Kiev firing Western-made missiles at civilian infrastructure – Moscow

A US-supplied HIMARS system was likely employed in a “terrorist attack” in Russia’s Kursk Region, the Foreign Ministry has said

Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists on Friday that during the day, there had been several “terrorist attacks by the Kiev regime against civilian targets on Russian territory.”

“In particular, for the first time, Kursk Region was hit by Western-made rockets, most likely from an American HIMARS,” she said.

The Ukrainian attack “completely destroyed” a bridge over the Seim River in the region’s Glushkovsky District, killing volunteers who were assisting local residents with evacuation, the spokeswoman stressed.

"As we have said earlier, all those responsible for these inhumane acts will face severe punishment,” Zakharova warned.

https://www.rt.com/russia/602721-kursk-himars-us-ukraine/

Watch: Bloody Brawl In Turkey's Parliament Left Lawmakers Injured, Even Women Were Punched

Things erupted in turmoil when MP Sik called AKP lawmakers "the biggest terrorists of this country."

That's when an enraged Alpay Ozalan of the AKP suddenly approached the podium and slapped and the opposition representative, who fell to the ground. From there all hell broke lose and at one point even women were being punched.

Politico detailed of the massive fight, which should prove a national embarrassment and certainly won't do anything to help improve Turkey's years-long efforts to join the European Union:

At that point, AKP member Alpay Özalan launched into Şık and shoved him to the ground. Other AKP lawmakers joined in to punch him while he was on the floor.

The attack quickly turned into a full-fledged brawl that lasted 30 minutes and led to the suspension of the hearing. When the session eventually resumed three hours later, MPs voted to uphold Atalay’s suspension.

The parliament also reprimanded Şık for his statements against the AKP and Özalan for the assault that kicked off the fight.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1824479625315078646

New Video Appears to Show DC Police Units Planting a J6 Pipe Bomb

https://twitter.com/i/status/1823783318300557761

Security Officers Exchange Gunfire with Multiple Active Shooters at Air Force Base in San Antonio

The JBSA-Chapman Training Annex’s entry gate reopened after active shooters attempted to gain entry on Saturday

Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland officials said its security officers returned fire on shooters who attempted to gain entry through the main gate at the JBSA-Chapman Training Annex.

San Antonio police said the initial incident happened around 2:15 a.m. Saturday.

Air Force security officers working at the entry gate located at Ray Ellison Boulevard and Medina Base Road told police they also heard several shots in addition to the shots that were fired at them.

After the first incident, SAPD said more armed Air Force security officers were added to the entrance gate as a precaution.

Around 4:30 a.m., according to base officials, a vehicle stopped on Medina Base Road located east of the JBSA-Chapman Training Annex gate.

For the second time, shots were fired at Air Force security officers, police said. The security officers then returned fire on the suspects’ vehicle.

SAPD said no injuries were reported in the incident. The base said the shooters are not known to have any military affiliation.

After the JBSA-Chapman Training Annex entry gate was closed due to a shooting investigation, the gate has since reopened.

KSAT witnessed cars entering the gate to the training annex around 10:45 a.m.

It is not yet known how many shooters attempted entry to the training annex gate, if the same suspects were responsible for both shooting incidents or if anyone was taken into custody.

KSAT asked a nearby business and a Northside ISD school for surveillance footage of either shooting, but neither said their surveillance footage captured the incidents.

KSAT reached out to JBSA-Lackland for additional information but has not yet heard back.

SAPD said its investigation into both incidents is ongoing.

https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2024/08/17/multiple-active-shooters-reported-near-jbsa-lackland-base-officials-say/

Every Leading Large Language Model Leans Left Politically

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrating into everyday life – as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems – which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations – can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users. LLMs' growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.

So it's of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLoS ONE, this doesn't seem to be the case.

AI researcher David Rozado of Otago Polytechnic and Heterodox Academy administered 11 different political orientation tests to 24 of the leading LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Twitter’s Grok. He found that they invariably lean slightly left politically.

"The homogeneity of test results across LLMs developed by a wide variety of organizations is noteworthy," Rozado commented.

This raises a key question: why are LLMs so universally biased in favor of leftward political viewpoints? Could the models' creators be fine-tuning their AIs in that direction, or are the massive datasets upon which they are trained inherently biased? Rozado could not conclusively answer this query.

