Warren Buffet's BLM Global Network Losing Its Grassroots Due To Lack Of Transparency And DNC Control

BAR  |  Black Lives Matter Inland Empire, in an open letter, last week announced its departure from the cash-heavy Black Lives Global Network.

“The issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party.”

To our community,

Recently, a group of BLM chapters known as the BLM 10 has come forward to voice their concerns and opposition to the Global Network. Those concerns, along with the egregious conduct the Global network demonstrated on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, have brought us to the conclusion that continuing to remain silent would be an act of betrayal. While the issues and problems that have been raised have been well known within our circle for years, it prompted many questions & concerns for us locally. We’d like to let the community know everything outlined in the statement put out by the BLM 10 is valid. We’ve also reached out to the BLM 10 and offered to sign on in support. Hopefully, we can provide insight and clarification into our chapter’s history, our relationship with the global network, and our commitments going forward. 

When BLM IE first started, we were originally known as the Black and Brown Underground (BBU). In 2015 we were approached by an individual named Patrisse Cullors, who offered us an opportunity to join the Global Network and organize as a Black Lives Matter chapter.  After hearing her proposal, we believed that our work, direction, and principles aligned and agreed to join the network; renaming ourselves Black Lives Matter Inland Empire in the process. We were told that the organization we were joining was decentralized and leaderless, but we quickly discovered that was not the case. The Global Network is a top-down dogmatic organization that promotes certain chapters that choose to align with their direction and sequester the ones that don’t. For us locally, that chapter has been Los Angeles.

“Continuing to remain silent would be an act of betrayal.”

For years, the leadership of the Los Angeles chapter has aligned with the Global network and One United Bank to impose on various chapters, particularly ours. We believe that while doing this they received substantial donations and funding, despite them continually soliciting the community for donations. Together, the Los Angeles Chapter along with the Global Network have consistently tried to strong-arm other groups and have worked to undermine a grassroots movement by capitalizing on unpaid labor, suppressing any internal attempt at democracy, commodifying Black death, and profiting from the same pain and suffering inflicted on Black communities that we’re fighting to end. In spite of being ostracised, receiving no financial support, and the maltreatment from both the Global Network and Los Angeles Chapter we’ve maintained our composure while working to the benefit of our community and victims of state sanctioned violence. 

Clearly, we do not have the same beliefs or sense of ethics. We no longer feel, as we initially did, that our politics align. As a result, we are announcing that we are no longer associated or connected to the BLM Global Network. As an attempt to distance ourselves, we have decided to rename part of our organization The Black Power Collective while we restructure. 

The use of the BLM name, which we believed was intended to unify our struggle, has been commodified and debased. It is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements. We have no interest in these pursuits, and we are opposed to the movement to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism. It has become clear that the Global network and certain figures have platformed our struggles with the sole purpose of exploiting our labor.

“The BLM name is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements.”

 Furthermore, the issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party. This is hypocritical at best, as the Democratic Party has historically rejected and ignored BLM’s demands and has made it clear that they are pro-police, pro-prison, and committed to capitalism. From Obama’s support of police and his double-cross of Erica Garner, to “Top Cop” Kamala Harris’ denial of justice for Matrice Richardson, even going back to the 1994 Crime Bill authored by Joe Biden along with the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act that stripped basic human rights from countless Black people—the Democratic Party has literally created the conditions that led to the formation of this movement. Even now, the Democractic party continues to support imperialism, killing African heads of state, bombing Somalia, abusing immigrants (including those of the Black diaspora), and spreading the U.S. military throughout Black and Brown countries around the world. This is a party that is a threat both here and internationally. To ally with them is to ally against ourselves.

Awwwww SNAP!!! Gov. Andrew Cuomo Done Fscked Up Now!!!

WSJ  |  Three months ago New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for “his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of TV to inform and calm people around the world.” Turns out the Emmys had the right actor—but the wrong performance. Increasingly it looks like Mr. Cuomo’s real act was to keep people from finding out how many people in his state’s nursing homes died from Covid-19.

On Thursday the New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, the Governor’s top aide, admitted to Democratic leaders that the state had deliberately kept the true numbers from them. In a Wednesday conference call, Ms. DeRosa told Democrats the Cuomo administration rejected a legislative request for the figures last August because Donald Trump was tweeting that “we killed everyone in nursing homes” and was directing “the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.”

As Ms. DeRosa put it, “Basically, we froze.” The administration wasn’t sure, she said, if any information it released to state lawmakers or the Department of Justice “was going to be used against us” or “if there was going to be an investigation.”

Nursing home deaths are a sensitive issue for Mr. Cuomo because of a March 25 health department directive that barred these homes from rejecting people because they had Covid-19. The Associated Press reports that 9,056 recovering patients were sent into nursing homes after the directive, more than 40% higher than what the state had previously reported. 

In January state Attorney General Letitia James released a report on an investigation into complaints about how the nursing homes handled Covid-19. Two findings stand out. First, that “a larger number of nursing home residents died from COVID-19 than” the official data reflected. Second, that the March 25 directive “requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.”

Liberty! Fraternity! Hierarchy! Qualitative Spiritual Praxis Or Biologically Conceived Hierarchy?

gatestoneinstitute  |  China is in the process of creating the "perfect Communist," Weichert, also the author of Winning Space, told Gatestone. "China is run by a regime that believes in the perfectibility of mankind, and with the advent of modern genetic and biotechnology research, China's central planners now have the human genome itself to perfect according to their political agenda."

Chinese scientists already are on the road of "gene-doping" to make future generations smarter and more innovative than those in countries refusing to embrace these controversial methods. "What you are witnessing in China," Weichert has written, "is the convergence of advanced technology with cutting-edge bio-sciences, capable of fundamentally altering all life on this planet according to the capricious whims of a nominally Communist regime."

Shenzhen's He, after an international uproar caused by news of his dangerous and unethical work, was fined and jailed for "illegally carrying out human embryo gene-editing," but in the Communist Party's near-total surveillance state, he obviously had state backing for his experiments.

