Jun 07

Today’s News 7th June 2023

  • Luongo: There Never Was An Offramp In Ukraine
    Luongo: There Never Was An Offramp In Ukraine

    Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

    The long-awaited offensive from Ukraine has begun. So far the results have been mixed with both sides claiming victories per the normal flow of propaganda. None of that matters.

    What is not up for discussion is the tragedy, aimed squarely at civilians, of the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, attacked last night releasing the Dnieper river into the valley in Kherson oblast.

    This dam provided not only local electric power but also cooling water for the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.

    The ZNPP has been the subject of numerous incidents since this war began with battles being fought over it, and accusations flying wildly from the West as to how irresponsible Russia was. None of that turned out to be true as ZNPP was set up to be the site of a massive false flag involving UN inspectors which failed.

    It doesn’t matter who you back in this war or whose incentives you sympathize with. Acts like this serve many purposes, some of them military, some of them political.

    And they follow a particular pattern.

    Like the narrative from last year surrounding the attacks on the ZNPP, this attack on the dam begs very obvious questions.

    Why would Russia attack a nuclear power plant in an area under its control?

    Going back to Syria right after Donald Trump took office in early 2017, why would Assad gas civilians when he and Russia had the momentum and was clearly winning the war in Idlib province, invoking the wrath of the world?

    Why would Russia blow up Nordstream 1 and 2 as they were initially accused of?

    Why would Russia attack a dam in territory they control that provides local power to Kherson, cooling water to the ZNPP and fresh water to Crimea?

    The answers to all of these questions is simply, “They wouldn’t.”

    So now let’s do a little more historic digging into past behavior.

    Before the war officially started who blew up power stations denying Crimea power in the fall of 2015, creating blackouts and real civilian hardship?

    Who is on record saying that the Minsk Agreements were simply a time-buying exercise to arm Ukraine and freeze Russia for the war we have today?

    Who staged a terrorist attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge?

    Who has tested the waters on attacking the dam?

    Whose leadership continues to go around the world desperately trying to convince rational people that this irrational ethnic war between tribes of Slavs is a fight for the future of western civilization?

    Who intentionally helped stoke simmering hatred of all things Russian across the entirety of Eastern Europe to push the world to this moment?

    In short, who armed Ukraine while never once acting with one ounce of humility or basic human decency to find a solution that didn’t involve thousands of dead Slavs?

    The answer is the same people accusing Russia today of blowing up a dam that severely weakens their strategic position in southern Ukraine.

    The first person out the gate was EU Council President Charles Michel:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The rest of the world will pile on for the next 72 hours or so until some footage or evidence makes its way into the information space. It’s the same pattern as Nordstream, the chemical attacks in Ghouta and Khan Sheykoun, MH-17 and a host of other attacks on civilians over the past decade since Putin helped thwart Obama’s “Coalition of the willing” to take out Assad in 2013 following Ghouta.

    Right on schedule: Perfidious Albion weighs in.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Everything in Ukraine is downstream (all puns intended) of that. Everything. It’s all one big long policy decision after another. In this respect Ukraine has been a series of moves on a chess board leading to a particular outcome.

    And that outcome will be a full-fledged war between NATO and Russia over Ukraine. It’s what everyone in power actually wants, even when they mouth words to the contrary. EU officials like Michel, EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and now presidential candidates in the US say the same thing.

    There can be no victory for Russia in Ukraine. It would be the end of the West.

    Waffle House Waitress Nikki Haley is out repeating the lie that Russia will take all of Poland and the Baltics if he wins on CNN. It doesn’t matter that she’ll get 1% of the primary vote, her job is to reinforce the narrative.

    We’ve all been waiting for the next big ‘disaster’ to up the ante in Ukraine. It’s been too quiet for too long. Now with the fighting intensifying along multiple fronts, this move is it.

    So, with it done what does it mean?

    The most obvious is that this materially weakens Russia’s position in Kherson and then Crimea. It follows that this is just the prelude to the long-expected full on attack on Crimea.

    It could be some weird statement by the Ukrainians that they are looking for an offramp by drawing an impassable barrier between their territory and Russia’s but I’ll need to see a lot more evidence of that before I can even contemplate it.

    Because Occam’s razor reminds us of the intense need to take not only Ukraine to the next level but the entire Davos Great Reset agenda there as well.

    For more than a year the West, primarily the US with a lot of British assistance, have tried to craft a humanitarian crisis narrative around Russia to justify a wider war.

    This is just the latest example of their handiwork.

    • The Ukrainians want this to elicit sympathy from gaslit morons with Ukraine flags in the Twitter name.

    • The Brits need this because their centuries-long feud with Russia simply cannot end with a whimper in Ukraine.

    • The US thinks they need this because of the ridiculous Great Powers mind virus unleashed on us by our colonial “betters.”

    • Davos needs this because you can’t roll the world up into your total control if there are any great nations left.

    When viewed through the lens of the power-mongers who unleashed this war I leave you with one last question.

    What do you call a hundred thousand dead Slavs fighting over swampland?

    A good start.

    *  *  *

    Join my Patreon if you want off this ride

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/07/2023 – 02:00

  • Andreesen: Why AI Will Save The World
    Andreesen: Why AI Will Save The World

    Authored by Marc Andreesen via a16x.com,

    The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out.

    Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.

    First, a short description of what AI is: The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. AI is a computer program like any other – it runs, takes input, processes, and generates output. AI’s output is useful across a wide range of fields, ranging from coding to medicine to law to the creative arts. It is owned by people and controlled by people, like any other technology.

    A shorter description of what AI isn’t: Killer software and robots that will spring to life and decide to murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything, like you see in the movies.

    An even shorter description of what AI could be: A way to make everything we care about better.

    Why AI Can Make Everything We Care About Better

    The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and thousands of studies is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better. Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity: academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’ perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction.

    Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.

    What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.

    AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very quickly from here – if we let it.

    In our new era of AI:

    • Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.

    • Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.

    • Every scientist will have an AI assistant/collaborator/partner that will greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every caregiver will have the same in their worlds.

    • Every leader of people – CEO, government official, nonprofit president, athletic coach, teacher – will have the same. The magnification effects of better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous, so this intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all.

    • Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet.

    • Scientific breakthroughs and new technologies and medicines will dramatically expand, as AI helps us further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for our benefit.

    • The creative arts will enter a golden age, as AI-augmented artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers gain the ability to realize their visions far faster and at greater scale than ever before.

    • I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.

    • In short, anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.

    • And this isn’t just about intelligence! Perhaps the most underestimated quality of AI is how humanizing it can be. AI art gives people who otherwise lack technical skills the freedom to create and share their artistic ideas. Talking to an empathetic AI friend really does improve their ability to handle adversity. And AI medical chatbots are already more empathetic than their human counterparts. Rather than making the world harsher and more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer and nicer.

    The stakes here are high. The opportunities are profound. AI is quite possibly the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those.

    The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future.

    We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can.

    So Why The Panic?

    In contrast to this positive view, the public conversation about AI is presently shot through with hysterical fear and paranoia.

    We hear claims that AI will variously kill us all, ruin our society, take all our jobs, cause crippling inequality, and enable bad people to do awful things.

    What explains this divergence in potential outcomes from near utopia to horrifying dystopia?

    Historically, every new technology that matters, from electric lighting to automobiles to radio to the Internet, has sparked a moral panic – a social contagion that convinces people the new technology is going to destroy the world, or society, or both. The fine folks at Pessimists Archive have documented these technology-driven moral panics over the decades; their history makes the pattern vividly clear. It turns out this present panic is not even the first for AI.

    Now, it is certainly the case that many new technologies have led to bad outcomes – often the same technologies that have been otherwise enormously beneficial to our welfare. So it’s not that the mere existence of a moral panic means there is nothing to be concerned about.

    But a moral panic is by its very nature irrational – it takes what may be a legitimate concern and inflates it into a level of hysteria that ironically makes it harder to confront actually serious concerns.

    And wow do we have a full-blown moral panic about AI right now.

    This moral panic is already being used as a motivating force by a variety of actors to demand policy action – new AI restrictions, regulations, and laws. These actors, who are making extremely dramatic public statements about the dangers of AI – feeding on and further inflaming moral panic – all present themselves as selfless champions of the public good.

    But are they?

    And are they right or wrong?

    The Baptists And Bootleggers Of AI

    Economists have observed a longstanding pattern in reform movements of this kind. The actors within movements like these fall into two categories – “Baptists” and “Bootleggers” – drawing on the historical example of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s:

    • “Baptists” are the true believer social reformers who legitimately feel – deeply and emotionally, if not rationally – that new restrictions, regulations, and laws are required to prevent societal disaster. For alcohol prohibition, these actors were often literally devout Christians who felt that alcohol was destroying the moral fabric of society. For AI risk, these actors are true believers that AI presents one or another existential risks – strap them to a polygraph, they really mean it.

    • “Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors. For alcohol prohibition, these were the literal bootleggers who made a fortune selling illicit alcohol to Americans when legitimate alcohol sales were banned. For AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks.

    A cynic would suggest that some of the apparent Baptists are also Bootleggers – specifically the ones paid to attack AI by their universities, think tanks, activist groups, and media outlets. If you are paid a salary or receive grants to foster AI panic…you are probably a Bootlegger.

    The problem with the Bootleggers is that they win. The Baptists are naive ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical operators, and so the result of reform movements like these is often that the Bootleggers get what they want – regulatory capture, insulation from competition, the formation of a cartel – and the Baptists are left wondering where their drive for social improvement went so wrong.

    We just lived through a stunning example of this – banking reform after the 2008 global financial crisis. The Baptists told us that we needed new laws and regulations to break up the “too big to fail” banks to prevent such a crisis from ever happening again. So Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was marketed as satisfying the Baptists’ goal, but in reality was coopted by the Bootleggers – the big banks. The result is that the same banks that were “too big to fail” in 2008 are much, much larger now.

    So in practice, even when the Baptists are genuine – and even when the Baptists are right – they are used as cover by manipulative and venal Bootleggers to benefit themselves. 

    And this is what is happening in the drive for AI regulation right now.

    However, it isn’t sufficient to simply identify the actors and impugn their motives. We should consider the arguments of both the Baptists and the Bootleggers on their merits.

    AI Risk #1: Will AI Kill Us All?

    The first and original AI doomer risk is that AI will decide to literally kill humanity.

    The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods. Later, Mary Shelley gave us moderns our own version of this myth in her novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, in which we develop the technology for eternal life, which then rises up and seeks to destroy us. And of course, no AI panic newspaper story is complete without a still image of a gleaming red-eyed killer robot from James Cameron’s Terminator films.

    The presumed evolutionary purpose of this mythology is to motivate us to seriously consider potential risks of new technologies – fire, after all, can indeed be used to burn down entire cities. But just as fire was also the foundation of modern civilization as used to keep us warm and safe in a cold and hostile world, this mythology ignores the far greater upside of most – all? – new technologies, and in practice inflames destructive emotion rather than reasoned analysis. Just because premodern man freaked out like this doesn’t mean we have to; we can apply rationality instead.

    My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious handwave.

    In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.

    Now, obviously, there are true believers in killer AI – Baptists – who are gaining a suddenly stratospheric amount of media coverage for their terrifying warnings, some of whom claim to have been studying the topic for decades and say they are now scared out of their minds by what they have learned. Some of these true believers are even actual innovators of the technology. These actors are arguing for a variety of bizarre and extreme restrictions on AI ranging from a ban on AI development, all the way up to military airstrikes on datacenters and nuclear war. They argue that because people like me cannot rule out future catastrophic consequences of AI, that we must assume a precautionary stance that may require large amounts of physical violence and death in order to prevent potential existential risk.

