Uncategorized – Page 30 – The Faithful Watchman

U.S. SPY AGENCY DREAMS OF SURVEILLANCE UNDERWEAR IT’S CALLING “SMART EPANTS”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is throwing $22 million in taxpayer money at developing clothing that records audio, video, and location data.

THE FUTURE OF wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community.

The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.

Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.

“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s press release, “This eTextile technology could also assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.”

IARPA contracts for the SMART ePANTS program have gone to five entities. As the Pentagon disclosed this month along with other contracts it routinely announces, IARPA has awarded $11.6 million and $10.6 million to defense contractors Nautilus Defense and Leidos, respectively. The Pentagon did not disclose the value of the contracts with the other three: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and Areté. “IARPA does not publicly disclose our funding numbers,” IARPA spokesperson Nicole de Haay told The Intercept.

Dawson Cagle, a former Booz Allen Hamilton associate, serves as the IARPA program manager leading SMART ePANTS. Cagle invoked his time serving as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq between 2002 and 2006 as important experience for his current role.

“As a former weapons inspector myself, I know how much hand-carried electronics can interfere with my situational awareness at inspection sites,” Cagle recently told Homeland Security Today. “In unknown environments, I’d rather have my hands free to grab ladders and handrails more firmly and keep from hitting my head than holding some device.”

SMART EPANTS IS not the national security community’s first foray into high-tech wearables. In 2013, Adm. William McRaven, then-commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, presented the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit. Called TALOS for short, the proposal sought to develop a powered exoskeleton “supersuit” similar to that worn by Matt Damon’s character in “Elysium,” a sci-fi action movie released that year. The proposal also drew comparisons to the suit worn by Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., in a string of blockbuster films released in the run-up to TALOS’s formation.

“Science fiction has always played a role in DARPA,” Jacobsen said.

The TALOS project ended in 2019 without a demonstrable prototype, but not before racking up $80 million in costs.

As IARPA works to develop SMART ePANTS over the next three and a half years, Jacobsen stressed that the advent of smart wearables could usher in troubling new forms of government biometric surveillance.

“They’re now in a position of serious authority over you. In TSA, they can swab your hands for explosives,” Jacobsen said. “Now suppose SMART ePANTS detects a chemical on your skin — imagine where that can lead.” With consumer wearables already capable of monitoring your heartbeat, further breakthroughs could give rise to more invasive biometrics.

Ohio Pastor Charged for Opening Church Doors to the Homeless

First Liberty is representing Pastor Chris Avell of Dad’s Place, a church in Bryan, Ohio. He’s facing 18 criminal charges for violating the city’s zoning laws.

The city is going after him because earlier this year Pastor Chris opened the church 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He’s seeking to serve homeless people.

In November 2023, the city sent a letter ordering the church to stop allowing overnight guests or face criminal prosecution. This past Sunday—on New Year’s Eve—police showed up at the church. They handed the Pastor a packet of multiple charges and violations.

Our attorneys will be attending a court hearing next week, on January 11, to defend the Pastor and the church.

Pastor Chris said he’s willing to face those charges for the sake of the church’s mission.

“I was spiritually homeless and God provided a home for me. He’s put a burden on my heart for the homeless,” Pastor Chris said. “Many of these people have been rejected by their families and cast aside by their communities. So, if the church isn’t willing to lay down it’s life for them, then who will? This is what we’re called to do.”

“The city would rather kick these folks to the curb in the cold outdoor months of December and early January than allow the church to remain open 24/7 to those who need it the most,” Dys said. “It’s unconscionable. We’re going to hold them accountable.”

“This isn’t a homeless shelter, it’s a church,” said Pastor Chris in an interview with The Village Reporter. “But we have put in things people can use, like a shower and a small ability to do laundry. Some who found this to be a home for them have stuck around.”

The Pastor says he began opening the building this way, because the local homeless shelter was often full, which led to the needs of many vulnerable people not being met. He says at least a hundred have been helped in some way by his church being opened 24/7.

