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Mr. Puzzles might be an evil, manipulative control freak, but he also knows how to put brats in their place and stuff them to the brim~🍆💦📺 🧩Mr. Puzzles: berry🍓 (Fruity PNGTuber) 🍑YCH Bottom: 🔞TwunkyKaiju🔞 {Comms 3/8 Open} 🎨Art: jayden 🔞🔜 AQF 💥Editing/SFX: MigasHeartVA🔞(Available for VA work!) (Reposts appreciated!) #MrPuzzles...

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“A Wizard Is Never Late” In the scene where Gandalf meets Frodo in the Shire, Frodo teases him for being late. Gandalf replies: “A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early.” He then concludes that a wizard always arrives at precisely the time he means to. At first glance, this is simply a humorous remark, perfectly in keeping with Gandalf’s character. But when I place it alongside his other words throughout The Lord of the Rings, I feel that the line opens up a deeper way of looking at the character. Gandalf is not someone who knows the entire future in advance. But he is aware that he is carrying out a mission greater than himself, and that what happens in Middle-earth does not lie entirely within the control of any individual. So the question I want to ask is: when Gandalf says that he is neither late nor early, but arrives at the right time, what does “the right time” actually mean to him? Other forces are at work One of the lines that draws my attention most is what Gandalf says about Bilbo finding the Ring. In the novel, Gandalf says: “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it.” I am especially struck by the phrase: “was meant to.” Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. And if that was so, Frodo was also meant to have it. What is interesting is that Gandalf does not explain the Ring coming into Bilbo’s possession simply as an accident. He senses that something lies behind the event, something beyond the intention of the very maker of the Ring. In the film, this idea is expressed more briefly. Gandalf says: “There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the evil.” There are other forces at work in this world besides evil. In the way I see it, this is one of the most important lines for understanding how Gandalf views the world. Sauron has his own will. The Ring has its own power and purpose. Bilbo, Frodo, Gollum, and the others still have choices of their own. But at the same time, Gandalf recognizes that other forces are at work beyond the control of any individual. He knows that he exists within a greater order than himself. Gandalf knows much, but he does not know everything This becomes even clearer when he speaks about Gollum. Frodo regrets that Bilbo did not kill Gollum when he had the chance. But Gandalf does not agree with this way of seeing things: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends... My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end.” The words that stand out to me most are: “Even the very wise cannot see all ends.” Even the wisest cannot see every outcome. This is important. Gandalf does not know what Gollum will ultimately do. He only senses that Gollum still has some part to play before the story comes to an end. And this is precisely where I see Gandalf as different from a character who “knows everything in advance.” He sees more than Frodo does. But he also knows that what he sees is only part of the whole. He does not give himself the right to determine Gollum’s entire fate, because he understands that there are outcomes even he cannot yet see. This connects directly to Bilbo. Gandalf says: “The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.” Bilbo could not have known that when he spared Gollum. He simply chose not to kill a creature he felt pity for. Yet that choice later became one link in a story far greater than Bilbo himself. This is the part I find especially beautiful: An individual can still choose freely, yet cannot know the full meaning that their choice will eventually create. Therefore, the existence of a greater order does not necessarily turn the characters into puppets. Bilbo still chooses. Frodo still chooses. Gandalf still chooses. But those choices can become woven into a story greater than the people who make them. Gandalf as a servant When Gandalf faces the Balrog, he says: “I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor.” I am especially struck by one word: “servant.” Gandalf is a being of great power. Yet he does not introduce himself as the ultimate master of that power. He calls himself a servant. This fits Gandalf’s place in Tolkien’s world: he was sent to Middle-earth to carry out a mission. His power, therefore, is not an end in itself. He does not possess power simply so that he can do whatever he wants. His power is connected to a mission. This becomes even clearer after his confrontation with the Balrog. In the novel, Gandalf says: “Naked I was sent back — for a brief time, until my task is done.” The important words here are: “sent back.” He was sent back. And he returned: “until my task is done.” Gandalf did not decide for himself to return. He was sent back and continued his task. I do not want to take this line too far by claiming that Gandalf knew the exact details of the entire plan behind his return. What we can say more confidently is that Gandalf himself understands his return as having been sent back so that he may continue and complete his task. This fits the image of Gandalf throughout the story: He has a task, but he does not see the entire outcome. He knows that he is serving something greater, yet he still has to choose how to carry out his part. The circumstances are given, but the choice remains ours This is expressed very clearly when Frodo says: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf replies: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Here, I see two beautiful layers: The circumstances are given. The actions are chosen. Frodo cannot choose the age into which he was born. He cannot choose whether the Ring will appear. But Gandalf does not say that Frodo therefore has no choice. He says that what we can decide is what we will do with the time that is given to us. In The Return of the King, Gandalf also says: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set...” We are not meant to master all the tides of the world, but to do what lies within our power during the years in which we have been placed. These two lines complement each other very clearly: We do not control the whole of our circumstances, but we are still responsible for our part in them. In the way I see it, this is where providence and free will meet. Gandalf is not someone who simply sits back and waits for everything to happen according to a script he already knows. He still has to observe, judge, and choose. But neither does he act as an individual completely separate from a greater order. So what can “A wizard is never late” mean? After placing this line beside Gandalf’s other words, I begin to feel that “the right time” may carry a deeper meaning. Gandalf is not someone who knows the entire future. He himself admits: “Even the very wise cannot see all ends.” At the same time, he recognizes that the world does not operate solely according to the wishes of the individuals living within it. Bilbo was “meant to” find the Ring. There are “other forces at work.” Gandalf calls himself a “servant.” And when he returns to Middle-earth, he says that he was “sent back” until his task is complete. These words make me feel that Gandalf understands something very clearly: he can choose how he acts, but he is not the master of the entire story. He has a task. He has his part to play. But he does not know the full outcome to which that part will lead. So when Frodo tells Gandalf that he is late, Gandalf does not need to prove that he knows the future. He simply sees that moment from a different perspective. To Frodo, time is measured by when Gandalf should have arrived. To Gandalf, the important moment may be when he needs to be there to do what he is meant to do. And that is why, for me, the line: “A wizard is never late. Nor is he early.” is no longer merely a joke. It can be understood as a glimpse into the way Gandalf sees his place within a story greater than himself. He does not know the whole future. He does not control the entire course of the world. He simply knows that he is serving something greater, and that he must do his part when the time comes. Perhaps that is why, in the very same moment, Frodo sees a Gandalf who is late. While Gandalf sees himself as arriving precisely on time.

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16,120 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Sensational discovery: the memoirs of a German Nazi bureaucrat in occupied Poland come to light The archive of the Pilecki Institute has acquired an extraordinary historical testimony: the previously unpublished memoirs of a German civil servant who worked in the administration of the General Government during the second world war. The 132-page typescript was donated by a private individual. At the donor’s request, both their identity and that of the author remain confidential. What makes the memoirs so significant is the author’s very ordinariness. He was neither a fanatical Nazi nor a senior official, but a young, well-educated civil servant who volunteered for service in the General Government. His account shows how violence, corruption and self-enrichment became routine features of life among the German occupiers, how even being aware of the mass murder of Jews scarcely disrupted bureaucratic work or social life. That is precisely what gives the source its value: it reveals how ordinary Germans sustained the occupation, profited from it and came to regard the suffering of those they ruled as normal. The document is now being prepared for scholarly use. A detailed analysis is due to appear in a peer-reviewed journal; the memoirs will later be made available in the reading room of the Pilecki Institute’s archive in Warsaw. “The Institute’s mission is above all to document the experiences of the victims of totalitarian regimes and preserve their testimony,” says Karol Madaj, the Institute’s director. “Sources left behind by members of the occupation apparatus provide an important complement.” The donor’s wish for anonymity does nothing to diminish the document’s historical value. In a way the memoirs reveal less about the occupiers’ official ideology than about their inner world. They show how a sense of civilisational superiority could coexist with participation in a system of plunder, violence, terror, murder and a profound moral indifference. The result is not merely an account of daily life under German occupation, but a record of the colonial mentality of German officials in the General Government. The memoirs show how violence against Poles and Jews was organised administratively and made to seem normal by those who carried it out. “They offer a rare view from the perpetrator’s side,” says Mr Madaj. That makes them especially valuable for the Institute’s research and educational work. For Mr Madaj, the circumstances of the donation matter, too. “The fact that these memoirs were entrusted to us has a special significance for me, not least because they were donated by a German private individual through our Berlin branch.” This, he argues, demonstrates the importance of maintaining a permanent Polish research and educational institution in the German capital. The Institute’s Berlin branch is headed by Hanna Radziejowska. “The memory of Germany’s occupation of Poland must also have a place in Germany, not as an accusation, but as an invitation to confront the past together.” Mr Madaj sees the voluntary donation of a document that may challenge comforting ideas about national and family history as a remarkable expression of trust. “That trust is expressed not in a declaration, but in an act.” The donation also suggests that the Institute’s work is needed and that the public trust built up over many years is bearing fruit. In this case, it has opened access to a rare source on the painful history of the second world war, one that might otherwise have remained beyond the reach of researchers. The memoirs are now being examined by Dr Joanna Nikel, a historian who has spent years at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw studying German administrative personnel in the General Government and the operation of the occupation authorities in Poland. She is placing the account in its wider documentary context, comparing it with archival records concerning the author, the offices in which he served and the occupied society he describes. Rafał Ruciński is also contributing to the research. “The memoirs entrusted to our archive are an exceptional and rare source. Their power lies precisely in their ordinariness,” says Dr Nikel. The author was neither an ideological zealot nor a high-ranking servant of the regime. “He was a young, well-educated civil servant who consciously chose, without external compulsion, to work in the civilian administration of the General Government. It is precisely this deliberate decision that gives his account its particular value as a source.” The picture that emerges is far removed from Nazi propaganda’s image of the German civil servant: a disciplined bearer of culture bringing German order to a supposedly backward East. Instead, the memoirs depict an occupying society in which heavy drinking, sexual excess, corruption and personal enrichment through public office were not aberrations, but part of everyday life. “We are dealing with an account in which even knowledge of the mass murder of the Jews does not substantially disturb the author’s daily life,” says Dr Nikel. “There is no sign of despair or of any kind of moral unease. The bureaucratic routine continues, as do social life and the pursuit of small pleasures.” The author describes the plight of the Polish population in similarly dispassionate terms. He sees the misery, the children living in abject poverty and the material devastation. Yet he scarcely considers his own place in the system that created this reality. On the contrary, he benefits from it. The 132-page typescript is divided into 17 chapters and was written after the war. It focuses on the author’s time in the General Government, particularly in the Radom district. Research in Germany’s Federal Archives and the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia has enabled Dr Nikel and Mr Ruciński to establish the dates of his posting: he was in the General Government from October 1943 until June 1944. The findings are expected to appear in an academic journal and will subsequently be published on an open-access basis. Because the article is still undergoing peer review, publication is expected early next year. “Primo Levi wrote that in a criminal system there were only a few real monsters,” says Dr Nikel. “But they alone did not make the system so dangerous. More dangerous were the ordinary people prepared to carry out the tasks assigned to them without objection.” Her observation echoes Hannah Arendt’s formulation, after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, of the “banality of evil”: an evil requiring no demonic motive, but capable of arising from thoughtlessness from the unexamined performance of a function within a bureaucratic machine. “That is precisely why these memoirs matter so much,” says Dr Nikel. “They show that the German occupation regime in Poland was not established and maintained only by ideological fanatics and those who directly carried out its terror. It was also sustained by ordinary Germans: officials and employees of the occupation institutions who had learned to accept violence, inequality and their own privileged position as natural features of everyday life.” The memoirs thus reveal something much harder to discern in official records: the daily workings of occupation and the psychological mechanisms that enabled its functionaries to inhabit a world of violence, plunder and mass murder without seeing themselves as perpetrators. The newly examined source is of central importance to the study of the General Government as a colonial space. Most revealing is the contradiction between the author’s deeply rooted belief in German civilisational superiority and the occupiers’ actual conduct. As his memoirs show, that conduct was driven by baser impulses: greed and excess, opportunism and the lust for power, contempt for the weak, brutality and indifference to the suffering of others.

