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Charity Builds Dozens of Tiny Homes for Homeless on PRIVATE PROPERTY, Cops & Gov’t Destroy All Of It

In 2020, The Free Thought Project reported on the work of two groups, Food Not Bombs and the Sidewalk Project, who raised $16,000 and built 26 tiny homes in Las Vegas for the city’s homeless community. It was an amazing feat put together by a handful of caring people trying to better their community but it came to a chaotic and destructive end when police and city officials raided the camp and destroyed all the homes.

The City of Las Vegas claimed that the destruction of the homes was justified as the city maintains “this right of way for NDOT, the property owner.” Joey Lankowski, who does homeless outreach with Food Not Bombs, sought to remedy this problem of building tiny homes on public property by raising money to purchase their own swath of land on private property.

Since last year, members of Food Not Bombs, the Sidewalk Project, and the New Leaf Community have been working tirelessly, volunteering countless hours of their personal time, to build a community of tiny homes on this newly owned piece of property.

For months volunteers built the tiny homes and allowed the community’s houseless population to live on the property. The community was thriving until earlier this year when the bureaucratic police state set their sights on the project’s private property.

The code enforcement division of the Las Vegas city government claimed that the property was in violation of zoning ordinance NLVMC 17.20.10 which states that the “accessory uses are not permitted” on the private property. According to the notice, a single family residence must be on the property before the tiny homes could be built and heavy fines would follow if they did not get “up to code.”

Since then, the city has waged an immoral war against the tiny home community and levied even more seemingly frivolous ordinance violations.

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How the White House Correspondents Dinner Broke the Democratic Party

When I was a political reporter in Washington, I used to loathe the White House Correspondents Dinner. I hated how it portrayed Beltway journalism as a game. How it reduced the project of government accountability to performative antagonism practiced daily by reporters in White House press briefings — a performance exposed annually at a dinner where the most powerful people in the world would rub elbows and yuck it up about funny “inside jokes” like George W. Bush’s bungling of the Iraq War and the media’s culpability in helping him do it.

Maybe because I was a reporter at the time, I always considered the dinner’s rottenness from the perspective of the relationship between the media and politicians, lamenting that images from the Washington Hilton of the press mingling with administration officials in black tie undercut the public’s faith in an independent media.

But the further away I’ve gotten from the experience — and the faster our republic has tumbled toward oblivion — the more I’ve considered how the dinner contributed in other, significant ways to the brokenness of our current political moment: The dinner highlights the laughable disconnect between the people in Washington with the power to do something (the dinner attendees) and the rest of us mere mortals (people largely not watching the dinner at home on C-SPAN).

The presidency of Barack Obama transformed the Democratic Party in ways many pundits already have explored ad nauseum, from a revolution in data analytics to Obama’s creation of an entire political infrastructure outside of the Democratic National Committee. Yet, the White House Correspondents Dinner, now that it’s back from its hiatus in the two years we acknowledged the ongoing pandemic as real, is also a reminder of perhaps Obama’s worst contribution to modern politics: the marriage between actual Hollywood and the “Hollywood for ugly people” known as Washington.

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FBI Accused of Doctoring Evidence in Child Sex Trafficking Case

A convicted child sex trafficker has accused the FBI of doctoring evidence in his case, which is under appeal.

Keith Raniere, the former leader and founder of NXIVM, was sentenced to 120 years in October 2020 after a federal jury found him guilty of sex trafficking, forced labor conspiracy, and racketeering. Raniere’s alleged crimes have been the subject of multiple documentaries, including HBO’s August 2020 series, The Vow.

An appeal hearing is set for May 3 for Raniere, but the defendant said on April 28 that he has come into possession of evidence that could overturn his entire case. According to Raniere, the FBI manipulated digital photos to make it appear as if he had photographed a female under the age of 18.

“Specifically, there is evidence that computer data related to digital photographs taken of a nude female were materially altered to make it appear that these photographs were taken in 2005,” Raniere’s motion said. “The government used the year 2005 to establish the female as being under the age of eighteen, making the photographs contraband.”

Raniere’s motion contains sworn statements from three digital forensic experts, including one who worked for the FBI for 20 years.

Retired FBI special agent Richard Kiper, who was a computer forensic examiner for the bureau from 1999 to 2019, said in his sworn statement that he believes there was evidence tampering in Raniere’s case.

“In my 20 years serving as an FBI agent, I have never observed or claimed that an FBI employee tampered with evidence, digital or otherwise. But in this case, I strongly believe the multiple, intentional alterations to the digital information I have discovered constitute evidence manipulation,” Kiper said.

