When George Orwell wrote “1984” in 1948, not only did he foresee where advanced technology would bring society, he also foresaw that such technology would become available. At that time, this meant two enormous insights in one. A Big Brother may arise among power hungry forces, but it can do nothing without the technology to control and trace people. And 73 years ago, it wasn’t obvious that this would ever be reality.
But today it is here. If there’s anything the Covid era -virustime- teaches us, it is that. We are now all required to think the same, and act the same, as everyone else, and as scripted by powers that -more than ever- oversee our every move. What 1984 should have taught us, but didn’t, is that once you allow such powers to acquire such oversight, they will never let go. You need to stop them beforehand.
Because if you don’t, they will squeeze you ever tighter, until you have no freedom, no liberty, and finally no personality left: you will no longer be human in the sense that it has long been defined. There is a history and a name for this.
Learned helplessness is well-documented. It takes place when an individual believes he continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to improve his circumstances, even when he has the ability to do so. Discovering the loss of control elicits a passive reaction to a harmful situation. Psychologists call this a maladaptive response, characterized by avoidance of challenges and the collapse of problem-solving when obstacles arise. You give up trying to fight back.
You could push back, but you have been made afraid at a core level and so you just give in. You’re left believing nothing will fix this. Helpless to resist, you comply “out of an abundance of caution.” American psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier created the term “learned helplessness” in 1967. They were studying animal behavior by delivering electric shocks to dogs (it was a simpler time.) Dogs who learned they couldn’t escape the shock simply stopped trying, even after the scientists removed a barrier and the dog could have jumped away.
Learned helplessness has three main features: a passive response to trauma, not believing that trauma can be controlled, and stress.{..] You are not responsible, can’t fix something so systemic, and best do what you are told. The way out is to allow people to make decisions and choices on their own. This therapy is used with victims of learned helplessness such as hostages . During their confinement all the important decisions of their life, and most of the minor ones, were made by their captors. Upon release, many hostages fear things as simple as a meal choice and need to be coaxed out of helplessness one micro-choice at a time.
There is no such thing as overwhelming evidence that year-long lockdowns and mask mandates and “the vaccines” can achieve their alleged goals. But that doesn’t matter if and when there is central control over what evidence -and narrative- people are allowed to read and watch. With that kind of control, there is simply just one story, and no discussion.
Whereas discussion, with different views and opinions being submitted, is essential to come out of a situation like this. Two people know more than one, basic stuff. We’re good at it, if we try. But if you look at the media, and the entire medical field, there is on discussion happening. There is only one opinion, and it’s -state and corporate- sanctioned.
I don’t find the stories about the origin of the virus all that interesting -at this moment-, they act mostly as a distraction from what is more important: freedom, having a voice in one’s own life, making your own decisions, and saving lives in the process. The virus origin stories, crazy as they may be, have nothing to do with that: they merely make you watch a sort of battle of the gods, something that never gave anyone any power over their lives.
And in the meantime you may be “allowed” some extra basic human rights, but not too many, you wear a mask on your face, and you get injected with a substance that for 99% of people is both unnecessary for their survival, and potentially dangerous to that same survival. But it’s the only narrative that is “allowed”.
As for the potential danger, it’s not just the blood clots that the media are allowed to report on, it’s also the spike proteins the vaccines induce your cells to produce, and which are free to roam around your body, gathering in testes, ovaries, placenta and a whole slew of other organs.
All we can do is hope our immune systems are strong enough to fight off the vaccines.
Seldom should any substances have been subjected to more rigorous research than mRNA vaccines, and seldom have any been subjected to less. So the problems should not be a surprise to anyone. Facebook now “allows” you to say that the vaccines are not FDA approved, but not that they are experimental or haven’t been appropriately tested. Which is the same thing. What gives Facebook that power to begin with?
