If he only...

MemeTime!

High Wee-Wee of Climate Change Hoo-Ha Delivers Holiest Sermon

Banned in Brazil...

Have a Merry MAGA Christmas!

Brazil Follows US in Gagging Government Critics

On the Ongoing Governmental Abuses of Power

Clay Higgins brought his investigative skills from the streets of Louisiana where he was a cop for years to the halls of congress, where he’s been investigating January 6th ever since it happened.

We sat down for a tough, far-reaching interview to explore what he’s learned… pic.twitter.com/engaZJp0np

— Truth In Media (@Truth_InMedia) December 14, 2023

Andy Harris Caves... Again. :(

Supported Yesterday's Defense Appropriations Bill passage with Aid to Ukraine and Extension of Policies Allowing Government Snooping on American Citizens after Promising to Stop Enabling the Pointless Ukraine War.

Are Britain and the US Midwitocracies?

Noah Carl, "Are we ruled by midwits?"

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler,” said Machiavelli, “is to look at the men he has around him”. If we look at the men (and women) around our contemporary rulers, what do we find?

Few reasons for optimism, I’m afraid.

In 2011, the Royal Statistical Society asked 97 British MPs a simple maths question: “If you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?” Since the chance of getting heads on one spin is 50%, and the two spins are independent, the answer is just 50% × 50% = 25%. Not exactly quantum physics.

Shockingly, only 40% of MPs got the answer right. (Among Labour MPs, it was only 23%.) Most of those who got the answer wrong said “50%”, which is obviously incorrect when you think about it. Imagine spinning a coin 20 times and getting heads every single time. That would be extremely unlikely. So getting heads twice in a row has to be less likely than getting it once.

The fact that so few MPs got the right answer is particularly worrying in light of what else the survey found: 77% of MPs said they “generally feel confident when dealing with numbers”. So at least 1 in 3 MPs felt confident when dealing with numbers but couldn’t answer a simple math question. They were both innumerate and overconfident – a dangerous combination.

In 2021–22, the Royal Statistical Society asked another sample of 101 MPs the same question. The results were better, but only slightly: 52% of MPs gave the right answer. (In this case, there was almost no difference between Conservative and Labour MPs.)

The more recent survey asked MPs two further questions. First, “Suppose you roll a 6-sided die. The rolls are 1, 3, 4, 1, and 6. What are the mean and mode values?” I’d say this is even easier than the coin-toss question: to calculate the mean, you just have to add and divide; and to obtain the mode, you just have to notice that ‘1’ appears twice.

Remarkably though, only 64% gave the mean correctly and only 63% gave the mode correctly. Again, that’s almost 40% who couldn’t answer the most basic questions about statistics. How they interpret GDP figures, unemployment numbers, and public opinion data is anyone’s guess.

The second additional question was, “Suppose there was a diagnostic test for a virus. The false-positive rate (the proportion of people without the virus who get a positive result) is one in 1,000. You have taken the test and tested positive. What is the probability that you have the virus?” There were five response options: “99.9%”, “99%”, “1%”, “0.01%” and “Not enough information to know”.

The correct answer is “Not enough information to know”, since the probability that you have the virus depends not only on the false-positive rate of the test, but also on the false-negative rate and the prevalence of the virus in the population.

This is definitely the hardest of the three, but still only 16% of MPs got the answer right – which is actually less than if they’d answered at random. Doing worse than chance would be embarrassing in any circumstances, but the country had just been through a viral pandemic where this kind of problem came up repeatedly.

MPs weren’t even required to calculate the probability of having the virus. They just had to realise that it depends on viral prevalence, which is pretty intuitive when you think about extreme examples. If the prevalence is 1 in 10,000, most positive tests will be false-positives. But if the prevalence is 1 in 100, most positive tests will be true-positives.

The MPs did at least do better than the general public – though barely on the last question. 25% of British people got the coin toss question right; 25% gave the mean correctly; 25% gave the mode correctly; and 15% got the diagnostic test question right.

While MPs may have outsmarted the general public on these simple maths questions – an outcome that is less flattering to MPs than it is unflattering to the general public – they did worse than school children in a recent mock exam.

Eight MPs and five members of the House of Lords sat two SAT papers under strict exam conditions. The SATs – not to be confused with the American exams of the same name – are taken by 11 year olds in Britain. They assess basic knowledge in reading, writing and maths.

Past papers can be found online. Examples of some of the harder questions are shown below. As you can see, it’s pretty straightforward stuff – although you do have to answer quickly.

Left: maths questions. Right: English questions.

Incredibly, only 50% of those who took part passed the English test, and only 44% passed the math test. (You may have noticed there are no whole numbers that correspond to 50% or 44% of 13 – the number of individuals who took part. Yet these were the figures reported by the Times. So it’s possible that whoever wrote the press release wasn’t very good at maths.) By comparison, 72% of school children passed the English test, and 71% passed the maths test.

