To quote Heather Williams, H.W., M., “Translation is the creative process of re-engineering the outdated software of your mind.” Translation is a 5-step process using syllogistic reasoning to transform apparent man and the universe back into its essential whole, complete and perfect nature. Through the process of Translation, reality is uncovered and thus revealed. Through word tracking, getting to the essence of the words we use to express our current view of reality, we are uncovering the underlying timeless reality of the Universe.
Sense testimony:
Injuries of unknown cause can trigger massive negative imagination.
Conclusions:
Truth is the only source/origin/cause/motivation, all-conceiving/all-perceiving, all-seeing, without deceiving, all-ability, all-“canning,” devoid of injury, to massive (infinite) effect (e-fact), always saying “Yes” to Itself.
I Am I, all knowing Truth, consciousness in one mind is the perfect law and order of the Universe of self awareness.
The Peaceful Well Being of Powerful Beautiful Harmonious Truth Adorns, Paints, Expresses all there is.
To come.
[The Sunday Night Translation Group meets at 7pm Pacific time on Skype. Translators are welcome to join or start your own group.]
It’s stormy—you might even call it tempestuous—when we meet some characters on a boat (which is a decidedly bad place to be in a storm). We learn that the King of Naples and several of his attendants are on this boat, and that things are going so badly there’s not much to do but pray. The boat splits in half and the people float off into the sea.
We cut to dry land and to Prospero, our main character, chatting with his daughter Miranda. We learn that Prospero was the source of the magic that caused the storm that sank this boat, and that he did it for good reason. However, he promises his sweet daughter that nobody was hurt in spite of all the fire, boat-splitting, and drowning that was clearly going on.
Prospero also tells Miranda that it’s time she found out that she’s a princess. Prospero says he used to be the Duke of Milan until his brother, Antonio, betrayed him and stole the dukedom (with the consent of the King) while Prospero was busy learning magic in his library (not really his job). After all the usurping (which is a great word for stealing positions of power), Prospero and the three-year-old Miranda were shuttled out to the ocean in a wreck of a boat. They ended up on this island, where the ex-Duke has raised his daughter for the last twelve years. However, a star is looking pretty lucky in the sky, so Prospero thinks the time is right for action and revenge.
We briefly meet his two servants. One is a delicate and airy spirit who was imprisoned in a tree by a witch for not being nasty enough (Ariel) and the other is the child of said witch and the Devil (Caliban). Guess who’s Prospero’s favorite.
Then we learn that mostly all the folks responsible for stealing Prospero’s dukedom were on the sinking boat from the beginning of the play, and they’re now scattered about the island. Alonso, the King who allowed the wicked Antonio to take Prospero’s dukedom, fears he lost his son (the Prince) in the storm. The shipwrecked group—Alonso, Antonio, Alonso’s brother Sebastian, and various lesser lords—set off to find Alonso’s son, the lost Prince Ferdinand.
Meanwhile, the not-so-lost Prince is alive and convinced that his dad and everyone else from the boat is dead. His grieving is kind of soft-core,since he’s already fallen in love with Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Prospero accuses the shipwrecked Prince of being a traitor and puts Prince Ferdinand to the hard task of carrying wood. Ferdinand is happy to do this because his newfound love for Miranda makes work seem easy. (Aw.)
On Ferdinand’s second encounter with Miranda, he learns her name and promises to marry her. She also declares her love for him, though he is only the third man she has ever seen (the first two are her dad and Caliban, the son of the Devil).
Back with the search party looking for the Prince, everyone feels weary and assumes the guy is dead. A banquet appears in front of the shipwrecked group, set up by silent fairy spirits. Yes, this is weird, but the search party is hungry and wants to eat. Before they can dig in, a scary harpy monster shows up. This freaky harpy (a result of Prospero’s magic) says that the sea took Prince Ferdinand in exchange for the wrong Alonso committed against Prospero many years ago.
The harpy also points out that there are three traitors at the table. This traitor comment brings us to an important side-plot: Antonio and Sebastian, thinking Prince Ferdinand is dead, are plotting to murder Alonso so Sebastian can be king. This is messed up because Alonso is Sebastian’s brother. Still, Antonio clearly has no conscience; he admits that he’s never been bothered by stealing his brother Prospero’s dukedom. So, back at the scene with the monster harpy: Alonso is disturbed and repents of his foul deed, but Sebastian and Antonio—not so much.
Switching back to the other group on the island, Prospero now accepts Ferdinand, saying that he was just testing the young man with all that hard labor. Since the Prince has worked (for what? three hours?) carrying heavy wood, he has permission to marry Prospero’s daughter.
