90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Dear Washington Elites:

The FBI Has Been Lying About Seth Rich - What Are They Hiding?

A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.

A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their heading. The emails were provided in, to say the least, heavily redacted form.

Before I analyse these particular emails, I should make plain that they are not the major point. The major point is that the FBI claimed it had no records mentioning Seth Rich, and these have come to light in response to a different FOIA request that was not about him. What other falsely denied documents does the FBI hold about Rich, that were not fortuitously picked up by a search for correspondence between two named individuals?

To look at the documents themselves, they have to be read from the bottom up, and they consist of a series of emails between members of the Washington Field Office of the FBI (WF in the telegrams) into which Strzok was copied in, and which he ultimately forwarded on to the lawyer Lisa Page.

The opening email, at the bottom, dated 10 August 2016 at 10.32am, precisely just one month after the murder of Seth Rich, is from the media handling department of the Washington Field Office. It references Wikileaks’ offer of a reward for information on the murder of Seth Rich, and that Assange seemed to imply Rich was the source of the DNC leaks. The media handlers are asking the operations side of the FBI field office for any information on the case. The unredacted part of the reply fits with the official narrative. The redacted individual officer is “not aware of any specific involvement” by the FBI in the Seth Rich case. But his next sentence is completely redacted. Why?

It appears that “adding” references a new person added in to the list. This appears to have not worked, and probably the same person (precisely same length of deleted name) then tries again, with “adding … for real” and blames the technology – “stupid Samsung”. The interesting point here is that the person added appears not to be in the FBI – a new redacted addressee does indeed appear, and unlike all the others does not have an FBI suffix after their...

Mitt Romney Is ‘Formally Not Invited’ To CPAC

Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney was notified Friday by a tweet from Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) chair Matt Schlapp that he was “not invited” to the annual conference after being one of two Republicans in the Senate to vote to call additional witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

“The ‘extreme conservative’ and Junior Senator from the great state of Utah, @SenatorRomney is formally NOT invited to #CPAC2020,” Schlapp tweeted.

CPAC is one of the largest conservative gatherings in the country, and President Donald Trump has spoken at the political conference the last three years. The event is scheduled for February 26th at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center with Republican California Rep. Devin Nunes, conservative commentator Mark Levin, and Brexit leader Nigel Farage set to speak at the conference.

Romney, along with Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins, voted Friday to allow for additional witnesses to testify at the impeachment trial. The measure ended up failing 49-51 after other moderate Republicans joined the the rest of the party in voting no.

The Senate is expected to vote on whether to acquit Trump or remove him from office Wednesday.

In 2012, then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke at CPAC, but over the years the Utah senator has alienated many conservatives by...

George Soros Funding Secret Plot To Overturn Brexit

President Trump Teases ‘Very Big Trade Deal’ with the UK Following Successful Brexit

The Cult of Western Shaming

An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.

Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.

My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her “how dare you” complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon emissions.

Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of carbons will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.

In the late 1950s, many elites in United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.

Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.

By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.

Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.

After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.

The U.S. and Europe are often quite critical of violence against women, minorities and gays. The European Union, for example, has often singled out Israel for its supposed mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank.

Yet if the purpose of Western human rights activism is to curb global bias and hate, then it would be far more cost-effective to concentrate on the greatest offenders.

China is currently detaining about a million Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps. Yet activist groups aren’t calling for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Beijing in the same way they target Israel.

Homosexuality is a capital crime in Iran. Scores of Iranian gays reportedly have been incarcerated and thousands executed under theocratic law since the fall of the Shah in 1979. Yet rarely do Western activist groups call for global ostracism of Iran.

Don’t look to the United Nations Human Rights Council for any meaningful condemnation of worldwide prejudice and hatred, although it is a frequent critic of both the U.S. and Israel.

Many of the 47 member nations of the Human Rights Council are habitual violators of human rights. In 2017, nine member nations persecuted citizens who were actively working to implement U.N. standards of human rights.

There are many reasons for Westerners’ selective outrage and pessimism toward their own culture. Cowardice explains some of the asymmetry. Blasting tiny democratic Israel will not result in...

Abra Cadabra Bitch!

Morning Mistress

Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,

Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.

If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.

Please Leave Silently Into The Night......

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

U.S. Army Funds 'Fully Automated Microaggression Detector' to 'Catch Implicit Bias' In The Workplace

The US Army Research Laboratory gave a $1,500,000 three-year grant to two associate professors to develop what's being called a "fully automated luxury microaggression detector" Alexa-like device to "catch implicit bias" in workplaces across America.

From NorthEastern.edu, "Could a smart device catch implicit bias in the workplace?":

Despite the growing adoption of implicit bias training, some in the field of human resources have raised doubts about its effectiveness in improving diversity and inclusion within organizations.

But what if a smart device, similar to the Amazon Alexa, could tell when your boss inadvertently left a female colleague out of an important decision, or made her feel that her perspective wasn't valued?

This device doesn't yet exist, but Northeastern associate professors Christoph Riedl and Brooke Foucault Welles are preparing to embark on a three-year project that could yield such a gadget. The researchers will be studying from a social science perspective how teams communicate with each other as well as with smart devices while solving problems together.
"The vision that we have [for this project] is that you would have a device, maybe something like Amazon Alexa, that sits on the table and observes the human team members while they are working on a problem, and supports them in various ways," says Riedl, an associate professor who studies crowdsourcing, open innovation, and network science. "One of the ways in which we think we can support that team is by ensuring equal inclusion of all team members."

"One step closer to a fully automated luxury microaggression detector," Psychology professor Geoffrey Miller commented. "Coming soon to your schools, workplaces, and...