The parliamentarians’ poor performance could be partly down to them having forgotten the meaning of jargon like ‘obtuse angle’ or ‘adverbial phrase’ (though you can usually work it out from the context). And perhaps a different sample of 13 individuals would have done better. Still, performing noticeably worse than 11 year olds is quite an achievement!

Were MPs any smarter in the past? Based on the quality of parliamentary debate, you’d assume they were. But I’m not aware of any test-score data to back this up.

A less satisfactory method is to track their education levels over time. Doing so reveals two countervailing trends: while the percentage of MPs with a university degree has increased, the percentage who attended Oxford or Cambridge has decreased (amongst Conservatives).

Overall, the evidence suggests that our elected representatives could be accurately described as “midwits” – people of above-average but unremarkable intelligence. Their cognitive faculties seems to be particularly lacking when it comes to non-verbal reasoning – a domain that is increasingly important for navigating our “knowledge economy”.

Returning to the quote from Machiavelli, he was of course referring to rulers who appointed the men around them. His point was: judge a ruler’s intelligence by those whom he appoints. But in a democracy, “we the people” rule through our elected representatives. So what does it say about us that we have selected such mediocre intellects to fill that role?

USIC's American-Theater Media PsyOps Shift into High Gear to Prevent Congressional Funding Disaster and Revelation of the Ukraine War Truth

Katie Bo Lillis, "Russia has lost 87% of troops it had prior to start of Ukraine war, according to US intelligence assessment"

Russia has lost a staggering 87 percent of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks, a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress told CNN.

Still, despite heavy losses of men and equipment, Russian President Vladimir Putin is determined to push forward as the war approaches its two-year anniversary early next year and US officials are warning that Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable. A highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive stagnated through the fall, and US officials believe that Kyiv is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months.

The assessment, sent to Capitol Hill on Monday, comes as some Republicans have balked at the US providing additional funding for Ukraine and the Biden administration has launched a full-court press to try to get supplemental funding through Congress.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington on Tuesday, meeting with US lawmakers and President Joe Biden in desperate bid to secure the military and economic aid he says is vital to Ukraine’s ability to maintain the fight against Russia.

Russia has been able to keep its war effort going despite the heavy losses by relaxing recruitment standards and dipping into Soviet-era stockpiles of older equipment. Still, the assessment found that the war has “sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force.”

Of the 360,000 troops that made up Russia’s pre-invasion ground force, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, according to the assessment. 2,200 of 3,500 tanks have been lost, according to the assessment. 4,400 of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers have also been destroyed, a 32 percent loss rate.

“As of late November, Russia lost over a quarter of its pre-invasion stockpiles of ground forces equipment,” the assessment reads. “This has reduced the complexity and scale of Russian offensive operations, which have failed to make major gains in Ukraine since early 2022.”

CNN has reached out to the Russian Embassy in Washington for comment.

But it is the political environment in Washington that presents perhaps the greatest peril for Ukraine. Some Republicans are stiffly rejecting any additional funding and Senate Republicans are insisting on making it part of a broader spending package to include money for Israel, Taiwan and the US southern border. The Biden administration is warning that the US will soon be out of money for Ukraine.

“The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?”

Other newly declassified intelligence previously reported by CNN suggests that “Russia seems to believe that a military deadlock through the winter will drain Western support for Ukraine and ultimately give Russia the advantage despite Russian losses and persistent shortages of trained personnel, munitions, and equipment,” according to a National Security Council spokesman.

“Since launching its offensive in October, we assess that the Russian military has suffered more than 13,000 casualties along the Avdiivka-Novopavlivka axis and over 220 combat vehicle losses-the equivalent of 6 maneuver battalions in equipment alone,” NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson told CNN.

Before the invasion, Russia had a total standing military of approximately 900,000 active-duty troops, including ground troops, airborne troops, special operations and other uniformed personnel, according to the CIA. Since the start of the invasion, Russia has announced plans to increase the size of the armed forces to 1.5 million. The Russian Ministry of Defense has announced several rounds of conscription, including its regular fall conscription cycle on October 1.

Russia has also leaned heavily on convicts marshaled to the fight by the Wagner Group and has increased the age limit for certain categories of citizens to remain in the reserve of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

Cashing in on Emotional Capitalism

The essence of Corporate personhood - "You don't have to love my Products... Just Love my Brand!" ...or "Why Advertisement's no longer make rational "sense".

 

...or NOT!

RESIST the "Brand/ Influencer"!

From the "Too True" Desk...

The NEW Left's New Golden Calf

More Democrat Dirty Tricks Revealed

Grassley says Democrats officially no longer enforce laws against Democrats or act with impartiality and actively retaliate against whistleblowers.

Dugin on the USSR, Ideology, & Liberalism

Meme of the Day

Birth of a Movement...

The Buck Stops Now

What "Unfit for Office" Looks Like

Is this man really threatening the American people with WWIII if his corporatist NeoCon dummy campaign contributors don't get what they want?  This man needs to be impeached.

