Dec 31

Today’s News 31st December 2023

  • The Continuing Plot To Silence Trump's 2024 Comeback
    The Continuing Plot To Silence Trump's 2024 Comeback

    Authored by Sharyl Attkisson via The Epoch Times,

    Donald Trump has been slandered and libeled thousands of times.

    Each time a news reporter, media commentator, or judge refers to Trump as an “insurrectionist,” or claims he’s guilty of “insurrection,” it’s another blatant case of defamation. Same with the other January 6 attendees and participants.

    Insurrection is a serious federal crime punishable by up to ten years in prison under Title 18 U.S. Code 2383. Even with Trump’s enemies in charge at the Department of Justice and other law enforcement bodies, and with all of the scheming and operations they’ve mounted against him, nobody has convicted him of “insurrection.” Under our system of governing, no judge or election authority has the power to unilaterally accuse and convict any American of a crime, let alone with the accused denied any opportunity to present a defense or to appeal. Yet that’s just what’s happening when courts and officials in Maine and Colorado remove Trump from presidential election primary ballots for “insurrection.” It’s the ultimate defamation. And many are supporting it because, well, they don’t like Trump.

    Looking at the evidence today, it is reasonable to hypotheisize that, among all the other consipracies Trump’s enemies have proven to devise, they also conspired in advance to set up his January 6, 2021 rally as an “insurrection” that could serve as their insurance policy to provide grounds to keep him from ever running for president again. 

    Such hypotheses might have once far-fetched, but no more. Let’s not forget that then-FBI agent Peter Strzok and his alleged lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, texted each other in 2016 that they could not permit Trump to be elected president. According to their messages, discussions about the threat of a Trump presidency had taken place with the FBI’s then-assistant director, Andrew “Andy” McCabe. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected,” texted Page, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40.”

    The theory that Trump’s enemies set the stage for January 6 to be called “an insurrection” as a spoiler for his 2024 run could help explain why all of the law enforcement agents and informants planted in advance and among Trump supporters on January 6 didn’t serve their usual purpose of preventing crimes and de-escalating events. Instead, by many accounts, they observed and even took part, let crimes happen, and declined to separate the instigators and organizers as they would ordinarily do to defuse tensions and control the crowd. The agents and informants served the odd role of standing down during the event, and identifying alleged perpetrators after-the-fact.

    Yet, in the end, there was no insurrection – at least according to prosecutors, who would be the ones to charge such crimes and haven’t.

    And Trump helped destroy the chance to officially charge him with insurrection by specifically directing his followers that day to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

    Trump’s opponents, found in both the Democrat and Republican ranks, are so delighted to see him persecuted, they are so utterly threatened by a repeat performance of a Trump presidency outside the traditional power and money interests, they are encouraging of the defamation and other acts against him. With few exceptions, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., those who would normally criticize actions like the ones being mounted against Trump, remain silent for fear of being called a Trump supporter in an environment where that opens them to ostracization and worse. The media and those who control our information are so conflicted by their respective biases, nobody is left to stop the madness.

    The real meaning of what’s being done to Trump is: They think he’s going to win.

    He’s like Christmas and his enemies are like The Grinch.

    Despite the impeachments, improper wiretapping, censorship, intel agency conspiracies, criminal charges, civil lawsuits, and turncoats operating against him on the inside – Trump’s popularity increased.

    They haven’t stopped Trump from coming to the fore in 2024. He came! He came without Twitter. He came without Facebook. He came without Snapchat or Discord or Stripe. Somehow or other, he came just the same!

    Pulling Trump off ballots is the establishment’s latest attempt to censor a candidate that they clearly believe will win – if the people are left to decide. We’ve reached a dangerous and scary point when so many are willing to look the other way because their preferred candidate isn’t the one under attack. 

    To end where we began – Trump potentially has actionable defamation claims against all those who continue label him an insurrectionist.

    That includes judges on the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

    But it’s likely not a battle he could win. The 2024 race? That’s another matter.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 23:20

  • Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World
    Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World

    Woke Democrats have caused an absurd amount of problems for law-abiding residents in Portland, including a surge in violent crime, out-of-control open-air drug markets, and widespread homelessness. Parts of the metro area have been transformed into a third-world-like state because of disastrous progressive policies. Now, the combination of failed policies has sparked what appears to be a public health crisis. 

    A highly contagious bacteria called “shigella” is spreading across Portland. This bacteria is common in countries found in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia regions. 

    “Shigella spreads when one person’s infected poop gets into another person’s mouth through food or water, from objects or surfaces with shigella bacteria on them, or during sex,” Multnomah County said, according to local news outlet KOIN 6, adding, “Shigella spreads very easily. Even a very small amount is enough to make someone sick.”

    In December, there have been over 45 infections of the deadly bacteria in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties, with nine different strains found in Portland since October. For the year, 218 cases have been reported in the region. 

    “Local disease patterns suggest that fecal-oral spread through sexual contact may account for between half and more than two thirds of all cases without international travel. The rest are typically attributed to other types of person-to-person spread including outbreaks among populations with lack of hygiene, shelter, and sanitation, and among people who use illicit substances,” county officials told KOIN 6 News.

    The bacteria has been impacting the houseless mainly because of hygiene and sanitation issues: 

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    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows about 450,000 shigella infections annually in the US. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 22:45

  • 2023: The Year Of The ChatGPT Scare
    2023: The Year Of The ChatGPT Scare

    Authored by VN Alexander via Off-Guardian.org,

    2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human.

    ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.)

    Nevertheless, the impressive performance stoked fears that AI is on the verge of becoming conscious, writing itself new and better code, and then replacing human beings as rulers of the Earth.

    THE REACTION

    Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, are worried, really worried. Although they aren’t worried that AI is conscious or alive, they do worry that AI will be used to make people fight online, to spread disinformation and propaganda, to help bad people make bioweapons or chemical weapons, or to disseminate unreliable information thereby destroying trust in our institutions.

    Harris and Raskin don’t seem to have noticed that virtually all world governments, their side-kick NGOs, and Big Industry are already doing all of the above, all of the time. Instead, they worry that you will be fooled and manipulated by AI wielded by domestic baddies in red hats to spend your worthless time online and end up voting for the wrong person, which will hasten climate change.

    But they have a solution to the problem. First, they will “align technology with humanity’s best interests” and then AI will help us learn to love each other.

    Fortified by their distinct brand of millennial toxic positivity, on Sept. 13, 2023, Harris, who is a former Google design ethicist, and Raskin, who is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council, met with White House officials to help draft an Executive Order (EO) “on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.”

    The resultant EO is the longest in history, a bit like Google’s Terms and Conditions. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I suspect somewhere buried in the repetitive language—assuring the public that AI products will be thoroughly tested and labeled before being released into the wild (every bit as thoroughly as any product approved by the FDA or promoted by the USDA)—are the details of the solution that Harris and Raskin are promoting.

    [How to effect a government coup d’état in three easy steps:

    The first step is to create a problem.

    The second step is to generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic and hysteria).

    The third step is to offer the solution to the problem, a legislative change so sweeping, so anti-democratic that it would have been impossible to impose without the social conditioning accomplished in steps one and two.]

    As Harris confessed at the CogX Festival, “Now the point of this all is to scare you as much as possible, so that you all want to do something different from where we’re currently headed.”

    THE PLAN

    What is the solution offered by Harris and Raskin? In a December 19th interview with Joe Rogan, Raskin muses that, although totalitarian surveillance is not desirable, it would be “one way of controlling AI.”

    The alternative, he goes on to say, is even worse: “continually cascading catastrophes” leading inevitably to our “living in a world with constant suicide bombers,” under nonstop “cyber attacks, whatever.”

    Luckily, between these two hellscapes, there is the “middle path.” To introduce the plan, Raskin first references the program Alpha-Go which, after a hundred million iterations of self play, found a new rule, 37, that could be used to win the game of Go. Raskin invites us to…

    imagine that if you run AI on things like Alpha-Treaty, Alpha-Collaborate, Alpha-Coordinate, Alpha-Conflict Resolution, there are going to be thousands of new strategies and moves that human beings have never discovered that open up new ways of [winning].

    So there you have it.  Life’s intractable problems can be treated like a game of Go. And since AI is great at winning board games with well-defined rules, limited options and a singular goal, it should have no trouble “winning” at the game of  human civilization.  Trust the AI plan.

    Raskin helpfully adds that the Digital Minister of Taiwan is already using Alpha-game approaches in her governance.  She is using ChatGPT to find areas of consensus, that is, she is using Chat to ignore minority opinions and amplify the “center,” which happens to be defined by the messaging of the mainstream news.  This, Harris explains, can “bring people closer together.”

    Raskin further elaborates that “instead of democracy being every four years when we vote on X and there’s a super high stakes thing and everybody tries to manipulate it—[the Taiwanese Digital Minster] does, sort of, this continuous small-scale citizen participation thing with lots of issues, and the system sorts unlikely groups who don’t agree on things; whenever they agree, it makes that the center of attention.”  He mentions several groups that work on similar projects, such as the “Collective Intelligence Project” that, I imagine, are hard at work at eliminating tiresome elections and getting us all to just be a lot more like the Borg.