Pilecki-Institut Berlin

29,181 Aufrufe • vor 4 Tagen

I have read your very long and meaningless response Mr Mutebuka. I always wanted to engage, especially on political debates that foreground national questions, but I have discovered, in my research on what you do and how you conduct yourself, even in the courts where you work, that you have a propensity for substituting clarity and structured thought with unnuanced rumblings to waste time. I have also discovered that you mistake length for substance in most of your engagements. That is the reason why I had blocked you. I simply wanted to save my time after realising that most of your submissions are usually very verbose high-sounding nonsense. At least I am not the only one who discovered such shortcomings in your discursive engagements. Judge Lucy Shepherd, someone you know very well, also registered disquiet over your penchant for making lengthy, irrelevant speeches just to waste time. She wrote, in one of her judgements, “The parties had been ordered to agree and provide a strict timetable for the second part of the hearing…..When the Employment Judge attempted to move matters forward, assist with appropriate questions, and manage the hearing Mr Mutebuka made lengthy speeches about bias, bullying and diversity which were not relevant and caused further delay.” It is in your nature, Mr Mutebuka, to make lengthy meaningless rumbles whenever you have nothing substantial to say. I was tempted to say you are a bat of esoteric erudition; but realised you are just a distracted preacher of political hogwash ministering to the vanity of an equally vacuous waning politician. That is the reason I didn’t want to engage you. But seeing that you want to be an undertaker to the democratic efforts being put in place to resist Constitutional Amendment Bill 3 through your unwarranted attacks on people like TENDAI BITI and others, I have chosen to engage you with the hope you will see the folly of what you are doing. I want you to see, Mr Mutebuka, that in supporting a regime enabler in nelson chamisa, you are aiding Emmerson Mnangagwa to achieve a term extension from whence Chamisa would benefit the post of Prime Minister in 2030. The truth, Mr Mutebuka, is that nelson chamisa initiated talks with Mnangagwa, seeking to become Prime Minister without MPs after Douglas Mwonzora had taken control of the MDC-A party. He was afraid of being seen at State House, so he asked Hopewell Chin’ono Hopewell Chin’ono to act as his emissary. Chamisa and the First Lady’s aide, Benson Muneri, met to kick-start the negotiations at Chin’ono’s house in Chisipite Harare. These meetings were once written about here on X by George Charamba Jamwanda, and people rubbished him because they could not believe that Chamisa could be selfish to an extent of seeking to initiate talks with Mnangagwa’s regime, not for national good, but for personal benefit. I have attached herein, an audio recording in which you can hear Chamisa telling the First Lady’s emissary that he no-longer wanted a go-between in his negotiations. This is when he decided to drop Hopewell Chin’ono from the negotiations because Hopwell, unbeknown to Chamisa, had engaged the late Dr Alex Magaisa to draft a proper framework for negotiations for a government of national unity, not just a personal deal for Chamisa. Those are the papers he says he didn’t want. In the audio I have attached here, you can hear him saying “Nyaya yandisingadi ndeye matsamba nechii chii, zvinhu zvinozokonzera manewspapers.” Clearly, Chamisa wanted some secret deal that wasn’t supposed to come out in the public through newspapers. He didn’t want a paper trail. He didn’t want accountability. The question is why? Some of us have been knowing about this since 2021, but we chose to keep quiet hoping your guy would repent. It was not until you started publishing your treacherous fiction, which I am well aware, came from Chamisa, in an attempt to taint people like Biti, Hopewell and others, that I decided to clarify issues and to expose your guy for who he is-a Mnangagwa project. There is a wealth of evidence, not the fictional stories you are peddling, to prove that Chamisa approached the regime for a personal deal and that he engaged Hopewell to be his go-between. Hopewell even asked Chamisa if he could do this with someone from the CCC party, since he was not a member. Chamisa refused and said he did not want anyone else to know. However, Hopewell informed Dr Alex Magaisa, and they agreed that he should not tell Chamisa that he had shared this, since Chamisa insisted on absolute secrecy. The first meeting took place in November 2021 at State House. Before going there, Hopewell informed his lawyer, a prominent businessman, an economist, and a bank CEO to cover his back, after he had been warned that Chamisa was treacherous. He was driven to meet Ben Muneri at his offices by the well-known economist. Hopewell presented Nelson’s position to the First Lady, who was acting as a go-between between Nelson and the President. Chamisa wanted to be Prime Minister, a position not provided for in the constitution. You can see why he has no problem with the illegal changes to the constitution that Mnangagwa is pushing? It is because they see things the same way. Their personal interests take precedence over constitutional provisions. The second meeting took place in February 2022, just after Chamisa’s CCC large rally at Zimbabwe Grounds. This time, Chamisa had also told Dr Magaisa but misled him by claiming he was the only one aware of the talks. He also misrepresented, to Magaisa, the purpose of the talks. For the second meeting, Hopewell asked Dr Magaisa to draft a proposal, since Chamisa had provided none. Dr Magaisa produced what he termed a pre- and post-election pact, which rejected Chamisa’s desire to become Prime Minister before the 2023 elections. It called for an agreement on non-violence and proposed that any Government of National Unity could only be based on the outcome of the 2023 elections. When Chamisa discovered that his ambition to become Prime Minister had been blocked by the position paper that Dr Magaisa had given Hopewell, on the basis that a GNU could not be formed while Mwonzora controlled Parliament, he then dropped Hopewell. He instructed the First Lady’s emissary to cut Hopewell out and said he no longer wanted him involved. The evidence is contained in the audio below. The opposition and Zimbabwe were saved by Dr Magaisa, who wrote the paper that Hopewell presented, blocking Chamisa’s Prime Ministerial deal with Mnangagwa. It was a personal deal, that is why he wanted to go it alone in the negotiations. Today, he is silent on 2030 because he has been promised the same position of Prime Minister if 2030 goes through. He is currently in America, but he will be back for Easter Holidays to cause more confusion. As long as you continue publishing your fiction and trying to sow confusion among those fighting Constitutional Amendment Bill3, I will come here with more damning audios about Chamisa and how he wants to derail the people’s fight against 2030, the same way he did to Geza’s calls to fight ED. Watch this space! #2027EDAnengeAsipo #Ngazvitenderere

mawarire mbizvo jealousy

226,186 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

Rolled credits on Hell is Us after 25 hours! REVIEW: Hell is Us is a rare risk taker in the modern gaming landscape. It foregoes things like quest logs and map markers, instead challenging you to figure things out on your own, without holding your hand. This is a game full of "lightbulb moments." The large, open maps are filled with puzzles, and figuring out these solutions on your own can be very satisfying. Items you collected hours ago could be the key to a solution in a completely different area. It forces you to THINK, and when it finally clicks, it's an extremely rewarding feeling. One of the game's most impressive qualities is the sheer immersion and worldbuilding. Hadea is a war-torn country that is deeply layered with lore. It can at times be a dark story - touching on subjects like prejudice, abuse, and the horrors of war. The country is in an active civil war and Rogue Factor isn't shy about it putting it directly in your face. The two warring factions have commited atrocities against one another, and it's often put front and center. You'll learn the history of the war, as well as the different cultures, religous beliefs, cults, uprisings, and other major events in each area. The visuals, while not the most cutting edge, are still a highlight with strong art design. From thick forests and foggy mists, to dark underground caverns with supernatural phenomena, to wide open lakes and secret underground facilities - none of them felt out of place. Performance was great for me and was much improved from the demo in my experience. Sadly though, combat was a mixed bag. The core mechanics are solid, but the overall execution still needs some work. The parry/block felt inconsistent and visual clarity can be a huge issue. The effects look great but can make it hard to read enemy telegraphs. There's a good amount of build potential however, with dozens of different abilities to choose from for both your weapons and your drone. These cost 'Lymbic Energy' which is recharged by dealing damage. Health and stamina can also be recovered by timing a Ki Pulse ability after every attack. It's a good system that allows you to keep up nonstop pressure once you master it. Difficulty ramps up in Act 2 and beyond, but there were surprisingly few actual boss fights. Enemy variety was also very low with 5 core enemies, and 5 "Hazes." Each can be slightly altered depending on what grade they are (1-3), but in the end it can get quite repetitive. Hell is Us isn't perfect - but it makes some bold design choices that I can appreciate. It's a strong effort from a relatively unknown studio, and there's a LOT of potential for a sequel. The world is rich with lore, and it's already a very fleshed out universe. I completed my playthrough in around 25 hours, but there's easily 30-40 hours worth of content to discover. I've seen some criticism of the story's ending, but I thought it was fine, although somewhat abrupt. It's very clearly teasing a sequel or DLC of some kind. It's well-priced, and ultimately a worthwhile experience IMO! Final Score: 8/10 Playtime: 25 hours Platform: Steam Thanks to Nacon and Dead Good PR for providing a code for review. ❤️

