I now make my living by releasing short videos on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
I assumed you who subscribed to my feed or became Facebook “friends” would receive that video every Tuesday.
Wrong! Turns out social media companies send our posts to only some of our friends. (That’s why I ask for your email address. Then they can’t cut us off.)
Why might they cut us off?
One reason is that we’d drown in a fire hose of information if they showed us everything. The companies’ algorithms cleverly just send us what the computer determines we’ll like.
Another reason may be that the companies are biased against conservative ideas.
They deny that. But look at their actions. Social media companies say they forbid posts that “promote violence,” including ones that encourage violence offline.
“In Austin, they were calling for a paramilitary operation!” says Glenn Beck. That antifa group’s Facebook account is also still up, even though it links to a manifesto calling for opponents to be “beaten bloody.”
In my newest video, Beck, who runs a big media operation called The Blaze, says social media companies push a leftist agenda.
“They manipulate algorithms to reshape our world.”
Beck himself hasn’t been banned, but he says Facebook limits his reach, putting him in a “digital ghetto.”
“They’re shaping you,” he warns.
Is it true?
Although I’m not a conservative, sometimes I do notice odd things happening with my posts.
On average, my videos get more than a million views. But when I did one that criticized Facebook, that video got half as many views.
Because Facebook didn’t show it to many people?
I can’t know. Facebook won’t say.
Today, social media companies are pressured to cut off anyone spreading hate. In response, YouTube and Facebook say they now even demote content that almost violates policies.
But those antifa accounts are still up.
By contrast, Beck says, conservative accounts are censored merely for making fun of Democrats.
“Remember the person who slowed down (a video of House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi?” he asked.
The video made Pelosi sound drunk. It went viral, but once Facebook got complaints, the company announced it “dramatically reduced its distribution.”
When Facebook did that, notes Beck, “The person in charge happened to be one of the leaders in Nancy Pelosi’s office who had just left to go to work for Facebook.”
I told Beck that Facebook hires some Republicans. “They do,” he replied, “but only about 20 percent, and not in top level positions.”
The site Spinquark did the research Beck cites, finding dozens of Democratic campaign workers who now work for social media companies.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once invited Beck and some others to come to his offices to talk about bias.
“I sat with him and he said, ‘Why would we do that?’ And I said, ‘I want to believe you, but your actions don’t match.'”
Beck was also unhappy with conservatives at that meeting. “Some said, ‘Mark, solve this by having affirmative action…. For every liberal you hire, hire a conservative.'”
“I don’t want that!” Beck said. “We don’t need more regulation!”
We don’t.
But it’s human nature, when people see a problem, to demand government do something.
Beck himself fell prey to that when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed she saw border guards telling migrants to drink water from toilets. On his radio show, Beck said government should “prosecute anyone making outrageous charges like this!”
I gave him a hard time about that. “You want prosecution of members of Congress who say nonsense?!”
Beck laughed and quickly walked his statement back. “John, I speak five hours off script every day…. There’s a lot that I vomit out.”
The solution?
“No censorship,” says Beck.
“Publish everything?” I asked.
“Yes!” answered Beck. “We can handle it. Stop treating us like children.”
I agree. On at least some platforms, all speech should be free. The more that is blocked, the less we learn.
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Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who is notionally challenging Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, last week claimed Trump is guilty of “treason, pure and simple.” He added that “the penalty for treason under the U.S. Code is death.”
Weld thus joined a long list of commentators and politicians in both major parties, including Trump himself, who casually tar their political opponents as traitors. Often, like Weld, they mean this literally, in which case they are demonstrably wrong. Sometimes they are just suggesting that the other side is disloyal and unpatriotic, in which case they are merely contributing to a poisonous political atmosphere that is incapable of supporting rational debate.
The basis for Weld’s claim is the allegation that Trump, for crass political reasons, pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender to oppose Trump as the Democratic nominee in next year’s election, by delaying military aid that Congress had approved. Such conduct would be an abuse of presidential power as well as an illegal usurpation of the legislative branch’s spending authority.
Contrary to Weld, however, Trump’s alleged machinations do not qualify as treason. The legal definition requires waging war against the United States or “adher[ing]” to its enemies—defined as nations or organizations that are at war with the U.S.—by giving them “aid and comfort.” Ukraine is not at war with the United States, and in any event Trump’s alleged aim was not to help Ukraine but to help himself by getting its government to dig up dirt on a man who wants to take his job.
Weld, who as a former U.S. attorney certainly should know better, also erroneously claimed that death is “the only penalty” for treason. The possible penalties include prison and fines as well as execution.
Former White House adviser Stephen Bannon was likewise wrong when he said that meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, constituted treason. The president also has been falsely accused of treason by counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance, political consultant Rick Wilson, former CIA Director John Brennan, former State Department official John Shattuck, historian Jon Meacham, and New York Times columnist Charles Blow, to name a few.
Trump himself, of course, is not shy about deploying the T-word. In his view, the administration officials who communicated their concerns about his July 25 telephone conversation with Zelenskiy thereby committed treason.
The argument that Trump obstructed justice when he tried to stop or limit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, Trump said, was an “illegal and treasonous attack on our Country.” The Mueller investigation itself was a “Phony & Treasonous Hoax” involving “treasonous acts,” according to the president.
