“For God’s sake. Stop giving your “”Democratically-Elected”” Governments the benefit of the doubt”

University professors who are critical of the establishment have witnessed their space steadily shrink in Iran over the past two years.

In recent weeks, however, authorities have dismissed dozens of independents from their posts in a project that has been called a "second cultural revolution" to purge higher education of professors whose views do not align with the Islamic Republic. 

The administration of principlist President Ebrahim Raisi began sacking university professors, such as philosophy professor Bijan Abdul Karimi and sociologist Mohammad Fazeli, and philosophy researcher Arash Abazari, during the early months of his presidency in 2021.

But the rate of dismissals seems to have accelerated over the past few months, causing alarm across the academic and intellectual communities that the move would have a long-lasting effect on Iranian society.

In August, the reformist Etemad newspaper released a list of 58 professors who have been fired by the government since the purge began. 

The United States has quietly acknowledged that Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard successfully put an imaging satellite into orbit this week in a launch that resembled others previously criticized by Washington as helping Tehran's ballistic missile program.

The U.S. military has not responded to repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press since Iran announced the launch of the Noor-3 satellite on Wednesday, the latest successful launch by the Revolutionary Guard after Iran's civilian space program faced a series of failed launches in recent years.

Early Friday, however, data published by the website space-track.org listed a launch Wednesday by Iran that put the Noor-3 satellite into orbit. Information for the website is supplied by the 18th Space Defense Squadron of the U.S. Space Force, the newest arm of the American military.

It put the satellite at over 450 kilometers (280 miles) above the Earth’s surface, which corresponds to Iranian state media reports regarding the launch. It also identified the rocket carrying the satellite as a Qased, a three-stage rocket fueled by both liquid and solid fuels first launched by the Guard in 2020 when it unveiled its up-to-then-secret space program.

For the 13th time, a War Thunder player has shared sensitive military information on one of the video game’s forums.

Developed by Gaijin Entertainment, War Thunder is a multiplayer video game that provides players with realistic simulations using U.S. and foreign military equipment. The gamers’ stickler for accuracy has prompted several users to attempt to win arguments on the game’s forums by sharing sensitive information about a variety of weaponry – including F-117 Nighthawks.

Niche Gamer, a news and reviews website about video games, was first to report that a War Thunder player recently shared the technical manual for the AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter. The Apache is the Army’s attack helicopter, which first entered service in the 1980s. Production on the AH-64D began in 1997, and the AH-64E is the latest version of the helicopter.

The technical manual is restricted to service members, Defense Department civilians, and military contractors, and that means posting it violated War Thunder’s rules, a forum moderator noted. Those rules explain that even declassified information can be “restricted” if it includes technical data for military technologies that cannot be exported.

In 1967, the CIA’s covert use of the National Student Association to spread countermessages to communism was revealed by a college dropout named Michael Wood.2 The revelation sent shockwaves through the U.S., and as journalists started to pull at the strings, the the CIA’s covert propaganda operations unraveled.

Journalists discovered that the CIA had set up nonprofit foundations to funnel taxpayer money into philanthropic foundations that then sent the CIA’s “donations” to organizations that had joined the CIA’s payroll to promote government-sponsored propaganda

These included youth organizations and student groups, church groups, public radio and news organizations. Sen. Wayne Morse, D-Ore., slammed the CIA’s covert propaganda activities, arguing the agency had created a “credibility chasm” within public opinion — a gap that could not and would not be bridged unless the government made clear that it would “fill the chasm with the truth”

The CIA was never reined in and is more involved in propaganda activities today than ever before

While many still have not realized it, we are at war, and the aggressors are government intelligence and security agencies that have turned their weapon of choice — information — against their own citizens

The FDA was forced by a judge to release clinical data on the COVID vaccines back in January and so 55,000 pages of documents were just released.

The FDA had originally wanted to hide the data for 75 years and release it in 2096 because, of course, the FDA is basically engaged in a criminal conspiracy. The COVID vaccines should never have been approved. This was obvious from the very beginning when animal trials were skipped in the Trump Administration’s ill-fated “Operation Warp Speed.” And now it’s undeniably true. We have the clinical data, and it’s horrific.

