Deepdub on track to provide AI-generated dubbing for the film and TV industry

From The J Post.com (May 11):

Israel-based start-up Deepdub, which has developed AI-driven audiovisual dubbing and language localization technology, has received certification from the Motion Picture Association’s Trusted Partner Network (TPN), making it the first AI-powered dubbing solution to be accepted as a trusted service provider in the entertainment industry.

Dubbing has long been a crucial tool for making movies and television shows accessible to audiences around the world. However, the traditional process of dubbing has often been slow, expensive, and unable to capture the full range of emotion and expressiveness from the original performance. Additionally, the need for high-quality dubbing has become even more pressing as streaming services expand globally, with viewers expecting the same level of localization as in their own language.

To solve these challenges, Deepdub has pioneered a breakthrough approach to audiovisual dubbing and language localization, using generative AI technology to deliver theatrical-grade content localization swiftly and cost-effectively.

"We are thrilled to join the ranks of TPN-certified companies, demonstrating our commitment to quality and security in the services we provide," said Ofir Krakowski, CEO and co-founder of Deepdub. "Achieving this certification not only highlights our dedication to excellence but also reinforces our promise to offer our clients the best possible experience in AI-powered dubbing and localization."

With advanced generative AI algorithms, it is now possible to emulate a person's voice with remarkable accuracy, creating a synthesized speech that sounds almost identical to the original. This breakthrough technology has opened up a range of new possibilities, particularly in the field of dubbing and localization, where the need for seamless integration between the original performance and the dubbed audio is paramount.

Already established in Latin America

Deepdub has already established a strong track record in the entertainment industry, having secured a multi-series partnership with Topic.com to translate their foreign TV shows into English, and becoming the first company to use generative AI voices to dub dozens of titles into both English and Latin American Spanish. The company is now collaborating with several Hollywood studios on various film and TV projects, and has already contributed to the dubbing of several movies currently being screened in theaters worldwide.

"The fact that we are the first AI dubbing solution to be accepted as a trusted service provider in the entertainment industry is a strong testament to our ability to deliver premium quality dubbing solutions. It also signifies a growing trend in the industry, where embracing AI technologies is becoming increasingly important," said Krakowski.

By harnessing thousands of voices to match each performance, AI-powered dubbing solutions like Deepdub can effectively reproduce the original viewing experience in the audience's native language, capturing the full spectrum of emotion and expressiveness from the original performance in the dubbed audio. As the technology continues to evolve, it is likely that more innovative applications of AI-generated speech, from personalized virtual assistants to realistic digital avatars, will emerge. [source]

On Tyranny Part 1 notes

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power.

Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.

Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Source: On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder.

Good points. On defending institutions is fine generally unless they are corrupt especially the leadership. 

As for believe in truth, not believing in truth can possibly lead to irrationality at the least and insanity at the most. Truth is an anchor. Without it the mind can get lost. Examples of untruths are: believing in men can give birth, a black man can be a white supremist, global warming can cause all sorts of things that doesn't have to do with the weather, not to mention renaming "global warming" to "climate change" a term that means nothing, etc. 

Coptic Christians Kicked and Beaten in Italy by Muslim Mob for Smoking During Ramadan

From The Gateway Pundit.com (April 24, 2022):

Two Coptic Christian men were kicked and beaten in Turin, Italy for smoking during Ramadan. The two elderly men, 62 and 70, were standing in the Corso Vigenano smoking when they were attacked by angry Muslims in the street.

The Coptic brothers were wearing Christian crosses around their necks.

La Reppublica reported (translated) and Medforth.biz.

They were attacked because they did not respect the Ramadan rules which require not to smoke during the fasting period. “But my father and my uncle are Coptic Christians, they are not Muslims”, explains the daughter and niece of the victims of an attack that took place Monday afternoon in Corso Vigevano almost in Piazza Crispi. “It is not the first time that even in Italy we have been attacked for the fact that we are Christians”, says the 23-year-old girl, born and raised in Italy.

His family has lived in Turin for more than 40 years, his father is 62 and has always been an activist to promote the rights of the Coptic minority who are victims of discrimination in Egypt. “It makes me angry to think that this discrimination also exists here,” he says.

The father, 62, and the uncle, 70, were standing in the square. “They were waiting for my mother – says the young woman – My uncle was smoking a cigarette and this passing group, foreigners but I don’t know what nationality, began to insult and swear. My father then turned around and asked them if they did. they were addressing him and my uncle. They said yes, saying it was not good Muslims to smoke. ”

When the two explained that their faith was different, they were attacked with kicks and punches. Both were treated at Giovanni Bosco for several bruises. They don’t know their attackers. “But maybe that group of people had already noticed my family members, my uncle lives in the area, my father is known in the community for his work as an activist. Both wear quite evident Christian crosses.”

[source]

Chip Shortage Leads Major Firm to Scavenge Semiconductors From Old Washing Machines

From The Epoch Times.com (April 21, 2022):

The global semiconductor shortage has led a major industrial conglomerate to resort to buying up old washing machines and removing chips from inside them for use in their own products, according to the head of a supplier of key technologies to chipmakers.

Peter Wennink, CEO of ASML, a company that dominates the global market for machines used to etch circuits into silicon wafers, made the remarks in an April 20 earnings call, without identifying by name the conglomerate that was scavenging chips from washing machines.

Wennink said ASML had a record year in terms of sales and profits and was facing “unprecedented customer demand” across all sectors, including for its lithography machines that function as a kind of printing press for silicon chips.

“With this unprecedented demand exceeding our capacity, we are ramping our output capability to meet the strong demand,” he said, acknowledging challenges such as labor force constraints and the vulnerability of operating at full steam. “We are even more vulnerable when running at maximum capacity as there’s little room for recovery when things don’t turn out as planned.”

Wennink noted that ASML went on a major hiring spree last year, although many of the new hires still have to be fully trained.

Like the chipmakers it supplies, ASML is also having to work through its own equipment and component shortages and COVID-related supply chain disruptions, according to Wennink.

“All of what I just mentioned needs maximum attention and monitoring, creativity and flexibility of all our partners and stakeholders,” he said, noting that some testing of ASML equipment was being downstreamed to customer sites, which has freed up additional production capacity.

Wennink told Financial Times in March that chipmakers’ multibillion-dollar expansion plans will be constrained by shortages of key equipment over the next two years as the supply chain struggles to accelerate production. Surging demand for semiconductors has exposed supply chain kinks, prompting a historic wave of investment and an unlocking of government subsidies.

“It took 50 years to become a half-a-trillion-dollar industry. It’ll take just eight to 10 years to reach a trillion dollars,” Tom Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.

In telling the anecdote about the unnamed major industrial company that he said was buying old washing machines in order to salvage the chips in them, Wennink said the story wasn’t unique, illustrating the desperation on the part of chipmakers to meet demand.

Wennink also said on the earnings call that the utilization rates of ASML’s machines were at all-time highs, suggesting that customers are buying more not to stockpile, but because they can’t keep up with surging demand.

“We’re just looking at the data points; they just point to a market that is significantly short of semiconductor manufacturing capacity, this year and next year,” he said.

Intel, which relies on ASML’s lithography equipment, told Financial Times that there’s still time to resolve the shortage of the lithography machines. That’s because it takes two years to build the shell of a chip factory and ASML’s machines won’t be needed until year three or four, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, told the media outlet.

But while Wennink told Financial Times that there’s still some time to expand capacity, it’s not a simple task, because of long lead times for key components, such as lenses, that are needed to make the machines.

ASML shares were up by about 1 percent at $649.50 at 7:30 a.m. ET. [source]

It’s like Americans are living in a third-world country. Sad. That’s Joe Briden!

