The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

Cliff, I didn't address honesty here. If your point is that Dennis is in the closet, I may suspect you're right, but I'm not going to speculate.

“Sleepy Joe” is the tell.  Pure MAGA-speak.

I suspect Wheeler was taken out by an errant Hugo Chavez Laptop Killshot.

Edited December 30, 2020 by Cliff Varnell

[Cliff Varnell]

14 hours ago, Dennis Berube said:

The "rumors" are much worse and much more dire than that, although that is obviously happening. Unfortunately, the majority of the population apparently believes the mainstream corporate narrative despite having been burned by them time and time again.

At 3:30pm EST Oct. 7, 2016 the cable news shows reported that the Obama Administration formally accused the Russian government of interfering in the 2016 election.

Normally, this kind of story would occupy the Cable News Cycle for days — like the recent Russian Cyber Hack story.  If US intel had ginned up the Russia-hacked-the-DNC story in 2016 in order to frame Putin  and hurt Trump there should have been day after day of TV pundits and politicos opining about Russian intentions and methods with replay after replay of Trump’s “Russia if you’re listening” speech.

Instead, at 4:00pm EST 10/7/16 the Access Hollywood tape dropped followed by the Podesta E-mails at 4:30.

After that, the Russia-interference story was dead until after the election.

It’s important to greet what’s reported in the MSM with healthy skepticism— but even more important is what they leave out.

Edited December 30, 2020 by Cliff Varnell

[Joe Bauer]

If only America's supposedly Christian moral teaching following Evangelicals had been rationally outraged over Trump's true grossly immoral "unchristian" character exposed on that Access Hollywood tape "I like to grab em by the Pu$$y" " and they let me get away with it because I'm a celebrity... enough to at least say they shouldn't vote for such a sinful man...

But their leaders told them to forgive such indescretions ( and we now know they themselves were leading a sexually deviant, promiscuous and drunken unchristian lifestyle - Jerry Falwell Jr. ) and the flock blindly obeyed.

 

 

Edited December 30, 2020 by Joe Bauer

[David Andrews]

14 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

   Remember Petula Clark singing, Downtown, on the radio back in 1964?   "The lights are much brighter there.  You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, and go DOWNTOWN, etc."

Singer Petula Clark responds to song being used by Nashville bomber

Singer Petula Clark responds to song being used by Nashville bomber | TheHill

December 29, 2020

Perfect incel ballad, though.  Like something out of Joker:

       When you're alone and life is making you lonely,

       You can always go...

 

Edited December 30, 2020 by David Andrews

[Steve Thomas]

This is funny.

You "little crybaby Pecker Boys."

Proud Boys erupt at ‘Proud Girls’ co-founder: ‘Want to support us? Get married, have babies’

By Brad Reed December 30, 2020

https://www.rawstory.com/hot-off-the-wires/proud-boys-girls/

A former mixed martial arts fighter has decided to found a far-right gang called the "Proud Girls" -- and the far-right Proud Boys gang is not happy about it.

The Daily Beast reports that Tara LaRosa's effort to found her own "Proud Girls" chapter was met with scorn and derision on the Proud Boys' official Telegram channel earlier this month.

"Don't ride our coattails," wrote one upset Proud Boy of LaRosa's initiative. "Want to support us? Get married, have babies, and take care of your family."

A meme posted in the Oklahoma Proud Boys channel, meanwhile, made similarly sexist comments about LaRosa's fledgling group.

"This is a men's club," the meme said. "If you're not in a relationship with a Proud Boy, at worst, you're a groupie."

Another meme being passed around on Proud Boys channels bluntly states, "If you are a Proud Boy and you are involved in supporting Proud Girls you are fake and gay."

But LaRosa, who literally once made a living beating people up, fired back by declaring she was "tougher than 99% of you alleged men," whom she described as "little crybaby Pecker Boys."

Steve Thomas

 

 

[W. Niederhut]

56 minutes ago, David Andrews said:

Perfect incel ballad, though.  Like something out of Joker:

       When you're alone and life is making you lonely,

       You can always go...

 

During my psychiatric career I sometimes had to assess and intervene in cases of potential homicide.

How did the cops NOT properly assess and intervene here?  It's mind-boggling.

Nashville man’s girlfriend warned he was building bombs

Nashville man’s girlfriend warned he was building bombs - The Washington Post

 

[David Andrews]

49 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

During my psychiatric career I sometimes had to assess and intervene in cases of potential homicide.

How did the cops NOT properly assess and intervene here?  It's mind-boggling.

 

I suppose the cops could have gotten past his lawyer and gotten a search warrant if he'd made public threats, such as on social media.  But all they had was his ex-girlfriend's accounts of their conversation.

The most they could have done is entered her info on him into a terrorist database such as the one they maintain in Memphis, and wait until they had a second and third hit on him, such as being caught on CCTV photographing the AT&T building.  You can read about the Memphis/federal terrorism database interface in the book Top Secret America, by WAPO reporters Priest and Arkin.  In this case, all the license plate logging done in Tennessee didn't deter a major crime.

EDIT: Actually, here's a WAPO excerpt from Top Secret  America that I clipped before I bought the book, which has a much fuller picture of the extent and limits of state/federal terrorism monitoring.

From Afghanistan to Tennessee

On a recent night in Memphis, a patrol car rolled slowly through a parking lot in a run-down section of town. The military-grade infrared camera on its hood moved robotically from left to right, snapping digital images of one license plate after another and analyzing each almost instantly.

Suddenly, a red light flashed on the car's screen along with the word "warrant."

"Got a live one! Let's do it," an officer called out.

The streets of Memphis are a world away from the streets of Kabul, yet these days, the same types of technologies and techniques are being used in both places to identify and collect information about suspected criminals and terrorists.

The examples go far beyond Memphis.

* Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were carried by U.S. troops during the insurgency in Iraq to register residents of entire neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling the same type of equipment to police departments to check motorists' identities.

* In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Facial Recognition Unit, using a type of equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000 biometric digital mug shots a month.

* U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies General Atomics' Predator drones along the Mexican and Canadian borders - the same kind of aircraft, equipped with real-time, full-motion video cameras, that has been used in wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to track the enemy.

The special operations units deployed overseas to kill the al-Qaeda leadership drove technological advances that are now expanding in use across the United States. On the front lines, those advances allowed the rapid fusing of biometric identification, captured computer records and cellphone numbers so troops could launch the next surprise raid.

Here at home, it's the DHS that is enamored with collecting photos, video images and other personal information about U.S. residents in the hopes of teasing out terrorists.

The DHS helped Memphis buy surveillance cameras that monitor residents near high-crime housing projects, problematic street corners, and bridges and other critical infrastructure. It helped pay for license plate readers and defrayed some of the cost of setting up Memphis's crime-analysis center. All together it has given Memphis $11 million since 2003 in homeland security grants, most of which the city has used to fight crime.

"We have got things now we didn't have before," said Memphis Police Department Director Larry Godwin, who has produced record numbers of arrests using all this new analysis and technology. "Some of them we can talk about. Some of them we can't."

One of the biggest advocates of Memphis's data revolution is John Harvey, the police department's technology specialist, whose computer systems are the civilian equivalent of the fancier special ops equipment used by the military.

Harvey collects any information he can pry out of government and industry. When officers were wasting time knocking on the wrong doors to serve warrants, he persuaded the local utility company to give him a daily update of the names and addresses of customers.

When he wanted more information about phones captured at crime scenes, he programmed a way to store all emergency 911 calls, which often include names and addresses to associate with phone numbers. He created another program to upload new crime reports every five minutes and mine them for the phone numbers of victims, suspects, witnesses and anyone else listed on them.

Now, instead of having to decide which license plate numbers to type into a computer console in the patrol car, an officer can simply drive around, and the automatic license plate reader on his hood captures the numbers on every vehicle nearby. If the officer pulls over a driver, instead of having to wait 20 minutes for someone back at the office to manually check records, he can use a hand-held device to instantly call up a mug shot, a Social Security number, the status of the driver's license and any outstanding warrants.

The computer in the cruiser can tell an officer even more about who owns the vehicle, the owner's name and address and criminal history, and who else with a criminal history might live at the same address.

Take a recent case of two officers with the hood-mounted camera equipment who stopped a man driving on a suspended license. One handcuffed him, and the other checked his own PDA. Based on the information that came up, the man was ordered downtown to pay a fine and released as the officers drove off to stop another car.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

A record of that stop - and the details of every other arrest made that night, and every summons written - was automatically transferred to the Memphis Real Time Crime Center, a command center with three walls of streaming surveillance video and analysis capabilities that rival those of an Army command center.

There, the information would be geocoded on a map to produce a visual rendering of crime patterns. This information would help the crime intelligence analysts predict trends so the department could figure out what neighborhoods to swarm with officers and surveillance cameras.

But that was still not the end of it, because the fingerprints from the crime records would also go to the FBI's data campus in Clarksburg, W.Va. There, fingerprints from across the United States are stored, along with others collected by American authorities from prisoners in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in Clarksburg, a volume that government officials view not as daunting but as an opportunity.

This year for the first time, the FBI, the DHS and the Defense Department are able to search each other's fingerprint databases, said Myra Gray, head of the Defense Department's Biometrics Identity Management Agency, speaking to an industry group recently. "Hopefully in the not-too-distant future," she said, "our relationship with these federal agencies - along with state and local agencies - will be completely symbiotic."

----

The FBI's 'suspicious' files

At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.

If the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, works as intended, the Guardian database may someday hold files forwarded by all police departments across the country in America's continuing search for terrorists within its borders.

The effectiveness of this database depends, in fact, on collecting the identities of people who are not known criminals or terrorists - and on being able to quickly compile in-depth profiles of them.

"If we want to get to the point where we connect the dots, the dots have to be there," said Richard A. McFeely, special agent in charge of the FBI's Baltimore office.

In response to concerns that information in the database could be improperly used or released, FBI officials say anyone with access has been trained in privacy rules and the penalties for breaking them.

But not everyone is convinced. "It opens a door for all kinds of abuses," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who now leads the American Civil Liberties Union's campaign on national security and privacy matters. "How do we know there are enough controls?"

The government defines a suspicious activity as "observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity" related to terrorism.

State intelligence analysts and FBI investigators use the reports to determine whether a person is buying fertilizer to make a bomb or to plant tomatoes; whether she is plotting to poison a city's drinking water or studying for a metallurgy test; whether, as happened on a Sunday morning in late September, the man snapping a picture of a ferry in the Newport Beach harbor in Southern California simply liked the way it looked or was plotting to blow it up.

Suspicious Activity Report N03821 says a local law enforcement officer observed "a suspicious subject . . . taking photographs of the Orange County Sheriff Department Fire Boat and the Balboa Ferry with a cellular phone camera." The confidential report, marked "For Official Use Only," noted that the subject next made a phone call, walked to his car and returned five minutes later to take more pictures. He was then met by another person, both of whom stood and "observed the boat traffic in the harbor." Next another adult with two small children joined them, and then they all boarded the ferry and crossed the channel.

All of this information was forwarded to the Los Angeles fusion center for further investigation after the local officer ran information about the vehicle and its owner through several crime databases and found nothing.

Authorities would not say what happened to it from there, but there are several paths a suspicious activity report can take:

At the fusion center, an officer would decide to either dismiss the suspicious activity as harmless or forward the report to the nearest FBI terrorism unit for further investigation.

At that unit, it would immediately be entered into the Guardian database, at which point one of three things could happen:

The FBI could collect more information, find no connection to terrorism and mark the file closed, though leaving it in the database.

It could find a possible connection and turn it into a full-fledged case.

Or, as most often happens, it could make no specific determination, which would mean that Suspicious Activity Report N03821 would sit in limbo for as long as five years, during which time many other pieces of information about the man photographing a boat on a Sunday morning could be added to his file: employment, financial and residential histories; multiple phone numbers; audio files; video from the dashboard-mounted camera in the police cruiser at the harbor where he took pictures; and anything else in government or commercial databases "that adds value," as the FBI agent in charge of the database described it.

That could soon include biometric data, if it existed; the FBI is working on a way to attach such information to files. Meanwhile, the bureau will also soon have software that allows local agencies to map all suspicious incidents in their jurisdiction.

The Defense Department is also interested in the database. It recently transferred 100 reports of suspicious behavior into the Guardian system, and over time it expects to add thousands more as it connects 8,000 military law enforcement personnel to an FBI portal that will allow them to send and review reports about people suspected of casing U.S. bases or targeting American personnel.

And the DHS has created a separate way for state and local authorities, private citizens, and businesses to submit suspicious activity reports to the FBI and to the department for analysis.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

Of those, 103 have become full investigations that have resulted in at least five arrests, the FBI said. There have been no convictions yet. An additional 365 reports have added information to ongoing cases.

But most remain in the uncertain middle, which is why within the FBI and other intelligence agencies there is much debate about the effectiveness of the bottom-up SAR approach, as well as concern over the privacy implications of retaining so much information on U.S. citizens and residents who have not been charged with anything.

The vast majority of terrorism leads in the United States originate from confidential FBI sources and from the bureau's collaboration with federal intelligence agencies, which mainly work overseas. Occasionally a stop by a local police officer has sparked an investigation. Evidence comes from targeted FBI surveillance and undercover operations, not from information and analysis generated by state fusion centers about people acting suspiciously.

"It's really resource-inefficient," said Philip Mudd, a 20-year CIA counterterrorism expert and a top FBI national security official until he retired nine months ago. "If I were to have a dialogue with the country about this . . . it would be about not only how we chase the unknowns, but do you want to do suspicious activity reports across the country? . . . Anyone who is not at least suspected of doing something criminal should not be in a database."

Charles Allen, a longtime senior CIA official who then led the DHS's intelligence office until 2009, said some senior people in the intelligence community are skeptical that SARs are an effective way to find terrorists. "It's more likely that other kinds of more focused efforts by local police will gain you the information that you need about extremist activities," he said.

The DHS can point to some successes: Last year the Colorado fusion center turned up information on Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident planning to bomb the New York subway system. In 2007, a Florida fusion center provided the vehicle ownership history used to identify and arrest an Egyptian student who later pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism, in this case transporting explosives.

"Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to anything" said Richard Lambert Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office. "But we're happy to wade through these things."

 

Edited December 30, 2020 by David Andrews

[Dennis Berube]

7 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

Cliff, I didn't address honesty here. If your point is that Dennis is in the closet, I may suspect you're right, but I'm not going to speculate.

You guys make me laugh sometimes, thank you. Let us be careful not to infringe on the forum policies however. 

19 hours ago, Ron Ecker said:

Who would ever have thought that it was doctors and other medical professionals who would plot to destroy America?

Till we get to the bottom of this mind-boggling conspiracy and its complicit corporate media, I think every medical license in the country should be suspended, but of course that's impractical. I would quit going to my doctor at all, but how would I get my prescriptions refilled? And is he trying to kill me with the ones he's given me?

 

Every conspiracy is mind boggling when you first hear about it, perceptions...

Instead of me supplying you with "factoids" which some of our members would undoubtedly recoil to the safety of various MSM articles in order to reacquaint their beliefs, I recommend looking for yourself. I've posted various places where this information is available several times. The general "plan" is well known and talked about openly, its overtly called the great reset. The political reaction to covid has been designed to assist that plan. 

Regarding your prescriptions... yes he is probably shortening your life, although not intentionally. The story of nutrition and pharmaceutical drugs since 1950 or so is very interesting. Two good books to start with the pharmaceutical side are "Bottle of Lies" and "Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime". With nutrition, start with anything by Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz's "Big Fat Surprise". 

[W. Niederhut]

1 minute ago, David Andrews said:

I suppose the cops could have gotten past his lawyer and gotten a search warrant if he'd made public threats, such as on social media.  But all they had was his ex-girlfriend's accounts of their conversation.  And, he was white...

        Still, if a lady told me that her boyfriend was building bombs in his RV, I would have considered it a highly credible, serious threat.   It's a phenomenon that we see, repeatedly, in cases of mass shootings and domestic terrorism in the U.S.-- family members and friends reporting serious homicide threats that are ignored/denied by those who are in a position to intervene.  The examples are legion.

[Steve Thomas]

President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that the pace of the Trump administration's vaccine rollout is unacceptable and that he will strategize to distribute 100 million inoculations within his first 100 days.

What's the plan, I wonder, for disposing of 100 million needles?

Steve Thomas

[Steve Thomas]

Ted Cruz Is Pocketing the Money He’s Raising for Georgia GOPers. He’s Not Alone.

ALL FOR ME

“The runoff is a gold mine for politicians. And now that they can run Facebook ads in Georgia, they’re rushing for it.”

By Lachlan Markay Dec. 30, 2020

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ted-cruz-is-pocketing-the-money-hes-raising-for-georgia-gopers-hes-not-alone?ref=home

 

“The Cruz campaign bought 15 separate ads on Facebook over the past two weeks, each featuring a video of the senator dramatically hyping the need to hold two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia runoff contests.

He asked for five dollar contributions to his new “Keep Georgia Red fund.” But Facebook users who clicked through to the online donation page—and read the fine print at the bottom—would see that the actual beneficiary was Cruz’s own campaign committee, not Sens. Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue, the two Republicans running for reelection in Georgia.”

“Cruz is just one of a number of elected officials of both parties using the competitive—and extremely expensive—Georgia runoff contests to raise money for themselves.”

 

And the grift goes on, grift goes on
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain...

Steve Thomas

[Ron Ecker]

31 minutes ago, Dennis Berube said:

Regarding your prescriptions... yes he is probably shortening your life, although not intentionally. The story of nutrition and pharmaceutical drugs since 1950 or so is very interesting. Two good books to start with the pharmaceutical side are "Bottle of Lies" and "Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime". With nutrition, start with anything by Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz's "Big Fat Surprise". 

Anything that keeps down my high blood pressure, mainly my prescriptions, I consider good. Which is one reason I hate Donald Trump so much. Thank God for my blood-pressure medicine.

 

 

 

[Steve Thomas]

America’s voice goes silent in Berlin as last US radio station closes

KCRW Berlin went off air this month.

By Nette Nöstlinger December 29, 2020

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-radio-station-kcrw-berlin-closes/

“In a country that had been force-fed a steady diet of Hitler’s favorite brass-band marches and Wagner for more than a decade, AFN’s American sound — from George Gershwin to Billie Holiday — was new and titillating. That was especially true in the 1950s, when rock ‘n’ roll emerged as the West’s most powerful cultural weapon.

The old post-war AFN network was “probably the best foreign policy instrument the U.S. had ever thought of,” former U.S. Ambassador to Germany John Kornblum, who also helped start KCRW Berlin, told the station recently.”

Steve Thomas

[Douglas Caddy]

[Ty Carpenter]

9 minutes ago, Douglas Caddy said:

I've always thought decently of and have tolerated mitch until now, but the swamp creatures are outing themselves. It should be abundantly clear to all, that absolutely no one in Washington gives a flying fart about any of us.

The government is out of control and is there to serve only themselves. I think of them as some sort of mafia organization but then remember even the mob has redeeming qualities at times. These rats do not.

Our forefathers revolted for much less!