[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, DC — The FBI claims to have mounting evidence and probable cause to justify an additional raid of Mike Lindell, this time of his home and MyPillow manufacturing plant. In an unrelated story, the agents involved in the raid have reported the most comfortable sleep of their lives.
"When we first breached Mr. Lindell's estate while he was holed up in the MyPillow fort, we were struck by the patented interlocking foam fill and blended fibers — from the sheer tactile pleasure we knew we had to...discover...evidence, at least enough evidence to warrant another raid." FBI agent Scott Dewey spoke to reporters about the second raid, adding that Mr. Lindell slept soundly even as they battered down the door.
According to lip-reading experts who have analyzed footage of an FBI huddle in the parking lot of Lindell's factory, agents were marveling at how the foam fill of MyPillow products keeps its position throughout the night, as well as agreeing that they fell asleep faster and stayed asleep longer. They also added that the seized documents were the softest, most comfortable documents they had ever confiscated.
Critics contend that the FBI has fabricated the evidence, asking how they can sleep at night. Many are in stitches with anger, but some say the criticism is just sewing contention. The critics have vowed to press on, however, following the thread wherever it goes until all the relevant material is exhausted.
At publishing time, all the FBI agents involved had converted to Trump supporters after seeing mountains of evidence the election was stolen in Lindell's home.
[BBC] Oregon Democratic Governor Kate Brown will commute the sentences of all the state's 17 death row prisoners to life in prison without chance of parole.
With less than a month left in office, she said she was using her executive power because she believed capital punishment was wrong.
Oregon is one of 27 states that allows the death penalty, but it has not executed a prisoner since 1997.
Republicans in the western US state condemned Ms Brown's order.
It will take effect on Wednesday.
In a statement, she said she was not acting because these prisoners had been rehabilitated, but because the death penalty is "immoral".
"It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably," she said.
Ms Brown has used her clemency powers more than any other previous Oregon governor, reports Oregon Public Broadcasting.
According to her office, she is the seventh US governor in the past 50 years to commute all death sentences in a state.
Oregon State Senate Leader Tim Knopp, a Republican, assailed her policy on Tuesday.
"Did the people of Oregon vote to end the death penalty?" he said. "I don't recall that happening."
He added: "Even in the final days of her term, Brown continues to disrespect victims of the most violent crimes."
Capital punishment is written into Oregon's constitution, meaning another governor can choose to resume the practice in the future.
The Democrat replacing Ms Brown, Tina Kotek, has said she opposes the death penalty because of her religious beliefs.
Seventeen people have been executed in the US in 2022, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
An opinion poll from earlier this year found Ms Brown to have the lowest approval rating of any US governor.
#2
The same types who always argue "there is no such thing as a slippery slope" now turn their attention from abolishing the death penalty to abolishing life with no parole sentences as being "inhumane." Meanwhile, future killers are being nurtured in their ways early in their trajectories with "no cash bail" and revolving door arraignments.
Full disclosure: I am anti death penalty. In principle, I certainly recognize people who deserve it. In practice, the system we have is so busted it can't possibly administer it in a just manner. I say that as a crime reporter who covered murder cases and watched senile judges, incompetent defense attorneys, lying prosecutors, cops and "experts," and brain dead jurors first hand.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/15/2022 7:12 Comments ||
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#3
That is why in certain inner cities, no one cooperates with the 'authorities'. One side does have a death penalty. It gets resolved by vendetta.
#6
She also added around $1.4 Million per year to the state's spending.
Rough annual cost to keep a prisoner on death row - $80K
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
12/15/2022 9:04 Comments ||
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#7
# 5, Heinlein is a great read and he touches a lot of thought-provoking topics. Do I want to live in a society or world where he's the top philosopher?
No.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/15/2022 9:17 Comments ||
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#8
Granted - he's not real long on the whole "forgiveness" thing...
#11
To me, Heinlein and Asimov came across as reactions to the decay of classical philosophy and morality among movers and decision makers.