Hiding out in one appendix is the clinical data for Pfizer’s vaccine — which lists 1,291 adverse side effects in alphabetical order. 

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to a pair of scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman will share the prize.

The technology was experimental before the pandemic, but has now been given to millions of people around the world to protect them against serious Covid-19.

The same mRNA technology is now being researched for other diseases, including cancer.

The Nobel Prize committee said: "The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times."

Webmaster addition: I wouldn't get too excited. In 1949, the exact same Nobel prize was awarded to the inventor of the lobotomy, António Egas Moniz. A lobotomy consisted of jamming what was essentially an ice pick through the roof of the nose into the brain and stirring it around!

The White House is prohibiting senior administration officials from traveling for international energy engagements that promote carbon-intensive fuels, including oil, natural gas and coal, Fox News Digital has learned.

The guidance — which originated from the White House National Security Council (NSC) — was revealed in a Department of Energy (DOE) memo issued internally to agency staff on Sept. 15 and obtained by Fox News Digital. The memo was authored by Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk who outlined travel restrictions and stated officials are required to obtain approval from the NSC before attending any global energy engagement.

"This guidance sets out a presumption that agencies and departments will pursue international energy engagement that advances clean energy projects," Turk wrote in the memo. "It also outlines a process for seeking limited exceptions to pursue carbon-intensive engagements on a justified geostrategic imperative or energy-for-development/energy access basis."

Windows operating systems are the target of new malware dubbed ZenRAT by U.S.-based cybersecurity company Proofpoint. The attackers built a website that impersonates the popular Bitwarden password manager; if accessed via Windows, the fake site delivers the ZenRAT malware disguised as Bitwarden software. It’s currently unknown if the malware is used by threat actors for cyberespionage or for financial fraud.

We’ll delve into the technical details and share more information from Proofpoint researchers, as well as provide tips on mitigating this ZenRAT malware threat.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak put a political leash on his attack dog Defense Minister Grant Shapps, who made headlines this week saying British ground troops would enter Ukraine to train the Ukrainian Army.  Shapps statement caused a clear response from Russia saying such troops would be targets for the Russian Army.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Sunday that any Brit soldiers training soldiers inside Ukraine would be legitimate targets for Russian forces and "ruthlessly destroyed."

He directed his fury at Shapps who told The Sunday Telegraph that he wants to "eventually" deploy military instructors to Ukraine in addition to training Ukrainian troops in Britain.

In a post on Telegram, Medvedev fumed: "The number of leading idiots in Nato countries is growing."

"One newly minted cretin - the British Minister of Defence - decided to transfer English training courses for Ukrainian soldiers to the territory of Ukraine itself."

"These idiots are actively pushing us towards a Third World War."

The Bundestag in Germany said that Ukraine will have the right to attack the territory of occupied Crimea with German-Supplied, Taurus missiles. This was stated by the Chairman of the Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann.

Germany has not yet officially announced the transfer of Taurus missiles because the Russians have openly warned about this.

The Taurus KEPD 350 is a Swedish-German air-launched cruise missile, manufactured by Taurus Systems and used by Germany, Spain, and South Korea.

The missile incorporates stealth technology and has an official range in excess of 500 km (300 mi).[10] It is powered by a turbofan engine at Mach 0.95 and can be carried by Panavia Tornado, Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab JAS 39 Gripen, McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, and McDonnell Douglas F-15K Slam Eagle aircraft.

The dual stage 480-kilogram (1,100 lb) warhead, called MEPHISTO (multi-effect penetrator highly sophisticated and target optimized), features a pre-charge and initial penetrating charge to clear soil or enter "hard and deeply buried targets" (HDBT) such as hardened underground bunkers, then a variable delay fuse to control detonation of the main warhead.

Not content with conspiring with the British Parliament in throttling Russell Brand’s voice, NATO has set the entire British legal establishment against him.

Victoria Prentis KC, Britain’s attorney general, has warned the nation’s editors that any pertinent coverage about either Russell Brand or any criminal case that may be taken against him “may amount to contempt”, even though no arrests have yet taken place or cautions to Brand issued and no warrants have yet been issued against him. Legally, even in NATO’s corrupt British heartland, Brand should be free as a bird to go about his business, as should we be to make reasonable comments about him.