KAMI

445,459 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten

At 14, Jim Simons got a job putting away stock in a basement. He was so bad, they demoted him to floor sweeper. When he said he wanted to study math at MIT, his bosses laughed. He went on to make $100+ billion in trading profits. More than Buffett, Soros, & Dalio combined. In 2010, he spent 60 minutes at MIT explaining how a mathematician became the world's greatest trader: "They thought that was the funniest thing they had ever heard. The guy who couldn't remember where to put the sheep manure is going to be a mathematician at MIT." He applied to MIT. Got accepted. Studied mathematics. It went all right. After graduating, Simons took a job at the Institute for Defense Analysis. Secret government work. Good pay. Half your time on their work, half on your own mathematics. Then the Vietnam War happened. General Maxwell Taylor, the head of the organization, wrote an article in the New York Times about how victory was days away. Simons disagreed. He wrote a letter to the Times expressing that view. "They kindly published it." A few months later, a reporter asked to interview him about people who work for the defense department but oppose the war. Simons agreed. Told his local boss afterward. "He said, 'You did what?' And he picked up the phone and called General Maxwell Taylor." Silence on the other end. "He hung up. Looked at me. Said, 'You're fired.'" "I said, 'I'm fired? I'm a permanent member.'" "He said, 'I'll tell you the difference between a temporary member and a permanent member. A temporary member has a contract.'" "It was the first time, and happily the last time, I was ever fired." On starting Renaissance: Simons left mathematics at 38. Frustrated. Stuck on a problem he couldn't solve. He had some money from an investment that finally paid off. He invested that money. Found out he wasn't bad at it. He brought in the best modeler he knew. A guy named Lenny Baum. "Lenny started making models. But then he seemed to get less interested in models and more interested in reading the news." "Then he started having opinions on what was going to go up and what was going to go down. And he was right enough times." "I said okay, to hell with the modeling. Let's just try to make some money." What happened next: "We multiplied our investors' money by 12 in two years." "We were incredibly lucky." But in the back of his mind, he knew models were the answer. "If you're doing fundamental trading, one morning you come in, you feel like a genius. Your positions are all your way. You think, God, I'm really smart." "The next day you come in, they've gone against you, and you feel like an idiot." "It just didn't seem like a way to live your life." In 1988, he made the decision: 100% models. No human override. "Some firms say they have models. What they typically mean is the model advises the trader what to do. If he likes the advice, he'll take it. If he doesn't, he won't." "That's not science. You can't simulate that. How were you feeling when you got out of bed 13 years ago? Did you like what the model said?" "If you're going to trade using models, you slavishly use the models. You do whatever the hell it says. No matter how smart or dumb you might think it is at that moment." "That turned out to be a wonderful decision." On the secret sauce: "People always ask me, what's the secret? We're not the only quant firm in the world. But we seem to have done better than anybody." "The real secret sauce is that we start with great scientists. First-class people who've done first-class work." "Second, we provide people with a great infrastructure." "The most important thing is an open atmosphere. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. No compartmentalization." "And people get paid based on the overall profits. Not just on your work. Everyone has an interest in everyone else's success." "Those policies, no one of which seems so remarkable, turn out to be a pretty winning combination." On guiding principles: His wife told him to end with values. He said he wasn't sure he had any. "She assured me that I had some values, if only I could think hard about them." Here's what he came up with: 1. Do something new. "I don't like to run with the pack. For one thing, I'm not such a fast runner." "If you're one of n people all working on the same problem, I'd be last. But if you can think of a new problem that other people aren't working on, maybe that'll give you a chance." 2. Collaborate with the best people you possibly can. "That gives you some reach and some scope. And it's also fun to work with terrific people." 3. Be guided by beauty. "What's aesthetic is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people. Approaching the problem and doing it right." "It's a beautiful thing to do something right." 4. Don't give up. "Sometimes it's appropriate to be trying to do something for a hell of a long time." 5. Hope for some good luck.

Jaynit

73,903 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Thabo Cele and Lebo Maboe double pivot vs Polokwane City📝 The level of organisation, discipline, and resistance was completely different compared to our games vs Magesi, Orbit or TS Galaxy and that matters when analyzing performance. And, before even getting into the Maboe–Cele double pivot, it’s important to address the front 3. Trying to impose a possession-based approach with Lilepo, Duba, and Silva is, at this stage, a bit unrealistic. The profiles don’t naturally support sustained control or efficiency in tight spaces; they are more direct, which makes the approach look slightly disconnected. Otherwise, who should combine with the double pivot to keep possession against a low block cos you're not inverting any fullbacks or CBs? Mdu[10] is also direct and won’t drop deep into ball circulation. ■ The midfield pairing of Cele & Maboe gave the team a clear structural balance in the 1st and 2nd phase, even if the chemistry is still far off. I mean, it's their 1st start together so🤷🏾‍♂️ Cele operated as a holding midfielder, anchoring the team behind/next to Maboe. He took on most of the defensive responsibility, well-positioned to screen the backline, and effective in managing transitions. ■ In possession, Cele was central to the 1st and 2nd phase of progression. He completed more passes than Plk City’s midfield duo of Kambala and Maphangule combined while also neutralising their 10 Mutudza. Mutudza managed just 5 passes in 66 minutes, which says everything about Cele’s dominance in that zone. He constantly made himself available in front of the CBs, scanning, managing the tempo, and organising the team’s structure. He always demanded movement from his teammates, always pointing to open spaces they should be occupying to progress better. At one point, he was calling Mdu to receive while Mdu was instead making a forward run away from Cele who had the ball. Cele didn’t force progression unnecessarily, but that doesn’t mean he lacked intent to move the team forward. He completed more line breaking passes and passes into the final 3rd than any other player. That highlights his awareness of when to accelerate play and when to maintain control. ■ Maboe, on the other hand, operated as the 8, with freedom to impact higher zones. With Cele securing the base, he was free to connect phases and influence play closer to the final 3rd. However, you could still see old habits from his previous role. He often dropped deeper than expected, which slightly limited his presence in decisive attacking areas. As much as he played balls into the final 3rd, we also needed him to receive in the final 3rd more. ■ Together, Cele and Maboe created 5 chances against a very disciplined low block of Plk City. 4 of those came from Maboe, underlining how much creative responsibility he still carried. However, this wasn’t his sharpest attacking performance in terms of passing and shooting. Despite the output in chances created, there were several misplaced passes in key moments, and he didn’t attack the box enough for an 8 with a reliable 6 behind him. It’s a similar issue we had with Mdu yesterday, he also struggled to consistently enter the opposition box as usual or combine between the lines. There was a clear lack of chemistry in the final 3rd in our overall performance. We couldn't stay on the ball enough to put pressure on their defense and cause enough panic for them to crack. ■ Towards midway through the 2nd Half, both Cele & Maboe started to lose some steam, and the pairing needed refreshing. At this point, Plk City had already overloaded the middle and allowed very little space for us to operate. We failed the same way in the loss vs Stellies, they improved their midfield to cancel our dominance, and we looked confused with our subs, no clear intention to improve a clear area that's been neutralized. Our struggles were not in the double pivot. There was nothing result-altering or structurally wrong with Maboe & Cele. [Video] Part 1:

