Smoothest pick up line ever

My baby girl is 5 months (21.5 weeks) and has been sleep trained since around 17/18 weeks. She has been a decent sleeper for some time so sleep training was really the final push to get her to sleep more independently.
I got the okay to night wean at our 4 month appointment (she was 19 weeks) because she was sleeping through the night on her own 5/7 nights of the week. I’ve been cutting ~.5 an ounce from her bottle every 3/4 nights but ever since that appointment she’s waking almost every night again.
We never did dream feeds but now I’m considering doing a dream feed before I go to bed, and weaning off the dream feed instead of weaning off her inconsistent wake ups (sometimes 1am, sometimes 4am, sometimes both, sometimes not at all) so I guess my question is… is it too late to introduce a dream feed? Is it worth a try? It’s Saturday so I don’t work tomorrow and if it ruins tonight’s sleep I would just cosleep to get through it, I kind of miss my snuggles anyway.
The other option I am considering is setting an alarm for 1:30am and if she doesn’t wake at 1am I go in to feed her, avoiding her waking up at 4am which always throws her whole schedule off.
What are everyone’s thoughts/experiences with night weaning? Any tips/suggestions?
(Also, since I am anticipating at least one person to say it, I know some baby’s still need the MOTN feed for months to come. I am not depriving her of nourishment. Talking about it with my doctor, he feels this feed is more for comfort than sustenance, she’s more than double her birth weight, developing well, and like I said before she was sleeping through the night the majority of the time until he said “alright, why don’t you wean off that bottle in the MOTN?”)

I applied for a visa at the NYC office on Memorial Day and received the yellow receipt. I don't live in the area and had to go back to work the next day, so I took it home and then mailed it to my parents. My dad commutes to NYC for work every day, so he agreed to go to the consulate to pick it up for me. I put it in the mailbox last Wednesday evening (I think) but it still hasn't arrived at my parents. I am afraid it got lost in the mail.
As I'm writing this post, I'm again at my parents' house in NJ. I plan to go into NYC on Monday to pick up the visa without the receipt. My question for the sub is: How can I get into the consulate without an appointment or the receipt? When I went for the appointment, I had to show my reservation to be let inside. Obviously I don't have that now and I also don't have the yellow receipt. I do, however, have a picture of the receipt. Will that be sufficient to be let inside to pick up the visa sans-receipt?

Today I was at a big event with a friend who asked me to go with her. People don’t often ask me to go to things with them so I was super excited! During the car ride with her, we had great conversations, good energy, etc. We talked about our recent accomplishments, the new queer season of the ultimatum, etc. It was nice. My 1:1 conversations usually go like this.
But then at the event, the tone shifted. She struck up a conversation with a stranger and they clicked immediately, already getting into witty banter and inside jokes while I was standing there like🧍‍♀️ She started subtly putting me down and making me feel a bit stupid to lift her new friend up and, as often mentioned in this sub, I am a huge people pleaser and wasn’t able to call her out on it because I didn’t want to cause a scene or ruin the vibe. I just felt like an outsider and so awkward. I wasn’t able to quickly chime in with something witty or funny like they were able to do. I’ve noticed this is how a lot of my group conversations go — I always feel like the weird odd ball out who people pick on or roll their eyes at.
By the end of the event I felt completely dejected and even in the midst of a crowd, completely alone. How do you all respond or act in this kind of scenario? Is this even a scenario you typically find yourself in?

I’ve landed a few more customers today (3) so I’ve had 4 in 48 hours, I only started on Friday so I’m impressed with how quickly it picked up.
My customers are all over the place though. 30-40 minutes away. How long did it take you to get customers within 15-20 minutes distance?
I don’t think Poplin is doing much ad work to get the word out especially with the rebranding.

In honor of this week’s RightsCon and 360/OS Summit, we dug into the #TwitterFiles to revisit the integration of the Atlantic Council’s anti-disinformation arm, the Digital Forensic Research Labs (DFRLabs), while also highlighting its relationship with weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, Big Tech, and others who fund the NATO-aligned think tank.

The Atlantic Council is unique among “non-governmental” organizations thanks to its lavish support from governments and the energy, finance, and weapons sectors. It’s been a key player in the development of the “anti-disinformation” sector from the beginning.
It wasn’t an accident when its DFRLabs was chosen in 2018 to help Facebook “monitor for misinformation and foreign interference,” after the platform came under intense congressional scrutiny as a supposed unwitting participant in a Russian influence campaign.
Press uniformly described DFRLabs as an independent actor that would merely “improve security,” and it was left to media watchdog FAIR to point out that the Council was and is “dead center in what former President Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes called ‘the blob.’”

What’s “the blob”? FAIR described it as “Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy consensus,” but thanks to the Twitter Files, we can give a more comprehensive portrait.
In the runup to the 360/OS event in that same year, 2018, Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council boasted to Twitter executives that the attendees would include the crème de la crème of international influence, people he explained resided at the “no-kidding decision-maker level”

Similar correspondence to and from DFRLabs and Twitter outlined early efforts to bring together as partners groups that traditionally served as watchdogs of one another.
Perhaps more even than the World Economic Forum meetings at Davos or gatherings of the Aspen Institute in the US, the Atlantic Council 360/OS confabs are as expansive a portrait of the Censorship-Industrial Complex as we’ve found collected in one place.

In October 2018, DFRLab was instrumental in helping Facebook identify accounts for what became known as “the purge,” a first set of deletions of sites accused of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
Facebook in its announcement of these removals said it was taking steps against accounts created to “stir up political debate,” and the October 2018 “purge” indeed included the likes of Punk Rock Libertarians, Cop Block, and Right Wing News, among others. Even the progressive Reverb Press, founded by a relatively mainstream progressive named James Reader, found his site zapped after years of pouring thousands of dollars a month into Facebook marketing tools.

In the years since, DFRLab has become the central coordination node in the Censorship Industrial Complex as well as a key protagonist in the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project.
Its high-profile role at RightsCon, the biggest civil society digital rights event on the calendar, should concern human rights and free expression activists.

According to their London 2019 event “360/OS brings together journalists, activists, innovators, and leaders from around the world as part of our grassroots digital solidarity movement fighting for objective truth as a foundation of democracy.”
Their Digital Sherlocks program aims to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation.”

The Twitter Files reveal DFRLabs labeled as “disinformation” content that often turned out to be correct, that they participated in disinformation campaigns and the suppression of “true” information, and that they lead the coordination of a host of actors who do the same.

Twitter Files #17 showed how DFRLabs sent Twitter more than 40,000 names of alleged BJP (India’s ruling nationalist party) accounts that they suggested be taken down.
DFRLab said it suspected these were “paid employees or possibly volunteers.” However as Racket’s Matt Taibbi noted, “the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.”
Twitter recognized there was little illegitimate about them, resulting in DFRLabs pulling the project and cutting ties with the researcher.

Twitter Files #19 further revealed DFRLab was a core partner in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which “came together in June of 2020 at the encouragement of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA” in order to “fill the gaps legally” that government couldn’t.
As a result, there are serious questions as to whether the EIP violated the US First Amendment.

DFRLabs was also a core partner on the Virality Project, which pushed its seven Big Tech partners to censor “stories of true vaccine side-effects.”

