Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

I Have Heard The Bots Singing, Each To Each

Saturday, January 4th, 2025

If you look at some of the key ills plaguing America over the last ten years, Facebook has certainly had a hand in perpetuating some of them. Wokeness, censorship, echo chambers, commodification of user information and spam are just some of the evils Facebook (AKA Meta) has helped inflict on the citizenry.

Now Facebook is inflicting AI-generated profiles on its users.

  • Kneon: “Facebook is experimenting with AI generated profiles on Facebook and Instagram.”
  • K: “it’s going to be pretty scary because I mean you already don’t know who you’re dealing with on the internet, and I’ve heard some pretty convincing or seen some pretty convincing video. They actually had uh one of the uh AI video generators doing like an influencer video for Tik Tok and you couldn’t tell it wasn’t a real person.” If you’re doing influencer videos on Tik-Tok, I’m already halfway convinced you’re not a real person…
  • K: “It’s going to make it a lot harder to tell who you’re dealing with on the internet.”
  • Is one of the profiles woke? Of course it is. Geeky Sparkles: “‘Proud black queer mama of two, truth teller.’ It’s a truth teller, but it’s an AI, so it’s already not real but it’s going to tell you the truth. ‘Your realest source for life’s ups and downs.’ Uh, but it’s not real, it’s an AI who doesn’t know about life’s up and ups and downs, but you know it’s a black queer, it identifies as ‘a black queer mama.'”

  • K: “Their parent company Meta company is rolling out a wide array of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook.”
  • GS: “Why? Why do you need an AI character?” Why indeed?
  • K: “From someone who worked in marketing for years, and as a business owner, we have had some interesting things happen with Facebook advertising, and I don’t think all your money is going to ads being seen by real people.”
  • GS: “If advertisers are upset, and bots are a problem and bots and fake accounts are a problem because advertisers are getting scammed, they feel like they’re getting scammed and it’s an issue and we have to stop bots, why would flooding the market with generative AI characters and make your own make sense?”
  • K: “Meta hopes to attract a younger audience in a face off with competitors like Tik Tok and Snapchat.” First, why would Meta think younger users are all like “Hey, you know what I love? Fake profiles!” Second, if you’re taking your cues from Tik-Tok and Snapchat, you’ve already lost.
  • GS: “It’s hard to be a Tik tocker and make content all the time, or it’s hard to have enough content to keep going, but these AI can generate it indefinitely, so we’ll just tell people on Tik Tok to buy your shit.”
  • Maybe the goal is to create Ai influencers who pimp one company’s product and slam competitors.
  • Or create fake women on OnlyFans to make a mint.
  • In fact, there are already AI influencers earning money.
  • GS: “They’re talking about the Dead Internet Theory. And Dead Internet Theory, for those who don’t know is [basically] more and more accounts and activity on the internet are done by computers and fake people than real people.”
  • K: “Facebook feels dead now. Like endstage MySpace.”
  • In the wake of these revelations, there are conflicting accounts in different MSM sources as to whether Facebook has shut these accounts down or not.

    Maybe different MSM writers are talking to different AI bot pretending to be “inside sources.” Or maybe the MSM “writers” are bots as well.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    I’m sure a lot is advertiser driven, but I wonder if some of the investment boom in AI is coming from lefty executives watching the collapse of their systemic preference falsifaction falling away due to events like Trump’s election (all of them) and Brexit and thinking to themselves “Shit, we need to fool the rubes even harder” by using social justice bots to give The Narrative the illusion of popularity.

    Fortunately for us, I think it’s too late for them to pull it off. Maybe Bluesky could finally surpass Twitter/X in user base, if we ignore that 98% of them are bots…

    But still, caution seems to be in order. More than ever, everything you see online should be treated with a degree of skepticism, even if you agree with it.

    Especially if you agree with it…

    Are Hackers About To Erase The Internet’s History?

    Saturday, October 12th, 2024

    One of the more useful, long-time websites on the Internet is the Internet Archive, aka The Wayback Machine, which contains captured, iterative versions of a vast amount of the World Wide Web.

    Except that, right now, the site is offline and under attack by hackers.

