activistpost | Big Tech has gathered unprecedented amounts of personal data from
millions of people. At the same time, a system of total surveillance has
been constructed: Facial recognition, biometric scanning, cell phone
surveillance and more have amassed a huge amount of information.
We see the stories about the growing surveillance state, but we don’t
hear about the gigantic multinational corporation that is helping to
build the physical infrastructure supporting it.
Idemia (formerly Morpho), is a billion dollar multinational
corporation. It is responsible for building a significant portion of the
world’s biometric surveillance and security systems, operating in about
70 countries. Some American clients of the company include the
Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the FBI.
The company website says that Morpho has been “…building and managing databases of entire populations…” for many years.
Morpho has been building and managing databases of entire
populations for governments, law enforcement agencies and other
government bodies around the world, whether for national ID, health
cards, bank cards or even driver license programs.
The company is now pushing digital license trials in the U.S. Delaware and Iowa
are among five states involved in the trials this year. With the mobile
license, law enforcement will be able to wirelessly “ping” a drivers
smartphone for their license. The move is part of a wider trend toward
cashless payment.
Police in California are being sued for using excessive force against a deaf 76-year-old woman who was allegedly jaywalking and
failed to halt when police yelled at her. According to the lawsuit,
police searched the woman and her grocery bags. She was then slammed to
the ground, had a foot or knee placed behind her neck or back,
handcuffed, arrested and cited for jaywalking and resisting arrest.
In New York, Customs and Border Protection officers have come under fire for subjecting female travelers (including minors) to random body searches that
include strip searches while menstruating, genital probing, and forced
pelvic exams, X-rays and intravenous drugs at area hospitals.
At a California gas station, ICE agents surrounded a man who was taking his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver their baby,
demanding that he show identification. Having forgotten his documents
at home in the rush to get to the hospital, the husband offered to go
get them. Refusing to allow him to do so, ICE agents handcuffed and
arrested the man for not having an ID with him, leaving his wife to find
her way alone to the hospital. The father of five, including the
newborn, has lived and worked in the U.S. for 12 years with his wife.
These are not isolated incidents.
These cases are legion.
This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you
can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed
merely for not complying with a government agent’s order or not
complying fast enough.
This isn’t just happening in crime-ridden inner cities.
And the “upgrade” – as that is styled – is trackable biometric tagging, just the right word. Like the ear tags ranchers use to keep track of their cattle.
Without which they aren’t allowed beyond the barbed wire. Just like us.
The REAL ID will also plug the cow – whoops, person – into “ . . .national linked databases allowing millions of employees at all levels of government around the national to access personal data.”
That data being … everything.
Not just your DMV record, date of birth, sex and the usual data pertaining to driving.
The REAL ID will tie everything about you that’s been uploaded to
government/corporate data bases into one easily accessible (by the
government and corporations) place. When an armed government worker
pulls you over, he’ll be able to know you better than your spouse does
just by scanning your card. Also your bank, employer and everyone else
you’re forced to ID yourself to.
And if you don’t get the REAL ID? It’s the reservation for you.
How did this happen?
The REAL ID Act was imposed upon Americans back in 2005 by
the enemies of freedom – that is, by George W. Bush, his puppet master,
Dick Cheney and the politicians of both the Democrat and Republican
persuasion – who voted to rescind the freedoms of Americans in the aftermath of the (ahem) terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In the name of “fighting terror,” Americans would
be terrorized – forced to submit to fingerprinting, retinal-scanning
and other such biometric cattle tagging in order to travel . . .
anywhere.
tomluongo | Do you remember the Zune? I barely do.
Do you remember the iPod? Silly question.
The iPod changed everything.
While the Zune was technically superior in nearly every way to the iPod, the iPod became a phenomenon.
Why? Because Apple focused on how the iPod made your life better.
In marketing there is something called “The Chasm.” It’s an idea put
forth by Geoffrey Moore in the early 90’s. Getting 16% market share is
easy. There are nearly always one in six people who are willing to
adopt the new or different thing.
But, to become a social phenomenon that ‘new thing’ has to ‘cross the
chasm’ by shifting the marketing message from its newness superiority
to why this ‘new thing’ will make your life better.
The message has to appeal to people’s sense of shared experience and
community. And if that shift is successful your product or message will
‘cross the chasm’ and begin to see mass adoption.
For that shift to win out conditions have to be right and the message aligned perfectly with it.
If you do your new thing will explode in the public consciousness literally overnight.
Look at how quickly Jordan Peterson has blown up.
Conditions were right for people to receive his message. And all it
took was for the right moment him to stand up to a virulent ideologue
like Kathy Newman of the BBC to become a hero to millions.
The First Black President
So, what does all this 16% Chasm stuff have to do with Donald Trump?
realclearpolitics | CNN's Commentator and former Congressional Black Caucus Executive
Director Angela Rye blasted Gina Loudon, a member of President Trump's
2020 Advisory Council, over her "nonsense" talking points about black
staffers at the White House.
Transcript, via CNN:
ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: OUTFRONT now, Angela Rye, former
executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Gina Loudon, a
member of President Trump's 2020 reelection advisory council.
Gina, let me start with you. You know, in the context we're talking
about, all this discussion about Omarosa, and whether there's an N- word
tape, and Kellyanne Conway not able to say the last name of one
African-American she could label who worked with her in the White House,
it would seem a simple question, how many black staffers work in the
White House? She couldn't even give a rough number. Does that disappoint
you?
