All of this may be true. The Kuwaiti paper may have pushed an Iranian story to stir up mischief. Fox may not have done due diligence on the story. It all might be a clever bit of disinformation.

On the other hand, "a hit dog will holler."

The counterargument to the story is based on the idea that the Kuwaiti newspaper has links to the Tehran regime and has posted inaccurate stories. //

That sounds plausible until you consider how many of the Steele Dossier stories that the media accepted at face value were also based on a single anonymous source. I'm not sure that is the strongest argument to make given our own media's performance during the Russia Hoax and COVID when they produced regime disinformation on a massive scale. I don't know why I'd believe the same people who were involved in sending $1.7 billion in cash to Tehran and lying about it rather than some other group of liars. //

The fact is that Biden's foreign policy is based on two impulses: fear and appeasement. Well, three impulses: fear, appeasement, and lies. We have read over and over about how the White House is trying to prevent "escalation" between Israel and Iran. We know from White House sources that Biden is trying to pressure Netanyahu into winding down the war in Gaza and not reacting to Hezbollah and Iranian provocations. We know that Iran has threatened to hit American targets if it can't adequately punish Israel; see Iran Warns US That If It Helps Israel Defend From Iran's Retaliation Itself Then the US Is Next – RedState. We know that the White House permits Iranian-backed gunmen to rocket US bases in the region with token retaliation. //

We know that Biden's foreign policy and defense agencies have senior people with very close ties to Tehran; see Defense Official With Frequent White House Visits and Known Iranian Ties Has a Link to Kamala Harris. Kamala's national security adviser has been employed by what is described as Iran's lobbying arm in Washington.

We also know that the White House is in thrall to the "Palestinian" movement and is deeply anti-Israel, if not outright antisemitic. //

I understand why people don't want to believe the story is true. I'd also love to be able to tell the story of an outrageous fraud. What I don't understand is what about the story isn't both plausible and totally on-brand for the Biden White House.  //

John Q. Public Dieter Schultz
4 hours ago
The people who say that the story isn’t true have lied about literally everything else. Is today the day they finally decided to be honest? //

Wabash08
2 hours ago
Even if it’s not accurate, it reflects the utter shambles Biden has left our relationship with Israel. That story wouldn’t get reported unless there is either hard evidence the US acted as accused, or Israel is angry enough at American behavior to let it be printed without definitive proof. I would put my money on the story being true given Biden and his Obama staffed state department’s obsequiousness to Iran.

how easy it is to set up an IP tunnel between two locations. This will allow you to access files on a server and share printers between two locations, no matter how far apart. In addition, it enhances data security by encrypting packets as they travel through the tunnel. To accomplish this task, you will need two Mikrotik routers, one at each location, and two public IP addresses.

We can redirect dns requests on Mikrotik to the IP address on the LAN interface of the Mikrotik router, assuming we want the Mikrotik router to serve as the dns server for all connected LAN users, or to the IP address of a locally hosted dns server. There are many reasons for doing this; top most on the list is security.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
A wall of negative headlines was so predictable. They’re such NPCs 🤣🤣

All this does is drive even more people to listen to the conversation themselves and realize how much the legacy media lies to them!

Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital
Collection of the negative headlines from the Trump x Elon spaces
10:36 AM · Aug 13, 2024

NPC means "non-player character." It's a gaming term that has come to refer to those who can't think for themselves and blindly follow the narrative as so much of MSM does. //

But Musk decided to have a little more fun concerning the event and posted this video that's terrific.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Haters will say this is AI 🕺🕺
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1823742501884453312
0:36 / 0:36
11:24 AM · Aug 14, 2024. //

Some like actor Kevin Sorbo joked that they were there, so they know it was "real."

Kevin Sorbo @ksorbs
·
Replying to @elonmusk
It’s real, I was there
11:43 AM · Aug 14, 2024

Over My Shoulder
John Walker's Reading List

NextDNS protects you from all kinds of security threats, blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps and provides a safe and supervised Internet for kids — on all devices and on all networks.
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exampleadultsite.com
is only a demonstration site.
If you were using OpenDNS Parental Controls or Web Filtering for business, this demo and real adult sites would be blocked.

