kmbc | 33-year-old Ahmad Simmons was shot and killed at 37th and Prospect on the morning of April 15. His murder happened two blocks away and a few hours after another homicide at 35th and Prospect.
A father and community activist is hoping to put rumors to rest one week after his son was killed at 37th and Prospect.
That
area has seen a lot of violence recently, prompting Kansas City Police
to step up patrols. Last week alone, Kansas City, Missouri, police reported more than 30 gunfire incidents where more than 200 rounds were fired.
Mark your calendars for next Thursday, Sept. 23! The KCPD Explorer Program is open to youth ages 14-20 interested in careers in Law Enforcement. They are having an open house at East Patrol Division in the Community Room. Text "EXPLOREKC" to 41444 to RSVP! pic.twitter.com/jU80INDa94
Ahmad Simmons, 33, was shot and killed at 37th and Prospect on the
morning of April 15. His murder happened two blocks away and a few hours
after another homicide at 35th and Prospect.
His father says it was senseless and there was no reason for his son to die.
“When
you speak about him, you speak about the ultimate kid that you would
want to have,” Thomas Simmons said. “People right now are generally in
disbelief, you know, who would kill the Taco Man?"
The 33-year-old was known for his food truck and his heart.
“You can kill people, but you can't kill who they were,” Thomas
Simmons said. “This is a legacy, I'm sure, is going to live for years
and years and years.”
Darren Faulkner works with KC Common Good – a nonprofit organization
working to address the root causes of violence. He said Simmons’ death
was likely a retaliation after the murder at 35th and Prospect a few
hours earlier.
"There had been some rumors put out in the
community that this was a gang hit,” Faulkner said. “Because of this
rumor that was put out in the community, another person died. An
innocent person died."
Faulkner said that rumor is all that it is, and the community needs to know that.
"I
feel like that was part of the narrative that needed to be told to keep
this from becoming even a worse situation than it is,” Faulkner said.
Simmons is hopeful other families will not have to feel his same pain.
"He's
going to be missed. I mean, greatly missed by not only the people, his
family. I mean, I'm sure this whole community,” Thomas Simmons said.
Thomas Simmons also said his son had never been in a gang.
fox4kc | Eight days after five people were shot at a Kansas City, Missouri gas station, video of that shooting is circulating and community leaders are voicing their concern.
One of the victims was under five years old. A new video shows the chilling moments when that gunman starts shooting.
“Fear, anger, concern, it’s very terrifying and the fact that
residents and neighborhoods are plagued with this kind of violence. It’s
unacceptable and we have to do something about it,” Darren Faulkner,
the program manager with KC Common Good said.
The owner of the gas station told FOX4 he has seen a 50 percent decline in business since last Friday’s shooting.
“Historically in Kansas City, gun violence goes up during the summer
months June, July and August and we’ve seen such a spike—it seems
like—already,” Faulkner said.
Because of that shooting and the ones that followed near the area of
35th and Prospect, the Kansas City Missouri Police Department had to increase patrols in the area.
Darren Faulkner says the problem is getting worse and there needs to be action that addresses the root causes.
“These are issues that are deeply rooted in the lack of something;
the lack of knowledge, the lack of education, the lack of resources, the
lack of finances, the lack of whatever. This is deeply rooted in the
lack of.”
If you have any information that can help the police, you’re asked to reach out to the Kansas City Missouri Police Department.
adage | Anheuser-Busch InBev has changed marketing leadership for Bud Light in the wake of controversy over the brand sending a can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her face on it.
Alissa Heinerscheid, marketing VP for the brand since June 2022, has taken a leave of absence, the brewer confirmed, and will be replaced by Todd Allen, who was most recently global marketing VP for Budweiser.
Heinerscheid did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
The brewer has also streamlined its marketing function to reduce layers “so that our most senior marketers are more closely connected to every aspect of our brand’s activities,” a company spokesperson said in a statement, adding that “these steps will help us maintain focus on the things we do best: brewing great beer for all consumers, while always making a positive impact in our communities and on our country.”
The statement noted that “we communicated some next steps with our internal teams and wholesaler partners,” adding that “we made it clear that the safety and welfare of our employees and our partners is our top priority.”
Snopes-MSDNC |There was no evidence to support the claim of a causal link
between the calls for a Bud Light boycott in April 2023 and the
company's financial standing. Snopes reached out to
Anheuser-Busch's but we did not hear from the company as of this
writing. We will update this story when, or if, that changes.
There
was no demonstrable connection between the above-outlined statistics
and conservative calls to stop buying Bud Light, just one of
Anheuser-Busch's many products. As with all stocks, multiple factors
affect market changes, such as political climate, competition, etc. –
not just consumer behavior.
Experts said that such market declines are common. For example, the value of AB InBev BUD shares was $58.05 on Feb. 10, 2023, went up to $62.08 on March 3, and then declined to $59.78, on March 7. "[Such] declines are historically not unusual," wrote Dan Hunt, senior investment strategist at Morgan Stanley.
