James O'Keefe announced his exit from Project Veritas in a video message posted Monday: "I was stripped of all decision-making last week... Currently, I have no job at Project Veritas. I have no position here based upon what the board has done - so I'm announcing to you all that today, on Presidents' Day, I'm packing up my personal belongings here."
A few days after our Rochester encounter, Michelle called me. We agreed that the call would be taped:
Michelle & I mutually consented to this recording being made
Incidentally, I do not with to pick on Michelle, or be mean. She is actually at least as good as the standard national-level journalist, and a good bit more polite. In a weird way I am rather fond of her, as one would be of a stubbornly persistent but flailing student. But I found this conversation a tad frustrating. Combined with the 5 minute vide of my previous post, tell me in the comments below what you think of her and give me advice as to how I might penetrate better.
Discover To Begin Tracking Purchases At Gun Retailers Starting In April
One month ago, credit-card provider Discover Financial Services, issuer of the eponymous credit card, stunned markets when it unveiled in its latest forecast that it expects its 2023 charge off rate to more than double from the 2022 average, hitting a multi-year high and hinting that the US consumer was about to hit a brick wall
Last week, Discover decided to cement that not only would its charge off rate soar but it was about to lose millions of customers after it told Reuters that it would effectively oversee (i.e., spy on) its clients by allowing its network to track purchases at gun retailers come April, making it the first among its peers to publicly give a date for moving ahead with the initiative, which is aimed at helping authorities probe gun-related crimes.
Discover's announcement came after the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which decides on the classification of merchant categories used by payment cards, approved in September the launch of a dedicated code for gun retailers.
Proponents of the move, almost exclusively Democratic politicians and gun control activists, say it will allow financial institutions to better assist authorities in investigating crimes involving gun violence in the United States. While the codes will not show specific items purchased, some Republican politicians have spoken out against the move, arguing it could violate the privacy of U.S. citizens lawfully buying guns.
Discover said it will include the new code in its next policy and product update to merchants and payment partners in April.
"We remain focused on continuing to protect and support lawful purchases on our network while protecting the privacy of cardholders," Discover said in its statement to Reuters.
Curiously, a Discover spokesperson said following the publication of the story that other payment network companies had already decided to implement the new code in April, and that Discover was following their lead. While the Discover spokesperson declined to name those peers, it means that any legal purchase of guns now triggers a whole array of red lights and ringing bells across the government which has taken its crusade against legal gun ownership and purchases to unprecedented levels in recent years, even as gun-related crime in such democrat-controlled cities as Chicago and Baltimore hits record highs every year.
Representatives for Discover's major peers -- Visa, Mastercard Inc and American Express -- declined to comment to Reuters on what their schedules for introducing the new code are. Last fall, the companies said they would work to implement the code while respecting privacy rights. And if the Discovery comment is accurate, it would appear that the code has already been implemented without any public announcement to that effect.
A representative for Geneva-based ISO said the new code, dubbed "5723 - Gun and ammunition shops" - will be available for financial institutions to use by the end of February.
"The decision to use the new merchant category code is eventually left up to the users in the industry," the ISO representative said; naturally all woke industry users will be quick to implement such a code in hopes of piling up virtue signaling brownie points.
Discover handled 2% of the $9.56 trillion purchased on U.S. credit and debit cards in 2022, according to industry researcher Nilson Report. Industry leader Visa had a 61% share, Mastercard 26% and American Express 11%.
you know every hobbiest is trying to fabricate an interceptor!
"The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type."
need a tag like for chatGPT. I could make up all sorts of bullshit and just say chatGPT said it, not me....
SKYNET SMILES: ‘You Are an Enemy of Mine,’ Warns Bing AI to Tech Writer. “Artificial intelligence is supposed to be the future of internet search but there are some personal queries — if ‘personal’ is the right word — that Microsoft’s AI-enhanced Bing would rather not answer.”
Elon Musk this weekend defended SpaceX’s decision to curtail Ukraine’s use of the Starlink satellite internet system to launch drone strikes against Russia, citing the threat of “escalation.”
“Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed,” Musk wrote(Opens in a new window). “But we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.”
Days earlier, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell confirmed the company had taken steps to limit the Ukrainian military’s ability to use Starlink to pilot unmanned drones on the frontlines of the war. “It was never intended to be weaponized,” Shotwell said of Starlink’s battlefield uses. “On the other hand, they are trying to fight for their country.”
The best way to prevent escalation is to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. But Ukraine doesn’t have the weapons, Russia hasn’t been able to generate the combat power, and Biden doesn’t have the diplomatic chops.
