#data falsification

[jbfly46]

The collapse of the U.S. economy is imminent. The published GDP data that isn't outright falsified, is manipulated to the extent that the data literally isn't true, and the data that isn't falsified or manipulated, is either outdated, or based on fraudulent activity. The only possible way to save the economy before it collapses, because of how long our politicians have waited to address this issue they keep issuing bandaid fixes for, is to somehow gather accurate data on black market economic activity, and then include that in the GDP data, and that still will only be a bandaid fix that will offer at least some significant leeway, hopefully enough for our leaders to gain the spines, balls, and morals necessary to do what actually needs to be done to permanently fix the issue with our economy.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[econoenigma]

If it's a computer, it can be hacked.

Did Trump just admit that Elon stole the election for him?

[genshin-impact-updates]

Web Event "Fragmented Memories" Now Online: Take part to obtain Primogems and other rewards!

The memories of the past are like pieces of a puzzle... Putting them together allows us to sketch the path we've walked.

The limited-time web event "Fragmented Memories" has begun! Participate to get Primogems!

>> Click to Take Part in Event <<

〓Event Duration〓

May 7, 2024 – May 26, 2024 11:59 (UTC+8)

*Rewards cannot be claimed after the event ends. Please claim them in time.

〓Eligibility〓

Adventure Rank 10 or above

〓Event Rewards〓

● Clear the jigsaw puzzle stages to obtain a total of Primogems ×40.

● Share the event for the first time and obtain Mora ×20,000.

● Complete the Recall Rewards mission as an inviter to obtain an extra reward of Primogems ×60.

*After the event ends, you will no longer be able to play the stages or exchange for puzzle pieces, so remember to take part in time.

〓Gameplay Details〓

1. During the event, you can log into Genshin Impact daily, consume Original Resin, complete Domain Challenges, and other challenge missions to obtain puzzle pieces.

2. Puzzle pieces can help you obtain the complete card and enter the next puzzle stage.

3. During the event, Travelers can use the Recall Code on the card to invite returnees. After returning Travelers complete linking on the web page, Travelers who have been linked will receive puzzle pieces as a reward.

4. When invited Travelers complete the web event's Activity Missions, the inviter will receive bonus Primogem rewards.

〓Definition of "Returning Travelers"〓

Reach Adventure Rank 10 or above

Player who haven't logged into Genshin Impact in the last 14 days

〓Notes〓

1. Please log in to the event using your HoYoverse Account and select your corresponding character in Genshin Impact to take part. This will ensure that your rewards can be sent and claimed correctly.

2. The event card is not available after the event ends. Please claim it in time.

3. After completing the puzzle, the in-game rewards will be distributed via in-game mail. The mail will expire after 30 days, so don't forget to claim the rewards in time.

4. Only the UID that was first linked to each account can participate in this event.

5. You can only use your HoYoverse account to invite your friends. If you invite your own HoYoverse accounts, or if you commit any other acts of falsification to game the invitation data, the rewards you have received will be canceled and reclaimed.

[halikyon]

MiqoMarch Day 26: Sky

We turned off the sky. I expected the grey, deactivated land, but for the sky itself to have been false... I can't stand this place. One giant mausoleum draining an entire society of all it has. A society that can't even remember the people within it. Its nothing, literally nothing. Stored data manifested as images projected over grey monoliths. I am more convinced every moment that this is not what the original Sphene of their reflection would have wanted. The queen they have now is simply another falsification. I feel sympathy for Krile and Erenville, I do, but a walking, talking tombstone is still a tombstone, and there is nothing here for them but the pain of what could have been. At last, though, there is nowhere for the queen to run. I look forward to seeing our own sky again when this is over.

[darkmaga-returns]

Merck’s mumps vaccine, part of the MMR shots, is confirmed to be far less effective than claimed, with courts acknowledging intentional fraud to maintain monopoly and avoid admitting failure.

Whistleblowers exposed Merck’s practice of “overfilling” vaccine doses with excess live virus to artificially boost efficacy test results, which was neither safety-tested nor disclosed.

Despite evidence of data falsification and misconduct, Merck faces no repercussions, while the FDA continues to endorse the vaccine, perpetuating public health risks.

U.S. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s criticisms of the vaccine’s efficacy are sidelined by critics who question his motives due to his previous legal career targeting pharmaceutical firms.