There is also another side story going on: Caliban has been plotting with the King’s drunken butler, Stefano, and jester, Trinculo (also drunk), to murder Prospero so they can rule the island. Caliban (very drunk) pledges to be Stefano’s slave and kisses his feet way more than we are comfortable with. The drunken schemers are led off by Ariel playing music. Ariel leaves the group in a pool that smells like the lesser part of a horse to await his master’s orders.
The trio eventually gets out of the muck pool and sets off to murder Prospero. However, Prospero sets hounds upon them, and the would-be-murderers run off. Eventually they come back and get made fun of for a bit, at which point Caliban repents and says he’ll work to be in Prospero’s good graces again.
That being dealt with, Prospero now goes to meet the shipwrecked King & Co. The harpy really shook up the King, so Alonso apologizes to Prospero and returns his dukedom. Prospero doesn’t tell the King directly of Antonio and Sebastian’s treachery, but neither of the traitors apologize or repent or even shuffle their feet. They don’t learn a lesson. However, Prospero starts some banter about how he recently lost his daughter to the tempest too, commiserating with the King. Prospero changes the subject and asks if they’d like to see his cell (the place he lives). He pulls back the curtain covering his dwelling to reveal—you guessed it—two very-much-not-dead children, who are very much in love.
Alonso rejoices to see his son, Ferdinand rejoices to show-off his new girl, and Miranda rejoices at seeing so many dudes—hence the line “O brave new world that has such people in it.” Prospero promises to explain most of this eventually. Tonight he’ll tell some of his life story and everyone will head back to Naples via ships in the morning. Prospero says he’ll watch the kids get married, and then he’ll retire to his dukedom in peace. He charges Ariel to make sure the ships get to Naples safely, and then frees him from the servant gig.
During the closing lines, Prospero speaks directly to the audience, and says they can free him from the island with their applause. It’s like “clap if you believe in fairies” except it’s actually the best playwright in Western history saying goodbye to writing plays. All around, it’s pretty intense.
John Gruber (born 1973) is a writer, blog publisher, UI designer, and the inventor of the Markdown publishing format. Gruber is from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area. Wikipedia
Turn on the Closed Captions (CC) to know the countries where the images were filmed and the first name of the interviewees.
What is it that makes us human? Is it that we love, that we fight ? That we laugh ? Cry ? Our curiosity ? The quest for discovery ?
Driven by these questions, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand spent three years collecting real-life stories from 2,000 women and men in 60 countries. Working with a dedicated team of translators, journalists and cameramen, Yann captures deeply personal and emotional accounts of topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness.
The VOL.1 deals with the themes of love, women, work and poverty.
In order to share this unique image bank everywhere and for everyone,
HUMAN exist in several versions :
A theatre version (3h11) , a tv version (2h11) and a 3 volumes version for the web
CONTACTS
Office Yann Arthus-Bertrand : Yann2@yab.fr
Project manager: jessica@human-themovie.org
French events and non-commercial distribution : event@human-themovie.org
Official website HUMAN : http://www.human-themovie.org
For further contents, visit http://g.co/humanthemovie
Enjoy and share #WhatMakesUsHUMAN
Watch the full film from September 12 at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJy4…
All these shoots were carbon-offset through the GoodPlanet Foundation’s United Carbone Action program: http://www.goodplanet.org/en/united-c…
Scientists on the lookout for subtle disturbances in the fabric of space-time have detected the signal from a cataclysmic collision between two black holes that lie some 3 billion light-years away, much farther two previous discoveries.
The findings by the team working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, cement the idea that gravitational wave astronomy — a cutting-edge tool to observe some of the most powerful events in the universe — is here to stay.
“We’re really moving from novelty to new observational science — a new astronomy of gravitational waves,” said MIT senior research scientist David Shoemaker, spokesman for the LIGO team.
Astronomers typically document the universe in different wavelengths of light, from visible and infrared all the way to X-rays and gamma rays.
But black holes do not emit light as far as we know, which makes them very difficult to study. By picking up deformations in space-time, LIGO allows scientists to “hear” these mysterious phenomena, even if they can’t see them with telescopes.
“Every time we find a new way of looking in the sky … we understand our universe in a whole new way, at a whole new level,” said Clifford Johnson, a theoretical physicist at USC who was not involved in the work.
The new signal, called GW170104, was picked up in the early morning hours of Jan. 4 by the twin L-shaped detectors in Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La. The ripple was triggered after two black holes, spinning around slowly toward each other, finally succumbed to their shared gravitational tug and merged. The powerful collision resulted in the creation of a new, single black hole — and converted mass into gravitational waves in the process.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, caused by objects accelerating or decelerating through space. Their existence was predicted more than a century ago by Albert Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity, but they were thought to be so faint as to be virtually undetectable.
A second event soon followed. With the third confirmed find, announced Thursday, scientists are finally moving LIGO’s work from the examination of singular curiosities to demographic studies of the sky’s invisible denizens. Already, this third discovery is revealing that there may be some diversity in this mysterious cosmic population.