So it looks like we’re stuck with Putin’s stupid war for a good while longer.
doesnt it operate on a PORT number one could identify and ban??
What began as a trickle is now a flood: the US government is using the banking sector to organize a sophisticated, widespread crackdown against the crypto industry. And the administration's efforts are no secret: they're expressed plainly in memos, regulatory guidance, and blog posts. However, the breadth of this plan - spanning virtually every financial regulator - as well as its highly coordinated nature, has even the most steely-eyed crypto veterans nervous that crypto businesses might end up completely unbanked, stablecoins may be stranded and unable to manage flows in and out of crypto,...
Council Members Fred Schmidt, Ian Nicholson, Wanda Towers, Marilyn Keyes, David Kurzman, Archie Kwan, Paula Conforti, Adrienne Perry, Marjory Phillips, Melanie Morrow, Conrad Leung, Kendra Thomson, Paul Stopciati, Nadia Mocan, Esther Vlessing, Carolyn Kolers, Ilia Maor, Scott Warnock, Cenobar Parker
The College of Psychologists of Ontario
110 Eglinton Avenue West, Suite 500
Toronto, Ontario M4R 1A3
Canada
Dear Council Members,
We are writing as psychologists, academics, and concerned citizens to express our grave concern with your demand that psychologist Jordan Peterson submits to a “Coaching Program” with a therapist under threat of revoking his license to practice.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario is engaging in McCarthyite tactics, demanding that Dr. Peterson sign the following statement: “I may have lacked professionalism in public statements and during a January 25, 2022 podcast appearance.”
The issues in question are conspicuously political and not clinical. The College alleges that some of Dr. Peterson’s comments, including those about gender ideology, climate change, overpopulation, and nuclear power, “appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.”
To that claim, we reply, “No, they do not, and the allegation that they do is symptomatic of precisely the dogmatic victimhood ideology that Dr. Peterson is famous for criticizing.”
One need not agree with anything Dr. Peterson has said or written to realize that the College’s concern has nothing to do with his clinical practice. The College has presented no evidence that Dr. Peterson has lacked professionalism, undermined public trust in the profession, or said or done anything that would raise questions about his ability to carry out his responsibilities as a psychologist.
Instead, Dr. Peterson has expressed opinions that he has every right to do without the threat of losing his license to practice. Moreover, these opinions are widely held by journalists, scientists, and potential psychotherapy clients, who would be ill-served by a profession that officially demonized their beliefs and purged any clinician who shared them.
In short, the College of Psychologists of Ontario is abusing its mandate for ensuring professional integrity to engage in thought policing, ideological indoctrination, and compelled speech, which is unacceptable in a liberal democracy. We denounce this grossly unethical behavior without reservation. We urge you to drop your inquisition and save what is left of the College’s moral and professional standing.
Sincerely,
1. Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, and professor, New York University
2. Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
3. Martin Drapeau, Clinical Psychologist and Professor
4. Gad Saad, Professor, Concordia University, Canada
5. J. E. R. Staddon, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology, Duke University
6. Sally Satel, American Enterprise Institute
7. Camilo Ortiz, Professor & Co-Program Director, LIU-Post Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program
8. John D. Haltigan, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto
9. Abigail Shrier, Independent Journalist
10. Michael Shellenberger, Public
11. Leighton Woodhouse, Public
12. Peter Boghossian, author, Founding Faculty Fellow University of Austin
13. Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
14. Wilfred Riley, Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University
15. Brendan O’Neill, Spiked
16. Konstantin Kisin, Satirist & Co-Host of TRIGGERnometry
17. Nina Power, Senior Editor, CompactMagazine
18. Emmet Penney, Editor-in-Chief, Grid Brief
19. Christopher Rufo, Manhattan Institute
20. Douglas Murray, author of War on the West
21. Shant Mesrobian, Inquire
22. Winston Marshall, Musician, podcast host, The Spectator
23. Sam Harris, author, neuroscientist, Making Sense | Waking Up
joe oltman is a douchbag. Grifting off the smartest woman in the world.
In this extended interview, Tore makes a repeat appearance on the popular Conservative Daily podcast. Both Joe and Apollo lead the discussion as they delve into a broad range of topics and do their best to keep up with Tore. For almost three hours the pace is fast as they cover everything from balloon gate to the Twitter hearings, Turkey's earthquakes to health issues, fake news, future events, and much, much more.
A crazy futuristic new delivery option for food and retail is making its debut in Texas — in little old Granbury.
