Tag: military industrial complex

Former Intelligence Director says UFO report raises concern U.S. behind on military technology

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe is suggesting a new Pentagon report on UFOs should raise concerns about more than alien life, saying it might highlight possible weaknesses in America’s current military technologies.

“I know everyone gets caught up on the alien life and all of that, but my concern as the director of national intelligence was, if anyone, foreign adversary, regardless of how you define foreign adversary, have technologies that the United States don’t have, we need to find out more about that,” Ratcliffe stressed during an interview with Fox & Friends on Sunday. 

Ratcliffe said he disclosed the existence of an unidentified aerial phenomenon task force to the Senate Intelligence Committee because “I wanted there to be greater transparency to the American people about the number of sightings of things that are unexplained.” 

He explained that during his time as DNI the government he learned that “Navy pilots and Air Force pilots were discouraged from reporting” UFO sightings because they thought that it would ruin their careers.

“We need to have information if there are technologies out there, and very clearly, as this most recent report reveals, the sightings are increasing, which is a good thing, because that means we’re getting more honest reporting from our Navy and Air Force pilots,” Ratcliffe said. “But it gives us more information… there very clearly are now hundreds of unexplained sightings, meaning that there’s no natural phenomenon involved.”

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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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Shocking Investigation Finds Widespread Uranium Contamination in US Water Supply

A new investigation looks into the extent to which U.S. water supplies are contaminated with uranium.

Maybe it’s the good kind of uranium that turns you into Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk and not the bad kind of uranium that turns you into Thyroid Cancer Man – one of the lesser-known Marvel superheroes.

ProPublica has come out with an investigation entitled “The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater.” After World War II, the Cold War started between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. because the rich needed to stop the damn Communists from pushing their furry hats on everyone! There was a feverish need to build loads of nuclear weapons. To do that, the U.S. needed uranium, and its ruling class didn’t care how they got it.

More than 50 uranium mines popped up across the Western U.S. But they didn’t just turn our weapons radioactive. They also “dumped radioactive and toxic waste into rivers like the Cheyenne in South Dakota and the Animas in Colorado. … Some of the more than 250 million tons of toxic and radioactive detritus… scattered into nearby communities, some spilled into streams and some leaked into aquifers.”

Luckily for the U.S. government at the time, most of the people having their lives destroyed by radioactive detritus were either Native Americans, poor, or both. And as we know well, none of those groups matter to the ruling class – not then and not now. They don’t care about anybody who doesn’t have enough money to have, at minimum, one backup tax haven for when their first tax haven floods due to climate change.

Providing clean water is the most basic responsibility of a government. The U.S. government – the richest in the world – can’t do that, which puts this country at the level of a failed state.

And this is nothing new. The U.S. government – which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America – has a long history of polluting its own people’s drinking water.

Of course, everyone knows about the lead-tainted water of Flint, Michigan. But did you know that in 2016, excessive lead levels were found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states?

This year, shocking levels of lead were found in Chicago’s tap water. But of course, it goes far beyond lead.

Also this year, as reported by ABC News, “A lawsuit alleged the Navy ‘harbored toxic secrets’ after jet fuel leaked from a storage facility in Red Hill, Hawaii operated by the Navy, contaminating locals’ drinking water and sickening hundreds of families.”

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What’s Inside the Budget for the Secretive DARPA?

The Economist has called DARPA the agency “that shaped the modern world,” and listed weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which “DARPA can claim at least partial credit.” These technologies were originally invented for the military aims of the Pentagon. 

DARPA was providing funding and technical support to Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology since at least 2013. DARPA also had long-time associates and partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

A look at their new budget provides a glimpse at what the U.S. Military sees as part of the future of warfare. 

Using machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate information or human behavior seems to be a priority for DARPA judging by the budget. 

A project named AAI aims to further the “facilitation of operator-machine interface, knowledge management and dissemination, and social context-informed AI forecasting.” The project also aims to include a “focus on measuring and aggregating preconscious signals and how these can be used to determine what people believe to be true.” 

Project SemaFor is being earmarked for hundreds of millions of dollars and will use AI “to identify false information, its origin, and its intent [emphasis added]. A project named ASED is developing “counter-social engineering bots.” A little description of this project is given. 

Once thought to be a thing of only movies and television shows, DARPA plans to further its development of a type of “ray gun.” Project Warden is being earmarked millions of dollars to “amplify the range and lethality of high-power microwave systems and weapons.” 

The World Economic Forum idea of Fourth Industrial Revolution technology, which is partly defined as the merging of the digital, technical and biological systems is also highlighted in the DARPA budget. 

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Drone advances in Ukraine could bring dawn of killer robots

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

“Many states are developing this technology,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst. ”Clearly, it’s not all that difficult.”