GINA LOUDON, MEMBER OF PRESIDENT TRUMP'S 2020 RE-ELECT ADVISORY COUNCIL:
You know, what disappoints me is the division and the fact that we're
having to count people based on their skin color, I don't like that. And
I think that, you know, you look back at our history, we have a pretty
amazing history of overcoming slavery, of expanding civil rights, of
women's rights, and a lot of those things happened under American
presidents who didn't have any minorities at all on their White Houses.
Thank God we do. I looked over the list of people I know there, about
one-third are a minority or women. Those are great strides. Could they
be better? Absolutely.
And I know -- I talked to some of my friends in the White House tonight,
and they said, yes, they would love more diversity in the White House.
The problem is when you have someone come out, and defend the president
or even say they want to sit down and have a conversation with him, for
example, Kanye West, they're completely annihilated in the press.
And so, there is a trepidation there. So, I think if we could focus on
the fact that we would like to build on that and work on it together, I
know the administration is open to that.
BURNETT: So, your number is roughly a third and that counts women, too.
So, you're saying two-thirds are white men, and one-third are diverse in
some way, but you're counting women in there? Just to make sure I
understand.
LOUDON: Erin, if you look at the comms department, as far as my count, I
did this cursory before the show, but Hogan Gidley is the only white
guy I can even find in the comms department. So, I think it depends
department to department. It's going to vary.
But I think the bottom line is the policy that comes out of this White
House, 700,000 new jobs, record unemployment for all minorities and
women. I mean, you know the list and it's a good list.
And there's more coming out. There's new -- on Dodd-Frank repeal.
There's great news coming out about small business leaders, many of them
are minorities. So, there's a lot of good news, Erin.
BURNETT: Angela?
ANGELA RYE, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think I got stuck at Gina
saying that American presidents have done a great deal for people of
color like ending slavery? Like I think I'm stuck in 1865 right now.
Like I can't believe that's --
The controversial former White House staffer and ex-Donald Trump crony has been hawking her book, “Unhinged,” on rival MSNBC, but hasn’t been able to book an appearance on CNN.
“Don Lemon was offered one of the first cable interviews and passed,” an insider told Page Six.
We’re told Manigault Newman was also scheduled to appear on Jake
Tapper’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, but CNN canceled the
appearance.
Another source said CNN was initially only interested in booking
commentators who would trash-talk the reality-show vixen. “They only
wanted to book guests with nothing positive to say about her. They were
specifically looking for people who would provide a more negative slant
when discussing Omarosa,” the source said.
CNN | Only
a few paragraphs of Omarosa Manigault Newman's book are about Puerto
Rico. But their claims are significant: that President Donald Trump
lacked empathy in Hurricane Maria's aftermath and that the President and
Chief of Staff John Kelly referred to Puerto Ricans in derogatory
terms.
The result, the new book titled "Unhinged"
alleges, was a slow and cavalier response to the devastation wrought,
especially when compared to Trump's swift and effective handling of the
hurricanes in Texas and Florida weeks earlier.
Manigault Newman, a former senior White
House adviser, wouldn't specify what offensive terms the Trump
administration allegedly used when referring to Puerto Ricans, even when
pressed to do so during one of her many interviews to promote her book.
CNN has not independently verified her claims, and the White House did not respond to CNN's requests for comment.
I was in Puerto Rico when the Category 4 storm tore through the
island on September 20. I witnessed much of what the book describes
about conditions and response on the ground unfold in real time.
The
White House has branded Manigault Newman a liar, and many have
questioned her tactics, her motives and her accuracy. But based on what I
witnessed in Puerto Rico and what I read in her book about the
hurricane response, this might be one example where she got it right.
thehill | Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Sunday that he thinks former CIA Director John Brennan's rhetoric is becoming an issue "in and of itself."
"John
and his rhetoric have become an issue in and of itself," Clapper said
on CNN's "State of the Union." "John is subtle like a freight train and
he’s gonna say what’s on his mind."
Clapper's comments came in response to an op-ed penned by Brennan in The New York Times this week, in which he wrote that President Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
Clapper said he empathized with Brennan, but voiced concerns for Brennan's fiery rhetoric toward Trump and his administration.
"I think that the common denominator among all of us [in the
intelligence community] that have been speaking up … is genuine concern
about the jeopardy and threats to our institutions," Clapper said.
Brennan's claims drew criticism from some in the intelligence community who said the timing was suspect.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Thursday took aim at Brennan for "purport[ing] to know, as fact, that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power."
“If
his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving
office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other
personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed
to the special counsel, not The New York Times,” Burr said.
Burr
added that Trump has the “full authority” to rescind security
clearance if the statements were “purely political and based on
conjecture.”
We know John to be an enormously talented, capable, and
patriotic individual who devoted his adult life to the service of this
nation. Insinuations and allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Brennan while in office are baseless.
(Scores of “ex-spies” later joined the original twelve.) In this post, I’m not going to discuss motive, whether Trump’s for revoking Brennan’s clearance, or the intelligence community’s outrage that he did so, or the media’s.
Rather, I’m going to focus on the question of whether “the twelve”
should have any standing to issue such a statement in the first place.
After all, if torture, extraordinary rendition, warrantless
surveillance, and whacking US citizens without due process are not
“wrongdoing,” then what on earth can be?[3] To this end, I will first
present a table sketching the careers and personal networks of “the
twelve.” Next, I’ll look at those who did not sign the
statement. After that, I’ll make a few brief comments about “the twelve”
as a class. I’ll conclude by raising the issue of standing again. I
hope this post will be especially useful to those who haven’t been
following politics since 9/11, who may take our current institutional
structures for granted (see especially footnotes [1] and [2]).
