Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. Presentation by Author Yasha Levine - THE INTERNET WAS CREATED AS A WEAPON OF WAR - A WAR AGAINST THE MASSES - TO BE USED TO PREVENT DISSENT AGAINST GOVERNMENT TYRANNY AND GLOBALIST OPPRESSION - 6,308 views April 6, 2018 Author Yasha Levine - Ed Mays - (See Book Download From Archive.org Below) - With each passing year the internet becomes more and more a part of modern life. Despite story after story of hacks, malware, government surveillance, and corporate corruption, we continue to rely on the web for ever more social functions. - Investigative journalist Yasha Levine shares observations to help us gain perspective on this system we take for granted, revealing the for-profit surveillance businesses operated within Silicon Valley and the military origins of the platforms and tools we use every day. - Levine offers findings from his book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, tracing the history of this modern commodity back to its beginnings as a Vietnam-era military computer networking project for spying on guerrilla fighters and anti-war protesters. - His insight offers us an opportunity to reframe this multinational communication tool as a global system of surveillance and prediction. Levine explores how the same military objectives that drove the development of early internet technology are still at the heart of Silicon Valley today—and invites us to reconsider what we know about the most powerful, ubiquitous tool ever created. - Yasha Levine is an investigative journalist for Pando Daily, a San Francisco-based news magazine focused on covering the politics and power of big tech. He has been published in Wired Magazine, The Nation, Slate, The New York Observer, and many others. He has also appeared on network television, including MSNBC, and has had his work profiled by Vanity Fair and The Verge, among others. - BOOKMARKS: the counterinsurgency origins of the internet 10:46 read a couple of excerpts from the book 12:11 protect yourself from google by using the dark web 27:01 talk about your process of writing this book 46:35 - Surveillance Valley The Secret Military History Of The Internet : Yasha Levine : Free Download... - Listen to this on archive.org › https://archive.org/details/surveillance-valley-the-secret-military-history-of-the-internet_202306 - MP3 Audiobook Direct Download: https://archive.org/download/surveillance-valley-the-secret-military-history-of-the-internet_202306/Yasha%20Levine%20-%20Surveillance%20Valley%20The%20Secret%20Military%20History%20of%20the%20Internet.mp3 The Internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built. - In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the Internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. - A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not

Judy with the blue eyes The post “I am yours, you are mine”: Stephen Stills’ odes to Judy Collins first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

“By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed.” Those lyrics, from the third verse of Samuel John Stone’s “Church’s One Foundation,” written in 1866 to rebut heresies about biblical inspiration then ripping through the Church of England, have a timeless quality about them. They could have been written in A.D. 48–50 when the nascent church convened in Jerusalem to disabuse adherents of the notion that new Gentile believers had to adopt Jewish ways (see Acts 15). And they could have been repeated in every century since, starting already in the next one. A second-century teacher named Marcion tried to scrub Scripture of the Old Testament — he thought it was about a different God from the New Testament God, an evil creator god of the Jews. Gnosticism, also from the early centuries of the church, held that special spiritual knowledge (gnosis), apart from that revealed in Scripture, was necessary for salvation. Then there was Montanism and Donatism and Docetism and Apollinarianism… There is no end of heretical “isms.” But the major heresy of the church’s first four centuries was Arianism. Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria, held that Jesus was a created being, not co-eternal with God, and thus not fully God. Said he: “If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning in existence, and from this it follows there was a time when the Son was not.” Arianism was no small offshoot of the orthodox faith. Arius was no ascetic crank hurling anathemas from atop a desert pillar. Arianism claimed thousands of followers from all stations of life, from slaves to sovereigns. Indeed, Emperors Constantius II and Valens subscribed to the teachings of the subordinationists, and priests, monks, bishops, and whole congregations aligned with the anti-Trinitarians. So riven was the faith that a church-wide council was called by Emperor Constantine. That convention, labeled the Council of Nicaea, brought about 300 church bishops together in A.D. 325 in the Bithynian town of Nicaea (today the Turkish city of Iznik) to settle, in repeatable, creedal