Hmmm... Iran.... Go Figure...

https://www.newsweek.com/pakistani-man-i...nt-1935488

Quote:Federal law enforcement officials have charged a Pakistani national who allegedly plotted to assassinate a top U.S. politician or official, said to be former President Donald Trump.



Asif Merchant, 46, was arrested while in the process of attempting a murder-for-hire scheme, in which he allegedly paid undercover U.S. agents to arrange meetings with potential hitmen, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in New York.


Merchant, who has purported ties to Iran, travelled to New York City to meet the undercover agents and was arrested before he could flee the country.


"This dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in today's complaint allegedly was orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook," FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a press release.



"A foreign-directed plot to kill a public official, or any U.S. citizen, is a threat to our national security and will be met with the full might and resources of the FBI."


Attorney General Merrick Garland, meanwhile, said the Department of Justice would spare no resources in disrupting Iran's plans, while others praised the work of federal agents.
"This case underscores the dedication and formidable efforts of our agents, analysts and prosecutors in New York, Houston, and Dallas," Acting Assistant Director Christie Curtis of the FBI New York Field Office said.


"Their success in neutralizing this threat not only prevented a tragic outcome but also reaffirms the FBI's commitment to protecting our nation and its citizens from both domestic and international threats."


Merchant remains in federal custody and the FBI is still investigating the case.
The plot unfolded just a few weeks before an attempt on Donald Trump's life at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The young man who fired at Trump in that incident is believed to have been acting alone.

Quote:A Pakistani man with ties to Iran has been charged over an alleged plot to assassinate Donald Trump and other US politicians.
FBI director Christopher Wray called the scheme a "dangerous murder-for-hire plot... straight out of the Iranian playbook".
Asif Merchant, 46, is accused of attempting to hire a hitman in New York to kill prominent American officials. CBS, the BBC's news partner, quoted sources as saying that Trump was among the targets.
Security for the Republican presidential nominee was increased in June after authorities learned of an Iranian plot to kill him.


"A foreign-directed plot to kill a public official, or any US citizen, is a threat to our national security and will be met with the full might and resources of the FBI," Mr Wray said on Tuesday.
Mr Merchant was arrested in July and is being held in New York.
According to the justice department's indictment, Mr Merchant arrived in the US from Pakistan in April after having spent time in Iran.
After arriving, he allegedly contacted a person whom he believed could help with the assassination plot. That unnamed contact later reported Mr Merchant to the police.
Mr Merchant allegedly made a "finger gun" motion with his hand when talking about what he wanted to do.
The indictment said the job would not be a "one-time opportunity" and that contacts services would be needed on an ongoing basis.

This guy passed "drivers licenses" for Illegal Aliens, Pro DEI, and Pro Socialist. 

His quote "One Persons Socialist Is Another Person's Neighborliness"

It is reported he personally ordered police to abandon police posts during a riot and allow rioters to burn and loot.

And yes, it is all on video.

And I thought Disney was bad with their delusional executives. 

Tech CEO says people will enjoy paying a monthly fee to use a mouse. ‘You’re going to really love that.’

Tech CEO on people keeping a mouse forever: ‘Imagine it’s like your Rolex; you’re going to really love that’

https://fortune.com/2024/07/31/logitech-...-hardware/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolog...r-BB1qZ08g?

Quote:Logitech’s new CEO has grand ideas for the computer hardware company, and one of them is a “forever mouse” that you’d never have to replace but that you may have to pay for every month.



The CEO, Hanneke Faber, told the Verge’s Decoder podcast that the immortal mouse is still just a concept, but that one day Logitech could create a mouse that, like a nice watch, is useful in perpetuity—with the help of software updates. 


“I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever,” Faber said. “So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic quality, well designed, software enabled mouse.”


Faber noted that Logitech was not “necessarily super far away” from making the forever mouse a reality, but added that the high price of its extreme durability may require the company to add a subscription model to help make it profitable.


The average price of a mouse or a keyboard is about $26, Faber said, and Logitech has the opportunity to create a higher priced, premium product that delivers more quality. While Faber acknowledged that consumers may be shocked by the concept of a subscription mouse, she said the quality is worth it.


“Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that,” she told the Verge.
Logitech did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.


The hardware company is no stranger to bold mouse ideas. In April it announced a mouse with a built-in AI button that could be used to launch an AI prompt builder to help summarize text or write emails.


Faber’s mouse-as-a-service concept is the latest example of the increasing prevalence of subscription-based business models in unusual categories. While customers may be used to paying a subscription for movie or music streaming, now hardware companies are trying to get in on the trend. 



Some customers have already decried Logitech’s idea of adding yet another subscription for an everyday object. One user on Twitter said there is no need for a “forever mouse,” because their mouse from 30 years ago has held up just fine. 

Weaving reality before our very eyes

Quote:It’s almost like we can see this stuff coming…crashing economy is the new shock headline in the ongoing effort to keep you from seeing the wires and trap doors. Tech sector and Bitcoin crashing, “recession” being tossed around…quick look over here!

Folks with memories longer than a gnat’s eyelash will recall that on June 27, 2024, Joe Biden went head-to-head with Donald Trump in a “debate” with no audience, televised from CNN’s studios in Atlanta. As I write this sentence, that was 35 days ago.

In that time, Biden was vanished, Trump was shot, KaMAla Harris was canonized, the Ukraine all but collapsed, Israel started bombing Lebanon and Iran, there was some highly offensive event in Paris, Russia traded a convicted Mockingbird agent for a highly skilled convicted assassin, Bitcoin became a mainstream financial asset, and essentially the entire planet turned inside out. If we expand the window by a couple of weeks, we can include Hurricane Beryl slamming East Texas, killing a couple dozen people.

Any one of these stories would have filled a month’s worth of news cycles just a decade ago. The attempted assassinations of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan each topped the headlines for months. A story as big as Harris being anointed without receiving a single vote should have caused an uproar in the month leading up to the Democrat convention. Two wars that have dominated news cycles for years faded to the “oh yeah and…” file. When Hurricane Alicia slammed Houston in 1984, it topped news cycles for a month, but Beryl blipped and died.

I have worked professionally in media and entertainment since the age of 12, I’ve been a stringer for many of the world’s largest networks, I’ve won awards for my writing, video and film work — and I have NEVER seen anything like this.

I really don’t know where to start unravelling this ball of yarn, so let’s start at the beginning…June 27, 2024, at around 8pm EDT.

The Trump-Biden “debate” was clearly a set-up. The rules and setting were unlike any other “debate” between presidential front-runners. Trump was uncharacteristically subdued, which leads me to believe he had some inkling of what was happening, and he didn’t want to muddy the headlines with anything he said or did. In an interview days later with George Snuffalluffigus, Biden said he was distracted by Trump’s histrionics, which never happened. Biden was apparently reciting lines from a prepared narradigm set before the “debate”. I suspect the Trump angle was supposed to distract the masses while Biden was quietly sidelined in the background.

For the next two weeks or so, while the GeezerMedia fabricated consensus, Biden was the lead word in hourly headlines, with the attendant wailing and gnashing of teeth, because they had planned a completely different narradigm and had nothing else to run with. Then, just as suddenly, Biden vanished literally and figuratively. I suspect he is dead, but that’s another column. He was instantly (less than 24 hours or one news cycle later) replaced by KaMAla Harris in a clear coup d’etat, and one of the most distasteful and disliked political figures in America simply stepped into the Front-Runner Slot, without a single vote being cast, nor a legitimate nomination process.

Part 2 of the coup was to take out the Republican leader and replace him in a similar manner. In what is unmistakably an operation run by the FBI and Secret Service, a kid with a rifle was allowed to perch in clear view of the audience, media were positioned for high-resolution close-ups of heads exploding, and Trump ungraciously turned his head a fraction of an inch at the last moment, and spoiled the entire narradigm. The images were iconic, but not quite what the coup planners wanted.


A Made-It-Happen-On-Purpose (MIHOP) operation is the only scenario that fits all the available facts.

Despite having their narradigm shot to hell (pardon the pun), the GeezerMedia Machine has been forced to run with the script in hand, only now they don’t have two Constitutionally ineligible women heading up both campaigns, truly complicating things.

