Better in their words…

A culture of corruption exposed at NIH; another one at Stanford; top spook infests Chatbot developer; Alex Jones flirts with bankruptcy liquidation; extreme weather floods the world; and more.

Source: TRUSTWORTHY ☙ Friday, June 14, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🪳🪳 The UK Daily Mail ran a painful story yesterday headlined, “Dr. Anthony Fauci’s department hid plans to create mutant monkeypox virus that ‘could’ve started pandemic,’ bombshell Congress report finds.” What else should they have done with their Bond-villain-style plans to create a mutant monkeypox virus?

In 2015, the NIH schemed to engineer a highly infectious, highly fatal version of the difficult disease that, back while it was only paddling around remote African villages, was long called ‘monkeypox.’ But the worst part of 2022’s worldwide epidemic of horrid sores afflicting delicate body parts, which terrified the world’s leather festival community, was the bug’s triggering, intolerant name. So alert public health authorities narrowly avoided disaster by promptly re-defining the disease as the nonsense word ‘mpox.’

Whew! That was a close one.

This week, following a painful 1.5-year probe, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released its aching results: the HHS, NIAID and the NIH repeatedly “obstructed and misled the committee” about whether the risky experiments were approved and actually carried out, describing the agency’s deceptive lack of cooperation with the probe as “unacceptable and potentially criminal.”

Keep things in perspective. It’s not like a brand-new, never-before-seen version of the virus popped up simultaneously in ten different cities worldwide seven years after the NIH experiments started or anything. Oh, wait. Nevermind.

During the investigation, the HHS and the NIH repeatedly promised the Committee that the dangerous mpox experiments had never ever been formally proposed, planned, approved, or conducted, and were never even under serious consideration. But the House report concluded those “repeated assertions were false.”

So now, suddenly and unexpectedly, the NIH has been infected with a lack of trust.

According to the Committee report, amidst a long list of woeful but unsurprising findings, a list more painful to read than a nether-region mpox sore, it revealed that the human cockroach Fauci’s agency, the NIAID, is a law unto itself:

It’s unclear exactly who needs to hear this, but a “culture of secrecy and obfuscation” is just what you don’t want in a public health agency. And, note that an organization’s culture is downstream from management. Just saying.

Slow progress. As I’ve said many times, we need to stop these scientists before they kill us all. But it’s progress.

🔥 Yesterday, Platformer ran a terrific but widely-ignored story headlined, “The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled.” And good riddance! They won’t stop trying, of course, but at least one six-legged, insectile group of crypto-fascists has been squashed.

During the 2020 election cycle, Stanford set up the bizarrely named “Observatory” as a public-private partnership, to root out social media misinformers and snitch on them to the government. In turn, the FBI would report any “election interferers” and “science deniers” to the platforms, for “voluntary” censorship or worse.

Academic snitches get legal stitches. After the Twitter files exposed the SIO’s role in censoring Americans, at least three groups of plaintiffs have sued Stanford, alleging its researchers illegally colluded with the federal government to censor speech. And the House Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government is currently investigating the Orwellian research group.

But there is less and less to investigate. Apparently, too much transparency has been forced onto the high-minded enterprise. Internal sources told reporters the ‘lab’ will not be researching the 2024 election, or any future election, for that matter.

In other words, if we insist on watching them while they work, then fine, they just won’t do it.

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) is apparently “winding down.” Founding director Alex Stamos left his post in November. Last week, research director Renee DiResta left after her contract was not renewed. Another key staff member’s contract expired this month, and other staff have been advised to apply for employment elsewhere.

Apparently also tracking a culture of secrecy and obfuscation, plus lying, Stanford hotly disputes that the SIO is being dismantled. “The important work of SIO continues under new leadership, including its critical work on child safety and other online harms, its publication of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, the Trust and Safety Research Conference, and the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium,” a spokesperson wrote.

The university complained, “Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, that chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much needed academic research – both at Stanford and across academia.”

We also remain deeply concerned, about Stanford. And we wish they would stop helping create a police state and get back to teaching kids productive business skills. Is that too much to ask?

🔥🔥 Here we go again! Yesterday, TechCrunch ran a spooky story headlined, “Former NSA head joins OpenAI board and safety committee.” Because ChatBots need the very best deep state security expertise. I’m reassured. Are you reassured?

After decades of leading domestic spying operations (including those exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden), General Paul M. Nakasone, 60, just retired from his job commanding U.S. Cyber Command and directing the NSA in February. Apparently unsatisfied with the slow pace of his retirement, a few weeks later, the nation’s top spook is now joining A.I. giant OpenAI, on its board of directors, and also to supervise its “trust and safety” operations.

Because of course.

This isn’t the first time TechCrunch reported on General Nakasone’s various public-facing operations. In January — right before the general “retired” — the tech magazine ran a story exposing Nakasone’s secretive, quasi-illegal interface with big data:

One month after that story broke, Nakasone retired and went to OpenAI. He’s obviously the perfect man for the job, depending on what you think his new job will be.

Corporate media has fussily ignored this story. Media will never ever push OpenAI to explain why the head of the NSA was a good fit for an “open” organization — it’s right in the name! — allegedly committed to trust and transparency. OpenAI has been touting the spy chief’s expertise in securityand privacy.