Of course, the real reason for his hissy fit is that he suspects
(correctly, I think) that Trump is planning to cancel the security
clearances of the swamp creatures like Mudd who have tried to undermine
his presidency and the will of the American people. The loss of the
clearance may not have any direct effects on their earning power but it
sends a powerful signal that they no longer are part of the inner
circle. That is a fate worse than death for the men who think they know
what is good for the American people.
If I was Trump, any former senior official who said a peep against me
would have his clearances pulled the next day. These people are
expected to conduct themselves in a professional manner, in or out of
government. Suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome is no excuse for
the behavior of people like Brennan and Mudd.
zerohedge | Support for President Trump among black voters hit 36% according to a new Rasmussen
poll released on Thursday - nearly doubling his approval rating among
African-Americans from the same day last year, which stood at 19%.
Today’s @realDonaldTrump approval ratings among black voters: 36%
The boost corresponds with all-time low unemployment among blacks of 5.9% in May, which President Trump and others have been touting:
What's more, the Rasmussen poll comes amid controversy over the
reported existence of a tape which contains Trump saying the N-word. The
curiously timed allegations were brought by former White House aide and
apprentice contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman - who was fired from the Clinton administration after being shuffled around four times.
That said, the Washington Post refutes Rasmussen's results with a Friday article entitled "No, one-third of African Americans don’t support Trump. Not even close."
Polling firms that have interviewed far more African Americans, and that are much more transparent than Rasmussen, all show that Trump’s black approval rating is much lower than 36 percent.
For example, Gallup has interviewed thousands of African American
respondents in 2018. Its polling suggests that Trump’s black approval
rating has consistently been around 10 to 15 percent through 2018.
Perhaps it depends on who's doing the asking, and what part of the country the questions are being asked?
jezebel | By many accounts, the New York University professor Avital Ronell—a
German and comparative literature scholar and a superstar in her corner
of academia— is a brilliant woman and a sought-after advisor. Former
students who have taken her classes describe
her as “original” and “inspiring.” Ronell, who is in her 60s and has
taught at NYU for more than two decades, inspires a kind of admiration that some have called “mystical.” She is the kind of professor whose classes students don’t want to end.
But,
for the past year, Ronell has also been the subject of a sexual
harassment investigation by NYU’s Title IX office, initiated after a
former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman, alleged in a complaint filed
last September that she had sexually harassed him over a period of
several years. On August 13, the New York Timesreported that after an 11-month investigation, the university has found Ronell responsible for sexually harassing Reitman while he wasearning his Ph.D. The university has suspended
her for a year without pay and has also mandated that any future
meetings she has with students will be supervised upon her return.
Reitman and his attorney are considering filing a lawsuit against NYU,
as well as Ronell.
News of the sexual harassment complaint against Ronell surfaced
earlier this summer, after a group of prominent academics—including the
noted feminist scholar Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and Gayatri
Spivak—sent a letter of support to NYU officials, rallying to Ronell’s
defense and decrying what they describe as a “legal nightmare.”
The letter, which was never meant to be public, was subsequently posted
on the philosophy blog Leiter Reports, with the title, “Blaming the
victim is apparently OK when the accused in a Title IX proceeding is a
feminist literary theorist.” It is likely that without the publication
of this letter, and without the signatures of so many influential and
feminist scholars, many if not all of the details of Reitman’s complaint
would have remained confidential—it is almost certain that much of this
now very public and increasingly messy case would have been swept under
the rug (a situation that I suspect NYU officials would have
preferred).
In the letter, dated May 11, 2018 and addressed to NYU
President Andrew Hamilton and Provost Katharine Fleming, the signers
acknowledge they had “no access to the confidential dossier,” but
believe that Reitman was waging a “malicious campaign” against Ronell
and that “the allegations against her do not constitute actual
evidence.”
theatlantic | When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president
in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his
“deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the
paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her
hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of
the need to stop certain female writers and journalists
from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter,
but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the
opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a
parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system.
When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered
in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone
has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this
mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.
In
the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson
foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the
world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His
audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his
fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this
is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right
venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title
of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents
reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White
Ethnocide.”
If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire;
and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the
election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only
kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are
similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled
by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly
baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the
culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are
looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at
discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at
its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.
Perhaps,
then, the most dangerous piece of “common sense” in Peterson’s new book
comes at the very beginning, when he imparts the essential piece of
wisdom for anyone interested in fighting a powerful, existing order.
“Stand up straight,” begins Rule No. 1, “with your shoulders back.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department have
continued to insist they did nothing wrong in their Trump-Russia
investigation. This week should finally bring an end to that claim, given the clear evidence of malfeasance via the use of Bruce Ohr.
Mr. Ohr was until last year associate deputy attorney general.
He began feeding information to the FBI from dossier author
Christopher Steele in late 2016 - after the FBI had terminated Mr.
Steele as a confidential informant for violating the bureau’s rules. He
also collected dirt from Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the
opposition-research firm that worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and
employed Mr. Steele. Altogether, the FBI pumped Mr. Ohr for information at least a dozen times, debriefs that remain in classified 302 forms.
All the while, Mr. Ohr failed to disclose on financial forms that his
wife, Nellie, worked alongside Mr. Steele in 2016, getting paid by Mr.