The Stanford Internet Observatory, which led the project, is now being sued by the New Civil Liberties Alliance for its censorship of “online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”
Debate as to the frequency of serious adverse events is ongoing, however. The German health minister put it at 1 in 10,000, while others claim it is higher.

The Virality Project sought to suppress any public safety signals at all. The Stanford Internet Observatory is also at the moment reportedly resisting a House Judiciary Committee subpoena into its activities.

TwitterFiles #20 revealed some of the Digital Forensic Lab’s 2018 360/0S events, which brought together military leaders, human rights organizations, the Huffington Post, Facebook and Twitter, Edelman (the world’s biggest PR firm), the head of the Munich Security Conference, the head of the World Economic Forum (Borge Brende) a former President, Prime Minister and CIA head, intel front BellingCat and future Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, all to combat “disinformation.” We can now reveal more.

The Atlantic Council is a NATO-aligned think tank established in 1961. Its board of directors and advisory board are a Who’s Who of corporate, intelligence and military power, including:

• James Clapper – former Director of National Intelligence whose tenure included overseeing the NSA during the time of the Snowden leaks. Asked whether intelligence officials collect data on Americans Clapper responded “No, sir,” and, “Not wittingly.” Clapper also coordinated intelligence community activity through the early stages of Russiagate, and his office authored a key January 2017 report concluding that Russians interfered in 2016 to help Donald Trump. Clapper has been a 360/OS attendee.
  
• Stephen Hadley, United States National Security Advisor from 2005 to 2009 (also a 360/OS attendee)
  
• Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State who oversaw the carpet bombing of Vietnam, among other crimes against humanity
  
• Pfizer CEO Anthony Bourla
  
• Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder, The Blackstone Group
  
• Meta’s President for Global Affairs, Nick Clegg
  
• Richard Edelman, CEO of the world’s largest PR firm (and 360/OS attendee)
  
• The Rt. Hon. Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Former Secretary General of NATO
  
• Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, Former President of the World Bank
  
• Leon Panetta, former US Secretary of Defense & CIA Director. Panetta oversaw the US’s massive growth in drone strikes.
  
• John F. W. Rogers. Goldman Sachs Secretary of the Board
  

Chuck Hagel, chairman of the Council, sits on the board of Chevron and is also a former US Secretary of Defence.

The Atlantic Council raised $70 million in 2022, $25 million of which came from corporate interests.
Among the biggest donors were: the US Departments of Defense State, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Google, Crescent Petroleum, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, Meta, Blackstone, Apple, BP, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Raytheon, ExxonMobil, Shell, Twitter, and many more.
Ukraine’s scandal-ridden energy company, Burisma, whose links to Hunter Biden were suppressed by the August 2020 table-top exercise coordinated by the Aspen Institute, also made a contribution.

You can view the full 2022 “honor roll” by clicking here.

The Atlantic Council and DFRLabs don’t hide their militarist affiliations.
This week’s OS/360 event at RightsCon Costa Rica runs together with a 360/OS at NATO’s Riga StratCom Dialogue, which DFRLab note they have “worked closely with” “since 2016.”

DFRLabs was founded in 2016, and has been a major catalyst in expanding the “anti-disinformation” industry.
Among non-governmental entities, perhaps only the Aspen Institute comes close to matching the scope, scale and funding power of DFRLabs.
DFRLabs claims to chart “the evolution of disinformation and other online and technological harms, especially as they relate to the DFRLab’s leadership role in establishing shared definitions, frameworks, and mitigation practices.”

Almost $7 million of the Atlantic Council’s $61 million spent last year went to the DRFLabs, according to their 2022 annual financial report.

Through its fellowship program, it has incubated leading figures in the “disinformation” field.

Richard Stengel, the first director of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was a fellow.
GEC is an interagency group “within” the State Department (also a funder of the Atlantic Council), whose initial partners included the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.
GEC is now a major funder of DFRLabs and a frequent partner

In this video, Stengel says, “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t think it’s that awful.”
Stengel was true to his word, and apart from DFRLab, the GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index, which set out to demonetize conservative media outlets it claimed were “disinformation.” (See 37. in the censorship list)

He thought the now-disgraced Hamilton68 was “fantastic.” In total, GEC funded 39 organizations in 2017.
Despite Freedom of Information requests, only 3 have been made public to date.

Roughly $78 million of GEC’s initial $100 million budget outlay for fiscal year 2017 came from the Pentagon, though the budgetary burden has shifted more toward the State Department in the years since.

The Global Engagement Center was established in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, via a combination of an executive order and a bipartisan congressional appropriation, led by Ohio Republican Rob Portman and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy.
The GEC was and remains virtually unknown, but reporting in the Twitter Files and by outlets like the Washington Examiner have revealed it to be a significant financial and logistical supporter of “anti-disinformation” causes.

Though tasked by Obama with countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests,” its money has repeatedly worked its way back in the direction of policing domestic content, with Gabe Kaminsky’s Examiner reports on the GDI providing the most graphic example.

GEC frequently sent lists of “disinformation agents to Twitter.” Yoel Roth, former head of Trust and Safety referred to one list as a “total crock.” Roth is now a member of DFRLab’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web. Let’s hope he brings more trust than Stengel. You can read more on GEC’s funding here.

Other DFRLab luminaries include Simon Clark, Chairman of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (a UK “anti-disinformation” outfit that aggressively deplatforms dissidents), Ben Nimmo (previously a NATO press officer, then of Graphika (EIP and the Virality Project partners) and now Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead), and Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat.

Bellingcat has an ominous reputation, which it’s earned in numerous ways, including its funding by the National Endowment for Democracy...

Most recently, Bellingcat assisted in the arrest of the 21-year-old Pentagon leaker, further speeding up the abandonment of the Pentagon Papers Principal where the media protected, rather than persecuted, leakers.
Bellingcat was part of 360/OS backroom meetings with former intel chiefs, the head of Davos and the Munich security conference among many others, as we will see soon.

The Virality Project built on the EIP and had partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Google, TikTok and more to combat vaccine “misinformation.”
Stanford and DFRLab partnered with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Social Media and Politics, and the National Congress on Citizenship.

Through a shared Jira ticketing system they connected these Big Tech platforms together, with Graphika using sophisticated AI to surveil the online conversation at scale in order to catch “misinformation” troublemakers.

VP went far beyond any kind of misinformation remit, most infamously recommending to their Big Tech partners that they consider “true stories of vaccine side effects” as “standard misinformation on your platform.”

A Virality Project partner called the Algorithmic Transparency Initiative (a project of the National Congress on Citizenship) went further.
Their Junkipedia initiative sought to address “problematic content” via the “automated collection of data” from “closed messaging apps,” and by building a Stasi-like “civic listening corps,” which in recent years has taken on a truly sinister-sounding mission.
The current incarnation might as well be called “SnitchCorps,” as “volunteers have an opportunity to join a guided monitoring shift to actively participate in monitoring topics that disrupt communities”

Garret Graff, who oversaw the Aspen Hunter Biden table-top exercise, was chairman of that same National Congress on Citizenship when they collaborated on the Virality Project.
Both EIP and VP were led by Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a former CIA fellow who engineered the now disgraced New Knowledge initiative, which developed fake Russian bots to discredit a 2017 Alabama senate race candidate, as acknowledged by the Washington Post.

