Tag: police state

Senator Mark Kelly inquired about social media censorship to curb bank runs

On Sunday, while discussing the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in an emergency conference call led by Senate President Chuck Schumer, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) reportedly inquired about the possibility of censoring social media posts to avoid a bank run.

This information was reported by Republican House members who were also present on the call and heard by representatives of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

“Just got off of a zoom meeting with Fed, Treasury, FDIC, House, and Senate,” Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie tweeted. “A Democrat Senator essentially asked whether there was a program in place to censor information on social media that could lead to a run on the banks.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert also tweeted, “On a briefing with Biden Under Secretary of the Treasury Nellie Liang regarding the SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] BAILOUT they are working towards and a member asked if they were reaching out to Facebook and Twitter to monitor misinformation and ‘bad actors.’”

Keep reading

Proposed Illinois Bill Seeks To Criminalize Parental Discipline As ‘Parental Bullying’

As if things were not out of hand enough with California’s latest proposed bill implying that the suspension of disruptive students is somehow racist, Democrats in Illinois have introduced a bill that would criminalize parents who “knowingly, with intent to discipline or alter the behavior of a child, says or messages anything that would coerce the child.” In other words, the proposed legislation would classify the appropriate disciplining of children by parents as ‘parental bullying’ and would criminalize the act. And to think California’s legislation seemed outrageous.

The bill was introduced by State Representative La Shawn Ford (D-Chicago) and states the following:

Amends the Criminal Code of 2012. Creates the offense of parental bullying. Provides that a parent or legal guardian of a minor commits parental bullying when he or she knowingly and with the intent to discipline, embarrass, or alter the behavior of the minor, transmits any verbal or visual message that the parent or legal guardian reasonably believes would coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to the minor. Provides that parental bullying is a petty offense. Provides that if a person is convicted of parental bullying, the court shall order that person to pay for the costs of prosecution and that a portion of any fine imposed, as determined by the court, be placed in escrow for the purchase of a certificate of deposit for use by the victim when he or she attains 18 years of age.

The bill was introduced back in December but, not surprisingly, does not have any additional sponsors.

The measure would, in effect, make being a successful parent a crime. As written above, a parent would be subjected to a petty offense and required to pay court costs and a fine if found guilty of yelling at their child for fighting with a sibling, throwing food at the table, or not doing their homework. It would be the end of the angry mom glare across the room when she catches her child doing something inappropriate. The list is endless and blurs so many lines that parents would live in constant fear of being arrested for being, well, parents.

Keep reading

NewsGuard denies being government funded after Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files expose

Matt Taibbi appeared before the new congressional Weaponization of Government Committee on Thursday and said the for-profit organization NewsGuard, an organization aimed at “combating misinformation,” according to their website, was “US government funded.”

According to the Washington Examiner, “In a lengthy email to @mtaibbi on Friday morning, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz refuted that the purported disinformation tracker is ‘U.S. government funded.’ In 2021, the Department of Defense awarded $749,387 to Newsguard.”

Taibbi also tweeted out another round of the Twitter files on Thursday, detailing what he dubbed a “Censorship-Industrial Complex” moving within Twitter, government agencies, establishment media, and mostly non-profit organizations all of whom ideologically align in censorship efforts and named NewsGuard as funded by the Department of Defense.

Keep reading

The 10 Rules Of Propaganda

Lord Arthur Ponsonby was a British diplomat and politician, dates 1871–1946.

This keen and cagey fellow pinpointed 10 rules of propaganda.

They are these:

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

3. Our adversary’s leader is evil and looks evil.

4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interest.

5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes.

6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons.

7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big.

8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause.

9. Our cause is sacred.

10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

Just Look at the News

A daily scan of the newswires calls to mind three or more of these propaganda rules. On some days, six or seven. On others still, all 10.

We refer specifically to the conflict presently arage in the eastern European nation of Ukraine.

Let us now consider these rules. We will not take up each of them since some rules relate closely to others. We will instead weld these together. To proceed…

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

On how many occasions have you read or heard condemnations of Mr. Putin’s “unprovoked” act of aggression?

To phrase it differently, when has it not been described as unprovoked?

Yet a man can argue very persuasively that Mr. Putin’s war was indeed provoked.

The Russian autocrat warned on several occasions that NATO expansion into Ukraine was a “red line.”

Russia would not abide the NATO dagger pressing against its vitals (parts of Ukraine actually lie east of Moscow).

