The Conservative Cave

A little over two years ago, a group of protesters shut down traffic on one side of the Golden Gate Bridge. This was connected to the pro-Palestinian protests which were then taking over campuses around the country.

The bridge was shut down for more than four hours, largely because the police took three hours to start making arrests. Then the vehicles had to be towed. It was a giant mess that impacted thousands of people and 26 protesters were arrested.

Something surprising happened next. San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins actually charged all 26 of the protesters with crimes. That almost never happens in liberal enclaves after protesters are arrested.
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But over the past year, charges against 19 of them have been dropped in favor of some kind of diversion program.
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However, the remaining seven continued to face felony charges. Here they are.

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That trial has been underway since last month. The defense argument is that they were taking necessary action to stop a greater evil.

Rep. Thomas Massie is on his way out of the House, having resoundingly lost his primary election last month. So how is he spending his last months in public office? He is defaming Israel.

Today, on the floor of the House, Massie resurrected an old calumny against the Jewish state, the USS Liberty incident, which occurred in 1967 during the six-day war. He described his shameful performance as “one of the biggest honors of my lifetime.” Here he is; the chamber appears to be mostly empty, and his speech had no bearing on any pending legislation. He did it merely for the principle of the thing:

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David Reaboi offers this rebuttal:
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Massie: Israel deliberately attacked the ship with the intent to leave no survivors. There is absolutely zero evidence it was a premeditated strike. The Israeli military correctly identified the ship at dawn, but a duty officer erased the ship’s marker from the naval plot hours later because the information was considered stale. ... .

If Israel had intended to sink the ship, they would have used iron bombs—but the Israeli air controller deliberately diverted the flight carrying iron bombs away from the ship.

When an Israeli pilot recognized Latin letters on the hull (Arab warships used Arabic script), the attack was immediately halted with the order, “Leave her!” Israel then dispatched rescue helicopters, ceased fire immediately, and apologized within hours, before Washington had even publicly acknowledged the incident.

Massie: The attack was a 25-minute unprovoked assault using napalm, and lifeboats were machine-gunned. In reality, the air attack lasted approximately 14 minutes, and every official investigation confirms there were only two Mirages and two Super-Mystères involved. (Even survivor advocates who previously claimed there were up to 30 sorties have conceded on the record that there were only two initial jets).

The jets dropped napalm because they had been diverted mid-mission from bombing Egyptian infantry, not because of a surgical plan to sink a steel ship.

Furthermore, the torpedo boat did not machine-gun lifeboats to execute survivors; it actually recovered a damaged life raft put overboard by the crew that was marked “US Navy.” This recovery is exactly how the Israelis realized the ship was American.

Massie: It was a clear day with unlimited visibility and the American flag was flying proudly. While Massie argues the flag should have made the ship’s identity obvious, gun-camera film from the attacking pilots and shipboard photos confirm that the smoke from the burning ship was rising straight up–meaning there was essentially no wind. Because of the calm conditions, the flag hung limp and drooping against the mast rather than extended. The Navy Court of Inquiry specifically concluded that the calm weather and slow speed (~5 knots) “may well have made the American flag difficult to identify.”

Swede (40,324 posts)



https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221291857

Never mind Fancy Bear, or the NSO Group, the biggest threat to the open internet today is from the Big Tech corporations on which it has come to depend. For what else are we to conclude given that Google appears to be working on a system to lock large parts of the internet behind a new form of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) designed not to tell apart humans from bots, but instead to make an un-person of anyone who doesn’t own an ‘approved’ Android or Apple device.

Google’s reCAPTCHA service is used by a wide variety of websites, many of them independent of Google in every other regard, to limit incoming traffic or data entered into contact forms. It is intended to prevent automated software from accessing these resources and using them to send spam messages or flood websites with denial of service attacks. You have probably encountered it when told to identify all the bicycles in a grid of images.

Under the auspices of its Cloud Fraud Defence programme, Google is introducing a new form of CAPTCHA for which the way to ‘prove’ one is a human is to be in possession of a Google-approved device. Reclaim the Net‘s original reporting focused on the threat to deGoogled phones, meaning phones running Android-like operating systems which have Google’s – often unwelcome – proprietary features removed, such as GrapheneOS or LineageOS. However, just as the dull name of ‘age verification‘ serves as a cloak beneath which schemes to end all truly personal computing can be smuggled, the danger here could be much broader than the technically focused headline implies. As the sources discussing this are relatively few, it is hard to ascertain exactly what has already been rolled out and what is still in the conceptual stages. But it appears that the new style of CAPTCHA threatens not just users with deGoogled phones but anyone without an ‘approved’ device. Google’s own documentation confirms the existence – as a “Preview” in limited use with alternative options presently existing – of CAPTCHAs which require an Apple or Android handset to pass them. But it describes this in a “Mobile Verification” context, which may imply a more limited use than reCAPTCHA in general. However, with such functionality possible, there is no reason that Google could not activate this, without alternative options, everywhere that its reCAPTCHA-branded prompts appear.