US Military Aid To Ukraine Exceeds The Costs Of Afghanistan

Ukraine receives the most military aid from the United States: Since the beginning of the war and as of Jan. 15, 2023, $46.6 billion in financial aid for military purposes has flowed to the country now at war with Russia.

When calculating the average annual costs (in 2022 prices) of previous wars in which the United States has been involved in, the true magnitude of the country’s Ukraine aid expenditure can be seen.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, the payments to Ukraine have already exceeded the annual military expenditure of the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010. The U.S. military costs in the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and the Korean War were significantly higher – according to calculations by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy as part of its Ukraine Support Tracker.

In the Vietnam and Korean wars, the high usage rate of ammunition and other supplies cost a particularly large amount of money, in addition to the wear and tear of equipment and numerous other assets such as the care of the wounded. Further complicating matters in each case was the great distance to the theater of operations. Although the U.S. maintained a number of bases in Southeast Asia, the large weapons systems and the required replacement components all had to be shipped or flown across the Pacific. In addition, a large fleet of aircraft carriers was always deployed off the coast of Vietnam. The numerous missions of the air force also caused significant costs.

In the U.S., criticism of the scale of military aid to Ukraine is already coming from within the Republican ranks.

Some of the U.S. Republicans in Congress have announced that they intend to block aid to Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the day after his visit to Kyiv, U.S. President Biden underscored his country’s commitment to continued support of the Ukrainian war effort. Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, he said:

“This is not just about freedom in Ukraine. It’s about freedom of democracy in general”.

In addition to the military aid detailed in this infographic, the U.S. has also supplied weapons and equipment worth over $5 billion.

Read More: US Military Aid To Ukraine Exceeds The Costs Of Afghanistan

 

Experts Warn against Humans Wearing Bracelets to “be used as part of an electromagnetic radiation antenna system to power 6G”

Human 6G Antennas? ‘One of the Worst Ideas Ever,’ Critic Says

Authors of a new study say human beings wearing special copper-coiled bracelets could be used as part of an electromagnetic radiation antenna system to power 6G. Critics say the technology could be harmful to your health.

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.

Human beings could be used as part of an electromagnetic radiation (EMR) antenna system by wearing a special copper-coiled bracelet, according to a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.

The researchers said they developed a low-cost way to “harvest” the radiofrequency (RF) radiationthat gets “leaked” during visible light communication (VLC) — a technology they said is likely to be used in the “coming 6G networks.”

But some critics allege that using human beings as RF antennas for 6G is disrespectful to the human body and may have unknown health implications.

“I am diametrically opposed to this type of work, especially given the paucity of medical research on using the human body as an RF antenna,” said Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., Children’s Health Defense(CHD) chief scientific officer and professor of biology at Simpson University.

“This type of technology makes the human body an RF collector and ignores the health implicationsof EMR altogether,” Hooker told The Defender.

‘LiFi’ can ‘enable new pervasive wireless systems’ for Internet of Things

The researchers — including Jie Xiong, Ph.D., an associate professor of information and computer sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Qing Wang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Embedded Systems Group in the Department of Software Technology at TU Delft, The Netherlands — are proponents of VLC, or “LiFi” as it is sometimes called, which uses light to transmit data.

VLC works by turning LED lights on and off at a very high speed invisible to the human eye.

Like WiFi, VLC is wireless — but instead of using a router and RF waves to transmit data, VLC uses LED bulbs and light signals to send and receive information.

According to OpenVLC, a research platform co-founded by Wang, VCL can “enable new pervasive wireless systems in the context of the Internet of Things.”

Read More: Experts Warn against Humans Wearing Bracelets to “be used as part of an electromagnetic radiation antenna system to power 6G”

 

Journalist Uses AI Voice to Break into Own Bank Account

In a recent experiment, Vice.com writer Joseph Cox used an AI-generated voice to bypass Lloyds Bank security and access his account.

To achieve this, Cox used a free service of ElevenLabs, an AI-voice generation company that supplies voices for newsletters, books and videos.

Cox recorded five minutes of speech and uploaded it to ElevenLabs. After making some adjustments, such as having the AI read a longer body of text for a more natural cadence, the generated audio outmaneuvered Lloyds security.

“I couldn’t believe it had worked,” Cox wrote in his Vice article. “I had used an AI-powered replica of a voice to break into a bank account. After that, I accessed the account information, including balances and a list of recent transactions and transfers.”

Multiple United States and European banks use voice authentication to speed logins over the phone. While some banks claim that voice identification is comparable to a fingerprint, this experiment demonstrates that voice-based biometric security does not offer perfect protection.

ElevenLabs did not comment on the hack despite multiple requests, Cox says. However, in a previous statement, the firm’s co-founder, Mati Staniszewski, said new safeguards reduce misuse and support authorities in identifying those who break the law.

Preventing AI voice misuse

Technology to counteract this kind of attacks, at least in theory, is already on the market.