    My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone? These questions go mainly unanswered apart from “You can’t prove it won’t happen!” In fact, these Baptists’ position is so non-scientific and so extreme – a conspiracy theory about math and code – and is already calling for physical violence, that I will do something I would normally not do and question their motives as well.

    Specifically, I think three things are going on:

    First, recall that John Von Neumann responded to Robert Oppenheimer’s famous hand-wringing about his role creating nuclear weapons – which helped end World War II and prevent World War III – with, “Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.” What is the most dramatic way one can claim credit for the importance of one’s work without sounding overtly boastful? This explains the mismatch between the words and actions of the Baptists who are actually building and funding AI – watch their actions, not their words. (Truman was harsher after meeting with Oppenheimer: “Don’t let that crybaby in here again.”)

    Second, some of the Baptists are actually Bootleggers. There is a whole profession of “AI safety expert”, “AI ethicist”, “AI risk researcher”. They are paid to be doomers, and their statements should be processed appropriately.

    Third, California is justifiably famous for our many thousands of cults, from EST to the Peoples Temple, from Heaven’s Gate to the Manson Family. Many, although not all, of these cults are harmless, and maybe even serve a purpose for alienated people who find homes in them. But some are very dangerous indeed, and cults have a notoriously hard time straddling the line that ultimately leads to violence and death.

    And the reality, which is obvious to everyone in the Bay Area but probably not outside of it, is that “AI risk” has developed into a cult, which has suddenly emerged into the daylight of global press attention and the public conversation. This cult has pulled in not just fringe characters, but also some actual industry experts and a not small number of wealthy donors – including, until recently, Sam Bankman-Fried. And it’s developed a full panoply of cult behaviors and beliefs.

    This cult is why there are a set of AI risk doomers who sound so extreme – it’s not that they actually have secret knowledge that make their extremism logical, it’s that they’ve whipped themselves into a frenzy and really are…extremely extreme.

    It turns out that this type of cult isn’t new – there is a longstanding Western tradition of millenarianism, which generates apocalypse cults. The AI risk cult has all the hallmarks of a millenarian apocalypse cult. From Wikipedia, with additions by me:

    “Millenarianism is the belief by a group or movement [AI risk doomers] in a coming fundamental transformation of society [the arrival of AI], after which all things will be changed [AI utopia, dystopia, and/or end of the world]. Only dramatic events [AI bans, airstrikes on datacenters, nuclear strikes on unregulated AI] are seen as able to change the world [prevent AI] and the change is anticipated to be brought about, or survived, by a group of the devout and dedicated. In most millenarian scenarios, the disaster or battle to come [AI apocalypse, or its prevention] will be followed by a new, purified world [AI bans] in which the believers will be rewarded [or at least acknowledged to have been correct all along].”

    This apocalypse cult pattern is so obvious that I am surprised more people don’t see it.

    Don’t get me wrong, cults are fun to hear about, their written material is often creative and fascinating, and their members are engaging at dinner parties and on TV. But their extreme beliefs should not determine the future of laws and society – obviously not.

    AI Risk #2: Will AI Ruin Our Society?

    The second widely mooted AI risk is that AI will ruin our society, by generating outputs that will be so “harmful”, to use the nomenclature of this kind of doomer, as to cause profound damage to humanity, even if we’re not literally killed.

    Short version: If the murder robots don’t get us, the hate speech and misinformation will.

    This is a relatively recent doomer concern that branched off from and somewhat took over the “AI risk” movement that I described above. In fact, the terminology of AI risk recently changed from “AI safety” – the term used by people who are worried that AI would literally kill us – to “AI alignment” – the term used by people who are worried about societal “harms”. The original AI safety people are frustrated by this shift, although they don’t know how to put it back in the box – they now advocate that the actual AI risk topic be renamed “AI notkilleveryoneism”, which has not yet been widely adopted but is at least clear.

    The tipoff to the nature of the AI societal risk claim is its own term, “AI alignment”. Alignment with what? Human values. Whose human values? Ah, that’s where things get tricky.

    As it happens, I have had a front row seat to an analogous situation – the social media “trust and safety” wars. As is now obvious, social media services have been under massive pressure from governments and activists to ban, restrict, censor, and otherwise suppress a wide range of content for many years. And the same concerns of “hate speech” (and its mathematical counterpart, “algorithmic bias”) and “misinformation” are being directly transferred from the social media context to the new frontier of “AI alignment”. 

    My big learnings from the social media wars are:

    On the one hand, there is no absolutist free speech position. First, every country, including the United States, makes at least some content illegal. Second, there are certain kinds of content, like child pornography and incitements to real world violence, that are nearly universally agreed to be off limits – legal or not – by virtually every society. So any technological platform that facilitates or generates content – speech – is going to have some restrictions.

    On the other hand, the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it’s an inevitability. Once a framework for restricting even egregiously terrible content is in place – for example, for hate speech, a specific hurtful word, or for misinformation, obviously false claims like “the Pope is dead” – a shockingly broad range of government agencies and activist pressure groups and nongovernmental entities will kick into gear and demand ever greater levels of censorship and suppression of whatever speech they view as threatening to society and/or their own personal preferences. They will do this up to and including in ways that are nakedly felony crimes. This cycle in practice can run apparently forever, with the enthusiastic support of authoritarian hall monitors installed throughout our elite power structures. This has been cascading for a decade in social media and with only certain exceptions continues to get more fervent all the time.

    And so this is the dynamic that has formed around “AI alignment” now. Its proponents claim the wisdom to engineer AI-generated speech and thought that are good for society, and to ban AI-generated speech and thoughts that are bad for society. Its opponents claim that the thought police are breathtakingly arrogant and presumptuous – and often outright criminal, at least in the US – and in fact are seeking to become a new kind of fused government-corporate-academic authoritarian speech dictatorship ripped straight from the pages of George Orwell’s 1984.

    As the proponents of both “trust and safety” and “AI alignment” are clustered into the very narrow slice of the global population that characterizes the American coastal elites – which includes many of the people who work in and write about the tech industry – many of my readers will find yourselves primed to argue that dramatic restrictions on AI output are required to avoid destroying society. I will not attempt to talk you out of this now, I will simply state that this is the nature of the demand, and that most people in the world neither agree with your ideology nor want to see you win.

    If you don’t agree with the prevailing niche morality that is being imposed on both social media and AI via ever-intensifying speech codes, you should also realize that the fight over what AI is allowed to say/generate will be even more important – by a lot – than the fight over social media censorship. AI is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered. You should be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the age-old claim that they are protecting you.

    In short, don’t let the thought police suppress AI.

    AI Risk #3: Will AI Take All Our Jobs?

    The fear of job loss due variously to mechanization, automation, computerization, or AI has been a recurring panic for hundreds of years, since the original onset of machinery such as the mechanical loom. Even though every new major technology has led to more jobs at higher wages throughout history, each wave of this panic is accompanied by claims that “this time is different” – this is the time it will finally happen, this is the technology that will finally deliver the hammer blow to human labor. And yet, it never happens. 

    We’ve been through two such technology-driven unemployment panic cycles in our recent past – the outsourcing panic of the 2000’s, and the automation panic of the 2010’s. Notwithstanding many talking heads, pundits, and even tech industry executives pounding the table throughout both decades that mass unemployment was near, by late 2019 – right before the onset of COVID – the world had more jobs at higher wages than ever in history.

    Nevertheless this mistaken idea will not die.

    And sure enough, it’s back.

    This time, we finally have the technology that’s going to take all the jobs and render human workers superfluous – real AI. Surely this time history won’t repeat, and AI will cause mass unemployment – and not rapid economic, job, and wage growth – right?

    No, that’s not going to happen – and in fact AI, if allowed to develop and proliferate throughout the economy, may cause the most dramatic and sustained economic boom of all time, with correspondingly record job and wage growth – the exact opposite of the fear. And here’s why.

    The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do.

    The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.

    But the good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages. This is because, at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest. The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages.

    To summarize, technology empowers people to be more productive. This causes the prices for existing goods and services to fall, and for wages to rise. This in turn causes economic growth and job growth, while motivating the creation of new jobs and new industries. If a market economy is allowed to function normally and if technology is allowed to be introduced freely, this is a perpetual upward cycle that never ends. For, as Milton Friedman observed, “Human wants and needs are endless” – we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market economy is the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could conceivably want, but never all the way there. And that is why technology doesn’t destroy jobs and never will.

    These are such mindblowing ideas for people who have not been exposed to them that it may take you some time to wrap your head around them. But I swear I’m not making them up – in fact you can read all about them in standard economics textbooks. I recommend the chapter The Curse of Machinery in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, and Frederic Bastiat’s satirical Candlemaker’s Petition to blot out the sun due to its unfair competition with the lighting industry, here modernized for our times.

    But this time is different, you’re thinking. This time, with AI, we have the technology that can replace ALL human labor.

    But, using the principles I described above, think of what it would mean for literally all existing human labor to be replaced by machines.

    It would mean a takeoff rate of economic productivity growth that would be absolutely stratospheric, far beyond any historical precedent. Prices of existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually zero. Consumer welfare would skyrocket. Consumer spending power would skyrocket. New demand in the economy would explode. Entrepreneurs would create dizzying arrays of new industries, products, and services, and employ as many people and AI as they could as fast as possible to meet all the new demand.

    Suppose AI once again replaces that labor? The cycle would repeat, driving consumer welfare, economic growth, and job and wage growth even higher. It would be a straight spiral up to a material utopia that neither Adam Smith or Karl Marx ever dared dream of. 

    We should be so lucky.

    AI Risk #4: Will AI Lead To Crippling Inequality?

    Speaking of Karl Marx, the concern about AI taking jobs segues directly into the next claimed AI risk, which is, OK, Marc, suppose AI does take all the jobs, either for bad or for good. Won’t that result in massive and crippling wealth inequality, as the owners of AI reap all the economic rewards and regular people get nothing?

    As it happens, this was a central claim of Marxism, that the owners of the means of production – the bourgeoisie – would inevitably steal all societal wealth from the people who do the actual  work – the proletariat. This is another fallacy that simply will not die no matter how often it’s disproved by reality. But let’s drive a stake through its heart anyway.

    The flaw in this theory is that, as the owner of a piece of technology, it’s not in your own interest to keep it to yourself – in fact the opposite, it’s in your own interest to sell it to as many customers as possible. The largest market in the world for any product is the entire world, all 8 billion of us. And so in reality, every new technology – even ones that start by selling to the rarefied air of high-paying big companies or wealthy consumers – rapidly proliferates until it’s in the hands of the largest possible mass market, ultimately everyone on the planet.

    The classic example of this was Elon Musk’s so-called “secret plan” – which he naturally published openly – for Tesla in 2006:

    Step 1, Build [expensive] sports car

    Step 2, Use that money to build an affordable car

    Step 3, Use that money to build an even more affordable car

    …which is of course exactly what he’s done, becoming the richest man in the world as a result.

    That last point is key. Would Elon be even richer if he only sold cars to rich people today? No. Would he be even richer than that if he only made cars for himself? Of course not. No, he maximizes his own profit by selling to the largest possible market, the world.

    In short, everyone gets the thing – as we saw in the past with not just cars but also electricity, radio, computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and search engines. The makers of such technologies are highly motivated to drive down their prices until everyone on the planet can afford them. This is precisely what is already happening in AI – it’s why you can use state of the art generative AI not just at low cost but even for free today in the form of Microsoft Bing and Google Bard – and it is what will continue to happen. Not because such vendors are foolish or generous but precisely because they are greedy – they want to maximize the size of their market, which maximizes their profits.

    So what happens is the opposite of technology driving centralization of wealth – individual customers of the technology, ultimately including everyone on the planet, are empowered instead, and capture most of the generated value. As with prior technologies, the companies that build AI – assuming they have to function in a free market – will compete furiously to make this happen.