  • “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and stones and is constantly on the verge of a major security breach? It just happened.”
  • “The Wayback Machine [is] one of the most important websites in the history of the Internet, because it literally archives the history of the Internet. It’s been taking snapshots of websites, including their HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images since 1996, allowing us to remember the worldwide web in its peak form, when Amazon looked like this and weird people made weird websites just for fun. Unlike nowadays where everybody just chases algorithms on cringe factories like Tik-Tok and Instagram.”
  • It was founded by digital librarian Brewster Kahle.
  • “Unfortunately, the fate of this website hangs in the balance, as it’s currently getting pwned, boned and owned from multiple angles.”
  • “A data breach exposed 31 million email addresses and password hashes. Its Open Library lost a critical legal battle. Its website was defaced with some JavaScript graffiti. It’s been getting DOSed non-stop, and its current status is offline as we speak. What the hell is going on?”
  • “The Wayback Machine contains over 890 billion archived web pages weighing in at nearly 100 petabytes. It’s an unimaginable amount of data. If you look at one web page every second for the next 100 years, you would have looked at less than 1% of the total archive.”
  • “This data is practically irreplaceable. The only company that might be able to replace it is Google, but Google recently stopped using its own cached archive, and its search results now points to, you guessed it, the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.”
  • “We don’t know if the hackers have access to the archived website data, but if they do, and they might, they have the power to erase the history of the world wide web.”
  • “The Internet Archive will remove personal data and comply with GDPR [the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation], but some people want legitimate content to be memory-holed forever.”
  • Section on their Open Library project losing a lawsuit to publishers snipped.
  • HIBP (which is not an STD, but rather a website that helps people find out if their data has been compromised in a data breach) was informed of the Internet Archives data breach on September 30th. It’s confirmed on October 5th. The Internet Archive gets notified on October 6th [before] making the data breach public on October 8th.
  • “The Internet Archive has been been facing aggressive DOS attacks going all the way back to May.”
  • “The website is defaced with some JavaScript library which triggers an alert message about the data breach before it’s been officially disclosed.”
  • “Right now on October 10th, the website is still being attacked and is completely offline. Things are not looking good.”
  • “What sort of sick, twisted hacker would want to mess with the Internet Archive, and why? Well, a hacktivist group called Blackmeta is claiming responsibility.”
  • “They say they’re not a bunch of teenagers, which means that they’re probably just a bunch of teenagers.”
  • According to this post, “Attributed by Radware to SN_BLACKMETA, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist with potential ties to Sudan that may operate from within Russia.” YouTuber Fireship (whose video this is) thinks that’s a false flag, but his reasons are “This doesn’t make sense and won’t get people to like you,” which hasn’t stopped those End Oil idiots. Indeed “this is stupid and makes people hate you” describes a vast array of real “activist” actions going all the way back to the Symbionese Liberation Army and attempts to levitate the Pentagon back in the 1960s, so I think Fireship’s deduction here is off-base.
  • Could be pro-Palestinian sorts, who have never seemed to care about “making friends” while raping women and beheading babies. Or it could be any number of social justice types, whose Khmer Rouge-esque “Year Zero” vibe jibs nicely with wiping out the Internet’s history. Or maybe they’re trying to erase Kamala Harris’ obvious past idiocies.

    In any case, let’s all hope this attack fails, and that the Wayback Machine has robust, rotating offline backups…

    Paxton Files Lawsuit Against Tik-Tok

    Saturday, October 5th, 2024

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doesn’t just sue the Biden Administration, he sues anyone breaking Texas law. and this time he’s suing Chinese-owned Tik-Tok.

    Big tech companies, and TikTok especially, have continued to draw the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has now sued the social media giant alleging it violated aspects of a newly enacted Texas online safety law.

    “Big Tech companies are on notice that I will hold them accountable for exploiting Texas children and failing to prioritize minors’ online safety and privacy,” Paxton wrote on social media.

    The Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act is at the center of Paxton’s allegations. “In contravention of the SCOPE Act, Defendants have failed, and continue to fail, to create and provide parents and guardians with the tools legally required to protect minors’ privacy and safety,” the lawsuit states.

    An overview of the SCOPE Act can be found here, and the full text of the act can be found here.

    The SCOPE Act, also known as House Bill 18, was passed during the 88th Legislative Session. The law aims to prevent digital service providers (DSPs) from entering into agreements with minors without parental or guardian consent. It also mandates that DSPs include options in these agreements for parents or guardians to permanently enable specific settings.

