cognitive infrastructure.”
For years, the administration and many Democrats in Congress have resisted every effort to expose the sprawling government censorship program that one federal judge described as an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'” As I have written previously, it included grants to academic and third-party organizations to create a global system of blacklists and to pressure advertisers to withdraw support from conservative sites.
Most recently, a House Judiciary Committee report revealed another layer of this system, described as a “switchboarding” role for the censorship system by channeling demands for removal or bans from state and local officials. This switchboarding process was confirmed by Brian Scully of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), during prior court testimony. CISA’s director, Jen Easterly, previously declared the administration’s intent to extend its role over maintaining critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure” and combating not just mis- and disinformation but also “malinformation,” which CISA describes as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
As a result, over the last four years, researchers, politicians, and even satirical sites have been banned or blacklisted for offering dissenting views of COVID measures, climate change, gender identity or social justice, according to the House Judiciary report. No level of censorship seemed to be sufficient for President Biden, who once claimed that social media companies were “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices.
Now, though, President Biden himself is accused — by some in his own administration — of spreading misinformation and supporting war criminals.
Blinken's face after Joe Biden calls Chinese President Xi a "dictator" 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/XqjQU9FmZd
— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) November 16, 2023
Biden advisors scream at press to leave the room after Xi’s statement😳 pic.twitter.com/U8b9yuGvsg
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 15, 2023
RFK Jr says the quiet part out loud:
— Danny Haiphong (@SpiritofHo) November 8, 2023
Israel is a stronghold for us…It's like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East…If Israel disappears, Russia, China and the BRICS+ countries will control 90% of the world's oil, and this will be a disaster.pic.twitter.com/OWmu2peyFF
thecradle | The catastrophic debacle of Project Ukraine and the revival of an intractable West Asian war are deeply intertwined.
Beyond the fog of Washington's “worry” about Tel Aviv’s genocidal rampage, the crucial fact is that we are right in the thick of a war against BRICS 11.
The Empire does not do strategy; at best, it does tactical business plans on the fly. There are two immediate tactics in play: a US Armada deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean – in a failed effort to intimidate Resistance Axis behemoths Iran and Hezbollah - and a possible Milei election in Argentina tied to his avowed promise to break Brazil-Argentina relations.
So this is a simultaneous attack on BRICS 11 on two fronts: West Asia and South America. There will be no American efforts spared to prevent BRICS 11 from getting close to OPEC+. A key aim is to instill fear in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – as confirmed by Persian Gulf business sources.
Even vassal leaders at the OIC show would have been aware that we are now deep into The Empire Strikes Back. That also largely explains their cowardice.
They know that for the Hegemon, multipolarity equals “chaos,” unipolarity equals “order,” and malign actors equal “autocrats” - such as the new Russian-Chinese-Iranian “Axis of Evil” and anyone, especially vassals, that opposes the “rules-based international order.”
And that brings us to a tale of two ceasefires. Tens of millions across the Global Majority are asking why the Hegemon is desperate for a ceasefire in Ukraine while flatly refusing a ceasefire in Palestine.
Freezing Project Ukraine preserves the Ghost of Hegemony just a little bit longer. Let's assume Moscow would take the bait (it won’t). But to freeze Ukraine in Europe, the Hegemon will need an Israeli win in Gaza - perhaps at any and all costs - to maintain even a vestige of its former glory.
But can Israel achieve victory any more than Ukraine can? Tel Aviv may have already lost the war on 7 October as it can never regain its facade of invincibility. And if this transforms into a regional war that Israel loses, the US will lose its Arab vassals overnight, who today have a Chinese and Russian option waiting in the wings.
The Roar of the Street is getting louder - demanding that the Biden administration, now seen as complicit with Tel Aviv, halt the Israeli genocide that may lead to a World War. But Washington will not comply. Wars in Europe and West Asia may be its last chance (it will lose) to subvert the emergence of a prosperous, connected, peaceful Eurasia Century.
The catastrophic debacle of Project Ukraine and the revival of an intractable West Asian war are deeply intertwined.