If we are feeling Starship Troopers or Foundation, its because those given ward of health care lie about 200 years of medical advancement while the workers learn deathbed dances, and it is tolerated, celebrated, as moral apex.
#12
So, on the one side, you have VDH whining about how society is collapsing, but offering no solutions. On the other side, you have a particular school of sci-fi writers snarling about how society is collapsing and offering up an avalanche of untenable solutions.
Seems the answers, whatever they might be, are to be found elswhere.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/15/2022 11:10 Comments ||
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#13
Not sure if untenable is the right word there.
Heinlein's Luna comes across as heavily influenced by Scots-Irish and then therefore colonial Appalachian culture and the desire of an oppressed people fighting for independence has much more historical tenure than bitch online until someone finds me an answer culture.
#14
#2, that took guts, M. I, like many others, might have been more comfortable if they had done it to Charlie Manson but I too believe the system is error prone and likely to execute innocent people.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/15/2022 12:36 Comments ||
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#15
One thing I've learned from years of observation is that the system is not perfect.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/15/2022 12:46 Comments ||
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#16
The same people who a year and a half ago wished harm or death on those not getting the jab, and encourage the hard drug use, so I don't think the preservation of justice or saving life for the sake of saving life is the real motivation here. If it were a few with real questions about evidence but its a full sweep the table damn the law and precedence without even checking voter preference.
#17
I'm a San Diego born and raised, but I'm an honorary Texan in that : "Some people need killing"
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/15/2022 19:48 Comments ||
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#18
To be honest, if you don't want to have a state mandated death penalty for vile scum who are dangers to society, you will instead wind up with a societal based one that is utterly without mercy.
[Powerline] We know now that tech companies cooperated with government officials to suppress Americans’ freedom of speech. Was that legal? Of course! say liberals: the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. (This is the first and only time when liberals accord such unfettered discretion to private industry.) But is that really the end of the story?
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, law professor Philip Hamburger took up the question. He concludes that a plausible case can be made that the collusion between public and private actors constituted a criminal conspiracy to deprive Americans of their civil rights. This is the relevant criminal statute:
Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
How might it apply?
Because the First Amendment doesn’t bar private parties from independently suppressing speech, Section 241 would apply to tech censorship only if government officers, acting as part of a conspiracy, have violated the Constitution. … The type of suppression most clearly barred by the First Amendment was the 17th-century English censorship imposed partly through cooperative private entities—universities and the Stationers’ Company, the printers trade guild.
Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts. There would be no purpose to a Bill of Rights if government could evade it by using private entities to do its dirty work. As the Supreme Court put it in Frost & Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Commission (1926), “It is inconceivable that guaranties embedded in the Constitution of the United States may thus be manipulated out of existence.”
More:
The other main issue in prosecutions under Section 241 is specific intent. But most of the tech companies seem to have the specific intent to work with the government in suppressing speech. A prosecutor wouldn’t have to show that private participants self-consciously understood the unconstitutionality of what the government was doing. Yet it would be relevant that some private participants recognized they were helping the government accomplish what in the government might be an unconstitutional act. As Renee De Resta of the Stanford Internet Observatory acknowledged on video, private assistance was necessary because there were “very real First Amendment questions” about what the government could do by itself. [Ed.: Actually, there isn’t any question at all.] The observatory is part of a consortium, the Election Integrity Partnership, that developed government expectations of censorship into specific requests.
#1
a DeSantis administration could take a fresh look.
LOL. They still are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They will never release their grasp on power. It's over because you know what has to be done and you won't..accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed
[Garowe] Illicit sugar trade from Somalia to neighboring Kenya could be the highest source of revenue for the al-Shabaab ...... an Islamic infestation centering on Somalia attempting to metastasize into Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and similar places, all of which have enough problems without them... krazed killers, a report published by the Global Initiative Network suggests, noting the amount of taxation imposed on traders smuggling goods to the East African nation.