Illegals spreading scabies through buses, planes, Border Patrol source warns —report

From Monica Showalter on American Thinker.com (May 13, 2022):

Illegal invaders, who travel for thousands of miles through mud, jungles, rivers, cargo boxcars, unsanitary third-world city streets, and other inhospitable places before crossing into the U.S., can bring with them a lot more than just COVID.

According to independent journalist Michael Yon, who has been traveling the migrant routes to the U.S. border:

SCABIES: From Border Patrol source just now: “The problem with scabies is that is is highly contagious and the illegal aliens are getting in busses and commercial aircraft to travel around the country. The next person that sits in that seat now has scabies!”

We already know that they get onto buses, and good luck to the people who have no choice but to ride that method of transport that leftists are always trying to push Americans into.

But it also appears to be true that illegals are somehow getting onto commercial aircraft -- two days ago, I took a flight from the border city of San Diego to Denver, and was astonished to see the last seats filled in by a line of single weathered young men speaking Spanish and carrying raggedy backpacks who very much appeared to be recent border crossers. If it's true they were illegal border crossers, then yes, it appears likely that after some rough travel, they could have had scabies and spread them to the next person who took their seats on the plane.

Of course, any person who sleeps rough could, but we normally don't see those people on planes. One wonders what mechanism exists that permits illegal border crossers to get onto commercial planes, and how many people may catch scabies as a result.

And it's worth noting that illegals bring in all sorts of diseases as they cross illegally into the U.S. -- COVID, tuberculosis, leprosy, leishmaniosis, flu... But scabies, unlike those other afflictions, some contagious, is pretty common and pretty closely linked to environmental factors, all of which involve rough travel and sleep, which is what nearly all illegals do.

I looked up how people get scabies and how long the scabies "itch mites" can last on surfaces and be transmissible. I found this item on the CDC website:

Scabies usually is spread by direct, prolonged, skin-to-skin contact with a person who has scabies. Contact generally must be prolonged; a quick handshake or hug usually will not spread scabies. Scabies is spread easily to sexual partners and household members. Scabies in adults frequently is sexually acquired. Scabies sometimes is spread indirectly by sharing articles such as clothing, towels, or bedding used by an infested person; however, such indirect spread can occur much more easily when the infested person has crusted scabies.

...and...

How long can scabies mites live?

On a person, scabies mites can live for as long as 1-2 months. Off a person, scabies mites usually do not survive more than 48-72 hours. Scabies mites will die if exposed to a temperature of 50°C (122°F) for 10 minutes.

One wonders where the ever-so-solicitous-of-our-public-health CDC is now that there's this brand new imported public health hazard spreading about the country on public transport sources?

It seems insane to let obviously affected people, or even unsanitary-looking people be free to roam about the country on public transport, given the risks to ordinary Americans of new diseases being spread.

The Biden administration has taken to releasing illegal border crossers into the country without so much as a court date to track their whereabouts, let alone some scabies treatment with mandatory use in their welcome packets. That's a lot of scabies that can be spread on airliners and other public transit.

While it's important not to panic, and to investigate new sanitation methods to travel safely, it's supremely unfair for Biden administration officials to expose the U.S. public to this health hazard, particularly among the immunocompromised.

As if illegals didn't bring enough costs and problems as it is, count this as another gift to the American people from the Bidenites and their open border. [source]

Ewe! That’s not good.

GAMA SOSA: The GOP Is Clueless To The Dems' Sinister Immigration Agenda — And It Has Nothing To Do With Elections

From Daily Caller.com (May 13):

The GOP has been very good at diagnosing the problems we will face from the illegal migrant invasion following the end of Title 42. Americans will pay more taxes while seeing cartel activity, gang violence, and other crime skyrocket. Housing and healthcare will become scarcer and more expensive, and the labor market will worsen as a larger labor supply suppresses American wages.

Republicans have mostly attacked the Democrats’ plan to create a “permanent majority” or accused them of enabling crime. Ultimately, this short-sighted approach focuses on the short-term electoral game. As usual, the Democrats and their handlers hide their true intentions, and the GOP is none the wiser.

The final Democrat goal is to turn America into a communist state in which Washington and its mega-corporate partners control every aspect of life. But Americans increasingly realize they are better off controlling their own affairs. So what is Uncle Sam to do?

Enter a pair of 60s radicals from Columbia University. Professors Richard Cloward and Frances Piven taught at the Ivy League university during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society. In 1966, they argued that Johnson’s welfare program was not going far enough because most welfare was the purview of state and local authorities. In order to get everyone on the federal teat, a crisis had to be created to give the feds the excuse to step in. Their proposal was to have massive numbers of poor people overwhelm local and state governments that they would beg Uncle Sam for help.

This general idea is the long-term strategy behind mass immigration.

If the Democrats cannot get Americans to accept a neo-communist, technocratic, oligarchic state run by billionaires and their political marionettes, they will import those who will. And the masses of impoverished foreigners, who are already accustomed to socialism and heavy-handed government, are the perfect trojan horse.

AOC may be dumb, but the people behind her aren’t. They want to overwhelm their own cities – and then everywhere else. They know that if NYC and Chicago can’t handle migrants, then the rural counties these cities are shipping migrants to definitely won’t – let alone the 750 million people who want to come here. The only entity left to pick up the tab is the federal government (in practice, this means you), which will use demographic chaos, poverty, and declining standards of living as a pretext to “save” the day. Coincidentally, Eric Adams has called for just that.

So what do you do when people can’t afford to live as a result of both low wages and high taxes to pay for all these illegals (among other things)? Enact universal basic income, preferably with a trackable CBDC that will control what you can buy, and when and whether you can buy it at all. Can’t afford healthcare because the system is strained and clogged up? Roll out Medicare for all, which of course gets to prioritize certain patients over others according to federal whims. No doubt diversity and inclusion will be criteria. Local and state police can’t handle the out of control crime anymore as a result of illegal immigration and soft-on-crime DAs? Create a national police force.

COVID-19 was a good try from the feds. They got tons of people to wear masks, take experimental shots, and hate their neighbors, but it didn’t result in the economic collapse and massive run to the welfare rolls that they had hoped for. So now, they’ve hit upon an all-too-commonly seen plan in history: when your own people hate you, bring in dependent outsiders. [source]

The author could be right. It wouldn’t surprise me. Cloward and Piven definitely wanted to radically transform this nation.

The Three Cs Preventing Total State Control

From JB Shurk on American Thinker.com (Mar. 20, 2022):

If you were a time-traveling supervillain intent on world domination, how might you change the past in order to seize total control of the present?  I'd get rid of the personal automobile, unsupervised cash transactions, and uncontrolled mass communication.  If you take away freedom of movement, freedom of commerce, and freedom of speech, then you can keep people isolated, dependent on government welfare, and ignorant of any ideas that might threaten the power of the State.  Cars, cash, and communication are tools for promoting and protecting freedom, so if your goal is total State control over the individual, the three big Cs must go.

Is it a coincidence, then, that Western governments today seem committed to following that very playbook?  They can't go back in time and un-invent the automobile, but they can make cars so prohibitively expensive through endless regulation that only the wealthiest among us eventually own them.  They can't surveil every market transaction, but they can make it increasingly difficult to exchange goods or services without using traceable electronic platforms.  They can't completely shut down email, social media, or the Internet without shutting down power grids, but they can partner with ideologically-aligned tech monopolists to censor information and viewpoints, limit anonymity, and track users.  Who needs time travel when it is possible to transform freedom-enhancing technologies into systems of State control?