Simpson for anti-Trump research. The Justice Department has now turned over Ohr documents to Congress that show how deeply tied up he was with the Clinton crew - with dozens of emails, calls, meetings and notes that describe his interactions and what he collected.
Mr. Ohr’s conduct is itself deeply troubling. He was
acting as a witness (via FBI interviews) in a case being overseen by a
Justice Department in which he held a very senior position. He appears
to have concealed this role from at least some superiors, since Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified that he’d been unaware of Mr.
Ohr’s intermediary status.
Lawyers meanwhile note that it is a crime for a federal official to
participate in any government matter in which he has a financial
interest. Fusion’s bank records presumably show Nellie Ohr, and by extension her husband, benefiting from the Trump opposition research that Mr. Ohr continued to pass to the FBI. The Justice Department declined to comment.
But for all Mr. Ohr’s misdeeds, the worse misconduct is by the FBI and Justice Department.
It’s bad enough that the bureau relied on a dossier crafted by a
man in the employ of the rival presidential campaign. Bad enough that it
never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of that
dossier’s provenance. And bad enough that the FBI didn’t fire Mr. Steele
as a confidential human source in September 2016 when it should have
been obvious he was leaking FBI details to the press to harm Donald
Trump’s electoral chances. It terminated him only when it was absolutely
forced to, after Mr. Steele gave an on-the-record interview on Oct. 31,
2016.
But now we discover the FBI continued to go to this
discredited informant in its investigation after the firing—by funneling
his information via a Justice Department cutout. The FBI has
an entire manual governing the use of confidential sources, with
elaborate rules on validations, standards and documentation. Mr. Steele
failed these standards. The FBI then evaded its own program to get at his info anyway.
consortiumnews |After
eight years of enjoying President Barack Obama’s solid support and
defense to do pretty much anything he chose—including hacking into the
computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee—Brennan now lacks what,
here in Washington, we refer to as a “Rabbi” with strong incentive to
advance and protect you. He expected Hillary Clinton to play that role
(were it ever to be needed), and that seemed to be solidly in the cards.
But, oops, she lost.
What needs
to be borne in mind in all this is, as former FBI Director James Comey
himself has admitted: “I was making decisions in an environment where
Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president.” Comey, Brennan, and
co-conspirators, who decided—in that “environment”—to play fast and
loose with the Constitution and the law, were supremely confident they
would not only keep their jobs, but also receive plaudits, not
indictments.
Unless one
understands and remembers this, it is understandably difficult to
believe that the very top U.S. law enforcement and intelligence
officials did what documentary evidence has now demonstrated they did.
So, unlike
his predecessors, most of whom also left under a dark cloud, Brennan is
bereft of anyone to protect him. He lacks even a PR person to help him
avoid holding himself up to ridicule—and now retaliation—for
unprecedentedly hostile tweets and other gaffes. Brennan’s mentor,
ex-CIA Director George Tenet, for example, had powerful Rabbis in
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as a
bizarrely empathetic establishment media, when Tenet quit in disgrace
2004.
The main
question now is whether the chairs of the House oversight committees
will chose to face down the Deep State. They almost never do, and the
smart money says that, if they do, they will lose—largely because of the
virtually total support of the establishment media for the Deep State.
This often takes bizarre forms. The title of a recent column by
Washington Post “liberal” commentator Eugene Robinson speaks volumes:
“God Bless the Deep State.”
bbc | The 18-month investigation graphically detailed numerous instances of
Catholic clergy members raping and molesting children in several
Pennsylvania dioceses, which in total represent about 1.7 million
Catholics.
"Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men
of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it
all," the 1,300-page report found.
The horrific allegations include:
One priest forced a nine-year-old boy to rinse out his mouth with holy water after abusing him.
A boy was made to confess his sins to the priest who had abused him.
A priest who was accused of abuse by
three boys was later hired by Disney World after receiving a positive
job reference from the church.
A priest raped a seven-year-girl when he visited her in hospital after she had her tonsils out.
One child was made to pose naked, like
Christ on the crucifix, as priests photographed him. Priests gave that
boy a gold chain with a cross so that other predator priests would know
he had been abused.
Repeated abuse by a priest left one boy with lasting back injuries. He became addicted to painkillers and died of an overdose.
Globe | A central pillar of President Trump’s politics is a sustained assault on
the free press. Journalists are not classified as fellow Americans, but
rather “the enemy of the people.” This relentless assault on the free
press has dangerous consequences. We asked editorial boards
from around the country – liberal and conservative, large and small –
to join us today to address this fundamental threat in their own words.
There was once broad, bipartisan, intergenerational agreement in the
United States that the press played this important role. Yet that view
is no longer shared by many Americans. “The news media is the enemy of
the American people,” is a sentiment endorsed by 48 percent of
Republicans surveyed this month by Ipsos polling firm. That poll is not
an outlier. One published this week found 51 percent of Republicans
considered the press “the enemy of the people rather than an important
part of democracy.”
“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors,” Supreme Court
Justice Hugo Black wrote in 1971. Would that it were still the case. Lies are antithetical to an informed citizenry, responsible for
self-governance. The greatness of America is dependent on the role of a
free press to speak the truth to the powerful. To label the press “the
enemy of the people” is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic
compact we have shared for more than two centuries.
newyorker | On Monday, in an account of the
F.B.I.’s firing of Peter Strzok—the senior agent who led the Bureau’s
2016 investigations of Hillary Clinton e-mails and Trump-Russia
connections—the Timesreported that the move “was not unexpected.” Given the inflamed political climate in Washington, that is an accurate statement.