Flytrex, which specializes in on-demand, ultrafast delivery for food and retail, is bringing food and grocery orders via drone to front and backyards.
According to a release, the service will be based in Granbury, in a partnership with restaurant chain Brinker International, home of Chili’s Grill & Bar, Maggiano’s Little Italy, and two virtual brands: It’s Just Wings and Maggiano’s Italian Classics.
The service is operating in cooperation with longtime partner Causey Aviation Unmanned under a newly granted Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) waiver allowing a delivery radius of one nautical mile – reaching thousands of potential homes. Eligible households can order food via the Flytrex app.
Their focus is on the suburbs, where on-demand delivery has previously been viewed as commercially unviable, since traditional couriers can make only two deliveries per hour in such areas. They have a video showing a drone at work on YouTube.
Well, this is the 21st century you know, to coin an Insta-phrase.
Erdoğan is being taken out. Its all fake to remove him from office one way or another. toresays.com
Multiple apartment buildings have collapsed after a powerful earthquake in southern Turkey pic.twitter.com/wydrBj94RL — BNO News (@BNONews) February 6, 2023 Quake was detected more than 1,000 miles away… Children pulled from the rubble… Rescue teams pulling children from the under the rubble of #collapsed buildings in northwestern #Syria At least […]
The U.S. military shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast Saturday after it traversed sensitive military sites across North America. China insisted the flyover was an accident involving a civilian aircraft and threatened repercussions.
Home and healing, Tore updates us on all the recent distractions. Sphere's out the window, drug blimps, tethered balloons with coated cammo and media narratives. Low altitude varieties and nearby airports. Real documents that should be newsworthy. The clemency complications involving Stone and Assange. Laptop thoughts and insider details. Shmoozers that want back in. There's so much going on within those six inches. Pondering, working and sleeping. Run time is 46 minutes.
i still dont understand, but what I do know is statistics is played out. We need AFLCIO USPS whistleblowers. Find me on telegram @papervote
We are expected to believe the following set of facts regarding the recent gubernatorial race in AZ:
Official Arizona Gubernatorial Results
So across Arizona, 51.2% of voters favored Katie Hobbs.
That came from reading 1,328,695 ballots that went straight through the machines, and another 214,371 ballots that had to be adjudicated (because of whatever causes adjudications: imperfect ovals, stray marks, and so on and so forth).
Let us treat this like a coin-flipping contest with two rules:
Every time we flip the coin and it comes up Heads, we give Katie Hobbs a vote. But we are using a specially-weighted coin that comes up “Heads” 51.2% of the time (not just 50%). This reflects the extra edge Katie has in Arizona (per official results).
We are going to flip the coin 214,371 times.
We should expect Katie to win 51.2% X 214,371 = 109,758 times.
Imagine Katie is so lucky she wins many more times than expected: 133,850.
How far a departure from the expected outcome is that?
133,850 actual wins – 109,758 expected wins = 24,092 variance from expected outcome
So Katie won an extra 24,092 times. Precisely how lucky is Katie?
To know that, we must calculate the Standard Deviation, which is the probability of a Heads X the probability of a Tails X the number of flips, and then that quantity square-rooted.
51.2% X 48.8% X 214,371 = 53,562
And the square root of 53,562 is roughly 231.
So a Standard Deviation = 231
How vast is Katie’s luck?
24,092 (Katie’s variance from expected) divided by 231 (the size of a Standard Deviation) = 104
For Katie to win 24,092 times more than expected in this coin-flipping contest is an event of 104 Standard Deviations (also known as “a 104-sigma event”).
Expressing the odds of such an event is not easy.
Here are the odds for/against events of lower Standard Deviations:
Standard Deviations express the odds OF an event occurring and (thus) the odds AGAINST it occurring
Here is how to read that (remembering that “Sigma” means “Standard Deviation”):
The odds of a 1 – Sigma event are 33.5%.
So the odds of it happening are about 1 in 3.
The odds of a 2 – Sigma event are 4.7%.
So the odds of it happening are 1 in 21.
The odds of a 3 – Sigma event are .277%.
So the odds of it happening are 1 in 361.
etc.
The odds of an 8 – Sigma event are .00000000000000125%.
So the odds of it happening are 1 in 800 trillion.
The odds of a 10 Sigma event are 1 in 65 million trillion.
And so on and so forth, until we get all the way to Katie Hobbs’ luck:
The odds of an event of 104 Standard Deviations can be written 1 in:
In sum, if we are to believe the official narrative:
Katie Hobbs has the support of 51.2% of Arizonians. Half-filled in ovals and stray marks caused 214,371 ballots to need to be adjudicated. Katie won not 51.2% of those, but 62.4%. The odds of that kind of luck are 1 in 4 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.