terms, the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father. This year, 2025, marks the 1,700th anniversary of this historic council. Pope Francis hopes to celebrate the anniversary in Turkey later this year, and commemorations are scheduled throughout the anniversary year, some at the ancient site itself. In that original conclave, Athanasius, the orthodox champion, was set against Eusebius of Nicomedia, who represented the Arians. The great church father led the council to embrace the Greek term homoousios (“of one substance”) to describe the Son’s relationship with the Father and reject the weaker Arian term homoiousios (“of similar substance”). There was, in this case, an iota of difference between the two words, and a crucial iota it was. The historian Edward Gibbon is said to have remarked that never had there been so much energy spent on one vowel. A preliminary creed was penned to spell out the orthodox belief, which was then refined at the Council of Constantinople in 381. This revised statement has come to be known as the Nicene Creed, which Christians now recite in worship. It confesses Jesus as “the Only Begotten Son of God … true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.” Heresies Never Die Arianism, alas, did not die a quick and expeditious death. It lingered for decades following the council, even centuries, and indeed, distresses the church to this day. It manifests itself in theology that rejects Jesus’s divinity. We see it in certain sects on the borderlands of the faith — Unitarians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom deviate from historic, creedal Christianity. But most prolific, and potent, is the emphasis on Jesus the teacher, Jesus the example, Jesus the wise rabbi, Jesus the brave martyr but not Jesus who is God from God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, the father’s eternal Son made man. The view mostly surfaces publicly with liberal theologians who long ago abandoned the miraculous. For them, Jesus remains a potent figure, indeed, as Father Dwight Longenecker wrote, a human being who is “so fulfilled and self-actualized that he has ‘become divine.’” The difference between ancient Arians and those bearing that heretical mantle today, Longenecker muses, is that Arius was actually explicit in his teaching. The modern heretics are not. They inhabit our seminaries, our monasteries, our rectories and presbyteries. They are the modernist clergy who dominate the mainstream Protestant denominations and who are too many in number within the Catholic Church as well. They are not a separate sect or denomination. Instead they infest the true church like some hideous parasite. And, alas, most shockingly, they have influenced those sitting in the pews of some of the most conservative churches in America – evangelical churches. A study from 2022 found that evangelical believers were far more positive about human nature than in previous years — 65 percent believe that “everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God”; 48 percent no longer think God is omniscient and never changing but now hold that God “learns and adapts to different circumstances.” Where the modern-day Arians have gained traction is with this remarkable finding — 43 percent of evangelicals agreed with this statement: “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” The Council of Nicaea was concerned exclusively with doctrine, with belief. We celebrate its anniversary in a world that has gone in the opposite direction. Our world is defiantly anti-dogmatic. Doctrine is considered irrelevant at best, “divisive” at worst. Concern about doctrine may have been necessary in an earlier age, we’re told, but now, here today in our postmodern world, it only tears apart Christians who should be united against … oh, let’s see … injustice and sexism and climate change and cisheteronormativity. Creeds divide, the old ecumenists used to say, and deeds unite. Christianity is a propositional faith, and to diminish the importance of the propositions by definition erodes the faith. But doctrine informs ethics as well; what you believe determines what you do. The Council of Nicaea taught us the importance of pure and correct belief. Let’s hope celebrating its 1,700th anniversary this year will jog the conscience of the modern church to revisit doctrinal theology. The modern church ignores it to its peril. READ MORE from Tom Raabe: What’s the Matter With the NBA? Men in Women’s Sports Is Becoming a Major Political Issue How a Church Fought Back Against a Liberal Takeover — And Won The post Christian Churches Mark 1,700th Anniversary of the Nicene Creed appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Later this year, the most important free-speech case in decades will be decided by the Supreme Court, and it’s not about speech at all. It’s about common internet smut, and it’s high time the high court dispelled the modern myth that the purpose of the First Amendment includes protecting porn. The truth is that common porn popular on the internet today is lower than obscene speech. Obscene speech is unprotected, but at least it’s speech. Common internet porn today is not speech at all, and that makes a big difference.  