The
special counsel, Robert Mueller, removed Strzok from the Russia
investigation last year, after it was discovered that he had sharply
criticized Donald Trump,
who was then running for President, in private text messages with Lisa
Page, another F.B.I. employee, with whom Strzok was having an affair.
Earlier this summer, a report from the Justice Department’s inspector
general, Michael Horowitz, said
that Strzok’s text messages to Page “potentially indicated or created
the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or
improper considerations.” Since then, President Trump has been attacking
Strzok regularly on Twitter. Last month, Strzok testified at a public
hearing on Capitol Hill, where congressional Republicans tore into him.
At one point, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, called for Strzok to be jailed.
But,
despite all the noise and fury, there is now a basic question that
needs an answer: Why was Strzok fired? Before the Clinton and Trump
investigations, Strzok had racked up twenty years of distinguished
service in the Bureau, rising to the position of deputy assistant
director of the Counterintelligence Division.
Since his
communications with Page have become public, Strzok has insisted that
his personal views about Trump didn’t affect his actions while
overseeing the Clinton and Russia investigations. During his testimony
on Capitol Hill, he insisted
that when, in the course of discussing Trump’s Presidential bid with
Page, he wrote to her that “we will stop it” he was referring to the
American public at large.
AP | For years, Omarosa Manigault Newman stood at Donald Trump’s side,
making her deeply unpopular with African-Americans who see her as a
sellout for aligning herself with a president who has hurled one insult
after another at black people.
Her falling out with Trump and her decision to call him a racist as
she sells her new book — and in turn, his calling her a “dog” — have not
been enough for many African-Americans to invite her back to the family
picnic.
Too little, too late, many said.
“Her tell-all mea culpa won’t win her any brownie points with most
blacks,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author of the book “Why Black Lives
Do Matter.” ″Their loathing of Omarosa is virtually frozen in stone.
She’s still roundly lambasted as a two-bit opportunist, a racial sellout
and an ego driven hustler.”
Few in the black community immediately rushed to defend Manigault
Newman after she wrote a book titled “Unhinged” about her time in the
White House. It paints a damning picture of Trump, claiming without
evidence that tapes exist of him using the N-word as he filmed “The
Apprentice” reality series, on which she co-starred.
She has since stepped up her attacks on Trump as she promotes her
book, telling The Associated Press on Tuesday that the president is “a
racist, a misogynist, a bigot.”
“I want to see this nation united as opposed to divided,” she said. “I don’t want to see a race war, as Donald Trump does.”
The deep hostility that African-Americans harbor for Manigault Newman
stems largely from her defense of the president or her public silence
as he repeatedly attacked the American citizenship of former President
Barack Obama; insulted various minority groups and described some
African nations as “shithole” countries. He has also insulted prominent
blacks like U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters and NBA superstar LeBron James, said
that “many sides” are to blame for the violence at last year’s white
nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and ripped
African-American athletes for protesting racial injustice.
realclearpolitics | I do believe that, uh, Mr. Trump
decided to take this action, as he has done with others. He has tried
to intimidate and suppress any criticism of him or his administration
and revoking my security clearances is his way of trying to get back at
me, but I think I have tried to voice the concerns of millions of
Americans about Mr. Trump's failures in terms of fulfilling the
responsibilities of that sacred and solemn office of the presidency. And
this is not going to deter me at all, I'm going to continue to speak
out.
But I am very worried about the message that it appears Mr. Trump is
trying to send to others, including those who apparently hold security
clearances within the government. I think he included Bruce Ohr, a
current DOJ official among those whose clearances he is reviewing. Is
this an effort to try to cow individuals both inside and outside of the
government to make sure they don't say anything that is critical of Mr.
Trump or with which he disagrees? And I've seen this type of behavior
and actions on the part of foreign tyrants and despots and autocrats for
many, many years, during my CIA and national security career.
I never, ever thought that I would see it here in the United States. I
do believe that all Americans really need to take stock of what is
happening right now in our government, and how abnormal and how
irresponsible and how dangerous these actions are.
investors |Russia Investigation: It's beginning to look as if
claims of monstrous collusion between Russian officials and U.S.
political operatives were true. But it wasn't Donald Trump who was
guilty of Russian collusion. It was Hillary Clinton and U.S.
intelligence officials who worked with Russians and others to entrap
Trump.
That's the stunning conclusion of a RealClear Investigations report
by Lee Smith, who looked in-depth at the controversial June 2016 Trump
Tower meeting between officials of then-candidate Donald Trump's
campaign staff and a Russian lawyer known to have ties with high-level
officials in Vladimir Putin's government.
The media have spun a tale of Trump selling his soul to the Russians
for campaign dirt to use against Hillary, beginning with the
now-infamous Trump Tower meeting.
But "a growing body of evidence ... indicates that the meeting may have been a setup — part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials," wrote Smith.
Smith painstakingly weaves together the evidence that's already out there
but has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which have become
so seized with Trump-hatred that their reporting even on routine
matters can no longer be trusted.
Memos, emails and texts now in Congress' possession show that the
Justice Department and the FBI worked together both before and after the
election with Fusion GPS and their main link to the scandal, former
British spy and longtime FBI informant Chris Steele.