    Marx was wrong then, and he’s wrong now.

    This is not to say that inequality is not an issue in our society. It is, it’s just not being driven by technology, it’s being driven by the reverse, by the sectors of the economy that are the most resistant to new technology, that have the most government intervention to prevent the adoption of new technology like AI – specifically housing, education, and health care. The actual risk of AI and inequality is not that AI will cause more inequality but rather that we will not allow AI to be used to reduce inequality.

    AI Risk #5: Will AI Lead To Bad People Doing Bad Things?

    So far I have explained why four of the five most often proposed risks of AI are not actually real – AI will not come to life and kill us, AI will not ruin our society, AI will not cause mass unemployment, and AI will not cause an ruinous increase in inequality. But now let’s address the fifth, the one I actually agree with: AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things.

    In some sense this is a tautology. Technology is a tool. Tools, starting with fire and rocks, can be used to do good things – cook food and build houses – and bad things – burn people and bludgeon people. Any technology can be used for good or bad. Fair enough. And AI will make it easier for criminals, terrorists, and hostile governments to do bad things, no question.

    This causes some people to propose, well, in that case, let’s not take the risk, let’s ban AI now before this can happen. Unfortunately, AI is not some esoteric physical material that is hard to come by, like plutonium. It’s the opposite, it’s the easiest material in the world to come by – math and code.

    The AI cat is obviously already out of the bag. You can learn how to build AI from thousands of free online courses, books, papers, and videos, and there are outstanding open source implementations proliferating by the day. AI is like air – it will be everywhere. The level of totalitarian oppression that would be required to arrest that would be so draconian – a world government monitoring and controlling all computers? jackbooted thugs in black helicopters seizing rogue GPUs? – that we would not have a society left to protect.

    So instead, there are two very straightforward ways to address the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, and these are precisely what we should focus on.

    First, we have laws on the books to criminalize most of the bad things that anyone is going to do with AI. Hack into the Pentagon? That’s a crime. Steal money from a bank? That’s a crime. Create a bioweapon? That’s a crime. Commit a terrorist act? That’s a crime. We can simply focus on preventing those crimes when we can, and prosecuting them when we cannot. We don’t even need new laws – I’m not aware of a single actual bad use for AI that’s been proposed that’s not already illegal. And if a new bad use is identified, we ban that use. QED.

    But you’ll notice what I slipped in there – I said we should focus first on preventing AI-assisted crimes before they happen – wouldn’t such prevention mean banning AI? Well, there’s another way to prevent such actions, and that’s by using AI as a defensive tool. The same capabilities that make AI dangerous in the hands of bad guys with bad goals make it powerful in the hands of good guys with good goals – specifically the good guys whose job it is to prevent bad things from happening.

    For example, if you are worried about AI generating fake people and fake videos, the answer is to build new systems where people can verify themselves and real content via cryptographic signatures. Digital creation and alteration of both real and fake content was already here before AI; the answer is not to ban word processors and Photoshop – or AI – but to use technology to build a system that actually solves the problem.

    And so, second, let’s mount major efforts to use AI for good, legitimate, defensive purposes. Let’s put AI to work in cyberdefense, in biological defense, in hunting terrorists, and in everything else that we do to keep ourselves, our communities, and our nation safe.

    There are already many smart people in and out of government doing exactly this, of course – but if we apply all of the effort and brainpower that’s currently fixated on the futile prospect of banning AI to using AI to protect against bad people doing bad things, I think there’s no question a world infused with AI will be much safer than the world we live in today.

    The Actual Risk Of Not Pursuing AI With Maximum Force And Speed

    There is one final, and real, AI risk that is probably the scariest at all:

    AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China.

    China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do – they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop. They are not even being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to China – they intend to proliferate it all across the world, everywhere they are powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning Belt And Road money, everywhere they are providing friendly consumer apps like Tiktok that serve as front ends to their centralized command and control AI.

    The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.

    I propose a simple strategy for what to do about this – in fact, the same strategy President Ronald Reagan used to win the first Cold War with the Soviet Union.

    “We win, they lose.”

    Rather than allowing ungrounded panics around killer AI, “harmful” AI, job-destroying AI, and inequality-generating AI to put us on our back feet, we in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard as we possibly can.

    We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not.

    In the process, we should drive AI into our economy and society as fast and hard as we possibly can, in order to maximize its gains for economic productivity and human potential.

    This is the best way both to offset the real AI risks and to ensure that our way of life is not displaced by the much darker Chinese vision.

    What Is To Be Done?

    I propose a simple plan:

    • Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.

    • Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way.

    • Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have.

    • To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.

    • To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.

    And that is how we use AI to save the world.

    It’s time to build.

    Legends and Heroes

    I close with two simple statements.

    The development of AI started in the 1940’s, simultaneous with the invention of the computer. The first scientific paper on neural networks – the architecture of the AI we have today – was published in 1943. Entire generations of AI scientists over the last 80 years were born, went to school, worked, and in many cases passed away without seeing the payoff that we are receiving now. They are legends, every one.

    Today, growing legions of engineers – many of whom are young and may have had grandparents or even great-grandparents involved in the creation of the ideas behind AI – are working to make AI a reality, against a wall of fear-mongering and doomerism that is attempting to paint them as reckless villains. I do not believe they are reckless or villains. They are heroes, every one. My firm and I are thrilled to back as many of them as we can, and we will stand alongside them and their work 100%.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/07/2023 – 00:05

  • Supreme Court Overrules Local Governments For Seizing Homes
    Supreme Court Overrules Local Governments For Seizing Homes

    Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The U.S. Supreme Court reversed court rulings in which local governments seized two homes over unpaid tax debts and kept sale proceeds that far exceeded the tax owed.

    The Supreme Court held a special sitting on Sept. 30, 2022, for the formal investiture ceremony of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States/Getty Images)

    Critics call the practice “home equity theft.”

    The case came after Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which represented the homeowners in both cases, released a report late last year saying that 12 states and the District of Columbia allow local governments and private investors to seize dramatically more than what is owed from homeowners who fall behind on property tax payments. PLF is a national nonprofit public interest law firm that takes on governmental overreach.

    The U.S. Supreme Court released unsigned orders (pdf) on June 5 summarily reversing two rulings of the Supreme Court of Nebraska.

    The nation’s highest court did not explain why it was issuing the orders. No justices dissented.

    The judgments of the Supreme Court of Nebraska were vacated and the cases remanded to that court “for further consideration in light” of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County on May 25.

    In that decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Minnesota county wronged a 94-year-old grandmother when it forced the sale of her condominium over an unpaid tax debt and kept the sale proceeds that far exceeded the tax she owed.

    Geraldine Tyler owned a modest one-bedroom condominium in Hennepin County, but after she was harassed and frightened near her home, she moved to a new apartment in a safer neighborhood. The rent on her new apartment stretched her resources and she fell into arrears on her condo’s property tax bills, accumulating about $2,300 in taxes owed, along with $12,700 in penalties, interest, and costs.

    The county seized Tyler’s condo, valued at $93,000, and sold it for just $40,000. Instead of keeping the $15,000 it was owed, the county retained the full $40,000, amounting to a windfall of $25,000.

    Tyler sued, arguing that the government violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment by seizing property in excess of the debt. Her lawsuit was rejected by the courts, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, which found that the legal forfeiture of the property extinguished the owner’s property interest.

    But the county went too far in keeping the windfall, the U.S. Supreme Court held.

    The principle that a government is not allowed to take from a taxpayer more than she owes is based in English law and goes back at least as far as the Magna Carta of 1215. And Supreme Court precedents have long recognized that a taxpayer is entitled to the surplus in excess of the debt owed, the court stated at the time.

    “The Takings Clause ‘was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

    “A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed.”

    On June 5, the U.S. Supreme Court simultaneously granted the petitions of Kevin and Terry Fair and Sandra Nieveen seeking review while skipping over the oral argument phase when the merits of the case would have been considered.

    Some lawyers call this process GVR, which stands for grant, vacate, and remand.

    Critics say this process is part of the so-called shadow docket, which they say lacks transparency.

    In Fair v. Continental Resources (court file 22-160), Kevin and Terry Fair’s $60,000 home was taken by Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska, and Continental Resources for a $5,200 tax debt, according to the Fairs’ petition.

    Under the state’s tax foreclosure statute, the county extinguished the couple’s interest in the home by conveying full title to Continental without holding an auction and without any opportunity for the couple to recover their equity.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 23:25

  • San Fran's CRE Apocalypse: The City's Two Biggest Hotels Have Defaulted
    San Fran’s CRE Apocalypse: The City’s Two Biggest Hotels Have Defaulted

    The marxist shit(covered)show that is San Francisco is imploding before our very eyes in ways that are both terrifying, memorable wholly different each and every day.

    First, it was commercial real estate: at 30%, the city has the highest office vacancy rate in the US…

    … and amid an existential crisis for the city’s tech-focused tenants, finds that it can’t even sell office skyscrapers at a firesale price of 80% off  the purchase price, and even in the best case, a 71% discount is as good as it gets  (it got worse as we detailed in “There’s Poop Everywhere”: San Francisco’s Office District Not Only A Ghost Town, It’s Also Covered In Sh*t).

    Of course, it’s not just commercial real estate: residential is just as bad, with home prices in San Fran now tumbling double digits y/y, and just that other liberal disaster, Seattle, seeing home prices plunge faster.

    But while we expect the implosion in residential housing prices to accelerate, it’s really CRE where the ticking neutron bomb is to be found, and according to the latest horror story out of San Fran’s commercial real estate market, the owner of two of San Francisco’s biggest hotels — Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 — has stopped mortgage payments and plans to give up the two properties.

    As the SF Chronicle reports, Park Hotels & Resorts said Monday that it stopped making payments on a $725 million loan due in November, handing over the keys to the property to the creditors and expects the “ultimate removal of these hotels” from its portfolio. The company said it would “work in good faith with the loan’s servicers to determine the most effective path forward.”

    “After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market. Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges — both old and new,” said Thomas Baltimore Jr., CEO of Park Hotels, in a statement which could be applicable to every other liberal-controlled US metropolis.

    The 1,921-room Hilton is the city’s largest hotel and the 1,024-room Parc 55 is the fourth-largest, and together they account for around 9% of the city’s hotel stock. The hotels could potentially be taken over by lenders or sold to a new group as part of the foreclosure process, although it is unclear who would want to put even one dollar of equity into property that will more than likely redefault within a few years.

    That’s because there is no easy solution to San Fran’s long list of challenges which not only a record high office vacancy of around 30%, but also concerns over street conditions (and the amount of feces covering them), a lower rate of return to office compared with other cities (because woke snowflakes are naturally entitled to work from home of course) and “a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand,” Baltimore  Jr., said.

    Park Hotels said San Francisco’s convention-driven demand is expected to be 40% lower between 2023 and 2027 compared with the pre-pandemic average.

    San Francisco Travel, the city’s convention bureau, expects Moscone Center conventions to account for over 670,000 hotel room nights this year, higher than 2018’s 660,868 room nights but far below 2019’s record-high 967,956. And weaker convention attendance is projected for each following year through 2030.

    Park Hotels & Resorts expects to save over $200 million in capital expenditures over the next five years after giving up the hotels, and to issue a special dividend to shareholders of $150 million to $175 million. The company’s exposure will shift away from San Francisco toward the higher-growth Hawaii market (good luck with that).