    It goes on to allege that TikTok has “failed to develop a commercially reasonable method for a known minor’s parent or guardian to verify their identity and relationship to a known minor.”

    Last month, the SCOPE Act went into effect, but only partially.

    Judge Robert Pitman for the Western District Court of Texas in Austin determined that the “monitoring-and-filter requirements” of the SCOPE Act, which would require DSPs to monitor certain categories of content and filter them from being on display for known minors,” posed a threat to “content based” online speech.

    In his opinion, Pittman questioned the “overbroad terminology” employed by the SCOPE Act.

    “For example, what does it mean for content to ‘promote’ ‘grooming?’ The law is not clear.”

    “Grooming” is listed alongside other explicit topics like suicide and substance abuse that the SCOPE Act would have required DSPs to monitor and filter out for minors.

    Tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed the lawsuit to block the law, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sued Paxton in an effort to prevent the SCOPE Act from going into effect.

    “Texas law requires social media companies to take steps to protect kids online and requires them to provide parents with tools to do the same,” wrote Paxton about his most recent lawsuit. “TikTok and other social media companies cannot ignore their duties under Texas law.”

    The lawsuit, filed in a Galveston County District Court, is seeking civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation and injunctive relief to prevent future violations of the SCOPE Act by TikTok.

    TikTok has come under increased scrutiny in recent months.

    President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that included a requirement for the Chinese corporation ByteDance to divest from the social media platform.

    Last year, back when I wad employed, I had a cleaning lady come in to do my house before a small 4th of July gathering. She brought her daughter, who watched Tik-Tok videos while her mother cleaned. And by “watched,” I mean she would look at the first second or two of a video and then instantly scroll on to the next. I fear we’re raising generations with the attention span of a gnat.

    We’ve previously covered that Tik-Tok is nasty Chinese spyware, but the issue of parental controls is not one easily solved, nor is the issue of balancing constitutional rights with the traditional doctrine of in loco parentis any less difficult. Indeed, there are multiple constitutional issues involved:

  • Just what “constitutional rights” does a corporation owned in part by the Chinese Communist Party enjoy? Corporate personhood is a legal fiction designed to allow corporate entities to enter into legal contracts an obtain standing as separate entities in the judicial system. The rights of foreign corporations to access American markets is usually defined by bilateral or multilateral treaties, yet we know Communist China ignores such treaties at will when it suits them. Why should Tik-Tok enjoy First Amendment protections when American corporations enjoy no such rights in China?
  • Can a state have the standing to regulate a company that doesn’t have any physical presence in that state? Can California sue Gunbroker for not banning AR pattern rifles entirely?
  • There seems to be a legal assumption that states have some standing in these matters, as Pornhub IP range-blocked Texas rather than test the constitutionality of parental control requirements in court.
  • It would be better if parents instituted their own controls and/or refrained from handing their spawn smartphones with mind-destroying Chinese spyware installed, but that doesn’t seem to be the world we live in.

    Needless to say, if you have Tik-Tok on your phone, you should delete that right now…

    Spectrum Internet Down Across Texas

    Tuesday, July 9th, 2024

    Houston isn’t the only place in Texas having trouble. Spectrum Internet is down all across Texas. Including here. I’m typing this on my iPhone.

    They’re not sure if it’s from Beryl or not, but it didn’t go out here until after noon today, and if a Houston power outage is affecting service in the entire state, that’s pretty poor disaster planning by Spectrum.

    Will update when I know more.

    Update: Back up here at 4:49 PM.

    Update 2: All four lights are on but The Internet isn’t showering my screens with any bits. Those 30 minutes of Internet were useful while they lasted…

    Update 3: Give them credit: They said by 7 PM, and it came on only a few minutes after that.

    Supposedly a Spectrum tower in Houston that was damaged by Beryl was the root of a problem, but that seems suspicious. How can a single tower in Houston take out Internet in Austin and San Antonio? If true, this would be a whole lot of failover plans failed to switch over properly. Where’s the emergency redundancy?