In what could be a national security threat to Kenya, it has routinely become possible for smugglers to use the Kenya-Somalia border unnoticed, even as the two countries delay opening the border. Kenya had closed down the border as a mitigation measure for increased al-Shabaab activities in the northeastern part of the country.
Continued on Page 49
In which the editorialist lays out the Russian position in light of Frau Merkel’s recent statement.
[ZeroHedge] "Germany is Hamlet," Gordon Craig once wrote. The great historian of that nation (1913–2005) was noted for pithy summations of this kind, insights that cast light into the innermost recesses of the German psyche, the what-makes-them-tick of its people.
Does Germany face westward to the Atlantic or eastward to the Eurasian landmass? From which tradition does it draw? Where lie its loyalties? These are questions geography; a rich, old culture; and a long, complicated history bequeathed to Germans. I do not think Craig meant to suggest this condition was burdensome. No, there was nothing to resolve. In its ambiguous state — in the West but not wholly of it, in the East but not wholly Eastern — Germany was most truly itself.
Germans lived this way, making no apologies, for a long time. They could allow the U.S. to station 200,000 troops on their soil — the figure at the Cold War’s end — while pursuing Willi Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the Federal Republic’s opening to the German Democratic Republic and by extension the whole of the East Bloc. It was Germany that invested with Gazprom, the Russian energy conglomerate, in the Nord Stream I and II pipelines even amid rising East–West tensions.
On the long drive into Moscow from Domodedovo International Airport, the broad thoroughfares are lined with German car dealers, German construction cranes, the factories of German companies. German businesses, along with many German citizens, were vociferous critics of the sanctions regime the U.S. imposed on Russia — and effectively on Europe, indeed — after the U.S.-choreographed coup in Kiev eight years ago set in motion the current crisis in Ukraine.
I read those two extraordinary interviews Angela Merkel granted Der Spiegel and Die Zeit last week against this history, this record, this ordained state of ambiguity. If there is one truth that may stand above all others in the former chancellor’s astonishing revelations of Berlin’s duplicity in its dealings with Moscow, it is that the Federal Republic has abandoned its inheritance — its natural state, indeed —and so the considerable responsibilities the past and geography awarded it.
EAST-WEST ALIENATION
It would be hard to overstate the significance of this turn for all of us. The global divide just got wider. Cold War II just got colder. The alienation of East and West is now down as a more or less permanent state of affairs. And the world just lost the one country capable of mitigating these dreadful circumstances by dint of its special, maybe singular position in the community of nations.
It is odd to consider the view of Prince Heinrich XIII, the German aristocrat just arrested for leading a plot to overthrow the Berlin government (a set of absurd allegations, I must mention right away, I do not for a minute take seriously absent credible evidence, and I do not expect we will ever see any). It seems the prince has long argued that Germany did not become a new nation after World War II but a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S.
“We are not Germans. We are not in a real German state,” his alleged followers are quoted as saying in a (highly misleading) New York Times piece published Sunday. “We are just a branch of a GmBH,” this last meaning a limited liability company.
How strange to read this the same week that Merkel removed all doubt this is precisely the German condition — arguably since the early postwar years, certainly since Washington committed itself and its allies to its all-out, all-in campaign to bring NATO to Russia’s very doorstep and ultimately to subvert the Russian Federation.
As has been widely reported and excellently analyzed — except in the mainstream American press, where Merkel’s remarks last week go unmentioned — the former German leader described her cynical, treacherous betrayal of Moscow during negotiations of the two Minsk Protocols, the first signed in September 2014 and the second the following February.
Berlin, Paris, the post-coup Kiev regime and Moscow were signatories to those accords. How well I recall the earnestness with which Russian President Vladimir Putin entered into the talks. How hopeful many of us were that, with Kiev having swiftly breached Minsk I, the second accord would produce what the Russian president sought — a lasting settlement that would leave Ukraine united and stabilize the security order on Russia’s southwestern border and Europe’s eastern flank.
