Nine years ago, when crypto-fraudster @SBF_FTX was 19, his mother, a Stanford professor, wrote a very long article making the case that free will is a myth and that we should not blame people for committing crimes.
“[O]ur worldviews, aspirations, temperaments, conduct, and achievements—everything we conventionally think of as “us”—are in significant part determined by accidents of biology and circumstance,” she wrote in 2013.
“[S]uppose that Smith grew up in a neighborhood where drug dealing was the most common form of gainful employment. He was raised by a single mother who was a cocaine addict, and by the time he was twelve was supporting his family by selling drugs…
“When he was seventeen, he got caught up in a drug deal gone bad, and in the altercation that ensued, he shot and killed the buyer.
How should we think about Smith’s level of moral responsibility?”
She adds, “parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison…”
According to Fried’s own argument, we should hold her son *more* responsible for his fraud, given his rich, educated parents.
Fried concludes, “we have gotten nothing from our 40-year blame fest except the guilty pleasure of reproaching others for acts that, but for the grace of God, or luck, or social or biological forces, we might well have committed ourselves.”
*Nothing.* For her, it’s black & white
Fried’s essay is reflective of the standard Woke attack on personal responsibility. “You’re not responsible because you didn’t choose your genetics or circumstances.” Under such reasoning, one is not responsible for committing crime.
Amazing.
I addressed this denial of free will/personal responsibility in “San Fransicko.” I noted that, after WWII, there was a debate over free will, and most decided that the “good soldier” a.k.a. “I was just following orders” defense was untenable.
I pointed out that denial of free will gives people permission to behave badly. SBF may be proof of that.
If free will is a myth, it’s a good one. It’s what leads people to obey laws. It’s what allows civilization to exist. The fact that free will is a myth, “socially constructed,” is no argument against it.
What all of that philosophical gymnastics gets you is the justification to do whatever you want. It opens the door to might-makes-right justifications. And it provides a clear path to the charitable-ends-justify-the-fraudulent means rationalizations SBF engaged in.
This scandal is spectacular proof that high intelligence is no substitute for shitty ethics, and may even undermine them. The smartest guys in the room are particularly well-equipped to justify bad, power-hungry nihilism.
Some people have misinterpreted my thread as saying we should blame SBF’s mother for SBF’s apparent crimes. Definitely not. That’s her argument, not mine. I’m saying we should hold SBF, and nobody else, responsible.
As usual, the antidote can be found near the poison. Paul Bloom, in the same issue, makes the identical case I made, which is that free will motivates good behavior.
“If you take her argument seriously, nobody should blamed for anything—not the teenager, or the corrupt politician, or the cheating spouse, or anybody else. You also shouldn’t praise, admire, or respect anyone, as all of these attitudes presume some degree of choice.”
Amen
SBF deliberately hit his investors in the face while they were sleeping and now he is half-denying he did so deliberately.
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The US government says it is not hiding a secret UAP (UFO) program. But dozens of whistleblowers say it is. And now, a new whistleblower has come forward to reveal what the government is hiding, including the name of the secret program, which is revealed here for the first time.
Pentagon Is Illegally Hiding Secret UFO Program From Congress, Whistleblowers Allege
New government whistleblower reveals, for the first time, the name of the Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP) for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)
General Lloyd Austin testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of Defense on January 19, 2021. (Photo by GREG NASH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
_________________________________________
One of Congress’ most important responsibilities is oversight of the executive branch in general and the military and Intelligence Community (IC) in particular. The first article of the United States Constitution specifies this responsibility. This role ensures that powerful governmental entities operate within the bounds of the law, uphold democratic principles, and remain accountable to the American people.
This responsibility extends to classified programs like Special Access Programs (SAPs). By law, the Department of Defense (DOD) must notify the “Gang of Eight” (the chairpersons and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate) and/or the relevant congressional committees about their existence.