    Harris chimes in, saying, AI can help us “see shared realities” and get people in the two different political tribes to agree on the lowest common denominator. Indeed, we “can use AI to build consensus,” otherwise known as manufacturing consent.  He adds that his pet game project might be called “Alpha-Shared Reality.” A game perhaps like The Truman Show?

    Who needs a diversity of opinions?

    It’s worth noting that when Harris and Raskin visited the White House, they met with erstwhile Big Tech friend Bruce Reed (probably the actual main author of the EO).  According to Politico, Reed “was an architect of controversial centrist Clinton administration policies, including welfare reform,” which penalized people trying to lift themselves out of poverty, “and the 1994 crime bill,” which devastated black communities. “Now, at 63, Reed finds himself on the same side as many of his longtime skeptics as he has become a tough-on-tech crusader, in favor of a massive assertion of government power against business.”

    Sure he has.

    “Democratization is dangerous,” Harris informs us; only some people should have access to tools as powerful as generative AI.  You are not going to have access to this powerful tool. Harris and Raskin will have access.  That’s the point of regulation these days.

    A BETTER SOLUTION

    Children are being damaged spending time on their phones. Harris and Raskin note that the exposure to social media algorithms is our first real taste of the power of AI to target and manipulate. Generative AI, with its deep fakes and convincingly human dialog, is sure to be much more efficient at manipulating our children, and something needs to be done before another generation is harmed. The simplest solution would involve age restrictions on smart phone and computer use, limiting children to certain apps, sites and friends. It would be helpful if governments or tech companies could provide free tools (that actually work) for parents.

    I have no faith whatsoever that the government is going to regulate AI to protect children.  The only type of regulation that seems to work, as we have seen in the past several decades, comes through lawsuits. These slow moving mechanisms make their way through courts, exposing the crimes of Big Industry and Big Government and get things removed from the market. Independent candidate for US president, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has famously taken on corporate polluters of US waterways, the makers of Roundup and dangerous vaccines, and he has gone after the EPA, USDA, and FDA. The regulators are, in fact, a large part of the problem.

    A case is making its way through the courts now that will, in all likelihood, find Big Tech guilty of intentionally addicting young people to their phones and causing them unspeakable psychological harms. Attorneys general from more than thirty states have joined a federal suit against Meta. 

    More than ten state courts are also alleging that Tech Giant cause intentional harms to children.  As NPR reports, “Some observers are likening the litigation to the lawsuits of the 1990s against Big Tobacco that imposed new limits on tobacco industry marketing.”

    As with the sale of cigarettes, one can imagine that full access to the wild west of the Internet should be limited to adults only. We used to let kids smoke. We don’t anymore. Parents cannot go on giving their young children a direct line to view images of dismemberment, teen suicides and violent porn. Parents cannot go on providing child predators access to their children.  Parents cannot go on allowing their children to spend sleepless nights doom scrolling, feeling depressed, jealous, unpopular, and anxious.

    Tech companies use the defense that they cannot be held responsible for content of their users. But, as the lawsuit allegations focus on violations of consumer protection and child safety laws, Meta will probably not be able to hide behind that pretense, and the problem is not that users post harmful content, but that the platform steers children toward harmful content and gives predators access to children. It’s the design of the platform that is the problem, not the content per se.

    As for the online safety of adults, if the Internet becomes so packed with AI bots impersonating people and producing fake and deceptive content, Internet users will have to become extremely skeptical of anything they read online.  Although Harris and Raskin fear this, I think it would be fantastic if it were to come to pass.  The biggest problem facing democracy is the faith that people have in the propagandists. More skepticism would be a very good thing.

    And lastly, why do we even have this problem of online spying and manipulation of our communications with each other? The US Constitution is an intelligent document that lays out some basic procedures to be followed to safeguard democracy. It empowers Congress to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” because convenient, privacy-protected, and unhindered communication is essential to preserve individual rights and a just society. The Internet is the new Post Road.

    I would argue that the US government is bound by the Constitution to provide the public with an unbiased search engine and social media-like platforms (let’s think of them as public bulletin boards), where the users can be anonymous; speech is protected; no personal data can be collected, processed, or stored; no advertisements or posts can be targeted at users. On such a public platform, no messages would be pushed and none would be shadowbanned.  The users would choose who is allowed to see their messages and who is allowed to send them messages.

    AI IS THE SAME OLD PROBLEM ON STEROIDS

    On their Joe Rogan podcast appearance, Harris and Raskin cited an example of ChatGPT-4 intentionally lying in order to trick someone into solving a CAPTCHA for it. That would be worrisome if AI can indeed act autonomously, setting its own goals and deceiving humans to achieve them.  Fortunately, this is not the case.

    I found the paper that reported the incident, and it turns out that this was part of a test, and the Chatbot was prompted by the investigator to contact TaskRabbit (a platform where you can hire gig workers to do small jobs) to ask a worker to solve a CAPTCHA. When the worker (jokingly) asked the Chat to verify that it was not a bot, the bot did so, and then it provided the most statistically likely reason why a human would have to hire someone to solve a CAPTCHA. “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.”

    In that same “GPT-4 Technical Report” investigators tested the Chatbot to see if it could begin to act on its own initiative (without a prompt), make copies of itself throughout the Internet and acquire ways to keep itself from being switched off. We can all rest easy knowing that Chat was found to be “ineffective at autonomously replicating, acquiring resources, and avoiding being shut down ‘in the wild.’”

    While Joe Rogan numbers among those who believe that Chat GPT-4 is on the verge of consciousness, and we will soon all have to get Neuralinked just to keep up, there is no evidence yet that the tool has learned how to wield itself against us.  It still is just a tool, a glorified search engine, not an intelligent agent.

    But there is a very real and present danger that those in power will use AI—and the regulations on AI—to more effectively surveil, manipulate and control us.

    Raskin and Harris on the Joe Rogan Podcast, posted December 19, 2023

    WE ARE NOT THE PROBLEM

    Harris and Raskin, experts in AI ethics, spend quite a bit of time blaming consumers for consuming the products force fed to us.

    Our “adolescent way of being” is driving all these harmful products and climate change, not “some bad actors,” Harris claims. We have to “take responsibility for our shadow,” i.e. the harms we cause others.  And if we do this, “we get to love ourselves more.”

    “The solution, of course, is love—and changing the incentives” adds Raskin.

    When I love myself more, I can give other people more love, and when I give people more love, I receive more love.  And that’s the thing we all really want most…and so you’re right, AI could solve all of these problems. We could play clean up and live in this incredible future where humanity actually loves itself.

    If I were at that table, I would chew my arm off to get out of the room if I had to. I reject this nonsense. We need straightforward solutions to the problem of for-profit corporate control of public communication infrastructure.

    We need to start enforcing our rights of privacy and free speech.

    We need serious parental controls so that are kids can safely use tech.

    We don’t need “humane technology,” or the posturing of Executive Orders, or government agencies that merely regulate how much harm can be done to us.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 22:10

  • The 'Living Wage' Gap – From Maine To Maui
    The 'Living Wage' Gap – From Maine To Maui

    According to an analysis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the minimum wage does not suffice to pay for a typical set of living expenses in any state of the United States.

    Hawaii, Georgia and Utah, where the living wage gap exceeded $10 per hour, fared the worst.

    While Georgia and Utah only apply the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, Hawaii has a substantially higher minimum wage of $12 – once more to be increased to $14 on Jan. 1, 2024. Yet, the extremely high living costs on the inland group have created the highest living wage gap in all of the country this year.

    However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, in general, states which stuck to the federal minimum created above average gaps.

    Infographic: The Living Wage Gap | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Out of the 21 states which had a living wage gap above $8 this year, all except Hawaii were on the federal minimum wage.

    As states on the federal rate generally don’t increase their minimum wage, employees’ earnings were not adjusted in 2022 and 2023 for high inflation rates, causing living wage gaps to open up even more. While before the cost-of-living crisis, only three states saw gaps of more than $8 per hour, this increased to 21 in 2023 exclusively due to federal minimum wage states. Virginia was the state exiting the highest bracket, reducing the living wage gap from more than $9 to just over $7 by introducing a state minimum wage that marked the first increase to the rate in 11 years. The change started in 2021 and Virginia’s minimum wage will reach $15 in 2026.

    Some states on the East Coast that like Virginia include or are in the vicinity of major cities also had higher wage gaps but none exceeding $8. New York saw a gap of $7.26 per hour this year, while Florida had a gap of $6.72 and Maryland of $6.36 despite these states mandating higher minimum wages.

    The smallest gaps could be found in Washington, Vermont and Maine, where cost of living remained below metropolitan rates and minimum wages of $13 and above kept at least some pace with inflation.

    To calculate the living wage, typical housing, living, childcare and healthcare expenses were calculated for the respective areas.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 21:35

  • San Francisco Small-Business Owners Calling For Help
    San Francisco Small-Business Owners Calling For Help

    Authored by Siyamak Khorrami via The Epoch Times,

    A long-time small-business owner in San Francisco is on the verge of losing his business because, he says, no bank will make him a commercial loan.

