Last week, the US military news site Special Operations Forces Report (SOFREP) wrote that America’s “Green Berets” were planned to be deployed to Taiwan to act as permanent training observers and prepare the island’s special units. This represents a departure from past practice that saw frequent but non-permanent visits by US personnel to Taiwanese training facilities, the report said. The permanent US forces, according to the article, would be situated on the Kinmen Islands, just 10 kilometers from mainland China.
Beijing sees the self-governing isle as part of China’s sovereign territory, and has repeatedly warned it against formally declaring independence. Although Taiwan has governed itself since 1949, most of the international community, including the US, does not officially recognize it as a sovereign state. While the US does not officially support Taiwanese independence, it maintains security ties with the island. Under the ‘Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act 2022,’ to “deter People’s Republic of China (PRC) aggression against Taiwan” the US is authorized to spend up to $2 billion a year in military grants to bolster the island’s security up until 2027. Mainland China has slammed the increased rotation of US military personnel to the island. The US always prioritizes its own interests, and Taiwan is merely a “pawn” it uses against mainland China, Beijing’s spokesman Chen Binhua stated on Wednesday. He claimed that by “closely aligning with the US to carry out so-called military training programs,” Taiwan’s political leadership is gradually “pushing the people of Taiwan into a crisis.” “Any attempt to seek ‘independence’ through military means or rely on external forces for ‘independence’ will only lead to danger and ultimately result in self-destruction for Taiwan,” he warned.
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Former US President Donald Trump has said that freeing the “wrongfully imprisoned” Capitol Hill rioters will be one of his “first acts” if he returns to the White House. Nearly 1,400 Trump supporters have been arrested and charged for taking part in the January 6 protest.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump said: “My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” A crowd of Trump’s supporters descended on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying what they believed was Joe Biden’s fraudulent victory in the presidential election the previous November. The demonstration quickly degenerated into a riot, although US Capitol Police restored order within hours. Biden and his Democrat allies labeled the affray an “insurrection,” and the US Justice Department launched an unprecedented manhunt to track down and arrest those who took part. As of last week, 1,358 people have been charged in relation to the riot, most of them for misdemeanor trespassing offenses. However, 127 have been charged with using weapons or injuring police officers, and even those convicted of non-violent crimes have received lengthy prison terms. Trump is facing federal charges for allegedly instigating the riot. According to government prosecutor Jack Smith, the former president sparked the unrest and committed conspiracy against the United States by telling his supporters to “fight like hell” against Congress’ certification of Biden’s win. According to Trump’s lawyers, the then-president was well within his rights to give such a speech, during which he also encouraged his followers to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” A Washington DC appeals court has yet to decide whether presidential immunity should shield Trump from being prosecuted over the speech. Trump has referred to the rioters as “political prisoners,” and suggested that he would pardon some of them if re-elected. “I am inclined to pardon many of them,” he said at a CNN town hall event last year. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control,” he added. With his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, suspending her presidential campaign last week, Trump is all but certain to be the Republican Party’s nominee to take on Biden in this November’s presidential election. Most recent opinion polls show Trump leading the incumbent Democrat by between two and nine points. NATO could face a serious risk of the US leaving the alliance if Donald Trump is re-elected in November, the Telegraph said on Saturday, citing several diplomats from the bloc’s member states.