    Watch A Certain YouTube Video? Google Just Turned All Your Personal Info Over To The Feds

    Wednesday, March 27th, 2024

    Chalk up another win for conspiracy theorists:

  • “If you watch certain YouTube videos, investigators demanded your data from Google.”
  • “Investigators have approached Google and said ‘We want to know who watched certain videos, give that information up.’ So as Chase [DiBenedetto] writes, if you’ve ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to put you on some kind of watch list, your concern may be more than warranted.”
  • “Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity of YouTube accounts and IP addresses that watched certain YouTube videos, which was part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.”
  • It turns out the feds had sent a link to this video to a single “suspected cryptocurrency launderer,” but was able to get a warrant for personal details on everyone who watched it.
  • Also, it wasn’t some sort of illegal video, either. They were “public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software. Forbes says the videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated the case.” But the government now has their personal data. And the past five years has shown that if the deep state gets your data, they won’t hesitate to abuse it to advance their interests.
  • Google says they “push back” against overbroad demands. But given how woke Google has become, how hard do you think they’re going to push aback against data demands targeting the right?
  • “This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets.”
  • “It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying, and it’s happening every day.”
  • “When you’re on the internet, your actions are being tracked by all kinds of entities.”
  • “The scary part is they’ve got this information on you to begin with, but we’ve known that for a while.”
  • “Your car is snitching on you, and so on so is your smartphone, and now so is Google, on occasion.”
  • “‘We want the information on tens of thousands of people,’ and suddenly you realize ‘OK, this is an extremely broad search. Couldn’t you narrow it a little better than that?'”
  • Asking for such information in a search warrant is an overly-broad abuse of power and violation of privacy rights, and also suggests sloppy investigative technique on the part of the feds.

    Here’s hoping the courts quash such requests in he future.

    “The Internet Is Unusable Without Ad Block”

    Monday, March 18th, 2024

    Here’s a rant from Charles White, AKA Cr1TiKaL, AKA penguinz0, about the pain of using the web without an ad-blocker.

    I have dialed in my ad-blocker so that the only time I see the damn things is when using my iPhone, when they make some sites unusable.

  • “There’s a few things that everyone knows human beings can’t live without water, air, a nice smile. But there’s actually something that’s often overlooked that’s a necessity for life on this planet, and it’s an ad blocker when using the worldwide web.”
  • He made the mistake of turning off adblock to look at something…and unleashed an unspeakable horror!
  • “It’s just a massive headache, just this visual nuisance, all this clutter with an inundation of ads that seems like it’s some kind of scene from a 90s movie where you get hacked, where it just has, like, ‘Virus Detected!'”
  • “If you try and watch a video on some of these mainstream media sites, you get an ad every 2 or 3 seconds, and I’m not exaggerating. I don’t mean you get a banner ad, I mean you get a full 20 to 30 second video ad that pauses your video to play that ad. So a 2-minute video that I was trying to watch about a bobblehead heist ended up taking over 10 minutes, and I still didn’t even finish the video.”
  • “It is absurd, it’s unusable.”
  • “I would argue it’s like a basic human right at this point to have an ad blocker when using the internet. It is that fucking atrocious.”
  • He then demonstrates, and it’s every bit as horrifying as described. “This can’t be legal.”
  • He mentions YouTube’s war on ad-blockers, which I seem to have defeated with a combination of scripts.
  • Which sites do you particularly find unusable without adblock?

    Firefox Bungles Windows List In Update

    Saturday, December 31st, 2022

    I use Firefox as my browser, and the latest version (108.0.1 (64-bit) for MacOS) has managed to screw up the windows list system. (I use windows for individual web pages when hooked up to my large monitor, but tabs when I’m using my MacBook Pro by itself.) Firefox has managed to screw up two different things with this release:

    1. For just about every version back to the dawn of time, Firefox lists windows in the order you open them. For the way I work, I usually have Gmail as my first opened window, my Books Wanted List in the second, and Bookfinder in the third, then a whole bunch of other windows, depending on what I’m working on. Well, now Firefox lists them alphabetically. Worse still, I see no way to change this behavior in preferences.
    2. Before, when you accessed the window list, it was the same no matter which Firefox window you opened it from, and it showed all your windows. Now, Firefox only shows you the windows that were open when you opened this window. That means older windows will only bring up a much smaller windows list that excludes the windows opened subsequently. And honestly, I’m not 100% it works that way for every window, as there seem to be exceptions. So they only way to see a list of all your open browser windows is to find the most recently opened window. Which is no longer listed at the bottom of the list. (You can also get a list of all open Firefox windows in the Firefox Task Manager, which I always have open,as its useful for tracking down memory hog windows.)

