
Bertrand Russell on fear…


WITHIN HOURS OF the storming of the Capitol on January 6, the FBI began securing thousands of phone and electronic records connected to people at the scene of the rioting — including some related to members of Congress, raising potentially thorny legal questions.
Using special emergency powers and other measures, the FBI has collected reams of private cellphone data and communications that go beyond the videos that rioters shared widely on social media, according to two sources with knowledge of the collection effort.
In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were identified at the crime scene. Investigators have also relied on data “dumps” from cellphone towers in the area to provide a map of who was there, allowing them to trace call records — but not content — from the phones.






Saturday Night Live (SNL) has come in for a storm of criticism after airing a joke critical of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout policy. The show’s anchor Michael Che quipped that “Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population. And I’m going to guess it is the Jewish half.” Despite addressing the topic for fewer than seven seconds before moving on, Che’s words sparked a chorus of denunciations from conservative Jewish groups and supporters of the Middle Eastern nation.
“We find the use of age-old anti-Semitic tropes on last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live to be deeply troubling,” wrote the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who accused the show of “propagating Jew hatred under the guise of comedy.” The American Jewish Committee claimed that Che’s words were “a modern twist on a classic antisemitic trope that has inspired the mass murder of Jews.” Meanwhile New York radio host and pro-Israel activist Dov Hikind claimed that SNL has a “long record of anti-Semitism” and that Israel was vaccinating its Arab citizens at the same rate as its Jewish ones.
Even progressive figures expressed their unease with the joke. “I watched that and cringed. Enough that the Israeli govt does is worthy of legitimate criticism; lying about what they do is just as bad,” reacted Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.
Meckler, who was appointed as interim CEO of Parler following the removal of founder John Matze, currently runs the Convention of States Project, a supposed “grassroots” organization pushing for a convention under Article V of the Constitution.
The project describes itself as a “national effort to call a convention under Article V of the United States Constitution, restricted to proposing amendments that will impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress,” which initially sounds appealing.
However, a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argued that such a restriction on an Article V convention would be impossible, with states unable to control what a convention could and could not discuss, and nobody else having clear constitutional control over the convention.
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