Image is 19 miles wide colored according to temperature: blue coldest, orange warmest.
Mars northern polar cap map
Tag: technology
Sexy NSA Commercial With Sasha Grey
(NOTE: I first posted this in July 2013. Hit the mark pretty good, I’d say. ABN)
The NSA database shows once again that it is technology that moves the world more than ideology. I doubt there is anything anyone can do to stop this database or others like it, here or abroad.
We can maybe hope that those who have access to databases of this type are completely honest and that they function within perfect systems that have no corruption, but historically that is highly improbable.
Big databases like the NSA’s (and we know there are more of them) create a form of international competition akin to the arms race. If we don’t get ahead of others, they will get ahead of us.
In the near-term, our best hope is probably for even more technology in the form of accurate lie-detectors that can be used to keep all of us honest, including those with access to the database. I do believe that the database has rendered our traditional form of government obsolete and that there is no turning back.
In the long-term, the database will surely look passe, even puny. Isn’t it likely to be a precursor to the even larger database that will house our electronic/digital “selves” once we have achieved a non-biological stage of evolution (if we haven’t already)? Will we need or even want privacy then?
For today, a conundrum in the database arms race is that the NSA has in one way made us “safer” by staying ahead of other countries (I guess), but it has also made us less safe because no database like that can be made perfectly unhackable.
The database should make it clear to even more people that we fundamentally have no idea how our government works or who controls it to what purpose. Rather than look behind the scenes for who has the “real” skinny, as we naively did twenty years ago, now we must wonder if anything known to the public has any bearing at all on what is really going on.
first posted JULY 13, 2013
Old Soviet motorcycle full Restoration
Even if bikes are not your thing, this is a beautifully done video. ABN
Harley-Davidson Pan America: Style and function explained
CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training)
We’re introducing a neural network called CLIP which efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision. CLIP can be applied to any visual classification benchmark by simply providing the names of the visual categories to be recognized, similar to the “zero-shot” capabilities of GPT-2 and GPT-3.
…CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) builds on a large body of work on zero-shot transfer, natural language supervision, and multimodal learning. The idea of zero-data learning dates back over a decade8 but until recently was mostly studied in computer vision as a way of generalizing to unseen object categories.910 A critical insight was to leverage natural language as a flexible prediction space to enable generalization and transfer. In 2013, Richer Socher and co-authors at Stanford11 developed a proof of concept by training a model on CIFAR-10 to make predictions in a word vector embedding space and showed this model could predict two unseen classes. The same year DeVISE12 scaled this approach and demonstrated that it was possible to fine-tune an ImageNet model so that it could generalize to correctly predicting objects outside the original 1000 training set.
CLIP: Connecting Text and Images
Patrick Byrne provides data on vote flipping
About a week ago I published some preliminary numbers regarding vote flipping, prepared by some very deep diving dolphin-speakers. They had only located, analyzed, And reconstructed about 18 of them at the time. They had found just short of 300,000 votes flipped. Now they have worked further through the data, and they have locked down what 85 case, for over 2 million votes. They are most of the way but not yet completely all the way through the data, so this may increase a little more.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Publishes Preliminary Data On Foreign Vote Flipping In 2020 US General Election
This is important information. Byrne is a credible man. We absolutely cannot allow our elections to be hacked. Nor can we allow significant numbers of Americans to reasonably suspect that our elections are being hacked, which is the case today. This information must be taken seriously and not suppressed, buried, or slow-walked to oblivion. Sorry to say, keep it away from the FBI or DOJ.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Landing Animations
Mike Lindell on election chicanery
I posted this video yesterday after watching only part of it. I just finished watching the entire film and can see no reason whatsoever that Americans cannot openly discuss the information Lindell presents.
Watch the film and decide for yourself. Who among us wants to live in an authoritarian state where information as good as this is censored, ignored, or ridiculed? If the election was clean, why would anyone object to a full forensic analysis?
Short-selling explained and why GameStop crowd-funding is a good thing
…I know this because I’ve lived it. In 2004, the stock price of my company rose dramatically — but that drew over $1 billion in short positions and led to a highly-coordinated public relations and legal campaign against our company. Within months, press that ignored us began assailing us. We were sued over 100 times, and a federal government investigation was triggered that alarmed both our shareholders and customers causing real damage.
Short sellers nearly destroyed our business, because doing so was lucrative for them. We survived by the skin of our teeth, and that experience showed me the lengths to which short sellers will go to influence the market — not just predict its moves.
I Run A Public Company. Short Sellers Attacked Us Years Ago. Here’s Why I Stand With Reddit’s WallStreetBets.
RIP USA: What kind of candy-ass, jackass country allows this?
Are we so weak we cannot handle these views? Lindell is not saying anything terribly controversial. Nor is he saying anything that “might lead to violence,” which is the absurd excuse FB and other Big Tech use to censor.
Sellers running off the set may be due to personal cowardice or due to fear of his supervisor and company policy. Whatever the case, it’s shameful that Lindell’s views—which are common among citizens—cannot get a fair public hearing.
It is the scared duty of government to ensure that elections are run fairly to the satisfaction of all citizens.
