Today’s News 9th February 2023

• China Balloon – A Layered Scandal
  China Balloon – A Layered Scandal

  Authored by Robert B. Charles via RealClear Wire,

  A Chinese surveillance balloon floats over the United States for a week. No action is taken, until the outcry makes taking it down necessary. A second is over South America, a third was over Hawaii. President Biden says it happened under President Trump. After former Trump administration officials said that didn’t happen, Biden countered they were “discovered” after Trump left. What explains all this?

  

  To start with, China just tested Joe Biden, and he failed. China had put a spy balloon over Hawaii, and the president – we now learn – did nothing about a device about a dozen miles in the air leisurely traversing the United States and presumably sending images in real-time back to the Chinese military. U.S. airspace goes to 62 miles up.

  Why was it not shot down? We’re told only that “debris” might hurt someone, or that it was innocuous, and hence no need for action. These were tenuous, if not false, excuses for inaction. Debris would have been minimal and could be engineered into empty spaces. Satellites see things, but a spy balloon 100 times closer sees more.

  As for “no need,” well, only if you want more spy balloons next month and see no danger in the precedent, which is to say, the possibility of one day facing a possible chem, bio, radioactive, or EMP threat. Otherwise, you shoot it down fast, as you would a Chinese fighter or bomber.

  We did not do that. Why not? The explanation apparently is that the Biden team is timid, afraid to upset China, and believes this provocation will be viewed as a mere “incremental” violation, one they can let slip if not noticed.

  Except that Americans saw it with their own eyes, so we were treated to predictably partisan and self-serving crisis management: Biden’s team quickly said they had “discovered” it, were “monitoring” it, would decide what to do next. Meantime, the secretary of state immediately waffled on postponing his planned trip to China.

  Biden’s team wrung their hands, said little, did less, and hoped this would just drift away. The outcry was significant, so they finally decided to shoot the offending balloon down over the ocean, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken bravely delayed his trip.

  The courage quotient in this White House, Biden’s Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and State Department, is stunning – for its absence. Are we to imagine no one thought of the possibilities here? Are we to imagine we only consider planes or missiles a threat?

  So, the Biden team finally shoots the Chinese spy balloon down over the ocean, while China mumbles, lies, and carries on. But this is where the “scandal within scandal” begins. Under the gun to explain themselves, Biden and his team belatedly says “three Chinese balloons” were over the U.S. under Trump. Almost every highly cleared Trump intelligence and national security appointee (more than a dozen) flatly deny that.

  This leads to the next hard-to-believe deflection. Biden’s team says the Chinese balloons Trump did not shoot down were only discovered after he left office. What?

  Yes, they say it happened then but was only “discovered after” Trump left, which is probably why no one had heard about it. This is hard to credit. Are we to believe that NORAD’s 24/7 operations center was asleep – that China dared cross Trump, and we only saw the spy balloons after reviewing the tape?

  All this sounds increasingly absurd, throws water on solid facts, damning, indefensible, and which should require – in an accountable republic – high level resignations. Here are the big, real questions.

  First, if any spy balloon from China really floated over the United States during Trump’s time and not one appointee was briefed, do we have an “intelligence deep state” – which is either pro-China or which so feared Trump’s penchant for action that they withheld that? Exactly who knew what, when, and said nothing?

  Second, if the balloons were over the U.S. under Trump, and NORAD or the intelligence community did not see them in real time, why not? That is a major intelligence failure. How did that happen? Third, either way – and regardless of which scandal is worse – the Chinese spy balloon in U.S. airspace should have immediately been brought down. Would we wait on a fighter, and say debris worried us?

  China has learned a key lesson, and it cannot be unlearned. Biden will hesitate, deflect, do almost anything to avoid confrontation with China, even allow penetration of U.S. airspace. None of this will make Taiwan feel good, or Japan, Australia, the Philippines – or any U.S. ally.

  Communist China’s deliberate penetration of U.S. airspace is not a non-event, not inconsequential, not something to pretend did not happen. And it should have instantly triggered a shootdown.

  Who will be held accountable for this fiasco? What will China do next? This is not a small error, passing oversight, or victory – nor was the disastrous U.S. exit from Afghanistan. This is another layered scandal.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 23:50

• Distract, Divide, & Conquer: The Painful Truth About The State Of Our Union
  Distract, Divide, & Conquer: The Painful Truth About The State Of Our Union

  Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

  

  These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

  Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

  Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

  Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

  The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

  The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

  Deepfakes, AI and virtual reality are blurring the line between reality and a computer-generated illusion. Powered by AI software, deepfake audio and video move us into an age where it is almost impossible to discern what is real, especially as it relates to truth and disinformation. At the same time, the technology sector continues to use virtual reality to develop a digital universe—the metaverse—that is envisioned as being the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.

  Advances in technology are outstripping our ability to protect ourselves from its menacing side, both in times of rights, humanity and workforce. In the absence of constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, we desperately need an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

  The courts have aligned themselves with the police state. In one ruling after another, the courts have used the doctrine of qualified immunity to shield police officers from accountability for misconduct, tacitly giving them a green light to act as judge, jury and executioner on the populace. All the while, police violence, the result of training that emphasizes brute force over constitutional restraints, continues to endanger the public.

  The nation’s dependence on foreign imports has fueled a $1 trillion trade deficit. While analysts have pointed to the burgeoning trade deficit as a sign that the U.S. economy is growing, it underscores the extent to which very little is actually made in America anymore.

  World governments, including the U.S., continue to use national crises such as COVID-19 to expand their emergency powers. None are willing to relinquish these powers when the crisis passes. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the U.S. government still has 42 declared national emergencies in effect, allowing it to sidestep constitutional protocols that maintain a system of checks and balances. For instance, the emergency declared after the 9/11 has yet to be withdrawn.

  The nation’s infrastructure is rapidly falling apart. Many of the country’s roads, bridges, airports, dams, levees and water systems are woefully outdated and in dire need of overhauling, and have fallen behind that of other developed countries in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that crumbling infrastructure costs every American household $3,300 in hidden costs a year due to lost time, increased fuel consumption while sitting in traffic jams, and extra car repairs due to poor road conditions.

  The nation is about to hit a healthcare crisis. Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other high-income country, it has the worst health outcomes than its peer nations. Experts are also predicting a collapse in the U.S. health care system as the medical community deals with growing staff shortages and shuttered facilities.

  These are just a small sampling of the many looming problems that threaten to overwhelm us in the near future.

  Thus far, Americans seem inclined to just switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.

  Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 23:30

• Johnstone: They're Not Worried About "Russian Influence", They're Worried About Dissent
  Johnstone: They’re Not Worried About “Russian Influence”, They’re Worried About Dissent

  Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

  Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

  

  I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

  Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

  Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming: https://t.co/vxnKAoI9T7

  — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023

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

  That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

  Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

  They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

  One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

  Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

  The arguments in this article are self defeating (a crisis of democracy should use secret unaccountable CIA subsidies to push “democracy”) and have already been refuted countless times, and is pointless as we are still using disguised cutouts and pass throughs to do propaganda https://t.co/kMtQxShCSp

  — Joel Whitney (he/him) (@joel_whitney) January 30, 2023

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

  All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

  That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

  They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

  Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

  They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

  *  *  *

  My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

  Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 23:10

• Macron Says Russia Cannot Win Against Ukraine
  Macron Says Russia Cannot Win Against Ukraine

  After a surprise UK visit, Ukraine’s President Zelensky went to Paris immediately afterward in a whirlwind European tour to meet with Western leaders. In Paris he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

  Macron asserted during the visit that Russia cannot win the war against Ukraine. “Ukraine can count on France, its European partners and allies to win the war. Russia cannot and must not win,” Macron said before a working dinner among the three leaders at the Elysee Palace.

  

  Just ahead of the meeting, Zelensky in an interview with Le Figaro hailed a change of heart in Macron. “I think he has changed, and changed for real this time,” Zelensky said. “After all, it is he who paved the way for the delivery of tanks. And he has also supported Ukraine’s membership to the EU. I think that was a real signal.”

  Macron had angered Kiev when in June he said the West must not “humiliate Russia, so that when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” 

  Macron has also come under fire for being among the only Western leaders to hold frequent phone conversations with President Vladimir Putin, in order to attempt a diplomatic breakthrough towards ending the war. But Ukrainian leaders have suggested such diplomatic efforts are a form of ‘capitulation’.

  As for Macron’s slow pivot away from pursuing a diplomatic offramp, the Associated Press now describes: 

  Macron has said France hasn’t ruled out sending fighter jets but set conditions, including not leading to an escalation of tensions or using the aircraft “to touch Russian soil,” and not resulting in weakening “the capacities of the French army.”

