Be careful what you post online. There are malevolent actors who will use photos and audio to abuse you and scam your relatives.
#grownostr #privacy
As a kid I always wanted to try walking on burning coals to see if I could do it. I thought I could, but never had the courage or opportunity to try.
This is a very interesting article on the government roots of the internet and internet tracking and censorship. I posted part of it because Mercola articles disappear after 48 hours.
"In this video, I interview Mike Benz, executive director for the Foundation for Freedom Online. Benz started off as a corporate lawyer representing tech and media companies before joining the Trump administration, where he worked as a speech writer for Dr. Ben Carson, the former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and President Trump.
He also advised on economic development policy. He then joined the State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology. There, he ran the cyber desks at state, meaning all things having to do with the internet and foreign policy.
“This is toward the end of 2020, which was a really fascinating time to witness the merger, in many respects, of big government and big tech companies themselves,” he says. “I had grown up, I think, like many Americans, with a belief that the First Amendment protected you against government censorship.
The terms of engagement that we had enjoyed from 1991, when the worldwide web rolled out, until 2016, the election in the U.S. and Brexit in the U.K., which is, really, the first political event where the election was determined, in many respects, by momentum on the internet.
There was that 25-year golden period where the idea of being censored by a private sector company, let alone the government, was considered something, to me, very deeply anathema to the American experience.
What I witnessed at the State Department — because I was at the desk, basically, that Google and Facebook would call when they wanted favors abroad, when they wanted American protection or American policies to preserve their dominance in Europe, or in Asia or in Latin America.
And the U.S. government was doing favors for these tech companies while the tech companies were censoring the people who voted for the government. It was a complete betrayal of whatever social contract typically underlies the public-private partnership.”
The Internet Was Founded by the National Security State
Ostensibly, the rapid expansion of censorship started post-2016, but you can make a strong argument that the internet was never intended to remain free forever. Rather, the intention for it to be used as a totalitarian tool was likely baked in from the start when the national security state founded it in 1968.
The worldwide web, which is the user interface, was launched in 1991, and my suspicion is that the public internet was seeded and allowed to grow in order to capture and make the most of the population dependent upon it, knowing that it would be the most effective social engineering tool ever conceived. Benz comments:
“I totally agree ... A lot of people, in trying to understand what's happening with the net censorship, say ‘We had this free internet, and then suddenly there was this age of censorship and the national security state got involved at the censorship side.’
But when you retrace the history, internet freedom itself was actually a national security state imperative. The internet itself is a product of a counterinsurgency necessity by the Pentagon to manage information during the 1960s, particularly to aggregate social science data. And then, it was privatized.
Opening it up to all comers in the private sector, it was handed off from DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to the National Science Foundation, and then went through a series of universities on the infrastructure side.
And then, right out of the gate in 1991, you had the Cold War coming to an end, and then simultaneously, you had this profusion of Pentagon-funded internet freedom technologies. You had things like VPNs, encrypted chat, TOR.
All of the early internet freedom technologies of the ‘90s were funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, and developed by the intelligence community, primarily, as a way of using internet freedom as a means to help dissident groups in foreign countries be able to develop a pro-U.S. beachhead, because it was a way to evade state-controlled media.
This was, basically, an insurgency tool for the U.S. government, in the same way that Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty, and Radio Free Europe were tools of the CIA in the Cold War, to beam in, basically, pro-U.S. content to populations in foreign countries in order to sway them towards U.S. interests. It was a way of managing the world empire.
The internet served the same purpose, and it couldn't be done if it was called a Pentagon operation, a State Department or CIA operation. But all of the tech companies themselves are products of that. Google started as a DARPA grant that was obtained at Stanford by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
In 1995, they were part of the CIA and NSA's [National Security Agency’s] massive digital data program. They had their monthly meetings with their CIA and NSA advisers for that program, where the express stated purpose was for the CIA and NSA to be able to map so-called ‘Birds of a feather’ online ... so that they could be neutralized.”
How It All Began
As noted by Benz, the idea of having the intelligence community map political “Birds of a Feather” communities in order to either mobilize or neutralize them was (and still is) justified in the name of counterterrorism. Nowadays, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, it’s used to control public discourse, suppress truth, and promote propaganda angles.
The technology used to control public discourse is an artificial intelligence (AI) technique called natural language processing (NLP). It’s a way of aggregating everyone who believes a certain thing online into community databases based on the words they use, the hashtags, the slogans and images.
