In other words, concludes legal analyst Nick Sibilla, “the Supreme Court has effectively created a new legal immunity for cops accused of infringing on the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.”
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of every constitutional principle that serves as a bulwark against government tyranny, overreach and abuse.
As usual, the latest assault comes from the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a 6-3 ruling in Vega v. Tekoh, the Supreme Court took aim at the Miranda warnings, which require that police inform suspects that they have a right against self-incrimination when in police custody: namely, that they have a right to remain silent, to have an attorney present, and that anything they say and do can and will be used against them in a court of law.
By shielding police from lawsuits arising from their failure to Mirandize suspects, the Supreme Court has sent a message to police that they no longer have to respect a suspect’s right to remain silent.
In other words, concludes legal analyst Nick Sibilla, “the Supreme Court has effectively created a new legal immunity for cops accused of infringing on the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.”
Why is this important?
In totality, the rights enshrined in the Fifth Amendment speak to the Founders’ determination to protect the rights of the individual against a government with a natural inclination towards corruption, tyranny and thuggery.
The Founders were especially concerned with balancing the scales of justice in such a way that the innocent and the accused were not railroaded and browbeaten by government agents into coerced confessions, false convictions, or sham trials.
Indeed, so determined were the Founders to safeguard the rights of the innocent, even if it meant allowing a guilty person to go free, that Benjamin Franklin insisted, “It is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.”
Two hundred-plus years later, the Supreme Court (aided and abetted by the police state, Congress and Corporate America) has flipped that longstanding presumption of innocence on its head.
In our present suspect society, “we the people” are all presumed guilty until proven innocent.
The International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America has released a statement opposing the US government’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, saying the billions being funneled into the military-industrial complex “at a time when ordinary Americans are struggling to pay for housing, groceries, and fuel” is “a slap in the face for working people.” The statement advocates a negotiated settlement for peace, saying continuing to pour weapons into the country will “needlessly prolong the war, resulting in more civilian deaths” and that it “risks escalating and widening the war – up to and including nuclear war.”
In response to this entirely reasonable and moderate position, the DSA is currently being raked over the coals with accusations of Kremlin loyalty and facilitation of murder and bloodshed by blue-checkmarked narrative managers on Twitter. This is because the only acceptable positions for anyone of significant influence to have about this war range from supporting continuing current proxy warfare operations to initiating a direct hot war between NATO and Russia.
That’s how narrow the permissible spectrum of debate has been shrunk regarding this conflict: status quo hawkish to omnicidal hawkish. Anything outside that spectrum gets framed as radical extremism. As Noam Chomsky said: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
This spectrum of debate has been shrunk on the one hand by imperial spinmeisters continually hammering home the message that any support for de-escalation and diplomatic solutions is “appeasement” and indicative of Russian sympathies, and on the other by hawkish pundits and politicians pushing for the most freakishly aggressive responses to this war possible. By forbidding the spectrum of acceptable debate to move toward peace while shoving it as hard as possible in the direction of warmongering extremism, imperial narrative managers have successfully created an Overton window wherein the only debate permitted is over how directly and forcefully Russia should be confronted, with calls for peace now falling far outside that window.
Which is a problem, because both direct NATO hot war with Russia and continuing along the empire’s current course of action in Ukraine are stupid. Direct conflict between nuclear powers likely means a very fast and very radioactive third world war, and the status quo proxy warfare approach isn’t stopping Russia as more and more territory is taken in the east in cool defiance of western claims that Ukraine is bravely vanquishing its evil invaders. Biden administration officials have told the press that they doubt Ukraine will even be able to reclaim the territory it has lost already. Unless and until something significant changes, Ukraine has no apparent path to victory in this war anytime soon.
In short, there is no exit strategy to this proxy war. There are no plans in place to deliver Putin a swift defeat, and the Biden administration remains steadfastly dismissive of even the slightest gestures toward diplomacy with Moscow. Boris Johnson has reportedly been buzzing around admonishing Ukraine’s President Zelensky, France’s President Macron and who knows who else not to work toward peace in Ukraine. The doors to ending this war quickly by either winning it or negotiating a peace settlement are both bolted shut, all but guaranteeing a long and bloody slog.