DFRLab are the elite of the “anti-disinformation” elite.
They work closely with a wide range of actors who have participated in actual disinformation initiatives.
Here they’re invited to an elite Twitter group set up by Nick Pickles of “anti-disinformation” luminaries First Draft, also participants in the Hunter Biden laptop tabletop, and the Alliance for Security Democracy, part of the RussiaGate Hamilton68 disinformation operation.

The 360/OS event marries this tarnished record with the financial, political, military, NGO, academic and intelligence elite. Some of this is visible through publicly available materials.
Twitter Files however reveal the behind the scenes, including closed door, off-the-record meetings.

“I’ve just arrived in Kyiv” Brookie notes in 2017, as he seeks to line up a meeting with Public Policy Director Nick Pickles as they discuss Twitter providing a USD $150K contribution to OS/360 (seemingly secured), and to garner high level Twitter participation.
Pickles is visiting DC and Brookie suggests he also meet with the GEC and former FBI agent Clint Watts of Hamilton 68 renown. “Happy to make those connections,” he chimes.

360/OS events are elite and expensive — $1 million according to Brookie — so closer collaboration with Twitter, especially in the form of funding, is a high priority.
Twitter offers $150,000

When Brookie mentions the attendees at the “no-kidding decision maker level” he isn’t kidding.
Parallel to the 360/OS public program is the much more important off-the-record meeting of “decision makers ranging from the C-Suite to the Situation Room.”

Here, he is explicit about a convening of military and financial power.
Vanguard 25 is presented as a way to “create a discreet and honest way to close the information gap on challenges like disinformation between key decision makers from government, tech, and media.”

The document boasts of its high-level participants

More are revealed in email exchanges, including Madeleine Albright and the head of the WEF

They go on to list a bizarre mishmash of media leaders, intelligence officials, and current or former heads of state

...Germany’s Angela Merkel was out of reach in the end, but many of the others attended this behind the scenes meeting on “disinformation.” Who are they?

• Matthias Dopfner – CEO and 22% owner of German media empire Axel Springer SE, the biggest media publishing firm in Europe
  
• Borge Brende – head of the World Economic Forum and former Norwegian foreign minister
  
• Toomas Hendrick Ilves – former President of Estonia who co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Blockchain Technology. Hendrick is also a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (where the Stanford Internet Observatory is housed) and is on the advisory council of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, of Hamilton 68 renown.
  
• Chris Sacca – billionaire venture capitalist
  
• Mounir Mahjoubi – previously Digital Manager for President Macron’s presidential campaign, and former Chairman of the French Digital Council
  
• Reid Hoffman – billionaire and Linkedin co-founder
  
• Ev Williams – Former CEO of Twitter and on the Twitter board at the time
  
• Kara Swisher – New York Times opinion writer, who founded Vox Media Recode
  
• Wolfgang Ischinger - Head of the Munich Security Conference
  
• Aleksander Kwasniewski – Former President of Poland. Led Poland into NATO and the EU.
  
• Richard Edelman – CEO of the largest PR company in the world
  
• Elliot Shrage – previously Vice-President of Public Policy at Facebook (DFRLab had election integrity projects with Facebook)
  
• Lydia Polgreen – Huffington Post Editor in Chief
  
• Jim Clapper –former US Director of National Intelligence
  
• Maria Ressa – co-founder of Rappler and soon to be winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
  

Why would such a group all gather specifically around the question of “disinformation”?
Is disinformation truly at such a level that it requires bringing together the world’s most popular author with military and intelligence leaders, the world’s biggest PR company, journalists, billionaires, Big Tech and more?

Or is this work to build the case that there is a disinformation crisis, to then justify the creation of a massive infrastructure for censorship? A glimpse of the agenda offers clues

Here the head of the most important military and intelligence conference in the world (Munich) sits down in a closed door meeting with a former Secretary of State and the Executive Vice-Chair of the Atlantic Council.

Which is followed by a closed door session with the Editor-in Chief of the ...Huffington Post and peace-maker Maria Ressa who presented to the same group of military, intelligence, corporate and other elites.
Is the role of a journalist and Nobel laureate to work behind closed doors with militarists and billionaires, or to hold them to account?

At 2022’s OS/360 at RightsCon Ressa conducted a softball interview on disinformation with current US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

In testimony last April 2023, former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell stated that Blinken “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement” by more than 50 former intelligence officials that the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russia information operation.”

The Twitter Files also revealed that in August 2020 the Aspen Institute organized a table-top exercise to practice how best to respond to a “hack and leak” of a Hunter Biden laptop.
The laptop only came to light however two months later.
In attendance was First Draft (now the Information Futures Lab), the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, CNN, Yahoo! News, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Here, DFRLab head Graham Brookie speaks with the Aspen Institute’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise.

After it turned out the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and the disinformation operation was more appropriately described as having been led by the likes of Blinken and the Aspen Institute.
The appropriate response is apparently for RightsCon, DFRLab, Blinken and Ressa to put on a nice forum to promote these figures as “anti-disinformation” leaders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8YTPuTC9xs

Former DFRLab fellow and intel front Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is also invited to the closed door sessions with a former head of the CIA, a former Prime Minister and a President.

How do you keep power accountable when you are in the same cozy club? This theme runs throughout.
Bellingcat is featured heavily at the public sessions also

On the public side, we see Amnesty International participating to further collapse the distinction between those who are meant to hold power to account, and the powerful themselves.
The Iraq war gave us embedded journalists, and the “anti-disinformation” field gives us embedded digital rights activists.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Chris Krebs also joined the closed door session.
Krebs was Co-Chair of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder.
Other members included Prince Harry, the Virality Project’s Alex Stamos (Stanford Internet Observatory) and Kate Starbird (University of Washington and previous 360/OS participant), Katie Couric, and more. Craig Newmark attended as an observer.

Meanwhile Renee DiResta, former CIA fellow and Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director, presented with the former Prime Minister of Sweden.
This was years before she would launch the Virality Project, and take on the bugbear of “true stories of vaccine side effects.”

The President of the Atlantic Council participated in an “off-the-record, “ behind closed doors conversation on “trust” with the CEO of the world’s biggest PR firm, Edelman.

“Public relations” and “trust” may well be opposites, and trust is being destroyed not by the disinformation street crime that these groups claim to target, but by the disinformation corporate crime protected by, or in some cases created by these same people.
Disinformation is real, but its biggest purveyors are governments and powerful corporate interests.

DFRLab and RightsCon show just how far the capture of civil society by elite interests has come. Again, I made a mistake helping to co-organize RightsCon in 2015.

The jumping in bed with the government and Big Tech was arguably there in 2015, though to a much lesser degree.
It now partners with militarists in the form of the Atlantic Council and is an enabler of the “disinformation” grift that is so deeply impacting freedom of speech and expression.

The air-gaps that should separate civil society, media, military, billionaires, intelligence and government have collapsed, and many of these actors have formed a new alliance to advance their shared interests.
If weapons manufacturers funding human rights is considered legitimate then where is the red line? Effectively, there is none.

This collapse however has also been pushed by funders, who have been proactive in asking NGOs to collaborate more with Big Tech and government - something I successfully resisted for my almost 18 years at EngageMedia, critically RightsCon was the only time I let my guard down.