“Emerging narratives, all manner of metadata affiliations, all that can be aggregated to create a topographical network map of what you believe in and who you're associated with, so that it can all be turned down in a fast, precise and comprehensive manner by content moderation teams, because they're all birds of the same feather,” Benz explains.
“The fact that this grew out of the U.S. National Security state, which is running the show, essentially, today, to me says that there's a continuation between the internet freedom and internet censorship. They simply switched from one side of the chess board to the other.
For clarity, when Benz talks about the "National Security State,” what he’s referring to are the institutions that uphold the rules-based international order. Domestically, that includes the Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), certain aspects of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the 17 intelligence agencies.
Of those, the Pentagon, State Department and the intelligence community (IC) are the three central ones that have managed the American world empire since the 1940s. None of them are supposed to be able to operate domestically, but in a sense their power has expanded so much that they essentially control domestic affairs.
As explained by Benz, the Pentagon, State Department and IC are not supposed to be able to operate domestically. “But in a sense, they really control domestic affairs, because their power has expanded so much that they've developed an extraordinary laundering apparatus to be able to fund international institutions that then boomerang back home and effectively control much of domestic political affairs, including discourse on the internet.”
As for the CIA, it was created in 1947 under the National Security Act. It was created as a cloak-and-dagger mechanism, to do things the State Department wanted done but couldn’t get caught doing due to the diplomatic repercussions — things like election rigging, assassinations, media control, bribery and other subversion tactics.
The Birth of Hybrid Warfare
Benz continues his explanation of how and why internet censorship emerged when it did:
“So, there's the U.S. National Security State, and then there's the transatlantic one involving NATO. The story of Western government involvement in internet censorship really started after the 2014 Crimea annexation, which was the biggest foreign policy humiliation of the Obama era.
Atlanta's School of Foreign Policy was deeply inflamed by this event and blamed the fact that there were these breakaway Russia-supporting entities in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea on a failure to penetrate their media, and this idea that hearts and minds were being swung towards the Russian side because of pro-Russian content online.
NATO then declared this doctrine of so-called hybrid warfare — this idea that Russia had won Crimea not by a military annexation, but by winning, illicitly in a sense, the hearts and minds of Crimeans through the use of their propaganda. And the doctrine of hybrid warfare, born in 2014, was this idea that war was no longer a kinetic thing.
There hadn't been a kinetic war in Europe since World War II. Instead, it had moved sub-kinetic into the hearts and minds of the people. In fact, NATO announced a doctrine after 2014 called ‘From tanks to tweets,’ where it shifted its focus, explicitly, from kinetic warfare to social media opinions online.
Brexit, which happened in June 2016 ... was blamed on Russian influence as well. And so all of these institutions that argued for control over the internet in Eastern Europe said, ‘Well, it needs to come now. Now it's an all-of-Europe thing.’
When Trump was then elected five months later, explicitly contemplating the breakup of NATO, all hell broke loose. This idea that we need to censor the internet went from being something that was touchy and novel, in the view of Pentagon brass and State Department folks, to something that was totally essential to saving the entire rules-based international order that came out of World War II.
At the time, the reasoning was, Brexit, in the U.K., was going to give rise to Frexit, in France, with Marine Le Pen and her movement there. Matteo Salvini was going to cause Italexit In Italy, there’d be Grexit in Greece, Spexit in Spain, and the entire European Union would come undone, just because these right-wing populist parties would naturally vote their way into political power.
They would vote for working-class, cheap energy policies that would make them more closely aligned with Russia naturally, because of the cheaper oil prices, or cheaper gas prices. Then, suddenly, you've got no EU, you've got no NATO, and then, you've got no Western military alliance.
So, from that moment, after Trump's election, immediately, there was this diplomatic roadshow by U.S. State Department officials, who all thought they were getting promotions in November 2016. They thought they were going to get promoted from the State Department to the National Security Council. Turns out, they all got fired, because someone with a 5% chance of winning ended up winning that day.
So, they took their international connections, their international networks around the Atlanta Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the entire think tank, quasi-intelligence, quasi-military, government-funded NGO soup, and they did this international roadshow, starting in January 2017, to convince European countries to start censoring their internet ...
Out of that came NetzDG [Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, the Network Enforcement Act] in Germany, which introduced a necessity of artificial intelligence-powered social media censorship.
