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The Air Force is testing a high-energy microwave weapon system in Africa to combat armed drones operated by terrorists. 

In April, we first reported the Air Force would test a new prototype drone-killing microwave weapon overseas for a 12-month assessment. At the time, there was no mention by the service of where the testing would be conducted until now. 

Richard Joseph, the Air Force’s chief scientist, was recently quoted by Breaking Defense as saying the Tactical High Power Microwave Operational Responder (THOR) is being tested in a “real-world setting” in Africa. 

“We have recently deployed a test system to Africa for base defense … based on a microwave system. And the purpose is to be able to disrupt and destroy the performance of drones or swarms of drones,” Joseph recently told the Mitchell Institute.

“It’s been tested extensively, works remarkably well. … I’ve watched it in action and it’s really quite impressive.”

Tactical High Power Microwave Operational Responder (THOR)

Given the proliferation of drones and drone swarms on the modern battlefield in Africa and the Middle East, he said THOR was the best system to defend high-value assets. 

“Drones are becoming more and more pervasive and can be used as weapons intended to cause harm to our military bases at long standoff ranges,” the Air Force Research Laboratory directer energy chief Dr. Kelly Hammett said in April. 

Joseph said THOR was “better than anything else” the service has in its arsenal, and noted that “the capabilities that can be incorporated in the system are increasing day by day.” 

… and the reason why the Air Force is testing microwave technology to combat drones on the modern battlefield is that drone swarms could one day be classified as a weapon of mass destruction because of their precision to annihilate high-value targets. 

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It is still too early to say, but perhaps the U.S. election is the beginning of a new ‘Turning’ (in the sense of the ‘Fourth Turning’). Of course, what happens in the U.S. is most people’s primary focus now; but even as that plays out over the coming year – perhaps chaotically – the seeds sown on 3 November, and in its aftermath, take us to a pivot: Does the centralising project of progressive ‘wokedom’ in Blue America, and in Merkel’s Europe, have the ‘grit’ to persevere – or will its leaders fold in the face of the approaching crises – and concomitant public anger?

The Project has three main pivots:

1. the centralisation of Big Tech and MSM;

2. the concentration of banking and financial tech, within centralised Central Banking;

3. and Merkel’s centralisation of politics in Europe, at the head of an empire claiming to occupy the ‘moral high-ground’.

What is so significant about the U.S. election; what is so significant about the last four topsy-turvy years in Washington, has been the casting aside of all illusion of democracy, and the blunt demonstration that real power is exercised by a clique of billionaires. Europeans with little by way of independent news may be the last to notice. But for sure, China, Russia, Latin America – and the Middle East, which has suffered the most from America’s and Europe’s ‘moral’ sieges and wars – have taken due note. They will not further put up with European or American moral hectoring.

We may look back, and conclude that the post-war era effectively came to its end on 3 November.

What happened? For most Americans, if asked what it was that made them American, they likely would mumble about the Constitution, about its’ first and fifth Amendments, about its founding ethos. But the courts, and the institutions of America have ‘moved on’ under the influence of an activism that amends old rules to seal-in ‘new values’.

Even the Supreme Court, three of whose justices were appointed by Trump, no longer views the Constitution to be a ‘contract’ between 50 sovereign states. The final jury is perceived now to be that of public opinion (as scripted and directed by Big Tech and MSM). Americans who espoused that traditional notion of identity have discovered it was all a myth. They feel their own creation turned against them.

Then elections – the mechanism for the transition of power: last week, Fox News released a poll that said 68% of Republicans believe the election was stolen from President Trump. Overall, 36% of American voters say they think he was robbed. Irrespective of whether one believes there was, or was not, decisive electoral fraud, America – the Avatar of democracy – is unpacking its long tradecraft of electoral fraud, and washing this laundry in full public gaze.

Perhaps in a year or so, America will have an Inquiry.

It will find that, indeed there was fraud, but the then President, Biden, simply will tell Americans that these lacunae are ‘all fixed now’. Who will believe him?

For now, Big Tech and MSM just repeat, ‘no evidence’ and repeatedly delete or censor postings. Next, they wash, rinse and delete all who differ with their determination of what constitutes Americans’ best health, pandemic or vax ‘interests’. Americans are told they must comply – and hold a vax certificate to prove it. But will they?

And the Central Bank wizards – finally – are admitting the massive economic and social distortions perpetuated by their policies, and they accept too, that they have painted themselves into a corner leaving them with no tools by which to exit. They can only continue doing the same (until something breaks). And when it does, will the élites have the ‘steel’ to stand against the anger?

And, finally to the EU pivot: Perry Anderson, in a piece entitled The European Coup, reviews a book by a EU ‘true believer’ and insider – van Middelaar (who was in the cabinet of Van Rompuy, the first full-time President of the European Council):

“During seventy years,’ the book begins, ‘the preconditions of the miracle play: that is, a free society disappeared from view’ – while talk in Europe was all of growth, education, healthcare and suchlike, with little care for the overarching questions of ‘state and authority, strategy and war, security and the border, citizenship and opposition’. Then suddenly, crises came one after another: ‘banks collapsed, the euro wobbled, Russia attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea, vast numbers of desperate people attempted to cross into Europe, and Donald Trump pulled the U.S. security rug from underneath the European continent.”

The answer to this concatenation of ills, it turns out, effectively followed the American playbook: ‘entryism’ by the ideologically like-minded into European institutions and media, together with institutional disregard for old rules that now were to be updated with the progressive agenda of Brussels:

“First had come the troubles of the single currency. There Merkel’s declaration that ‘if the euro fails, Europe fails’ was decisive – heralding the rise of Germany’s power in the Union. Did the measures that followed respect the Treaty of Maastricht? No, and so much the better. ‘“Europe” trumped Maastricht.’ For Merkel’s ‘seemingly naive’ words concealed a rarely noticed truth: ‘the states had committed themselves at the Union’s foundation not only to adherence to Union law but to the continued existence of the Union as such. In emergency situations, therefore, breaking with the rules could actually equate to being true to the contract.’”