Professor emeritus of Medical Microbiology and Immunology Dr. Bhakdi doesn’t agree. But Facebook knows better, right?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1401154680361730049
And then you get things like this line: “Britain’s medicines regulator said Friday the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is safe for adolescents aged 12 to 15 after a “rigorous review”, following similar assessments in the EU and US.” What rigorous review? Where is it? How much time did you take for that research? And if it was so rigorous, why are they still not approved? And what exactly is the benefit to these children? A 0.001% higher chance of survival? Vs a 10x higher chance of suffering adverse effects?
Anyway, one step back. Yes, the vaccines are completely unnecessary. Michael Yeadon, former Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer put it like this:
“Ivermectin is an off-patent drug that is one of the most widely used drugs in the world, and we know it is able to reduce Covid-19 symptoms at any stage of the disease by about 90%, so there is no need for vaccines.”
A 90% reduction of symptoms means no need for vaccines OR facemasks OR lockdowns. That’s ostensibly better than any of the vaccines can achieve. And this could have started at least 6 months ago (I’m thinking of Pierre Kory’s Dec. 8 Senate testimony here, conveniently killed off by YouTube), and after 6 months of a 90% reduction, there is no danger left at all.
Dr. Pierre Kory said if you take ivermectin, you won’t get sick (and it’s safer than Tylenol). Renowned science writer Michael Capuzzo recently wrote The Drug That Cracked Covid. And couldn’t get it published. Here at the Automatic Earth, we’ve been discussing ivermectin for over a year, especially after our resident physician John Day switched to it from hydroxychloroquine to treat his Covid patients.
This is from a very recent report written by Pierre Kory and the team at FLCCC published in the American Journal of Therapeutics:
It should be noted that the concentrations required for an effect in cell culture models bear little resemblance to human physiology given the absence of an active immune system working synergistically with a therapeutic agent, such as ivermectin. Furthermore, prolonged durations of exposure to a drug likely would require a fraction of the dosing in short-term cell model exposure. Furthermore, multiple coexisting or alternate mechanisms of action likely explain the clinical effects observed, such as the competitive binding of ivermectin with the host receptor-binding region of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, as proposed in 6 molecular modeling studies.21–26
In 4 of the studies, ivermectin was identified as having the highest or among the highest of binding affinities to spike protein S1 binding domains of SARS-CoV-2 among hundreds of molecules collectively examined, with ivermectin not being the particular focus of study in 4 of these studies.27 This is the same mechanism by which viral antibodies, in particular, those generated by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The high binding activity of ivermectin to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could limit binding to either the ACE-2 receptor or sialic acid receptors, respectively, either preventing cellular entry of the virus or preventing hemagglutination, a recently proposed pathologic mechanism in COVID-19.21,22,26–28
Ivermectin has also been shown to bind to or interfere with multiple essential structural and nonstructural proteins required by the virus to replicate.26,29 Finally, ivermectin also binds to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), thereby inhibiting viral replication.30
Dr. Kory estimates that 500,000 deaths could have been prevented with ivermectin treatment. The same is likely true for hydroxychloroquine. And he’s probably deliberately lowballing it. Then there’s vitamin D, and zinc, and a dozen or so repurposed drugs. All put together, there is no doubt they make the vaccines superfluous.
And yes, if someone is responsible for 500,000 deaths, there must be an investigation, just like there must be one into the origin of the virus. Why suppress ivermectin and other drugs, and at the same time promote vaccines without properly testing them? Who made those decisions? But right now, it seems more important to make sure that no more people die unnecessarily. Take care of that first, and then investigate.
In “1984”, the idea is that everybody must do the same thing, and think the same thing. In 2021, they do. Nothing good can come from that.
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Obviously, like hopefully many people, I’ve been following the WikiLeaks CIA revelations, and closely. It’s too early for too many conclusions, if only because WikiLeaks has announced much more will flow from that same pipeline. But one thing is already clear: the CIA is -still- a club that sees enemies behind every tree, and behind every TV set too. Which is not as obvious a world view as it may seem; it’s just something we’ve become used to.
