Giving Christine Blasey Ford the opportunity to testify about her unsubstantiated accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is, somehow, silencing her, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) declared Wednesday night.
Refusing to launch an FBI investigation into Ford’s claims is also “silencing her,” Sen. Gillibrand said in a tweet:
“Denying Dr. Ford an FBI investigation is silencing her. Forcing her into a sham hearing is silencing her. And pushing through Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation is silencing her.”
After calling off the launch of a smart display device earlier this year, Facebook is reportedly planning to announce it next week. Here are the details from Cheddar‘s Alex Heath, who cites unnamed sources:
The main feature will be video chat, and Facebook will use facial recognition to tag users and follow them around the room.(Amazon’s Echo Show and Google-powered smart displays don’t identify users’ faces, though some security cameras do.)
The device will have a privacy shutter to disable the camera tracking, but amazingly, Facebook may have only thought to include this in response to its own recent privacy scandals.
While the device was once rumored to rely a homegrown voice assistant to handle basic commands, Portal may instead lean on Amazon’s Alexa for things like music, recipes, and news briefings.
Portal could come in small and large sizes for $300 and $400, respectively.
People will not only tolerate this invasion, not only welcome it but also pay for it. Crazy times. Facebook is like a vampire – never invite it into your home.
For what its worth, every honest criminal defense attorney knows exactly what Trump and Guiliani meant by their “baffling” incrimination statements. It’s true.
The mass, mainstream, slanted, biased, dishonest, yellow, establishment, corporate media has become the American equivalent and embodiment of Grima Wormtongue – slithering, slinking, whispering, and lying – ever misleading the just and the honest for the benefit of other masters. Some, tiring of the deception, bluntly call it what it is: fake news. This doesn’t sit well with Fake News, Inc. To wit:
Marjorie Pritchard, of the Boston Globe, made an impassioned call for editorials “denouncing what the newspaper called a ‘dirty war against the free press.’” And I, as your C.F. Floyd Feature Writer of National Affairs, hereby answer the call!
Estimates indicate that around 100 newspapers, large and small, will respond this week. Reckon TPC as number 101, kind of. Alas that I cannot denounce a war, dirty or otherwise, against the free press as such simply does not exist. Rather, consider this my part in the free war against the dirty press.
This all started with a Tweet from the President back in February. (Actually, it started years ago with the corruption of the mainstream media, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves). Tweeted Donald J. Trump: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
I felt this dissent important enough to forward to someone. My recent email:
Hon. Donald J. Trump
The White House
August 16, 2018
Dear Mr. President:
First, thank you for all that you do for America and for our beloved freedoms.
Second, today I understand that some 350 establishment newspapers, large and small, feature editorials excoriating you and your defense of the free people. This being done under the false guise of defending the “free press.” Some are even making claims about the First Amendment, apparently having lately discovered the Constitution. In doing so they prove they are not only the enemies of the people but organized and coordinated enemies. They prove they can offer nothing except Fake News.
Some of us – MOST of us – stand with you and your mission. While cheering your election I did maintain some differences with you here and there concerning policy. And I still do. However, my understanding (and appreciation) is now clearer as to the total scope of your work. In short: MAGA!
Thank you again for all that you do. May God bless you each day and may God bless America.
Sincerely,
Perrin Lovett
C.F. Floyd Writer for National Affairs, TPC
This isn’t the garden variety refugee either, not the kind the left and the open borders crowd tell us are so critically beneficial to the GDP. It’s Julian. Assange. The same cyber sleuth and reporter held up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years now.
It seems this particular refugee isn’t adding that magic economic value. In fact, they say he’s become an “inherited problem” and a nuisance. Ecuador may give him the boot:
Julian Assange’s nearly six-year refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London is in danger, opening the WikiLeaks founder to arrest by British authorities and potential extradition to the US, multiple sources with knowledge tell CNN.