“The same held good, van Middelaar argued, for the tough financial and political measures taken by Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels to oust weak governments in Southern Europe, crack down on the gambler Varoufakis, and circumvent the blackmail of Britain’s opposition to the Fiscal Compact. Responsibility and solidarity were ‘the root melodies of the Union’ in conducting Europe away from the ‘incalculable risks’ of a Greek exit from the euro …

“Lastly came the double blow of Brexit and Trump … So, for van Middelaar … [a]t this Machiavellian moment, Europe, in Merkel’s memorable saying, showed itself able ‘to take its destiny in its own hands’. In Paris, Macron stepped forth to the sound of the ‘Ode to Joy’, and the EU united behind a determination to punish Britain for its desertion. Its stance was perfectly rational: ‘Bluntly put, it would not be in the Union’s interests for things to go well in the post-Brexit UK … So Donald Tusk gave Ireland a veto on the withdrawal process, with Brussels compactly behind Dublin. Yet it was above all the awakening of the decisive power of Germany to the stakes at issue, that made Brexit the Union’s finest hour”.

Middelaar’s book concludes that whilst, in its day, the rule-factory of the Commission in Brussels had done sterling work revealing to the public at large ‘just how difficult it is to escape its clutches’. “Yet – though technically it retained a monopoly of legislative initiative – that role had passed to the EU Council (of Ministers). If member states were … to offer their peoples a powerful role in the world, an ‘emancipation of the executive’ of the Union was vital” (emphasis added).

“The Council handles ‘Chefsachen’ – the stuff of high politics, not low regulation – in closed sessions. At these, van Middelaar can report, all 28 heads of government call each other by their first names, and may find themselves agreeing to decisions they had never imagined beforehand, before emerging together for a beaming ‘family photograph’ in front of the cameras of the one thousand reporters assembled to hear their tidings, whose presence makes ‘failure impossible’, since every summit (with just one upsetting exception) ends with a message of common hope and resolve. Flanked by its trusty ‘Eurogroup’ of finance ministers and above all by the European Central Bank, ‘a monetary version of the passage to Europe’s new politics’ capable of equally decisive action in defence of the single currency, this is not a Council to be garlanded with the academic ribbon of mere legitimacy. What it now wears is something older, firmer and more capacious – the uniform of authority”. (emphasis added).

Well, thanks to the ‘Great Disrupter’ (Trump), as David Stockman is wont to call him, many Americans have come to the settled view that their votes matter naught in eyes of those navigating ‘the centralisation project’. That there is scant accountability to it, and that all benefits accrue to the oligarchy. They feel disenfranchised – and are angry.

What they are traumatically experiencing, though, is the planned transition from ‘the politics of rules’ to the era of coerced consensus – as Middelaar so proudly outlined it.

The ‘Project’s modus operandi of a seemingly ‘depoliticised’ progress towards centralization, however, has crashed into the ever-unpredictable ‘rock’ of Trump. He intends to drive straight through – and past – the election ‘fraud’.

Even if it takes longer than 6 January (or the Inauguration of Biden), it seems plain that Trump is determined for the election entrails – with all the fingerprints – to be pulled out, and laid bare. This eventuality was not fully in the blueprint: Trump was supposed, under pressure, ultimately to concede. It is thus far from over. The election and Biden personally are de-legitimised for half America: Will the MSM ‘dam’ succeed to hold back the waters at this level?

Usually, such ‘coups’ are supposed to proceed quietly – with decisions presented as ‘depoliticised’ necessities, imposed by a series of emergencies (Covid being the most obvious example) – thus casting all opposition as ‘extremist’, or even as a ‘security risk’ (as in the case of anti-vaxxers).

However, risks are attached to the ‘coercive consensus’ stratagem of the U.S. Tech platforms, and of Merkel’s similar tactic of declaring measures ‘alternativlos’ (translation: alternative-less, or TINA) – a favourite formula of Merkel’s. This strategy of endlessly repeated fait-accomplis feeds public scepticism: The public hears this as ‘like it or lump it’, and becomes more angry.

U.S. politics today is not just polarized, it is poisoned. Nonetheless, Merkel and Germany (together with the EU), in a concerted move, plough on – placing themselves in the vanguard of those calling the election for Biden almost immediately. This was totally EU praxis: the leitmotiv of depoliticisation is invariably accompanied by the mantra of keeping to ‘solidarity and responsibility’.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas immediately accused Trump of irresponsibly “pouring oil on the fire”, and creating a downward spiralling situation, potentially leading to what, Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said, would be “a constitutional crisis”. And Angela Merkel slammed Trump’s behaviour as “awful”.

Yet by her early excitement at a Biden ‘win’, Merkel openly displayed EU partisanship: Cleaving so openly to the Democrats however shows the world that the EU is a full partner to the Blue State – not that anyone in the non-West was in much doubt. Merkel’s EU faithfully has followed the U.S. in sanctioning Russia, Syria et alii – and indeed has leveraged the U.S. sanctioning of the world to somehow showcase the EU as occupying the moral high ground (despite joining in almost every American action).

The signs of a new post-election paradigm are already evident: Hungary and Poland held the EU budget and Recovery Fund hostage – and Merkel caved. Another straw in the wind is how China, fed up at being hectored by Australia repeating all the American anti-China tropes, reportedly is planning to scale back imports of Australian  coal. This follows similar moves by Beijing to curb trade in other key commodities: wine, barley, fisheries, and timber.

