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Comer Accuses National Archives of Stonewalling Probe Into Biden Classified Documents

The new chair of the House Oversight Committee has accused the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) of stonewalling the GOP-led probe into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.

In what is fast becoming a crisis of credibility for Biden, the White House said Saturday that another five pages of classified documents were found on Thursday at Biden’s Delaware home, which is in addition to sensitive materials found in December in the president’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington.

Biden said he was “surprised” by the discovery of the documents and both he and his allies have insisted they’ve cooperated with NARA and the Justice Department over the materials, while Republicans have launched a probe into the matter.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said in a post on Twitter late Sunday that the National Archives has yet to provide a “simple briefing” to the committee on its handling of classified documents after Comer sent a letter to the agency nearly a week ago requesting information and documents.

“The Archives isn’t being transparent with the American people,” Comer wrote in the post.

“So many questions remain unanswered,” he continued. “I will use the power of the gavel to get answers.”

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What Privacy? This AI Can Identify You by Your Computer Habits

The world of privacy is a constant battlefield. It’s not a static decision where once you’ve done this one single step, you’re now good until the end of time. Instead, you have to stay abreast of the research, studying the ways that privacy is constantly being diminished so that you can then take the appropriate steps to respond.

If you’ve read through a privacy policy for an app, website, or contract in the past, you’ve likely noticed that they state they may sell your data to third parties. Exactly who these third parties are, you never know, nor what your information is being used for in the first place.

But sometimes you find the privacy policy tries to add a feel-good clause here, saying something to the extent that “our data about you is completely anonymous.”

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FEMA Distributed Nonsense Emergency Brochures To Native Alaskans

FEMA hired a California government contractor to translate disaster-assistance information into two native Alaska languages, but all it and the natives got was a big heap of nonsense. 

After a typhoon hammered the west coast of Alaska in September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) hired a Berkeley-based company, Accent on Languages, to translate instructions for applying for disaster aid. 

FEMA quickly turned the company’s work into tri-fold, glossy brochures that left native Alaskans utterly perplexed, as they encountered phrases like: 

  • “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny.”
  • “Tomorrow he will go hunting Alaska very early, and will (bring) nothing”  
  • “When she said so, the dog ran farther off from the curtain.”

University of Alaska Fairbanks linguist Gary Holton says one of the translations is a random assortment of phrases copied from a compilation of far-eastern Russian folklore: “Yupik Eskimo Texts from the 1940s.” 

“They clearly just grabbed the words from the document and then just put them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup’ik but made no sense,” Holton told AP. He summed up the work as a “word salad.” 

In a publicly-posted letter, Accent on Languages CEO Caroline Lee said her firm will reimburse FEMA $5,116. “We make no excuses for erroneous translations, and we deeply regret any inconvenience this has caused to the local community.” 

Lee said when the “horrifying,” botched translations came to her attention, that her company hired a new team of translators to do the project over again. FEMA has fired the company. 

Former Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney wants more than a reimbursement, saying the company is guilty of fraud — “and you can’t put a price on the impact of denying services to vulnerable communities because of misinformation.” The grandstanding Sweeney even called for congressional hearings. 

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A comet not seen in 50,000 years is coming. Here’s what you need to know

Typically, during the course of a year about a dozen comets will come within the range of amateur telescopes. Most quietly come and go with little fanfare, but some are particularly noteworthy. 

During the upcoming weeks, a newly-discovered comet will be making a relatively close approach to the Earth. On Feb. 1, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will pass to within 28 million miles (42 million km) of our planet, its first approach in 50,000 years. While this will no doubt entice many skywatchers to attempt to view the comet, whether or not one will actually be able to see it will depend on a variety of factors including location and light pollution from both natural and artificial sources.

But don’t be dismayed! Even if you don’t have the right gear or conditions to see comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), the Virtual Telescope Project will be hosting a free livestream of the comet beginning at 11:00 p.m. EST on Jan. 12 (0400 GMT on Jan. 13). You can watch the live webcast courtesy of the project’s website(opens in new tab) or on its YouTube channel(opens in new tab).

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Detailed Report Exposes CIA-Backed ‘Zero Units’ In Afghanistan

In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the C.I.A.-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. 

