Curiously Curated Conspiracies, Cover Ups and Corruption. All content is 'for your consideration' only. "The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears." ~ Hunter S. Thompson
While I have fond memories of life in New York, many of them involve defying some stupid rule or regulation. It’s a pleasure to now live in Arizona where government, while still idiotic, generally has a lighter touch. Unfortunately for friends and family I left behind, Empire State officialdom still hasn’t learned its lessons, as evidenced by the heavy regulatory hand stifling sort-of-legalized marijuana, and proposals to similarly reinforce the black market with an outright ban on cigarette sales.
“Governor Kathy Hochul today signed new legislation to increase civil and tax penalties for the unlicensed and illicit sale of cannabis in New York as part of the FY 2024 Budget,” the New York governor’s office announced this week. “The legislation, first proposed by the Governor in March, provides additional enforcement power to the Office of Cannabis Management and the Department of Taxation and Finance to enforce the new regulatory requirements and close stores engaged in the illegal sale of cannabis.”
In the spring of 2019, two New York City Police Department officers entered the Bronx apartment of Kawaski Trawick. The 32-year-old personal trainer and dancer had called 911 after locking himself out.
But 112 seconds after their arrival, footage showed, one of the officers shot and killed Trawick, despite the officer’s more-experienced partner repeatedly telling him not to use force.
When an internal investigation later cleared the officers — saying “no wrongdoing was found” — the NYPD offered no explanation for its reasoning. But records obtained by ProPublica can now reveal how the department came to that conclusion.
Investigators never explored key exchanges between the two officers in the run-up to the shooting. They also never followed up with the officers when their accounts contradicted the video evidence.
“Any conversation between you and your partner?” the head of the investigative unit asked Officer Herbert Davis hours after the shooting.
“No,” Davis answered.
That wasn’t true.
After arriving at Trawick’s apartment and finding him holding a stick and a bread knife, body-worn camera footage shows that Davis, who is Black, told his less-experienced white partner, Officer Brendan Thompson, not to use his Taser. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he said, motioning for Thompson to step back.
Thompson fired his Taser anyway, causing Trawick to become enraged, and Davis then tried to stop Thompson from shooting Trawick. “No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Davis said, before briefly pushing Thompson’s gun down.
The investigators had access to all that footage. They never asked either officer about it.
ProPublica obtained the NYPD’s full internal investigation, including audio of interviews with both officers, via a Freedom of Information Law request.
Police have their sights set on every surveillance camera in every business, on every porch, in all the cities and counties of the country. Grocery store trips, walks down the street, and otherwise minding your own business when outside your home could soon come under the ever-present eye of the government. In a quiet but rapid expansion of law enforcement surveillance, U.S. cities are buying and promoting products from Georgia-based company Fusus in order to access on-demand, live video from public and private camera networks.
The company sells police a cloud-based platform for creating real-time crime centers and a streamlined way for officers to interface with their various surveillance streams, including predictive policing, gunshot detection, license plate readers, and drones. For the public, Fusus also sells hardware that can be added to private cameras and convert privately-owned video into instantly-accessible parts of the police surveillance network. In Atlanta, Memphis, Orlando, and dozens of other locations, police officers have been asking the public to buy into a Fusus-fueled surveillance system, at times sounding like eager pitchmen trying to convince people and businesses to trade away privacy for a false sense of security.
The model expands police access to personal information collected by private cameras that would otherwise require warrants and community conversation. Because these cameras are privately owned, police can enjoy their use without having to create and follow records retention and deletion policies.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been collecting and reviewing documents about cities’ uses of Fusus, which counts nearly 150 jurisdictions as customers. You can access these records on DocumentCloud. EFF also shared these documents with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which published its report today.
Police surveillance threatens constitutionally protected activities. It gives police the ability to surreptitiously spy on and track people of no real or alleged criminal concern. It creates caches of sensitive, personal information that can be retained indefinitely. Fusus is compounding these issues by expanding police access to surveillance cameras and integrating the cameras with a number of other surveillance services. This increases the ways police are able to record, track, and marginalize communities.
Deciding whether to expand police video surveillance to every corner of our lives should never happen without strong community conversation, transparency, and real respect for procurement rules and the public’s liberty. Yet cities’ responses to public records requests reveal a lack of clear guidance on when live access can be utilized, with very few locations able to provide policies regarding appropriate and specific police use of the system.
Disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn loves a conspiracy theory—except when it’s about him.