While Assange has in the past claimed his position in the embassy was under threat, sources say his current situation is “unusually bad” and that he could leave the embassy “any day now,” either because he will be forced out or made to feel so restricted that he might choose to leave on his own. His position there is “in jeopardy,” one source familiar with the matter said.
Assange’s exit from the embassy could open a new phase for US investigators eager to find out what he knows.
In their defense, the man is costing them much money and worry. It’s an embassy, not an apartment building. For him, his potential release to the streets is fraught with danger.
The UK will arrest him on a procedural bench warrant stemming from a Swedish criminal matter. That’s just procedure.
Sweden may extradite him on untenable, quasi-dismissed, and likely nonexistent criminal charges related to #metoo event that probably never happened. That’s probably going nowhere.
The real danger comes, surprise, surprise, from the American Empire. US “investigators” claim they want to know what Assange knows about international affairs. To that end, they have likely already secured an arrest warrant for him. Mind you, there’s no crime the US could, in good faith, charge him with. But that matters little in a land of little faith. If they want him, they’ll get him.
And they already know what he knows. He published it. That’s how he got into trouble in the first place – by exposing the embarrassing secrets the Empire would rather remain secret.
It would not surprise me at all if Assange were simply “silenced.”
It’s amazing. The US literally crawls with politicians, banksters, bureaucrats, MIC operatives, Hellywood values monsters, liars, charlatans, and criminals of every stripe, all dedicated to robbing, murdering, or enslaving the free people. It’s not a Deep State so much as a Deep World. But they go after Assange for exposing a little bit of it.
Most amazing is that the people have heard little of this and care even less.
One almost hopes for a James Bond-style escape for Julian to some civilized country. Maybe Pam can arrange something?
Hold on to your ARs! Superstar Survivor David Hogg (rhymes with “slog,” as in the tiring noun usage) readies a new and sure-to-be trendy book on how you need to surrender your lives to communism. It’s anterior title is #NeverAgain.
One hopes, given the title, it may be the last time we have to hear from the spaghetti-armed bully who is totally not a crisis actor. More likely it’ll be the long-awaited sequel to the utter fairy tale bullshit that was Michael Bellesiles’s (pronounced: “l-i-a-r”) Arming America.
Captain Boogie Board is probably out hawking it at one of today’s marches for Marx. Good luck, kid.
If you’re into truth, then seriously consider Tom Wood’s new work, Wrong About Guns.
There’s an Epidemic of Low-IQ Arguments Against Guns
Supporters of gun rights are being accused of child murder, and liking their guns more than their children. Time to fight back.
Inside this free eBook:
* Why civilians have a much better record than police at stopping mass shootings — the numbers will shock you
* Don’t countries with tougher gun laws have fewer gun fatalities? Here’s the real truth
* How concealed-carry laws reduce violent crime
* The truth about “assault weapons”
* The bogus constitutional arguments of the anti-gun lobby
* The only reasonable approach to school shootings
Perhaps inspired by the recent student walkouts for gun control, the March for Marx, some California students are trying to organize a similar protest for a far deadlier cause:
This week, Rocklin High School students are using social media to organize a pro-life walkout using the hashtag #life.
“To honor all the lives of aborted babies pretty much. All the millions of aborted babies every year,” said organizer Brandon Gillespie.
He says his history teacher inspired the idea.
As thousands of students across the country walked out of class demanding strict gun laws, in honor of the Parkland shooting victims, Benzel was placed on paid administrative leave when she asked students to consider whether there’s a double standard in the national school walkout.
“I would like a conversation about when is too much? And are we going allow this on the other side?” said Julianne Benzel
The principal at Rocklin High declined to meet with us for an on-camera interview, but a district spokeswoman tells us, he does plan to sit down with the student about the possible abortion walkout, and that’s not going over well with some of his peers.
“Abortions aren’t really anything that has to do with school or students here,” said Naeirika Neev.
Neev is the editor of the school newspaper. In her posts, she’s using the hashtag “enough is enough” to promote peace, and take a stance against anything anti-abortion on campus.