Similarly,
Nicole Goodkind of CNN Business explained companies make more comebacks
from declines than the other way around. "The 14 bull markets since
1932 have returned 175% on average, while the 14 bear markets starting
in 1929 have resulted in an average loss of 39%, according to S&P
Dow Jones Indices data," Goodkind wrote.
In
reality, as of this writing, the financial impact of the protest
remains unknown. There was no financial data to determine if, or to what
extent, the calls to stop buying Bud Light had impacted
Anheuser-Busch's market value. A MarketWatch piece explained:
For
now, there's no hard data on the financial fallout of the Bud Light
protest. But the brand, analysts say, had already become less relevant
in the U.S. to both beer drinkers and to Budweiser's parent company,
Belgium-based AB InBev BUD.
The
MarketWatch piece said "the impact of any right-wing backlash could be
eclipsed by a broader slowdown in the beer industry as inflation cuts
into consumer purchases, craft beer becomes a barroom staple and brewers
crank out a seemingly endless rotation of sours and hazy IPAs that more
or less taste the same."
Meanwhile, a satirical and demonstrably false assertion surfaced online that another Anheuser-Busch beer, Budweiser, had lost $800 million in one day. Snopes fact-checked othersatiricalclaims that surfaced about the alleged effects of the boycott on Anheuser-Busch, as well.
saraacarter | Secretary of State Antony Blinken is being investigated by the Committee on the Judiciary
and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for his prominent
role in persuading 51 former intelligence officials to falsely discredit
the “New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop as supposed
Russian disinformation” during the 2020 Presidential election. The
intelligence assessment led to a nearly blanket censorship of
investigative stories exposing the alleged corruption of President Joe
Biden and his family and kept the truth hidden from the American people
before the election, according to a letter released Thursday night by
the committees and obtained by SaraACarter.com.
During the campaign, Blinken was a senior campaign advisor to then former Vice President Joe Biden
and recruited the direct assistance of then former Deputy Director of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Michael Morell, who was one of the
51 signatories of the public statement. Biden used this false letter
signed by former senior intelligence officials, including five former
heads of the CIA, from both parties, on October 22, 2020 to disparage
President Donald Trump During the final presidential debate.
Biden used the intelligence assessment that the Hunter Biden laptop
story was Russian disinformation against President Trump during the
campaign. Despite legitimate calls by Trump to have the FBI investigate
Biden’s deeply concerning family business ties with China and Ukraine,
as well as other allegations contained in the laptop that did belong to
his son Hunter Biden, the Biden campaign used its connections within the
intelligence apparatus to cover up the evidence, the truth and keep it
from the American people.
Biden used the assessment signed by the intelligence officials to target Trump during the campaign’s last debate.
“They have said this has all the characteristics—four—five former
heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of
garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy
Giuliani,” said Biden during the debate and reiterated in Jordan’s
letter to Blinken.
The committees letter was sent to Blinken on Thursday and it contains
transcribed parts of a recent interview the lawmakers had with Morell.
jonathanturley | “No one f**ks with a Biden.” That statement by President Joe Biden last year to a Florida mayor seems more than just a boast this week after a whistleblower at the Internal Revenue Service surfaced. The Wall Street Journal reported that a career IRS Criminal Supervisory Agent has alleged preferential treatment given to Hunter Biden in tax investigations. The whistleblower also alleges that he or she has information that contradicts the testimony of “a senior Biden political appointee.”
The timing of the letter itself was notable. For years, the Democratically controlled committees blocked any investigation into allegations of corruption and influence peddling by the Biden family. Before the takeover by the Republicans in the House, this whistleblower would have had little reason to seek protection from a Committee with demonstrably little interest in such allegations.
In fairness to the Democrats, both parties have used their power to shield presidents or political allies. However, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has now uncovered an array of new facts that are shedding light on what could be one of the largest influence peddling efforts in history. For a city where influence peddling is a virtual cottage industry, that is saying a lot. Even in this premier league of corruption, the Biden family is the G.O.A.T.
Just this week, Chairman Comer revealed that new financial documents show six additional Biden family members may have benefited from foreign payments. That brings the total to nine Biden family members who appear on suspicious transactions or bank records. The identity of these family members and the underlying payments remain unclear, but the past disclosures of alleged influence peddling by Hunter Biden and his uncle James warrant full investigation.
The Bidens have long counted on an enabling media to tamp down coverage of corruption allegations. The most remarkable effort was successfully burying the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election. The Bidens were able to get the media to buy into the effort. For many reporters, even the acknowledgment of this corruption would be a self-indictment of their own lack of curiosity and integrity.
Yet, there has also been a notable lack of perceptible movement in any of the investigations of the Bidens. Take the investigation of David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware. Weiss is looking into an array of possible crimes, including tax violations, unlawful work as a foreign agent, unlawful foreign transactions and other offenses. Many of these crimes are relatively easy to investigate but the investigation has moved at a glacial pace.