Earlier this year Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s first post-coup president, shocked everybody when he stated publicly that Kiev never had any intention of honoring the commitments it made when it signed the Minsk Protocols: The talks in the Belarusian capital and all the promises were meant simply to buy time while Ukraine built fortifications in the eastern regions and trained and armed a military strong enough to wage a full-dress war of aggression against the Russian-tilted Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Until a few days ago, there were few more striking advertisements for European democracy than the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Eva Kaili.
All her life the statuesque 44-year-old had known nothing but success. The youngest member of the city council in Thessaloniki, the youngest candidate for the Greek Parliament, a news presenter on Greece’s oldest private TV channel, a star of the centre-left Pasok party . . . nothing seemed beyond her.
At the beginning of this year, Kaili reached a new peak. Already a member of the European Parliament, she was elected as one of its Vice Presidents. She was the golden girl of Brussels, hailed as ‘alluring’, ‘bold’ and ‘outspoken’, at ease on both the floor of a nightclub and the debating chamber.
I wouldn’t have said alluring, but I am no expert on the subject.
She's pretty hawt
And then, this week, it all came crashing down, as Belgian prosecutors blew open an alleged conspiracy by World Cup hosts Qatar to buy influence at the European Parliament. In a series of raids, they seized €150,000 in Kaili’s flat, a further €600,000 in the home of the former Italian MEP Pier Antonio Pancheri, and ‘several hundred thousand euros’ in a suitcase in a Brussels hotel.
In a twist too glorious for fiction, the suitcase allegedly belonged to Kaili’s father, who had reportedly tried to flee the local Sofitel with it after being tipped off about the raids. As for his glamorous daughter, she has been arrested and charged with ‘participation in a criminal organisation, money laundering and corruption’. Kaili has denied the allegations, and people are innocent until they are proven guilty.
But when you look back at Kaili’s record, you can see why there have long been suspicions. Only last month, she had the gall to tell the European Parliament that critics of Qatar’s World Cup were ‘bullying’ the oil-rich Arab state.
#2
I'm sure it wasn't about the money. It was about getting away with a crime and waving it under everyone's noses. Like when CIA Director Brennan lied under oath to Congress and got away with it. His punishment? To be praised by Obama.
[End of The American Dream] The war on cash has just gone to an entirely new level. When I heard that the European Union was planning to completely ban all cash transactions above 10,000 euros, I had a hard time believing it. There are so many wild rumors flying around on the Internet these days, and so I wasn’t going to write about this unless I could confirm it. Unfortunately, this particular rumor is quite real. Under the pretext of fighting "money laundering and terrorist financing", the European Union will be entirely outlawing all cash payments greater than 10,000 euros. The following comes from the official website of the Council of the European Union...
#1
Let the Balkanization of Amerika begin. One thing that usually holds a country together is a common currency. Forget the Euro. A currency cannot unite people of vastly different mindsets. One might be forgiven in assuming that the US is in just such a place currently. Not so much geographically as ideologically.
Banning a common currency that you can hold will fractionate the already cracking union. In my neck of the woods (Idaho) I could imagine that a useful form of barter might be used. No records, taxes or other control...wouldn't the Feds just love that....
#3
Cash transactions above 10,000 Euro. So drug dealers and Russian oligarchs cannot buy luxury cars, yachts and homes and must use approved laundering methods to get the swiss bankers their cut.
[Bee] BAHAMAS — Deposed king of cryptocurrency and founder of the now-defunct FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested by Federal authorities and will be prosecuted after running out of bribery money.
The top donor to Democrat lawmakers has reportedly run out of the money required to keep Democrat lawmakers at bay.
"Authorities have raided one of Mr. Bankman-Fried's mansions searching for evidence of money left to line our pockets, as $39 million was just not enough." said a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee. "As we speak, agents are holding the suspect upside down and shaking him in hopes that a few crypto coins might fall out."