    Maybe some people asked for the ability to alphabetize windows in the list, but I doubt anyone wanted that as an unchangeable default, and I’m pretty sure no one asked for the inconsistent listing.

    If anyone know how to revert this behavior to the previous default settings, let me know…

    Log4J and Internet Castles Made of Sand

    Thursday, December 16th, 2021

    If you work outside of a tech company, chances are you’ve spent this week primarily concerned with getting ready for Christmas. If you work inside a tech company, there’s a significant chance your company spent much of this week patching a critical vulnerability in an open source Java logging library called Log4J.

    Here’s a non-technical explanation of the problem:

    It’s a vulnerability that was discovered in a piece of free, open source software called log4j. This software is used by thousands of websites and applications, to perform mundane functions most people don’t think about, such as logging information for use by that website’s developers, for debugging and other purposes.

    Every web application needs functionality like this, and as a result, the use of log4j is ubiquitous worldwide. Unfortunately, it turns out log4j has a previously undiscovered security vulnerability where data sent to it through that website — if it contains a special sequence of characters — results in log4j automatically fetching additional software from an external website and running it. If a cyberattacker exploits this, they can make the server that is running log4j run any software they want — including software that can completely take over that server. This is known as a Remote Code Execution (RCE) attack.

    To use a technical phrase, this is Really Bad.

    The net result is that, left unaddressed, cyberattackers right now can completely take over thousands of websites and online applications, allowing them to steal money, data, and access. The security community has been completely focused on this vulnerability for the past two days, and updating servers running log4j as quickly as possible to protect against this vulnerability.

    The good news is that mitigations are relatively easy to implement. The bad news is that left unmitigated, the vulnerability is extremely easy to exploit. iCloud, Minecraft, Baidu, and many other sites have been confirmed to be vulnerable so far, and you’ll likely hear more about many other sites being vulnerable in the coming days.

    And those companies are just the tip of the iceberg. LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) are used as the technological underpinnings for a wide variety of web applications of all sizes. (It’s not universal, as NGINX has taken over as a market leader from Apache, and there are still a few all-Microsoft houses that use IIS, and neither of them have the vulnerability.)

    Open Source has been a revolutionary invention because it provides rapid development by armies of distributed developers, and Linus’s Law states that “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.” But there are tens of thousands of Open Source components out there running critical infrastructure that haven’t had nearly as many eyes on the code as the Linux kernel. It’s simply the nature of the beast. XKCD had a cartoon for this occasion:

    Internet applications gain usefulness from widespread adoption and the number of other components they tie into and support. You know what creates new vulnerabilities? A larger user base and the number of other components they tie into and support, which creates more attack surfaces for malicious actors to exploit.

    The flaw isn’t the fault of Random Guy in Nebraska, the fault is the company adopting software that they can’t possibly test for all the use-cases they’re going to use it for. Surprise! Just about every high tech company in the world is in the same boat. Pretty much everyone uses a wide panoply of open source tools for their Internet applications, and no one can test all the permutations of how each component might be put to use.

    You can’t eliminate the risk, you can only minimize and mitigate it. You can use containerization strategies (Docker, Kubernetes, Container D, etc.) to minimize attack surfaces and limit contagion. You can run all your code through security scanning tools on your CI/CD platform of choice. You can do constant testing and keep rolling backups of everything to limit risk and speed recovery. (You can also train your employees not to click on random email links without verifying the sender is who they say they are, and not to give any any account information or passwords over the phone, and train them enough so that the lessons stick, even though phising and human engineering weren’t factors in the Log4J vulnerability.)

    But there still a good chance that the platform you’re using today is different than the platform you’ll be using ten years from now, and you’ll have to go through the same learning lessons discovering new vulnerabilities for the new platform all over again.

    Castles made of sand all fall into the sea eventually…

    A Big Chunk Of The Internet Went Down This Morning

    Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

    While you were asleep this morning, a big chunk of the Internet briefly went down:

    Among those affected are Amazon, Twitch, Reddit, The Verge, The Guardian, ZDnet, The New York Times, Freetrade, The Financial Times, Pinterest, Kickstarter, Ebay, The Telegraph, CNN, and Imgur. Google searches are also partially impacted, as is the Google Cloud Platform. While Twitter is up, its emoji platform is offline.