Another Election Invalidated

Athena Thorne, "Another Election Overturned Due to Shenanigans"

A Louisiana Supreme Court justice has overturned the results of a Nov. 18, 2023, runoff election that was decided by a single vote. And while this case may seem like small potatoes, it could indicate that a sorely needed trend is beginning to emerge in the United States. Namely, unfairly defeated candidates are refusing to accept flawed elections, and more importantly, courageous judges are doing the right thing when faced with clear proof that shenanigans affected the outcome of an election.

The Louisiana election for the position of Caddo Parish Sheriff pitted Democrat candidate Henry Whitehorn against Republican opponent John Nickelson. Whitehorn prevailed by a single vote.

“The unofficial results of the sheriff race between me and my opponent indicated a one-vote margin out of more than 43,000 votes,” observed Nickelson at the time. “That’s something that hasn’t happened as far as we can tell in more than a century in this country, it’s truly unprecedented.”

Furthermore, “Many, dozens at a minimum, in the small sample of ballots we were able to inspect in the short time we had of these certificates had no signatures at all,” claimed Nickelson. “In other words, ballots had been submitted without a voter signing it,”

A recount was performed, which added three new votes to each candidate's tally, leaving Whitehorn the victor again by a single vote. Mickelson then filed suit, contesting the results and calling for a new election.

On Tuesday, Louisiana Supreme Court justice Joseph Bleich ruled that the election results were null and void. “It was proven beyond any doubt that there were at least 11 illegal votes cast and counted,” explained Bleich, and therefore, it “is legally impossible to know what the true vote should have been.”

In an interesting side note, Bleich had to come out of retirement to serve as judge "ad hoc" after four justices recused themselves, citing personal friendships with Democrat candidate Whitehorn. This story could have ended like a classic "good ol' boys" corrupt setup where it's impossible to achieve justice because everyone is a crony. But instead, everyone did the right thing, and now a new election will be held.

This is the second noteworthy voided election this year. These cases are blazing a trail forward that other plaintiffs and judges can follow when close elections have been provably affected by voter fraud, ballot harvesting, faulty machines, or other shenanigans or irregularities.

I have also been following the race for mayor of Bridgeport, Conn., for PJ Media:

The background to this case is that, in Bridgeport's Democrat mayoral primary on Sept. 12, challenger John Gomes was ahead of incumbent Joe Ganim (a felon who has served time for corruption) after the Election Day machine count. But after Bridgeport's famous "midnight magic," Ganim "won" by 251 votes. Shortly thereafter, video emerged of a Ganim ally, Wanda Geter-Pataky, stuffing a ballot box with mad stacks of votes. And to his credit, Gomes refused to be railroaded and vowed to fight.

Gomes took his case to court, and Connecticut Superior Court Judge William Clark overturned the primary results and ordered a new primary. "The court finds the plaintiff has met its burden of proof and established violations in the placing of absentee ballots into drop boxes by partisans who were not designated to handle such ballots and that the volume of ballots so mishandled is such that it calls the result of the primary election in serious doubt and leaves the court unable to determine the legitimate result of the primary," Clark wrote in his judgment.

Although the Bridgeport general election proceeded per state law and Ganim was declared the winner, the new primary will be held on Jan. 23, 2024. If Gomes defeats Ganim, then a new mayoral election will be held with Gomes as the Democrat nominee.

Read my original report on Bridgeport: Maybe This Latest Blatant Ballot Box Stuffing Scandal Will Be the Last Straw

"Big deal, Caddo Parish Sheriff and mayor of Bridgeport — who ever even heard of those places?" you huff. Bear in mind that both these cases now involve the highest law enforcement in their respective states. They are one step away from the regional Federal courts. They are significant matters, and they are being watched closely by people who are involved in other campaigns.

Democrats are doing their best to smear anyone who doesn't swallow their "securest election EVUH!" narrative as "deniers" and traitors, and they are actively trying to jail former/possibly future President Donald Trump for daring to question the 2020 results. But sooner or later, the widespread issue of unsecured elections — of illegal ballot harvesting and invalid ballots being counted — will have to be addressed. These small-potatoes cases today may well become the blueprint that addresses big, valid claims of election fraud tomorrow.

The Average American Today...

 

...IN-Dividuals Suffering from an Excess of Systemic Gravity...

 

...Seeking to Destroy the Imposed Shame Born of SJW Elite Ressentiment...

...Trying... Attempting... to Become Just "Fine" Again.

Shunning All Intersectional Labels, Symbols, and Pre-Defined Elitist 'Dividual Marketting' Categories.

Make America Fine Again!

Attack of the Virtue Hoarders

Globalist Run Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) Unveiled

Lucas Nolan, "Report: US and UK Military Contractors Conspired to Develop Global Censorship Strategy"

Newly leaked documents have revealed a secretive initiative by U.S. and UK military contractors to establish a global censorship framework in 2018, according to a new report by journalists behind the Twitter Files.

