Desperate Developer Offers Free Tesla With Purchase Of New Vancouver House
Vancouver real estate has been one of the world’s weakest luxury markets for the last 12 months. The city, once a mecca for foreign money and skyrocketing home prices, is now seeing real estate developers panic as homes go unsold, that is why one firm is now offering free Teslas to attract millennial homebuyers with the purchase of a new condominium and or townhouse in the Metro Vancouver area, reported CTV News Vancouver.
“For every home you purchase we’re going to include a free Tesla,” said Celia Chiu, sales manager for Viridian Homes.
Viridian is an upscale townhome community in South Surrey, British Columbia. It resides overlooking Nicomekl River, with over 57 townhomes in the neighborhood.
Developer Century Group has sold 47 out of the 57 homes, and the last remaining ten will be offered with a free Tesla Model 3.
Chiu said the unsold homes have been on the market for at least one year, but the community has “been around for two years and with a market having kind of a subtle stall, we wanted to take it to the next level” and attract millennials.
Each of the 57 homes has about 2,000 square feet of living space and a price tag of more than a million dollars.
The promotion kicked off last week and will continue through Oct. 21, or until the ten homes are sold.
“An incentive like this does have to have a wow factor,” Chiu added.
Each home with the Tesla promotion will include a charging station in the garage, something Century Group president Sean Hodgins said in a press release reflects the project’s “innovative design with energy-efficient capabilities.”
With Metro Vancouver area home prices plunging -13.6% YoY in 2Q19, developers have been offering innovative promotions to attract millennial homebuyers.
Earlier this year, Woodbridge Home offered millennials free avocado toast for a year if they bought a home in the Kira development in West Coquitlam.
Wesgroup Properties offered young homebuyers a glass of wine per day for a year if they purchased a home at MODE in South Vancouver.
Real estate agent Gurdial Badh told CTV News Vancouver that the promotions are unique. “Either there are promotions or a price reduction to come in line with what the market is today,” Badh said.
Since the market has been soft this year, prices have dropped, but sales have started to rise.
“We’re seeing a lot more activity on the lower range and once the low range starts moving then obviously it will have an impact on the higher price range properties,” said Badh.
To support the ailing real estate industry, Badh said the government needs to intervene and do more to assist first-time homebuyers.
“The main thing I think the government needs to do is help these first-time buyers,” he said, with the hope the market will turn back up.
And when real estate developers overbuild into a market that is shifting lower, they will do pretty desperate things to attract new homebuyers, such as offering Teslas, and or even avocados and free wine.
Ryan Murphy, an economist at Southern Methodist University, recently published a working paper in which he ranked each of the states by the predominance of—there’s no nice way to put it—psychopaths. The winner? Washington in a walk. In fact, the capital scored higher on Murphy’s scale than the next two runners-up combined.
“I had previously written on politicians and psychopathy, but I had no expectation D.C. would stand out as much as it does,” Murphy wrote in an email…
On a national level, it raises the troubling question as to what it means to live in a country whose institutions are set up to reward some very dubious human traits. Like it or not, we’re more likely than not to wind up with some alarming personalities in positions of power.
One of the most frustrating aspects of modern American politics – and the culture in general – is our all encompassing fixation on the superficial. It’s also one of the main reasons I have very little interest in presidential politics, which basically consists of a bunch of billionaire friendly puppets auditioning to become the next public face of imperial oligarchy. Though I understand the desire for quick fixes, our focus on highlighting and mitigating only the symptoms of societal decay as opposed to the root causes, ensures we’ll never achieve the sort of positive paradigm-level shift necessary to bring humankind forward.
The truth of the matter is incentives rule the world, and if we look at some of the most pernicious and predatory areas of our socio-economic reality, including (but not limited to) the financial sector, the defense industry, intelligence agencies and healthcare, we find a slew of incentives that handsomely reward sociopathic behavior, while penalizing ethical, conscious action beneficial to society at large. Notice it’s always the whistleblowers who end up imprisoned or hunted down.
In the economic realm, if we think about the idea of a competitive free market, the primary reason the profit incentive exists and is widely accepted is the implicit understanding that people should be incentivized to create a product or service that benefits the public at large. While we still have remnants of this at play within the modern U.S. economy, much of the “wealth” attained these days is a direct consequence of rent-seeking, parasitic behavior and corruption of one kind or another. The reason is pretty simple. It’s incentivized.