This merger between a binary pair of black holes happened around 3 billion years ago, at a distance more than double that of the first two finds (which occurred around 1.3 billion and 1.4 billion light-years from us, respectively).
Scientists believe one of the black holes held as much mass as 31.2 suns, while the other held 19.4 solar masses. When they coalesced, the new singularity weighed in at 48.7 solar masses, and the remaining mass was transformed into gravitational waves.
This puts the merger right in the middle of the same weight class as the two previously detected mergers — a class that scientists had not originally expected to encounter.
Most black holes, they had figured, were the corpses of dead stars and significantly smaller, on the order of a few times the mass of the sun. Others, the kind that anchored the hearts of the Milky Way and other galaxies, were supermassive, holding millions or even billions of solar masses.
These intermediate black holes, however, are starting to look rather common.
“It clearly establishes a new population of black holes,” said LIGO team member Bangalore Sathyaprakash of Penn State and Cardiff University.
The new merger does have one key difference, however. In the previous two events, the paired black holes seemed to have spins that were aligned with their orbital axis. This is consistent with one theory about how they were formed, which assumes that the stars that became these black holes are born, and die, in pairs.
But in the new find, the black holes’ spins were apparently not aligned. That would favor a competing theory that says the black holes may pair up much later in their life histories.
Both theories may explain a slice of the black hole binary population, said LIGO Executive Director David Reitze of Caltech. But how big is each slice? The answer could help scientists understand the complexities of both stellar and black hole formation.
The findings, described in a paper accepted to Physical Review Letters, also allowed scientists to investigate the limits of Einstein’s theory of general relativity by looking to see whether the gravitational waves underwent dispersion — a bending of the different wavelengths of light that happens when light passes through a physical medium. This is why white light splits into a rainbow of colors when it passes through a prism.
Einstein’s theories forbid this from happening to gravitational waves, and LIGO’s measurements have yet to contradict them.
For now, the LIGO team cannot localize where these black holes merge. But as more detectors come online in Europe, Japan and India, researchers will be better able to triangulate the sources.
Once that happens, scientists will be able to train their telescopes on these targets. They might be able to catch signals they had not previously known were related to black hole activity. (Though light cannot escape from a black hole once it passes the event horizon, black holes can be detected thanks in part to the superheated matter that collects around them.)
Scientists hope to eventually see more than just black hole mergers, Reitze said. The next big class of events would be the mergers of binary neutron stars, which could definitely be seen with both LIGO and traditional telescopes.
In the meantime, LIGO is set to wrap up its current observing run in late summer, right around the time that the European Virgo detector is expected to go online.
With a little bit of overlap between the two runs — and a little bit of luck — the two detectors might be able to see the same events. If so, it would allow scientists to get even better measurements of these violent cosmic phenomena.
Eventually, scientists might expect to catch a gravitational event once or twice a week, or perhaps even on a daily basis. But for now, each one is a thrill, said Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the LIGO work.
“Five or 10 years from now, we’re going to have another event discovered, and then I’ll be, like, ‘Oh, yeah, another gravitational wave event,’” Kamionkowski said.
“But I’m still amazed every time they discover every one of these things. The glow from last year is still there.”
On March 2, a disturbing report hit the desks of U.S. counterintelligence officials in Washington. For months, American spy hunters had scrambled to uncover details of Russia’s influence operation against the 2016 presidential election. In offices in both D.C. and suburban Virginia, they had created massive wall charts to track the different players in Russia’s multipronged scheme. But the report in early March was something new.
It described how Russia had already moved on from the rudimentary email hacks against politicians it had used in 2016. Now the Russians were running a more sophisticated hack on Twitter. The report said the Russians had sent expertly tailored messages carrying malware to more than 10,000 Twitter users in the Defense Department. Depending on the interests of the targets, the messages offered links to stories on recent sporting events or the Oscars, which had taken place the previous weekend. When clicked, the links took users to a Russian-controlled server that downloaded a program allowing Moscow’s hackers to take control of the victim’s phone or computer–and Twitter account.
As they scrambled to contain the damage from the hack and regain control of any compromised devices, the spy hunters realized they faced a new kind of threat. In 2016, Russia had used thousands of covert human agents and robot computer programs to spread disinformation referencing the stolen campaign emails of Hillary Clinton, amplifying their effect. Now counterintelligence officials wondered: What chaos could Moscow unleash with thousands of Twitter handles that spoke in real time with the authority of the armed forces of the United States? At any given moment, perhaps during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, Pentagon Twitter accounts might send out false information. As each tweet corroborated another, and covert Russian agents amplified the messages even further afield, the result could be panic and confusion.
