Frank Ashe 🇵🇸

@neiltyson This is a fallacy, coming from accepting classical mechanics and ignoring the quantum nature of the universe. Santa deliveries are a an example of Schrodinger's wave function.

Amal Khalil was alive for hours. She phoned her family and the Lebanese military for help. People followed in horror as her colleagues updated the world on what was happening. And yet Israel blocked the Red Cross from reaching her for seven hours. That is stone cold murder.

Everyone should read what the Israeli military did to journalist Amal Khalil today in this minute-by-minute account as the international community watched in horror. First the text messages threatening her then trapping her and a photographer in a house then bombing them then firing on international rescue crews, all with the world watching in real time. There are no words left for the horrors that U.S. political leaders are enabling.

Conway Savage, who sadly died in 2018, was a highly respected keyboard player, composer and member of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. youtu.be/3_wCwM-hOUQ?si…

Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong need to listen to this.👇🏽

I have been on Twitter since the earliest of days. In that time I have been subject to a plethora of different pile ons, gaslighting campaigns and silencing attempts. The most egregious and sophisticated of these (which I was pulled into the orbit of) was the attack on my former colleague Dan McCrum when he was exposing Wirecard. We now know that Wirecard utilised the services of some of the shadiest private investigators and intelligence-style contractors to defend their online reputation, which - as well as using covert surveillance efforts and sting operations - also targeted journalists and short sellers with smear campaigns and aggressive cyber tactics in a bid to make them back off from criticising Wirecard. I am therefore somewhat familiar with the hallmarks of inorganic influence operations and how they manifest. Waking up this morning to a long list of hateful, ad hominem and context-lacking attacks (most of them at best drawing on kindergarten level reasoning and debating logic - to make their point) just because I dared to push back on the established narrative on Palantir’s “manifesto” is the surest sign in my mind that the public view of the company is being shaped not by authentic debate in the traditional western enlightened sense but by an extremely well targeted and sophisticated agenda-driven influence campaign. This isn’t really surprising. If I was a hostile authoritarian actor or enemy of the west I too would encourage and cultivate attacks on those trying to balance any narrative about firms that offer highly effective tools to defend the west and make western corps more effective within the tradition of democratic norms. None of this is to say such firms should not be scrutinised and held to account. I am as worried about my privacy being eroded as anyone else. But for me it is the extreme asymmetry and absolutism at hand - notably the idea that the only acceptable public intellectual position on Palantir is that it must be the source of all evil the world over - that bears the hallmarks of an “operation” in its own right. The signs that something inorganic are going on: 1) disproportional amount of direct replies and quotes relative to impressions from random accounts of dubious origin and transparency. 2) emotive and aggressive nature of said replies, often misrepresenting or purposefully avoiding the critique at hand. 3) many more “likes” in relative terms. 4) puerile ad hominem attacks. Journalistic curiosity about established narratives should in my opinion always be piqued whenever such asymmetries and hysteria make a sudden showing. To pre-empt a fresh wave of attacks I will just reiterate that as a journalist interested mostly in responsibly entertaining other perspectives to ensure I am not a victim or group think, I am not suggesting palantir should be above criticism. I am simply saying I don’t currently see a reasonable media or public attempt to address their perspective at all let alone in good faith. Good journalism should always attempt to hear out the counter perspective in its full context, even if it ultimately concludes it is not defensible. What I see right now is people cherry picking points in the “manifesto” without context to fit their prescribed agenda about the company.

I knew it. Coachella took down the video. Variety, NME, CNN Brasil, & Pitchfork wrote articles using this tweet. Reposting it here in clips: the moment The Strokes criticized the CIA, the US government, and the killings in Iran and Gaza. #Strokeschella

We have already reached 10-year agreements with three key countries: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. We already have requests from 11 countries – the Middle East and the Gulf, plus we’re also gradually turning our attention to the Caucasus. Within this Drone Deal, there will be at least 10 different agreements covering various categories of Ukrainian weapons exports. Co-production is planned – the construction of our production lines both in Ukraine and in other countries. New technologies that we are developing jointly with various countries, in which they are investing. There is also an agreement on annual funding for a specific amount, along with a fixed number of years. Second: the European track. Work has already begun with Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Of course, we have good relations with the United Kingdom and France. I am confident that all of this will also be implemented there. From an interview with the “United News” telethon.

Inconceivably evil.

