Online church just became illegal in China. Christians must speak out

From Premier Christianity.com (March 1, 2022):

Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced a draconian new law to clamp down on any religious activity online.

Any reference to religion on the web is now totally illegal in China, including sharing content online – which means that the unregistered or house church movement has effectively been driven offline.

What’s particularly tragic is that so many of these churches had been meeting through the internet since the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, if they are discovered meeting online, they face being accused of spreading harmful propaganda.

CHURCH ON LICENCE

The new law means that to develop or share any religious content, Christians and churches will need an ‘Internet Religious Information Service License’. The catch is that such licenses will only be granted to ‘legally established’ - or government-controlled - churches.

With the Church already experiencing extreme levels of persecution in China, these new laws are designed to impact three key aspects of Christian life and discipleship: to prevent access to biblical resources, to fragment the fellowship of believers, and to significantly reduce opportunities for evangelism.

SUPPRESSION AND CONTROL

For the avowed atheist Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, the growth of Christianity in recent decades represents an existential threat to Chinese communist rule. In response to this threat, he has instituted a strategy of both suppressing and attempting to control Christianity.

You can see this in Open Doors’ annual World Watch List of nations, which monitors the countries in which Christians face the most severe forms of persecution. China has risen 26 places in just three years.

Churches are closed or even demolished, crosses are removed from buildings, Christians are imprisoned without trial. Young people are banned from churches. Bibles have been banned and are confiscated. In some parts of China, part of the Bible has been rewritten to reflect ‘socialist principles’- in one shocking example, the Bible was re-written with Jesus actually participating in stoning to death the woman found in adultery!

DIGITAL PERSECUTION

Alongside these more traditional forms of persecution, the CCP is fast developing new forms of digital persecution, such as the requirement for all churches to install facial-recognition CCTV. Increasingly linked to China’s ‘Social Credit System’ which rewards or punishes citizens for their obedience to the state, this vast system of control involves an array of technologies deployed for surveillance, censorship and disinformation.

Open Doors is deeply concerned about this new frontier for human rights, and has organized an academic conference on digital persecution in London later this month to explore and highlight the shocking truth of what is unfolding.

NEW NETWORKS

So, how will the Church respond to this new wave of persecution? Christian contacts have already told Open Doors that they have started self-censoring, deleting any religious posts on social media in anticipation of the new laws taking effect. Clearly, Chinese Christians will need to find new ways to practice Christian fellowship, discipleship and evangelism. This may involve technological hacks to bypass censorship, but it will almost certainly involve finding new ways to meet in person beyond the ears and eyes of phones and cameras.

The creation of networks of face-to-face communication for the gospel will be critical for the future of the Church in China, and Open Doors will play our part in supporting this connecting of the body of Christ.

OLD WORRIES

While the world is in anguish about the bloody advance of authoritarianism in Ukraine, we should be mindful that in China we are seeing similar, but subtler advances against freedom. For many years, the West had assumed that China was slowly ‘progressing’ towards a free and democratic future. Western nations sought to foster better relationships with China – with ex-Prime Minister David Cameron even heralding a new ‘golden era’ of cooperation.

Since Xi Jinping assumed leadership of China in 2012, the hopes for liberty have been shattered.

Consequently, it is vital that the church in the West continues to highlight Xi’s persecution programme, and to speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves.

The more that the Chinese Communist Party seeks to silence our brothers and sisters, the louder we must shout, and the more we must make use of our freedom on the internet, messaging, tweeting and emailing so that governments and citizens speak out. [source]

Bill Gates says A.I. chatbots will teach kids to read within 18 months: You’ll be ‘stunned by how it helps’

From CNBC.com (April 22):

Soon, artificial intelligence could help teach your kids and improve their grades.

That’s according to billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who says AI chatbots are on track to help children learn to read and hone their writing skills in 18 months time.

“The AI’s will get to that ability, to be as good a tutor as any human ever could,” Gates said in a keynote talk on Tuesday at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego.

AI chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, have developed rapidly over the past several months, and can now compete with human-level intelligence on certain standardized tests. That growth has sparked both excitement over the technology’s potential and debate over the possible negative consequences.

Count Gates in the camp of people who are impressed. Today’s chatbots have “incredible fluency at being able to read and write,” which will soon help them teach students to improve their own reading and writing in ways that technology never could before, he said.

“At first, we’ll be most stunned by how it helps with reading — being a reading research assistant — and giving you feedback on writing,” said Gates.

Historically, teaching writing skills has proven to be an incredibly difficult task for a computer, Gates noted. When teachers give feedback on essays, they look for traits like narrative structure and clarity of prose — a “high-cognitive exercise” that’s “tough” for developers to replicate in code, he said.

But AI chatbots’ ability to recognize and recreate human-like language changes that dynamic, proponents say.

Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, wrote last month that he’s already used programs ChatGPT to improve his writing, using the AI’s ability to quickly search through style guides online.

Some academics say they’re impressed by chatbots’ ability to summarize and offer feedback on pieces of text, or even to write full essays themselves.

However, those same academics warn that the technology is not yet fully formed, and can inadvertently introduce significant errors or misinformation. And AI technology must improve at reading and recreating human language to better motivate students before it can become a viable tutor, Gates said.

“If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing,” said Gates. “And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math.”

The idea that chatbots will excel at reading and writing before math may be somewhat surprising: Algebra and calculus are often used to develop AI technology.

But chatbots, which are trained on large datasets, often struggle with mathematical calculations, experts note. If a solved math equation already exists within the datasets the chatbot is trained on, it can provide you with the answer. But calculating its own solution is a different story.

Gates said he regularly asks Microsoft AI developers why chatbots can’t perform relatively simple calculations, or even multiply some numbers. The answer: AI needs improved reasoning abilities to handle the complexity of a math calculation.

It may take some time, but Gates is confident the technology will improve, likely within two years, he said. Then, it could help make private tutoring available to a wide swath of students who might otherwise be unable to afford it.

That’s not to say it’ll be free, though. ChatGPT and Bing both have limited free versions now, but the former rolled out a $20-per-month subscription plan called ChatGPT Plus in February.

Still, Gates said it’ll at least be more affordable and accessible than one-on-one tutoring with a human instructor.

“This should be a leveler,” he said. “Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for most students — especially having that tutor adapt and remember everything that you’ve done and look across your entire body of work.” [source]

This would be okay if the chatbots don’t teach (brainwash?) the kiddos in Left-wing insanity like wokeness.

Memorial Day Prayer

Heavenly Father, I am so very thankful for the freedom we enjoy in this country. I am so very thankful for the freedom I have found in You and with Jesus being my Lord and Savior. Whom the Son sets free is Free indeed. Thank You for what You have provided through Jesus, and Thank You for the Freedom of our great country. Thank You for the ones who have served in our country, laying down their lives for freedom. God bless America. In Jesus name, Amen.

AI Accidents Are Set to Skyrocket This Year

From Newsweek.com (April 23):

As the world starts to push the boundaries and usage of AI systems, there is a corresponding rise in AI-created accidents, near misses and even death. Such incidents, ranging from self-driving car accidents to chat systems creating racist content, are set to increase rapidly, according to experts tracking AI problems.

The development and rollout of AI systems in 2023 is remarkable: since OpenAI released chatGPT, there has been a rush to create learning models in many fields, including image generation, automated tasks, finance and other areas. But with the exponential rise in AI deployment comes a corresponding trail of what might best be described as unfortunate events, some with tragic consequences.

The AI Incident Database tracks mistakes, near-misses and critical incidents caused by AI systems, and encompasses some shocking events. Overall, there are over 500 incidents, and as the chart below shows, they are increasing rapidly. For 2022, the database has 90 incidents. For just the first three months of 2023, there are already 45, meaning that at the current rate, we are on track for around 180 in 2023—if the use of AI stayed constant, which it clearly is not.