Illustration by Brobel Design for TIME
For many Americans, Russian hacking remains a story about the 2016 election. But there is another story taking shape. Marrying a hundred years of expertise in influence operations to the new world of social media, Russia may finally have gained the ability it long sought but never fully achieved in the Cold War: to alter the course of events in the U.S. by manipulating public opinion. The vast openness and anonymity of social media has cleared a dangerous new route for antidemocratic forces. “Using these technologies, it is possible to undermine democratic government, and it’s becoming easier every day,” says Rand Waltzman of the Rand Corp., who ran a major Pentagon research program to understand the propaganda threats posed by social media technology.
Current and former officials at the FBI, at the CIA and in Congress now believe the 2016 Russian operation was just the most visible battle in an ongoing information war against global democracy. And they’ve become more vocal about their concern. “If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before Congress on May 8.
If that sounds alarming, it helps to understand the battlescape of this new information war. As they tweet and like and upvote their way through social media, Americans generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments–literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it.
That’s where the algorithms come in. American researchers have found they can use mathematical formulas to segment huge populations into thousands of subgroups according to defining characteristics like religion and political beliefs or taste in TV shows and music. Other algorithms can determine those groups’ hot-button issues and identify “followers” among them, pinpointing those most susceptible to suggestion. Propagandists can then manually craft messages to influence them, deploying covert provocateurs, either humans or automated computer programs known as bots, in hopes of altering their behavior.
That is what Moscow is doing, more than a dozen senior intelligence officials and others investigating Russia’s influence operations tell TIME. The Russians “target you and see what you like, what you click on, and see if you’re sympathetic or not sympathetic,” says a senior intelligence official. Whether and how much they have actually been able to change Americans’ behavior is hard to say. But as they have investigated the Russian 2016 operation, intelligence and other officials have found that Moscow has developed sophisticated tactics.
In one case last year, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, a Russian soldier based in Ukraine successfully infiltrated a U.S. social media group by pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife and weighing in on political debates with specially tailored messages. In another case, officials say, Russia created a fake Facebook account to spread stories on political issues like refugee resettlement to targeted reporters they believed were susceptible to influence.
As Russia expands its cyberpropaganda efforts, the U.S. and its allies are only just beginning to figure out how to fight back. One problem: the fear of Russian influence operations can be more damaging than the operations themselves. Eager to appear more powerful than they are, the Russians would consider it a success if you questioned the truth of your news sources, knowing that Moscow might be lurking in your Facebook or Twitter feed. But figuring out if they are is hard. Uncovering “signals that indicate a particular handle is a state-sponsored account is really, really difficult,” says Jared Cohen, CEO of Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which tackles global security challenges.
Like many a good spy tale, the story of how the U.S. learned its democracy could be hacked started with loose lips. In May 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer bragged to a colleague that his organization, known as the GRU, was getting ready to pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him five years earlier as Secretary of State. The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election.
What the officer didn’t know, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, was that U.S. spies were listening. They wrote up the conversation and sent it back to analysts at headquarters, who turned it from raw intelligence into an official report and circulated it. But if the officer’s boast seems like a red flag now, at the time U.S. officials didn’t know what to make of it. “We didn’t really understand the context of it until much later,” says the senior intelligence official. Investigators now realize that the officer’s boast was the first indication U.S. spies had from their sources that Russia wasn’t just hacking email accounts to collect intelligence but was also considering interfering in the vote. Like much of America, many in the U.S. government hadn’t imagined the kind of influence operation that Russia was preparing to unleash on the 2016 election. Fewer still realized it had been five years in the making.
In 2011, protests in more than 70 cities across Russia had threatened Putin’s control of the Kremlin. The uprising was organized on social media by a popular blogger named Alexei Navalny, who used his blog as well as Twitter and Facebook to get crowds in the streets. Putin’s forces broke out their own social media technique to strike back. When bloggers tried to organize nationwide protests on Twitter using #Triumfalnaya, pro-Kremlin botnets bombarded the hashtag with anti-protester messages and nonsense tweets, making it impossible for Putin’s opponents to coalesce.
Putin publicly accused then Secretary of State Clinton of running a massive influence operation against his country, saying she had sent “a signal” to protesters and that the State Department had actively worked to fuel the protests. The State Department said it had just funded pro-democracy organizations. Former officials say any such operations–in Russia or elsewhere–would require a special intelligence finding by the President and that Barack Obama was not likely to have issued one.
After his re-election the following year, Putin dispatched his newly installed head of military intelligence, Igor Sergun, to begin repurposing cyberweapons previously used for psychological operations in war zones for use in electioneering. Russian intelligence agencies funded “troll farms,” botnet spamming operations and fake news outlets as part of an expanding focus on psychological operations in cyberspace.