Flynn, who has boosted countless conspiracies over the last two years, from claiming Italian military satellites helped steal the 2020 election to claiming COVID was a hoax perpetrated by the “global elite,” filed a lawsuit last week against a man who has spent the same time repeatedly and consistently accusing Flynn of being Q.
Jim Stewartson, who previously worked in developing alternate reality games, has attained a level of notoriety online for his wild accusations about Flynn being part of a Kremlin-funded psyop to destroy U.S. democracy.
“Mike Flynn, the worst traitor in history who stole 2016, created Q, planned the insurrection,” Stewartson tweeted on Wednesday, repeating conspiracies he has posted obsessively for over two years.
Stewartson has, as usual, failed to produce any convincing evidence to back up his claims, which have been debunked and dismissed by journalists and researchers who closely track the development of QAnon.
In Flynn’s lawsuit, filed last week in the circuit court in Sarasota County, Florida, where Flynn lives, the former Army general claims that “Stewartson sought fame through the trend of defaming prominent conservative figures.”
The lawsuit contains a long list of the accusations Stewartson has made against Flynn in social media postings, Substack articles and on his podcast.
The lawsuit includes a lengthy list of Stewartson’s “pernicious lies” about Flynn, which it says include “accusing him of committing treason and domestic terrorism, working for Vladimir Putin, being a Russian asset, stealing the 2016 election, working to overthrow the United States government, planning and executing a violent insurrection, being a leader of QAnon, being a Nazi, waging psychological warfare on the American people, wanting a second Holocaust, using ISIS radicalization techniques on the American people, torturing prisoners, and literally trying to murder former Vice President Mike Pence.”
The lawsuit says Stewartson has made these claims to boost his profile and profit from subscriptions to his podcast and Substack account. Flynn is seeking $150,000 in damages from Stewartson.
Stewartson has 20 days to file a written response to the lawsuit. When Stewartson was contacted for a comment by this reporter, who he has repeatedly claimed is part of the Flynn-Russia psyop, Stewartson replied on a public Twitter thread, saying, “I think that @GenFlynn is a psychological warfare expert who knows how to protect himself with his ‘army of digital soldiers’ including you.”
Stewartson shows no sign of changing his approach; this week he published a Substack post entitled, “Q sued me.”
The e-verify program is one of those subtle Trojan Horses that government is so good at.
It starts with a widely perceived problem that has widespread support: that the country is full of illegal workers.
Whether or not this is actually a problem is a matter that can be debated, but that’s not actually the relevant bit. The relevant bit is that it’s popularly seen as such in many quarters.
The solution looks simple: create e-verify.
All employers are required to check citizenship/work eligibility when hiring.
It seems simple, straightforward, and people will support it because it does not harm them, it keeps others from competing with them. we’re simply solving the problem of “stop flooding into work, there are no jobs for you any more.” (Well, except in agriculture which is being carved out because no one is crazy enough to block that and let crops rot in fields or field lie fallow.)
But there is a much more subtle twist here: it’s a classic trojan framing.
The decision released Wednesday, by the 4th District Court of Appeals, clears the way for a trial court judge to review the transcripts and determine if their release will further justice.
The outcome of the proceedings made it possible for the politically connected Palm Beacher, who police had accused of victimizing a series of young teenagers, to continue to molest and traffic girls for 13 more years, noted Nina Boyajian, representing the Post before the appeal court’s three-judge panel Feb. 28. Learning how the grand jury reached its decision is essential to knowing whether justice was sabotaged by prosecutors, she said.
A Palm Beach Post investigation found that out of multiple teenage girls who told police that they were recruited and paid to come to Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion where he sexually abused them, then-State Attorney Barry Krischer’s office called only one to testify before the grand jury, and undermined her testimony, displaying social media posts about boys and drinking.
It’s a matter of free speech, says Omali Yeshitela, the longtime leader of the St. Petersburg-based Uhuru Movement and founder of the African People’s Socialist Party.
Yeshitela was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa last month and accused of working with Russian nationals to sow discord in the United States, spread pro-Russian propaganda and influence elections, along with two other members of the Uhuru Movement, Penny Joanne Hess and Jesse Nevel.
On Wednesday, the three Uhuru members spoke to the press for the first time since their indictment.
“I believe in free speech,” Yeshitela said at the news conference. “If I didn’t believe in free speech, I would never have said anything because they kill Black people for talking in this country.”