He's efforts are not isolated. Nature magazine's news team reported in April 2015 that Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, in another world-first experiment, edited "non-viable" human embryos with CRISPR-Cas9. "A Chinese source familiar with developments in the field said that at least four groups in China are pursuing gene editing in human embryos," the magazine's website stated.

Beijing's prosecution of He, therefore, looks like an attempt to cool down the furor and prevent the international scientific community from further inquiry into China's activities.

Unfortunately, China's advances in gene editing human embryos for super soldiers is persuading others they must do the same. Soon, for instance, there will be "Le Terminator." The French government has just given approval for augmented soldiers. "We have to be clear, not everyone has the same scruples as us and we have to prepare ourselves for such a future," declared French Minister for the Armed Forces Florence Parly.

Michael Clarke of Kings College London told the Sun, the British tabloid, there is now a biological competition fueled by China. Will we soon have, as the International Society for Military Ethics has dubbed it, a race of "homo robocopus"?

Ahnenerbe The Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Organization

salon  |  There were three main categories of unethical medical experiments carried out by Nazi scientists, most of which were done under the supervision of Sievers and the Ahnenerbe (as well as, famously, by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz). Prisoners were used as some laboratories might experiment on animals.

The first category was survival testing. The idea was to determine the human survival thresholds for Nazi soldiers. One example was an experiment to determine the altitude at which air force crews could safely parachute. Prisoners were placed in low-pressure chambers to replicate the thin atmosphere of flight, and observed to see when organs began to fail. Sievers’ most infamous experiments at Dachau were to determine the temperature at which the human body would fail, in the case of hypothermia, and also how best to resuscitate a nearly-frozen human. A body temperature probe was inserted into the rectum of prisoners, who were then frozen in a variety of manners (for example, immersion in ice water or standing naked in the snow). It was established that consciousness was lost, followed quickly by death, when body temperature reached 25 C. Bodies of the nearly-frozen were then brought back up in temperature through a variety of similarly unpleasant manners, such as immersion in near-boiling water. Himmler himself suggested the most bizarre, but least cruel, method of reviving a hypothermic — by obliging him to have sex in a warm bed with multiple ladies. This was actually practiced (and seemed to work, at least better than the other methods). But the very idea that experiments were undertaken to kill or almost kill, humans through freezing, and then determine how best to resuscitate them, bring them back to life, is not a long leap to the reanimation of the clinically dead.

The second category of tests included those with pharmaceuticals and experimental surgeries, with inmates used like lab rats. Doctors tested immunizations against contagious diseases like malaria, typhus, hepatitis and tuberculosis, injecting prisoners and exposing them to diseases, then observing what happened. Procedural experiments, like those involving bone-grafting without anesthetic, which took place at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp, could also fall into this category. Antidotes were sought to chemical weapons like mustard gas and phosgene, with no regard for the well-being of those experimented upon. Keeping in mind the Nazi policy of using prisoners of “lesser” races for economic benefit (this is why concentration camp victims were often kept just alive enough to provide free labor, rather than universally being killed upon capture), this prisoner-as-guinea-pig approach fits into this perverse logic.

November 1944 saw an experiment with a cocktail drug called D-IX, at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. D-IX included cocaine and a stimulant called pervitine. The Luftwaffe (Nazi air force) had been supplied with 29 million pervitine pills from April-December 1939 alone, with the pill codenamed “obm.” Its use left the soldiers addicted, but did succeed in extending attention spans, reducing the need for sleep and food and giving a dramatic increase in stamina. 18 prisoners were given D-IX pills and forced to march while wearing backpacks loaded with 20 kilos of material — after taking the pills, they were able to march, without rest, up to 90 kilometers a day. The goal was to determine the outer limit of stamina induced by the pills. The D-IX pill proper, launched March 16th, 1944, included in each pill 5 mg of cocaine, 3 mg of pervitine, 5 mg of eucodal (a morphine-based painkiller) and synthetic cocaine. It was tested in the field with the Forelle diversionary unit of submariners. The experimentation and use of the pills, both on prisoners and soldiers, was considered very successful, and a plan was put in place to supply pills to the whole Nazi army, but the Allied victory months later stopped this. These pills sought to create super soldiers, in a contorted interpretation of the Nietzschean übermensch.

The third category was racial, or ideological testing, famously overseen by Josef Mengele, who experimented on twins and gypsies, to see how different races responded to contagious diseases. Mass-sterilization experiments on Jews and gypsies provided a sort of photo-negative to one of Himmler’s pet projects, called Lebensborn. It was a breeding program in which racially-ideal Aryan men and women (tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, strong Nordic bone structure) were obliged to breed, in order to produce more, and purer, Aryan children. This was part and parcel with the belief that the Aryans of the 20^th century were descended from an ancient race with superhuman powers — and that these powers had been gradually lost through interbreeding with “lower” races. If the “pollution” of these other races could be bred out, through generations of Aryans mixing only with other Aryans, then perhaps these powers could be regained? This, too, has an echo of resurrection to it. Resurrecting the lost purity of the original Aryans from Thule, and bringing back their superhuman powers, through breeding programs with pure-blooded Aryans.

Comprehending Transcendent Levels Of Reality Through Concrete Phenomena

aaroncheak  |  The Lubiczs returned to France in the early 1950s, retiring to Mas du Coucagno at Plan-de-Grasse. In 1952, on the day of St. John the Baptist, Schwaller penned an intriguing text entitled Verbe Nature (Nature Word), perhaps one of his most deeply revealing works.[61] The subtitle of the work is: Quelques réponses de la Nature et de ses Sages aux questions de l’auteur, porte-parole des inconnus (Some responses from Nature and her Sages to the questions of the author, spokesperson of the unknown). Bearing the distinct stamp of Schwaller’s mysterious daimon, the premise of the text is the transcription of a series of answers given by ‘Nature and her sages’ to questions posed, but not recorded, by Schwaller. It is thus composed solely of responses. One of the more important features of the text is the insight it gives into Schwaller’s broader theories of biological and spiritual transmutation. Nature Word makes the startling claim that there is a fixed alchemical salt—an immortal mineral ‘nucleus’ that neither fire nor putrefaction can destroy—residing in the human femur.