Beyond the fog of Washington's “worry” about Tel Aviv’s genocidal rampage, the crucial fact is that we are right in the thick of a war against BRICS 11.
The Empire does not do strategy; at best, it does tactical business plans on the fly. There are two immediate tactics in play: a US Armada deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean – in a failed effort to intimidate Resistance Axis behemoths Iran and Hezbollah - and a possible Milei election in Argentina tied to his avowed promise to break Brazil-Argentina relations.
So this is a simultaneous attack on BRICS 11 on two fronts: West Asia and South America. There will be no American efforts spared to prevent BRICS 11 from getting close to OPEC+. A key aim is to instill fear in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – as confirmed by Persian Gulf business sources.
Even vassal leaders at the OIC show would have been aware that we are now deep into The Empire Strikes Back. That also largely explains their cowardice.
They know that for the Hegemon, multipolarity equals “chaos,” unipolarity equals “order,” and malign actors equal “autocrats” - such as the new Russian-Chinese-Iranian “Axis of Evil” and anyone, especially vassals, that opposes the “rules-based international order.”
And that brings us to a tale of two ceasefires. Tens of millions across the Global Majority are asking why the Hegemon is desperate for a ceasefire in Ukraine while flatly refusing a ceasefire in Palestine.
Freezing Project Ukraine preserves the Ghost of Hegemony just a little bit longer. Let's assume Moscow would take the bait (it won’t). But to freeze Ukraine in Europe, the Hegemon will need an Israeli win in Gaza - perhaps at any and all costs - to maintain even a vestige of its former glory.
But can Israel achieve victory any more than Ukraine can? Tel Aviv may have already lost the war on 7 October as it can never regain its facade of invincibility. And if this transforms into a regional war that Israel loses, the US will lose its Arab vassals overnight, who today have a Chinese and Russian option waiting in the wings.
The Roar of the Street is getting louder - demanding that the Biden administration, now seen as complicit with Tel Aviv, halt the Israeli genocide that may lead to a World War. But Washington will not comply. Wars in Europe and West Asia may be its last chance (it will lose) to subvert the emergence of a prosperous, connected, peaceful Eurasia Century.
antiwar | More than 400 US officials from 40 government agencies have sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza in the latest example of dissent from within the US government.
“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians; the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services; and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” the letter reads.
According to The New York Times, the majority of the signatories to the letter are political appointees who work throughout the government, including in the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Security Council. Some signatories helped get Biden elected and said they were worried his support for the onslaught on Gaza was opposed by many Democratic voters.
The letter says that the “overwhelming majority of Americans support a ceasefire,” citing a poll from Data For Progress that found 66% of voters believe the US should push for a ceasefire, including 80% of Democrats. “Furthermore, Americans do not want the US military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle East,” the letter says.
President Biden and his top aides have called for “pauses” in the fighting but refuse to use the term “ceasefire,” demonstrating that they are committed to continuing support for the Israeli war, which has killed at least 11,000 Palestinians, including over 4,500 children.
Since October 7, the US has shipped weapons to Israel on a near-daily basis and is providing special operations support, including surveillance drone flights over Gaza. Besides the new letter, Biden’s full-throated support for the brutal war has drawn three dissent memos from State Department employees and an open letter signed by more than 1,000 employees of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
al-jazeera | A billionaire real estate tycoon in the United States is rallying support for a high-dollar media crusade to boost Israel’s image and demonise the Hamas armed group amid global pro-Palestinian solidarity protests.
The media campaign — called Facts for Peace — is seeking million-dollar donations from dozens of the world’s biggest names in media, finance and technology, according to an email seen by news website Semafor.
More than 50 individuals are being courted, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Dell CEO Michael Dell and financier Michael Milken. They have a combined net worth of around $500bn, Semafor said.
Some of the individuals, such as investor Bill Ackman, have publicly threatened to blacklist pro-Palestine students who are critical of Israel. On October 10, Ackman wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he and other business executives wanted Ivy League universities to disclose the names of students who are part of organisations that signed open letters criticising Israeli policies in Gaza.