Republicans criticized Democrats for blatantly seeking bribes by invading the personal space of Mr. Bankman-Fried for more bribe money, insisting that crypto coins were inside the computer. They then instructed agents to break open all computers in search of the valuable coins.
At publishing time, Bankman-Fried had escaped custody after distracting lawmakers with news that a chest full of untraceable bribe-ready cryptocurrency was hidden in the basement of the Alamo.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/15/2022 07:34 ||
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Link ||
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[Breitbart] Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s "Kudlow" that Republicans had "emasculated" themselves by agreeing to the framework for an omnibus spending bill to fund the government through 2023. 'Stopgaps pending bill'... oh HELL no. Couldn't foking wait until a Pub congress could be seated.
Paul said, "This brings upon us the lie that Republicans really are fiscally conservative. The Democrats aren’t. They will not pretend to be fiscally conservative. Not one of them up here gives a darn about the debt. The Republicans all profess to be, but when you make them vote on the PAYGO resolution, pay as you go, that we can’t have new spending without offsetting it, they always vote to exempt it. So the omnibus will be 3,000 pages. We’ll get it two hours before they want to pass it. No one will read it. But hidden in the 3,000 pages will be we’re going to wave PAYGO."
He added, "It would take 41 votes. Forty-one votes would stop the big spending. If 41, one of us said no and held our ground until there was a compromise, we could force Democrats to reduce spending. We have completely and totally abdicated the power of the purse. Republicans are emasculated. They have no power, and they are unwilling to gain that power back."
#2
The only thing worse than two parties is one party made up of political elites. Welcome to the CCP model. McConnell is a sellout of the American people.
[ZERO] Medical pathologists from Heidelberg University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany have published direct evidence showing how people found dead after mRNA vaccination died. As this team of six scientists explore in their study, these mRNA-vaccinated patients suffered from heart damage because their hearts were attacked by their own immune cells. This autoimmune attack on their own heart cells then leads to their damaged hearts beating so many times per second that, once the tachycardia unexpectedly started, they died in minutes.
The article, "Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination," was published on Nov. 27, 2022, in the journal Clinical Research in Cardiology, the official journal of the German Cardiac Society. The research team autopsied 25 victims of different ages who were found dead at home within 28 days of vaccination. They looked at their heart tissue under the microscope to find out why these people died of cardiac rhythmic disruption when they had no apparent underlying heart disease.
In the authors’ own words: "Our findings establish the histological phenotype of lethal vaccination-associated myocarditis."
Histological phenotype means direct observation of microscopic tissue.
In a video analyzing the results, nurse educator Dr. John Campbell, who is based in the United Kingdom, told his audience: "This is peer-reviewed. This is proper science, and a definitive pathological diagnosis by a group of leading German pathologists." Campbell’s video has been viewed 918,000 times. He has 2.58 million subscribers on his channel.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...... an Islamic infestation centering on Somalia attempting to metastasize into Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and similar places, all of which have enough problems without them...
[End of The American Dream] The war on cash has just gone to an entirely new level. When I heard that the European Union was planning to completely ban all cash transactions above 10,000 euros, I had a hard time believing it. There are so many wild rumors flying around on the Internet these days, and so I wasn’t going to write about this unless I could confirm it. Unfortunately, this particular rumor is quite real. Under the pretext of fighting "money laundering and terrorist financing", the European Union will be entirely outlawing all cash payments greater than 10,000 euros. The following comes from the official website of the Council of the European Union...
Hey Rand, I think I have located the source of the problem.
[ZERO] Medical pathologists from Heidelberg University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany have published direct evidence showing how people found dead after mRNA vaccination died. As this team of six scientists explore in their study, these mRNA-vaccinated patients suffered from heart damage because their hearts were attacked by their own immune cells. This autoimmune attack on their own heart cells then leads to their damaged hearts beating so many times per second that, once the tachycardia unexpectedly started, they died in minutes.