Public has published a report by Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi claiming that a whistleblower has surfaced with documents suggesting that U.S. and UK military contractors, including prominent defense researchers and cybersecurity experts, orchestrated a comprehensive plan for global censorship. These documents, rivaling the significance of the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, which both Taibbi and Shellenberger contributed to, depict the formation of an “anti-disinformation” group named the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). Allegedly a “volunteer project” by data scientists and defense veterans at its outset, CTIL’s tactics were seemingly integrated into projects of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The CTIL documents fill gaps left by previous disclosures, painting a detailed portrait of the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex.” This network, comprising over 100 government agencies and NGOs, has been instrumental in pushing for censorship on social media platforms and spreading targeted propaganda. The documents include detailed accounts of digital censorship programs, military and intelligence community involvement, partnerships with civil society organizations and media, and the deployment of covert techniques like sock puppet accounts.

The whistleblower’s revelations highlight the pivotal role of CTIL in the creation and expansion of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Spearheaded by Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, a former UK defense researcher, and others, CTIL developed a comprehensive censorship framework in 2019. This framework was later adopted by various governmental and non-governmental organizations, including DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Key to this framework was the concept of “cognitive security,” integrating into cybersecurity and information security fields. This approach aimed at not just stopping misinformation but influencing public opinion by shaping narratives and controlling information dissemination.

The documents further reveal CTIL’s collaboration with social media platforms, urging them to censor posts by individuals and officials. Despite the overwhelming evidence of government-backed censorship, the origins of this extensive operation remained unclear until these documents came to light.

Read more at Public here.

---

Joel Abbott, "REPORT: Bombshell whistleblower documents, Slack communications show US and UK military contractors created a "sweeping plan for global censorship in 2018""

This is going viral right now, so let's dive into this beat (grab that coffee).

You may remember Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi from the Twitter Files exposés on government/Big Tech censorship during Covid. This may be bigger news:

Breuer, UK defense researcher Sara-Jayne "SJ" Terp, and Chris Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA)

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an "anti-disinformation" group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the "anti-disinformation" sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.

The whistleblower's documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.

"Lock your sh•• down," explains one document about creating "your spy disguise." Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority."

The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a "former" British intelligence analyst, was "in the room" at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a "repeat of 2016."

Over the last year, Public, Racket, congressional investigators, and others have documented the rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of over 100 government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that work together to urge censorship by social media platforms and spread propaganda about disfavored individuals, topics, and whole narratives.

The US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role.

Emails from CISA's NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and other US government contractors. EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship, it had yet to be determined where the idea for such mass censorship came from. In 2018, an SIO official and former CIA fellow, Renee DiResta, generated national headlines before and after testifying to the US Senate about Russian government interference in the 2016 election.

But what happened between 2018 and Spring 2020? The year 2019 has been a black hole in the research of the Censorship Industrial Complex to date. When one of us, Michael, testified to the U.S. House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex in March of this year, the entire year was missing from his timeline.

From 2018 to early 2020, right when Covid started spreading, the groundwork was laid for a multi-national effort, led by the industrial military complex, to silence dissident citizens.

If you feel like America or Britain or the rest of the West feels different today than it was pre-2018, now you know why.

Another wall of text:

Now, a large trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that, in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne "SJ" Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework.

These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020. In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018. Internal CTIL Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process. The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.

In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like "all jobs are essential," "we won't stay home," and "open America now." CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios.

The group also discussed requesting "takedowns" and reporting website domains to registrars. CTIL's approach to "disinformation" went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote "counter-messaging," co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups. In one suggested list of survey questions, CTIL proposed asking members or potential members, "Have you worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously?" The survey then asked whether these influence operations included "active measures" and "psyops."

These documents came to us via a highly credible whistleblower. We were able to independently verify their legitimacy through extensive cross-checking of information to publicly available sources. The whistleblower said they were recruited to participate in CTIL through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by DHS.

The FBI declined to comment. CISA did not respond to our request for comment. And Terp and the other key CTIL leaders also did not respond to our requests for comment.

The goal of CTIL was to become part of the US federal government, Shellenberger says.

This reminds me a bit of the plot to the 2015 Bond film "Spectre," where a British cybersecurity expert plots terror attacks to convince world leaders to create a global surveillance system that would allow governments to monitor every aspect of their citizens' lives for "safety," without realizing that the data was actually being sent to the evil villain organization Spectre.

And remember how the last Jason Bourne film in 2016 had government agent Tommy Lee Jones working with a social platform to spy on and censor Americans?

Funny how art imitates life.

But one person involved, Bonnie Smalley, replied over Linked in, saying, "all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid…. i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though."

Yet the documents suggest that government employees were engaged members of CTIL. One individual who worked for DHS, Justin Frappier, was extremely active in CTIL, participating in regular meetings and leading trainings.

Here's one screenshot of the Slack channel these people used:

Terp's plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create "Misinfosec communities" that would include government.

