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Imagine future election campaigns

One of the first posts in this newsletter’s Shrinking Trust Horizon series was about how “deep fake” technology will make fake images, videos, and audio recordings almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This will kill millions of modeling and acting jobs, while weaponizing audio and video in all kinds of disturbing ways.

That day has apparently arrived:

Baltimore high school teacher arrested over deepfake audio of principal

A Maryland high school teacher has been arrested for allegedly using AI to deepfake a bogus recording of his principal making racist comments.

Dazhon Darien, 31, is accused of creating the hoax audio of Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert.

Mr Eiswert was placed on leave and had police outside his home amid death threats he received over the fake clip.

Mr Darien was held at an airport after a security check over a gun in his bag found an arrest warrant against him.

He faces charges of stalking, theft, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness.

Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Myriam Rogers said the school, as well as the Baltimore County Police Department, launched an investigation on 17 January when they were made aware of the voice recording.

Detectives requested a forensic analysis of the audio, which found it was not authentic.

In the recording, Mr Eiswert’s deepfaked voice is heard making disparaging comments about black students’ test scores, black teachers and Jews.

Police believe Mr Darien, the Baltimore-area school’s athletic director, made the recording to retaliate against Mr Eiswert because he was pursuing an investigation into potential mishandling of district funds.

Mr Darien had authorised a payment of nearly $2,000 (£1,600) to his roommate, falsely claiming the roommate was an assistant coach for the Pikesville girls’ soccer team, reports the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Lancet Publishes CDC Studies on Misinformation, Hoping You Forgot The Lancet and CDC Spread Pandemic Misinformation

April 27, 2024

The Lancet Publishes CDC Studies on Misinformation, Hoping You Forgot The Lancet and CDC Spread Pandemic Misinformation

Censorship academic Claire Wardle helps guide the journal’s descent into authoritarian, censorship hell.

Medical authorities and like-minded charlatans address public failure with several strategies. One method is to deny error, feign outrage at critics pointing to the screwup, and shroud yourself in the holy mantle of science. When caught lying about the science on masks and the possibility he funded a lab accident in Wuhan, Anthony Fauci famously deployed this strategy by first denying what he had said, and then striking back at his critics, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”

The second strategy science academics and kindred con artists deploy is to ignore their blunder, blunder onward while feigning expertise, and hope the public has the mental capacity of goldfish who forget their entire world every 15 minutes. After being humiliated several times for publishing COVID misinformation, The Lancet has landed on this second tactic, inverting reality to assert authority on misinformation—the very same topic they fucked up in the recent past.

But a few were not fooled. The Lancet’s announcement that they were publishing two papers warning about medical misinformation set off howls of laughter and merry disbelief on social media.

“You guys may want to sit this one out,” quipped conservative commentator, Tracy Beanz.

“Misinformation you say?” tweeted another, linking to news deriding a bogus study by a company called Surgisphere that the Lancet was forced to retract.

“By publishing falsehoods like the surgisphere fraud and the Lancet commission whitewash of lockdown failure and harms, the @Lancet was among the worst contributors to public misinformation during the covid era,” tweeted Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Tech Sponsors Event With Canadian Pro-Censorship Justice Minister Advocating Online Censorship

April 27, 2024

Big Tech Sponsors Event With Canadian Pro-Censorship Justice Minister Advocating Online Censorship

Canada’s justice minister, Arif Virani, proposes speech-restrictive legislation at an event backed by corporate sponsorship from Meta and AWS.

Canada’s government, represented by “captain of censorship” Arif Virani – the country’s justice minister and attorney general, will use an upcoming event as the opportunity to once again push for more speech-restrictive legislation, allegedly solely in order to deal with online “harm and hate speech.”

No surprise there, but the list of the sponsors of the event – dubbed, “Where Online Harms Have Real World Consequences: The Case for Legislating Against Harm and Hate” – is interesting. It includes Meta, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

There could be different interpretations of this, one being that the giants want online speech regulated “to entrench their positions and keep out dissenting views” – as Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski put it.

Or it could be that Canada’s relentless policies damaging these companies’ business interests in the process of restricting speech are motivating the likes of Meta and Amazon to try to stay on the authorities’ good side, including through sponsorships.

And, two wrong things get to be true at the same time, so we may be witnessing some combination thereof.

In any case, the Empire Club, where the gathering is to be held, announced it by saying participants will be able to learn about the government’s plans to “tame some of the worst excesses of life online, and protect the rights of all Canadians who wish to express themselves without fear.”