[sigmaleph]

look like Francesca Gino's defamation suit against Data Colada has been dismissed (the suit still continues in some of its counts against Harvard)

The case is the one where bloggers found evidence of falsified data in several studies about, ironically, dishonesty. They contacted the author's employer (Harvard Business School) and published a number of blog posts detailing why they thought the data had been falsified. The author sued them for defamation over it, which, y'know, not a great way to settle academic disputes if you ask me!

The judge dismissed the defamation claim, on the grounds that saying 'hey I noticed these anomalies and on the basis of that I think there may have been data falsification' is not defamatory.

[marcopolosports]

Trump's Untrue "White Genocide" Allegations: Dispelling the Myths Told to South Africa's President

Overview: A tense meeting at the White House

Former U.S. President Donald Trump presented South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with fabricated and deceptive evidence of a purported "white genocide" in South Africa during a contentious meeting in the Oval Office.

When Trump played a video and showed pictures that were either inaccurate or taken from completely different countries, the long-debunked accusations that were still making the rounds in far-right groups reappeared.

What Did Trump's False Evidence Actually Show?

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) images Not true Associated with South Africa

Trump displayed an article printout that included a picture he said depicted "white farmers being buried" in South Africa.

Reality Check: According to Reuters, the photo was taken in Goma, DRC, and depicted victims of fighting against M23 rebels supported by Rwanda.

2. Inauthentic "Mass Graves" Video

A video that Trump aired purportedly showed the "burial sites of over a thousand white farmers."

Truth: Rather than a mass burial, the video showed a makeshift memorial for two killed Afrikaner farmers near Newcastle, South Africa.

Rob Hoatson, who organized the memorial, acknowledged that it was never a real graveyard.

3. Falsification of Julius Malema's Position

Julius Malema, the head of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of South Africa, was seen in the video yelling, "Kill the Boer, kill the farmer."

False Implication: Although the EFF is not in power and only has 9.5% of parliamentary seats, Trump implied that Malema was a government figure.

Why Does the Myth of the "White Genocide" Still Exist?

Far-right parties have long promoted the disproven conspiracy notion of a white genocide in South Africa. Important details:

Although farm killings are a severe problem, they don't only afflict white farmers.

Systemic persecution is denied by the South African government, and the genocide claim is not supported by crime data.

Trump's 2018 asylum offer to white South African farmers drew harsh criticism for being politically driven.

The Diplomatic Reaction of Ramaphosa

Trump's allegations were denied by President Ramaphosa and his entourage. Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen (Democratic Alliance) said the government coalition was formed in order to prevent the EFF from gaining power.

Ramaphosa's attempt to mend the strained U.S.-South Africa relationship, which had been exacerbated by Trump's previous criticism of South Africa's foreign policy and land reform initiatives, included the meeting.

Conclusion: The Peril of False Information in International Relations

Trump's use of fabricated and deceptive proof demonstrates how misinformation may influence global affairs.

The "white genocide" narrative is a lie that perpetuates divide, even while white South Africans deal with issues relating to crime.

Questions and Answers (FAQs)

1. Is South Africa truly experiencing a "white genocide"? No. There is no proof of a purposeful genocide against white farmers, despite the fact that violent crime affects all South Africans.

2. What was the real source of Trump's photos and videos? Not from South Africa, but from the DRC conflict, were some of the pictures.

Instead of being a graveyard, the "mass grave" footage was a memorial site.

3. Does Julius Malema represent the South African government, and if so, who is he? Less than 10% of parliamentary seats are held by the opposition EFF party, which is led by Malema.

Government policy is not reflected in his extreme rhetoric.

https://marcopolosports.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/00a994fb-9f3f-45dd-80ee-c15eb2adf1d8.jpg

Last Updated in May 2025

South African officials continue to reject the "white genocide" narrative as bogus propaganda, and recent fact-checks reveal that there is no fresh evidence to back up Trump's assertions.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Peter Boghossian

Published: Dec 30, 2024

Academia is a fraud factory. Last year, 10,000 research papers were retracted—and those are just the ones that got caught. Entire lines of literature are fabricated out of whole cloth. Plagiarism is rampant. Universities are protecting and hiding fraud—they’re keeping serial plagiarists on the payroll. They don’t even fire Pretendians (people pretending to be Native Americans who hold positions of authority), despite their lip service, land acknowledgments, and ostensible deference to Native Americans’ lived experiences.

A curious person might wonder: Why? How could this happen? Why would anyone hide corruption or deny it or look the other way—especially when it undermines the legitimacy of their disciplines and the academy itself?

