Three Additional Bonus Videos:
Monday, November 7, 2022
U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal
(Reuters) - Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.
“I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” Snowden said in a message posted to Twitter.
Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S. telephone records - the who, the how, the when, and the where of millions of mobile calls - was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian newspaper in 2013.
Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the program’s exposure, U.S. officials fell back on the argument that the spying had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.
U.S. officials insisted that the four - Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh - were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA’s telephone record spying, but the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday that those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified record.”
The ruling will not affect the convictions of Moalin and his fellow defendants; the court ruled the illegal surveillance did not taint the evidence introduced at their trial. Nevertheless, watchdog groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the case to appeal, welcomed the judges’ verdict on...
Bette Midler trashes ‘MAGA Women’ telling them to move to Iran and it goes SO SO SO very wrong
Strange how much people like Bette despise her own country and fellow country-women.
She thought this was smart to tweet out:
So not only insulting to American women but to Iranian women as well.
Thoughtless, nasty, and ugly.
Much like Bette herself.
We are proud mamas.
Yes we are.
Not very feminist of her.
Nope.
HA HA HA HA HA
Too creepy and also too accurate.Yeah, this old lady has a history of saying really horrible and stupid stuff.
Disgusting is putting it nicely.
We can only wish.
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1195
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......
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1895
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.
Sunday, November 6, 2022
Brutal Murders, Rotting Corpses, Broken Elevators: Inside Raphael Warnock’s Secret Low-Income Apartment Building, Vol. 2.
Emergency services have been called to MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020
A maintenance man charged with brutally murdering a tenant. A sex offender who slept in the hallways. A dead body left in an apartment for days, found covered in flies.
These are just a few disturbing tales of the living conditions in apartments owned by Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D., Ga.) church, gathered from interviews with residents and hundreds of pages of Atlanta Police Department, Fire Department, and court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Atlanta police and firefighters have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences at MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020, the records show. Responding officers have been met with corpses and people trapped in elevators, as well as fights, burglaries, and car thefts. Both buildings are owned by the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock serves as senior pastor.
The Free Beacon also learned that Columbia Tower management hired a convicted murderer now charged with killing a female tenant who lived with him at Columbia Senior Residences, which is just across the street from the apartment building.
"They hired a guy who killed his girlfriend. He was the maintenance guy who was living in the senior building and he had a record already," a resident told the Free Beacon in October. "Why would you hire a person like that who has keys to the building? I understand second chances, but this person already had a background in murdering someone, and you give him keys to our apartment?"
The records could pose problems for Warnock, who is seeking to defeat Republican challenger Herschel Walker amid rising crime. Crime is one of Atlanta voters' main concerns heading into next week's midterm elections, polls show. Homicides have increased in Atlanta by at least 60 percent since 2019, according to 11Alive News, citing Atlanta Police Department crime data.
Warnock has advocated for softer crime policies, including ending cash bail. He has criticized the American prison system as a "scandal on the soul of America," and called to end "mass incarceration." Warnock has also championed safe housing during his time in the Senate, saying earlier this year that "housing is dignity."
But records tell another story. Police have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences over 150 times since January, in response to allegations of larceny, fighting, and criminal trespassing. The Fire Department has been called to Columbia Tower 153 times since January 2020, sometimes to rescue people trapped or stranded due to broken elevators.
Firefighters also reported making gruesome discoveries at the apartment building.
"The person was stiff as a board and his jaw was locked," firefighters reported in April 2020 upon conducting a welfare check on a resident who was missing for three days. "Engine 10 crew checked for a pulse and there was no pulse. The person appears to have been dead for a couple of days because there were a lot of flys [sic] around the person. This was an elderly male."
Firefighters discovered another dead body at the apartment complex in January 2021. "E10 investigated and checked for a pulse, no pulse was found," an incident report states.
In August, a man reported that his car was stolen from the back parking lot. In July, Atlanta police detained a man who "continues to trespass on the property by sleeping in the hallway of the building on the third floor," according to a police report. The man, a sex offender with a history of violence and an outstanding warrant, had been subject to a no-trespassing court order by Columbia Residential months earlier, but continued to enter the building, an employee told police.
In the spring of 2020, Columbia Residential hired a new maintenance man named Anthony Bernard Stokes, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison two years earlier after serving decades for a 1992 homicide. Fulton County prosecutors allege that just months after he started the job, Stokes killed his 56-year-old girlfriend, Sean Macklin, in the apartment they shared at Columbia Senior Residences.
Stokes had a key to every room in Columbia Tower when he worked at...
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