Frank Zappa on the illusion of freedom…
Tag: police state
How Many Zombie Agencies Does Government Need?
How many federal agencies do we pay for? I bet you think, as I once did, that a quick internet search would tell. But researching for an essay a couple of years ago, I found numbers varying from 78 to 158, and websites saying the exact number was impossible to determine.
Looking at the USA.gov website recently, I discovered a tab for Federal Agencies A to Z (actually there are none past W). Scrolling around the list for two days, subtracting duplicate listings, like Useless Policy, Office of and Office of Useless Policy, I counted 456 (and a few more as I checked some links while drafting this essay).
The large number of agencies was my first, but not my only surprise. Each agency’s listing had a field for government branch, mostly filled with Executive, some Legislative, some Judicial. But sometimes that field contained: Independent, Quasi, or None. How can we have parts of government that are not part of a branch of our government?
It amused me that some agency names made it easy to guess when they were created. Delinquency was a focus in the 1930s; nuclear threats, 1950s; civil rights, 1960s; cyberterrorism, after 2001.
This just started with to know how many federal agencies we have. But discovering there are agencies decades past their freshness date, begs to be explored. This essay is a just cursory view.
Needless to say…
Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles
On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.
This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”
This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.
What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.
Biden’s Banking Nominee Calls to Eliminate All “Private Bank Accounts”
Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), called during a March 2021 virtual conference to eliminate all private bank accounts and deposits.
Omarova spoke at the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project’s “Law & Political Economy: Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism” conference in March.
Omarova discussed one of her papers, “The People’s Ledger How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” which would help “redesign” the financial system and make the economy “more equitable for everyone.”
She said it would change the “private-public power balance” and democratize finance to a more systemic level.
During her explanation of her paper, she said that the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, can only use “indirect levers” to “induce private banks to increase their lending.”
Her paper calls for eliminating all banks and transferring all bank deposits to “FedAccounts” at the Federal Reserve.
During her conference speech, she said, “There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed”.
Makes sense…
New York Gov. Hochul: School Mask Mandate Can Be Lifted When ‘Parents Do the Right Thing’ and Vaccinate Their Children
The school mask mandate in New York State can only be lifted after parents “do the right thing” and vaccinate their children, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) suggested this week.
Interim guidance for in-person instruction, issued June 7, 2021, states that masks should be required in school facilities, requiring them to be “worn by all individuals in all classroom and non-classroom settings, including but not limited to hallways, school offices, restrooms, gyms, auditoriums, etc.”
While masks are not required outdoors, schools may choose to require them in such scenarios.
Currently, there is no end in sight for the school mask mandate. Rather, Hochul is placing the burden on the parents, suggesting the they must get their children vaccinated if they want to return to a state of maskless, pre-pandemic normalcy.
“If parents do the right thing all over the state, get their kids vaccinated. There will come a time when there’s no reason to wear a mask, that every child is safe. But we need compliance,” she said during an appearance on WNYW’s Good Day New York this week.
“And in some communities it’s stronger than others. So let’s get the kids vaccinated. I don’t have a date. I’m not going to prejudge this,” she said, failing to even offer a rough timeline and suggestion it all hinges on compliance. “There’s no way I can know.”
“I need to know how people are doing, are a lot of people getting vaccinated, or is there an early rush and then it plateaus and then half the kids in the class aren’t protected. That’s what I’m watching. I’m always driven by the numbers. So that’s why I can’t say, ‘on this date, we’re going to do X,’” Hochul added.
Property owners?
If The Left Ends Parent Rights, You Might Need A License To Raise Your Own Child
Parents are now more aware than ever that their right to raise their own children is in danger. Recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere testify to that awakening. A lot of the news focused on the public school curriculum of critical race theory, which pits children against one another based on their race. Parents never signed on to that.
But they’re also waking up to a host of other disturbing trends in public education. An extremist sex education curriculum includes pornography and pushes transgenderism. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) instruction tells kids exactly how they should feel and relate to others while using invasive data-mining to collect psycho-social information on them.
COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates are another point of contention. All of these directives hijack the role of parents as the emotional and moral guides of their children.
Parents ought to be asking: What next? If those trends are left unchecked, I think the answer could be the state licensing of parents.
New Zealand Tells Schools to Phone the Police if Unvaccinated Staff Show Up
Authorities in New Zealand have told schools to phone the police if unvaccinated staff show up for work.
Yes, really.
“The advice, published in the Ministry’s gazette on Thursday, tells school leaders that if they, or any education staff, turn up to work on Monday unvaccinated against Covid, they will be committing an offence,” reports the Mail Australia.
Any staff member who hasn’t had the COVID vaccine by November 15th who tries to enter school grounds will be subject to a fine as part of the country’s “no jab, no job” policy.
“If staff do turn up on site after this date, we encourage school leaders to deal with this in the usual manner you would if other inappropriate people were to turn up on site,” states the advice from the Ministry of Education.
“If you feel your safety or the safety of akonga (pupils or students) or other staff is compromised, you could consider contacting the police.”
As we previously highlighted, New Zealand has imposed one of the most brutal lockdowns in the developed world, in some instances locking down entire areas of the country after just a single COVID case.
Earlier this summer, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern mimicked Australia’s top public health official by telling citizens, “Don’t talk to your neighbors.”
Hellbound and Down 
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