That is not now the case. Having been traduced at the behest of the 77th Brigade by the British media, Prentis has now decreed that any salient comments on Brand’s as yet non-existing case is in contempt of court, despite the fact that Brand has not yet got his day in court and no jury of his peers has yet been appointed to adjudicate on the case which, to repeat, as of yet does not exist.

There’s been a lot of debate lately over the US strategy of surrounding nations like Russia and China with war machinery in order to deter them from aggressive actions. Some argue that since powerful nations tend to respond aggressively to the amassing of military threats on their borders, this policy actually provokes the very aggressions its proponents claim it prevents.

And to these people I say: hogwash. Only peaceful and harmonious responses can possibly be expected from policies of military encirclement.

That’s why I propose that the People’s Liberation Army should begin militarily encircling the continental United States with Chinese war machinery as quickly as possible, in order to deter future US aggression around the world.

On this episode of The Whistleblowers, John Kiriakou speaks with Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer. While working in the Cayman Islands as an employee of Julius Baer, he exposed financial crimes. In blowing the whistle, Elmer believes he was acting in the public interest. Since then, he has been pursued for breaking the draconian Swiss banking secrecy laws. His family has been severely harassed. Under investigation since 2005, he has already served 220 days in prison, and is still being pursued by judges of the high court in Zurich.

The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else.

When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: “Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud” — Apple’s cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who’s behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse — and political will — of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., appeared at a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, earlier this week to join members of the United Auto Workers on the picket line against the Big Three automakers. There, he called himself “pro-worker,” challenged the companies to give workers a pay raise and more time off, and said he’s with the workers “100 percent.”

While he is rallying against the Big Three now, he has previously received campaign contributions from the automakers. During his first run for Senate in 2018 and through 2020, Hawley’s PAC received $8,500 from GM’s PAC, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. His Senate campaign received $3,500 from Ford’s PAC and another $1,000 from a GM executive during that same time period. His PAC and campaign received an additional $13,000 from PACs associated with Toyota, a Japanese company notorious for running non-union shops in the United States.

Asked about the donations, a spokesperson for Hawley pointed to the senator’s 2021 promise to no longer accept money from corporate PACs.

As one of only seven commercial facilities currently operating in the United States, Braven Environmental is at the vanguard of the growing chemical recycling boom. An Intercept investigation, however, found numerous issues at its Zebulon facility.

A review of meeting minutes, permit applications, and compliance documents reveals that Braven misled the public about the risks of its pyrolysis operation and has potentially endangered human health and the environment through “significant noncompliance” with hazardous waste management regulations. While the ACC has touted Braven as a sustainable success story, documents also show that much of the company’s pyrolysis oil was not converted into useful plastic or fuel — it was disposed of as highly toxic waste.

“Chemical recycling is really a greenwashing technique for burning up a bunch of petrochemicals in a new way, and it’s releasing tons of air pollutants into the environment,” said Alexis Luckey, executive director of Toxic Free NC, in an interview. “What we’re talking about is incinerating carcinogens and neurotoxicants in a community.”

A ministry statement said some 20 targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, were “destroyed” in the aerial operation, including caves, shelters and depots.

Earlier, suicide bomber detonated an explosive device near an entrance of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, injuring two police officers. A second assailant was killed in a shootout with police Sunday, the interior minister said.

An news agency close to the PKK said he group has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing.

Archaeologists discovered the world's oldest wooden structure, said to be almost half a million years old.

A team of archaeologists unearthed a simple wood structure along a riverbank in Africa. At the dig site, researchers found two bush willow tree logs that appeared to have been manipulated by ancient humans approximately 476,000 years ago. The archaeology discovery makes it older than homo sapiens – believed to have emerged around 300,000 years ago.

Scientists believe that the high water levels from the nearby Kalambo Falls and fine sediment encased the structure to help preserve the wood.

The study of the oldest wooden structure was published in the journal Nature, and declared that archaeologists had discovered "the earliest evidence for structural use of wood in the archaeological record."