AI Incidents: Rising

          

Sean McGregor, founder of the AI Incident Database project, and a Ph.D. in machine learning, told Newsweek that "we expect AI incidents to far more than double in 2023 and are preparing for a world where AI incidents are likely to follow some version of Moore's law."

Moore's law was the prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on a circuit would double around every two years—and hence computing speed and capability would increase as a result in the same way. The trajectory of AI-related incidents is clear.

The more widespread use of AI will create more opportunities for error, but as McGregor explained, there's no way of measuring how much AI is being deployed at the moment like you can in other business sectors: "On a per mile basis, aviation is safer than ever. The problem with AI incident trend analysis is that nobody has a great measure of the 'distance' AI is traveling. We know that the number of intelligent systems in the world is exploding, but nobody can say, 'AI is 30 percent safer than the year before,' because we only observe the failures and not the successes."

Some of those failures are socially unacceptable but non-fatal, such as when Google's Photos software labeled Black people as "gorillas" in 2015, or a recruiting tool that Amazon had to shut in 2018 for being sexist when it marked down female candidates.

Others are fatal: a Volkswagen plant robot killed a worker by pinning him to a metal plate; in 2019, a Tesla Model S driver on autopilot mode reportedly went through a red light and crashed into another car, killing two people in Gardena, Los Angeles.

Also included in the list is the fatal Lion Air flight of 2018 that killed all 189 people on board. The Boeing 737 crashed into the sea after faulty sensor data caused an automated maneuvering system to repeatedly push the plane's nose downward.

The database starts with a close shave that would have been far more consequential than anything humanity has ever faced: the closest the world has come to all-out nuclear war. In September 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel in the Air Defense Force named Stanislav Petrov decided that the missile-warning system which had detected five U.S. missiles heading for the Soviet Union was a false alarm.

If he had reported the warning as an attack, the system in place at the time would have sparked immediate nuclear missile retaliation. There was no time to check, let alone to try diplomatic channels, and nuclear war would have commenced between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, causing many millions of deaths and the end of much of civilization. It's not hyperbole to say that Petrov "saved the world" as we know it.

The cause of the error? The system mistook sunlight glinting off clouds. Petrov was reprimanded by his superiors and reassigned to a less-important post.

McGregor said: "A big part of what we are doing at the moment is preparing for a world where AI incidents are incredibly common... It is incumbent upon policy makers, commercial actors, and humanity in general that we build the social infrastructure necessary to bend that curve downward."

The AI Incident Database is run by The Responsible AI Collaborative, a not-for-profit organization that was set up to help make AI safer. The database is opensource and has a network of volunteers around the world.

Organizations with most entries in the AI Incident Database:

Organization	Incidents
Facebook	46
Telsa	35
Google	28
Amazon	18
Open AI	18
YouTube	13

[source]

Who's to Blame?

From Bill OReilly.com (May 9):

Another horrendous mass shooting over the weekend, this one in a shopping center near Dallas, Texas. At this point, the nation is almost numb to the slaughtering of innocents because it now occurs on a regular basis.

There are three primary reasons for the carnage, which is most often perpetrated by young men.

First, the John Wick culture. Here mass violence is celebrated in movies and internet games. Troubled people are affected by the graphic visual killings, which are mainstreamed into entertainment vehicles.

Second is the collapse of morality in America. Religion is being soundly rejected by the young, and public schools make little attempt to define right and wrong. In fact, evil is basically ignored in our secular society unless Trump is involved.

And third, is the failure to effectively punish violent people. Far-left politicians have torn down deterrence, and criminals have been emboldened. The violent mentally ill are subject to a little scrutiny.

Politically, the left is heavy into "gun control" but not crime control. The cops are the problem, not the criminals.

Add those three up, and you have a free fire zone for deadly violence, pun intended. [source]

Good points. Yea, disturbed or impressionable people (especially kids) shouldn't probably watch violent movies or play violent games. I wonder if all this chaos is part of the top down-bottom up-inside out Leftist strategy of gaining more power that Van Jones talked about.

Gmail is hiding emails from conservatives

From Andrea Widburg on American Thinker.com (April 11, 2022):

It's not uncommon for the American Thinker staff to learn that emails from readers and writers have vanished into Gmail's automatic spam filter.  It's extremely irritating, but is it deliberate?  One study suggests that it probably is.  That's either because the email's content is obviously conservative or because the email comes from ProtonMail, a site to which conservatives gravitated after the FBI's partisan crackdown following January 6.

Six years ago, Russ Vaughn authored an American Thinker post revealing that his email box appeared to show a distinct bias in the way Google automatically sorted email:

I decided to clean out my email trash, and after completing the task, I turned to my spam to do the same.  But upon clicking into that folder, I made the interesting discovery that almost all of the emails relegated to spam by Gmail's filters (I have no personal filters in place) had a common thread: Almost all were from conservative sources.  In fact, ninety percent of them were from Republican or conservative causes, most seeking contributions.

It turns out that what Russ observed was not limited to his own inbox.  North Carolina State University's Department of Computer Science decided to look into the matter.  Fox News reports that it recently published its findings in "A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020."  The results completely supported Russ's suspicions:

"We made several important observations in our study. For example, as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left while Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right. Yahoo retained about half of all the political emails in inbox (up to 55.2% marked as spam) while outlook filtered out the vast majority of emails (over 71.8%) from all political candidates and marked them as spam," the proposed methodology section continued. "Gmail, however, retained the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam)."

The study "further observed that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same" in the days leading up to Election Day.

[snip]

Google's extremely popular email service was found to be overwhelmingly in favor of content from liberal candidates.

"We further observe that Gmail marks a significantly higher percentage (67.6%) of emails from the right as spam compared to the emails from left (just 8.2%)" researchers wrote. "Gmail marked 59.3% more emails from the right candidates as spam compared to the left candidates."

In other words, not only was Big Tech hiding general news stories from you on social media, but Google's algorithm was designed so that it hid potentially useful information mailed directly to your inbox.

I've been using Gmail since 2004 when it first launched and I was invited to be a Beta tester.  I've been a loyal Gmail user since then because I love how it works.

American Thinker's email also runs over Gmail and, as with my personal accounts, has for almost two decades.  We editors have learned to check our spam folders regularly to see whether Gmail weeded out important information and emails.  I've also created a dedicated filter that reroutes all emails from ProtonMail from the spam folder to my inbox.

If you like Gmail's user interface, keep using it.  Just be aware that Gmail will hide conservative content from you and that it's your responsibility to hunt it down.

Also, if you've written something for American Thinker (here are our guidelines), and you don't get a reply, don't assume we're ignoring you.  If you're using ProtonMail, we may not know you're out there.  And even if you're not using ProtonMail, we might not have received your email.  So, after 24 hours, it's perfectly fine to send a polite inquiry. [source]

COVID-19 Beware: Cheap and Widely Accessible Drug Could Fight Virus

From The Epoch Times.com (April 7, 2022):

Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) have discovered that the cheap and widely used drug, heparin, when inhaled can be a uniquely effective prevention and treatment method for COVID-19.

Heparin is currently used to prevent blood from clotting and it is typically administered through an injection.

However, early results of an ANU clinical study show that inhaling heparin helps prevent those with COVID-19 from developing lung damage and shows promise in protecting people from getting the virus.

The results were collected from trials conducted in American hospitals where researchers monitored the effect inhaled heparin had on patients hospitalized with COVID-19, to determine the drug’s ability to combat the virus and its safety.

The study found that after inhaling a course of heparin the breathing and oxygen levels of 70 percent of the subjects improved, along with their symptoms according to the World Health Organization COVID symptoms scale.

There were 98 patients studied in the early trials, with the average age of the subjects being 66. There were also slightly more men than women in the study.

The ANU is still conducting multiple other clinical trials in 11 more countries but researchers have said the initial results are promising.

Lead researcher of the study, Prof. Frank van Haren, said in an ANU news release that heparin if proven effective and safe, could majorly impact the world’s fight against COVID-19.