The RightsCon sponsor matrix wouldn’t be out of place at NASCAR
This is the equivalent of hosting a Climate Change conference sponsored by Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil.

How do you keep power accountable when Big Tech pays your wage? The “let’s all work together” approach has failed.
The weakest partner, civil society, got captured and we lost.
Many more lost their way and have acquiesced to and often enabled much of the new censorship regime.

https://www.racket.news/p/twitter-files-extra-how-the-worlds

Does anyone else feel used a lot? I'm told a lot that I'm very easy to talk to. Probably because I think of myself as a bad enough person that I know I have no right to judge anyone, and people pick up on that.
And I love that people, especially people I care about, feel comfortable enough to talk to me about things that bother them. Even serious vulnerable subjects. It makes me feel good knowing I've created a safe environment for that person to let things out.
But, the people I'm close to who I do this for are all horrible at being emotionally supportive. And if I try to open up to them about difficult things going on in my life, I end up feeling very used because they don't know how to be supportive.
For example one of my best friends called me a few weeks ago excited about something, and after a minute he could tell something was wrong, asked what, and I told him it was something stupid that I shouldn't be upset about. Because it was. I was upset with myself for letting something I'd experienced before get to me. I felt weak, and in actuality I really wanted to talk about it. And he told me "Then stop being upset about it. Perk up, I'm excited here" and that was the end of that.
I know I can't expect people to know how to be supportive like I am. It's a lot of effort, and it takes practice to know what to say. But it feels horrible knowing I can't feel supported and safe to open up about things that really hurt.

My partner (28, Albanian male) and I (31, American female) are taking a 1-3 month break from our relationship so that he can figure out if he wants to move in with his parents and brother 6-7 hours away. He is the eldest son. We’re in love (felt by both of us) and have a healthy relationship but the elephant in the room of our 3+ year relationship has been this question of proximity to his family. We are both really close with our families and value them dearly. I do not really want to move down there with him (it was on the table) and he doesn’t seem to want to do long distance. However, I am open to discussing it together. I prompted the 1-3 month break (with very little communication during) so that he can see what it is like to live without me kind of thing. Months ago it felt like we broke up (but ended up staying together until now) because I pressed the issue and he responded with saying things like: “I want to move home, and don’t want to do long distance, I miss my family and want to live in the same house as them”. We cried over this together and almost mourned the loss of the relationship because we felt like: “okay this is what you want, and how are we supposed to work out now?” So prompted by me, we came to conclusion that we’d take this break but back then it got put off until now, so that he could focus on taking an important exam for his career (he, like a lot of men, is good at compartmentalizing feelings and taking specific time to sort feeling and thinking matters out). He also didn’t want to leave but was definitely still conflicted and perhaps confused. Now we’re officially on the break and it’s been a month and a half.
Part of me is hopeful that we’ll stay together, but other times, I am hopeless. When he said he’s homesick and wants to give due diligence and respect to our relationship by taking this time apart to feel through emotions (he said he hasn’t given it too much thought!), I feel somewhat hopeful (also I feel hopeful when I think of the love we share for each other and how compatible we are). Also, I feel hopeful when he admits he is homesick and doesn’t want to make a rash decision in that state of being. I feel hopeless when I think of the things he’s said months ago, as mentioned above.
He said he is lonely here and when I’m gone or out of town or something, he really feels the lonesomeness. We shared mutual friends but they dealt with some issues with one another and he doesn’t really have a great support network out here like he does at his original home (with Albanian long-time friends and family). He is also a pretty passive man, really easy going, and seemingly simple man that I think can be fairly happy and content anywhere. He isn’t great at making friends or just doesn’t care to because he stays busy and we love spending time together. He hasn’t seen his family in 7+ months and maybe his homesickness is playing a part in his desire to move back/conflicted feelings?
He’s also said this will be the most difficult decision he’ll ever have to make. We share a dog together that we got as a puppy and both love so much. He gets along with my family and we live with my younger brother close to my other brothers, and I feel like this can get a bit too much for him.
I am in limbo and that’s fine because I want him to take his time so that he gets clarity. I want him to be happy and if it’s not with me, then what can I do? We can’t last and maintain a healthy relationship if we both aren’t happy and fairly content. I don’t know what’s going to happen and some moments are gut wrenching. I love him so much and appreciate him. We even dabbled with the idea of children but he is uncertain about that matter as of late (when I was out of town, upon my return, he said he definitely wants children but later reneged that statement, saying it might have been out of loneliness 😢).
I am the kind of partner that encourages him to visit his family as much as possible and I love going down there to hang with them as well. I like when we’re apart because it gives me hearty time to focus on my other relationships and me, as he gets to do the same.
Does anyone have advice?!? Has anyone been in a similar situation?? I would absolutely love to hear any feedback!! I feel fairly clear about what we’ve been dealing with but I will be absolutely devastated if we break up…I can’t even imagine that yet, it makes me sick feeling.
TL;DR: Me (31F) and my partner (28M) of almost 4 years are at risk of splitting up because he is homesick and feels responsible as the eldest Albanian son to help his refugee parents who live 6-7 hours away from us.

Is there anything you can do to get a low rating removed? Today we had a big storm come through and of course the DD Ap decided it was a good time to be glitchy. I picked up a Panda Express order.... Confirmed pickup... everything looked spec..... leave at door, dont knock, etc. When I get to the customers house the delivery instructions changed to " Please ask for extra sweet & sour". Ok, how the hell was I supposed to know???? I left the order and went on break. 20 min later I check back in and am greated by a 1 star and a thumbs down for followed directions. Things like this make you really want to ensure their next order that dare crosses your phone has an accident so you can call in and get it canceled.

I absolutely love piano. Started when I was 4 years old by the recommendation of my neighbor. I am the first person in my family to ever play a musical instrument. 12 years later, and I come into a situation where I will no longer be able to continue lessons due to my dad losing his job.
For a multitude of reasons, I have not started getting good lessons until about 2 years ago. I am not as good as one would expect a 12-year experienced piano player would be. I am about halfway through learning Clair De Lune, and some of the best pieces in my repertoire are Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, Rage Over a Lost Penny (not completely up to speed), and a few other songs I’m forgetting about right now.
How can I continue to get better at piano without a teacher? Are there any good YouTube courses, free theory books, etc, that I can use? My theory knowledge is limited but I am trying to improve.