There are plenty of reasons. Here are a few:

Ideology. Many academics don’t see research as a way to discover facts about an objectively knowable world. Instead, they view research as a tool to create the world they want—a world that’s just, fair, equitable, and free of oppression. Their goal isn’t to uncover the truth; it’s to craft a narrative that aligns with their vision of justice. To make this happen, they describe how they think things should be and cherry-pick methods to support those conclusions (Action Research).

When this mindset takes over, research goals shift. It’s no longer about trying to falsify claims; research is about verifying narratives to fit preexisting beliefs of how the world should operate.

[ Claudine Gay, Former President of Harvard University and current Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies ]

Career Advancement. Not all fraud is ideological—sometimes it’s just about climbing the ladder. This kind of corruption is especially common in the soft and hard sciences, where data fabrication boosts publication records, improves reputations, and increases grant money. Academic fraud, by its nature, is difficult to discover. If I had to guess, I’d estimate that around 15% of papers are flat-out fraudulent (data fabrication), and another 25% are less obvious but still bogus (e.g., p-hacking). Although these estimates could be low given the replication crises in various fields.

Midwits. This isn’t merely ignorance—it’s midwittery. Many academics are not particularly intelligent; they are, at best, middling intellects. We think of academia as a haven for brilliant minds, but it’s full of people with average intelligence inflated by credentials. Midwits cluster heavily in the humanities and thin out in the hard sciences. They are not capable of understanding complex problems (like why falsification matters more than affirmation) because they lack intellectual horsepower.

Moral Echo Chambers. Academia is a giant moral echo chamber. For all the talk about the indispensable importance of diversity, the academy is dominated by identitarian leftists. For them, morally unfashionable conclusions aren’t just wrong—they’re heretical. Disagree and you’re not merely mistaken—you are evil.

Entire areas of inquiry are off-limits because some academics think they shouldn’t be studied. And yet, these same people insist their claims are true. How do they know? They don’t. They can’t. But questioning them makes you the bad guy.

Reputation Preservation. Fraud doesn’t just undermine individual academics—it threatens entire institutions. If the public knew how widespread the rot really is, the entire system would likely collapse. So, they protect their own. Whistleblowers are silenced. Critics are dismissed. And the fraud? It never ceases.

The rot in academia is not an accident. It is the inevitable outcome of a system built on groupthink, careerism, and warped moral compasses. The academy once claimed to be a bastion of free thought and inquiry, but it has become a fortress of conformity, where the truth takes a backseat to narratives, prestige, and power. Until fraud is met with consequences and intellectual diversity is embraced, academia will remain what it has become: A factory of lies, wrapped in the illusion of legitimacy, and churning out the very propaganda it pretends to oppose.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian:

The release of the first volume of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report provides a jarring reminder that less than a week from today we will witness the inauguration of the man (a convicted felon on 34 counts on a separate election interference and business records falsification matter) who sought to overturn an election. The report may not contain many new data points but it underscores one of the worst failures of the Biden presidency – the inability to secure the conviction of Donald Trump, which in turn allows his return to power. Refusing to launch a prompt investigation against the insurrectionist leader (insisting instead on working “from the bottom up” by prosecuting rioters), Attorney General Merrick Garland made it possible for Trump, in cahoots with the U.S. Supreme Court, to run out the clock. Smith’s report confirms he believes there was sufficient evidence to indict Trump, had his election not made it impossible for prosecution to continue. What Smith lacked was not facts nor sufficient legal tools but time. As of this writing we also have not seen the second volume of Smith’s report relating to his absconding with top secret documents at the end of the first term. We not only will never see Trump prosecuted for his alleged crimes; we may never learn the full story. Again, responsibility lies with Biden’s Attorney General. To speed up the Mar-a-Lago report, Garland could have bypassed sharing the report in advance with Trump; he could have dismissed the case against the other two defendants (removing any argument that they would be prejudiced). Now, we may never see it, nor learn about any role that nominees such as Kash Patel might have played. Garland’s obsession with procedural niceties at the expense of basic principles of equal justice has rendered him among the worst (certainly the most foolish) attorneys general. And yet, we would be wrong to lay the blame exclusively on Garland. Biden knew what sort of attorney general he was getting, fantasized that Garland would be above “reproach,” then declined to replace him once he proved inept. Failure to prosecute Trump—or even get out the full story of Trump’s alleged crimes—is Biden’s doing.