  As for Scholz, he was cited in the following on Wednesday:

  He added that Paris would “continue the efforts” to deliver arms to Kyiv. Mr Scholz also assured the Ukrainian president of enduring allied support.

  “We will continue to do so as long as necessary,” he told reporters, noting Germany and its partners had backed Ukraine “financially, with humanitarian aid and with weapons”. He added that Ukraine belongs to the European family.

  ⚡️Video showing Zelensky meeting Macron and Scholz a few moments ago. pic.twitter.com/65T0BmVfnQ

  — War Monitor (@WarMonitors) February 8, 2023

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

  The US and UK too have lately signaled no options are off the table at this point. UK leaders took it further on Wednesday in saying Ukraine might expect Typhoon fighter jets in the longer-term.

  After Paris, Zelensky is expected in Brussels on Thursday, where he will continue pushing for Ukraine to be fast-tracked into EU membership.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 22:50

• 73-Year-Old Arizona Rancher Held On $1 Million Bond For Killing Illegal Alien On Property
  73-Year-Old Arizona Rancher Held On $1 Million Bond For Killing Illegal Alien On Property

  Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A 73-year-old Arizona rancher has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder for the killing of an illegal alien who has been tentatively identified as a Mexican citizen.

  

  Full details about the shooting have not been made available, and it is unknown whether the rancher, George Alan Kelly, and the deceased, Gabriel Cuen-Butimea, 48, knew each other. The killing occurred on Jan. 30, and Kelly’s arrest was preceded by authorities finding the dead body of Cuen-Butimea on Kelly’s cattle ranch. Cuen-Butimea’s was identified from a Mexican voter registration card he carried.

  Kelly is being held at the Santa Cruz County Jail in Nogales, Arizona, and his bail was set at $1 million by Justice Emilio Velasquez. Kelly has requested the judge to reduce his bail in order to go back home and take care of his wife.

  “She’s there by herself… nobody to take care of her, the livestock or the ranch,” he said, according to Nogales International. “And I’m not going anywhere. I can’t come up with a million dollars,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Cuen-Butimea has entered the United States multiple times illegally and was deported repeatedly, according to reports.

  The Shooting

  The incident happened in the Kino Springs area just outside Nogales, according to Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Gerardo Castillo. A call came in at about 2:40 p.m. Monday, regarding a shooting in the Sagebrush Road area, per Nogales International. There were reports of a commotion at the scene but the deputies found nothing on arrival.

  However, around 6:00 p.m., the sheriff’s office received another call about shots fired at the property. This time, deputies found the deceased body of Cuen-Butimea with a visible gunshot wound 100–150 yards from Kelly’s house.

  Kelly lived 1.5 miles north of the border with Mexico, roughly three-quarters of a mile southeast of Kino Springs Road. Kelly was arrested because the body was found on his property.

  According to the outlet, Kelly requested a reduction in the bond amount but Judge Velasquez said that it would be determined by the County Attorney’s Office. Kelly was cordial with the officers when he was brought to court.

  At present, Kelly, who appears to be a self-published fiction writer based on the Nogales International news report, is being held at the Santa Cruz County Jail and is set to appear in court on Wednesday.

  Stand Your Ground

  A person can fight, and even kill, in order to protect himself or others based on Arizona law.

  The state’s Justification statute, which is similar to Florida’s “stand your ground” law, says “a person is justified in threatening or using physical force against another when and to the extent a reasonable person would believe that physical force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the other’s use or attempted use of unlawful physical force.”

  The burden lies on prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not justified in using deadly force during self-defense.

  As of December 2022, the number of illegal immigrant encounters along the southern border was at 251,487, a new monthly record, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The earlier record was in May at 241,136 encounters.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 22:30

• Vulnerability Vs Resilience In The World's Most Earthquake-Prone Countries
  Vulnerability Vs Resilience In The World’s Most Earthquake-Prone Countries

  According to the 2022 World Risk Index, Turkey is only reaching a mediocre score for disaster resilience. The country that was ravaged by devastating earthquakes claiming thousands of lives this week is attested a “high” vulnerability in the most recent report released by the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict at the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany.

  As Statista;s Katharina Buchholz reports, the vulnerability score is further broken down into three categories – social inequality and lack of development, insufficient political stability, health care and infrastructure as well as lack of progress.

  Especially in the second category, Turkey was rated as having a “very high” vulnerability to natural disasters.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  On Wednesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged that there had been some delays in the country’s initial response to the quake.

  Nations that like Turkey experience many earthquakes – for example China, Japan, the U.S. or Iran – are all rated as highly exposed to natural disaster by the World Risk Index.

  Syria is labeled as having a “high” risk of natural catastrophe. While developed nations Japan and the U.S. score lowest for vulnerability, China also considered relatively well prepared. Turkey’s overall vulnerability, however, stands at 29.58 points, more severe than that of Iran (27.34 points). This is despite the fact that the country ranks far ahead of Iran on the Human Development Index. Other nations with very high disaster risk which are less developed but rated better prepared than Turkey included Nicaragua, Bolivia, Vietnam, Mexico and Honduras.

  Indonesia’s, India’s and the Philippines’ vulnerability received worse ratings than Turkey’s. Syria – ranked among the 25 percent of the least developed countries in the world – was ranked as having “very high” vulnerability throughout.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 22:10

• What Is Mike Pompeo Running For?
  What Is Mike Pompeo Running For?

  Authored by A.B. Stoddard via RealClear Wire,

  The Chinese spy balloon was perfect for Mike Pompeo, an opportunity that fell from the sky. He has been running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination since 2021 and badly needs a way to stand out.

  

  BalloonGate gives Pompeo a mini moment to weigh in as a national security hawk, call President Biden weak, and tweet about his important experience on the world stage.

  “I took many shots at the CCP during my time in the Trump administration. Read more in my new book ‘Never Give An Inch,’” Pompeo wrote in the most cringey tweet before the balloon was shot down, with a picture of the balloon marked “problem” and a picture of him pointing a rifle marked “solution.”

  It’s hard to know who will even notice. Sens. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and many others are out there blasting away at Biden for dithering on the balloon. And Pompeo is a low poller in the 2024 sweepstakes. He seems to lack a plan for how to break through. He’s not criticizing or challenging the popularity of Trump, or of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the other frontrunner. But he has picked what appears to be a pointless fight with Nikki Haley.

  In the weeks after the midterm elections, Pompeo joined the chorus of disappointed Republicans expressing frustration with Trump and his losing candidates, tweeting, “We were told we would get tired of winning. But I’m tired of losing. And so are most Republicans.” But he has since otherwise refused to put any real distance between himself and his former boss. He assiduously avoids criticizing Trump in his book, instead choosing to note that Trump often called him “My Mike,” which seems an embarrassing thing to admit. Pompeo also seems proud that he was the “only member of the president’s core national-security team who made it through four years without resigning or getting fired.”

  Still, Pompeo has used his memoir, a best seller, to try to reach GOP voters and convince them he is macho, mad, mean, and ever-in-battle with the mainstream media. In his fight to uphold the “highest principles” Pompeo wrote, “I was vicious, relentless, manic, determined – you pick the adjective,” and he calls reporters “hyenas” and “wolves.”

  His fly-by attack on Haley, including an accusation that she conspired with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to dump Mike Pence from the 2020 ticket, seems gratuitous and petty. (Haley called this “gossip and lies.”) Pompeo writes: “As for Haley, she gave fine remarks supporting Israel, but didn’t do much else … She abandoned the governorship of the great people of South Carolina for this ‘important’ role and quit it after just months on the job. Was it simply to join Boeing’s board of directors, or did she leave to protect her reputation from the inevitable so-called Trump taint the media inevitably slaps on people?”

  Insulting Haley is clearly part of Pompeo’s intentional groundwork-laying, though to what end it isn’t clear. He hasn’t yet said he is running, but praying on the decision with his wife, which will be announced in “the next handful of months.” But Pompeo started his campaign, for relevance, a few months after Trump left office. He formed a PAC to help Republican candidates in the midterm elections and has traveled to early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

  Pompeo is running as Resume Man. And man, is his resume impressive. He graduated first in his class from West Point, and from Harvard Law and was on Harvard Law Review. After six years in the House of Representatives, he became CIA director for Trump, and then secretary of state – the only person ever to hold both jobs.