Europe’s NATO countries should develop some strategy to deal with the consequences of such an eventuality and reconsider the bloc’s defence capabilities, they warn. The possibility of America’s withdrawal is a “concern,” one European diplomat told the paper. “Nobody knows what he’s going to do next,” he said, referring to Trump. The former president secured his leadership in the Republican primaries earlier this week as he swept 14 out of 15 states at stake on Super Tuesday and got 995 Republican convention delegates’ votes. His only opponent, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race for the GOP nomination soon thereafter. He is now expected to face off against President Joe Biden in November since the incumbent American leader also came out on top in the Democratic primaries. Earlier, several former senior US officials claimed that a Trump White House could make America withdraw from NATO. Former US Défense Secretary Mark Esper made such a prediction in December 2023. According to him, Trump could start pulling US forces out of NATO countries, potentially causing “the collapse of the alliance.” Reuters also reported on such a possibility at that time. In mid-February, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, made a similar statement. “NATO would be in real jeopardy,” he said, adding that Trump “would try to get out.” A European diplomat said that the rest of the bloc should “do the planning” for a scenario in which Trump follows through on such plans or just weakens America’s commitment to NATO. “Preparations need to be in place,” the paper’s source added. Another official described NATO as “so overdependent on the US.” A “discussion” on hedging against risks of a US withdrawal was “necessary,” this person added. A third source quoted by the paper said European nations should check the adequacy of their own “defence planning” amid such risks. In the UK, similar concerns were previously voiced by Lord Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US and a prime minister’s national security adviser. “If I were an official in any prime minister’s office around Europe, I would be commissioning the experts in government to start doing some contingency thinking about how a NATO without the United States would look and function – just in case,” he said in a piece he wrote for Prospect last month. Trump himself has not made any comment lately about leaving the alliance. Instead, he said in February that he would not “protect” those NATO members that fall short of the 2% spending threshold in case of an attack, including by Russia. Speaking at a campaign rally in South Carolina on February 10, he recalled what he described as a conversation with “the president of a big country” in Europe. When allegedly asked whether he would rush to the nation’s aid in case of an attack by Moscow, Trump said that if this nation hadn’t spent enough on defence, he “would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to it. Moscow itself has repeatedly denied any plans to attack a NATO member, adding that starting a global war would go against “common sense.” Brian Wompler has just released the Wampler Ego 76 compressor! This pedal pays homage to the legendary 1176 Peak Limiter, which has shaped music for decades. With its timeless studio sounds, this pedal is a must-have for any musician looking to take their sound to the next level. Wampler Ego 76: The Ego has expanded The 1176 Peak Limiter has been a studio staple since its introduction in 1967. As the first solid-state peak limiter on the market, the original, with its FET-based circuit, gave every signal an unmistakable, “improved” sound, especially when it reached its limits in “British Mode,” where all ratio buttons were pressed. According to the manufacturer, the Ego 76 attempts to reproduce this magic. But with some contemporary improvements. In terms of parameters, you get six dials: Tone (for tone shaping), Attack, Release, Level (for output level), Blend (like a Dry/Wet knob), and Compress (for ratio). How does it compare to Universal Audio’s pedal version? Parallel compression
According to Brian, the Wampler Ego 76 offers more energy and brilliance for your guitar sounds compared to using an actual 1176. The pedal also contains two functions that the original doesn’t offer. For example, there is the Blend control, which allows for plenty of parallel compression shenanigans. Compress the hell out of your guitar tone, then blend it to taste with your dry signal and preserve the attacks! If you compress a guitar signal too much, the high frequencies can sometimes get lost in the heat of the moment. The Tone control can counteract this by adding controlled overtones to the signal. In addition, you get plenty of tone-shaping options through various combinations of Attack and Release, especially with clean tones. US President Joe Biden and his main challenger, former President Donald Trump, dominated their respective primaries across the country on Tuesday, according to projections by multiple news agencies.
The voting held in several states on March 5 – dubbed ‘Super Tuesday’ – is crucial in determining who the Democrats and Republicans will formally nominate as their candidates for the presidential election in November. According to Reuters, Trump comfortably won the GOP challenges in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. His last-remaining Republican rival – former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley – currently maintains a narrow lead over Trump in Vermont, CNN reported. Trump celebrated his victory on Tuesday evening, vowing to unify the country. “We have a great Republican party with tremendous talent and we want to have unity and we’re going to have unity and it’s going to happen very quickly,” he said in a speech in Palm Beach, Florida. Biden, meanwhile, won the Democrat vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia, Reuters said, citing a projection from Edison Research. The voting took place a day after the US Supreme Court struck down a decision by Colorado’s top court to bar Trump from the presidential ballot in November. The ruling effectively derailed the campaign waged by Democrat activists to disqualify Trump because of his controversial role in the riot at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Trump has long argued that attempts to prevent him from seeking a second term were a politically motivated “witch hunt.” Campaigning has intensified in recent weeks, with Trump and Biden attacking each other’s record and character. The incumbent president and his aides have described Trump as a “threat to democracy.” The Republican, meanwhile, has questioned Biden’s mental fitness and has claimed that the continuation of his administration would usher in “the collapse” of America.
