A spokesman for the Yemeni Houthi terrorist organization identified the Panamanian-flagged, Chinese-owned-and-operated Huang Pu as one of several ships it attempted to bomb in the past 24 hours, incorrectly identifying it as "British."
The post Houthis Finally Admit to Bombing Chinese Ship, Claim It Is British appeared first on Breitbart.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh traveled to Tehran on Tuesday for meetings with senior Iranian officials, a day after the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Israel’s campaign against the terrorist organization Haniyeh leads.
The post Hamas Leader Visits Iran After U.N. Passes Gaza Ceasefire Resolution appeared first on Breitbart.
The Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen launched missiles at a Chinese-owned oil tanker, seemingly violating a promise of safe passage.
The post Houthis Bomb Chinese Ship After Telling Beijing It Gets a Pass appeared first on Breitbart.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for a deadly ambush on a military convoy in Niger, in which 23 soldiers were killed and 17 wounded.
The post Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Deadly Ambush on Niger Military Convoy appeared first on Breitbart.
There is a worrying trend of young people not reading anymore and not engaging in independent thinking when it comes to writing papers or formulating opinions. Only 17% of young people read for fun.
Two-thirds of young adults listen to podcasts, which in and of itself is not a problem. However, by listening to podcasts, they are getting their information and opinions fed to them in audio form from people they like, rather than reading reports from experts.
Statistics show that videos receive 1,200 times as many reshares as texts and pictures, suggesting that video is becoming the preferred way of obtaining information.
Videos, like podcasts, can be created by anyone, regardless of their expertise, and will be reshared for various reasons apart from their information content or quality. They also must exist on video and podcast platforms, which have strict censorship rules and will be pulled if they violate “community standards,” which tend to be very left-leaning.
For example, Twitter removed tweets that referred to Hamas as terrorists, although Hamas has officially been designated a terrorist organization.
Beyond censorship, another problem with videos is that people are not really watching them. The average time spent on a video before scrolling is about 2.5%. So, while young people may prefer to obtain information from videos, they are actually obtaining almost no information.
Only 7% of young people say they read a newspaper several times per week, while 45% said they never read a newspaper. In the past, students read and researched to obtain knowledge.
They then wrote papers where they synthesized this knowledge and formulated opinions and conclusions based on data and information. Now, no one is reading. No new information is coming in. Additionally, 56% of college students and 46% of high school students are using AI to write their papers.
When we transitioned from using books and periodicals to using search engines for research, there were some disadvantages and some advantages. When doing Google searches and finding sources, people tend to skim and scan, rather than sitting down and reading an entire book or source and taking notes as students did in the past.
Research shows that over 40% of people who open an article on the web will not read beyond the nut graph, the first paragraph, usually only one to two sentences that explain the context of the story.
On the other hand, no school ever had a library of books or access to periodicals on the scale that students do today, with the internet. So, for those who actually read, there is greater availability of information today. However, fewer and fewer people are using that information.
Even worse, although the information is available and free, people are less likely to find it, as we move to AI. When you use a traditional search engine, you type in a subject or keywords and see that lots of choices come up.
So, you read through them, albeit superficially, until you find the ones you want to use. Even the laziest of readers will be exposed to multiple sources and points of view. But now, already, 40% of millennials and nearly 30% of the population are switching from traditional search engines to AI-powered searches.
AI search engines and chatbots have safety protocols to protect people from harmful or misinformation, including hate speech. And, as we have seen in our society, hate speech is an ill-defined term that can apply to almost anything people do not like.
The protocols also protect us from misleading or biased information, which raises questions about who decides what is and is not misinformation. It also suggests that for certain questions, there is only one viewpoint.
Eventually, in the not-too-distant future, we will reach a point where there is one accepted viewpoint, and because all others are misinformation, they will be excluded from searches.
With young people growing up in a world where they do not read, do not actually watch a video, do not write their own papers, and are only exposed to a single “correct” opinion, how will they develop critical-thinking skills, and how will they analyze complex issues or formulate nuanced opinions?