"Back in 2003, under the Howard government, the Israeli intelligence services had taken it into their heads to user forged Australian passports in one of their operations abroad. They had been found out. Dennis Richardson, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation at the time, had hauled them over the coals. The Israelis had been forced to sign an agreement with us that if we were to continue intelligence cooperation with them in the future, they would never do this again. Obviously the Israelis did not take us seriously, because they did it again [in January 2010 when an Israeli assassination squad killed a Palestinian in a hotel in Dubai using three fake Australian passports]." — PM Kevin Rudd 🇦🇺

To whom it may concern. It is with a degree of reluctance that I find myself compelled to draw attention to a rather serious wrong that has, of late, afflicted the monetary world. It is a wrong that bears significant systemic consequences for all of us, albeit mostly for me. It relates to the unfortunate usage of the term “pegging” by parties operating outside financial and monetary contexts. This "appropriation" is now giving rise to a degree of stigma, with negative digital externalities, for those of us who still primarily associate the term with its original financial usage. I would respectfully remind readers that such usage — leaving aside carpentry, camping, and clothes-hanging — has a long-standing heritage dating back to at least the 1930s: a rightful original claim, if ever there was one. This is why I have decided, as of today, to launch an unofficial campaign to reappropriate the term for its rightful monetary application. Why now? In what can only be described as a fairly profound display of innocence, when I decided to rebrand my stablecoin publication to ThePeg.co (formerly Cash Equivalence), I was not aware that the term had, in recent years, been… err, repurposed to denote what might be put mildly as an expression of female empowerment. I realised something wasn't quite right while at lunch with a male bank equity analyst late last year, specifically when he began to chuckle awkwardly upon the reference. I have since educated myself on the term’s “other” meaning, which (as far as I can tell) has a rather less illustrious pedigree, emerging only around 2001. The proper financial usage, I should point out, was chiefly popularised in the aftermath of Bretton Woods, when the dollar was famously pegged to gold and other currencies to the dollar. This is why the name seemed a perfect fit for a publication focused not just on stablecoins, but on the broader rewiring of the global financial system. Central bank archives, I would stress, are jam-packed with pegging references — currencies pegged, rates pegged, regimes pegged, etc. Pegs everywhere. Given this rather weighty heritage, it seemed difficult to justify retreat upon familiarisation with the more salacious application. On reflection, in a supposedly female-empowered era, there was really only one option: lean into the faux pas. It is not the first time, after all, I’ve been caught out by my naivety (famous Virgin Atlantic story, IYKYK). Moreover, as a long-time James Bond fan, I decided it was about time that the finance industry loosen its tie, ditch the stiff demeanour, and indulge in a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour like they used to in the good old eurodollar days. Alas, the real trouble began when I set up my new email: @thepeg.co It turns out that corporate email filters, now the vigilant defenders of professional decorum in an increasingly no-fun-allowed environment, preemptively block even entirely respectable emails if they originate from an outfit called thepeg.co. This is, understandably, a problem for a journalist who needs to engage in overt solicitation to land stories. For now, I have resorted to my other "safe for work" domain, the-blindspot.com (ironically named, given this story). But this is proving suboptimal. This is why, after yet another pingback, I decided today something more proactive needs to be done. Hence, the woeful publicisation of my story in the hope of stimulating an organic, widespread reappropriation campaign — one that may yet compel corporate filters the world over to open up to The Peg. At this point, I would gently remind readers that it's not just the most powerful central banks and publications in the world that boast ample references to pegging. There are 7,263 references to things being "pegged" in the Financial Times alone. I attach pictorial evidence of such respectable historic usage, in the hope it might assist those wishing to lobby their web managers on my behalf that pegs should not, in fact, be blocked. Thank you for your attention to this matter. The destigmatisation of “pegging” is no laughing matter. We must work together to restore the term to its rightful place in monetary discourse.