And it is the duty in our system of government when it is working properly for the news media to support those who doubt the government by giving their views a fair hearing. US media does that for communists, both foreign and domestic, for Wall Street, for lobbyists, for BLM and Antifa, but not Lindell, Powell, Trump, Giuliani, and literally hundreds of millions of Americans who, at the very least, just want to be sure we have a legitimate president in the White House.
The one-sided “elite” narrative of the past five years—now emphasized and made even worse by blatant censorship—is destroying us. The creative beauty of our system cannot survive this.
A reasonable hypothesis of why Wall Street is going apeshit over GME
The post and many of the comments are plausible and interesting.
Here is my hypothesis: I think the hedge funds, clearing houses, and DTC executed a coordinated effort to put Game Stop out of business by conspiring to create a gargantuan number of counterfeit shares of GME, possibly 100-200% or more of the shares originally issued by Game Stop. In the process, they may have accidentally created a bomb that could blow up the entire system as we know it and we’re seeing their efforts to cover this up unfold now. What is that bomb? I believe retail investors may hold more than 100% of GME (not just 100% of the float, more than 100% of the actual company). This would be definitive proof of illegal activity at the highest levels of the financial system.
link to original
Patrick Byrne details foreign interference
This is a long and detailed read, well worth skimming with some segments read carefully. The elephant in the room is why can’t we as a society be open about this? A snip below and an image from Byrne’s post.
31. One in five components used in voting machines are from China-based companies
Byrne is a smart guy using a lot of his own money to do this. I do not see a credible motive for him to be lying. Or any reason he would waste his time on fantasies. Furthermore, a great number of Americans agree with his stated motives: to get to the truth. Me included. ABN
Big Tech strikes again
A Youtube spokesperson said:
“We have demonetized The Epoch Times’ YouTube channel and affiliated channels and suspended them from the YouTube Partner Program. All channels on YouTube need to comply with our Community Guidelines and in order to monetize, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines. Channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program.”
YouTube demonetizes The Epoch Times
No specific, factual reasons given, so we are right to guess. Is YT beholden to CCP? Is Epoch Times becoming so popular its interviews are undermining the Big Tech narrative? I post Epoch interviews from time to time because they are substantive and get right to the point. In my view, they are actually fairly vanilla and studiously avoid many crucial problems central to USA and world.
A blanket excuse for many of the suspensions and deplatformings we have been seeing recently is the “content” nebulously “promotes violence.” So a thoughtful analysis of the Capitol riot that refrains from calling it a “terrorist insurrection” or shows Antifa was involved is somehow promoting rioting at the Capitol and thus violence.
It should be clear by now that Donald Trump is and was no cult figure. He is and was not a demagogue or subject to idolization. What his supporters liked and still like are his policies which virtually all aimed at making America a healthy, well-defined, and wealthy polity whose aggregate voice would be heard and influence our government.
Cross my heart, I would be very happy with Biden if he continued Trump’s policies and went further down that road. Also, though I think he is a ridiculous president, I do not hate him and will not put a stupid hat on my head in protest or encourage burning our cities because of him or his policies.
Notice the ironic symbolism of a permanent fence around Congress (and most of their fabulous homes) while our borders fall into disrepair both legally and physically. U.S. Capitol needs permanent fencing around complex after deadly riot, acting chief says.
See also: Florida Congresswoman Proposes ‘Loyalty Test’ For Employees.
Patrick Byrne blows the doors off a massive post-election “shit-show” with more than one clogged hopper
This piece is a must read if you want to know what was happening behind the scenes in the weeks following the November 3 election. Byrne is clear about what he means and engaging in how he says it. It’s actually “fun” to read though the subject matter—incompetence, disorganization, booze, and failure—is depressing. Follow the link below the excerpt for the full story.
…At one point I learned how the President was staying involved. Periodically, Rudy Giuliani and the Mediocrity were going over to the White House to brief him. Really, no kidding: the person who was so bad my colleagues had declared they would quit rather than work another moment with that person, and the 76 year old guy who had trouble sending an email and was spending his days sloshed, were the ones explaining to the President what was going on and what his options were. At first I thought it was some kind of sick joke, but I confirmed it. The Mediocrity and the Mayor were the ultimate point-people on the mission of stopping this world-historic task.
Flynn and I felt sick. A frequent subject of mutter between us ran along the lines, “Why the fuck are we doing this?” The president’s children were off, uninvolved, or planning retirements, or pep-rallying. We could detect no discernible strategy out of the President’s team, no marching orders, just an organization wandering around and melting as it did so. A Mediocrity who was so bad, we had had to make special arrangements such that the Mediocrity did not have direct contact with our people, or they were going to flee. And the whole mess was led by a 76 year old gentleman, a man mujch beloved by his country, but who six weeks into what might be the most sophisticated cybertheft in all of history, could still not have a coherent conversation beyond, “Did you hear that 211 dead people in Philadelphia voted? Dead people?!?!? And they voted! Have you heard?!?”
How DJT Lost the White House, November 3 – December 23: All the President’s Team(s)
Volume Three of the Navarro Report
…While it is now politically correct in progressive circles and the mainstream media to demand that all Americans submit and confess to the “truth” of what may well be the fiction of a free and fair election for the sake of “unity” and “harmony,” such a Kafkaesque demand in the face of the evidence in this report will likely have the opposite effect.
Volume Three of the Navarro Report