When you have a financial fraud crime spree like the one witnessed earlier this century and your response is to bail out the criminals and ensure no executives go to jail, it’s essentially a gigantic bell ringing in the ears of every scoundrel on the planet. It’s open season for sociopaths. The Obamas weren’t super wealthy when Barack became President, yet they’re now worth an estimated $40 million (likely more given the size of their real estate purchases). The same thing happened to the Clintons. They’ve reportedly earned $240 million since Lolita express frequent flier Bill left office.
The most surefire way to succeed in America today is to be a high-functioning sociopath who scratches the backs of other high-functioning sociopaths. As such, the most pressing problem at a root level is that our economy and society incentivizes sociopathic behavior by systematically funneling sociopaths into positions of unaccountable power. If this sounds insane it’s because it is. The very structure of how our society functions is in fact insane.
These are the people running the show. They infect every country, every industry, every government. All the halls of power. Until we figure out a way to marginalize humanity’s sociopaths rather than hand them the reins of power globally, we’ll continue to repeat the current pointless, destructive cycle.
Yes, the recurrent problem is a very small percentage of sociopaths in society always get into power.
For a better future, we need to create systems that are specifically built to be resistant to this sort of takeover. https://t.co/9VS3jVkJFo
I’m certain the current mainstream political discussion in the U.S. isn’t serious because so few people are focused on the structure of society itself. There’s very little focus on incentives, on the fact that our entire economy functions as a promotion mechanism for sociopaths. No amount of tinkering around the edges is going to dramatically transform the human experience into something more positive until we figure out a way to make society itself resistant to sociopath takeover.
Significantly, one of the most in your face examples of sociopath dominance relates to imperial military policy, which has nothing to do with national defense and everything to do with national offense. It’s simply about utilizing state murder to advance power and profit for a few. The incentives are completely backwards, which is why it never gets better.
There are few things a human being can do more evil and depraved than lying a nation into war, yet that’s precisely what the proponents of the Iraq war did. More significantly, what consequences have befallen the proponents of that war? Increased fame and fortune in most cases. In fact, one of them is currently the leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination for President.
When you incentivize murderous behavior, you get more of it. Those who stand to benefit most from war should also have the most to lose, but our current system functions in the exact opposite way.
If every country in the world did this, large scale wars might disappear entirely. https://t.co/zdcJ8EEBIs
All that said, perhaps the most concerning instance of perverse incentives in society today can be found in the relationship between the national security state and average citizens. The way it works, and it’s rapidly getting worse, is you the individual have zero right to privacy while the national security state can classify what the CIA director ate for lunch. Those with the most power are subject to the least transparency, while the powerless masses are subject to mass surveillance. This unaccountable, authoritarian structure will continue to ensure the worst people alive end up in the highest echelons of power. What self-respecting sociopath wouldn’t be attracted to a system where you get to exercise total dominance over hundreds of millions of people with zero accountability? It’s like bees to honey.
If you build a house with a bad foundation you’re going to have problems. The same thing can be said about civilizations. We need to admit we live a world that incentivizes the worst amongst us to attain all meaningful positions of power.
Begging a sociopath for scraps of food might help you survive another day, but it won’t result in sustainable long-term progress. We need to see sociopaths for the societal cancer they are and completely reorient our incentive structure in order to reward conscious, cooperative behavior as opposed to ruthless parasitism. Change the incentives and you’ll change the outcome.
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“It Is Ours!” Indian Minister Says Islamabad About To “Lose Pakistani-occupied Kashmir”
A top Indian official has put Islamabad on notice, saying India’s nuclear-armed neighbor “should be ready to lose Pakistani-occupied Kashmir,”in perhaps the most provocative statement yet since New Delhi’s revoking its own administered Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) historic autonomy on August 5.
Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani was quoted by local media as making the inflammatory statement, saying—
“Now, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) too is ours … For fulfilling the dream of united India, we are ready to move forward for PoK.”
“Article 370 has been revoked. Now, Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) too is ours. Pakistan should be ready to lose PoK. For fulfilling the dream of united India, we are ready to move forward for PoK… Pakistan should stop supporting terrorism… India will not tolerate this,” he asserted while speaking at a political rally, according to India Today.