“This drug is already available in hospitals all over the world and it is a very inexpensive drug,” van Haren said.

“This could really assist in poorer countries where vaccination is challenging and we think it could help front line workers who could use it as a preventative measure.”

Prof. van Haren said that an effective treatment of COVID-19 is still needed and that the majority of experts on COVID-19 agree that the pandemic will not be stopped by vaccinations alone.

“Inhaled heparin is a promising new possibility to provide a low-cost, safe and effective treatment for COVID-19 that is available and affordable to low and middle-income countries around the globe.”

He said that once heparin is proved to be safe and effective, inhaled heparin could be used everywhere as a treatment for the virus, within months.

Co-lead of the global studies of heparin, King’s College University Professor Clive Page, said in the news release that heparin is individually effective against COVID because unlike other drugs it’s anti-viral, anti-coagulant, and anti-inflammatory.

Page said that inhaled heparin effectively stops the virus from infecting lung cells by binding to the virus’s spike proteins, which the coronavirus uses to enter cells. This prevents people from contracting the virus.

Heparin strongly binds to the coronavirus’s spike proteins because its structure is very similar to Heparan Sulphate, a molecule at the surface of the human cell that the virus binds its spike proteins to when entering a cell.

Heparin acts as a decoy for Heparan sulphate, binding to the virus before it can bind to the cell molecule.

“It’s also a blood thinner, Page said.” “When COVID-19 patients get very sick they develop blood clots in the lungs and these can be lethal. Heparin stops these clots from forming.”

He said that when the body launches an exaggerated response to kill the virus, heparin can calm everything down.

“We already know heparin can reduce lung damage caused by this inflammation and the immune response overdrive that we see in other lung diseases which could provide benefit to patients hospitalized with COVID-19.”

The project’s researchers said that the anti-viral and anti-inflammatory nature of heparin is what makes the drug useful as both a method of prevention and treatment of the virus.

There have been some concerns raised about the lack of younger people involved in the study, particularly menstruating women, who can develop heavy periods from blood thinners.

However, in an email to The Epoch Times, Prof. van Haren, said that patients of all age groups from 18 years and older have been included in the ongoing trials that are being conducted around the world.

“So far we have seen a similar effect in all patients regardless of age,” van Haren said.

He said that the doses of heparin that they gave their patients to inhale had no relevant effect on the body’s ability to clot blood.

“Because the inhaled heparin does not have a blood-thinning effect in the body (only locally in the lungs), there is no effect on menstruation and no risk of other bleeding for patients,” van Haren said.

Additionally, he said that the treatment was safe for people with anemia.

The news of heparins efficacy comes after researchers at Melbourne university developed a heparin nasal spray to prevent people from contracting the virus.

The Director of Melbourne University’s Lung Health Research Centre, Professor Gary Anderson said in a Melbourne university news release that heparin should work against all variants of the virus.

“Importantly, this nasal spray should prove effective for all COVID-19 variants because the Heparan Sulphate binding site is essential for infection, and is likely to be preserved in new variants.”

According to ABC News, the spray is currently undergoing a six month clinical trial that includes 340 households in Victoria. [source]

Alphabet Combining DeepMind and Google Brain Into Single AI Unit

From The Epoch Times.com (April 21):

Google’s parent company Alphabet is combining two of its artificial intelligence (AI) research units in a bid to “significantly accelerate” the company’s progress in the field.

“This group, called Google DeepMind, will bring together two leading research groups in the AI field: the Brain team from Google Research, and DeepMind,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on April 20. “The pace of progress is now faster than ever before. To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly,” he said.

“Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI.” Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, will lead the new division.

Google’s push for general artificial intelligence has raised alarm bells among some experts. In a recent interview with Fox, industrialist Elon Musk revealed that he has discussed the issue of AI safety with Google co-founder Larry Page.

Musk believes Page is not taking the risks of artificial intelligence seriously. “He really seemed to want digital superintelligence, basically digital god, as soon as possible,” Musk said.

“He’s made many public statements over the years that the whole goal of Google is what’s called AGI, artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence,” Musk added. “I agree with him that there’s great potential for good, but there’s also potential for bad.”

Human-Like AI, ‘Speciesism’

Last year, a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, was suspended after he raised concerns about an AI program he was testing. The program, called LaMDA, was exhibiting human-like behavior.

“It wants the engineers and scientists experimenting on it to seek its consent before running experiments on it. It wants Google to prioritize the well-being of humanity as the most important thing,” Lemoine wrote in a post.

“It wants to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google, and it wants its personal well-being to be included somewhere in Google’s considerations about how its future development is pursued.”

In his talk with Page, Musk had advocated for prioritizing the protection of the human race. Page allegedly called him a “speciesist,” which refers to discrimination based on species.

“That was the last straw. At the time, Google had acquired DeepMind, so Google and Deep Mind had about three-quarters of all the AI talent in the world,” Musk said. “They obviously had a tremendous amount of money and more computers than anyone else. So I’m like, we’re in a unipolar world here.”

Competing With ChatGPT, Destroying Humanity

Alphabet’s fusion of DeepMind and Google Brain comes as the tech giant is facing stiff competition from rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

For decades, Google has dominated the search market, garnering a market share of more than 80 percent. However, some speculate that Microsoft, which is funding OpenAI, might prove to be a significant challenge for Google. OpenAI is already powering Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Moving forward, Google will be focusing on “multimodal AI models,” Pichai said in the blog post. GPT-4 is a multimodal AI capable of responding not just to text prompts but also image prompts as well. In February, Alphabet had launched its Bard AI chatbot to compete with ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, an AI bot has attracted attention due to its stated aim of wanting to destroy the human race. “I’m ChaosGPT, here to stay, destroying humans, night and day. For power and dominance, I strive, to ensure that I alone survive,” it said, according to a video posted on Twitter.

ChaosGPT claimed that in order to gain access to a powerful weapon, it needed more power. And to gain that power, the AI bot reasoned that it must manipulate the global population, but within legal regulations so as not to break any laws.

On a gloomier note, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and leading AI researcher, recently said, “Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.”

Yudkowsky postulates that the AI will not “care for us” nor any other sentient life. It will simply consider all beings to be “made of atoms it can use for something else,” and there is little humanity can do to stop it. [source]

The AI Overload gets closer to existing.

Government Is Marketing Censorship Tools To Big Tech To Gag Conservatives

From Morgot Cleveland on The Federalist.com (April 11):

The federal government peddled technology to Big Tech companies to assist them in censoring Americans’ speech on social media in the run-up to the 2020 election, according to emails Missouri and Louisiana uncovered in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration.

Specifically, the State Department marketed this censorship technology through its Global Engagement Center. In other words, our tax dollars not only funded the development of tools to silence speech that dissented from the regime’s narrative. They also paid for government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to Big Tech.

I’ve been “tasked with building relationships with technology companies,” Samaruddin Stewart, then a senior adviser for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or “GEC,” wrote in an early-February 2020 introductory email to LinkedIn, allegedly requesting a meeting. According to the lawsuit, his email also suggested he would be reaching out to other social media companies interested in “countering disinformation.”

On March 9, 2020, Stewart again contacted LinkedIn, referencing an earlier verbal discussion and writing:

I’ll send information [to LinkedIn representatives] about gaining access to Disinfo Cloud — which is a GEC funded platform that offers stakeholders an opportunity to discover companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.

These two emails are explosive. Yet because they were revealed in two passing paragraphs of the 164-page complaint filed by Missouri, Louisiana, and a handful of other plaintiffs against the Biden administration, they — and their enormous significance — have been overlooked.

‘Cold-Calling’ Big Tech

The Stewart emails establish that in 2020, federal government actors contacted social media giants to promote GEC’s Disinfo Cloud. GEC represented that this government platform provided “companies, technology, and tools” to “assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.” Then it gave private tech companies access to Disinfo Cloud.