Yeshitela founded the African People’s Socialist Party in 1972. The Uhuru Movement is the party’s activist branch, started in the 1990s. The group supports reparations for Black people and has protested racism, colonialism and capitalism for decades. Hess and Nevel are the chairpersons of groups for white allies under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, respectively.
The United States should end involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, call for a cease-fire and begin negotiations immediately.
No matter what the War Party claims about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supposed desire to reinstate the Soviet Union or Russian empire, the fact is that this war was provoked by the United States, and — no surprise — particularly the neoconservatives.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama overthrew the government of Ukraine twice in 10 years, with their astro-turfed fake Orange and Maidan so-called “revolutions” of 2004 and 2014 because the people of Ukraine kept voting for the wrong guy.
W. announced at Bucharest in 2008 America’s determination to bring both Ukraine and former-Soviet Georgia, both of which border Russia, into the NATO alliance, just as he had overseen the addition of the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in 2004. This led to war in Georgia just a few months later when their American-installed regime attempted to reconquer two provinces lost during the breakup of the Soviet Union.
W. also began installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Romania and Poland, which are launched from the dual-use Mark-41 launchers, which can also fit Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be fitted with hydrogen bombs, thus violating at least the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s great Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty of 1987, which President Donald Trump tore up in 2019.
The Obama administration — led by Robert Kagan’s wife, former Dick Cheney advisor Victoria Nuland — supported the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, with neo-Nazi and far-right groups taking an active role in the overthrow. Soon, the new regime threatened to kick the Russians out of their only year-around, warm-water port at Sevastopol, Crimea, leading to Ukraine’s loss of the entire peninsula and the outbreak of war in the far-eastern Donbas region, which was majority ethnic Russian and had supported the recently ousted president.
After France and Germany struck the Minsk peace deals of 2014 and 2015 between Ukraine and Russia, Obama and Trump sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Kiev, incentivizing their continued violation of the peace deals.
After eight years of so-called “low-level” proxy war in the east, Putin demanded the full implementation of the Minsk agreements and a new treaty with the United States promising not to integrate Ukraine into NATO or station missiles there.
Instead of negotiating in good faith, the Biden administration said they were looking forward to replicating U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They would bog Russia down and bleed them to bankruptcy just as the Soviets had helped do to the United States in Vietnam and our own government has been helping Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda do to us for the last 20 years in the Middle East.
Los Angeles nonprofit workers passed out boxes of government-funded crystal meth pipes to the homeless population living on Skid Row, allegedly assuming it helps prevent fatal drug overdoses.
Bodycam footage reported by local media shows workers from the Homeless Health Care Los Angeles nonprofit organization distributing the drug paraphernalia while driving around the neighborhood in a golf cart, which witnesses said only enables addicts.
“If you walk down Skid Row and see the people that are on methamphetamine … and got sores all over their body, their teeth falling out, bumps all over their face, running down the street butt naked, that’s no safety,” Tony Anthony, resident, told Fox 11 Los Angeles. “They don’t need to be coming down here passing out these glass pipes.”
The news outlet reported that the nonprofit’s executive director turned down an interview and has yet to issue a statement.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) under the Biden administration continues its ‘door-to-door’ operation to seize Rare Breed FRT-15 triggers from private citizens. The latest example comes days ago when ATF agents, noticeably armed and wearing ballistic plate carriers, showed up at a person’s home, demanding the surrender of the FRT-15 trigger.
A man who claimed to be the owner of Moonlight Industries, a company specializing in making chest rigs for special forces operators, posted a video on Moonlight’s YouTube channel of two ATF agents visiting him at his home.
The conversation begins with the woman ATF agent saying, “Were you expecting us?”
The man responded, “Well, it doesn’t surprise me with a guy wearing a plate carrier showing up…”
The woman ATF agent (who does most of the talking) said, “The reason why we’re here … that just recently, the ATF, classified the FRT as machine guns.”
She said, “We are aware that you might have purchased some of these FRTs.” She admitted, “Like the whole agency is basically ‘reaching out’ to these purchasers, and we have to pick them up.”
After all that, Moonlight’s owner responded, “Well, I won’t be answering any questions today … and I don’t have any comments on this subject … and I won’t be giving you anything.”
In a split second, the male ATF agent asked Moonlight’s owner, “Are you refusing to give us the trigger?”
Moonlight’s owner said, “I’m not refusing to give anything. I just won’t be answering any questions.”
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