Moreover, as we see time and again, organizations like the CIA and NATO have no qualms about ‘creating’ enemies if they are in short supply. The flavor du jour has now been, for years, Russia, but don’t be surprised if another one is cultivated alongside it. ISIS, China, North Korea, plenty of options, and plenty of media more than willing to aid the cultivation process. It’s a well-oiled machine geared towards making something out of nothing, a machine very adept at making you believe anything it wants you to.
In this way, our friends can become our enemies, and our enemies our friends. What gets lost in translation is that this way in reality we become our own worst enemies. While the upper and most secretive layers of society, filled with folk of questionable psychological constitution -sociopaths and psychopaths-, get to chase their dreams of wealth and power, those who try to live normal decent lives are, for that very purpose, increasingly subjected to poverty, misery and fear. As our economies decline further, this will only get worse.
Who needs your -conscious- vote or voice if these can be easily manipulated? Or do you not think you’re being manipulated? How many of you, American or European, think Russia is an actual threat to you? I’m afraid by now there’s a majority on each continent who perceive Putin as an evil force. The president of a country that spends one-tenth on its military of what the US does. Trump’s announced military spending increase alone is almost as much as Russia spends in a whole year.
If Putin is really the threat he’s made out to be, to both Europe and the US, he must be extremely smart; merely devious wouldn’t do it. A man who can be an active threat to two entire continents and almost a billion people while spending a fraction on building that threat of what those he threatens do, must be a genius. Or the victim of media-politico manipulation.
But we don’t stop there. As the CIA spying and hacking files once again make abundantly clear, America increasingly seeks its enemies at home. This may be presented in the shape of Donald Trump, or terrorists on US soil, imported or not, but claiming that we can still tell a real threat from an invented one is no longer credible. We are led along on a propaganda leash 24/7, and the best thing about it is we believe we are not. That’s why it’s a good idea to pay close attention to what WikiLeaks is telling us.
The most extreme example of the political machinery turning our friends into enemies is probably right there, in the WikiLeaks and whistleblower corner of society. Earlier today I wrote:
The CIA spent a huge wad of taxpayer money on this, and then lost it all. It’s early days to say what this will mean for the agency’s abilities, and the nation’s safety, as well as that of American citizens, but it’s not good. Question is: who’s going to investigate how this could have happened? (Snowden and Kim Dotcom could)… And who’s going to repair the damage done? Anyone could be spying on your phone and your TV by now, not just the CIA -as if that wouldn’t be bad enough.
Then later I saw I wasn’t the only one who had thought of this:
Edward Snowden and Kim Dotcom and Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are ‘the enemy’, so say our ‘leaders’. They have received this honorable label for exposing secrets these same leaders were trying to hide from us. Secrets most of us, if we think it over, would say should not be kept from us. The NSA spying on the American people, or the CIA turning your phones and TVs and cars into objects that can be used against you, these are things that don’t belong in our societies.
Still, as I’ve always said, if they can do it -from a technical point of view-, they will, damn the law. So we will have to make very sure the laws keep up with these developments, or we’re defenseless. The Obama administration hasn’t been much help with this, and the rest of Washington won’t be either, they’re not just part of the machine, they are the engine that drives the machine. Obama allegedly gave in to the CIA for fear of ending up like JFK and the rest, along with the press, is under control too.
So perhaps Trump is our best chance at putting a stop to this coup, this deep state, from taking over. If we still can. And for that we might well need Snowden and Dotcom and Assange, who are not the enemies they are made out to be, they are the smartest among us, or at least they belong right up there. And they are not only the smartest, they are the bravest too. Locking them up would be a huge disservice to our societies, it would be much better to ask them to help us figure out what game the hell is being played.
One thing the WikiLeaks files accomplished is they made and and all accusations of Russian hacking, and of links between Trump and Russia, utterly meaningless in one fell swoop. Because the CIA has acquired the capability, both through hacking Russian files and through coding, to leave ‘footprints’ that make it look like the Russians left them. And the only ‘proof’ there ever was for all these accusations was based on these footprints. That’s one narrative that must now be restarted from scratch -just one of many.