And further referencing the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war in which Bangladesh was liberated, the Chief Minister responded to recent statements by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan. “Pakistan was boasting of occupying Delhi in 1971 but they were about to lose Karachi. Bangladesh was partitioned. Their Army became our refugees,” he said.
This comes after Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi warned last week that the situation on the Line of Control (LoC) in the Jammu and Kashmir region continues to deteriorate and risks sparking an “accidental war,”as reported in the Hindustan Times.
Qureshi was speaking on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last Wednesday. He told journalists that Pakistan and India “understand the consequences of a conflict”. But he added that “an accidental war” cannot be ruled out. “… If the situation persists … then anything is possible,” he said.
Since the 1947 partition of British India, both countries — now bitter nuclear-armed rivals — have laid claim to Kashmir in full, though a tense status quo has left each with its side of the LoC.
After the Indian revocation of Article 370 to its constitution last month, tens of thousands of additional Indian troops have poured into J&K, putting the restive border region further on edge.
Pakistani officials previously claimed nothing less than an Indian-sponsored “genocide” is being carried out against Kashmiri Muslims on the Indian side of the LoC amid the sweeping security crackdown.
If indeed India is ready to “move forward” to “reclaim” the Pakistani side of the LoC, all-out war would no doubt be inevitable.
There’s a bit of news in the case of Jeffrey Epstein. He’s the convicted sex offender who somehow managed to commit suicide in a New York jail last month while he was supposed to be under close watch.
My public information request about his death – has been formally denied.
Shortly after Epstein died in August, I filed a Freedom of Information request for public documents about his injuries and medical care for both the day he died and earlier, in July, when he reportedly attempted suicide.
Members of the public and press are entitled to review documents and communications generated and collected by federal agencies and officials because– we own them. However, federal agencies often delay, obstruct and resist the release of such documents.
Guidance from FOI court cases and the executive branch indicates that federal agencies are supposed to make every effort to release as much information as possible– and at least partial information if exemptions are at play.
In the case of the Epstein documents I requested, the federal Bureau of Prisons responded by stating that it is withholding all of the documents entirely.
The Bureau cites six exemptions, including that releasing the information “could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of an(y) individual.”
One of the exceptions cited by the Bureau of Prisons in withholding all information related to Jeffrey Epstein.
The Bureau of Prisons invited me to keep refiling in the future to see if the status changes.
The FBI is said to be investigating how jail authorities missed Epstein committing the act of suicide in their custody while awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges.
Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which experienced three massive meltdowns in 2011, is running out of room to store radioactive water. No surprise! But now, what to do about phosphorescent water?
Addressing the issue, Japan’s environmental minister Yoshiaki Harada held a news conference (September 2019). Unfortunately, he proffered the following advice: “The only option will be to drain it into the sea and dilute it.” (Source: Justin McCurry in Tokyo, Fukushima: Japan Will Have to Dump Radioactive Water Into Pacific, Minister Says, The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2019)
“The only option”… Really?
Over the past 8 years, Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) has scrambled like a Mad Hatter to construct emergency storage tanks (1,000) to contain upwards of one million tonnes of contaminated radioactive water, you know, the kind of stuff that, over time, destroys human cells, alters DNA, causes cancer, or produces something like the horrific disfigured creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing! That’s the upshot of a triple nuclear meltdown that necessitates constant flow of water to prevent further melting of reactor cores that have been decimated and transfigured into corium or melted blobs. It’s the closest to a full-blown “china syndrome” in all of human history. Whew! Although, the truth is it’ll be a dicey situation for decades to come.
Ever since March 11, 2011, TEPCO has scrambled to build storage tanks to prevent massive amounts of radioactive water from pouring into the ocean (still, some lesser amounts pour into the ocean every day by day). Now the government is floating a trial balloon in public that, once the tanks are full, it’ll be okay to dump the radioactive water into the ocean. Their logic is bizarre, meaning, on the one hand, the meltdown happens, and they build storage tanks to contain the radioactive water, but on the other hand, once the storage tanks run out of space, it’s okay to dump radioactive water into the ocean. Seriously?
Meantime, the Fukushima meltdown brings the world community face to face with TEPCO and the government of Japan in an unprecedented grand experiment that, so far, has failed miserably. Of course, dumping radiation into the Pacific is like dumping radiation into everybody’s back yard. But, for starters, isn’t that a non-starter?