Which as it turns out suits Washington just fine. Biden administration officials have stated that the goal is to use the Ukraine war to “weaken” Russia, and the US already has an established pattern of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires as we saw in both Afghanistan and Syria. Continuing to pour weapons and military intelligence into Ukraine while working to cut Russia off from the world stands no chance of ending the war in a timely manner, but it does stand a pretty good chance of bleeding and weakening Moscow.
And since this is the course of action that has been taken by the empire, we can only assume that this is its desired outcome: not victory, not peace, but a long and gruelling war.
One of the major recurring criticisms of the Iraq invasion was that Bush rushed into it without an exit strategy, without a plan for ending the war once it had been started. This proxy war with Russia not only lacks a strategy for ending the war, it apparently only has strategies for not ending the war. No exit strategy is the strategy.
Whenever you point out the insanity of this approach you’ll get useful idiots of the empire objecting that by criticizing US proxy warfare and supporting a negotiated settlement you are guilty of “appeasement” and exactly the same as Neville Chamberlain, because the only argument empire apologists ever have is to compare every US-targeted government to Nazi Germany.
According to these propaganda-addled empire automatons, having the story of not compromising with Putin-Hitler and not committing the sin of “appeasement” is worth sacrificing everyone in the entire nation of Ukraine for. They will happily throw every Ukrainian life into the gears of this war while they sit safe at home eating Funyuns and tweeting, just so they can have that “we didn’t compromise with Putin” story hanging on their mental mantlepiece.
How many more lives are such people prepared to feed into an unwinnable war which the westknowinglyprovoked? How many more of other people’s children are they prepared to sacrifice? How long does the bloodshed need to drag on before their “no appeasement” story loses value to them? How long until people wake up from their propaganda-induced comas and realize we’ve been manipulated into supporting a proxy war which benefits ordinary people in no real way, and in fact impoverishes us and threatens our very lives?
There is no morally consistent argument for continuing this proxy war in the way it has been going. If you actually value life and peace, the only way out is through negotiation and compromise. I point this out not because I believe it will happen, but to hopefully help a few more people open their eyes to the fact that we are being deceived.
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They should EITHER admit their data is garbage or that the vaccines should be IMMEDIATELY halted for ages 10 to 14. Ideally, they admit BOTH. Practically speaking, they will do NEITHER.
UH OH!!! The UK government now has a huge problem. A triply vaxxed child is 45 times more likely to die than an unvaccinated child. That makes the vaccine the biggest child killer ever deployed by any government and makes COVID deaths look like rounding error (45X vs. 0.05X).
UH OH!!! The UK government now has a huge problem. A triply vaxxed child is 45 times more likely to die than an unvaccinated child. That makes the vaccine the biggest child killer ever deployed by any government and makes COVID deaths look like rounding error (45X vs. 0.05X).
The “UK numbers are garbage” is confirmed once again by this dataset.
If you believe the UK numbers are right, then you should be jumping up and down and IMMEDIATELY BE DEMANDING a halt to the vaccines for ages 10 to 14.
Details of both claims are explained below.
But here’s the punchline: there is simply no way out of this for the UK government. They must pick either 1 or 2. They must either confirm their numbers are garbage or they must call an immediate halt to the vaccines for 10 to 14.
The UK press should force them to choose which way they want to have their credibility decimated.
My suggestion: They should come clean and admit to both.
Here are the details for each of my assertions.
The UK numbers are garbage
First of all, compliments are due to the UK government for exposing the data. The US government doesn’t expose any data nearly this detailed so it’s impossible to do the proper analyses on the US data because there is no data to use.
The UK government seems to be not including the most interesting metrics to assess safety and efficacy. The Expose points this out; it seems when the numbers work against them, they either stop reporting the data entirely, stop breaking it out, or in this case, not doing the calculation of the deaths per 100K person years so that only more motivated people will take the time and see that there is a huge problem.
For your convenience, you can download my annotated version here. Go to Table 6. My annotations are in Column G. The important numbers that we’ll use below are in red.
We see that the all-cause mortality (ACM) rate for ages 20-24 is reduced by a factor of 2 (compare G21 vs. G28).
That’s impossible! The vaccine isn’t a fountain of youth. It is only claimed to reduce death from COVID, not eliminate deaths from all known diseases.
According to the unvaccinated Row 21, only (43/378) = 8.3% of the deaths are from COVID. So if you have a PERFECT vaccine, ACM can only go down by 8.3%. It cannot go down by 50%.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced a bold new direction for the DA’s office Friday when she put forward an innovative new plan to arrest people who break the law.