All Canadians, that is, except those Virani would like to be put under house arrest or cut off their internet access as a kind of dystopian “preventive measure” – namely, when there is “fear” they might commit whatever’s designated as hate propaganda or crime, at some point in the future.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Brazil Targets Twitter Files Author Who Revealed Censorship Orders

April 27, 2024

Brazil Targets Twitter Files Author Who Revealed Censorship Orders

Brazil’s Attorney General claims his Twitter Files coverage amounts to a “probable crime” against the state, a charge the journalist vehemently denies.

Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, who has recently been covering the public clash between X owner Elon Musk and the President of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and Supreme Federal Court (STF) justice Alexandre de Moraes, is now likely to himself be targeted by one of those courts, the STF.

If the court starts a criminal prosecution against Shellenberger, it will be at the request of Brazil’s Attorney General Jorge Messias, who claims that there is information proving that the US journalist has committed a “probable crime” against the rule of law and institutions, along with an “attempt to destabilize the democratic state.”

Messias further accuses Shellenberger of disclosing confidential information related to the events of January 8, 2023.

The memo sent to STF says that the journalist on April 3 published, as part of the Twitter Files that concern Brazil, a number of emails exchanged by the court and X employees, which are referred to as “confidential files.”

And, of course, Shellenberger is “guilty” of making accusations against Moraes, Messias wrote, remarking that the journalist – “attributes authoritarian and anti-democratic measures” to the STF justice.

Shellenberger has denied these claims made against him, in turn describing Messias’ move as an “abuse of power,” urging the country’s Congress to investigate and finally end such conduct, and noting that in a democracy, there is no law against “destabilizing the democratic state” through non-violent means.

That would pretty much be what politics is all about – given that in this case, the term “state” clearly refers to those currently in power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This really is World War III

April 27, 2024

This really is World War III

It’s Team Tyranny vs. Team Freedom in the fight of our lives

I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.

Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:

Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
“One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.

So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.

And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.

Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by big tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

From One Ignorance to the Next

April 27, 2024

From One Ignorance to the Next

Is humanity a herd of animals, doomed to follow its rulers to slaughter?

There is a tendency to view history as if it were a personified being, as if it has a mind of its own and is trying to accomplish predetermined goals for humanity. One version of this view is that history moves toward liberating man from oppressive regimes. Marx claimed that history moved determinately through stages according to prevailing modes of production, roughly going from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism, and ultimately to socialism. Modern neoliberals or neoconservatives might say that history is a process of “the people” being given more of a voice in their government—a view that conveniently means the current system that provides the elite with power and job security is the ultimate end of history.

Personally, I view history as ultimately a product of Providence. However, God works in mysterious ways, and allows us to be the agents of change within whatever His ultimate plan for history is. Thus the question for what causes change from one period of history to the next is not as simple as saying it is whatever God wills. Even embracing Providence, we can still ask whether any patterns emerge in how human beings ambulate from one period of history to the next.

Thus, it occurs to me that a case can be made for viewing the progression between historical periods as the product of a series of “veils of ignorance” being removed from people’s minds, only to be replaced with new ones under which they can still be ruled but under new systems of government.

person covering the eyes of woman on dark room — Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Leading German politician calls for the state to issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online

April 27, 2024

Leading German politician calls for the state to issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online

If only speech were not a right but a privilege granted selectively by the state, our democratic freedoms would be that much more secure.

You may remember this man. His name is Mario Voigt, and he is the head of the centre-right CDU in Thüringen. He made national headlines a few weeks ago for grievously threatening German democracy by agreeing to debate his AfD counterpart Björn Höcke on national television. Because the AfD in general and Höcke in particular are antidemocratic fascists, allowing them anywhere near a microphone is very likely to destroy our entire system of government, that is what a weak and failed state we have here in Germany.

The duel between our leading Thuringian politicians was all but unwatchable, as indeed almost all political debates turn out to be. While Höcke could’ve acquitted himself better, Voigt’s performance was flat, uninspired and profoundly banal. Among other things, the man suffers from a peculiar rodentine aspect; he bites his way stiffly through bland preformulated arguments like a squirrel chewing a stale nut or a beaver gnawing through saplings. After the event, the CDU took to the press to declare victory, but polls showed that viewers found Höcke on balance more persuasive, which is of course the real reason that everybody told Voigt to avoid the confrontation. Voigt is intensely democratic and therefore extremely right about everything, but somehow – and this is very awkward to discuss – his being eminently righteous and correct in all things does not manifest in an ability to defeat the very wrong and evil arguments of his opponents. It’s very weird how that works, perhaps somebody should look into it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Blaming the Public’s “Perception of the Economy”

April 26, 2024

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Blaming the Public’s “Perception of the Economy”

If you think you spent twenty years being ripped off while a generation of rent-seeking scam artists was showered with public subsidies, experts agree: your “perception” needs correcting

“People are really tying Bidenomics and their perception of the economy to the inflation rate,” said Matt Monday of Morning Consult, in a new Bloomberg story titled, “Biden’s gains against Trump vanish against deep economic pessimism, poll shows.” It’s the latest entrant in an intensifying campaign to describe voters, especially in key electoral swing states, as morons and partisan haters who’ll deny reality itself out of political spite.