There is ample evidence of Hunter working for foreign entities without registering as a foreign agent — a crime that the Justice Department used liberally against other defendants like Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort. There are also clearly false statements used by Hunter in relation to his possession of a handgun that appear undeniable.
However, years have passed without any indictment from Weiss or any state counterpart. At the same time, Attorney General Merrick Garland has steadfastly ignored the obvious basis for the appointment of a special counsel despite repeated references to the President as an intended recipient of influence peddling proceeds.
caitlinjohnstone | The superseding indictment
containing these charges consists of a lot of verbal gymnastics to
obfuscate the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting US citizens for speech
and political activities in the United States which happen not to align
with the wishes of the US government. The grand jury alleges that the
aforementioned Ionov “directed” these Americans to “publish pro-Russian
propaganda” and “information designed to cause dissention in the United
States,” which is about as vague and amorphous an allegation as you
could possibly come up with.
For the record Omali Yeshitela, the
founder and chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and one of
the four Americans named in the indictment, has adamantly denied ever
having worked for Russia. Earlier this month before charges were brought
against him, the Tampa Bay Times quoted him
as saying, “I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever.
They know I have never worked for Russia. Their problem is, I’ve never
worked for them.”
But it’s important to note that this should not
matter. Under the First Amendment the government is forbidden to abridge
anyone’s freedom to speak however they want and associate with whomever
they please, which necessarily includes being as vocally pro-Russia as
they like and promoting whatever political agendas they see fit, whether
that happens to advance the interests of the Russian government or not.
The indictment alleges that the four Americans engaged in “agitprop” by
“writing articles that contained Russian propaganda and
disinformation,” but even if we pretend that’s both (A) a quantifiable
claim and (B) a proven fact, propaganda and disinformation are both
speech that the government is constitutionally forbidden from
repressing.
It’s not reasonable for the government to just dismiss
the First Amendment on the grounds that it is being “weaponized”. You
can’t have your government dictating what speech is valid and what
counts as “agitprop” and “disinformation”, because they’ll always define
those terms in ways which benefit the government, thus giving more
power to the powerful and taking power away from the people. You can’t
have your government dictating what political groups are legitimate and
which ones are tools of a foreign government, because you can always
count on the powerful set such designations in ways which benefit
themselves.
justice | A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, returned a superseding
indictment charging four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals with
working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the
Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign
malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the
superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited,
funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal
agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian
propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular,
participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local
office within the United States.
This is an absolutely remarkable - and chilling - indictment. Several American black leftist groups and activists are being charged with felonies for posting memes and other political content against the war in Ukraine, protesting racial injustice: allegedly on behalf of Russia: https://t.co/SQ1K1VZG1v
Additionally, in a separate case out of the District of Columbia, a
criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia
Burlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent
of Russia in the United States.
“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First
Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide
Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said
Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s
National Security Division. “The department will not hesitate to expose
and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in
service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits
are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”
“Efforts by the Russian government to secretly influence U.S.
elections will not be tolerated,” said Assistant Attorney General
Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
“As today’s announcement demonstrates, the Criminal Division is
committed to eradicating foreign malign influence from the U.S.
political system and helping ensure the integrity of our elections.”
“Today’s announcement paints a harrowing picture of Russian
government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere
with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit
U.S citizens to their efforts,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt
Ronnow of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “All Americans should
be deeply concerned by the tactics employed by the FSB and remain
vigilant to any attempt to undermine our democracy. The FBI remains
committed to confronting this egregious behavior and ultimately
disrupting our adversaries and those who act on their behalf.”
United States v. Ionov, et al.
According to the superseding indictment returned in the Middle
District of Florida, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow,
was the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of
Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, and
funded by the Russian government. Ionov allegedly utilized AGMR to carry
out Russia’s malign influence campaign. Ionov’s influence efforts were
allegedly directed and supervised by Moscow-based FSB officers,
including indicted defendants Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor
Sergeyevich Popov.
“The prosecution of this criminal conduct is essential to protecting
the American public when foreign governments seek to inject themselves
into the American political process,” said U.S. Attorney Roger B.
Handberg for the Middle District of Florida. “We thank our partners at
the FBI for their tireless investigation of these events and their
commitment to ensure justice is done.”
Among other illegal activities, the superseding indictment alleges
that Ionov, Sukhodolov and Popov conspired to directly and substantially
influence democratic elections in the United States by clandestinely
funding and directing the political campaign of a particular candidate
for local office in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019. For instance, the
superseding indictment alleges that Popov expressly referred to this
effort on behalf of the FSB as “our election campaign,” and Ionov
referring to the candidate as the “candidate whom we supervise.” Ionov
and Popov allegedly intended that this election interference plot would
extend beyond the 2019 local election cycle in St. Petersburg, and
subsequently discussed that the “USA Presidential election” was the
FSB’s “main topic of the year.”