  The problem for Pompeo is that GOP primary voters aren’t shopping for Resume Man. Pompeo and DeSantis both may want to avoid mentioning their Ivy League degrees in a primary campaign. After Trump no one needs the requisite experience for the presidency, and elites and their credentials are as contemptible as socialists and the media.

  What’s more, today’s GOP primary voters – the ones who nominated Doug Mastriano, Gen. Don Bolduc, Tudor Dixon, and Herschel Walker for serious jobs – are also far less interested in foreign policy than Pompeo thinks they are. And wait until they find out about his deep ties to the Koch Network.

  Sure, Haley is talking about the same foreign policy issues Pompeo is, but she’s likely running for vice president. The former governor and U.N. ambassador is most definitely qualified to run for president, she has great appeal as the only woman running in the contest, and she is also Indian American. But like Pompeo, she seems ill-suited to MAGA voters. Putting in a halfway decent performance in the primary still makes her the most obvious pick as a running mate.

  Other likely contenders, with DeSantis leading the pack, all have their specific appeal as well: Pence has a natural constituency among his fellow evangelical Christians, especially those who believe Trump has too much baggage to win again; Glenn Youngkin flipped a state Biden won by 10 points the year before; Chris Sununu is a pro-choice swing state governor; Asa Hutchinson and Larry Hogan are former governors who have been openly anti-Trump.

  Pompeo throws around “America First” labels to describe his four years of work for Trump, but he is no MAGA star or culture warrior ready to rescue the nation from “woke.” You don’t see Pompeo hanging out on OAN or online bashing vaccines or drag shows or grade school syllabuses.

  With Ukraine aflame, and the looming prospect of war with China over Taiwan, it’s not that national security is unimportant. In next year’s general election these matters will be a critical part of the debate. But the bulk of Republicans Pompeo must woo for the nomination are more interested in what library books their kids can access than Iran’s current stash of fissile material. And Trump will spend more time talking about transgender issues than the cohesion of our transatlantic alliance as it counters Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Trump now opposes any more funding for Ukraine and, according to a new Politico report, plans to paint everyone else in the primary field as warmongers.

  It doesn’t sound like Pompeo’s got a workaround for that. And if he doesn’t, but enters the race anyway, he’s off his balloon.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 21:50

• Texas Sues Biden Admin Over 'Pharmacy Mandate' To Dispense Abortion Drugs
  Texas Sues Biden Admin Over ‘Pharmacy Mandate’ To Dispense Abortion Drugs

  Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Texas filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration on Tuesday to block federal health guidance that allegedly forces pharmacies to dispense abortion-inducing drugs.

  

  The Biden administration in July 2022 released guidance requiring pharmacies to supply women with abortion-inducing drugs or risk losing Medicaid and Medicare funds, even if certain state laws prohibit the procedure.

  Texas argues in its lawsuit, which refers to the guidance collectively as the “pharmacy mandate,” that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has attempted to impose, via executive fiat, a federal right to abortion. The lawsuit said this was a part of the Biden administration’s “war against” the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. That ruling reversed a 1973 ruling that made abortion legal nationwide.

  “But whether the Biden Administration likes it or not, the question of abortion is up to the people’s elected representatives—not unelected bureaucrats,” the lawsuit states (pdf). “The Biden Administration’s attempt to inject itself into that question is both procedurally and substantively illegal.”

  The HHS guidance, which involved roughly 60,000 U.S. retail pharmacies, claims that federal anti-discrimination law requires pharmacies to provide these drugs. The guidance was released on July 13, 2022, a few days after President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed an executive order that made it easier to obtain abortion services following the Dobbs decision.

  

  ‘Patently False’: Paxton Pushes Back

  However, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, argues that Title IX’s anti-discrimination protections don’t require companies to provide abortions, and instead protect any person or entity from being forced to aid in the provision of abortions.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 21:30

• Artificial Intelligence Could Pose Existential Threat To Humanity: Australian MP
  Artificial Intelligence Could Pose Existential Threat To Humanity: Australian MP

  Authored by Victoria Kelly-Clark via The Epoch Times,

  The risks around artificial intelligence must be thoroughly investigated as it could pose an existential threat to human life, says one Australian MP.

  In a speech in Parliament on Feb. 6, Labor MP Julian Hill said ChatGPT had the potential to revolutionise the world but warned that if AI were to surpass human intelligence, it could cause significant damage.

  “It doesn’t take long, if you start thinking, to realise the disruptive and catastrophic risks from untamed AGI are real, plausible, and easy to imagine,” he said.

  Hill said that risk analysts working on threats such as asteroids, climate change, supervolcanoes, nuclear devastation, solar flares or high-mortality pandemics are increasingly putting artificial general intelligence (AGI) at the top of their list of worries.

  “AGI has the potential to revolutionise our world in ways we can’t yet imagine, but if AGI surpasses human intelligence, it could cause significant harm to humanity if its goals and motivations are not aligned with our own, ” he said.

  “The risk that increasingly worries people who are far cleverer than me is what they call the ‘unlikelihood’ that humans will be able to control AGI or that a malevolent actor may harness AGI for mass destruction.”

  

  Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm as technology improves at a breakneck speed.

  Hill also noted that militaries around the world were pursuing AGI development as it could transform warfare and render current “defensive capabilities obsolete.”

  “An AGI-enabled adversary could conquer Australia or unleash societal-level destruction without being restrained by globally agreed norms,” he said.

  AI programs have been banned in schools across New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia.

  MP’s Speech Partly Written by ChatGPT

  To illustrate his concerns, Hill said he had used ChatGPT to write parts of the speech he was delivering.

  The program took just 90 seconds to summarise recent media reports about students using artificial intelligence in Australia to cheat and said the paragraph it produced was “pretty good.”

  ChatGPT wrote, “Recently, there have been media reports of students in Australia using artificial intelligence to cheat in their exams. AI technology, such as smart software that can write essays and generate answers, is becoming more accessible to students, allowing them to complete assignments and tests without actually understanding the material. This is causing concern, understandable concern, for teachers, who are worried about the impact on the integrity of the education system.”

  ChatGPT also wrote that students were effectively bypassing their education and gaining an unfair advantage by using AI.

  “This can lead to a lack of critical thinking skills and a decrease in the overall quality of education. Moreover, teachers may not be able to detect if a student has used AI to complete an assignment, making it difficult to identify and address cheating. The use of AI to cheat also raises ethical questions about the responsibility of students to learn and understand the material they’re being tested on,” it wrote.

  

  Screens displaying the logos of Microsoft and ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence application software developed by OpenAI. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images)

  Hill warned the quality of the response meant humanity needed to be a step ahead.

  “If humans manage to control AGI before an intelligence explosion, it could transform science, economies, our environment and society with advances in every field of human endeavour,” he said, calling for an inquiry or international cooperation on investigating the issue.

  “The key message I want to convey is that we have to start now.”

  AI Community Worried

  Hill’s speech comes after a decision by The International Conference on Machine Learning to ban authors from using the chatbot to write scientific papers.

  “During the past few years, we have observed and been part of rapid progress in large-scale language models (LLM), both in research and deployment. This progress has not slowed down but only sped up during the past few months. As many, including ourselves, have noticed, LLMs released in the past few months, such as OpenAI’s chatGPT, are now able to produce text snippets that are often difficult to distinguish from the human-written text,” the ICML said.

  “Such rapid progress often comes with unanticipated consequences.

  “Unfortunately, we have not had enough time to observe, investigate and consider its implications for our reviewing and publication process. We thus decided to prohibit producing/generating ICML paper text using large-scale language models.”

  US Defence Puts AGI on Watch List

  Meanwhile, the U.S. Defence Information System Agency (DISA) has placed AGI on its watch list.

  The DISA watchlist is known for featuring items that later become pillars of U.S. defence such as 5G, zero-trust digital defence , quantum-resistant cryptography, edge computing, and telepresence.

  DISA Chief Technology Officer Stephen Wallace told an event hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International (AFCEA) that the organisation had taken an interest in the technology.

  

  Participants at Intel’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Day stand in front of a poster during the event in the Indian city of Bangalore on April 4, 2017. (Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)

  “We’ve heard a lot about AI over the years, and there’s a number of places where it’s already in play,” Wallace said on Jan. 25, according to Defence News. “But this sort, the ability to generate content, is a pretty interesting capability.

  “We’re starting to look at: How does [generative AI] actually change DISA’s mission in the department and what we provide for the department going forward.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 21:10

• Cargo Thefts Spike 15% Across US, Canada In 2022
  Cargo Thefts Spike 15% Across US, Canada In 2022

  By Noi Mahoney of FreightWaves

  The end of 2022 saw a surge in cargo thefts that pushed the yearly total to above an estimated $223 million worth of goods stolen across Canada and the U.S., according to recent data from CargoNet.

