Bidenomics…
Blog
Intelligence Community Goes to the Washington Post to Push a Claim That It Knew When Russia Would Invade Ukraine
According to a major exclusive in Tuesday’s Washington Post, before Russia invaded Ukraine, “U.S. intelligence community had penetrated multiple points of Russia’s political leadership, spying apparatus and military, from senior levels to the front lines, according to U.S. officials.” If so, we might add, how well did that work out for us?
This is how the Washington Post sets the scene.
On a sunny October morning, the nation’s top intelligence, military and diplomatic leaders filed into the Oval Office for an urgent meeting with President Biden. They arrived bearing a highly classified intelligence analysis, compiled from newly obtained satellite images, intercepted communications and human sources, that amounted to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war plans for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
For months, Biden administration officials had watched warily as Putin massed tens of thousands of troops and lined up tanks and missiles along Ukraine’s borders. As summer waned, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, had focused on the increasing volume of intelligence related to Russia and Ukraine. He had set up the Oval Office meeting after his own thinking had gone from uncertainty about Russia’s intentions, to concern he was being too skeptical about the prospects of military action, to alarm.
The session was one of several meetings that officials had about Ukraine that autumn — sometimes gathering in smaller groups — but was notable for the detailed intelligence picture that was presented. Biden and Vice President Harris took their places in armchairs before the fireplace, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the directors of national intelligence and the CIA on sofas around the coffee table.
Tasked by Sullivan with putting together a comprehensive overview of Russia’s intentions, they told Biden that the intelligence on Putin’s operational plans, added to ongoing deployments along the border with Ukraine, showed that all the pieces were now in place for a massive assault.
According to the Washington Post, we had it all. We knew the axes of advance, and we knew the sequencing of actions involving Russian airborne and special operations forces. Even so, Joey SoftServe was in a quandary because the #OrangeManBad had really fouled up things.
As he absorbed the briefing, Biden, who had taken office promising to keep the country out of new wars, was determined that Putin must either be deterred or confronted, and that the United States must not act alone. Yet NATO was far from unified on how to deal with Moscow, and U.S. credibility was weak. After a disastrous occupation of Iraq, the chaos that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and four years of President Donald Trump seeking to undermine the alliance, it was far from certain that Biden could effectively lead a Western response to an expansionist Russia.
The Euros were skeptical of the intel and suspected the US was making it sound much more definitive than it was. On the other hand, the Ukrainians were afraid that reacting to intelligence in which they didn’t have 100% confidence could possibly precipitate a Russian invasion and would definitely hurt Ukraine’s economy.
Strange new phase of matter created in quantum computer acts like it has two time dimensions
By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time, the physicists report July 20 in Nature.
This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu.
The approach’s use of an “extra” time dimension “is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter,” says Dumitrescu, who worked on the project as a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City. “I’ve been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting.”
Dumitrescu spearheaded the study’s theoretical component with Andrew Potter of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Romain Vasseur of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Ajesh Kumar of the University of Texas at Austin. The experiments were carried out on a quantum computer at Quantinuum in Broomfield, Colorado, by a team led by Brian Neyenhuis.
Road piracy…
Multiple Cops Ignore Citizens Flagging Them Down to Report a Rape Taking Place on the Sidewalk in Front of Them
If ever you thought police in the United States were here for your protection, the following case out of New Orleans, Louisiana should remove all doubt. Nearly a dozen eye witnesses flagged down several police officers, pointed them to a rape in-progress and not a single one of them chose to act. New audio footage from the 911 call, illustrates just how utterly incompetent the security force in New Orleans actually is.
Even after one citizen dialed 911, officers continued to ignore the ongoing rape on the sidewalk and by the time one of the officers finally responded, the rapist had fled.
“There’s a police officer in front of me now,” the woman told the 911 dispatcher.
“He looked at me like I was crazy,” the woman told Nola.com, asking to remain anonymous out of fear of police retribution.
In the recording of the 911 call, we can hear the woman approach the officer and tell him that a woman was literally being raped right now and he can stop it.
“I mean, this police officer isn’t even moving,” she told 911. “He’s still just parked here.”
“There was no urgency whatsoever,” the caller’s spouse told Nola.com. “A woman is being raped in public in front of other people — that is unacceptable.”
Despite pleading with 911 and the officer — who was reportedly working an approved detail for a film — no one stepped in and stopped the rape and the rapist was able to get away.
After an AI bot wrote a scientific paper on itself, the researcher behind the experiment says she hopes she didn’t open a ‘Pandora’s box’
A researcher from Sweden gave an AI algorithm known as GPT-3 a simple directive: “Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text.”
Researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström said she stood in awe as the text began to generate. In front of her was what she called a “fairly good” research introduction that GPT-3 wrote about itself.
After the successful experiment, Thunström, a Swedish researcher at Gothenburg University, sought to get a whole research paper out of GPT-3 and publish it in a peer-reviewed academic journal. The question was: Can someone publish a paper from a nonhuman source?
Thunström wrote about the experiment in Scientific American, noting that the process of getting GPT-3 published brought up a series of legal and ethical questions.