“They have their First Amendment, they can go protest about that anytime anywhere,” she said.
But Brandon says protesting on school grounds is just the point.
“I would like to see if there really is a double standard and what will come of that,” he said.
He doesn’t have a date for the protest, but he does with the principal. Their meeting is set for this Friday.
This story has just about everything:
A teacher suspended for daring to question the narrative;
A budding SJW student-editor: Our First Amendment, here and now, for our causes – your’s somewhere else. What-ev...; and
A few students actually concerned about real mass violence against their class.
Look for major, massive coverage of this protest from the major media. Hold your breath.
A Breakdown of the numbers:
In 2014, the last year for which statistics were easily available (from Wikipedia), there were a grand total of … 17 American children (possibly a few adults, we’ll call them all children) murdered (killed, we’ll call them all murders) by shootings in schools. In the same year 652,639 American children were murdered in “legal” abortion clinics.
17 dead is way too many. One is too many. 652,639 is way, way, way too many.*
By recent historic norms both numbers were slightly lower than the average. For example: this year, 2018, there have already been 26 children (again, calling them all children) murdered in school shootings (17 in Parkland, FL). So, expanding that to the whole year, we’re tracking about 104 for 2018. No word on 2018 abortions but they should be around the 600,000-700,000 mark. Both sets have been declining steadily since the 1990’s.
A little math, not magic, tells us that, in 2014, American children were 38,390 times more likely to be killed, murdered by abortion “providers” than by school shooters. (652,639 / 17 = 38,390). They were also more likely to be killed by cars, lightening, water, and foods.
The statistical variance isn’t limited to the young either. During 2014 all Americans were about 80 times more likely to die from abortion murder than firearms murder.
The obvious way to save the most lives is to ban guns?
Young Neev is kind of right. The issue has nothing to do with those students currently at the school – because all of them survived the abortion epidemic. I suspect she might deem aborted children mere lumps of tissue or some such. That is, in a way, an adequate description of all humans, in the womb, in schools, in California, and elsewhere.
The fact that she would shirk all responsibility for safeguarding other, less fortunate members of her cohort and those immediately past and future, speaks to the failings of her education, mathematical and moral. She’s young, impressionable, and probably misdirected. Her lack can easily be forgiven. That of her teachers, administrators, political leaders, etc. cannot. They should know better. Anyone with a calculator should know better.
**Maybe there’s a grant or two in that $1.3 Trillion mess from Congress to buy calculators for the media, politicians, etc.**
Then again, when it comes to these two issues, the truth isn’t popular. Telling the truth about abortions hurts the Sanger-Rudin narrative and system of controlling the “undesirables” – literally Nazi style. Telling the truth about firearms usage hurts the Marxist narrative and system of controlling the rest – literally Soviet style.
I hope these young Californians do walk out. Maybe it will help others wake up.
A real epidemic, regressing to the mean. Bloomberg/CNN.
*The 17, as bad as they are, are offset by the 1 million or so lives saved by firearms that year (each year) in the US. I am unaware of any lives saved by abortion (likely has to be a few, but only a few).
With the highest gun ownership per capita in the world – by far – the US is only number 111 (of around 200 nations) in per capita murders. The left’s assertion that over-armed America is the murder capital of the world is a ridiculous lie. And, dear God, let’s NOT get into the statistics of who commits the largest measurable percentage of murders in America (hint: it’s not the Amish).
Gun murders and deaths, including those related to rifles (including “assault-style” rifles) are but a near microscopic fraction of total “unnatural” or “preventable” deaths in the US. From 2014:
248 people killed with rifles (all types including … assault rifles);
435 people killed with baseball bats and hammers;
660 people killed with punches and kicks;
8,124 people killed with guns of all kinds (offset by 1,000,000+ lives saved by all guns);
14,249 murders of/by all weapons sources (and unarmed murders);
32,744 killed by automobiles;
Approximately 200,000 killed by doctors and medical professionals;
Approximately 365,000 killed by obesity and fat-related causes;
652,639 killed by “legal” abortions.