Secure Technology Value Solutions is a company with a boring name and a bland website that is staffed by jovial-looking former policemen and corrections officers. It doesn’t exactly scream “Chinese Communist Party threat,” and that’s precisely the point.

Secure Technology Value Solutions is actually a front for Nuctech, a Chinese government- and military-owned company, and it’s selling sensitive security equipment to police and corrections departments all across the United States.

Nuctech sells devices such as the body scanners that passengers must use during airport security checks, as well as larger devices, such as cargo scanners for commercial ports.

It was an early adopter of a technique that’s become popular among Chinese companies that fall under national security scrutiny: Change the name of your American subsidiary to something that sounds benign and hope to fly under the radar.

Nuctech’s U.S. subsidiary changed its name to Secure Technology Value Solutions in 2022, after Nuctech was hit by several forms of national security sanctions.

Nuctech equipment was blocked from U.S. airports a decade ago by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department in 2020 on national security grounds.

Some 500 miles west of Beijing, in the desert of the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, a solar-power project is underway that is — even by China’s standards — audacious in scale and, most remarkably, in ambition.

Officials in Ordos are over the next several years going to install 100 gigawatts of solar panels — more than three times as much capacity as the United States is currently building nationwide — along a stretch of land 250 miles (400 kilometers) long and 3 miles (5 km) wide.

The goal isn’t just to generate huge amounts of clean power. It is also to restore a no man’s land, bringing greenery and even livestock to an area roughly the size of Puerto Rico. In doing so, the local authorities are doubling down on two of China’s most successful efforts of recent years: An epic expansion of solar power, and major progress in combating desertification. //

Initially, those operating in desert climes adopted measures such as creating sand barriers and planting trees in order to safeguard their operations. “They must take actions to minimize the damage they would bring to the local ecology and environment while also protecting their own bases from being damaged by sandstorms,” Wang Weiquan, the general secretary of the Energy and Environment Committee of China Energy Research Society, a Beijing-based NGO, told me. “Much to their surprise, they found that their work led grass to grow in the desert.”

Indeed, according to a 2022 study, desert-based solar power projects have resulted in “a significant greening trend”: About one-third of the land under solar plants built in 12 Chinese deserts has seen vegetation grow.

As another recent study showed, solar panels do not only create shade, enabling plants and vegetables to grow, but also reduce the ground wind speed, preventing sand from being picked up.

Solar companies saw opportunities: They started to search for suitable crops to grow under the panels. One plant they found worked was liquorice, which can survive in the harsh environment and make the soil more fertile by absorbing nitrogen from the air and converting it to the ground. //

There are also environmental concerns. For one, most Chinese developers build their desert bases by bulldozing sand dunes, and this could ultimately lead to sand and dust storms, a Chinese sand-control expert told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. A previous study also showed that covering the Sahara with solar panels may, in fact, worsen global warming by potentially increasing surrounding air temperatures markedly and reshaping rainfall patterns worldwide.

A source told Axios that “the campaign buys search ads with news links to give voters searching for information about Vice President Harris more context.”

The campaign has rewritten headlines since August 3, targeting over a dozen outlets:

The Associated Press
CBS News
CNN
The Guardian
The Independent UK
NPR
PBS
Time
USA Today
The Guardian, CNN, USA Today, and NPR told Axios they had no idea the Harris campaign had these ads. //

The ads include links to real articles from the news outlets, but the headlines and supporting text have been altered to read as though the articles support the Harris campaign’s objectives. //

Bonchie
@bonchieredstate
·
Follow
Yesterday, Sara Fischer of Axios threw a fit on CNN over “disinformation” and Elon Musk allowing Trump to “say whatever he wants.”

Today, she’s hand-waving away the Kamala Harris campaign editing press headlines in ads to spread disinformation.

Incredible.
5:32 PM · Aug 13, 2024 //

Evil Otto in reply to dwb. | August 14, 2024 at 7:29 am
Do you understand how it works? Democrats can get away with things Republicans can’t. If the GOP even tried this it would be national headlines.