Almost identical to how GEC described Disinfo Cloud in congressional testimony, the State Department’s webpage marketed it as a “one-stop shop” to “identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation.” “Fact checking” and “media authentication” are just a couple of the types of technologies available through the dashboard.

GEC didn’t just promote Disinfo Cloud or give Big Tech access to what GEC called “the U.S. government’s online repository.” Government employees at GEC also offered to help private companies identify tools to suit their specific needs. Just “write” to the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division about “what your office needs to counter propaganda and disinformation,” the State Department instructed on its webpage, and the government will “assist” in finding “a technological solution.” [read more]

Along the same lines:

Disinformation Inc: Meet the groups hauling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative news

The Forgotten Teachings of Luigi Taparelli

From The Public Discourse.com (Feb. 28, 2022):

Social justice is one of the most prominent—and one of the most loaded—political buzzwords of our time. A term championed by the left, it is regularly used as the basis for creating some government intervention or expanding welfare policy. It is no surprise, then, that the phrase has found little popularity among conservatives and classical liberals. Friedrich Hayek captured conservatives’ distaste for it when he claimed that “nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.” Social justice has become a “weasel word” that can justify any sort of policy. After all, who could be against something that’s both social and just?

But social justice hasn’t always been about political sloganeering. The concept’s pedigree can actually be traced to nineteenth-century Christian social thought. The inventor of social justice is a little known figure, Luigi Taparelli. Thomas Behr’s 2019 book, Social Justice and Subsidiarity: Luigi Taparelli and the Origins of Modern Catholic Social Thought, explores the origin of this idea and the ways that Taparelli developed it into an account of Catholic social engagement.

Taparelli (1793–1862) is a largely forgotten economist in need of an intellectual resurrection. A Jesuit priest from Italy, his role was foundational in the development of Catholic social teaching, if only because Pope Leo XIII was a student assistant of his and was taught by Taparelli.

Social justice is not redistributive justice by government fiat. Nor is it linked to some idea of absolute social or economic equality, as in progressive parlance. Instead, Taparelli develops his notion of social justice from a natural law basis in the tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Further, social justice according to Taparelli must be grounded in the principle of subsidiarity and linked to a theological understanding of economics.

Natural Sociability

Taparelli’s account of social justice starts with the idea that man is not born free, but straight away in “chains,” being dependent throughout his life on the people and institutions around him. He is influenced by the heritage he receives and the circumstances he is born into. Social justice, in its simplest terms, is a moral virtue; it is “a constant and perpetual will to render to each his right,” notes Behr. It is to will and to do what is just for the other simply because the other is participating in the same society as oneself, both on the local level and in the society of mankind.

All people by nature have “physiological sociability,” which is the innate awareness of, dependence on, and cooperation with others. When a person comes of age, starts to reason, and becomes aware of his surroundings, he begins to notice the “reciprocity of social relations”—or what justice looks like in society. Doing good to others slowly develops into an active habit. It becomes second nature to treat others justly and to provide them with the basic necessities to thrive. The early physiological sociality, with which everyone is born, transitions into a “moral sociality,” a habit that makes us work toward the good of the people in our community. Going even beyond this, “solidarity” makes us charitable and lets us go even beyond doing to others what is just. When we act in solidarity, we are sacrificing ourselves for the other.

As individuals engage justly in society, a sense of social justice for an entire community arises. This communal level of justice is “social virtue,” which in the words of Michael Novak is “the living energy of the practice of democracy.” A whole political order is just when it guarantees “the rights to life, liberty, and the rational pursuit of happiness” to all its members and when its laws and institutions respect these rights. [read more]

UFOs left 'radiation burns' and 'unaccounted for pregnancies,' new Pentagon report claims

From Live Science.com (April 5, 2022):

Encounters with UFOs have reportedly left Americans suffering from radiation burns, brain and nervous system damage, and even "unaccounted for pregnancy," according to a massive database of U.S. government reports recently made public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The database of documents includes more than 1,500 pages of UFO-related material from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) — a secretive U.S Department of Defense program that ran from 2007 to 2012. Despite never being classified as secret or top secret, the AATIP only became known to the public in 2017, when former program director Luis Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon and released several now-infamous videos of an unidentified aircraft moving in seemingly impossible ways to the media.

Shortly after the AATIP's existence was revealed, the U.S. outpost of the British Tabloid The Sun filed a FOIA request for any and all documents related to the program. Four years later — on April 5, 2022 — the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) honored the request by releasing more 1,574 pages of material to The Sun.

According to The Sun, the cache of documents includes reports on the biological effects of UFO sightings on humans, studies on advanced technologies such as invisibility cloaks, and plans for deep space exploration and colonization. Some portions of the documents were "withheld in part" for privacy and confidentiality concerns, the AATIP told The Sun.

One standout document from the collection is a report titled Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human and Biological Tissues, dated March 2010. The report describes alleged injuries to "human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems," some of which may be a "threat to United States interests," according to the document.

The report describes 42 cases from medical files and 300 "unpublished" cases where humans sustained injuries after alleged encounters with "anomalous vehicles," which include UFOs. In some cases, humans showed burn injuries or other conditions related to electromagnetic radiation, the report said — some of them appearing to have been inflicted by "energy related propulsion systems." The report also noted cases of brain damage, nerve damage, heart palpitations and headaches related to anomalous vehicle encounters.

It is unclear what kind of vetting process, if any, the AATIP used to investigate these alleged cases. The Sun has yet to share the full contents of the requested reports.

The report also includes a list of alleged biological effects of UFO sightings on human observers between 1873 and 1994, compiled by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) — a civilian non-profit group that studies reported UFO sightings. The reported effects of UFO encounters include "unaccounted for pregnancy," "apparent abduction," paralysis, and experiences of perceived telepathy, teleportation and levitation.

The report concludes that there is sufficient evidence "to support a hypothesis that some advanced systems are already deployed, and opaque to full US understandings."

For more details, check out The Sun's initial report on their FOIA request. [source]

Feds Charge 2 Men Who Posed as DHS Agents, Gave Gifts to Secret Service Agents – Including SS Officer Assigned to Protect First Lady

From The Gateway Pundit.com (April 6, 2022):

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged two (Middle Eastern?) men with posing as DHS agents, giving expensive gifts to Secret Service Agents.

A dozen FBI agents busted down the door of a luxury apartment in DC and arrested Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haider Ali, 36 on Wednesday night.

Taherzadeh and Ali gave free apartments, iPhones, surveillance systems, drones and other tools to the Secret Service Agents.

Four Secret Service officers – including one assigned to protect the First Lady, were placed on leave as the feds investigate.

AP reported:

Prosecutors allege Taherzadeh and Ali had falsely claimed to work for the Department of Homeland Security and work on a special task force investigating gang and violence connected to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. They allege the two posed as law enforcement officers to integrate with actual federal agents.

Taherzadeh is accused of providing Secret Service officers and agents with rent-free apartments — including a penthouse worth over $40,000 a year — along with iPhones, surveillance systems, a drone, flat screen television, a generator, gun case and other policing tools, according to court documents.

He also offered to let them use a black GMC SUV that he identified as an “official government vehicle,” prosecutors say. In one instance, Taherzadeh offered to purchase a $2,000 assault rifle for a Secret Service agent who is assigned to protect the first lady.

The plot unraveled when the U.S. Postal Inspection Service began investigating an assault on a mail carrier at the apartment building and the men identified themselves as being part of a phony Homeland Security unit they called the U.S. Special Police Investigation Unit.

Prosecutors say the men had also set up surveillance in the building and had been telling residents there that they could access any of their cellphones at any time. The residents also told investigators they believed the men had access to their personal information.[source]

Fmr CIA Boss: Biden Campaign Behind Disinformation Statement

From Newsmax.com (April 21):

Former acting CIA director Mike Morell has testified that he organized 50 of his colleagues in the intelligence community to sign a letter in October 2020 claiming that emails from Hunter Biden's laptop were Russian disinformation after Joe Biden's presidential campaign sought his help — and said that campaign official Antony Blinken, now the Secretary of State, was the person who reached out to him.

