Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Mousetrap World

Building Better,

DARPA's work on cyborg warriors who never tire, and may have any mechanical body imaginable, controlled by an "unrestricted" human brain, grown around little network interface wires, and trained in that brave new world, is underway. The poster project is more lifelike prosthetic arms for soldiers with amputations. 
It's going quite well, if you talk to the folks who only do the soldier-rehabilitation work. 
The other part of the project is silent and invisible to us. It might be upsetting.

The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. Bio warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program - Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) - and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa. 
Look: Anthrax, Ebola, Tularemia, Botulism, Cholera, Swine Flu, Hemorrhagic Fever, bats, mosquitoes, biting flies, ticks, spray nozzles, rockets, bombs, artillery, Georgia, Ukraine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Sierra Leone, USA!

Look! Nothing! (Didn't there use to be something there last week?) Caitlin Johnstone (temporarily reinstated, after deletion for "abusing John McCain")
It is now clear that there is either (A) some degree of communication/coordination between Twitter and Facebook about their respective censorship practices, or (B) information being given to both Twitter and Facebook by another party regarding targets for censorship. Either way, it means that there is now some some mechanism in place linking the censorship of dissident voices across multiple platforms. We are beginning to see smaller anti-establishment alternative media outlets cut off from their audiences by the same sort of coordinated cross-platform silencing we first witnessed with Alex Jones in August.​..
 Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you’ll always get some guy in your face who’s read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like “Facebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!” Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How “private” is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.

​Google finally acknowledges censored Chinese search engine project.​ (Huh? It's been a secret? Some secret!)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-16/google-finally-acknowledges-chinese-search-engine-project

The bonds holding Julian Assange so tightly are loosened a bit. Why? What deal will he be offered? Who in the shadow world anticipates benefit?
The Wikileaks founder has been cut off from internet and phone communication since March 2018.
The Ecuadorian government has partially restored communications for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, an ITV report claimed Sunday.
“Ecuador has told WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange that it will remove the isolation regime imposed on him following meetings between two senior UN officials and Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno on Friday," a Wikileaks statement noted.
“Mr Assange was informed of Ecuador’s decision hours after Mr Grandi and Mr Kaye met with President Moreno," the statement added.
According to Wikileaks, the decision to restore Assange's communication was made after UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi and UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression David Kaye met with the president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno.  

​Tom Luongo noticed the change in Assange's status, and had these thoughts. Trump considered pardoning Assange in 2016. Remember?
The pressure on Ecuador’s new President to keep Assange silent must have lifted otherwise he’d still be in effective solitary confinement.   And why would that pressure lift all of a sudden?
Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS ‘took the Fifth’ in Congressional testimony.  Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ignored the summons from Congress.
Everyone knows Julian Assange can put the finger on Hillary for what happened in 2016 (and so many other things).
So, putting the last piece to this puzzle together, it should be getting clearer here that some very important people are about to be indicted and/or arrested.
Containment around Hillary’s crimes has been breached and all that’s left now is for the people close to her to start turning on each other.  The mid-terms were their last, best hope for a stay of execution.
https://tomluongo.me/2018/10/15/polls-tighten-signs-point-hillary/

​Secretary of State Pompeo flew to Saudi Arabia and back to talk with King Salman for 15 minutes.​ The deal is presumably outlined.
Update: After this morning's mini-meeting, Pompeo said that King Salman had agreed to a "timely" investigation. Meanwhile, Turkish officials have told Western media inside the Saudi consulate to suggest that Khashoggi was killed there.  

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday said that Turkey was the only country that could lead the Muslim world.
“Turkey, with its cultural wealth, accretion of history and geographical location, has hosted diverse faiths in peace for centuries, and is the only country that can lead the Muslim world,” he said in a meeting with religious officials.
The "Custodian of the two Holy Mosques" (in Mecca and Medina) is the official title of the Saudi king. It implies leadership within the Muslim word. Since Saladin the title was used by many Islamic rulers, including the Ottoman Sultans. Erdogan wants it back. His aspirations pose an open challenge to the Saudi rulers.
But when a deal has to be made, a deal will happen. Even it it takes some time.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has urged the US to come to terms with the North’s demand for a formal declaration of an end to the Korean war, amid growing differences between the two major allies...
 South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told the nation’s legislators earlier this week that Seoul was reconsidering its own sanctions relief against Pyongyang. However, reports said she later backtracked, with her ministry announcing that no active review of its North Korea policy was in the works.
Reacting to Kang's remarks however, US President Donald Trump stated, "They won't do it without our approval. They do nothing without our approval," referring to the South Korean government...
The US has refused to declare an end to the 1950-53 Korean war – when hostilities halted with a ceasefire instead of a peace treaty – insisting that the North must first take more steps towards giving up its nuclear arsenal.
However, Pyongyang -- which has long maintained that it needed nuclear arms as an only viable counter-measure against a potential US military invasion -- has vowed only to work towards denuclearization "of the Korean peninsula," demanding simultaneous, reciprocal efforts by Washington, pointing to a peace declaration as its first priority.

TOKYO (Sputnik) - North and South Korean authorities have agreed to hold a ceremony for the launch of work on interconnecting roads and railways through the buffer zone that separates the countries in late November – early December, Yonhap news agency reported on Monday...
Earlier, North Korean Railways Ministry's Department of the External Affairs Deputy Director Kim Chang Sik noted that North Korea would develop the project on connecting the railways jointly with Russia and South Korea, noting that the countries of the Korean peninsula should become "owners" of the project.
The North and South Korean authorities have also agreed to hold general-level military talks as soon as possible, the joint statement released on Monday said.

​"No Way Out"​ Into the Brexit Labyrinth lays out all of the paths tried so far, and all of the potential paths, including walking back out, sitting down at the entrance, and burning down the labyrinth. Personally, I see the only flaw of this excellent essay as being the assumption that the labyrinth does not change.
Call it the Brexit Impossibility Maze. Prime Minister Theresa May marched boldly through the main entrance on March 29, 2017, when she triggered Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon. She has been wandering through a political and logistical labyrinth ever since.  
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/into-the-brexit-labyrinth-by-jacek-rostowski-2018-10

Ignoring warnings from the European Commission, the ECB and the European Commission (as well as practically every other supranational organization in Europe), the populist-led Italian government managed to submit their draft budget to the Commission before a midnight deadline - an outcome that was cheered by BTP traders, who bought back into Italian bonds, once again compressing the spread to bunds, which has blown out in recent months.
But rather than representing a deescalation of tensions between Italy and Brussels, the game of fiscal chicken in which both sides are presently engaged is instead entering its most acute phase, as Brussels now has two weeks to review the budget proposal before it can either accept the plan, or send it back with requests for revisions. And anybody who has been paying even passing attention to the populist government's denigration of EU budgetary guidelines over the past few months should already understand that Brussels won't just sit back and accept the budget for what it is.​..
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is set to address EU leaders at a summit in Brussels on Thursday, despite fears that he might hijack the summit's agenda, which leaders have hoped would focus on finalizing a draft Brexit deal. But while some EU leaders have pushed to give Italy a pass, fearful of provoking an EU "showdown," Juncker has continued to insist that the EU must abide by its rules.​..
"Europe needs Italy and Italy needs Europe," Juncker said, answering "No" when asked if Europe could survive an Italian exit.

​Searching for Cheese​

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