All of that was, essentially, spearheaded by this network of State Department and Pentagon folks who then used their own internal folks in the government to procure government grants and contracts to these same entities. Eventually, they all rotated into those tech companies to set the policies as well.”
Threat From Within
So, to summarize, the infrastructure for worldwide internet censorship was largely established by IC veterans who were forced out by the Trump administration, and that infrastructure was then used to catalyze the international censorship response during COVID in late 2019, early 2020. Benz continues:
“Right. And those veterans were not alone. The full story is not just the shadow security state and exile. The fact is this. The Trump administration never had control of its own defense department, State Department or intelligence community.
It was the intelligence community that, essentially, drove his first impeachment, that drove a two-and-a-half year special prosecutor investigation that rolled up 12 to 20 of Trump's closest associates. You had a chief of staff there who was hiding the military figures from the government. The careers at state threatened the political appointees from the inside. I experienced that myself.
This permanent aspect of Washington, with unfireable careers in high places, combined with a turf war in the GOP [Republican Party] between the populist right and the neo-conservative right, with the neo-conservative right having many well-placed Republicans in the Defense Department, State Department, in IC, to thwart the previous president's agenda there, allowed this political network and exile, on the censorship side, to work with their allies within the government to create these censorship beach heads.
So, for example, that's how they created the Department of Homeland Security’s ... first permanent government censorship bureau in the form of this entity called CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, founded in November 2018], which is supposed to just be a cybersecurity entity.
It was done because of media and intelligence community laundering of a never-substantiated claim that Russia had potentially hacked the 2016 election, hacked the election machines or voting software, or might be able to do so in the future, and so we need a robust armed-to-the-teeth DHS unit to protect our cybersecurity from the Russians.
It's the mission creep of the century. After the Mueller probe ended in June 2019, this unit, CISA, within DHS [Department of Homeland Security] — which had set up all of this, and which is only supposed to do cybersecurity — said ‘Well, if you squint and look at it, discourse online is a cybersecurity threat because if it undermines public faith or confidence in our elections, and it’s done using a cyber nexus, i.e., social media post, then that’s a form of cybersecurity threat, because democracy is essential to our security.’
And so you went from this cybersecurity mission to a cyber censorship bureau, because if you tweeted something about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election, that was deemed to be a cyber attack on critical infrastructure, i.e., elections.
When they got away with that in 2020, DHS then said, ‘Well, if you squint and look at it, public health is also critical infrastructure.’ So, now, DHS gets to direct social media companies to censor opinions about COVID-19.
Then they worked their way into saying the same thing about financial systems, financial services, about the Ukraine war, about immigration. It got to the point where, by late 2022, the head of CISA declared that cognitive infrastructure is critical infrastructure.”
Cracks only appeared after Republicans got a majority in the House of Representatives in November 2022 and Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Public support for government also dwindled as Musk’s release of the Twitter Files revealed the extent of government’s involvement in the censoring of Americans.
So far, though, public awareness hasn’t changed anything. The very entities that once stood for internet freedom, like the National Science Foundation, are still actively funding and furthering government censorship activities.
AI Gives Censors God-Like Powers
Benz first became “gripped by the stakes of what was happening on the internet” in August 2016, after reading a series of papers discussing the use of NLP to monitor, surveil and regulate the distribution of information on social media based on the words used.
“DARPA provided tens of millions of dollars of funding for this language processing, this language chunking capacity of AI in order, ostensibly, to stop ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter,” Benz says.
“As part of the predicate for putting military boots on the ground in Syria, there was a lot of talk about ISIS coming to the U.S., and they were recruiting on Facebook and Twitter. And so the Pentagon, DARPA and the IC developed this language spyware capacity to map the dialectic of how ISIS sympathizers talk online, the words they use, the images they share, the prefixes, the suffixes, all the different community connections.
And then, I saw that this was being done for purposes of domestic political control instead of foreign counterterrorism, and the power that it has. It is what totally changed the internet forever. Before 2016, there was not the technological capacity to do mass social media censorship. That was the age of what censorship insiders like to call the whack-a-mole era. Censorship was reactive.
It was done by forum, by moderators, essentially. Everything had to be flagged manually before it could be taken down, which meant millions of people had already seen it, or it had already gone viral, it had already done its damage, so to speak, and you were just cutting off the backend with an act of censorship.
You could never have a permanent control apparatus in that setting, because there would always be a first mover advantage to whoever posted it. What AI censorship technology breakthroughs enabled after 2016 was a kind of nuclear weapon, if you will, on the censorship side, to be able to end the war immediately.