Both public records and the whistleblower's documents suggest that she achieved this. In April 2020, Chris Krebs, then-Director of CISA, announced on Twitter and in multiple articles, that CISA was partnering with CTIL. "It's really an information exchange," said Krebs.

Top-level Homeland Security officials working with entities that want to censor Americans? Cool!

The documents also show that Terp and her colleagues, through a group called MisinfoSec Working Group, which included DiResta, created a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).

They wrote AMITT by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by MITRE, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding. Terp later used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization then employed in "countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe."

Guys, congrats on surviving the propaganda of the last three years. Truly, it's a miracle that they didn't entirely get away with it. Thank the Lord.

Sorry for more text, but that's all there is: Just a wall of insane info about what our governments did to us:

A key component of Terp's work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of "cognitive security" into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.

The sum total of the documents is a clear picture of a highly coordinated and sophisticated effort by the US and UK governments to build a domestic censorship effort and influence operations similar to the ones they have used in foreign countries. At one point, Terp openly referenced her work "in the background" on social media issues related to the Arab Spring. Another time, the whistleblower said, she expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.

According to the whistleblower, roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA. "For a while, they had their agency seals — FBI, CISA, whatever — next to your name," on the Slack messaging service, said the whistleblower. Terp "had a CISA badge that went away at some point," the whistleblower said.

Alright, this next part is VERY IMPORTANT, because it shows how they want to penalize people for supporting the wrong things:

The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the Censorship Industrial Complex went far beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists.

The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them. It calls for training influencers to spread messages. And it calls for trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.

[...]

Highlighting the Bright Future of Women's Professional Sports

Hollywood won't make a movie about how laughably absurd it is that we now allow grown men to call themselves women and then dominate women's sports.

So we did.

Introducing our first feature-length comedy, 'LADY BALLERS.'

Available December 1st, only on https://t.co/p0JKWmMBKq pic.twitter.com/zkukluQfT2

— Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing) November 27, 2023

The Rise of Anarcho-Capitalism...

The New Ghetto's of White Supremacy...

Nov 6, 2023 · New polls by The New York Times and Siena College found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of the most important battleground states said they would support former President Donald Trump...

Subversive Anti-Democracy

Satellite Jamming in Ukraine - Russian EW?

Guesses as to frequency ranges being jammed?

On the Drone jamming front...

Russia deploys tank-mounted Volnorez jammers in Ukraine
September 25, 2023 Tim Mahon Counter-UAS systems and policies

First seen in public at the Russian Army Expo 2023, the Volnorez (Breakwater) C-UAS jammer has now been seen mounted on T-80BVM main battle tanks in Ukraine, according to social media reports circulating in mid-September.

Volnorez spans the frequency range from 900-2,000MHz and is able to disrupt drone signals from ranges in excess of one kilometre, providing the jammer-equipped vehicle (and its immediate neighbours) with enhanced levels of protection in an increasingly intense conflict. The jammers – which are magnetically attached to the host vehicle, thus increasing operational agility-are omnidirectional, thereby providing 360° coverage.

Sounds like Ukraine could use some wild Weasels and anti-radiation missiles like HARM or better to home on the jammers.  The need to continuously radiate/ jam has GOT to be an exploitable vulnerability.

America's "Hobson's Choice" Political System

 

from Wiki:

A Hobson's choice is a free choice in which only one thing is actually offered. The term is often used to describe an illusion that multiple choices are available. The best known Hobson's choice is "I'll give you a choice: take it or leave it", wherein "leaving it" is strongly undesirable.

The phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in his stall nearest to the door or taking none at all.

Origins[edit]

Portrait of Thomas Hobson in the National Portrait Gallery, London

According to a plaque underneath a painting of Hobson donated to Cambridge Guildhall, Hobson had an extensive stable of some 40 horses. This gave the appearance to his customers that, upon entry, they would have their choice of mounts, when in fact there was only one: Hobson required his customers to take the horse in the stall closest to the door. This was to prevent the best horses from always being chosen, which would have meant overuse of the good horses.^[1] Hobson's stable was located on land that is now owned by St Catharine's College, Cambridge.^[2]

Early appearances in writing[edit]

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known written usage of this phrase is in The rustick's alarm to the Rabbies, written by Samuel Fisher in 1660:^[3]

If in this Case there be no other (as the Proverb is) then Hobson's choice...which is, choose whether you will have this or none.

It also appears in Joseph Addison's paper The Spectator (No. 509 of 14 October 1712);^[4] and in Thomas Ward's 1688 poem "England's Reformation", not published until after Ward's death. Ward wrote:

Where to elect there is but one,
'Tis Hobson's choice—take that, or none.^[5]

So who shall it be, America?  DJT or Genocide Joe?  Which stands nearer the political UniParty's L->R stable door?

Democratic Party NewSpeak Strikes Again...