What the 3 November outcome ultimately means for America is moot. What it means for the EU is profound, also. It cannot escape it. The U.S. election turns the public spotlight onto the European project, as much as onto the American, for they all are of the same substance. The ‘moral high-ground’ “liberal” meme is exposed as illusion (the EU is umbilically tied to the American Deep State); the ‘solidarity and responsibility’ meme is thread-bare; the alignment to U.S. sanctions and sieges may turn a liability (especially in respect to China); and the stratagem of ‘coerced consensus’ is daily being discredited by the heavy-handedness of Messrs Besos and Zuckerman.

Again the question is: Are these élites as solid and as confident as they seem? When the recessionary crisis truly strikes, and anger explodes, will they fumble it? Trump and his supporters may conclude that precisely will be the moment to go to the streets.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

The narrative could not be more transparent or obvious, but then again, the elites are becoming lazy in their propaganda and the leftists are not all that bright. Essentially, every time conservatives (or moderates) organize to defend themselves against communist or globalist attack we are called “Nazis”, brownshirts, populists, bullies, etc. Now, I would remind these people that if we were really going the path of the Sturmabteilung then there would be rampant intimidation and assault on leftists to the point that they would be afraid to leave their homes or even identify as leftists. Conservatives believe in self defense, not coercion and terror tactics.

Such actions are the wheelhouse of the political left these days. They are far better than we are at imitating Brownshirt behavior. The reality is that across the board the only people engaging in widespread censorship and violence are on the political left, yet we are supposed to be the “Nazis”?

Historically, there does seem to be a pattern here, though. In Germany in the 1920s-1930s communist groups were highly active and initiated street violence, riots and even assassinations. This lured many Germans in fear of being overtaken by a communist regime to support national socialism, the other side of the coin when it comes to tyranny. In other words, to defeat the communists the public supported the fascists, and the fascists ended up being just as bad as the communists.

If you study the investigations of historians like Antony Sutton in books like ‘Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution’ or ‘Wall Street And The Rise Of Hitler’, you will discover there is incredible evidence proving that BOTH the communists and the fascists were funded and managed by the same global elites. In other words, the bankers win either way because they control both sides of the game.

I do suspect that a similar strategy is being implemented within the US today, and that part of the agenda of globalists hellbent on getting their “great reset” is to foment civil war in America while controlling or manipulating both sides of the fight.

It is indeed a Catch-22 for conservatives:

• If we roll over and do nothing, then the extreme left and their corporate and political partners take control of the country and we will never see freedom again as they assert their “social justice” mandates along with their lockdown mandates.

• If we fight back using the same tactics as the leftists or support martial law, then we ultimately erase the civil liberties protected within the Bill of Rights. Those rights will NEVER return (don’t believe the promises for a second) and we become history’s biggest hypocrites and a cautionary tale of the “dangers of nationalism” told to children generations from now, much like the Nazis.

There is, however, another option, and it’s not diplomacy.

The establishment likes to make people think there are only ever two choices during any crisis, and both choices involve giving up more freedom or giving government more power. What they don’t want you to consider is the third option – The people taking power for themselves and removing power from those that would abuse it.

Why should we rely on a middleman to enact such measures? Why are we always being told that we need to wait for a president or a government to do the job we can do ourselves? The liberty movement doesn’t revolve around Trump or the election, and it should NEVER rely on martial law as a means to secure our safety. We can do this on our own without asking permission or waiting to be led by a mascot.

It is true that the political left and conservatives are no longer capable of finding common ground (except, interestingly, among some moderate liberals that also stand against forced vaccinations and medical mandates). In terms of the hard left, their cult is so far beyond reality now that it would be impossible to reconcile. They live on another planet and their frothing zealotry is too entrenched for them to ever see reason.

In their delusional fantasies we are the ultimate villains, and they are the “noble freedom fighters”. Of course, every single establishment power platform in the corporate world, in Big Tech and in the mainstream media is at their disposal, not to mention millions in funding from globalist organizations like the Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, so this tale of the leftist “underdog” makes us double over with laughter at times.

The majority of conservatives just want to be left alone to live our lives the way we see fit. You know, like real Americans are supposed to do. But this notion is not acceptable to collectivists. They argue that we are “all part of a society”…THEIR society, and we must abide by their ideologies and rules “for the greater good” or suffer the consequences. In other words, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

The fact is, groups in general are abstractions of the mind. Just because someone declares that you are a part of their society does not make it so. Walking away is every individual’s right as a human being. Groups that survive and thrive tend to be built on shared values and principles. They don’t all need to agree on every detail, but they can’t be diametrically opposed in every way either.

Usually those with principles that match with an inherent sense of conscience are the groups that most appeal to people.

That said, there are people in this world (around 1% to 5% of any given population) that do NOT have inherent conscience, or they suffer from an ingrained affliction called narcissism. These people are attracted to movements that seek to dominate others, and they maintain membership through force rather than appealing to principle. There is no possible way that this group can ever coexist with people that value freedom and empathy. At least, not without incredible conflict…

There is a large and growing opposition to pandemic lockdown measures, social justice policies that amount to cultural Marxism, as well as the prospect of a Biden presidency which would encourage both of these travesties exponentially. It’s not all about Biden or the leftists, obviously. The Reset goes far beyond them, but many conservatives are looking at the problem more according to what is directly in front of them and less according to the people behind the curtain.

In light of this the mainstream media is doing exactly what is it designed to do – Create propaganda to “shame” anyone that dares to oppose the prevailing establishment narrative. Their most recent strategy is to label the conservative rebellion against the Reset as “the new Confederacy”, and to bring up the specter of the Civil War.

This narrative is riding on the back of discussion among conservatives and state politicians that the possibility of secession should be explored in the wake of the growing impasse between leftists, the globalist agenda, and freedom loving Americans.