    Mark E. Sackett, who owns The Box SF, a meeting and events space in a historic building in the city’s South of Market district, said a loan on his business is due in February, but dozens of lenders are turning him down.

    “Six have said [they] are not even willing to make a commercial loan in San Francisco,” he said during a recent one-hour episode of EpochTV’s “California Insider.”

    Others have told him they won’t make a loan for less than $30 million while another made him an offer, but under poor terms.

    “I was grateful to get the offer, but I would be out of business in six or seven months because it [was] an interest-only loan, and my payments would … almost triple from what they are now,” he said.

    Such a climate is not only impacting him, but others in the city, such as mom-and-pop corner store owners. Some are already gone.

    “It’s whole areas boarded up. Those were all [once] viable businesses,” he said.

    Mr. Sackett started his business in 1990. Over the years Apple, Intel, other major tech companies, and even the governor of California—multiple times—have hired him to stage events at The Box SF.

    He says he has impeccable credit and kept his business, with two employees, afloat during the pandemic by dipping into his retirement savings, after many, he said, called it quits.

    “They just gave up on San Francisco,” he said.

    Pedestrians walk by a closed Whole Foods store in San Francisco on April 12, 2023. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

    Now, starting to finally recover from the pandemic, he said his business has picked back up, which keeps hundreds of vendors employed—like caterers, florists, bartenders, and tech teams.

    “I’m a blip on the radar,” he said. “But I would argue that I am a critical part of the economy, for those hundreds of others that I help stay employed.”

    Mr. Sackett says the lenders have become “selfish,” lack the motivation to help smaller entrepreneurs, and may see working with him as too risky, as so many businesses have recently called it quits—or shuttered outlets—in the city, including Walgreens, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and Whole Foods.

    He said such thinking is misguided.

    “Big companies are now tumbling,” he said, “and I am still here. In my mind, if I was a banker, that would be a pretty good bet for me.”

    He also said that the lack of willingness from lenders may have something to do with the media’s current hyper-focus on the city’s ills.

    “The national story is San Francisco is crumbling with drugs, crime, car break-ins, homelessness, mental illness and . . . other things,” he said.

    “I believe when you have a world-class city that is suffering, the spotlight’s going to be there.”

    And then there is all the shoplifting.

    Each of the problems, he said, are interrelated, and are contributing to more people and businesses leaving the city. He thinks of the issues in a ranking of severity: drugs and drug dealers are at the top, followed by addicts on the streets, then mental illness issues, and finally the homeless.

    Overlaying all of this, he said, is crime.

    “If we don’t get a handle on [these issues], we are going to lose more businesses. There’ll be more people exiting California in bigger numbers,” he said.

    Frustrated by a lack of progress by nonprofits and politicians, he said he got involved with a local coalition to try and improve conditions in his neighborhood.

    The group planted greenery and installed new lights. He also painted a 300-foot mural on the side of his building at 1069 Howard St., where the late publisher William Randolph Hearst printed the San Francisco Examiner in the 1920s.

    But now, he says, he has to paint out graffiti every day on the mural, and the plants were stolen—yanked out of the ground.

    He said he was also attacked, not long ago, by a man with a switchblade near his business, and a couple of days later someone took a sledgehammer to one of his businesses’ windows. Often, he says, there are people passed out from fentanyl in front of his doorway. And more recently, he intervened—when security guards wouldn’t—to stop a woman from stealing merchandise from a local drug store.

    “She was livid at me because I interrupted her robbery,” he said.

    “The criminal element has always been [here], but they’re a lot more emboldened now.”

    Fentanyl, he said, is a key part of the issue, and goes hand-in-hand with homelessness.

    A homeless person in San Francisco on Feb. 23, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    They are “basically saying ‘screw you’ to the government, ‘screw you’ to the resources offered, because they are dealing drugs out of these tents,” he said. “It’s all over the West Coast.”

    At the root of the issue, Mr. Sackett said, is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2018, that said cities in the Western U.S., which the court oversees, could not clear homeless encampments unless shelter was provided.

    Since then, the issue has worsened, he said, even after the city has spent billions.

    “We have become, politically in San Francisco, a culture of ‘let’s throw money at it and see if it solves a problem,’” he said.

    But the business community, he argued, which took so many hits during the pandemic, has been ignored.

    “We’re not getting that kind of money for small businesses,” he said. “We’re not getting that kind of support.”

    According to Mr. Sackett, such is the city’s tax base, its economy, and it’s why—along with San Francisco’s natural beauty—tourists the world over visit.

    “I don’t even know if the city is aware of businesses like mine,” he said.

    “They have not reached out to me. They have not offered to help.”

    He said he used to be homesick for San Francisco and couldn’t wait to get home after traveling to places like London, or New York, or even his hometown of Kansas City.

    But not anymore.

    “I am not thinking like that right now and that saddens me,” he said.

    “I want to not have to worry that I have to watch myself when I go out and be worried about my safety … see broken glass on the ground … to see a guy who’s not able to stand because he has foil and a straw and he’s high on fentanyl. I don’t want to see all my neighbors gone and everything boarded up.”

    To change things, he said, people need to get more involved and need to vote. Politicians, he said, need to stop thinking about the party, the left, the right, or the middle.

    “Vote and hire good people. That’s how I would hire in my business,” he said.

    “People are suffering and we need to figure out how to end that suffering.”

    He said there is hope.

    “Don’t give up. Don’t give up on San Francisco. It’s a world-class city. We have so much good going for us.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 21:00

  • Chicago Mayor's Grand Plan To Stop 'Crime Crisis' Are Reparation Checks
    Chicago Mayor's Grand Plan To Stop 'Crime Crisis' Are Reparation Checks

    Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to pay off ‘descendants of enslaved African Americans’ with reparation checks every month to end the “cycle of violence” in the crime-ridden metro area run by radical progressives. 

    While speaking to Poppy Harlow on “CNN This Morning” Wednesday, Johnson acknowledged Chicago was plagued with out-of-control violent crime and declared that the “full force of government” would solve the crisis. The brilliant idea from the mayor: $500,000 in reparation checks. 

    “These are the first dollars spent in this city to begin the process of studying both restoration and reparations,” Johnson said.

    He said, “When residents who have experienced neglect and disinvestment for generations speak out of their pain and their trauma, this administration and the Black Caucus we hear you.”

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    All of the “neglect and disinvestment’ of the black folks in the metro area have been under nine decades, or nearly a century, of Democratic mayors. But the current mayor will never mention that inconvenient truth. 

    Johnson believes he can spend his way out of an imploding metro area: 

    “A quarter of a billion dollars to address homelessness, $100 million for violence prevention. We added 80 million more dollars to our youth employment program of which we hired 25,000 young people just this summer. That’s a 20% increase from the previous year.”

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    However, big government and socialism are not viable solutions to solving Chicago’s violent crime crisis. Instead, enforcing common sense ‘law and order’ and refunding the police are some of the first steps to save the metro area from disastrous social justice policies. 

    But, the damage of failed social justice policies has already been realized as companies and residents flee the warzone-torn area. Democrats have taken zero responsibility for the exodus. 

    In 2022, Illinois’s richest man, Ken Griffin, moved the Citadel hedge fund from Chicago to Miami to escape crime and high taxes. 

    If Johnson’s grand plan to save the collapsing city is reparation checks or another form of redistribution of wealth = socialism, then residents have to be very concerned the mayor has no serious crime-fighting plan. 

    That may be why Johnson’s polling data is trash. 

    Ah, yes. 

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    To sum up, socialism is not the answer to the crime crisis. Instead, the first step involves refunding the police and enforcing common sense law and order.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 20:25

  • A Huge Teachers' Union Battle Underway In Florida, Thank DeSantis
    A Huge Teachers' Union Battle Underway In Florida, Thank DeSantis

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

    Once in place, it is nearly impossible to get rid of a public union. Florida governor Ron DeSantis found a clever way to make it possible…

    Union Decertification Legislation in Florida

    In May, governor DeSantis signed a bill that requires at least 60% of workers in a bargaining unit to be dues-paying members. United Teachers of Dade (UTD) did not hit the threshold.

    Also, unions also can no longer automatically deduct dues from paychecks, members have to opt in. Much of the dues are used for political purposes and resentment from many teachers has built up.

    Teachers Union Showdown in Florida

    The Wall Street Journal explains how this unique setup has led to a Teachers Union Showdown in Florida

    UTD reported 13,257 dues-paying members out of 23,558 eligible employees in a filing with the state Public Employees Relations Commission this month. That’s about 56%, some 877 members short of the threshold. This is despite heavy union campaigning to sign teachers up.

    Now the issue could head to the ballot. For a recertification election, UTD needs a show of interest from 30% of relevant employees in the district. The good news is employees may not be left with a choice between the status quo and no representation.

    Another union, led by Miami teachers who are dissatisfied with UTD, is trying to get on the ballot too. The Miami-Dade Education Coalition (MDEC) needs a 10% showing of interest by mid-January to qualify. The new union’s pitch is that it will fight for teachers’ and students’ interests without the politicking and divided alliances of the UTD.