I know we're all supposed to believe that carbon dioxide plant food is evil, and the only way to "save the planet" is to ban everyone (except the "elites") from using energy, but it sure is convenient that a century after the automobile revolutionized the world, the "ruling class" wants to de-revolutionize mass mobility.  In the late nineteenth century, most people lived and died in the towns where they were born.  With highway systems and the internal combustion engine, personal freedom jumped by leaps and bounds.  Not only did people find a relatively inexpensive way to interact with the world beyond their homes, but they also discovered ideas and economic opportunities that never would have reached them otherwise.  If part of freedom's allure is the ability to choose one's path and destination, then the car is freedom. 

Yet isn't it strange that personal transportation has only gotten more expensive over the decades?  Gone are the days when teenagers could afford to buy cheap wheels with summer earnings.  Gone are the models so basic that learning automotive mechanics was a part of growing up.  Safety and fuel regulations and increasingly complex computer systems have pushed car prices higher and higher.  Building cars from scratch has been replaced with taking out car loans for life.  And now the "green police" want to replace the affordability of the internal combustion engine and gasoline pumps with expensive batteries made from Chinese and African rare earth metals (usually mined by slaves) and requiring hour-long recharges from electrical power stations running on coal energy.  What's more likely — that cars are a threat to the planet or that the freedom cars represent is a threat to state control?

If the car is freedom, cash is privacy.  You can buy and sell without every transaction being recorded or scrutinized.  You can hide it, store it, or give it away at will.  So what does it say to you that Western governments are already planning for the collapse of their depreciating currencies by preparing for the day when their physical currencies can be replaced with purely digital forms?  It tells me that running the U.S. debt up a few hundred trillion dollars wasn't just the normal work product of criminal politicians and bureaucratic spendthrifts but an intentional plan to transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest before forcing everyone onto an easily surveilled digital system.  If only government-sanctioned digital currencies are allowed, then no purchase, donation, or transfer is private. 

Governments wouldn't abuse that kind of power, would they?  Canada already answered that question by freezing the assets and bank accounts of freedom convoy protesters it deemed hostile to the State.  Then the West spoke with one voice by cutting off Russian citizens from international electronic transfer systems for the actions of their president.  Does anybody doubt that the socialists who have taken over the West are just itching to deny salaries to "politically incorrect" citizens as punishment?  Or to prevent future purchases of ammunition, donations to freedom-minded organizations, or personal expenditures on unapproved books or education?  Does anybody doubt that replacing physical currencies with only government-issued digital monies will end private property and institutionalize Marxist redistribution of wealth?  Then you know why decentralized cryptocurrencies free from government control are such a threat to governments' power.

But if you've figured out by now that the State is limiting your freedom and privacy, then you must also know that it will do everything in its power to keep you from telling others — which is why Western governments have made free speech their enemy.  The "golden age" of mass communication for governments was when only they could speak to millions of their citizens at a time through subtle propaganda broadcast on radio and television programs.  With the rise of the Internet, social media, and cheap cameras, though, citizens can engage in mass communication.  If the State cannot control the message or the messenger, then the State's power is transferred to the people.  See why free speech has now become unacceptable in the West?  See why everything the State doesn't like must be criminalized as "hate"?  See why President Trump had to be de-platformed?  Spreading ideas far and wide without State approval is dangerous to the State's control over its citizens. 

Does that sound hyperbolic?  Ask yourself when the last time was that government institutions reacted to any crisis in a way that could be understood as expanding personal choice.  A school shooting occurs, and how does the government respond?  By demanding that law-abiding citizens hand over their own means of self-defense.  Does the legalization of gay marriage conflict with some Americans' religious beliefs?  Those Americans must be bullied into publicly supporting something antithetical to their own consciences.  People are so afraid of a virus that they insist on never leaving their homes?  Then people who are unafraid of the virus must be compelled to stay in their homes, too.  Do parents disagree with school curriculums promoting "white supremacy" and "transgenderism"?  Then those parents must be treated as "domestic extremists" and reported to the FBI.  After nearly a decade in Iraq and two decades in Afghanistan, Americans are hesitant to rush into war in Ukraine?  Then their viewpoints must be labeled as "Russian propaganda" and their opinions deemed "traitorous."

Can you remember a time when disagreement was accepted as a vital part of a healthy and free society?  Can you remember a time when speech was not policed and people were not fired for their personal beliefs?  Can you remember a time when self-sufficiency was a virtue and government dependence was something to avoid?  Can you remember a time when freedom was not something "handed out" for good behavior?  If you can, then you know what's already been lost.  And unless Americans demand control over their own futures once again, you know how much more there is still left to lose. [source]

Good points. The cyan highlight is mine. The author could have added guns as way of protecting freedom. An unarmed populace makes it easier for the gov’t to take over completely—harder to fight against oppression when you are unarmed. The Founders knew that principle well.

More articles on subject:

• 14 Signs of Totalitarianism
• Trudeau takes another major step toward totalitarianism

THEY HAVE IT ON TAPE! Kevin McCarthy Told GOP Leaders Twitter and Big Tech Needed to Strip Accounts from Fellow GOP Lawmakers — AFTER CUTTING VIDEO AGAINST CENSORSHIP!

From The Gateway Pundit.com (April 21, 2022):

Rachel Maddow leaked a private phone call on her show on Thursday night of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy with Trump-hating lunatic Liz Cheney on January 10, 2021.

On January 10, 2021, Kevin McCarthy spoke with several GOP House leaders including Liz Cheney who was third-in-line in the House Republican Caucus at that time.

During the call, McCarthy told Liz Cheney that he would counsel President Trump Trump to resign.

From the call:

Kevin McCarthy:  “I think [impeachment resolutions] will pass, and it would be my recommendation you (President Trump) should resign… What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it.”

McCarthy also indicated that he believed Twitter and Facebook should delete the accounts of lawmakers who were supporting Trump’s claim of a rigged election. “We can’t put up with that,” he said. “Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?”

Jonathan Martin, national political correspondent for The New York Times, joined Rachel Maddow about to discuss his new book with New York Times colleague Alex Burns. Marin told Rachel Maddow that Kevin McCarthy wanted Twitter to suspend his fellow Republicans from their platform.

For the record — Kevin McCarthy has posted numerous tweets condemning Twitter censorship.

While pushing for it on his fellow party members!

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have special protections in something called #Section230. But Big Tech is abusing those protections and choosing to censor Americans with different political views.

It is time to #Scrap230 and start over. pic.twitter.com/IaX8AZCJ9N

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) October 15, 2020

More…

The President tweets that people should stop breaking the law and Twitter moves to censor him.

The left is uncomfortable that in a vibrant democracy, citizens have a right to hear directly from their President and decide for themselves what to think about it.#StopTheBias!

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) June 23, 2020

[source]

I’m glad Trump didn’t resign. He was completely innocent. McCarthy and any republican that believes the Left’s lies about Trump (or any conservative for that matter) are just dupes—suckers even. The Left does lie, misrepresent and trick. That’s their nature. You can’t trust them. Unless they show you solid proof about someone, don’t believe them.

US Fed warns of state hackers targeting industrial control systems

From Tech HQ.com (April 14, 2022):

Industrial control systems (ICS) are essential for the steady functioning of critical infrastructures such as the energy and water grid or the manufacturing sector. Therefore, when an attack is launched on ICS, the consequences are often far-reaching, just like then a ransomware attack targeted Colonial Pipeline Inc. in the US mid-last year.

That attack brought the entire facility to a complete halt for a few days which then inevitably caused an acute fuel shortage, while prices soared through the roof. It is unfortunate though that threat actors are increasingly shifting their focus from information technology (IT) to what ICS is often referred to as operational technology (OT).

This puts the critical industrial infrastructure owned by the state and private entities at high risk of destructive cyberattacks that can cause severe economic damage. Predictably, governments across the world can only urge private entities to toughen their critical infrastructure defenses—while taking steps to improve national cyberspace security.

Hence why in the US, the Department of Energy (DOE) alongside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) yesterday to warn critical infrastructure owners of a tool developed by hackers to target ICS like power grids and oil refineries.