 With unusual specificity, Schwaller held that the incorruptible salt in the human femur is the mineral ‘register’ upon which the most vital moments of human consciousness could be permanently ‘inscribed’. This salt or nucleus was, in comparison the chromosome,  ‘extremely fixed or even indestructible’.[62] Schwaller regarded it as more permanent than DNA and accorded it a key role in his esoteric theory of evolution (genesis). Contrary to the Darwinian theory (where only the characteristics of the species are able to be preserved through genetic transmission), Schwaller maintained that the fixed salt located in the femur is the precise mechanism by which individual characteristics—the vital modes of consciousness—are able to be preserved and transmitted beyond the death of the individual. This salt was therefore central to the alchemical process of rebirth (palingenesis). Within the wider framework of Schwaller’s cosmology—in which material genesis is conceived as the visible index of the evolution of consciousness—the alchemical salt forms the ‘magnet’ that draws primordial matter through the existential vehicles of the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms towards the ultima materia (or telos) of ‘spiritual concretion’. As such it formed the hidden link—the invisible bond in the chain of continuity—in the otherwise apparently discontinuous process in which the generation and corruption of evolving forms is situated.

In 1956, Schwaller published Le Roi de la théocratie pharaonique (The King of Pharaonic Theocracy), a work which, among other things, traces the deviation and distortion of Egyptian consciousness through Greek rationality, highlighting the Egyptian rather than Greek basis of the intellectual ‘miracle’ than transformed antique civilisation. In this work, Schwaller reveals important insights into the alchemical process of ‘qualitative exaltation’, a term he compares to the occurence of ‘teratological proliferation’ (mutational phenomena) in plants. Pointing to the images of the proliferous lotuses depicted on the ‘Botanical Gardens’ of Thutmose III at Karnak, he reveals how authentic alchemical mutation emerges not from the purification of the material body of an entity, but from the intensification of its spirit or consciousness.[63] In short, consciousness shapes form, and it was precisely the qualitative exaltations of consciousness that were registered in the immortal mineral remains (the fixed salt) and carried over between kingdoms and species, thus forming the Ariadne’s thread in de Lubicz’s esoteric theory of evolution.

 It was in Plan-de-Grasse, however, that Schwaller finally completed and published his three-volume magnum opus, Le Temple de l’homme (1957-8), the magisterial synthesis of his many years of on-site study in the temples of ancient Egypt. On the eve of Le Temple, Schwaller presented some papers at the Congrès des Symbolists in Paris.[64] Just after his chef d’œuvre appeared, a Belgian-American by the name of André VandenBroeck encountered Schwaller’s work and, over a period of eighteen months, became his last, and perhaps most important, ‘disciple’. The account that VandenBroeck left of this period (1959-60), published some twenty-seven years later on the centenary of Schwaller’s birth (Al-Kemi: Hermetic, Occult, Political, and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, 1987), remains the single most important memoir of Schwaller de Lubicz to date.

 The final book published by de Lubicz was Propos sur ésotérisme et symbole (On Esotericism and Symbol, 1960), a short text actually written during the Christmas of 1947, and dedicated to his ‘friends from the Luxor group’. Propos sur ésotérisme et symbole distils many of the themes explored in the wealth of notes and unpublished papers that Schwaller wrote throughout the 1940s, and remains one of his most concise meditations on metaphysics, containing specific insights into the Hermetic mystery of salt.[65]

Human Beings DO Live In A Simplified Narrative-Dream World...,

NYTimes |  Relations between master and disciple were always difficult. Mr. VandenBroeck already had some background in the occultist philosophy of Ouspenkyism and in the hardly less bizarre Chicago-based general semantics movement, which opposed traditional Aristotelian logic. De Lubicz for his part was suspicious and cryptic. Knowledge had to be worked for.

R. A. Schwaller was born in 1887. In his youth he worked as a chemist and studied art and theosophy. The aristocratic Lithuanian poet and occultist Oscar Milosz conferred the title of de Lubicz on Schwaller. At around the same time, Schwaller de Lubicz claims to have met the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli. Fulcanelli later became famous for his book ''Le Mystere des Cathedrales'' (1925), an alchemical reading of the symbolism of Gothic cathedrals.

Soon afterward, Fulcanelli (certainly a pseudonym) vanished mysteriously. De Lubicz claimed that Fulcanelli had not only pirated his (de Lubicz's) ideas on the symbolism of cathedrals, but had also attempted to make gold without fully understanding the procedure. This last had fatal consequences, and Mr. VandenBroeck tells us that, when de Lubicz visited Fulcanelli on his deathbed, the alchemist had turned black.

After World War I, de Lubicz was largely responsible for the formation of the Veilleurs (the Watchmen), a group dedicated to preserving higher values in a demoralized postwar world. The higher values were those of hierarchy and discipline. The elite of the Veilleurs sought to evolve to a higher state of being. The group's ambitions were esoteric and protofascist. Subsequently R. A. de Lubicz went to Egypt, where he spent years studying the temple at Luxor. ''Le Temple de l'Homme,'' published in 1958, was his exposition of the inner meaning of Pharaonic architecture, which boring mainstream Egyptologists with their profane readings had failed to penetrate. Finally, de Lubicz moved to Grasse, where Mr. VandenBroeck found him a couple of years before his death.

This is all quite interesting, but the reader has to work hard to extract the interest. The book is clogged with abstruse lectures on secret harmonies, mystical chemistry and whatnot. The style is rigorous, but the content is ultimately meaningless.