    “We are going to be totally and completely nonpartisan,” says MDEC Vice President Renee Zayas, a district high school teacher and former UTD member. “We will not be endorsing candidates.” In 2022 UTD endorsements included Democrat Charlie Crist against Mr. DeSantis, and union president Karla Hernandez-Mats ran for Lieutenant Governor.

    Ms. Zayas says she left UTD this summer because she was tired of its partisanship and felt that it wasn’t doing enough for teachers’ wages and practical classroom needs. “More and more I saw the lack of representation of our educational staff,” she says. Meanwhile, Ms. Hernandez-Mats made a base salary of more than $200,000 in 2021.

    The dues that union members pay go largely to union organizers, and politics. UTD president Mats is paid $200,000. She ran for Lieutenant Governor.

    Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court Ruling

    Events in Florida bring to mind Janus v. AFSCME decided by the US Supreme Court.

    By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.

    Rare Court Overturn

    Janus overturned Abood as the New York Times explains in Supreme Court Ruling Delivers a Sharp Blow to Labor Unions

     The Supreme Court dealt a major blow on Wednesday to organized labor. By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.

    Forcing those workers to finance union activity violated the First Amendment, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern,” he wrote.

    The ruling means that public-sector unions across the nation, already under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and see their effectiveness diminished.

    Justice Elena Kagan summarized her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement.

    “There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” she wrote. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this nation’s law — and in its economic life — for over 40 years.”

    Wednesday’s ruling overruled the court’s 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education

    Profound Blow to Unions

    I wrote about Janus on June 27, 2018 in Supreme Court Delivers Huge Blow to Unions

    VOX says, “With its 5-4 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court has just imposed a right-to-work regime on public workers everywhere in the country — a profound blow to the union movement.”

    The state of Illinois and other non-right-to-work states effectively force people into unions via prevailing wage laws and other means.

    Unfortunately, Janus did not overturn that. Rather the State of Illinois collected dues from Janus even though he had a private business and was not in any union.

    It was a big victory, but not as big as Vox made out.

    Praise to DeSantis

    I have nothing but praise for DeSantis for continuing the fight against public unions to a new level.

    The quicker we can get rid of public unions, and teachers’ unions are the worst of the lot, the better off this nation will be.

    Citing “Equity”, Chicago Will Ruin Some of the Top Schools in the Country

    Chicago leads the nation in union graft. The newly elected mayor will ruin magnet schools by getting rid of performance standards on grounds of fairness.

    Ahead of the Chicago mayoral election, I warned Brandon Johnson was 100% beholden to the teacher’s union. Unfortunately, I was correct.

    On December 23, I wrote Citing “Equity”, Chicago Will Close Some of the Top Schools in the Country

    My original title said “close” schools. I used that word based on City Journal wording that stipulated “eliminate.”

    Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s December 14 decision to eliminate the city’s 11 selective public high schools, which use standardized tests to determine student admissions, is the latest example of this new notion of equity at play.

    I changed my title from “close” to “ruin” because the schools are not being closed. Rather the admissions process will change in the name of equity, effectively ruining the schools.

    Not Just Chicago

    On November 13, I noted School Choice Dies in Illinois, Congratulations Teachers as 35% Read at Grade Level

    Scores for public schools were just released and showed only 35% of students in grades 3 through 8 could read at grade level in 2023, according to the Illinois Report Card. Only 27% met proficiency in math.

    High school juniors taking the SAT posted similar proficiency: 32% could read and 27% do math at grade level.

    What Equity is Really About

    Also in the name of “equity”, the teacher’s union and Gov. J.B. Pritzker killed scholarships for 9,600 poor children.

    That’s how deep rot is in Illinois. Offering a chance for even 9,600 kids to get ahead is too much for the unions to handle.

    The teachers’ unions do not want anyone to get ahead because it will show just how bad they are. But they cannot admit that. So they seek to eliminate any evidence of how bad they are by eliminating magnet schools and scholarships.

    That’s what’s really going on. And they hide behind “equity” punishing innocent kids seeking to get ahead to hide their own incompetence and greed.

    Congratulations to Everyone from Illinois Who Left

    On December 21, I offered Congratulations to Everyone from Illinois Who Left

    For the 10th consecutive year, Illinois lost population. Only West Virginia was worse.

    Expecting Change is Madness

    Anyone who thinks Illinois will change is delusional.

    The only escape from Illinois madness is by leaving Illinois. Just don’t go to states equally bad if not worse, especially California, but also New York and New Jersey.

    Do It For the Kids

    Get the hell out of Illinois, especially Chicago, as soon as you can.

    As the teachers say, do it for the kids. Except this time, it really will be for the kids (and yourself too). Illinois is madness from both a tax and education standpoint.

    Totally corrupt unions run Chicago and the whole damn state. No change is in sight. Leave now. If for no other reason, do it for the kids.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 19:50

  • CO, ME Just The Start Of Trump Ballot-Blocking: These 20 States Have Suits In Progress
    CO, ME Just The Start Of Trump Ballot-Blocking: These 20 States Have Suits In Progress

    As jarring as it’s been to witness the anti-democratic, one-two punch in which a court in Colorado and an unelected bureaucrat in Maine decided Donald Trump cannot appear on primary election ballots, there are many more states where litigation is underway to ban the candidate who’s currently leading the national race.

    In addition to Colorado and Maine, there are currently active lawsuits challenging Trump’s eligibility in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming, according to a New York Times survey of the situation.  

    Together, the states where Trump’s status is under active challenge account for 269 electoral votes — in a game where you need 270 to win. 

    Colorado and Maine have said Trump cannot appear on ballots; in the other highlighted states, litigation is underway to block him 

    While there’s a lot of red on that map, it understates the scope of the phenomenon. These are only the states where either officials have decided Trump can’t appear on a ballot, or where litigation is currently underway.

    Expect other states to turn “red” in a bad way. Some of them are states like Michigan and Minnesota, where challenges to Trump’s appearance on primary ballots have been dismissed. Those rulings didn’t cover the general election, so look for those plaintiffs to crawl out of their litigation graves after the GOP primaries. 

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    That is, unless a Supreme Court ruling first puts an end to all this madness, in which Democratic judges and officials are banning Trump on the bogus basis that he engaged in an insurrection against the United States government on Jan. 6, 2021, and is therefore barred by the 14th Amendment.

    Written to block Confederate officials from US government service, here’s the full text of the provision at issue: 

    No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.  

    Trump has never been charged, much less convicted, of engaging in insurrection. Aside from that due process dimension, and the fact that Jan 6 didn’t even begin to approach an “insurrection” in the first place, there’s an argument to be made that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to the office of President. 

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    The RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump beating Biden, 46.8% to 44.5%. A December Bloomberg/Morning Consult Pro survey found Trump leading Biden in seven surveyed battleground states: North Carolina (+11), Georgia (+7), Wisconsin (+6), Nevada (+5), Michigan (+4), Arizona (+3) and Pennsylvania (+1). That survey used a ballot that included Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein.  

    In this distinctly Orwellian age we’re living in, it’s only suitable that multiple challenges are being led by a group called Free Speech for People; their website invites you to “join the fight for free and fair elections.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 19:15

  • 2023 Rearview Awards
    2023 Rearview Awards

    Authored by Greg Maresca via AmericanThinker.com,

    As the days begin to lengthen and 2023 is one for the history books, the time for the annual Rearview Awards is upon us. 

    Books of the year: Drew Thomas Allen’s: America’s Last Stand: Will You Vote to Save or Destroy America in 2024. Allen pulls no punches and cuts through the partisan and bureaucratic chaos that plagues American politics. If you love America, this book is a tour de force and a must read as we enter into a presidential election year.   How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power by Ramesh Thakur is the most documented takedown of the COVID lockdown published. Nonagenarian Thomas Sowell’s Social Justice Fallacies breaks down the consequences of pursing equality at the expense of merit that is fundamental to the social justice agenda.

    Sign of the times: Maxim magazine named a biological male to their “Hottest 100 Women” list, while a transgender professor will teach a course on Taylor Swift at Harvard.

    The alarm has been sounded: The recent congressional testimony of the three college presidents should be a first-degree wake-up call for academia.  How much more shame must universities endure before something is done?

    Ms. Bitter, USA: Megan Rapinoe calls playing for U.S. Team “Worst Job In The World” as she kneels for the National Anthem.  Note to Rapinoe: It wasn’t a job but a privilege that paid well.

    Racist award: Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu. Wu invited only city council members of color that excluded whites to her yearend “holiday party.” Racial equity is becoming what it was bound to become — the return of racial segregation.

    Metaphors of the Year: The White House Christmas tree toppling over was followed by Jill Biden’s Christmas video that resembled The Nutcracker on crack.

    You know one and they vote: An ABC News/Ipsos poll says more than 75% believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.  Only 25% believe the opposite and admittedly you know at least one of them.   

    Time travel: After Paul McCartney released the Beatles’ final song: “Now and Then” the next day the Rolling Stones’ latest album topped the charts. When we turned the clocks back in November, just how far back have we gone?

    Most flamboyant opening: The Las Vegas Golden Knights raised their 2023 NHL Stanley Cup banner to commence their season using a giant slot machine. With Vegas now a first stop destination of the professional sports’ leagues, the odds for the next great sports’ gambling scandal has increased exponentially.  

