Yer a Balenciaga Harry…

HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.

Marvin Heemeyer, the perpetrator of the 2004 Killdozer rampage in Granby, Colorado, was not an American folk hero. Rather, he was a selfish and greedy small business owner who took advantage of the town’s numerous efforts to appease and assist him in his petty squabbles with the local town’s government. When finally overruled, in response to these perceived civic slights he committed a violent act of terrorism that miraculously resulted in only his own death, by suicide.

The mythic narrative ascribed to Heemeyer of a rugged individualist American pushed too far by the system, and who was justified in his violence, is a false one.

According to the sources, family members told authorities that the PTSD stemmed from the fighting Lakanwal did in Afghanistan, where he fought in a CIA-sponsored-and-trained unit of the Afghan special forces known as a Zero Unit.

Suspect struggled to assimilate

Lakanwal appeared to have been unraveling for years, unable to hold a job and flipping between long, lightless stretches of isolation and taking sudden weekslong cross-country drives, emails obtained by The Associated Press indicate. His behavior deteriorated so sharply that a community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, fearing he was becoming suicidal.

‘He was clean on all checks’

Lakanwal began working with the CIA around 2011, a senior US official told CNN. At the time, the CIA would have vetted him through a variety of databases, including the National Counterterrorism Center’s, to see whether he had any known ties to terrorist groups, the official said.

Lakanwal would have also been vetted after he applied for asylum in 2024. It was granted in April, during the Trump administration. Noem on Sunday told NBC, “The vetting process all happened under (former President) Joe Biden’s administration.”

The above quotes from the article were chosen by me to support this thesis:

The Trump administration is actively lying about this event to justify their illegal and reckless deployment of the national guard and to cover the fact that they have installed a military force to perform policing, ironically mirroring the tactical stance in Afghanistan that resulted in similar attacks.

Following the same legislative and narrative pattern as the EU for “Chat Control”, similar laws and rhetoric are now cropping up in the US. The narrative is “save the children from porn” but the action is censorship, mass surveillance, and the elimination of privacy on the Internet.

As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. The bill seeks to broadly expand the definition of materials that are “harmful to minors” beyond the type of speech that states can prohibit minors from accessing—potentially encompassing things like depictions and discussions of human anatomy, sexuality, and reproduction.

Wisconsin’s bill has already passed the State Assembly and is now moving through the Senate. If it becomes law, Wisconsin could become the first state where using a VPN to access certain content is banned. Michigan lawmakers have proposed similar legislation that did not move through its legislature, but among other things, would force internet providers to actively monitor and block VPN connections. And in the UK, officials are calling VPNs "a loophole that needs closing.

I am a huge fan of her talks which are always well informed, grounded, balanced, and restore a sense of reality to some of the most unhinged political times in our history.

In this, she covers Trump’s flashes of narcissistic rage, the failed attempts to prevent the release of the Epstein files, the Republican party’s Nazi problem, and a little inspiration of how you can help to continue the momentum of breaking the Trump regime’s tenuous grip on power.

DEF CON 33 - Post Quantum Panic: When Will the Cracking Begin, & Can We Detect it? - K Karagiannis

Due to recently published algorithmic improvements (1399 qubits @ 2048 bit key length for Shor's) and leaps being made in quantum computing hardware (IBM Starling @ 200 logical qubits in 2029, and IBM Blue Jay @ 2000 logical quibits from 2033 and on), encryption is in danger of State-sponsored and high end-criminal attacks as soon as 2030. Particularly susceptible are crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, which rely on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) and are attackable by Shor's factoring capability on a predictably feasible quantum computer.