If the denouement of Smith’s investigation represents a low point in the Biden presidency, heading into the last days of his presidency and his time in public office, we have also seen him display some of his strongest qualities. At Jimmy Carter’s funeral—where cameras captured frosty interchanges, awkward body language, and dirty looks among the current and past first and second families—Biden took one more opportunity to skewer his successor. He came to praise Carter but by implication to condemn Carter’s moral opposite, Donald Trump. “Character. Character. Character,” Biden said of Carter. Clearly, he did so to remind us that Trump has None. None. None. Similarly, it was impossible to hear Biden’s admonition (“[C]haracter.. is destiny. Destiny in our lives and quite frankly, destiny in the life of the nation”) as anything other than a rebuke of the narcissistic bully poised to lead America down a dark path in one week. Trump might have been puzzled by the suggestion that “strength of character is more than title or the power we hold.” Trump simply cannot process the notion that what matters is treating everyone with “dignity, respect.” If Trump had any self-awareness, he would recognize that Biden’s suggestion that “we have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor [and] to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all: the abuse of power” was an indictment pointed directly at him. So, Biden scores for once more defending decency, empathy, and kindness—and for showcasing the nerve to warn us that selecting leaders who lack those qualities has severe consequences. In recent days, Biden also got his chance to take one more victory lap on the economy. “With today’s report of 256,000 new jobs in December, we have created over 16.6 million jobs over the course of my administration, and this is the only administration in history to have created jobs every single month,” he wrote in a statement last Friday. “Although I inherited the worst economic crisis in decades with unemployment above 6% when I took office, we’ve had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years with unemployment at 4.1% as I leave.”

[...] Unfortunately, in the final days of Biden’s presidency we are also witnessing his faults and frailty. He insists he could have won the election—preposterous on its face and grossly insulting to Kamala Harris, who heroically came close to overcoming the burden of running as his vice president. Even worse, Biden told the press corps, “I would have beaten Trump, could have beaten Trump, and I think that Kamala could have beaten Trump and would have beaten Trump…” Looking and sounding every bit his age, his remarks prompt us again to ponder if Democrats could have won had he announced years ago he would not run for reelection, thereby allowing a full primary and the benefit of time for the nominee. Biden’s achievements co-exist alongside his faults. His domestic and foreign policy accomplishments rival any modern presidency. And yet ego and self-delusion delivered the presidency to Trump. Sadly, credit to him for rescuing the country from Trump’s clutches is now undercut by his part in enabling Trump’s return. Ironically, Biden’s legacy will depend in part on whether democracy survives another four years of Trump.

This Jennifer Rubin column in the recently-launched The Contrarian about Joe Biden having the best and the worst on display almost simultaneously.

See Also:

Vox: The president who could not choose

[girlactionfigure]

⚫ Mon morning  - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

⭕ BALLISTIC MISSILE at Eilat, intercepted.  From the Houthis.  Shot down by Arrow.  (( And why aren’t we firing back? ))

⭕ ROCKETS from Hezbollah at Hurfeish, Alkosh, Matat - towns not previously targeted in the north.

🔥FIRE TERROR - Almon, Judea.  (( Nothing shows your love for the land of Palestine like burning it. ))

♦️IDF ATTACKS SYRIA.. Aleppo, Syria, a “factory”.

♦️IDF ATTACKS LEBANON.. artillery attacks on the Shiite town of Alma al-Sha'ab, opposite Israeli town Hanita.

♦️AND GAZA.. 50 airstrikes in the past day.

♦️COUNTER-TERROR.. Ramon (Ramallah area), Hassan, Shechem, Aqaba (Tubas area), 

▪️HERO HOSTAGE (BODY) FOUND - NOT KIDNAPPED.. The body of Dolev Yehud was located in Kibbutz Nir Oz after a strenuous investigation and in collaboration with anthropologists and after scientific identification.  He was a medic and was murdered on Oct. 7 as he left his home to help save lives.

May his family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, and may G-d avenge his blood!

▪️WAR GUIDANCE ORG - 42% OF RELEASED TERRORISTS KILL AGAIN.. bring data studies showing 42% of terrorists released in the Shalit deal killed again - from public data.  They add: with confidential data likely it is higher. 

▪️MORE ON THE BIDEN DEAL..

.. details from the proposal: Israel mostly agrees with the outline for the release of the hostages drawn up by Hamas.

.. MK Shikli: the deal presents an outline to stop the war for six weeks without knowing the fate of the hostages - it's not a deal, it's a joke.