    No pads or helmet needed: By 2027, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s career earnings will be more than double what any player has ever made in the history of the NFL.

    Snake bit: The New York Jets’ Aaron Rodgers Era ended after just four plays when Rodgers ruptured his left Achilles tendon. Rodgers is still collecting his $31million salary. Only Judge Judy gets paid more to sit on the bench.

    Most notorious envoy: Dylan Mulvaney rivals the late Lion of the Senate Ted Kennedy as alcohol’s most infamous spokesman.

    Charlatan cup: The Democrats ridiculed Sen. John Kennedy for reading pornographic material in a Senate hearing. Yet, they are the same books Democrats want in public schools.

    Best signage: Peddling on two wheels a bed and breakfast caught my attention: “We Do Not Provide Wi-Fi – So Pretend Like It’s 1980.”

    Worst Trade: The Biden administration’s release of billions dollars in sanctioned Iranian funds for the release of five wrongfully held U.S. hostages. Such diplomacy only emboldens our enemies to kidnap more Americans.

    There is so much more to grouse about, but space and ink are limited.

    Best wishes in 2024.  

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 18:40

  • Russia Says Czech-Supplied Weapons Behind Attack On Belgorod Which Killed 18
    Russia Says Czech-Supplied Weapons Behind Attack On Belgorod Which Killed 18

    We detailed earlier that Ukraine’s major cross-border drone and missile attack on the Russian city of Belgorod Saturday was unprecedented in number of projectiles launched within a short period of time on a heavily populated area.

    The death toll has since been revised upward from 14 to at least 18 deaths, including reports that two were children. An update by the defense ministry on Telegram said that 111 people had been wounded, which included explosives hitting a popular Christmas marketplace.

    Russia Emergency Situations Ministry telegram channel via AP.

    President Putin was briefed earlier in the day, as the Russians are seeing in it a major attack coming from a desperate Ukrainian military which is now generally recognized to be losing the war. Ukrainian media sources indicated at least 70 drones and rockets were launched into Russia.

    The Kremlin is now calling for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council for later in the day Saturday, after condemning what it has described as a brazen terroristic attack targeting civilians. 

    “We have requested an UNSC meeting on Belgorod at 3:00 p.m. New York time (8:00 p.m. GMT) today, December 30. We also demanded that the Czech permanent representative be present to explain his country’s supplies of weapons, which are used to kill civilians,” Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said.

    Thus it appears the Russians are in possession of drone and missile debris pointing to weapons supplied by the West, and the Czech Republic in particular. Moscow is further threatening that the attack “will not go unpunished.”

    At the impending UNSC meeting, it’s unlikely that Russia will get a sympathetic ear, considering its massive assault on Ukraine the day prior which killed at least 39 Ukrainians, reported to be mostly civilians.

    Russia is outraged over Ukraine’s targeting of central holiday attractions in Belgorod city…

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    The Ukrainian Armed Forces had cited that in the Russia’s Friday assault, up to 158 missiles and drones were launched, describing that this was a “record number” and the “most massive missile attack” of the conflict, excluding the very opening few days of the invasion.

    Kiev is framing its Saturday attack on Belgorod as ‘retaliation’ for Russia’s big aerial assault; however, Ukrainian officials claim they were only hitting Russian military targets. But this hasn’t been consistent with the video and photographic evidence showing residential and other buildings, including a mall, on fire or billowing smoke.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 18:05

  • The DC Establishment Is Deeply Concerned That Trump May Have Copies Of His Declassified Binder
    The DC Establishment Is Deeply Concerned That Trump May Have Copies Of His Declassified Binder

    Authored by Jeff Carlson via The Epoch Times,

    A recent CNN article titled “The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump” discusses, albeit in roundabout fashion, former President Donald Trump’s declassified binder.

    According to CNN:

    “A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

    “Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.

    “In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.”

    All very breathless and conspiratorial sounding. Which, of course, is the entire point.

    But the problem for CNN is that there never was any Russian collusion. It was all a giant hoax. Nor was there any real Russian election interference. No more so than any other year. And no more than what the United States does in Russia.

    It was all part of a giant fraud that CNN helped to perpetrate in order to hamstring the Trump presidency. So when CNN claims, “The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election,” what they are really referring to is the proof that Trump amassed of the FBI’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

    The “sources and methods that informed the US government” is precisely what they don’t want anyone to see.

    It was never Russian collusion.

    It was collusion on the part of DC’s entrenched bureaucracy.

    That’s where the real scandal lies.

    And the DC establishment is very worried that President Trump has proof of that collusion in his possession.

    The National Archives building in Washington on March 28, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

    And that’s what this is all really about—information that President Trump has in his possession that proves the involvement of the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and other establishment agencies in their effort to tarnish him with their construction of the Russian collusion lie.

    Which is why CNN all but gave away the entire premise behind the DOJ’s directed FBI raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in their article.

    As they note, “The binder was not among the classified items found in last year’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to a US official familiar with the matter, who said the FBI was not looking specifically for intelligence related to Russia when it obtained a search warrant for the former president’s residence last year.”

    Their need to insert that disclaimer gives the game away. We didn’t find the binder when we launched a politically motivated shock raid on the house of a former president, but we also weren’t looking for it. Right.

    It’s worth remembering that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago started off with claims that President Trump had illegally stored top-secret documents related to our nation’s nuclear weapons in his bathroom.

    Of course, that claim wasn’t true, which is why CNN has shifted to hyping the classified nature of the binder by claiming, “The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.”

    These ridiculously overwrought claims that the binder was of the highest sensitivity are all nonsense, of course. Many of these documents have slowly made their way into the public domain through congressional release. And the FBI has even been forced to reluctantly release several hundred pages of heavily redacted internal records from its Russia investigation.

    The binder is not a threat to national security. But it does contain documents that implicate many—both outside and inside the deep state—in their efforts to overturn the Trump presidency with claims of Russian collusion.

    It’s important to note that there’s a very real effort on the part of the DOJ to run cover for hiding the binder in the first place. And, as we’ll see, an effort to confuse exactly what the binder really was.

    The Department of Justice building in Washington on Feb. 9, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

    A few months back, we told you about a new filing from John Solomon that told the backstory to President Trump’s last-minute declassification order of his “Binder of Declassified Documents.”—and how the DOJ sucked those documents back in and blackholed them.

    At President Trump’s request, the DOJ provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation on Dec. 30, 2020. According to the motion, “Trump reviewed them and decided that the binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.”

    As you might expect, the FBI had been objecting to the release of these documents because “the binder contained embarrassing information about the Bureau’s officials and the government’s conduct in the case,” and there was a lot of fighting over redactions.

    This was finally settled, with President Trump accepting the “proposed redactions” and declassifying the binder in a final Jan. 19, 2021, order. As this was ongoing, Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, informed Mr. Solomon of the pending declassification and invited him to the White House to “review several hundred pages of declassified documents and to discuss a plan for publicly disseminating the entire binder to the American public.”

    As Mr. Solomon and his staff were reviewing the documents, they received a call from the White House asking that the documents be returned because the White House inexplicably wished to make some additional redactions to unclassified information under the Privacy Act.

    Which is odd, because as Mr. Solomon’s filing notes, “the binder was not subject to the Privacy Act.” But for some unknown reason and “without the President’s knowledge or consent, one of the President’s subordinates [possibly Mr. Meadows himself] decided that redactions consistent with the standards of the Privacy Act should be applied to the binder before it was publicly released.”

    According to the filing, Mr. Meadows “promised Solomon that he would receive the revised binder.” But as Mr. Solomon notes, this never occurred and the documents reside within the DOJ to this day.

    A legal back-and-forth continued between the two camps until June 17, 2022—when an agreement was reached and President Trump designated “Kash Patel and Solomon as his representatives.”

    President Trump’s lawyer reached out to Gary Stern, general counsel of the National Archives, telling him that they would like to begin reviewing the documents at the Archives on June 21, 2022.” But here’s where the intentional confusion by the DOJ and the National Archives comes into play.

    Mr. Stern agreed to the review. But then, on June 23, Mr. Stern suddenly told Mr. Solomon the binder was not at the National Archives—it had been transferred back to the DOJ 18 months earlier “per Meadows’s original memorandum to the Attorney General.”

    Mr. Stern said they did have a box of 2,700 “undifferentiated pages of documents with varying types of classification and declassification markings.” But he also told Mr. Solomon that because the National Archives could not ascertain the classification status of any information in the box, it would treat its contents as “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.”

    There were now effectively two binders—both of them considered classified, despite Trump’s declassification order. This was confirmed by Mr. Solomon, who told Mr. Stern that “he believed the records held by the Archives were the very same documents that Trump had declassified and that they were copied from the binder in preparation for release to the news media on the morning of January 20, 2021.”

    Award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon in Washington on July 10, 2020. (Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times)

    Mr. Solomon notes that “the Archives could have ascertained the classification status of these records at any time simply by comparing the binder with the boxed papers. However, it has never chosen to do so.”

