TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD LAUREN MESTAS was already having a bad day when she noticed a cop car tailing her northbound on Interstate 35, headed into downtown Austin. She wasn’t overly concerned at first, as she wasn’t breaking any laws, but the patrol vehicle remained on her tail as she exited onto Riverside Drive, headed west. She started to suspect that it might have something to do with the slogans soaped all over the windows of her 2001 Toyota 4Runner. In addition to “BROWN PRIDE” and “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” written across the rear window were the words “FUCK THESE RACIST POLICE.”
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NEW DOCUMENTS FURTHER UNVEIL DEMOCRAT’S ‘RUSSIAGATE’
A number of recent document releases shine new lights on ‘Russiagate’. That conspiracy theory, peddled by the Obama administration, the Democratic Party aligned media and ‘deep state’ actors opposed to President Trump, alleged that Trump was in cahoots with Russia. The disinformation campaign had the purpose of sabotaging his presidency.
To some extent it has worked as intended. But due to the legal investigation of the whole affair much more is now known about those who conspired against Trump. Some of them are likely to end up in legal jeopardy.
Some of those are the agents under FBI director Comey who used the easily debunked Steele dossier, paid for by the Democratic party, to gain a FISA court warrants that allowed them to spy on the Trump campaign. It now turns out that the main source for the dossier they used was a shady actor who the FBI had earlier investigated for an alleged connection to Russian intelligence:
The primary sub-source for the Steele dossier was the subject of an earlier counterintelligence investigation by the FBI, and those facts were known to the Crossfire Hurricane team as early as December 2016, according to newly released records from the Justice Department that were first reported by CBS News.The timing matters because the dossier was first used two months earlier, in October 2016, to help secure a surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and then used in three subsequent surveillance renewals.
“Between May 2009 and March 2011, the FBI maintained an investigation into the individual who later would be identified as Christopher Steele’s Primary Sub-source,” the two page FBI memo states. “The FBI commenced this investigation based on information by the FBI indicating that the Primary Sub-source may be a threat to national security.”
That the Steele dossier was potentially based on the words of a Russian spy should have been a red flag against its use. It seems that the FBI had not informed the FISA court about the dubious sourcing of the dossier allegations.
I abstain from government violence…
NJ State Legislature Passes Ban On Paper Bags, Foam Food-Containers, And Plastic Straws
In addition to joining New York in some type of weird social experiment to see how high taxes can get before you drive all of your state’s citizens elsewhere, New Jersey has also decided to now ban both paper and plastic bags in the state.
We guess the crippling effect of Covid 19 on local businesses wasn’t enough – but now also seems like a great time to weigh them down with further regulations and higher costs.
The state’s assembly and Senate passed a bill Thursday that bans LDPE plastic film bags, like the kind you get at the grocery store. It also bans the alternative – paper bags – at markets that are over 2,500 sq. feet in an attempt to get shoppers to bring their own bags. The same bill also bans polystyrene clamshell food containers and makes plastic straws only available “upon request” at restaurants, according to NorthJersey.com.
We’re guessing there’s going to be a lot of “requests”.
The false link between Amy Coney Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale, explained
One of the weirder ways this debate has played out since Barrett was first discussed as a potential Supreme Court nomineeis the fight over whether or not People of Praise, the group of which she is a member, is also one of the inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel (and its recent TV adaptation), fertile women are forced to live as childbearing slaves called handmaids. The book isn’t an established inspiration — but the story has developed legs anyway.
The inaccurate link between the People of Praise and Atwood’s story, perpetuated by a series of confusing coincidences and uneven fact-checking, first emerged in a Newsweek article and was later picked up by Reuters. Both articles have since been corrected, but the right was furious at both. The Washington Examiner called it a “smear that just won’t die.” Fox News noted several other outlets have mentioned Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale in the same story.
To be absolutely clear: People of Praise is not an inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, and the group does not practice sexual slavery or any of the other dystopian practices Atwood wrote about in her novel. But the argument over whether or not the two are connected reflects the deeply contentious atmosphere in which Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court will occur — and the immense symbolic weight The Handmaid’s Tale carries in American popular culture.
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Dream-shaping tech from MIT channels suggestions into your dreams
MIT scientists have figured out how to manipulate your dreams by combining an app with a sleep-tracking device called Dormio. In their new study, the researchers were able to insert certain topics into a person’s dreams, with some pretty bizarre outcomes.
To do so, the researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces — a group that develops wearable systems and interfaces to enhance cognitive skills — used a technique called targeted dream incubation (TDI).
Prior studies have shown that during a rare dream state known lucid dreaming, in which a sleeper is aware that a dream is taking place, dreamers can use that awareness to consciously shape aspects of their dreams. TDI takes advantage of an early sleep stage, known as hypnagogia, to achieve a similar result (though not quite “controlling” dreams outright), researchers told Live Science.
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