Tag: police state

2022 Was a Year of Bad, Botched Death Row Executions

The good news for opponents of the death penalty is that its use in the United States continued to decline in 2022. The bad news is that many of the executions that did take place appear to have been botched by officials who subjected prisoners to cruel torment.

Those are the main takeaways from the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) annual year-end report. It shows that American states are increasingly turning away from executions, but that in those states where capital punishment still happens, there’s been a turn toward cruelty and secrecy in the relevant government agencies.

Six states—Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas, Missouri, Arizona, and Mississippi—executed 18 people in 2022. That’s an increase over the 11 people executed in 2021, but both numbers are low relative to the last decade. For eight consecutive years, states have performed fewer than 30 executions annually and issued fewer than 50 new death penalty sentences annually. Federal executions were halted entirely when President Joe Biden took office.

The downturn may not be permanent. Oklahoma halted executions in 2015 temporarily after a series of problems with the drugs that led to one man groaning and struggling as the drugs took hold in 2014 and a case in 2015 where they received the wrong drug entirely. In 2020, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt announced Oklahoma would restart executions using those very same drugs. In 2021, Oklahoma executed its first two inmates in years. During the first of those executions, John Marion Grant reportedly convulsed and vomited before he died. In 2022, Oklahoma executed five inmates, making the state responsible for nearly a third of all executions.

And if the state gets its way, there will be many more to come in 2023. In June, Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor started planning 25 executions over the next few years. According to DPIC, the state has 11 planned for next year and 10 in 2024.

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NFL Pro Game gets full power as Tennessee residents suffer freezing temps and rolling blackouts

Residents in Tennessee were furious at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on Sunday as the state suffered in a deep freeze and people were left cold on Christmas Day replete with rolling blackouts while the NFL’s Titans game against Houston was granted full power usage.

The temperature in Nashville on Sunday ranged from 16 to 30 degrees. The cold air put a significant strain on the TVA’s power grid and in response, the power authority implemented rolling blackouts in Memphis and Nashville. The Nashville Electric System (NES) also mandated reductions in power consumption just when it was needed most to keep residents warm. Over a million residents were told to limit the power they used to stay warm in freezing temps while millionaires cavorted on a football field for a billion-dollar enterprise.

As if the rolling blackouts and mandated limits weren’t bad enough, there were periods where there was no power at all during the below-freezing winter day.

The NFL allegedly got preferential treatment on power usage and was allowed to fully tap into mega-wattage for the game at Nissan Stadium. While a million residents shivered in their homes, 66,634 attendees luxuriated in buying tickets to a football game.

“I’ve been informed that TVA’s unilateral rolling blackouts will continue,” Nashville Mayor John Cooper said after requesting that the game be postponed. “All non-essential businesses should reduce power usage. I’ve asked the Titans to postpone their noon game in solidarity with our neighbors. TVA needs to invest in infrastructure to withstand extreme temps.”

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2022’s Danger Signs: From Totalitarian Paranoia to Authoritarian Madness

The danger signs were everywhere in 2022.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.

Totalitarian paranoia spiked. What we have been saddled with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it has conspired to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. In a Machiavellian attempt to expand its powers, the government unleashed all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace in order to justify its demands for additional powers to protect “we the people” from emerging threats, whether legitimate, manufactured or overblown.

The state of our nation suffered. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. The combined blowback from a contentious presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Americans being subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, and the criminalization of lawful activities.

Thought crimes became a target for punishment. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In 2022, those who criticized the government—whether that criticism manifested itself in word, deed or thought—were flagged as dangerous alongside consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information.”

Speech was muzzled. Those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech continued to push for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

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Number Of Imprisoned Journalists Worldwide Hits New Record

The number of journalists imprisoned worldwide has hit a new record at 533, according to an annual report by press fredom watchdog, Reporters Without Borders.

The total number is up from 2021, when 488 journalists were imprisoned, according to the RSF’s Annual Press Freedom Review published last week.

“More than a quarter of them were imprisoned during the year,” according to the Paris-based watchdog which has kept records on imprisoned reporters since 1995.

