Feds Charge Japanese Yakuza Leader with Nuclear Materials Trafficking
February 21st, 2024Weapons-grade plutonium!? That’s a big deal, if true. Where did that come from?
Via: CNBC:
Federal prosecutors in New York on Wednesday said they had charged a Japanese Yakuza leader with conspiring to traffic nuclear materials from Burma to other countries.
Prosecutors said the accused gangster Takeshi Ebisawa “and his confederates showed samples of nuclear materials in Thailand” to an undercover agent from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“With the assistance of Thai authorities, the nuclear samples were seized and subsequently transferred to the custody of U.S. law enforcement,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan said in a statement.
“A U.S. nuclear forensic laboratory later analyzed the samples and confirmed that the samples contain uranium and weapons-grade plutonium,” the statement said.
NYC Mayor To Give Migrants Debit Cards Worth Up To $10,000
February 21st, 2024Via: NY Post:
It takes money to make money, as the old saying goes, and apparently, it also takes money — as much as $53 million — to give money away.
Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Eric Adams is giving out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.
Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and his administration for nearly a month has failed to correct several public misperceptions about it.
One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50 million to migrants.
No wonder the mayor has been reticent.
This debit card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multibillion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.
It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.
New Zealand Green Party MP Efeso Collins Dies After Charity Run
February 21st, 2024A message from Manukau ward councillor Efeso Collins to stay strong, stick together and look out for each other and to get vaccinated this Super Saturday. This is to keep your whanau, your neighbours and our community safe.
And now…
Via: Guardian:
New Zealanders, including leaders from across the political spectrum, have expressed shock and devastation at the sudden death of Green MP Efeso Collins, who collapsed after a charity run in Auckland on Wednesday.
“It is with profound shock and sadness that we can confirm that Green Party MP Efeso Collins has died,” said a statement from the Green party.
Japan Bets $67 Billion to Become a Global Chip Powerhouse Once Again
February 21st, 2024Via: Bloomberg:
Deep in the snowy northern island of Hokkaido, Japan is pouring billions of dollars into a long-shot bet to revive its chip-making prowess and insulate its economy from growing US-China tensions.
…
A freshly created homegrown venture, Rapidus Corp., is looking to mass produce state-of-the art 2 nanometer logic chips in 2027 from an initial starting point of zero. By industry standards it’s an implausible challenge for an 18-month-old venture in a country that has fallen far behind overseas rivals on semiconductor production.But with the US and China sparring over access to the latest chipmaking expertise and equipment, Japan’s government has sensed an opportunity to leverage Washington’s concern over supply chain security to get back into a game it once dominated.
Trident Missile Test Fails for Second Time in a Row
February 21st, 2024Via: BBC:
The test firing of a Trident missile from a Royal Navy submarine has failed, for the second time in a row.
The latest test of the UK’s nuclear deterrent was from HMS Vanguard and was witnessed by the defence secretary.
The missile’s booster rockets failed and it landed in the sea close to the launch site, according to the Sun, which first reported the malfunction.
Albedo Space: Low Earth Orbit Satellites Will Have 10cm Resolution
February 20th, 2024Via: New York Times:
Anyone living in the modern world has grown familiar with diminishing privacy amid a surge security cameras, trackers built into smartphones, facial recognition systems, drones and other forms of digital monitoring. But what makes the overhead surveillance potentially scary, experts say, is its ability to invade areas once seen as intrinsically off limits.
“This is a giant camera in the sky for any government to use at any time without our knowledge,” said Jennifer Lynch, general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who in 2019 urged civil satellite regulators to address this issue. “We should definitely be worried.”
Against that concern, Mr. Haddad and other supporters of Albedo’s technology say real benefits must be weighed, especially when it comes to fighting disasters and saving lives.
…
Investors in Albedo include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the investment firm of Bill Gates. Albedo’s strategic advisory board includes former directors of the C.I.A. and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Pentagon.
From 2019: Soon, Satellites Will be Able to Watch You Everywhere All the Time
The War On Children
February 20th, 2024Via: The War On Children:
Worth watching, especially for parents pic.twitter.com/k6gb2CMVqU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 18, 2024
Achieve AGI By Just Scaling Compute?
February 20th, 2024Video Generation Models as World Simulators:
We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable durations, resolutions and aspect ratios. We leverage a transformer architecture that operates on spacetime patches of video and image latent codes. Our largest model, Sora, is capable of generating a minute of high fidelity video. Our results suggest that scaling video generation models is a promising path towards building general purpose simulators of the physical world.
Via: The AIGRID:
OpenAI might have already achieved AGI internally:
WHO Chief’s Dire Warning: Disease X Outbreak ‘A Matter of When, not If’
February 18th, 2024Mmm hmm.
Via: Fox:
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus has issued a new warning about the likelihood of Disease X breaking out, telling global world leaders it is “a matter of when, not if” a new pathogen and pandemic will strike.
Tedros, who goes by his first name and is not a medical doctor, told attendees at the World Government Summit in Dubai earlier his week he gave a similar warning in 2018 that a pandemic was likely to hit, and he was proven right with the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus.
Complaining that the world is still ill-prepared for a new pandemic, Tedros once again touted the urgent need for a global treaty to be agreed upon by May and dismissed suspicions of it being a WHO power grab as outlandish.
He called the treaty “mission critical for humanity.”
Possibly Related: “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones Heard Warnings from the FBI of Imminent Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.”
“Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones Heard Warnings from the FBI of Imminent Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.”
February 18th, 2024It is possible, maybe even likely, that nothing unusual will happen. (“Nothing unusual,” assumes that you understand that many major U.S. cities are already existing in what I’d consider to be a state of collapse.)
Privately, I have been advising people inside the U.S. to be at full readiness and far away from cities before the election in November. What full readiness means will vary from person to person. At a minimum, I suggest that your definition should include:
– A means to avoid freezing to death
– Adequate water and food for your group
– High capacity weapons and ammunition (with everyone in your group trained extensively in their use)
– Fuel / electricity
– First aid kit
– Communications (Internet, mobile phone, TV, AM/FM radio, CB, shortwave, ham, etc.). However, assume that the Internet and mobile phone networks will be totally or partially down.
While I don’t know if anything unusual will happen, according to the U.S. Army’s 4th PSYOP Group, “All the world’s a stage”:
All the world’s a stage.
Keyword: All.
With that context out of the way, here’s Sheriff Richard Jones:
Via: Journal-News:
At the National Sheriff’s Association Conference in Washington. D.C, last week, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones heard warnings from the FBI of imminent terrorist attacks on the U.S., and he is out to make sure his department is prepared.
“It’s not if they are going to attack, it’s just when they are,” Jones said. “There are people already here who have come to this country who hate us and want to kill us.”
Lines of attack, he said he was told, will be through cyber attacks, crippling power grids, train derailments and cells of armed terrorists who target multiple areas of the country.
Bonus: WHO chief’s dire warning: Disease X outbreak ‘a matter of when, not if’ [Right before election?]