All we need now is for Trump to figure out who his enemies are, and who his friends. He already knows the CIA is not his friend, but has he figured out yet that the whistleblowers are not his enemy? And has his crew? Kim Dotcom is right, Trump is in real danger, he’s been watched, and being watched, 24/7. Whether Obama ordered that or not is not very relevant. There are more urgent matters at hand.
And somewhere along the way he’s going to have to figure out that chasing women and children around the country and out of it is not just ugly, it’ll cost him too much sympathy too. But so far all protests come from the Democrats and their supporters, who have all been left voiceless and shapeless by the election and now see their Russian conspiracy narratives blown to smithereens too, so why wouldn’t he please his own voters for a bit longer?
Well, for one thing, because he has to start to realize he’s going to need very broad support, and soon, be a president for all Americans so to speak, to fend off the CIA et al, and in what may be the hardest thing to do, he needs to invoke transparency, explain to people exactly what he does, and why, to drain the deep swamp.
If he fails in all this, and for now the odds point in that direction, those who protest him today will feel validated, right, and winners. They will be tragically wrong. Because if Trump loses this, the CIA wins. And then we will all live in 1984 for as far into the future as we can see.
I know there’s a lot that’s not to like about Trump and Bannon and all those guys. However, look at it this way: they are the only ones who can keep the doors of the vault from slamming shut for the rest of our lives, leaving time for y’all to wake up and find a president who doesn’t seek to turn your friends into your enemies. At least you’ll still have that choice.
With present-day Washington, Democrat or Republican, there’s no such choice. They’re CIA, as are the media. Kim Dotcom tweeted this too today:
China’s economy has managed a curiously singular feat for any country: Growing a steady rate of 6.7% for the third quarter in a row. “It’s definitely unusual in an international context,” noted Julian Evans-Pritchard, a China economist at Capital Economics on Wednesday. “There are almost no countries that have such stable GDP growth rates.” The GDP trifecta is the first since at least 1992 when Reuters began compiling data. “It suggests quite significant smoothing of the data behind the scenes. Even by Chinese standards, this is quite rare,” Evans-Pritchard said. [..] “In China, these numbers don’t tend to bounce around a lot. They tend to be remarkably smooth,” said Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics.
“The authorities feel so strongly about the GDP numbers that the whole government apparatus are always doing everything they can, especially in terms of policies and stimulating growth to make sure that the activity numbers, the economic growth numbers are pretty close to what it’s targeting.” Kuijs said he viewed the focus on meeting the 6.5-7.0% economic growth target as a setback. He noted that last year, high-level policymakers had indicated that it would be acceptable to miss growth targets, but then late in 2015, the government returned to a rigid interpretation. “Many economists find that unfortunate,” Kuijs said. “If you have organic growth in your economy of around 5.5% in a context of a pretty subdued global economy, if you continue to insist on 6.5% growth, that means you have to rely on rapid credit growth and other macro-economic stimulus to achieve it.”
The value of China’s new home sales rose 61% in September from a year earlier, defying policymakers’ moves earlier this year to cool the property market. The value of homes sold rose to 1.2 trillion yuan ($178 billion) last month from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data the National Bureau of Statistics released Wednesday. The increase compares with a 33% gain the previous month. Residential transactions surged in an extended real-estate bull market, prompting local authorities in late September to roll out tougher curbs in big cities. At least 21 cities have introduced purchase restrictions and toughened mortgage lending since late September, reversing two years of easing to support buyers. Property-development investment growth, which expanded at the slowest pace in 15 years in December, was running at 5.8% in the first three quarters of this year, up from 5.4% in the first eight months.
When our buttoned-down economic guardians start using words like “disruptive adjustment” it’s a sign something’s amiss. Over the past few weeks both the Reserve Bank and the IMF have used that same ominous phrase with reference to Australia’s biggest trading partner, China. In essence, the problem is a corporate debt binge. Credit growth in China has accelerated and is growing at twice the pace of its economic growth rate. Debt levels have ballooned to 250% of GDP and alarm bells are ringing. So how worried should we be here in Australia? No one knows for sure, but probably a fair bit. Economists often resort to the term “uncharted waters” to describe unusual conditions but in this case the cliche is apt.