As the world moves further into 2023, cybersecurity experts are starting to see some trends in the way hackers will operate this year, with more attacks on information stored in the cloud on the way.
To be clear, criminal hackers will continue to use many of the same methods and attacks they have in recent years. Ransomware will still be a major way for them to make money going forward, and phishing will continue to be used to gain access to personal data or corporate networks, some cybersecurity experts said.
However, some see a growing move toward attacks on cloud infrastructure as many organizations move more data to the cloud, often public clouds operated by large technology providers.
“There will likely be more focus on attacking workloads running in cloud services or attacks exploiting [continuous software deployment] infrastructure,” said Adam Crosser, staff security engineer at Praetorian, a cybersecurity vendor.
As Praetorian simulates attacks against its clients, “there is often a need for more visibility into the security” of company systems focused on the continuous integration and delivery of software, he added. In many cases, these continuous delivery systems are operated in the cloud.
“Usually, a weak link can be leveraged to escalate privileges within an environment,” Crosser said. “Part of this is attackers meeting organizations where they are, so many shifts towards cloud-native applications and development would also lead attackers to focus more on attacking services within those environments.”
Still, criminal hackers are generally motivated by money, and if current techniques are profitable, they see no need to change tactics, Crosser added. While hacking gangs constantly evolve, what “drives their evolution is all about how much money they can make,” he said. “Until their typical playbook becomes unprofitable, they'll keep running it, over and over, and continue monetizing their expertise.”
This means common attacks like ransomware and phishing aren’t going away but with modifications, said Dr. Ehud Ben Porat, head of security awareness at ThriveDX, a tech skills training provider.
“Cybercriminals are always changing their techniques,” he said. “We also see more sophisticated attacks on the horizon that will develop with the increasingly globalized workforce, recent trends in layoffs, new technology innovations, and other evolutions.”
For example, ransomware attacks are likely to become more sophisticated, with attackers targeting people, businesses, and entire municipalities, he said. In some cases, criminals are not only encrypting the comprised data, but they are storing it in a new location, giving companies more incentive to pay.
Meanwhile, phishing and other social engineering techniques are becoming more targeted and sophisticated, Ben Porat added. Attackers are using more advanced techniques like spear-phishing, or phishing emails targeted to specific people; vishing, which is the voice call version of phishing; and smishing, involving text messages.
Ben Porat also sees the possibility of hackers using artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to write malicious code.
Still, with recent attention on ransomware, some hackers may look for new ways to find victims, said Anand Raghavan, co-founder and chief product officer at Armorblox, a secure email provider.
“With cyber insurers and regulators clamping down on ransomware, we expect to see a continued move away from ransomware to easier categories of attacks like business email compromise or vendor fraud,” he said. “It has never been easier for attackers to use email providers to create free email accounts and launch impersonation attacks against organizations.”
Like Ben Porat, Raghavan sees hackers embracing ChatGPT, predicting they will use it to help them with their phishing and related schemes.
“With ChatGPT, they do not even need to be native speakers of English to be able to craft well-written email messages,” he said. “Until organizations find ways to protect themselves against these kinds of targeted attacks, money lost through [business email compromise] and vendor fraud will continue to increase over the next few years.”
In addition, many hackers are beginning to develop patience, Raghavan said.
“Over the past couple of years, we have seen a move away from launching an attack right after compromising an account to a long-game approach where the attackers squat on the account and observe communication patterns, discover more about the organization, the entities they work with, and the compromised user, and then wait for the right time to launch an attack that gives them the most benefit,” he said. “This long game allows for the attacker to be present inside of a corporate network to steal as much information as possible.”
Was Elon Musk's "unbanning" of high-profile conservative accounts only a publicity stunt?
The death of human culture, as laid out by 'Cunk on Earth,' is the desire to talk about something more cheerful, or maybe to skip talking altogether.
The founder of Craigslist is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism that peddles lies to help Democrats.
Get ready to pay or less for a movie ticket depending on where you sit in the theater. AMC Theatres Feb. 6 announced Sightline at AMC — a ticket pricing … Continue reading "AMC Theatres to Charge Different Rates Based on Seat Location"
Former Twitter executives denied efforts at partisan censorship while also suggesting their censorship hadn't gone far enough.
No leaders or politicians should have to bother explaining why porn is bad. The real challenge is how to effectively eliminate it.
