Friday, October 25, 2019
Lee Camp Ledger, Week Of Oct 22, 2019
The US has been a ‘Rogue’ State for A LOT longer than Trump has been in power. And Trump’s just making it worse — on this episode of Redacted Tonight
The US ruling elite want more war in Syria — this and more on the latest episode of VIP
More info keeps coming out about Jeffrey Epstein’s human trafficking ring but your media won’t tell you about it — on this week’s episode of Moment of Clarity
100 companies drive climate change forward & we can absolutely do something about that — read my latest article on Truthdig
Hillary Clinton attacked Tulsi Gabbard & somehow didn’t realize that Gabbard had the ammo to clap back ferociously — on the latest episode of my podcast Common Censored
The New York Times implied that the military should hold a coup over Trump — on Moment of Clarity
[...]
Julian Assange’s court hearing in London: Britain stages a lawless show-trial
24 October 2019
Julian Assange’s hearing in
London’s Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday was a despicable show trial.
Any pretence that this was somehow a legal proceeding, aiming to enforce the
law and respect the rights of the accused, has been abandoned.
Assange, who defied the most
powerful governments by revealing to the world’s people war crimes and
corruption, appeared gaunt and tormented by what a leading UN expert has
described as torture.
Craig Murray, a former British
diplomat and current human rights activist, wrote that
he was “shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his
hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated
ageing. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he
has lost over 15 kg in weight.”
Murray stated that Assange’s
“physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration. When
asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several
seconds to recall both.”
In a grave warning, Murray
wrote: “Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest
journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to
death by the state, before our eyes.”
With all the vindictiveness of
the British ruling elite, presiding judge Vanessa Baraitser did not even
attempt to conceal her hostility to Assange, his legal team and supporters.
Baraitser waved away arguments
from Assange’s lawyers, which should have resulted in the immediate dismissal
of proceedings for his extradition from Britain to the US, and his release from
prison. These included the fact that existing treaties explicitly ban
extradition from Britain to the US on political offences, and that the US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had conducted illegal spying against Assange
while he was being protected by political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.
The surveillance included audio and video recordings of Assange’s confidential
meetings and the theft of his legal documents.
Far from being scrutinised by
the court, CIA henchmen were effectively running the hearing, openly coaching
the British prosecutors. As investigative-journalist John Pilger wrote, the
court was “swarming with US officials, their visible instructions holding
sway.”
Finally, Baraitser rejected a
request for a three-month delay to Assange’s full extradition hearing in
February. Struggling to speak, Assange stated: “This superpower had 10 years to
prepare for this case… I can’t access any of my written work… They have an
unfair advantage dealing with documents… This is not equitable what is
happening here.”
Baraitser contemptuously
declared that Assange could speak to his lawyers later if he did not understand
the proceedings. Neither the judge, nor any other representative of the corrupt
British judiciary, has explained why he is being held in virtual solitary
confinement in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison—despite the fact his
custodial sentence on a bogus bail charge expired in September.
The miserable show trial was
not covered seriously by any major corporate publication in the world. All of
them have sought to cover-up what it revealed: that the nine-year US vendetta
against Assange has been an illegal political persecution from the outset.
Every step of the way,
the Guardian, the New York Times and a host of other corporate
outlets have functioned as the adjuncts of the US government in its attempt to destroy
the WikiLeaks’ founder.
They incessantly promoted the
bogus Swedish investigation into alleged sexual misconduct against Assange,
which was the fraudulent basis for his arrest by the British police in 2010 and
which forced him to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in June 2012.
The well-heeled journalists
claimed that Assange was “hiding from justice.” They covered up the fact that
Assange was never charged with a crime in Sweden, and that one of the women
involved said she had been “railroaded by the police” into making a complaint.
The corporate journalists derided Assange’s insistence that the Swedish
allegations were aimed at blackening his name and providing an alternate route
for his extradition to the US over WikiLeaks’ exposures of American war crimes.
All of Assange’s warnings have
come to pass. The entire pseudo-legal veneer of the campaign against him,
including the Swedish frame-up, has been exposed as a fraud. Even before he has
been extradited to the US, Assange is facing a lawless show-trial in Britain.
But the corporate publications
have not reversed their position. The torrent of slander has continued, as they
seek to keep the population in the dark about the dire implications of
Assange’s persecution.