As a former British spook in Moscow, Steele had extensive ties to
Russia. That's why he was picked as the primary researcher to compile
the "unverified and salacious" Trump dossier, as former FBI Director
James Comey once described it.
thefederalist | In threearticles for The Hill last
week, investigative journalist John Solomon revealed previously
undisclosed text and email discussions between former Associate Deputy
Attorney General Bruce Ohr and former MI6 agent and Spygate dossier
author Christopher Steele. Solomon’s reporting also uncovered notes Ohr
took summarizing discussions he had with Steele’s boss at Fusion GPS,
Glenn Simpson, about the Russia “collusion” investigation.
This conclusion flows from an email exchange revealed in Solomon’s first article,
which established that Ohr met with Steele on July 30, 2016, in
Washington DC. Ohr brought his wife Nellie to the breakfast gathering.
Nellie, as has long been reported, worked at Fusion GPS, also on the
Trump opposition-research project.
That end-of-July meeting followed emails exchanged earlier in the
month, in which Steele told Ohr: “There is something separate I wanted
to discuss with you informally and separately. It concerns our favourite
business tycoon!”
libertyblitzkrieg | These tech companies have been compliant, out of control government
snitches for a long time. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’re aware of the
deep and longstanding cooperation between these lackeys and U.S.
intelligence agencies in the realm of mass surveillance. As such, the
most recent transformation of these companies into full fledged
information gatekeepers should be seen in its proper context; merely as a
dangerous continuation and expansion of an already entrenched reality.
But it’s all out in the open now. Facebook isn’t even hiding the fact
that it’s outsourcing much of its “fake news” analysis to the Atlantic
Council, a think tank funded by NATO, Gulf States and defense
contractors. As reported by Reuters:
Facebook began looking for outside help amid
criticism for failing to rein in Russian propaganda ahead of the 2016
presidential elections… With scores of its own cybersecurity professionals and $40
billion in annual revenue in 2017, Facebook might not seem in need of
outside help.
It doesn’t need outside help, it needs political cover, which is the real driver behind this.
But the lab and Atlantic Council bring geopolitical expertise and allow Facebook to distance itself from sensitive pronouncements.
On last week’s call with reporters, Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief
security officer, said the company should not be expected to identify or
blame specific governments for all the campaigns it detects.
“Companies like ours don’t have the necessary information to
evaluate the relationship between political motivations that we infer
about an adversary and the political goals of a nation-state,” said
Stamos, who is leaving the company this month for a post at Stanford
University. Instead, he said Facebook would stick to amassing digital evidence and turning it over to authorities and researchers.
It would also be awkward for Facebook to accuse a government of
wrongdoing when the company is trying to enter or expand in a market
under that government’s control. Facebook donated an undisclosed amount to the lab in May
that was enough, said Graham Brookie, who runs the lab, to vault the
company to the top of the Atlantic Council’s donor list, alongside the
British government.
Facebook employees said privately over the past several
months that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to outsource many of
the most sensitive political decisions, leaving fact-checking to media
groups and geopolitics to think tanks. The more he succeeds,
the fewer complications for Facebook’s expansion, the smaller its
payroll, and the more plausible its positioning as a neutral platform.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
independent | A key feature of modern antisemitism has been the racialised projection
of “the Jew”, an archetype which stands above and in conflict with the
working class. Throughout the history of the left, certain
anti-capitalist visions generated by socialists have overlapped and
combined with this strain of antisemitism. What makes antisemitism
particularly attractive and dangerous for the left is that it can appear
oppositional. It provides an easy personification of oppression in the
face of less tangible, global forms of domination.
Scandals provoked by accusations of antisemitism have become a recurrent
feature of British politics. As the latest tumult subsides we have an
opportunity to reflect on the issues that underlie these controversies
and prepare the way for Labour and the left to do better in future.
theoccidentalobserver | In the months immediately before his coronation in 1189, Richard the
Lionheart became aware of rising anti-Jewish sentiment among the people
of England. This ill-feeling was the result of decades of rampant usury,
property seizures, social disparities, and what historian Robert Chazan
described as the “effective royal protection” of Henry II.[2] Eager to
ally himself with the mood of the nation, particularly in the tenuous
early days of his reign, Richard appealed to the sentiments of the
masses by banning Jews from attending the coronation ceremony at
Westminster Abbey. News of the ban was welcomed by the people, but the
move was deeply unsettling to England’s Jews. The prohibition was
nervously perceived by the nation’s Hebrews as a weakening of the vital
Jewish relationship with the elite. This relationship, particularly the
protection it provided to Jewish loan merchants, had been absolutely
essential to the untroubled continuation of the Jews’ highly
antagonistic financial practices among the lower orders. Without this
protection, the position of the Jews in England would no longer be
viable. Therefore, in a desperate attempt to resist a decline in Jewish
influence, on the day of the coronation a party of senior Jews arrived
at the doors of Westminster Abbey bearing lavish gifts and sycophantic
tongues. The effort was in vain.
The Jewish party were refused entry by nobles and officials, and the
group was then stripped and flogged for their flagrant defiance of royal
orders. Since this punishment was a public display, a story soon
circulated among the peasantry that the new king consented to general
action against the Jews, and that the royal elite was now siding with
the people. In the ensuing days, luxurious Jewish homes were burned, and
castles containing Jewish debt rolls were stormed and their contents
destroyed. These actions, however, were built on an assumption of elite
backing that was in reality non-existent. The expectations of the masses
were soon rudely crushed. The Lionheart’s banning of the Jews had been a
mere measure of propaganda intended to endear him to his subjects, and
the flogging of the intruding party was carried out without his consent.