The establishment and the useful idiots on the left will have none of it. Despite the fact that all they talked about during the first two years of Trump’s presidency was secession, now that the shoe is on the other foot (if Biden enters the White House and maybe even if he doesn’t) the SJWs and their media counterparts are FURIOUS at the idea that conservatives might actually succeed where they failed.

Collectivists are good at destroying things, not creating things. Their calls for secession were a joke because we all know they are incapable of self sufficiency, and also they have no means of defense. One look at short lived autonomous zones like “The CHAZ” will give you insight to what would happen if leftists tried to separate within a states. It would be a disaster for them.

When conservatives talk about separation, though, the leftists and globalists listen. They might not ever admit it, but they know we are actually capable of it.

To be clear, what I believe is happening is that conservatives are being prodded and provoked, not to separate and organize but to centralize. I think they want us to support actions like martial law which would be considered totalitarian. Conservatives, the only stalwart defenders of civil liberties, using military suppression and abandoning the Bill of Rights to maintain political power? That is a dream come true for the globalists in the long term. And despite people’s faith in Trump, there are far too many banking elites and globalists within his cabinet to ensure that such power will not be abused or used against us later.

I think the concept of the “new confederacy” label being used by leftists and the media reveals what they truly fear, though:

• If they can get us to roll over for the lockdowns and medical tyranny and a Biden dictatorship, they’re happy.

• If they can get us to support martial law under a Trump “coup”, they’re happy.

• But what they don’t want is for conservatives and moderates to form their own organizational resistance not beholden to any singular political figure or top down pyramid structure.

Such organization is happening right now. Millions of liberty minded Americans are leaving leftist counties and states, taking their wealth and businesses with them, and going to more conservative regions where they feel they will be safer. There has not been an ideological immigration like this in the US for well over a century. The reality is that conservatives are congregating (FINALLY) and they are starting to work together for their own security.

In my own area in Montana I have been running local open meetings on preparedness and current events in the hopes of getting people on the same page and networked in the event that the current crisis spills over and rule of law breaks down. Or, in the event that there is an attempt by the state or federal government to enforce medical lockdown mandates where we live. These meetings have been expanding in the past couple of months and needless to say, people in my town are not going to submit to restrictions and do not plan to hide quietly in their homes while their community and businesses are destroyed.

These groups are forming across the country, and thank God, because without community organization there is ZERO chance of survival or freedom for liberty minded Americans. As I’ve noted in some of my latest articles, the rebellion against lockdowns and vaccination mandates is visible even in hard-left states like California and New York. There is much to be optimistic about. However, the fight is going to be difficult and there will be ample vitriol leveled against us as we successfully unify.

Organization requires a tit-for-tat philosophy to do well. Meaning, everyone must take some risk in order to encourage others to join the fight.

For example, conservatives want business owners to refuse to enforce lockdown rules. But, if a business owner makes this courageous choice and faces off with government health officials, then patriots need to be there to back them up. This might even mean standing in the way of law enforcement that is violating the constitutional rights of that business.

I call this “creating a wall of worry”; many police and sheriffs are not onboard with the enforcement of illegal mandates, but those that are need to understand that there are potential consequences for doing so. The wall of worry is a deterrent, and the larger the group of people involved the better. Police are not going to risk escalation of a fight over lockdown mandates if they realize that fight could go badly for them. And, if people in their own departments are against the lockdowns, the consequences double if they seek to enforce them. They should be the ones worried, not us.

Health Department officials are even less likely to push the issue in the face of opposition.

By extension, if your local sheriff’s department or police department is standing against the unconstitutional mandates and the state or federal government threatens them with repercussions, YOU must be there to offer help and support. They are taking a risk for you, so you must be willing to take a risk for them.

I am also hearing considerable chatter that many medical professionals including doctors and nurses are going to REFUSE to take the poorly tested and questionable Covid vaccine for fear of damaging side effects. And why should they? Why take a vaccine for a virus that only threatens less than 0.3% of the public outside of nursing homes?

Medical professionals are under immense pressure to take the vaccine or lose their license to practice. Conservatives MUST defend them if they rebel against mandatory vaccination.

This means helping them to set up their own clinics outside of the controlled system where they can continue to aid people and still make a living. This means networking liberty minded patients that need treatments for various ailments to doctors and nurses that will not demand they show a medical passport and will not report them to the government. This means protecting doctors and nurses from retribution should government officials try to punish or arrest them.

Communities will need to build their own localized economies, using barter and trade and maybe even creating a local currency scrip (hopefully backed by some kind of commodity). They are going to have to insulate themselves from the lockdowns economically in order to defy the lockdowns in a practical way. Otherwise, anyone that does not conform to medical passports and contact tracing will be denied access to the establishment controlled economy and die of poverty. We have to create alternatives. We have to offer people a choice outside of tyranny, otherwise many will go along with the tyranny.

Finally, conservative communities are going to have to provide for their own security. Regardless of how the election situation actually ends, and even if Trump stays in the White House and refuses to concede, martial law is an unacceptable scenario. Conservatives don’t need it anyway. We should be establishing localized security (otherwise known as militias) composed of any able bodied person in the community that wants to join. These militias would have to form as unofficial organizations, as it is unlikely that state politicians will sanction them.

That’s okay. We don’t need them to sanction our own security and defense. Like I said, we can handle it ourselves.

In the meantime, the leftists will label us “brownshirts”, but as mentioned they are the people that have proven over and over again to be violent and totalitarian, so their accusations ring hollow. The media will call us the “new confederacy”, which is funny because the majority of the original confederates and slave owners during the Civil War were Democrats.