One, if one is blind, deluded, and perhaps mentally deficient, or possibly evil, can easily see the way to best save lives in America is to ban the scary AR-15. (Better raise taxes while we’re at it).
And no one ever uses an assault rifle to prevent crime or save lives … except that they do.
Yesterday I ran a rather incomplete, but illustrative, list of current and historic gun control proponents. Show me a tyrant, a dictator, a mass murderer, a genocidal maniac, or an active war-monger, and I’ll show you a loud and proud supporter of disarming the locals.
All of this figures largely into today’s Prepper News Weekly, which you should watch on a regular basis:
Perrin Lovett/FPTV/YouTube.
Yet and still, otherwise decent people, whether they be “average”or “ordinary” or powerful celebrities, continue to mindlessly (no thought, just emotions) clamor to be disarmed. To disarm you. It’s as infuriating as it is embarrassing.
The impressionable youth, students who will walk out of classes to support gun control, are almost understandable. Some (very few) of them are subject to being killed, in schools or without, by bad people armed with guns. Sure, they’re more likely to be killed by bees, lightning, and swimming pools, but those facts are … facts and not really governed by easily manipulated feelings. (Ever hear someone decry “assault-style” ionized plasmatic electricity from the sky?) No.
The kids are far more likely to be killed by incompetent doctors, sugary drinks and starchy carbs, and autos. And many millions of their cohorts never even made it to the schools thanks to Planned Parenthood (aka, Rehashed Nazi Eugenics, Inc.). On that last note, an interesting, telling political cartoon:
Andy Marlette, Pensacola News Journal (via the Tampa Bay Times).
That’s good and bad rhetoric all in one, Mr. Marlette. There’s a vague truth behind it: “conservative” Republicans types, like Rick “Make it 21!” Scott, will claim to be anti-abortion. They’re not. For all the claims, there’s been remarkably little (read: NO) action since 1973 to curtail abortions. The slight numerical decline is more attributable to contraception, lifestyle changes, and the antics of the … um … Junior Anti-Sex League.
The young cartoon lady is well-instructed that the well-dressed, well-fed elephant does not care about her in or out of the womb. His only concerns are: appeasing his corporate overlords, and; getting reelected. (Yes, these are most similar to the real desires of his goofy-looking jackass “opponent”). The rhetorical truth evaporates. Then, mathematically considering the 80:1 and 2,600:1 ratios from 2014, above, the real truth interrupts with force.
For the politicians, especially the currently-in-charge GOPers, there can be no understanding, no sympathy. “Mindless shits” comes descriptively to mind.
“The schools are terrible because the teachers are incompetent, but arm the teachers.”
“No, don’t arm the teachers. Raise the gun-buying age and put a SWAT team in every school. Metal detectors! More drugs!”
“Okay. Let’s ban bump stocks (unnecessary to bump fire anyway)”.
“Take the guns first, due process second.”
Gibber. Gibber. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stupidity to make Democrats look sane by comparison. (One notices that, largely, the Dems are silently hanging back now, allowing the fat, stupid elephants, the kids, and the corporations to fight this one – a wise strategy).
The due process thing is really alarming. Not many of ye old Rights of Englishmen still exist in dying America. DP is kind of important. And it’s kind of under siege. And not just from The Trump. He says a lot of things, many of them unwise sounding:
President Trump on Wednesday voiced support for confiscating guns from certain individuals deemed to be dangerous, even if it violates due process rights.
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.
“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.
Trump was responding to comments from Vice President Pence that families and local law enforcement should have more tools to report potentially dangerous individuals with weapons.
Giving the orange man the benefit of the doubt, which I tire of doing, I’m sure he means what he says in limited, emergency circumstances. There are actually times when a situation sort of dictates dispensing with the technicalities of formal due process.