El Capitano⚪

58,049 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

---------------------------------------- Educational Purposes Disclaimer This content is shared strictly for educational and historical purposes. It is based on documented facts, verified sources, and established historical records. The material may include sensitive or uncomfortable topics that some viewers might find disturbing or offensive. The intention is solely to inform and provide context, not to insult, demean, or promote hatred toward any individual, group, or culture. Truthful discussion of history sometimes requires addressing difficult realities. Viewer discretion is advised. If you have concerns or additional verified information, feel free to share them respectfully in the comments. ---------------------------------------- Dr. William Luther Pierce - The Truth of Democracy "Did you ever wonder why the ǰews are such great proponents of democracy? Whether in Indonesia or Pakistan or Serbia or you name it, whenever there is some threat to universal suffrage, the J*ws are ready to send the U.S. armed forces in to bomb and kill until everyone is permitted to vote. Why is that? Why can’t the Indonesians have an Islamic theocracy if they want? Why can’t the Pakistanis have a military dictatorship? Why can’t the Serbs run their own country the way they prefer? What is the appeal in making sure that people whose minds have been wasted by Alzheimer’s Disease vote? Well, let’s not beat around the bush: the appeal of mass democracy lies in the fact that in essentially every country in the world today, the number of persons unable to think for themselves is substantially larger than the number able to make independent decisions. Those unable to think for themselves have their thinking done for them by the people who control the mass media. Which is to say, democracy is the preferred system because it gives the political power to those who own or control the mass media and at the same time allows them to remain behind the scenes and evade responsibility for the way in which they use that power. And the more inclusive the democracy is; that is, the more Alzheimer’s sufferers and Mongoloid cretins and paranoid schizophrenics and people who live in empty packing cases in alleyways and Jamaican immigrants and football fans are able to vote; the more certain is the grip of the media masters on the political process. Those voters who buy astrology magazines at the checkout stand and spend their time watching soap operas, game shows, and Oprah absorb their general attitudes on things through the television screen. They learn which ideas are fashionable and which are not by noticing the facial expression and tone of voice of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather when the news is announced each day. Their opinions on specific issues are formed as they view televised sidewalk surveys taken by reporters. The only uncertainty about these people is whether or not they’ll be able to pry themselves loose from their couches long enough to vote for the designated candidates. That’s why it’s important to have lots of them. And wherever there are lots of them, the men who control the mass media also will control the outcome of elections. It’s a much surer way of controlling governments than bribing corrupt dictators or slipping seductive whores into the king’s bedroom a la Esther and Ahasuerus; or Monica and Bill. Believe me, one day soon the Jeŵs on both sides of the great water will institute a web-TV voting system that allows the couch potatoes and the ball game fans to vote without having to get up from their couches, just by clicking their remote controls at their TV screens to select the next President or prime minister. That will be real democracy. You know, back close to the beginning of this century, around 1901 or so, a book first was published containing the text of what became generally known as The Prőtocols of the Learned Elders of Ziőn. The publisher was a Russian academic, Professor Sergei Nilus. Nilus himself allegedly had obtained The Protocőls from a Russian official, who had obtained the text from a patriotic Russian noblewoman, who in turn had purchased the material from a Jeŵ in Paris about 15 years earlier. The Protocols purports to be a collection of minutes or reports of meetings held by the leaders of the world Jewįsh community, at which they summarize the progress they had made to that time in their quest for world subversion, world ownership, and world power and outline their plans for continuing the process in the future. They talk about gaining control of the banking systems of various countries, about fomenting wars and revolutions to weaken and destroy Gentile power, about corrupting music and art and education, about subverting various Gentile institutions, about taking over the press everywhere and controlling the flow of information to the masses, about undermining the family and bringing family values into disrepute, and so on. The Elders of Zioń really are a satanic bunch of schemers. Reading The Protocołs makes one’s flesh crawl. We should remember that when The Protocolš began circulating in Russia in the first decade of this century, that country had not yet fallen victim to Jewisħ Bolshevism, but that wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the ǰews. The Jeŵs were generally recognized as a dangerously subversive element in Russia, as the schemers and string pullers behind every attempt to damage or upset the established order in Russia, and so Professor Nilus’ publication of The Pŕotocols found a ready market among the Russian public. After the Jȇwish Bolshevik revolution of 1917 overthrew the Russian government and established a communist dictatorship in Russia, anyone found with a copy of The Protočols was liable to be summarily shot. The text already had been translated into a dozen other languages and distributed far and wide outside Russia, however. Since then it has been published in virtually every language which has a printed form and has been read by tens of millions of people around the world. The Jȇws have been claiming hysterically since The Proţocols first appeared that the text is “a forgery.” I guess that’s their way of saying that it’s not what it purports to be: namely, the actual minutes of meetings of Jewish leaders discussing their plans for world domination. The great American industrialist and automaker Henry Ford was very strongly impressed by The Proţocols and helped circulate the text in the United States. When told by newspaper reporters in 1921 about the Jews’ claims that The Protočols was “a forgery,” Mr. Ford responded that all he could say about the material was that it fit what was actually happening in the world and had been happening ever since the The Pŕotocols first appeared in print. Of course, what Mr. Ford had especially in mind when he made that remark were two momentous things which had happened during the previous decade. One was the Jȇws’ success in taking over Russia and imposing communism on the Russians, and the other was the recently ended First World War: a horribly fratricidal and senseless war, which had destroyed the old order in Europe, had spilled the blood of millions of the best Europeans, and had weakened all of Europe’s long-established institutions, leaving every European country open to all manner of social, political, and cultural ills; in particular, to the further spread of communism. Well, Henry Ford was a very hard-headed, practical sort of man, and it’s easy to understand his attitude. He had no way of knowing whether or not The Proţocols of the Learned Elders of Ziőn was actually what it purported to be, but he was quite impressed by the fact that the plan for world subversion and domination by the Jeŵs outlined in the book seemed to be happening pretty much as described. I’ll go a step further than Henry Ford was willing to go in assessing The Protőcols. I think that they very likely are not what they purport to be. In the first place the text of The Protočols doesn’t ring true. It’s too straightforward, too open. It doesn’t use the sort of deceptive, weasel worded, self-justifying language that Jeŵs customarily use in expressing themselves, even to one another. When a group of Jȇwish leaders get together to discuss their plans for the destruction of a host nation, they don’t use straightforward expressions such as “encouraging miscegenation” and “leading the goyim to the slaughter.” They use weasel-expressions, such as “building tolerance,” “increasing diversity,” and “eliminating inequality.” In the second place, it’s difficult for me to imagine the head Jȇws laying out such a complete, self-contained, and pat explanation of what they’re up to. It’s just too convenient for those of us who aim at alerting our people as to what the Jews’ intentions are and then putting a monkey wrench in their gears. I wouldn’t call The Protočols “a forgery,” as the Jews do whenever the book is mentioned. I’m inclined to believe Professor Nilus was an astute observer of the Jeŵs and also was a patriot. He wanted to warn the Russian people of what the Jȇws were planning to do to them, and so he imagined how the ǰews’ plan might look if it were all laid out in straightforward language. I believe that he wrote the text he published, but that he believed it was a reasonably accurate description of what the ǰȇŵš actually were doing. And the reason that The Protőcőls ended up being translated into hundreds of languages and read by millions of people is that many people, like Henry Ford, saw that they fitted what was happening. Sometimes I have tried to imagine what Professor Nilus might have written if he were writing today instead of a century ago; and if he were writing still in the straightforward sort of language he used earlier. A 1999 version of The Ƥrotocols of the Learned Elders of Ziőn might read something like this: "Greetings, my fellow Elders of Zioń! Today I am happy to report to you that our plan for the destruction of the hated Gentiles and the acquisition of their remaining wealth is practically complete. There remain only a few loose ends to tie up, and then the struggle in which we have been engaged for thousands of years against the filthy goyim against the Nations, against all the non-Jeŵish peoples of the world, finally will be victorious, and we will be able to devour everything they have created, as Yahweh, the god of our tribe, has commanded us. Everywhere we already rule behind the scenes, with puppets completely under our control in the offices of power. In Russia, where they resisted us for so long; where the ordinary people always hated us as exploiters, as moneylenders and tax collectors and purveyors of alcohol and merchants in the sweet, white flesh of their daughters and sisters, and where the aristocrats also hated us, as subversives and troublemakers, and kept us confined to only certain areas of the country, so that we could not exploit all of the people; in Russia we used the doctrine of our dear, departed Elder of Ziőn, Karl Marx, to divide the Russian people against themselves and get the power into our own hands, where it remains to this day. We butchered their Czar and his whole family like the Gentile cattle they were. With the help of the common people we slaughtered all of the Russian aristocrats and took their wealth. And then we turned on the common people. First we murdered their leaders; their writers and teachers and intellectuals and military officers; so that there would be no one able to turn them against us, and then we began murdering the common people themselves, the farmers and workers, first by the millions and then by the tens of millions in labor camps and death camps all across Russia. And most of them never did understand what was happening to them. One of them, who had been studying to become a Christian priest, we corrupted and made into our ally. His name was Stalin. Later, like the pharaoh who knew not Joseph, Stalin tried to turn against us, but one of our women was his doctor, and we poisoned him before he could harm us. When the system based on the theory of our departed Elder Marx had bled the Russian people dry, we launched a “privatization” scheme, which put most of the remaining wealth which had belonged to the government directly into our hands. Their gas and oil, their forests and their lumber industry, their mines and factories; and especially their television broadcasting facilities; are now owned by us acting as capitalists. Today we have a drunken, sick, old Russian clown, Boris Yeltsin, as the nominal leader of the Russians, but one of our people, Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, tells him what to do and keeps him under tight control through bribes. In England, the country from which all of us were expelled by the king as exploiters and troublemakers just over 700 years ago, we now have another puppet, Tony Blair, in place as the nominal leader of the English, but like Yeltsin he is completely under our control. One of our people, Michael Levy, finances his election campaigns and controls his purse strings. Another of our people, Jack Straw, controls his domestic policies. America, however, is the prize example of our success. Just as in England and in Russia, also in America we have been able to put a totally corrupt Gentile politician into the position of nominal power and then to surround him with our own people, who wield the real power. Actually running the American government, our people are in charge of America’s State Department, America’s Defense Department, America’s Federal Reserve System, and America’s Treasury Department. When one of our people, Robert Rubin, retired recently as secretary of the treasury, we simply moved another of our people, Lawrence Summers, into that position. Clinton appoints to every high office in the American government, whether the Supreme Court or his own cabinet, only those people we suggest to him, and the totally corrupt politicians of the Senate dare not disapprove anyone we suggest, lest we label them as “anti-Semites.” We have gained nearly complete control of America’s educational system, from kindergarten through the universities. No ideas or facts may be taught unless we have given them the stamp of Political Correctness. We have made it impossible for anyone in an American university to contradict anything we have claimed, no matter how preposterous, about what happened to us during the Second World War. We now have the American government, just like every government in Europe, paying us “reparations,” because not enough was done for us during the war. We have succeeded in corrupting and then dominating America’s art and music and literature. We have made degeneracy the touchstone for American culture. We own the art galleries and set the standards for painting and sculpture. We have the Americans lining up and paying admission to see a “work of art” which consists of animal dung smeared onto a crude painting of a Nȇgress, which we tell them is their Virgin Mary. They read the depraved and trashy novels we tell them to read and believe that these novels are “literature.” Their children listen to Negrőid rhythms and chant Nȇgroid “rap” ditties, because we control the popular music industry. Through the immigration policy we have imposed on America we are increasing the percentage of non-White minorities in every part of the country. Within the next few years we will succeed in making White Americans a minority in their own country. Our success in America has been due to two things: our control of the mass media of news and entertainment, through which we control the ideas and attitudes of the masses; and the system of mass democracy, which ensures that the votes of the masses under our control determine which figurehead politicians actually make up the American government. Since the last part of the 19th century we have been gathering the power of the mass media into our hands. In those days many of us were only rag-pickers and dealers in used merchandise, recently off the boat from Russia or Poland, but whenever a Gentile newspaper got itself into financial difficulties, we were ready instantly to pool our resources and buy it out, so that henceforth it could be in the hands of one of our people. In the 1920s, when radio was becoming a powerful medium of persuasion, we began buying broadcasting stations and putting together networks. At the same time we saw the potential for motion pictures and began moving into Hollywood. By working together with each other we were able to bankrupt or buy out every Gentile film producer except Walt Disney. We had to wait until he died to take control of his film company, but by then we already dominated the entire motion picture industry. After the Second World War, when television became the most powerful medium of mass persuasion, we were ready to move in and dominate the TV industry from the beginning. Today no motion picture can be made and no television program can be broadcast in America without our approval. Only a few independent commercial radio stations, a few shortwave radio stations, and a handful of book and magazine publishers remain free of our control. But the American masses, for the most part, never see or hear anything we have not approved. They do not understand shortwave, and they are afraid to read any publication we have not approved, for fear that it might be “hate” material. There is, of course, that pesky Internet, which is not yet under our control, but we are moving rapidly to deal with that matter. We expect soon to have our puppet politicians enact “hate speech” legislation in America, similar to that which we already have succeeded in having enforced in Europe, so that no one can say anything on the Internet that has not been approved by us. The couch potatoes will not object, because we will tell them that the new laws will make them safe from terrorism. By that time we also should have achieved our goal for the disarmament of the American population. And then, my fellow Elders of Zioń, we can do to the American people what we did to the Russian people. With our power of television, we will have them voting for their own slaughter. Long live our mass media! Long live democracy! Long live the power of triumphant Ȥion!" "

Mofobian

24,562 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

VEO 2 by Google DeepMind : MY CHEAT SHEET Alright, so after 500h-ish spent on VEO and giving birth to both "Kitsune" and "Banished", tons of people asked for a making-of. Instead, I decided to give you what I actually know of VEO 2 to this day. Please share! it's made to be spread around! 1/ If you're not using a LLM (Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever), you're doing it wrong. VEO 2 currently has a sweet spot when it comes to prompt length: too short is poor, too long drops information, action, description etc. I did a lot of back and forth to find my sweet spot, but once I got in a place I thought felt right, I used a LLM to help me keep my structure, length, and help me draft actions. I would then spent an extensive amount of time tweaking, iterating, removing words, changing order, adding others, but the draft would come from a LLM and a conversation I built and trained to understand what my structure looked like, what was a success, or a failure. I would also share the prompts working well for further reference, and sharing the failures also for further reference. This would ensure my LLM conversation became a true companion. 2/ Structure, structure, structure Structure is important. Each recipe is different but same as any GenAI text-to something, it looks like the "higher on the prompt has more weight" rule applies. So, in my case I would start by describing the aesthetics I am looking for, time of day, colors, mood, then move to camera, subject, action, and all the rest. Once again, you might have a different experience but what is important is to stick to whatever structure you have as you move forward. Keeping it organized also makes it easier to edit later. 3/ Only describe what you see in the frame If you have a character you want to keep consistent, but you want a close-up on the face for example, your reflex will be to describe the character from head to toe and then mention you want a close-up...It's not that simple. If I tell VEO I want a face close-up but then proceed to describe the character's feet, the close-up mention will be dropped by VEO... Once again, the LLM can help you in this by giving it the instruction to only describe what is in the frame. 4/ Patience Well, it can get costly to be patient, but even if you repeat the same structure, sometimes changing one word can still throw the entire thing out and totally change the aesthetics of your scene. It is by nature extremely consistent if you conserve most words, but sometimes it happens. In those situations, trace your steps back and try to figure out which words are triggering a larger change. 5/ Documenting When I started "Kitsune" (and did the same for all others), the first thing I did was start a Figjam file so I could save the successful prompts and come back to them for future reference. Why Figjam? So I could also upload 1 to 4 generations from this prompt, and browse through them in the future. 6/ VEO is the Midjourney of video Currently, no text-to-video tool (Minimax being the closest behind) gave me a feeling I could provide strong art directions and actually get them. I have been a designer for nearly 20 years, and art direction to me has been one of the strongest foundations of most of my work. Dark, light, happy, sad, colorful or not, it doesn't matter as long as you have a point of view and please...have a point of view. Recently watched a great video about the slow death of art direction in film (link in comments) and oh boy, did VEO 2 deliver on giving me the feeling I was listened. Try starting your prompts with different kinds of medium (watercolor for example), the mood you are trying to achieve, the kind of lighting you want, the dust in the rays of light, etc... which gets me to the next one 7/ You can direct your colors in VEO It's as simple as mentioning the hues you want to have in the final result, in which quantity, and where. When I direct shots, I am constantly describing colors for two reasons: 1. Well, having a point of view and 2. reaching better consistency through text-to-video. If I have a strong and consistent mood but my character is slightly different because of text-to-video, the impact won't be dramatic because a strong art direction helps a lot with consistency. 8/ Describe your life away Some people asked me how I achieved a good consistency between shots knowing it's only text-to-video and the answer is simple: I describe my characters, their unique traits, their clothing, their haircut, etc..anything which could help someone visually impaired have a very precise mental representation of the subject. 9/ But don't describe too much either... It would be magical if you could stuff 3000 words in the window and have exactly what you asked for, right? Well, it turns out VEO is amazing with its prompt adherence, but there is always a moment where it starts dropping animations or visual elements when your prompt stretches for a tad too long. This actually happens way before the character limit allowed by VEO is reached, so don't overdo it, it's no use and will play against the results. For info, 200-250 words seems like a sweet spot! 10/ Natural movements but... VEO is great with natural movements and this is also one of the reasons why I used it so extensively: people walking don't walk in slow-motion. That being said, don't try to be too ambitious on some of the expected movements: multiple camera movements won't work, full 360 revolutions around a subject won't work, anime-style crazy camera movements won't work, etc... what it can do is already great, but there are still some limitations...