We’ll set aside that irony and point out that people have an inherent right to self defense and to freedom from oppression, and none of us are slave owners. Anyone that calls for the globalist Reset is an enemy of individual rights, and anyone that tries to enforce medical tyranny is on the wrong side of history and of morality.

They can call us whatever they want and make erroneous historical comparisons until they are blue in the face; it won’t change the fact that we are seeking to be free and they are seeking to take that freedom away. This is all that matters.

*  *  *

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A new satellite from Capella Space is capable of taking high-resolution images anywhere in the world, even through the walls of buildings, according to Futurism. 

What makes the Capella-2 satellite nothing short of magnificent is its onboard sensor, called the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which can snap a picture in night or day, rain or shine.

Capella-2 Satellite

Futurism says SAR technology “works similarly to how dolphins and bats navigate using echolocation.” 

“The satellite beams down a powerful 9.65 GHz radio signal toward its target, and then collects and interprets the signal as it bounces back up into orbit. And because the satellite is sending down its own signal rather than passively capturing light, sometimes those signals can even penetrate right through a building’s wall, peering at the interior like Superman’s X-ray vision.” 

Capella Space CEO Payam Banazadeh, a former system engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the technology-based news publication that most surveillance and observational satellites in low Earth orbit do not have the ability to view land-based objects through clouds or at night. He said the Capella 2 satellite can take clear images during night or day, rain or shine.

“It turns out that half of the world is in nighttime, and half of the world, on average, is cloudy,” Banazade said. “When you combine those two together, about 75 percent of Earth, at any given time, is going to be cloudy, nighttime, or it’s going to be both. It’s invisible to you, and that portion is moving around.”

This week Capella Space launched a platform allowing government agencies and private organizations to request images of anything in the world. 

Capella Space Platform 

The company is expected to create a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that, combined, can produce clear radar images of anywhere in the world every hour. 

Image of Tokyo 

Certainly, this type of invasive surveillance technology will fuel panic among the privacy watchdog community. 

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

I have been going through my Asia Times archives selecting reports and columns for a new e-book on the Forever Wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. But then, out of the blue, I found this palimpsest, originally published by Asia Times in February 2014. It happened to be a Back to the Future exercise – traveling in time to survey the scene in the mid-1980s across Silicon Valley, MIT’s AI lab, DARPA and the NSA, weaving an intersection of themes, and a fabulous cast of characters, which prefigure the Brave New Techno World we’re now immersed in, especially concerning the role of artificial intelligence. So this might be read today as a sort of preamble, or a background companion piece, to No Escape from our Techno-Feudal World, published early this month. Incidentally, everything that takes place in this account was happening 18 years before the end of the Pentagon’s LifeLog project, run by DARPA, and the simultaneous launch of Facebook. Enjoy the time travel.

In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley (Blade Runner) Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as “the acting president,” was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters.”

The world was mired in Cyber Cold War mode; the talk was all about electronic counter-measures, with American C3s (command, control, communications) programmed to destroy Soviet C3s, and both the US and the USSR under MAD (mutually assured destruction) nuclear policies being able to destroy the earth 100 times over. Edward Snowden was not yet a three-year-old.

It was in this context that I set out to do a special report for a now-defunct magazine about artificial intelligence (AI), roving from the Computer Museum in Boston to Apple in Cupertino and Pixar in San Rafael, and then to the campuses of Stanford, Berkeley and MIT.

AI had been “inaugurated” in 1956 by Stanford’s John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, a future MIT professor who at the time had been a student at Harvard. The basic idea, according to Minsky, was that any intelligence trait could be described so precisely that a machine could be created to simulate it.

My trip inevitably involved meeting a fabulous cast of characters. At MIT’s AI lab, there was Minsky and also an inveterate iconoclast, Joseph Weizenbaum, who had coined the term “artificial intelligentsia” and believed computers could never “think” just like a human being.

Joseph Weizenbaum. Source: Chatbots

At Stanford, there was Edward Feigenbaum, absolutely paranoid about Japanese scientific progress; he believed that if the Japanese developed a fifth-generation computer, based on artificial intelligence, that could think, reason and speak even such a difficult language as Japanese “the US will be able to bill itself as the first great post-industrial agrarian society.”

And at Berkeley, still under the flame of hippie utopian populism, I found Robert Wilensky – Brooklyn accent, Yale gloss, California overtones; and philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, a tireless enemy of AI who got his kicks delivering lectures such as “Conventional AI as a Paradigm of Degenerated Research.”

Meet Kim No-VAX

Soon I was deep into Minsky’s “frames” – a basic concept to organize every subsequent AI program – and the Chomsky paradigm: the notion that language is at the root of knowledge, and that formal syntax is at the root of language. That was the Bible of cognitive science at MIT.

Minsky was a serious AI enthusiast. One of his favorite themes was that people were afflicted with “carbon chauvinism”: “This is central to the AI phenomenon. Because it’s possible that more sophisticated forms of intelligence are not incorporated in cellular form. If there are other forms of intelligent life, then we may speculate over other types of computer structure.”

Marvin Minsky at MIT Lab. Photo: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

At the MIT cafeteria, Minsky delivered a futurist rap without in the least resembling Dr Emmett Brown in Back to the Future:

I believe that in less than five centuries we will be producing machines very similar to us, representing our thoughts and point of view. If we can build a miniaturized human brain weighing, let’s say, one gram, we can lodge it in a spaceship and make it travel at the speed of light. It would be very hard to build a spaceship to carry an astronaut and all his food for 10,000 years of travel …

With Professor Feigenbaum, in Stanford’s philosophical garden, the only space available was for the coming yellow apocalypse.

But then one day I crossed Berkeley’s post-hippie Rubicon and opened the door of the fourth floor of Evans Hall, where I met none other than Kim No-VAX.

