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More COVID Hypocrisy: NJ Governor Appears Maskless at Indoor Ball After Mandating Masks for Students

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) was seen without a mask at an indoor ball, just weeks after he implemented a mask mandate for school children.

The Equality Ball, an annual fundraiser for Garden State Equality, a nonprofit LGBTQ+ advocacy group, took place Thursday, when Murphy, leaders of New Jersey Education Association and other officials were caught without masks.

State Senator Holly Schepisi said that the maskless event is the type of hypocrisy “that is driving people in New Jersey insane.”

“At the very same time that this Governor issued another EO mandating two year olds wear masks for upwards of 7 hours a day because of purported ‘safety,’ the New Jersey political democratic elite gathered maskless by the thousands at multiple indoor events throughout the State, including in “high-risk” Asbury Park, Bergen and Hudson Counties,” Schepisi said in a statement to Fox News.

“The people of New Jersey are being told by this administration that they must comply, don’t ask questions or get labeled a knucklehead or worse while those demanding compliance flout the very policies they push,” she continued. “It is wrong.”

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FACEBOOK’S SECRET BLACKLIST OF “DANGEROUS INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS”

TO WARD OFF accusations that it helps terrorists spread propaganda, Facebook has for many years barred users from speaking freely about people and groups it says promote violence.

The restrictions appear to trace back to 2012, when in the face of growing alarm in Congress and the United Nations about online terrorist recruiting, Facebook added to its Community Standards a ban on “organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity.” This modest rule has since ballooned into what’s known as the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, a sweeping set of restrictions on what Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users can say about an enormous and ever-growing roster of entities deemed beyond the pale.

In recent years, the policy has been used at a more rapid clip, including against the president of the United States, and taken on almost totemic power at the social network, trotted out to reassure the public whenever paroxysms of violence, from genocide in Myanmar to riots on Capitol Hill, are linked to Facebook. Most recently, following a damning series of Wall Street Journal articles showing the company knew it facilitated myriad offline harms, a Facebook vice president cited the policy as evidence of the company’s diligence in an internal memo obtained by the New York Times.

But as with other attempts to limit personal freedoms in the name of counterterrorism, Facebook’s DIO policy has become an unaccountable system that disproportionately punishes certain communities, critics say. It is built atop a blacklist of over 4,000 people and groups, including politicians, writers, charities, hospitals, hundreds of music acts, and long-dead historical figures.

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“Ready For Fielding” – US AC-130 Gunship Receives Laser Cannon

One of the most feared planes on the modern battlefield is the U.S. Air Force’s AC-130H Spectre gunship. The service has made major upgrades to the gunship, including a new offensive laser weapon system. 

Lockheed Martin published a press release last week outlining how the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) “is ready for fielding today.” 

“Completion of this milestone is a tremendous accomplishment for our customer,” said Rick Cordaro, vice president, Lockheed Martin Advanced Product Solutions. “These mission success milestones are a testament of our partnership with the U.S. Air Force in rapidly achieving important advances in laser weapon system development. Our technology is ready for fielding today.”

The gunship, nicknamed “Hell in the Sky,” packs a serious punch with three side-firing weapons, including a 25mm Gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer. The fourth will be the AHEL, a chemical energy weapon, unleashing concentrated pulses of light to transfer energy to the target, quickly heating it and damaging it. 

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Tyrants of the Nanny State: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.

We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.

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BBC Anchor Claims Arguing Against Surveillance State “Was A Fair Talking Point In The 1990s, But People Are Over That Now”

An arrogant BBC News anchor lectured a privacy advocate Tuesday who argued that a rise in violent crime, particularly against women, cannot be countered by eroding freedom and further empowering the surveillance state.

Following the announcement that police in the UK are setting up a scheme to use CCTV cameras to watch women at night to make them ‘feel safer’, Madeline Stone of the privacy advocate group Big Brother Watch argued that there are already masses of surveillance cameras everywhere and they do not make people any safer or prevent crime.

Stone emphasised that adding more cameras strips away privacy and is in no way a solution to the problem, including harassment of and violence against women.

“But the woman is asking for the camera to be on them, so this is not a breach of civil liberties,” the anchor responded, referring to the scheme which uses an opt-in app.

Stone replied that having an anonymous stranger tracking a woman’s movements via a camera isn’t going to help, but was continuously interrupted by the anchor who repeatedly stated “if it’s something that’s going to make you feel safer,” it will be welcomed.

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Pelosi Doubles Down on IRS Looking Into Bank Transactions

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has doubled down on a provision in the Democrats’ multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to see information on all Americans’ bank transactions totaling $600 or more. Republicans and banks have raised the alarm about the provision, reporting that their constituents and clients are deeply concerned about the proposal.

Since the introduction of their reconciliation bill, Democrats have insisted that the bill will not add to the debt or the deficit, claiming that all new spending in the bill will be paid for.

Along with significantly increasing marginal tax rates to pay for the bill, Democrats proposed and wrote into the bill a section to allow the IRS to gather Americans’ private information from banks, including information on all transactions totaling more than $600.

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Mayorkas orders ICE to stop worksite raids in latest limits on immigration enforcement

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to immediately stop any mass worksite deportation raids in what is the latest limit placed on ICE’s deportation powers.

“The deployment of mass worksite operations, sometimes resulting in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers, was not focused on the most pernicious aspect of our country’s unauthorized employment challenge: exploitative employers,” Mayorkas said in a memo to acting ICE Director Tae Johnson.

“These highly visible operations misallocated enforcement resources while chilling, and even serving as a retaliation for, worker cooperation in workplace standards investigations,” he said.

The use of worksite raids to detain and potentially deport illegal immigrants working there became a more regular practice during the Trump administration. The most notable raid was the arrest of nearly 700 illegal aliens at food processing plants in Mississippi in 2019 — in what became the largest single-state immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.

However, the Biden administration has dramatically narrowed ICE’s scope for enforcement, including rules that limit ICE officers to focusing on recent border crossers, aggravated felons and national security threats. That guidance coincided with a significant drop in arrests and deportations. Critics have accused the Biden administration of gutting ICE as part of a broader, more lax approach to illegal immigration that has encouraged an enormous migrant surge at the southern border.

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CNN Uses Creepy, Dystopian “Before Times” Rhetoric to Justify Empty Shelves

Questions are being asked of CNN after the network used the creepy dystopian phrase “Before Times” to describe a time pre-COVID when grocery shelves weren’t empty.

The phrase appears in a report about how grocery shelves “are not going back to normal this year” as a result of labor shortages and transportation restrictions.

“If you hoped grocery stores this fall and winter would look like they did in the Before Times, with limitless options stretching out before you in the snack, drink, candy and frozen foods aisles, get ready for some disappointing news,” states the article.

Note how “Before Times” is emphasized by its seemingly otherwise unnecessary capitalization.

The dystopian language appears to be another way of socially engineering Americans to accept “the new normal,” which will include rolling lockdowns, energy crises and food shortages.

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