.. HAMAS SAYS: "The military of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are putting pressure on the families of the captives  through psychological warfare so that they will put pressure on Netanyahu."  (( Exactly. ))

.. Hamas demands a written document that includes everything that US President Biden said on Saturday evening with an additional declaration that includes full and enforceable guarantees from the United States

▪️MORE ON THE RAMMING TERRORIST ON THE LOOSE IN SHECHEM.. He ran to the Palestinian police station, he claimed an accident, the PA proposed a joint investigation committee and Israel refused, he was thrown out of the police station for fear that the IDF would invade the station and is now on the run.

▪️RELIGIOUS IDIOCY AT THE TOMB OF JOSEPH.. (monthly visits to this holy site, in the middle of the Arab city of Shechem, are closely coordinated and guarded by the IDF - first hand report)  Last night a limited visit was overwhelmed with overloaded buses, with IDF escort, to visit Kever Yoseph (the tomb of the biblical patriarch Joseph).  

A controversial Breslev rabbinical figure instructed his followers to go to the tomb or the lookout to the tomb (Mitzpe Yosef, Israel controlled area).  50-100 of the overzealous followers decided to enter Shechem by foot because the buses were already at capacity, sneaking around the IDF soldiers.

The IDF had to stop the controlled entry of the buses and chase after the followers on foot, to prevent them from being kidnapped or killed.  At least one of the followers made it further into the city, was beaten and taken by PA police.

▪️3 DAY SEARCH IN THE KINNERET.. 25 year old woman fell  into the Kinneret the evening of May 31 from a small boat without a life jacket.  After 3 days of searching her body was found.

▪️ILLEGAL PALESTINIAN WORKERS.. police caught a group of 16 workers in a Rami Levy supermarket in Hadera (with fake-issued permits -  the worker-company doing the falsification), and 17 caught trying to infiltrate Jerusalem via a “double sided” hidden compartment in a box truck.

[mariacallous]

There has been plenty of discussion in Western media about why Russians are not protesting President Vladimir Putin’s regime and the war against Ukraine, whether it’s due to the economy, genuine enthusiasm for the war, or fear. One thing that most experts agree on is that Russia has a severe political apathy problem. That’s true—but it’s also far more pervasive than even Russianists often realize.

This problem is not new; it’s a continuation of Soviet-era cultural norms that have been carefully amplified and curated by Putin’s state propaganda. Russian experts themselves were once able to point out the problem—including Andrey I. Kolesnikov (a member of the “Kremlin pool” of journalists as the deputy CEO of the influential Kommersant newspaper and the editor in chief of Russky Pioner magazine) in an RIA news article from 2006, or academic Marina Podhomutinkova in a 2011 paper.

As statistics on the increasingly low number of people who get involved in politics show, the situation has only gotten worse over time. Apathy, tinged with fear, is the Russian norm. That explains some of the strangeness of public opinion data. Recent polls by the Moscow-based Levada Center show that support for war among the general population remains high, fluctuating around the 75 percent mark. At the same time, 71 percent of respondents would also approve of immediate peace talks. Although part of this can be attributed to the “preference falsification” that researchers find is common in authoritarian states, the apathy that Putin has cultivated goes far deeper than that.

On a personal level, if you ask the average Russian what they actually want from the war or expect to achieve if they win, then the answer is a resounding “nothing.” I’ve asked this question to many Russians—including relatives, friends, and business acquaintances. I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time on various anonymous Russian imageboards and Telegram channels, asking about people’s opinions in situations where anonymity is guaranteed. The result stays the same—the average Russian person just doesn’t care.

As one interviewee told me, “This is a stupid question. I’ve never thought about politics in my life—that’s the smart thing to do. Let politicians do their politics; that’s not for me. Sooner or later, this will be over. Putin will probably figure something out with China and [U.S. President Joe] Biden. I just hope that they don’t start throwing nukes around, but that’s all.”

Unsurprisingly, my interlocutors almost universally asked for anonymity.

Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, stated a similar conclusion in an interview with Radio Liberty in January this year: “This is indifference and being overwhelmed by life, poverty, and lack of rights, and pacifist beliefs, or simply well-being combined with the position ‘politics does not interest me.’”

As Gudkov noted, in some ways, this helps Putin: Active, ideological pro-war supporters, known as turbopatriots, have certain demands that Moscow has largely failed to fulfill. Look at the imprisoned ultranationalist Igor Girkin, who turned on Putin after the war against Ukraine went sour.

Maxim Katz, a Russian opposition politician-turned journalist-responded when I asked him this question during a livestream : “What an American, very Western question. It’s hard for the people in the West to understand that the average Russian wants nothing from this war, he does not see the victory in any way, he completely doesn’t care. For him, this is a question that his superiors are dealing with. The most important thing for him is to ensure that this war doesn’t affect him personally in any way.”