“DOE, CISA, NSA, and the FBI warn that certain advanced persistent threat (APT) actors have exhibited the capability to gain full system access to multiple ICS/supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices,” the statement reads.

The tools, according to the officials, enable the threat actors to scan for, compromise, and control affected devices once they have established initial access to the OT network. “Additionally, the actors can compromise Windows-based engineering workstations, which may be present in information technology (IT) or OT environments, using an exploit that compromises an ASRock motherboard driver with known vulnerabilities,” they said.

By compromising and maintaining full system access to ICS/SCADA devices, DOE, CISA, NSA, and the FBI said APT actors could elevate privileges, move laterally within an OT environment, and disrupt critical devices or functions. Therefore, the CSA urges critical infrastructure organizations, especially energy sector organizations, to implement the detection and mitigation recommendations provided to detect potential malicious APT activity and harden their ICS/SCADA devices. [source]

Not good. Would one these state hackers be China by chance? Or even Russia?

Nashville school shooting manifesto: Why killers write about motives

From Fox News.com (May 19):

Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old assailant who killed six people, three of them 9-year-old students, at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, at the end of March, left behind a manifesto, artwork and other writings, according to police.

However, the documents have not yet been released, and lawsuits are demanding their public disclosure.

While police have not revealed a motive, Hale studied previous mass shooters, planned and targeted the school, and left behind an abundant paper trail, according to authorities. Other killers have left similar documents behind, leaving a grim trail of evidence and potentially also inspiring future murderers.

"When people intent on killing others write manifestos, they want their motivation to be publicized," explained Dr. Katherine Ramsland, professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University. "Sometimes, it's a suicide note, but it can also be an attempt to punish or to inspire others to follow their lead."

Ramsland, the author of "Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers," said such killers typically "vent" against people, institutions or their own social standing.

The National Police Association, media outlets and many members of the public want answers. In part, according to the law enforcement group's attorney, the association is concerned that the work of city police is being interfered with by "outside influences" seeking to keep the manifesto secret.

State law is "simple and straightforward" and the documents must be disclosed unless they fall under an exemption, said Doug Pierce, the lawyer representing the National Police Association and private investigator Clata Brewer in a lawsuit against the City of Nashville and Davidson County.

"It's heartbreaking when you think of it, 9-year-old children gunned down," Pierce told Fox News Digital. "It's very sick, sad and heartbreaking."

Under Tennessee law, documents produced or received by government agencies conducting public business become public records unless they fall into an exempted category. City and county officials have argued that there is an ongoing investigation. However, with the shooter dead, attorneys for the NPA and other groups behind similar lawsuits argue there is no active law enforcement proceeding.

…………….

Nashville Metro Police Chief John Drake said investigators had not immediately determined a motive but believed that Hale, a former student, had targeted the school and its affiliated church. The killer studied previous mass murders while plotting the attack, he said.

This is another common trait among mass murderers, [Dr. Katherine] Ramsland [, professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University] said.

"They study other mission-based killers to learn strategies and avoid mistakes because they seek maximum impact," she told Fox News Digital. [read more]

Why can’t the public read this murder’s manifesto? Why the cover up? Isn’t because she identified as a trans? It seems more and more mass killers are identifying as trans for some reason. Maybe someone should look into that.

EXCLUSIVE: Clintons in the crosshairs...again! Republicans demand new probe into Bill and Hillary after report reveals FBI top brass shut down FOUR criminal investigations into millions of dollars in foreign donations and speaker fees

From Daily Mail.co.uk (May 18):

The FBI had at least four criminal investigations into Hillary and Bill Clinton that were ultimately shut down months before the presidential election in 2016, a new Justice Department report reveals – and Republicans want to reopen those probes.

A long-awaited report by Special Counsel John Durham released on Monday shows the FBI began investigating claims in late 2014 from a 'well-placed' confidential source that two foreign governments were trying to make illegal donations to buy influence with Hillary during her presidential campaign.

Investigators were even offered documents of one alleged $2,700 illegal contribution that led to a 'substantial' further donation.

The bombshell report also reveals three different FBI field offices, in Washington, D.C., Little Rock, Arkansas, and New York, launched investigations into the Clinton Foundation in early 2016 for 'possible criminal activity.'

One of the investigations was partly based on statements made in journalist Peter Schweizer's 2015 book, Clinton Cash, claiming the Clintons' charity was taking millions in donations from foreign governments trying to change US foreign policy while Hillary was Secretary of State.

But despite making progress, all four criminal investigations were shut down by senior officials, Durham found.

The new revelations are prompting calls from current and former Republicans for a renewed investigation into the alleged criminal activity involving the Clintons.

One is Florida Republican representative Matt Gaetz, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee's 'Weaponization of the Federal Government' subcommittee which has been probing claims of political bias in the FBI.

'The Clintons had a team of people at the FBI running interference for them to avoid criminal culpability,' Gaetz claimed in a statement to DailyMail.com.

'These matters absolutely warrant additional exposure and review.'

Former Republican congressman and ex House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz expressed similar sentiments saying the FBI 'didn't complete the job' and probes into the Clintons should be reopened.

'They had the scent, they were on the trail, and they were shut down by the higher ups who had an obvious political desire to see Donald Trump lose and Hillary Clinton win,' he said.

'It's disgusting really. Absolutely these investigations should be revisited,' he added.

'There's no reason why Congress can't have a series of hearings with the field agents who were pursuing the Clinton Foundation, and public interviews with them as well.'

Bombshell new information about the FBI's Clinton probes was disclosed in the special counsel's 316-page report delivered to Attorney General Merrick Garland on May 12.

The report compared the FBI and Justice Department's voracious investigation of Trump's connections with Russia, to its allegedly lackluster approach to its Clinton probes 'tippy-toeing' around the former Secretary of State.

Durham reviewed a January 2016 report on the Clinton Foundation by the Little Rock Field Office which found possible evidence that 'large monetary contributions were made to a non-profit, under both direct and indirect control of [a] federal public official, in exchange for favorable government action and/or influence.' [read more]

Nothing to see here. Just the FBI top brass covering elite dems’ butts again.

Greed Doesn’t Drive Inflation, Monetary Policy Does

From The Public Discourse.com (Mar. 6, 2022):

If 2020 was the year of the pandemic, 2021 was the year of the return of inflation. In 2021, consumer prices for all items rose by 7 percent in the United States—the largest yearly increase since 1981.

Most economists explain the rise in inflation by pointing out the role of Biden’s stimulus program as well as the supply-side disruption produced by COVID lockdowns. But other academics and politicians are propagating a misleading and dangerous idea.

They claim that inflation is not a monetary phenomenon at all. Instead, they believe that businessmen are to blame for the rise in inflation. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, argues that the rise in inflation is nothing more than the result of “corporate greed.” In a public letter Warren sent to the CEOs of Kroger, Albertsons, and Publix, she blamed their companies for “passing costs on the consumer to preserve their pandemic gains.”

Your company, and the other major grocers who reaped the benefits of a turbulent 2020, appear to be passing costs on to consumers to preserve your pandemic gains, and even taking advantage of inflation to add greater burdens.

Your companies had a choice: They could have retained lower prices for consumers and properly protected and compensated their workers or granted massive payouts to top executives and investors. It is disappointing that you chose not to put your customers and workers first.

Most economists reject the idea that greed drives inflation as nonsensical. But the problem is that if Warren and others convince the public that greedy businesses are to blame, she and other politicians will be empowered to regulate and punish businesses without actually addressing the underlying causes of inflation (i.e., increases in the money supply).

It’s worrisome that calls for price controls are beginning to emerge in the United States. For instance, Isabella Weber, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote in The Guardian that the United States needs a “systematic consideration of strategic price controls as a tool in the broader policy response to the enormous macroeconomic challenges.”