Leprosy, Polio, Malaria, TB, Measles… and Massive Unscreened Illegal Immigration

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

Neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the Department of Homeland Security would discuss the issue with RealClearInvestigations. Legal immigrants are required to receive vaccinations for a host of diseases, but the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged it does not have vaccination records for the millions who have entered the U.S. since the Biden administration relaxed border controls upon taking office in January 2021.

“It’s not like there is some Typhoid Mary out there, but this is something people are seeing and thinking about, even if they don’t want to discuss it publicly,” said Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the Biden administration’s border policies.

The reticence of federal agencies has not stopped some local officials, however, from raising public health alarms over massive immigration. New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan warned in April that at least half of the migrants who have poured into the city had not been vaccinated against polio. The potentially paralyzing and life-threatening virus remains endemic in two countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the World Health Organization. Since President Biden ordered what proved to be a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, an estimated 90,000 Afghans have come to the U.S. under the terms of Operation Allies Welcome.

It is not clear if those migrants met the polio vaccination requirement. DHS did not respond to a question about whether medical histories were reviewed in the fast-tracked entry of Afghans who got out of their country before the Taliban reimposed its control.

Vasan’s warning pointed directly to the southern border, which has seen record-shattering arrivals on the Biden administration’s watch.

“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border,” he wrote in an 11-page letter. “I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum.”

Citing outbreaks of chickenpox in shelters for illegal immigrants, Vasan also noted the arrival of newcomers who either began their journey in a country where tuberculosis is present or passed through such countries en route to the U.S.

‘Why do we need elections?’ WEF chairman Schwab declares voting will not be necessary because AI will predict the results

World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab envisioned a future without elections, predicting that voting will no longer be needed as artificial intelligence will be able to predict who voters would want in power.

Schwab spoke to Google co-founder Sergey Brin on stage at the WEF gathering and discussed the predicting powers of AI technology.

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power; now we go into a predictive power, and we have seen the first examples, and your company very much evolved into it,” he told the Google founder. “The next step could be to go into a prescriptive mode, which means you do not even have to have elections any more because you can already predict.”

Next, with the audience eerily silent, Schwab then asked if elections would even be necessary given that the outcomes would already be predicted.

“Afterwards you can say ‘why do we need elections?’ because we know what the result will be.”

Brin then pontificated about eliminating world leaders — replaced by an AI decision-making apparatus — and praised Schwab for his “profound” thoughts.

Schwab later explained that a “crucial issue” that needs to be tackled would be how humanity is viewed.

“We need new concepts to define what humanity is and what’s the purpose of our lives is,” Schwab asked, referring to the automation of agriculture and daily tasks. The WEF chairman predicted most menial tasks would become a job for AI.

Despite his suggestions in the unearthed video, the globalist organization called AI-powered misinformation one of the primary threats to the global economy.

According to the WEF’s “Global Risks Report 2024,” misinformation and disinformation were defined as “persistent false information (deliberate or otherwise) widely spread through media networks, shifting public opinion in a significant way towards distrust in facts and authority.”

Report: Nearly 5,000 Christians Killed for their Faith in 2023

ROME — The global persecution of Christians rose sharply in 2023, according to the 2024 World Watch List (WWL) published Wednesday by Open Doors Christian charity.

More than 365 million Christians worldwide suffer “high levels” of persecution and discrimination for their faith, WWL reveals, which means that one in seven Christians are persecuted because of their faith.

During 2023, 4,998 Christians were killed in connection with practicing their faith, counting only the number of reported cases, WWL found.

Attacks on the homes of Christians nearly quadrupled (+371 percent) from 2022 to 2023, rising from 4,547 to 21,431, and the number of attacks on churches, Christian schools, and hospitals jumped sevenfold, from 2,110 in 2022 to 14,766 in 2023.