You don't need a standing army of 100,000 people to censor COVID. You need one good developer, working with one manic social scientist who spends her entire life mapping what Dr. Mercola says online, and what he's talking about this week, what his followers are saying, what they're saying about this drug, or what they're saying about this vaccine, or what they're saying about this institution.
All of that can be cataloged into a lexicon of how you talk. And then, all of that talk can just be turned down to zero. At the same time, they can super amplify the language that they themselves are doing. So it gives a God-like control to a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of people who can then use that to control the discourse of the entire population.
What's also so terrifying about the National Security State's involvement in this is, when they discovered the power of this by mid-2018, they began to roll it out to every other country in the world for purposes of political control there — to the Ghana desk, to the Ecuador desk, to Southeast Asia, all over Europe.””
#grownostr #censorship #internet
I attached a pdf of the article, but don't know if people can read it. It might depend on what client is being used.
I may see deer (and other wildlife) frequently, but it never gets old.
At our house, I see deer on the other side of the river from us usually a couple times a week. We usually see white tails in the river valley and mule deer up on the hills nearby. We also see antelope, pheasants, bald eagles, turkey, pelicans, rabbits, and other wildlife fairly frequently.
This is what a traffic jam looks like where I live. I had to wait at least 15 minutes for this huge flock of turkeys to finish crossing the road. The turkeys in the picture were less than a third of the turkeys in the flock.
When I was a kid, I'd go most of the summer never putting on shoes. I'd walk on asphalt so hot it was bubbling out tar and even walk on sand spurs with no problems. Now I live in a colder climate and wear shoes most of the time when I leave the house. I think I can walk on hot or pointy stuff like when I was a kid, but always pay the price because my feet aren't tough like they were when I lived barefoot.
Where we live, we see deer all of the time. At work, our building is an "L". The deer like to hang out in the corner of the "L" because it rarely gets mowed and it blocks our crazy wind. I've had doe's with their fawns lying in the grass a foot from our glass door. My husband turned around in his office chair and there was a big buck fogging the window less than a foot from him one time.
I can't speak to the high end stoves, but I've had off and on trouble with my GE stoves, so I would never buy GE again.
For what it is worth, I don't ever want to cook on anything other than gas. Gas with cast iron or carbon steel pans is the best. It heats fast, adjusts fast, and cooks when there is no electricity. If you get to pick what you want, I'd definitely go gas.
Ironic that we had large denomination bills when the dollar was worth a lot and only low denomination bills now that the dollar isn't worth much. They seem to be using inflation to make using bills impractical.
I would love to dissolve the union and try this stuff out. I've already picked the states I'd like in my union. I'd be fine with basing pay on their district.
On minds, someone asked me what I would recommend doing about the government. Obviously going full anarchy or minarchy would be preferred, but knowing that that won't be happening in my lifetime, a more pragmatic, but still pie in the sky ideas are listed below. I guess you could say this is my idea given the constraints that I don't want chaos and death in the streets, but I do want a small government and freedom. I could add more, but this would be an amazing start.
If people were actually willing to make changes and if we still had honest elections (both are very questionable), these are some changes I would make to move us towards liberty, understanding that it likely isn't possible to get where I want us to get in my lifetime. Understand that these are steps in the right direction, not what I want ultimately.
I'd abolish the FBI, CIA, NSA, Dept of Education, Department of Commerce, HUD and most of the other federal agencies. I might allow a 1-5 year transition to make them go away, but the intelligence agencies would be abolished instantly.
I'd change the Constitution to return election of Senators to the states so the Senate would represent the states reducing the centralization of power in the Federal government.
I'd make Congress's pay 150% of the median wage of citizens from the previous year (they get the extra 50% because they have to maintain 2 residences).
I'd make a Constitutional amendment requiring all bills to be single subject and all bills over 10 legal pages with 12 pt font to require votes on each section of 10 pages or less.
I'd make all bills sunset and have to be repassed with the full committee review, reading aloud in the chambers and votes to reissue them.
I'd make it so all increases in taxes or regulations require 60% of the House & Senate to vote for it but any bill that reduces taxes or regulations only requires 50% of the vote.
Social security is going bankrupt. I'd use a related transition to the one in Chile where people could chose to invest most of their money on their own with only a small amount going in to support the current retirees, with the goal of no new SS recipients after 10 years.