Complete & Utter Failure = Success!!!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

IfNET/ WEF: The Blind Leading the Blind

Institute For New Economic Thinking & World Economic Forum To Collaborate On The Future Of Economics (2/22/13)

Collaboration to introduce the ideas and innovations of a new generation of economists

INET scholars to participate in the World Economic Forum's "Summer Davos" in Dalian, China in September

NEW YORK and DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and the World Economic Forum today announced plans for closer collaboration to foster new approaches to economic thinking.

Ahead of this year's World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, both organizations highlighted the need for innovative and sustainable solutions for persistent economic, social and political challenges. Their future collaboration will focus on engaging both a new generation of economic thinkers, as well as the most influential scholars from a variety of disciplines.

"The problems facing us today require a fundamental shift in economics and the participation of a global community from business, politics and academia," Dr. Robert Johnson, Executive Director of INET said. "We are therefore very excited to be collaborating with the World Economic Forum to accelerate the development of new economic thinking. The financial crises, environmental challenges and increasing inequality have revealed just how little we understand about the issues facing our world. Addressing these is key to creating a more resilient and dynamic world, and is core to many of the discussions in Davos this year."

"The state of the world remains such that we need to challenge fundamental economic assumptions and to embrace new thinking globally," said Lee Howell, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum responsible for their Annual Meeting in Davos. "INET is a leader in innovative ideas and research because of their commitment to stellar young scholars, who represent the future for the field of economics."

The World Economic Forum and INET will collaborate on introducing new economic ideas at the Forum's Annual Meeting of New Champions referred to as the "Summer Davos" in Dalian, China. "INET looks forward to working with the World Economic Forum in Dalian and bringing new visions, ideas and outstanding scholars into dialogue with the young people convening there," Dr. Johnson said. This collaboration will also provide opportunities for INET's Young Scholars to engage with the World Economic Forum's communities, such as the Young Global Leaders and Global Shapers – communities aimed at fostering interaction and exchange with the next generation of leaders.

Dr. Johnson also serves as vice-chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on New Economic Thinking and will contribute to a number of sessions at the Annual Meeting in Davos. He will moderate a dinner discussion featuring the world's leading economists. The session will focus on designing the economics textbook needed to guide society from the present day to the year 2030. Participants in this session include Nobel Laureate Professor Robert Engle of New York University, Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University, Professor Li Daokui of Tsinghua University, Dr. Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and INET Advisory Board Members Professor Barry Eichengreen and Professor Helen Rey.

About the Institute for New Economic Thinking

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) is a global economic research and education foundation designed to broaden and accelerate the development of a new field of economic thought that will lead to real-world solutions to the great economic and social challenges of the 21st century.

www.ineteconomics.org

Media Contacts:
Eric J. Weiner, Institute for New Economic Thinking, + 1 212 493-3327, ejw@ineteconomics.org
Lucy Jay Kennedy, World Economic Forum, + 41 79 817 06 07, lucy.jaykennedy@weforum.org

SOURCE Institute For New Economic Thinking

American Interventions....

Rise of the "Anti's" - Distancing from the Secular Human

Robert Huddleston, "Humanism and Its' Discontents"

Humanism aspires to ethical universalism but in practice it is defined by what it opposes and excludes.

“Humanism,” Sarah Bakewell tells us, “is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications.” As a philosophy, humanism encompasses the intellectual and cultural legacy of the Renaissance, humanitarianism, liberalism, atheism, and agnosticism, and the objects and methods of study of a loosely affiliated set of academic disciplines. As a historical movement, it is more coherent. It began in Europe in the late Middle Ages and—despite setbacks due to political and religious persecution—there has been an unbroken tradition of humanism in the West stretching up to the present day. In her provocative and intriguing book, Bakewell examines a slew of thinkers from Petrarch to Tzvetan Todorov and—despite the conceptual cloudiness of her subject—reveals certain key aspects of humanism, as both a tradition and as a system of values.
One of these core characteristics is humanism’s intrinsically pluralistic epistemology. Humanists believe that there is more than one aspect to the truth. This should not be confused with the position that truth is merely relative, that different things can be true, depending on your point of view, and that there is therefore no such thing as objective truth—an idea known as perspectivism. Nor does it mean that nothing is really true (nihilism). As historian Edward Hallett Carr puts it in his 1961 book What Is History?, “It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape or an infinity of shapes.” Paul Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire from various angles, at different times of day, and in changing weather, yet in every picture it is recognizable as the same mountain in Provence. Analogously, while individual human perspectives differ—there are many ways to be human—there is clearly a “human dimension of life,” as Bakewell puts it, and that dimension exists “in between the physical realm of matter and whatever purely spiritual or divine realm may be thought to exist.”