    Parc 55 is a block from Westfield San Francisco Centre (the mall where Nordstrom is also departing), and the block where Banko Brown, an alleged shoplifter, was killed in a shooting outside a Walgreens in April. Nearby blocks are also full of empty storefronts, as tourist and local foot traffic hasn’t fully recovered and probably never will.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 23:05

  • Maté: Russiagate Prober Durham Neglected DNC Hack Claim, Despite Evidence It Too Was A Democrat Sham
    Maté: Russiagate Prober Durham Neglected DNC Hack Claim, Despite Evidence It Too Was A Democrat Sham

    Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClear Wire,

    Special Counsel John Durham’s final report faults the FBI for opening the Trump-Russia collusion investigation on baseless grounds and relying on Hillary Clinton-funded material to pursue it, all while ignoring a warning that Clinton was plotting to frame Trump as a Russian asset. Yet Durham does not address the Clinton campaign’s equally central tie to Russiagate’s other foundational allegation: that Russia interfered in the 2016 election by hacking Democratic party servers and releasing the material through Wikileaks to help elect Trump.

    Durham’s silence on the Clinton team’s role in generating this unproven claim comes despite his unearthing of evidence that newly calls it into question.

    Material obtained by Durham’s team shows that the Clinton campaign and its contractor, the cyber-firm CrowdStrike, stonewalled the FBI’s requests for critical data about the alleged Russian hack. Two key Clinton associates who were integral to the Russian hacking claim also appear to have perjured themselves before Congress.

    RealClearInvestigations has pieced together these overlooked revelations through court documents connected to Durham’s probe, particularly his unsuccessful prosecution of Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann on a separate perjury charge.

    In April 2016, Sussmann hired CrowdStrike to investigate the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). In mid-June just as Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS were producing their first Clinton-funded dossier report alleging a Trump-Russia conspiracy Clinton-funded CrowdStrike came forward to publicly accuse Russia of hacking the Democrats’ computer networks. Sussmann, who worked closely with the firm, lobbied the FBI to endorse the allegation. The FBI initially declined, but reversed course months later despite failing to examine the DNC/DCCC servers. Instead, much like its use of Steele’s dossier for surveillance warrants and investigative leads when it came to collusion, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics and redacted reports.

    The FBI’s dependency on CrowdStrike – and, indeed, the entire basis for the Russiagate probe was further called into question when it emerged that the firm’s president had admitted under oath that it “did not have concrete evidence” of Russian hacking. Shawn Henry, a former close FBI colleague of Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey, made the disclosure to Congress in December 2017. Yet his testimony was kept secret throughout the entirety of the FBI’s Comey- and Mueller-overseen Russia probes, and only became public in May 2020.

    Exhibits released by Durham in Sussmann’s case expose a new problem for CrowdStrike and its client the Clinton campaign: In recounting their roles in the FBI’s Russian hacking probe in congressional testimony, Sussmann and Henry gave identical false statements.

    FBI Officials Contradicted

    When they appeared before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, both Sussmann and Henry claimed that the FBI did not try to conduct its own independent, onsite investigation of the Democratic Party servers. The pair’s account contradicted FBI officials, including Comey, who have said that they requested access but were denied.

    Asked directly if the FBI sought access to the servers, Sussmann replied: “No, they did not.” He then added a caveat: “Excuse me, not to my knowledge.” The FBI, Sussmann added, “would have” had access “if they wanted it … But it wasn’t something that they were interested in at the time.”

    CrowdStrike’s Henry also told the committee that he was “not aware” of the FBI ever asking for access to the servers or being denied it. Asked directly if he was ever told that the FBI  “required access to the servers,” Henry said: “I have no recollection of them saying that to me or anybody on my team, no.”

    Henry and Sussmann’s accounts are not only at direct odds with the FBI, but with their own emails that Durham obtained.

    In October 2016, these emails show, the FBI directly asked Sussmann if the bureau could come onsite to inspect and copy the servers. Sussmann relayed that request to Henry and other CrowdStrike executives – who promptly stonewalled it.

    In an October 13, 2016 exchange, Elvis Chan, a special agent in the FBI’s San Francisco office, asked Sussmann if the “DNC/DCCC would be amenable to letting FBI computer forensics personnel onsite to conduct the imaging” of the servers. “In theory, sure,” Sussmann replied, adding that he would “put you directly in touch with CrowdStrike.”

    Contradicting what he would tell Congress the following year, Sussmann informed Henry and others at CrowdStrike that the FBI is “asking whether FBI computer forensics personnel can come ‘onsite’ to conduct the imaging.” Sussmann added that he was “connecting CrowdStrike and the Bureau to discuss directly on this email chain.”

    In response, CrowdStrike executive Justin Weissert did not address the FBI’s request for onsite access. Weissert instead introduced a new proposal: CrowdStrike would send the FBI a copy of the firm’s imaging of the servers.

    “As we just discussed under a separate email thread, CrowdStrike wants to assist with this effort and, given the nature of the past activities and our commitment to supporting our friends at the FBI, we’re going to move ahead with providing the information at no additional expense to anyone,” Weissert wrote.

    Rather than remind CrowdStrike that he had asked if FBI cyber experts could come “onsite to conduct the imaging,” Chan accepted the offer and provided a mailing address. “FBI San Francisco greatly appreciates your help,” he wrote.

    Given that Sussmann personally received the FBI’s request and relayed it to CrowdStrike, his erroneous recollection is especially suspect.

    Asked about their false statements to Congress, Sussmann and Henry did not respond to RCI’s questions by the time of publication. CrowdStrike also did not respond to a request for comment. 

    A Missed Opportunity

    In failing to address this episode, Durham missed an opportunity to press Sussmann and Henry on why they denied the FBI access to the DNC servers – and whether their false statements to Congress amounted to a criminal offense. By contrast, the Mueller team aggressively prosecuted four Trump associates for alleged false statements, including two cases – Roger Stone and Michael Cohen – for perjury before Congress.

    The Durham materials also reveal that the FBI’s failure to examine the DNC servers was not its only rebuffed request. Emails obtained by Durham show that CrowdStrike and the Clinton campaign ignored what the FBI listed as its number one “Priority Requests”: “Un-redacted copies of CrowdStrike reports” on both the DNC and DCCC “incidents.” That request, also made to Sussmann, came in a September 30, 2016, email from FBI Special Agent E. Adrian Hawkins.

    The FBI never got what it wanted. In a May 2019 court filing, the Justice Department disclosed that the U.S. government “does not possess” CrowdStrike’s unredacted originals, and that Sussmann only provided “three draft reports” in redacted form.

    In Senate testimony, James Trainor, then-assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, recalled that he was “frustrated” with the CrowdStrike report he received in late August 2016 and “doubted its completeness” because Sussmann had “scrubbed” it. According to Trainor, the DNC’s cooperation in the hacking probe was “moderate” overall and “slow and laborious in many respects.”

    CrowdStrike’s redacted reports were provided to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but have not been publicly released. The FBI has denied RCI’s Freedom of Information Act requests for the CrowdStrike reports, releasing only the documents’ cover pages.

    Changing the FBI’s Messaging

    Other emails released by Durham in Sussmann’s case show that the Clinton lawyer personally reviewed and edited an FBI public statement on the alleged hack of the DNC.

    On July 29, 2016 – just one week after WikiLeaks released a trove of embarrassing Democratic Party emails – the FBI drafted a press release on what it called “a possible cyber intrusion involving the DCCC.” Trainor contacted Sussmann for input.

    “A draft response is provided below,” Trainor wrote. “Wanted to get your thoughts on this prior to sending out.”

    In response, Sussmann took exception with the FBI’s mention of a “possible” hack. This qualifier, he noted, contradicted the Clinton campaign’s messaging on a Russian intrusion.

    “The draft you sent says only that the FBI is aware of media reports; it does not say that the FBI is aware of the intrusion that the DCCC reported,” Sussmann wrote. “Indeed, it refers only to a ‘possible’ cyber intrusion and in that way undermines what the DCCC said in its statement (or at least calls into question what the DCCC said).”

    Accordingly, Sussmann suggested new language that removed the FBI’s caveat of a “possible” hack. Trainor accepted the Clinton lawyer’s edit. “I am fine with the below suggestions,” he wrote.

    The FBI’s failure to obtain both direct access to the DNC servers and unredacted copies of the CrowdStrike reports further calls into question U.S. intelligence officials’ claim that Russia hacked the DNC.

    On October 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a joint statement claiming, for the first time, that the “U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails” from the Democratic Party. Jeh Johnson, who then served as DHS secretary, later testified that President Obama “approved the statement” and “wanted us to make [it].”

    Yet as Durham’s Sussmann-FBI emails confirm, this Obama-approved claim was released one week before CrowdStrike denied the FBI’s request for an “onsite” inspection. This timing means that when the intelligence community made its first public attribution of Russian hacking, it had not only failed to inspect the servers, but had not even received CrowdStrike’s copies of them.

    When the FBI and DHS released a more detailed report two months later, the document described the alleged Russian hacking effort as “likely leading to the exfiltration of information” from Democratic Party networks. (Emphasis added.)

    The Mueller probe, having also relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics, failed to add any more certainty. Mueller’s final report of April 2019 likewise stated that Russian intelligence “appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments” from Democratic Party servers. (Emphasis added.)

    Read in retrospect, these qualifiers – “likely” and “appear” signaled that U.S. intelligence lacked concrete evidence for their Russian hacking claims, given that CrowdStrike and the Clinton campaign had denied the FBI full access to the digital crime scene. The material emerging from Durham’s probe newly confirms this significant evidentiary hole.

    Durham’s decision to ignore the FBI’s deference to Clinton-funded CrowdStrike is all the more striking given his criticism of the FBI’s extensive use of Clinton-funded sources in its hunt for collusion.

    The FBI, the Durham report notes, relied on a “significant quantity of materials … that originated with and/or were funded by the Clinton campaign or affiliated persons.” Accordingly, Durham concluded, the FBI should have considered whether the Clinton camp was feeding it false claims as “part of a political effort to smear a political opponent” and exploit “the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support” of that goal.

    For unexplained reasons, Durham did not apply this critique to the FBI’s reliance on Clinton-funded sources to probe the theft of Democratic Party emails. As a result, seven years to the month after CrowdStrike triggered the Russiagate saga, the U.S. public remains in the dark about whether the Russian hacking allegation was yet one more deception funded by the Clinton campaign and parroted by the FBI.

    Aaron Maté has provided extensive coverage of corruption within federal intelligence agencies as a contributor to RealClearInvestigations. He is also a contributor to The Nation, and his work has appeared in Democracy Now!, Vice, Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, The Intercept, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Maté is the host of the news show Pushback with Aaron Maté.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 22:45

  • China Launches Domestically Built Cruise Mega-Ship
    China Launches Domestically Built Cruise Mega-Ship

    China, apparently not content with producing nearly all of the West’s goods and products in sum, is now adding “cruise ships” to its list of manufacturing feats.

    The country’s first ship, being called “Adora Magic City,” also known as “Mo Du” in Putonghua, left its docks at Shanghai at 1:30PM local time on Tuesday, according to reports from China Media Group and the Global Times. 

    The ship had been under construction for nearly 4 years, the report says. The report calls the ship “the world’s most complex single electronic product made up of over 25 million individual parts, five times the number of individual parts used in China’s first domestic aircraft”. 

    The ship sports 2,125 guest rooms and can accommodate 5,246 guests, the report says. It was built by Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding Co (SWS) under the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC).

    With a 6 day floating process behind it, the ship is now being delivered for final testing and internal decoration. It is set to be delivered at the end of 2023, following two sea trials. Commercial operations will start shortly thereafter in 2024.

    The “Adora Magic City” is as tall as a 24-floor building, has 14 decks and offers 40,000 square meters of public areas, China-state owned media entity Global Times writes, calling it a “crown jewel” of global shipbuilding.

    China now joins Germany, France, Italy and Finland as a country with the ability to build large cruise ships. Global Times says that “Shanghai is being built into China’s global cruise ship hub”.