“My analysis demonstrates that some of these alterations definitely took place while the devices were in the custody of the FBI. Therefore, in the absence of any other plausible explanation, it is my expert opinion that the FBI must have been involved in this evidence tampering.”

Among his findings, says Kiper, are dates, file names, and timestamps of digital photos being altered while in FBI possession.  He also said photos were manipulated to appear as though they came from Raniere’s computer hard drive when they were actually placed there manually.

In addition, Raniere’s motion included sworn statements from Steven Abrams, an attorney and retired digital forensics expert, and computer scientist Wayne Norris.

They agreed with Kiper’s findings.

“Dr. Kiper’s third finding is that the filesystem access data metadata was overwritten on Sept. 19, 2018. I agree. This sort of mishandling of digital evidence is common among lay people. I regularly observe attorneys mishandle their client’s evidence produced in discovery in this manner, but this sort of mishandling of evidence is unexpected from the FBI,” said Abrams.

“This is either a rookie mistake or a purposeful act of digital sabotage.”

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Ministry of Truth: Joe Biden’s New ‘Disinformation Board’ Director is a Ukrainian Govt Advisor Who Was ‘Pleased’ By The Censorship Of Hunter Biden’s Hard Drive.

The Executive Director of the Biden White House’s newly launched Disinformation Governance Board celebrated the censorship of news reports regarding Hunter Biden’s hard drive, appearing to describe the story as “Russian disinformation.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created the board to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security” focusing “on irregular migration and Russia,” according to POLITICO. The report also revealed that Nina Jankowicz – whose career has focused on partisan operations and advising foreign governments, rather than news reporting – will serve as its executive director.

Partisanship & Foreign Influence.

While participating in U.S. Congressional hearings, Jankowicz dismissed documented links between Ukrainian energy company Burisma and the Biden family, while calling for an increase in federally-funded media outlets and an “oversight” agency of social media platforms.

She described the well-documented business ties between the first son and Burisma as “perhaps the most well-known example of information laundering” and “unsubstantiated and misleading.”

Jankowicz is a former “disinformation fellow” at the partly government-funded Wilson Center, and even advised the Ukrainian government as recently as 2016.

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Biden Truth Minister Sings: ‘Who Do I F*ck’ to Be ‘Rich, Famous, and Powerful’

Before her new job at the Department of Homeland Security, President Joe Biden’s new disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz displayed her musical talent on YouTube.

In one video, Jankowicz sings a version of “My Simple Christmas Wish (Rich, Famous, and Powerful)” by David Friedman.

“I want to be rich famous and powerful! Step on all my enemies and never do a thing,” she sings as a piano plays in the background.

Jankowicz sang an edited version of the song to include “Who do I fuck” to be “famous and powerful,” instead of the original lyrics “who do I have to fake”

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An algorithm that screens for child neglect raises concerns

Inside a cavernous stone fortress in downtown Pittsburgh, attorney Robin Frank defends parents at one of their lowest points – when they are at risk of losing their children.

The job is never easy, but in the past she knew what she was up against when squaring off against child protective services in family court. Now, she worries she’s fighting something she can’t see: an opaque algorithm whose statistical calculations help social workers decide which families will have to endure the rigors of the child welfare system, and which will not.

“A lot of people don’t know that it’s even being used,” Frank said. “Families should have the right to have all of the information in their file.”

From Los Angeles to Colorado and throughout Oregon, as child welfare agencies use or consider tools similar to the one in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, an Associated Press review has identified a number of concerns about the technology, including questions about its reliability and its potential to harden racial disparities in the child welfare system. Related issues have already torpedoed some jurisdictions’ plans to use predictive models, such as the tool notably dropped by the state of Illinois.

According to new research from a Carnegie Mellon University team obtained exclusively by AP, Allegheny’s algorithm in its first years of operation showed a pattern of flagging a disproportionate number of Black children for a “mandatory” neglect investigation, when compared with white children. The independent researchers, who received data from the county, also found that social workers disagreed with the risk scores the algorithm produced about one-third of the time.

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PayPal Blocks Multiple Alternative Media Figures Critical Of US Empire Narratives

In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin, and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.

Just the other day MintPress published an excellent article by MacLeod titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” documenting the many ways skepticism of the US government’s version of events in this war is being suppressed by Silicon Valley megacorporations, including financial censorship via the demonetization of YouTube videos that don’t regurgitate the imperial line on Ukraine.

Today, both MintPress and MacLeod have been banned from using the payment service that many online content creators have come to rely on to help crowdfund their work.

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