According to CNN, "The wood pieces were too old to be directly dated using radiocarbon techniques. Instead, the team used a technique called luminescence dating, which involved measuring the natural radioactivity in minerals in the fine sediment that encased the wood to figure out when it was last exposed to sunlight."

On Monday 16th of March 2020, when Boris Johnson first proclaimed, “You must stay home,” I very meekly said “OK!” And the chances are that you did too. 

Polling from the time shows that self-reported compliance with the stay-at-home orders was high – a finding broadly corroborated by mobility data, which has the marked advantage of not depending on respondents’ honesty about following the law (Ganslmeier et al. 2022; Jackson and Bradford 2021). 

In itself, however, this data alone does not tell us why an unprecedented suspension of our civil liberties enjoyed such high levels of compliance.

There are, however, surveys that do provide some insight (see, for example, Jackson and Bradford 2021; Foad et al. 2021; and Halliday et al. 2022) and amongst their more surprising findings is that instrumental considerations – that is, personal fear of the virus or of coercion by the State – may have been relatively unimportant in driving compliance with the lockdown rules. Instead, they found that, in general, people followed the rules because (1) they were the law and (2) because they provided us with a shared understanding of what was good and right to do, which many of us seem to have internalised (Jackson and Bradford 2021).

The first of these is not particularly surprising. The law enjoys a ‘reservoir of loyalty’ amongst Brits who are therefore already predisposed to respect its edicts just because they have been made law (Halliday et al. 2022, p.400). 

This, however, does not explain the second driver of compliance. That is, it does not explain why we bought into lockdown laws and willingly accepted them as the basis of our public morality – to the point that we even often justified our non-compliant behaviours as nonetheless remaining within the ‘spirit of the law’ (Meers et al. 2021). It does not explain why we looked upon the sanitised, terrorised redrawing of society and saw that it was good. It is worth briefly revisiting, with the benefit of cooled heads and hindsight, what exactly this looked like. 

When western nations rolled out a grand plan to throttle Russian oil imports and impose sanctions on Kremlin energy exports, we - and many others - laughed: after all, we have repeatedly seen how toothless western sanctions are when seeking to contain "rogue regime" oil profits, from Iran (which is pretty much selling oil to China at max capacity) to Venezuela and onward. One year later, our laughter has been well justified, because as the FT reports, "Russia has succeeded in avoiding G7 sanctions on most of its oil exports", a shift in trade flows that will boost the Kremlin’s revenues as crude rises towards $100 a barrel, and as Russian Urals prices hit $80, the highest level in over a year.

It’s estimated that there are nearly 1.4 million kilometers (0.9 million miles) of submarine cables in service globally. They ensure emails, content, and calls find their way, linking colossal data centers and facilitating worldwide communication.

Currently, there are 552 active and planned submarine cables:

Submarine cables harness fiber-optic technology, transmitting information via rapid light pulses through glass fibers. These fibers, thinner than human hair, are protected by plastic or even steel wire layers.

Cables usually have the diameter of a garden hose, but often with added armor near the shore. Coastal cables are buried under the seabed, hidden from view on the beach, while deep-sea ones rest on the ocean floor.

Length varies widely, from the 131-kilometer CeltixConnect cable, connecting Dublin, Ireland, and Holyhead, UK, to the sprawling 20,000-kilometer Asia America Gateway cable, connecting San Luis Obispo, California, to Hawaii and Southeast Asia:

Outraged parents have condemned the local mayor’s decision to accommodate up to 80 asylum seekers in containers on the grounds of a primary school in the German town of Monheim am Rhein.

Dozens of local residents attended a recent question time of the local council to voice their displeasure over the controversial move proposed by Mayor Daniel Zimmerman’s administration and expressed their concerns for child safety, calling the plans both inappropriate and unacceptable.

Starting next spring, a cohort of migrants will reside in containers located on the school grounds, which are no longer used for educational purposes.

In response to the protestations of locals, the council cited economic factors as a primary reason for the move, insisting that the estimated €150,000 it would cost to convert the containers into housing was substantially lower than the cost of renting private accommodations, where around 80 percent of the migrants recently received by the municipality currently reside.