It turns out Putin had outside help. One particularly talented Russian programmer who had worked with social media researchers in the U.S. for 10 years had returned to Moscow and brought with him a trove of algorithms that could be used in influence operations. He was promptly hired by those working for Russian intelligence services, senior intelligence officials tell TIME. “The engineer who built them the algorithms is U.S.-trained,” says the senior intelligence official.
Soon, Putin was aiming his new weapons at the U.S. Following Moscow’s April 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. considered sanctions that would block the export of drilling and fracking technologies to Russia, putting out of reach some $8.2 trillion in oil reserves that could not be tapped without U.S. technology. As they watched Moscow’s intelligence operations in the U.S., American spy hunters saw Russian agents applying their new social media tactics on key aides to members of Congress. Moscow’s agents broadcast material on social media and watched how targets responded in an attempt to find those who might support their cause, the senior intelligence official tells TIME. “The Russians started using it on the Hill with staffers,” the official says, “to see who is more susceptible to continue this program [and] to see who would be more favorable to what they want to do.”
On Aug. 7, 2016, the infamous pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli declared that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson’s. That story went viral in late August, then took on a life of its own after Clinton fainted from pneumonia and dehydration at a Sept. 11 event in New York City. Elsewhere people invented stories saying Pope Francis had endorsed Trump and Clinton had murdered a DNC staffer. Just before Election Day, a story took off alleging that Clinton and her aides ran a pedophile ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.
Congressional investigators are looking at how Russia helped stories like these spread to specific audiences. Counterintelligence officials, meanwhile, have picked up evidence that Russia tried to target particular influencers during the election season who they reasoned would help spread the damaging stories. These officials have seen evidence of Russia using its algorithmic techniques to target the social media accounts of particular reporters, senior intelligence officials tell TIME. “It’s not necessarily the journal or the newspaper or the TV show,” says the senior intelligence official. “It’s the specific reporter that they find who might be a little bit slanted toward believing things, and they’ll hit him” with a flood of fake news stories.
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow’s agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. “They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by–they do that just as much as anybody else does,” says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.) The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, has said he is looking into why, for example, four of the top five Google search results the day the U.S. released a report on the 2016 operation were links to Russia’s TV propaganda arm, RT. (Google says it saw no meddling in this case.) Researchers at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of political tweets in 2016 between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were generated by bots of unknown origin; investigators are trying to figure out how many were Russian.
As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia’s role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump’s top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. “Nobody can prove it yet,” the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
There are plenty of people who are skeptical of such a conspiracy, if one existed. Cambridge Analytica touts its ability to use algorithms to microtarget voters, but veteran political operatives have found them ineffective political influencers. Ted Cruz first used their methods during the primary, and his staff ended up concluding they had wasted their money. Mercer, Bannon, Breitbart News and the White House did not answer questions about the congressional probes. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica says the company has no ties to Russia or individuals acting as fronts for Moscow and that it is unaware of the probe.
Democratic operatives searching for explanations for Clinton’s loss after the election investigated social media trends in the three states that tipped the vote for Trump: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In each they found what they believe is evidence that key swing voters were being drawn to fake news stories and anti-Clinton stories online. Google searches for the fake pedophilia story circulating under the hashtag #pizzagate, for example, were disproportionately higher in swing districts and not in districts likely to vote for Trump.
The Democratic operatives created a package of background materials on what they had found, suggesting the search behavior might indicate that someone had successfully altered the behavior in key voting districts in key states. They circulated it to fellow party members who are up for a vote in 2018.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper calls Russian cyber influence operations a threat to democracyBrendan Smialowski—AFP/Getty Images
Even as investigators try to piece together what happened in 2016, they are worrying about what comes next. Russia claims to be able to alter events using cyberpropaganda and is doing what it can to tout its power. In February 2016, a Putin adviser named Andrey Krutskikh compared Russia’s information-warfare strategies to the Soviet Union’s obtaining a nuclear weapon in the 1940s, David Ignatius of the Washington Post reported. “We are at the verge of having something in the information arena which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals,” Krutskikh said.
But if Russia is clearly moving forward, it’s less clear how active the U.S. has been. Documents released by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and published by the Intercept suggested that the British were pursuing social media propaganda and had shared their tactics with the U.S. Chris Inglis, the former No. 2 at the National Security Agency, says the U.S. has not pursued this capability. “The Russians are 10 years ahead of us in being willing to make use of” social media to influence public opinion, he says.
There are signs that the U.S. may be playing in this field, however. From 2010 to 2012, the U.S. Agency for International Development established and ran a “Cuban Twitter” network designed to undermine communist control on the island. At the same time, according to the Associated Press, which discovered the program, the U.S. government hired a contractor to profile Cuban cell phone users, categorizing them as “pro-revolution,” “apolitical” or “antirevolutionary.”