In the modern myth of the First Amendment, free speech is at once too shallow and too broad. It’s too shallow, as it’s taken to be just the act of pleasing one’s self by saying or doing something. It’s just “trolling” speech that can be censored. According to the myth, a man may be censored merely if others are displeased by what he says more than he is pleased by saying it. But free speech is much deeper than just trolling: It’s the right to seek and then — by one’s conscience — to state the truth. In the modern myth, free speech is also too broad. It includes that which has absolutely no meaning or message and is just mere conduct, like looting or internet smut. The modern free-speech misunderstanding leads to the atrocious anomaly whereby the most important speech is leveled with the worst conduct and the former gets too little protection while the latter gets too much.  This tragic misunderstanding is on full display at the Supreme Court in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton. The case arises from several state laws requiring porn sites to verify their users’ ages. As everyone knows, any child with an internet connection — and that’s all of them now — can pull up free porn within seconds with virtually no effort. The internet’s public square is awash in free porn. Three of the five most trafficked websites in the United States, according to data from April 2023, are porn. (RELATED: Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton: Porn Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Inevitable’) In Paxton, porn sites challenge the new age-verification laws, claiming that they violate the First Amendment. The current United States solicitor general joined the case, mostly agreeing with the states that their laws satisfy the First Amendment but agreeing with the porn sites that the laws should be subject to a legal test called “strict scrutiny,” the highest protection afforded a constitutional right. What level of scrutiny applies to the porn sites’ First Amendment claims may seem like a mundane legal detail, but it’s anything but. It’s the most important thing in the case, far more important than even whether the porn sites ultimately lose. And on the level of scrutiny, both the porn sites and the solicitor general are dead wrong. Applying the same exacting test to laws burdening political editorials as to laws burdening common internet smut gives smut far too much protection and political speech far too little. It is no coincidence that the same solicitor general who earlier defended the federal government’s extensively documented efforts to censor online criticism of its pandemic policies is urging strict scrutiny for internet porn now. Instead of defending smut to the level of political speech, the solicitor general would censor political speech to the level of smut, allowing too few political opinions but too much smut. (RELATED: Biden and Harris Finally Back Free Speech — For Porn) Porn today is fundamentally different from porn before the internet. Then, pornographers adapted artistic media. Professional directors or photographers would stage scenes. Porn movies would have plots. The Supreme Court, in porn cases past, would worry that coming down too hard on obscene speech might scare people into avoiding protected speech: that punishing the director of Deep Throat might scare Kubrick away from making Eyes Wide Shut. The Court would err toward encouraging protected speech by striking down laws punishing obscene speech when those laws left people in doubt as to whether their speech would count as punishable. But, the Court never actually held that all porn was protected speech. Now, porn is much different. Now, porn is little more than sex with a camera rolling. Like sex in the park, it’s mere conduct — not speech. It’s neither speech nor even expressive conduct because there’s nothing to express: there’s neither meaning nor message. And, coming down hard on “not speech” will not scare people from protected speech. It will at worst scare people from obscenity, which although speech, is unprotected, so it would not matter. The states’ age-verification laws chill no protected speech, and the Court’s worry in past porn cases about the chilling effects on protected speech does not apply. The right result for the porn sites is their crushing defeat. That’s also the simplest opinion for the Supreme Court to write: “These sites deal in conduct, not speech. The First Amendment does not apply. Case dismissed.” READ MORE from Sean Ross Callaghan: Biden and Harris Finally Back Free Speech — For Porn Feds Charge Trump With a Fake Crime The post At the Supreme Court, Porn Should Lose So Free Speech Can Win appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

