The CIA is definitely operating in Iran. Nobody reasonable will deny that. Mossad is too, guaranteed. How inflated their numbers are, I don't know, but even just the confirmed numbers of dead both officially and unofficially are too high.
At this point they need to split the country so people who want to live differently can do so. Maybe that would prevent needing to bomb the Iranian government into oblivion.
Most of the human rights organisation in Iran, cited heavily by western media, are backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which some countries (and some right-wing political organisations) believe is used by the CIA (if not funded and a front for it). Human Rights Activists in Iran is based in Fairfax, Virginia (where the CIA HQ is). (Apparently, they've received up to a million dollars in funding from the NED). The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABCHRI) has also been associated with the NED. The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) is also based in New York City and Washington, D.C, and also funded by the NED (according to the Chinese).
According to their website NED is based in washington dc. The CIA hq is not in fairfax, it is in Langley. Even if they were in the same city that is an incredibly weak argument. Custom ink (the shirt company) is also in fairfax. Are they a cia front too?
Langley is part of Fairfax County. Much of northern Virginia is unincorporated Census Designated Places within counties.
Additionally, a large portion of NGOs are based in Fairfax county due to the proximity to DC.
The NRA headquarters is in Fairfax, and Maria Butina lived down the road from the NRA headquarters.
A fun game to play is following the source. For instance, when events in Xiajiang were getting nonstop coverage, nearly every article that came out would cite either the adrian zenz paper or an NGO's article, which would cite the paper.
Sometimes you'd have to go a few NGO layers deep. I repeated this experiment a few dozen times, about half would lead to an office park in Fairfax County. One time it was an Australian NGO that had the US DoD as a sponsor.
There is an entire industry around intelligence laundering and consent manufacturing.
What part? NGO/thinktanks operating within a 30 minute drive to the nation's capital?
One such example is James Leibold, a scholar of Xinjiang ethnic policy. He would report on Xiajiang and the claimed genocide. He is an australian. He worked for the Jamestown Foundation based in DC.
On the Board of Directors for the Jamestown Foundation is a man named Michael G Vickers, who was previously the Under Secretary of Defense for intelligence, and worked at the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan War(The one where the US funded the Mujahadeen who immediately began throwing grenades into schools for girls).
Vickers was even featured in the book, "Charlie Wilson's War", about Operation Cyclone and the events which would eventually lead to blowback via 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and the second Iraq war.
This is just one example. Any time you see articles like this, follow the sources. They either wont cite anything, or will cite a thinktank/NGO staffed by career intelligence workers and funded by similar groups.
The NED is a CIA-cut out says the New York Times: "The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades"[1].
They are right to ask for a source. I should provide them more often, if possible with statements coming straight out of the horse's mouth. These days, our politicians are so cocky they tend to announce to the whole world their conspiracies.
I don't exactly see it this way - "You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their experience around specific problem areas without ever mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific solution is likely to bias your subject."
Sometimes the entrepreneur needs to expand the possibility space, rather than just addressing an "unmet need". There's the Jobs-ism about figuring out what the customer is going to want before they do. Thiel also talks in Zero to One about some of the biggest innovations not spawning from customer feedback or lean methodology.
I wouldn't say that GPT addressed a problem I had per se. It just created a whole new set of activities I wanted to try.
One of the best HN posts I’ve ever read. Thanks for sharing your story. I don’t have any doubt you’ll be happy about your pivot and successful in your next phase. Good luck.
Author here. Thanks for the kind words and happy to answer any questions. If you like my writing, checkout my blog at rnikhil.com where this was posted originally.
100% agree with this. If we seek true breakthroughs, we need highly experienced and focused teams working together on specific problems. These teams should be comprised primarily of staff scientists, like they have at the national laboratories like Lawrence. Given how high of a priority the US government places on funding biomedical research, it doesn't make sense for the vast majority of funding to be allocated to principal investigators who count that research project as only one of their numerous job responsibilities. Nor does it make sense for that work to be executed by under-supported postdocs and technicians. Instead, cultivate a career track that goes from grad student to junior -> senior staff scientist. Prioritize positions other than academic faculty with continuity and the ability to focus primarily on making steady research advancements.