The National Security Act of 1947 requires that covert operations and Compartmentalized Access Programs (CAPs) by intelligence agencies, including the military intelligence community, be reported to Congress. Specifically, the President must provide a written finding that justifies covert action and submit it to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
While the military and IC may limit the amount of detail shared with Congress, the Constitutional and legal responsibility remains. Sunshine remains the best disinfectant. Readers are, of course, welcome to disbelieve the whistleblowers and the evidence they provide of UAPs. I do not claim to know what they are.
There is, however, a growing body of evidence that the government is not being transparent about what it knows about UAPs and that elements within the military and IC are in violation of their Constitutional duty to notify Congress of their operations.
Over the last four days, a Pentagon spokesperson repeatedly promised to respond to Public’s questions but did not do so. We will update this article with their response should they decide to provide one.
— Michael
_________________________________________
There is no evidence that any non-human or extra-terrestrial intelligence has visited Earth, according to a May 2024 report by the office the Pentagon created in 2022 to study unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), formerly called UFOs.
The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office AARO “assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part,” the report concluded, “the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence.”
The former Director of AARO has since resigned his position and has repeatedly dismissed and ridiculed the topic, claiming that talk of the phenomenon is due mainly to a small group of individuals in the grip of a rumor-based religion.
But critics say that AARO’s 63-page history of the US government’s investigation into UAPs since the end of World War II was riddled with factual errors and poor referencing, including to Wikipedia. And the document was missing historical information that appeared in the 117-page “UAP Timeline” document created by a former or existing US government intelligence officer that Public published last year.
Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush, wrote a lengthy rebuttal, concluding, “this is the most error-ridden and unsatisfactory government report I can recall reading during or after decades of government service.”
And major political figures, including Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, have vouched for the credibility of UAP witnesses and whistleblowers.
“I’ve interviewed solid people,” said former president Donald Trump in September, “great pilots for the US Air Force, et cetera, they’ve seen things that they cannot explain.”
Former President Donald Trump being interviewed by his son, Don Trump, Jr., about UAPs
Trump has said repeatedly that the government has information about UAPs that it has not released. In 2020, during a podcast with his son, Donald Trump, Jr., Trump said, “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.”
In June of this year, Trump said that the government has information about UAPs that it has not released. "I have access,” he said, “and I speak to people about it. I've had actually meetings on it. And they will tell you there's something going on.”
In 2021, former CIA Director John Brennan said, “I think some of the phenomena we may be seeing continue to be unexplained and might be some type of phenomenon that results from something that we don’t yet understand and could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
The same year, the current Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, said UAPs could constitute human intelligence (NHI).
In 2023, a high-ranking former intelligence officer named David Grusch testified to Congress that the US government had retrieved spacecraft of nonhuman origin and bodies, which US government insiders told Public was accurate.
In July 2022, the Intelligence Community Inspector General concluded that Grusch’s complaint that “elements” of the IC had withheld or hidden UAP-related information from Congress “to purposely and intentionally thwart legitimate Congressional oversight of the UAP Program” was both “credible” and “urgent.”
At the time, Charles McCullough III, the first Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, who the US Senate had confirmed for his job in 2011, represented Grusch.
That does not mean that extraterrestrial beings occupy or are operating the UAPs, nor that the US government and military contractors are hiding crashed alien spacecraft or bodies, as some former astronauts, former IC officers, and former military leaders claim.
There are other explanations for UAPs. Current dominant alternative theories, including those put forward by AARO, are that UAPs are some kind of natural phenomenon we don’t yet understand, like ball lighting or plasma. They could also be part of some new US or foreign government weapons program, such as drones, aircraft, balloons, CGI hoaxes, or birds.
Other UAP skeptics say that some combination of government disinformation and social contagion, like the Satanic panic of the 1980s or the Salem witch trials, among UAP believers in the US military are driving the phenomenon.
Is it possible that the Pentagon and CIA are still playing disinformation games with the American people to cover up unacknowledged programs? Or that intelligence and security agencies, as well as politicians, are creating a UAP hoax to frighten the public? And is it possible that whistleblowers are fabricating parts or all of their testimony?