For more than 2,300 years, Euclid’s Elements has been the foundation for countless students to learn how to reason with precision and pursue knowledge in all fields of learning.

The brilliance of his work has made it the second most published book in history because it provides profound tools to distinguish truth from error and discover fundamental principles about the world.

Modeled after our core mathematics course, “Mathematics and Logic” examines the vital importance of good reasoning to the liberal arts.

With this course, you’ll study the transformation of mathematics by the ancient Greeks, the fundamentals of logic and deductive reasoning, the central proofs of Euclid, the birth of modern geometry, and much more.

And now, you can own a DVD box set of “Mathematics and Logic” for a gift of $100 or more to Hillsdale College.

Large language models are increasingly integrating into everyday life—as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence systems, which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations, can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users.

Large language models’ growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.

So, it’s of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLOS ONE, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Argentina's recent repeal of rent control by libertarian President Javier Milei has led to a surge in housing supply, with the freedom to negotiate contracts, previously restricted, directly causing a drop in rental prices.

Milei, a self-described "anarcho-capitalist" known for his free-market approach, repealed the 2020 Rental Law, enacted by former leftist President Alberto Fernández, which had imposed restrictions on landlords and led to a significant decline in rental availability.

With Argentina's inflation reaching 211.4%—the highest in 32 years—rent prices were adjusted every 12 months, and leases had to last at least three years. The law, introduced in 2020, ended up distorting the real estate market and hurting both landlords and tenants.

The law aimed to provide tenants with more financial security, but by the end of last year, an estimated one in seven homes in Buenos Aires was sitting empty as landlords chose not to rent them out in Argentine pesos. Deposits were capped, and it was nearly impossible to end tenancies early.

For many locals, finding a new apartment had become "mission impossible." But after the repeal, Buenos Aires saw a doubling of available rental units, and rental prices have stabilized. Under the new rules, landlords and tenants have more freedom to agree on lease terms. If the duration isn't specified, it defaults to two years.

While having a rugged router at the core of your network is highly recommended, the security settings required to keep the network behind it fully secured can never be over emphasized. In this post, we will look at 9 settings required on a Mikrotik router to keep the network secured.

A. Force Redirect to OPENDNS (without PI hole)
/ip dns
set allow-remote-requests=yes servers=208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220

/ip nat
add action=redirect chain=dstnat dst-port=53 in-interface-list=LAN protocol=tcp
add action=redirect chain=dstnat dst-port=53 in-interface-list=LAN protocol=udp

B. Force OPEN DNS (via PI hole)
/ip firewall nat
add chain=dstnat in-interface-list=LAN protocol=tcp dst-port=53 action=dst-nat to-addresses=10.0.0.31 to-ports=53
add chain=dstnat in-interface-list=LAN protocol=udp dst-port=53 action=dst-nat to-addresses=10.0.0.31 to-ports=53
add chain=srcnat src-address=10.0.0.0/24 dst-address=10.0.0.0/24 action=masquerade

Ok, then, why does Harris have to wait to become president to do anything about, well, anything? //

Former Biden domestic policy adviser Susan Rice described presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris as an “integral architect” of President Joe Biden’s agenda.

From Fox News:. //

Trump War Room

@TrumpWarRoom
·
Follow
Kamala: "When I am president, it will be a day one priority to bring down prices."

Kamala has been Vice President for 1,301 days.

Prices are up 20.2% while real average weekly wages are down 3.9%.

If Kamala has a plan to bring down prices, why isn't she doing it right now?

Last edited
9:33 AM · Aug 14, 2024 //

georgfelis | August 14, 2024 at 2:00 pm
To be clear, they’re lying. The ‘support staff’ for the current administration makes all the decisions, determines what legislation to push, what to ignore, who to promote, what agendas to embrace, and so on. The only real decisions the two nitwits at the top of this anthill have made over the last three years is what bribes to take. The positions of the current administration have proven to be highly profitable for the current administration and their supporters, but crushing and destructive for the rest of the country. In order to get reelected, the support staff need to position the current administration as opposed to the current administration, and to that end they are lying like crazy. Hopefully, they lose. Big.