Much of what is publicly known about the mechanics and techniques of social media propaganda comes from a program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that the Rand researcher, Waltzman, ran to study how propagandists might manipulate social media in the future. In the Cold War, operatives might distribute disinformation-laden newspapers to targeted political groups or insinuate an agent provocateur into a group of influential intellectuals. By harnessing computing power to segment and target literally millions of people in real time online, Waltzman concluded, you could potentially change behavior “on the scale of democratic governments.”
In the U.S., public scrutiny of such programs is usually enough to shut them down. In 2014, news articles appeared about the DARPA program and the “Cuban Twitter” project. It was only a year after Snowden had revealed widespread monitoring programs by the government. The DARPA program, already under a cloud, was allowed to expire quietly when its funding ran out in 2015.
In the wake of Russia’s 2016 election hack, the question is how to research social media propaganda without violating civil liberties. The need is all the more urgent because the technology continues to advance. While today humans are still required to tailor and distribute messages to specially targeted “susceptibles,” in the future crafting and transmitting emotionally powerful messages will be automated.
The U.S. government is constrained in what kind of research it can fund by various laws protecting citizens from domestic propaganda, government electioneering and intrusions on their privacy. Waltzman has started a group called Information Professionals Association with several former information operations officers from the U.S. military to develop defenses against social media influence operations.
Social media companies are beginning to realize that they need to take action. Facebook issued a report in April 2017 acknowledging that much disinformation had been spread on its pages and saying it had expanded its security. Google says it has seen no evidence of Russian manipulation of its search results but has updated its algorithms just in case. Twitter claims it has diminished cyberpropaganda by tweaking its algorithms to block cleverly designed bots. “Our algorithms currently work to detect when Twitter accounts are attempting to manipulate Twitter’s Trends through inorganic activity, and then automatically adjust,” the company said in a statement.
In the meantime, America’s best option to protect upcoming votes may be to make it harder for Russia and other bad actors to hide their election-related information operations. When it comes to defeating Russian influence operations, the answer is “transparency, transparency, transparency,” says Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He has written legislation that would curb the massive, anonymous campaign contributions known as dark money and the widespread use of shell corporations that he says make Russian cyberpropaganda harder to trace and expose.
But much damage has already been done. “The ultimate impact of [the 2016 Russian operation] is we’re never going to look at another election without wondering, you know, Is this happening, can we see it happening?” says Jigsaw’s Jared Cohen. By raising doubts about the validity of the 2016 vote and the vulnerability of future elections, Russia has achieved its most important objective: undermining the credibility of American democracy.
For now, investigators have added the names of specific trolls and botnets to their wall charts in the offices of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. They say the best way to compete with the Russian model is by having a better message. “It requires critical thinkers and people who have a more powerful vision” than the cynical Russian view, says former NSA deputy Inglis. And what message is powerful enough to take on the firehose of falsehoods that Russia is deploying in targeted, effective ways across a range of new media? One good place to start: telling the truth.
–With reporting by PRATHEEK REBALA/WASHINGTON
(Inspired by William Fennie, H.W., M., in his Sunday Meeting talk: “Nurturing the Ontological Identity”)
“He made them male and female and blessed them. The authors of the Bible assumed that God created two making one male and one female, but this statement was not a statement of plurality (creating two beings). It is a statement of inclusiveness that humanity is whole both male and female. So God created man in his own image.” This part of the western Bible has caused more pain in society than can be imagined. First the word man has been misunderstood. The word man was originally used to mean humanity. Humans are androgynous by nature physically and spiritually.
Each person carries the vestiges of what has traditionally been designated as male and female genitalia. This wholeness plays out in many ways. Every act of creation, writing, cooking, art, making love, singing or just being requires you use your androgynous nature. Your genitalia have little or nothing to do with your acts of creation. This androgyny is seen throughout as Ying and Yang. It is this wholeness (masculine/feminine) that gives us a feeling of completion. It is this wholeness of being we experience at the moment of orgasm.
An orgasmic moment can be while we are making love (or just enjoying a sexual encounter), it can be when we see a movie that affects us, making a dinner, writing, listening to music. In other words it can occur anytime we drop our pretense of being either male or female and just be. It is in this moment where we find absolute harmony and balance at a spiritual level.
In a sense for us to say I am lesbian or gay, bi, or hetero, or Trans, or or or is not really so. We all are androgynous therefore we are all genders. Meaning that neither our masculine or feminine energy stands by itself. It is this very idea of being Gender Neutral—of being whole—that frightens the Strict Father way of thinking. For in the GLBTQ community we are neither male nor female; we are whole beings. For most of us sexual encounters are moments of spiritual understanding of higher self, Truth, and God. Our orgasms and meeting a lover are not based on a misunderstanding of our nature, but rather a releasing of our androgynous nature from a box. When we open that Pandora’s Box, many things are let loose.