Some scholars have even argued that rationing is necessary to avoid shortages. Rebecca Spang, a historian at Indiana University, recently said: “If you try to have price controls without rationing, you end up with shortages, you end up with purveyors pulling their goods from the market.”

Inflation is never caused by either greed or any other business activity. We need to make sure that people do not fall for those misleading narratives. If we fail to do so, then the United States runs the risk of repeating the same mistakes that my country did a decade ago—the very same mistakes that caused the worst humanitarian crisis in the history of the Americas.

A Cautionary Tale

Politicians and academics scapegoating businesses for inflation is exactly what happened in my own country, Venezuela. In the last decade, the idea that businessmen cause inflation led to a series of heavy regulations on business, including price controls. These controls ended up destroying the market mechanisms of the Venezuelan economy and caused chronic shortages of food and medicines. These policies laid the groundwork for Venezuela’s current humanitarian crisis.

How can a country so rich in natural resources—so wealthy in oil—end up so badly? My answer is always that Venezuela did not fail because of bad luck, nor even because of bad politicians. It goes deeper than that. My country failed because of the ideas its citizens held. Everything else is nothing more than a consequence of this terrible fact—from the leaders that we elected to the policies that they implemented.

A few of the detrimental ideas Venezuelans embraced were that presidents need almost unlimited powers, that expanding the supreme court was necessary, and that rewriting the country’s constitutions was not such a bad idea, which is why the country voted for these things in 1999.

Additionally, anti-business attitudes spread throughout the country starting in the 2000s. Coupled with the political ideas mentioned above, these attitudes enabled the late president Hugo Chavez to build his revolution. Chavez regularly denounced wealth and free markets while praising socialism. He said things like: “Being rich is bad, it is inhuman. I say so and I condemn the rich.” And: “Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ—who I think was the first socialist—only socialism can really create a genuine society.” And: “I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.”

These anti-business ideas, embraced widely by Venezuelans and propounded by Chavez, led to the economic policies that propelled Venezuela into the worst economic collapse in the western hemisphere’s modern history. Venezuela imposed tight currency controls to allegedly avoid capital flights to the United States (savings leaving the country), widespread nationalization of businesses (from sectors like farming to banking, energy, and others), and large state entities created to run all those sectors that were previously held by private organizations.

As I wrote in Public Discourse back in August 2020, the Venezuelan economic model could be summarized as a system that substitutes central planning for virtually all market mechanisms. I explained:

The Venezuelan state controls virtually all the country’s means of production, from basic industries like oil and aluminum, to agriculture, food distribution, telecommunications, and most other economic sectors. Moreover, through tight price controls and production quotas, the state strictly regulates those parts of the economy that are owned by the private sector. As such, the Venezuelan economy is doomed to low levels of investment, productivity, employment, and income.

[read more]

Yea, if America isn’t careful we could be Venezuela.

Other articles on inflation and monetary policy::

• Hyperinflation in Germany, 1914–1923
• What the Bible Says About Money Inflation, Debt, and The Fed
• Modern Monetary Theory Isn't Modern. It's Antiquated

New Documents Suggest Democrats Sicced The CIA On Their Domestic Enemy, The President

From The Federalist.com (April 20, 2022):

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements.

When Special Counsel John Durham charged former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann in September 2021, the indictment focused on the Alfa Bank hoax that Sussmann, tech executive Rodney Joffe, and other cybersecurity experts had crafted. The indictment detailed how Joffe and other tech experts had allegedly mined data and developed “white papers” that deceptively created the impression that Trump had maintained a secret communication network with the Russia-based Alfa Bank.

Then, allegedly on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Joffe, Sussmann provided the Alfa Bank material to the media and to the FBI’s general counsel at the time, James Baker, with Sussmann falsely telling Baker he was sharing the “intel” on his own and not on behalf of any client. That alleged lie formed the basis for the one count, Section 1001 false statement charge against Sussmann.

There’s Another Alleged Lie

The 27-page indictment, however, also spoke of Sussmann sharing “updated allegations” on February 9, 2017, to another U.S. government agency, namely the CIA, while allegedly repeating the same false claim that he was not sharing the “intel” on behalf of any client. From the framing of the indictment, it appeared that what Sussmann had shared with the CIA concerned the same Alfa-Bank data provided to the FBI several months earlier, albeit updated.

But then two months ago, as part of the government’s “Motion to Inquire Into Potential Conflicts of Interest,” Durham’s team revealed for the first time that when Sussmann met with the CIA in early 2017, he provided agents with internet data beyond the Alfa Bank conspiracy theory. This data, Sussmann claimed, “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”

The “supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones” were “Yotaphones.” Following Durham’s filing of the conflicts of interest motion, it appeared Sussmann bore responsibility for peddling a second conspiracy theory to the CIA. But the details contained in the government’s motion proved insufficient to understand the Yotaphone angle to Spygate. That all changed on Friday, when the special counsel filed two CIA memoranda memorializing what Sussmann said about the Yotaphones and the data Joffe and his tech experts had compiled.

What Sussmann Told the CIA

The first memorandum, dated January 31, 2017, summarized what Sussmann told a former CIA employee in hopes of scoring a meeting with the CIA. Sussmann said his client “had some interesting information about the presence and activity of a unique Russian made phone around President Trump.” Sussmann claimed the activity started in April 2016 when Trump was working out of the Trump Tower on its Wi-Fi network. That phone was also used on the “Wi-Fi at Trump’s apartment at Grand Central Park West,” according to Sussmann.

The memorandum then noted that “when Trump traveled to Michigan to interview a cabinet secretary, the phone appeared with Trump in Michigan.” The unnamed cabinet secretary apparently refers to Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, whose husband Richard DeVos was chairman of the Michigan-based Spectrum Health in 2016.

According to the notes, Sussmann also told his contact that “the phone was never noticed in two places at once” and was seen “only around the President’s movement.” The memo noted that once, when Trump was not in Trump Tower, the phone was active on the Trump Tower WiFi network. Then, “in December 2016, the phone disappeared from Trump Tower Wi Fi network and surfaced on [the Executive Office Building] network,” the memorandum said, with Sussmann claiming it was the same Yotaphone and that it “surfaced” at the Executive Office Building after Trump moved to the White House.

The Yotaphone is rare, Sussmann told his contact, with only about a dozen or so present in the United States, and Russian government officials often receive a high-end version of the phone as a gift. According to Sussmann, the Yotaphone connected to Trump made a number of WiFi calls to Moscow and St. Petersburg from April 2016 until February 2017. [read more]

Trump was right all along.

Secret Service claims it has ‘no records’ of who visits Biden in Delaware

From NY Post.com (April 20, 2022):

WASHINGTON — The US Secret Service has dubiously claimed to The Post that it has “no records” of visitors to President Biden’s two Delaware residences and therefore cannot divulge that information in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Biden was at his residences in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach on about one-quarter of all days during his first year in office, but little is known about who stopped by for official meetings or less formal lobbying efforts — such as by members of his family and their associates.

The Post sought more than one year of visitor log records, including for Biden’s first year in office, but Secret Service Freedom of Information Act officer Kevin Tyrrell wrote in a response dated Monday that “[t]he Secret Service FOIA Office searched all Program Offices that were likely to contain potentially responsive records, and no records were located.”

First son Hunter Biden is under criminal investigation for possible tax fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying after routinely seeking business in countries where his father held sway as vice president. The younger Biden worked on some overseas projects with his uncle Jim Biden.

Documents and photos from a laptop that formerly belonged to Hunter Biden indicate that he introduced his dad to business associates from China, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine — including at the vice president’s residence in Washington.