Henry Daubrez 🌸💀

31,182 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

💥🛸 Bigelow: I met with Trump in February for 75 minutes and suggested he tell the world this: "A non-human intelligent presence has been on Earth for a very long time, using spacecraft and with performances completely beyond our capabilities, and our human physics." Knapp says a disclosure speech has been written for Trump. But will he ever read it? 🤷🏼‍♂️ ~ Anchor: "Bigelow, a longtime supporter of President Trump, recently met in the Oval Office and advised the commander in chief what he might want to say to the country." Knapp: "[Bigelow] thinks the time has come for some sort of formal disclosure, and that Trump is the guy to do it. Coincidentally or not, in the five months since their White House meeting, the government has started releasing piles of UFO-related information." Bigelow: "And disclosure was one of the topics. And so, when I was ready, I asked to see him. And so February the 6th, I was in the Oval Office with the president." (Bigelow says he had 75 minutes with Trump, and one topic was Disclosure.) Knapp Voiceover: "Bigelow says a presidential aide cleared off the resolute desk, Bigelow plopped down seven reports on seven subjects and jumped right into UFO disclosure." Bigelow: "I was emphasizing that the disclosure process, starting with confirmation, is a big deal. You know, that really is important for somebody like the president of the United States to say, 'Yeah, they're real. They're here,' and eliminate all the other nonsense, all the noise that's been going on for 80 years." Knapp: "You go into it with an idea of not just things in the sky, floating around, some mystery. We've got the goods. Somewhere, there are crashes. Do you tell them that there are bodies, that there are crash retrieval vehicles of unknown origin, or how specific do you get on that?" Bigelow: "Basically, I focused on him and how to prepare himself if he's not already prepared." Knapp Voiceover: "Bigelow declines to repeat anything the president said in response, not even gestures or facial expressions. The report he wrote for Trump included recaps of some notable, well-documented UFO incidents and cases, along with specific comments that could be shared with the public, including a suggestion that he be delivered in one of the quick exchanges the president has with reporters aboard Air Force One." Bigelow: "And this is what I want you to say, Mr. President: 'A non-human intelligent presence has been on Earth for a very long time, using spacecraft and with performances completely beyond our capabilities and our human physics.' And that's it. To say nothing else. That's it. That's all, because what this is, is disclosure, and it's actually confirmation." Knapp Voiceover: "A primary angle in Bigelow's proposal to the president was a preemptive pardon, amnesty for the private contractors who've helped the government hide the truth for 80 years. Bigelow says he has direct knowledge of aerospace companies which have stashed and analyzed materials and craft of unknown origin. Their expertise will be vital in educating and reassuring the public, he says." Bigelow: "And if it's handled right, it can be done successfully." Knapp: "If you were president, would you announce that yes, we've got crash retrievals, yes, we have reverse engineering programs, and yes, we've got bodies?" Bigelow: "Yeah, because the rest of the world already knows that. The people that count in Russia and China already know." Knapp Voiceover: "In the months since their February meeting, the White House has authorized an ongoing release of UFO files and videos, some of which were already in the public arena, with promises of more releases in the months ahead. "Bigelow isn't the only Trump whisperer interested in the subject. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was one of the most vocal members of Congress urging UFO transparency back when he was a senator. Donald Trump Jr. has raised the subject with his dad. Vice President J.D. Vance says he's fascinated too, but thinks UFOs might be demons. "Bigelow won't say whether he made a dent in Trump's opinion about UFOs and ETs. The president's previous comments have been largely noncommittal, although he has authorized the release of government files. "The strongest part of the pitch might have been Bigelow's suggestion that UFO disclosure would cement Trump's place in history." Bigelow: "The world goes so fast, but the president that took on the challenge of disclosure and of confirmation, and actually built a satisfactory conclusion of a relationship between human beings and that subject, is going to go down in history as having really accomplished something." Knapp in Studio: "With Mr. Bigelow, this started a couple of months ago. A conversation about, let's do some interviews. He wants to get some things off his chest. I'm the guy to do it, and then it turned into a podcast. So he's built his own studio, we recorded a podcast. It's now up on our Mystery Wire site. "A lot of really interesting stuff about his encounter with RFK Jr. Crazy story, and we will be sharing more of that, and then more to come, here, we're going to be recording additional things about what he wants to get off his chest. " Anchor: Well, there's been sort of like these whispers that there's actually a speech prepared for the president, if and when he ever decides to address the nation about this. You think that's some validity?" Knapp: "I've heard those stories. The answer is yes. There's at least one speech that has been written for him now. Whether he's read it or not, I don't know. But if he gets in the mood, it should be sitting right there somewhere in the desk."

Joe Murgia

34,753 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

The proposed indefinite stay-away by Zimbabwe’s war veterans’ leader Blessed “Bombshell” Geza has failed to take off. Zimbabweans, particularly in Bulawayo and Harare and other small towns, chose to go to work today. I see on social media that some citizens in the diaspora are angry with fellow compatriots back home for going to work, but we should remember that Zimbabwe has 95% unemployment, so if people do not go out to hustle, they will starve, so goes the argument. The idea that people would get food from retailers or wholesalers was Alice in Wonderland stuff, it was never going to work or happen in a country where most businesses are owned by the corrupt cabal that the action intended to remove or loosen its grip on power. Secondly, Zimbabweans want to be liberated from corrupt rule by a particular type of political group and politician, so without the traditional opposition throwing its weight behind Geza's call, his efforts were always going to be in vain even though they are noble and progressive. The failure of this stay-away ends any immediate hope that citizens will participate in any liberation efforts unless mobilised by the traditional opposition, which does not exist, or by the military. I will be blunt. Short of a military intervention to stop Emmerson Mnangagwa’s corrupt rule, he will now get everything he wants, including term extensions. He is relentless. Zimbabweans will now be stuck with Mnangagwa until the day he dies and possibly will have to accept that his kids will rule them too with the assistance of his crooked cronies and clansmen. Zimbabweans should forget about the 2028 election and as a local doctor mentioned on social media, begin working through the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. It is pointless putting your hopes in a process that you know too well will be rigged. For him to fail to achieve what he wants, Mnangagwa would have to make a catastrophic mistake, like killing loads of people which will attract international scrutiny or firing his Vice President, General Constantino Chiwenga which might finally trigger a decisive response. There is now nobody with the capacity to stop him, short of a military intervention or death. Geza has tried, but there is no tangible citizen support that was forthcoming. Geza managed to force Mnangagwa’s team to stop chanting the 2030 slogan and pushed them into another plan of bribing MPs with illegally parcelled land. But after today, the dictator knows that Geza is now all alone, unless the military intervenes, which, as I have said before, is now looking highly unlikely unless they are provoked by the continued conspicuous consumption of looted public funds. So, Zimbabweans must now accept the reality that their failure to sacrifice for their liberation by simply staying at home will mean more unemployment, more looting of public funds, more dilapidated hospitals and public infrastructure, and more economic pain all around. Those are the grim political and socio-economic realities of Zimbabwe going forward, nothing less, nothing more. Journalists will continue writing about corruption scandals, but only for historical records and as part of our job, and for many readers, it would be for entertainment value sadly. Some will just switch to issues that have positive mental health outcomes. If you are young, have a passport, and have somewhere to go, my advice is to leave, otherwise, you will just become another tragic statistic of poverty, unemployment, and possibly death in a derelict hospital. Ordinarily, Africans do not care about who is in power if they have the basic necessities of life. But sadly, in Zimbabwe, those necessities will remain out of reach for as long as Mnangagwa and his corrupt cabal are in power. As for the opposition, it is dead. There will be no pushback for reasons you all know. You will remember that last year in May, I mentioned that three key countries to Zimbabwe's politics privately mentioned through their diplomats that, as far as they were concerned, 2028 was gone, and they were now looking at perhaps 2033 or even beyond to envisage any possibility of a change of government. But as long as Zimbabweans remain fixated on the main actor syndrome and not an opposition movement, they must also accept being stuck in the current political ditch for a long time to come. What does this mean? It means more looting. For the diaspora, it means continuing to send money back home for the foreseeable future. The tragedy is that Zimbabwean citizens continue to look for a hero figure rather than building a durable, collective movement that outlasts individual egos. Until that changes, power will remain concentrated in the hands of whoever seizes the moment, no matter how corrupt or undemocratic they are like Mnangagwa. For foreign diplomats, it simply means accepting that they now must work with the government of the day no matter how corrupt it is, with no hope of any change unless there is a dramatic intervention that puts an end to the current political rot. For General Constantino Chiwenga, it means kissing goodbye to his dream of becoming president. He must now tighten his security and pray that Mnangagwa does not make the un-strategic mistake of firing him because he might not be able to fight back. If he still has an appetite for this job, he has to fight for it by coming out of the shadows, otherwise he will meet the same fate that destroyed Joice Mujuru’s career. Without her husband, she became a nobody, and without the military, Chiwenga will be just another brick in the wall. For 74-year-old war veterans’ leader, former intelligence officer, and former Member of Parliament Blessed “Bombshell” Geza, keep your head up high old man. You did what you could, and history will be kind to you for trying, at great personal cost. Your beautiful home in Sanyati was burnt, your wife harassed, and now you are living in hiding. One would have to be a fool of monumental proportions not to acknowledge your efforts and say thank you for trying. You have contributed to people’s consciousness about how bad corruption has become, and hopefully you will live to see the change that Zimbabwe so desperately needs. Every struggle needs leadership; people cannot lead themselves. The idea that the Arab Spring was leaderless is rooted in ignorance and a lack of understanding of what happened. Without leaders to provide direction and inspiration, citizens cannot move forward on their own. Citizens were given direction and inspiration by Geza, but quite evidently, they felt it was not enough to compel them to make sacrifices, such as simply staying away from work and enduring a little hardship for the greater good and a better future. The dysfunctionality of national leadership in Zimbabwe has been fuelled by money changing hands, shameless ethnic alignments, corruption, and the absence of a shared national vision and values. Put simply, Zimbabweans are not united against the common enemy, corrupt rule. The oversized egos that prioritise individualism over a collective agenda are self-evident, and they are among the key ingredients of today’s failed politics. Sadly, it is the ordinary people and the lumpen who cheer that individualism that will continue to suffer. As Dr Solomon Guramatunhu has always said in my favourite saying of his, politicians are a mirror of who we are as a society. Every society has a leadership it deserves. When the society fundamentally changes, it will change its leadership too. When citizens hero-worship politicians regardless of the mistakes they make, it means such a people deserve those leaders. When citizens demand more, the leaders will also change. For now, Zimbabweans are stuck with Mnangagwa and an elusive opposition that only exists in name and not indeed. I conclude by saying that only something very dramatic will change Zimbabwe’s state of affairs. It could be a military intervention that removes the current corrupt political leadership of Mnangagwa, but ultimately it will also serve the interests of the elites if the citizens are just by-standers, or a dramatic fall from grace for the corrupt if a few of them are arrested beyond the president’s control, leading to the public shedding its fear. At this moment, any change will do, because the country was removed from the gutter in 2017 into the sewer. The question is who has the capacity to bring the required change? Only time will tell.