Along the way, deceit breeds duplicity, as the aforementioned Guardian article says the Japanese government claims only one (1) death has been associated with the Fukushima meltdown but keep that number in mind. Reliable sources in Japan claim otherwise, as explained in previous articles on the subject, for example, “Fukushima Darkness, Part Two” d/d November 24, 2017, and as highlighted further on in this article.
When it comes to nuclear accidents, cover-ups reign supreme; you can count on it.
As such, it is believed the Japanese government is lying and should be held accountable for hoodwinking the world about the ravages of Fukushima, especially with the Olympics scheduled for next year.
For example, the following explains how death by radiation is shamefully hidden from the public via newspeak: Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station worker deaths “that expire at home” are not officially counted. Accordingly, how many workers on a deathbed with radiation sickness leave home to go to work (where deaths are counted) just before they die? Oh, please!
Meanwhile, the last thing the world community needs in the face of an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown, like Fukushima, is deceptiveness and irresponsibility by the host government. Too much is at stake for that kind of childish nonsense. And just to think, the 2020 Olympics are scheduled with events held in Fukushima. Scandalously, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is A-Okay with that.
In contrast, a Greenpeace International March 8th 2019 article entitled: Japanese Government Misleading UN on Impact of Fukushima Fallout on Children, Decontamination Workers:
“The Japanese government is deliberately misleading United Nations human rights bodies and experts over the ongoing nuclear crisis in areas of Fukushima… In areas where some of these decontamination workers are operating, the radiation levels would be considered an emergency if they were inside a nuclear facility.” Enough said!
“In its reporting to the United Nations, the Japanese government deliberately misrepresents the scale, complexity, and radiation risks in areas of Fukushima, the working practice and conditions for workers, and its disregard for children’s health and wellbeing. This reality should shame the government to radically change its failing policies,” said Kazue Suzuki, Energy Campaigner of Greenpeace Japan.
As such, either Greenpeace or the IOC is “dead wrong” about the conditions at Fukushima. Take your pick.
After all, the trend of misrepresentation of nuclear accidents has been established for decades.
Not only Fukushima, Chernobyl (1986) is a nuclear disaster zone where the “official death count from radiation exposure” has been considerably discounted by various governmental agencies and NGOs. For inexplicable reasons (actually explicable but a long story), nuclear accidents are given Get Out Jail Free cards by the world’s press and associated governmental orgs and NGOs.
Yet, over time, the truth comes out, and when it does it’s dreadfully atrocious:
A BBC special report, The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster d/d July 26, 2019 says: “The official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster.”
That’s the official tally. Ugh! It’s so far off the mark that, if it were a baseball pitch, it’d be in the dirt, and a prime example of the public not getting the truth about the ravages of nuclear power accidents.
Of course, it is important to take note of how “wordsmiths” describe the death numbers, i.e., “died as an immediate result of Chernobyl” can only include someone standing at the site when it happened, leaving out all cases of radiation exposure that kills and cripples over subsequent days, months, and years. Or, in the case of the UN statement, “only 50 deaths can be directly attributed.” Only those standing there when it happened… ahem!
According to the BBC article, the Russian Academy of Sciences said as many as 112,000-125,000 died by 2005. That’s 2,500xs more deaths than the official reports, which also never increase in number over time as radiation takes its merry ole time blasting, destroying, and/or altering human cell structure. Ukrainian authorities claim death rates of Chernobyl cleanup workers rose from 3.5 to 17.5 deaths per 1,000 between 1988 and 2012 on a database of 651,453 cleanup workers, which equates to 11,392 deaths. Additionally, Belarus had 99,693 cleanup workers, equating to 1,732 deaths. Not only that, disability among workers shows that approximately 5% are still healthy in 2012 (only 5%, meaning 95% unhealthy) with commonality of cardiovascular and circulatory diseases and nervous system problems.
By 2008 in Belarus alone 40,049 liquidators or cleanup workers of Chernobyl were registered with cancer.
Viktor Sushko, deputy director general of the National Research Centre for Radiation Medicine (NRCRM) based in Kiev, Ukraine, describes the Chernobyl disaster as: “The largest anthropogenic disaster in the history of humankind,” Ibid.