It is notoriously hard to predict how and when debt bubbles will unwind in the most transparent of democratic systems. In a huge one-party-state like China it’s even more mysterious. Few institutions have invested as much over recent years in understanding the Chinese economy as the Reserve Bank of Australia. In its regular review of financial stability, released on Friday, it described China as “a key locus of risk” given its increasing size in the global economy and the run-up in borrowing. “The potential for a disruptive adjustment in China remains pronounced, given the ongoing increase in debt,” it said. The sheer pace of lending growth makes it likely many loans are going to marginal borrowers or unprofitable projects.
China’s growth is slowing and that will make it harder for highly leveraged firms to service their debts, especially if loans have funded unviable projects. To make matters worse much of the rapid growth has been from China’s less regulated “shadow banking” sector. China’s financial system “has become increasingly large, opaque and interconnected,” the Reserve warned.
Our old friend Michael David White has this: “Greece is a savvy tycoon sitting on piles of money compared to the United States. Detroit is a model of careful planning. Venezuela is smooth and efficient in its operation.”
Every person in America can sell everything they own two times — every house, car, bicycle, tent, stock, bond, blanket and kitchen sink — send all the money to the federal government, and Medicare and social security will almost be in good standing. Americans have $90 trillion of personal wealth and $210 trillion of federal debt. We are a dead man. We rest peacefully, in a lead coffin, at the bottom of the sea. We are underwater and we can’t pay our bills. We are dead broke. Plan B is now our destiny. The federal government’s debt of $210 trillion is two times greater than all of the personal wealth of all Americans combined. The federal government’s debt is 11 times greater than the debt of a country in bankruptcy.
And the federal government’s debt is more than 20 times greater than the mortgage debt on every American home. The Democratic Party, led by the progressive Big Media, whose signature legislation is social security and Medicare, has bankrupted the wealthiest country in the history of the world. The “social justice” initiatives of President Roosevelt and Johnson will end with the greatest financial crisis ever. The Roosevelt-Johnson global depression will spread poverty misery and violence far and wide. Socialism bankrupts host countries. America is going to learn the hard way and the world will be forced to go with us for a very long ride. Big Media will bury the story until the cities are burning.
Mike shows you how much the government controls the economy today. And why it will be very difficult to get out of this mind-boggling level of debt. You’ll see this is not just a problem in the Western world, it’s the entire world. As Mike says, “this is going to be a global recession and it’s going to be bad.”
France produced the most power from fossil fuels for September in 32 years to help meet demand as nuclear generation dropped. Output from coal and gas plants more than doubled as Paris-based Electricite de France was forced to keep reactors offline for inspections. French month-ahead power prices have risen to near the highest since 2009. “The availability of French nuclear continues to alarm market participants,” said Bruno Brunetti, managing director of global power at Pira Energy Group in New York. “With the lack of French exports supporting thermal generation, we have revised upward forecasts of coal-fired dispatching by roughly 5 terawatt-hours through 2017 in western Europe.”
EDF’s reactors produced 26.6 terawatt-hours of electricity in September, the least since August 1998, prompting “heavy use” of stations burning coal and gas in a trend that has been increasing since April, according to a report by French grid operator Reseau de transport d’electricite. Thermal power generation was 4,132 gigawatt-hours, or 11% of the total. France has seven fewer reactors available than at the same time last year after EDF announced it needed more time to carry out inspections to rule out potential anomalies on steam generators at 18 of its 58 units ordered by the nation’s nuclear regulator.
The constitutional argument against Brexit is clever and powerful. It’s being made by David Pannick, a member of the House of Lords and a particularly skilled and brilliant barrister. As articulated before the court it runs like this: A well-recognized principle of the U.K. constitution is that one law enacted by Parliament may only be changed by another law. Parliament enacted the European Communities Act in 1972. That law, which opened the way for the U.K. to join the European Economic Community, says that European laws apply in the U.K. European law today includes lots of individual rights, including those found in the European Declaration of Human Rights. Once the U.K. leaves the EU, the rights will no longer apply to Britons. Hence, Pannick says, the U.K. can’t leave the EU without a law authorizing withdrawal. And a law requires an act of Parliament.
