90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, November 21, 2022

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #786

Free America 2

We’re already dealing with a fascist regime.

There has been a great deal of discussion of late about how the midterm elections were rigged, if not with outright fraud, at the very least with mail-in ballots and in so many other ways that elections can be manipulated to achieve the desired result. But what is the end game? Where does the Democrat Party want to be in five years, or ten or twenty? We saw that very clearly on September 1, 2022, when Joe Biden made his infamous speech with the red and black background.

Biden gave a speech that was without parallel in American history. It was an extraordinary departure from 200 years of American political tradition, and it was extremely important. It reveals what the Left is trying ultimately to do. The best analogy for that speech is not in American history at all; it’s actually in German history, in a speech that the Chancellor of Germany named Adolf Hitler gave on March 23, 1933, in the Reichstag.

This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. Godwin’s Law holds that if you invoke Hitler or compare some contemporary figure to Hitler, then you lose. That’s all very well, unless you’re talking about real fascists. Joe Biden is a real fascist. The Democrat Party is at this point a fascist party. Biden, on the other hand, has called conservatives fascists, and Trump in particular. But what exactly is a fascist?

The Latin word fasces means bundles, like bundles of sticks. On the United States dollar bill, there is an American eagle clutching a couple of bundles of sticks. The idea is that a single stick is weak and can be easily snapped in two and destroyed, but if you hold a bundle of sticks together, they can’t be so easily broken. The idea is that out of unity comes strength. The statement E Pluribus Unum, which is on the dollar and is one of the mottoes of the United States, “out of many, one,” is in one sense a fascist statement, because it is saying that we are all stronger together than we are separately.

The Founding Fathers were not remotely fascist. America is not fascist. They were just emphasizing the importance of unity among the various states. But fascism as an organized political ideology shares that idea of strength in unity. It arose in the beginning of the 20th century in Italy, and of course, spread to Germany and elsewhere, and was thought to be completely discredited at the end of World War II. However, the People’s Republic of China today is more fascist than communist, and Joe Biden’s United States of America is a fascist state as well.

When Hitler came to power, there were a lot of socialists in his government. His party was called the National Socialist German Workers Party. There was a great deal of what we would think of as leftist Marxist rhetoric in the Nazi program. There were people who wanted him to nationalize all the industries, but he refused. Instead, he called in the captains of industry, the big industrialists in Germany, and made it clear to them that they would do exactly what he said, or they would be killed, and they did do what he said. But they maintained ownership of their industries.

So while communism nationalizes industries, seizing control of the means of production, fascism does not. Fascism allows for private ownership of the means of production, but coordinates them all, applying the principle of “out of many, one,” a bundle of sticks. A fascist regime coordinates them all together to work for the same goal. So both fascism and communism are totalitarian systems, and are quite similar to one another. The idea that fascism is extreme Right and communism is extreme Left is baseless; it’s actually leftist propaganda.

The reality is that fascism and communism are closely aligned and very similar to one another. They’re both totalitarian systems that extinguish individuality and coordinate everything for the good of the state. There are two primary differences. Fascism tends to be nationalist, and fascism does not seize the means of production, but merely controls the means of production.

Now think about the United States of America today. What we have is a President of the United States and his party with one point of view. That same point of view is shared by all the major corporations, all the social media giants, and all of the media. That’s fascism: out of many, one. Bundles: they’re all bundled together, and they’re all working for the same...

The Biden administration is about to sign a contract with Dataminr – a licensing deal for the company’s product that is used in the monitoring of social media.

This is revealed in documents published by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) which will buy 30 licenses to deploy Dataminr’s First Alert V2, designed for the public sector and the scouring of 200,000 online sources and data mining, then compiling real-time news alerts for the White House, and other clients.

Dataminr is a popular tool used by news desks and others that want to monitor the internet and it’s easy to see why it would be useful to the government. Portions of the press show an unfavorable attitude towards Dataminr because it was used by police in many cities, including New York and Los Angeles, to monitor the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

US Defense Department’s non-civilian employees already use Dataminr’s services thanks to a 2021 contract signed with the Air Force.

DISA said in June it had no plans to directly or in another way “involve” Twitter as a subcontractor. In August, this agency that handles the White House communications said it needed a contract (with Dataminr) of its own because civilians it employs cannot utilize mass surveillance of social media through that Air Force deal.

New York-based Dataminr, which is also known for its work as one of Twitter’s official partners and bills itself as an AI company, has been awarded the contract but the details, such as its duration and the overall cost of licensing have not been announced.