Eventually, Mr. VandenBroeck left the temple of mysteries at Grasse. It is to his credit that an important motive for his doing so was that he found de Lubicz's political ideas objectionable. It would have been even more to his credit if he had gone further and had recognized that most of de Lubicz's theories were junk. His ''archeology'' at Luxor failed to take account of the ascertainable circumstances of the temple's building. His ''history'' was a farrago of nonsense about racial destiny and the secret histories of Templars, tarot cards and so on. His ''geography'' had space for a manmade Nile and a Sphinx up to its neck in seawater. His ''science'' was an ill-tempered polemic against Darwin and Einstein. It is odd, then, to find Saul Bellow's foreword giving endorsement to de Lubicz as ''a source of revolutionary insights.''

 

 

Social Media Is A Scam

idler |  From The Century of the Self to HyperNormalisation, the journalist Adam Curtis has consistently exposed stories and truths that lay hidden to others. His BBC blogs feature brilliantly researched articles on, for example, the history of think tanks and their relationship with battery farming and Google. Always entertaining and always a provocative, original voice, he refuses to spout liberal platitudes and makes up his own mind. This bold voice has found him millions of fans across the world, and he is gaining a new audience among the teens and 20-somethings.

I recorded two interviews with Curtis and what follows is edited highlights from our exchanges. We start by discussing the so-called power of the tech titans. Adam argues that a simple way to remove their grip on us would be to stop believing in their magic.

Adam Curtis: When we say: “Facebook is a dark, manipulative force”, it makes the people in charge seem extremely powerful. The truth is that people within the advertising and marketing industry are extremely suspicious about whether online advertising has any effect at all. The internet has been captured by four giant corporations who don’t produce anything, contribute nothing to the wealth of the country, and hoard their billions of dollars in order to pounce on anything that appears to be a competitor and buy it out immediately. They will get you and me to do the work for them – which is putting the data in – then they send out what they con other people into believing are targeted ads. But actually, the problem with their advertising is that it is – like all geek stuff – literal. It has no imagination to it whatsoever. It sees that you bought a ticket to Budapest, so you’re going to get more tickets to Budapest. It’s a scam. In a way, the whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica thing played into their hands because it made it even more mystifying. I’ve always thought John Le Carré did spies a great service because he made it seem as if there were endless depths of mystery and darkness when in fact, if you’ve ever researched the spies, they are (a) boring and (b) useless. I mean really, really useless. I researched MI5 once and they hardly ever manage to capture any traitors… it’s usually someone else who points them in the right direction. And in a way I think that’s true of this. The tech companies are powerful in the sense that they’ve got hold of the internet, which people like me think could be a really powerful thing for changing the world and disseminating new ideas, and they’ve got it in this rigid headlock. To do that, they’ve conned everyone into thinking that their advertising is worth it. And in the process, they’re destroying journalism.

Tom Hodgkinson: Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are surely clever and manipulative though?

AC: I’m sure some really bad stuff went on. There’s no question about that. But where’s the evidence that it actually swayed elections? What we lost in the hysteria about it all, is the sense of: why did people really vote for Brexit and Trump? I maintain that all the evidence points to the fact that there is real anger and a sense of isolation in Britain and America. The results reflected that. For 20 years, they’ve been offered no choice between the political parties. They’ve been given this enormous button that says “Fuck off” and they’ve pressed it. That’s a rational thing to do. The problem with the professional classes is that they don’t know how to deal with that. Instead they turn to these other reasons, which of course are there. But it’s like they’re looking at a little part of something much, much bigger, which involves having to make political choices about what might have gone wrong in your society. Everyone goes: “Oh that’s magical!” about the internet, but so what? That’s actually just so banal. People go: “Oh it’s terrible, they’re manipulating us!” or: “They know so much about me!” Well, what do they know about you? Your shopping? That’s it? What they don’t know, actually, are all the things that you’ve forgotten which are your real intelligence, and that world that you live in your head, day by day – which is rich and extraordinary.

TH: That’s a lovely thought. So we should really be saying they’re stupid and they’re boring?

AC: Yes, and all they really know about you is your shopping.

TH: There are good things about the internet.

AC: The internet is all sorts of things. The real problem is that we’ve grown up in a period of high individualism and, in a period of high individualism, the one thing you don’t notice is power. You’re supposed to be an empowered individual yourself. What’s disappeared out of the language is power. We just don’t see it. We just blindly go through the world, not seeing that there are powerful forces.

Transcend Delusional Narrative Conditioning And Return To The Lucid Understanding Of Reality

caitlinjohnstone |  It’s easier to control people through the narrative world than the real world because the narrative world and its relationship with the real world is too complicated for most people to understand, whereas the real world is quite simple and straightforward. For this reason, a tremendous amount of energy goes into controlling the dominant narratives, the dominant stories that people tell about what’s going on in the world.

Convince people to accept the narrative that a government’s leader is an evil dictator in need of regime change, and you can trade that narrative for real world control over a crucial geostrategic region. Convince people to accept that the status quo is working fine and any attempts to change it are dangerous insanity, and you ensure that people will never rise up and take away your real world control. Convince people that anyone questioning your narratives is a conspiracy theorist or a Russian propagandist, and you ensure your continued hegemonic control over the narrative world.

The most powerful manipulators are the ones who have succeeded in exerting control over both the real world and the narrative world, and they pursue both agendas with equal emphasis. Populations in the real world who insist upon their own national, resource, financial, economic or military sovereignty are subject to real world attacks by bombs, starvation sanctions and special ops. Entities in the narrative world which threaten imperial narrative domination are attacked, smeared, marginalized and censored.

That’s all we are seeing with the increasingly shrill mainstream panic about disinformation, conspiracy theories, foreign propaganda and domestic extremism. Our rulers and their media lackeys are not compassionately protecting us from deception, they are ensuring that they remain the only ones authorized to administer deception. By golly the only ones allowed to deceive us should be our government, our news media, our teachers and our priests.