Biden was at one of his Delaware homes for 99 days during his first year in office, including for official business, such as an Oct. 24 breakfast where Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lobbied centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to support Biden’s Build Back Better Act social spending plan.

The president sometimes speaks about how his houseguests influence his views on policy. For example, in January, Biden said that a family friend gave him an education about rising prices amid four-decade-high inflation.

“I was sitting in my kitchen yesterday and here’s a sunroom off the kitchen and my wife was there with her sister and a good friend named Mary Ann,” Biden recounted. “And she was saying, ‘Do you realize it’s over $5 for a pound of hamburger meat? $5?’”

Transparency groups have fought for presidential visitor logs with mixed success, incurring notable defeats from federal appeals courts based in Washington and New York.

The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) successfully sued to obtain limited records pertaining to a Japanese delegation visit to former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but the records weren’t detailed.

“While we won access to those records, we never got much, as the Secret Service came out and said they were not vetting the president’s meetings, the Trump Organization was,” said CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz.

“I have not seen any reporting that there is a ton of official business and outside meetings being done when Biden goes to his personal residence in Delaware for the weekend, mainly just going to church,” Libowitz added. “If he were meeting with foreign heads of state at his house in Delaware, that would obviously be a different matter, though.” [read more]

Another article on the subject: 

 Secret Service Is Selling Us a Bunch of Malarkey When It Comes to Joe Biden's Visitors

CBP Is Using Sophisticated AI Tool to Monitor Americans’ Social Media Activity

From The Epoch Times.com (May 19):

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using an artificial intelligence (AI) data collection tool to collect information from social media activity that can in some cases be linked to individuals’ social security or driver’s license numbers, according to a CBP document describing the software tool. The document was obtained by Vice magazine’s tech site Motherboard via a Freedom of Information Act request, and described in a May 17 report.

The CBP document describes the open-source AI tool, dubbed Babel X, which was developed by Babel Street, a U.S. company focused on intelligence gathering. Babel Street’s top leadership and board of advisors include tech industry experts, veteran military leadership, and former intelligence officers.

CBP is a federal agency under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CBP submitted the document, termed a Privacy Threshold Analysis (PTA), to DHS to “continue to pilot the use of Babel Street’s Babel X platform.”

The date when the PTA was filed is not listed; however, the DHS privacy office approved the document on Dec. 14, 2020. The end date for the PTA is listed as Sept. 25, 2023. According to the DHS website, PTAs expire after three years or when changes occur.

Screening for ‘Derogatory’ Info

The PTA describes Babel X as a multilingual tool that gathers publicly available information, including social media activity. Designed for use by the intelligence community and law enforcement, the sophisticated tool allows CBP to screen travelers, including U.S. citizens, refugees, and people seeking asylum.

Babel X is “geo-enabled,” analyzes texts, and can monitor web activity on the public, “dark,” and “deep” webs. The dark web is a portion of the internet that is not indexed by search engines and functions on a different software infrastructure. It is often used for organized criminal activity.

The Babel X platform can search for keywords or phrases on more than 52 social media websites, in millions of web addresses, and in 200 languages, allowing users to enter English terms and return foreign language results.

CBP says it uses the tool to detect information that is “derogatory” or could show a threat to national security or  CBP personnel.

The document mentions Locate X, another software that can find the location of a person using geolocation data. Also sold by Babel Street, Locate X allows users to draw a digital fence around a specific area, pinpoint mobile devices within that area, and see where those devices have traveled, going back months, according to an article from Protocol.

Some parts of the document were redacted after the mention of Locate X, and because of this, no more information could be found on the use and legality of Locate X.

Monitoring Large Tracts of Data in Near Real-Time

According to the CBP submission, “Babel X makes sense of large tracts of multi-lingual data in near real-time. Users identify themes, entities, and categories, as well as detect relationships, within the cloud-based platform. Babel users can explore the data through a wide range of analytical lenses to include geospatial, temporal, link analysis, public records search and topics of interest.”

The use of Babel X is supposedly focused on “refugees/asylees,” the document says.

The information collected may include a person’s name, date of birth, address, email address, phone number, social media usernames, content, images, IP address, domain information, social security number (SSN), driver’s license number, employment history, and location data based on geolocation in public posts.

According to the PTA, social security numbers are not “required” to conduct queries on the platform, however, CBP may conduct social security number queries on a case-by-case basis. “CBP is not proposing to collect SSNs directly from individuals as part of this effort,” it says, but from commercially available sources, “in furtherance of its statutory law enforcement and border security responsibilities.”

While queries are stored indefinitely in the Babel X software, query results are not stored by the vendor but by CBP.

Personally identifiable information (PII) obtained by the software is shared with other U.S. government agencies, according to the document.

An ‘Ever-Expanding Social Media Dragnet’

Regarding the legality of all this, the document concludes by listing several “initiatives” that are legally covering Babel X’s use, such as the “DHS/CBP/PIA-058 Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situation Awareness Initiative” and ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, designed for foreigners visiting the United States.

CBP’s use of Babel X cannot be found on the CBP’s website. However, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police mentions its monitoring with Babel X on its official website.

“The U.S. government’s ever-expanding social media dragnet is certain to chill people from engaging in protected speech and association online,” Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, told Motherboard.

DeCell called CBP’s use of the advanced social media surveillance technology “especially concerning in connection with existing rules requiring millions of visa applicants each year to register their social media handles with the government. As we’ve argued in a related lawsuit, the government simply has no legitimate interest in collecting and retaining such sensitive information on this immense scale.”

Bennett Cyphers, a special advisor to digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard in an online chat “The data isn’t limited to public posts made under someone’s real name on Facebook or Twitter.”

Cyphers added, “Most of the people whose location data is collected in this way likely have no idea it’s happening.”

Legal Justification: ‘Privileged’

“Homeland Security needs to come clean to the American people about how it believes it can legally purchase and use U.S. location data without any kind of court order. Americans’ privacy shouldn’t depend on whether the government uses a court order or credit card,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Motherboard in a statement.

“DHS should stop violating Americans’ rights, and Congress should pass my bipartisan legislation to prohibit the government’s purchase of Americans’ data.”

CBP has told Congress that the legal justification for its warrantless tracking is privileged, reported a Motherboard article dated Oct. 23, 2020.

CBP paid Babel Street more than $2.7 million to Babel X in 2019, and $265,000 in 2020, according to online procurement records, Vice reported.

Eighty-four percent of U.S. national security agencies have partnered with Babel Street, the company’s website says.

The Epoch Times reached out to CBP for comment.

The Babel X link on Babel Street’s website currently displays a “page not found” message. [source]

It Happened Again: Cherokee County, Kansas Election Results Reversed After “Vote Flip” Discovered

From The Gateway Pundit.com (Aug. 10, 2022):

Nothing to see here, folks.  Just a human error, technical glitch, or “we caught it in time”.  Those are the excuses we hear every single time.  Every time.  Antrim County, Dekalb County, Williamson County, Windham, NH.  The list goes on and on and on of jurisdictions that have some “human error” or “technical glitch” that causes votes to flip, change or swap.

Enter our latest example:  Cherokee County, Kansas.  Not to be confused with Cherokee County, GA that recently went against the will of their constituents by refusing to conduct a hand recount and sided with highly questionable legal guidance from a conflicted attorney who used to work for the Secretary of States Office that is being called into question.

Cherokee County, KS’s election was held last Tuesday on August 2nd.  During a post election audit, they discovered that the thumb drives used in the election flipped the votes cast for District 1 County Commissioner Myra Frazier and instead gave them to her opponent, Lance Nichols, who was initially declared the winner.