To be freed from a dark box into the light is symbolic of consciousness awakening to its progenitor. When we open the door to our true identity we cannot step back into being a male or female, we can only exist as a whole being, an androgynous being knowing itself expressing in the image of the creator source of life.
Our sexual appetites are not something we choose but rather the way in which our consciousness unfolds. Saying we can choose not to be harmonious and expressive of our androgynous nature is like saying we can choose the color of our skin or eyes. To be in the image of the progenitor is to be whole, complete, without beginning or end. The consciousness we call the progenitor manifests in infinite variety. We share the majority of our genes with all living life. All life manifests in a harmonic balance. And as the grass does not choose what kind of grass it is to be, so it is with humanity.
You are an artist creating your life with love. Art is a creation of love, sexual energy is a creator of art. All life is art and therefore love.
To me, pride is not about being different but rather about being whole and loving who I am.
From “Sexual Fluidity” by Suzanne Deakins, release date fall of 2017.
Suzanne Deakins, HWM. is a publisher (One Spirit Press and The Q Press) and author. Her books may be found on amazon.com. She teaches seminars on straight thinking and ontology, as well as Radical Forgiveness. She maybe reached at theqpress@gmail.com. Watch for her new blog site www.a.small.revolution2017.com will be available soon.
IT WAS IN the month of June when I saw Him for the first time. He was walking in the wheatfield when I passed by with my handmaidens, and He was alone.
The rhythm of His steps was different from other men’s, and the movement of His body was like naught I had seen before.
Men do not pace the earth in that manner. And even now I do not know whether He walked fast or slow.
My handmaidens pointed their fingers at Him and spoke in shy whispers to one another. And I stayed my steps for a moment, and raised my hand to hail Him. But He did not turn His face, and He did not look at me. And I hated Him. I was swept back into myself, and I was as cold as if I had been in a snow-drift. And I shivered.
That night I beheld Him in my dreaming; and they told me afterward that I screamed in my sleep and was restless upon my bed.
It was in the month of August that I saw Him again, through my window. He was sitting in the shadow of the cypress tree across my garden, and He was still as if He had been carved out of stone, like the statues in Antioch and other cities of the North Country.
And my slave, the Egyptian, came to me and said, “That man is here again. He is sitting there across your garden.”
And I gazed at Him, and my soul quivered within me, for He was beautiful.
His body was single and each part seemed to love every other part.
Then I clothed myself with raiment of Damascus, and I left my house and walked towards Him.
Was it my aloneness, or was it His fragrance, that drew me to Him? Was it a hunger in my eyes that desired comeliness, or was it His beauty that sought the light of my eyes?
Even now I do not know.
I walked to Him with my scented garments and my golden sandals, the sandals the Roman captain had given me, even these sandals. And when I reached Him, I said, “Good-morrow to you.”
And He said, “Good-morrow to you, Miriam.”
And He looked at me, and His night-eyes saw me as no man had seen me. And suddenly I was as if naked, and I was shy.
Yet He had only said, “Good-morrow to you.”
And then I said to Him, “Will you not come to my house?”
And He said, “Am I not already in your house?”
I did not know what He meant then, but I know now.
And I said, “Will you not have wine and bread with me?”
And He said, “Yes, Miriam, but not now.”
Not now, not now, He said. And the voice of the sea was in those two words, and the voice of the wind and the trees. And when He said them unto me, life spoke to death.
For mind you, my friend, I was dead. I was a woman who had divorced her soul. I was living apart from this self which you now see. I belonged to all men, and to none. They called me harlot, and a woman possessed of seven devils. I was cursed, and I was envied.
But when His dawn-eyes looked into my eyes all the stars of my night faded away, and I became Miriam, only Miriam, a woman lost to the earth she had known, and finding herself in new places.
And now again I said to Him, “Come into my house and share bread and wine with me.”
And He said, “Why do you bid me to be your guest?”
And I said, “I beg you to come into my house.” And it was all that was sod in me, and all that was sky in me calling unto Him.
Then He looked at me, and the noontide of His eyes was upon me, and He said, “You have many lovers, and yet I alone love you. Other men love themselves in your nearness. I love you in your self. Other men see a beauty in you that shall fade away sooner than their own years. But I see in you a beauty that shall not fade away, and in the autumn of your days that beauty shall not be afraid to gaze at itself in the mirror, and it shall not be offended.
“I alone love the unseen in you.”
Then He said in a low voice, “Go away now. If this cypress tree is yours and you would not have me sit in its shadow, I will walk my way.”
And I cried to Him and I said, “Master, come to my house. I have incense to burn for you, and a silver basin for your feet. You are a stranger and yet not a stranger. I entreat you, come to my house.”
Then He stood up and looked at me even as the seasons might look down upon the field, and He smiled. And He said again: “All men love you for themselves. I love you for yourself.”
And then He walked away.