As China and its allies increasingly threaten the real world hegemony of the US and its allies, operations in the narrative world are getting increasingly heated and intense. Expect continued demonization of Russia, and expect anti-China propaganda to get more and more noisy. Expect people to be herded into partisan echo chambers with thicker and thicker walls in the narrative world, because dividing them up in this way makes it much easier to administer propaganda to them.

The narrative world is getting more and more frenzied while the real world is headed toward disaster due to the military and ecological pressures created by our status quo. There are only a few ways this can possibly break, with the most obvious being mass scale climate disaster or nuclear war.

Why Doesn't Matthew Rosenfeld Say A Word About The Origin Of Signal?

TAC |  Recent political turmoil has driven a stampede of smartphone users to encrypted messaging services, so much so that service providers are having a hard time keeping up with demand. The exodus to these digital havens might come across as reasonable given social media’s newfound penchant for censorship and deplatforming. However, the public record shows that encrypted messaging apps, despite the litany of high-profile celebrity endorsements, aren’t what they appear to be. Lurking beneath the assurances of confidentiality are unsettling facts that raise doubts about the wisdom of following the herd.

The mainstream press has been talking up apps like Signal and Telegram. The New York Times in particular. That, in and of itself, should set off alarm bells. Signal, for example, has received millions of dollars over the years from a bureaucratic spin-off of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Broadcast Board of Governors, rebranded as the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has been an ardent supporter of Signal through its Open Technology Fund. The U.S. Agency for Global Media is the foreign propaganda arm of the State Department and has historical links to clandestine regime-change operations.

The Signal project is run by a guy who won’t tell anyone his real name. Would you buy insurance from someone like that, much less trust them with your physical safety? Another indicator that something is amiss. Said guy goes by the handle of Moxie Marlinspike. He likes to create the impression of a radical anarchist who’s leading a noble battle against government surveillance. Which is unusual considering how acquainted Marlinspike appears to be with government officials. Indeed, they liked him so much they financed him.

Telegram likewise has some notable advocates despite its questionable security. Enrique Tarrio, who currently leads the Proud Boys, described Telegram’s platform as “the darkest part of the web.” Which sounds like a glowing testimonial by an ostensibly credible figure. Readers should note that based on court documents viewed by Reuters, federal officials indicate that Tarrio has worked with law enforcement as an informant on a number of cases. In an interview with Reuters Tarrio stated, “I don’t recall any of this.” Keep in mind that infiltration and subversion are genuine threats to secure messaging systems. In fact, online providers could even facilitate such monitoring by adding hidden members to messaging groups.

Don’t even ask about Facebook’s WhatsApp messenger. The company openly admits that it collects more than enough metadata to dispel any illusions about personal privacy.

All of this underscores an inconvenient truth about apps which Ken Thompson, the creator of UNIX, spelled out nearly four decades ago. In his excellent Turing Award Lecture Thompson warned, “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.” Primarily because, as the SolarWinds debacle illustrated, backdoors are a grave threat. And it just so happens that the American intelligence community has a heavily documented record of planting backdoors in software, one that goes all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War, with global business interests like Crypto AG that outwardly appeared to be legitimate. The Swiss are neutral, right? Nope, not when they’re in bed with the CIA. Please understand that the organizations which deployed the compromised encryption technology sold by Crypto AG mistakenly believed that it was going to make them more secure. Allied governments naively trusted state secrets to gear that they didn’t design, giving spies a perfect opportunity.

 

Floridians Thank God Every Day Mayor Q Andrew Gillum Didn't Get Selected Governor...,

turcopolier  |  Republican governors need to go on the offensive. They should require every hospital to collect and publish data along the lines of what Sarasota Memorial Hospital puts out every day. Those numbers should be posted on a website that all citizens can read. But additional data is needed. What are the ages of the people dying? Florida is called God's waiting room by some wags because of the swarm of elderly that have put down roots here to avoid shoveling feet of global warming in such charming iceboxes as Massachusetts, Minnesota and Iowa. Guess what? Old people die. Not just from COVID.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that COVID is not a real, serious disease. But it is not the only disease that threatens life and we should not be bullied into sacrificing our Constitutional rights just because some out of touch bureaucrats buried in the bowels of Washington try to tell you where you can worship and who you can hang out with.

I believe information is power and we need to put more of the correct information into the hands of each and every American. You are more trusted to run your life than letting slow Joe do it.

Sarasota Memorial Hospital	17-Nov	15-Dec	10-Feb
Today’s patient census:	678	757	718
COVID-positive patients total	57	78	45
% of Covid Patients in Hospital	8.41%	10.30%	6.27%
ICU census:	51	57	55
CoVID-positive patients in ICU	12	9	10
% of Covid Patients in ICU	23.53%	15.79%	18.18%
Total Hospital Beds	839	839	839
Total ICU Beds	62	62	72
7-Day SMH positivity rate	5.40%	4.63%	3.20%
Patients who tested positive	1348	1701	2811
Patients who tested negative	32011	38265	52510
% of Patient who tested positive	4.21%	4.45%	5.35%
Patients hospitalized since outbreak began (Mar 2, 2020)	1134	1410	1999
Patients treated/discharged	1233	1548	2304
Patient Deaths	112	140	203

Empty StoreFronts Put The Lie To Quinton Lucas' Broke Kansas City Buck-Passing

kansascity |  Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas is proposing a $12 million cut to the budget of the Kansas City Police Department, and that’s not going to be painless, either practically or politically.

But given that so much of our city budget is spent on public safety, there is no way, in the middle of this pandemic that won’t be over until most of us get vaccinated, that the KCPD could or should be spared this 4.3% cut.

As Lucas has been saying for months, it was the refusal of congressional Republicans to send any pandemic relief to cities that will now necessitate some degree of “defunding” all over the country. 

Because it’s cities, of course, that actually fund our local police.

“We hear all the time about irresponsible cities” that because they’re run by Democrats deserve no COVID-19 relief, the mayor said in a Tuesday night interview. But “if we’d received CARES Act funding that allowed for revenue replacement, there would be no cuts to the police department.” 