I'd abolish the Fed.
I'd ban the government's control of money and let the market chose money.
I'd ban the federal government from having any authority over anything that stays within in state (zero exceptions).
I'd ban all government from passing any regulations regarding guns, knives, or weapons with the only exception being for convicted felons guilty of violent crimes.
I'd ban all executive orders that effect anyone outside of the executive branch and require even those to be ratified by Congress within 60 days.
I'd allow 51% of states to overturn any bill or regulation that increases taxes or regulations in any way.
I'd take away the federal government's ability to regulate commerce in any way other than for federal courts to act as arbitrator when two states disagree and at least one state asks for arbitration.
I'd ban federal courts from ruling on any cases involving only one state and only allow federal rulings when one state sues another state.
I'd allow 50% of states to overturn any international agreement or treaty that adds regulations or taxes or puts limits/controls on economic activity in any way.
I'd ban all taxes other than sales tax and put a limit of 5% on the Federal government, 5% on the state government and 1% for county or city governments. All other taxes would be illegal. I'd also require that these taxes be listed individually on all receipts. I'd also ban sales tax on unprepared foods and medical care.
I'd ban mandatory licenses for any job. I'd encourage 3rd party certifications that consumers would be encouraged to look for (like UL or CE for electronics).
I'd ban all levels of government for requiring or prohibiting the use of any medical treatments, including but not limited to vaccines, drugs, gene therapies, counseling, etc.
I'd ban sending troops over seas without a declaration of war and that declaration of war would have to be redeclared every 90 days. If a declaration is not renewed, troops must be brought home within 30 days of the expiration.
I'd require that all government departments be audited every other year and anyone responsible for misuse or illegal use of funds be banned fromI would set up a 5-10 year transition to a ban on any federal funds being taken from one person or company and given to another person or company for any reason. I would set up a 10-20 year transition of the same for states and lower governments. Things like and workman's compensation would become 3rd party insurance where unemployment insurance would be voluntary for the company and the employee and workman's compensation would be mandatory.
As people are being weaned off of government assistance, I would setup some methods of slowly getting people off. In the short run, unemployment would pay 80% of wages for the first 2 months, then go to 70% the 3rd month, 60% the 4th month, etc. so it gets harder and harder to live encouraging people to work harder and harder to find a job or take a lesser job than they desire.
Since all taxes except sales tax will be banned, there will be nothing taken out of people's paychecks by the government and there will be no form of property tax.
I'd allow judges to punish people and lawyers who bring frivolous lawsuits and allow the judge to award the defendant payment for costs incurred including time wasted for frivolous suits.
If we could implement all of these changes, things would be so much better. Unfortunately, even those who claim to want small government and liberty, probably don't want to go this far and those in government will use every means they have, including those that are evil and illegal to prevent it. ever working for the government or lobbying the government and be brought on charges with potential jail time.
I'd love to hear other people's ideas and comments
#grownostr #politics #liberty #change #smallgovernment #
Check out these amazing Milkyway photos
#grownostr #milkyway #nightsky
I used to love the Marvel movies, but I'm not interested in watching them anymore. They've gone woke. Modern Disney destroys everything it touches.
I got the chance to do some serious debate back when I was involved with the Republicna party and went to the state conventions and was on the platform (2x) and the bylaws (1x) committees. I enjoyed the debates on principles, but the politics was too stressful, so I had to stop.
I think either would work. I do make a body cream made of mostly organic leaf lard (w/ a small amount of jojoba, sea buckthorn oil, borage oil, and some essential oils), and it is luxurious. I think beef tallow is harder, especially when cold, so it might be harder to spread. You could combine the two.
Government schools are a big part of it. To debate, you need to be able to use logic and think for yourself. The government doesn't like that, so it is discouraged in school and most people never grow out of their indoctrination.
I love a friendly debate. (So few people know how to debate today) I can be friends with almost anyone with a different opinion if they are polite, principled, and think for themselves. It is a bit harder when they blindly repeat what authority tells them and verbally abuse me when my arguments hit home.
#grownostr #debate
Taibbi: Does Anyone Believe American Propaganda Anymore? https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/taibbi-does-anyone-believe-american-propaganda-anymore
They shouldn't, but many, maybe even the majority, still do. Many know they are being lied to in one area, but are adamant that the government/media are telling the truth in another area. Why don't people see that liars lie?
Beautiful photos. I particularly like the one with the clouds through the columns.