    A “sister ship” to the Adora started construction in 2022. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 22:25

  • J6 Defendant On Ray Epps: "They Are Protecting Him Like Crazy"
    J6 Defendant On Ray Epps: “They Are Protecting Him Like Crazy”

    Authored by Julie Kelly via American Greatness,

    Epps’ unusual defenders make less and less sense…

    He is one of the most consequential—and complicated—individuals involved in the events of January 6.

    Ryan Samsel, then a 37-year-old Pennsylvania barber, drove to Washington on the morning of January 6, 2021 with his girlfriend to watch Donald Trump’s speech. Unable to hear the president, they walked east towards Capitol Hill where a large group, including members of the Proud Boys, had assembled.

    Samsel soon found himself on the front lines of a protest the national media and Joe Biden immediately branded an “insurrection.” Video shows Samsel approaching a weak line of Capitol police officers and bike racks positioned on the west side of Capitol grounds shortly before 1 p.m., the time Congress convened a joint session to debate the results of the 2020 Electoral College vote certification.

    Wearing a white hoodie underneath a jean jacket and a red “Make America Great Again” cap, Samsel appears to engage one of the officers guarding the large outdoor area that leads to the building.

    Interactions between protesters and police got heated. The officer in front of Samsel shoved a bike rack with an “Area Closed” sign into a few protesters, including Samsel, who grabbed the fence. He then proceeded to remove his jacket and turn his hat backwards as if spoiling for a fight.

    At that point, someone can be heard behind Samsel yelling, “hey, hey, hey!” A large man, also donning a red cap, grabbed Samsel’s right shoulder and pulled him away from the officer. The man spoke directly to Samsel then cupped his hand to whisper in his ear. Samsel immediately returned to the barricades, where a shoving match ensued. The racks and police were overrun—the individual who spoke to Samsel remained right behind him.

    That man was Ray Epps.

    It would become a pivotal moment in the events of January 6. In fact, a snapshot of Epps whispering to Samsel remains on the Twitter page of the Washington field office of the FBI in a collage of photos of those “who committed violence” at the Capitol.

    What Epps—the still-uncharged agitator who first became a subject of public scrutiny after a 2021 exposé in Revolver News—said to Samsel in that iconic exchange has been the subject of speculation for more than two years.

    The New York Times reported Epps told the FBI tip line he attempted to de-escalate the situation between Samsel and police. Epps gave the same story to the January 6 Select Committee. “OK, you know, that’s not why we’re here,” Epps told the committee about his interaction with Samsel. “You’ve got to be peaceful, [I] pulled him back and told him, it’s not what we’re about.”

    Samsel’s initial FBI interview, according to Times reporter Alan Feuer, provided a similar account. “Samsel said much the same thing, telling investigators that a man he did not know came up to him at the barricades and suggested he relax, according to a recording of the interview obtained by The New York Times,” Feuer wrote in May 2022. “‘He came up to me and he said, ‘Dude’—his entire words were, ‘Relax, the cops are doing their job.’”

    But in a phone conversation with American Greatness last week, Samsel disputed Epps’ testimony and contradicted what he reportedly told the FBI a few weeks after the Capitol protest.

    “[Epps] said to me, ‘Don’t pull. I’ve got people. We have to push through.’”

    Arrested on January 30, 2021, Samsel has been behind bars ever since. Prosecutors argued Samsel’s history—unlike most January 6 defendants, Samsel has a criminal record that includes assaults against women—justified pretrial detention. (The government also maintains Samsel was on parole on January 6. Samsel told me he was on probation.)

    Samsel is in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, a treacherous facility that houses “extremely dangerous, violent, or escape-prone inmates.” (One defense lawyer described it to me as “one of the worst of the worst.”)

    Considering his record and public silence on the matter for the past few years, Samsel’s new claims about what Epps said to him warrant some skepticism. But a closer look at the court docket shows how the Justice Department is intentionally delaying Samsel’s trial, presumably to prevent the public from learning more about Epps’ involvement at that crucial juncture and his movements before, on, and after January 6. “[Prosecutors] are protecting him like crazy,” Samsel said of Epps.

    Samsel’s case file seems to support that view. Prosecutors did not indict Samsel until seven months after his arrest, a violation of federal law, which requires the government to file charges within 30 days of an arrest. Samsel said during that time the government tried to coerce him into saying Epps did not instigate any misconduct and that Joseph Biggs, a Proud Boys leader recently convicted of seditious conspiracy, was carrying a gun. (He was not.)

    Biden’s Justice Department finally charged Samsel in August 2021 on seven counts including assault of a police officer, civil disorder, and obstruction of an official proceeding, the most common felony associated with the January 6 prosecution. According to Samsel, he’s been transported to 16 different prisons; he was viciously attacked by guards in the D.C. gulag, sustaining injuries that still require medical attention.

    His trial date has been moved numerous times as the Justice Department added codefendants and new charges to his case, a tried-and-true delay tactic. And two days before both sides were expected to file a schedule in preparation for an April 24 trial, U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves filed a fourth superseding indictment against Samsel, forcing another postponement.

    Samsel’s new trial date is October 23—which means he will have been behind bars for nearly three years before he has an opportunity to defend himself before a jury. (Judge Jia M. Cobb, a Biden appointee, is overseeing Samsel’s case.)

    While Samsel now faces 12 charges and has languished in jail for more than 28 months, Epps remains a free man even though Graves’ office could easily indict Epps on many of the charges filed against Samsel, who, like Epps, never entered the building.

    Why isn’t Epps charged with the obstruction felony since he was among the first set of protesters that eventually forced Congress to suspend the joint session? Why is Epps not charged with impeding law enforcement and civil disorder? He, like Samsel, crossed police barricades and remained on restricted grounds for at least 90 minutes as officers fought with the crowd. (Samsel tended to one of the officers pushed down by the protesters as Epps ran past her.)

    Further, Epps was wearing military garb including a tactical vest and backpack, garb prosecutors cite as evidence of preplanning for violence.

    And what about Epps’ text boasting to his nephew at 2:12 p.m. on January 6 that “I was in the front with a few others. I also orchestrated it.” He told the January 6 committee that he “helped get people there.” 

    Individuals have been charged and convicted for conspiracy based on less. Why does Epps continue to evade prosecution?

    Not only is Epps seemingly protected by the Justice Department—after Epps showed up in yet another video in the Proud Boys trial, a prosecutor told jurors accusations that Epps worked at the behest of the government are “fantasies”—he is defended by the same news media and politicians insisting anyone involved in the events of January 6 is a criminal.

    None other than former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) recently brushed off questions as to why Epps hasn’t been charged. Cheney, vice chairman of the now-defunct January 6 committee, referred to claims Epps was a federal asset as a “conspiracy theory,” a favorite descriptor of those oddly eager to exonerate one of the most outspoken “insurrectionists.”

    For now, Samsel remains in the ruthless grip of Joe Biden’s Justice Department. (He has a GiveSendGo account to raise money for his defense.) So why is he speaking up now in seeming contradiction to what he told federal authorities shortly after his arrest? “I don’t want to look back in 10 years and say I was a coward,” he told me.

    Samsel is neither a coward nor a hero for now—but he is a human pawn in the Biden regime’s ongoing retaliation against Americans who protested the rigged 2020 presidential election on January 6. And while government agencies come under increased scrutiny as to the role of undercover officers and informants on January 6, Epps’ unlikely set of defenders make less and less sense.

    If Samsel gets the chance to take the stand and testify under oath, and before the American people, as to what Epps said to him that fateful afternoon, he might unravel one of the biggest mysteries of January 6. Which appears to be precisely what the Justice Department is desperate to prevent.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 22:05

  • Iran Joins Tiny Club Of Nations With Hypersonic Missiles: Raisi
    Iran Joins Tiny Club Of Nations With Hypersonic Missiles: Raisi

    Iran on Tuesday claimed it has joined the club of those very few nations which have hypersonic weapons in their arsenal. Currently, it’s believed only Russia, China, and the United States possess them.

    Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi attended a ceremony unveiling of the new Iranian-made “Fattah” (literally, “Conqueror”) hypersonic missile in Tehran, wherein he touted “Today we feel that the deterrent power has been formed.” He said: “This power is an anchor of lasting security and peace for the regional countries.”

    New hypersonic ballistic missile called “Fattah” unveiled by Iran. Handout: West Asia News Agency via Reuters

    “We build missiles so that we do not suffer from aggression by enemies, and so that…enemies would not even think of an act of aggression against the Islamic Republic,” Raisi said, which comes after repeated warnings from Israel that it reserves the ‘right’ of a preemptive strike on Iran’s alleged nuclear program.

    “Iran’s military, defense and missile power creates deterrence, of course, it creates deterrence not only from invasion but also from the thought of invasion,” Raisi added.

    At the same unveiling ceremony, the head of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard’s aerospace program Gen. Amir-Ali Hajizadeh hailed that the new advanced weapon will “usher in a new generation of missiles in Iran,” according state-run IRNA.

    Hajizadeh described the Fattah as having a range of up to 870 miles and that “there exists no system that can rival or counter this missile” – as it can also reach speeds of up to Mach 15, according to Iran’s claims.

    While Iran released official video showing the alleged hypersonic rocket in flight, other statements suggested it is likely still in the development phase and is not yet be deployable as an active weapon in Iran’s arsenal. Russia, for example, spent years test-firing its hypersonics – but sometimes without success.

    Video released by Tehran was filled with a computer-generated graphics portion, raising doubts over whether the country has achieved hypersonic capability…

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    Gen. Hajizadeh alluded Iranian rocket scientists’ work, saying it “will not end with the construction of this missile,” and further that Iran’s military “will continue on this path so that no enemy even imagines attacking Iran.”

    But again, some of the footage purporting to show the Fattah in a test launch and flight appears computer generated…

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    Yet still, Israel is likely watching these developments very closely, and has long urged the West to act more forcefully not just against Iranian nuclear sites, but against its advanced and ballistic missile program as well.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 21:45

  • CDC Warns that Pride Events Could Spawn Massive Monkeypox Outbreak
    CDC Warns that Pride Events Could Spawn Massive Monkeypox Outbreak

    Submitted by Mark Pellin via Headline USA,

    Only weeks after approving revamped guidelines that allow gay men to donate blood without previously-required screening for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases largely prevalent in the LGBT community, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sounded the alarm for a potential outbreak of monkeypox.

    In an ominous assessment issued late last month, the CDC warned that an “uptick in mpox cases in Chicago that began in mid-April underscores the risk of renewed mpox outbreaks, which we judge is substantial across the United States.”

    Mpox, the preferred moniker since monkeypox was cancelled as racist by Biden regime leftists, has remained relatively rare in the general population while persisting to cause concern for LGBT communities where transmission rates are highest.

    The concern gained added urgency last month with the looming onslaught of so-called Pride Month parades, festivals and protests.

    “CDC continues to assess that the risk of resurgent mpox outbreaks is substantial in the United States,” the agency wrote in its May update. “The risk of outbreaks could further increase as people gather this spring and summer for festivals and other events with high potential for skin-to-skin contact or increased sexual activity.”

    Adding to the potential crisis, the CDC also acknowledged that it was exploring a theory that the monkeypox virus “may have evolved mutations to evade the two-dose Jynneos vaccines that were rolled out last year to protect against it,” CBS News reported.

    The possible mutations were detected “in a cluster of cases” around Los Angeles, which officials said indicated that drug-resistant monkeypox could be transmitted person-to-person in at least “rare cases.”

    Those cases could spread rapidly in a tidal wave of LGBT Pride events scheduled across the country, including large cities that are hotspots for LGBT activists.

