Said he would drop drug charges against her in exchange for “favors”. Copblock
Further proof that the Drug War corrupts character on both sides of the badge, with the innocent being victimized by the scum that rises to power on either side of the law.
Of course, hostility towards Russia keeps NATO in business. Reuters
Spanish government tries to ban memes. A good political meme captures the essence of the ridiculousness of a situation involving a political parasite. The best ones, the most popular, are those memes that have viewers nodding their head while laughing, because that particular meme made plain the truth. A simple picture with a few words typed across it can turn the subject into a laughingstock, and in these days of instant social media, a good meme can tear through the cyberverse in seconds, and pretty soon everyone is laughing at Mr. or Mrs. corrupt so-and-so. Memes are powerful, which is why the corrupt fear them.
FBI may have distributed half of all child porn on dark web. 24 websites may have been FBI-run, and visitors’ computers were exposed to malware that sent information about them to government computers. Half.
Crime lab chemist confessed to falsifying evidence for over 8 years, putting 20,000 drug convictions in doubt. These people are still in jail as officials drag their feet. Unbelievable, yet all too believable.
Marijuana is the real winner of 2016. California weed will flow outward. 2016 is the extinction-level event for Prohibitionist dinosaurs.
Trump may pick a Bush-era torture architect to run the CIA: “Rodriguez, the former director of the National Clandestine Service, helped developed the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of “waterboarding,” the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees.”
When Politics Becomes Your Religion, from the wonderful Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. Everyone has seen political disagreements reach such a level of animosity that friendships and goodwill are utterly destroyed. All this over garbage candidates Trump and Hillary? Politics is poison.
Brainwashing Your Kids About Politics Is Not Healthy Or Cute. Everyone brainwashed into believing Presidential politics is somehow desperately relevant to their lives or the future of the country were either screaming in ecstasy or bawling their eyes out on Tuesday. They of course dragged their poor kids into the swirling emotional vortex. As a child, I never would’ve believed that adults would behave like this.
Did the EM Drive violate physics?
DEA prepares to ban synthetic opioid, U-47700, also known as “pink”
FBI documents show why ordinary Americans should worry about current surveillance practices
Government had plan to destroy evidence linking Agent Orange to sick vets
Canadian spy agency has been illegally collecting bulk data for over a decade, court finds
Arizona battling opioid epidemic with the same tactics that gave it the opioid epidemic
Polls point to a win for recreational marijuana in California, Massachusetts on Tuesday. After California, the dominos will fall. The only real concern should be the possible cartelization of the entire industry. Let free markets reign in legal marijuana.
Julian Assange will be questioned by Ecuador over rape charges
Cop and K9 “partner” kick, maul subdued man for over a minute (video)
The “Will of the People” is a Myth
“Impossible” EM Drive really works, according to leaked NASA paper
Wind farms may be killing 80,000 bats per year, according to British study
A watershed moment for marijuana legalization: “The really big advantage of ending marijuana prohibition is not the possible health benefits, but eliminating the harm caused by the arrest and imprisonment of many thousands of people, many of them poor and disadvantaged. The FBI estimates that some 643,000 people were arrested in for marijuana offenses in 2015, including some 574,000 for mere possession. While only a small minority of these arrests lead to prosecution, the arrests themselves can be traumatic and dangerous, and can end up damaging the educational and employment prospects of those targeted. Arrests also often unavoidably create confrontations in which suspects and police officers could be injured or (in rare cases) killed. Over 12,000 people are incarcerated for marijuana offenses in federal prison. I have not been able to locate good recent data on marijuana-related incarceration in state prisons. But the numbers are likely to be much higher. All of these arrests and incarcerations inflict serious harm on suspects, and expend vast amounts of law enforcement resources that could better be employed combating violent crime.”
Hillary’s expensive plan for ‘National Service’. Unleashing a vast, peacetime army of tax-subsidized flunkies, paid to promote loyalty to the State under the guise of patriotism or civic duty or whatever, would be nothing more than PR for a federal government that no one trusts any longer. And it reeks of fascism.
Rogue FBI Twitter bot dumps months of FOIAs
San Antonio cop fired for feeding actual crap sandwich to homeless man
Public schools are probably the gravest threat to privacy today. Taking hi-res photos, fingerprints, compiling detailed information on every student, bundling it up into a nice package, and then…what? Do you think that data will be protected from the Surveillance State’s massive databases?
Wonderful essay by Tom Palmer on Hayek “the Dangerous”: Hayek’s thinking, which is vast and sprawling and a joy to explore, represents a danger to all those who have great ideas for the remaking of society, for the enlistment of the masses in their great plans for authentic existence. Hayek’s individualism was not like Ayn Rand’s, which some have accused (perhaps very unfairly) of shading into a philosophy of superhuman power and thus of rule by the able over the rest of us, but is radically different: it is rooted in the limitations of human reason and the importance of evolved institutions of social cooperation.”
FBI director Comey stands by previous conclusion that Hillary didn’t break the law. Got through those 650,000 emails quickly, huh?
Google has quietly dropped the ban on personally-identifiable web tracking
Researchers develop glasses that can fool facial recognition software
Bill Weld gives up on his ticket, shills for Hillary. Every choice voters have this election season is a hideous one.