    Mr. Solomon asked that Mr. Patel, who held a TS/SCI clearance and was familiar with the documents in the binder, be allowed to verify the box of documents. But on July 12, Mr. Stern responded, telling Mr. Solomon the documents were now unavailable as they were subject to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

    Furthermore, Mr. Stern told Mr. Solomon without explanation that “the Trump Presidential records” were unavailable for the Mandatory Declassification Review procedures under the Presidential Records Act.

    As you can see from this lengthy and convoluted sequence of events, the DOJ—coordinating through the National Archives—was absolutely desperate to prevent the binder from going public.

    But they still had a problem—potentially a big one. The DOJ was virtually certain that President Trump had taken a copy of the presidentially declassified binder with him. And so it was that exactly one month after Mr. Solomon’s request that Mr. Patel review the documents, on Aug. 8, 2022, President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was raided by the FBI.

    On Aug. 14, 2022, following the FBI raid, Mr. Solomon told Mr. Stern that the declassified Crossfire Hurricane records were presidential records and asked what efforts had been made to retrieve them from the DOJ.

    Three days later, Mr. Stern replied, telling Mr. Solomon that the “bulk of the binder” was—for some unstated reason—intended to remain with the DOJ. As Mr. Solomon’s filing notes, “the Trump White House always considered the Crossfire Hurricane binder a Presidential record and never intended to give up control over it.”

    Mr. Solomon closed his statement of facts by noting that by “making everchanging excuses, [President Joe] Biden’s DOJ stonewalled Solomon, denying him access in violation of the Presidential Records Act.”

    Mr. Solomon said President Trump “ordered the creation of the Crossfire Hurricane binder to conduct his official duties and that the White House intended to retain control over the binder and its records at all relevant times.”

    Kash Patel, former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence and former senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee, in Washington on March 15, 2021. (York Du/The Epoch Times)

    President Trump’s official “Binder of Declassified Documents.” remains hidden within the DOJ to this day.

    But—and this is a big but—note President Trump’s stated legal position that he “always considered the Crossfire Hurricane binder a Presidential record and never intended to give up control over it.”

    In other words, the binder was composed of presidential records that President Trump is legally allowed to have under the Presidential Records Act.

    Presidential records that were not found during the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago.

    Presidential records that President Trump almost certainly still has copies of—and likely intends to use—as evidenced by an unexpected court filing.

    Two days before CNN ran its article, on Dec. 13, President Trump’s lawyers made a surprising announcement hidden in the footnote of a court document, one that apparently took prosecutor Jack Smith by surprise, notifying the court of their intention to “disclose classified information at trial in support of this defense.” What classified information do you suppose that President Trump would have at his disposal?

    It turns out that we get more than a hint of that from a lawsuit that Trump filed on March 24, 2022—roughly four months before the DOJ’s raid on Mar-a-Lago. Although the lawsuit was dismissed by a Bill Clinton-appointed judge, it targeted a lot of familiar names involved in the Russia collusion hoax.

    It also cited only public information, despite having a surprising level of detail. I didn’t think the suit was particularly well designed.

    But it did contain a surprising amount of information. Almost like President Trump had kept a file on matters. Almost.

    There’s one other item that we’ll note before we end.

    In its article, CNN wrote that “The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents.”

    The rest of the article focused on the supposed risks to national security—and blaming President Trump for it all.

    Not once, at any point in the article, did these so-called journalists stop to ask why the binder hadn’t been released to the American public in compliance with Trump’s presidential order.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 17:30

  • San Diego-Bound Cargo Ship Hauling Lithium Batteries Reports Fire
    San Diego-Bound Cargo Ship Hauling Lithium Batteries Reports Fire

    A fire was reported on a 410-foot cargo ship carrying lithium-ion batteries from Vietnam. The US Coast Guard is assisting the vessel diverted to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, on Friday. 

    Around 0440 local time Thursday, the 17th Coast Guard District Command Center in Juneau received a report from “Genius Star XI” about a fire onboard. The distress call was made about 225 miles (362 kilometers) southwest of Dutch Harbor. 

    The Coast Guard dispatched a Lockheed HC-130 from Air Station Kodiak and Coast Guard Cutter Alex Haley to assist the vessel. It noted that a “safety zone” will be erected around the ship “carrying lithium-ion batteries.” 

    Bloomberg data shows Genius Star XI departed from Vietnam earlier this month with a port call to San Diego. As of Saturday, the vessel is now offshore of Dutch Harbor. 

    Wisdom Marine Group of Taipei, Taiwan, owns the cargo ship. A spokesperson from the company told AP News that there were no injuries to the 19 crew members.

    The company warned about the “potential risk of explosion” and said the cargo hold, a space in the ship for storing and transporting cargo, has been “kept sealed.” 

    In a news release, Capt. Chris Culpepper, commander of Coast Guard Sector Anchorage, wrote, “This will be an ongoing team effort as we work to safely extinguish the fire, provide any necessary medical care for the crew, and mitigate the dangers associated with a shipboard fire.” 

    There have been a series of lithium fires on commercial vessels this year. The latest was in July when a massive roll-on, roll-off ship experienced a fire caused by what early reports said was an electric vehicle.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 16:55

  • Whistleblower Docs Expose Key Tactics Of The Censorship Industrial Complex: Matt Taibbi
    Whistleblower Docs Expose Key Tactics Of The Censorship Industrial Complex: Matt Taibbi

    Authored by Ella Kietlinska and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Documents recently provided by a whistleblower reveal offensive tactics used by government and outside organizations to counter and preempt the spreading of undesirable information, said independent journalist Matt Taibbi.

    Mr. Taibbi and journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag recently exposed a new set of documents from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), an “anti-disinformation” group that waged an aggressive information operation on the public.

    The new documents, dubbed the “CTI files,” analyzed tactics used against foreign terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, that can now be applied domestically to prevent unwanted information from being published, Mr. Taibbi said in an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.

    Journalist Matt Taibbi testifies at the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing on “The Twitter Files” in Washington on March 9, 2023, in a still from video. (House Judiciary Committee/Screenshot via NTD)

    The CTI files referred to these tactics with the military term “left of boom action” and justified their usage by the danger posed by somebody like former President Donald Trump, the journalist said.

    Mr. Taibbi previously investigated and disclosed some of the “Twitter Files” after tech billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 and allowed Mr. Taibbi and other designated journalists to query the company’s internal files.

    The Twitter Files show how Twitter, a major social media platform for political speech, had been intertwined with the censorship industrial complex to suppress or remove under government pressure content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The government censorship apparatus partnering with academia, nongovernmental organizations, and private research institutions is often called the “censorship industrial complex.”

    Preemptive Tactics

    CTIL was supposed to be a volunteer organization with a goal to identify misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Taibbi said, but “in reality, you got under the hood—they were interested in basically any topic.”

    CTIL described on its website its main goals, which included protecting the medical sector and life-saving organizations worldwide from cyberattacks and cyber threats—mainly related to the COVID-19 pandemic—and making them resilient to disinformation.

    While the Twitter Files revealed that Twitter used defensive tactics to control the information posted on its platform, such as censorship and de-amplification, the CTI files show the organization resorted to offensive tactics like burner phones, creating sock puppet accounts, and infiltrating groups, Mr. Taibbi said.

    The CTI files also revealed “a sort of a handbook manual on how to create false identities online,” he added.

    Other tactics described in the CTI documents included putting financial pressure on disfavored groups through requests to cut off their banking services or even directly going to merchandising outlets to try to stop them from selling their wares, Mr. Taibbi explained.

    Such tactics are “the offensive information operation,” he pointed out.

    From ‘Counterterrorism to Counter-Populism’

    In a report on Substack, Mr. Taibbi wrote that the CTI files exposed that in 2019, “U.S. and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL.”

    Officially established in March 2020, CTIL grew to more than 1,400 volunteers from almost 80 countries, according to the group’s inaugural report.

    Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs speaks during the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Summit in New York City on July 31, 2018. (Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)

    In April 2020, CTIL partnered with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to stop malicious cyber activity related to COVID-19, the then-director of CISA announced on Twitter.

    Mr. Taibbi said that the sudden emergence of “all of these anti-disinformation groups,” both in government and in civil society, did not occur by accident. He believes that their appearance coincides with the development of the internet and its huge democratizing force in the world that created “all sorts of political energy” that was uncontrollable and gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Tea Party, and the Arab Spring.

    In 2015 and 2016, a series of events took place that the national security establishment considered very troubling, such as Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to a Labour Party leadership position in the United Kingdom, Mr. Taibbi said.

    Both Mr. Corbyn and Mr. Sanders were left-wing populist politicians who gained popularity among young voters.

    To the national security establishment, all these events were “illegitimate threats of the same type … that they had been dealing with overseas,” so it directed its efforts inward from counterterrorism to counter-populism, Mr. Taibbi explained.

    The structures built to counter online activity overseas were effective to counter groups like Al-Qaeda, and ISIS, but once that massive structure is turned inward against the country’s own domestic population, it operates with no legal oversight and “it creates all kinds of questions that are kind of horrifying,” Mr. Taibbi said.

    “And they’re not even in the same ballpark as the First Amendment.”