  

  The Verisk Analytics-owned data firm, which tracks voluntarily reported cargo thefts, recorded 1,778 “supply chain risk incidents” in Canada and the U.S. in 2022, a 15% jump compared to 2021. 

  “The No. 1 commodity [for cargo theft] was household goods for all of 2022, electronics was No. 2, and then food and beverage commodities were No. 3,” Scott Cornell, transportation lead and crime and theft specialist at Travelers, told FreightWaves. 

  California led the way with 417 reported cargo thefts in 2022, a 41% year-over-year increase, followed by Texas with 223 and Florida with 153.

  CargoNet’s 2022 data showed the average value of cargo stolen in a theft was $214,104, a 20% increase compared to 2021. 

  Cargo theft hot spots are typically areas around major ports, as well as intermodal facilities, distribution centers and truck stops.

  “When we look at the hot spots in general for cargo theft, they tend to be port areas,” Cornell said. “If you look at the heat map that CargoNet puts out, you’ll see California is always No. 1. California definitely has several ports in that state, then Florida, another port state, Texas, Georgia, New Jersey, Illinois, that’s really considered an inland port because of the rail yards, same thing for Memphis, almost sort of an inland port because of the rail yards.”

  Danny Ramon, an intelligence and response manager at Overhaul, a real-time visibility and risk management platform based in Austin, Texas, said wherever there is a density of cargo and large populations there are going to be thieves “targeting low-hanging fruit.”

  “Whenever you’ve got a lot of cargo, somebody’s going to be the low-hanging fruit. Somebody didn’t actually get to park inside the parking lot that’s gated, somebody had to park outside of the coverage of the streetlights or the CCTV cameras, somebody at the truck stop was going to leave their load alone for more than more than 10 or 20 minutes, giving thieves the opportunity to steal the entire tractor-trailer,” Ramon said.

  

  Organized crime rings can react quickly to market trends

  Cornell said nine out of 10 times a cargo theft incident occurs, it’s usually perpetrated by an organized crime group.  

  “Most of the time, cargo theft is committed by organized rings and those rings are usually fulfilling orders,” Cornell said. “They have orders that they’re filling, trying to meet the needs of their customers that they have within their own supply chain that have asked them for electronics or energy drinks, cleaning supplies, things like that.”

  According to CargoNet, cargo theft in Georgia increased 34% year over year, partly due to organized crime groups that took advantage of increased traffic at the Port of Savannah.

  Cornell said one of the most common methods of cargo theft is surveilling a truck or shipments outside of busy distribution centers.

  “[Cargo thieves] know the distribution centers for what they distribute,” Cornell said. “So if they know that this distribution center distributes energy drinks — they know that from gathering intel — they know if they follow a truck out of that warehouse, there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to get energy drinks.” 

  Ramon said organized cargo theft rings and the black market can often react more quickly to market demand than normal supply chains.

  “These criminals can react, turn on a dime, react to market trends very quickly,” Ramon said.  “Anything that has retail purchasing restrictions is going to be big. Anything that’s bearing a bigger brunt of inflation or product shortages, for whatever reason, whether that’s because of flooding in California or avian flu, anything causing things to go up and desirability to go up in price because there’s a shortage is definitely going to be targeted.”

  Strategic thefts, fictitious pickups, double brokering on the rise

  Both Cornell and Ramon said they have seen an increase in more sophisticated methods of cargo theft, such as strategic thefts, which include identity theft, fictitious pickups and double brokering scams.

  “Strategic theft by definition is when cargo thieves basically trick you into giving them the cargo,” Cornell said. “Within strategic theft, the most common one tends to be identity theft, and that’s where they basically steal the identity of a legitimate trucking company, they pose as that company on load boards or the internet or by calling a freight broker.”

  Thieves posing as a legitimate trucking company, called ABC Trucking, will negotiate a price for a load with brokers, pick up the load and then disappear, Cornell said. 

  “If you’re a freight broker, you call ABC Trucking a couple days after the loads are picked up. You say, ‘Hey, you guys picked up these loads the other day and they were never delivered,’” Cornell said. “Then ABC Trucking says, ‘Yeah, we never picked those up. We don’t know who you dealt with but it wasn’t us.’”

  Ramon said identity theft and fictitious pickups used to be more common at West Coast ports but moved to East Coast facilities in 2022.

  “Overhaul just put out a bulletin to our customers and clients talking about how primarily this has been a Southern California modus operandi, this fraudulent effort or strategic cargo theft,” Ramon said. “We’re starting to see some of the same actors actually branch out to the East Coast, as well as Indiana and Illinois.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 20:50

• "I Won't Go Away": Kari Lake Confirms She's "Entertaining" Major Run If She Loses Election Lawsuit
  “I Won’t Go Away”: Kari Lake Confirms She’s “Entertaining” Major Run If She Loses Election Lawsuit

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Arizona Republican candidate Kari Lake said she is currently “entertaining” a run for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat in 2024 if her election-related court cases don’t pan out.

  

  During an interview with Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk this week, Lake spoke about speculation that she would run for Arizona’s Senate seat in 2024. That would pit her against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Rep. Rueben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who recently announced he would be running for the seat. A former Democrat, Sinema announced last year she would switch to be an independent.

  Asked by Kirk on Monday if she’s “entertaining” a run for Sinema’s seat, Lake said, “Yes, I am entertaining it. I mean my number one priority is our court case, and I have full confidence in our court case and I hope we will get a judge to do the right thing.

  “But I’m also looking at what happens if we don’t get a decent ruling in that, and they want me to go away, they want our movement to go away,” Lake said. “I represent we the people, and if they want us gone so badly that they’re willing to steal an election then I’m not going to let them have that, I won’t go away.”

  Further, Lake said that she viewed “internal polling” that showed she would have a good chance of unseating Sinema or defeating Gallego. It’s not clear if Sinema, who was first elected in 2018, is planning to run for reelection, and she has made no public comments in response to Lake’s or Gallego’s criticisms of her.

  Gallego, meanwhile, announced that he would run for Senate in January. Since then, both he and Lake have repeatedly sparred with one another on Twitter and in public appearances.

  “I’ve seen some internal polling that shows I’m the only Republican who can beat these other two,” Lake said, referring to Gallego and Sinema. “I find both of them incredibly dangerous to the people of Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema’s voting record being 93 percent of the time voting for Joe Biden’s agenda, I find Ruben Gallego being a self-admitted socialist really frightening for Arizona and if I’m the only Republican who can beat them, I would be willing to jump in.”

  A spokesperson for Lake, meanwhile, confirmed to Politico that she met with Republican Senate officials in Washington, D.C., although few details were divulged. A meeting between Lake and the National Republican Senatorial Committee officials lasted about an hour on Thursday, said Lake advisor Caroline Wren.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 20:30

• "Not A Sustainable Model": AZ Hospital 'On Brink Of Collapse' After Spending $20 Million On Migrants
  “Not A Sustainable Model”: AZ Hospital ‘On Brink Of Collapse’ After Spending $20 Million On Migrants

  A hospital in Yuma, Arizona is reportedly on the brink of collapse after providing $20 million in care for what has become a constant stream of illegal migrants.

  

  Dr. Robert Transchel, president and CEO of Yuma, Arizona’s Regional Medical Center, told Fox News that the problem is not new.

  “It’s been a long journey,” he said. “We’ve been at this for well over a year now. We tracked our uncompensated care for a period of over six months, and we calculated that we’ve provided over $20 million in uncompensated care to the migrants crossing the border.“

  According to Transchel, despite approaching state officials and Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas for aid, neither the city, state, or the federal government have stepped up to help to pay for the migrant care.

  “We just don’t have a payer source. Everybody is sympathetic, and everybody lends a listening ear, but nobody has a solution,” he told “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

  “We’ve provided $20 million in care to the migrants that are crossing the border and we just don’t have a payer source for those individuals. It’s not a sustainable model to have these continued rising expenses without a revenue source to offset that.”

  Transchel said the hospital will keep functioning, adding that most hospitals operate on a “very thin margin.” 

  “We’re fine today, and we’ll be fine tomorrow. The problem is, if this continues, it’s gonna build up, and it’s gonna continue to be a problem.”