For their part, innumerable corrupt
pseudo-left organisations, from the British Socialist Workers Party to the now
defunct US International Socialist Organisation, endorsed the CIA-concocted
lies that Assange had to answer the Swedish allegations. From Jacobin magazine
in the US, to Socialist Alternative in Australia, they have remained silent as
the attempted slow-motion assassination of Assange has proceeded this year.
Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour Party, who occasionally claims
to be a socialist, has refused to defend the WikiLeaks’ founder.
The case is an abject lesson
in the rotten character of every official institution: from the courts, to the
media, to the political establishment, including its pseudo-left wing. All of
them are hurtling towards authoritarianism, amid the deepest crisis of
capitalism since the 1930s and a resurgence of the class struggle.
Assange will only be freed by
a mass political movement of the working class, the constituency for the
defence of democratic rights. Around the world, millions of workers are
entering into explosive struggles, from the 48,000 US auto-workers on strike, to
the hundreds of thousands protesting in Chile and Ecuador.
The World Socialist Web
Site calls on workers to take up the fight for the immediate freedom of
all class war prisoners, including Assange and Chelsea Manning—the courageous
whistleblower incarcerated by the Trump administration for refusing to give
false testimony against Assange.
Some 90 years ago, the
socialist workers’ movement mounted a campaign in defence of Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were framed-up by the US government because of their
political activism. That fight, which mobilised millions of workers
internationally, played a defining role in world politics and has gone down in
history as one of the great struggles against state persecution. The Assange
case is to this generation what Sacco and Vanzetti was to the 1920s.
The pursuit of the WikiLeaks’
founder is aimed at creating a precedent for the suppression of all opposition
to militarism, authoritarianism and government illegality. His defence must
become the spearhead of a counter-offensive by the working class for all its
social and democratic rights and against imperialist war.
There is no time to lose.
Craig Murray’s warning, that “unless Julian is released shortly, he will be
destroyed,” is an alarm that must be answered by all defenders of democratic
rights, through an active campaign for Assange’s immediate freedom. In working
class suburbs, in factories and at university campuses, all workers and youth
must be apprised of Assange’s plight and mobilised for his freedom, including
through meetings, campaigns and rallies.
Contact us today
to take part in this crucial struggle.
Oscar Grenfell
Achieving quantum supremacy
UC Santa Barbara/Google
researchers demonstrate the power of 53 entangled qubits
October 23, 2019
UC Santa Barbara
Researchers have made good on
their claim to quantum supremacy. Using 53 entangled quantum bits ('qubits'),
their Sycamore computer has taken on -- and solved -- a problem considered
intractable for classical computers.
"A computation that would
take 10,000 years on a classical supercomputer took 200 seconds on our quantum
computer," said Brooks Foxen, a graduate student researcher in the
Martinis Group. "It is likely that the classical simulation time,
currently estimated at 10,000 years, will be reduced by improved classical
hardware and algorithms, but, since we are currently 1.5 trillion times faster,
we feel comfortable laying claim to this achievement."
The feat is outlined in a
paper in the journal Nature.
The milestone comes after
roughly two decades of quantum computing research conducted by Martinis and his
group, from the development of a single superconducting qubit to systems
including architectures of 72 and, with Sycamore, 54 qubits (one didn't
perform) that take advantage of the both awe-inspiring and bizarre properties
of quantum mechanics.
"The algorithm was chosen
to emphasize the strengths of the quantum computer by leveraging the natural
dynamics of the device," said Ben Chiaro, another graduate student
researcher in the Martinis Group. That is, the researchers wanted to test the
computer's ability to hold and rapidly manipulate a vast amount of complex,
unstructured data.
"We basically wanted to
produce an entangled state involving all of our qubits as quickly as we
can," Foxen said, "and so we settled on a sequence of operations that
produced a complicated superposition state that, when measured, returns
bitstring with a probability determined by the specific sequence of operations
used to prepare that particular superposition. The exercise, which was to
verify that the circuit's output correspond to the equence used to prepare the
state, sampled the quantum circuit a million times in just a few minutes,
exploring all possibilities -- before the system could lose its quantum
coherence.
'A complex superposition
state'
"We performed a fixed set
of operations that entangles 53 qubits into a complex superposition
state," Chiaro explained. "This superposition state encodes the
probability distribution. For the quantum computer, preparing this
superposition state is accomplished by applying a sequence of tens of control
pulses to each qubit in a matter of microseconds. We can prepare and then
sample from this distribution by measuring the qubits a million times in 200
seconds."