“This may seem like a radical idea,” began Jenkins, “but I think that if someone breaks the law we should prosecute them and throw them in prison so they can no longer harm others.”
Jenkins’ revolutionary idea has received zero pushback from a community that is reportedly tired of being raped and murdered. Though unproven, the plan is expected to make the streets of San Francisco cleaner and safer, as well as boost the dwindling tourism market.
“I love San Francisco,” said longtime resident Joey Gladstone. “But I’m not a fan of being defecated on by a hobo who thinks he’s legendary Trojan warrior Hector while my wife gets mugged by another hobo. I really hope this brave plan to put people in jail pays off!”
Legislators have voiced support for the district attorney’s office, calling the idea an incredible breakthrough for the criminal justice system.
“I can’t believe no one has thought of this before!” commented CA State Senator Scott Wiener. “What a great idea! Arresting criminals… fascinating!”
At publishing time, CA Governor Gavin Newsom admonished San Francisco Mayor London Breed for allowing a radical DA to lock up misunderstood criminals.
Lawmakers added $37 billion beyond what the Pentagon asked for, most of it going to defense contractors at the expense of service members.
The bill also added three Lockheed Martin F-35s and eight Boeing F-18s, while preventing the Air Force from retiring 12 Boeing F-15s. One of the most egregious moves by the House was its decision to block the administration from scrapping five of the nine Littoral Combat Ships it had hoped to eliminate. The LCS is a ship without a mission, unable to survive a concerted attack and rife with performance problems, including an inability to track enemy submarines.
Yesterday the House of Representatives passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policy goals and recommends a number for total Pentagon spending. The final version of the bill will be determined later this year.
The House bill would set spending for the Pentagon and related activities like work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at an astonishing $850 billion, $37 billion more than the Pentagon even asked for in its FY2023 budget request. The vast bulk of the added funds will go to pad the bottom lines of contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.
Of the $37 billion in add-ons to the Pentagon’s proposal, over two thirds — or $25 billion — will go to weapons procurement and research and development, categories of funding that mostly go to contractors. By contrast, the increase for military personnel and health was just $1 billion, an indication that corporate profits continue to come before the needs of the troops.
Many of the additions to the Pentagon budget had more to do with parochial politics than they did with any coherent defense strategy. Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), who co-sponsored the amendment that added the $37 billion when the bill was under consideration by the House Armed Services Committee, made sure to include an extra Arleigh Burke class destroyer, a $2 billion ship built in Bath, Maine under the auspices of General Dynamics. Golden’s co-sponsor for the add-on was Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), whose district abuts the Huntington Ingalls corporation’s Newport News Shipbuilding subsidiary, which builds aircraft carriers and attack submarines, and will benefit from the $4 billion in added funds for shipbuilding included in the House bill.
The bill also added three Lockheed Martin F-35s and eight Boeing F-18s, while preventing the Air Force from retiring 12 Boeing F-15s. One of the most egregious moves by the House was its decision to block the administration from scrapping five of the nine Littoral Combat Ships it had hoped to eliminate. The LCS is a ship without a mission, unable to survive a concerted attack and rife with performance problems, including an inability to track enemy submarines. An amendment by House Armed Services Committee chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) that sought to sustain the administration’s decision to retire the LCS’s failed by a vote of 208 to 221. The drive to retire the LCS was supported by a coalition of fiscally conservative organizations led by Taxpayers for Common Sense.
On the nuclear front, the House doubled down on the latest installment of the Pentagon’s three-decades-long, $2 trillion nuclear weapons buildup. To make matters worse, the House bill also included funding for a nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, a dangerous and destabilizing system that the Biden administration had hoped to cancel.
An amendment by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) to block the $37 billion add-on garnered 151 votes, including a large majority of the Democratic caucus, a sign that the days of endless increases in Pentagon spending may be numbered. Robert Weissman of Public Citizen gave a useful perspective on efforts to roll back the Pentagon budget.
“We are racing toward a trillion-dollar military budget that tolerates and encourages mind-blowing waste, rewards military-industrial complex political spending with unfathomably large contracts — and fails to address priority national security needs” Weissman said. “The good news is: the American people are on to the racket and mobilizing to demand a reallocation of funding away from the Pentagon and to prioritize human needs.”