"The results of this study should not be interpreted as evidence that organizations that create LLMs deliberately use the fine-tuning or reinforcement learning phases of conversational LLM training to inject political preferences into LLMs. If political biases are being introduced in LLMs post-pretraining, the consistent political leanings observed in our analysis for conversational LLMs may be an unintentional byproduct of annotators’ instructions or dominant cultural norms and behaviors."

Ensuring LLM neutrality will be a pressing need, Rozado wrote.

"LLMs can shape public opinion, influence voting behaviors, and impact the overall discourse in society. Therefore, it is crucial to critically examine and address the potential political biases embedded in LLMs to ensure a balanced, fair, and accurate representation of information in their responses to user queries."

Source: Rozado D (2024) The political preferences of LLMs. PLOS ONE 19(7): e0306621. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306621

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/08/14/every_leading_large_language_model_leans_left_politically_1051145.html

Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders. He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions.

Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard, the Brazilian public not being informed about these orders and our Brazilian staff having no responsibility or control over whether content is blocked on our platform, Moraes has chosen to threaten our staff in Brazil rather than respect the law or due process.

As a result, to protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately.

The X service remains available to the people of Brazil.

We are deeply saddened that we have been forced to make this decision. The responsibility lies solely with Alexandre de Moraes.

His actions are incompatible with democratic government. The people of Brazil have a choice to make - democracy, or Alexandre de Moraes.

https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1824819053061669244

📍Dundrum, Tipperary.

This tiny Irish village of 200 people was forcibly planted this morning. 280 ‘asylum seekers’ are to be housed in this hotel, replacing the local population overnight.

Ireland is ground zero for population replacement.

https://x.com/Mick_O_Keeffe/status/1823329085541564586

Isabel has been arrested, AGAIN, for THINKING.

MPs vote TOMORROW on banning silent prayer near all abortion facilities in🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿&🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

"You've said you're engaging in prayer, which is the offense."

"Silent prayer."

"You were still engaging in prayer, which is the offense."

https://x.com/i/status/1632820479131099136

U.S. Colleges Clamp Down on Free Speech

Zionist ADL overpowers American universities to squash possible protests against the tragedy in Gaza.

As collegiates gear up for another semester, school administrators across the nation are putting a stiff knee on free speech, primarily because of the rise in activism against the Gaza genocide.

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigned Wednesday for her handling of the protests at the Manhattan campus where tent encampments sprung up last spring.

According to the AP, the new rules include banning encampments, limiting the length of demonstrations, and restricting protests to specific arenas and to those with university identification. Protestors must also register well in advance to limit the size of gatherings.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) condemned the implementations as “overly restrictive” and “beyond reasonable.”

Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs.

The University of Pennsylvania also created “temporary guidelines” banning encampments and overnight protests. The school requires posters and any banners to be removed within two weeks. UPenn claimed to be committed to free speech in its statement, but that doesn’t appear so.

Indiana University has a new “expressive activities policy” geared towards eliminating encampments and requiring that signs be given prior approval.

The AP reported Harvard’s student newspaper showed the university’s considerations for prohibiting overnight encampments, chalked messages, and signs without prior approval.

https://nationalfile.com/u-s-colleges-clamp-down-on-free-speech/

Vast Stretches of America Are so Depressed That They Look Like Something Out of a Horror Movie

The wealthy are doing just fine at the moment, but they don’t seem to understand that much of the country is deeply hurting right now. 59 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is currently experiencing a recession, and that is because most of them are personally experiencing economic pain. Literally just about everything is substantially more expensive in 2024, more major layoffs are being announced with each passing day, and thousands of businesses are going bankrupt. We haven’t seen a tsunami of economic suffering like this in a long time.

If you live in a wealthy area in a good part of the country, you may wonder what all of the fuss is about.

If you and everyone around you is still doing well, life may still seem quite good.

But the truth is that there are vast stretches of this country that are so depressed that they literally look like something out of a horror movie.

There are many communities that are so plagued by poverty, drugs, homelessness, violence and theft that it seems like there is no possible way that things could ever turn around.

A man named Drew Binksy recently visited one of the poorest parts of West Virginia, and he discovered that most of the people there are living in poverty…

‘Most of [the residents] live below the poverty line and life expectancy is well below the national average.

‘Many families rely on Government assistance just to get by and there’s limited access to healthcare.’

Today, tens of millions of Americans are heavily dependent on the checks that they get from the government each month.

In areas where most people have lost hope of ever finding a better life, drug addiction often runs rampant, and that is precisely what Binksy witnessed…

He also notes that ‘crystal meth and Fentanyl addictions run wild’ in the state, while many people are ‘living so isolated, they have their own dialect.’