Moreover, from at least November 2014 until July 2022, Ionov
allegedly engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign
targeting the United States. As a part of the campaign, Ionov allegedly
recruited members of political groups within the United States,
including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement
(collectively, the APSP) in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia and a
political group in California (referred to in the superseding indictment
as U.S. Political Group 3), to participate in the influence campaign
and act as agents of Russia in the United States, including the
following indicted defendants:
Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg,
Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the chairman and founder
of the APSP;
Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg,
Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the leader of a
component of the APSP;
Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida,
and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as a member of a component of the
APSP; and
Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in
St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who served as a leader of the APSP
and a founder of Black Hammer in Georgia.
One focus of Ionov’s alleged influence operation was to create
the appearance of American popular support for Russia’s annexation of
territories in Ukraine. For example, in May 2020, Ionov allegedly sent a
request he stated was from “Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic” – an
apparent reference to a Russian-occupied region in eastern Ukraine – to
Yeshitela and members of other U.S. political groups to make statements
in support of the independence of the so-called Donetsk People’s
Republic, a Russian-backed breakaway state in eastern Ukraine. Ionov
later allegedly touted to the FSB that Yeshitela’s video-recorded
statement of support was the first time that “American nonprofit
organizations congratulated citizens” of the occupied region.
stephenwolfram |Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And today—just two and a half months later—I’m excited to announce that it’s happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language
as well—to give it what we might think of as “computational
superpowers”. It’s still very early days for all of this, but it’s
already very impressive—and one can begin to see how amazingly powerful
(and perhaps even revolutionary) what we can call “ChatGPT + Wolfram” can be.
Back in January, I made the point that, as an LLM neural net, ChatGPT—for all its remarkable prowess in textually generating material “like” what it’s read from the web, etc.—can’t itself be expected to do actual nontrivial computations,
or to systematically produce correct (rather than just “looks roughly
right”) data, etc. But when it’s connected to the Wolfram plugin it can
do these things. So here’s my (very simple) first example from January,
but now done by ChatGPT with “Wolfram superpowers” installed:
It’s a correct result (which in January it wasn’t)—found by actual computation. And here’s a bonus: immediate visualization:
How did this work? Under the hood, ChatGPT is formulating a query for Wolfram|Alpha—then sending it to Wolfram|Alpha for computation,
and then “deciding what to say” based on reading the results it got
back. You can see this back and forth by clicking the “Used Wolfram” box
(and by looking at this you can check that ChatGPT didn’t “make
anything up”):
There are lots of nontrivial things going on here, on both the
ChatGPT and Wolfram|Alpha sides. But the upshot is a good, correct
result, knitted into a nice, flowing piece of text.
Let’s try another example, also from what I wrote in January:
In January, I noted that ChatGPT ended up just “making up” plausible (but wrong) data when given this prompt:
But now it calls the Wolfram plugin and gets a good, authoritative answer. And, as a bonus, we can also make a visualization:
Another example from back in January that now comes out correctly is:
If you actually try these examples, don’t be surprised if they work
differently (sometimes better, sometimes worse) from what I’m showing
here. Since ChatGPT uses randomness
in generating its responses, different things can happen even when you
ask it the exact same question (even in a fresh session). It feels “very
human”. But different from the solid
“right-answer-and-it-doesn’t-change-if-you-ask-it-again” experience that
one gets in Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language.
Here’s an example where we saw ChatGPT (rather impressively) “having a
conversation” with the Wolfram plugin, after at first finding out that
it got the “wrong Mercury”:
One particularly significant thing here is that ChatGPT isn’t just
using us to do a “dead-end” operation like show the content of a
webpage. Rather, we’re acting much more like a true “brain implant” for
ChatGPT—where it asks us things whenever it needs to, and we give
responses that it can weave back into whatever it’s doing. It’s rather
impressive to see in action. And—although there’s definitely much more
polishing to be done—what’s already there goes a long way towards (among
other things) giving ChatGPT the ability to deliver accurate, curated
knowledge and data—as well as correct, nontrivial computations.
But there’s more too. We already saw examples where we were able to
provide custom-created visualizations to ChatGPT. And with our
computation capabilities we’re routinely able to make “truly original”
content—computations that have simply never been done before. And
there’s something else: while “pure ChatGPT” is restricted to things it “learned during its training”, by calling us it can get up-to-the-moment data.
wired |The stunning capabilities of ChatGPT, the chatbot from startup OpenAI, has triggered a surge of new interest and investment in artificial intelligence.
But late last week, OpenAI’s CEO warned that the research strategy that
birthed the bot is played out. It's unclear exactly where future
advances will come from.
OpenAI
has delivered a series of impressive advances in AI that works with
language in recent years by taking existing machine-learning algorithms
and scaling them up to previously unimagined size. GPT-4, the latest of
those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and
many thousands of powerful computer chips. The process cost over $100
million.