Activist lawyers had successfully petitioned the state to remove Trump’s name, arguing that his alleged encouragement of the Capitol Hill riot in 2021 had made him an “insurrectionist.” The states of Illinois and Maine had also attempted to bar Trump from contesting the election, but both will now be forced to abandon these efforts.The ruling was unanimous, with no written dissents published. However, two different concurrences were filed. In the majority view, conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Brett Kavanaugh argued that “nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure [the] chaos” of an electoral map in which different presidential candidates were offered to voters in different states. “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand,” they concluded, before arguing that only Congress could enforce the insurrection clause against presidential candidates.
Concurring with the decision, conservative Amy Coney Barrett agreed that “states lack the power to enforce” the clause, but argued that the five justices in the majority should not have ruled that Congress has this power. Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson also concurred with the majority, but argued that the ruling went too far to “insulate” Trump from “future controversy.” In a post on his Truth Social platform immediately after the ruling was announced, Trump described it as a “big win for America.” The court was expected to side with Trump, after all nine justices expressed skepticism at the Colorado Supreme Court’s judgment during a hearing last month. At the time, Kavanaugh pointed out that Trump had not been charged with the crime of insurrection, and all nine justices voiced reservations at allowing an individual state to determine the outcome of a federal election. Having won eight out of nine primary contests so far, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee to challenge President Joe Biden in November’s election. Recent polls show him with a lead of between one and six points over his Democratic rival. Former US President Donald Trump has said that he would “very much consider” Texas Governor Greg Abbott as his running mate for this year’s presidential election. The Republican frontrunner said that Abbott has “done a great job” in securing the US-Mexico border.
Trump and Abbott met in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Thursday, with Trump touring a stretch of the border that has been heavily fortified by Abbott since 2021. Despite the US Supreme Court siding with the White House and permitting federal agents to remove razor wire fencing along the frontier, Abbott has vowed to build more barricades, and the governor snubbed President Joe Biden to meet with his chief political rival instead. Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity later that day, Trump described Abbott as “a spectacular man,” adding that the Republican governor had “done a great job” in fighting to stem the tide of illegal immigration across Texas’ 1,200-mile stretch of the Mexican border. Asked whether he would consider Abbott for vice president, Trump replied: “Yeah, certainly he would be somebody that I would very much consider.” “So he’s on the list?” Hannity asked again. “Absolutely, he is,” Trump confirmed. When asked who else he was considering for the role, Trump named South Carolina Senator and former Republican challenger Tim Scott. However, he was less effusive in his praise for Scott, describing him as an “okay” presidential candidate but an “unbelievable” campaign surrogate. Trump’s list of potential running mates now numbers seven people. Last month, the presidential hopeful confirmed to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that Scott, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida Representative Byron Donalds, and former Hawaii Rep.Tulsi Gabbard, an ex-Democrat who broke with the party in 2022, were all in contention for the spot. However, Abbott said on Friday that he is not interested in the role. “Obviously, that’s very nice of him to say,” the governor told reporters on Friday. “But I think you know my focus is entirely on the state of Texas. I’ve announced that I’m running for re-election two years from now, and so, my commitment is to Texas and I’m staying in Texas.” DeSantis, who along with Ramaswamy dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination in January, has also said that he wouldn’t consider the job. Trump has won all five Republican primary contests to date, and is the firm favorite to secure his party’s support to take on Biden later this year. However, his last remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, has refused to drop out of the race, despite being soundly beaten by Trump in her home state of South Carolina last month and trailing the former president by 20 delegates to 110. US billionaire Elon Musk has taken OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company he once helped to found, to court over an alleged breach of its original mission to develop AI technology not for profit but for the benefit of humanity.
OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab to develop an open-source Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), has now become a “closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world,” Musk’s legal team wrote in the suit filed on Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court. The lawsuit claimed that Musk “has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity – perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today.” “But where some like Mr. Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power,” it added. “Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.” Musk left the OpenAI board of directors in 2018 and has since grown critical of the firm, especially after Microsoft invested at least $13 billion to obtain a 49% stake in a for-profit branch of OpenAI. “Contrary to the founding agreement, defendants have chosen to use GPT-4 not for the benefit of humanity, but as proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world,” the suit read. The lawsuit listed OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and president Gregory Brockman as co-defendants in the case, and called for an injunction to block Microsoft from commercializing the tech. AI technology has improved at a rapid pace over the last two years, with OpenAI’s GPT language model going from powering a chatbot program in late 2022 to performing in the 90th percentile on SAT exams just four months later. More than 1,100 researchers, tech luminaries and futurists argued last year that the AI race poses “profound risks to society and humanity.” Even Altman himself has previously acknowledged that he is “a little bit scared” of the technology’s potential, and barred customers from using OpenAI to “develop or use weapons.” However, the company ignored its own ban on the use of its technology for “military and warfare” purposes and partnered up with the Pentagon, announcing in January that it was working on several artificial intelligence projects with the US military. US State Department fixture and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, aka “Regime Change Karen,” apparently woke up one day recently, took the safety off her nuclear-grade mouth, and inadvertently blew up the West’s Ukraine narrative.
Until now, Americans have been told that all the US taxpayer cash being earmarked for Ukrainian aid is to help actual Ukrainians. Anyone notice that the $75 billion American contribution isn’t getting the job done on the battlefield? Victory in military conflict isn’t supposed to look like defeat. Winning also isn’t defined as, “Well, on a long enough time axis, like infinity, our chance of defeat will eventually approach zero.” And the $178 billion in total from all allies combined doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, either. Short of starting a global war with weapons capable of extending the conflict beyond a regional one, it’s not like they’ve been holding back. The West is breaking the bank. All for some vague, future Ukrainian “victory” that they don’t seem to want to clearly define. We keep hearing that the support will last “as long as it takes.” For what exactly? By not clearly defining it, they can keep moving the goal posts. But now here comes Regime Change Karen, dropping some truth bombs on CNN about Ukrainian aid. She started off with the usual talking point of doing “what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world.” Conveniently, in places where they have controlling interests and want to keep them – or knock them out of a global competitor’s roster and into their own. “And by the way, we have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the US to make those weapons,” Nuland said, pleading in favor of the latest Ukraine aid package that’s been getting the side eye from Republicans in Congress. So there you have it, folks. Ukrainians are a convenient pretext to keep the tax cash flowing in the direction of the US military industrial complex. This gives a whole new perspective on “as long as it takes.” It’s just the usual endless war and profits repackaged as benevolence. But we’ve seen this before. It explains why war in Afghanistan was little more than a gateway to Iraq. And why the Global War on Terrorism never seems to end, and only ever mutates. Arguably the best one they’ve come up with so far is the need for military-grade panopticon-style surveillance, so the state can shadow-box permanently with ghosts while bamboozling the general public with murky cyber concepts that it can’t understand or conceptualize. When one conflict or threat dials down, another ramps up, boosted by fearmongering rhetoric couched in white-knighting. There’s never any endgame or exit ramp to any of these conflicts. And there clearly isn’t one for Ukraine, either. Still, there’s a sense that the realities on the ground in Ukraine, which favor Russia, now likely mean that the conflict is closer to its end than to its beginning. Acknowledgements abound in the Western press. And that means there isn’t much time left for Europe to get aboard the tax cash laundering bandwagon and stuff its own military industrial complexes’ coffers like Washington has been doing from the get-go. Which would explain why a bunch of countries now seem to be rushing to give Ukraine years-long bilateral security “guarantees,” requiring more weapons for everyone. France, Germany, Canada, and Italy have all made the pledge. Plus Denmark, which also flat-out said that it would send all its artillery to Ukraine. If security for Europe is the goal, that sounds kind of like