“All we know is, we opened a gate,” Thunström wrote. “We just hope we didn’t open a Pandora’s box.”
After GPT-3 completed its scientific paper in just two hours, Thunström began the process of submitting the work and had to ask the algorithm if it consented to being published.
“It answered: Yes,” Thunström wrote. “Slightly sweaty and relieved (if it had said no, my conscience could not have allowed me to go on further), I checked the box for ‘Yes.'”
She also asked if it had any conflicts of interest, to which the algorithm replied “no,” and Thunström wrote that the authors began to treat GPT-3 as a sentient being, even though it wasn’t.
“Academic publishing may have to accommodate a future of AI-driven manuscripts, and the value of a human researcher’s publication records may change if something nonsentient can take credit for some of their work,” Thunström wrote.
DOJ Opposes Release Of Underlying Affidavit For FBI Mar-A-Lago Raid
The Department of Justice has opposed the release of the underlying FBI affidavit used to justify last week’s raid on Mar-a-Lago because they claim “it would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” according to Politico‘s Kyle Cheney.
“The fact that this investigation implicates highly classified materials further underscores the need to protect the integrity of the investigation,” the DOJ said in a Monday court filing.
Trump and other Republicans stepped up calls on Sunday for the release of the affidavit after a search warrant released last week indicated that Trump had 11 sets of classified documents at his home – which he told journalist John Solomon were declassified before they were taken out of the White House. The DOJ convinced a judge that they had probable cause to conduct the search due to potential violations of the Espionage Act – which have nothing to do with classification issues.
That said, the DOJ says it intends to unseal additional documents related to the raid.
Purported Free Speech Champion Elon Musk Writes Article for Chinese Censorship Bureau Magazine
Tesla billionaire Elon Musk wrote an article for a magazine produced by the chief censorship bureau of Communist China, despite being a self-described “free speech absolutist.”
The world’s richest man penned an article in the July issue of China Cyberspace, a magazine produced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the top internet regulator, responsible for enacting the strict censorship apparatus of the regime in Beijing.
So central to the power structure of the Communist Party, the director of the CAC, Zhuang Rongwen, is also the head of the Propaganda Department, and it is a subsidiary of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, of which Xi Jinping, himself, is the director of.
While the CAC is mostly involved in laying out the censorship agenda of the government, it also has the ability to purge material directly, notably being at the head of Operation Qinglang (cleansed and uncontaminated), launched in 2021 to crack down on non-state run media entities, such as social media users and citizen journalists from posting “harmful” material on the Chinese internet, which is itself already heavily censored.
The decision by Musk to choose to write an article for a magazine produced by the CAC comes in direct contrast to his self-described status as a “free speech absolutist” and his persistent criticism of censorship in the West, namely on social media sites like Twitter. However, it perhaps demonstrates the lengths to which the Tesla founder will go to maintain a cosy relationship with China, a key country for the future expansion of the electric car company. It also provides further proof for Donald Trump’s claim that Musk is a “bullshit artist.”
Cryptocurrency’s own ‘Bernie Madoff’? Inside WILD world of former Disney child star-turned-crypto billionaire who founded controversial Tether coin – which experts have dubbed a ‘ponzi scheme’ that could bring down the industry once and for all
It’s been described by experts as the great ‘crypto winter.’ In a matter of six months during the early half of 2022, a dramatic downward spiral shook up the market, wiping out $2 trillion in value, plunging retail investors into financial ruin, causing companies to lay-off thousands of employees, and bankrupting some of the industry’s biggest heavyweights.
Amid mounting fear over the future of digital currency, scrutiny is being placed on a new weak point in the cryptosphere: Tether.
Even in crypto’s freakish world of joke coins, overnight billionaires and scam artists, Tether stands out thanks to its incredibly curious origin.
It’s not the scheme of a savvy financial expert but rather the brainchild of an eccentric Disney child actor-turned-Bitcoin billionaire who loves EDM music and Pokemon, snorts Peruvian psychedelics — and — as one person described, ‘looks like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and speaks in riddles, like Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’
His name is Brock Pierce. By the time he was in his 20s, the former kid star, now 41, had reinvented himself multiple times over and emerged as a crypto cult leader in the gonzo world of digital currency.
In the process, he’s played footsie with a wide range of unsavory characters, convicted felons, and D-list celebrities including Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Bannon, the rapper Akon, as well as the current Mayor of New York, Eric Adams (who controversially flew on Pierce’s private jet at the beginning of his term).
New York Times Asked Communist Chinese Tech Company To Censor Americans
The New York Times asked TikTok, a social media app with known connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to censor American users sharing election integrity concerns on its platform.
In a recent article titled, “On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms,” Times writer Tiffany Hsu details how “TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information” ahead of the 2022 midterms, with the issue of voter fraud being a prominent topic shared across the platform. Buried within the article, however, Hsu tacitly reveals that as a result of the Times reaching out to the CCP-connected company, TikTok began censoring users from using a popular hashtag associated with fears about election interference.
“Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month,” the article reads. “Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times.”
Hsu goes on to note the platform’s failure to address the spread of “misinformation” in foreign elections, citing those in France and Australia as examples.
You must be logged in to post a comment.