    The issue has been traced back to content delivery network Fastly, which is down. The company runs an Edge cloud between companies’ data centers and the end user, reducing latency, protecting from DDoS attacks, and helping them handle traffic spikes.

    Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN), an intermediary that brings data closer to Internet end users so their interactions don’t need to go all the way back to the company’s central servers. This is the market Akamai pioneered, and other companies in the space include CDNetwork and Cloudflare. “Edge computing” is a sort of catch-all term for intermediary cloud services that became one of those buzzwords that VC companies threw money at about two years ago.

    With Amazon down, a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that AWS, Amazon’s 800 pound cloud service gorilla, was experience an outage, but it turned out to be Fastly, who evidently fixed the problem at 10:57 UTC (5:57 AM CDT):

    “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” On Twitter, the company added: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”

    The modern Internet is decentralized, widely distributed and pretty efficient, but its very decentralized nature means that there are more moving parts to break, and also more attack surfaces for hackers to exploit. Delivering rich content over the Internet (be it text, images, video or shopping) usually involves dozens, if not hundred of software pieces, protocols, companies, etc. for every web page served up. Any of them can go down. Network engineers design in as much redundancy as possible, but there’s only so much you can do. I worked for a company in 2020 whose computer testing lab went down because antifa rioters in Minneapolis physically destroyed a fiber optic cable.

    All I can tell you is to keep multiple rotating backups of your most valuable data, because anything that can go wrong eventually will…

    LinkSwarm for June 5, 2020

    Friday, June 5th, 2020

    Congratulations on surviving a week of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting. The riots themselves seem to have mostly petered out, but it looks like the federal prosecutions are just getting started. But we interrupt our regularly scheduled riot ruminations to bring a deeply unexpected bit of good news:

  • The U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. “Unexpectedly!” as job gains under Republican Presidents (and job losses under Democratic ones) always seem to be. We still have a huge self-inflicted hole to climb out out, but these numbers suggest that not only are we in a V-shaped recession, we’re already on the other side of the V.
  • Stating the obvious: “Democrats Are Using Antifa to Foment Revolution.”

    To set the reality in which Antifa plans to prosecute the Democrats’ promised “revolution,” it needs to attack all the pillars of society. Throughout the country, they burned post offices, police precincts, banks, gas stations. city halls, and courts — they hit the CNN Center, and now churches.

    Barack Obama started the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” Yet, this is not Obama’s Antifa. A failure as president, he did manage to accomplish one important prerequisite for this rebellion. He instilled in the left the understanding that “change” must be forced upon an unwilling electorate.

    With this insight, Antifa has transitioned from pajama-boy blobs of perpetually offended miscreants, mostly drawn from misanthropes who were picked last in high school, into a trained guerilla force with cool uniforms. Fascists like cool uniforms.

    Antifa, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, has spent the last three years recruiting, and organizing. They have mobilized and learned tactics. They have a plan and are working hard to cover all the bases. Starting slow, they probed to find what government would allow, media would trumpet, and the public would endure.

    When they burned the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, they knew they could get away with anything.

    And, as we have seen, they can adapt. This was evident Monday night in New York City. Instead of massing together in one place to confront police, they executed lightning-fast blitzkrieg attacks in small groups. Hitting commercial properties, they ripped down plywood and broke windows. They didn’t loot or dilly dally, they moved quickly to the next target before police could respond.

    This “hit and run” tactic is perfect for their organization because spreading the destruction over larger areas negates the numerical advantage of police and national guard. They will surely take this nationwide — it is what guerillas do.

  • Night falls:

    Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.

    This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.

    Snip.

    The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.

    It cannot.

    It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.

    (Hat tip: Powerline.)

  • “The Minneapolis Disaster has Democrat Fingerprints All Over It“:

    The Democrats chose to support Black Lives Matter and to coddle Antifa. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously posed with a copy of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, touting it as “the book that strike fear in the heart of” Trump. Now Ellison has been tweeting conspiracy theories that blame the riots on “white supremecists”. But, the only white supremacists on the scene are Democrats.

    Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor stepped down in 1974. While his city burned, Mayor Jacob Frey, a Biden supporter, attacked President Trump, whining, “weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions, weakness is pointing your finger at someone else in a time of crisis.”

    That’s exactly what Frey and the Democrats have been doing in the face of the riots. Frey, a former community organizer, had repeatedly tweeted support for the Black Lives Matter racist hate group that is carrying out much of the violence. Instead of taking responsibility, Frey is blaming President Trump.