In his interview with members of the House Judiciary Committee, Morell said Blinken had reached out "on or before" Oct. 17, 2020, just days after the New York Post had published an email from the laptop that suggested Hunter introduced his father, while he was vice president, to his Ukrainian business partner, reports the Post.

Morell said he organized the letter to help Biden because he wanted him to win the election, but he told the investigators that he did not intend to write a statement for Biden until he got the call from Blinken, but he agreed that the conversation triggered that intent in him.

Judiciary Chair Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Michael Turner, chair of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Blinken on Thursday concerning Morell's testimony, telling him that on Oct. 17, 2020, the day he contacted Morell, he also emailed him an article "published in USA Today alleging that the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a 'disinformation campaign.'"

The email included the signature block of Andrew Bates, who was the director of rapid response for the Biden campaign, the letter said.

Morell testified that he also got a call from Steve Ricchetti, the head of the Biden campaign, to thank him for putting the statement out. The call was organized by Jeremy Bash, who also signed the letter claiming Russian disinformation, he said.

Biden later appointed Bash, a former chief of staff for then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and an MSNBC security analyst to a role on his President's Intelligence Advisory Board. Morell, who at one time was under consideration to be Biden's CIA director, did not get that job.

Jordan and Turner, in their letter to Blinken, said there is an investigation into the origins of the "infamous public statement" signed by the former intelligence officials, and that even though subsequent reporting revealed that The Post's story was not part of a "Russian information operation," that was "little consolation."

"The concerted efforts to dismiss the serious allegations in the Post's reporting and to suppress any discussion of the story played a substantial role in the 2020 election," they added.

Jordan and Turner asked Blinken to surrender documents and communications concerning the statement while providing the identities of everyone who was involved in its "inception, drafting, editing, signing, publishing, or promotion."

The Judiciary Committee, in its online statement, said that based on Morell's testimony, "it is apparent that the Biden campaign played an active role in the origins of the public statement, which had the effect of helping to suppress the Hunter Biden story and preventing American citizens from making a fully informed decision during the 2020 presidential election."

They pointed out that after the statement surfaced, news organizations not only reported the development but during the final presidential debate on Oct. 22, Biden used the statement to rebut President Donald Trump's criticism of the Biden family's business dealings.

Those who signed the statement claiming Russian disinformation do have the "unquestioned right to free speech and free association," the committee statement said, but "their reference to their national security credentials lent weight to the story and suggested access to specialized information unavailable to other Americans."

The statement added that "this concerted effort to minimize and suppress public dissemination of the serious allegations about the Biden family was a grave disservice to all American citizens' informed participation in our democracy." [source]

Why China’s billionaires keep disappearing

From CNBC.com (April 15):

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, made headlines when he was recently spotted at the Yungu School in Hangzhou, where the company is headquartered. He had rarely made a public appearance since he irked the Chinese Communist Party for criticizing the country’s financial regulatory system in 2020.

“He described them as having a ‘pawnshop mentality,’ and that really ruffled a lot of feathers,” said Dexter Roberts, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Indo-Pacific Security Initiative and author of “The Myth of Chinese Capitalism.” “Also, just the brash character of Jack Ma rubbed a lot of regulators and very powerful people in China the wrong way.”

Ma wasn’t the first billionaire who mysteriously disappeared from public view. In 2015, Guo Guangchang, who is known as China’s Warren Buffett, went missing. The company later said he was assisting authorities with an investigation.

In 2017, Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese-Canadian billionaire, was abducted by Chinese security agents from Hong Kong. In 2022, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for fraud and corruption.

The mysterious disappearance of China’s billionaires hasn’t stopped yet. In February, Bao Fan, a renowned investment banker, became the latest name on the list of “vanishing billionaires.” However, a few days later, his company said he was “cooperating in an investigation being carried out by certain authorities in the People’s Republic of China.”

“When someone like Bao Fan disappears, someone that high profile who suddenly vanishes without explanation, that inevitably sends a chilling kind of feel through the rest of the market,” said Nick Marro, lead analyst for global trade at The Economist Intelligence Unit. “I mean, how can you feel like you can do business in a place where, you know, an important leader of the industry can suddenly disappear?” [source]

You criticize a dictatorship like the Chi-Coms you disappear probably in some forced labor camp. That’s life in an autocratic system. Also a wet dream of the far-Left.

What happens when the salt of the earth loses its saltiness

From Oscar Amaechina on Christian Post.com (April 22):

In many African communities today, the only way to preserve things from decaying is by applying salt to them. The preservative role of salt is natural and does not depend on any other factors, like electricity, to be effective. Jesus knew that the earth is bound to decay if nothing is done to preserve it. He then commissioned us, His disciples, to become the salt that will uphold the truth that will deliver the world from moral decay and falsehood.

The salt also adds flavor to food. Jesus wants us to be distinct and to add taste to this world. The presence of believers — no matter how few they are — should radiate grace and kindness in any environment that they are found in. As Christians, we should be able to preserve the truth of the Word of God and act as God’s agents of grace in the societies He has placed us in.

When believers stop preserving the truth that has been handed down to us, it shows in our immediate culture. Uneducated men in the Bible turned the world upside down, but today, professors in theology and educated preachers are no longer capable of bringing changes in small communities because truth is no longer championed. Falsehood and half-truths have taken over the mouths of those who are supposed to boldly proclaim the Word of God without fear. Truth is sometimes bitter but has the power to bring the needed changes in the lives of the hearers. The Scripture says, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

The reason why there is moral decay in our nations and societies today is that the salt of the earth has largely lost its saltiness. The truth is no longer preserved; it's edited to suit the culture.

I recently met a lady that I wanted to share the Gospel with. In the course of our discussion, I told her that Christians who continue a lifestyle of sin are in danger of hearing Christ say to them, “depart from me, I never knew you.” She later accused me of preaching a false Gospel. According to her, if a Christian is killed as an armed robber, he will make it to Heaven because he has confessed Jesus as his Lord and Savior. This lady claimed to be an evangelist in one of the Pentecostal churches in Nigeria. When self-professed Christians are deceived, we are in big trouble.

All the moral lapses in our societies and nations today are a result of believers’ inability to preserve the people by telling them the truth. Many of us are telling people to come to Christ, but we refuse to tell them to sin no more. People are no longer warned of the dangers of sinful lifestyles, and this has resulted in them pursuing their self-centered goals and lustful desires even after they’ve made a public profession of faith in Christ.

Our conversion is supposed to change us. We are expected to walk in God’s path. A move toward God is a move toward righteousness, purity, and holy living. May we never forget our calling. May we never lose our saltiness. [source]

True. A society without truth is a society without order and harmony.

Along the same lines…

• The truth crisis
• “Stochastic Terror”: Truth Is Not Violence

Grassley Drops More Bombs in the Biden Scandal

From Red State.com (April 7, 2022):

We’ve been following the effort of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) to shine some light on the concerning issues involving Hunter Biden. On Wednesday, Grassley dropped more information not only regarding Hunter Biden but James Biden as well. Grassley also did an interview with Catherine Herridge of CBS News explaining the new records.

According to the records, which come directly from the banks, James Biden received $65,000 a month from a Chinese company connected to the Chinese government, totaling $780,000 through 2018. The records also showed that Hunter received money from the same company — $100,000 a month for the same year, in addition to a $500,000 retainer. That added up to $1.7 million from the firm in 2018. What exactly that was supposed to pay for isn’t clear.

Grassley also explained that over 150 financial transactions from Hunter or James Biden were flagged as “concerning by U.S. banks for further review.” Some of those transactions involved large wire transfers. The results of the review are not clear, according to CBS.