In part, this cynicism is bred by the gap between propaganda and reality. Russian state media takes nationalism to extremes, but ordinary Russians know that this is nonsense, often using the phrase “war between the TV and the refrigerator” to talk about the discrepancies between broadcast propaganda and the reality of empty shelves or failing appliances. The elites also know that the people know. As the old Soviet saying goes, “You pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.” That mentality is in full swing here.

This charade was a mainstay of the Soviet system. Elections were faked, with 99 percent of the population always voting for the only available party list. Trade unions nominally existed, but they were directly under the control of the Communist Party, never fulfilling any real functions, and any real expression of people’s political will was nearly nonexistent. But patriotism was compulsory, especially over national holidays. This led to an increase in apathy, nihilism, and disillusionment about the Soviet government.

When Mikhail Gorbachev took power, some nonpolitical interest clubs concerning social issues were finally permitted, such as the green movement. Russia had a brief spurt of real politics, freedom of speech, and open discussion—one that also coincided with economic chaos and a deep sense of disillusionment as Russia’s place in the world plummeted in the 1990s. The combination of all of these factors led to many people losing faith in democracy and liberal ideas, an increase of nostalgia toward the Soviet era, and a neglect of politics in general.

There’s a common Soviet era saying that remains popular among Russian speakers: “The folks up there see better.” What it means is that if you’re not one of the members of the political elite, then you should not be questioning their decisions, because they probably know better than you do—so don’t be curious, just do what you’re told. It’s related to another famous phrase—“I’m not an expert in this matter, but…”—that’s reached a meme status on the Russian speaking internet. Sometimes it’s joking, but often it’s used seriously. The idea that only an authorized few should get to have an opinion is embedded deep into the public mentality.

Another familiar trope that serves political apathy is the idea of “tough Russians.” Putin loves to play on that, portraying himself as a strongman who embodies the traditional Russian virtues of virility and masculinity. He makes macho but hollow boasts, such as his response from 2018 to a question about the potential of foreign nuclear threats against Russia: “We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will just drop dead.”

But for ordinary people, there’s the commonly used term terpila (“the one who endures” or “endurer” in English). It refers to someone who just suffers through everything that life throws at them, without ever doing anything about it. It’s a negative term—but it describes many Russians.

These are the ideals that are being actively reinforced in Russia today as Putin doubles down on Soviet nostalgia. People are shown that they have a strong, powerful leader, who will bring greatness to the country. That is a promise of stability and prosperity, but because of Russia’s Soviet past, it is also a reminder that you shouldn’t bother with politics or civic engagement, and that only a narrow group of specialists are ever allowed to have an opinion in any given matter. If there are any problems, you should endure them as a so-called real Russian and not have any ideas of change.

What does this mean for the war? Well, it’s been decided by the higher-ups, so it’s not any of your business.

Roughly 20 million Ukrainians have relatives in Russia. One-third of Ukraine’s population stated in a 2011 survey that they have friends there as well. So, when Russians answer polling questions about their support for the war, they say “yes”—because that’s a political issue, and they have enough problems to deal with. At the same time, when they get asked about whether they would support immediate peace talks, they respond “yes” again, because the killing of Ukrainians just seems odd to the vast majority of people—even if they’ve bought into Putin’s propaganda about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government supposedly being full of Satanists and neo-Nazis.

As one of my own distant relatives told me on the phone, “What do you mean, want from the war? How can you even want something from a war? I want the war to end, and I think that every reasonable person has the same opinion!” Her husband added, “We’re just not that political, as a people, you know. Nobody thought this was possible, but now … now we just want this to end, to return to how things were.”

The bloodiness of this war seems to play little role in the average Russian person’s political activity. Casualties in this conflict are very high—current estimates of those killed or wounded in the conflict put the figure at more than 500,000 people, much higher than the casualties suffered during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where approximately 15,000 USSR soldiers were lost, with approximately 35,000 more wounded. The difference lies in who is getting mobilized.

During the Afghanistan war, the Soviet Union sent regular conscripts to fight, as per the mandatory service and zinc coffins were seen in cities all over the USSR. In the Ukrainian war, Putin is careful to preserve the illusion of normalcy for the citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg—it’s the ethnic minorities and convicts that do most of the fighting, as to not provoke the Russian people into caring too much. Especially since he has another political issue with this war that he needs to be careful about.