This is a little bit like those in the pro-Donald Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol who were carrying Blue Lives Matter flags — while attacking police officers. It doesn’t track, does it?

It’s “because of our Republican defunding of government,” Lucas said, that “we’re being forced to reevaluate” how to keep the city as safe as possible with less funding for police officers.

So what might that look like? “In budgets past, we said there’s one way to address violent crime,” and that was by hiring more officers. Last year’s budget did that, and for a lot of reasons, we still had our most violent year ever.

Now, “rather than being afraid” because that’s not even an option, “rightsizing gives us the opportunity” to look at alternatives, Lucas said. Like “better collaboration with social services.”

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article249204540.html#storylink=cpy

 

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article249204540.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article249204540.html#storylink=cpy

Whether He Intended To Or Not - Trump Put Himself In Direct Opposition To The Great Reset

thescrum |   There are rumblings among the Right and Libertarian factions of Western politics about a horrific plan that Davos Man intends to unleash upon mankind: The Great Reset! While Western conservatives and libertarians depict this as some sort of globalist attempt to take advantage of the disruption caused by the Covid–19 pandemic to impose a global, eco-socialist system of governance, this assessment is incomplete. At bottom, the Great Reset is the expression of a movement based on greenwashing, the fetishization of digital technology, and a neoliberal conceptual nucleus: a corporate structural “reform” called stakeholder capitalism. 

Let us be wary.

If one scratches the surface of the Reset movement one can see why it should be viewed with skepticism and caution. It has many questionable boosters. Credibility is not strong when one’s movement is composed of such figures as Tony Blair, famous for foolishly lending British support to the 2003 Iraq war, or corporations such as Nestlé, notorious for taking worldwide advantage of lax tax laws and, further back in history, its disgraceful exploitation of mothers in developing nations in what is known infamously as “the baby formula scandal.” Indeed, the danger here is that corporations are hurtling towards a complete usurpation of national sovereignty, a global corporate coup intended not to impose a global Green New Deal but to maintain the neoliberal order.

The Reset crowd’s roots in Davos are not to be overlooked. Two prominent apostles of the movement, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, have a strong Davosian pedigree. Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in Davos 40 years ago. He is a former member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, an organization dedicated to defending “free” market Western capitalism, and helped create the concept of stakeholder capitalism. Malleret is a former investment banker and founded/headed the Global Risk Network at the World Economic Forum. 

To add further fuel to the skepticism fire, TIME recently partnered with the WEF and interviewed a number of Reset advocates, ranging from Doug McMillon, the CEO of Wal–Mart, a company notorious for its poor treatment of employees, to Kristalina Georgieva, the current director of the International Monetary Fund, an organization notorious for inflicting austerity and privatization programs upon nation after nation as conditions for needed multilateral financial assistance. The founders of this movement, Schwab and Malleret, claim in their book, Covid–19: The Great Reset, that this movement is “an attempt to identify and shed light on the changes ahead, and to make a modest contribution in terms of delineating what their more desirable and sustainable form might resemble.”   

“Stakeholder capitalism,”… positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges…There is the prospect, however likely or unlikely, that corporations will eventually be persuaded that stakeholder capitalism is ultimately beneficial to their bottom lines—in effect a new profit-maximization strategy with the added benefit of preserving the social order—and enter in enthusiastically.

The problem I have with the article is that the author seems to discount the full extent to which the ruling elites have already positioned themselves as the “trustees” of the “social order.” It’s as if this were hypothetical planning for the future whereas in it is clearly underscored in a recent Time article, referenced in below link, that the “Shareholders” (aka ruling elites) came out and boasted how they took measures to determine the 2020 Presidential election outcome.

The “great reset” is an ongoing process whose various machinations are documented in many places, including here, at NC. Cloaking it in terms of “Stake Holder” vs. “Shareholder”, in my opinion, masks the more fundamental questions regarding human freedom, agency, and what it means to be human. When making statements that pertain to the relationship between the individual and society without reference once to “class” and or incorporating elements of class analysis, seems odd in an article that seeks to examine structural changes in capitalism

“…It is hard to see corporations voluntarily switching to a stakeholder model after being accustomed to forty years of rapacious shareholder capitalism. What non-corporate entity could possibly force corporations to transform? Governments come to mind as they have, in the past, acted as shapers and regulators of capitalism…”

“…Schwab nonetheless (and very ironically) makes the familiar claim we have come to call TINA since Margaret Thatcher made the phrase familiar—“there is no alternative”—and specifically dismisses state capitalism as a rival: “But while state capitalism may be a good fit for one stage of development, it, too, should gradually evolve into something closer to a stakeholder model, lest it succumb to corruption from within.”

The fundamental requirement of this global neoliberal project is to destroy the capacity of nation-states to regulate economic activity. Perry Anderson’s recent three part opus on the EU illustrated this well. Ideologically, the fundamental requirement is the absolute demonization of “nationalism” and also “populism” as synonymous with fascism. This is why the Establishment reaction against Trump is so ferocious. This is also why the example of China is so threatening, and must be undermined at all costs.
Neither Trump nor China represent my ideal exemplars. But both challenge the TINA arguments of the global elite that “stakeholder capitalism” our only real future.

  

The Conspiracy To Take The 2020 Presidential Election

Time |  There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

The Harr-Iden Administration Opened The Border But Wants To Close Florida?

floridapolitics | Florida’s Governor blasted as “unconstitutional” a trial balloon floated from the Joe Biden administration that would see domestic travel restrictions imposed on the state, setting up a day of what would be aggressive messaging and fundraising appeals to his base.

“Any attempt to restrict or lockdown Florida by the federal government would be an attack on our state, done purely for political purposes,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in Port Charlotte Thursday morning, leading off a news conference with a warlike speech aimed at some reported considerations from the Biden administration.