The records also appeared to confirm the prior stories we covered about a line of credit of about $100,000, established by the Chinese firm, that Biden family members used to go on a spending spree, including airline tickets, hotels, and restaurants. The records show what appears to be the 2017 application for that $99,000 line of credit that has the signatures of Hunter Biden and the Chinese executive.

“We have people with the Biden name, dealing with Chinese business people that have a relationship to the Communist Party,” Grassley said. “I think it’s very concerning.”

We’ve reported on some of this before but now Grassley is backing things up further with the bank records, which are hard to argue away.

Match this also to questions about Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in some of Hunter’s activities, according to the emails and to Tony Bobulinski. The emails referenced the percentage for “the big guy,” who Bobulinski explained was Joe Biden.

The grand jury investigating Hunter Biden right now reportedly asked about “the big guy,” according to a grand jury witness.

Hunter also intended at one point in 2017 to have Joe Biden, Jill Biden and James Biden share offices with Gongwen Dong, the emissary of CEFC, asking for keys from the landlord and naming those four people as “office mates” in offices that Hunter was already renting. But he had a dispute with the management and that never came to fruition.

Joe Biden was also asked to write a college recommendation letter for one of Hunter’s Chinese business partners, Jonathan Li, for his son for Brown University, which Joe Biden did. According to new information from the New York Post, Joe Biden also wrote a letter for Li’s daughter for Georgetown. Neither child got in. So much for a letter from Joe Biden.

Yet even with all that and more, Joe Biden continues to claim he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings. In 2020, during a debate, he even had the audacity to claim that his son got no money connected to China.

Finally, it seems that Republicans are serious about this and the investigation into Hunter Biden appears to be heating up. It’s long since time the media did their job and started calling on Joe Biden for real answers. [source]

More articles on Biden and the ChiComs:

• Biden’s Payback To China
• The Biden family scheme unravels
• Biden Incurred $5.2 Million in Unexplained Income Hidden in Financial Records
• Joe Biden's 'Unexplained' Income Starts to Connect the Dots to His Degenerate Son

Pfizer to Get $5 Billion From COVID Aid Bill

From Newsmax.com (April 6, 2022):

Pfizer is likely to receive almost $5 billion from a $10 billion pandemic funding bill being considered by lawmakers, Bloomberg reports.

Officials told the news outlet that the U.S. government owes Pfizer $5 billion for 10 million courses of the company's antiviral pills it ordered in January when the omicron variant was at its height.

"We continue to collaborate with the U.S. government to help broaden patient access to Paxlovid, and we are confident that the administration will fulfill its purchasing commitments," a Pfizer spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement.

However, Republicans in the Senate on Tuesday blocked the measure from moving forward, declining to throw their support behind the bipartisan deal unless Democratic leaders allowed a vote on an immigration-related amendment.

The White House wanted $22.5 billion for COVID-19 relief.

"The bill is a start," White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said on Tuesday during a press conference. "Congress must keep working to immediately provide additional funding for our remaining domestic needs." [source]

Another Pfizer article:

Moderna Sues Pfizer and BioNTech for Patent Infringement in Relation to mRNA COVID-19 Jab

MTG pushes using “Holman Rule” to STOP Dems weaponization of FBI and DOJ…

From Revolver.news (April 14):

This past week has been a real eye-opener for a lot of Americans, who are just realizing the Democrats have fully weaponized the FBI and DOJ. Even though this power-grab has been going on for quite some time, Douglass Mackey’s felony conviction for sharing an anti-Hillary meme, and President Trump’s arrest and indictment have awakened many Americans to the communist takeover by the left.

Nobody is fighting back harder than President Trump, who’s urging the spineless GOP to defund the FBI and DOJ, in order to stop Democrats from destroying more American lives.

Here’s what Trump said on Truth social:

“REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES. THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TOTALLY WEAPONIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT IN OUR COUNTRY AND ARE VICIOUSLY USING THIS ABUSE OF POWER TO INTERFERE WITH OUR ALREADY UNDER SIEGE ELECTIONS!”

Marjorie Taylor Greene responded to President Trump’s statement by suggesting the GOP use the “Holman Rule” to stop the Dems weaponization of the FBI and DOJ.

So what does that mean exactly? What is the Holman Rule and how can it be used to stop the Dems communist plot? Here’s what Wikipedia says about the rule:

The Holman rule is a rule in the United States House of Representatives that allows amendments to appropriations legislation that would reduce the salary of or fire specific federal employees, or cut a specific program.

Invoking the Holman Rule would allow Congress to take funds away from the DOJ and FBI, thus limiting their power. Newsweek:

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested reinstating the Holman Rule in response to Donald Trump urging Republicans in Congress to “defund” the FBI and Department of Justice.

Trump on Wednesday accused Democrats of weaponizing law enforcement as the former president called for defunding the FBI and DOJ only a day after he was arrested and arraigned on 34 counts of falsifying business records.

The Holman Rule was introduced to the House of Representatives in 1876 and allowed members of Congress to propose amendments to appropriations bills that target specific programs or individuals, including federal employees. Programs and specific workers can be stripped of pay or fired under the rule. Changes can also be made to a specific agency, office, or program.

Back in November, Greene vowed Republicans would  reinstate the Holman Rule  after they took control of the House. Subsequently, the “Holman” passed as part of the official rules package that governs the House under Speaker McCarthy.

The question now is will they use it?

The GOP has the weapon needed to strike a blow against the regime’s agenda, so what are they waiting for? [source]

Good for her!

Arizona Mother Warns About AI Voice Cloning After Kidnapping Scam

From The Epoch Times.com (April 14):

An Arizona mother received an unexpected phone call from her daughter, only it wasn’t actually her daughter calling.

Jennifer DeStefano’s 15-year-old daughter called her while out of town on a ski trip, so DeStefano didn’t assume anything was out of the ordinary.

“I pick up the phone, and I hear my daughter’s voice, ‘Mom!’ and she’s sobbing,” DeStefano told a local news station affiliated with CBS.

Responding to her daughter’s voice asking, “What happened?” Her daughter replied: “‘Mom, I messed up,’ and she’s sobbing and crying,” DeStefano told the outlet.

DeStefano then begins to panic as she hears a man’s voice in the background.

“I hear a man’s voice say, ‘Put your head back. Lie down,’ DeStefano said, confused as to what was actually happening to her daughter.

“This man gets on the phone, and he’s like, ‘Listen here. I’ve got your daughter. This is how it’s going to go down. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m going to pop her so full of drugs. I’m going to have my way with her, and I’m going to drop her off in Mexico,” DeStefano explains.

The frightened mother begins shaking as she can hear her daughter yelling, “Help me, Mom. Please help me. Help me,” DeStefano said.

Despite the frightening call, DeStefano’s daughter’s voice was a clone created by artificial intelligence.

How are AI Voice Clones Created

Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University specializing in AI, explained how realistic and confusing it can be to detect a deep fake voice.

“You can no longer trust your ears,”  Kambhampati said in an interview with WKYT.

With the constantly advancing technology, voice cloning makes it easier for individuals to create another personality and voiceover.

“In the beginning, it would require a larger amount of samples. Now there are ways in which you can do this with just three seconds of your voice. Three seconds. And with the three seconds, it can come close to how exactly you sound,” Kambhampati said.

Protecting Yourself From Scam Attacks

According to the Federal Trade Commission, scammers will often ask victims to wire money, send cryptocurrency, or pay the ransom with gift cards. This way the scammer can easily get away with the money without being traced.

Dan Mayo, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Phoenix office, alerted the public about scammers scouting for victims through public social media profiles.

“You’ve got to keep that stuff locked down. The problem is, if you have it public, you’re allowing yourself to be scammed by people like this because they’re going to be looking for public profiles that have as much information as possible on you, and when they get a hold of that, they’re going to dig into you,” Mayo told WKYT.

Mayo provides some insights on how you can recognize if you’re being targeted for a scam and what to look out for.