Hopewell Chin’ono

121,193 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

This weekend sees the last ever episode of Football Focus broadcast on the BBC. One of my colleagues sent me this earlier this week. A montage of some of the stuff we did on the show and it brought back so many lovely memories ❤️ I can tell you exact spot where I was standing on the old runway at Turnberry golf club when I got the call to see if I wanted to become the presenter of Football Focus. I was covering The Open in 2009 and it was one of the best conversations I have ever had. For a kid who had grown up watching the show every week with my dad it was an amazing privilege to know that I would be hosting a programme which had always been such a big part of my weekend. I called my dad immediately and he was just as pleased as I was. When the news was announced I had a phone call from the one and only Bob Wilson. He was so warm and encouraging, as he always is, and said “Dan, you are gonna love this job. There is nothing like it… make sure you take care of it”. I hope I did. As a former custodian of the couch, Bob knew how special it was and I felt the same way when I handed over the reins to the brilliant Alex Scott when I left Focus after 12 seasons. People still talk to me about the show all the time. Focus is stitched into my life and I know there are still so many fans who really care about it which is why it’s such a crazy decision to get rid of it. Move it to Saturday morning, tinker with the format but, in a world where there is such a premium on reliable and trusted brands, why would you throw away over 50 years of hard work and history? It carries weight. I remember interviewing Pele years ago and I told him I was from Football Focus and he said “I know all about Football Focus” with a big smile. When we were filming a show about the history of Barcelona at the Nou Camp we were about to sit down to talk to Eusebio and Johan Cryuff (I had to pinch myself about that one) and Sir Bobby Charlton walked over and said to them, “You can tell this is important gentlemen… the team from Football Focus are here”. When I called Noel Gallagher to talk about an idea we had to get him to interview Mario Ballotelli at Manchester City he rearranged his world tour to be there. Obviously Balotelli was a draw but Noel said “I’d do anything for Football Focus”. When I interviewed Jurgen Klopp in the tearoom at Exeter City before an FA cup tie the lovely ladies serving brews were wedged into the corner while we spoke. I introduced them to Mr Klopp afterwards and he apologised for stealing their space; “Don’t worry about that” they said. “We’ve just been on Football Focus! Wait until we tell the family about this!”. I know the game has changed and the way we consume it has changed but there is still an audience there if you find the right place for it, promote it, ‘take care of it’ and give fans the chance to be part of the conversation on an informed, thoughtful and entertaining show about the sport we all love. I am gutted it’s going but also so thankful for all the amazing people I got to work with over the years. They remain life-long friends and I still can’t quite believe I got to sit alongside the people I grew up watching play the game at the highest level. I remember when Alan Shearer called me “Dan” on one of the first shows I worked on. The little kid inside me thought “Alan Shearer knows my name!”. It was a pleasure to work with so many brilliant pundits and it was great to watch Alex develop on Focus and then go on to host the programme so well. I was asked this week to pick a favourite moment from my 12 years on the show. It’s a very hard question because I have a huge catalogue of wonderful memories. I always look back on our on-the-road shows because we were taking Focus out to the fans; their club was the canvas and we got to paint a beautiful picture together each week about what the place meant to the community, the history, the culture and all the things that were part of that.

Dan Walker

161,304 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Dumbing Down II "By Faith, this is the last rent I am paying as a single lady. If you support me to pay this rent, by the grace of God, this time next year, I will be in my husband's house." is back begging for support to pay another rent. Not because God didn't bring eligible suitors her way, but because her PASTOR has replaced the Holy Spirit in her life. Pastors ruin a lot of destinies when they insist on playing God instead of their primary role as destiny guides. Many members have submitted their free will to their pastors, giving their pastors the power that God himself didn't take from us from the dawn of creation. When you take the ability of the individual to act as a free agent in the name of religion, you reduce him or her to a puppet and yourself to a puppeteer. You want to pull the strings of the lives of thousands of born-again Christians at the same time while rendering them useless to follow their paths in Christ and grow into mature sons. I was at a Church in Anthony village about three years ago to minister, and I met this young man who was schooled at a very prestigious university in the USA. He was the in-house IT consultant of the church, and the pastor placed him on a monthly stipend while he was working for God. It was the Pastor who introduced the young man to me while boasting that God had given him the most capable hands to help him in ministry. I asked him if he had any Python, Java, cloud engineering, data management, digital marketing, coding, or similar tasks available for the young man in the church. He said no. I said, "You are giving this young man the job that any young school leaver who is proficient in computer appreciation can do, and you don't see it as limiting his capabilities and rendering his skills obsolete?" You would rather boast that you are ruining a destiny to build up your own profile rather than set this young man on the path of excellence? Did God call him into ministry as a preacher? Is he understudying you in preparation for his own ministry? The pastor said, "No, I plan that as the church expands, he will head our digital infrastructure and position us for the future." I said, "He can do that as a consultant or even as a member, he shouldn't be doing that while you are paying him 100,000 Naira a month. He should be out there, flying with his peers and earning in dollars! The only exception is if the Lord has called him to be a preacher and he is understudying you as your personal assistant, as led by the Lord as part of his season of preparation. Anything other than that is injurious to his destiny!" The pastor had never seen it that way When I was done ministering in the church, the young man hugged me and thanked me profusely. He said his mother sent him to the pastor when he returned from the USA and the pastor immediately told him that God had need of him in the ministry or he would die without fulfilling his purpose. Why do pastors do this? I have another case from the Northern part of Nigeria. A young lady reached out to me seeking clarity regarding her future She said her Apostle told her she has been raised by God to sing in his church choir, but she is a medical doctor by training and desires to further her studies abroad Every time she raised the issue with the Apostle, he shut her down and told her she was struggling with the will of God "Why can't you just submit to God and serve in the choir and watch as God will take your voice all over the world as this ministry grows?" The young lady said she knows she has a good voice and sings very well as one who is full of the Holy Spirit, but she does not want to be "Sinach", she wants to fulfil her dream of practising as a Pediatrician. She was wary of incurring the wrath and curse of the Apostle, however, and did not know how to extricate herself from the situation. The apostle did not see anything wrong with his actions because he was a user of people who believed that in order to fulfill his own desire to become a big ministry, others could not thrive and grow in their visions and ministries as ordained by God. This is witchcraft. It is not of God. Jesus didn't lead his disciples this way. Insecurity is the undoing of many African so-called Pastors and Spiritual leaders, and they hide behind the illusion of divinity to put others in bondage. I experienced this firsthand as a young graduate, so I understand how a pastor trying to build his ministry could see the potential in a young man or woman and try very hard to turn such a person into servants and house helps in the name of discipling them or training them for kingdom relevance You graduate from the University and join the labour force, you apply for many jobs, and at a point, you tell yourself it is important to seek supernatural guidance in your quest to fulfil destiny Somebody somewhere tells you about a church or a ministry, you join, and you are convinced the church is good. You also tell your friends, and they join. But you are all fresh graduates who are heading into the future one way or the other, but this pastor wants you to be his flock. To him, his church of ten members had suddenly become a church of 30 members because of you guys, and he wants to keep the numbers growing, so he begins to give you prophesies that were not of God but with the aim of keeping you in the fold for as long as possible. He told young graduates who ought to go for NYSC that God is telling him they should give it up for service to God in the vineyard. The mother of two of the ladies in the fellowship, whose daughters told that the pastor told them not to go for NYSC, quickly removed them from the fellowship before the seed of corruption being planted by this pastor would bear fruit The others also left as soon as they could gather their wit People who you ought to guide on their path in sincerity ran as far as they could from you based on how you chose to manipulate rather than nurture them. A married woman whose husband worked abroad was a trained secretary, and while her husband was abroad, catering to the needs of the family, he begged her to stop working so that she could focus on raising the children. She was raising five children all by herself, and combining this with a job seemed a bit too much at the time. One of the vital institutions for raising godly children was the church This woman attended church regularly with her children and even volunteered to spend any free time she had typing the pastor's sermons, Sunday School pamphlets, handouts, books, journals, and other church reports and documents She was not officially employed to do the work; she just saw that she could take some of the secretarial duties on during her downtime, and she did so with all sincerity. The church enjoyed her free services for five years until the pastor forgot completely that she was doing the church a favour One day, the woman came to church to tell the pastor that her husband would be returning home to visit the family, and she would not be available for a few days because she had to pick her husband up from the airport and ensure that he settled in properly. Unfortunately, that weekend was the weekend of the church's anniversary, and the pastor had a lot of secretarial work to do. He told the woman God said she should pick one. Heaven or marriage. He said if she goes to pick her husband from the airport, she has chosen the world and forsaken the Lord. The woman wept all the way home, It was not the thank you, thou faithful servant report she had worked day and night for many years to get that she received. She went to pick her husband from the airport and distanced herself from any church founded by any individual after that experience. She said the ambition of church founders requires that they use people to build, even though they lacked the resources to pay or compensate such people, so they resort to blackmail, coercion, lies, fake prophesies, promises, and manipulations to get things done while keeping their followers on a leash. Followers are also enablers as they refuse to read the Bible for themselves and walk in the light of the word of God. No one should be able to take you captive in the name of God, Jesus, all the angels, or any form of miracle if you know the word of God. The word of God is profitable to make one wise, and therefore, anyone who knows the word of God cannot fall victim to any false doctrine, teaching, spiritual manipulations, or lies. All the false teachings of someone being a covering for someone else came from these manipulative narratives, and believers should be wise to them. I have seen a pastor declare that his church is the only church in Africa that is licensed by God to take people to heaven, and some members believed him. The day he said that, all his members ought to laugh, pick up their Bibles, and leave without looking back. Self-aggrandisement has become the order of the day in some churches, the pastor sells himself as the be-all and end-all of the member's spiritual enlightenment, and the members sheepishly surrender their eyes of their understanding to him or her. He or she must determine where they work, whom they marry, who they associate with, whose music they must listen to, and whose sermons they must hear. If they want to travel, he must see if the road is clear on their behalf, if they want to build a house, he must approve, if he does not dedicate their baby, the baby is illegitimate. This is not the faith Christ or the Apostles died for. Jesus died that you might be free of religion. Christianity is not a religion, it is the opposite. It is individualistic and determined by the faith and belief system of the one rather than the many. Salvation, therefore, is a personal affair, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit is also a personal affair Religion is the opium of the masses, and Christianity is the salvation of the individual and his or her walk with God. When we fellowship together, we do so not so we can get brainwashed by one "super Christian" but so that we can minister to the Lord and minister to one another in the presence of God. Every believer must hold this truth to be self-evident. PS: Someone sent me the video of a pastor condemning a song recently released by a fellow believer, which is making a global impact The Pastor represents an old school of Christians who are unfit to be custodians of the gospel due to their rigidity and limited understanding of the finished work of Christ. Disciples of the gospel of Works and Performance lack creativity and discernment but are good stewards of rigidity and religious doctrines. In other words, a Pharisee must act like one, and Jesus must act like Jesus. We are all just being true to our nature. "I can never go back o No...No It's already too late o No...No Where Am I going to... No...No" If you read to this point, when I was in Spain, I asked a very important question about a meal. If you know the answer, I'm inside the comment section. -GSW-