For instance, if a police officer sees someone committing (or about to start committing) what the officer reasonably believes to be a crime or dangerous activity, then the officer is lawfully authorized to use force, up to and including lethal force, to stop said crime or activity. No need to trouble a judge up-front. It happens all the time. And it many times doesn’t even involve the police; see the linked example of the armed citizen of Illinois, above.
And there is, in such emergency situations, a built-in due process anyway: people know or should know not to commit or attempt to commit crimes! At least not where others might see them. And with the expectation that they might be resisted if they proceed. It’s as much common sense as it used to be common law.
You know, the common law with the due process specter floating around?
“No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law …” (5th Amend., U.S. Const., as amended, 1791)(See also: Amend. 14).
If there is to be formal legal action, then it needs to take place before any subsequent state taking action. Before, first, Donald, not second. And a gun would seem to fit the description of “property.” Of course, explaining this to a man who will use executive, administrative action, in defiance of Articles I and II, to ban superfluous rifle accessories, seems tenuous. Then again, the man says a lot of things; sometimes he rationally clarifies afterwards. Time will tell, time permitting.
It’s odd, given The Trump’s hasty pronouncements and the quasi-legal developments of the past 20 years, that he does not (yet) take a similar approach to the deep state, the treasonous lukers, the pizza-lovers, the banksters, and the Dreamers. Would not a delayed due process, say via Enemy Combatant proceedings, benefit the stabilization of whatever remains of this political mess? Dunno but, the fact that I, a anarcho-libertarian type, would even ask such a question speaks to where we really are in the here and now…
This article runs a little long but it is worth considering the whole of the fallen government and how it reacts to the law. Joe Bob Briggs considers the TeeVee-ification of the Third Branch:
The genius element of the English justice system is the invention in the Middle Ages of the state prosecutor, or, in its original incarnation, the king’s prosecutor. His purpose was to keep vengeance out of the courtroom. Before that you had the aggrieved-kinsman system. The suffering family brought charges against the alleged offender, so that if a Hatfield killed a McCoy, it was up to the McCoys to file charges, and if the Hatfield was found guilty, the McCoys were allowed to take vengeance in the form of executing the offender themselves. Eye for an eye, family member for family member, murder for murder, rape for rape. This is the system that, in various forms, still exists today in many Muslim cultures, and it’s the system that we supposedly got rid of 800 years ago after agreeing that eye-for-an-eye is not what we wanted. Henceforth the only person allowed to bring criminal charges was an unbiased public official representing the state and the people, and that person had to be emotionally uninvolved with either side of the case.
Then, as the court system developed in England and America, we became strict about excluding from trials anyone who had any kind of bias, even if he otherwise qualified as a witness. In fact, bias caused by friendship or blood relation is one of the principal ways that witnesses are impeached.
…
*Please read the whole original at Taki’s, via the above hyperlink.*
Our courts, judges, and prosecutors are every bit as out of control as their legislative and executive counterparts. It’s a very good article as are most that pass through that source. Still, I will note that there was a time and place for private prosecutions, ones involving really process and decorum. The Romans, for example, ran a system of private felony proceedings similar to those used in their major civil cases. The aggrieved party, usually of Patrician class, brought charges and prosecuted them before the whole Senate or before a large jury of the accused’s actual friends, his peers.
We don’t do that anymore … to our detriment. We still, to a degree, use the Roman system of magistrates to quickly resolve minor cases. But the felonies are now handled by self-serving government agents, before government judges, with government witnesses, all before a jury carefully selected so as to favor the government. In short: you are screwed.
Maybe the Romans, like the ancient English, were a little more civilized. More honest. More intelligent. “We” certainly tend to be none of those things.
Also, to partly answer Joe Bob, the changes (to due process, equal protection, etc.) may have started prior to the 1980’s. It might have come through the example of 1945-46 and the Nuremberg Trials, which essentially threw out hundreds, thousands even, of years of legal refinement. Threw them out for temporary expedience and feel-good-isms. And with ramifications for the future.