Tulsa cop arrested for violating protective order against her
The top-10 reasons to vote YES on marijuana legalization. Read the entire article, all good reasons. One of my favorites is the return of industrial hemp in the US. The ban on industrial hemp is utterly ridiculous, and economically damaging. As Ron Paul said, to get high off of hemp, you’d have to smoke a joint the size of a telephone pole.
The US is pretty terrible at fighting the Drug War abroad, too. Recent evidence: opium production is up 43% in Afghanistan. That’s after throwing $12 billion at a war against poppy fields. Now, Afghanistan produces 80% of the world’s opium, the majority of which is distilled into heroin.
Police arrest more people for marijuana use than for all violent crimes COMBINED. A month old, but it’s necessary to be reminded of the nature of the Drug War, which is nothing more than a jobs program that artificially provides “work” for a bloated, militarized police force. Take away Prohibition and cops would have very little to do, and very little power with which to do it.
Podesta emails reveal Clinton camp’s close ties to environmental Left: “Podesta’s emails reveal a collusive, quid-pro-quo relationship between the Clinton campaign and national environmental groups. They show a disturbing and unusual level of access to power for billionaire donors like Steyer and Simons, and that Bernie Sanders never really stood a chance at getting the endorsement of prominent environmental groups. The emails also reveal attempts to silence academics and discourage the production of oil and gas resources. Lastly, the emails show the political calculus behind forming the Clinton campaign’s policy positions.”
Sleepwalking into a new Cold War, Pentagon-style. From the Ron Paul Institute. The Warfare State has a multi-trillion dollar plan that only a trumped-up war with Russia could justify.
Police have killed 897 people in the United States in 2016 so far, according to The Guardian‘s invaluable database, The Counted.
Amazon has already patented a drone that will work with police. And of course it will be armed with a nice real-time facial recognition camera, capturing and storing everything the police wish it to.
Cop gives thumbs-up as he poses with overdose victim for picture.
Google reveals it received secret FBI subpoena, known as a National Security Letter, in the first half of 2015. NSLs come with an automatic gag order, that may eventually be lifted by the government, or never lifted at all: “Government watchdogs have criticized the FBI for abusing national security letters multiple times over the years — for restricting First Amendment protected speech, failing to provide enough evidence to make the requests, and targeting a massive number of Americans without notifying them or giving them the chance for redress. The provisions in the Freedom Act were meant to address some concerns — including what many have argued are unconstitutionally lengthy gag orders.”
Koch Bros. fund pro-surveillance, pro-war Senate candidates
Pipeline activist shot with rubber bullet while being interviewed on-camera
Drunken cop caught on video beating his K9 partner outside a casino. The cop was given “administrative leave”, or as the article points out, paid vacation, for the badged, subhuman piece of garbage you see in the video. He was eventually fired, only to be reinstated in late October. The judge argued that it was only his first offense, thereby putting citizens in danger from a confirmed violent, alcoholic criminal. But, then again, cops don’t really mind violence against dogs at all, do they?
Speaking of marijuana, California will almost certainly legalize recreational pot on November 8th.
Jeffrey Tucker makes a convincing case for allowing children to work again: “A century ago, we invented a system that imagined children as civic soldiers. Kids bolted to chairs with absolutely no skin in the game have abstract “information” pounded into their heads by tax-paid instructors who teach from state-approved books.
We push these kids through the system and deny them any chance to realize their human value in gainful employment in a community of productivity and real learning. Then we tell them to scrape together $100,000 for yet another degree that will somehow gain them entry into the workforce, but all these demoralized and cynical kids end up with is an empty CV and 15 years of debt.”
Would President Trump free Julian Assange? Justin Raimondo ponders. (I remain doubtful)
FBI opens investigation into one of its own Twitter accounts
Contrary to the rising cacophony of political opinion, this is the least-important election of our lifetime, says Daniel Harsanyi
How to block the ultrasonic signals you didn’t know were tracking you: “The technology, called ultrasonic cross-device tracking, embeds high-frequency tones that are inaudible to humans in advertisements, web pages, and even physical locations like retail stores. These ultrasound “beacons” emit their audio sequences with speakers, and almost any device microphone—like those accessed by an app on a smartphone or tablet—can detect the signal and start to put together a picture of what ads you’ve seen, what sites you’ve perused, and even where you’ve been. Now that you’re sufficiently concerned, the good news is that at the Black Hat Europe security conference on Thursday, a group based at University of California, Santa Barbara will present an Android patch and a Chrome extension that give consumers more control over the transmission and receipt of ultrasonic pitches on their devices.”
Colorado cannabis industry outperforms all other industries in the state: 18,000 cannabis-related jobs created in 2015, over $1 billion in sales.
Sheldon Adelson fights marijuana legalization while funding pro-marijuana research
The Internet of Things is a Cyberwar Nightmare
Obamacare’s Chickens Come Home to Roost
Outrage over rising drug prices is devastating Big Pharma’s bottom line
Libertarians finally fed up with Bill Weld
How Hillary Clinton Poisons American Politics: Justin Raimondo ably explains the grim consequences of anti-Russian fearmongering.
Because their current “cyber defences” are in shambles. Ars Technica