Meanwhile, it is speculated that Dataminr was chosen by the US administration precisely for its association with Twitter, as DISA spelled it out in the document explaining the choice of the vendor by saying it must be a certified Twitter partner.

There are 15 firms to which Twitter has granted this certified status, and the value that adds to their operations is up to five years of Twitter’s historical data and early access to the social platform’s products. DISA now wants Dataminr to provide “event detection” thanks to big data scraped from Twitter.

Nevertheless, both Twitter and Dataminr maintain that the latter is not breaking any Twitter policies. Twitter specifically claims that its developer policy prevents third parties like Dataminr from carrying out surveillance or tracking, alerting, and monitoring events deemed as sensitive – and that this is not happening in this case – while Dataminr said it does not “target, monitor or profile” people on social media, Insider reported.

Twitter also maintains that its API Policy team reviews all Dataminr government users for approval and decides “which version of First Alert they will receive based on the risk of the end user, the use case, and the product.”

Dataminr and Twitter have an interesting history that extends beyond “officially partnering” in a process that involved the use of the public sector version of First Alert. Both Twitter and CIA venture firm In-Q-Tel were early investors in Dataminr, which in late 2016 amounted to Twitter having a 5% stake in the company – although Twitter says that it no longer has any.

Other than these two, official investors in Dataminr are now several venture capital firms, and investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Stanley Morgan, Credit Suisse, but also Google Cloud.

First Alert’s capabilities, as per the company, allow it to alert first respondents to breaking events and provides “the fastest real-time response.” Among the hundreds of thousands of sources data-mined with the tool are not only social media, but also blogs, the dark web, and information sensors.

Dataminr’s sales pitch for its products lists them as tools beneficial to society thanks to aiding in dealing with all manner of calamities: emergency response, global health crises, escalating conflicts, climate change, and even “threats to human rights.”

In addition to the White House, other Dataminr clients are the United Nations, while the company proudly stresses its role in providing “critical intelligence on...

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #785

Merrick Garland has proved himself unfit for Supreme Court — but he shouldn’t be AG either

Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama died on base when Republicans refused to take it up. The seat was instead filled by now-Justice Neil Gorsuch. Garland’s consolation prize: becoming President Joe Biden’s attorney general. Yet in nine short months, he’s proved not only unfit to sit on the court but unfit to serve as attorney general. Indeed, his behavior suggests he’s not qualified for any federal position.

Garland’s nomination to the court was always iffy. Libertarians thought his track record was dangerously authoritarian. The trustees of the estate of the late Justice William Brennan, for whom Garland had clerked, inexplicably sealed records having to do with Garland’s time working at the court. And though Garland was touted as a “moderate,” a straight-shooter who could cruise to an easy confirmation, he satisfied neither the Democratic left nor the Republican center.

But what Garland has demonstrated as AG is a different kind of deficit, a deficit of character and integrity. As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said to Garland in hearings this week, “Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court.”

Those hearings involved Garland’s inexplicable decision to target federal law-enforcement resources at parents who speak against critical race theory and unpopular transgender policies at school-board meetings. In response to a letter from the left-leaning National School Boards Association, which described those meetings with lurid language but scant evidence of any real threats, Garland ordered the FBI and the Department of Justice into action.

There was no justification for Garland’s move, which was political thuggery at its worst. The disorder at these meetings mostly involved people shouting and talking out of turn, with the occasional scuffle. (One arrest, at a meeting of the now-notorious Loudoun County, Va., school board, involved the father of a girl raped in a bathroom by a boy in a skirt — a rape the school board attempted to cover up. The boy has since been convicted.)

None of the supposed threats raised a federal issue, despite the now-familiar claims of “domestic terrorism,” which in today’s Democratic Party lexicon simply means “opposition to our policies.” And if there were to be any violence, there’s no reason to think that local law enforcement couldn’t handle it.

But enforcing federal laws wasn’t the point. Intimidating political opponents was. It didn’t work, partly because the politicized Justice Department and FBI have become national laughingstocks due to their behavior of the past few years.

Parents around the country continue to resist the dangerous and unpopular policies on race and gender being pushed by leftist activists, and even the NSBA faced such backlash that it had to back down. With state and local school boards across the nation canceling their memberships in the association, the group publicly retracted its letter.

Garland, however, did not retract his statement, though in the hearings he pretended to care about people’s First Amendment rights. Unimpressed, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called for Garland’s resignation. Said Hawley: “You have weaponized the FBI and the Department of Justice. It is wrong. It is unprecedented to...