As an aside, it is very curious — to me at least — that KaMAla Harris, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and JD Vance’s wife are all of Indian descent. I don’t know what this means, but it’s beyond coincidence.

Harris’ PR machine, headed by David Plouffe, leapt into action, scrubbing all unsavory items from her past and painting her black instead of Southern India brown. Magically, a book ostensibly written by Harris appeared on the market, trying to make cohesive sense out of the verbal chunks that routinely spew from her gob. All video of her is being flooded with a folksy street-talking chick in casual clothes, “spontaneously” taking calls from the Obama clan on speaker phone surrounded by cameras while using a lavaliere microphone. Ya sure you betcha.

I can’t believe it’s not butter.

It wasn’t enough to get folks off the topic of bungled assassinations. So, cue the Moulin Rouge and every physically, morally and spiritually repulsive meme, theme and dream they could come up with. Everything from Corpulent Christ, to drag racers, to torch singers…throw it ALL in there. Make sure we offend just about every human on the planet. Heck, even Muslim clerics were complaining about the wholesale degradation of Christian religious icons. That’ll get the rubes off the scent.

Whoops! Didn’t work.

Cue Nuttyahoo’s trip to Washington DeeSee, where he received the intel, money and weaponry…and naturally the blessing of St. Harris…to target and take out a Palestinian living in the capital of a non-combatant nation. Surely apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds (pale rider, anyone?) will change the subject. That’ll distract the rubes!


Oops, new video released of running snipers on dangerous rooftop slopes in Butler Park, recorded by one of the folks shot in the failed assassination attempt, where 155 law forcers where apparently distracted by Krispy Kreme. Seriously, this Crooks guy was a master of disguise and stealth, and might have had a brilliant career as a security consultant.

Cue the shiny Bitcoins and financial freedom baubles. Damn, bad jobs report. Cue the dire situation in the Ukraine. Ugh! No one cares anymore. Cue China’s pending invasion of Taiwan. Uh oh, no one’s buying a collapsing economy going to war over an island.

Obviously, the Deepsters are doing everything possible to blow dust in our eyes. They screwed up and their machinations aren’t working. They needed the shock-and-awe of Trump’s death to make it all happen, and they missed. Even worse, the wires and trap doors are visible, and the illusion is destroyed. Once the magic is exposed, it can’t be recovered. It has become so painfully obvious that I am literally shocked that the US military hasn’t begun arresting bureaucrats and politicians in DeeSee. Perhaps they are following the advice of Napoleon Bonaparte, and not interfering with an enemy in the process of committing suicide. Let’s hope that is the case on both sides.

Rather than being comforting, though, this is a most dangerous moment. The Beast is cornered.

The only way out for the Magicians at this point is something so big, so horrendous, so mind-blowing, so devastating, that the past 35 days will disappear in a puff of smoke. I have no doubt that right now, somewhere deep in the bowels of DeeSee, a withered bony finger is poised over the Ultimate Distraction Button.

All propaganda requires a substantial amount of bait to get the rubes to swallow the hook. It is incumbent on the aware reader to dismiss everything coming out of all media. Once we accept any part of the bait, the hook will be set. Once we think, “Oh, well that’s true, so everything else must be true too,” we will end up grilled on the Deepster dinner table.

Every news outlet, social media platform, television, radio, computer screen, and “smart” phone has been or is being weaponized at every scale. Nothing you see, hear or read can be trusted. Chatbots, algorithms, filters, geo-fencing, and targeted feeds are being deployed to ensure you see and hear only what is intended for your consumption. And yes, we’re getting the same thing here in Asia.

This may sound alarmist, but I have worked for the Magicians. I know how the tricks are done, and I’m watching them happen in real time. What I’ve never seen is this type of full-court press, with all stops pulled and timelines accelerated. We saw this with the Damnpanic, but the narradigm was built over several years. The current narradigm was supposed to run up to November 5th, and they’ve had to squeeze it all into a month.

We are supposed to be shocked every few weeks, so each shock has time to worm its way into our minds, but they are coming daily now and the masses are getting numb. They don’t have time to process and recover before the next one comes, and so folks tune out. This is a war mentality, where the mind begins defending itself by rejecting the senses.