  He added that the $20 million care cost fails to encompass the full scope of losses the facility has suffered since migrant patients became a problem, pointing to flight costs for some, as well as expenses associated with increased staffing. –Fox News

  “The infrastructure that we’ve had to add is uncompensated as well,” he added.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 20:10

• Canadian Theater Sparks Backlash After Announcing Performances For "Black-Identifying Audiences"
  Canadian Theater Sparks Backlash After Announcing Performances For “Black-Identifying Audiences”

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

  A government-funded Canadian theater organization has come under fire after announcing that it will be holding an event for only “black-identifying audiences.”

  

  The National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa announced the “Black Out Night” event on its official website on Jan. 16.

  According to the theater, the “award-winning presentation of Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is will run from Feb. 9–18 at its 897-seat Babs Asper Theatre” and is one of the “milestones in a series of offerings over Black History Month.”

  The show features depictions of violence, death, and murder, and references to domestic violence, familial and generational abuse, and suicide, among other issues, according to the theatre’s official website.

  The production will be the first of two “Black Out” nights that will be held at the theater this year, according to the website.

  However, the move has sparked backlash online, including from columnist Brian Lilley, who wrote in the Toronto Sun on Jan. 26 that the government-funded theater should be “presenting plays that reflect the diversity of Canada.”

  “What is bothersome is the apparent segregationist appeal,” he wrote.

  “Rather than encouraging black theatergoers, in what is a mostly white but slowly diversifying national capital, to attend, the NAC makes it sound like this event is only for black patrons.”

  Event Sparks Race Row

  Elsewhere, the Ontario chapter of the Foundation Against Racism and Intolerance said in a statement: “We strenuously object to the taxpayer-funded National Arts Centre reinvigorating segregation in theater through the inauguration of ‘Black Out’ performances.

  “We can on the National Arts Centre honor the legacy of Viola Desmond by making it clear that all human beings are welcome in the theater at every performance.”

  Desmond, a Canadian civil and women’s rights activist, challenged racial segregation at a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, in 1946 by refusing to leave the whites-only section of the theater.

  Others showed support for the “Black Out” night event though, including journalist Kevin Bourne, who wrote in the Canadian magazine Shifter that the event is about “representation and providing well-needed infrastructure for black creators.”

  “While the wording surrounding the NAC’s event could’ve been better, the underlying themes are representation and community, and representation matters,” Bourne penned.

  “Any attempt at carving out a dedicated space for racialized communities is often labeled by some as ‘racist’ and counterproductive to this Utopian kumbaya idea of all people getting along (despite the fact many individuals still don’t like black people; even among people of color),” Bourne said.

  The NAC, which describes itself as “Canada’s bilingual, multidisciplinary home for the performing arts,” said it was inspired to host the two “Black Out” events after Broadway held a similar event in 2019 for Jeremy O’Harris’s Slave Play.

  ‘No Racially Segregated Shows at NAC’

  “A Black Out is an open invitation to black audiences to come and experience performances with their community,” the website states. “The evenings will provide a dedicated space for black theatergoers to witness a show that reflects the vivid kaleidoscope that is the black experience.”

  It adds that “creating evenings dedicated to black theatergoers will allow for conversation and participation to be felt throughout the theater and open the doors for black-identifying audiences to experience the energy of the NAC with a shared sense of belonging and passion.”

  However, in a statement to Jon Kay, the editor of the online magazine Quillette, a communications official at NAC said the center will not be race-checking attendees.

  The statement, which Kay shared on Twitter, says that there are “no racially segregated shows at NAC”—and that “of the nine performances of Is God Is, we have dedicated one performance—Friday, February 17—to those who self-identify as black and their guests.”

  “No one will be turned away at the door; there will be no checkpoints for Black Out Night ticket holders and no questions will be asked about anyone’s identity, race, or gender,” the center said.

  Canadian law states that discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, and more are illegal.

  The Epoch Times has contacted the National Arts Centre for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 19:50

• Researchers Discover Promising 'Young Blood' Anti-Aging Drug
  Researchers Discover Promising ‘Young Blood’ Anti-Aging Drug

  Young blood plasma transfusions for anti-aging are popular with some wealthy elites. There are claims that young blood rejuvenates the body’s organs. But turning back the body’s clock with transfusions might not need to be done anymore following research from Columbia University in New York that states an anti-inflammatory drug can rejuvenate the body and possibly increase the human lifespan by decades. 

  “An aging blood system, because it’s a vector for a lot of proteins, cytokines, and cells, has a lot of bad consequences for the organism,” Emmanuelle Passegué, Ph.D., director of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative, who’s been studying how blood changes with age, said in a statement. 

  “A 70-year-old with a 40-year-old blood system could have a longer healthspan, if not a longer lifespan,” Passegué said. 

  Instead of a liter of plasma from younger donors that might cost thousands of dollars, researchers found young blood could be produced in pill form. 

  

  That pill is an anti-inflammatory drug called anakinra, already approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis. Passegué and graduate student Carl Mitchell discovered anakinra reverses some of the effects of age on the hematopoietic system of mice. 

  “These results indicate that such strategies hold promise for maintaining healthier blood production in the elderly,” Mitchell said.

  What didn’t work, and explained by Passegué and her team in a 2021 study in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, was:

  to rejuvenate old hematopoietic stem cells, in mice, with exercise or calorie-restricting diet, both generally thought to slow the aging process. Neither worked. Transplanting old stem cells into young bone marrow also failed. Even young blood had no effect on rejuvenating old blood stem cells.

  Her team then discovered the benefits of anakinra in mice: 

  Mitchell and Passegué then took a closer look at the stem cells’ environment, the bone marrow. “Blood stem cells live in a niche; we thought what happens in this specialized local environment could be a big part of the problem,” Mitchell says

  With techniques developed in the Passegué lab that enable detailed investigation of the bone marrow milieu, the researchers found that the aging niche is deteriorating and overwhelmed with inflammation, leading to dysfunction in the blood stem cells.

  One inflammatory signal released from the damaged bone marrow niche, IL-1B, was critical in driving these aging features, and blocking it with the drug, anakinra, remarkably returned the blood stem cells to a younger, healthier state.

  Even more youthful effects on both the niche and the blood system occurred when IL-1B was prevented from exerting its inflammatory effects throughout the animal’s life.

  The researchers are now trying to learn if the same processes are active in humans and if rejuvenating the stem cell niche earlier in life, in middle age, would be a more effective strategy.

  Meanwhile, “treating elderly patients with anti-inflammatory drugs blocking IL-1B function should help with maintaining healthier blood production,” Passegué says, and she hopes the finding will lead to clinical testing.

  “We know that bone tissue begins to degrade when people are in their 50s. What happens in middle age? Why does the niche fail first?” Passegué says. “Only by having a deep molecular understanding will it be possible to identify approaches that can truly delay aging.”

  Of course, the research is still very early, and results have yet to be tested on humans. But that might not stop people from Googling the drug as a possible anti-aging solution. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 19:30

• Taibbi: Take A Bow, Columbia Journalism Review
  Taibbi: Take A Bow, Columbia Journalism Review

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket,

  The Columbia Journalism Review stunned many last Monday by publishing “The Press Versus the President,” a 24,000-word autopsy of press coverage in the Trump years, focusing on the the Trump-Russia collusion scandal colloquially known as “Russiagate.”

  

  The piece was written by Jeff Gerth, a long-serving New York Times writer who is as credentialed as they come in the legacy press, having among other things won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 (for reporting, incidentally, not commentary or public service). In retirement at the start of the Trump years, Gerth watched with growing alarm as venerable institutions like the Times and the Washington Post continually made high-stakes assertions in headlines that appeared based on thin or uncheckable sourcing.

  The pile of such stories was already stacked to skyscraper height, and commemorated by awards like a joint Times-Post Pulitzer, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrapped up an investigation of the matter without indicting Trump or anyone else for the supposed conspiracy. There was no way for Mueller’s probe to have ended the way it did and for years of “worse than Watergate” news reports about Trump-Russian collusion to be true, so Gerth went back to the beginning in search of the real story of what, if anything, went wrong on the coverage side.

  The result is a long, almost book-length compendium of errors and editorial overreach. It could have been longer. Gerth focused on the would-be investigative reports at papers like the Times and the Post that drove Russiagate, mostly leaving alone the less serious players at cable news and at online journals whose main contribution was making the click-bomb bigger.

  A brief note on some issues that were already popping up as problems in the media business heading into 2016-2017, and which are important subtext to Gerth’s piece:

  All the President’s Men was a great movie, but it may have infected the media world with a delusion. Alan J. Pakula’s atmospheric thriller depicted journalists as modern-day noir detectives, with the bustling Washington Post newsroom replacing the stylish offices of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman giving America a portrait of reporters as sexy young rebels who could topple a president with a keystroke. The job is virtually never like that, but a generation of reporters and editors grew up with this ideal, on the alert for that one great scoop that would lead to lucrative book and movie deals and model-level actors playing them onscreen. I don’t think it’s an accident that just as journalism was beginning to lose its way, Hollywood began cranking out All the President’s Men homages one after another, from Spotlight to She Said to The Post.