On a break till the end of the month. What do I do when we meet again?
I made a post previously about this, but I guess this is sort of an update maybe?
I 24F was in a relationship with 24M for 2 years and 9 months. The end of this month would be roughly 3 years we’d known each other and been hooking up before some months down the line made it official.
Anyways, we are on a break and the set end date is a little under 2 weeks away which is after I defend my thesis.
He’s basically taking this time to figure out if he wants to continue with me and I’m taking this time to work on myself and be happy by myself.
The terms of the break are supposed to be no contact. We can see other people if we wish but protection must be worn. I don’t really plan on seeing other people and it seemed like he doesn’t either. I was not very good at no contact for the first weekend of it but since then it’s always been him breaking his own agreement of no contact. Aside from one instance.
On Tuesday I believe of this week I woke up and hopped in the shower and all the sudden felt kinda light headed so I hunched down to try to wait it out and feel better. That wasn’t working so I tried to turn the water to colder and accidentally made it hotter and then I passed out. When I came to I was on the floor of the bathroom and super confused. I don’t remember doing this but apparently I texted my mom what happened and also contacted him. He then called me later and I was very confused why he was calling me because I didn’t remember contacting him. After that we hadn’t talked since really.
I submitted my paper to my committee which is a super big step in completing my degree. I posted a pic of my cover page on Snapchat to show it was FINALLY happening and I was super excited. This was last night. This morning he replied to the story saying he was proud of me and send a good morning Snapchat and then called me all in the span of less than probably a minute. I reluctantly answered the phone because we are supposed to be no contact and he basically said he wanted to call to congratulate me and say that he was proud of me. We talked for a bit longer and then hung up. When hanging up he said he loved me. I then read the snapchats I mentioned previously and said something along the lines of thank you and that I’d love to keep talking with you but you said you wanted no contact and I’m trying to do that so please respect that so we can work on ourselves and think about things. He then replied and said I know it’s just some days are harder than others. I replied back with “Facts”. He then said yesterday was one of those days and then I asked why and he said idk so I left it at that.
I really do love him and want to be with him but I don’t know what to do when the break ends and we meet up to talk.
I’ve been writing down the things I think about and what I would like to see change and stuff like that but I think my main fear is that when we do meet he’s just gonna say I don’t want to be with you.
It might be important to note that we have been long distance for most of the relationship except for summers when I’m off from school. During the summers I’d live with him and work 1-2 jobs. Before the break the plan was for me to move in with him. He’s been going through a lot in the past year with family loss, getting out of the military and getting a new job, moving, etc. before the break he was asking when I’d be moving in. He used to say he wanted to marry me and have kids and in November he was talking about asking my dad for his approval. He’s also said he hasn’t been able to think clearly since his last deployment.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
TL/DR: on a break that ends in two weeks. Not sure how to proceed when we meet again. I don’t want to make a fool out of myself but I do want us to work.

In honor of this week’s RightsCon and 360/OS Summit, we dug into the #TwitterFiles to revisit the integration of the Atlantic Council’s anti-disinformation arm, the Digital Forensic Research Labs (DFRLabs), while also highlighting its relationship with weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, Big Tech, and others who fund the NATO-aligned think tank.

The Atlantic Council is unique among “non-governmental” organizations thanks to its lavish support from governments and the energy, finance, and weapons sectors. It’s been a key player in the development of the “anti-disinformation” sector from the beginning.
It wasn’t an accident when its DFRLabs was chosen in 2018 to help Facebook “monitor for misinformation and foreign interference,” after the platform came under intense congressional scrutiny as a supposed unwitting participant in a Russian influence campaign.
Press uniformly described DFRLabs as an independent actor that would merely “improve security,” and it was left to media watchdog FAIR to point out that the Council was and is “dead center in what former President Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes called ‘the blob.’”

What’s “the blob”? FAIR described it as “Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy consensus,” but thanks to the Twitter Files, we can give a more comprehensive portrait.
In the runup to the 360/OS event in that same year, 2018, Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council boasted to Twitter executives that the attendees would include the crème de la crème of international influence, people he explained resided at the “no-kidding decision-maker level”

Similar correspondence to and from DFRLabs and Twitter outlined early efforts to bring together as partners groups that traditionally served as watchdogs of one another.
Perhaps more even than the World Economic Forum meetings at Davos or gatherings of the Aspen Institute in the US, the Atlantic Council 360/OS confabs are as expansive a portrait of the Censorship-Industrial Complex as we’ve found collected in one place.

In October 2018, DFRLab was instrumental in helping Facebook identify accounts for what became known as “the purge,” a first set of deletions of sites accused of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
Facebook in its announcement of these removals said it was taking steps against accounts created to “stir up political debate,” and the October 2018 “purge” indeed included the likes of Punk Rock Libertarians, Cop Block, and Right Wing News, among others. Even the progressive Reverb Press, founded by a relatively mainstream progressive named James Reader, found his site zapped after years of pouring thousands of dollars a month into Facebook marketing tools.

In the years since, DFRLab has become the central coordination node in the Censorship Industrial Complex as well as a key protagonist in the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project.
Its high-profile role at RightsCon, the biggest civil society digital rights event on the calendar, should concern human rights and free expression activists.

According to their London 2019 event “360/OS brings together journalists, activists, innovators, and leaders from around the world as part of our grassroots digital solidarity movement fighting for objective truth as a foundation of democracy.”
Their Digital Sherlocks program aims to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation.”

The Twitter Files reveal DFRLabs labeled as “disinformation” content that often turned out to be correct, that they participated in disinformation campaigns and the suppression of “true” information, and that they lead the coordination of a host of actors who do the same.

Twitter Files #17 showed how DFRLabs sent Twitter more than 40,000 names of alleged BJP (India’s ruling nationalist party) accounts that they suggested be taken down.
DFRLab said it suspected these were “paid employees or possibly volunteers.” However as Racket’s Matt Taibbi noted, “the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.”
Twitter recognized there was little illegitimate about them, resulting in DFRLabs pulling the project and cutting ties with the researcher.

Twitter Files #19 further revealed DFRLab was a core partner in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which “came together in June of 2020 at the encouragement of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA” in order to “fill the gaps legally” that government couldn’t.
As a result, there are serious questions as to whether the EIP violated the US First Amendment.

DFRLabs was also a core partner on the Virality Project, which pushed its seven Big Tech partners to censor “stories of true vaccine side-effects.”

The Stanford Internet Observatory, which led the project, is now being sued by the New Civil Liberties Alliance for its censorship of “online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”
Debate as to the frequency of serious adverse events is ongoing, however. The German health minister put it at 1 in 10,000, while others claim it is higher.

The Virality Project sought to suppress any public safety signals at all. The Stanford Internet Observatory is also at the moment reportedly resisting a House Judiciary Committee subpoena into its activities.

TwitterFiles #20 revealed some of the Digital Forensic Lab’s 2018 360/0S events, which brought together military leaders, human rights organizations, the Huffington Post, Facebook and Twitter, Edelman (the world’s biggest PR firm), the head of the Munich Security Conference, the head of the World Economic Forum (Borge Brende) a former President, Prime Minister and CIA head, intel front BellingCat and future Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, all to combat “disinformation.” We can now reveal more.

The Atlantic Council is a NATO-aligned think tank established in 1961. Its board of directors and advisory board are a Who’s Who of corporate, intelligence and military power, including:

• James Clapper – former Director of National Intelligence whose tenure included overseeing the NSA during the time of the Snowden leaks. Asked whether intelligence officials collect data on Americans Clapper responded “No, sir,” and, “Not wittingly.” Clapper also coordinated intelligence community activity through the early stages of Russiagate, and his office authored a key January 2017 report concluding that Russians interfered in 2016 to help Donald Trump. Clapper has been a 360/OS attendee.
  
• Stephen Hadley, United States National Security Advisor from 2005 to 2009 (also a 360/OS attendee)
  
• Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State who oversaw the carpet bombing of Vietnam, among other crimes against humanity
  
• Pfizer CEO Anthony Bourla
  
• Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder, The Blackstone Group
  
• Meta’s President for Global Affairs, Nick Clegg
  
• Richard Edelman, CEO of the world’s largest PR firm (and 360/OS attendee)
  
• The Rt. Hon. Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Former Secretary General of NATO
  
• Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, Former President of the World Bank
  
• Leon Panetta, former US Secretary of Defense & CIA Director. Panetta oversaw the US’s massive growth in drone strikes.
  