But the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, says
further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we're
at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant
models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week.
“We'll make them better in other ways.”
Altman’s
declaration suggests an unexpected twist in the race to develop and
deploy new AI algorithms. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November,
Microsoft has used the underlying technology to add a chatbot to its Bing search engine, and Google has launched a rival chatbot called Bard. Many people have rushed to experiment with using the new breed of chatbot to help with work or personal tasks.
Meanwhile, numerous well-funded startups, including Anthropic, AI21, Cohere, and Character.AI,
are throwing enormous resources into building ever larger algorithms in
an effort to catch up with OpenAI’s technology. The initial version of
ChatGPT was based on a slightly upgraded version of GPT-3, but users can
now also access a version powered by the more capable GPT-4.
Altman’s
statement suggests that GPT-4 could be the last major advance to emerge
from OpenAI’s strategy of making the models bigger and feeding them
more data. He did not say what kind of research strategies or techniques
might take its place. In the paper describing GPT-4,
OpenAI says its estimates suggest diminishing returns on scaling up
model size. Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data
centers the company can build and how quickly it can build them.
Nick
Frosst, a cofounder at Cohere who previously worked on AI at Google,
says Altman’s feeling that going bigger will not work indefinitely rings
true. He, too, believes that progress on transformers, the type of
machine learning model at the heart of GPT-4 and its rivals, lies beyond
scaling. “There are lots of ways of making transformers way, way better
and more useful, and lots of them don’t involve adding parameters to
the model,” he says. Frosst says that new AI model designs, or
architectures, and further tuning based on human feedback are promising
directions that many researchers are already exploring.
WaPo | There are laws that govern how federal law enforcement can seek information from companies such as Twitter, including a mechanism for Twitter’s costs to be reimbursed. Twitter had traditionally provided public information on such requests (in the aggregate, not specifically) but hasn’t updated those metrics since Musk took over.
But notice that this is not how Carlson and Musk frame the conversation.
Once
Musk gained control of Twitter, he began providing sympathetic writers
with internal documents so they could craft narratives exposing the ways
in which pre-Musk Twitter was complicit with the government and the
left in nefarious ways. These were the “Twitter Files,” various
presentations made on Twitter itself using cherry-picked and often misrepresented information.
One
such presentation made an accusation similar to what Carlson was
getting at: that the government paid Twitter millions of dollars to
censor user information. That was how Musk presented
that particular “Twitter File,” the seventh in the series, though this
wasn’t true. The right-wing author of the thread focused on government
interactions with social media companies in 2020 aimed at uprooting
2016-style misinformation efforts. His thread suggested through an
aggregation of carefully presented documents that the government aimed
to censor political speech. The author also pointedly noted that Twitter
had received more than $3 million in federal funding, hinting that it
was pay-to-play for censorship.
The
insinuations were quickly debunked. The funding was, in reality,
reimbursement to Twitter for compliance with the government’s subpoenaed
data requests, as allowed under the law. The government’s effort — as
part of the Trump administration, remember — did not obviously extend
beyond curtailing foreign interference and other illegalities. But the
narrative, boosted by Musk, took hold. And then was presented back to
Musk by Carlson.
Notice
that Musk doesn’t say that government actors were granted full,
unlimited access to Twitter communications in the way that Carlson
hints. His responses to Carlson comport fully with a scenario in which
the government subpoenas Twitter for information and gets access to it
in compliance with federal law. Or perhaps doesn’t! In Twitter’s most
recent data on government requests, 3 in 10 were denied.
Maybe
Musk didn’t understand that relationship between law enforcement and
Twitter before buying the company, as he appears not to have understood
other aspects of the company. Perhaps he was one of those rich people
who assumed that because DMs were private they were secure — something
he, a tech guy, should not have assumed, but who knows.
It’s
certainly possible that there was illicit access from some government
entity to Twitter’s data stores, perhaps in an ongoing fashion. But
Carlson is suggesting (and Musk isn’t rejecting) an apparent symbiosis,
in keeping with the misrepresented Twitter Files #7.
It
is useful for Musk to have people think that he is creating a new
Twitter that’s centered on free speech and protection of individual
communications. That was his value proposition in buying it, after all.
And it is apparently endlessly useful to Carlson to present a scenario
to his viewers in which he and they are the last bastions of American
patriotism, fending off government intrusions large and small and the
robot-assisted machinations of the political left.
In
each case, something is being sold to the audience. In Musk’s case,
it’s a safe, bold, right-wing-empathetic Twitter. In Carlson’s, it’s the
revelation of a dystopic America that must be tracked through vigilant
observation each weekday at 8 p.m.
In neither case is the hype obviously a fair presentation of reality.
CNBC | Google and AlphabetCEO Sundar Pichai said “every product of every company” will be
impacted by the quick development of AI, warning that society needs to
prepare for technologies like the ones it’s already launched.