Putin has described Ukrainians as belonging to the Russian civilization—misled by the West, yes, but brothers nonetheless. My impression from talking to Russians is that at this point, they’ll support whatever Putin declares needs supporting, whatever scheme he has going on, as long as this confusing nightmare ends faster. Then everyone, ideally, could go back to business as usual, pretending that this war never even happened.

There is a silver lining to this though. Putin is 71 and has been in power for nearly 25 years. Anyone who could have given him an honest opinion, much less some constructive criticism, has long been forced into retirement, pushed into exile, imprisoned, or outright killed. He’s visibly lost touch with reality—according to a recently defected Kremlin insider, Putin does not use a smartphone, nor does he know how to use a computer beyond the very basics of functions. He does not use the internet. A video where he, supposedly, is shown logging in to vote via Russia’s online voting platform in the farcical so-called presidential election in March was laughable, as it’s obvious that Putin has no idea what he’s doing.

But the cynicism and apathy of the older generation may not extend to the younger one. The Kremlin has no clue about what to do with the younger generation, who mainly watch YouTube and listen to podcasts. Among this category of Russians aged 25 to 39, the Levada Center’s April polls showed only 23 percent support for the war. Russia’s best attempt at propaganda on YouTube was its failed RuTube project, where various popular Russian content creators were paid large amounts of money—more than they were making via their channels on YouTube—to move all of their content to RuTube and occasionally include pro-Kremlin content among whatever they were posting normally.

As a result, most of the pro-Putin YouTube channels have lost their audience, and the Russian government is wasting money paying for content that nobody watches. It’s also about to launch a state-approved version of Wikipedia, which will steal articles from the original Russian-language wiki and then automatically censor them. The project is equally likely to crash and burn.

Russians won’t be overthrowing their regime anytime soon. But if the war becomes a more personal problem, attitudes could shift fast. This is important, because people reevaluate their risks on a daily basis—when the regime is strong, they would rather lay low and stay on the safer side. But as soon as cracks start to appear, the very same people can suddenly turn fiercely.

Western policymakers should take this into account. Russian people are absolutely fine with the war ending—as long as there’s a plan for them, and not a repeat of the humiliations of the 1990s.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil's Bolsonaro Is Indicted For First Time Over Alleged Falsification Of Own COVID Data

It's the first indictment for the embattled far-right leader with others potentially in store.

Brazil’s Federal Police have accused former President Jair Bolsonaro of criminal association and falsifying his own COVID-19 vaccination data, marking the first indictment for the embattled far-right leader with others potentially in store.

The Supreme Court released the police’s indictment on Tuesday that alleges Bolsonaro and 16 others inserted false information into the public health database to make it appear as though the then-president, his 12-year-old daughter and several others in his circle had received the COVID-19 vaccine.

During the pandemic, Bolsonaro was one of the few world leaders railing against the vaccine, openly flouting health restrictions and encouraging society to follow his example. His administration ignored several emails from pharmaceutical company Pfizer offering to sell Brazil tens of millions of shots in 2020 and openly criticized a move by Sao Paulo state’s then-Gov. João Doria to buy vaccines from Chinese company Sinovac when no jabs were otherwise available.

Brazil’s prosecutor-general’s office will have the final say on whether to use the police indictment to file charges against Bolsonaro at the Supreme Court. It stems from one of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro, who governed between 2019 and 2022.

Continue reading.

[sukimas]

renko usami data falsification with ill intent

[cassiachloe]

Deepfake and AI video recreation is in the public mind a lot. This is a legitimate concern for the public on multiple levels, and one of the more important aspects is not focused upon – that is the way in which AI can be used to enforce Orwell’s dictum.

PRISM (as leaked by Snoden) has demonstrated partially a degree to which the existing state-capitalist institutions of control embed in to internet and other media platforms (primarily focusing on how your data is harvested). What is not considered is the multi-directional control of media platforms, not merely through algorithm manipulation, but by direct interference.

Something I have witnessed personally (as a tortured and trafficked slave it appears I am used as a guinea pig for a variety of novel tech and methods) is the live manipulation of videos already loaded on to Youtube by AI. Whilst I have witnessed targeted posts designed to influence me specifically based on my personal data (this includes using targeted ads or pages controlled by propaganda and mind control factions), I have now witnessed the modification of videos for mind control on YouTube and other platforms.

This does not only include the creation of New AI videos to specifically influence me or the public, BUT also the modification on past videos on the platform. Theoretically, this could be achieved in a targeted way to myself by direct end devices hacking on my laptop (which is achievable due to entrance in my home which I have documented), but also it may now be possible to modify past videos already uploaded to these platforms to entirely rewrite history.