No, that was not the Hitchcock blonde and Vertigo icon; it was an altered hardware computer (No-VAX because it had moved beyond Digital Equpment Corporation’s VAX line of supercomputers), financed by the mellifluously acronymed Pentagon military agency DARPA, decorated with a photo of Kim Novak and humming with the sexy vibration of – at the time immense – 2,900 megabytes of electronic data spread over its body.

The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – or DARPA – was all about computer science. In the mid-1980s, DARPA was immersed in a very ambitious program linking microelectronics, computer architecture and AI way beyond a mere military program. That was comparable to the Japanese fifth generation computer program. At MIT, the overwhelming majority of scientists were huge DARPA cheerleaders, stressing how the agency was leading research. Yet Terry Winograd, a computer science professor at Stanford, warned that had DARPA been a civilian agency, “I believe we would have made much more progress”.

It was up to Professor Dreyfus to provide the voice of reason amidst so much cyber-euphoria:

“Computers cannot think like human beings because there’s no way to represent all retrospective knowledge of an average human life – that is, ‘common sense’ – in a form that a computer may apprehend.”

Dreyfus’s drift was that with the boom of computer science, philosophy was dead – and he was a philosopher:

“Heidegger said that philosophy ended because it reached its apex in technology. Philosophy in fact reached its limit with AI. They, the scientists, inherited our questions. What is the mind? Now they have to answer for it. Philosophy is over.”

Hubert Dreyfus. Source: Berkeley Campus News

Yet Dreyfus was still teaching. Likewise at MIT, Weizenbaum was condemning AI as a racket for “lunatics and psychopaths” – but still continued to work at the AI lab.

NSA’s wet web dream

In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI “secret” would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency – already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as “no such agency,” with double the CIA’s annual budget to pay for snooping on the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net – that was years before all the hype over the “information highway” – and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades – remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on – AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades).

So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the revolution in military affairs and the full spectrum dominance doctrine?

They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command a la Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed that “only in the next century” would we be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation; and MIT on another system that identified words spoken by different people; while Intel was developing a special chip for all this.

Although, predictably, prevented from visiting the NSA, I soon learned that the Pentagon was expecting to possess “intelligent” computing systems by the 1990s; Hollywood, after all, already had unleashed the Terminator series. It was up to Professor Wilensky, in Berkeley, to sound the alarm bells:

Human beings don’t have the appropriate engineering for the society they developed. Over a million years of evolution, the instinct of getting together in small communities, belligerent and compact, turned out to be correct. But then, in the 20th century, man ceased to adapt. Technology overtook evolution. The brain of an ancestral creature, like a rat, which sees provocation in the face of every stranger, is the brain that now controls the earth’s destiny.

It was as if Wilensky was describing the NSA as it would be 28 years later. Some questions still remain unanswered; for instance, if our race does not fit anymore the society it built, who’d guarantee that its machines are properly engineered? Who’d guarantee that intelligent machines act in our interest?

What was already clear by then was that “intelligent” computers would not end a global arms race. And it would be a long time, up to the Snowden revelations in 2013, for most of the planet to have a clearer idea of how the NSA orchestrates the Orwellian-Panopticon complex. As for my back to the future trip, in the end I did not manage to uncover the “secret” of AI. But I’ll always remain very fond of Kim No-VAX.

*  *  *

Asia Times Financial is now live. Linking accurate news, insightful analysis and local knowledge with the ATF China Bond 50 Index, the world’s first benchmark cross sector Chinese Bond Indices. Read ATF now.

Our friends at Open The Books continue to expose government waste – and fraud – and in their latest investigation, they have shone the spotlight on one of the largest wastes in the US government: the Social Security Administration.

What they have uncovered is that last year alone, Social Security admitted to $8 billion in improper and mistaken payments.

The punchline: when they dug deeper, they found that there are six million active social security numbers of people aged 112 and older… even though only 40 or less or those people exist in the world.

The root cause of this collosal abuse: failure to verify death. And yet while you won’t read about it in the papers, the four-year total sum to US taxpayers is roughly $2.8 billion, which in today’s numbers when trillions are thrown around may not sound like much, but add up all the other areas of government waste, and soon you end up with far greater numbers.

Watch the clip below for more.

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

Despite the swift industrial recovery from the pandemic, factories in areas in China are working only part-time, and residents in several provinces are asked to save electricity, while authorities are turning off street lights and billboards, warning of coal shortages this winter.

In at least three provinces in China, authorities have ordered limits on electricity use, saying there could be shortages of coal, The New York Times reports. At the same time, Chinese authorities vehemently deny that the potential shortages have had anything to do with the diplomatic spat with Australia, which has turned into a true energy trade war, with China banning imports of coal from one of its major suppliers (last week we reported that “China Endures Worsening Electricity Shortages In Name Of Punishing Australia“).

Still, China has admitted there is a problem with electricity supply in parts of the country, just ahead of the winter season when Chinese industrial activity has been recovering very well from the COVID-related economic slump earlier this year.

“At the moment, some provinces temporarily do not have enough electricity. This is an objective fact,” the NYT quoted the Chinese authority overseeing state-held firms as saying during the weekend.

As a result of the power shortages with a reduced supply of thermal coal, some factories are cutting working hours and are operational only two or three days a week, while office workers in some cities have had to climb 20 flights of stairs to reach their workplaces because elevators have been shut down to save electricity.

“We are not living a normal life when our factory can only work two days a week and the streets are dark at night,” Mike Li, who owns a plastic flower factory in the city of Yiwu, eastern China, told the Financial Times.

Despite the fact that the Chinese government denies that the spat with Australia is responsible for coal shortages and electricity rationing, an official at state-owned power producer China Huadian Corporation told FT that many local power plants depend on Australian coal and scramble to source alternative supply.