Thus begging the most obvious of questions re Fukushima victims in the years ahead; how many cases of cancer, and how many will die? Unfortunately, radioactive isotopes don’t stop once they’re activated in a nuclear meltdown. They’re pernicious over time destroying and/or grotesquely altering human cell structure. For proof, visit second-generation Chernobyl children locked up in orphanages in Belarus.
“As of January 2018, 1.8 million people in Ukraine, including 377,589 children, carried status of victims of the disaster, according to Sushko and his colleagues. Not only that, there has been a rapid increase in the number of people with disabilities, rising from 40,106 in 1995 to 107,115 in 2018,” Ibid.
According to a USA Today article – Chernobyl’s Legacy: Kids With Bodies Ravaged by Disaster, April 17, 2016: “There are 2,397,863 people registered with Ukraine’s health ministry to receive ongoing Chernobyl-related health care. Of these, 453,391 are children — none born at the time of the accident. Their parents were children in 1986. These children have a range of illnesses: respiratory, digestive, musculoskeletal, eye diseases, blood diseases, cancer, congenital malformations, genetic abnormalities, trauma.” Many of the children are hidden away deep in the forested countryside in orphanages in Belarus.
Back to Fukushima, there are numerous instances of governmental meddling to hide the truth, starting with passage of the 2013 government secrecy act, The State Secrecy Law, aka: Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets (SDS), Act No. 108, which says that civil servants or others who “leak secrets” will face up to 10 years in prison, and those who “instigate leaks,” especially journalists, will be subject to a prison term of up to 5 years. Subsequently, Japan fell below Serbia and Botswana in the Reporters Without Borders 2014 World Press Freedom Index.
Horrifically, at the end of the day, when nuclear goes bad, it takes everyone along on a daunting trip for years and years and more years, outliving life spans but continuing generation after generation, like the 453,391 Chernobyl-radiated-influence children born after the nuclear blowout in 1986. Chernobyl altered their genes before they were born…. Imagine that!
Cliodhna Russell visited children’s orphanages in Belarus in 2014: “Children rocking back and forth for hours on end, hitting their heads against walls, grinding their teeth, scraping their faces and putting their hands down their throats.” (Source: How My Trip to a Children’s Mental Asylum in Belarus Made Me Proud to be Irish, the journal.ie, March 18, 2014.)
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Postscript: “It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that, but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it,” Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba (Fukushima Prefecture) Fukushima Disaster: Tokyo Hides Truth as Children Die, Become Ill from Radiation – Ex-Mayor, RT News, April 21, 2014)
Post-Postscript: “The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in a town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers; others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside,” (Source: Mari Yamaguchi, Fukushima ‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned, AP & ABC News, Minamisona, Japan, March 10, 2016)
It seems finding a new multi-billion-dollar greater-fool is harder than you – or Masayoshi Son – thinks.
As Softbank scrambles to support/beg/ponzi its stake in WeWork within its massive Vision Fund, Bloomberg reports that the fund’s biggest backers – largely middle-eastern sovereign wealth funds – are reconsidering how much to commit to its next investment vehicle. As Bloomberg details:
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the first fund’s biggest backer with $45 billion, is now only planning to reinvest profits from that vehicle into the second fund, according to people familiar with the talks.
Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co., which invested $15 billion, is considering paring its future commitment to below $10 billion, the people said, asking not to be identified in disclosing internal deliberations.
Any signs of doubt among these massive investors would make fundraising for SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son’s Vision Fund 2.0 increasingly difficult.
However, before we write Masayohsi Son’s epitaph, Bloomberg notes that a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian wealth fund declined to comment. Mubadala said discussions are continuing on whether or not any investment will take place. Additionally, a spokesman for Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund, said “the suggestion we have made any decisions on the size or timing of a potential investment is simply unfounded.”
However, The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund wasn’t planning to be a significant investor in the new fund but may still make a more modest commitment.
Given that the American people have been inculcated with the notion that they are a free people who live under limited government, whatever the federal government does is considered part and parcel of a free society. Sometimes it’s helpful to examine what totalitarian regimes do in order to bring a sense of reality to Americans.
Most every American would agree that China is not a free society. It is ruled by a brutal unelected communist totalitarian regime that will suppress any dissent that is considered to be potential threat to the regime’s monopoly control over the political process. So, we can safely use China as a model for a tyrannical regime.