Given that the entire generation is growing up without knowledge and critical thinking skills, you may wonder where the next generation of videos and articles will come from.
The answer is, they will be generated by AI, cutting out the human middleman. AI will create content, then direct humans to the content, and it will be the sole source of information and opinion.
The post No More Reading or Thinking: Where Will Information Come from in the Future? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Vladimir_Lenin_giving_a_speech
Vladimir Lenin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“Armies are always training to fight the last war.” Old military saying.
The Houthi attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea serve as a stark reminder of the threat non-state actors pose to the security of the United States and the world. Australia’s dispatch of its navy to participate in Operation Prosperity Guardian, despite being half a world away from its shores, underscores the global nature of the crisis posed by non-state actors. With their emergence, traditional concepts and strategies of warfare are rapidly becoming outdated, prompting a critical need for a new approach to national defense. Simply relying on conventional military might is no longer sufficient; the Department of Defense must adapt and innovate to effectively counter evolving threats.
Simultaneously, the ongoing threat from state actors armed with conventional and nuclear weapons underscores the complexity of modern security challenges. Additionally, the potential for state sponsorship of or influence on non-state actors introduces further complexity, requiring military strategists to adopt a balanced and nuanced approach to effectively tackle these diverse threats.
Transnational terrorist organizations and transnational crime groups are growing in number and in their geographic range. Islamic extremist groups have cells all over the world and are often aligned with local crime or terrorist organizations. Transnational organized crime, such as “mafia” from Russia, China, or Albania, is engaging in a wide variety of business lines from prostitution to drugs and gambling. Increasingly, financial crimes such as telephone and internet scams or credit card theft or cloning can be traced back to these groups. The internet and modern telecommunications allow them to work from anywhere in the world. AI and language tools help them overcome natural barriers that once suppressed their activities. And open US borders allow these groups to place agents within the U.S.
The Mexican drug cartels are a prime example of a modern, transnational crime organization. In addition to flooding America’s streets with illicit drugs, they are also the largest human traffickers, bringing illegals into the United States. They have associations with street gangs in the US who help with drug distribution, managing prostitution, as well as doing collection and enforcement. Throughout Latin America, cartels have destabilized the local governments and economic system to such a point that they are driving a flood of illegal immigration into the United States.
Russia’s private military company (PMC), Wagner Group, or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force (IRGF) operate in theaters ranging from Africa and the Middle East to Central and South America. They provide training, weapons, sometimes money, and combat support to despicable actors around the globe. While the Kremlin or Tehran may be controlling the reins of these attack dogs, both governments can claim plausible deniability and dispatch these forces to undertake operations that would trigger an international incident or a war if conducted by uniformed armies.
State-supported militias are changing the face of warfare. The United States was accused of war crimes for bombing Houthi positions in Yemen, with critics arguing that Yemen and the Houthis are not synonymous. And while bombing Tehran would most likely cripple the IRGC’s destabilizing activities, it would be considered a crime under international law.
Along with the rise of state-supported threat actors are private companies that sell their services to combatants. Elon Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company provided Starlink terminals to Kyiv, and the Canadian geo-intelligence firm MDA provided the Ukrainians with satellite imagery to track Russian troop movements. These are examples of Western firms aiding “the good guys” as chosen by their governments. But what about foreign firms from threat countries assisting the “baddies”?
The US is now sanctioning or considering sanctioning a number of Chinese firms that are aiding Russia. At the same time, China, taking a cue from Russia’s Wagner Group, is expanding its Private Security Companies (PSC), deploying them around the world. Compared to Wagner, there is much less risk that they would actively engage in combat, but they pose a tremendous espionage and diplomatic power threat, as they saturate pockets of the globe where China has investment interests.
Cyber threats, hacking, are a growing area of concern for the US government. These can come from state actors, non-state actors, private companies working on behalf of a foreign government, or transnational criminal or terrorist organizations. With the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital platforms, small, well-equipped, and well-trained groups can pose as great a threat as a large conventional military, taking down US infrastructure, telecommunications, or financial networks. Unmanned systems (UxS), killer drones, and additive manufacturing (also known as 3D printing) multiply the danger.