With President Joe Biden’s term nearly over, federal agencies should be winding down activities for the year and preparing for enormous changes in their leadership and policy goals. However, one relatively small but powerful agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB), is doing the opposite. The CFPB is tasked with the worthy goal of helping represent consumers in the financial industry, though it has often opted to pursue politically motivated, ideological goals rather than sticking to its core mission. This has been especially true under its current chair, Rohit Chopra. At this point, Chopra should be packing up his office and preparing to hand over the reins to President-elect Donald Trump’s yet-to-be-announced pick. Instead, under his leadership, the CFPB has launched a last-minute assault on a wide array of American businesses and advanced a series of last-minute regulations that could prove harmful and costly to American consumers and companies. The 11th-hour shenanigans are almost unbelievable. In the days before Christmas, while many Americans were focused on the holidays, Chopra’s CFPB was filing lawsuits almost as quickly as children opening advent calendars. On Dec. 20, the CFPB went after nearly every large bank in the country with a lawsuit that alleges improper oversight of the Zelle payment platform, which is jointly owned by seven large banks. Zelle pointed out that fraud on its network has actually fallen by 50 percent since 2023. Just a few days later, on Dec. 23, the CFPB targeted the world’s largest retail company, Walmart, with a lawsuit alleging that it forced delivery drivers into a payment system that resulted in junk fees. Walmart responded by noting the rushed nature of this action and its failure to follow due process. The same day, the CFPB filed another dubious lawsuit against Rocket Homes, claiming that the company’s referral incentive program was actually an illegal kickback scheme. Rocket pulled no punches in its response, calling CFPB’s actions a “reckless and shocking misuse of public resources.” It hasn’t let up off the gas, filing another suit against Capital One on Jan. 14 over an alleged “bait and switch” scheme with interest rates on its high-yield savings accounts. While the CFPB claims consumers are being harmed by lower-than-expected rates, a recent Wall Street Journal editorial points out that Capital One’s rates are “in line with those offered by other high-yield banking competitors” and “are higher than what many big banks offer on their standard savings accounts.” Obviously, Chopra sees the writing on the wall. His days as the leader of the CFPB are rapidly coming to an end and he is trying to make his mark on the U.S. financial system while he still can. He’s even suggesting he might try to stick around for a portion of the Trump administration, which is laughable. Trump’s pick to head the CFPB could squash these actions, but before a changing of the guard, Chopra is rushing to implement an aggressive last-minute regulatory agenda, despite a stern warning to hit the brakes from leaders in Congress, like Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC). Chopra’s decision to ignore these requests is particularly concerning because other rulemaking agencies such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Federal Reserve all agreed with Chairman Scott to pause new regulatory actions. Yet, Chopra’s agency is plowing ahead with highly controversial regulations like a rule to expand its authority to cover nonbank entities that make personal loans. This is part of a last-minute power grab that Chairman Scott correctly called “little more than an attempt to expand the CFPB’s jurisdiction and grant the agency more authority to pick winners and losers in the financial services system.” The Trump administration needs to fix this mess, starting with a complete restructuring of the agency. As it stands, the CFPB is insulated from congressional scrutiny because it doesn’t receive its funding from the normal appropriations process, like the vast majority of federal agencies. This means that the CFPB does not receive proper oversight from taxpayers. While the Supreme Court upheld the CFPB’s structure in May of last year, the Trump administration and Congress can and should change the law to make the agency more accountable to the people. Further, it should unwind the politically motivated 11th-hour flurry of regulations and lawsuits that should have never seen the light of day. READ MORE: Overhaul the Financial Regulatory System Regulations’ Enormous Costs and DOGE’s Enormous Upside Trump’s Regime Change at the SEC Brandon Arnold is the executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. The post Federal Agency Gone Wild: Why the CFPB Needs Immediate Reform — and a New Chair appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from CultivateElevate: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from The Jimmy Dore Show: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Reagan Reese, All News Pipeline: In his final days as president, Joe Biden has made a series of moves that set the Trump administration up for a tougher transition and first 100 days in office. From approving more student debt relief to trying to auction off part of the border wall, there has been a flurry of […]