US billionaire Barry Sternlicht, who started the project, said the campaign would help Israel “get ahead of the narrative” as the world has reacted to the intensive Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.
“Public opinion will surely shift as scenes, real or fabricated by Hamas, of civilian Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel’s] current empathy in the world community”, Sternlicht wrote in an email soliciting contributions from the wealthy figures shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, according to Semafor. “We must get ahead of the narrative.”
Israel has carried out relentless air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7, killing at least 11,078 Palestinian people, including 4,500 children, displacing 1.5 million people, and wrecking much of the territory’s infrastructure, Gaza officials say.
Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli territory on October 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis, according to Israeli officials.
Sternlicht’s media drive aims to brand Hamas as a “terrorist
organisation” that is “not just the enemy of Israel, but of the United
States”, he wrote. The goal is to draw $50m in private donations, paired
with a matching contribution from a Jewish charity. Hamas is already
designated as a “terrorist” organisation by the US and the European
Union for its armed resistance against Israeli occupation.
strategic-culture | What is the ‘elephant’ (or elephants) in the room? Blinken’s recent regional diplomacy was ‘a bust’. None of the regional leaders that Blinken met would talk further about Gaza beyond demanding stridently, ‘no Palestinian population displacement into Egypt’ a ‘stop to this madness’ – the carpet bombing of Gazans – and the demand for an immediate ceasefire.
And Biden’s calls for a ‘pause’ – softly, at first, and the more strident now – is being bluntly ignored by the Israeli government. The spectre of President Carter’s impotence during the Iran hostage crisis hangs ever more soberly in the backdrop.
The truth is that the White House cannot force Israel to do its will – the Israeli lobby holds the more clout in Congress than any White House team. Thus, ‘no exit’ from the Israeli crisis is readily to be seen. Biden ‘made his bed’ with the Netanyahu cabinet and must live with consequences.
Impotence then, as the Democratic Party fractures beyond the simplistic division between centrists versus progressives. The polarisation emanating from the ‘no ceasefire stance’ is having stark destabilising effects on politics, both in the U.S. and Europe.
Impotence then, as the shape of the Middle East crystallises into sharp antagonism towards the West’s perceived accommodation of the mass slaughter of Palestinian women, children and civilians. The die may be too far ‘cast’ to brake the ongoing tectonic reset already underway. Western double standards are just too inescapably obvious now to the Global Majority.
The large ‘elephant’ is this: Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of high explosives since 7 October (the 1945 Hiroshima nuke was 15,000 tons equivalent). What exactly is Netanyahu and his war cabinet’s aim here? Ostensibly, the earlier military operation in Jabalia Camp was about targeting a Hamas leader suspected of lurking under the camp – but six 2,000 lb bombs for one Hamas ‘target’ in a crowded refugee camp? And why too the attacks on water cisterns, hospital solar energy panels and hospital entrances, roads, schools and bakeries?
Bread has almost disappeared in Gaza. The UN says all bakeries in northern Gaza have closed following the bombing of the last bakeries. Clean water is desperately short, and thousands of bodies are slowly decomposing under rubble. Disease and epidemic are appearing, whilst humanitarian supplies are being tightly restricted as a bargaining tool toward further hostage releases..
Editor of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, puts the Israeli strategy very plainly:
“The expulsion of the Palestinian residents, transformation of their homes into piles of construction rubble, and the restriction of the entry of supplies and fuel into Gaza are the “tiebreaking move” employed by Israel in the current conflict, unlike all previous rounds of fighting in the Strip”.
Of what are we talking here? This clearly is not about avoiding collateral civilian deaths occurring as the IDF battles with Hamas. There have been no street battles in Jabalia, or in and around the hospitals – as one soldier commented: “All we’ve done is ride around in our armored vehicles. The boots on the ground stuff will come later”. The pretext of a ‘humanitarian evacuation’ therefore is bogus.
politico | The Washington Post on Friday announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking decades of tradition in a...