The new nature of warfare is that wars are undeclared and unconventional. A response from the US military would be called a war crime by the international community. And so, each threat is being handled in isolation, and the resolution of one attack does not prevent the next one. To adequately protect the nation, the intelligence agencies, along with Homeland Security, Space Force, and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency (CSIA), will play a larger role. At the same time, because these threats can emerge from anywhere at any time, there are likely to be restrictions on personal freedoms in the US, a precedent most of us do not want to see.
The post Non-State Actors: Growing National Security Threat appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Al-Qaida_crée_une_brigade_dirigée_par_des_Touaregs_(8246938011)
By Magharebia - Al-Qaeda creates Touareg-led brigade | القاعدة تنشئ كتيبة بقيادة طوارقي | Al-Qaida crée une brigade dirigée par des Touaregs, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23633229
Geller: Iran Arrests 29 Women for Appearing in Public Without a Hijab While Western Feminists Impose World Hijab Day
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart News, February 3, 2018:
The Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Tehran police have arrested 29 women for appearing in public without a headscarf as protests against the dress code in force since the Islamic revolution of 1979 intensify,” citing Iranian police.
“Those arrested were accused of public order offences and referred to the state prosecutor’s office, Iranian nnews [sic] agencies reported without elaborating,” the report noted.
Thursday was also “World Hijab Day,” which its organizers say is designed to “fight discrimination against Muslim women through awareness and education. It is a day on which women of diverse backgrounds and persuasions are encouraged to wear the Islamic head veil in solidarity with Muslim women.”
And so under the hashtag #StrongInHijab, Islamic supremacists and their willing gophers on the left – middle-class Western feminists – observed the first annual “World Hijab Day” yesterday. In one of the most pathetic and destructive shows of “virtue signaling,” non-Muslim women were urged to wear the garment of oppression, subjugation, and misogyny. While women are fighting and dying for their most basic rights in countries ruled under Islamic law, left-wing goons in the West are working to impose the misogyny of the sharia.
Look, no cares if you wear the hijab. No one cares if you wear purple hair, for that matter. But what about the women forced to wear the hijab. American girls like Jessica Mokdad, Amina Said, Sarah Said, Noor Almaleki, and so many others who were honor murdered for not wearing the hijab, for wanting to live free. Who speaks for them? The real world recognition day should be in tribute to women who are forced to wear the hijab, beaten and/or arrested if they don’t.
One campaign fighting against the enforced hijab in Iran set up by Ms. Masih Alinejad is My Stealthy Freedom. It is “dedicated to Iranian women inside the country who want to share their ‘stealthily’ taken photos without the veil,” and aims to be a “living archive” of their fight.
For years, my work in defense of Muslim women wanting to live free, be free, out from under the boot of sharia misogyny, was smeared, mocked, labeled “Islamophobic.” Girls such as Rifqa Bary and the now-dead girls, including Aqsa Parvez, Amina and Sarah Said, Jessica Mokdad, Noor Almaleki, et al, wanted to be free not to wear the hijab – in America. Our calls for such an elemental freedom were viciously attacked amid the constant cries of “racism” (Islam is not a race) and absurd claims that we were making it hard for Muslim women to wear the hijab. That was laughable, of course, because I never so much as addressed Muslim women and their choices, no matter how submissive and subdued, but this was uniformly repeated and chanted by Islamic supremacists and their leftwing lapdogs, most especially in the “feminist movement.”
And now we see an entire nation of women, Muslim women, standing up against the hijab. Are they, too, “Islamophobes”?
Remember: the Islamic Republic of Iran is the country that the Democrats are fighting for today, opposing President Trump’s efforts to stop Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons.
As David Kurten in Breitbart News points out, punishments for removing a hijab can be brutal – Islamic regimes are known to physically beat women for non-compliance with their dress codes. This is true not only in the Middle East, but increasingly on a local level in the West.