This campaign has been weirdly perverse in its mockery. Seattle Times cartoonist David Horsey recently tossed off a visual of the reality-denying swing voter, rendering him as a pudgy, confused hominid in the mode of Monty Python’s duncelike Gumbys. Having negative feelings about “the best performing [economy] in the world” is equivalent to denying who won the Super Bowl:

When the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago ran “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data,” I thought the “It’s not me, it’s you” framing had to be ironic, a spoof of these increasingly numerous “perception of the economy” pieces. Nope:

Noting that 74% of respondents in a recent poll said they felt inflation in the “past year” was going in the wrong direction, author Greg Ip noted flatly “it’s not true,” adding:

I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Designing Collective Security | Olivia Lazard

April 26, 2024

Designing Collective Security | Olivia Lazard

Navigating existential crisis in a time of political and social upheaval

We’re breaking all kinds of records at the moment: cities are boiling at 62C, ocean temperatures are literally off the charts, and governments have increased the global defence budget to an alarming $2440 billion.

War costs life, and not just human life. The environmental impacts of war are colossal, with one study already showing that the first few months of Israel’s assault on Gaza emitted more carbon dioxide than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in one year. Our ecosystems are at their breaking point, with six of nine planetary boundaries crossed. We need global collaboration to commit the huge systems overhaul necessary to survive the planetary crises and mitigate the catastrophic decisions of the last centuries.

Olivia Lazard, environmental peacemaker and research fellow at Carnegie Europe, joins me to discuss just how complex that task is, detailing the five steps of the Anthropocene and how violence increases at each step. We discuss these legacy systems of extraction and violence and how they are embedded into decisions being made around A.I., creating security risks in a resource-scarce world. We also cover the dematerialisation of our economies, the myths that blind us to energy and materials, before discussing the balance of power tipping our planet and human systems further into crisis.

Tucker Carlson Explains that Watergate Was an Orchestration to Remove President Nixon from Office

April 26, 2024

Tucker Carlson Explains that Watergate Was an Orchestration to Remove President Nixon from Office

I have several times reported the same. Nixon was removed because he was making arms limitation agreements with the Soviets and opening to China. This was normalizing the enemy that the military/security complex needed for its budget and power. It was for the same reason that President Kennedy was assassinated by the military/security complex. The growing suspicion about Kennedy’s assassination meant that the military/security complex could not risk a second violent assassination, so Nixon was politically assassinated.

The same strategy was applied to Trump. When Trump said he intended to normalize relations with Russia, he presented himself as the same threat to the military-security complex as Kennedy and Nixon. That is what Russiagate was about, and what documentsgate, Jan 6 Insurrection, and two failed impeachments are all about. When Russiagate and the impeachments failed, they decided to steal the election. When Trump’s support survived all of this, they decided on the indictments. In the least, the indictments will keep Trump off the campaign circuit and use up his resources in legal fees.

It is the determination and ability of the military/security complex to protect its budget and power that makes peace impossible and wars our way of life.

https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1781484602756124759

Rumble Defies Global Censorship Trends, Takes Stand Against New Zealand’s Free Speech Crackdown

April 26, 2024

Rumble Defies Global Censorship Trends, Takes Stand Against New Zealand’s Free Speech Crackdown

Rumble rejects New Zealand’s censorship demand after whistleblower reveals alleged Covid vaccine-related deaths.

The CEO of Rumble, a free-speech YouTube competitor, says that global censorship levels are on the rise, but that what’s particularly noticeable are censorship demands coming from Australia and New Zealand – who seem to be following in the controversial, to say the least, footsteps of France and Brazil.

On the one hand, this is surprising, given these countries’ formal democratic provenance.

On the other hand, their actions over the last years, including site blocking at ISP level, constant demands for more stringent regulation to facilitate social media content removal, and even the draconian Covid – and post-Covid era measures, tell a different story.

Chris Pavlovski told Mat Kim that the FreeNZMedia channel has now become a deplatforming target in New Zealand, for reporting about leaked data from the National Vaccination Database, that a whistleblower, former Health New Zealand IT employee Barry Young, made available.

And the data Young gave to reporters and activists concerns Covid vaccine-related deaths and claims that these facts are being covered up.

For referring to Young, and referring to the data he provided to the public, a letter has been sent to Rumble to remove FreeNZMedia. It came from the National Health Authority.

However, Pavlovski said that the company has decided to refuse to do that, or to withdraw from the country, and will instead “challenge it and see what happens.”

