How Facial Recognition Technology Is Helping Identify the U.S. Capitol Attackers – IEEE Spectrum

“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 …

How a Small Minority Coerced Multitudes

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…

Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes

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?

The Great Unraveling/Awakening

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?

Runaway Saves

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….

Vaccinating Vs Similar Diseases

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…

It Was the Uniparty

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.

Suppose They Gave an Inauguration and Nobody Came?

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.

An Ascendant Left Silences and Excludes Its Enemies

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.

Look Familiar?

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

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

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.

How We Went Back to the Middle Ages

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?

Recipe for Gasoline

Nothing is less nonpartisan than a social media platform run by politicized CEOs. Yet social media platforms are precisely that: defined by their politics whether they be Facebook, Twitter, Parler or Gab. They are not ‘social media’ vehicles full of pictures of families having picnics or singing round campfires. They are places where activists call for the evisceration of their opponents. Nothing weiners and marshmallows about them.

Ask yourself: why is the telephone system not inflammatory? How come email never produced this incendiary effect. Perhaps the answer lies in how they differ from social media:

  • they carry all messages regardless of content;
  • the messages they convey are addressed to specific recipients. They are not broadcast media.

That’s why neither the telephone nor email stoked up the fires of unrest. By contrast social media is sent out into universe. Despite it’s refusal to call itself an edited platform it is full of algorithmic secret panels, alligator pits, rotating bookcases and trapdoors to snag the unwary. What we call social media is a broadcast platform, run by editors; nay by political activists.

The Costs of Wading into Politics

One of the nice things about not being in politics is not being in politics. Make no enemies where you can make no friends.

Facebook sees $34 billion erased from market cap as Trump-ban fallout continues to spook tech investors
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the ban on Thursday, saying the risks of allowing Trump to remain on the platform ‘are simply too great.’

Like I said weeks ago, both sides are so evenly matched any clash will cause mutual damage. “The populist uprising is now objectively too powerful for progressives to crush. The left must live with it, negotiate with it, coexist with it because they can no longer bulldoze it away. By the same token, the populists must accept that progressives are similarly too powerful to ignore. They cannot be provoked without cost.”

A New Correlation of Forces
The revolt of the Deplorables

“We will have nothing left to open”

City hall can beat anyone except reality.

“Who sent you?”

(pause)

“God.”

(pause)

“Never heard of Him.”

After Forcing Thousands Of Businesses To Shut Down, Cuomo Now Says The ‘Cost’ Of Staying Closed Is ‘Too High’
After forcing thousands of small businesses to shut down – with some forced to close permanently – Gov. Cuomo said "the cost is too high" to remain closed.

Twitter stock tumbles 10% after Trump is permanently banned from the platform | Business Insider

Even battleships take damage. The long term damage will be greater. There a certain powers which are tolerated on the tacit understanding that they will never be used, like authority to order a nuclear strike or the capacity to beat up one’s wife. Once this capability is used, whatever the justification, things are never the same again. What has been seen cannot be unseen and things are never so free and easy as before.

Social media is global. Facebook in particular is widely used by the Third World. Presidents other than DT use Twitter. In the past this vast audience was prepared not to think about how social media spied on, used and policed them because they lulled themselves into thinking that cool, hip Tech would never act like a vengeful posse. Now there’s no ignoring the fact that if they can cancel millions they can cancel you. And everyone can imagine the noose tightening round their throat — at least potentially.

It would be surprising if in the months to come users didn’t seek a hedge against the power they’ve seen displayed.

Twitter stock tumbles 10% after Trump is permanently banned from the platform
REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstTwitter stock slumped on Monday after President Trump was banned from the platform.
Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning ‘Stop the Steal’
Citing use of the phrase among members of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol, the tech giant said its move is aimed at stemming incitements to violence ahead of Inauguration Day.
Ron Paul blocked from accessing Facebook page over violating “community standards”
“Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified,” the former GOP congresssman tweeted.