Last year, I published an article featuring interviews with 13 former Jewish-school students about the “brainwashing” they said they endured. What you see in the video below is part of a trip that almost everyone I spoke with mentioned. Here’s an excerpt from my article that discusses it. “Another key component most former students mentioned to me was the March of the Living, where thousands of Jewish students from around the world go on a two-week trip consisting of a week in Poland visiting concentration camps and other sites of the Holocaust, and then a week in Israel celebrating the state, culminating in Israeli Independence Day.  [Shoshana] Schwebel told me that while the trip wasn’t mandatory, classes would shut down during it and it was seen as “embarrassing” to not go. Describing the trip, Schwebel said, “It was really like, ‘Let’s whip them into a froth, and then they’ll be primed to join the IDF.’” Explaining how this would occur, Schwebel said, “The Israel part was very, very directly a recruiting breeding ground. It was very clearly using this shock of the Holocaust and death camps and concentration camps — a very straight line, like ‘point a’ to ‘point b,’ where ‘point b’ is joining the army and ‘point a’ is the Holocaust. So it’s like, ‘Okay, now you’ve seen the Holocaust. Now it’s your duty as a Jewish person to join the army and make sure that never happens again.’” Schwebel provided a specific example from her trip: “I remember one activity that they ran for us when we were in Israel where they had us sort ourselves into, ‘Which type of Jew are you?’” The options put forward were “soldier,” “diaspora philanthropist,” “rabbi” and “pacifist.” Schwebel and her boyfriend at the time chose pacifist, the only ones to do so. Then, she said, “[The soldiers] literally just laughed at us and called us naive treehuggers. The soldiers were like, ‘These naive treehuggers are going to get killed. You guys are going to get killed first because you’re so naive.’”  She added, “The idea was that the top tier that everyone should be aspiring to was ‘soldier,’ and if you weren’t ‘soldier,’ you should be ‘rich philanthropist’ donating to the soldiers.” The March of the Living’s website links to a 2015 study exploring the impacts the trip has on its participants, and approvingly cites several examples, including that: 86 per cent “assert that it’s very important that their spouse be Jewish”; 91 per cent “intend to give their children a Jewish education” (though just under half attributed that intention to the March); 65 per cent “feel that it’s important to live in a Jewish neighborhood”; and almost 90 per cent “said that the March had made it more likely that they would financially support Jewish causes.” The article adds: “Given the overwhelmingly positive results, it’s fair to say that the March has been and continues to be an enormously successful program in terms of ensuring and enhancing Jewish identity.” The March of the Living did not respond to The Maple’s comment requests.”

Just to be very clear here The NSW Premier @ChrisMinnsMP knew, absolutely knew, that this law was unconstitutional He was told that by expert lawyers & members of his own govt He cost NSW & Aust taxpayers hundreds of thousands of $$ with his arrogance & deliberate provocation

“Football Unites the World”, right @FIFAcom?

$760M short on oil. Placed 20 minutes before the Hormuz announcement. This is the 3rd time. March 23: $500M short — 15 minutes before Trump delayed Iran strikes. Oil dropped 15%. April 7: $950M short — hours before the US-Iran ceasefire. April 17: $760M short — 20 minutes before Hormuz declared open. The CFTC is investigating. The ‘peace trade’ was sold to retail. Someone else got out first. Who knew?

The blood-drenched Butcher Netanyahu is due to address the UN General Assembly at 11 pm tonight our time. I really do hope that the Australian delegation walks out on him, with the rest of the civilised world. @SenatorWong RT if you agree.

The average age of a Tik Tok’er is 26.5 years old. Xitter is a little bit older. But Iran is meme-ing their way straight into the brains of youth. America and Israel is not. Not even close.

Israel just blew up a school in southern Lebanon. A year ago, it would have fabricated lies that the school was a secret hideout of Hamas or that there were tunnels below it filled with weapons. Since the West protected Israel as it destroyed Gaza, Israel doesn't even feel the need to make up lies or excuses any longer. It just kills and destroys without limitation. And according to Israeli politicians, yesterday it was Gaza, today it's Lebanon and Iran, and tomorrow it will be Turkey.

This👇is quite extraordinary, showing how much Trump is uniting Europeans on all sides 𝒂𝒈𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒕 him Elly Schlein, Leader of Italy's largest opposition party, (herself 50/50🇮🇹🇺🇸) furiously condemns Trump's attacks on her opponent Meloni. The whole Chamber stands up to applaud the whole time. My English s/t👇 "Italy is a free and sovereign country. Our Constitution is clear - Italy repudiates war. No foreign Head of State has the right to attack, threaten or disrespect our country or government. We are opponents in this Chamber, but we are all Italian citizens and Italian MPs. We are asking for unanimous condemnation of these attacks and threats"

Israel’s iron dome didn’t see this coming from Pakistan

I’ve been in crypto for 13 years, of everything I’ve seen, this is quite possibly the worst and most blatant fraud I’ve come across. It’s insanity. Sad to see.