  Gerth doesn’t say that great papers like the Times and the Post were so busy self-mythologizing that they untethered themselves from accountability mechanisms that once kept papers out of trouble, but it’s implied in the facts he uncovers. Perhaps the most damning scene in the four-part series comes in Part Two, when in an astonishing display of hubris the Times invites a documentary crew to film them for a series called The Fourth Estate. The problem is, the scene they invite Showtime to record is perhaps the biggest screwup in the Russiagate years. This is the journalistic equivalent of Captain Edward Smith inviting cameras to record him snoring away as his Titanic drives into an iceberg.

  The Fourth Estate cameras were in the newsroom as Times leaders were preparing a front page stunner for February 14th, 2017 called “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The piece cited “phone records and intercepted calls” and “four current and former American officials” in asserting that “members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign” had repeated contact with “senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”

  If true, this piece by the iconic daily might easily have been just the first in a series of exposés leading to the end of the Trump presidency. Or so the Times thought, seemingly. Gerth, who correctly identifies the “Repeated Contacts” story as one of the decisive moments in the Russiagate disaster, recounts how editors and reporters preened for the cameras as they accelerated toward their proverbial iceberg:

  As the story is being edited, Mark Mazzetti, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau who was also helping edit some of the Trump-Russia coverage, is shown telling senior editors he is “fairly sure members of Russian intelligence” were “having conversations with members of Trump’s campaign…” He asks Baquet, “Are we feeding into a conspiracy” with the “recurring themes of contacts?”

  Baquet responded that he wanted the story, up high, to “show the range” and level of “contacts” and “meetings, some of which may be completely innocent” and not “sinister,” followed by a “nut” or summary “graph,” explaining why “this is something that continues to hobble them.”

  Baquet’s desire to flush out the details of supposed contacts is similar to his well-founded skepticism in October 2016 about the supposed computer links between a Russian bank and the Trump organization.

  Mazzetti reports back that the story is “nailed down.”

  Baquet asks, “Can you pull it off?”

  “Oh yeah,” Mazzetti replies.

  So Baquet signs off, adding that it’s the “biggest story in years.”

  Elisabeth Bumiller, the Washington bureau chief, adds her seal of approval: “There’ll be hair on fire.”

  That’s the executive editor of the New York Times asking a reporter to double-check with his (unnamed) sources on a huge front-page story, and the reporter coming back in a jiffy with news that the piece is “nailed down.” It’s not happening today, but the publishers of the Times will sooner or later wish they had that moment back.

  The story turned out to be wrong, at least according to the FBI, whose director James Comey would later testify that “in the main, it was not true.” Even the man leading the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, Peter Strzok — the same ferocious Trump critic Peter Strzok, who reassured his lover Lisa Page that Trump would never become president, because “we’ll stop it” — even he couldn’t find a way to confirm the tale, as Gerth describes (emphasis mine):

  The story said “the FBI declined to comment.” In fact, the FBI was quickly ripping the piece to shreds, in a series of annotated comments by Strzok, who managed the Russia case. His analysis, prepared for his bosses, found numerous inaccuracies, including a categorical refutation of the lead and headline; “we are unaware,” Strzok wrote, “of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Comey immediately checked with other intelligence agencies to see if they had any such evidence, came up empty, and relayed his findings to a closed Senate briefing, according to testimony at a Senate hearing months later.

  This was a classic example of reporters being more eager for a headline than afraid of a mistake. This can only happen because mistakes of this sort are no longer career-threatening as they once were. The press is supposed to be one of society’s primary mechanisms for holding people in power accountable, but the system only works if reporters and editors aim that regulatory reflex at themselves first. A newspaper no one believes isn’t going to be worth much on the oversight front, yet the figures in the newsroom scene Showtime captured appeared to forget that, in their zeal to cast themselves in the next “All the President’s” remake.

  In that same vein it’s notable that Gerth got Bob Woodward, journalism’s original movie star, to go on record castigating the business over its Trump-Russia reporting. Woodward told Gerth he believed the coverage “wasn’t handled well,” and “urged newsrooms to ‘walk down the painful road of introspection.’” He also described to Gerth how he tried to warn “people who covered this” in the Washington Post newsroom away from certain stories, only to be met with shrugs. “To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post about what I had said, why I said this,” he told Gerth. “I accepted that and I didn’t force it on anyone.”

  Gerth’s story is a long, weedsy tale, and though some have described it as hard to read, I disagree. The piece is a thorough chronicle of a classic tale of human folly, describing how a business that depends on independence of thought, honesty, and a strong instinct for self-preservation to survive, fell victim instead to herd-think and walked en masse off a very high cliff. The story is scrupulously documented, as Gerth worked hard to get everyone from Woodward to former FBI spokesman Mike Korten to Donald Trump on the record, providing an immediate contrast to the anonymous “people familiar with the matter” (an attribution used a thousand times by the Times in the Trump years, Gerth notes) who propped up so much of the Russiagate reporting. It’s conspicuous that the people who mostly refuse comment in this article are the reporters themselves, who clearly still haven’t grasped what happened here and what they need to face to save their profession.

  One last note about Jeff, who was good enough to answer a few questions for this article. The news business is not Hollywood. It’s not even politics, which as the old joke goes is Hollywood for ugly people. Real reporting work is mostly a drag, mostly time-consuming, and very often a high-effort, low-reward activity. If you’re doing it right, most of the time you’re making phone calls that don’t pan out, being a nuisance via repeated requests to use a quote or put a name to one, or sitting up at night and hyperventilating about article factoids your sleeping mind has woken you up to have panic attacks about.

  Subscribers to Racket can read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 19:10

• Matt Gaetz Steps Out Of Line On Ukraine
  Matt Gaetz Steps Out Of Line On Ukraine

  Rep. Matt Gaetz early this week took an extremely unpopular position within the D.C. swamp, saying just before President Biden’s Tuesday night State of the Union address, “How much more for Ukraine? Is there any limit?”

  From the swamp’s point of view, he has certainly “stepped out of line”… but from the point of view of average Americans struggling to pay rising grocery, utility, and housing costs as billions of US tax dollars remain flowing to a corrupt foreign government, Gaetz in his lonely but outspoken stance is saying precisely what needs to be said at this late stage.

  

  The Florida Republican went off in a House floor speech Monday: “How much more for Ukraine? Is there any limit?” And posed: “Which billionth dollar really kicks in the door? Which redline we set will we not later cross?”

  He had earlier previewed Biden’s State of the Union address in saying: “Tomorrow, President Biden will tell us how much more we must do for Ukraine,” Gaetz said. “Look around your house. How much stuff is made in Ukraine, or even Russia for that matter?”

  “So why Ukraine, a country that just rounded up dozens of senior leaders in its government over overt corruption?” Gaetz asked. “Perhaps the answer is as simple as the Hunter Biden life motto: the grifters gotta grift.”

  He emphasized the huge risk of D.C. pursuing its policy of arming Ukraine at all costs while inching toward nuclear-armed superpowers clashing, while at the same time most Americans find the Biden administration’s rationale for the unprecedented defense aid for Kiev to be unclear.

  “Why should we do more for a country that just rounded up dozens of its senior officials over overt corruption?” he asked the administration and its supporters.

  At the #SOTU tomorrow, Joe Biden will tell us how much more we must do for Ukraine.

  But why should we do more for a country that just rounded up dozens of its senior officials over overt corruption?

  The answer is as simple as Hunter Biden’s life motto: a grifter’s gotta grift. pic.twitter.com/gYrZLUjGVN

  — Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) February 6, 2023

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

  For many months now going back to last spring, Gaetz has warned fellow lawmakers and the public of a “bipartisan push to go to war with Russia” – which could unleash nuclear apocalypse.

  Ironically, Joe Biden himself in so many words has warned of the same thing, in an October speech admitting that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is the highest it has been for 60 years, since the Cuban missile crisis.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 18:50

• What Fauci Knew About Vaccine Ineffectiveness… And When
  What Fauci Knew About Vaccine Ineffectiveness… And When

  Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  What if Anthony Fauci co-authored an article on vaccines that would have gotten you and I blocked and banned at any point in the last three years?

  That just happened.

  His article in Cell – “Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses” – says it as plainly as possible: the COVID vaccine did not work because it could not work.