The only thought I can leave the dear reader with is, be prepared. Keep reminding yourself that it is a script and we are watching a show. Be vigilant and be very selective about what information you take in. If you have a hobby, now is the time to go whole hog on it — garden, build ships in bottles, read those classic books you’ve been meaning to get to for 30 years — do literally anything BUT listen to the siren-song narradigm.

This is an extremely dangerous moment in history. I can’t think of an analogy with the same scope and scale of what we are witnessing, and I haven’t even touched on events in Europe and Asia. At the same time, it is highly alluring to watch it happen, knowing that generations to come will be analyzing this moment for a long time.

Like Perseus, we can only gaze upon these Medusan events in a reflective surface, lest we fall victim to the hideousness of it all.

Which brings us nicely to our movie suggestion of the day: 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), one of my all-time favorites, and an amazing acting tour de force by Tony Randall. Hopefully, it will lighten the mood a bit.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl...51392.html

Quote:Former Secret Service Chief Wanted To Destroy Cocaine Evidence
[/url]
[url=https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/08/05/former_secret_service_chief_wanted_to_destroy_cocaine_evidence_151392.html#comments-container]


By Susan Crabtree - RCP Staff
August 05, 2024

AP
Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.
At least one Uniformed Division officer was initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident. But after he told his supervisors, including Cheatle and Acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe, who was deputy director at the time, that he wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol, he was taken off the case, according to a source within the Secret Service community familiar with the circumstances of his removal.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi denied that Cheatle or Rowe or anyone in Secret Service leadership asked for the cocaine evidence to be destroyed. Guglielmi, however, ignored a detailed set of questions asking if an agent or officer had been removed from the investigation and whether anyone has been retaliated against for rejecting leadership’s orders or requests during that process or afterward. 

“This is false,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “The US Secret Service takes its investigative and protective responsibilities very seriously. There are retention policies for criminal investigations,  and the Secret Service adhered to those requirements during this case.”
The discovery of the bag of cocaine posed an unusual problem for Cheatle, who resigned in the face of bipartisan pressure after the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Hunter Biden had a well-documented addiction to cocaine, crack cocaine, and other substances for many years but repeatedly claimed to be sober since 2021, an assertion that has prompted President Biden to often proclaim how “proud” he is of his son. While neither Joe nor Hunter Biden were at the executive mansion when the cocaine was found, it was discovered after a period when Hunter had been staying there.
Cheatle became close to the Biden family while serving on Vice President Joe Biden’s protective detail – so close that Biden tapped Cheatle for the director job in 2022, in part because of her close relationship to first lady Jill Biden.

I would have liked to go there in person before China went all stupid but alas at least we have a video of this amazing place.

Quote:Longyou Caves Mystery - For thousands of years, the Longyou Caves remained lost to time and history. No one even knew that such a cave existed. But all that changed one day when one curious local of the Shiyan Beicun village decided to put a popular legend to the test. #longyu #cave #mystery

Skip to the 5 minute mark to miss the Ad.

Quote:Imagine a world where a small group of people control everything - the economy, politics, even the information you receive. Now, what if I told you this world already exists? In luxurious hotels, behind closed doors, the most powerful people on the planet gather. They're not just wealthy - they're presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs of global corporations. These meetings aren't publicized. There are no minutes, no records. The attendees are sworn to secrecy. But their decisions impact your life in ways you can't imagine. From the price of gas to the wars we fight, from the technology in your pocket to the money in your bank account - it all traces back to these clandestine gatherings. Who are these people? What do they want? And most importantly, what does it mean for the rest of us?

Quote:Last Wednesday I blogged about the prospect of Artificial Intelligence Executive Orders awaiting the next occupant of the White Out House, be it Orange Man Bad, or Madam Kamalarkey. each, I suspect, will be presented with some version of executive orders basically amounting to "full steam ahead..." with a slight steerage to the right or left to garner the good will of their respective supporters. I warned in that blog that there was some semi-good news coming in the next blog.