As reported by KSNF Joplin:

“Upon discovering the improper programming, I immediately contacted representatives of Atchison, Kansas-based Lockwood Elections, who is responsible for programming the thumb drives used in our elections.  The company recognized their error, and my office has since re-tabulated the ballots by a hand count audit, which resulted in Commissioner Frazier retaining her party’s nomination for the November General Election later this year.  The Commission race was the only one impacted by the company’s error and I have already visited with both candidates impacted,” said County Clerk Rebecca Brassart. 

“This is a good example of why we verify the accuracy of election results by conducting a post audit of election results, regardless of what the unofficial election night numbers might indicate.  I again want to assure the citizens of Cherokee County how important election accuracy is to me and reiterate my commitment to ensuring every valid vote is properly counted,” she concluded.

While it is unclear if other races were counted or not, there is a major problem with the statement above:

It was literally the “needle in the haystack.”

Kansas Revised Statute KSA 25-3009 states:

(2) The audit will review contested races as follows:

…

(B) In even numbered non-presidential election years:

(i) One federal race;

(ii) one statewide race;

(iii) one state legislative race; and

(iv) one county race.

And since the only race alleged to be impacted by this questionable explanation of a “compromised thumb drive” was a county commissioner race, it is a pure fluke that that was one of the races selected to be audited.  Had any other race been selected, the results of this race would have gone unaltered and entirely against the will of the People of Cherokee County, KS.  Much like Antrim, where it was picked up the next morning by a local constituent who voiced his concern.  Or Dekalb, where it was only caught because the candidate showed zero votes in her own precinct.  Or Williamson, TN where a poll worker was keeping a tally of the ballots counted on a pad of paper and realized the tabulator tapes at the end of the night were way off.

Another words:  How many races go unchecked?  How many races have one of these “human errors” or “glitches” and somehow slides under the radar?

And perhaps the most relevant question of all, especially with the lawsuits in Colorado regarding the 53% adjudication in El Paso during the recount:

How did these machines pass the Logic and Accuracy Test?

Well, according to KOAM News:

Officials say the drives worked properly during testing, however, the malfunction was detected after the voting process.

Can these machines be programmed to act appropriately during a Logic and Accuracy Test?  Last week, we saw a small county in Michigan have major discrepancies with the ballots.  It was, once again, chalked up as <insert lame excuse here>.  But the real question that should have been asked, and should be asked in all these examples:

How do they pass the Logic and Accuracy Test?

Or is the L&A test just smoke and mirrors to give us a warm gooey feeling that the machines are doing exactly what they should be. [source]

Not good at all.

Excerpts from the book The Deeper State Part 2

According to a blog by Wordpress.com, the “Church of Progressivism” is a real religious ideology for the globalists elite. It is replete with all the trappings of traditional religion: …a holy mission (social ‘justice’ and climate change), prophets (like Marx [as well as Hegel and Wilson]), saints (like FDR, JFK, LBJ, Gore [Kissinger and Rockefeller]), martyrs (the Rosenbergs…), scripture (the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, NPR), original sin (our past prosperity and exceptionalism), a messiah (Obama [and/or Clinton]) and a self-righteous worldview that discounts from consideration all counter theories and reviles those who question the complete moral authority of their ecclesiastical body (the Democratic Party)…and that’s just the denomination that operates in the United States…the most delusional of the “ultra-orthodox” zealots have been in control of Western Europe since the 60s and Eastern Europe since 1917.

……………….

Consider five areas in which the globalists elite seek to control the world’s economy in order to create wealth for themselves, not to improve the lives of the masses. After all, as elite-owned, giant, multinational corporations acquire more economic power, they exercise significant control over our lives. They acquire that power through control of these five areas.

Economic Control #1: Big Banks and International Finance.

Wall Street tycoons and international financers lead the charge for globalism by promoting the one-world consumer culture. They push governments to embrace consumer-friendly trade agreements and franchises such as the European Union, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

……………….

Economic Control #2: Trade and Business. The progressive elite use multinational corporations to seek control over trade and business, which explains their lust for control of every key strategic resource—oil, water, and food—in order to dominate society.

They use their deep pockets to establish resource dominance, which leads to dependent societies. To accomplish this goal, they must eliminate national boundaries and create super-states such as the European Union. These super-state arrangements, so-called free trade agreements like TPP and NAFTA, allow mega corporations power and control of the masses while maximizing profits.

……………….

Economic Control #3: Health and Medicine. Health and medicine is a big issue for everyone. However, for the globalists elite, health and medical interests tend to be about extending their own lives, reducing costs to increase their corporate profits, and controlling the world’s population.

Some globalists elite really do want to reduce the world’s population. Globalists elite like CNN’s Ted Turner suggest this planet can only sustain a population of less than one billion people out of the current 7.5 billion. Therefore, under the iron fist of a globalist-elite world government, there will be draconian measures to reduce earth’s population to a sustainable level.

………….

Economic Control #4: Science and Technology

Technology is a craven force when left in the hands of globalists and progressives to create more efficient consumerist economies. It ravages everything in its wake—government, family, faith, freedom, and life. The modern technological society as guided by globalists welcomes whatever facilitates the consumerist economy, such as immigration and multiculturalism, because those forces facilitate greater efficiency and, by association, capital growth. After all, the flow of immigrants in industrialized countries tends to lower wages while replacing the native population, and at the same time creates new cohort of consumers.

…………….

Economic Control #5: Energy. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat with demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned namely mistaking systems for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself. —Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, 1991

The globalists elite have harnessed “global warming” as an ally to wrestle more control over the world’s economy. They intend to promote global warming, which has become the modern bogeyman, giving the globalists an opening to promote a worldwide system of taxation and control.

Source: The Deeper State: Inside the War on Trump by Corrupt Elites, Secret Societies, and the Builders of an Imminent Final Empire (2017) by Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis.

GOP governors form border security ‘strike force’

From Washington Times.com (April 20, 2022):

More than two dozen GOP governors have signed up to push back against the Biden administration’s border chaos, forming the American Governors Border Strike Force to share intelligence on threats to their communities that come across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Republican governors pledged to track and share analysis of state-level crimes connected to border security, and to try to target the financing and mobility of cartels that smuggle people and drugs across the border and deep into America’s heartland.

Led by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the two Republicans with pieces of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, the strike force includes governors of 24 other states. They said they were forced to step in to plug holes in border security created by President Biden’s policies, which have erased most of former President Trump’s get-tough measures.

“The American Governors’ Border Strike Force will serve as a force multiplier in the fight against criminal activity directly tied to our border. My thanks to my fellow governors who saw the problem and chose to be part of the solution,” Mr. Ducey said.

Governors and local law enforcement officials across the country have been alarmed by a massive surge in the availability of fentanyl, most of which is flowing across the southern border, and which is sending drug overdose deaths to new records.

Local sheriffs say they can see the reach of the cartels into their communities.

“If a person is selling heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamines, he’s working for the cartel. I don’t even ask the question anymore,” Sam S. Page, sheriff in Rockingham County, North Carolina, told The Washington Times earlier this year.

In addition to Arizona and Texas, the governors in the strike force are from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. [source]

Good. If the Briben regime won’t secure the border then the governors have to even though it’s not really their responsibility.

Who is America's God now? | Cults

From Glenn Beck.com (April 17, 2022):

Covid-19 broke us.

People who were once reasonable began to call for the banishment of the unvaccinated from civil society. Death was divided by vaccine status and treated accordingly. Information was censored for “our own good.” Anyone who questioned the leader or fell out of line, was deemed as dangerous or literally accused of murder.

Steven Hassan developed the B.I.T.E model by, among other things, studying brainwashing in Maoist China. B.I.T.E stands for:

B — Behavior
I — Information
T — Thought and
E — Emotional control

B.I.T.E identifies patterns used by cults to manipulate their members.

