Wretchard.com

Reality usually is. But in an ideological world where the good side and the bad must clearly distinguishable and never stray from their categories nobody is interested in the truth. “Journalism” becomes impractical; only polemic is possible. You’re stuck with the narrative you start.

Who Is John Sullivan, Who Was the Woman With Him and Their Appearance on CNN After the Capitol

New video…

This is true of everything. Maybe even lockdown advocates knew this but could not break ranks. Ignorance is an undefined quantity when loyalty is paramount.

We live in a world of the permanent narrative. Once you embark on a storyline — about the elections, the Capitol, the pandemic — you’re locked in.

COVID lockdowns have no clear benefit vs other voluntary measures, international study shows

The peer reviewed study, which was conducted by a group of Stanford researchers and published in the Wiley Online Library on January 5, analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020.

Millions are switching to encryption because secrecy, whatever its faults is the only way you can hear yourself think.

Millions Flock to Telegram and Signal as Fears Grow Over Big Tech

The encrypted messaging services have become the world’s hottest apps over the last week, driven by growing anxiety over the power of the biggest tech companies and privacy concerns.

He Created the Web. Now He’s Out to Remake the Digital World.

Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data. He has technology and a start-up pursuing that goal. Can he succeed?

I’ve often predicted that the complexity crisis would bring forth a componentized world to replace the open borders model. Maybe it’s happening.

Google blocks Australian news as part of ‘experiment’

Users this month complained they were no longer able to see articles from national news websites including Daily Mail Australia in the search engine’s results.

• Google has admitted to hiding news stories from the top of its internet searches
• Readers of leading Australian outlets report no longer seeing latest top stories
• Search giant said it changed its algorithm as part of a ‘short-term experiment’
• Move criticised as show of power as Google fights plans to make it pay for news
• Expert said Google was trying to show outlets need them more than vice versa

Google says it has completed $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit amid antitrust concerns

Google has completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness-gadget maker Fitbit, a deal that could help the internet company grow even stronger.

Google and big tech are demonstrating their power. From now on when they give a press conference their spoken statements should have full reverb like edicts from Olympus.

Won’t stop government from creating AI because:

• Politicians will be certain they can pay HAL off.
• Politicians will fund the construction of an AI agent to control AI.
• Artificial idiocy always beats artificial intelligence.

Calculations Show It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI

The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for many decades, and scientists have just delivered their verdict on whether we’d be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost defini

Part of the team’s reasoning comes from the halting problem put forward by Alan Turing in 1936. The problem centres on knowing whether or not a computer program will reach a conclusion and answer (so it halts), or simply loop forever trying to find one.

Facebook robots shut down after they talk to each other in language only they understand

‘you i i i everything else’

Books:  Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost by Michael Walsh “A philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy — Andy Ngo’s book on the “Idea” that burned cities and perhaps much else.

Facial recognition can track one face from a billion yet databases can’t identify the Covid deaths in NY nursing homes. The press can investigate a high school yearbook photo from the ’80s but WHO can’t investigate the origins of the virus in China.

Our magic world leans to one side. Tech doesn’t track what it’s not allowed to. The means exist. It’s the permission that’s missing. In our facial recognition world, like voting, it’s not the faces that count but who does the recognizing.

Cuomo still refuses to disclose total number of COVID-19 nursing home deaths: watchdog

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is again refusing to release the total number of nursing home residents who’ve died from the coronavirus for at least another two months — until…

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is again refusing to release the total number of nursing home residents who’ve died from the coronavirus for at least another two months — until March 22 at the earliest, a watchdog group charged.

In a letter to the Empire Center for Public Policy on Wednesday, the state Health Department claimed that it needs another nine weeks and five days to comply with the legal request for a full accounting of nursing home deaths “because the records potentially responsive to your request are currently being reviewed for applicable exemptions, legal privileges and responsiveness.”

The Empire Center submitted its FOIL request on Aug. 3 seeking the total number of COVID-19 nursing home fatalities — those who died in nursing homes and those who were ill and died after being transported to hospitals.

Books:  Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost by Michael Walsh “A philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy — Andy Ngo’s book on the “Idea” that burned cities and perhaps much else.