"For classical computers,
it is much more difficult to compute the outcome of these operations because it
requires computing the probability of being in any one of the 2^53 possible
states, where the 53 comes from the number of qubits -- the exponential scaling
is why people are interested in quantum computing to begin with," Foxen
said. "This is done by matrix multiplication, which is expensive for
classical computers as the matrices become large."
According to the new paper,
the researchers used a method called cross-entropy benchmarking to compare the
quantum circuit's output (a "bitstring") to its "corresponding
ideal probability computed via simulation on a classical computer" to
ascertain that the quantum computer was working correctly.
"We made a lot of design
choices in the development of our processor that are really advantageous,"
said Chiaro. Among these advantages, he said, are the ability to experimentally
tune the parameters of the individual qubits as well as their interactions.
While the experiment was
chosen as a proof-of-concept for the computer, the research has resulted in a
very real and valuable tool: a certified random number generator. Useful in a
variety of fields, random numbers can ensure that encrypted keys can't be
guessed, or that a sample from a larger population is truly representative,
leading to optimal solutions for complex problems and more robust machine
learning applications. The speed with which the quantum circuit can produce its
randomized bit string is so great that there is no time to analyze and
"cheat" the system.
"Quantum mechanical
states do things that go beyond our day-to-day experience and so have the
potential to provide capabilities and application that would otherwise be
unattainable," commented Joe Incandela, UC Santa Barbara's vice chancellor
for research. "The team has demonstrated the ability to reliably create
and repeatedly sample complicated quantum states involving 53 entangled
elements to carry out an exercise that would take millennia to do with a
classical supercomputer. This is a major accomplishment. We are at the
threshold of a new era of knowledge acquisition."
Looking ahead
With an achievement like
"quantum supremacy," it's tempting to think that the UC Santa
Barbara/Google researchers will plant their flag and rest easy. But for Foxen,
Chiaro, Martinis and the rest of the UCSB/Google AI Quantum group, this is just
the beginning.
"It's kind of a
continuous improvement mindset," Foxen said. "There are always
projects in the works." In the near term, further improvements to these
"noisy" qubits may enable the simulation of interesting phenomena in
quantum mechanics, such as thermalization, or the vast amount of possibility in
the realms of materials and chemistry.
In the long term, however, the
scientists are always looking to improve coherence times, or, at the other end,
to detect and fix errors, which would take many additional qubits per qubit
being checked. These efforts have been running parallel to the design and build
of the quantum computer itself, and ensure the researchers have a lot of work
before hitting their next milestone.
"It's been an honor and a
pleasure to be associated with this team," Chiaro said. "It's a great
collection of strong technical contributors with great leadership and the whole
team really synergizes well."
Story Source:
Materials provided by UC Santa Barbara. Original
written by Sonia Fernandez. Note: Content may be edited for style and
length.
Related Multimedia:
Journal Reference:
Frank Arute, Kunal Arya, Ryan
Babbush, Dave Bacon, Joseph C. Bardin, Rami Barends, Rupak Biswas, Sergio
Boixo, Fernando G. S. L. Brandao, David A. Buell, Brian Burkett, Yu Chen, Zijun
Chen, Ben Chiaro, Roberto Collins, William Courtney, Andrew Dunsworth, Edward
Farhi, Brooks Foxen, Austin Fowler, Craig Gidney, Marissa Giustina, Rob Graff,
Keith Guerin, Steve Habegger, Matthew P. Harrigan, Michael J. Hartmann, Alan
Ho, Markus Hoffmann, Trent Huang, Travis S. Humble, Sergei V. Isakov, Evan
Jeffrey, Zhang Jiang, Dvir Kafri, Kostyantyn Kechedzhi, Julian Kelly, Paul V.