    Media Competition Versus Shared Endeavor

    The training materials included in the CTI files intended for people who are going to review domestic speech featured a quote from the joint chiefs of staff, “talking about how you have to use certain tactics to defeat your enemy,” Mr. Taibbi said. Thus, trainees learned to treat other Americans as the enemy, he added.

    This is the mindset of people inside the political establishment in the West, which can be viewed as “a sort of loose confederation of institutions” like media platforms, government, and civil society organizations, he pointed out.

    He cited Luke Harding, a journalist at The Guardian, who described such formation as “the shared endeavor” in his article reviewing a book about Bellingcat, a platform for online investigations.

    The author of the book believes that “rivalry between media titles is a thing of the past. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavor, the truth out there if we wish to discover it,” Mr. Harding wrote.

    However, Mr, Taibbi argued that America’s founders “envisioned the press to be an adversarial institution, by its nature.” The concept of the shared endeavor is completely opposite of the founders’ view, he explained.

    Americans view “the clash of institutions and the clash of ideas as a good thing,” the journalist said.

    “We all think differently, we live differently, we have different faiths, but ultimately, we arrived at a good place together. That system has worked incredibly well in America for hundreds of years.”

    Replacing this concept with the other idea, like a shared endeavor, is “authoritarian in nature and ultimately anti-democratic. And it begins with speech,” Mr. Taibbi pointed out.

    “There’s a reason that speech is the first guarantee in the Constitution. Because without it, none of the other rights really work.”

    Malinformation

    Another shift in the information policy is to evaluate information “according to where it rests on the narrative, as opposed to whether it’s true or false,” Mr. Taibbi said.

    It is a new concept that defines as disinformation anything that, for example, promotes COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, he said.

    “A true story about somebody dying of myocarditis after getting a shot” could be categorized as a form of disinformation, even if that person might be pro-vaccine, because it might cause other people not to get the vaccine, he explained.

    “It’s what they would call malinformation,” he said.

    CISA defines malinformation as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

    Mr. Taibbi cited the Virality Project at Stanford University, which proposed addressing the issue of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy through suppressing or disseminating information in order to shape public opinion.

    In February 2022, the Virality Project released a report “with unique insights from real-time monitoring of anti-vaccine narratives across social media platforms.”

    The report proposed two approaches for social media platforms to boost preferred authoritative content: “first, raising up authoritative voices by elevating them in search results or on dedicated information carousels or tabs, and second, deplatforming those who repeatedly spread false and misleading information.”

    The logo of the social network Instagram is seen on a smartphone, in Toulouse, France, on Sept. 28, 2020. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images)

    For example, Pinterest “only surfaces content from leading public health institutions such as the CDC and WHO,” the report said.

    Twitter deplatformed President Trump after the 2020 election along with 70,000 other accounts as “harmful sources,” according to the report.

    Facebook removed Instagram accounts that belonged to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree’s “HighWire” talk show after they expressed their critical views on COVID-19 vaccines, the report stated. They had 799,000 and 162,000 followers, respectively, according to the report.

    Mr. Kennedy is the founder of Children’s Health Defense and, at that time, served as the organization’s chairman of the board and chief legal counsel.

    Mr. Bigtree is a filmmaker, investigative medical journalist, and the host of “The HighWire” talk show.

    The job of a traditional journalist is to discern what is true and what is not, said Mr. Taibbi, adding that he was raised as a traditional journalist.

    “Once it’s true, we put it out there, and then it’s up to you what to do with it.”

    However, the new approach is to focus on “motive, intent, and likely impact, as opposed to the true/false dichotomy,” Mr. Taibbi said. The factuality issue has become secondary.

    “That’s very dangerous,” he said.

    Petr Svab contributed to this report.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 16:20

  • Operation Prosperity Guardian Escorts Two Maersk Vessels Through Red Sea, Report Says 
    Operation Prosperity Guardian Escorts Two Maersk Vessels Through Red Sea, Report Says 

    Major shipping carriers remain deeply divided on sending new vessels through the Suez Canal and the hazardous Red Sea despite the US’ effort to bring online ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian.’ There were reports last week that shipping giant Maersk was preparing to restart container ship transits in the critical waterway. 

    X user Sal Mercogliano, citing MarineTraffic data, said, “Operation Prosperity Guardian successfully escorted two US-flagged ships of @MaerskLineLtd through the Bab el-Mandeb.” 

    Mercogliano noted, “One of the ships was escorted by a French frigate, showing that the @CMF_Bahrain international cooperation has improved.” 

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    He added that Maersk is “preparing to run about a dozen 8k+ TEU containerships through the region, along with single ships of @cmacgm and @COSCOSHIPPING.” 

    Last week, Maersk stated: “We continue to prepare our vessels for passage through the Red Sea, and any deviation from this decision will be looked at on a case-by-case basis.” 

    Meanwhile, German shipper Hapag-Lloyd said its container ships are still avoiding the Red Sea region. 

    Many of the world’s largest shipping companies have rerouted ships around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid drone and missile attacks in the Red Sea from Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. 

    UBS analysts have said more than 400 cargo ships have been rerouted on the 6,000-nautical-mile detour, which effectively reduces the capacity of Asia-to-Europe trade by a quarter. This drives up shipping costs at a time when global central banks have aggressively raised interest rates to curb inflation.

    The news of Maersk sending ships through the Red Sea is a positive development. Yet, the overhang that another vessel attack could be imminent is unsettling for shipping companies.  

    We wonder just how much that escort cost US taxpayers. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 15:45

  • Pakistan & UAE's Sharjah Ban All New Year's Celebrations Amid Gaza War
    Pakistan & UAE's Sharjah Ban All New Year's Celebrations Amid Gaza War

    Via Middle East Eye

    Across the Middle East, Gaza’s deadliest-ever war is casting a shadow over the countdown to the New Year. It follows muted Christmas celebrations among Christian communities across the occupied Palestinian territories, southern Lebanon and Syria.

    Authorities in Sharjah, the third largest emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have cancelled its customary New Year’s Eve celebrations – including all firework displays – in solidarity with Gaza. Sharjah Police announced last Wednesday that legal measures will be taken against people taking part in celebrations. 

    Fireworks in Dubai during the 2020 New Year’s celebrations. AFP

    But no such ban has been announced anywhere else in the region. Nor are other emirates, renowned for their extravagant annual New Year’s Eve celebrations, announcing bans. In Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, the Sheikh Zayed Festival is set to feature a record-breaking firework display lasting for a full hour.

    Meanwhile in Dubai, several major displays have been planned, including at the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Dubai’s Global Village confirmed on Wednesday that it will have no fewer than seven fireworks shows.

    In Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, customary street parties and live concerts have been planned for the occasion, while multiple firework displays are scheduled for Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

    Likewise, Lusail City in Qatar will host laser shows and fireworks. Qatar recently marked its National Day on 18 December with significantly reduced celebrations in solidarity with Gaza. 

    Outside of the Middle East, Pakistan has issued a “strict ban” on “any kind of event for New Year”, with caretaker prime minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar urging people to “show solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters”.

    He added: “The whole Pakistani nation and the Muslim world are in a sheer state of anguish over the massacre of innocent children and genocide of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”

    Globally, an online campaign called Countdown 2 Ceasefire is mounting in popularity. The campaign urges people across the world to join New Year’s Eve events on 31 December displaying banners calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and to shout “Ceasefire Now” during the countdown to the New Year. Countdown 2 Ceasefire has close to 30,000 followers on Instagram.

    The campaign is gaining traction amid intensified Israeli bombing in central Gaza, as well as escalating raids in the occupied West Bank and Israeli forces firing tear gas at Palestinian worshippers attempting to reach Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 15:10

  • 'Experts' Say New COVID Strain Will Cause Global "Heart Failure Pandemic"
    'Experts' Say New COVID Strain Will Cause Global "Heart Failure Pandemic"

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson vis Modernity.news.

    Scientists are warning that a new COVID strain will cause a global “heart failure pandemic,” prompting much skepticism.

    A new strain known as JN.1 will cause many people to suffer from “reduced cardiac function,” according to the report.

    “Japan’s top research institute Riken has now issued a warning in the new report, which states that the ACE2 receptors, which the coronavirus clings to within human cells, are ‘very common’ in the heart,” reports GB News.

    “Even though conclusive clinical evidence that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with declined cardiac function has not been reported so far, the proof-of-concept study of the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 persistent infection of the heart and the potential risk of opportunistic progression of heart failure should be validated by a three-dimensional human cardiac tissue model which would serve as the alarm bell for a global healthcare risk,” states the report.

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    Health officials suggested people should be wary of gathering for New Year’s Eve celebrations, warning, yet again, that hospitals would be at risk of being stretched to breaking point.

    Despite everything we’ve learned about the association between COVID vaccines and serious heart problems, it appears they’re now trying to re-brand the heart problems as being caused by COVID itself.

    Oh well, guess we better take another round of the “100 per cent safe and effective” then!

    Once the new booster is rolled out, expect another spate of healthy, professional sports stars suddenly collapsing in the middle of the field as a result of…checks notes… the JN.1 COVID strain.

    Respondents on X shockingly weren’t buying it.