They expect to stay for a month but will start work immediately during their two-week quarantine, according to the WHO.

WHO team arrives in Wuhan to investigate the origins of COVID-19 / Twitter

China has a lot riding on the long-awaited WHO probe — but so does Australia

The diplomatic defensiveness and tight control of research so far in China doesn’t bode well for hopes of a fully transparent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, writes Bill Birtles.

WHO investigators have arrived in China for a COVID-19 origin probe. But they’re already downplaying expectations …

They will head straight to hotel quarantine for two weeks.

During that time, they’ll be continuing their work, holding more of the video calls with Chinese counterparts that they’ve already been doing from abroad.

The team then has roughly two weeks in Wuhan to visit hospitals, labs, wet markets and other relevant places before the trip is expected to wrap up ahead of Chinese New Year.

Two Members of W.H.O. Team on Trail of Virus Are Denied Entry to China

Beijing has repeatedly impeded the global inquiry into the emergence of the coronavirus. Two scientists on the team remained in Singapore after testing positive for antibodies.

The limits on WHO make “not proven” almost foregone.

“We have over three billion photos that we indexed from the public internet, like Google for faces,” Hoan Ton-That, CEO of facial recognition start-up Clearview AI told Spectrum.

Every move you make, every pic you take I’ll be watching you. Oh can’t you see you belong to me.

You do it to yourself.

What is the face recognition setting on Facebook and how does it work? | Facebook Help Center

The face recognition setting is a part of your settings on Facebook.

The technology to police the world, down to the smallest village in Africa, is being invented in China and America. What the soundtrack of our lives? “Eye in the Sky” or “Eye of the Tiger”? Or is it …

Impossible? Stalin did it. How he did it is why history matters. Stalinism was a rigorous attempt to implement Marxism. It wasn’t the Revolution Betrayed but the Revolution implemented with unshakeable will.

The social engineering impulse makes it possible to exercise limitless, self-righteous power.

Joseph Stalin: Waiting For Hitler (Part 2)

Did you miss part one? Listen to part one of the episode here
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-d… Recorded on January 25, 2018. “If you’re interested in power, [if] you’re interested in how power is accumulated and exercised, and what the consequences are, the subject of Stalin is just unbeli…

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago, when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.

The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever.

Somehow they always guess the password to deactive the nuclear bomb in the movies. Now if only voting would be so secure. Why not? In principle votes could be anonymously ledgered on a blockchain immutably but the voter could always know how it was recorded — and prove it.

The technology for secure voting exists. The politicians just don’t want it.

Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes

Bitcoin owners are getting rich because the cryptocurrency has soared. But what happens when you can’t tap that wealth because you forgot the password to your digital wallet?

Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, realizes the devil actually exists, and rules a kingdom of lies, which sooner or later becomes a realm on earth. There was nothing so destructive as lying in a good cause.

Miracle, mystery and authority are the three temptations of evil. They can only give you the world. The only way to heaven is the unshakeable faith it has already been given you, if only you choose it. But this is the scary path, as Dostoevsky pointed out; until we are desperate enough to take it.

The Great Unraveling

The old order is dead. What comes next?

Gab is restoring a backup of Trump’s Twitter posts. Yes, but how about you? Is YOUR information backed up: the search history, social media submissions etc mined by big silicon?

Epic! Twitter Competitor Gab Backed Up Trump’s Twitter Account and Recreated It on Their Platform

Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, a free-speech alternative to Twitter, backed up President Trump’s entire account before it was deleted, and recreated it on Gab….

This vaccine platform, called a mosaic nanoparticle, was developed initially by collaborators at the University of Oxford. The nanoparticle is shaped like a cage made up of 60 identical proteins, each of which has a small protein tag that functions like a piece of Velcro. Cohen and his team took fragments of the spike proteins of different coronaviruses (spike proteins play the biggest role in infection) and engineered each to have a protein tag that would bind to those on the cage—the other half of the piece of Velcro. When these viral pieces were mixed together with the nanoparticle cage structure, each virus tag stuck to a tag on the cage, resulting in a nanoparticle presenting spikes representing different coronavirus strains on its surface.

Vaccine platforms are the holy grail of the CDC who aspire to go from “bug to drug” in 24 hours. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are pioneering examples of these nontraditional approaches many of which are yet to come.

The power of big bio will dwarf big tech.

Nanoparticle immunization technology could protect against many strains of coronaviruses

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the COVID-19 pandemic is just one of many different viruses in the coronavirus family. Many of these are circulating in populations of animals like bats and have the potential to “jump” into the human population, just as SARS-CoV-2 did. Researchers in the laborat…

They enjoy all of the benefits of being U.S. based companies, but their operations and customers span the world. Many of them have participated in the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council. The compact of that group states, “society is best served by corporations that have aligned their goals to long term goals of society.” It also pledges to use the UN Sustainable Development Goals (previously called Agenda 21) as a roadmap.

If Global Corporations Walk Away from Republicans the GOP Will Have to Listen to New Voters

Yesterday, numerous global corporations announced they will no longer donate to Republican candidates. The GOP needs to appeal to a new set of voters.

CNN says

his channel earned a strike under the platform’s policies, the company said Tuesday evening.

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you.

That includes you also.

Roger Simon writes:

Don’t show up!
When I say don’t show up, I mean really don’t show up.
Don’t protest the inauguration in any way, not in Washington, not at your state house, nowhere. Ignore the whole thing.
Don’t even watch the event on television or stream it on any of your devices.

I suspect significantly fewer are going to tune in, if not in America then at least in the rest of the world, not in protest or partisan pique but because the magic’s gone from Washington DC.

An audience that was formerly awed at a distance got close enough to see the caked make-up and the painted props. Olympus has fallen.

It may be all for the best. A free people are ruled by men not gods.

Twitter outraged.

“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns – they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the #OpenInternet,” it said in a statement.

At least Weimar had the Great War as an excuse to fall apart. What alibi is there for the current moral collapse?

The best show on television right now features a major city, the capital of an unsteady government, that is gradually being pulled apart by two competing political parties. The center can’t hold; it’s being steadily overwhelmed by a pair of rival Socialist groups who don’t hesitate to take their conflicts into the streets as they sweep away their country’s past and head into a glorious future.

Washington, D.C., in 2021? No, Berlin in the late 1920s.

That’s different! Or it?

SPOKANE, Wash. — A North Idaho internet provider, Your T1 WIFI, confirmed it is blocking Facebook and Twitter from its WIFI service for some customers due to censorship claims.

Hard times need someone to blame. 2021 is likely to be a rough ride for countries all over the world. But it will be especially hard on those who have raised psychological expectations to an unreasonable degree. The dawn has broken so where’s the sunshine? The bad December job numbers are ominous.

What happens if DT is gone and things get worse? A post-Covid depression could make 2016-19 seem like a Golden Age. Post hoc ergo propter hoc may be a fallacy but it is a persuasive one.

https://youtu.be/VRbMpLKjA80

George Friedman’s take on the number is that many businesses are permanently lightening ship. The economic damage is now long term.

Those 140,000 cuts were made largely by businesses that have a profound understanding of the business they are in and of the appetite of their customers for what they sell. Most businesses have always controlled the number of people they employ – that is, not maintaining a mass of disposable staff. So when they cut jobs, they cut deep, and if they are cutting to the bone they are seeing something unpleasant coming. The cuts will not show up in unemployìjjment figures, nor in banking numbers, nor most certainly in the stock markets.

But it will show up. The post hoc ergo propter hoc impulse ensures that an economic crisis will be blamed on something. What would that be?

U.S. loses 140,000 jobs in first monthly loss since spring

At the same time, the unemployment rate stayed at 6.7%, the first time it hasn’t fallen since April.

We were warned in 2003 about the coming age of censorship.

Today, when censorship is being advocated to counter ‘disinformation’ or the ‘Big Lie,’ it may be time to remember John Walker, the man who anticipated way back in 2003 that a digital imprimatur would be required to say anything substantial online. Walker was the man who wrote AutoCAD.

The Digital Imprimatur

Remember when the Internet meant freedom?