Gbenga Samuel-Wemimo

28,735 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

🤐 Why Won't Firsthand Witnesses Speak? 🤫 "This is treason. What's the penalty for treason? Execution." 👽 Grusch: People I Interviewed and Sent to the IG, Saw the Bodies. 👽 Jesse - Jesse Michels: "You were also honest in the (2023) hearing, and definitively said you hadn't seen the bodies." Grusch: "Not personally, no." (So what did Grusch allegedly say to cause this reaction in the office of a member of Congress?) James Fox: "What Mr. Grusch revealed to all of us, what he had seen with his own eyes, left the room speechless. It drew the oxygen out of the room. I looked at everybody in that room, and their eyeballs were popping out." (Seen with his own eyes, meaning in videos, film or photos? If Grusch saw bodies and different morphologies on video or film, why not respond to Jesse's question like this? Grusch: "That is correct. I never went to any location and saw bodies in person." That would leave the door open for him seeing it on video, film or in photographs. If he later claims he saw bodies on video, film, or in photos, people will debate whether he changed his story or not. BTW, this is a great doc Yes Theory did on Grusch and so was the one Jesse did.) ~ Jesse: "So just people who, very-high trust, you had, sort of, you know, a lot of intersection with career-wise with them, and..." Grusch: "But they have. The people that I interviewed have, and they were some of the people that were interviewed by the Inspector General. Because, that was the thing, is like, you know, people are like, 'Oh, hearsay,' whatever. "Okay, I understand. Secondhand. I, literally, brought the people, firsthand, to the authorities. I'm just here as the meeting monkey, or the like, unifier, trying to bring everybody together and bring the people who do have that knowledge to the right people. So, yeah." Yes Theory: "Which feels also, that this [was] the perfect set of circumstances for you to be the one that blows the whistle, because firsthand knowledge would have put you in a completely different category of being able to disclose this stuff, right?" Grusch: "If I became subject of a non-disclosure agreement by becoming a firsthand guy, [that] actually would have hindered me, and I would have never been able to do this. I think about some stuff I was denied access to, and if I signed that non-disclosure agreement, I would have absolutely not been able to go public this. I would have been trapped." (If the gatekeepers could see the future and knew that Grusch was going to go public, they might have had him sign an NDA and showed him the alleged NHI craft and bodies in person, if they exist. Then we never would have heard from Grusch, and who knows where we'd be right now with disclosure. So, thanks, gatekeepers!) Grusch: "So, it's actually weird that my lack of that... But knowing the people that do, though, and I brought those people to the IG, is the only way I was able to get... So, the actual reprisal stuff and the access-denial stuff actually enhanced my ability to operate. "But I will tell you, I talked to these people in the program, they are just so afraid. Because the way it was enforced over the years, the threatening nature of some of their indoctrinations, where they're like, 'This is treason, you're going to Leavenworth if you EVER tell anybody not in the program. And, oh, by the way, what's the penalty for treason? Oh, right, execution, right?" Jesse: "Did you ever at any point try to suss out whether you were being lied to?" Grusch: "Oh, 100%." Jesse: "Because all of these people are coming from the same programs, and so, presumably there's some level of coordination between..." Grusch: "Ohhh!" Jesse: "So how do you kind of get through, and just make sure that they're not, you know, meeting in some back room saying, 'You say this to Dave, I'll say this to Dave'?" Grusch: "Yeah, no, for sure. So, like, I also went out of my way to find people who don't know each other, either, that like, you know, through methods like making sure I'm not getting circular reporting, not a part of some other kind of faction that might want to push a certain narrative out. "I had very higher-ranking colleagues of mine who were part of the same effort in their official capacity, go talk to other people that I didn't even personally talk to, to keep that separation, so they didn't know that they were feeding some of that information back to me. So I had a bunch of people go out, just to make sure I wasn't being targeted. I had other people conduct oral-history interviews. But they were getting the same information. "We took all that, and I'm like, all the people who conducted those interviews, I made them get interviewed by the Inspector General. Because, we're crossing our Ts here, because this shit is crazy. And, I was... I mean, you can never be perfect, but, man, I was so freaking careful to make sure I wasn't getting fed some bullshit. "And the quality of people we talked to, if they ever go public, it'll blow your mind who we talked to. I mean, we're talking to some serious players that were like, confirmed by the Senate, you know, years ago, that we talked to, and I'll just leave it at that." (I think it's pretty obvious now that one of the people he was referring to was General James Clapper, who Grusch claimed had managing the crash retrieval program. Also, Clapper was confirmed by the Senate to be the Director of National Intelligence (2010) and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (2007), so he fits the bill.) Grusch: "I mean, I hope that they eventually go public. I understand the reputational hazards, their hazards to their legacy. They might have a slightly different thought process than me about protecting the information and what should be acknowledged. But, I think if they want to do the right thing before they kind of sunset, you know, in their lives, I think this would be a noble thing to do, if they're watching right now, and, you know, they know who they are. It'd be great, yeah."

Joe Murgia

31,062 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

The Anatomy of a Crime: Theft at Ministry of Works & Transport? A lot has been said about some fraudulent practices at the MoWT centered around Commissioner Transport and Road Safety, Winstone Katushabe. Some counter measures have been put in place by him to discredit the activists behind this campaign and get it out of the press. But it’s a bit late for that. For the next few days, I’ll try and break down how such theft of public funds happened. Today, I’ll concentrate on four entities: Face Technologies, Ciber Consulting, ITSL and TisCon. All are united by one South African man: Johannes Vorster. Ciber Consulting: Their website says they’re located in Pretoria. Their LinkedIn says they’re located in Midrand. Midrand like Pretoria is in Gauteng Province, somewhere between Johannesburg and Pretoria. In fact, it’s closer to Johannesburg (27km) than it is Pretoria (30km). When were they formed? LinkedIn says 2007. Their website is from 2018 but there’s an article from 2003 that says they were formalizing a 27 million Rand relationship with “Face Technologies”. Guess they went back in time and did this. Their LinkedIn has one article, from a month ago, probably when the public inquest into MOWT started gaining steam. When you follow the article, it’s from Johan Vorster who, depending on what you read, is either still the CEO or left the company in October 2015 to go work as Operations Executive at Infopicture (Pty) Ltd. The confusing thing is that he seems to have forgotten to change his LinkedIn bio line where he is still listed as the CEO of Ciber Consulting. The website ( also lists him as such and puts his private phone number as the only number to contact them. He has had an entanglement with a company called Tasima, for which he was MD from 2001-2009 and even the aforesaid Face Technologies which, ironically, another entity he is involved with here was supervising as consultants. When you dig into the Ciber Consulting website it says they do work for “Ministry of Works and Transport”. Only problem is: South Africa, where they’re based, doesn’t have any such ministry. Theirs is a Ministry of Public Works and Infrastructure. It appears that this website was tailor-made for a Ugandan audience just in case someone comes snooping. Now, you might wanna grab your coffee for this next section. You might recall that back when Face Technologies was handing over Driving License operations, they were given a contract to: implement Phase I of Digital Archiving of all Driving Licenses at UCDP. The claim was there were 15 million of these. FIFTEEN MILLION!! So, a UGX 3.5 Billion contract was given to them. The contract supervisor was Integrated Transport Solutions Ltd. This was a no-bid contract. Mr Winstone Katushabe was in charge of oversight of Face Technologies on behalf of the MOWT. This company, ITSL, then formed a Joint Venture with Ciber Consulting and this venture is what’s recorded at Uganda Registration Services Bureau as TisCon. It then received a 22.6 Billion contract with just over 4 BN of VAT tacked on for good measure. The contract was for the “Functional Design and Supervision of a Motor Vehicle Registration System. This contract was signed by the PS of MOWT Wasswa Bageya on 7th April 2022, exactly 9 months after the TisCon JV was registered on 7th July 2021. The signatories of the JV were the aforementioned Johan Vorster for Ciber Consulting and Collins Rugaba. The latter being a relative of Mr Winstone Katushabe and part time legal fixer. Same fellas got an 8.9 Billion contract for “provision of professional services relating to the recruitment and management of contract staff to operationalize Motor Vehicle Inspection Centres and establish additional Motor Vehicle Registration Centres.” This was in July 2025. Now, when you get into ownership of ITSL, you might be surprised to find same Johannes Vorster as majority shareholder, Collins Rugaba, Zulu Media and a one Annette Kobusingye. Tabz shared this….

Anthony Natif

48,335 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

I have a story about addiction from a different perspective. A story where recovery was not possible. I have one sibling. An older brother. Everyone loved him. It was easy to love him. He died 10 years ago. It was a horrible death that took him 20 years to accomplish, dragging everyone who loved him along the way. He was an amazing musician. He didn't read music. No lessons. Hand him any instrument, and he can play it. He had a big heart. He was easily the funniest person I've ever known. And he is the only other human being who speaks fluent movie-script-quotes with precision and skill. But alcohol took over in his mid-20s. Bam Margera is just 2 years younger than my brother. He reminds me of my brother *so* much. Everything Bam and his family went through with his addiction is what my brother and family went through. My brother left high school because he was a gifted songwriter and musician. Bam left because he was a gifted skater. My brother was really into editing and producing films, and so is Bam. When Ryan Dunn died, and Bam went off the deep end, I was watching my brother do the same thing every time a strong emotion hit him, and he simply didn't know what to do with it. My brother was so beautiful on the outside, yet unrecognizable at the end. I can not tell you how many times my brother would go missing. Hundreds of times. He would sometimes go missing for up to a week. Then we'd get a call from the police or a hospital. Usually, the hospital would be first because he'd be near death. Then they would keep him on a 5150 at a mental health facility. Then he would come home. One time, he chased me with a knife in his hand, screaming he was going to kill me as I was running out of my parents' home on a cordless phone dialing 911. I found a fifth of vodka in his room and poured it down the drain. He went looking for it 20 minutes later, and it was empty...and I told him I poured it out. When I was 24 years old, I landed my first job that came with an office. My name was outside of it. I was stoked. I worked my ass off to get there. But there was no happiness at that time in my life. I remember my father calling me at work, sitting in that office, to say he was coming to pick me up because he knew where my brother, who had been missing for 4 days, was. The credit card he stole from my mother showed he was at a little oceanfront motel 10 minutes away. And I remember thinking to myself on the way over there...I have to open the motel room door. I can't let my dad see him hanging. It will destroy his life. I told my dad to wait about 10 feet to my left, and I opened the door, and there was my brother fashioning a sheet into a noose. Another time he went missing, and they found him on the roof of a building with the inside of his arms slashed from elbow to wrist, just lying in a pool of blood. Dark shit. Both of the insides of his arms were mutilated from being sliced open so many times. At least 30, if not more. He stopped wearing short-sleeved shirts in public about 10 years before he died. He got to the point of seizures when he withdrew and had alcohol-related dementia for the last 3 years of his life, which would come and go. Then one day, after 2 decades, he called my parents and said something was wrong. My parents went over to his place, ended up calling 911, the ambulance got there, and he started walking outside with assistance from paramedics and collapsed. In front of my parents. He was rushed to the hospital. I had not seen my brother for the last 9 years of his life. He disowned me. Because he felt he had to. He killed my dog when he got drunk 9 years before he died. No one knows if he meant to or not, he was so wasted. He couldn't face me after that. So he disowned me. And a piece of my heart died the day he did it. I talked to my parents right before they left to see what was wrong that day. The last thing I said to my dad was, "Do not let him die without me having an opportunity to say goodbye." My dad called me from the er 2 hours later and said, "You should come over now. He won't know you're here." When I got there, I was shocked at what I saw. He wasn't the right color. He was in a coma. Severe internal bleeding. On life support. It was jarring even after seeing him in a much similar state hundreds of times for such a long time. He was taken to the ICU 3 hours later, where they would transfuse blood by the bag damn near constantly, and it just shot out of his nose. It was bloody. A lot of blood. After about 6 hours, I told my parents to go home and get some rest. I would stay with him. And I talked to him like he was right there. Like one of the hundreds of pillow-fort slumber parties we had as kids. Like no time had passed, and his addiction never existed. I showed him pictures of my life over the past decade on my phone...just like he was there. But he wasn't there. And after 3 hours and extensive talks with several doctors and specialists, I had to make the decision to remove his life support. After my parents returned and said goodbye, I told them to wait out in the hall until he passed because I could not allow them to have the memory of him dying, and I returned to my brother's side, and said what I needed to say, bawling my heart out. I told them to turn off the machines, and I held him in my arms as he died. It took just over 7 minutes. And I just held him. I had Nine Inch Nails playing for him. One of his favorites thanks to Pretty Hate Machine. He was a fan for life after that. He was my best friend. But he was also someone I had to protect myself from if he was intoxicated. This is the end that usually becomes a reality for addicts and their families. Then there's someone like Bam Margera. He went to the same place my brother went to in his head. And he came back. Bam is one of the greatest comebacks ever and a story of recovery worth knowing. I see YouTube shorts of Bam skating again every day, and I'm so moved that I just sit here and cry. You can see his personality is back. You have no idea how rare that is. Their personality shows very little while they're in their addiction. Recovery stories are incredibly personal to so many people, including those who have gone through addiction with an addict because they love them so much...they'd see anything they had to see and endure anything they have to endure just to be there with them at their lowest point. Addicts are not monsters. The stuff they use to numb the pain they do not understand is the real monster. And when you put enough of that into a human being, they do things they would *never* do without it. People are not pure. We are more complex than that. We are good and bad. Light and dark. Right and wrong. Chaotic and serene. You will find that the answer to every question you have about life is usually "both" for a reason. Because one can not exist without the other. With recovery stories like Hunter Biden's and Bam Margera's out in the ether, more people will be less ignorant as to how this disease plays out, and that will do nothing but good for so many families struggling with this issue. Addiction isn't just for the addict. Addiction is for everyone who loves them, as well. It's just a different perspective of hell. So listen to recovery stories with renewed respect because most addicts end up the way it ended for the only sibling I'll ever have.