Klimov, Sergey Knysh, Alexander Korotkov, Fedor Kostritsa, David Landhuis, Mike
Lindmark, Erik Lucero, Dmitry Lyakh, Salvatore MandrĂ , Jarrod R. McClean,
Matthew McEwen, Anthony Megrant, Xiao Mi, Kristel Michielsen, Masoud Mohseni,
Josh Mutus, Ofer Naaman, Matthew Neeley, Charles Neill, Murphy Yuezhen Niu,
Eric Ostby, Andre Petukhov, John C. Platt, Chris Quintana, Eleanor G. Rieffel,
Pedram Roushan, Nicholas C. Rubin, Daniel Sank, Kevin J. Satzinger, Vadim
Smelyanskiy, Kevin J. Sung, Matthew D. Trevithick, Amit Vainsencher, Benjamin
Villalonga, Theodore White, Z. Jamie Yao, Ping Yeh, Adam Zalcman, Hartmut
Neven, John M. Martinis. Quantum supremacy using a programmable
superconducting processor. Nature, 2019; 574 (7779): 505 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5
ExxonMobil Hasn't Stopped Bankrolling Climate Deniers
Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute
OCT 23, 2019
ExxonMobil says it
believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being
part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also
says it supports
a federal carbon tax and the Paris
climate agreement.
Then why, after all these
years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and
business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate
crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts
to rein in carbon emissions?
According to the company’s
latest grantmaking
report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include
its annual dues to trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute,
which opposes
a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock
directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65
million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the
2017-18 election cycle went to climate
science deniers.
Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s
2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan
Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the
company has spent some $37
million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record
of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late
David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.
The shred of good news here is
that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half
of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the
company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off
such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want
to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.
So what did ExxonMobil get for
its money in 2018?
Underwriting Climate Denial at
the U.S. Chamber
In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5
million to the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period on top
of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting
climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year,
the company kicked in $350,000 for
the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for
the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to
$365,000.
Two years ago, the Chamber
sponsored a widely debunked report that
wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S.
economy. President Trump used that report as his primary
rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.
Earlier this year, however,
the Chamber posted a new statement on
its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position.
“We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today
and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are
contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website
also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate
policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale
renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international
cooperation.”
Does that mean the Chamber has
finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the
Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power
plant carbon emissions, and supports the
Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber
spokesman told Politico
in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris
climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was
unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so
we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the
United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken
the U.S. commitment to it.
Backing Denial at the American
Enterprise Institute
The American Enterprise
Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has
received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier
organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000,
bringing its total to $4.65
million since 1998.
Economist Benjamin Zycher, an
Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate
issues, argues that
a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the
Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers
by John Christy, Judith Curry and other
outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate
alarmism.”
Last fall, for example, Zycher
took aim at the second volume of
the Fourth National
Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of
peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by
the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands
of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump
administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would
receive limited attention.
Zycher took issue with the
report’s conclusions in a blog
post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on
climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included
half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims,
human activity is responsible for more
than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950;
sea level rise has accelerated due
to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency
of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase
in hurricane
intensity over the past 40 years.
Zycher also posted a column belittling
a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges
ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate
climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for
internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22,
alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its
oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be
left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target
and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that
she filed the suit to advance her career.
Financing the Manhattan
Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables
The Manhattan Institute, a New
York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from
ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company
has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3
million.
Like the Enterprise Institute,
the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren
Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration
climate efforts, alleges the
international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think
tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for
an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric
vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the
oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.
Cass’s colleague, Senior
Fellow Robert Bryce,
has been bashing wind power for years and, like President
Trump, he wildly overstates its
threat to birds. In fact, the top
human-caused threats to birds are climate
change, buildings,
power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas
industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his
bogus argument.
Still another Manhattan
Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall
Street Journal in May titled “What
if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind,
solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains
far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new
electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a
June report by
Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and
solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills
also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution.
The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at
least $85
billion in damages.
Aiding and Abetting
Congressional Gridlock
On top of the hundreds of
thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last
year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67
percent of the $1.65
million it spent during the 2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1
million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate
science deniers.
It then spent $11.15
million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more
than any other oil and gas company.
One of the most talked-about
climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite
ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded
senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at
least five
nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a
majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent,
voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding
priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in
the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once
again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution,
which passed by
a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had
received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.
ExxonMobil first announced its
support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade
bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million
over two years to Americans for Carbon
Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral
carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a
coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government
officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for
dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution
regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate
lawsuits.
In a surprise move, however,
the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends
recently deleted the
provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently
abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and
ExxonMobil, which are facing more
than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate
change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but
based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers
who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case
that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep
bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol
Hill.
Author’s note: Besides the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000)
and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave
grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups:
American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and
International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution
($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of
Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).
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