In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes”
aired on Sunday that struck a concerned tone, interviewer Scott Pelley
tried several of Google’s artificial intelligence projects and said he
was “speechless” and felt it was “unsettling,” referring to the
human-like capabilities of products like Google’s chatbot Bard.
“We
need to adapt as a society for it,” Pichai told Pelley, adding that
jobs that would be disrupted by AI would include “knowledge workers,”
including writers, accountants, architects and, ironically, even
software engineers.
“This is going to impact every product across
every company,” Pichai said. “For example, you could be a radiologist,
if you think about five to 10 years from now, you’re going to have an AI
collaborator with you. You come in the morning, let’s say you have a
hundred things to go through, it may say, ‘these are the most serious
cases you need to look at first.’”
Pelley viewed other areas with
advanced AI products within Google, including DeepMind, where robots
were playing soccer, which they learned themselves, as opposed to from
humans. Another unit showed robots that recognized items on a countertop
and fetched Pelley an apple he asked for.
When warning of AI’s
consequences, Pichai said that the scale of the problem of
disinformation and fake news and images will be “much bigger,” adding
that “it could cause harm.”
Last month, CNBC reported
that internally, Pichai told employees that the success of its newly
launched Bard program now hinges on public testing, adding that “things
will go wrong.”
Google launched its AI chatbot Bard as an experimental product to the public last month. It followed Microsoft
’s
January announcement that its search engine Bing would include OpenAI’s
GPT technology, which garnered international attention after ChatGPT
launched in 2022.
However, fears of the consequences of the rapid progress has also reached the public and critics in recent weeks. In March, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and dozens of academics called for
an immediate pause in training “experiments” connected to large
language models that were “more powerful than GPT-4,” OpenAI’s flagship
LLM. More than 25,000 people have signed the letter since then.
“Competitive
pressure among giants like Google and startups you’ve never heard of is
propelling humanity into the future, ready or not,” Pelley commented in
the segment.
Google has launched a document
outlining “recommendations for regulating AI,” but Pichai said society
must quickly adapt with regulation, laws to punish abuse and treaties
among nations to make AI safe for the world as well as rules that “Align
with human values including morality.”
WaPo | In the long contest ahead with Russia and China, U.S. military power
will be of greatest importance, but non-military instruments of power
will be essential to our ability to compete and win as well. The most
crucial such instrument is economic, the importance of which is widely
recognized, as both the executive branch and Congress work to promote
strong growth and technological superiority.
We have, however, seriously neglected other instruments of power that were fundamental to winning the Cold War: telling our story to the world, telling the truth to populations of countries ruled by authoritarian governments and exposing disinformation spread by those same governments.
Strategic communications and engagement with foreign publics and leaders are essential to shaping the global political environment in ways that support and advance American national interests. In this crucial arena of the competition, however, Russia and China are running rings around us.
Russia’s militarized bid to reverse the Cold War verdict and resurrect its empire has relied heavily on propaganda and disinformation to spread false narratives among its own people and those outside its borders, as well as to undermine the West’s coherence and resolve. Because Russia has no positive narrative to offer, its strategic communications aimed at other countries mainly attack the United States and the West, and serve as spoilers intended to disrupt and divide.
China has taken a far more comprehensive approach. It has built an extraordinary global strategic communications and foreign influence operation, committing huge sums of money to building a modern media apparatus aimed at domestic and world audiences. China’s Xinhua News Agency has nearly 180 bureaus globally (and there is not a single country on the planet that is not reached by one or more Chinese radio, television or online outlets). Chinese companies buy stakes in domestic media outlets in numerous countries, especially in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. Chinese TV and radio broadcasts, websites and publications are readily available in the United States, but there is no reciprocity in China. More than 500 Confucius Institutes, ostensibly established to promote Chinese language and culture, spread China’s message around the world. The scale of the overall endeavor — and multiple mechanisms used — is without parallel.
In stark contrast, the United States after the Cold War largely dismantled its strategic communications and engagement capabilities. The U.S. Information Agency, our primary instrument to engage foreign publics throughout the Cold War, with a presence in 150 countries, was eliminated in 1999. Parts of it were parceled out to the State Department, and most of our know-how and key structures for engaging foreign publics were left to atrophy. The lack of priority attention to American strategic communications and engagement over the years is demonstrated most vividly by the fact that the undersecretary position in the State Department charged with overseeing these efforts has not had a Senate-confirmed occupant 40 percent of the time since it was created in 1999 and 90 percent of the time under Donald Trump and President Biden.
U.S. strategic communications and public diplomacy are fragmented among 14 agencies and 48 commissions. Yet, the State Department, which ought to be driving this train, lacks not just necessary resources in dollars and people but also, importantly, the authority to coordinate, integrate and synchronize these disparate and unfocused efforts. Further, there is no government-wide international communications and engagement strategy, and certainly no sense of urgency. In short, the country that invented public relations is being out-communicated around the world by an authoritarian Russia and increasingly totalitarian China.