But no other man ever walked the way He walked. Was it a breath born in my garden that moved to the east? Or was it a storm that would shake all things to their foundations?
I knew not, but on that day the sunset of His eyes slew the dragon in me, and I became a woman, I became Miriam, Miriam of Mijdel.
* * * * *
His mouth was like the heart of a pomegranate, and the shadows in His eyes were deep.
And He was gentle, like a man mindful of his own strength.
In my dreams I beheld the kings of the earth standing in awe in His presence.
I would speak of His face, but how shall I?
It was like night without darkness, and like day without the noise of day.
It was a sad face, and it was a joyous face.
And well I remember how once He raised His hand towards the sky, and His parted fingers were like the branches of an elm.
And I remember Him pacing the evening. He was not walking. He Himself was a road above the road; even as a cloud above the earth that would descend to refresh the earth.
But when I stood before Him and spoke to him, He was a man, and His face was powerful to behold. And He said to me, “What would you, Miriam?”
I would not answer Him, but my wings enfolded my secret, and I was made warm.
And because I could bear His light no more, I turned and walked away, but not in shame. I was only shy, and I would be alone, with His fingers upon the strings of my heart.
No one ever told me it was wrong to think outside of the box but somehow I got that impression that to step outside a proscribe procedure or pray differently was forbidden. When I first took The Prosperos’ seminar called Translation I saw it as a kind of prayer. I diligently wrote my translations and saw my perception change. I saw my world was changing. Like Job I said life is good. Every time I translated I looked more and more at the importance of keeping the structure as perfect as I could.
Then a real crisis came in my life. My 2 ½ year old daughter lay dying in the ICU. The illness was rarely survived. Eyes filled with tears I could not see to translate on paper. I called someone not sure who, who put out the word to the translation service… but I began translating in my head… starting with the Truth syllogism … going through the first step I reach the phrase complete, whole and perfect in my reasoning. I was stunned. How could I see perfection in this horrible illness that was sucking the life from my daughter?
After her death letters and notes flooded our mailbox. People said such things as “this was God’s will, you and your daughter choose this, it was predestination, on and on. My head and heart screamed in rebellion. How come translation didn’t work? I knew intellectually this was a tool for rethinking what our senses were reporting… It isn’t a process about changing physical circumstances. And yet if the consciousness is changed inherently the out picturing of our consciousness, the physical world should change.
At the end of the first three months of mourning I found myself pregnant and afraid. Afraid this evil that took my daughter would take the life growing in me. For the first time I began to explore Truth. Not Truth as some pretty and perfect concept, but Truth that was a driving force. I saw that Truth could appear cloven in our consciousness and a Truth that allowed children to die and really bad people to hurt other people.
It was and is apparent that Truth/God must in some manner see life, experience consciousness different than my human mind. This was serious stuff I was, to my thinking, challenging the very idea that Truth was perfect. I began thinking about duality and evil. The disease was evil, bad and separate from God.
Like Job I began to see evil everywhere. My consciousness, my intellect, and heart would not rest. Truth as I had known was whole, complete and perfect, but this was not whole, and not perfect by a long shot. It was to take me 2 ½ years before I had an eureka moment of understanding. I am not sure what I Translated (sense testimony) but all at once I saw it all. Consciousness was not limited to a body, was confined to my thinking. I saw that the seeds of constructs (beliefs and assumptions) are in us all. When the right conditions (proper soil and water) are present the seed will germinate. Out of this germination can come what appear to be great evil, pain, and sorrow. But out of it can come great freedom.
The working word in this illumination is the word appear. With all sight our vision relies on Not what we see but what our mind tells us we are seeing. We see nothing but light, which our unconscious mind labels according to our experiences and beliefs. For the first time I saw that perfection was not in sight, but in the mind. Truth was indeed perfect, ever evenly present without beginning or end, total, whole, complete. I had an eureka moment of knowing, seeing, experiencing that Truth didn’t reside in anyone’s pocket. No one had more Truth than anyone else it was indeed every star and blade of grass. It was what my mind saw as evil, bad, and imperfect, for Truth is all that exist.
Life is not about humanly perfect, but being engaged with all that comes to you. Truth is all there is. It does not depend on your recognition of it as good or perfect it just is. It is our thinking and knowing that turns it into the palate we call life. If we stay engage and continue to paint and repaint our life sooner or later we get to a place where we understand we have never left the father and like the prodigal son we find that the feast has always awaited us, that we have always been the child of Truth and the understanding of Truth being all there is is now present.
Translation and Releasing the Hidden Splendour (Radical Forgiveness) are life long acts of unveiling lifting the fog from our minds and thinking. It is remembering no matter what our senses seem to be saying Truth is all there is ever evenly present.
Life is not perfection or the quest for perfection, but being engaged and mindful of our actions and reactions.
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