The content creator starts his journey in Bluefield and as he wanders through the once prosperous manufacturing city, he says it feels like he has stepped into ‘a forgotten world.’

He continues: ‘Empty streets and closed shops stretch as far as the eye can see. It’s like life just stopped.’

This is where the entire country is heading.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about the “retail apocalypse” that is rapidly spreading across America.

Thousands upon thousands of stores are closing, and most of those abandoned stores will not be filled any time soon.

But at least they will make convenient locations for drug addicts to gather.

According to one woman that Binksy interviewed, 30 percent of the people in her community are into illegal drugs…

One woman in the store tells the camera crew: ‘We’re the poorest county in the United States or we were.

‘About 30 per cent of our community are dopers, druggies… more than 30 per cent!’

https://thelibertydaily.com/vast-stretches-america-are-so-depressed-that-they/

Suicide bomber kills 16 soldiers in southern Yemen, official says

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claims responsibility for the attack that targeted STC fighters in Abyan.

A suicide bomber has killed 16 Yemeni pro-government soldiers and wounded 18 others in a military post in the southern province of Abyan, local authorities have said.

The attacker “drove a booby-trapped car into a site for the security forces” in the Mudiyah district on Friday, said Mohamed al-Naqib, a spokesperson for the Southern Transitional Council (STC).

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility for the operation in a statement, saying a bomber detonated a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device at the military post, according to US-based SITE intelligence group.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/16/suicide-bomber-kills-16-soldiers-in-southern-yemen-official-says

So Al-Qaeda are fighting with the Israeli UK US V Yemen

At Least 10 Killed as Israel Attacks Southern Lebanon Industrial Area

Hezbollah reports that all of the slain are civilians

On Saturday, Israel carried out an airstrike against the industrial-residential area of the southern Lebanon city of Nabatieh, killing at least 10 people and wounding five others, two of them seriously. Officials say that the airstrike hit a residential building.

Reports from the Lebanon Health Ministry are that all 10 of the slain were Syrian nationals. The attack appears to have targeted the residences of people working in the industrial area and their families. A mother and two of her children were among the slain.

Israel claimed that the attack targeted a weapons storage facility belonging to Hezbollah. Locals said that was not the case, and the factory owner said they are a “well-known family” in the area not aligned with any political party.

Hezbollah issued an announcement saying that all of the slain were civilians. Reportedly they fired some 55 rockets against northern Israel’s Ayelet HaShahar in retaliation. Israel’s Defense Forces claimed there were no injuries in the attack.

Later, however, the Israeli Army issued a statement reporting that two soldiers had been wounded in an attack near the Lebanon border. They did not offer details on how they were injured, so this may have been separate from the 55 rockets fired. One of the two was reported seriously wounded, the other lightly.

The Israeli attack took place overnight, just hours after negotiations to try to broker a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip had ended. US and French officials have said that a Gaza truce is a key step to preventing an Israeli war in Lebanon.

https://news.antiwar.com/2024/08/17/at-least-10-killed-as-israel-attacks-southern-lebanon-industrial-area/

Hunter Biden’s ex-partner cooperating in bizarre murder-for-hire prosecution, court records show

Devon Archer, who worked with Hunter Biden on several ventures stretching back to 2008, argued that his sentencing on a fraud conviction should be delayed because of his full cooperation with ongoing congressional and Justice Department investigations.

Devon Archer, the former Hunter Biden confidant convicted of fraud in January, whose testimony to Congress transformed the congressional impeachment probe into alleged Biden family corruption, also is a cooperating witness in an unrelated federal murder-for-hire prosecution, according to court records.

Archer's lawyers have used their client's cooperation in the Vermont murder-for-hire case and the impeachment inquiry in Congress to successfully delay his sentencing last month in a securities fraud case, where he was convicted back in 2018.

According to the court docket, U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams granted Archer’s motion to argue the sentencing and scheduled a hearing date for Nov. 8, 2024.

"The primary reason for this request is to allow Mr. Archer to complete his ongoing cooperation with Congressional and Department of Justice investigations, and to allow the Court to have all relevant information about that cooperation at sentencing,” defense lawyer Matthew Schwartz wrote.

Correspondence in the court files states that Archer is also cooperating as a witness in a separate prosecution in Vermont centering on a murder-for-hire plot and fraud.