A brave headteacher in a London primary school recently took action to ban children under the age of eight from wearing hijabs in her school. The school is in an area of east London that has undergone almost total population replacement of the white working-class there 50 years ago to mostly people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslim origin today. The response of the local community was to organize a campaign of intimidation against her until she backed down.
World Hijab Day is a stunning indictment of the hypocrisy of the evil left as much as choosing the sharia-promoting, forced marriage advocate Linda Sarsour for their leader. The real “feminists” are the women who are fighting for a fraction, a sliver of the freedoms their Western “sisters” enjoy.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
Geller: Iran Arrests 29 Women for Appearing in Public Without a Hijab While Western Feminists Impose World Hijab Day
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart News, February 3, 2018:
The Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Tehran police have arrested 29 women for appearing in public without a headscarf as protests against the dress code in force since the Islamic revolution of 1979 intensify,” citing Iranian police.
“Those arrested were accused of public order offences and referred to the state prosecutor’s office, Iranian nnews [sic] agencies reported without elaborating,” the report noted.
Thursday was also “World Hijab Day,” which its organizers say is designed to “fight discrimination against Muslim women through awareness and education. It is a day on which women of diverse backgrounds and persuasions are encouraged to wear the Islamic head veil in solidarity with Muslim women.”
And so under the hashtag #StrongInHijab, Islamic supremacists and their willing gophers on the left – middle-class Western feminists – observed the first annual “World Hijab Day” yesterday. In one of the most pathetic and destructive shows of “virtue signaling,” non-Muslim women were urged to wear the garment of oppression, subjugation, and misogyny. While women are fighting and dying for their most basic rights in countries ruled under Islamic law, left-wing goons in the West are working to impose the misogyny of the sharia.
Look, no cares if you wear the hijab. No one cares if you wear purple hair, for that matter. But what about the women forced to wear the hijab. American girls like Jessica Mokdad, Amina Said, Sarah Said, Noor Almaleki, and so many others who were honor murdered for not wearing the hijab, for wanting to live free. Who speaks for them? The real world recognition day should be in tribute to women who are forced to wear the hijab, beaten and/or arrested if they don’t.
One campaign fighting against the enforced hijab in Iran set up by Ms. Masih Alinejad is My Stealthy Freedom. It is “dedicated to Iranian women inside the country who want to share their ‘stealthily’ taken photos without the veil,” and aims to be a “living archive” of their fight.
For years, my work in defense of Muslim women wanting to live free, be free, out from under the boot of sharia misogyny, was smeared, mocked, labeled “Islamophobic.” Girls such as Rifqa Bary and the now-dead girls, including Aqsa Parvez, Amina and Sarah Said, Jessica Mokdad, Noor Almaleki, et al, wanted to be free not to wear the hijab – in America. Our calls for such an elemental freedom were viciously attacked amid the constant cries of “racism” (Islam is not a race) and absurd claims that we were making it hard for Muslim women to wear the hijab. That was laughable, of course, because I never so much as addressed Muslim women and their choices, no matter how submissive and subdued, but this was uniformly repeated and chanted by Islamic supremacists and their leftwing lapdogs, most especially in the “feminist movement.”
And now we see an entire nation of women, Muslim women, standing up against the hijab. Are they, too, “Islamophobes”?
Remember: the Islamic Republic of Iran is the country that the Democrats are fighting for today, opposing President Trump’s efforts to stop Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons.
As David Kurten in Breitbart News points out, punishments for removing a hijab can be brutal – Islamic regimes are known to physically beat women for non-compliance with their dress codes. This is true not only in the Middle East, but increasingly on a local level in the West.
A brave headteacher in a London primary school recently took action to ban children under the age of eight from wearing hijabs in her school. The school is in an area of east London that has undergone almost total population replacement of the white working-class there 50 years ago to mostly people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslim origin today. The response of the local community was to organize a campaign of intimidation against her until she backed down.
World Hijab Day is a stunning indictment of the hypocrisy of the evil left as much as choosing the sharia-promoting, forced marriage advocate Linda Sarsour for their leader. The real “feminists” are the women who are fighting for a fraction, a sliver of the freedoms their Western “sisters” enjoy.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.