  

  First some review from what we knew before this whole fiasco began.

  Vaccines are not suitable for coronaviruses. Such respiratory viruses spread and mutate too quickly. This is why there has never been a vaccine for the common cold and why the flu shot is predictably suboptimal. Vaccines can only be sterilizing and contribute to public health when the virus is a stable pathogen like Smallpox and Measles. For coronaviruses, there is really only one way forward: better anti-virals, therapeutics, and acquired immunity.

  The above paragraph has been repeated to me countless times in my life, especially after COVID hit. Every expert was on the same page. There was simply no question about it. Anything that would be called a vaccine would lack the features of vaccines past. It would not stop infection or transmission, much less end a bad season for respiratory viruses. This is why the FDA has never approved one. It would not and could not make it through trials, especially given the safety risks associated with every vaccine.

  Maybe, maybe, there exists the possibility that you can come up with one variant but it is not likely to be approved in time to be effective. It might provide temporary protection against severe outcomes from one variant but it will be useless against further mutations. In addition, vaccine-induced protection is not as broad as natural immunity, so it is likely that the person would get infected later. Boosting is likely only to pertain to last month’s mutation, and raises dangers of itself: imprinting the immune system in ways that make it less effective.

  Sadly, posting those three paragraphs on social media at any point in the last three years would likely get you censored or even banned. Normal science was suppressed. Common knowledge among experts was verboten. Everything we’ve learned for a century or even two millennia was thrown out. The job of censorship was tasked to a gaggle of ill-educated tech workers obeying the FBI overlords, so they went along.

  And here we are two years after the vaccine rollout and the truth is rather well known. The vaccines were an enormous flop. At best. At worst, they caused tremendous amounts of injury and death as compared to any vaccine ever approved for the market. That they were forced on people in many professions—and backed by a Stalinesque media frenzy—is simply incredible. Several cities even locked themselves down for the vaccinated only. Even now, unvaccinated non-Americans cannot travel to the United States, unless they come across the southern border.

  And yet only now does Fauci choose to lay out the science that we knew long ago. There is nothing particularly interesting in his article. Only the timing is interesting: following trillions in pharma profits, millions displaced by mandates, and suffering from injury all over the world. Now he says that there was really no chance that the vaccine would be either effective or necessarily safe.

  This is a level of trolling that is truly unthinkable and indescribable.

  Here is the summary of the article:

  “Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other ‘common cold’ viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns. Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines. In this review, we examine challenges that have impeded development of effective mucosal respiratory vaccines, emphasizing that all of these viruses replicate extremely rapidly in the surface epithelium and are quickly transmitted to other hosts, within a narrow window of time before adaptive immune responses are fully marshaled.”

  There are profound safety issues to consider too. It takes a very long time to assure that. Fauci says:

  “Considering that vaccine development and licensure is a long and complex process requiring years of preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy data, the limitations of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines remind us that candidate vaccines for most other respiratory viruses have to date been insufficiently protective for consideration of licensure …”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 18:30

• Due To Staggering Investment Losses, Masa Son Owes SoftBank Over $5 Billion On Side Deals
  Due To Staggering Investment Losses, Masa Son Owes SoftBank Over $5 Billion On Side Deals

  Several years ago, roughly around the time Masa Son’s SoftBank launched a truly unprecedented, historic capital misallocation campaign (which will one day be a case study in how to vaporize tens of billions), which was nothing more than a levered bet on easy monetary policy and central banks reflating markets, and also around the time we first asked if “SoftBank was the Bubble Era’s “Short Of The Century“, his earnings presentations were filled with jolly-if-ridiculous, unicorn-riddlged slides such as these pitching the financial conglomerates ill-fated foray into “AI”:

  

  

  And speaking of Artificial Intelligence, where according to SoftBank every entrepreneur in world was somehow an key cog in the AI wheel…

  

  … and where SoftBank saw itself as the “conductor” of the “AI revolution“…

  

  … despite burning billions in shareholder capital, Masa Son still has nothing at all to show for it, not even some woke chat (which supposedly will get people to quit Google and start using Bing, lol) and instead Masa was forced to resort to horrific charts such as this one taken from the “bank’s” earnings presentation yesterday.

  

  Or rather, we should say Masa’s lieutenants, because the plump and jolly (former?) billionaire – who was so happy to announce billions in buybacks during SoftBank’s glory days when central banks were reflating the bubble – was nowhere to be found during yesterday’s earnings call.

  Just in case the chart of cumulative losses shown above isn’t clear enough to indicate how SoftBank’s “investments” have done in recent years, here is some more data on why Japan’s (formerly) richest man opted out of his “legendary” investor presentation for the first time in decades, and it starts with a record $5.5 Billion loss for SoftBank’s Vision Funds.

  As the FT recaps, the technology conglomerate posted large investment losses for the fourth straight quarter with a decline in value for 73% of its 472 investments. To brace for the shareholder shock, SoftBank also cut back on deals with its two Vision Funds investing just $300mn in two companies, compared to $9.6bn during the same quarter in 2021. For Q4, SoftBank reported an investment loss of ¥731.94bn ($5.5bn), compared with a ¥1.38tn loss in the previous quarter for its two Vision Funds and a fund investing in start-ups in Latin America.

  The bottom line was horrific: during the three months ended Dec 31, one of the world’s biggest tech investors generated a ¥783.41bn net loss, which was far worse than the consensus forecast of a ¥103.59bn profit.  In the previous quarter, the company had logged a massive ¥3tn net profit, but that was mainly a result of its historic selldown of its stake in Chinese ecommerce group Alibaba.

  SoftBank also said that as of Dec 31, the fair value of the $100bn Vision Fund I was down 4.4% from a year earlier due to markdowns in privately held companies despite gains in some listed holdings, such as ride-hailing groups Didi and Grab. The valuation for investments in Vision Fund II was down 6.2%.

  Below are two slides showing the dire duds and dismal returns at both Vision Fund 1 and 2; pay particular attention to the latter: as FT’s Robert Smith reminds us, this was a fund launched “to facilitate the continued acceleration of the AI revolution through investment in market-leading, tech-enabled growth companies”, and suggested that it had raised $100bn from the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Standard Chartered, a bunch of Japanese banks and the Kazahk sovereign wealth fund. Oops.

  

  With SoftBank’s bullish founder offstage, its finance chiefs repeated that its balance sheet and investment portfolio was “safe” and “resilient” to placate investors concerned by the group’s borrowing costs as interest rates rise. Alas, it was not enough and SoftBank stock tumbled and was last down about 44% from its March 2021 all time high (it would be far lower if it wasn’t for the billions in stock buybacks authorized by the bank meant to keep its stock price elevated).

  Kirk Boodry, an analyst with Redex Research, said it would probably take time for market perceptions on SoftBank and its Vision Funds to improve, making it difficult for them to expand investments in the near future.

  “In order to be more proactive and aggressive with investing, they need money,” Boodry said. “The initial public offering of Arm is the quickest way for them to monetise, but beyond that, there is not a lot you can sell within the Vision Fund because many of the investments are underwater.”

  But there may be another reason why Masa decided to be mysteriously absent from yesterday’s call: due to the continuing investment losses, Son – once Japan’s richest man – is personally on the hook for about $5.1 billion on side deals he set up at SoftBank to boost his compensation, as losses mounted at its core Vision Fund venture capital arm.

  As Bloomberg reports, Son, whose stake in SoftBank grew in recent months, also owns portions of the company’s key investment vehicles. While these holdings have sparked controversy due to corporate governance concerns, the Japanese billionaire has denied any conflict of interest (and yet, India’s Adani just lost half his net worth for something very similar).

  According to Bloomberg calculations, Masa’s unrealized losses grew $400 million from three months before. The founder and chief executive of SoftBank was down $4.7 billion on the same side deals through the September quarter.

  Compensation has long been a contentious issue at SoftBank. Japanese companies pay some of the lowest executive salaries in the world, reflecting a culture where job-hopping by managers is still infrequent. Son himself has kept his pay at 100 million yen, now roughly $760,000 — a rounding error in the US where CEOs routinely make more than $100 million. Of course, the bulk of Son’s net worth is in the form of equity – he owns more than a third of the company –  which was almost wiped out after the bursting of the previous two bubbles: the third time may be the charm.

  Meanwhile, as SoftBank grew into a global investor – the same way Reddit’s apes grew into global investors and more or less, with the same results – Son argued the company couldn’t keep talent unless executives were allowed to cut side deals that tied compensation to the company’s performance. That’s exposed him further to the current market downturn.