    “Cases of mpox in San Francisco remain low, however, we remain watchful, as several new cases have recently been reported in other parts of the country,” San Francisco Health official Dr. Susan Philip said in statement released by the agency “in advance of the summer season and Pride Celebrations.”

    “We want to make sure that everyone can enjoy a happy and healthy Pride,” Philip said.

    In response to the monkeypox cluster outbreak in Chicago, the Biden administration is weighing a recommendation for more mpox vaccine boosters. A shift in strategy might be needed, said the regime’s national monkeypox response deputy coordinator, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, reportedly seen in April spreading the Biden doctrine in Las Vegas at the 2023 Biomedical HIV Prevention Summit.

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    “We’ve already, really immediately after seeing the Chicago cluster, convened folks within the U.S. government to discuss what the data is that we have and if there needs to be any change,” Daskalakis said last month.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 21:25

  • NYC Targets Drug-Infested Areas With Vending Machines Full Of Free Crack Pipes, Narcan, Condoms
    NYC Targets Drug-Infested Areas With Vending Machines Full Of Free Crack Pipes, Narcan, Condoms

    The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has introduced the first of four vending machines destined for drug-infested areas of the city. These machines provide free items like crack pipes, Narcan, and condoms, among other essentials. 

    The first public health vending machine operates at 1676 Broadway in Brooklyn. It’s a big blue box stocked with naloxone — a drug that can reverse overdoses, fentanyl test strips, hygiene kits, and safe sex kits. And it’s considered by health officials to be the first line of defense to combat the city’s out-of-control drug overdose crisis. 

    Anyone can use the vending machine. All someone has to do is enter their NYC zip code and pick if they want crack pipes, Narcan, and condoms (maybe this vending machine should be kept a secret from Hunter). 

    The city’s health commissioner said the machines would help fight the overdose crisis:

    “We are in the midst of an overdose crisis in our city, which is taking a fellow New Yorker from us every three hours and is a major cause of falling life expectancy in NYC.

    “But we will continue to fight to keep our neighbors and loved ones alive with care, compassion and action. Public health vending machines are an innovative way to meet people where they are and to put life-saving tools like naloxone in their hands. We’ll leave no stone unturned until we reverse the trends in opioid-related deaths in our city.”

    Overdose deaths across the metro area have hit record highs. In 2021, there were 2,668 overdose deaths in NYC, compared with 2,103 in 2020. In 2021, 84% of overdose deaths involved an opioid. Fentanyl, a highly potent opioid, was involved in 80% of all overdose deaths. There were 1,370 confirmed overdose death in the first half of 2022. Officials estimate 2022 could be the deadliest year for overdoses if that trend persists. 

    So what’s the strategy by Democrats to curb the drug and crime crisis? It revolves around vending machines full of crack pipes, Narcan, and condoms. Their approach to crime and drugs has been horrendous as NYC spirals into a crime-ridden hellhole. It’s not just NYC. Many other metro areas controlled by progressives are spiraling out of control. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 21:05

  • FBI Conduct Sparks Protest At Federal Building In Detroit
    FBI Conduct Sparks Protest At Federal Building In Detroit

    Authored by Steven Kovac via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A small but vocal group of demonstrators gathered on June 3 outside the Detroit office of the FBI to demand the firing of Christopher Wray, the bureau’s director.

    Organizers of a protest against the politicization of the FBI in Detroit, Mich. on June 3, 2023. (Steven Kovac/Epoch Times)

    “Wray must be fired, and the FBI must be decentralized and moved out of Washington, D.C.,” protest organizer and Trump supporter Brian Pannebecker said. “As long as the FBI and DOJ [Department of Justice] continue to illegally withhold subpoenaed evidence from Congress, we will continue to fight.”

    Wray was nominated by then-President Donald Trump to succeed FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired in the summer of 2017.

    When asked about that by The Epoch Times, Pannebecker said: “Yeah, Trump made some really bad appointments. He’ll know better in his next term.”

    Suppressing Potential Evidence

    Pannebecker, a U.S. Army veteran with a son currently serving in the Army National Guard in the Middle East, said he’s outraged by what he sees as the FBI’s protecting President Joe Biden by suppressing potentially incriminating evidence that allegedly links Biden to an international influence peddling scheme.

    “We are here today in the hope of awakening the people of Detroit, who are the victims of so much crime and violence, to the need to be rid of Wray and replace him with someone who will work for them,” he said.

    “I’m here because our government is completely corrupted,” Dana Coyne told The Epoch Times. “We are not a government of the people anymore.

    “We are a country run by globalists who do not love America and who disrespect the sovereignty of the United States.”

    John Zupanc of Macomb County said he came to downtown Detroit on a Saturday because he believes the government “is crooked and corrupt and must be held accountable.”

    Wray’s Offer

    Facing a contempt of Congress citation, Wray announced on June 2 that he would permit a piece of evidence subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee to be viewed only by Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Democratic Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

    Wray’s move on the eve of the protest did nothing to appease the demonstrators.

    “At this point, does anybody trust Wray to follow through? He has a history of stonewalling and then finally producing documents requested by Congress that are near totally redacted,” Pannebecker said.

    “I feel there is a two-tiered system of justice in this country. There should not be one set of rules for the favored few and different rules for the rest of us. Government should do the right thing,” said demonstrator Angelic Johnson, of the group Faith, Education, and Commerce United of Michigan (FEC).

    Protester Elisa Wagner said: “Today, our government is doing exactly what our Founding Fathers warned us about. We are living in a tyrannical time.

    “All Americans must do their due diligence to protect our constitutional rights. That’s why I’m here.”

    Differing Opinions

    Trump flags and “Fire Wray” picket signs in the Federal Building Plaza provoked responses from passing cars, with some honking and shouting, “Go Trump!” while others yelled obscenities and “Lock him up!”

    The demonstration also caught the attention of passing pedestrians.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 20:45

  • Tucker's Back! In Triumphant Return, Demolishes Ukraine Dam Propaganda, Massacres MSM For Ignoring UFO 'Bombshell Of The Millennium'
    Tucker’s Back! In Triumphant Return, Demolishes Ukraine Dam Propaganda, Massacres MSM For Ignoring UFO ‘Bombshell Of The Millennium’

    Tucker Carlson unveiled Episode 1 of his ‘Tucker on Twitter’ adventure  – which gained 10 million views in just over two hours – and the topic du jour is simple; government propaganda and the lying liars that spew it.

    His jumping off point is the bombing of the Kakhova dam… by Putin himself, if you believe the western media because ‘he is evil and evil people do evil things… even to themselves’ (despite the detailed explanation below of why that is simply farcical).

    By way of background, and helping explain why it absolutely, positively, without doubt must have been Putin that blew up the dam Antiwar.com’s Kyle Anzalone notes that the dam was built by the USSR during the 1950s and, for over a year, has sat on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine. It is nearly 100 feet tall and over 10,000 feet wide. The dam was constructed as a hydroelectric power plant and created the Kakhovka Reservoir, which is over 2,000 sq km. Europe’s largest nuclear power plant – the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and the Crimean Peninsula receive water from the reservoir.

    The attack on the dam will impact a core Russian concern in Ukraine. Through the 250-mile-long Northern Crimean Canal, the Kakhovka Reservoir feeds water to the peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin regularly issued demands to Kiev that irrigation systems supplying water to Crimea remain open.

    But you should believe it was Putin, as Carlson explains: 

    “You’ve got to be lied to over a period of years to reach conclusions like that…and of course, we have been…”

    Carlson then took the media to task for ignoring yesterday’s “bombshell of the millennium,’ in which a government whistleblower revealed that craft developed by non-human intelligence has been recovered by governments around the world in an 80-year race to reverse engineer materials for geopolitical advantages.

    Carlson’s concluding thoughts are a good reminder of reality: 

    “…if you are wondering why our country seems so dysfunctional, this is a big part of the reason – nobody knows what’s happening. A small group of people control access to all relevant information and the rest of us… don’t know. We’re allowed to yap all we like about something like racism… but dare to talk about something that really matters and go ahead and see what happens... you keep it up, they’ll make you be quiet – trust us… that’s how they maintain control.“

    Watch below:

    And the crowd goes wild…

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    Elon Musk chimed in on Tucker’s episode as well, tweeting “Would be great to have shows from all parts of the political spectrum on this platform!” 

    Of course, propagandists like Brian Stelter would never take the risk, lest they crash and burn in spectacular fashion.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 20:25

  • ATF Report Reveals Mass Noncompliance With Pistol Brace Rule
    ATF Report Reveals Mass Noncompliance With Pistol Brace Rule

    Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

    As we previously predicted in an article prior to the rollout of ATF’s pistol brace rule, very few gun owners have complied with the regulation and registered their pistol braced firearm via the ATF’s registration scheme. 

    According to a report published by The Reload, as of June 1, 2023, ATF received 255,162 applications for registration. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the number of braces in circulation is anywhere from 10 million to 40 million. This would mean total compliance with the pistol brace rule is around 0.2 – 0.6 percent. 

    Comparatively, this statistic is similar to compliance with ATF’s 2019 bump stock regulations. About 0.1% of all bump stocks (around 546 out of 520,000) were turned in or destroyed in compliance with ATF’s ruling. 

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    Although, it could be argued that the noncompliance with the pistol brace rule is more egregious to ATF, as there are 80 times as many braces in circulation compared to bump stocks.

    This statistic shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the public outcry from gun owners about the pistol brace rule. 

    Who can blame them? ATF hasn’t exactly been forthcoming and consistent in its rulemaking process. Prior to the pistol brace rule, ATF stated in court that their recent “definition of frame or receiver” rule allows companies to sell pistol frame blanks without background checks, as long as those frames do not include jigs and tools to manufacture into firearms. Then, months later, ATF issued an open letter reversing their position and classifying these same frames as firearms.

    Fortunately, Gun Owners of America is fighting ATF’s unconstitutional overreach. We were recently issued an injunction in our case GOA/GOF/Texas v. ATF halting the enforcement of the pistol brace rule for our members. We’re currently trying to expand that ruling to cover ALL gun owners nationwide.

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    We’re also working in Congress to pass a joint resolution of disapproval. The legislation is currently awaiting a vote in the House. 

    Using the Congressional Review Act, the ATF rule could be reversed and the agency could be prohibited from ever enacting a similar rule in the future. 

    Two joint resolutions of disapproval have already been introduced. H. J. Res. 44, introduced by Rep. Andrew Clyde, has 189 sponsors in the House of Representatives and S. J. Res. 20, introduced by Sen. Kennedy, has 47 sponsors in the Senate.  

    Public calls for Speaker McCarthy to hold a vote to block the pistol brace rule have only mounted in recent weeks, with several coalitions calling for immediate action—including 27 Attorneys General currently suing the Biden Administration, 2A influencers with over 30,000,000 combined followers, and numerous members of the gun industry. 

    That’s why GOA is also urging activists to contact Congress and urge them to provide oversight and protect all gun owners nationwide. 

    *   *   *

    We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 20:05

  • Media Smears Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. For "Conspiracy Theories" Even As Many Come True
    Media Smears Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. For “Conspiracy Theories” Even As Many Come True

    Authored by Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse via Public Substack,

    Yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared on a Twitter Spaces panel co-hosted by Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and venture capitalist David Sacks. He spoke for over two hours on a range of issues, including the war in Ukraine, energy policy, gun control, and the origin of SARS-CoV-2. And Kennedy deplored the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party, excoriated President Biden’s pro-war instincts, decried the domination of US foreign policy by neo-cons and promoted renewable energy.

    And yet, according to the New York Times and CNN, it was an orgy of right-wing conspiracy theorizing. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of one of the country’s most famous Democratic families,” wrote three New York Times reporters, “dived into the full embrace of a host of conservative figures who eagerly promoted his long-shot primary challenge to President Biden….On Monday, he sounded like a candidate far more at ease in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.”