It’s a nifty excuse. But the General’s job running the NSA was never to protect consumer data. It was to hide stuff and spy on citizens.

In other words, the NSA’s entire raison d’etre is mass surveillance, signals intelligence, and shielding its activities from public scrutiny. Nakasone’s core competencies were spying on people, finding ways to circumvent or creatively interpret privacy laws, and keeping potentially controversial practices hidden—not exactly qualifications you’d normally look for in an advocate for transparency and ethics.

But looking at the glass half full, it was a good move to help protect the AI developer from unprofitable government regulation. If it’s in business with the security agencies, Congress will avoid OpenAI like a vampire fleeing a hall of mirrors. They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.

It was probably inevitable. It’s happened again and again, in countless other authoritarian examples throughout history — from the KGB in the Soviet Union to the Stasi in East Germany to the SAVAK in Iran under the Shah — to the point it’s become axiomatic: A nation’s ungovernable secret police musthave a stake in everything. Anything they can’t control is a potential threat.

Not that I have any choice or say in the matter, but they’re welcome to my chat logs. I hope they enjoy reading up on how to repair a toilet that won’t stop running, or how to stop wrens from nesting in your sneakers.

🔥 🔥 Before they unleashed the hellscape of lawfare on President Trump, they law-bombed bombastic conservative talk-show host Alex Jones into oblivion. The AP ran a story yesterday headlined, “Alex Jones could lose his Infowars platform to pay for Sandy Hook conspiracy lawsuit.”

In 2022, Alex filed for bankruptcy protection after being successfully sued by several relatives of victims of the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 first graders and six teachers.

The trouble started when, right after the shooting, InfoWars initially expressed skepticism and aired contradictions and inconsistencies in the media reporting about the shooting. Some of Jones’ criticisms unfortunately turned out to be unfounded hot takes, even though some details remain unexplained. The relatives testified they were traumatized by Jones’ theories, and their feelings were hurt by peoples’ online speculations that the shooting was a false flag operation.

If not entirely novel, the legal theories used to sue Jones in multiple lawsuits were at minimum very creative. The infernal strategy of filing multiple cases in multiple jurisdictions multiplies the chance of getting a friendly judge and jury, multiplies the defendant’s costs, wrecks his ability to afford a good defense, and multiplies the collective case’s complexity, making it infinitely harder to defend, all while undermining the defendant’s right to a fair venue.

In 2022, juries awarded the plaintiffs a majestic $1.4 billion judgment in Connecticut and a littler $49 million judgment in Texas. The judgments are against both InfoWars and Jones personally. These jury verdicts instantly made history, although you’ll be forgiven for not knowing that fact.

No one in history has ever been awarded so much for harmful speech.

Jones filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and tried to propose a plan for reorganization that would have paid the plaintiffs off over time. But the plaintiffs successfully objected to that plan, and now, according to AP, Jones wants to switch to Chapter 7 liquidation, and just give them InfoWars to try to run without him. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs have sued him again in separate, new cases, arguing he’s shifted or hidden money.

It’s tempting to conclude the lawsuits against Jones are more about shutting him up for political reasons than actually compensating the victims’ relatives for their damaged feelings over Jones repeating some widely spread conspiracy theories.

Like President Trump, Jones is a fighter.  It’s not over yet.

🔥 As the Russian navy bobs around Florida’s storm-tossed southern oceans, the heavens continue pouring down unprecedented flash floods on the Sunshine State, creating countless near-apocalyptic scenes and images. CNN ran a story this morning headlined, “Storm-battered Florida braces for a fourth day of floods after downpours transformed roads into canals and stranded drivers.” One clip shows a stunned driver refusing to leave his stalled-out car as it slowly filled with water.

CLIP: Ten minutes of remarkable flooding footage from South Florida (10:15).

Hundreds or thousands of homes are underwater. House trailers are floating away. Schools are closed. Florida’s Department of Transportation is pumping water and rescuing stranded citizens. And West Florida has also started flooding, though not to quite the extent of what South Florida is going through.

I would (and do) ask for prayers for South Floridians, but it has been a year of nonstop flash floods, and in some very unusual times and places. In January, New Orleans unseasonally turned into jambalaya soup.  In February, it was California’s turn, as San Diego sank under flash floods. In May, flash flooding even killed 500 people in dusty Afganistan. In April, record floods swamped the desert city of Dubai. This week, while South Floridians were swimming to work, over on the other side of the Atlantic, freak floods also plagued Spain.

The extreme weather is creating fertile ground for theories about the cause, since nobody’s offering a coherent explanation. Of course, they keep barking “climate,” but they aren’t even trying anymore to attach logic to the claim. I found the best example yet of what passes for science these days in one of the articles I reviewed:

See? No evidence, no problem! That is, so long as your theory is an approved narrative. So just remember to use the probable explanationexception the next time somebody tells you there was “no evidence” of widescale cheating in the 2020 elections.

Have a fantastic Friday! We’re almost done with vacation week, after which things should settle back to normal here at C&C. Tomorrow morning, I’ll wrestle together some kind of Weekend Edition roundup for you, as Team Childers navigates a hopefully boring and unexciting travel day.

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