  Needless to say, the unwind of the bubble has not been kind to one of the biggest beneficiaries of the bubble era: the global tech investor was hit by continued mark downs in its investments in unlisted startups, which outweighed gains in its public holdings. Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said they applied “extremely strict” standards in writing down investment losses. SoftBank had invested in 472 companies through its venture capital arm by December.

  Portfolio losses ratcheted up Son’s deficit to about $2.9 billion from his Vision Fund 2 interest, and $344 million at the Latin America fund, according to disclosures for the December quarter. His remaining deficit at SB Northstar was 246.1 billion yen ($1.85 billion). The debt totaled $5.1 billion according to Bloomberg calculations based on company disclosures.

  Separately, the 65-year-old billionaire holds 17.25% of a vehicle set up under SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 for its unlisted holdings, as well as 17.25% of a unit within the company’s Latin America fund, which also invests in startups. He has a 33% stake in SB Northstar, a vehicle set up at the company to trade stocks and derivatives.

  The good news for Son is that there is no immediate deadline for repayment and the value of Son’s positions could improve in the future, and for SB Northstar, Son has already deposited some cash and other assets. The founder would pay his share of any “unfunded repayment obligations” at the end of the fund’s life, which runs 12 years with a two-year extension.

  Son’s net worth stood at $12.3 billion after Tuesday’s close, after adjusting for his deficit from his interests in SB Northstar, Vision Fund 2 and the Latin America fund, according to calculations by Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In other words he can afford at least a few more quarters of SoftBank losses before he is wiped out.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 18:10

• How NOSTR Will Change The World Of Privacy
  How NOSTR Will Change The World Of Privacy

  Authored by Fabiann Ommar via The Orgnaic Prepper blog,

  Bitcoin users have already flocked to it en masse. It has been the subject of constant raving from Edward Snowden. The former CEO and founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is participating. It’s being heralded as the replacement for Twitter and Instagram, but some industry insiders predict it’ll destroy both.  

  Although it’s too early to tell if NOSTR can achieve all of that, one thing it won’t be is another social networking platform (if only because it’s not even a platform). Read on to learn more and find out what NOSTR is and why has the potential to transform interpersonal relationships and communication.  

  

  What’s NOSTR? 

  It’s short for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.” It’s officially described as “a decentralized network built on cryptographic keypairs that is not peer-to-peer.” None of that soup of words does much to describe NOSTR, and the concept may take some time to sink in for those used to traditional social media. 

  However, once you do, NOSTR’s potential is obvious. 

  It is not a platform. It doesn’t have a server, a fancy glass office building full of nerds playing ping-pong and bingeing on free chai lattes, slick marketers, or even a CEO. You don’t really sign up for a NOSTR account and don’t look for a NOSTR app because there isn’t one available in the stores. 

  NOSTR is a protocol, or more precisely, a decentralized base-level protocol, that allows anyone to build nearly whatever they like, including a chat room, a social media platform, an interactive game, and a news site. 

  A developer by the name of fiatjaf designed and coded NOSTR in 2020 as a discrete, open-source, niche substitute for both Twitter and Mastodon. NOSTR is powered and distributed through decentralized platforms and apps, or “clients,” in contrast to conventional social media. 

  The excitement and expectations that followed Elon Musk‘s acquisition of Twitter are gradually fading. 

  Even if the blue bird’s platform may now function better, users are beginning to realize the fact that it’s still largely the same Twitter. This is due to the fact that centralized, server-based social media is always open to outside manipulation. It can be hacked, compromised, suppressed, tampered with, co-opted, or censored. Or purchased, as the Twitter transaction has demonstrated. 

  When Twitter changed hands, Mastodon, a social network made up of autonomous servers arranged around particular themes, subjects, or interests, started to grow quickly on the promise of decentralization. However, Mastodon is still based on servers whose administrators can censor or shadow-ban users’ material or manage their usernames and identity. That’s the crux of the matter. 

  There is a top-to-bottom movement that favors decentralization. 

  Geopolitically, this happens through the realignment of allegiances and partnerships of nations. Individuals, on the other hand, need to figure out how to keep their money, savings, and voices out of the reach of governments, bureaucrats, and technocrats. 

  Nobody is pleased with the scramble for power that’s taking place everywhere, and decentralizing technology may offer the common person a way out of the rat cage. 

  As big tech and legacy media collude with governments to control the narratives and censor dissent, people are searching for alternative locations and social media platforms where they can exchange and propagate ideas and their creations without running the risk of being de-platformed, censored, or canceled without much in the way of appeal.

  Against this background comes NOSTR. 

  Although the mainstream media hasn’t yet taken notice of NOSTR by large, it’s been making the rounds in the digital underworld for some time and beginning to surface and gain some traction. The final push was given by none other than Twitter by adding NOSTR to the list of items/services forbidden from being advertised on its platform. All this did was put NOSTR square in the spotlight. 

  After everything that transpired with COVID, lockdowns, vaccines, and everything else during the previous two years or so, what better way to put something squarely in the spotlight than to make it verboten? 

  (Want to starve the beast through means other than just NOSTR? Then check out our free QUICKSTART Guide on the subject.)

  How do people use NOSTR?

  In NOSTR, you can create an “account” by using an operating app (more on this soon). However, the decentralized architecture means that users control their pubkey (username) and private key (password) instead of the server owner/host (because neither exists). In other words, you own your full profile and can use it across all “clients” or apps and platforms as they’re called.  

  After logging in with your private key, you’re then free to run a client, log into your account (with your public key), and share posts or create articles. If a post is shared with another client, the information is transmitted “trustlessly” around the network in a similar way to how Bitcoin and cryptocurrency transactions are dispersed to all nodes in the platform.

  The foundation of the system’s operation is the relay servers that send, receive, index, structure, and store events (or messages) independently. It’s quite geeky and technical, and I admit that I don’t know nearly enough about programming, computers, or the internet to fully comprehend all of its intricacies. As a result, I recommend reading this article on Bitcoin Magazine if you truly want to go into the technical details of NOSTR. 

  I’m more interested in NOSTRs potential to serve as a decentralized base protocol that would enable the free creation and growth of truly independent, uncensored news and content outlets and social media. 

  With NOSTR, no one can restrict you or your content because it uses a decentralized protocol, and you own your login and key. You can choose who you communicate with, who you follow, and what you don’t want to see, but you can’t restrict other users’ content in any manner or stop them from seeing your stuff. Nobody can. 

  It’s a pretty straightforward protocol with lots of room for customization, ensuring that users can always communicate with one another regardless of what specific relay server operators decide to host or not to host. 

  How to NOSTR? 

  Even though the group chat is still being constructed, the NOSTR webpage invites you to join them on Telegram. Yes, it has just recently begun to take shape. 

  On February 1st, Apple and Google approved and made accessible the first Twitter-like apps in their stores, DAMUS (iOS) and Amethyst (Android), respectively. With those, you may make your pubkey and begin dabbing with NOSTR on your smartphone (my pubkey is npub1lv29xwmcxw3pnhsaet0ypahxetqdg2tpv74dptlvusmwu4938xsqrckncn / User: Musashi, if anyone is interested and joining in).

  Both are similar to Twitter, but if you feel a little lost, don’t worry or be intimidated because practically everyone there is still learning. 

  The projects ANIGMA (a Telegram-like conversation), BRANLE (similar to DAMUS), even a game (JESTER, a chess player), and others are already moving forward. Programmers are all over it, and everyone wants to be the next Twitter or Instagram or possibly something even more cutting-edge and ground-breaking than anything we now have. That is a huge incentive in and of itself for developers.

  The protocol is still limited in many ways. 

  As I said, NOSTR is still being constructed. The apps themselves are rather crude and are largely copies of popular apps like Twitter right now. That’s to say, it’s not all roses, and NOSTR undoubtedly has certain problems and shortcomings that aren’t yet obvious at this point because of its insufficient critical mass, track record, and database, among other limitations. 

  But it’s stirring up some excitement and might be just what people need to get past restriction and toward actual freedom of expression and innovation. New clients (apps and platforms) will not only appear if it acquires traction and momentum, but they will also be designed to fully utilize NOSTR’s capabilities. 

  Am I excited about NOSTR? You bet. You should be too.

  *  *  *

  Want uninterrupted access to The Organic Prepper? Check out our paid-subscription newsletter.

  Fabian Ommar isthe author of Street Survivalism: A Practical Training Guide To Life In The City and The Ultimate Survival Gear Handbook

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/08/2023 – 17:50

Digest powered by RSS Digest