    In pre-Trump America, Kennedy, an anti-war, pro-free speech environmentalist and fierce critic of corporate power, would have been universally regarded as a far-left candidate in the mold of Ralph Nader or his current campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich. He once called for the Koch Brothers to be criminally prosecuted. Kennedy believes that the war in Ukraine is being fueled by “the neo-cons in the White House” who want “regime change with the Russians.” In his campaign announcement speech, he described his mission as ending “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power” that is threatening “to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”

    But a dizzying political realignment has scrambled all of the traditional categories and left in its wake just two sides: not left and right, but insider and outsider. And no matter the substance of one’s beliefs, to the media, “outsider” means, by default, “right-wing conspiracy theorist.”

    On yesterday’s Twitter spaces conversation, the shift was lost on nobody, including Kennedy. “The Democrats slowly became pro-corporate, pro-war, and pro-censorship,” said Kennedy, and “Republicans became anti-censorship, pro-civil liberties, and anti-war. There’s been this tremendous realignment.”

    Kennedy’s rising profile ignited a media backlash yesterday that felt almost orchestrated. Kennedy’s “crackpot claims” and “outlandish views” have won him “favor on the right,” Vanity Fair moaned. “Mr. Kennedy has found another benefactor who seems to enjoy deluging the press with excrement: Elon Musk,” snarled The Independent. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Spends an Hour Sucking Up to Elon Musk in Twitter Space,” blared a New Republic headline.

    Business Insider called the conversation on Twitter “a bizarre Twitter Spaces conversation littered with falsehoods and conspiracy theories” and dismissed Kennedy’s “odd and occasionally incoherent policy positions.” Rolling Stone sneered at his “outlandish and pseudoscientific ideas” and labeled Kennedy a “fringe candidate” with “crank beliefs.” Esquire called him a “raving anti-vaxxer” and lambasted the very idea of having a contested Democratic primary.

    But none put it as plainly as The Washington Post. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tests the conspiratorial appetite of Democrats,” wrote the Post’s Michael Scherer. Kennedy, Scherer alleged, “campaigns on the idea that powerful people have been working in secret to deceive you.”

    The Washington Post may believe that the public’s distrust of the elite is nothing more than a conspiracy theory. But if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that powerful people have, indeed, been working in secret to deceive us.

    Consider how many suspicions that were dismissed as conspiracy theories turned out to be true: 

    1. Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that the U.S. government was indeed spying on millions of Americans without a warrant and without their knowledge and that such claims of widespread surveillance were neither paranoid nor conspiracy theories. Obama’s Director of National Intelligence had lied to Congress about NSA surveillance before Snowden revealed the truth.

    2. Jeffrey Epstein may have been running a honeypot blackmail operation with the knowledge of the CIA, whose director visited him frequently, according to his private emails.

    3. The evidence is today overwhelming that President Joe Biden’s son and brother sold access to Joe Biden, when he was Vice President, to foreign investors, including Chinese with close relationships to military intelligence.

    4. The Biden administration and media elites have aggressively pushed for bans and restrictions on natural gas stoves while claiming that those who claimed they were pushing for such bans and restrictions were spreading conspiracy theories.

    5. The U.S. really did manage bio-labs in Ukraine, despite propaganda from NPR and others dismissing this reality as a conspiracy theory.

    6. The Pentagon had indeed been covering up evidence of UFOs for decades.

    7. Emails show former NAID director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins conspired to spread the lie that the Covid lab leak hypothesis had been debunked. In truth, there is a long history of lab leaks in the US and around the world, and scientists had hotly debated whether coronavirus research should occur given the high risk of a leak.

    The New York Times wrote that “American intelligence agencies do not believe there is any evidence indicating that” COVID-19 was created as part of a bioweapons program. But Fauci’s NIH funding for gain-of-function research may indeed have originated as a biodefense effort.

    …

    Calling someone a “conspiracy theorist” is powerful and insidious. It does more than imply that a person is gullible or stupid. It suggests that they suffer from some kind of mental illness, and their opinions are not worth listening to.

    Calling someone a conspiracy theorist is an act of delegitimation, just as calling them a racist or climate denier is. The goal is to ostracize and stigmatize, to un-person one’s political adversaries, and to banish their arguments from public discourse instead of refuting them. This is what the media is doing to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

    …

    Kennedy’s zealous support for free speech runs counter to the media’s goal of “combating disinformation” by monitoring and censoring ordinary people online and thereby establishing themselves, once again, as the arbiters of truth and falsehood.

    This is another reason the media is so determined to destroy his candidacy.

    …

    That’s an existential threat to the mainstream media, so outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN are doing everything they can to discredit both the platform and Kennedy’s candidacy. That alone makes both worth fighting to defend.

    Subscribers to Public substack can read the full article here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 19:25

  • Kiev's Long-Term "Last Resort" Plan To Blow-Up The Kakhova Dam Exposed
    Kiev’s Long-Term “Last Resort” Plan To Blow-Up The Kakhova Dam Exposed

    A day after Ukraine’s much-heralded counter-offensive appears to have failed, almost before it had even begun, a major dam in the Russian-occupied region of Kherson is suddenly bombed, prompting mass evacuations as floods spread across the region.

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    As we detailed earlier, both sides accuse each other of the attack that puts tens of thousands of homes at risk and might even threaten the safety of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.

    However, as Raul Ilargi Meijer writes, twice last year (here and here), Ukrainian officials discussed Kiev’s plans to blow up the dam.

    Andrew Korybko lays out the real narrative here:

    The partial destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on early Tuesday morning saw Kiev and Moscow exchange accusations about who’s to blame, but a report from the Washington Post (WaPo) in late December extends credence to the Kremlin’s version of events.

    Titled “Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war”, its journalists quoted former commander of November’s Kherson Counteroffensive Major General Andrey Kovalchuk who shockingly admitted to planning this war crime:

    “Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages. The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.”

    [ZH: This clip purports to show the “test” firing last year described by WaPo]

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    His remark about how “the step remained a last resort” is pertinent to recall at present considering that the first phase of Kiev’s NATO–backed counteroffensive completely failed on Monday according to the Russian Ministry of Defense. Just like Ukraine launched its proxy invasion of Russia in late May to distract from its loss in the Battle of Artyomovsk, so too might does it seem to have gone through with Kovalchuk’s planned war crime to distract from this most recent embarrassment as well.

    The abovementioned explanation isn’t as far-fetched as some might initially think either. After all, one of complexity theory’s precepts is that initial conditions at the onset of non-linear processes can disproportionately shape the outcome. In this context, the first failed phase of Kiev’s counteroffensive risked ruining the entire campaign, which could have prompted its planners to employ Kovalchuk’s “last resort” in order to introduce an unexpected variable into the equation that might improve their odds.

    Russia had over 15 months to entrench itself in Ukraine’s former eastern and southern regions that Kiev still claims as its own through the construction of various defensive structures and associated contingency planning so as to maintain its control over those territories. It therefore follows that even the most properly supplied and thought-out counteroffensive wasn’t going to be a walk in the park contrary to the Western public’s expectations, thus explaining why the first phase just failed.

    This reality check shattered whatever wishful thinking expectations Kiev might have had since it showed that the original plan of swarming the Line of Contact (LOC) entails considerable costs that reduce the chances of it succeeding unless serious happens behind the front lines to distract the Russian defenders. Therein lies the strategic reason behind partially destroying the Kakhovka Dam on Tuesday morning exactly as Kovalchuk proved late last year is possible to pull off per his own admission to WaPo.

    • The first of Kiev’s goals that this terrorist attack served was to prompt global concern about the safety of the Russian-controlled Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which relies on water from the now-rapidly-depleting Kakhovka Reservoir for cooling. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that there’s “no immediate nuclear safety risk”, but a latent one can’t be ruled out. Should a crisis transpire, then it could throw Russia’s defenses in northern Zaporozhye Region into chaos.

    • The second goal is that the downstream areas of Kherson Region, which are divided between Kiev and Moscow, have now been flooded. Although the water might eventually recede after some time, this could complicate Russia’s defensive plans along the left bank of the Dnieper River. Taken together with the consequences connected to the first scenario, this means that a significant part of the riparian front behind the LOC could soon soften up to facilitate the next phase of Kiev’s counteroffensive.

    • In fact, the geographic scope of Kiev’s “unconventional softening operation” might even expand to Crimea due to the threat that Tuesday morning’s terrorist attack could pose to the peninsula’s water supply via its eponymous canal. The regional governor said that sufficient supplies remain for now but that the coming days will reveal the level of risk. While Crimea still managed to survive Kiev’s blockade of the canal for eight years, there’s no doubt that this development is disadvantageous for Russia.

    • The fourth strategic goal builds upon the three that were already discussed and concerns the psychological warfare component of this attack. On the foreign front, Kiev’s gaslighting that Moscow is guilty of “ecocide” was amplified by the Mainstream Media in spite of Kovalchuk’s damning admission to WaPo last December in order to maximize global pressure on Russia, while the domestic front is aimed at sowing panic in Ukraine’s former regions with the intent of further softening Russia’s defenses there.

    • And finally, the last strategic goal that was served by partially destroying the Kakhovka Dam is that Russia might soon be thrown into a dilemma. Kiev’s “unconventional softening operation” along the Kherson-Zaporozhye LOC could divide the Kremlin’s focus from the Belgorod-Kharkov and Donbass fronts, which could weaken one of those three and thus risk a breakthrough. The defensive situation could become even more difficult for Russia if Kiev expands the conflict by attacking Belarus and/or Moldova too.

    To be absolutely clear, the military-strategic dynamics of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine still favor Russia for the time being, though that’s precisely why Kiev carried out Tuesday morning’s terrorist attack in a desperate attempt to reshape them in its favor. This assessment is based on the observation that Russia’s victory in the Battle of Artyomovsk shows that it’s able to hold its own against NATO in the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” that the bloc’s chief declared in mid-February.

    Furthermore, even the New York Times admitted that the West’s sanctions failed to collapse Russia’s economy and isolate it, while some of its top influencers also admitted that it’s impossible to deny the proliferation of multipolar processes in the 15 months since the special operation began. These include German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, former US National Security Council member Fiona Hill, and Goldman Sachs’ President of Global Affairs Jared Cohen.

    The military-strategic dynamics described in the preceding two paragraphs will inevitably doom the West to defeat in the New Cold War’s largest proxy conflict thus far unless something major unexpectedly happens to change them, which is exactly what Kiev was trying to achieve via its latest terrorist attack.

    The reason why few foresaw this is because Kovalchuk admitted to WaPo last December that his side had previously planned to blow up part of the Kakhovka Dam as part of its Kherson Counteroffensive.

    It therefore seemed unthinkable that Kiev would ultimately do just that over half a year later and then gaslight that Moscow was to blame when the Mainstream Media itself earlier reported the existence of Ukraine’s terrorist plans after quoting the same Major General who bragged about them at the time. Awareness of this fact doesn’t change what happened, but it can have a powerful impact on the Western public’s perceptions of this conflict, which is why WaPo’s report should be brought to their attention.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 19:16

  • Blinken Plans To Visit China In Coming Weeks, Follows "Candid" Dialogue
    Blinken Plans To Visit China In Coming Weeks, Follows “Candid” Dialogue

    Amid attempts to reset normal relations, given the two sides have been engaged in tit-for-tat accusations going back to at least February, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China in the coming weeks, Bloomberg was the first to report Tuesday.

    CNN is also reporting that the trip is expected, though a precise date hasn’t been specified, citing unnamed US officials. The trip was supposed to happen in February, but that was abruptly canceled (or perhaps just “postponed”), following the Chinese “spy balloon” shootdown incident early that month and ensuing war of words and Chinese denials of wrongdoing.

