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US Coverup Of Syria Massacre Shows The Danger Of The Assange Precedent

The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists.

The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

“But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” The New York Times reports. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”

Journalist Aaron Maté has called the incident “one of the US military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.”

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Orwell’s Ideas Remain Relevant 75 Years After “Animal Farm” Was Published

Seventy-five years ago, in August 1946, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in the United States. It was a huge success, with over a half-million copies sold in its first year. Animal Farm was followed three years later by an even bigger success: Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In the years since, Orwell’s writing has left an indelible mark on American thought and culture. Sales of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four jumped in 2013 after the whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked confidential National Security Agency documents. And Nineteen Eighty-Four rose to the top of Amazon’s best-sellers list after Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration in 2017.

As a philosophy professor, I’m interested in the continuing relevance of Orwell’s ideas, including those on totalitarianism and socialism.

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Amazon’s Bezos predicts only limited number of people will get to remain on Earth

Humanity will move most industry into space and allow only a select few to remain on our planet, which will be turned into a natural resort, according to self-funded space explorer Jeff Bezos.

The Amazon billionaire enthusiastically shared his predictions for what human civilization will look like in the future – with him personally helping to bring that future closer – during a talk at the annual Ignatius Forum in Washington, DC.

He expects vast cylindrical space colonies spinning to create artificial gravity for millions of residents to take over most industrial production. Meanwhile, Earth will be turned into a natural reserve with restricted access similar to US national parks today.

“This place is special, we can’t ruin it,” the founder of Amazon said of our planet.

“Millions of people will move from Earth to space over time. And that’s the vision of Blue Origin – millions of people working in space,” he said, referring to his own firm.

“Over centuries, most or many of the people will be born in space. It will be their first home. They will be born on these colonies, they will live on these colonies. They may visit Earth the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park,” Bezos predicted.

He said that the colonies themselves “will have rivers and forests and wildlife,” which arguably brought his speech out of the realm of futurology and towards optimistic science fiction. Amazon is infamously resourceful when it comes to squeezing its workers for every drop of productivity. That’s why the similarly rosy description of ‘Amazon factory towns’ solving economic inequality in the US was met with horror, when it was proposed by a Bloomberg columnist in September.

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Hackers Compromise FBI Email System, Spams at Least 100,000 Recipients

Hackers compromised an external email system of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Spamhaus Project, a watchdog group tracking spam and similar cyber threats, announced Saturday.

“We have been made aware of “scary” emails sent in the last few hours that purport to come from the FBI/DHS [Department of Homeland Security],” announced the group on Twitter.

The messages came from a legitimate email address—eims@ic.fbi.gov—from the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP), which is owned by the FBI/DHS, the group said. It added, however, “our research shows that these emails *are* fake.”

The FBI, part of the Department of Justice, said in a statement that it and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are both “aware of the incident this morning involving fake emails from an @ic.fbi.gov email account.”

The agency added that although the impacted hardware was “taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue,” the situation is an ongoing one and it will not be providing additional information for now.

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“Infuriating” Report Reveals “Breathtaking Cover-Up” of US Airstrike That Killed Syrian Civilians

Advocacy groups, human rights defenders, fellow reporters, and other readers of The New York Times were outraged Saturday after journalists Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt published their investigation into a deadly 2019 U.S. airstrike in Syria and all that followed.

“This NYT report on the cover-up of U.S. war crimes in Syria should make your blood boil,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink, tweeted Sunday. “The U.S. wantonly kills civilians, covers it up, and then tells other countries how ‘democracy’ works. Infuriating.”

Evan Hill, a journalist on the Times‘ visual investigations team, said that “this is a long, complicated story, but it’s one that touches on nearly every problem with the global U.S. air war. At every attempt, the military tried to cover it up.”

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According to Facebook (Meta), the metaverse will be censored

The Facebook executive spearheading the company’s virtual reality efforts hopes to create virtual worlds with “almost Disney levels of safety” but has also acknowledged that moderation “at any meaningful scale is almost impossible.”

Facebook’s parent company Meta is working on creating virtual reality worlds where people will socialize, work, game, and even do shopping using 3D avatars of themselves.

In an internal memo, obtained by the Financial Times, Andrew Bosworth, who will be spearheading Meta’s $10 billion “metaverse” project, alleged that virtual reality can potentially be a “toxic environment,” especially for minorities and women.

The memo notes that content and behavior censorship and moderation could be a big challenge, especially given the company’s poor record in fighting “harmful” content.

“The psychological impact on humans is much greater,” said Kavya Pearlman, chief executive of the XR Safety Initiative, a non-profit focused on developing safety standards for VR, augmented and mixed reality. She further explained that users would retain what happened in the metaverse like it happened in reality.

Bosworth outlined a plan that the company could use to tackle the issue, but experts have noted that policing behavior in a virtual reality setting requires a lot of resources and might not even be possible.

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“Revolution In Warfare” – Israel Unveils New Scorpius Electronic Warfare System

Israel has recognized that the modern battlefield will not be entirely fought on air, sea, and space. To better prepare for new domains of warfare, Israel has developed a revolutionary weapon for electromagnetic warfare. 

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the country’s top aerospace and aviation manufacturer, has developed the Scorpius family of systems that scans a sphere of the operating environment for targets and deploys a narrowly focused beam to interfere with multiple threats across the electromagnetic spectrum. The high-tech weapon is categorized under “soft protection” because it doesn’t cause physical harm. Instead, it disrupts the operation of electromagnetic systems, such as radar, electronic sensors, navigation, and data communications.

Gideon Fustick, Marketing VP EW Group at IAI, told Forbes, “We call it [Scorpius family of systems] ‘soft protection.’ It’s an offensive weapon that doesn’t send out missiles. It’s not a hard-kill system,” adding that “it is very effective in engaging and disabling enemy systems.” 

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