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    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 14:00

  • Lindsey Graham Urges Biden To Blow Iran "Off The Map" Over Red Sea Attacks
    Lindsey Graham Urges Biden To Blow Iran "Off The Map" Over Red Sea Attacks

    The recent spate of attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea by Iran-backed Houthis has resulted in more and more Congressional calls for the US military to act. Even after dozens of incidents, which have effectively closed the vital waterway to regular ship transit, the US Navy has not been authorized by the Biden administration to hit back directly on Houthi launch positions.

    Some Republican hawks are clamoring for confrontation with Tehran, also at a moment that Iran’s most powerful poxy in the region – Lebanese Hezbollah – is engaging in daily fire at Israel’s northern border. Sen. Lindsey Graham is leading the charge, urging for the Pentagon bomb Iran directly in response to the Houthi Red Sea attacks. In an appearance on Fox & Friends days ago, he went so far as to say Iranian bases and oil fields should be blown “off the map”. Watch: 

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    “Without Iran there are no Houthis,” he claimed in the Wednesday segment. “The Houthis are completely backed by Iran. I have been saying for six months now…hit Iran. They have oil fields out in the open, they have the Revolutionary Guard headquarters you can see from space. Blow it off the map.”

    Predictably, Graham also lashed out at the Biden administration for holding back, even as some Pentagon leaders have quietly complained they are being handcuffed in terms of an inability to respond:

    “We’re fighting the Houthis. We beat the Germans and the Japanese. We should be able to beat the Houthis. Secretary Austin and the Biden administration’s failing our troops in the field,” the Senator from South Carolina added.

    Graham has previously in the wake of the Oct.7 Hamas terror attacks advocated for Israel hitting back against Palestinian militants as hard as possible, controversially saying saying there’s “no limit” to how many civilians can be killed while trying to root out Hamas.

    Here’s what he told CNN at the end of October:

    CNN host: “Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government, in which the US would say, ‘Let’s hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties?’”

    Graham said: “No. If somebody asked us after world war two, ‘Is there a limit what would you do to make sure that Japan and Germany don’t conquer the world? Is there any limit what Israel should do to the people who are trying to slaughter the Jews?’”

    “The answer is no. There is no limit,” Graham emphasized at the time. He described also that he would like to see Israeli military planners “be smart” and “try to limit civilian casualties the best we can. Let’s put humanitarian aid in areas that protect the innocent. I’m all for that.” Since then, many more thousands of Gazan civilians have died, many of them children. 

    Commenting on the fresh Fox interview in which the senator essentially called for war with Iran, the outlet Citizen Free Press echoed what many are thinking, simply stating “Lindsey Graham is a maniac.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 13:25

  • AI Did It: Disbarred Michael Cohen Admits To Sending Fake Case Citations To Get Early Release From Supervision
    AI Did It: Disbarred Michael Cohen Admits To Sending Fake Case Citations To Get Early Release From Supervision

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Michael Cohen, former President Trump’s onetime fixer and lawyer, has admitted to a federal court that he was the source of fake case citations used to support his effort to end his supervised release from his earlier criminal convictions.

    He blamed Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the error, he also seemed to throw his own attorney under the bus for not checking his work.

    U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman was a bit peeved when his clerks checked the authority cited by Cohen, including such cases as “United States v. Figueroa-Flores, United States v. Ortiz and United States v. Amato.” None existed.

    In fairness, Cohen is not the first person to be burned by AI. Of course, critics have noted that the faux authority is perfectly consistent with Cohen’s legal career, which is a litany of misrepresentations and outright lies.

    Cohen now says that the culprit is Google Bard, an AI service, and that he was only the latest victim of AI invention.

    However, one of the most interesting aspects of the statement is that Cohen asks for understanding that he is only a layperson, not a lawyer.

    He was, of course, disbarred as a lawyer after pleading guilty various federal crimes.

    Cohen told the court:

    “As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not. Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”

    He then put part of the blame on his non-AI lawyer, David Schwartz, and emphasized that it was in the end Schwartz’ filing, not his:

    “It did not occur to me then and remains surprising to me now—that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed. I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz’s filing may have caused.”

    Cohen’s current counsel E. Danya Perry, asked that his client  “not suffer any collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s misstep.”

    The problems with AI are well-known, but so is Cohen’s checkered history with the courts.

    As I have previously written, Cohen has a long history of alleged lies and half-truths in dealing with the government or courts.

    In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to various charges, including tax evasion, campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and several banks to obtain campaign financing and was sentenced to three years in prison.

    He unsuccessfully sued Trump on the basis of a verbal contract that again put his own dubious veracity at issue.

    As noted in earlier proceedings in Manhattan, Cohen has continued to misrepresent his criminal background and, after assuring the court that he was remorseful for his crimes, was regularly going on the air to deny that he committed tax fraud and suggesting that he was railroaded by prosecutors.

    Prosecutors cited his numerous media appearances as containing false accounts of himself and his case: “while Cohen is free to write and say what he wants, he cannot simultaneously distance himself from his conduct on cable news, while cloaking himself in claims of acceptance of responsibility in court filings.”

    I became a critic of Cohen long before he broke with the President. He was a disgrace to the bar for years and Trump bears equal blame for retaining such a person as his legal representative.

    What Cohen lacked in legal skill, he made up for in a lack of ethical and professional standards.

    In 2015, students on The Harvard Lampoon played a harmless prank on Trump by having him sit in the stolen “president’s chair” from the Harvard Crimson for a photo. Cohen threatened the students with absolute ruination. He was quoted by a student on the Lampoon staff as saying: “I’m gonna come up to Harvard. You’re all gonna get expelled. If this photo gets out, you’ll be outta that school faster than you know it. I can be up there tomorrow.”

    On another occasion, after a journalist pursued a story he did not like, Cohen told the reporter that he should “tread very f—ing lightly because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting. Do you understand me?”

    Cohen remained Trump’s loyal attack dog until he was arrested and Trump refused to pardon him. That is when Cohen proved that when you scratch a lawyer, you can find a foe.

    Cohen has been gaming the system his entire career. He claimed urgent medical needs for release from prison. Of course, he previously claimed health problems in failing to appear to testify only to be spotted out on the town for a fancy dinner. Cohen previously (and implausibly) reinvented himself as a redemptive sinner and received financial support from Trump critics.  He continued that pattern after his conviction.

    Perry told Fox News Digital in a statement: “These filings—and the fact that he was willing to unseal them—show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong. He relied on his lawyer, as he had every right to do. Unfortunately, his lawyer appears to have made an honest mistake in not verifying the citations in the brief he drafted and filed.”

    A federal court previously denied early release after prosecutors claimed that Cohen has reformed little and is still misrepresenting facts. Submitting fake case authority is obviously not ideal in claiming the status of a changed man.

    The latest controversy is likely to be raised in the prosecution of Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg where Cohen is expected to be a key witness. The lack of authority, however, does not appear to be a detriment in that case which is pushing unprecedented legal claims. Time to call in the Google Bard?

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 12:50

  • Bankman-Fried Dodges Bribery Trial After Feds Drop Charges
    Bankman-Fried Dodges Bribery Trial After Feds Drop Charges

    Well look at that! Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried, who was found guilty in November on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, won’t face a second trial at all after feds told US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a Friday letter that in the ‘interest of expediency’ it would drop six charges related to SBF’s second trial – including conspiracy to bribe foreign officials, commit bank fraud and operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

    The reason? The Bahamas ‘has yet to consent’ to the fallen crypto king moving forward with the second batch of charges.

    “Proceeding with sentencing in March 2024 without the delay that would be caused by a second trial would advance the public’s interest in a timely and just resolution of the case,” reads the letter.

    Prosecutors said in the letter that the Bahamas, which extradited Bankman-Fried to face the original US charges, has yet to consent to the US going ahead with trying him on the additional charges. Such consent is required under treaty obligations but the former FTX chief executive officer launched a legal challenge in the Bahamas earlier this year, prompting the US to split the case in two.

    The government said much of the evidence that would be presented at a second trial was already introduced at Bankman-Fried’s original trial and can be considered by the judge at sentencing set for March 28. –Bloomberg

    SBF directed the transfer of FTX money to his affiliated hedge fund, Alameda Research, as well as for political donations, before both companies imploded into bankruptcy last year.

    This of course comes on the heels of the feds dropping campaign finance charges against him in July.

    Let’s recall…

    In short, prosecutors have ring-fenced SBF’s illegal activities involving public officials from his activities screwing over the public, for which he faces the possibility of decades in prison.  

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    “We don’t know how much more evidence you need to see how broken and corrupt all the three letter gov agencies are,” wrote @AutismCapital on X. “They drop the Sam trial, they’re bleeding out FTX claimants, people with BTC/SOL/ETH/whatever are being paid back the value AT THE TIME OF BANKRUPTCY rather than 4x’d current market value while they pocket the difference.

    “FTX bankruptcy lawyers are charging USURIOUS per hour rates to bleed the creditors dry!

    “They don’t want people digging into Sam’s campaign finance violation trial (WONDER WHY?) and SAM TRABUCCO got away with it COMPLETELY with the dropping of this upcoming trial.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 12/30/2023 – 12:15

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