Our approach must be different from theirs. Our advantage over the Soviet Union in strategic communications during the Cold War was that the USIA and our radio broadcasters such as Voice of America simply told the truth. We must continue to do so. However, in those days we had eager audiences in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. The global audience today is more skeptical, so we must develop new approaches to effectively deliver our message.
The solution is not to re-create the USIA — the world has moved on. But a number of measures can be taken to dramatically improve the current lamentable state of affairs, some strategic, others operational. Many of them the president could implement immediately, while others would require congressional action.
WSWS | The response of the US media to a series of leaked Pentagon documents
revealing US involvement in the Ukraine war raises far-reaching issues
of democratic rights.
On Thursday, the New York Times
publicly identified the individual who allegedly leaked Pentagon
documents exposing US government lies about the Ukraine war, leading to
his arrest.
The Times, working with the state-funded
propaganda clearinghouse Bellingcat, publicly revealed the identity of
Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guard member. Teixeira was
arrested just hours later.
There are indications that Teixeira
holds repulsive fascist and antisemitic views. But Teixeira’s
motivations do not change the fact that the documents he released caught
the US government red-handed in systematically lying to the public in
waging an undeclared war against Russia in Ukraine.
The documents
showed that, contrary to false claims by the Biden administration, NATO
troops are on the ground in Ukraine, NATO is directly involved in the
war, and the Ukrainian military is in a far worse position than
presented by news reports.
These documents have exposed not only the US government, but the New York Times and Washington Post, as liars.
In
turn, the major US media outlets have responded by upholding, in
principle, the right of the US government to lie to the public.
On Thursday, the Washington Post published an editorial headlined, “The Discord leaks show our nation’s secrets at risk.”
Nowhere
in the editorial is there any criticism of the Biden administration for
having lied to the American public. Instead, the editorial upholds
government secrecy, and vows to assist the government to keep the public
from knowing what the government wishes to keep secret.
The editorial declares, “Keeping secrets is essential to a functioning government.”
In making this statement, the Post, owned by the oligarch Jeff Bezos, has declared war on a fundamental precept of democratic rule.
The billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed that he was
shocked to find out the real scale of the US government involvement and
access to Twitter communications when he purchased and took full control
of the social media giant last year.
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access
to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk told Fox
News’ Tucker Carlson, claiming he “was not aware of that” up until he eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October.
Musk confirmed that “everything” includes users’ supposedly private
direct messages, but the brief Sunday teaser of the upcoming interview
did not show whether Musk went on to call out any particular agencies or
their methods. It is also unclear what, if anything, has since changed
to limit the scope of the government’s access to people’s private
communications.
Since purchasing Twitter in October and installing himself as the
platform’s new CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal
documents and communications in a bid to shed light on its previously
opaque censorship policies and cozy ties with federal law enforcement
and intelligence agencies, enlisting independent journalists to break
each document dump.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported on the first batch of files back in
December, recently described the collusion between social media
platforms, non-governmental organizations and the US government to
suppress information they did not like as the “censorship-industrial
complex,” calling it “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth
in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the exact opposite of a
free press envisioned in the US Constitution.
theguardian | Washington lawmakers have written off Jack
Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman accused of being behind
the worst US intelligence leak in a decade, as an “alleged criminal”
after his arrest yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning
praise from the political right.
“He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal. That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” declared
the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening in the
opening monologue of his show, which is the most watched on cable
television. “The news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who
told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating
him like Osama bin Laden,” the late al-Qaida terrorist leader.
Federal prosecutors allege Teixeira took secret documents from the Massachusetts
air national guard base where he worked as a low-ranking cyber
specialist and posted them online. They first appeared on one of the
gaming messaging platform Discord’s servers in January before spreading
to other social media sites and being reported on by news outlets
earlier this month.
Shortly after he was taken
into custody in Massachusetts on Thursday, the far-right congresswoman
Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has persistently called for the Joe Biden
White House and Washington in general to cut off support to Kyiv –
rallied to his defense.
“Jake Teixeira is
white, male, christian, and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the
Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in
Ukraine and a lot more,” she tweeted in an apparent reference to one of the leaked documents that indicates 14 US special forces soldiers were present in Ukraine during the past two months.
“Ask
yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen
[sic]? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato
nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”
Other documents
have revealed details of how the United States gathers its information
and how deeply its intelligence agencies have penetrated Russia’s
military. Also among the leaked material is a pessimistic assessment of
Ukraine’s prospects of recapturing territory from Russia this spring – a
subject Carlson seized on.
“Ukraine is in fact
losing the war,” he said, citing other documents that indicate
Washington’s concerns about Kyiv’s ability to defend its airspace.