Well, this is that blog, and here is that semi-good news: artificial intelligence, at least in its current iterations, may end up by going "nuts":

AI systems could be on the verge of collapsing into nonsense, scientists warn

Observe how this "going nuts process" is already underway, and what might result from its continuance:

Quote:Recent years have seen increased excitement about text-generating systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That excitement has led many to publish blog posts and other content created by those systems, and ever more of the internet has been produced by AI.

Many of the companies producing those systems use text taken from the internet to train them, however. That may lead to a loop in which the same AI systems being used to produce that text are then being trained on it.

That could quickly lead those AI tools to fall into gibberish and nonsense, researchers have warned in a new paper. Their warnings come amid a more general worry about the “dead internet theory”, which suggests that more and more of the web is becoming automated in what could be a vicious cycle.
...
It takes only a few cycles of both generating and then being trained on that content for those systems to produce nonsense, according to the research.

They found that one system tested with text about medieval architecture only needed nine generations before the output was just a repetitive list of jackrabbits, for instance.

The concept of AI being trained on datasets that was also created by AI and then polluting their output has been referred to as “model collapse”.

In other words, AI appears to suffer from a phenomenon familiar to humans (in whose intelligence image AIs are made): how much progress is progress? When should one deliberately stop a cycle? The question is a crucial one, because in a system undergoing "model collapse" no sense of continuity, community, or tradition can emerge. "Model collapse" suggests rather that any attempt to turn more and more of the management decisions of more and more areas of human society over to artificial intelligence algorithms, the more chaotic and stupid society is bound to become.  In the past, I have used the example of algorithmic trading as an example of the chaos that can result with more and more dependency on such systems. Flash crashes inevitably occur. Fortunately, these have been confined in the past to one or two stocks or commodities, but the real lesson of such events has yet to be learned: putting inhuman and unhuman programs in control of human activities only makes those activities more distant from human thought and society; the markets become more reflective of programming algorithms, and less resemble human assessments and judgements of prices, risk, profit potential, and so on.  A flash crash is a "model collapse" in miniature, and it's a warning about more generalized applications of AI.  The recent travel difficulties caused by a defective download from Microsoft - while not a model collapse - are yet another warning of what could happen when model collapse spreads from algorithmic trading applications to other activities.

The article uses the following example:

Quote:Researcher Emily Wenger, who did not work on the study, used the example of a system trained on pictures of different dog breeds: if there are more golden retrievers in the original data, then it will pick those out, and as the process goes round those other dogs will eventually be left out entirely – before the system falls apart and just generates nonsense.

In other words, the initial data set - the "generative context" for all the analogical derivatives which follow - determines the basic shape or content of all that follows, until that model finally collapses. A case in point are all those stories out there about artificial-intelligence-generated academic papers that managed to pass "peer review", prompting the questions: (1) who were these "peers', or were they too the creations of AI? and more importantly (2) what happens when these gibberish papers actually become policy that is enacted by humans? If you're a regular reader here, you may have already encountered my "world simulation scenario" version of this story. That high octane speculation runs something like this: what if there is a super-computer with a super-program designed to "game out" all sorts of interlinked events, a "scenario generator and simulator", a kind of algorithmic trading program, but not confined to just market activities, but all sorts of human behaviors and activities. And what if there is a group of human beings whose faith in "science" and "progress" and computer modeling and design is so deep that they have absolute confidence in what their world simulator program tells them to do, even if it seems increasingly irrational. Such advice is, after all, founded on algorithms and mathematics and the best modeling.  Something like this, I strongly suspect, is already happening, and its a warning to those who think AI and such programs - and robots based upon them - are the wave of the future.

It may be indeed a wave, but waves can also devastate a society and civilization, and leave nothing but chaos and destruction in its wake, and that, I strongly suspect, is what is slated for the current round of fascination in and advocacy of AI...

Caveat emptor.

Walter discusses the legendary American ufology icon within a context of ancient Hindu lore. I like Walter's weirdness as he's one of the few on Utube that really digs into the history of his wide ranging topics and refuses to go with the status quo. Plus he has a very interesting background bio aside from his prolific authoring of books.

Study the thumbnail graphic before clicking play.