More than half of those jailed are in five countries: China (110), Myanmar (62), Iran (47) Vietnam (39) and Belarus (31) – with 32 of the 47 in Iran having been arrested since protests broke out in September over the death of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in police custody while breaching the country’s strict dress code.

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ICE Can’t ‘Locate’ Records of 378,000 Detainees

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are unable to locate any records of illegal immigrants taken into custody and placed in a federal program to “ensure non-detained non-citizen compliance with release conditions, court hearings, and final orders of removal,” according to a nonprofit government transparency advocacy group.

“ICE has conducted a search of the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for records responsive to your request and no records responsive to your request were found,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in a Dec. 22 letter.

The ICE letter cautioned that the failure to locate records sought by TRAC isn’t evidence that the documents do or don’t exist. The inability of ICE to locate the requested records was described by TRAC in a Dec. 23 statement as a “very troubling development.”

Nearly 378,000 individuals are currently covered by the program, according to federal officials.

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California will enact series of woke new laws from January 1 including ban on sale of new fur, and laws which effectively decriminalize jaywalking and loitering for prostitution

California is set to implement a series of new woke laws, including banning the sale of fur, decriminalizing jaywalking and prostitution-based loitering. 

Governor Gavin Newson signed about 1,000 bills into law this year, including some woke controversial laws.

Officials warn the laws, which will be enacted in early 2023, will harm state residents, including a prostitution law that will make it more difficult for law enforcement to identify victims of human trafficking. 

Meanwhile, other laws create new holidays and increase the state’s minimum wage.

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NYC Mayor Eric Adams: “Big Brother is protecting you”

In New York City, political rather than professional considerations seem to be dictating the way the police will proceed in fighting crime, including the degree to which this will include the use of invasive technology.

And Mayor Eric Adams must not have read the book, because, in dystopian form, he has just declared that “Big Brother” is actually the good guy.

Namely, reports suggest the mayor, now a year in office, is well aware of how the city has spiraled into crime – there’s been a whopping increase of 23.5 percent during the past year alone.

This “lawlessness” allegedly came as a consequence of the pandemic measures that among other things exacerbated the problem of homelessness, anti-police protests, and the erosion in morale among the force.

Now Adams, a Democrat, wants to please both his “moderate” supporters by dealing with crime, and the “progressives on the left” who oppose most anything that might resemble backing the police, by doubling down on methods as controversial as facial recognition and surveillance cameras.

The mayor appears to be one of those who believe that law enforcement suddenly has no means to fight crime, even though it has done it before this technology became available. And so the focus of his tenure going forward will be in employing “techniques to more accurately identify common criminal patterns and develop profiles of perpetrators,” Politico sums up the tactic Adams prefers.

While at it, Adams would also like to give “Big Brother” – a symbol of ruthless authoritarian state surveillance – an image makeover.

With this in mind, he accused his fellow politicians of being afraid to “embrace technology” and of instead considering technology-driven surveillance “a boogeyman” – that many will agree it is.

Not Adams.

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The FBI flagged tweets on Ukraine and vaccines

The latest Twitter Files revelations have shed light on the US government’s “constant contact” with the platform, showing the push for censorship of accounts that were critical of aspects of war in Ukraine or the Covid-19 vaccine.

The latest release suggests Twitter executives struggled against government claims of foreign interference supposedly occurring on their platform.

“The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in the latest revelations.

“‘Found no links to Russia,’ says one analyst, but suggests he could ‘brainstorm’ to ‘find a stronger connection.’”

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Disinformation, Censorship, And Information Warfare In The 21st Century

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”– Sun Tzu, the Art of War

In recent years, prominent national security officials and media outlets have raised alarm about the unprecedented effects of foreign disinformation in democratic countries. In practice, what they mean is that democratic governments have fallen behind in their command of the methods of information warfare in the early 21st century. As outlined herein, while information warfare is a real and serious issue facing democratic governments in the 21st century, the war on disinformation, as currently practiced, has backfired spectacularly and done far more harm than good, as evidenced most clearly by the response to COVID-19.

We begin with the definitions and history of a few key terms: Censorship, free speech, misinformation, disinformation, and bots.

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