The rewriting of history has never been easier; The mere modification of pixels on a screen can change the entire narrative. Entire sentences never spoken by an individual could be placed in to their mouths with AI. No longer would we have to hunt trough libraries and rip out pages not agreeable to the current regime, but worse. What does this mean? The real truth of the near past may exist only in the living memory of a few, but when they pass, this too will be gone.

Now, theoretically, AI falsification can also be detected with AI tools, and what we could see is a continued spiralling of development; AI becomes better at video falsification, then AI powered AI fake detection becomes more accurate, and this could go on and on (totally throwing the possibility of human detection way out the window). But, I question if there is enough of an incentive for power to (permit or) develop AI fake detection tools as they have the most to gain from AI fakes. Meaning a further power imbalance.

Moving away from public mind control, the manipulation of the past and the propaganda narrative, I would like to focus on an even more dangerous, disturbing and harmful use of the tool of video falsification: that is the tampering of security footage.

This becomes especially concerning when we recognise the edge state-capitalist institutions have to create less-detectable fakes, combined with the knowledge of institutional violence. A poignant example is the fact of sex traffick and rape infiltrating powers, including paedophilia and slavery (look to the Epstein case or Kincora boys). Rape, abuse and paedophilia is hugely profitable, and states have control over (and directly profit form) this cruel, degrading and inhuman black market.

My ultimate fear is that alongside other advancements in technology, such as neural interfaces, we could see entire schools rendered temporarily unconscious or amnesiac, to be mass raped for profit by ‘elites’. And then, due to the hacking capacities of the institutions and AI fake development, all security footage will be undermined, and it will appear as if such crimes did not occur.

And remember, many do not hold security footage for longer than 3 months, and presuming that the state-capitalist rapists have at least a 3 month technological edge, meaning their AI-fake will not be detectable by AI-powered AI-fake detection within that period, the footage will then be deleted.

Tom Keenan Photography

Taken at Hanna & Guy's Wedding

Cassia Chloe Fire Dancer, Pyro Show & Circus Performer

[usafphantom2]

BAE Systems will improve GPS technology in the Eurofighter Typhoon

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 11/17/2023 - 14:00 in Military

After successful activities to demonstrate functional compatibility and feasibility of physical installation, BAE Systems' Digital Anti-jam GPS Receiver (DIGAR) was selected to continue in the next phase of the Phase 4 Improvements (P4E) capability program on the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft.

DIGAR will increase the protection of the aircraft against GPS signal interference, falsification and radio frequency (RF) interference, so that pilots can perform their missions in the most contested RF environments.

DIGAR uses advanced electronic antenna, high-performance signal processing and digital beam formation for significantly improved GPS signal reception and superior interference immunity. These capabilities considerably increase the level of protection against GPS interference and are critical for combat aircraft while maneuvering in a contested battle space.

The fighter will also receive the new GEMVII-6 airborne digital GPS receiver from BAE Systems which, when coupled to the electronic unit of the DIGAR antenna, allows the platform to conduct high-capacity digital beam formation anti-jamming.

“Modern fighters require accurate positioning and navigation data for mission success in GPS-contested environments,” said Luke Bishop, director of Navigation Systems and Sensors at BAE Systems. "Our DIGAR antenna electronic components and GEM VII GPS receivers are reliable to protect these vital platforms in GPS-challenged environments to support mission success."

The Eurofighter Typhoon is the backbone of the combat to air defense of the United Kingdom and several of its main European and international allies. Serving nine nations, it provides 24/7 air security, 365 days a year and is in frontline operations, including NATO's ongoing air policing throughout Eastern Europe.

BAE Systems, as part of the Eurofighter consortium of four countries behind the aircraft, is continuously investing in the Typhoon jet to maintain its cutting-edge military capability.

In addition to the Typhoon, DIGAR is also installed on the F-16, F-15 and other special-purpose aircraft in the U.S., such as air interdiction and force protection platforms, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Leveraging more than 40 years of GPS experience, BAE Systems' GPS product family offers suitable size, weight and power characteristics for a variety of applications, including portable electronics, precision guided ammunition, unmanned aerial vehicles, vehicles and aircraft.

The work at DIGAR and GEMVII takes place at BAE Systems' facilities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the company invested in a state-of-the-art engineering and production center with 25,800 square meters.

Tags: Military AviationBAE SystemsEurofighter TyphoonGPS

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has work published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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