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    The State Department is keeping mum on the reports, however, with a spokesperson saying Tuesday, “We have no travel for the Secretary to announce; as we’ve said previously the visit to the People’s Republic of China will be rescheduled when conditions allow.”

    But Biden admin officials have been busy trying to rescue spiraling relations with Beijing. The State Department earlier described “candid” and “productive” meetings between US officials and their Chinese counterparts in Beijing Monday:

    Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and NSC Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs Sarah Beran, accompanied by US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, met with Ministry of Foreign Affairs Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu and Director General of the North American and Oceanian Affairs Department Yang Tao.

    “The two sides exchanged views on the bilateral relationship, cross-Strait issues, channels of communication, and other matters. U.S. officials made clear that the United States would compete vigorously and stand up for U.S. interests and values,” an official readout said.

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    Over the weekend Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit that any potential future conflict between the United States and China would bring “unbearable disaster for the world”.

    But he said both rival powerful countries should be able to grow together and to avoid confrontation. His words came as the US condemned what it called unsafe and aggressive maneuvers by a Chinese PLA Navy warship in the Taiwan Strait as the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon conducted a ‘freedom of navigation’ transit on Saturday.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 19:05

  • Santa Monica Residents Push Back Against Outdoor Needle Distribution Site For Homeless
    Santa Monica Residents Push Back Against Outdoor Needle Distribution Site For Homeless

    Authored by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times,

    Some residents in Santa Monica, an idyllic beach town in Southern California, are pushing for an outdoor county-operated program that distributes clean syringes weekly to homeless drug users near the city’s parks to be moved indoors to a county-owned facility.

    The “overdose prevention program”—which is overseen by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control—currently distributes syringes, first aid kits, opioid overdose reversal medication, and hygiene kits every Friday at three city parks, according to a spokesperson for the department.

    Members of the Santa Monica Coalition, a group of retail and commercial tenants, residents, and property owners, are looking to put an end to the syringe distribution, which they say has been operating without public knowledge since 2019.

    According to John Alle, who owns property on the Third Street Promenade, some city officials weren’t even aware of the county-funded program until he brought it to their attention a year ago.

    “We raised it. We went to the local papers, and we wrote letters directly with photos to the city council and to downtown Santa Monica business owners and residents, so they had to address it,” said Alle, who also helped found the coalition.

    The recently closed Wetzel’s Pretzels of Santa Monica, Calif., on June 2, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    City Councilman Oscar de la Torre confirmed that he only learned of the program after Alle first raised the issue.

    “There was never any discussion. We never really talked about it in city council meetings. It’s never been agendized, so it was kind of a shocker for me to just hear that that was going on,” he told The Epoch Times.

    The county’s health department works with the Venice Family Clinic, a community health center with several locations in the Los Angeles area to carry out the distribution of medical supplies, including needles. According to the coalition, Santa Monica is the only city in the country that currently has a publicly funded outdoor needle distribution program.

    “The City of Santa Monica and the County along with Venice Family Clinic have been operating the only open-air, publicly funded needle, condom, and synthetic distribution program in the country,” reads a petition created by the coalition in March that has since received 8,000 signatures.

    Petitioners are asking the city of Santa Monica to “force the County to move their distribution program indoors under medical supervision with supportive services.”

    Some residents say they’re concerned that outdoor giveaways could lead to an increase in homelessness, drug use, and crime.

    A Venice Family Clinic van is seen in a park in Santa Monica, Calif. (Courtesy of John Alle)

    City officials sent a letter to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors in September 2022 asking for the program to be halted in and near parks, noting that a large majority of residents are renters and rely on parks for open space.

    “Because roughly 70 percent of Santa Monicans are renters, our community relies on the City’s parks and open spaces as they do not have access to private open space,” reads the letter, signed by then-Mayor Sue Himmelrich.

    The city asked for the program to be moved to a “service-rich environment,” instead, that was “preferably” indoors inside a county-owned facility, with services for substance abuse and mental health.

    De la Torre told The Epoch Times that county officials did respond, saying the distribution would instead be done from a van, parked near the parks.

    But Alle said that’s not the case.

    Recently, he posed as a homeless person at one of the parks and was almost given a syringe—until it became clear that he was testing the program—by one of the nonprofit’s social workers, when he told them he was unable to walk to the van to retrieve it for himself, he said.

    “They’re not only operating from inside the van. They were giving out supplies to people in the park,” Alle said.

    John Alle is seen in a recent photo disguised as a homeless person in Santa Monica, Calif. (Courtesy of John Alle)

    Alle said he and two colleagues observed three workers of the clinic passing out Narcan—an opioid reversal medication—condoms, and syringes to several homeless people in the parks that day.

    Officials from the Department of Public Health didn’t return a request for comment on the allegations.

    According to Alle, such programs have exacerbated the city’s homeless and crime crisis.

    He recounted how he leased one of his properties on the promenade to the NFL for a pop-up store this year in advance of the February Super Bowl. But the football league asked for its money back after less than a week, he said.

    “After six days [they] said ‘John, we’ve had three break-ins, two of our employees have been hit over the head going to their cars, and we have people pissing against our windows during the day,’” Alle said.

    According to Alle, the promenade is roughly 50 percent vacant now.

    The clinic began passing out items in the area in 2019 at six locations in the city, including along Third Street Promenade.

    The locations have now been reduced to three parks.

    Bryan Paarlberg, who receives free meth pipes from the Venice Family Clinic, sits near his collection of items in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 2, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    “Los Angeles County is currently experiencing the worst overdose crisis in its history, and overdose prevention services are critical to save lives and protect public health and safety,” a public health department spokesperson said.

    Restricting access to such services will only lead to more overdoses and “exacerbate” the homelessness crisis, according to the spokesperson.

    “As part of our commitment to save lives and protect public health, we are in constant communication with Santa Monica officials to address community concerns and needs,” the spokesperson said.

    A family uses a playground near a homeless man in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 2, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    According to the health department, the clinic distributes 200 syringes at the three Santa Monica locations every month to 100 people and disposes of the dirty needles.

    It also refers those interested in substance use treatment services and refers individuals for free HIV or hepatitis C testing.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 18:45

  • Journalists Are Asking Ukrainian Soldiers To Hide Their Nazi Patches, NYT Admits
    Journalists Are Asking Ukrainian Soldiers To Hide Their Nazi Patches, NYT Admits

    The New York Times has been forced to very, very belatedly deal with something which had long been obvious and known to many independent analysts and media outlets, but which has been carefully shielded from the mainstream masses in the West for obvious reasons. 

    The surprising Monday Times headline said that “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” This acknowledgement comes after literally years of primarily indy journalists and geopolitical commentators pointing out that yes indeed… Ukraine’s military and paramilitary groups, especially those operating in the east since at least 2014, have a serious Nazi ideology problem. This has been exhaustively documented, again, going back years. But the report, which merely tries to downplay it as a “thorny issue” of Ukraine’s “unique” “History” – suggests that the real problem for Western PR is fundamentally that it’s being displayed so openly. Ukrainian troops are being asked to cover those Nazi symbols please!–as Matt Taibbi sarcastically quipped in commenting on the report.

    NBC News report in 2014: “Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past on Monday night, when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.”

    The authors of the NYT report begin by expressing frustration over the optics of Nazi symbols being displayed so proudly on many Ukrainian soldiers’ uniforms. Suggesting that many journalistic photographs which have in some cases been featured in newspapers and media outlets worldwide (typically coupled with generally positive articles on Ukraine’s military) are merely ‘unfortunate’ or misleading, the NYT report says, “In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.”

    The report admits this has led to controversy wherein news rooms actually must delete some photos of Ukrainian soldiers and militants. “The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II,” continues the report. 

    So it’s merely “thorny” and “complicated” we are told. Below is a small sampling of the kinds of patches that appear on Ukrainian military uniforms with “some regularity” – in the words of The New York Times:

    NATO itself has in the recent past been forced to delete images on its official social media accounts due to Nazi imagery being present among Ukrainian troops during photo shoots.

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    The following line from the report says everything you need to know about the so-called “paper of record” and its one-sided and ultra-simplistic coverage of what many are finally waking up to realize is a war with a deeply complex reality (to say the least), and far from the MSM’s goodies vs. baddies Hollywoodesque narrative of Putler vs. the free world which is typical of networks from CNN to Fox to NBC…

    From the NY Times: 

    “In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.”

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    And now we might expect some significant efforts at damage control, or even perhaps we’re witnessing the beginnings of evolving definitions and the moving of goalposts. More from NY Times [emphasis ZH]:

    But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.

    The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.

    Some are writing more appropriate and apt headlines for the NYT story…

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    Only very recently Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and even President Zelensky’s office was caught in the act: 

    In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.

    The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”

    To be expected, the Times still tries to run cover while desperately seeking to ‘reassure’ its audience by writing that “In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be ‘de-Nazified’ — a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.”

    New levels of cope indeed…

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    But then still, the NYT concedes awkwardly, “More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 18:30

  • US Knew Ukraine Planned To Blow Up Nord Stream Pipeline 3 Months Before It Happened: WaPo
    US Knew Ukraine Planned To Blow Up Nord Stream Pipeline 3 Months Before It Happened: WaPo

    The Washington Post is reporting that an unnamed European intelligence service told the CIA that Ukraine’s military was planning an attack on the Nord Stream pipelines a full three months before the September 26, 2022 sabotage blasts which disabled them.

    The revelation is based on Pentagon and classified intelligence documents leaked by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira, or part of the so-called Discord leaks. The intelligence report in question was drafted in June 2022 and shared with the Biden administration, which means the White House has known all along that the “Putin did it” narrative which the West rallied around was false from the start. According to the new report published Tuesday: 

    Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea, which U.S. and Western officials have called a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage on Europe’s energy infrastructure.

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    Among the more interesting aspects to the intelligence leak is that it says the Ukrainians conducting the sabotage operation reported directly the country’s top military officer, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in order to avoid sharing it with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, likely for the sake of plausible deniability. 

    The US government reportedly saw the information as of enough importance or authenticity to share it with Germany and other European intelligence services. It appears to be based on a single source or asset in Ukraine: “The intelligence report was based on information obtained from an individual in Ukraine” – as the Post report indicates.

    The intelligence describes a plot which is very similar to a theory which recently came to prominence as German investigators spent months attempting to uncover a culprit, which claimed that six individuals under false identifies utilizing a small boat conducted a deep diving operation in the Baltic Sea to plant the explosives on the pipeline. 

    The Washington Post writes in its Tuesday report, “The highly specific details, which include numbers of operatives and methods of attack, show that for nearly a year Western allies had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage.”

    “That assessment has only strengthened in recent months as German law enforcement investigators uncovered evidence about the bombing that bears striking similarities to what the European service said Ukraine was planning.”

    And WaPo offers the following verification that European intel services were briefed by the US on the information in its possession: “Officials in multiple countries confirmed that the intelligence summary posted on Discord accurately stated what the European service told the CIA.”

    The paper noted: “The Post agreed to withhold the name of the European country as well as some aspects of the suspected plan at the request of government officials, who said exposing the information would threaten sources and operations.”

    The timing of this revelation is interesting, as the WaPo report was published the same day as the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam was blown up. In fact, Russians are already seizing on the parallels…

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    Many are now calling it the new Nord Stream sabotage mystery, as just like with the pipeline attack both the Russian and Ukrainian sides are quickly pointing the finger at the other.

    One thing is clear in the wake of Tuesday’s Washington Post Nord Stream reporting: the White House is lying about major, war-shaping events related to Ukraine. The US is lying about the conflict, and the US has been lying for a long time. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/06/2023 – 18:25

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