Moreover, 42,849 Christians suffered physical violence or death threats in the course of the year, and 278,716 Christians were driven from their homes or forced to go underground. This represents more than double the figure from 2022 (124,310).

Topping the World Watch List, which ranks the 50 most dangerous countries for Christians, is once again North Korea, which also occupied the number one spot in the 2023 WWL findings.

North Korea is an officially atheist country run by a brutal communist regime that is particularly hostile to Christians. As WWL notes, being discovered to be a Christian in North Korea “is effectively a death sentence.”

BOMBS AWAY US building new nuclear ‘gravity bomb’ 24 TIMES more powerful than Hiroshima nuke to take on threat of Russia and China

THE US is building a new nuclear bomb 24 times more powerful than one dropped on Japan during World War II.

America’s defence department revealed a new version of the B61 nuclear “gravity bomb” is in development.

The decision to build this bomb comes as a way to deter threats from the main nuclear-armed competitors – China and Russia.

John Plumb, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, said: “The United States has a responsibility to continue to assess and field the capabilities we need to credibly deter and, if necessary, respond to strategic attacks, and assure our allies.”

B61-13 will have a similar yield to its predecessor B61-7 which can have a maximum load of 360 kilotons.

It is 24 times more than powerful the Hiroshima nuke and 14 times larger than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

The new model will also incorporate modern safety, security and accuracy features of a previous B61-12.

But the 13th version will provide the president with additional options against harder and large-area military targets, said the report.

The defence ministry will only produce a few of B61-13, taking advantage of the current, established production capabilities supporting the B61-12.

The B61-13 will not increase the US weapons stockpile, but instead will replace some of the B61-7s.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, told Defense News that the weapon will incorporate the same warheads from the 1980s- and 1990s-era B61-7s, transplanted into the same style casing and tail kit as the B61-12.

The Pentagon said in its announcement that modern aircraft would be able to deliver the new bomb.

Kristensen believes the B61-13 is a compromise to resolve a years-long disagreement between Republicans and Democrats over the massive, four-decade-old B83-1 bomb.

The 1.2 megaton nuke is the last of its kind left in the country’s nuclear arsenal and has 80 times the force of Hiroshima bomb.

Former president Barack Obama sought to get rid of the deadly nuke, but his successor Donald Trump reversed that decision.

Current president of the US, Joe Biden, has revived the efforts to discard the mega bomb and has been met with objection from key Republican lawmakers, saying the B83-1 is needed to strike hard and deeply buried targets.

Kristensed said: “This is a sweetener to the hardliners in Congress to basically say: ‘OK guys, you want something with a high yield.

“ ‘Here’s a small number of them … but you also get one with a tail kit that will be more accurate.’ ”

The gravity bombs arsenal of the US is currently somewhere between 400 and 500.

Some US senators welcomed the creation of a new bomb, calling it a “a modest step in the right direction.”

They believe the US is lagging behind in the nuclear arms race.

“China and Russia are in a full-on arms race, and the U.S. is running in place. Dramatic transformation of our deterrent posture — not incremental or piecemeal changes — is required to address this threat,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi in a joint statement.

Earlier this month, the US conducted a high-explosive experiment at a nuclear test site in Nevada.

Corey Hinderstein, deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said: “It’s meant to advance our efforts to develop new technology in support of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals.

“They [the experiments] will help reduce global nuclear threats by improving the detection of underground nuclear explosive tests.”

Government Regulators Are Coming for the Amish Farmer Again

Amos Miller is an Amish dairy and meat producer in Lancaster County, Pa. He’s been hassled by the state in past, and on Thursday state food authorities “illegally” raided his quiet farm and took away 37 boxes filled with his products. Amos reportedly hadn’t filed the proper signed documents in abeyance to the state health and safety regulators.

Amos Miller offers his organically grown and chemical-free cheeses, meats, raw milk, and eggs through a private club. His products are not sold in stores. His private club is thriving, thanks in part to the cheerleading of his attorney Robert Barnes who often urges people to sign up to Amos’s club to get clean, organic, and fresh products.