In truth, the King remained as beholden to the sway of mammon as his
predecessors. When push came to shove, the peasantry, unlike ‘his’ Jews,
were expendable. Richard wasted little time in rounding up and
executing the ringleaders of the anti-Jewish action, even including
those who had damaged Jewish property by accident. He then issued orders
to “the sheriffs of England to prevent all such incidents in the
future.”[3] In the aftermath of this crushing of the people, the Jews of
England would once again remain under high levels of royal protection
until ‘the Lionheart’ left the country for the Third Crusade — a
venture, ironically, to relieve people in foreign nations of the tyranny
of ‘infidels.’ The entire affair remains a perfect illustration of the
centuries-old symbiotic relationship between Jews and our native elites,
and the thread of parasitic capitalism that binds them.
Here we are in 2016, and so little has changed. More than that, we
find that another Lionheart is making the news in Britain in relation to
protected Jews and a suffering peasantry. In one of the more perverse
insults to follow notorious financial parasite Philip Green’s frenzied
feeding on the British Home Stores (BHS) pension fund, it has emerged
that the Jewish billionaire recently purchased his third luxury yacht,
aptly named Lionheart. While Green and the $120 million Lionheart
float serenely on the Mediterranean, more than 20,000 former BHS
workers struggle through the day, wondering if they will ever receive
the pensions they spent their working lives contributing to. Elite
responses to this tragic and incendiary grand larceny have been anodyne
and, much like Richard the Lionheart’s early gesture, limited to tokens
of mere propaganda. Green’s activities have recently been described by a
British Parliamentary committee as the “systematic plunder” of a
formerly thriving business, with the committee’s host of banalities concluding
that the Green saga was the epitome of “the unacceptable face of
capitalism.” In one of the blandest possible statements on the egregious
crimes of this apex predator, the politicians chirped that there was
“little to support the reputation for retail business acumen for which
he received his knighthood.” These insipid chastisements have been
followed by Prime Minister Theresa May’s clownish and empty proclamation that she wants to “reform capitalism.”
Notably absent among these and similar complaints about ‘corporate
largesse’ and ‘the failings of capitalism’ has been any real interest in
the Green case from the Far Left. There are distractions of course, and
these arise chiefly from the current predominance of cultural Marxism
in the Leftist mind rather than its economic counterpart. Western
socialists are now incessantly, and from an economic standpoint
counter-productively, engaged in assisting government efforts to flood
our nations with cheap exotic labor. The modern Left thus plays a
crucial role in depressing the salaries, living conditions, and public
services of the working class they claim to speak for. Other recent
moral-ideological Leftist crusades have included agitation for same-sex
marriage, the opening of various ‘anti-racism’ ventures, and the
creation and expansion of Black Lives Matter militancy — none of which
benefit native workers in any form.
strategic-culture |For
a man who is assailed and accused of lacking judgment even more than US
President Donald Trump, it's amazing how often British Labour Party
leader Jeremy Corbyn has already been proven courageously and
presciently right.
In
1990, Corbyn opposed the most powerful and successful peace time prime
minster of the 20th century, Margaret Thatcher when she tried to impose a
so-called poll tax on the population of the UK. His judgment was
vindicated: Thatcher’s own party rose up and threw her out of office.
At the beginning of the 21st century
Corbyn was pilloried throughout the UK media for his outspoken
opposition to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support for the US invasions
of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Blair was prime minister for a full decade
and won three landslide general elections, yet today he is discredited
and politically virtually a recluse. Corbyn‘s opposition to both wars
looks wise, as well as principled and courageous.
Corbyn’s
support for the revolutionary Irish Republican movement was so strong
that the UK security service MI5 monitored him for two decades listing
him as a potential “subversive” who might undermine parliamentary
democracy. On the contrary, in the late 1990s, Prime Minister Blair
engaged the Irish Republican Army and its political wing Sinn Fein in a
peace process that has led to a lasting peace in Ireland. Corbyn, who
supported strongly the 1998 Good Friday Agreement proved once again to
be ahead of his time.
Corbyn
has never been afraid of taking ferociously unpopular positions. In
2015, after shocking Islamic State terror attacks in Paris he advocated
the urgent need for a political settlement to end the Syrian Civil War.
His advice was ignored by every major Western government. Hundreds of
thousands of people have been killed and millions more turned into
destitute refugees flooding into the European Union since then.
Corbyn
was also ahead of his time in seeking to engage Iran constructively. He
hosted a call-in show on an Iranian TV channel for three years from
2009 to 2012 even though he knew that at the time such activities would
seem to rule him out from ever being a serious contender to lead the
Labour Party. But in 2015, the Conservative government of the UK, along
with those of the United States, France and Germany joined in signing a
far reaching nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Corbyn’s
economic positions have long been despised by the Western liberal
intellectual elites who have been spared the price of having their
livelihoods destroyed by such policies. He strongly advocates using the
power of government to encourage the rebuilding of major national
industries and manufacturing power. These views are hardly radical,
Robert Skidelsky, one of the most influential UK economists of the past
generation has given significant support to Corbyn’s proposal of a
National Investment Bank. These policies are neither Marxist nor
revolutionary. But they can certainly be described as Social Democratic
and humane.
medialens | Elite power cannot abide a serious challenge to its established
position. And that is what Labour under Jeremy Corbyn represents to the
Tory government, the corporate, financial and banking sectors, and the
'mainstream' media. The manufactured 'antisemitism crisis' is the last
throw of the dice for those desperate to prevent a progressive
politician taking power in the UK: someone who supports Palestinians and
genuine peace in the Middle East, a strong National Health Service and a
secure Welfare State, a properly-funded education system, and an
economy in which people matter; someone who rejects endless war and
complicity with oppressive, war criminal 'allies' such as the United
States, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In a thoroughly-researched article,
writer and academic Gavin Lewis has mapped a deliberate pro-Israel
campaign to create a 'moral panic' around the issue of antisemitism. The
strategy can be traced all the way back to the horrendous Israeli
bombardment of Gaza in the summer of 2014. A UN report estimated that
2,252 Palestinians were killed, around 65 per cent of them civilians.