Nicole Minét

409,172 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

BREAKING NEWS🚨🚨🚨: Michael Proctor will be forced to appear for his deposition with Alan Jackson and Karen Read, however Judge Gildea will delay his final ruling until 4pm ET today in order to supplement Proctor's "insufficient" arguments to the court regarding a protective order to delay that deposition. Another hearing will happen today at 4:15PM et TODAY (Monday, June 8th, 2026, via Zoom). Proctor's deposition, for now, is stayed for 24 hours. "For this case to proceed efficiently, and for our system of justice to work, certain basic things need to happen," Judge Gildea began during his ruling. "A subpoena needs to mean something, a lawyer's agreement needs to have some meaning, lawyers need to communicate with their clients, clients need to keep their attorneys informed, and when given an opportunity to provide support for a party's request, that party needs to avail themselves of the opportunity," Judge continued (scolding Proctor's counsel for failing to provide a sufficient record to justify a delay in Proctor's deposition, despite an order by the court on Friday for such information to be filed). Based on the record before me, there is insufficient information to support a delay in the deposition going forward, however, given the claims made in the filings over the weekend, I will delay making a final decision on the motion until 4PM today, to give Mr. Proctor's counsel to supplement the record before me," Judge Gildea concluded. The Michael Proctor and Sean Goode "Proctorgate" files have caused serious damage, and Karen Read stands tall. Read more about those shocking, and abhorrent, messages here (also discussed by Judge Gildea during today's hearing) wherein Proctor (a former State Trooper who investigated Karen Read for the death of John O'Keefe) and former Canton cop Sean Goode talked about everything from how Anne Frank was a "liar" to how Proctor felt Goode should "let them die" after Proctor noticed a car accident victim was, in Proctor's words, a "ni**er". Proctor also discussed "planting cocaine" on someone and, shockingly, said "America sucks" because the country stopped the Third Reich during World War II (while, at the same time, saying "Jews in Sharon" should be "put in a concentration camp") at this link: To this day, the death of John O'Keefe remains unsolved. Proctor is just one of multiple witnesses involving in the twice-failed prosecution of Karen for John's death who Read's lawyers have told Judge Gildea are attempting to avoid or delay depositions (including Colin Albert, Jennifer McCabe, Brian Higgins, Matt McCabe, Nicole Albert and Brian Albert). Last week, on Wednesday, I reported: In a shocking hearing before Judge Mark Gildea on Wednesday, Karen Read's lawyers announced that they have been forced to file a motion to compel a deposition of Colin Albert. Further, Karen's lawyers will be filing motions to compel depositions of Jennifer McCabe, Brian Higgins, Matt McCabe, Nicole Albert and Brian Albert, as those parties are seeking to delay their depositions until late July, or early August, of 2026. "Colin Albert refused to appear or produce documents...his attorney said he is unavailable and then, suddenly, said Colin would only be available for seven more days and, then, [Colin] would be gone for the entire discovery period," Karen's Lawyer, Aaron Rosenberg, told Judge Gildea during Wednesday's hearing. In that regard, here is the full recording of today's John O'Keefe and Karen Read hearing in Plymouth Superior Court. This case is one of three ongoing civil lawsuits (one in federal court and two in Plymouth District Court in front of Judge Gildea) that stem from the, yet-unsolved, murder of Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe. To this day, it is unclear if anyone has found the Mystery Man who is suspected of being at the center of potential upcoming investigations by state and federal authorities as to John's death. Read more about that Mystery Man here - Judge Gildea began Wednesday's hearing by asking counsel for all parties how many depositions have been conducted in the case. "I am hoping at least four have been taken," said Judge Gildea. The O'Keefe lawyer told Judge Gildea that only three depositions have taken place. Judge then asked the O'Keefe lawyer what depositions need to still take place for the plaintiffs. "There are 12," the O'Keefe lawyer responded, including Paul Markowski. The O'Keefe lawyers also need to change Karen's deposition until June 24th. The O'Keefe lawyers changed Karen's deposition from July to June 19th, but multiple lawyer's will not be working on that day as that day is a federal holiday. Judge was not pleased that so few depositions have taken place, but Judge understood that June 19th is a federal holiday and, in turn, Karen's deposition will be held on June 24th, 2026. Karen's lawyers had proposed four other dates and Mr. Diller (the O'Keefe lawyer) picked a federal holiday, instead. "It is beyond belief to me the number of experienced lawyers involved in this case, the length the case has been pending...for however long it has been pending for all parties...that there are so few depositions that have taken place...I don't need to hear all the details, and the nitpicking, what I need to hear is, going forward, how you all are going to get the discovery done," Judge Gildea said to all lawyers. Things, at that point, got quite intense, as Karen's lawyers then noted to Judge Gildea that they have six depositions currently scheduled for the following six witnesses; Brian and Nicole Albert, Matthew McCabe, Allie McCabe, Jennifer McCabe and Brian Higgins. However, the law firm for all of those people got back to Karen's lawyers last night, on June 2nd, 2026, at 9:45PM and said NONE of those witnesses could appear on the dates scheduled for their depositions and, for some reason, none of those witnesses are able to appear for depositions until late July of 2026 at the earliest. Stunningly, no reason was given for why those witnesses refused to appear for their depositions on the dates originally proposed by Karen's lawyers, Attorney Rosenberg told Judge Gildea. Those notices of depositions went out on May 5th, 2026, said Karen's lawyers, when Judge Gildea asked about that date (indicating Judge Gildea, already displeased with discovery and deposition delays in the years-old case, was not pleased to hear about witnesses, on their own accord, attempting to delay depositions by two more months). Karen's lawyers, picking up on Judge Gildea's frustration, then noted that they intend to file motions to compel those witnesses to appear for depositions as a result of the proposed delays. Also, during the hearing, it was announced that former Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor will be deposed by Karen Read's lawyers on Monday, June 8th, 2026, per a statement from Karen's lawyers in court on Wednesday. The O'Keefe lawyer, for their part, noted they intend to depose Aidan Kearney, Karen Read, Kaitlin Boudreau Read (Nathan Read's wife), Janet Read, Nathan Read, William Read, multiple witnesses from the bars (C.F. McCarthy's and The Waterfall), and an outstanding deposition that Karen's team needed to move last week. Judge Gildea then asked what, if anything, he could do to help the parties (other than moving quickly on motions before the court when submitted). Both parties said they will involve the court, in motion practice, as needed going forward. Judge then wanted to know what motions have been sent out under Rule 9(a). It was at that point that Karen's lawyers announced that she will be filing a motion to compel production of documents and the deposition of Colin Albert. "Colin Albert refused to appear or produce documents...his attorney said he is unavailable and then, suddenly, said Colin would only be available for seven more days and then [Colin] would be gone for the entire discovery period," Karen's Lawyer, Aaron Rosenberg, told Judge Mark Gildea during the hearing. Earlier, Karen also announced that she intends to file similar motions for Brian Higgins, Matt McCabe, Jen McCabe, Nicole Albert and Brian Albert, as those witnesses are attempting to avoid their depositions until late July or early August of 2026. The O'Keefe lawyer, for their part, told Judge Gildea they intend to serve a motion to compel regarding Aidan Kearney as a keeper of record (and, for some reason, Diller wants documents from Aidan's ongoing case in Norfolk Superior Court). "File a motion and we'll put it on for an expedited hearing," Judge Gildea said regarding that issue, and any other motions to compel the parties may want to file (including the motion regarding Colin Albert that has already been served, and should be in the docket in the next few weeks). When a motion is served under Rule 9(a), it is first given to the opposing party who then responds. Then, the moving party (the "movant") is able to file a sur-reply. Only at that point does the entire motion to compel get compiled as a so-called "Rule 9 (a) package" and, in turn, appear on the docket (with all filings related to a given motion showing up at the same time). It is unclear when the motions to compel the depositions of Brian Higgins, Jen McCabe, Matt McCabe, Nicole Albert and Brian Albert will be served and, eventually, docketed with the court. Penalties for third-parties who avoid discovery, or document production requests, can include court sanctions, compelled deposition dates, and adverse evidentiary rulings if a motion to compel is granted, yet further delays then occur. Judge Gildea told all of the lawyers present that he expects to dive deep into the issue of who was issued deposition notices in this case, who avoided those depositions, who delayed depositions and, in turn, what remedies the court will impose. "We served it Monday," the O'Keefe lawyer then said, as the hearing ended (indicating a number of motions to compel discovery, or depositions, may be heard over the coming weeks under the sweltering heat of Judge Gildea's virtual courtroom stare). More as I know it.

Grant Smith Ellis

25,043 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten