Michai Morin: “A Presentation on Historical & Modern UAP Trends”
January 9th, 2023This is an interesting high level overview of the UFO phenomenon. There’s probably not a lot of information here that’s new for Cryptogon readers, but you might like to pass it along to someone who is new to this area of inquiry.
Via: Project Unity:
James Webb Telescope Reveals Milky Way–Like Galaxies in Young Universe
January 9th, 2023Via: Phys.org:
New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal for the first time galaxies with stellar bars—elongated features of stars stretching from the centers of galaxies into their outer disks—at a time when the universe was a mere 25% of its present age. The finding of so-called barred galaxies, similar to our Milky Way, this early in the universe will require astrophysicists to refine their theories of galaxy evolution.
Prior to JWST, images from the Hubble Space Telescope had never detected bars at such young epochs. In a Hubble image, one galaxy, EGS-23205, is little more than a disk-shaped smudge, but in the corresponding JWST image taken this past summer, it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.
VALL-E: Microsoft’s New Speech Synthesis AI Can Mimic A Speaker’s Voice From A Three Second Sample
January 9th, 2023Many audio examples are at the link.
Via: Microsoft – Github:
We introduce a language modeling approach for text to speech synthesis (TTS). Specifically, we train a neural codec language model (called VALL-E) using discrete codes derived from an off-the-shelf neural audio codec model, and regard TTS as a conditional language modeling task rather than continuous signal regression as in previous work. During the pre-training stage, we scale up the TTS training data to 60K hours of English speech which is hundreds of times larger than existing systems. VALL-E emerges in-context learning capabilities and can be used to synthesize high-quality personalized speech with only a 3-second enrolled recording of an unseen speaker as an acoustic prompt. Experiment results show that VALL-E significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS system in terms of speech naturalness and speaker similarity. In addition, we find VALL-E could preserve the speaker’s emotion and acoustic environment of the acoustic prompt in synthesis.
John Deere Will Allow U.S. Farmers to Repair Their Own Equipment
January 9th, 2023Via: Engadget:
John Deere has been one of the stauncher opponents of right to repair regulation, but it’s now willing to make some concessions. Deere & Company has signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) that lets US farmers and independent repair shops fix equipment, rather than requiring the use of authorized parts and service centers. Users will have access to official diagnostics, manuals, tools and training. Deere will let owners disable electronic locks, and won’t bar people from legally obtaining repair resources even if the company no longer offers them.
Thousands of People Stormed Brazil’s Congress on Sunday in Protest of Left-Wing President Lula’s Win
January 9th, 2023Via: Daily Mail:
The supporters of far-right ex-President Bolsonaro invaded Brazil’s National Congress building, the Supreme Court, presidential palace on Sunday, and called for the military to overthrow newly elected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after Bolsonaro questioned the integrity of the election.
WHO: Anti-Vaccine Activism is Deadlier Than Global Terrorism
January 8th, 2023Mmm hmm.
Via: Summit News:
The World Health Organization shared a video on Twitter promoting the claim that anti-vaccine activism is deadlier than global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and gun violence.
Yes, really.
The video quoted Baylor College of Medicine’s Dr. Peter Hotez, who stated, “We have to recognize that anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally.”
U.S. to Send Ukraine Bradley Fighting Vehicles
January 8th, 2023Via: Antiwar:
The US is going to send Ukraine Bradley Fighting Vehicles for the first time in a new weapons package worth nearly $3 billion, US officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The officials said the $2.85 billion aid package will be formally announced on Friday, and it will mark the single largest arms package for Ukraine the US has pledged at one time. The package will include 50 Bradleys, which are designed to transport infantry troops with armored protection that are equipped with a 25 mm gun.
More: Meet All The Heavily Armored Western Combat Vehicles Ukraine Is Getting
Academia Will Never Account For Misguided COVID Policies
January 8th, 2023Via: American Thinker:
Academia will never account for its misguided COVID policies, and it will never back out of its commitment to consensus explanations or opportunities. Indeed, these people will help accelerate the entire COVID complex. COVID is a new social engineering program, and universities will make biosecurity, including molecular engineering and tracking technology, into a permanent research activity that is worth billions per year in funding and commercialization. The link connecting business, government, and higher education has never been stronger, while China-style social credit scoring, based in part on medical and ideological compliance, is considered by the current White House administration a necessary part of the political agenda.
For universities to admit that they were wrong would not only undermine their authority and risk their research funding, but also, most of all, put their senior administration in legal jeopardy. University directors, trustees, regents, and other governance bodies are keen to avoid liability, and university legal and communications departments are working overtime to shield their institutions from blowback, including vicarious liability.
Burzynski: The Cancer Cure Cover-Up
January 7th, 2023Taliban & Chinese Firm Sign Historic Afghan Oil Extraction Deal
January 7th, 2023Via: ZeroHedge:
On Friday a major deal for oil extraction inked between a Chinese company and the Taliban government has been revealed, centered in northern Afghanistan’s Amu Darya basin.
CNN details that “The agreement with China’s Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Co is the first major international energy extraction deal the Taliban has signed since taking control of Afghanistan in 2021.”
It underscores that the Taliban increasingly sees Beijing as a desperately needed economic lifeline amid its global isolation, collapsed post-wartime economy, and facing continued Western-led sanctions and as tens of billions in foreign reserves remain under seizure.