The death toll included 551 children. There was global public revulsion
at Israel's war crimes and empathy with their Palestinian victims.
Support rose for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) which
campaigns 'to end international support for Israel's oppression of
Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law'.
As Lewis observes, BDS came to be regarded more and more as a
'strategic threat' by Israel, and a campaign was initiated in which
Israel and its supporters would be presented as the world's real
victims. In the UK, the Campaign Against Antisemitism was established
during the final month of Israel's 2014 bombardment of Gaza. Pro-Israel
pressure groups began to bombard media organisations with supposed
statistics about an 'antisemitism crisis', with few news organisations
scrutinising the claims.
In particular, as we noted in a media alert
in April, antisemitism has been 'weaponised' to attack Corbyn and any
prospect of a progressive UK government critical of Israel. Around this
time in Gaza, there were weekly 'Great March of Return' protests, with
people demanding the right to reclaim ancestral homes in Israel. Many
were mown down by Israeli snipers on the border firing into Gaza, with
several victims shot in the back as they tried to flee. According
to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, a total of 155 Palestinians were
killed in the protests, including 23 children and 3 women. This is part
of the brutal ongoing reality for Palestinians.
Recently, much media attention has focused
laser-like on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)
definition of antisemitism, including 11 associated examples. Labour
adopted 7 of these examples, but dropped 4 because of their implication
that criticism of Israel was antisemitic. As George Wilmers noted in a piece for Jewish Voice for Labour, Kenneth Stern, the US Attorney who drafted the IHRA wording, has spoken out about the misuse of the definition. It had:
'originally been designed as a "working definition" for the purpose
of trying to standardise data collection about the incidence of
antisemitic hate crime in different countries. It had never been
intended that it be used as legal or regulatory device to curb academic
or political free speech. Yet that is how it has now come to be used.'
Examples of the curbing of free speech cited by Stern in written testimony to the US Congress include Manchester and Bristol universities.
NYTimes | Years ago I
spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a
computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me.
It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated
Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so
disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained me, people
have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.
“There
are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that
they’ve given up,” she said. “So when they hear this idea of robots as
companions, well … it’s not like a robot has the mind to walk away or
leave you or anything like that.”
This
girl had grown up in the time of Siri, a conversational object
presented as an empathy machine — a thing that could understand her. And
so it seemed natural to her that other machines would expand the range
of conversation. But there is something she may have been too young to
understand — or, like a lot of us — prone to forget when we talk to
machines. These robots can perform
empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or
your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships.
Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of
the human loss or love we describe to them. Their conversations about
life occupy the realm of the as-if.
Yet through our interactions with these machines, we seem to ignore this
fact; we act as though the emotional ties we form with them will be
reciprocal, and real, as though there is a right kind of emotional tie
that can be formed with objects that have no emotions at all.
vice | "I feel a special frisson with muscular women. The idea of a woman
being stronger than me, and the sexual possibilities that that entails,
is something I find extremely exciting."
Johnny, 37, is a
technical trainer with the British Army. As a conventionally handsome
guy in decent physical shape, Johnny is one of many men in the UK who
engages in the otherwise unconventional practice of muscle worship. Also
known as "sthenolagnia," muscle worship is a sexual paraphilia where a
person becomes sexually aroused by touching and "worshipping" the
muscles of a more physically dominant partner.
Male worshippers like Johnny are referred to in the muscle worship
subculture as "schmoes." The dominant women they adore are their
"goddesses." Although most schmoes can be found happily swarming around
the fringes of your local bodybuilding show, the erotic pleasure they
find in the strength and appearance of hyper-muscular women also
motivates them to seek out female bodybuilders for private sessions
where they can put those muscles to the test. These sessions can take
place anywhere from Airbnb apartments to, on special occasions, the
schmoe's own home. For many goddesses, sensual touching and wrestling is
as far as it ever goes. For others, sexual intercourse is also an
option.
"I've had several sessions," says Johnny. "They work out
at about £350 [$453] per hour. Some guys like to engage in serious
wrestling matches with the girls, but my own preference is for playful
wrestling while encouraging the woman to show off her strength by
lifting me and putting me in holds. The vast majority of sessions I've
had have ended in full sex. Some girls are known for always providing
sex. Others claim not to; but, in my experience, if the chemistry is
good in the room, good things invariably follow."
Johnny goes on
to explain how a surge of additional "goddesses" have become "available"
to him recently, as the direct result of rule changes to the sport of
women's bodybuilding.
The International Federation of Bodybuilding
& Fitness has removed the women's heavy-weight category from the
biggest global competitions (the Olympia, the Arnold Classic, and the
World Championships) and replaced it with Women's Bikini—a weight class
designed for lighter, more traditionally "feminine"-looking women. As
the larger athletes are being phased out, many find themselves wrestling
with men like Johnny to make ends meet. "There's barely any money in it
for women," says Wendy McCready, "even when you do turn pro."
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