There are fifty attributes to watch out for. Listen to some of these and compare them to your experience during the Covid-19 pandemic:

1. Dictate where, how and with whom the member lives and associates or isolates
2. Financial exploitation, manipulation or dependence
3. Restrict leisure, entertainment and vacation time
4. Permission is required for major decisions
5. Rewards and punishments are used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative
6. Discourage individualism, encourage group-think
7. Impose rigid rules and regulations
8. Instill dependency and obedience
9. Deliberately withhold information
10. Distort information to make it more acceptable
11. Systematically lie
12. Minimize or discourage access to non-cult sources of information, including:
    • Internet, TV, radio, books, articles, newspapers, magazines, media
    • Critical information
    • Former members
    • Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate
    • Control through cell phone with texting, calls, internet tracking
13. Compartmentalize information into Outsider vs. Insider doctrines
    • Ensure that information is not freely accessible
    • Control information at different levels and missions within group
    • Allow only leadership to decide who needs to know what and when
14. Encourage spying on other members
    • Impose a buddy system to monitor and control member
    • Report deviant thoughts, feelings and actions to leadership
    • Ensure that individual behavior is monitored by group
15. Extensive use of cult-generated information and propaganda, including newsletters, magazines, journals, audiotapes, videotapes, YouTube, movies and other media
16. Require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth
    • Adopting the group’s "map of reality" as reality
    • Instill black and white thinking
    • Decide between good vs. evil
    • Organize people into us vs. them (insiders vs. outsiders)
17. Use of loaded language and clichés that constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzz words (“Follow the science”)
18. Rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism
19. Forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine or policy allowed
20. Labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil or not useful
21. Make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the fault of the leaders or the group
22. Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness, such as:
    • Identity guilt
    • You are not living up to your potential
    • Your family is deficient
    • Your past is suspect
    • Your affiliations are unwise
    • Your thoughts, feelings, actions are irrelevant or selfish
    • Social guilt
    • Historical guilt
23. Shunning of those who leave; fear of being rejected by friends and family
    
24. Ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins
25. Phobia indoctrination: inculcating irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority
• No happiness or fulfillment possible outside of the group
• Terrible consequences if you leave: hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc.

That is basically all of them except for rape, murder, torture and kidnapping. So that’s horrifying. But what’s even scarier, is that most of us went along with it, even just for a little while. As a nation, as a world, we are still going along with it in many ways.

Now, look at antiracism.

Antiracism requires blind obedience to leaders like Ibram X Kendi — who can arbitrarily assign or remove guilt based on his own perception. The work of being an antiracist never stops. There is always more internalized racism to uncover and implicit bias to reveal. [read more]

Other articles about cults:

• What Is a Cult? The 6 Telltale Signs to Look For
• The Davos Death Cult's Bad Moon Rising
• THIS is how the far-left RECRUITS Americans into its CULT [video]

Report: IRS Removes Entire Team Probing Hunter Biden

From Newsmax.com (May 16):

The IRS removed the entire team of investigators in the Hunter Biden tax evasion probe, according to the Washington Examiner.

The Examiner attributed the information to a letter written by two attorneys for an IRS special agent they represent.

"Today the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Supervisory Special Agent we represent was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress," attorneys Tristan Leavitt and Mark Lytle wrote in a letter to Congress.

The removal order originated from the Department of Justice, according to the letter, which called the move "clearly retaliatory," the Examiner reported.

"Any attempt by any government official to prevent a federal employee from furnishing information to Congress is also a direct violation of longstanding appropriations restriction. Furthermore, 18 U.S.C. § 1505 makes it a crime to obstruct an investigation of Congress," the lawyers said in the letter.

In April, attorney Lytle wrote to lawmakers saying that his client has information about a "failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition" of a criminal investigation related to Biden's taxes and whether he made a false statement related to a gun purchase, according to The Associated Press.

"Despite serious risks of retaliation, my client is offering to provide you with information necessary to exercise your constitutional oversight function and wishes to make the disclosures in a nonpartisan manner to the leadership of the relevant committees on both sides of the political aisle," Lytle said in a letter, obtained by the AP.

The special agent also wants to disclose "examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected," the lawyer added.

The Examiner noted that in the latest letter, dated May 15, attorneys wrote: "Removing the experienced investigators who have worked this case for years and are now the subject-matter experts is exactly the sort of issue our client intended to blow the whistle on to begin with." [source]

The Deep State protecting its own. Will the nefarious parties involved in the Russia lie do a mea culpa? Probably not. Will there be criminal prosecutions of the scammers? Definitely not. Could there be libel/slander suits? Possibly. Hopefully.

Another article about the IRS and Hunter Biden:

IRS Whistleblowers: IRS, DOJ Hindered Hunter Biden Tax Probe

The extraordinary meaning of July 4th for America and the world

From Christian Post.com (June 30):

As we gather as a people to celebrate the 247th anniversary of our birth as a nation, we should all pause to ponder and expend some mental, emotional and spiritual capital meditating on the magnificent magnitude of what it is we collectively celebrate with fireworks, parades and speeches every Fourth of July.

Well, in the providence of God as I believe, or alternatively, as a consequence of extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, fortuitous circumstances, a dazzling, critical mass of political and philosophical talent coalesced on the eastern seaboard of the North American continent in the middle and latter third of the 18th century.

This uniquely extraordinary group of men produced a truly revolutionary new belief:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—”

Having pledged their allegiance to this truly revolutionary concept, they then assert that government (far from monarchs ruling by “divine right”) exists among men “to secure these rights” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

It is probably not possible for inhabitants of the 21st century to comprehend the full revolutionary power of these concepts to the 18th century mind.

As men of the 18th century, they are residents of their time and place (as we are men and women of our time and place), but in proclaiming the equality and equal worth of every human being, they were unleashing an ultimate and comprehensive truth which would turn their world upside down. The appeal to the Creator makes this a moral and theological concept rather than merely a biological one. So, this equality is not based on merit, talent, performance, or even potential, but rather on equal value spiritually, each one of us bearing the image and imprint of the Creator (the “imago Dei”).

Each and every human being, by virtue of being a human being, is from conception to natural death, and everywhere in between, of equal value and worth to the Creator, and thus should be to us.

It was this commitment to imago Dei in man that created the culture of life in Christendom. It is the modern world’s embrace of man as merely a uniquely sophisticated finite mammal, courtesy of Nietzsche and his modern acolyte Peter Singer that gave us the morally bereft “culture of death.”

On the Fourth of July, we celebrate first and foremost the declaration of the dignity and immeasurable worth of every human being and the tremendous blessings for humanity across the globe that have ensued.

By 1776, a distinct English-speaking civilization had developed in what was to become the United States of America. Extraordinary as they were, the founders were well aware of many of those limitations of being limited by the customs and values of their time and place.

And they knew it. George Washington, the “father” of our country and the nation’s first president, declared: “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.” America’s third president and the prime author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, declared, “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.”

The nation’s fourth president and one of the chief architects of the Constitution, James Madison, spoke of “the magnitude of this evil” concerning slavery. Jefferson sadly concluded, however, concerning slavery, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”

Slavery and the racism it required has undeniably significantly impacted America and Americans, black Americans most of all, and it still impacts us.

However, slavery was not at the center of the American project. America, from the Declaration onward, has been striving to evermore fully live out, and up to, the full implications of the seminal truths of the Declaration. Indeed, well over 300,000 young American men sacrificed all their tomorrows to end the evil of slavery. [read more]

Happy Birthday, America! Other articles about the 4th:

• These 18 Photos Show America’s Long History of Celebrating the Fourth
• Independence Forever: Why America Celebrates the Fourth of July
• For the 4th of July, Reflections on the Meaning of American Citizenship
• 'This changes absolutely everything': Glenn reads rediscovered ORIGINAL draft of the Declaration of Independence [video]