After a brief discussion of humanism’s roots in antiquity, Bakewell begins her exploration with 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), often considered the originator of the studia humanitatis, the humanities. Petrarch and his compatriot Giovanni Boccaccio “put together the [humanist] profile” of intellectual independence from faith and tradition. It took nearly two more centuries for humanism to become overtly moral and political. Desiderius Erasmus advocated that in civil and political affairs, we should be guided by human reason and viewed humanistic learning as a vital part of a civilizing ethical process. Following Plato, Erasmus attempts to separate human nature—which includes such undesirable aspects as a persistent propensity to violence—from an ethical ideal, a “true humanity, which we should be striving to develop and fulfill.” For Erasmus, humanism is about both social and individual enlightenment; it creates the proper conditions for moral and intellectual flourishing, for the spiritual elevation of the human being. This conception of humanism is liberal, but not yet fully secular. It views humanity as a set of moral qualities—this is not a given, but something we can get right or wrong, and that can be fostered by specific social practices that nudge us in the direction of good.

The antithesis of humanism, for Erasmus, is war. In his 1517 work The Complaint of Peace, Erasmus argues that, as Bakewell paraphrases, “War is a blunder: a failure to be human.” According to Erasmus, war is not only inhumane but unnatural to humans. Violence is literally brutalizing—it makes us descend to below the level of brute beasts. This later develops into one of the key tenets of humanism: it is something chosen. This implies that unlike beasts, we are free to choose the good; consequently, when we fail to do so, the fault lies with us. We cannot blame human violence on the promptings of nature. This suggests a view of human perfectibility—a view further developed by eighteenth-century writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, like Erasmus, believed that education was the key to developing and cultivating human capacities and steering them in the right direction.

For humanists, ethics is quite distinct from religion. In his Essays (1580), Michel de Montaigne writes, “I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves,” meaning that his ideas are not influenced by any consideration of the divine. The likely cause of this secularizing impulse was the violence unleashed by the hellish religious wars of the sixteenth century. Both secularism and pluralism came of age with Montaigne, for whom human multifariousness is to be celebrated in itself and for whom the most distinctive human quality is an irreducible diversity of conduct and opinion.

This pluralist outlook anticipates the novelistic tradition, inaugurated by writers like Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote (1605–15) and Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). The kaleidoscopic works of Cervantes and Fielding are characterized by a capacious curiosity about the wide range of human motivations and characters. This fascination is echoed in Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace (1865–69), in which Pierre is “struck by the endless variety of men’s minds, which prevents a truth from appearing exactly the same way to any two persons.” For Pierre, as for Montaigne, the idiosyncrasy of each person’s views forms the basis of his sympathy and esteem for human diversity.

The “fanatically nonfanatical” Montaigne, as Bakewell calls him, pioneered this new humanist value: tolerance of a wide range of customs, opinions, and appetites, including some that might seem intuitively odd or repellent, remarking in “Of Cannibals,” for example, that “Chrysippus and Zeno, the two heads of the Stoic sect, were of the opinion that there was no hurt in making use of our dead carcasses, in what way so ever for our necessity, and in feeding upon them too.” Montaigne was the originator of an anthropological strain of humanism that later developed into cosmopolitanism, with its emphasis on cultural diversity as a source of ethical and aesthetic enrichment.

The connection between humanism and liberalism is formulated most cogently by John Stuart Mill, who sought a political foundation for “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological,” as he writes in his 1859 work On Liberty. As Bakewell notes, Mill was profoundly influenced by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who saw freedom of expression as vital to human flourishing. Mill prefaces On Liberty with a quotation from Humboldt’s work on the theory of statecraft: “The grand, leading principle… unfolded in these pages… is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” Both Humboldt and Mill believed that the state’s main role was to provide enough security to allow human beings to freely define their own individual and collective goals. Mill’s utilitarianism—his belief in the greatest good for the greatest number—is a practical solution to the inevitable fact that people differ in their wishes and purposes. At the heart of Mill’s liberalism is compromise and a rejection of absolutism.

This reveals a glaring weakness in the humanist program: the need to tolerate one’s opponents sits uneasily with human nature. This commitment to pluralism can make humanism seem less like a universalist philosophy than like a particular temperament that must be trained: civilized, rational, urbane, averse to violence and coercion—a sensibility that exists only in the West, a WEIRD phenomenon. Many of the humanists profiled by Bakewell—from George Eliot and Bertrand Russell to Ludwig Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto—are exceptional humans.

This is a paradox traceable to humanism’s earliest origins. For Erasmus—as for Russell—humanity is something to be achieved. This has led some critics to view it as elitist. As detractors have noted, humanism aspires to ethical universalism but in practice it is defined by what it opposes and excludes. And that includes tendencies that are characteristically, stubbornly human and that lead to, as Bakewell puts it, “the general human habit of behaving inhumanely.” It seems too facile to treat human and humane as synonymous, as humanists tend to do.

Disillusionment with all too human moral depravity prompted the rise of antihumanism in the twentieth century. This in turn influenced both poststructuralism and Marxist critical theory—movements that are not only ideologically but methodologically antihumanist in emphasizing the causal role of social structures and historical forces over the agency of individuals. As the “new humanist” philosophers Luc Ferry and Alain Renault suggest, a widespread disillusionment among intellectuals with the cultural legacy of the West prevailed in the wake of the Second World War.