Miller has been on the state regulators’ radar for the past few years. Seven years ago, a smattering of his products had been cited for contamination. Miller’s supporters say this is a steady pressure campaign by state and federal regulators to put him out of business.

The Acting Director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Food Safety swore out an affidavit which was used to get a search warrant. Barnes says that “the state unlawfully obtained a search warrant, based on materially false statements in an affidavit.” He said the acting director has a “known grievance against independent farmers like Amos, and, after the raid and finding no evidence of wrongdoing, then illegally ordered detained every item of food in one of Amos Miller’s coolers, including buffalo meat not even subject to federal regulation.”

Barnes said that the state “without notice, raided Amos’ farm, and detained everything Amos had in the farm’s freezer. They did so in a lawless manner, without appropriate authority, in violation of their own rules and regulations, despite never objecting to the prior resolutions reached with the federal government, and despite a complete failure by the state to even reach out to Amos’ known counsel.”

Barnes said the raiders broke the law because they ignored “the state’s own rules require advance notice, reasonable time frames for inspections, and a showing of credentials, none of which occurred here.” Indeed, he says taking Miller’s products was “patently illegal under Pennsylvania law.”

The Lancaster Patriot local newspaper says the affidavit was done at the behest of “the [acting director] NY state Department of Health [which…] confirmed positive case of a foodborne pathogen (STEC – Shiga toxin producing E. Coli) in an underage individual.”

The affidavit claims that Miller has not completed the application process through the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture for “registration, licensing, or permitting under the pertinent Retail Food Facility Safety Act, Food Safety Act, or Milk Sanitation Laws.”

Israel will be at war for all of 2024, warns IDF chief

Calls by Western leaders to wrap up the conflict are very premature. The war against Hamas is nowhere near finished.

Western leaders, and especially US President Joe Biden, who faces an election this year, are eager for Israel’s war against Hamas to wrap up already.

As expected, the full scale of the horrors visited upon Israel on October 7 have started to fade from Western memories, and so too has the support and backing that was so strong and unequivocal in the opening weeks of the ‘Simhat Torah War.’

With a US presidential election looming, the White House wants to get the Gaza war out of the news cycle as quickly as possible. Biden’s early support for Israel hasn’t been popular with parts of his Democratic constituency, and could cost him votes in November.

But whether or not the mainstream international media continues to focus exaggerated attention on it, the war against Hamas is going to last well beyond the American election, said IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.

“We will be at war in Gaza, I don’t know if all year—we will be fighting in Gaza all year, that’s for sure,” Halevi said following a situational assessment with officers and commanders of the IDF’s Judea and Samaria Division.

Halevi and Israeli political leaders won’t say as much, but the West, and America in particular, have themselves largely to blame for the fact this war is so costly and lengthy.

For decades, Washington and other Western power brokers have mostly turned a blind eye to the institutionalized incitement in Palestinian society. Mosques, schools and state-run media incessantly brainwash Palestinian men, women and children to seek conflict with Israel, and to happily sacrifices their lives and the lives of their loved ones for the ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish state.

The Oslo Accords stipulated that the Palestinian population be educated for peace. Instead, it has been educated for war.

“Melting Antarctic” scare narrative exposed as FRAUDULENT: Antarctic ice MORE stable than previously thought

Mainstream “news” is littered with scare stories about how global warming has apparently gotten so bad that the Antarctic ice shelves are melting. The truth, though, is that Antarctica’s ice shelves are actually growing in size.

New research published by Andreasen et al. looks at Antarctic-wide satellite data collected between 2009 and 2019. The data was compiled using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS.

Between the 10-year period analyzed, Andreasen et al. discovered that the Antarctic ice shelf area grew in size by 5305 km2. Eighteen ice shelves did retreated in size somewhat during that time, but 16 others grew larger in terms of their overall area mass.

“Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade,” the researchers noted in their paper.

Numerous studies confirm: Antarctic ice is doing just fine

Another study published by Banwell et al. that appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters looked at an even wider range of Antarctic ice data ranging from 1980 through 2021. That study utilized microwave satellite data from the snow model SNOWPACK.

Like the first study, this second one, which was published in 2023, found that the highest meltwater volumes occurred on Antarctica’s Peninsula, reaching a peak in 1992 and 1993, as well as in 1994 and 1995. SNOWPACK calculated “a small, but significant, decreasing trend in both annual melt days and meltwater production volume over the 41 years.”

Another paper published by Frazer et al. in the journal Nature backs these findings even further. This one explains that while dramatic ice losses are occurring in some areas of Antarctica, including in West Antarctica from Pine Island and the Thwaites glaciers, ice projections for the future cannot be accurately made.

This study, which looked at a time period ranging from 2003 through 2015, identified extensive glacial retreat and acceleration along the Bellinghausen Sea coastline. Conversely, things look rather well on the ice front along the Amundsen Sea.

“Our results provide direct observations that the pace, magnitude and extent of ice destabilization around West Antarctica vary by location, with the Amundsen Sea response most sensitive to interdecadal atmosphere-ocean variability,” the authors wrote.

Finally, another paper published by Baico et al., also in 2023, found that over the centuries, Antarctic ice has both thinned and thickened, depending on the time period.

The authors looked at subglacial bedrock cores to discover that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) between the Thwaites and Pope glaciers “was at least 35 m (meters) thinner than present in the past several thousand years and then subsequently thickened.”

“A past episode of ice sheet thinning that took place in a similar, although not identical, climate was not irreversible,” the paper reads.

“We propose that the past thinning–thickening cycle was due to a glacioisostatic rebound feedback, similar to that invoked as a possible stabilizing mechanism for current grounding line retreat, in which isostatic uplift caused by Early Holocene thinning led to relative sea level fall favoring grounding line advance.”

As you can see, the science is not settled on climate change. As we and others have been saying for quite some time now, the climate is always changing. It goes through periods of cooling, followed by periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling – and on and on it goes, regardless of human activity.

“Most of Antarctica has a temperature inversion so more greenhouse gases make those areas colder,” a commenter further pointed out.

How Hamas chose October 7 for its attack on Israel

Terrorists reportedly trained for years without knowing specific purpose of training, underwent special tests to determine capabilities and combat skills for attack; commanders notified of attack just hours prior

Hamas’ plan to storm Israeli border communities, as happened on October 7, was known only to 70 members of its elite Nukhba unit, London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported on Wednesday, citing sources close to the military wing of Hamas, the Al-Qassam Brigades.

The terrorists, who trained for years without knowing the specific purpose of their training, launched a surprise attack from several different areas along the Gaza-Israel border, crossing it using explosive devices prepared and tailored for “weak points” identified in the fence. The sources revealed that the terrorists employed drones and paragliders, enabling them to take down Israeli positions.

According to the report, preparations for the attack began in 2014, prior to Operation Protective Edge, but the plan was put on hold with the outbreak of the operation. In 2021, it was decided to prepare for the attack again.

The terrorists were trained over the years and underwent special tests to determine their capabilities and combat skills for the attack. Shortly thereafter, they were sworn in before their leaders, pledging not to disclose secrets about their training and the specialized training plans.

The sources confirmed to the newspaper that many commanders of the military wing in Gaza were not aware of all the details.

The information compartmentalization, as claimed in the report, was intended to prevent leaks to Israeli intelligence. Ultimately, the decision to carry out the attack and its timing was made by five people: Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar, the military wing’s leader Muhammad Deif, one of Deif’s assistants and Yahya Sinwar’s brother Muhammad Sinwar, Hamas politburo member Rawhi Mushtaha and Hamas’ Central Brigade commander Ayman Nofal, who was assassinated by Israel in October.