
Edward Snowden on NSA surveillance…


Let’s start with a number: 262 million. That’s the number of unarmed people the late Prof. R. J. Rummel estimated governments murdered in mass killings he termed “democide” during the 20th century. “This democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century,” he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, the bloodiest body count was run up by totalitarian regimes, though authoritarians were busy stacking up the corpses, too, if in smaller piles. Democracies were also responsible for unjustifiable deaths, especially in subduing resistance in their colonial possessions (think: Belgian Congo) and in indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets during wars (think: Hiroshima), but to a far lesser degree than Communists, Nazis, and overdecorated generalissimos.

In the four months after Taylor’s death, both local and national changes inspired by Taylor. As of June 11, an ordinance called “Breonna’s Law,” banning no-knock search warrants and mandating that officers wear body cameras during searches was unanimously passed in Louisville, Kentucky, according to CNN. That same day, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul introduced the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act, a bill prohibiting no-knock warrants entirely in the U.S.
Following the death of David McAtee, a Black restaurant owner who was shot and killed by the Kentucky National Guard during a June 1 protest in Louisville honoring the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Steve Conrad, the Louisville police chief, was fired. On June 23, the city’s new police chief, Robert Schroeder, fired Brett Hankison, an officer-involved with Taylor’s unlawful death.
While these efforts are an important step in combating police brutality and systemic racism, no formal arrests or charges have been made. Here is how to continue to fight for justice for Breonna Taylor.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other Department of Homeland Security agents seized more than $2 billion in cash from travelers in U.S. airports between 2000 and 2016, according to a new report by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.
The institute’s report is the first to comprehensively analyze the use of civil asset forfeiture by federal law enforcement in airports, where multiple news investigations have revealed horror stories of passengers having their money taken even though they weren’t ever charged with a crime.
Lionel Morris, 39, made the poor decision to remove a toy drone from its packaging in a grocery store in an alleged attempt to steal it. These actions most assuredly should have come with some consequences but it should never have been a death sentence. When multiple officers from the Conway Police Department showed up to the call, however, minutes later, Morris’ life would be over.
Body camera and surveillance footage from that fateful day on February 4, 2020 has just been released this week showing this man’s final moments alive. Morris took the last breaths he would ever take with multiple police officer combat boots and a knee on his back.
His last coherent words were “I can’t breathe.”
After the wholesale execution of Willie McCoy — a rapper who was killed by police as he slept in the Drive Thru of a Taco Bell — a disturbing practice by the department who killed him came to light. SWAT team commander with two master’s degrees, Captain John Whitney exposed the celebratory practice of beers, barbecues, and badge bending to commemorate killer cops. After this decorated cop exposed this practice, he was forced out of the job.
According to a shocking investigation by Open Vallejo, for years, a secretive clique inside the Vallejo Police Department has commemorated fatal shootings with beers, backyard barbecues, and by bending the points of their badges each time they kill in the line of duty
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is advising retailers to call the police if they catch shoppers without face coverings in violation of her mask order.
Bowser’s mandate—extended on July 22—requires that all persons wear a mask outside of their residence when they will be interacting with someone “for more than a fleeting time” and that “businesses, office buildings, and other establishments open to members of the public” post signage to apply that rule internally.
Videos have gone viral of shoppers across the country resisting such rules. A woman at a North Hollywood Trader Joe’s threw a fit after store attendants requested she don a mask: “Democratic pigs!” she screamed. She later claimed he was “yelling in self-defense.”
Bowser was explicit about what shopkeepers should do if they encounter anyone who flouts her own mandate. “They should call the police and the police will enforce it,” she said during a press conference yesterday.
It is clear to me as a physician-lawyer that the disinformation about both Covid-19 and the Constitution has caused us to turn a medical issue into a legal crisis.
The scientific usefulness of a mask has been so aggressively overstated, and the foundational importance of the Constitution has been so aggressively understated, that we have normalized people screaming obscenities at each other while hiking.
The Covid virus was supposed to be contained in the kind of lab where people wear astronaut suits and go through triple sealed doors. It is a con of massive proportion to assert that now, having escaped those environs, a bandana will magically do the trick.
After all, size matters.
The pore size of cloth face coverings range from ~ 20-100 microns. The Covid virus is 200-1000x smaller than that, at 0.1 microns. Putting up a chain link fence will not keep out a mosquito. Even the most esteemed medical journals admit their purpose is to calm anxiety. “Expanded masking protocols’ greatest contribution may be to reduce the transmission of anxiety …”
Of course, by knowledge or common sense observation, most Americans already know that masking everyone is superstition. But unlike privately carrying a lucky charm, mandating facial coverings requires the consent of the governed.
Many cultures mandate clothing that appears totally irrational to outsiders. Never have those cultures pretended that there is a scientific basis for their clothing requirement. Their leaders rule, and their citizens accept, that their choice of clothing is due to religious or cultural preference.

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