the opposite. Particularly when Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba told the EU that “Russia has gotten closer to your home” in the wake of the most recent defeat in Avdeevka. He sounds like one of those guys in TV ads trying to peddle burglar alarms. Seems like Russia only exists in the minds of the West these days to justify sending weapons to Ukraine to get blown up, while also justifying to taxpayers why they should continue funding this whole charade. Meanwhile, the West’s drive towards peace seems to be taking the scenic route. “As we move forward, we continue our support to Ukraine in further developing President Zelensky’s Peace Formula,” G7 leaders said after a recent meeting with Zelensky in Kiev. Nice to see that he’s devoting all his time to this magic peace formula instead of running around extorting his friends for cash by threatening them with Putin. It was already a pretty big hint of what’s really been going on when the EU decided to use the taxpayer-funded European Peace Facility to reimburse EU countries for the unloading of their mothballed, second-hand weapons into Ukraine, where Russia can then dispose of them before anyone could be accused of overcharging for clunkers. Now, with the clunker supply running dry, they just have to make more weapons. Maybe funneling cash into weapons for themselves will be the Hail Mary pass that saves their economies that they’ve tanked “for Ukraine”? Thanks to Nuland’s nuking of any plausible deniability on Ukrainian “aid” not going to Washington, it’s now clear that Ukrainians continue to die so poor weapons makers don’t end up shaking tin cans on street corners. She has also removed any doubt about the ultimate US goal being Russian regime change, calling Putin’s leadership “not the Russia we wanted,” and sounding like someone who chronically sends back a meal to kitchens of a dining establishment. “We wanted a partner that was going to be Westernizing, that was going to be European. But that’s not what Putin has done,” she told CNN. That’s exactly what Putin has done, actually. It’s the West that’s moved away from itself and is becoming increasingly unrecognizable by its own citizens. Pretty sure that it goes beyond just wanting a country to be “European,” too. Because Germany’s European, and an ally, and Nuland wouldn’t shut up about how much she hated its Nord Stream gas supply — until it mysteriously went kaboom. Regime Change Karen saying the quiet part out loud has decimated the Western establishment’s narrative so badly that it’s a miracle no one has yet accused her thermonuclear mouth of being an asset of Russia’s weapons program. Tucker Carlson said on Tuesday that US spies had monitored him while he was in Russia earlier this month, and leaked to a ‘friendly’ outlet that he had met with Edward Snowden. This is despite the American journalist’s claim that he had tried to keep his meeting with the NSA whistle-blower a secret.
Carlson went to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. During his eight days in Moscow, he also met with Snowden – and US spies found out about it, he told podcaser Lex Fridman in the course of a three-hour conversation. “I was being intensely surveilled by the US government,” Carlson told Fridman, noting that US spies had thwarted his plans to interview Putin in 2021 and that he received confirmation that he was being intensely monitored ahead of his Moscow trip. “Then, I’m over there, and of course I want to see Snowden, whom I admire.”Snowden allegedly accepted Carlson’s invitation to have dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel, but declined the interview as well as a photo request, saying that it would be better to tell no one. “I didn’t tell anybody,” Carlson told Fridman, however the meeting was leaked. “Semafor runs this piece – reporting information they got from the US intel agencies, leaking against me, using my money, in my name, in a supposedly free country – they run this piece saying I met with Snowden, like it was a crime or something.” “If you have a media establishment that acts as employees of the national security state, you don’t have a free country. And that’s where we are,” Carlson added. Carlson revealed that he did not fear getting arrested in Russia at any point, but was warned by his lawyers that the US might arrest him depending on the content of the Putin interview. “I felt not one twinge of concern for the 8 days that I was there,” he told Fridman about being in Moscow. Before he left for Russia, his team of attorneys counseled him to “not do this… A lot will depend on the questions you ask of Putin. If you’re seen as too nice to him you could be arrested when you come back,” Carlson quoted the lead lawyer as saying, to which he said he replied, “You’re describing a fascist country, OK?” In 2013, Snowden revealed that the NSA was systematically engaged in mass illegal spying on American citizens. Fearing for his safety, he fled to Hong Kong with the intent to reach Ecuador, which did not have an extradition treaty with the US, but was stopped during a layover in Moscow after Washington canceled his passport. Russia ended up granting him asylum and reportedly, eventual citizenship. One of the founders of Semafor, the outlet to which Carlson claims US spies leaked his dinner with Snowden, is Ben Smith, a former editor-in-chief of the now defunct BuzzFeed newsroom. In 2017, Smith notoriously published the ‘Steele Dossier,’ a sham document leaked by US spies to discredit incoming President Donald Trump. |
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