ID R&D has developed a multi-modal biometric authentication system that passively verifies multiple biometrics during a chat session. This technology is designed to guarantee the authenticity of conversations by ensuring that only genuine people and not bots are doing the talking.

Nuance Communications also is working to combat AI voice misuse.

Brett Beranek, the vice president and general manager of security and biometrics at Nuance, has saidthat AI products can detect fraud from people’s conversation during live chat sessions.

It looks into word choice, grammar accuracy, syntax conventions, and emojis and acronyms used. Afterward, the AI compares these elements with legitimate customers’ patterns plus those from known fraudsters.

Read More: Journalist Uses AI Voice to Break into Own Bank Account

 

Climate Change Conference: The world’s best scientists reveal the truth

Yesterday, The Heartland Institute held its 15th International Conference on Climate Change(“ICCC15”) to bring together the world’s best experts to analyse the latest climate science and the wrong-headed energy and policy solutions the world’s governments are determined to impose on us all.

From the green energy boondoggles in the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” in the United States to the ongoing wind-power disaster in Germany and threats of energy cuts in the winter in the UK, the climate policy “solutions” are a real and growing problem for the people of the world. Why are we making life poorer and more miserable for most of the people on the planet when there is no climate crisis?

ICCC15 aims to reveal the truth and inspire viewers to spread that truth around the globe.

There are four panels or sessions during the one-day conference held in Florida, USA, on 24 February 2023.

During the first session titled ‘Taking the Temperature of Global Temperatures’, Anthony Watts discusses how the US temperature data has been hopelessly corrupted; Willie Soon, PhD, speaks about the effect of the sun on global temperatures, and how that is not taken well enough into account; and Joe Bastardi speaks about the effect of the oceans on global temperatures.

Dr. Willie Soon is a co-team leader of CERES-Science.  His presentation, ‘Global warming: Mostly human-caused or mostly natural?’, summarises some of the key findings of two of CERES’ recent scientific papers:

Evaluation of the Homogenisation Adjustments Applied to European Temperature Records in the Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset

How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate.  Supplementary materials for this study can be found HERE.

The slides for his presentation can be downloaded from the CERES-Science website HERE.

During the second session titled ‘Understanding What’s Really Happening to the Climate’, Judith Curry, PhD, gives a presentation titled ‘Climate Uncertainty and Risk’; Ross McKitrick, PhD, gives a presentation titled ‘Updated Climate Sensitivity and the Social Cost of Carbon’; Richard Lindzen, PhD, gives a presentation titled ‘Actual Climate vs. Policy’.

During the third session titled ‘Is Climate Science Scientific?’,  the flaws in climate models are examined. Tom Sheahen explains the need to apply the Scientific Method to modelling. Howard Hayden points out the glaring numerical inconsistency between AR-6 climate models and physical reality. Ken Haapala discusses the impact of IPCC’s continuing errors.

During the fourth session titled ‘Green Agenda’s Impact on People’, Donna Jackson speaks about how “environmental justice” for communities of colour is a scam; Bob Carlstrom speaks about the impact higher “green energy” costs have on the poor and the elderly; Margaret Byfield speaks about the Biden administration’s “30×30” agenda and its impact on land owners.

The live feed is no longer available but you can watch the full day’s presentations and discussions by following this LINK.

Read More: Climate Change Conference: The world’s best scientists reveal the truth

 

Schwab’s remark “who masters technologies will be the master of the world” is not an empty threat

A couple of weeks ago at the World Government Summit, Klaus Schwab stated that whoever masters artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, among other technologies, “will be master of the world.”

With synthetic biology, designing completely new enzymes or the manufacture of entirely new organs from scratch that never existed in nature before is alarmingly close to being a reality rather than science fiction.

Biotech and information technology have been completely intertwined for decades.  And the whole idea behind mRNA “vaccines” is to digitise vaccines by reducing them to synthetic gene sequences and using human cells as bioreactors to make the actual protein.  People still think this is just about a virus or a vaccine, it’s not. There’s much more at stake.

A science paper published in 2020 described how nanoparticles on a lipid chip function as computer hardware, and DNA strands are used as the software to provide molecular instructions. This enables a group of nanoparticles to form a neural network that provides a programmable, resettable, scalable computing architecture and circuit board – within the bodies of humans or animals.

Being “master of the world” is not an empty threat.  When Klaus Schwab says that those who master these technologies will master the world, if anything, he is underselling it. With these technologies, you could re-engineer an entire species – including humans – into something completely different.

Private-Public Partnerships for Mad Science – The Ongoing Plot to Reengineer Humanity

By Spartacus

Klaus Schwab said something recently that got people’s hackles up:

“Artificial Intelligence, but not only artificial intelligence, but also, the metaverse, near-space technologies, and I could go on and on – synthetic biology. Our life in ten years from now, will be completely different, very much affected, and – who masters those technologies, in some way, will be the master of the world.”

Read More: Schwab’s remark “who masters technologies will be the master of the world” is not an empty threat