“We simply can’t keep up with renting anymore,” a city press spokesperson told parents at the meeting.

Beware, the crisis at the southern border may be much worse than it appears...

Free Apple watches, bus and plane tickets all across the continental United States, and sophisticated lawyers standing by to counsel migrants on how to best navigate border officials’ scrutiny of asylum on the occasions when they are actually required to defend their asylum claims. These benefits being offered to illegal border crossers have left the public shocked, angry, and in many cases, feeling the issue closer to home than ever before. Many cities and states have also been overwhelmed as the consequences of the crisis have migrated well beyond the southern border states. Recently, New York City Mayor Eric Adams made news when he emphatically declared that the now-regular stream of migrants into the Big Apple “will ruin the City!”

It’s not just local budgets and social services that are being squeezed to the breaking point, although those are nothing to sneeze at and will have to be addressed. The increase in crime may be the biggest concern. Violent crime rates are up, and violent incidents are prominent on the nightly news. Less visible are the other criminal enterprises causing ripple effects. Human trafficking has gained more attention as its shocking reality is (very) slowly exposed. The recently released independent film, “The Sound of Freedom,” struck a chord for this very reason – human trafficking is striking too close to home for most Americans’ peace of mind. 

Then there are the drugs. The opioid epidemic has gotten substantially worse in the last few years, with annual overdose deaths, after a slight decline from 2017 through 2019, increasing dramatically in the last several years. As if this isn’t bad enough, the opportunities for smuggling in other illegal contraband have increased as well.

The transportation of those wishing to leave Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia is coming to its "logical conclusion," Armenian government spokeswoman Nazeli Baghdasaryan said on Sunday, adding that all those who wanted to leave the breakaway region after the recent escalation had already done it.

"The intensity [of the flow] has significantly decreased. We can say that the last people wishing to move to Armenia have done so and the process is coming to its logical conclusion," Baghdasaryan said.

Despite this fact, Yerevan will keep providing transportation for those wishing to leave the region.

As many as 100,514 people from Nagorno-Karabakh have arrived in Armenia since the recent escalation last week, Baghdasaryan said, adding that temporary housing had been provided for 48,649 people.

Billionaire Ray Dalio is warning the average American that the ruling class has put them in a “risky” financial situation. The debt crisis is getting worse by the second and a total collapse of the financial system is looming.

“We’re going to have a debt crisis in this country,” Dalio told CNBC according to a report by RT in an interview that aired Thursday. “How fast it transpires, I think, is going to be a function of that supply-demand issue, so I’m watching that very closely.”

Climate crisis activists have dreamed up a campaign that they bombastically call a “treaty” to ban advertising of high-carbon products – in other words, anything they, or their sponsors, don’t like.  These groups are not working alone; they are politically funded and politically motivated.

They are making moves to ban advertisements of motor vehicles and air travel, and the latest “fossil fuel” adverts being targeted is meat. You read that right, meat is being treated the same as a “fossil fuel” according to the Council of the Dutch City of Haarlem which has included meat on their list of “banned fossil fuel endorsements.”

All over the United States, major cities are descending into a state of chaos.  Every day, more migrants that came pouring through our wide open borders arrive in our inner cities, and many of them end up joining gangs or selling drugs.  Meanwhile, more of our young people get hooked on drugs with each passing day.  In the worst areas, you can see hordes of them literally staggering around like zombies because they have been drugged out of their minds.  All of this addiction is fueling an unprecedented homelessness crisis.  In fact, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that homelessness in the United States is growing faster this year than ever before.  In this sort of an environment, it should be no surprise that violent crime is absolutely exploding all over the nation.  If you choose to wander the streets of America’s hellish inner cities, you are literally taking your life into your hands, because a violent predator could literally be around the next corner.  Unfortunately, we are still only in the very early stages of this crisis.  It will inevitably get even worse in the months ahead as economic conditions deteriorate even more.

The most recent edition of the US Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the US military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

An Industrial War of Attrition Would Require Vast Numbers of Troops

The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the US to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.

The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.