• John F. W. Rogers. Goldman Sachs Secretary of the Board
  

Chuck Hagel, chairman of the Council, sits on the board of Chevron and is also a former US Secretary of Defence.

The Atlantic Council raised $70 million in 2022, $25 million of which came from corporate interests.
Among the biggest donors were: the US Departments of Defense State, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Google, Crescent Petroleum, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, Meta, Blackstone, Apple, BP, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Raytheon, ExxonMobil, Shell, Twitter, and many more.
Ukraine’s scandal-ridden energy company, Burisma, whose links to Hunter Biden were suppressed by the August 2020 table-top exercise coordinated by the Aspen Institute, also made a contribution.

You can view the full 2022 “honor roll” by clicking here.

The Atlantic Council and DFRLabs don’t hide their militarist affiliations.
This week’s OS/360 event at RightsCon Costa Rica runs together with a 360/OS at NATO’s Riga StratCom Dialogue, which DFRLab note they have “worked closely with” “since 2016.”

DFRLabs was founded in 2016, and has been a major catalyst in expanding the “anti-disinformation” industry.
Among non-governmental entities, perhaps only the Aspen Institute comes close to matching the scope, scale and funding power of DFRLabs.
DFRLabs claims to chart “the evolution of disinformation and other online and technological harms, especially as they relate to the DFRLab’s leadership role in establishing shared definitions, frameworks, and mitigation practices.”

Almost $7 million of the Atlantic Council’s $61 million spent last year went to the DRFLabs, according to their 2022 annual financial report.

Through its fellowship program, it has incubated leading figures in the “disinformation” field.

Richard Stengel, the first director of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was a fellow.
GEC is an interagency group “within” the State Department (also a funder of the Atlantic Council), whose initial partners included the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.
GEC is now a major funder of DFRLabs and a frequent partner

In this video, Stengel says, “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t think it’s that awful.”
Stengel was true to his word, and apart from DFRLab, the GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index, which set out to demonetize conservative media outlets it claimed were “disinformation.” (See 37. in the censorship list)

He thought the now-disgraced Hamilton68 was “fantastic.” In total, GEC funded 39 organizations in 2017.
Despite Freedom of Information requests, only 3 have been made public to date.

Roughly $78 million of GEC’s initial $100 million budget outlay for fiscal year 2017 came from the Pentagon, though the budgetary burden has shifted more toward the State Department in the years since.

The Global Engagement Center was established in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, via a combination of an executive order and a bipartisan congressional appropriation, led by Ohio Republican Rob Portman and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy.
The GEC was and remains virtually unknown, but reporting in the Twitter Files and by outlets like the Washington Examiner have revealed it to be a significant financial and logistical supporter of “anti-disinformation” causes.

Though tasked by Obama with countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests,” its money has repeatedly worked its way back in the direction of policing domestic content, with Gabe Kaminsky’s Examiner reports on the GDI providing the most graphic example.

GEC frequently sent lists of “disinformation agents to Twitter.” Yoel Roth, former head of Trust and Safety referred to one list as a “total crock.” Roth is now a member of DFRLab’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web. Let’s hope he brings more trust than Stengel. You can read more on GEC’s funding here.

Other DFRLab luminaries include Simon Clark, Chairman of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (a UK “anti-disinformation” outfit that aggressively deplatforms dissidents), Ben Nimmo (previously a NATO press officer, then of Graphika (EIP and the Virality Project partners) and now Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead), and Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat.

Bellingcat has an ominous reputation, which it’s earned in numerous ways, including its funding by the National Endowment for Democracy...

Most recently, Bellingcat assisted in the arrest of the 21-year-old Pentagon leaker, further speeding up the abandonment of the Pentagon Papers Principal where the media protected, rather than persecuted, leakers.
Bellingcat was part of 360/OS backroom meetings with former intel chiefs, the head of Davos and the Munich security conference among many others, as we will see soon.

The Virality Project built on the EIP and had partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Google, TikTok and more to combat vaccine “misinformation.”
Stanford and DFRLab partnered with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Social Media and Politics, and the National Congress on Citizenship.

Through a shared Jira ticketing system they connected these Big Tech platforms together, with Graphika using sophisticated AI to surveil the online conversation at scale in order to catch “misinformation” troublemakers.

VP went far beyond any kind of misinformation remit, most infamously recommending to their Big Tech partners that they consider “true stories of vaccine side effects” as “standard misinformation on your platform.”

A Virality Project partner called the Algorithmic Transparency Initiative (a project of the National Congress on Citizenship) went further.
Their Junkipedia initiative sought to address “problematic content” via the “automated collection of data” from “closed messaging apps,” and by building a Stasi-like “civic listening corps,” which in recent years has taken on a truly sinister-sounding mission.
The current incarnation might as well be called “SnitchCorps,” as “volunteers have an opportunity to join a guided monitoring shift to actively participate in monitoring topics that disrupt communities”

Garret Graff, who oversaw the Aspen Hunter Biden table-top exercise, was chairman of that same National Congress on Citizenship when they collaborated on the Virality Project.
Both EIP and VP were led by Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a former CIA fellow who engineered the now disgraced New Knowledge initiative, which developed fake Russian bots to discredit a 2017 Alabama senate race candidate, as acknowledged by the Washington Post.

DFRLab are the elite of the “anti-disinformation” elite.
They work closely with a wide range of actors who have participated in actual disinformation initiatives.
Here they’re invited to an elite Twitter group set up by Nick Pickles of “anti-disinformation” luminaries First Draft, also participants in the Hunter Biden laptop tabletop, and the Alliance for Security Democracy, part of the RussiaGate Hamilton68 disinformation operation.

The 360/OS event marries this tarnished record with the financial, political, military, NGO, academic and intelligence elite. Some of this is visible through publicly available materials.
Twitter Files however reveal the behind the scenes, including closed door, off-the-record meetings.

“I’ve just arrived in Kyiv” Brookie notes in 2017, as he seeks to line up a meeting with Public Policy Director Nick Pickles as they discuss Twitter providing a USD $150K contribution to OS/360 (seemingly secured), and to garner high level Twitter participation.
Pickles is visiting DC and Brookie suggests he also meet with the GEC and former FBI agent Clint Watts of Hamilton 68 renown. “Happy to make those connections,” he chimes.

360/OS events are elite and expensive — $1 million according to Brookie — so closer collaboration with Twitter, especially in the form of funding, is a high priority.
Twitter offers $150,000

When Brookie mentions the attendees at the “no-kidding decision maker level” he isn’t kidding.
Parallel to the 360/OS public program is the much more important off-the-record meeting of “decision makers ranging from the C-Suite to the Situation Room.”

Here, he is explicit about a convening of military and financial power.
Vanguard 25 is presented as a way to “create a discreet and honest way to close the information gap on challenges like disinformation between key decision makers from government, tech, and media.”

The document boasts of its high-level participants

More are revealed in email exchanges, including Madeleine Albright and the head of the WEF

They go on to list a bizarre mishmash of media leaders, intelligence officials, and current or former heads of state

...Germany’s Angela Merkel was out of reach in the end, but many of the others attended this behind the scenes meeting on “disinformation.” Who are they?