The US Air Force allegedly used disinformation against a UFO buff in the past to cover up a weapons program. Something similar could be happening today.
However, no available evidence supports that theory. And so, while this possibility should not be ignored, for it to be true, it would require a complicated conspiracy with unclear motivations.
As Senator Rubio noted last year, “Most of [the UAP whistleblowers] have held very high clearances and high positions within our government. So, you do ask yourself: What incentive would so many people with that kind of qualification – these are serious people – have to come forward and make something up?”
Rubio also said that individuals in “high clearances and high positions within our government” with “firsthand knowledge” of UAPs were “fearful of harm coming to them.”
Grusch and other UAP whistleblowers say the government retaliated against them and tried to stop them from going public.
Last year, Senator Gillibrand said, “There's a lot of fear and so I don't know if we'll ever get to the bottom of it. I don't know if we'll ever get the information about Special Access Programs that are ‘need to know,’ only that Congress has not [been] read in on. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it.”
The training and experience of many UAP witnesses and whistleblowers, including in the US IC and military, undermine facile dismissals of all these individuals as cranks and grifters.
In 2021, John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence under former President Trump, said that UAP demonstrated “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.” And, Ratcliffe said, U.S. intelligence analysts had “high confidence” that foreign adversaries were not behind the famous “Tic Tac” UAP that four Navy Pilots encountered over the water.
Last October, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the DOD published their 2023 Annual Report on UAPs. It said that “many reports from military witnesses do present potential safety of flight concerns, and there are some cases where reported UAP have potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability.”
Finally, many videos and photographs cannot be easily dismissed, and people have reported similar UAPs before drones, aircraft, and CGI existed or were widespread.
And now, existing and former US government officials have told members of Congress that AARO and the Pentagon have broken the law by not revealing a significant body of information about UAPs, including military intelligence databases that have evidence of their existence as physical craft.
One of these individuals is a current or former US government official acting as a UAP whistleblower. The person has written a report that says “the Executive Branch has been managing UAP/NHI issues without Congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorization for some time, quite possibly decades.”
Furthermore, these individuals have revealed the name of an active and highly secretive DOD “Unacknowledged Special Access Program,” or USAP. The source of the document told Public that the USAP is a “strategic intelligence program” that is part of the US military’s family of long-standing, highly-sensitive programs dealing with various aspects of the UAP ‘problem.’”
Public is revealing its name here for the first time.
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On Sept 27 @nytimes accused @elonmusk of being “misleading” for criticizing a new California law to censor parody. “The laws have exceptions for parody” said the Times
Five days later a judge ruled the law unconstitutional. Why? Because it banned a video clearly labeled “PARODY”
On Oct 5, three days after the judge’s ruling, @nytimes published the false Sept 27 accusation in its *print* edition.
The @nytimes has still not corrected its *misinformation* or, assuming it knew on Oct 5 that the accusation was wrong, *disinformation.*
@nytimes Who is the @nytimes reporter who spread the mis- and disinformation? Why he’s the reporter who covers misinformation! Because of course he is.
Bill Gates two weeks ago, John Kerry last week, and Hillary Clinton today — all demanding government censorship of X. Hard to see this as a coincidence. They appear to be laying the groundwork for totalitarianism. Our democratic republic is in danger.
California's recent ban on election-related "misinformation," including political parody, is unconstitutional, a federal court has just ruled. Free speech, not censorship, is the solution to bad info. Wonderful repudiation of totalitarians @GavinNewsom @KamalaHarris & @Tim_Walz
Judge John A. Mendez of the United States District Court of California directly addresses the "Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY, shared by @elonmusk , that led @GavinNewsom & California legislature to enact the unconstitutional censorship legislation.
Judge Mendez has granted the plaintiff's motion for a preliminary injunction, which prevents the California law from going into effect. The reason says Mendez is because "Kohls is likely to succeed in showing" that the California law is unconstitutional.
Tim Walz just spread misinformation in service of making the case for government censorship. He said it’s illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s a myth. The expression refers to a *nonbinding* claim in a 1919 Supreme Court opinion that was *overturned* in 1969.
Tim Walz had previously claimed that it was illegal to spread misinformation about elections. It’s not. How could it be? If you let the government to censor disfavored views on elections, how would we ever know if the government stole an election?
Walz, Harris, Bill Gates, John Kerry and the media are all effectively demanding that the government re-start an illegal censorship and election interference operation run by a “former” CIA operative.
It may seem like what's happening in Brazil has nothing to do with us, but it does. Brazil is a test case for the kind of censorship Kamala Harris wants to impose in the U.S. How do we know? Because we've caught her and Biden funding it.
Over the last two years, my colleagues and I have documented multiple illegal operations by United States government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
We documented how the CIA, its allies, and intermediaries created the Russia collusion hoax, ran tightly organized efforts to take control of censorship and content moderation at Twitter and other social media platforms, and interfered in the 2020 election by approving the publication of a letter from 51 former CIA and other Intelligence Community officials, which falsely claimed there was evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
We reported on the FBI’s persecution of employee whistleblowers, its inadequate investigation of an alleged pipe bomb on January 6, and its illegal interference in the 2020 elections by spreading disinformation about and encouraging censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Finally, we have documented how DHS, which Congress created after 9/11 to combat terrorism, ran multiple operations to spread disinformation, demand censorship, and interfere in elections. These efforts involved current or former members of the US Department of Defense, the British Ministry of Defense, and the CIA. We reported that DHS also created so-called “public-private partnerships” with censorship groups like the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Now, my colleagues and I have discovered that US government agencies, including the FBI and known intermediaries with the CIA, have been funding pro-censorship advocacy and advising the Brazilian government on how to engage in censorship.
This matters to me personally because the Brazilian government is currently persecuting me for exposing its illegal censorship and for denouncing its transformation into a dictatorship. The Federal Police wrote two reports about my alleged crime of publishing the Twitter Files - Brazil, which exposed illegal government censorship. President Lula’s Administration followed this up with a report by the Attorney General, recommending my prosecution.
But it should matter to all Americans because it is a gross abuse of power by the Kamala Harris-Joe Biden administration and further proof that the so-called Deep State agencies of the US government are pushing for illegal censorship and other totalitarian attacks on core American freedoms.
The good news is that many people are waking up. A few weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of people protested in Brazil in one of the largest free-speech gatherings in history.
And now, members of Congress are demanding an end to funding for censorship in Brazil. “The Biden-Harris Administration has weaponized U.S. foreign assistance programs and other means to promote censorship in Brazil and crack down on free speech that would be protected under our U.S. Constitution here at home,” said Rep. Chris Smith today. Smith is a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who chaired a congressional hearing to examine Brazil’s incipient totalitarianism last May.
Rep. @Jim_Jordan and @RepMariaSalazar co-sponsored the "No Funding or Enforcement of Censorship Abroad Act" (HR 9850). The Act would:
1. Prohibit foreign assistance to entities that promote censorship of speech that would be protected speech in the United States;
2. Prohibit foreign assistance to entities that back the Brazilian government’s censorship directives to U.S. internet companies;
3. Prohibit U.S. law enforcement cooperation with foreign countries to “cause, facilitate, or promote online censorship” of political speech; and
4. Prohibit U.S. law enforcement cooperation with Brazilian government censorship directives against internet companies headquartered in the United States.
“The House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have uncovered how the FBI under the Biden-Harris Administration facilitated a foreign government’s censorship requests against Americans,” said Rep. Jordan. “This bill is critical in stopping foreign government censors from using the DOJ or the FBI to silence disfavored views.”
“The United States needs to uphold the principles of its constitution and stand by its citizens whenever they face censorship abroad,” said Rep. Salazar....
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I am grateful to Rep. Chris Smith, Rep. @Jim_Jordan and @RepMariaSalazar for this legislation in general, and for mentioning my persecution by the Brazilian government specifically.🙏❤️✊