A few weeks ago, 28-year-old Simon Cheng, a Chinese citizen from Hong Kong crossed the border and entered mainland China, where he was arrested. The Chinese authorities apparently suspect him of involvement in the recent protests that have occurred in Hong Kong. No one has heard from him since. He has disappeared into the bowels of China’s communist criminal justice system.
According to a New York Times article about the incident, “Under Chinese law, suspects held for administration detention can be held for up to 15 days without court hearings or access to lawyers.” Regardless of what the law technically says, however, the Chinese authorities can and do hold suspects for much longer periods of time, sometimes indefinitely. The reason is there is no independent judiciary to require them to release a person. The Chinese judiciary is subservient to the ruling regime and defers to its authority.
Moreover, the regime can and does torture prisoners. Again, there is nothing anyone can do to prevent this. The torture is oftentimes so brutal that some independent minded, courageous individuals who were were protesting come out of the prison process as broken people, ones whose minds have been fixed through brutal and tortuous reeducation.
Before the 9/11 attacks, that sort of thing could not happen here in the United States, at least not legally. If the government arrested someone, it was required to file formal written charges (e.g., an indictment) that would notify the person of what he was being charged with. He also would be entitled to a jury trial instead of judge trial or a tribunal trial. He had the right to an attorney to represent him. He also had a right to an independent judge. And no cruel and unusual punishments, such as torture. That’s all because our American ancestors had the wisdom to guarantee such rights in the Bill of Rights.
What if U.S. officials did to someone what the Chinese government has done to Simon Cheng. In that event, the Constitution enables him to file a petition for writ of habeas corpus, a right that stretches back several centuries in English history and which actually is a lynchpin of a free society. An independent federal judge orders the government to bring the person to court and show cause why he should not be released. At the habeas hearing, the judge orders the government to charge the person with a crime or release him. No indefinite detention, like there is China. And of course no torture.
All that came to an end with the 9/11 attacks. At that point, the national-security branch of the federal government adopted many of the same powers as the Chinese communist regime, and without any amendment to the Constitution. The military and the CIA, two of the principal elements of the national-security state, now wield the power to take anyone, including both Americans and foreigners, into military or CIA custody by simply labeling them a “terrorist,” hold them as long as they want in a military dungeon or secret CIA prison camp, torture them, and even assassinate them. While Americans still have the right to file a petition for habeas corpus, federal judges will customarily defer to the Pentagon and the CIA on their determination that a person poses a threat to “national security.”
This is what all too many Americans still don’t realize — that U.S. officials used the 9/11 attacks to destroy the freedom of the American people by adopting the same type of totalitarian powers that are wielded by the Chinese communist regime and other totalitarian regimes.
Want another example? As those of you who have been reading my articles for some time know, I have continually emphasized that America’s system of immigration controls has brought into existence a police state in the American Southwest. As part of this system, federal officials have been requiring American citizens to turn over cellphones and disclose their passwords so that officials can retrieve all of the information on the cellphone and make a copy of it. No warrant. No probable cause or even reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Just raw omnipotent power to search the cellphone and, for that matter, the American citizen himself, including body cavities.
Now consider this excerpt from the NYT article:
Chinese border officers have stepped up checks on people crossing the border from Hong Kong. They have begun routinely searching the phones of people who enter the mainland from Hong Kong, apparently to identify people sympathetic to the protest movement and to prevent photographs or other information about the demonstrations from spreading to the mainland.
This is what all too many Americans simply will not permit themselves to consider: that the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state ended up destroying their liberty and their privacy. Oh sure, Americans can easily recognize tyranny abroad but they just are unable to recognize it at home. At home, they see the tyranny as “freedom” and, even worse, express gratitude for it. Unfortunately, all too many Americans reflect the words of Johann Goethe: None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Russia Absolutely Pwn3d The FBI During Obama Years: Report
Shortly before the Obama administration approved a deal granting Russia 20% of America’s uranium, US intelligence agencies discovered that the Kremlin had “dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams,” according to Yahoo News, which interviewed 50 current and former intelligence and national security officials.
In September 2011, Vladimir Putin announced the launch of his third presidential campaign, only to be confronted during the following months by tens of thousands of protesters accusing him of electoral fraud. Putin, a former intelligence officer, publicly accused then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of fomenting the unrest.