“The
Biden administration is perfectly aware of this. They’re panicked about
it, but they have lied about this fact to the public. Just two weeks
ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate
that Russian military power is ‘waning’. In other words, Russia is
losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he
repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd
Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime.”
NYTimes | In the Air Force, Airman Teixeira became a low-level computer tech at Otis Air National Guard Base in Sandwich, Mass., where his mother said he worked nights, helping maintain secure networks. There, he had broad access to a secure facility where he could access a global network of classified material from the military and 17 other American intelligence agencies.
Authorities say that Mr. Teixeira eventually leaked dozens of documents containing potentially harmful details about the war in Ukraine and other sensitive national security topics.
That a 21-year-old with so little authority could have access to a such a vast trove of top secret information might surprise the general public, but people who have worked in the intelligence world say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.
Those workers can log onto the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — essentially a highly classified version of Google — and in milliseconds pull up briefings on Ukraine, China or nearly any other sensitive subject that the U.S. government collects intelligence on.
Though his motivations may be different, Mr. Teixeira is remarkably similar to two other high-profile leakers in recent years, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, said Javed Ali, a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who held intelligence roles at the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
Ms. Manning was a 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 of giving more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. Ms. Winner was a 26-year-old former Air Force linguist working as a military contractor who in 2017 printed out a classified report on Russian hacking, hid it in her pantyhose, and gave it to The Intercept.
Unlike Ms. Manning and Ms. Winner, who came to be seen as whistle-blowers motivated by ideology, Airman Teixeira did not appear to be driven by government policies, according to people who knew him online.
But all three were relatively young and had security clearances that were the classified intelligence equivalent of having the keys to dad’s red convertible.
“Clearly their relatively young age is a common factor, and I would hope the intelligence community is thinking about that,” said Bennett Miller, a retired Air Force intelligence analyst. “The problem is that the community needs these people. It can’t work without them.”
The words “top secret” may conjure images of pristine vaults and retinal scanners, Mr. Miller said, but in reality, while some highly classified material is siloed in special access programs, most of the rest is accessible to thousands of ordinary people who have security clearances. And security can be surprisingly lax.
Often, these systems are basically just a bunch of computers on a desk and there is “nothing really stopping anyone from printing something and carrying it out,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “It ain’t as Gucci as people think.”
racket |On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest
of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review
reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a
dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app
where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:
Dark
humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of
impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into
symbols of hatred, researchers say.
Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!
The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast”:
The New York Timessummarized
key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things
suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their
government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s
not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction
to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught
lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve
been spying on, etc.
You’ll read a lot in the coming
days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups,
which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act,
the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would
give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication
technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.
The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post
in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor
Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a
Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or
intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump
years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to
supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.
When
civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail
for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord
Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is
Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top
FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly
about using “strategic leaks”
as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the
ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.
Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.
greenwald | On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post,
on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous
sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that
the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these
subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the
leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as
the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls
between Trump's incomcing National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed
based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State launedered in the American corporate press.
But when it comes to unauthorizedleaks--
which result in the disclsoure of secret evidence showing that the U.S.
Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the
full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of
the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed.
And now -- in a new and genuinely shocking esclation -- it is the
largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI's work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest.
This
playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The
point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and
incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who
exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned
and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do
with the disclosures themselves. Thus:
When Daniel Ellsberg
leaked the Pentagon Papers – showing the US Government was lying to the
American public that it believed it could win the war in Vietnam – FBI
and CIA agents broke into the office of his psychoanalyst to try to expose his psychosexual secrets to discredit him and distract from the substance of the disclosures.
When it became clear that Julian Assangehad
created a powerful and formidible instrument for holding the U.S.
Security State accountable and exposing their lies and crimes --
WikiLeaks -- corporate outlets began puking up a deluge of personal
attacks against him, ones designed to make people conclude he is so
repellent that the disclosures he enabled should be ignored because he
was just too personally distasteful. The then-editor-in-chief of The New York Times Bill Keller even stooped to demeaning his personal hygiene, publishing this 2011 paragraph that he said he received from one of his reporters:
“He
was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street,
wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white
shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his
ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”
When Edward Snowden furnished to myself and Laura Poitras the previously secret evidence that Obama national security official James Clapper lied to the public
when denying that the NSA spied en masse on millions of Americans --
reporting that ended up winning every major journalism prize in the West
and that caused an appellate court to rule that Obama's NSA had acted both unconstituitonally and illegally in infringing the privacy rights of millions of Americans -- CNN, NYT. NBC and The New Yorkier's Jeffrey Toobin labeled him a "narcissist" for believing he knew better than everyone else, and numerous outlets dug through his old blog comments to prove he had bad politics as a teenager.
Now, when doing the FBI's work by outing Jack Teixeira, both the Washington Post and CNN are emphasizing transgressive comments
he made about race and anti-Semitism in a teenagers' gaming room to
distract attention from the lies these docs reveal about, among other
things, Biden's role in Ukraine.
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