The sense of inevitability extends to activists, who have tried for years to ban killer drones but now believe they must settle for trying to restrict the weapons’ offensive use.

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Congress just gave the weapons industry a massive paycheck. What it means for U.S. defense

Congress authorized a massive increase in spending on weapons and ammunition in 2023, signaling a willingness to continue providing defense contractors the funding they need to deliver on future Pentagon orders, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Department Of Defense (DOD) would receive a 9% boost in defense spending, with some of the largest increases occurring in weapons budgets, in 2023 as part of Congress’ yearly funding bill, which allocates a total of $858 billion for defense. Concern that the U.S. lacks the capacity to both support Ukraine and deter China from attacking Taiwan have intensified as the U.S. continues to send billions in aid to Kyiv, but contractors will have to negotiate production challenges in order to supply what Congress and the White House believe they need, experts explained to the DCNF.

“This was not a ‘Christmas gift’ in the sense that defense industry pressure or an insider military-industrial complex led to the defense spending increases,” Eugene Gholz, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and a former senior Pentagon official, told the DCNF. “Congress has been leaning in this direction for several years, and it is the mood of the Washington consensus right now to throw money at defense.”

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U.S. Defense Contractors Sponsor D.C. Party for Ukrainian Forces Amid Ongoing War

Four major U.S. defense contractors sponsored a Washington, D.C., party for the 31st anniversary of the Ukrainian armed forces as they stand to gain billions from the ongoing war in Ukraine, according to a report.

Vox reported Saturday that the celebration, hosted by the Ukrainian Embassy last week, took place in downtown D.C. at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, located less than a mile from the White House, and that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was in attendance.

The invitation said the event was “supported by” Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Pratty & Whitney, and Lockheed Martin — their logos emblazoned on the invite, reportedly prompting some observers to “laugh out loud.”

“It’s really bizarre to me that they would put that on an invitation,” a think-tank expert told Vox’s Jonathan Guyer. An academic also told Guyer, “The fact that they don’t feel sheepish about it, that’s interesting.”

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Lawmakers ask Pentagon chief for details on waivers allowing retired generals to consult for foreign governments

Three House members on Tuesday sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to ask for additional details about how former generals receive waivers to consult on behalf of foreign governments. 

The letter from Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and Jason Crow (D-Colo.) comes after a Washington Post report in October that noted more than 500 retired military personnel received waivers to pursue jobs with foreign governments with known human rights abuses and histories of political oppression. 

The lawmakers said they are concerned about a lack of transparency in the waiver approval process and reporting to Congress, the lack of standardized internal procedures at the Defense Department to implement the waiver approval process and the lack of enforcement when retired personnel violate the law through failing to report that they are advising for a foreign government. 

They said they are also worried about potential conflicts of interest that were identified during the waiver approval process and the extent to which International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) concerns are discovered and resolved during the approval process. 

ITAR is intended to control the export of defense and military technologies to protect national security. 

The three House members said the public has a right to know the extent of influence that foreign powers might have over the country’s former military leaders and if high-ranking retired officers are taking advantage of their roles in government to create employment opportunities with foreign governments. 

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Military Groomers Are Increasingly Infiltrating US High Schools

Protect your kids.

A New York Times report has found that enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), a Pentagon-funded program designed to groom children for military service, is increasingly becoming mandatory in US high schools.

“J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines,” the report says. “But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.”

“While Pentagon officials have long insisted that J.R.O.T.C. is not a recruiting tool, they have openly discussed expanding the $400 million-a-year program, whose size has already tripled since the 1970s, as a way of drawing more young people into military service. The Army says 44 percent of all soldiers who entered its ranks in recent years came from a school that offered J.R.O.T.C.,” the Times reports.

And before you ask, no, the Pentagon’s grooming program is not being forced on kids in Malibu and the Hamptons.

“A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households,” the Times reports, naming Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City, and Mobile, Alabama as cities where high schools are funneling kids into the program en masse.

Defenders of mandatory JROTC enrollment reportedly cite the need to “divert students away from drugs or violence” and “the allure of drugs and gangs” in urban areas, as though corralling them into the single most violent gang on Earth is a deterrence from violence and gangs. Grooming students to go kill foreigners for crude oil is not my idea of a healthy diversion from youthful error, but maybe that’s just me.

This would probably be a good time to remind readers that poverty in the United States is one of the Pentagon’s most effective recruiting tools, with Army officials explicitly acknowledging that young people’s inability to afford a college education on their own is responsible for their success in meeting recruitment goals, and US lawmakers warning that helping people pay off crushing student debt will hurt recruitment. US military recruiters have an established record of targeting poorer schools, because impoverished communities often see military service as their only chance at upward mobility.

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