If accepted by the courts, Pannick’s argument would have the effect of blocking PM Theresa May’s government from invoking Article 50 of the EU treaty, which allows member states to withdraw. The government would need to go to Parliament, which would say no – and Brexit would be blocked. So is Pannick right? There’s a somewhat plausible technical response to his claims. It says essentially that since the 1972 law incorporates European law, and Article 50 of the EU treaty is European law, there’s no need for another act of Parliament, because the 1972 law isn’t really being revoked but simply relied upon to withdraw. This would be a pretty cheap way for courts to solve the deeper problem, and I suspect the judges won’t want to reject Pannick’s claim on a technicality – or at least they shouldn’t.
The better, more substantive answer to Pannick’s argument is that while Parliament hasn’t enacted a new law for EU withdrawal, there has been a public pronouncement on the topic: the Brexit referendum. True, a referendum isn’t a law. But it is the voice of the people, at least as expressed on the fateful day of the vote. Here’s where things get really interesting from a constitutional standpoint. If the U.K. had a written constitution, it would probably say whether a referendum should be treated the same as a legislative vote. But because it doesn’t, the courts will have to decide whether a referendum is just as good as a legislative vote, or better, or worse. And that judgment will require some serious thought about the true nature of democracy.
Homeless people are being told by councils to sleep rough so they can get help, research by a charity has found. People who turned to their local authority for help were often sent packing without support or instructed to sleep rough in order to access services, according to a report by St Mungo’s. The findings, based on interviews with 40 St Mungo’s clients, suggested that three-quarters of homeless people had slept rough the night after they asked a council for help because they had nowhere to stay. One of those interviewed by St Mungo’s said: “We decided to go to the local council and they told us that we had to sleep rough for three nights in a row before they could actually do anything to help us. We just felt complete despair.”
The charity is calling on the government to ensure that no one is sent away by local authorities when they have nowhere to go. St Mungo’s will take part in a mass lobby of Parliament on Wednesday in support of the Homelessness Reduction Bill. The research also found that 129 rough sleepers have died in London since 2010, while a quarter reported being physically assaulted when they were on the streets. One interviewee said: “I’ve been beaten up quite a few times sleeping in doorways, or even in cars, they smash the window in on top of you, spit on you, urinate on you, try and set you on fire. I’ve had all of those things happen to me.” In the past five years, the number of people sleeping rough has more than doubled – with a 30% increase in the past year alone.
All agencies are quietly being armed just in case there may be civil unrest which arises by rigging the election to defeat Donald Trump. Even Ben Carson has come out and explained why Trump beat everyone in the Republican field: “the people themselves have just gotten disgusted with being manipulated and controlled”. There is no question that we have entered a new age post-2015.75 that is one of betrayal and deception. Many people assume that Obama would never declare martial law and that the proposition is simply a conspiracy theory. This is simply not true. Martial law in the United States has been declared several times, so it is by no means off the table. The martial law concept within the United States legally is very closely linked with the right of habeas corpus, which has been suspended and reduced in many cases over the years.
That is why they keep Guantanamo open for if they are not on US soil, they cannot file a habeas corpus. Effectively, the right to a hearing on “lawful” imprisonment is embodied in the essence of habeas corpus that is under the supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary, which of course has been stacked with pro-government judges. The constitutional ability to suspend habeas corpus is related to the imposition of martial law. Under the Constitution, Article 1, Section 9 states; “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” There you have the authority to suspend the law if there is a “rebellion” based upon civil unrest that is political in nature. Obama can also claim “public safety” is at stake if Trump supports riot.
Therefore, under United States law, martial law is very limited by several court decisions that were handed down between the American Civil War and World War II. Don’t forget the Japanese Internment camps during World War II. You were locked up just because of your heritage without any rioting or committing some threatening act. It was just “presumed” you “might” do something and that was as good as guilt.