And so we are left with a system based on: ignoring facts, ignoring history, emotionally driven nonsense, collectivist actions, always geared towards taking the maximum amount of freedoms away from the maximum numbers of innocent or disconnected persons.
248 bad actors (calm down CNN, Google – not those actors) kill people with rifles, some of them surely “assault-ish,” while 100 Million good actors remain armed, responsible, peaceful, and vigilant. The solution is to disarm the many over the actions of the few?
That’s the “thought.” The thought of today’ do-good grabbers and of Hitler, Himmler, Mao, Stalin, Amin, Hussein, and Pot. A somewhat disconcerting truth and conundrum.
I don’t recall ever hearing so much about gun control as now. “Common sense” gun control. “Reasonable” gun control. “Hunters don’t need…” It’s coming from the usual sources: The Coalition to Stop Freedom, the Democrat Party, Tide Pod-eating millennial students, the American Pravda. And, now, we’re getting it from: Republicans, The Trump, DELTA, Dick’s Sports, and Walmart.
Some of the hysteria I could almost understand. I am solidly against gun violence, any violence, really. But I’m also against lies, tyranny, and communism.
So, here’s a reminder of who currently favors gun control along with some historical supporters (it’s all about the company one keeps/list in not all-inclusive):
Michael Bloomberg;
Diane Feinnstein;
Barry Obama;
Adolf Hitler;
Pol Pot;
Donald Trump;
Chuck Schumer;
Mao Zedong;
Adolf Eichmann;
Hillary Clinton;
Bill Clinton;
Chipper Jones;
Joseph Stalin;
Karl Marx;
Some actors paid millions to “kill” with guns on screen;
Saddam Hussein;
Vladimir Lenin;
Idi Amin;
Robert Mugabe;
Sarah Brady;
Benito Mussolini;
Nancy Pelosi;
Francisco Franco;
Matt Damon;
Abraham Lincoln;
Rick Scott;
Kim Jong-Il;
Kim Jong-Un;
Muammar Gaddafi;
Fidel Castro;
Slobodan Milosevic;
Chiang Kai-shek;
Kim Il-sung;
Ho Chi Minh;
Nikita Khrushchev; and
Hideki Tojo.
Sure, some of them murdered a few hundred million people but their hearts were (are) in the right place. It’s common sense, really.
The truth is part and parcel with common sense. Tomorrow I’m running a video and a list of gun/murder stats at FP which is intended to interject a little truth into the current mass hysteria. I’ll copy a link here, then.
It will also feature largely into Prepper News Weekly tomorrow.
Charles Krauthammer recently said on Fox News that, given the GOP-DNC-Comey-Russia-Trump-media mania and mass misinformation campaign, that the American people increasingly have nowhere to turn for accurate information. Considering that the mass media is mostly owned for four or five large companies, all beholden to special interests and incestuously tied to the crazed government in D.C., it makes perfect sense. Of course, I’m not sure most people want accurate information. Air conditioning, cable, and beer – yes. Info – maybe not.
These trends are doing to the media and reporting what a lack of income has done to retail – killing it, slowly but surely.
Consequently, a new study shows the number of reporters on the streets, digging up facts, is collapsing. A snapshot of the largest media markets over the past ten years or so:
BLS / Apartment List.
Odds are your city has 100 reporters or less. A few places are growing – D.C. especially – but the overall trend is down, precipitously.
At the rate things are going, I calculate that by 2027 we will be down to just 11 reporters nationwide. Two of those will be Russian hackers, the rest robots.
Having blasted the Trump administration for their hyprocritical flip-flop from “loving WikiLeaks” to “arrest Assange,” Ron Paul made his feelings very clear on what this signals: “If we allow this president to declare war on those who tell the truth, we have only ourselves to blame.” Today he sits down with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for a live interview…
“The CIA has been deeply humiliated as a result of our ongoing publications so this is a preemptive move by the CIA to try and discredit our publications and create a new category for Wikileaks and other national security reporters to strip them of First Amendment protections,”
PERRIN LOVETT 
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