    Chief Medaria Arradondo was handpicked by Frey’s predecessor as the city’s African-American police boss after the shooting of Justine Damond, an Australian woman reporting a crime, by Mohammed Noor, a Somali Muslim officer. Arradondo replaced Janee Harteau, the first female chief of the force.

    Arradondo, like Harteau, came into office promising transformational change. He had already sued the city for racial discrimination, winning a huge settlement, and had all the right buzzwords about diversity and equity.

    “I’m committed to making sure that when the history is written, we are on the right side of history,” he declared at his first press conference, echoing Obama.

    That’s the police force on whose watch the Floyd riots began.

    This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives, and happened under elected Democrat officials who embodied the progressive vision for America.

    George Floyd and the resulting riots are entirely the work of their hands.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis city council member, wants to ‘dismantle the Minneapolis police department.'” It’s like they want Minnesota to flip to Trump in November. And remember how close Keith Ellison came to becoming DNC chair in 2017…
  • Other Democrats are showing the knee-jerk anti-police mentality, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget to redirect it to race hustling poverty pimps and payoffs to connected black Democrats “communities of color.”
  • Antifa Loots Austin Target Store in Coordinated Effort, DPS Confirms Special Agents Embedded in the Organization.”

    Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McGraw told the press on Tuesday that Antifa was responsible for the Sunday evening looting of the Capital Plaza Target in Austin.

    McGraw also confirmed that the department has agents embedded in Antifa, from which they received the intel.

    He said, “[The looting] was done and organized by an Antifa webpage, and of course, the surveillance that was provided over the internet to identify where law enforcement resources were staged was done over Antifa accounts.”

    Antifa is a militant left-wing movement dedicated to fighting what it qualifies as fascism, and white supremacy, in America by any means — physically violent, verbally vitriolic, or otherwise — it deems necessary. Tracing its heritage to the German antifaschistischs in the 20th century, it engages in similar street-fight tactics that frequented the Weimar Republic.

    This 21st-century version sprung up after the 2016 election and is known for sucker-punching and assaulting those whom they oppose, setting fire to buildings, and inciting riots. They have a reach that extends far beyond the United States, across continents.

    I note that Antifa, being the racists they are, looted the Target closest to the poor, still-black part of East Austin. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • DeBlasio’s handling of the Antifa riots was so horrible that even #BlackLivesMatters slammed him.
  • Nothing says you’re dedicated to ending racism like destroying a statue dedicated to black soldiers who fought for the Union during he Civil War. Good job, Boston rioters!
  • “Spontaneous anger”:

  • Rioters try to track police officers to their homes and set their police cars on fire. It doesn’t go well for. Also, judging from their mugshots, I’m guessing they’re not the “white supremacists” we hear so much about…
  • On the other hand:

  • Chuck DeVore, who as a captain in the California Army National Guard helped put down the 1992 LA riots, covers historicla uses of the Insurrection Act, and whether invoking it is a good idea.
  • Devore also had a piece three years ago recounting his time in the LA riots.
  • Jose Nino provides an overview of China’s Communist Party oppressing their own people. Caveats: He fails to mention the brutal subjugation of Tibet, and I think his death toll estimates on starvation deaths from The Great leap Forward are somewhat on the low side.
  • UK PM Boris Johnson invites three million Hong Kong residents to come to the UK. Smart move.
  • “As expected DOJ has filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals SUPPORTING @GenFlynn’s writ of mandamus. Slightly unexpected is how much Team Sullivan & Collusion HQ get absolutely REKT.”
  • “Federal Appeals Court Blocks Texas Democrats’ Vote-by-Mail Mandate.” Good.
  • Fredo’s Failo.
  • “The NYT has changed, become a social justice paper instead of a Left-wing paper with some social justice op-eds. Wokeness infuses it all.”
  • Nature wants to kill you:

  • Important public service announcement: Being a cybercriminal is really, really boring.
  • Last woman receiving a Civil War era pension dies. Her father, who fought for the Confederacy before switching to the Union side in 1863, married when he was 83.
  • “Nike Releases Commemorative Shoe To Honor Looters.”
  • Flashback: “Portland Police: ‘We Wish There Were Some Kind Of Organized, Armed Force That Could Fight Back Against Antifa'”
  • I smiled: