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The World’s Smallest Political Quiz
Posted by M. C. on January 20, 2023
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The FBI and Personal Liberty – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
The FBI admission that it uses the CIA and the NSA to spy for it came in the form of a 906-page FBI rulebook written during the Trump administration, disseminated to federal agents in 2021 and made known to Congress last week.
Needless to say, the CIA and the NSA cannot be pleased. The CIA charter prohibits its employees from engaging in domestic surveillance and law enforcement. Yet, we know the CIA is present physically or virtually in all of the 50 U.S. statehouses.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/01/andrew-p-napolitano/the-fbi-and-personal-liberty/
Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the “wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies.
Those of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been warning for a generation that government spying is rampant in the U.S., and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much.
Here is the backstory.
After President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Congress investigated his abuse of the FBI and CIA as domestic spying agencies. Some of the spying was on political dissenters and some on political opponents. None of it was lawful.
What is lawful spying? The modern Supreme Court has made it clear that domestic spying is a “search” and the acquisition of data from a search is a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime presented under oath to the judge for a search or seizure to be lawful. The amendment also requires that all search warrants specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.
The language in the Fourth Amendment is the most precise in the Constitution because of the colonial disgust with British general warrants. A general warrant was issued to British agents by a secret court in London. General warrants did not require probable cause, only “governmental needs.” That, of course, was no standard whatsoever, as whatever the government wants it will claim that it needs.
General warrants, as well, did not specify what was to be searched or seized. Rather, they authorized government agents to search wherever they wished and to seize whatever they found; stated differently, to engage in fishing expeditions.
When Congress learned of Nixon’s excesses, it enacted FISA, which required that all domestic spying be authorized by the new and secret FISA Court. Congress then lowered the probable cause of crime standard for the FISA Court to probable cause of being a foreign agent, and it permitted the FISA Court to issue general warrants.
How can Congress, which is itself a creature of the Constitution, change standards established by the Constitution? Answer: It cannot legally or constitutionally do so. But it did so nevertheless.
Yet, the FISA compromise that was engineered in order to attract congressional votes was the wall. The wall consisted of regulatory language reflecting that whatever data was acquired from surveillance conducted pursuant to a FISA warrant could not be shared with law enforcement.
So, if a janitor in the Russian embassy was really a KGB agent who was distributing illegal drugs as lures to get Americans to spy for him, and all this was learned via a FISA warrant that authorized listening to phone calls from the embassy, the telephonic evidence of his drug dealing could not be given to the FBI.
The purpose of the wall was not to protect foreign agents from domestic criminal prosecutions; it was to prevent American law enforcement from violating personal privacy by spying on Americans without search warrants.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA, Constitution, FBI Informant, NSA, patriot act, personal liberty | Leave a Comment »
Hands Off My Income | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
Instead, most of Americans’ tax money is spent on welfare, grants, subsidies, vouchers, transfer payments, unconstitutional agencies and programs, foreign aid, hundreds of foreign military bases and tens of thousands of U.S. troops all over the globe, and offensive military intervention.
Taxes are not the price we pay for a civilized society, as is engraved on the exterior of the Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, D.C. Rather, taxes are the price we pay for the welfare/warfare state.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/hands-off-my-income/
House Democrats finally obtained former president Donald Trump’s tax returns and promptly released them to the public. No one should have his tax returns released: not presidents, not politicians, not celebrities, not sports figures, not cab drivers.
Released was nearly 6,000 pages of six years of individual and business income tax returns for the years 2015 through 2020. The returns show that Trump paid $750 in federal taxes in 2017, $0 in 2020, and had negative adjusted gross income in four of the six years. His highest year for charitable giving was 2017, when he donated $1.8 million.
But regardless of how “little” Trump may have paid in federal income tax, he neither wrote the tax code nor prepared his tax returns. His accountants merely did for him what they did for other rich businessmen. If there are loopholes, deductions, and credits that Trump’s accountants took advantage of, then good for them. As Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand wrote in the Helvering v. Gregory (1935) case: “Anyone may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.”
Democrats took the opportunity to blast “the rich” for using the tax code to their advantage: “Trump’s returns likely look similar to those of many other wealthy tax cheats—hundreds of partnership interests, highly-questionable deductions, and debts that can be shifted around to wipe out tax liabilities,” said Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden.
But who actually pays the majority of income taxes in this country?
According to the latest figures released by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), as reported by the Tax Foundation:
The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI below $44,269) faced an average income tax rate of 3.5 percent.
The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI of $546,434 and above) paid the highest effective income tax rate of 25.6 percent — more than seven times the rate faced by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers.
In 2019, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI below $44,269) earned 11.5 percent of total AGI and paid 3.1 percent ($48.4 billion) of all federal individual income taxes.
The top 1 percent (taxpayers with AGI of $546,434 and above) earned 20.1 percent of total AGI in 2019 and paid 38.8 percent of all federal income taxes.
In 2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $612 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $461 billion in income taxes.
But this is not the whole picture. The IRS dataset excludes the refundable portion of tax credits. Not only do “the poor” pay little or no federal income taxes, they receive “refunds” of tax money that they never paid in via refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit that can give them over $6,000 each year.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: grants, Military Bases, subsidies, transfer payments, unconstitutional agencies, Vouchers, welfare | Leave a Comment »
Poszar Was Right: Saudis Confirm Non-Dollar Oil Trade Plans In Davos
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
BY TYLER DURDEN
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/poszar-was-right-saudis-admit-non-dollar-oil-trade-plans-davos
Earlier this month, former NY Fed repo guru Zoltan Pozsar wrote one of his most important reports of 2022, in which he described how Putin could unleash hell on the Western financial system by demanding that instead of dollars, Russian oil exporters are paid in gold, effectively pegging oil to gold and launching Petrogold.
Then, China’s President Xi visit with Saudi and GCC leaders marked the birth of the petroyuan and a leap in China’s growing encumbrance of OPEC+’s oil and gas reserves: that’s because with the China-GCC Summit, “China can now claim to have built a ‘special relationship’ not only with the ‘+’ sign in OPEC+ (Russia), but with Iran and all of OPEC+.”
At the time, Zoltan urged the reader to think of the timing of this statement in a diplomatic sense:
“President Xi communicated his message on “renminbi invoicing” not during the first day of his visit – when he met only the Saudi leadership – but during the second day of his visit – when he met the leadership of all the GCC countries – to signal the following:
GCC oil flowing East + renminbi invoicing = the dawn of the petroyuan.“
And now, according to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is open to discussions about trade in currencies other than the US dollar, according to the kingdom’s finance minister.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Petrogold, renminbi invoicing, US dollar, Zoltan Pozsar | Leave a Comment »
Secretive Surveillance Program Captured 150 Million International Money Transfers Spanning 20 Countries: Sen. Wyden
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
Sen. Wyden thinks differently, saying TRAC allows the government to “serve itself an all-you-can-eat buffet of Americans’ personal financial data while bypassing the normal protections for Americans’ privacy.”
BY TYLER DURDEN
A secretive financial surveillance database established by the Arizona attorney general’s office in 2014 has ballooned into a behemoth tool used by more than 600 law-enforcement entities, which can search for more than 150 million money transfers between people in the US and more than 20 countries, according to internal program documents obtained by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The database is called TRAC, or Transational Record Analysis Center, and was established as part of a settlement reached with Western Union to combat human trafficking and drug runners from Mexico. The data includes the full names of both the sender and the recipient, along with the amount of the transaction, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“It’s a law-enforcement investigative tool,” said Rich Lebel, TRAC’s director, who claims that the program has resulted in hundreds of leads and busts involving drug cartels and other criminals engaged in money laundering. “We don’t broadcast it to the world, but we don’t run from or hide from it either.”
Three money-services companies, MoneyGram, Euronet, and Viamericas, sent TRAC bulk tranches of customer data in response to subpoenas issued out of the San Juan, Puerto Rico office of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Euronet and Viamericas had received customs summonses from that office seeking data for transactions between anywhere in the U.S. and countries including many in the Caribbean and Latin America as well as Canada, France, Spain, Ukraine and China, the companies told Mr. Wyden. Those subpoenas ordered the money-services companies to turn the data over to TRAC. -WSJ
What’s more, many of the subpoenas given to TRAC were extremely broad – often requiring all data on transfers between certain places above the $500 threshold, according to the documents – even in cases where an American living in a border state sends $500 or more to another American living elsewhere in the country.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Euronet, Money Transfers, MoneyGram, Sen. Wyden, TRAC, Viamericas | Leave a Comment »
The FAA has very quietly tacitly admitted that the EKGs of pilots are no longer normal. We should be concerned. Very concerned.
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
There was a study done on pilots. It will be published in The Epoch Times later this week. That indicated heart damage in over 20% of pilots screened (The Epoch Times will release the exact number).
Have a nice flight!
Update 1/17/22
When asked about the change, the FAA couldn’t justify it. Uh oh. Fact checkers aren’t going to touch this story.
Executive summary
In the October 2022 version of the FAA Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners, the FAA quietly widened the EKG parameters beyond the normal range (from a PR max of .2 to unlimited). And they didn’t widen the range by a little. They widened it by a lot. It was done after the vaccine rollout.
This is extraordinary. They did it hoping nobody would notice. It worked for a while. Nobody caught it.
But you can’t hide these things for long.
This is a tacit admission from the US government that the COVID vaccine has damaged the hearts of our pilots. Not just a few pilots. A lot of pilots and a lot of damage.
The cardiac harm of course is not limited to pilots.
My best guess right now is that over 50M Americans sustained some amount of heart damage from the shot.
That’s a lot of people who will be very upset when they realize the vaccine they took to reduce their chance of dying from COVID actually worked in reverse making it:
- More likely that people will get COVID
- Be hospitalized from COVID and other diseases
- Die from COVID (and other diseases)
- You also have an excellent chance of getting a lifetime of heart damage for no extra charge.
But don’t worry; you can’t sue them. They fixed the law so none of them aren’t liable (the doctors, the drug companies, the government). After all, you took the vaccine of your own free will. It’s not like you were forced (or coerced) to take it or anything like that! And there were plenty of people warning you not to take the shots (even though they censored most of them).
In this article, I will explain the evidence and thinking behind all my claims.
As I learn more, I will refine the estimate.
Introduction
On October 24, 2022, the FAA quietly, without any announcement at all, widened the EKG requirements necessary for pilots to be able to fly.
The PR (a measure of heart function) used to be in the range of .12 to .2.
It is now: .12 to .3 and potentially even higher.
This is a very wide range; it accommodates people who have cardiac injury. Cardiologist Thomas Levy is appalled at this change:
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Sports DEI – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/01/walter-e-block/sports-dei/
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been sweeping the nation. It has been applied to all sorts of institutions, albeit, preeminently, education. It is time, it is past time, that this initiative be spread out, even further. To wit, it should be introduced into the realm of sports.
According to DEI, the reason whites do better at earning wealth, educational attainment, employment, more stable families, incarceration rates, STEM occupations, etc., has nothing to do with ability, IQ levels, studiousness, work ethic, or anything else of that sort. Rather, it is all due to white racism. It is a little difficult to reconcile that claim with the undeniable fact that Orientals outstrip Occidentals in most of these dimensions, but let that pass. We do not want to assess DEI theory too harshly here. Instated, we want to apply it to the realm of athletics.
How would that work? First, let us consider professional basketball.
The percentage of black players is 73%, while they comprise only some 13% of the overall population. Whites make up 17% of these splendid athletes, but 76% of the total population. Asians? They comprise 0.4% of the NBA but 6% of all people in the US. Thus, blacks are highly overrepresented, while whites and Orientals are significantly underrepresented.
How can we account for these statistics? According to the DEI philosophy it has nothing to do with the fact that “white men can’t jump.” Rather, the culprit here, wait for it, I hope you’re sitting down while you read this, is black racism. Caucasians and Asians have just as much ability, on average, as do Africans and African Americans, but the latter just won’t allow them into the game to the degree that their abilities would warrant. Black athletes are just mean spirited. These world class sports pros are in effect hogging the ball. True, virtually all of the teams are owned by whites and as per usual, the buck stops at the top. But we’re going to ferret out black racism wherever it lies, with neither fear nor favor, and according to the DEI principles, it rests squarely with this demographic.
A similar analysis applies to football, where the players, disproportionately to their share of the total population, favor blacks (71%) over whites (25%). Data for track and field, marathon running is harder to come by, but eyeball experience indicates that blacks are keeping whites at “the back of the bus” to an even greater extent in these activities too.
However, when it comes to swimming and hockey (93% white), matters reverse. Here, at last, we find the evils of “white supremacy.” There are hardly any blacks with important accomplishments in either venue. This of course has nothing to do with black disinterest or lack of ability in either sport. No, we again utilize the DEI premise that all races are equally able in all dimensions. Expert economist Thomas Sowell says otherwise, over and over again, with evidence you could knock an elephant over with, but what does he know? If there are any differences in success rates it must necessarily be due to racism. Anyone who denies this is himself a racist. QED.
What are we then to make of the fact that too few basketball and football coaches are of African descent? Only seven out of 29 head NBA coaches were black last year. According to National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts “These numbers are just disgraceful…” But seven out of 29 is 24% roughly double the percentage of the black population. What is going on here? The craziness of DEI is going on here. This is true not only at the professional level, but includes college teams as well.
One last thing. DEI has all but banned ACT and SAT scores in academia. Why? That is because certain demographic groups do better, far better, than other demographic groups. Nor has this “gap” narrowed, despite heroic efforts for this to be done on the part of the wokists. What solution have the politically correct forces instituted to deal with this obvious injustice? Why, of course, to ban ACT and SAT scores in academia.
Can we do any less in sports DEI? Of course not. We wouldn’t want to be considered racists. Accordingly, we propose that all analogs to these tests be prohibited. No scoring in any sport. No calculation of times or places in foot races or in the swimming pool.
What about prizes such as the Stanley Cup in hockey, the gold, silver and bronze medals in the Olympics, the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy in basketball and the Vince Lombardi Trophy in football (the Superbowl, too, should be considered in this regard; it too is an award, and therefore suspicious). Again, we resort to DEI in academia for our model. There, proportionality, diversity, are the benchmarks. If we borrow a leaf from that practice, these sports awards should be given out not on the basis of ability, not based on points scored, or touchdowns, or distance thrown in the javelin, or time for foot races, but, rather, based on the proportion of a given demographic in the overall population. We wouldn’t want any racial community to have more than its fair share, now would we.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: DEI, diversity, equity, Inclusion, sports, STEM | Leave a Comment »
All Quiet (Panic) on the Western Front, by Pepe Escobar – The Unz Review
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
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“A New System” – Inside the Davos Summit 2023 – OffGuardian
Posted by M. C. on January 18, 2023
WEF conference looks set to focus on what the globalist elite can learn from the failures of their “pandemic” narrative.
The whole article is essentially a very long-winded way of saying “we need to tell better lies”.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/15/a-new-system-inside-the-davos-summit-2023/
The World Economic Forum’s annual meet-up kicks off tomorrow. Politicians, corporate giants, “philanthropists” and all manner of elite monstrosities gather for a weekend of telling each other how smart they are and making the world generally worse.
But what’s on the menu this year?
Well, here are the five main items up for discussion, according to the WEF’s website:
See if you can notice a pattern:
- Addressing the Current Energy and Food Crises in the context of a New System for Energy, Climate and Nature
- Addressing the Current High Inflation, Low Growth, High Debt Economy in the context of a New System for Investment, Trade and Infrastructure
- Addressing the Current Industry Headwinds in the context of a New System for Harnessing Frontier Technologies for Private Sector Innovation and Resilience
- Addressing the Current Social Vulnerabilities in the context of a New System for Work, Skills and Care
- Addressing the Current Geopolitical Risks in the context of a New System for Dialogue and Cooperation in a Multipolar World
Now, none of this is news. A “new system” for energy is a “green new deal”, a “new system” for international cooperation is some type of global governance, and a “new system” for investment and trade covers a lot of topics, including digital currency.
Like I said, nothing new, but it’s always refreshing to see it in print, with no effort to hide it.
It’s also interesting that they don’t use the phrases “new normal”, “great reset” or “build back better” anywhere on the page, despite the fact it’s obviously what they’re talking about.
A little victory for the alternate media, who have clearly raised enough awareness that those phrases are now considered too tainted to use.
In fact, the WEF brotherhood is clearly concerned about losing control of the narrative, as this article from a few days ago highlights:
The world’s biggest problem solvers need to craft better narratives
It argues:
People are more persuaded by the information presented within a narrative because a good narrative helps to ease information processing. Those trying to solve the world’s most pressing challenges must take notice of this.
The whole article is essentially a very long-winded way of saying “we need to tell better lies”.
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Dailywire Article – Intel Veteran Knew Hunter Biden Laptop ‘Had To Be Real’ Before Signing Letter
Posted by M. C. on January 18, 2023
One of the 51 intelligence veterans who signed a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop story could be part of a Russian disinformation operation said they knew the contents of the device were genuine at the time.
The letter, which came out in the days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, was used to dismiss the laptop and its provenance. Many of the contents of which have since been analyzed and shown to be authentic.
In a new interview more than two years later, Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, told The Australian, “all of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible.”
The signees, which included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, warned in the letter that the October 2020 arrival of reporting about the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Going further than what the letter said, Politico used a headline that said the former intelligence officials were claiming the story was “Russian disinfo.”
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