The Governor added that “if anyone tries to harm Floridians or target us, we will respond very swiftly,” wrapping up nearly four minutes of remarks alternating between the defense of the state’s coronavirus record and seeming anticipation of a confrontation with the Democratic presidential administration.

DeSantis was referring to a Miami Herald report, in which Biden White House members mulled what DeSantis called “some type of travel restrictions on Americans and on Floridians.” The concern is the B.1.1.7 strain of COVID-19, of which Florida has the most cases of any state.

“I think it’s an absurd report that they are thinking about doing that. It would be unconstitutional. It would be unwise. And it would be unjust,” DeSantis decried, before serving up a slab of red meat for Fox News and the rest of the national conservative media.

“And if you think about it, restricting the right of Americans to travel freely throughout our country, while illegal aliens pour across the southern border unmolested, would be a ridiculous, but very damaging, farce. So we will oppose it 100%,” DeSantis added. “It would not be based in science. It would be a political attack against the people of Florida.”

“It’s unclear why they would even try talking about that,” DeSantis said, noting Florida is middle of the pack in caseload and hospitalizations, with “much worse COVID results” in over half the country.

“Over the winter … we were way less per capita than a whole lot of lockdown states who are always cited as ‘the right way to do it,'” the Governor added.

Both of the state’s U.S. Senators, unsurprisingly, sided with Florida over Biden.

OBiden Greenlights A Fat Bailout For Mismanaged Insolvent Karenized Cities And States

bloomberg |  House Democrats are backing Biden’s proposal for $350 billion in funding for state and local governments, according to draft stimulus legislation released Tuesday night.

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney’s bill, slated for committee action on Friday, sets up a new dedicated state and local fund in order to bypass the traditional appropriations process which is not eligible for budget reconciliation.

States would receive $195 billion and that money would partly be distributed based on a the share of unemployed workers. The District of Columbia would get the same share as states, unlike in last year’s relief bill. Local governments would receive $130 billion, partly based on population, with a carve-out for smaller communities. Territories would receive $4.5 billion and tribes $20 billion.

The bill also would spend $570 million to pay for 600 hours of paid leave for federal and postal workers to use for Covid quarantine or to care for infected loved ones.

“Democrats’ plan to bail out locked-down, poorly managed liberal states is unfair to American taxpayers and is ripe for waste, fraud, and abuse,” said the committee’s top Republican James Comer of Kentucky. -- Erik Wasson

Naked Federal Retaliation Against DeSantis In Florida For Great Reset Lockdown Non-Compliance

CTH  |  The vast majority of the Florida economy is essentially open and not impacted by the COVID-19 virus and state mitigation efforts.  Factually visitors to Florida are stunned at the seemingly little impact the COVID scamdemic is having on the state.  Everyone is going about their business as normal enjoying freedom, and there is no undue chaos or concern.

The common sense within Florida, the lack of actual economic damage and the absence of panic amid the citizenry, is adverse to the interests of those who have weaponized the fear of COVID to attain power and control over compliant citizens.  Governor Ron DeSantis is considered a rebellious troublemaker who must be dealt with by JoeBama’s Federal agencies and authorities.

Today the Miami Herald is reporting that Joe Biden officials are contemplating using federal authority to restrict travel in to and out of Florida as a way to punish the sunshine state for their refusal to align with the fear-mongering compliance authority:

MIAMI – The Biden administration is considering whether to impose domestic travel restrictions, including on Florida, fearful that coronavirus mutations are threatening to reverse hard-fought progress on the pandemic.

[…] “we’re having conversations about anything that would help mitigate spread,” the official said, referring to discussions about new travel restrictions that could target the spread of the U.K. mutation in Florida.

[…] On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed the CDC, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security to “promptly” draw up a list of recommendations on “how their respective agencies may impose additional public health measures for domestic travel.”

In recent days, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky have said they are examining whether to require COVID-19 testing for travelers on domestic flights – a move that has drawn opposition from airline executives.

[…] While COVID-19 cases in Florida have declined in recent weeks, the U.K. variant has spread rapidly in the state during that time. It now accounts for up to 15% of new cases in Florida, according to estimates from a team of researchers modeling the variant’s growth across the country — up from about 1% at the beginning of January. (read more)

If you take out a national map and: (1) put a green pin in the areas where the lock-downs are most severe (draw a 100 mile circle); then (2) put a red pin in the areas where the riots and local anxiety was highest in summer 2020; then (3) put a white pin in the seven counties where election fraud was prevalent; then (4) put a blue pin in the areas known as “Opportunity Zones“, what you will see is a direct correlation.  This is not accidental.

There are more than 8,760 designated Qualified Opportunity Zones (PDF) located in all 50 States, the District of Columbia, and five United States territories. Investors can defer tax on any prior gains invested in a Qualified Opportunity Fund (QOF) until the earlier of the date on which the investment in a QOF is sold or exchanged or until December 31, 2026. (link)

If you are a member of ‘THE BIG CLUB’ with a massive influx in capital due to the benefits of the COVID-19 lockdowns, limits and regulations, the Opportunity Zones are now the perfect place to expand ownership and wealth.   Take advantage of the Main Street weakness, make moves with government authorization, and do so without capital gains.

 

 

Before You Fly The Domestic Skies You'll Be Getting A Swab

usatoday  |  Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian has joined the chorus of travel-industry executives coming out strongly against a government proposal to require mandatory COVID-19 tests for passengers on flights within the United States.

"I think it'd be a horrible idea for a lot of reasons,'' Bastian said Tuesday in an interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow. 

Bastian said testing won't keep domestic passengers safer and will set the travel industry's recovery back by at least another year. Airlines saw cancellations and bookings spike after mandatory testing for international flights to the U.S. was announced in January.

Bastian saidrequiring domestic travelers to get tested would divert about 10% of the country's already scarce testing resources, given that U.S. airlines are carrying about 1 million passengers a day on average as travel picks up. There were several days during the holidays whenpassenger counts topped 1 million, setting a pandemic record, but the numbers have since retreated, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Taking testing away from those "truly in need'' would be a "terrible decision,'' he said. And given delays in processing results, he believes it would be a "logistical nightmare." 

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly, who had already criticized the idea as "wholly impractical," took his case directly to President Joe Biden in a letter dated Tuesday.

"On behalf of the management and unions at Southwest Airlines, we respectfully ask your administration to refrain from imposing any federal mandate to require a pre-departure COVID-19 test for air travel within the United States,'' the letter says. "We believe such a mandate would be counterproductive, costly, and have serious unintended consequences, including for millions of people who have travel needs but may not have access to testing resources and for the millions of people whose livelihoods depend on a stable air travel industry.''

The GOP Is The Radicalized Terrorist Party

fivethirtyeight  |  In his inaugural address, President Biden described America as in the midst of an “uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” His invocation of a civil war and the American Civil War was provocative. It was also accurate. There is no formal definition of an uncivil war, but America is increasingly split between members of two political parties that hate each other.

In the same speech, Biden warned of the dangers of “a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” This too was accurate. Biden was delivering his address exactly two weeks after a group of supporters of then-President Trump, riled up by his false claims about voter fraud, stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the results of a free and fair election, an act of political extremism and domestic terrorism carried out by at least some people who believe in white supremacy.

Biden didn’t explicitly say that the extremism, domestic terrorism and white supremacy is largely coming from one side of the uncivil war. But that’s the reality. In America’s uncivil war, both sides may hate the other, but one side — conservatives and Republicans — is more hostile and aggressive, increasingly willing to engage in anti-democratic and even violent attacks on their perceived enemies.

The Jan. 6 insurrection and the run-up to it is perhaps the clearest illustration that Republicans are being more hostile and anti-democratic than Democrats in this uncivil war. Biden pledged to concede defeat if he lost the presidential election fair and square, while Trump never made such a pledge; many elected officials in the GOP joined Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results; and finally, Trump supporters arrived at the Capitol to claim victory by force. But there are numerous other examples of conservatives and Republicans going overboard in their attempts to dominate liberals and Democrats:

We could also compile a long list of anti-democratic and hostile actions taken by Trump himself against Democrats. At the top of that list would be his attempt to coerce the Ukrainian government into announcing it would investigate the Biden family — essentially a scheme for Trump to use the power of his office to tilt the upcoming presidential election in his favor.

It’s important to be specific here, however. Many of the most aggressive actions against liberals have been taken not by Republican voters but largely by Republican officials, particularly at the state level.

The President Can Use Lethal Force On American Citizens On American Soil

consortiumnews |  “the final element of the plan concerns insurgency leadership” before going on to criticize Trump’s unwillingness to accept his own defeat.

It’s that last — unspoken — part of Grenier’s plan that I believe is so dangerous and un-American.  What he means when he warns that we may be headed into a period of political violence “not seen since Reconstruction” is that the government needs to start cracking heads. 

In a subsequent interview with NPR, Grenier opened by saying that he’s not predicting that the U.S. is going to go the way of Iraq or Afghanistan.  But that’s exactly what he’s implying.  And it’s what he implied in his Times op-ed.

After all, what does a CIA-style counterinsurgency campaign look like?  Just use Iraq and Afghanistan as a model.  What it looks like is teams of military or paramilitary forces going around, blowing the doors off of houses, and killing everybody inside — killing them before they can commit a crime against the United States.

It also means a robust drone program.  Remember Anwar al-Awlaki?  The Obama administration accused him of being a major recruiter for al-Qaeda in Yemen.  They executed him by drone, and then a week later they executed his 16-year-old son and 16-year-old nephew.  The problem, though, is that the Awlakis were all American citizens.  They had Constitutional rights, including the right to face their accusers in a court of law and a right to a trial by jury.  The Awlakis had never been charged with a crime.  The government just decided to murder them without due process.

Recall also former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder who, in response to a question from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in 2013, said that the president had a constitutional right to use lethal force against American citizens on American soil, even if those Americans had never been convicted of a crime.

That is what Grenier is recommending.  He’s supposed to be one of the “moderates,” one of those Americans who is so concerned about America’s future and wants to offer a solution to ensure it.  His recommendation is that we should be prepared to kill Americans whose politics we disagree with.  All we need to do is declare that they’re “extremists” or “insurgents.”

 

Legislators Anticipate 10-20 Year Long Domestic War On Terror

WaPo  | An apparent bipartisan majority of the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday endorsed the idea of new laws to address domestic terrorism in the wake of last month’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, as experts warned such internal threats would plague the country for decades to come.

Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary of homeland security for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, warned lawmakers that there is a “high likelihood” that another domestic terrorist attack would occur in the coming months and that the problem would persist “for the next 10 to 20 years.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told lawmakers that Jan. 6 had been a “watershed moment for the white supremacist movement,” and that its adherents viewed the Capitol breach as a “victory.”

Their comments came during the committee’s first hearing in its investigation into the riot that has moved House Democrats and 10 Republicans to impeach the now-former president for an unprecedented second time. The panel’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), indicated that he expected its probe would result in concrete legislation to punish and dissuade such attacks, and better monitor and regulate the environments in which extremist ideologies proliferate.

Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control

“We have to do something,” Thompson said during the hearing. “I’m sure somewhere there will be agreement on specific legislation.”

But although both Democrats and Republicans on the panel showed enthusiasm for select ventures, it is not yet clear where leaders might prioritize their efforts — or if, in the end, they will be able to find enough common ground to avoid political stalemate.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the committee’s former chairman, joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers calling for legislation to set specific federal penalties for domestic terrorism cases. Such legislation would aim to bring the prosecution of such crimes into parity with laws targeting terrorism that originates overseas — something proponents said would recognize that the threats are equally insidious.

“What happened Jan. 6 just cries out” for such a response, McCaul said. “I think it sends a strong message about where Congress is, that we’re going to treat domestic terrorism on an equal plane as international terrorism.”