“Politics come first,” the official told FT, adding that the company doesn’t see China relaxing import control just because it is causing trouble.

On the same day the US embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone came under attack by a hail of eight rockets fired by unknown militants, the United States threatened Iran with military action should it decide to pursue any future retaliation for the US killing of IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani last January.

Sunday’s attack, widely believed the have been the work of Iran-backed Shia militia or an allied group, triggered the embassy’s counter-rocket defense system and resulted in at least one Iraqi civilian death and limited damage to the embassy complex.

General Kenneth McKenzie, who heads the US Central Command (CENTCOM), is currently touring the region ahead of the anniversary of the Jan.3 killing of Soleimani. The trip was unannounced and is being widely interpreted as sending a strong “message” to leaders in Tehran.

“We are prepared to defend ourselves, our friends and partners in the region, and we’re prepared to react if necessary,” Gen. McKenzie told journalists.

“My assessment is we are in a very good position and we’ll be prepared for anything the Iranians or their proxies acting for them might choose to do,” the four-star Marine general said further at an undisclosed location in the region.

McKenzie further explained that even amid the continuing White House ordered troop draw downs from Afghanistan and Iran – at 2,500 each country – the Pentagon is making preparations toward greater readiness ahead of Jan. 3.

It’s now emerging that Sunday’s attack included a direct hit on the embassy compound, resulting in damage.

Rocket attacks by “Iran-backed militias” into an area housing the U.S. embassy in Iraq killed at least one local civilian and damaged the embassy compound, according to U.S. diplomatic sources. https://t.co/qOaLQKGVEM

— NPR (@NPR) December 21, 2020

Days after the Soleimani assassination the region was on the edge of war, also given Iran responded by launching multiple ballistic missiles on American bases in Iraq, which the Pentagon at first claimed resulted in no casualties, though later it was revealed troops suffered widespread concussions from the missile attack, dubbed Traumatic Brain Injury.

At the very least, mass anti-American protests are expected both in Iran and Iraq, likely outside of the Green Zone near the US Embassy. The Pentagon and State Department have signaled they are making full preparations to beef up security ahead of the first week of January.

On the same day the US embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone came under attack by a hail of eight rockets fired by unknown militants, the United States threatened Iran with military action should it decide to pursue any future retaliation for the US killing of IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani last January.

Sunday’s attack, widely believed the have been the work of Iran-backed Shia militia or an allied group, triggered the embassy’s counter-rocket defense system and resulted in at least one Iraqi civilian death and limited damage to the embassy complex.

General Kenneth McKenzie, who heads the US Central Command (CENTCOM), is currently touring the region ahead of the anniversary of the Jan.3 killing of Soleimani. The trip was unannounced and is being widely interpreted as sending a strong “message” to leaders in Tehran.

“We are prepared to defend ourselves, our friends and partners in the region, and we’re prepared to react if necessary,” Gen. McKenzie told journalists.

“My assessment is we are in a very good position and we’ll be prepared for anything the Iranians or their proxies acting for them might choose to do,” the four-star Marine general said further at an undisclosed location in the region.

McKenzie further explained that even amid the continuing White House ordered troop draw downs from Afghanistan and Iran – at 2,500 each country – the Pentagon is making preparations toward greater readiness ahead of Jan. 3.

It’s now emerging that Sunday’s attack included a direct hit on the embassy compound, resulting in damage.

Rocket attacks by “Iran-backed militias” into an area housing the U.S. embassy in Iraq killed at least one local civilian and damaged the embassy compound, according to U.S. diplomatic sources. https://t.co/qOaLQKGVEM

— NPR (@NPR) December 21, 2020

Days after the Soleimani assassination the region was on the edge of war, also given Iran responded by launching multiple ballistic missiles on American bases in Iraq, which the Pentagon at first claimed resulted in no casualties, though later it was revealed troops suffered widespread concussions from the missile attack, dubbed Traumatic Brain Injury.

At the very least, mass anti-American protests are expected both in Iran and Iraq, likely outside of the Green Zone near the US Embassy. The Pentagon and State Department have signaled they are making full preparations to beef up security ahead of the first week of January.

Authored by Ray McGovern and Joe Lauria via ConsortiumNews.com,

The hyperbolic, evidence-free media reports on the “fresh outbreak” of the Russian-hacking disease seems an obvious attempt by intelligence to handcuff President-elect Joe Biden into a strong anti-Russian posture as he prepares to enter the White House.

Biden might well need to be inoculated against the Russophobe fever.

There are obvious Biden intentions worrying the intelligence agencies, such as renewing the Iran nuclear deal and restarting talks on strategic arms limitation with Russia. Both carry the inherent “risk” of thawing the new Cold War.

Instead, New Cold Warriors are bent on preventing any such rapprochement with strong support from the intelligence community’s mouthpiece media. U.S. hardliners are clearly still on the rise.

Interestingly, this latest hack story came out a day before the Electoral College formally elected Biden, and after the intelligence community, despite numerous previous warnings, said nothing about Russia interfering in the election. One wonders whether that would have been the assessment had Trump won.

Instead Russia decided to hack the U.S. government.

Except there is (typically) no hard evidence pinning it on Moscow.

Headquarters of the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence service, which is being blamed for the hack. (Alex Saveliev/Wikipedia)

Uncertainties

The official story is Russia hacked into U.S. “government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments,” as David Sanger of The New York Times reported.

But plenty of things are uncertain. First, Sanger wrote last Sunday that “hackers have had free rein for much of the year, though it is not clear how many email and other systems they chose to enter.”

The motive of the hack is uncertain, as well what damage may have been done.

“The motive for the attack on the agency and the Treasury Department remains elusive, two people familiar with the matter said,” Sanger reported. “One government official said it was too soon to tell how damaging the attacks were and how much material was lost.”