• Matthias Dopfner – CEO and 22% owner of German media empire Axel Springer SE, the biggest media publishing firm in Europe
  
• Borge Brende – head of the World Economic Forum and former Norwegian foreign minister
  
• Toomas Hendrick Ilves – former President of Estonia who co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Blockchain Technology. Hendrick is also a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (where the Stanford Internet Observatory is housed) and is on the advisory council of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, of Hamilton 68 renown.
  
• Chris Sacca – billionaire venture capitalist
  
• Mounir Mahjoubi – previously Digital Manager for President Macron’s presidential campaign, and former Chairman of the French Digital Council
  
• Reid Hoffman – billionaire and Linkedin co-founder
  
• Ev Williams – Former CEO of Twitter and on the Twitter board at the time
  
• Kara Swisher – New York Times opinion writer, who founded Vox Media Recode
  
• Wolfgang Ischinger - Head of the Munich Security Conference
  
• Aleksander Kwasniewski – Former President of Poland. Led Poland into NATO and the EU.
  
• Richard Edelman – CEO of the largest PR company in the world
  
• Elliot Shrage – previously Vice-President of Public Policy at Facebook (DFRLab had election integrity projects with Facebook)
  
• Lydia Polgreen – Huffington Post Editor in Chief
  
• Jim Clapper –former US Director of National Intelligence
  
• Maria Ressa – co-founder of Rappler and soon to be winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
  

Why would such a group all gather specifically around the question of “disinformation”?
Is disinformation truly at such a level that it requires bringing together the world’s most popular author with military and intelligence leaders, the world’s biggest PR company, journalists, billionaires, Big Tech and more?

Or is this work to build the case that there is a disinformation crisis, to then justify the creation of a massive infrastructure for censorship? A glimpse of the agenda offers clues

Here the head of the most important military and intelligence conference in the world (Munich) sits down in a closed door meeting with a former Secretary of State and the Executive Vice-Chair of the Atlantic Council.

Which is followed by a closed door session with the Editor-in Chief of the ...Huffington Post and peace-maker Maria Ressa who presented to the same group of military, intelligence, corporate and other elites.
Is the role of a journalist and Nobel laureate to work behind closed doors with militarists and billionaires, or to hold them to account?

At 2022’s OS/360 at RightsCon Ressa conducted a softball interview on disinformation with current US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

In testimony last April 2023, former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell stated that Blinken “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement” by more than 50 former intelligence officials that the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russia information operation.”

The Twitter Files also revealed that in August 2020 the Aspen Institute organized a table-top exercise to practice how best to respond to a “hack and leak” of a Hunter Biden laptop.
The laptop only came to light however two months later.
In attendance was First Draft (now the Information Futures Lab), the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, CNN, Yahoo! News, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Here, DFRLab head Graham Brookie speaks with the Aspen Institute’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise.

After it turned out the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and the disinformation operation was more appropriately described as having been led by the likes of Blinken and the Aspen Institute.
The appropriate response is apparently for RightsCon, DFRLab, Blinken and Ressa to put on a nice forum to promote these figures as “anti-disinformation” leaders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8YTPuTC9xs

Former DFRLab fellow and intel front Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is also invited to the closed door sessions with a former head of the CIA, a former Prime Minister and a President.

How do you keep power accountable when you are in the same cozy club? This theme runs throughout.
Bellingcat is featured heavily at the public sessions also

On the public side, we see Amnesty International participating to further collapse the distinction between those who are meant to hold power to account, and the powerful themselves.
The Iraq war gave us embedded journalists, and the “anti-disinformation” field gives us embedded digital rights activists.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Chris Krebs also joined the closed door session.
Krebs was Co-Chair of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder.
Other members included Prince Harry, the Virality Project’s Alex Stamos (Stanford Internet Observatory) and Kate Starbird (University of Washington and previous 360/OS participant), Katie Couric, and more. Craig Newmark attended as an observer.

Meanwhile Renee DiResta, former CIA fellow and Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director, presented with the former Prime Minister of Sweden.
This was years before she would launch the Virality Project, and take on the bugbear of “true stories of vaccine side effects.”

The President of the Atlantic Council participated in an “off-the-record, “ behind closed doors conversation on “trust” with the CEO of the world’s biggest PR firm, Edelman.

“Public relations” and “trust” may well be opposites, and trust is being destroyed not by the disinformation street crime that these groups claim to target, but by the disinformation corporate crime protected by, or in some cases created by these same people.
Disinformation is real, but its biggest purveyors are governments and powerful corporate interests.

DFRLab and RightsCon show just how far the capture of civil society by elite interests has come. Again, I made a mistake helping to co-organize RightsCon in 2015.

The jumping in bed with the government and Big Tech was arguably there in 2015, though to a much lesser degree.
It now partners with militarists in the form of the Atlantic Council and is an enabler of the “disinformation” grift that is so deeply impacting freedom of speech and expression.

The air-gaps that should separate civil society, media, military, billionaires, intelligence and government have collapsed, and many of these actors have formed a new alliance to advance their shared interests.
If weapons manufacturers funding human rights is considered legitimate then where is the red line? Effectively, there is none.

This collapse however has also been pushed by funders, who have been proactive in asking NGOs to collaborate more with Big Tech and government - something I successfully resisted for my almost 18 years at EngageMedia, critically RightsCon was the only time I let my guard down.

The RightsCon sponsor matrix wouldn’t be out of place at NASCAR
This is the equivalent of hosting a Climate Change conference sponsored by Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil.

How do you keep power accountable when Big Tech pays your wage? The “let’s all work together” approach has failed.
The weakest partner, civil society, got captured and we lost.
Many more lost their way and have acquiesced to and often enabled much of the new censorship regime.

https://www.racket.news/p/twitter-files-extra-how-the-worlds

my notes on in times new roman

1. obscenery - extremely groovy and octave fuzzy like EV and TCV almost! where did the violins come from??? bass is super groovy ofc. this sounds gorgeous, can i just say. crisper than LC honestly. the perfect refresher after villains. josh’s voice is gorgeous also!! gonna be throwing around the word gorgeous a lot because queens is gorgeous. very strange song structure, i expect a lot of that from this album from what i’ve read, but i’m good with that!!
   
2. paper machete - is this not just little sister again?!??! even the vocals are very little sister esq. loving the heavy guitars paired with synths!! even the solo is extremely little sister!!! was little sister (since its a love song about someones little sister) written about brody? because this could be totally intentional. theres that octave guitar part teaser at 3:10. never expected the context.
   
3. negative space - quite a bit slower in studio. love this song already from the live video. oh fuck this sounds good. very sat by the ocean. cant wait for that dual guitar solo. the vocals on this are awesome. FUCK this album sounds good. love troy’s echoey phaser guitar. or maybe dean with the wah guitar like he does live. just noticing a ton of phaser in the mix, and i bet thats all troy. very tcv with the room mic and echo on guitar. HE SAID EMOTION SICKNESS!!!! OH FUCK THAT SOLO!!!! this is my favorite so far.
   