The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

  • At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or appeared to target people for no clear reason.
  • A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty intelligence by the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence-gathering services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
  • The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians. He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. … We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.”
  • The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the C.I.A. often joined them. The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”
  • Military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new insurgent recruits. “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”

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Germany orders Holocaust survivor institutionalized over Covid-19 shot

Soviet-born composer Inna Zhvanetskaya is reportedly in hiding from German authorities after they attempted to have the 85-year-old committed to a mental institution and inoculated against her will with a Covid-19 shot, German outlet Report24 said on Thursday.

Zhvanetskaya was born in Vinnytsia, in the Ukrainian SSR, in 1937 and as a child survived the nazi holocaust.

Politicians and legal experts, including the ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD) party’s Martin Sich, have decried the court order against the composer as a violation of Germany’s Basic Law.

While a court order had authorized the forcible removal of Zhvanetskaya from her home in Stuttgart on Wednesday in order to institutionalize her “for her own good,” she was reportedly rescued ahead of their visit by “friendly activists.” In a video recorded from her hiding place, the composer told Report24 that “music is my life, and if they take away music from me then they take my life.”

Zhvanetskaya’s lawyer has filed an appeal and on Thursday convinced the District Court of Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt to suspend the compulsory vaccination part of the order until it is resolved. However, he cautioned she could still be institutionalized at any time.

Issued last month, the order authorizes Zhvanetskaya’s guardian and medical support staff to force their way into her home, calling on police if needed, then lock her up in a psychiatric institution until December 2024 at the latest so that she can be administered two shots of the Covid-19 vaccine she has repeatedly insisted she does not want.

The non-consensual treatment is said to be justified by the composer’s alleged mental and physical illnesses, which the order claims include narcissism, egomania, logorrhea, dementia, obesity, heart disease, and an obsession with music. “She is completely caught up in her compositions and so busy with music that it is impossible to have a meaningful conversation with her,” the document states. 

Zhvanetskaya’s acquaintances have countered that the video she made this week proves she is of sound mind and body. While admitting the composer was “introverted and autistic,” Mascha Orel, co-founder of a holocaust survivors’ advocacy organization, told German outlet TKP after speaking to Zhvanetskaya that this was “normal for a highly talented artist” but that the composer’s guardian had nevertheless been trying to institutionalize his charge for years because she had once refused to take her medication.

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How E-girl influencers are trying to get Gen Z into the military

“I’m not the American dream, I’m more like the American nightmare,” beams the influencer known as Haylujan in a video to her 363k TikTok followers. With full-face E-girl make-up, drawn-on freckles and a rosy nose, the 20-year-old is the face of an unsettling new breed of E-girl garnering millions of views online. She posts thirst traps inside choppers and pouty selfies with assault rifles, with hashtags like #pewpew and #militarycurves. She shares cutesy unboxing compilations and make-up tutorials, Get Ready With Me videos and lip syncs. She jokes about war bunkers and plays with remote control tanks, which she overlays with sparkly filters and heart emojis.

Known in esoteric meme circles as the psy-op girl, Haylujan, also known simply as Lujan, is a self-described “psychological operations specialist” for the US Army, whose online presence has led to countless memes speculating that she is a post-ironic psy-op meant to recruit people into the US army. Lujan, who’s actually employed by the US army psy-ops division, posts countless TikToks and memes that play into this (her official website is called sikeops). “My own taxes used to psy-op me,” says one commenter. “Definitely a fed (I’m signing up for the army now)” writes another.

But Haylujan isn’t the only E-girl using Sanrio sex appeal to lure the internet’s SIMPs into the armed forces. There’s Bailey Crespo and Kayla Salinas, not to mention countless #miltok gunfluencers cropping up online. While she didn’t document her military career, influencer Bella Porch also served in the US Navy for four years before going viral on TikTok in 2020, and is arguably the blueprint for this kind of kawaii commodified fetishism in the military. An adjacent figure, Natalia Fadeev, also known as Gun Waifu, is an Israeli influencer and IDF soldier who uses waifu aesthetics and catgirl cosplay to pedal pro-Israel propaganda to her 756k followers. She poses to camera, ahegao-style, with freshly manicured nails wrapped neatly around a glock, the uWu-ification of military functioning as a cutesy distraction from the shadowy colonial context: “when they try and destroy your nation,” she writes in one caption.