Sanger. (Wikimedia Commons)

On Friday, five days after the story first broke, in an article misleadingly headlined, “Suspected Russian hack is much worse than first feared,” NBC News admitted:

“At this stage, it’s not clear what the hackers have done beyond accessing top-secret government networks and monitoring data.”

Who conducted the hack is also not certain.

NBC reported that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “has not said who it thinks is the ‘advanced persistent threat actor’ behind the ‘significant and ongoing’ campaign, but many experts are pointing to Russia.”

At first Sanger was certain in his piece that Russia was behind the attack. He refers to FireEye, “a computer security firm that first raised the alarm about the Russian campaign after its own systems were pierced.”

But later in the same piece, Sanger loses his certainty: “If the Russia connection is confirmed,” he writes.

In the absence of firm evidence that damage has been done, this may well be an intrusion into other governments’ networks routinely carried out by intelligence agencies around the world, including, if not chiefly, by the United States. It is what spies do.

So neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done is known for certain.

Yet across the vast networks of powerful U.S. media the story has been portrayed as a major crisis brought on by a sinister Russian attack putting the security of the American people at risk.

In a second piece on Wednesday, Sanger added to the alarm by saying the hack “ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.” And on Friday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the cyber attacks. But he cautioned: “… we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure  some of it will remain classified.” In other words, trust us.

Ed Loomis, a former NSA technical director, believes the suspect list should extend beyond Russia to include China, Iran, and North Korea. Loomis also says the commercial cyber-security firms that have been studying the latest “attacks” have not been able to pinpoint the source.

Tom Bossert (Office of U.S. Executive)

In a New York Times op-ed, former Trump domestic security adviser Thomas Bossert on Wednesday called on Trump to “use whatever leverage he can muster to protect the United States and severely punish the Russians.” And he said Biden “must begin his planning to take charge of this crisis.”

[On Friday, Biden talked tough. He promised there would be “costs” and said: “A good defense isn’t enough; we need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyberattacks in the first place. I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber-assaults on our nation.”]

While asserting throughout his piece that, without question, Russia now “controls” U.S. government computer networks, Bossert’s confidence suddenly evaporates by slipping in at one point, “If it is Russia.”

The analysis the corporate press has relied on came from the private cyber-security firm FireEye. This question should be raised: Why has a private contractor at extra taxpayer expense carried out this cyber analysis rather than the already publicly-funded National Security Agency?

Similarly, why did the private firm CrowdStrike, rather than the FBI, analyze the Democratic National Committee servers in 2016?

Could it be to give government agencies plausible deniability if these analyses, as in the case of CrowdStrike, and very likely in this latest case of Russian “hacking,” turn out to be wrong? This is a question someone on the intelligence committees should be asking.

Sanger is as active in blaming the Kremlin for hacking, as he and his erstwhile NYT colleague, neocon hero Judith Miller, were in insisting on the presence of (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, helping to facilitate a major invasion with mass loss of life.

The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT, for short) needs credible “enemies” to justify unprecedentedly huge expenditures for arms — the more so at a time when it is clearer than ever, that that the money would be far better spent at home. (MEDIA is in all caps because it is the sine-qua-non, the cornerstone to making the MICIMATT enterprise work.)

Bad Flashback

In this latest media flurry, Sanger and other intel leakers’ favorites are including as “flat fact” what “everybody knows”: namely, that Russia hacked the infamous Hillary Clinton-damaging emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

Sanger wrote:

“…the same group of [Russian] hackers went on to invade the systems of the Democratic National Committee and top officials in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, touching off investigations and fears that permeated both the 2016 and 2020 contests. Another, more disruptive Russian intelligence agency, the G.R.U., is believed to be responsible for then making public the hacked emails at the D.N.C.”

That accusation was devised as a magnificent distraction after the Clinton campaign learned that WikiLeaks was about to publish emails that showed how Clinton and the DNC had stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders. It was an emergency solution, but it had uncommon success.

There was no denying the authenticity of those DNC emails published by WikiLeaks. So the Democrats mounted an artful campaign, very strongly supported by Establishment media, to divert attention from the content of the emails. How to do that? Blame Russian “hacking.” And for good measure, persuade then Senator John McCain to call it an “act of war.”

One experienced observer, Consortium News columnist Patrick Lawrence, saw through the Democratic blame-Russia offensive from the start.

Artful as the blame-Russia maneuver was, many voters apparently saw through this clever and widely successful diversion, learned enough about the emails’ contents, and decided not to vote for Hillary Clinton.

4 Years & 7 Days Ago

On Dec. 12, 2016, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) used sensitive intelligence revealed by Edward Snowden, the expertise of former NSA technical directors, and basic principles of physics to show that accusations that Russia hacked those embarrassing DNC emails were fraudulent.

A year later, on Dec. 5, 2017, the head of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm hired by the DNC to do the forensics, testified under oath that there was no technical evidence that the emails had been “exfiltrated”; that is, hacked from the DNC.

His testimony was kept hidden by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff until Schiff was forced to release it on May 7, 2020. That testimony is still being kept under wraps by Establishment media.

What VIPS wrote four years ago is worth re-reading — particularly for those who still believe in science and have trusted the experienced intelligence professionals of VIPS with the group’s unblemished, no-axes-to-grind record.

Most of the Memorandum’s embedded links are to TOP SECRET charts that Snowden made available — icing on the cake — and, as far as VIPS’s former NSA technical directors were concerned, precisely what was to be demonstrated QED.

Many Democrats unfortunately still believe–or profess to believe–the hacking and the Trump campaign-Russia conspiracy story, the former debunked by Henry’s testimony and the latter by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Both were legally obligated to tell the truth, while the intelligence agencies were not.