4. time and place - what is happening. OH SHIT!!! tcv and ev enjoyers will love ITNR… and those are my two favorite josh albums. this is such a groovy song, fuck its good. these songs are all so intricate, so it’s gonna take like 15 listens to fully understand them, but idc i’m just happy we have incredible new queens. this song is so groovy holy shit. that 1:53 flanger fuzzy guitar part!!! love all the echo and modulation and octave and fuzz. nothing new for the band, just happy to see it all so prominent. fucking loving how much mikey shines here. such a garage rock album so far!! but super super rocky. i’m listening to this with my friend, she calls this one a mix of all of ev, dead end friends, and new fang, and i agree. thank god lullabies, ev, and tcv are my favorites, because this album is the product of those three. its definitely got the tcv groove, the ev weirdness, and its haunted like lullabies.
   
5. made to parade - I GET THE WARSAW COMPARISON!!!!! fuck this is good, i’m giggling of joy right now. warsaw is my favorite tcv song, and it changes daily. getting a spinning in daffodils/tangled up in plaid thing from this as well. fuck i love sinister groovy and weird queens. this is like the perfect album for me. the harmonized like octave on the vocals. oh shit?? airy and light chorus!! HE SAID THE THING!!!! (what you worship is your god) this album is so fucking weird i love it!!! hopeful and light and airy chorus that follows another haunting verse.
   
6. carnavoyeur - already know and love this one!! super iggy and bowie inspired, almost post punk. great song, not gonna write a lot for this or emotion sickness cuz we know those
   
7. head like a haunted house 2 (peephole) - this has villains’s swagger but with incredible production. everything i could ever want. josh’s voice is just Always good. love how much mikey and jon are shining. OOOH HE SAID THE THING! he really doesnt care what the people say i guess🤷‍♂️ i love the slight interruptions in the vocals with josh’s “lazy” s/t voice. tonight is the night. john mulaney was right. FUCKING COOL! can’t wait for sicily.
   
8. sicily - cant quit me baby 2. OH MY GOD THIS IS THE JESSE PORK RINDS TEASER THAT IVE BEEN SO FUCKING EXCITED FOR LETS GOOOOOOOO. this shit is so groovy and evil as hell oh my godddddd im shaking and have chills. this also feels very headache esq. calling it, this is my favorite queens song ever. ohhh fuck that lazy jam after all that evil shit. ohhhhhhhhhhhh my god. super cant quit me baby. AND THE EVIL BUILDUP!!!!!! the low vocals oh my goddddddddd. sorry im having such a visceral full body reaction to this song. specifically just below the waist and above the thighs. that synth oh fuck dean just killed me.
   
9. emotion sickness - ferocious. we know this
   
10. straight jacket fitting - okay here we fucking go i guess! super fucking angry and rock-y. very i appear missing in the chorus honestly. nvm lol super badass and garage rock. theres a vocal at 1:45 that makes me think of makin us all forget from 3s & 7s. im losing my shit. this is so badass. tremolo guitar and more of that octave vocal harmony. super super groovy. glass shattering is an additional percussion thing. OHH 4 MINUTES IN THE VIOLIN. is he saying carpé demon? ohhh josh, you silly goose. this seems to be progressing along like a tcv song would but its a super badass straightforward rock song. very very very very clockwork. but of course they said this was an old clockwork track reformatted, so it makes sense. so goddamn sick of this place i’m only human? i think that’s what he’s saying. badass rock closer. more glass shattering. who the fuck said this album wasnt heavy??? no c standard though guys! doesnt really matter, doesnt need to be c standard or even d standard to be badass. oh shit is this acoustic part d standard????? theres a droning cello and ebow guitar part over it. fuck this is good. you guys are in for a treat. fuck that was magical.
    

final comments, HOLY SHIT!!!!! no seriously though, this album is probably a grower just like ev and lullabies and tcv were for me, but right now i’d rank it over lullabies honestly.

1. ev
2. tcv
3. itnr
4. lullabies
5. clockwork
6. r
7. deaf
8. s/t
9. villains

and btw i fucking love villains too, this is an order of favorite to almost favorite, not good to bad. objectively, clockwork and deaf are best and always will be. but i love some weird, groovy, haunting shit. and in times new roman delivers on it fully.

We’ve been together for two and a half years. We’ve been through a lot of hard life experiences together, and we’re extremely bonded as friends which makes this whole decision even more difficult. My recent emotionally erratic and unpredictable behavior has ultimately led to me to end my relationship with her. There has been no physical abuse by any means, but my reactions to minor setbacks like tight finances or botched plans are becoming wildly irrational. My breaks from reality start and I become anxious, I become a flight risk and will often walk away on foot, I get verbally abusive and frustrated with my self, and It has recently ruined vacations, date nights, and even family gatherings. She does not want me to leave her, and she’s begging me to stay. I’m incredibly torn, because I don’t want to give up on our dreams and the life we’ve built together. However, she doesn’t deserve to be subject to all of this emotional turmoil.
I’ve been to psychotherapists, psych MD’s, and general practitioner MD’s in efforts to figure out the source of my mental breaks from reality, but I’ve never been able to be formally diagnosed by anyone. I played football from ages 7-19 and lacrosse from 12-18, and I was also in several fist fights as a teenager. I was diagnosed with 2 concussions in sports, but there’s no way of ever knowing if I have CTE while I’m still alive. Regardless of my condition I am still responsible for my behavior.
I can not live with myself seeing my behavior cause her any more pain, so I just ended it. Did I do the right thing?

I went over to comfort them. I've never seen either of them cry before. I absolutely adored that cat - we all did. I used to seek him out to pick him up as soon as I went into their house. I feel so bad for my grandparents having to deal with this - they had 19 years with him, of his constant company. I feel numb and am mindlessly scrolling through my phone.

I’m looking for any info on these papers. I found them in my basement today with my paps stuff, he wasn’t one for holding onto this sorta thing so I am wondering if it has some sort of significance.

I just finished the latest 911 season and everyone's learning and moving on at the end.
And our boy Buck got ANOTHER GIRL IN HIS LIFE TO PICK HIS COUCH?????
When?? When will you learn your actions have consequences??? When will you learn Buck that you need to pick these things yourself 😭😭😭😭 it's like everyone's growing up but Buck is the only one in his hamster wheel
Fr like he had okay character growth this season with the death doula girl but yo pick your own couch my dude. She's gonna go too and you're gonna be -1 couch soon.... even if she doesn't go anytime soon, its your house bro...
He's never picked a couch in his life change my mind 😭😭😭

Hello all. I came across a YT tutorial that demonstrated the process of creating / cloning PM templates using cloud-init. I followed the instructions in the tutorial to the letter and all went wthout a hitch. Once I start up my Ubuntu clone for example I can open the PM console using VNC or xTerm. No issues there. However, I cannot use git bash from my Windows 10 machine. The error I receive is always the same. Something along the lines of Error: Permission denied (publickey). I have never had to setup any keys to access the dozen or so VM's and CT's that I have running in PM. Your time and assistance will be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Peter

IT REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS.
I can often sign up for services online with no verification of anything, yet trying to cancel the service is a fucking nightmare.
Sit on a hold line for an houdays, answer a million verification questions, pay cancelation fees. 60 days cancelation period. I understand it's all in the terms and conditions when you sign up, but it's just a fucking scam because every competitor uses the same policies meaning you either bow down to their bullshit or just not have power and internet I guess.
Another thing is companies having no direct contact details other than an email address which is ignored.