It was around this time that Putin’s spies in the United States, operating under diplomatic cover, achieved what a former senior intelligence official called a “stunning” technical breakthrough, demonstrating their relentless focus on the country they’ve long considered their primary adversary. –Yahoo News
Here are the core claims:
Around 2012, US officials realized that Russians had massively breached the FBI’s communications – including “hacking into computers not connected to the internet,” and compromising the FBI teams’ “cellphones outfitted with “push-to-talk” walkie-talkie capabilities” used as backup communications devices.
“Russians were able to intercept, record and eventually crack the codes to FBI radio communications.”
The intelligence allowed Russian spies in American cities “including Washington, New York and San Francisco” key insights into how FBI surveillance teams were operating.
The intercepted communications likely contained the “actual substance of FBI communications,” and “opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers.“
“Mobile listening posts” were deployed in which “Some Russian intelligence officers, carrying signals intelligence gear, would walk near FBI surveillance teams. Others drove vans full of listening equipment aimed at intercepting FBI teams’ communications.”
The Russians could only crack “moderately encrypted communications,” not the strongest types of encryption employed by the US government for sensitive transmissions.
After the breach was discovered, the FBI switched back to encrypted radios – and “expensive venture” according to one former counterintelligence official.
The revelations caused the CIA to curtail certain types of communications with overseas sources, and “had to resort to a whole series of steps” to prevent Russian eavesdropping.
The Russians primarily operated out of government compounds in Maryland and New York – both shuttered by the Obama administration in response to 2016 election hacking allegations – played a central role in the espionage. They were “basically being used as signals intelligence facilities,” according to the report – citing a former senior national security official.
How did this happen?
According to the report: “A former senior counterintelligence official blamed the compromises on a “hodgepodge of systems” ineffective beyond the line of sight. “The infrastructure that was supposed to be built, they never followed up, or gave us the money for it,” said the former official. “The intelligence community has never gotten an integrated system.”
The limitations of the radio technology, said the former senior officials, led the FBI’s surveillance personnel to communicate on the backup systems.
“Eventually they switched to push-to-talk cellphones,” said a former counterintelligence executive. “The tech guys would get upset by that, because if they could intercept radio, they might be able to intercept telephones.”
That is indeed what happened. Those devices were then identified and compromised by Russian intelligence operatives. (A number of other countries’ surveillance teams — including those from hostile services — also transitioned from using radios to cellphones during this time, noted another former official.)”
Fallout and damage control
In addition to embarking on sweeping and expensive technology upgrades, ‘unnerved’ US officials scrambled to shore up holes in our security – switching back to encrypted radios – an “expensive venture.”
Once the compromises of FBI communications devices were confirmed, U.S. officials scrambled to minimize the exposure of mobile surveillance team operations, quickly putting countermeasures in place, according to former senior officials. There was a “huge concern” about protecting the identities of the individuals on the teams — an elite, secret group — said the former senior counterintelligence official. U.S. officials also conducted a damage assessment and repeatedly briefed select White House officials and members of Congress about the compromise. –Yahoo News
“Anytime you find out that an adversary has these capabilities, it sets off a ripple effect,” said one former senior national security official. “The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given technology. … They are singularly dangerous in this area.”
Mark Kelton, who served as the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA until he retired in 2015, declined to discuss specific Russian operations, but he told Yahoo News that “the Russians are a professionally proficient adversary who have historically penetrated every American institution worth penetrating.”
This remains a core worry for U.S. spy hunters. The number of ongoing espionage investigations into U.S. government personnel — at the CIA, the FBI and elsewhere — including those potentially recruited by Russia, “is not a little, it’s a lot,” said another former senior counterintelligence official. –Yahoo News
What’s more, FBI officials were concerned that some of its assets had been compromised – consequently cutting off contact with some of its Russian sources.
Meanwhile, some of the FBI’s Russian sources stopped cooperating with their American handlers. “There were a couple instances where a recruited person had said, ‘I can’t meet you anymore,” revealed a former senior intelligence official.
“We didn’t understand that they were at political war with us already in the second term once Putin was reelected and Obama himself was reelected,” said Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, Evelyn Farkas (of “spilling the beans” Russiagate fame).
San Diego State University is teaching students that pedophilia could merely be considered to be an alternative “sexual orientation.”
“An actual topic we discussed in class today at a State University after watching an 8 minute Vice News video showcasing self identified pedophiles. This is going to be mainstreamed,” tweeted Alex Mazzara.
The photo shows a presentation slide entitled ‘Pedophilia as a Sexual Orientation’.
An actual topic we discussed in class today at a State University after watching an 8 minute Vice News video showcasing self identified pedophiles. This is going to be mainstreamed. pic.twitter.com/y4WJATXz08
It suggests that embracing pedophilia as an alternative sexual orientation could be part of the “acceptance of diverse sexual identities.”
The VICE video showcasing pedophiles may well have been their platforming of Todd Nickerson, a self confessed pedophile.
VICE’s article about Nickerson sympathetically portrayed him, an individual who openly admits wanting to molest children, as a victim of right-wing “vigilantes”.
Conservatives have been warning for years that the ultimate endgame of every fetish, gender identity and sexuality being not merely tolerated but endorsed would eventually be the mainstreaming of pedophilia.
We are now not far away from that very eventuality.
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Trump Seethes At NYT; Demands Resignation Of All Involved In “Kavanaugh SMEAR Story” And “Russian Witch Hunt Hoax”
President Trump called for the resignation of everybody involved in a deceptive New York Times report containing a new sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh – while failing to mention that the alleged victim denies any memory of it, and that of the seven people who claim to have heard the story – just one of them recalls hearing that Kavanaugh’s was the penis in question.
As we reported earlier Monday, while digging into an unsupported allegation by a woman named Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh waved his penis in her face during the 1983-1984 academic year at Yale, the Times‘s Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly claimed to have uncovered another alleged incident in which Kavanaugh’s penis was thrust into a female student’s hand.
A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.) –New York Times
However in their new book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation“- which the article was basically a promo for at Kavanaugh’s expense – the two yellow-journalists note that the woman has no memory of the incident.
NYT Reporters’ essay about a supposed second Yale incident omitted their own book reporting that completely undercuts it: alleged victim denies any memory of it. Journalistically indefensible, though gullible additional reporters are spreading it of course.
After The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemmingway and others pointed this out, the Times issued a major correction to what the National Review‘s John McCormack called “one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory.”
An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article. -NYT
And of course, many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates breathlessly called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment before the Times issued their major correction.
In response, President Trump began furiously tweeting Monday morning in Kavanaugh’s defense, writing among other things: “Just Out: “Kavanaugh accuser doesn’t recall incident.” @foxandfriends DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WILL DO OR SAY. They are looking to destroy, and influence his opinions – but played the game badly. They should be sued!”
Just Out: “Kavanaugh accuser doesn’t recall incident.” @foxandfriends DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WILL DO OR SAY. They are looking to destroy, and influence his opinions – but played the game badly. They should be sued!
“I call for the Resignation of everybody at The New York Times involved in the Kavanaugh SMEAR story,” tweeted Trump Monday afternoon, adding “while you’re at it, the Russian Witch Hunt Hoax, which is just as phony! They’ve taken the Old Grey Lady and broken her down, destroyed her virtue and ruined her reputation.”
“She can never recover, and will never return to Greatness, under current Management. The Times is DEAD, long live The New York Times!”
…She can never recover, and will never return to Greatness, under current Management. The Times is DEAD, long live The New York Times!
President Trump was not alone in his indignation as none other than The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board rushed out an angry op-ed blasting the left’s “Attack on the Supreme Court”:
“This is the most radical attack on the judiciary in decades. These aren’t crank voices like those posting “Impeach Earl Warren ” billboards in the 1950s. This campaign is led by the power center of the Democratic Party, including Members of the Judiciary Committee such as Ms. Harris who vet judicial nominations. Their attack on a core democratic institution is exactly what they claim President Trump is doing, but Mr. Trump is mostly bluster.
This assault on the judiciary is being carried out with conviction and malice, as the character assassination against Justice Kavanaugh shows. One motivation is that everything on the left’s new agenda, from the Green New Deal to a wealth tax, depends on favorable court rulings. The left is used to running the nation’s law schools and controlling the courts.
But the Senate has confirmed more than 150 judicial nominees since President Trump took office. And progressives would now rather attempt a hostile takeover of Article III courts than wait to win the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box.
The partisan relitigation of Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation is an embarrassment to the country…”
