Tuesday, December 07, 2021
*** SHOCK EXIT *** CALIFORNIA SENATOR NUNES RESIGNS
Nunes quits Congress for Trump Media job
Right to it: "Rep. Devin Nunes, a close ally of former President Donald Trump and the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, will resign from Congress later this month to run Trump's new social media company.
Nunes (R-Calif.), a 10-term Republican first elected in 2002, ascended to chair the committee in 2015. But he recused himself temporarily from an inquiry into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election while the ethics committee examined his handling of the committee’s investigation.
While the independent commission charged with redrawing California’s congressional map is still completing its work, an early draft tilted Nunes’ Central Valley district toward Democrats, potentially complicating his path to reelection.
Trump Media & Technology Group said in a statement Monday that Nunes would become CEO of the company in January.
“The time has come to reopen the Internet and allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship," Nunes said in the statement. "The United States of America made the dream of the Internet a reality and it will be an American company that restores the dream."
While Trump’s fledgling media company makes a logical landing spot for Nunes given his closeness with the former president — and their shared animosity toward the mainstream media — Trump’s media entity is also facing legal headwinds. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority are scrutinizing a special purpose acquisition company working with Trump Media & Technology Group.
In choosing not to remain in Congress, Nunes is achieving on his own terms what California Democrats could not in multiple well-funded attempts to unseat him. A Republican representing California’s agriculture-dominated Central Valley, Nunes has become a primary campaign target for Democrats given Nunes’ loyalty to Trump. . ."
READ MORE -- NATALIE ALLISON
Why the media take the bait and viewers fall for it.
You KNOW that now
The Nunes memo fiasco shows how politicians troll the media
Subscribe to our channel! http://goo.gl/0bsAjO
Between Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) secret memo, allegations of missing text messages, and the panic over a so-called “secret society” in the FBI, the past few weeks of political news coverage have been dominated by Republican pseudoscandals. And while each of these alleged “bombshells” has turned out to be a dud, these stories raise questions about whether GOP politicians are intentionally baiting journalists -- trolling them into covering conspiracy theories in order to raise doubts about the FBI and the ongoing Mueller investigation.
Read why the Nunes memo was a dud on vox.com: http://bit.ly/2D0tu8t
And how the media fell for it anyway: http://bit.ly/2CZMaoQ
Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com.
Unsealed Documents In Nunes' Family Farm's Lawsuit Against Ryan Lizza Raise More Questions About The Lawsuit Than They Answer
from the you-did-what-now? dept
"The saga of Devin Nunes' family's lawsuit against reporter Ryan Lizza and Esquire Magazine got even more bizarre last week. Back in June, we had written about some heavily redacted documents in the case that suggested that Nunes' lawyer, Steven Biss, was playing some very dangerous games in order to try to keep the employees of the NuStar Farms (owned by Nunes' relatives) from testifying as to their immigration status. CHINA IS EVIL?...Embracing Its Own Versions of Capitalism
Chinese Government Is Building A Surveillance System That Will Target, Track Foreign Journalists, Students
from the if-you-can't-beat-'em,-maybe-it's-time-to-start-physically-beating-t dept
"The Chinese government is truly, undeniably, utterly evil. Anyone saying otherwise has something to sell (most likely to the Chinese people or their government). Private companies and public entities alike have kowtowed and capitulated rather than face the ferocity of the easily angered government and/or risk losing access to a marketplace containing a few billion people...
[...] It has rolled out multiple layers of oppression to keep its citizens in line, starting with pervasive widespread surveillance that ties into "citizen scores" that limit opportunities for those the government believes aren't patriotic enough. It is engaged in the erasure of its Uighur Muslim population, utilizing concentration camps, disappearances, brutality, and a war of attrition designed to eliminate these "unwanteds" completely in the coming years.
Is China irredeemable? I guess it all depends on what you think of redemption. The underlying basis of Christianity is that no one is completely irredeemable (even if far too many Christians seem to believe certain people are). Our penal system, in a much more half-hearted way, conflates punishment with rehabilitation, as if the best way to turn your life around is to see it destroyed. China isn't a Christian nation, so that ends that part of the speculation. And China most likely believes people can be punished into contrition, which will "redeem" them while allowing the state to remain intact. Can China ever be anything than increasingly worse versions of itself?
Sanctions and public condemnation haven't had any effect. The Chinese government isn't too big to fail. Nothing ever is. Just ask the former USSR (which, unfortunately, is resembling its old self more and more every day.) But it is too big to care what anyone else thinks. The first step towards redemption is realizing you need to be redeemed. Will China ever reach that starting point?
It seems unlikely. The government likes things the way they are. And its vision for the future is the elimination of any roadblocks to complete power. But it still struggles to control the narrative, despite constantly finding new ways to limit the spread of information it doesn't approve of and its rewriting of even very recent history to excise anything that might suggest the state is immoral, fallible, or dangerous to the citizens it oversees.
Which brings us to this, which isn't the worst thing China has done. Instead, it's just another example of the Chinese government tossing aside concerns about its public image. Press freedoms are practically nonexistent in China. And now the government is planning to actively target journalists who refuse to play by its rules.
Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people", documents reviewed by Reuters showed.
A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government’s procurement website - reported in the media for the first time - details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases.
The surveillance apparatus is already in place. The county has millions of surveillance cameras everywhere. All these cameras need are a certain form of "smarts" -- one that lets the government identify and track undesirables. The government has already asked Chinese tech companies to give it AI capable of seeking out Uighur Muslims. Now, it wants a system that can see past facemasks and eyewear to positively identify journalists and foreigners it wants to keep track of. And it wants the system to be responsive and fast, capable of performing searches of recorded footage for images matching uploaded images or biometric attributes.
It's going to throw a lot of money and personnel at this "problem," . .
[...] All of this will be perfectly legal when it finally goes into use. The Chinese government has spent the last several years rewriting and expanding its national security laws to justify actions it takes against critics, activists, journalists, and dissidents. It has thrown "fake news" into the mix to grease the wheels for direct targeting of press outlets.
And it's not just for locals. The Chinese government was unhappy with foreign news coverage of flooding in the country earlier this year and engaged in harassment of reporters covering the disaster. Not coincidentally at all, the proposal paper also lists "foreign journalists" as targets of this surveillance, which suggests the government wants to be able to eject members of the press from other countries the moment their reporting starts contradicting the government's narrative.
This is ugly and it's right out there in the open. The tender documents were perhaps never meant to be seen by outsiders, but the details show the government is seeking ways to destroy everything but the party line. No one really needs any more evidence the Chinese government is evil. But somehow, entities that should want to have nothing to do with it play by its rules and apologize publicly when they break them. Maybe China can't be stopped. But the deference shown to it with alarming frequency certainly needs to.
Laser comms demo satellite & Space Force payloads launched atop Altas V
Here's the text to go with the video VideoFromSpace
1.52M subscribers
It was carrying a pair of demonstration satellites, including NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration satellite and a National Nuclear Security Administration payload designed to detect the detonation of nuclear bombs from space.
Credit: ULA
-
Flash News: Ukraine Intercepts Russian Kh-59 Cruise Missile Using US VAMPIRE Air Defense System Mounted on Boat. Ukrainian forces have made ...