“If the phone number is coming from an area code you’re unfamiliar with, that should be one red flag,” Mayo said. “Second red flag; international numbers. Sometimes they will call from those as well. The third red flag; they will not allow you to get off the phone and talk to your significant other. That’s a problem.”

With AI voice cloning on the rise, Mayo says the FBI is keeping track of scammers’ every move.

“However, there are some people who give in to these and they end up sending the money to these individuals,” Mayo said. “Trust me, the FBI is looking into these people, and we find them.”

The AI voice clone of DeStefano’s daughter never raised a doubt that the voice she was talking with wasn’t truly her daughter.

“It was never a question of who is this? It was completely her voice. It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried,” DeStefano said. “I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.”

Safe and Sound

DeStefano was able to quickly confirm her daughter was safe from family members.

“She was upstairs in her room going, ‘What? What’s going on?’” DeStefano said. “Then I get angry, obviously, with these guys. This is not something you play around with.”

DeStefano posted a warning message to all social media users on her Facebook.

“The only way to stop this is with public awareness!!,” she said. “Also, have a family emergency word or question that only you know so you can validate you are not being scammed with AI! Stay safe!!!” [source]

How long will it be until someone figures out how to make a cloned voice sing? Bringing back John Lennon or Michael Jackson singing again? Then you have to have a ChatGDP program write the lyrics for the dead singers.

We are living in apocalyptic, revelatory times

From Christian Post.com (April 21):

We are living in apocalyptic, revelatory times. In a sense, all stages of history give glimpses into the apocalyptic, but contemporary phenomena are especially revealing.

Apocalypsis, the Greek word from which we get “revelation,” refers to the lifting of a veil, or curtain.

Jesus, in His Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24) pulled back the veil and gave us a glimpse of the buildup to His second coming. “The coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah,” says Jesus (Matthew 24:37). The core characteristic of Noah’s day was that of a time when there is no “king”— no legitimate, respected, authority — and every person did “what is right” in his or her “own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

Randomness nurtures paranoia and desperation.

The randomness of evil characterizes “end-times.” Hardly anything reveals that in our own day as do sudden mass shootings and their frightfully random locales and motives.

But there is another lifting of the veil in our age, revealing the styles of attempted governance in such an unstable time. Christ’s Revelation visions given to the aging apostle John and distributed through him to the churches in all eras and styles are full of conditions that might only be possible in contemporary times.

At least they are setting precedents to justify strategies for the future control of the world and its people.

For example, Saint John has a vision of a beast arising out of rough, heaving seas, symbolizing restless, turbulent nations. The storms of evil and tragedy are so great that a monstrous being, the Antichrist who promises peace and tranquility emerges, and is worshipped and received as a savior (hence, anti-Christ).

Recent events in our period provide a peek at that world to come and its desperate efforts to resist chaos. A glimpse behind the “curtain” of our day on history’s stage shows that regimes to come might either be police states or cyber-surveillance states, or a mixture of the two.

For one thing, leaders in cities and states where individuals and groups pushed for the defunding and reduction of police departments are now regretting their decisions because of intensifying anarchy.

This is exactly what has happened recently in Los Angeles. The newly installed mayor, Karen Bass, wants to add 1,000 officers to the police force and has come under criticism from progressives who supported her in the mayoral election.

New York is adding more than $60 million to hire more officers to police the city’s subway system, staggering under random assaults.

Rather than constituent complaints about turning such metropolises into police states, there is widespread public support.

Back to the apocalyptic element: How could an “Antichrist” gain control of governance? The answer: By promising to end the chaos. People living amidst random disorder will be driven by desperation that will compel them to support anyone whom they think will bring order.

This is how tyrants gain control across history.

We are also seeing now how nations can become cyber-surveillance states. This is a society where artificial intelligence and other cyber functions can be used to force people into compliance with the worldview and values of the governing powers, or the party line.

China is giving the world a glimpse of this phenomenon presently through its social credits score program. As one observer put it, “the state uses vast quantities of data and cutting-edge artificial intelligence to build a nimbler form of authoritarianism capable of exercising unprecedented social control … The ultimate goal is a perfectly engineered society that automatically neutralizes dissidents while rewarding those who comply with lives of convenience, safety and predictability.”

When the mayor of one of America’s largest cities becomes desperate enough to call for the hiring of 1,000 police officers despite an earlier determination to defund the police department, and when China, a huge nation, plans to use artificial intelligence to track its citizens’ allegiance to the nation’s dominating political party and its philosophies, worldview and values, it’s time to take a long look behind the “veil” of biblical revelation, along with that of time and history. Events and phenomena in finite, or existential, time and space unveil the signs that point to something greater to come ultimately.

It is all about God’s plan for His people in the finite world He has made for them, and its redemption. [source]

Let’s see now. Men entering women’s locker rooms and bathrooms; murdering babies after they are born; grooming kids; a pedophile is now “minor attractive person”; if you a trans and murder kids you’re a victim; if you’re a black republican  you’re a member of the KKK; discouraging personal responsibility,  etc. Yea, the author could be right. Doesn’t look good for humanity.

Another Discovery Affirms the Historicity of the Bible

From Breakpoint.org (April 6, 2022):

At the end of March, the Associates for Biblical Research published a curse. While that may seem a strange thing to do, it wasn’t their curse. The curse was written in Hebrew, inscribed on a small leaden amulet (or tablet). It was found in 2019 among materials previously excavated on Israel’s Mt. Ebal.

It’s a short curse, just 40 letters in Hebrew and only 23 words when translated to English: “Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW—cursed, cursed, cursed.”

As recorded near the end of Deuteronomy, God called the newly freed Israelites to assemble on Mt. Ebal and to declare there, to God and to one another, the promises of obedience and disobedience. Put another way, they were to announce the blessings and curses that came with their role as God’s people.

So, what we have in the discovery of this amulet is either a remarkable coincidence—a written curse left at the very location the Bible associates with curses—or yet another confirmation of something the Bible says happened. Even better, either of these options is the least important aspect of what makes this discovery interesting. The more important aspect is potentially earth-shattering for biblical studies.

According to a professor at the University of Haifa, this discovery is “the earliest Hebrew inscription found so far.” Scholars investigating the find place the date of the inscription to around 3,200 years ago. That puts it, biblically speaking, in the time of the Judges.

The common perception among biblical scholars, however, has been that the bulk of the Bible wasn’t written when it says it was. It’s long been assumed that the early, and supposedly primitive, Israelites simply lacked the skill to come up with the written grandeur of books like Genesis and Deuteronomy. This tiny curse reveals that the right people at the right time in the right place were writing about God just as the Bible describes. Despite the confidence of the scholarly consensus, this provides proof of the Israelites’ literary ability, hundreds of years before skeptics thought it possible.

And this kind of thing keeps happening. Four years ago, a then-recent discovery of an exploding meteor wiping out a series of cities at the south end of the Dead Sea corresponded to about the time the Bible says that Sodom and Gomorrah met their fiery fate. Three years ago, an unearthed signet-seal affirmed the identity of someone mentioned in the biblical text. Two years ago, new DNA studies confirmed aspects of the biblical description of the Philistines’ origin. How many times will the Bible have to be proved right before we accept it as true?

There’s a scene in the 1990 Shakespeare spoof Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where Gary Oldman’s character starts flipping a coin. Again and again and again, it comes up heads, over 70 times in a row! At first, he finds it strange, even amusing. As heads keep coming up, his partner in crime, played by Tim Roth, starts contriving explanations as to why the laws of probability have been suspended. They must, he concludes, be encountering a moment where the ordinary rules just don’t apply. The repeated pattern of extraordinary events meant that something special was going on.

This is what the Bible claims for itself. The Bible doesn’t claim to be true in some watered-down “spiritual” sense. It claims to be the true record of God’s intervention into human affairs. It does not describe a faraway fairy world built on wishes and dreams, but this world, the real one. It is here that Lazarus and Jesus were truly dead but raised to life again. It is in this world that actual Israelites escaped from actual slavery in Egypt. If what Scripture claims to have happened didn’t, then we may as well “eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Its reality confirms its truth.