Yet the NATO alliance had announced its intentions to incorporate Ukraine — despite Vladimir’s moans and grimaces.

Keep reading

Corporatism Will Kill Us All

One of the chief characteristics of an anti democratic corporatist society is the way parliament and people become the servant of business. Large construction, transport, pharmaceutical or military projects are driven not by Government implementing a democratically expressed need but often by corporations creating “needs” – and the plans, systems and budgets to implement them.

Nowhere is that more blatant than in pharmaceutical corporations and their vaccines where deadly viruses are created with the excuse that “if we don’t create them nature or an enemy will and we need to develop a vaccine.”

The vaccines for COVID 19 have proven obscenely profitable for the vaccine producers who have made tens of billions of dollars in profits for themselves, despite tens of thousands of deaths following vaccination and a cover up of deaths and abortions in vaccine trials (not disclosed until long after millions were vaccinated). See this.

The 1918-1920 flu pandemic killed millions. It was over within two years and no vaccine was developed. Now scientists in the USA and Canada have created by “reverse engineering” an even more deadly version of that flu “in order to create a vaccine for it”: see this.

But we know that COVID emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan China which was doing dangerous “gain of function” work in collaboration with America scientists – who had been forbidden by law to carry out that research in the USA. There is no reason why this new recreation of the 1918 flu should not bring the same disaster.

These dangerous projects are totally out of the control of democratic representatives and are classic corporatist collaborations between ignorant governments who have access to the public’s pocket and corporations whose main incentive is profit seeking.

Keep reading

Locked-Away In ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Camps: The Orwellian Dystopia Of The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex”

I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war on dissent for the better part of the last six years.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.”

(Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

Keep reading

Cop Caught on Own Body Cam Harassing Victim Before Turning it Off to Allegedly Rape Her

The now-disgraced officer Deangelo Reyes is a bad cop. Regardless of how his rape trial unfolds, thanks to the release of body camera footage this week, the world now knows that he is a lying sexual predator who uses his authority to intimidate, coerce, and allegedly rape unwitting victims.

The Tulsa Police Department released footage from Reyes’ body camera this week that showed an incident unfolding in April 2022, leading to rape charges against the officer. Reyes’ police union-appointed defense team is not happy about the video’s release as it needs no interpretation to paint their client in a sick and twisted light.

The incident began in April of last year when Reyes was responding to a call at a local motel. As Reyes was wrapping up the call, he spotted a woman walking her dog and decided to go into full creep mode.

As the officer’s body camera footage showed, Reyes pulls up next to the unsuspecting woman, who was a guest at the hotel and begins hitting on her from his patrol car. Just a couple of lines in, Reyes tells the woman, “You’re sexy. Is that unprofessional of me? I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

“Have you seen a lady in like a yellow hoodie running around here? Looked like she was upset?” Reyes is heard asking the woman. She responds, “No.”

You can hear Reyes ask the woman what her name is before he lies to her and gives her a fake name. “I’m Eric … Nice to meet you.”

Reyes then asks the woman where he can find her later, but she doesn’t tell him, and the encounter ends. Moments after they part ways, this predator cop turns off his body camera before jumping onto his department-issued computer to access information on the woman he just propositioned.

According to his arrest affidavit, Reyes found the hotel where the woman was staying and approached her. Since he had just accessed the woman’s record and noticed that she had prior convictions, he used this against her, threatening to put her back in prison.

According to police, Reyes then kissed her on the neck and based on his statement about putting her back in prison, she became terrified that he was going to plant evidence on her to fabricate an arrest.

The affidavit states that Reyes proceeded to rape the woman after getting her inside the hotel room. The woman submitted to a rape kit after the encounter, proving they had intercourse. Reyes now claims it was consensual.

Keep reading

The Covid Era could not have been deployed without technology

We have a new kind of overlord. This overlord appeals not to excellence. Rather his fitness to rule purportedly derives from his ability to render the entire planet as “standing-reserve” for a universal project. Everything just standing there, waiting, so it may be called upon at any time.  

In 2020, masks, tests, people, arms, needles, hospital beds, lives and deaths themselves became “standing-reserve” – on standby and ready to be put on order, available on demand. Even health came to mean supply.  All this could not have happened if it weren’t for technology.

Technology in the modern sense is not neutral at all. Our technology is a great challenging of nature and man is the ultimate “standing-reserve” in the battle of ideology. What emerges from this technology is humanity made inhuman by the cult of technology.

“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.” – Martin Heidegger

Keep reading