We’ve entered an era of military-funded E-girl warfare. In what would’ve felt unimaginable only a few years back, influencers are the hottest new weapon in the government’s arsenal. Here, cosplay commandos post nationalist thirst traps to mobilise the SIMPs, attracting the sort of impressionable reply guys and 4chan lostbois who message “OMG DM me🔥” on every post. Sanitising the harsh realities of US imperialism with cute E-girl-isms, it promotes the sort of hypersexualised militarism that reframes violence as something cute, goofy and unthreatening – a subversion of the beefy special forces stereotype in the mainstream. Arguably far more unsettling than any 20th-century CIA covert ops, there’s no hush-hush to this operation. Rather it hides in plain sight, capitalising on online irony to lull you into a false sense of security with #relatable content and the sort of tapped-in memery that can only come from years of being terminally online (she’s just like me, fr).

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Wells Fargo Cutting Home Loans to Whites, Will Focus On Lending To ‘Minorities’

Wells Fargo, the top mortgage lending institution in the U.S., announced its cutting home loan services to instead focus on select customers, namely “individuals and families in minority communities.”

The financial services company claimed the decision is based on market changes and a slowing economy, but that apparently isn’t stopping the company from woke virtue-signaling.

“We are making the decision to continue to reduce risk in the mortgage business by reducing its size and narrowing its focus,” Kleber Santos, CEO of Consumer Lending said in a press release, according to the New York Post.

Kristy Fercho, Well Fargo’s head of Home Lending and head of Diverse Segments, Representation and Inclusion, noted that the company instead will “expand” its operations to focus on minority borrowers.

“We will continue to expand our programs to reach more customers in underserved communities by leveraging our strong partnerships with the National Urban League, Unidos US and other non-profit organizations,” Fercho said.

“We also will hire additional mortgage consultants in communities of color,” she added.

The company will reportedly continue to cater to existing customers and “underserved communities.”

The Post also reported the company intends to “expand its retail team by focusing on existing bank customers and underserved communities, invest an additional $100 million to ‘advance racial equity in homeownership’ and deploying additional Home Mortgage Consultants in local minority communities.”

“The press release highlighted that $150 million will also be used to serve minority communities looking to refinance or buy a home, ‘helping more black and hispanic families achieve homeownership,’” The Post added.

This comes amid a general mortgage collapse as the Federal Reserve has been hiking interest rates over the last year to supposedly fight historic 40-year-high inflation.

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FBI Informants Who Marched With Proud Boys on Jan. 6 Will Testify for Their Defense

Before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, the FBI had well-placed informants in the Proud Boys who the government hoped could glean information about the notorious far-right street-fighting gang’s inner workings. 

Now, some of those same informants are being called as witnesses in the Proud Boys’ high-profile seditious conspiracy trial—by the defense, who think their testimony will help get their clients off the hook and prove they had no plot to storm the Capitol. 

According to defense lawyers, those informants were privy to Proud Boys’ chats and even marched alongside them to the Capitol on Jan. 6. 

After several delays, opening arguments finally got underway Thursday in the high-profile seditious conspiracy trial against the Proud Boy ‘s ex-“chairman” Enrique Tarrio, top organizers Joseph Biggs, Zach Rehl, and Ethan Nordean, and member Dominic Pezzola. 

All five men are accused of entering into a secret agreement to storm the Capitol, with the ultimate goal of disrupting and even preventing the peaceful transition of power. They face a maximum of 20 years in prison. 

Each of the defendants has their own legal teams—an array of personalities and characters who are employing a grab bag of strategies and arguments they hope will exonerate their clients. But it’s clear that the biggest asset to the defense’s case, by far, could be the testimony of those government informants. 

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Top 20 Most Cringeworthy Zelensky PR Moments

The US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine has had many jaw-dropping instances of imperialist sociopathy, propagandistic audacity and brazen journalistic malpractice that we’ve discussed in this space many times, but one of the most cringeworthy and degrading aspects of the globe-spanning narrative control campaign surrounding this war has been the way the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been turned into an ever-present corporate mascot for the most aggressive ad campaign ever devised. The way the most powerful institutions in the western world have been throwing their puppet in everyone’s face to sell the empire’s proxy warfare puts Ronald McDonald to shame.

Here are 20 of the cringiest moments of establishment PR using Zelensky to market the McProxy War to the western world, in no particular order.

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