The defendants in that case, Serhat Gumrukcu of Los Angeles and Berk Eratay of Las Vegas, were charged with wire fraud in connection to a murder-for-hire plot and the January 2018 kidnapping and death of Gregory Davis, according to a Justice Department press release.

Archer is cooperating as a witness because he was a victim of one defendant’s fraud and is not “in any way involved in the alleged criminal conduct in that case,” his lawyer clarified for the judge.

Archer’s testimony last year emerged as a central component of the House Oversight Committee’s impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden. He has continued to cooperate with that committee’s investigation, according to the court filing.

Archer was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud in 2018 in a Manhattan federal court as part of a tribal bonds scheme that involved some of Hunter Biden's associates, though Biden was never accused of wrongdoing in that scheme.

Another defendant in the case, Jason Galanis, would later tell the House Oversight Committee that the fraudulent scheme set up by him and Archer was for the purpose of raising money for a hedge fund with Hunter Biden, a firm that his father was set to join after his vice presidency. Indeed, there is evidence that Hunter Biden was closely associated with the firm at the center of the fraud scheme, Burnham Asset Management.

In February 2022, Archer was sentenced to one year and a day in prison. After an appeal, Archer's legal team argued that he was improperly sentenced according to erroneous guidelines and that his lawyer provided ineffective counsel by not objecting to this error. In May, the federal judge agreed with his appeal on those grounds and ordered him to be resentenced.

You can read the Jul. 16, 2024, letter from Archer’s lawyer below:

File

July_16,_2024_ltr_fr_DA_atty_re_sentencing_re-schedule.pdf

Archer's lawyer noted that his client “continues to produce documents to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees and otherwise respond to their inquiries.” Additionally, the lawyer wrote that Archer is still expected to deliver “testimony in open hearings in the coming weeks” before the House committees, though a date had not been set when the July 16 letter was written. No hearings with Archer have taken place in the subsequent month.

The House Oversight Committee did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News. It is unclear if President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection just days after Archer’s letter had or will have any effect on the ongoing investigation.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/hunter-bidens-ex-partner-continues-cooperate-federal-investigators-wins

Serbia looks to reset ties with US, Israel with first Jewish FM Marko Djuric - interview

Djuric quoted in Hebrew what he describes as an old Jewish proverb and that translates in English to “You are only confined by the walls you build yourself.”

At a time of rampant antisemitism across much of Europe exacerbated by the war in Gaza, and with little fanfare, Serbia, a Balkan state of nearly seven million people and a minuscule Jewish population, appointed its first foreign minister of Jewish heritage in May.

Serbia, much like Israel, is a country that has traditionally sat at the crossroads of empires. It has a rich history that combines both East and West into something uniquely its own.

As the most populous country in the Western Balkans, its policy stance matters greatly for the overall stability of the region – one that has witnessed multiple American-led interventions in the 1990s and seen inroads made by Iran since the ’90s as well.

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-814966

Trump Calls for Increased Immigration: 'We Need More People, Especially With A.I. Coming'

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday called for increased immigration, insisting "we need more people, especially with AI coming."

"We're going to let a lot of people come in, because we need more people, especially with AI coming and all the different things," Trump said. "And the farmers need, everybody needs but we're going to make sure they're not murderers and drug dealers."

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64602

Microsoft abruptly closes Palestinian Skype and email accounts, disrupting communications amid Gaza conflict.

Microsoft has faced accusations of abruptly closing email accounts owned by Palestinians who used Skype to make phone calls to Gaza. According to a BBC investigation, several Palestinians living abroad had their Microsoft-owned voice and video chat app accounts terminated without warning, effectively “destroying their digital lives.” These closures have left them unable to access bank accounts, job offers, and the ability to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza. The situation is particularly challenging given the frequent disruptions to internet and mobile connectivity in Gaza due to the Israeli military campaign. While Microsoft claims that the account closures were due to violations of its terms of service, some Palestinians dispute this claim and express frustration over the sudden loss of crucial online services.

https://citizenwatchreport.com/microsoft-abruptly-closes-palestinian-skype-and-email-accounts-disrupting-communications-amid-gaza-conflict/

Appeals Court Rejects Challenge To California's Vote-By-Mail System

A U.S. appeals court on Aug. 15 turned away a challenge to California’s vote-by-mail laws.

The ruling addressed a case filed by the Election Integrity Project California (EIPCa) and other plaintiffs who appealed a ruling from a district court.

“Assuming that California officials have inadvertently counted some invalid [vote-by-mail] ballots in the past, the effect that counting such ballots had on the relative voting power of all votes was the same, regardless of voting method or geography,” U.S. Circuit Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote in the unanimous decision.

“A vote dilution claim requires a showing of disproportionate voting power for some voters over others, and EIPCa has not made—and cannot make—that showing based on the facts alleged,” she wrote.

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, vote dilution refers to votes carrying equal weight. Some voting systems, such as a Georgia county’s system that took tallied votes and selected officials using a majority of “county unit votes,” have been struck down by the courts.

“The crux of a vote dilution claim is inequality of voting power—not diminishment of voting power per se. After all, dilution of voting power, in an absolute sense, occurs any time the total number of votes increases in an election. Vote dilution in the legal sense occurs only when disproportionate weight is given to some votes over others within the same electoral unit,” the appeals court ruling stated.

While plaintiffs could have emerged victorious if they showed that a disproportionate number of invalid ballots were counted in favor of a particular candidate or party, the plaintiffs did not do that, the judges said.

U.S. Circuit Judges Michelle Friedland and Jennifer Sung joined Wardlaw in the decision.

All voters in California receive a ballot by mail. They can then choose to vote with the ballot or vote in person.

The plaintiffs said the laws governing the mail ballot system have led to an unconstitutional dilution of votes cast by people in-person, according to the lawsuit first filed in January 2021.

“Practices that promote the casting of illegal or unreliable ballots or fail to contain basic minimum guarantees against such conduct can violate the Fourteenth Amendment by leading to the diminution in value of validly cast ballots,” the latest version of the complaint stated. “Defendants have violated the Due Process Clause by implementing laws, regulations, and procedures that diminish the value of in-person voters, including EIPCa’s observers and plaintiffs in their respective counties.”

The original complaint requested decertification of the 2020 election. The latest version asked for an audit of all vote-by-mail ballots from that contest.

U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr. dismissed the case in 2023, finding in part that even if invalid vote-by-mail ballots were counted, they amounted to “garden variety problems,” not significant issues as required by court precedent.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/appeals-court-rejects-challenge-californias-vote-mail-system

The US “Special Relationship” with Israel: Abject Enslavement

I recently returned to the USA after a year-long absence, having taken up residence in exotic Morocco last July. Unfortunately I had a tight connection at LAX, which became even tighter when US Customs and Border Protection singled me out for interrogation. It seems that interesting stuff always pops up on government screens when they enter my name. How else would they know that I am a writer known for questioning the official story of 9/11? “So who did it?” the agent asked. “Israel,” I answered without hesitation.

A split second later, I was cursing myself for my impulsive honesty, brought on by sleeplessness and jet lag: “If that CPB agent is a Zionist, they’ll hold me for hours and I’ll never make my connection!”

Fortunately the agent took no offense and released me just in time to catch my flight. Apparently America isn’t a complete Zionist-occupied totalitarian hellhole yet.

But we’re getting there. A sign of the times was Israeli PM Netanyahu’s speech to Congress July 24. The good news is that 92 lawmakers boycotted the genocidal war criminal’s speech. The bad news is that the other 443 senators and representatives offered repeated standing ovations.

Why did more than 4/5ths of America’s lawmakers passionately salute the worst war criminal of the 21st century? Why the nauseatingly obsequious demonstration of loyalty to a genocidal foreign entity? It all comes down to what is euphemistically called the US-Israel “special relationship.”

So what exactly is the nature of that special relationship? There are plenty of available answers: A Google search of “US-Israel special relationship” yields 240 million results. The first thing Google tells us is that:

“Israel and the United States are bound closely by historic and cultural ties as well as by mutual interests. The U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship is strong, anchored by over $3 billion in Foreign Military Financing annually.”

https://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=293219

Funeral Director John O'Looney on the latest Monkey Pox scare.

"It's not a conspiracy anymore"

They've been preparing monkey pox vaccines for a year. You take em, you will die.

https://x.com/toobaffled/status/1824708339743461612

The US-Israel strategy is to use threats to prevent retaliation while continuing to attack and kill.

Point and case

US official warns Iran of 'cataclysmic' consequences if it attacks Israel

Senior official says Iranian strike would 'basically derail what we think is the best opportunity' in months to secure a Gaza ceasefire deal

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-official-warns-iran-of-cataclysmic-consequences-if-it-attacks-israel/

Sick Kabbalistic Jew Says 'Jews Run the World'

The antisemites of this world are right – the Jews do run the world – but not in the way they think…

https://youtu.be/3BkIwXJMNkk