Half of all American adults are included in databases police use to identify citizens with facial recognition technology, according to new research that raises serious concerns about privacy violations and the widespread use of racially biased surveillance technology. A report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found that more than 117 million adults are captured in a “virtual, perpetual lineup”, which means law enforcement offices across the US can scan their photos and use unregulated software to track law-abiding citizens in government datasets. Numerous major police departments have “real-time face recognition” technology that allows surveillance cameras to scan the faces of pedestrians walking down the street, the report found.
In Maryland, police have been using software to identify faces in protest photos and match them to people with warrants, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The report’s findings, along with revelations from the ACLU on police monitoring in Baltimore, suggest that the technology may be violating the rights of millions of Americans and is disproportionately impacting communities of color, advocates said. “Face recognition, when it’s used most aggressively, can change the nature of public spaces,” said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown’s privacy and technology center. “It can change the basic freedom we have to go about our lives without people identifying us from afar and in secret.”
The center’s year-long investigation, based on more than 100 police records requests, has produced the most comprehensive survey of facial databases to date and raises numerous questions about the lack of transparency and privacy protections. Law enforcement biometric databases have traditionally captured DNA profiles related to criminal arrests or forensic investigations. What’s alarming about the FBI’s “face recognition unit”, according to the report, is that it is “overwhelmingly made up of non-criminal entries”.
While Hillary Clinton has spent the presidential campaign saying as little as possible about her ties to Wall Street, the executive who some observers say could be her Treasury Secretary has been openly promoting a plan to give financial firms control of hundreds of billions of dollars in retirement savings. The executive is Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group. The investment colossus is most famous in politics for its Republican CEO likening an Obama tax plan to a Nazi invasion. James, though, is a longtime Democrat — and one of Clinton’s top fundraisers. The billionaire sculpted the retirement initiative with a prominent labor economist whose work is supported by another investment mogul who is a big Clinton donor. The proposal has received bipartisan praise from prominent economic thinkers, and James says that Clinton’s top aides are warming to the idea.
It is a plan that proponents say could help millions of Americans – but could also enrich another constituency: the hedge fund and private equity industries that Blackstone dominates and that have donated millions to support Clinton’s presidential bid. The proposal would require workers and employers to put a%age of payroll into individual retirement accounts “to be invested well in pooled plans run by professional investment managers,” as James put it. In other words, individual voluntary 401(k)s would be replaced by a single national system, and much of the mandated savings would flow to Wall Street, where companies like Blackstone could earn big fees off the assets. And because of a gap in federal anti-corruption rules, there would be little to prevent the biggest investment contracts from being awarded to the biggest presidential campaign donors.
[..] Recently, [..] regulators, pension trustees, investment experts and academics have questioned whether retiree savings should be invested with firms like Blackstone in the first place. Some pensions are pulling out their money. Other pension systems have been turned into 401(k)-style plans, which are difficult for the alternative investment industry to break into because of federal laws that discourage those plans from buying into riskier, illiquid investments. In the face of these challenges, James’ proposal could provide a government-mandated flow of money from workers’ paychecks into the high-fee alternative investment industry.
Earlier today we wrote about a new Project Veritas undercover video that uncovered several democratic operatives openly discussing, in explicit detail, how to commit massive voter fraud. One of the operatives was a person by the name of Robert Creamer who is a co-founder of a democratic consulting firm called Democracy Partners. Within the video, an undercover journalist details a plan to register Hispanic voters illegally by having them work as contractors, to which Creamer can be heard offering support saying that “there are a couple of organizations that that’s their big trick”. Unfortunately, the embarrassing video caused Creamer to subsequently resign from consulting the Hillary campaign as he issued a statement saying that he was “stepping back from my responsibilities working the [Hillary] campaign” over fears that his continued assistance would be a distraction for the campaign.