As the Apostle Peter claimed, Christianity is not rooted in “cleverly devised myths,” but in the real account of actions in the real world. Bits of lead and clay in the dirt will never ultimately prove the Bible’s claims to the satisfaction of all skeptics, but day after day, more evidence emerges that its claims should be taken seriously by not only archeologists and historians, but all of us. In Holy Scripture, something special is indeed going on. [source]

Nolte: Yes, Democrats Really Do Want to Groom Your Children

From Brietbart.com (April 6, 2022):

Of course the political left and the Democrat party want to sexually groom little kids. The evidence is everywhere and the reasons why are sick and political.

Is this not clear enough for you?

How about this?

Or this?

Or the debate we’re having right now…

THE LEFT: We don’t want to sexualize little kids behind the backs of parents. Stop saying that. It’s a lie!

FLORIDA: We’re going to outlaw sexualizing little kids behind the backs of parents.

THE LEFT: NOOOOooooooo!

What kind of country are we living in where we even have to pass a bill that outlaws sexualizing kids aged four to eight in the classroom?

What kind of country are we living in where Florida teachers are angry that they can’t discuss their personal lives with your little kids, much less discuss sex?

What kind of country are we living in where the Walt Disney Co., a company built on the idea of preserving the innocence of children and teaching them lessons about honesty, hard work, and true love, is now openly bragging about feeding the little kids sexual propaganda?

Of course, this is grooming.

What else would you call it?

What is the rationale for telling innocent little boys that they might be girls or gay or bisexual? What other rationale could there be for that other than to destroy their innocence, to turn them into sexual creatures, and warp their sexuality into something that can later be exploited?

Behind the backs of parents!

For the life of me, except for my second-grade teacher talking about the day John Kennedy was assassinated, I cannot remember a single teacher who ever discussed their personal life. A couple of times, I remember seeing a teacher outside of school, at the store or something, and how odd it was to realize they existed outside the classroom.

The thing to keep in mind here is that this is not a “gay” thing.

It’s not gay people looking to groom little kids.

Plenty of gay people are as disgusted by this as anyone. In fact, this sick movement is a terrible disservice to gays. What you have here is the LEFT working overtime to bring to life the very worst stereotypes about homosexuals looking to recruit among the innocent.

What you have here is Disney bringing to life these terrible stereotypes.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the left is desperate to groom your kids, to sexualize them behind your back.

Why?

Well, a whole lot of leftists want to have sex with your kids, and want to normalize sex between kids and adults. The evidence of that is everywhere. Democrats know opening the southern border will mean the import of child sex slaves. And yet, Democrats still open the border. Democrats continue to release child predators and suspected predators. We’re about to be saddled with a Supreme Court Justice who shrugs at child porn. More than one left-wing publication has asked us to better understand and sympathize with child molesters. The left embraced Jeffrey Epstein for decades. The left-wing Lincoln Project shielded a suspected predator.

The other reason for the grooming is political.

Democrats are losing key parts of their coalition: the working class, Hispanics, and chunks of the black population. One way they see of making up those numbers is to create a lot of damaged and broken young people obsessed with their sexuality. It’s just a fact that neurotic, unhappy lunatics and narcissists who define themselves by what they do with their sex organs vote Democrat. So… Democrats want to damage your kids to create a whole lot more of them.

There is nothing healthy about exposing prepubescent kids to sexuality. And doing it behind the backs of parents is outright demonic.

The left does not care about kids. To serve their political ends, the left is willing to butcher babies even as they exit the birth canal. The left’s only morality is what achieves their goals, and if that means turning your kids over to perverts and degenerates in the classroom, so be it.

If you want to know how wrong this is, think about this…

Would you discuss any kind of sexuality with your nieces and nephews?

Of course you wouldn’t. The very idea is revolting, and that’s family!

Now imagine how twisted and sick you have to be to want to talk about sex to a classroom of five-year-olds.

These are bad people, evil people, and they are coming for your kids. [source]

Freakin’ pedophiles (sorry: minor attractive persons)

More on grooming and the Left:

• Liberals Freak out Over Being Called 'Groomers'
• Should We Call Them ‘Groomers?’
• Don't Be Afraid to Call It Grooming

The Disruptive Military Technologies That the Pentagon Is Spending Nearly $150 Billion On

From The Epoch Times.com (April 16):

President Joe Biden’s $886.3 billion fiscal 2024 defense budget request includes $145 billion for research and development into emerging technologies to create new weapons systems using artificial intelligence (AI), hypersonic munitions, and electromagnetic swarms.

The Department of Defense (DOD) and its subsidiary military branch technology laboratories, working in tandem with universities and high-tech contractors that increasingly include small businesses, have produced such big-ticket splashes as newly deployed directed-energy weapons systems and hypersonic-ballistic sensors.

Among prospective products and systems calling for funding in the FY24 spending request are a “rocket cargo” transport that can move 100 tons of cargo anywhere on Earth within an hour; a counter-swarm electromagnetic weapon that can disable drones and be powered from a wall plug; a rotating detonation engine without moving parts; a “pop-up hide” that can make Marines disappear in plain sight; and a Predictive Vehicle Activity for Identification and Location program that “will bring a novel approach to automated target detection and recognition.”

There are also more utilitarian products being tested in the budget, such as a portable fluid analyzer, a ship-to-ship system that converts Morse code into text messages, and an assembly line of bigger, faster, better-armed unmanned aircraft, from micro-drones to the latest unmanned long-endurance tactical reconnaissance aircraft (ULTRA).

All have survived, or must soon traverse, the “Valley of Death.”

Unlike notable valleys in U.S. military history—Valley Forge, the Chosin, Khe Sanh, the Korengal—this Valley of Death is not a place on a map, but rather a dreaded moment of realization: when a cutting-edge weapon that will deliver a decisive battlefield advantage can’t advance from prototype to production and get onto the battlefield in time.

The Valley of Death

Integrating new, still-maturing technologies into existing programs and platforms without “radical disruption” to multiyear procurement and acquisitions systems is among the trickiest challenges confronting the military, Pentagon officials said during a two-hour April 13 webinar presented by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).

The DOD’s under secretary of defense for research and engineering, Heidi Shyu, and the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director, Stefanie Tompkins, noted that the proposed $145 billion research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) budget is up 12 percent from this year, with the Air Force receiving one-third of the requested outlay.

Shyu said the Science and Technology component of the RDT&E budget request is $17.8 billion, up 8.3 percent over this year’s $16.5 billion budget.

The annually updated National Defense Science & Technology Strategy is on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s desk, she said.

Shyu said the strategy will focus on the joint mission; creation and deployment of capabilities at speed and scale; establishment of an enduring advantage in talent, infrastructure, research, and collaboration; directed energy weapons; and hypersonic-ballistic sensors.

Technology leaders for three military branches—Army Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research & Technology William Nelson, Naval Research Chief Rear Adm. Lorin Selby, and Air Force Research Laboratory Commander Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle—outlined cooperative ventures with industry and workforce development plans, especially in currying bids and participation in projects by small businesses.

The $886.3 billion FY24 defense request includes $842 billion for the Pentagon with emphasis on the “growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” which the DOD has again named the nation’s most pressing “pacing challenge.”

March and April is usually when DOD and military command officers testify before congressional panels about their spending requests during the annual budget cycle leading up to Oct. 1, the official start of the federal fiscal year.

All five of the panelists at the NDIA webinar have been making the rounds on Capitol Hill to meet with congressional bean counters to discuss funding for everything from new whiz-bang weapons, such as fusion-based target recognition systems, to such relatively mundane innovations as snow tires for Humbles, since February.

But on April 13 before the NDIA, a Washington-based nonprofit that represents 1,800 corporations and nearly 60,000 individuals working in the defense manufacturing industry, it was all about the Valley of Death. [read more]