This skepticism was also fueled by the emerging anti-colonialist liberation movements. With some justification, the West was blamed for a long sequence of historical catastrophes. By extension, humanism and liberalism were also labeled suspect and dangerous, guilty by association with a “corrupt” civilization. Furthermore, as Richard Wolin argues persuasively in his 2004 book The Seduction of Unreason, antihumanism provided an alibi for writers tainted by fascism, such as Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, and Martin Heidegger, a way of shaking off the moral burden of collaboration. If the Enlightenment was in some sense “just as bad” as fascism, how could they be especially guilty—especially if the individual was not the locus of moral choice and action, but history was just “a process without a subject,” as Louis Althusser alleged.

This form of antihumanism began in the growing conviction that individuals are dominated by external forces and lack agency in the face of either history or discourse. It started to take root toward the end of the nineteenth century, presenting itself as analogous to the scientific principle that described objects in nature not in terms of their outward sensory manifestations or appearances but the imperceptible components of which they were composed and the forces that acted upon them. Antihumanism marshaled ideas from German idealism; from the hermeneutics of suspicion, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud; and from other sources, including the counter-Enlightenment eighteenth-century thinkers Joseph de Maistre and Johann Georg Hamann. It attempted to debunk the ideas of individual agency and universal human nature. 

One of the defining statements of the radical antihumanist view was Michel Foucault’s 1966 book The Order of Things. Foucault argued that the human sciences, rooted in Renaissance humanism, were already crumbling. The ideas (or “constructs”) of the human being and of a human-centered world would, he concluded, soon “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” by historical and ideological transformations. For the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, this was the explicit aim. The goal of structuralism was “not to constitute but to dissolve man” into the underlying symbols and processes of his social existence in the search for causal mechanisms that transcend the individual.

Bakewell devotes only a few pages to the postwar antihumanists and pays little attention in general to the long history of humanism’s ideological antagonists. Yet, humanism cannot be understood without examining their critiques.

As Richard Wolin has pointed out, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, antihumanists were typically reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, who were appalled by “the social cataclysms of revolutionary France—mob violence, dechristianization, anarchy, civil war, terror, and political dictatorship” and consequently rejected the revolution’s secularizing tendencies and ideals of reason and progress. Social turmoil produces antihumanist and authoritarian reactions as readily as humanist responses, it would seem. Later, antihumanism would be taken up by the radical Left as an alternative to the postwar liberal consensus.

More importantly, Bakewell says very little about differing strands of humanism itself. As Kate Soper has observed, what the term humanism means to most people—if it means anything at all—is a vaguely naturalistic atheism. This is certainly the platform of organizations like Humanists UK and Humanists International, something Bakewell downplays while attempting to portray their brand as essentially tolerant of religious belief. Such cheerful ecumenism elides profound differences in how humanists themselves have understood humanism—differences manifested in such questions as whether human values stem from a transcendental source. Bakewell’s history is a tad Whiggish, suggesting an inexorable march toward a single, vaguely defined enlightened secularism that happens to coincide with Western liberalism in its current form. While Humanly Possible emphasizes the unbroken continuity and progress of the humanist project, it touches on its many ruptures and lapses only glancingly.

Humanism’s biggest blind spot is that it fails to account for the intrinsically inhumane impulses in our nature—and, if it can’t do that, it can’t be an effective instrument of moral progress. While Bakewell’s book is both engaging and illuminating, she never examines head-on the feature that distinguishes human beings from animals and machines—our radical freedom to choose. As Bakewell acknowledges, in a brief nod to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism (1946), humans “have no preexisting blueprint” for our choices, apart from the history that we ourselves have made. As humans we cannot choose the circumstances of our origin, but we are nevertheless responsible for ourselves.

Humanism is, at heart, an aspirational philosophy. It suggests what we should value: human life and flourishing. But when those values are in abeyance—when we are in the grip of illiberal ideologies and thanatocratic cults, to which we are all too humanly susceptible as recent world events have shown—humanism fails to provide a roadmap for how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

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MIT's Administrative Jim Crow and Anti-Semitic "Green Book"/ Letter

This is the reality that MIT President wants to hide. A letter from Israeli & Jewish MIT students:

To all students at MIT,

Today, Jewish and Israeli MIT students were physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students that…

— Retsef Levi (@RetsefL) November 10, 2023

Today, on the 9th of November, on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which marked the beginning of the Holocaust, Jews at MIT were told to enter campus from back entrances and not to stay in Hillel for fear of their physical safety. We are seeing history repeating itself and Jews on MIT’s campus are afraid.

#BREAKING Hamas police and Al Qassam fighters are recorded firing their weapons at residents attempting to flee the Al Nasser hospital in Rimal, central #Gaza City after the Israelis declared the daily humanitarian opening to the south pic.twitter.com/E7DeemwXLS

— Gaza Report - اخبار غزة (@gaza_report) November 10, 2023

Meanwhile, Hamas begins herding/ shooting at their own Human Shields