But voter fraud isn’t Creamer’s only criminal specialty. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that Creamer spent 5 months in federal prison back in 2006 for a “$2.3 million bank fraud in relation to his operation of public interest groups in the 1990s.” So, with that kind of history, you can imagine our surprise when we discovered that a Mr. Robert Creamer showed up on the White House visitor logs 340 times beginning in 2009 when Obama took office and culminating with his latest visit in June 2016. Moreover, in 45 of those instances, Creamer was scheduled to meet with POTUS himself. Perhaps this is just two old Chicago “community organizers” hanging out?
We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed – they have no idea what to do. This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening – but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West – not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves – have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal. But there is another world outside. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago – that then festered and mutated – but which are now turning on us with a vengeful fury. Piercing though the wall of our fake world.
Abdul Shakoor thought nothing could shock him anymore. He has, after all, survived an assassination attempt by Pakistani security agents, he claims, in addition to torture in a Lahore prison. “But I was wrong.” Thirty-three-year-old Shakoor is standing in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos and pointing at the overcrowded plastic tents inside of which women, children and the ill are lying pushed up against one another, at the cement wall that surrounds the camp, and at the barbed wire. “I would have expected these kinds of conditions in Pakistan or Afghanistan,” he says. “But not in Greece.” As a result of the refugee influx, the infrastructure on Lesbos and other Greek islands is in danger of collapsing. Europe’s model is no longer working.
Although the number of migrants dropped after the EU-Turkey deal came into effect in March, the number of refugees heading for Greece has once again gone up, partially in response to the failed military coup in Turkey on June 15. In August and September, 6,527 refugees crossed the Aegean, twice as many as in May and June. The crisis in Turkey, it seems, isn’t just scaring many Turks, it is also driving refugees out of the country. Currently, there are at least 15,000 migrants on the Greek islands, with the camps available only able to handle half that many. And new boats arrive every day. Skirmishes between camp residents – and between refugees and locals – have become a frequent occurrence.
The Greek government is facing a dilemma, says political advisor Gerald Knaus, whose think tank, the European Stability Initiative, helped conceive the EU-Turkey deal. The Greeks, he says, can no longer ignore the chaos on the islands. If Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras carries through on his recent pledge to move large numbers of refugees onto the mainland, it would be a signal to the smugglers in Turkey that the Aegean Route has reopened. “If the EU doesn’t do anything quickly,” Knaus warns, “the refugee deal will be dead in a few months.” Knaus, whom many people describe as the creator of the refugee deal, warns that if the deal fails, chaos could result. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, he says, would arrive in Greece and try to break through the fences to the north. The Balkans would turn into a battleground for migrants, smugglers, border guards and soldiers, Knaus says. “That would be the end of European asylum policy.”
Hundreds of mammal species – from chimpanzees to hippos to bats – are being eaten into extinction by people, according to the first global assessment of the impact of human hunting. Bushmeat has long been a traditional source of food for many rural people, but as roads have been driven into remote areas, large-scale commercial hunting is leaving forests and other habitats devoid of wildlife. The scientists behind the new analysis warned that, without action, the wiping out of these species could lead to the collapse of the food security of hundreds of millions of people reliant on bushmeat for survival.
The work comes against the backdrop of the natural world undergoing the greatest mass extinction since a giant meteorite strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago, with species vanishing far more rapidly than the long term rate, driven by the destruction and invasion of wild areas by humans and their livestock and hunting. The researchers, whose study is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, used the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list to identify the endangered land mammals that are primarily at risk from hunting for food. They found 301 such species, representing 7% of all the land mammals assessed by IUCN and about a quarter of all endangered mammals.
Other mammals are threatened by habitat loss or hunting for other reasons, such as elephants which are poached for their ivory. The 301 species include 168 primates, such as the lowland gorilla and mandrill, 73 hoofed animals, such as the wild yak and bactrian camel, 27 bats, such as the golden-capped fruit bat and the black-bearded flying fox, and 12 carnivores, such as the clouded leopard and several bear species. There are also 26 marsupials threatened by meat hunting, including the grizzled tree kangaroo, and 21 rodent species, such as the Sulawesi giant squirrel and the alpine woolly rat.
