Jean Baudrillard, Libération 1991, La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu

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The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (French: La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu) is a collection of three short essays by Jean Baudrillard published in the French newspaper Libération and British paper The Guardian between January and March 1991.

Part 1, “The Gulf War will not take place” (La guerre du Golfe n’aura pas lieu) was published in Libération on January 4, 1991.
Part 2, “The Gulf War is not really taking place” (La guerre du Golfe a-t-elle vraiment lieu ?) was published in Libération on February 6, 1991 and
Part 3, “The Gulf War did not take place” (La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu) was published in Libération on March 29, 1991.

Contrary to the title, the author believes that the events and violence of the Gulf War actually took place, whereas the issue is one of interpretation: were the events that took place comparable to how they were presented, and could these events be called a war? The title is a reference to the play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).

The essays in Libération and The Guardian were published before, during and after the Gulf War and they were titled accordingly: during the American military and rhetorical buildup as “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place”; during military action as “The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place”, and after action was over, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. A book of elongated versions of the truncated original articles in French was published in May 1991. The English translation was published in early 1995 translated by Paul Patton.
Contents

Summary

Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war.[1] Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting “did not really take place” from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.[2]

The Corona Fraud: A crime against humanity with extensive legal consequences

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You can find the German version below…

Publication: Bulletin of the World Health Organization; Type: Research Article ID: BLT.20.265892 Page 1 of 37; Author: John P A Ioannidis

Conclusion: The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 can vary substantially across different locations and this may reflect differences in population age structure and case-mix of infected and deceased patients and other factors. The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic.

URL: www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf

Operation Moonshot: UK Government plans up to 10 million covid-19 tests a day

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The UK government has drawn up plans to carry out up to 10 million covid-19 tests a day by early next year as part of a huge £100bn (€110bn; $130bn) expansion of its national testing programme, documents seen by The BMJ show.

The internal correspondence reveals that the government is prepared to almost match what it spends on the NHS in England each year (£130bn) to fund mass testing of the population “to support economic activity and a return to normal life” under its ambitious Operation Moonshot programme.

A briefing memo sent to the first minister and cabinet secretaries in Scotland, seen by The BMJ, says that the UK-wide Moonshot programme is expected to “cost over £100bn to deliver.” If achieved, the programme would allow testing of the entire UK population each week.

A separate PowerPoint presentation prepared for the government by the global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, also seen by The BMJ, says the plans had the potential to grow the UK’s testing capacity from the current 350 000 a day to up to 10 million tests a day by early 2021.

Read more:
www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3520
www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3585

Deepfakes with AI

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Deepfakes (a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”) are media that take a person in an existing image or video and replace them with someone else’s likeness using artificial neural networks.[2] They often combine and superimpose existing media onto source media using machine learning techniques known as autoencoders and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their uses in celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud. This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.

Academic research

Academic research related to deepfakes lies predominantly within the field of computer vision, a subfield of computer science.[11] An early landmark project was the Video Rewrite program, published in 1997, which modified existing video footage of a person speaking to depict that person mouthing the words contained in a different audio track.[14] It was the first system to fully automate this kind of facial reanimation, and it did so using machine learning techniques to make connections between the sounds produced by a video’s subject and the shape of the subject’s face.[14]

Contemporary academic projects have focused on creating more realistic videos and on improving techniques.[15][16] The “Synthesizing Obama” program, published in 2017, modifies video footage of former president Barack Obama to depict him mouthing the words contained in a separate audio track.[15] The project lists as a main research contribution its photorealistic technique for synthesizing mouth shapes from audio.[15] The Face2Face program, published in 2016, modifies video footage of a person’s face to depict them mimicking the facial expressions of another person in real time.[16] The project lists as a main research contribution the first method for re-enacting facial expressions in real time using a camera that does not capture depth, making it possible for the technique to be performed using common consumer cameras.[16]

In August 2018, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley published a paper introducing a fake dancing app that can create the impression of masterful dancing ability using AI.[17][18] This project expands the application of deepfakes to the entire body; previous works focused on the head or parts of the face.[17]
Politics

Deepfakes have been used to misrepresent well-known politicians in videos. In separate videos, the face of the Argentine President Mauricio Macri has been replaced by the face of Adolf Hitler, and Angela Merkel’s face has been replaced with Donald Trump’s.[41][42] In April 2018, Jordan Peele collaborated with Buzzfeed to create a deepfake of Barack Obama with Peele’s voice; it served as a public service announcement to increase awareness of deepfakes. [43] In January 2019, Fox television affiliate KCPQ aired a deepfake of Trump during his Oval Office address, mocking his appearance and skin color.[44]

In May 2019, speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was the subject of two viral videos, one of which had the speed slowed down to 75 percent,[45] and another which edited together parts of her speech at a news conference for the Fox News segment Lou Dobbs Tonight. Both videos were intended to make Pelosi appear as though she was slurring her speech.[46] President Donald Trump shared the latter video on Twitter, captioning the video “‘PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE'”.[47] These videos were featured by many major news outlets, which brought deepfakes to the attention of the United States House Intelligence Committee.[48][49]

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake

Operation Mockingbird

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Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early 1950s and attempted to manipulate news media for propaganda purposes. It funded student and cultural organizations and magazines as front organizations.

According to writer Deborah Davis, Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and oversaw the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed after a 1967 Ramparts magazine article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In the 1970s, Congressional investigations and reports also revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups. None of these reports, however, mentions by name an Operation Mockingbird coordinating or supporting these activities.

A Project Mockingbird is mentioned in the CIA Family Jewels report, compiled in the mid-1970s. According to the declassified version of the report released in 2007, Project Mockingbird involved the wire-tapping of two American journalists for several months in the early 1960s.

For foreign news media, the report concluded that:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.

See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Jewels_(Central_Intelligence_Agency)

See also:

The Smith–Mundt Act – Legal Propaganda

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The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Public Law 80-402), popularly called the Smith–Mundt Act, is the basic legislative authorization for propaganda activities conducted by the U.S. Department of State, sometimes called “public diplomacy”. The act was first introduced by Congressman Karl E. Mundt (R-SD) in January 1945 in the 79th Congress. It was subsequently passed by the 80th Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948.

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which was contained within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (section 1078 (a)) amended the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987, allowing for materials produced by the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to be available within the United States.

Section 501(a) of the Act (care of the Voice of America Web site) provides that

information produced by VOA for audiences outside the United States shall not be disseminated within the United States … but, on request, shall be available in the English language at VOA, at all reasonable times following its release as information abroad, for examination only by representatives of United States press associations, newspapers, magazines, radio systems, and stations, and by research students and scholars, and, on request, shall be made available for examination only to Members of Congress.

U.S. Congressional Amendments to 1948 Act
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act#U.S._Congressional_Amendments_to_1948_Act

ABC Fake News – Syria Bombing

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Oshō on the liberty and happiness of children

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“Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.”
― Henri Bergson

osho-liberty-bilingual

A pertinent passage from George Orwell’s 1984

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Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. … There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’