Yes. This problem is of particular importance in drug response prediction, where small molecules are represented as graphs where the atoms are nodes and the bonds are edges. These are difficult to work with because of the variability in the number of nodes.
I'll play the contrarian and suggest that a space race is the best kind of national pride. If you're okay with football (soccer) or Olympics pride, this is, in my mind, better still.
And ironaically, as you suggest, when one country wins, we in fact all win.
I would much rather we fight to push back the boundaries of space than to hurl actual bombs at each other.
It took me a while to understand what's going on in these comments before I was reminded of the 30 Rock episode where a Canadian character has trouble understanding sarcasm because there aren't many Jews there.
But still, did you all miss the winking emoji right there following the text?
My point really wasn't that these folks got what's coming to them for their arrogance. My point is that this isn't a mission of international we're-all-in-this-together cooperation. It is very much viewed by the Israeli's running the mission as a part of the nation-state space race.
It's true. As an Israeli it's a very secreterian narrative was built around this endeavor.
We have in Israel a very deep rooted siege mentality, which considering our history is not surprising. Our current powers at be foster this feeling of pride and fear because it is a great way to keep political power.
It is rather sad that every Israeli endeavour is tainted by these sentiments. I am trying to ignore it but I kind of hoped for failure, I thought I couldn't handle the nationalistic euphoria orgy we would have in the media if we did land.
This! While my sentiment may feel a bit Star Trekky/naive, our quest to get to the stars will only succeed if we, as a planet, pull together. If we dont, we'll be limited to this solar system. China, US, India, Israel, Russia (sorry for anyone else Im missing :-)), are all pioneers and we should celebrate their successes, and continued desire to push the envelope.
The issue every single country you listed is that space tech and ICBM tech are virtually the same. Those countries are good at it because they make excellent missiles for war. It is a sad reality. NASA and the DoD work hand in hand together, and virtually always have.
I completely agree. War drives innovation, its a very sad reality. Though in order to get further than our solar system, we'll either need to destroy ourselves, or combine our resources. Some are already trying, and its great. Others have a way to go before realizing this. Very altruistic, I know. Though I think some altruism is needed!
It’s time to retire the ignorant notion that nation-state space programs can be morally disentangled from the governments pursuing them in no small part for political ends. Their success is the regime’s success.
Indeed, and the Israeli project was a new experiment in low cost, volunteer rich space exploration. Its outcome and repetition _is_ significant to everyone. Indeed, nationalistic associations distract from rather than enhance a project.
And we have a few examples of internationalism already like the ISS. And presumably any Mars mission will have to be international. Which is another one of the reasons such projects is worth while.
Agree to disagree here. The whole "we're all one people thing" is a great idea and all (I'm a huge fan, would love for the U.N. to be something other than the personification of national relations and instead be a real governing body) but that's not how things work.
This is Israel's project. They had assistance from other organizations/countries, but they're not doing this to better North Korea in any real way and you shouldn't hold North Korean responsible for their failure.
Disagree to agree here. It should really be how things can work. We have the opportunity and possibly the unity to get together on a vision for mankind for the first time in history. Obviously there are challenges, but if all people got to vote in their respective democraties for a global push to space - I would be surprised to not see it approved.
Should is a dangerous word. Just because you or I think something should happen doesn't mean it is in any way realistic. It seems we're a competitive species, and we rarely do anything really hard if it doesn't offer a chance to be the first or best at something, or to better someone else.
That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that we need something to change the market, not fairy tales about international cooperation. Elon Musk's project to massively decrease the cost of space access is a step in the right direction. I don't think we'd ever get to widespread space activity if we depend on massive spending by national governments to do it.
> Obviously there are challenges, but if all people got to vote in their respective democraties for a global push to space - I would be surprised to not see it approved.
My point is that I would be very much surprised to see it approved, as it appears to be the people themselves who have become against these sorts of global pushes.
Yes, it should be the goal, I was raised on Star Trek, I'm just saying that doesn't seem likely.
Horrifying.
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