Pavlovski went on to refer to this particular New Zealand case as “absurd” and “disgusting” – in that it bears resemblance to the Pentagon Papers. At that time, journalist Daniel Ellsberg emerged as a hero of free speech that was protected by the courts in the US.

…click the above link to read the rest of the article…

Accepting Our Lack of Agency

April 26, 2024

Accepting Our Lack of Agency

An early morning picture at Black Rock Mountain State Park in Georgia

The last month has been focused on acceptance, and has been building up to the inexorable, immutable, and irrevocable truth that besets us within the confines of the set of predicaments we face. The one thing I constantly see and hear is about all the things that “we” can do to mitigate the situation – all the ways we can “regenerate” nature – and all the ways we can “save the planet.” While I do think that society is beginning to realize that something is wrong, most people are still following the constant narratives being delivered in an attempt to keep the public calm. George Tsakraklides says it best right here, quote:

“The toxic positivity theatre isn’t confined to the corporatocracy. Hope, whether real and justified or morbidly delusional, is an irresistible narcotic for humans.

A hopeful message will always win over bitter truths, and our information machine knows this: news media habitually turn even the most sobering news into fast-consumable entertainment, making a mockery of reality.

It used to be that this was the role of movies: to allow us to experience a funny or terrifying world and entertain ourselves either way, knowing that it is all fake and we are watching from the safety of our sofa. But now the same is done to real, actual news coming from around the world: reality has been gamified, turned into amusement, into a video game in the most morally corrupt, sick, and irresponsible way possible. All of this, in the name of “hope” and “bringing lightness” to our collapse predicament.“

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ireland’s Hate Speech Bill Faces Backlash Amidst Authoritarian Fears

April 26, 2024

Ireland’s Hate Speech Bill Faces Backlash Amidst Authoritarian Fears

Ireland’s proposed hate speech legislation sparks fears of an authoritarian police state, with critics voicing concerns about blurred definitions and constitutional rights.

Ireland’s proposed hate speech legislation has sparked strong opposition amongst many of its citizens, with individuals complaining to their representatives about the potential risk of the country descending into an authoritarian police state, according to documents obtained by BreakingNews.ie through a Freedom of Information request.

Critics of the proposed bill, dubbed the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022, have expressed ambiguity around the definitions of hate and gender within the legislation.

The Taoiseach, Simon Harris, is resolute in modifying the Bill, which primarily seeks to revamp the 1989 incitement to hatred legislation, and pass it through successfully before the ensuing general elections.

Critics contend that the Bill’s primary aim to count “hate” as an aggravating element in certain offenses is fraught with a lack of clarity.

An alarming constituent email, forwarded to the Department of Justice by Fine Gael’s Michael Ring, a vocal opponent of the proposed law, emphasized that the Bill infringes on personal constitutional freedoms. The specific email highlighted the significant powers conferred on the police due to Section 15 of the Bill, arguing that such state control was reminiscent of a police state.

Moreover, Ring relayed a multitude of similar constituent concerns to the justice minister, seeking an urgent response from him. Meanwhile, Senator Michael McDowell raised the question of whether transgender is a gender in Irish law and requested clarity on the term’s legislative definition.

Numerous emails exposed further condemnation of the proposed laws and raised concerns about the potential implications they could have on freedom of speech.

Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

April 25, 2024

Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cashless Society: WEF Boasts That 98% Of Central Banks Are Adopting CBDCs

April 25, 2024

Cashless Society: WEF Boasts That 98% Of Central Banks Are Adopting CBDCs

Whatever happened to the WEF? One minute they were everywhere in the media and now they have all but disappeared from public discourse. After the pandemic agenda was defeated and the plan to exploit public fear to create a perpetual medical autocracy was exposed, Klaus Schwab and his merry band of globalists slithered back into the woodwork. To be sure, we’ll be seeing them again one day, but for now the WEF has relegated itself away from the spotlight and into the dark recesses of the Davos echo chamber.

Much of their discussions now focus on issues like climate change or DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), but one vital subject continues to pop up in the white papers of global think tanks and it’s a program that was introduced very publicly during covid. Every person that cares about economic freedom should be wary of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as perhaps the biggest threat to human liberty since the attempted introduction of vaccine passports.

The WEF recently boasted in a new white paper that 98% of all central banks are now pursuing CBDC programs. The report, titled ‘Modernizing Financial Markets With Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency’, notes:

“CeBM is ideal for systemically important transactions despite the emergence of alternative payment instruments…Wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) is a form of CeBM that could unlock new economic models and integration points that are not possible today.”

The paper primarily focuses on the streamlining of crossborder transactions, an effort which the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has been deeply involved in for the past few years…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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