When The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed piece by an administration official who was critical of the president, that was also “treason” in Trump’s mind. So was Democratic opposition to his immigration policies.
Even failing to applaud Trump during his State of the Union address might qualify as treason, he suggested last year. “Somebody said ‘treasonous,'” he said during a visit to Cincinnati. “I mean, yeah, I guess, why not?…They certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”
Needless to say (I hope), a lack of enthusiasm for the president is not the same as a lack of love for “our country.” Nor is criticizing U.S. policies the same as hating the United States, notwithstanding the president’s love-it-or-leave-it attitude.
Frederick Douglass, the classical liberal abolitionist whom Trump claims to admire, argued that “the best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy, who, under the specious and popular garb of patriotism, seeks to excuse, palliate, and defend them.” Nowadays both the president and his opponents routinely cloak their diametrically opposed agendas in that specious garb.
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison
Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.
At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.
As The Washington Postpoints out, “The United States is now the world’s largest producer — and its reliance on Saudi imports has dropped dramatically, including by 50 percent in the past two years alone.”
So if we’re not protecting the oil for ourselves, whose interests are we protecting?
The military industrial complex is calling the shots, of course, and profit is its primary objective.
America has long had a penchant for endless wars that empty our national coffers while fattening those of the military industrial complex.
Aided and abetted by the U.S government, the American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Unfortunately, this level of war-mongering doesn’t come cheap to the taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.
Despite the fact that Congress has only officially declared war eleven times in the nation’s short history, the last time being during World War II, the United States has been at war for all but 21 of the past 243 years.
The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.
Consider that the government lost more than $160 billion to waste and fraud by the military and defense contractors. With paid contractors often outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the American war effort dubbed as the “coalition of the willing” has quickly evolved into the “coalition of the billing,” with American taxpayers forced to cough up billions of dollars for cash bribes, luxury bases, a highway to nowhere, faulty equipment, salaries for so-called “ghost soldiers,” and overpriced anything and everything associated with the war effort, including a $640 toilet seat and a $7600 coffee pot.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. Trump, no different from his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically, calling on Congress to approve billions more to hire cops, build more prisons and wage more profit-driven war-on-drugs/war-on-terrorism/war-on-crime programs that pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
Essentially, in order to fund this burgeoning military empire that polices the globe, the U.S. government is prepared to bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse.
Making matters worse, taxpayers are being forced to pay $1.4 million per hour to provide U.S. weapons to countries that can’t afford them. As Mother Jones reports, the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Finance program “opens the way for the US government to pay for weapons for other countries—only to ‘promote world peace,’ of course—using your tax dollars, which are then recycled into the hands of military-industrial-complex corporations.”
Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.
As Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez rightly asks:
Why throw money at defense when everything is falling down around us? Do we need to spend more money on our military (about $600 billion this year) than the next seven countries combined? Do we need 1.4 million active military personnel and 850,000 reserves when the enemy at the moment — ISIS — numbers in the low tens of thousands? If so, it seems there’s something radically wrong with our strategy. Should 55% of the federal government’s discretionary spending go to the military and only 3% to transportation when the toll in American lives is far greater from failing infrastructure than from terrorism? Does California need nearly as many active military bases (31, according to militarybases.com) as it has UC and state university campuses (33)? And does the state need more active duty military personnel (168,000, according to Governing magazine) than public elementary school teachers (139,000)?
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
This is exactly the scenario Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.
The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.
What we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government—i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers—and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional principles which form the basis of the American experiment in freedom.
After all, a military empire ruled by martial law does not rely on principles of equality and justice for its authority but on the power of the sword. As author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”
Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who is notionally challenging Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, last week claimed Trump is guilty of “treason, pure and simple.” He added that “the penalty for treason under the U.S. Code is death.”
Weld thus joined a long list of commentators and politicians in both major parties, including Trump himself, who casually tar their political opponents as traitors. Often, like Weld, they mean this literally, in which case they are demonstrably wrong. Sometimes they are just suggesting that the other side is disloyal and unpatriotic, in which case they are merely contributing to a poisonous political atmosphere that is incapable of supporting rational debate.
The basis for Weld’s claim is the allegation that Trump, for crass political reasons, pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender to oppose Trump as the Democratic nominee in next year’s election, by delaying military aid that Congress had approved. Such conduct would be an abuse of presidential power as well as an illegal usurpation of the legislative branch’s spending authority.
Contrary to Weld, however, Trump’s alleged machinations do not qualify as treason. The legal definition requires waging war against the United States or “adher[ing]” to its enemies—defined as nations or organizations that are at war with the U.S.—by giving them “aid and comfort.” Ukraine is not at war with the United States, and in any event Trump’s alleged aim was not to help Ukraine but to help himself by getting its government to dig up dirt on a man who wants to take his job.
Weld, who as a former U.S. attorney certainly should know better, also erroneously claimed that death is “the only penalty” for treason. The possible penalties include prison and fines as well as execution.
Former White House adviser Stephen Bannon was likewise wrong when he said that meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, constituted treason. The president also has been falsely accused of treason by counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance, political consultant Rick Wilson, former CIA Director John Brennan, former State Department official John Shattuck, historian Jon Meacham, and New York Times columnist Charles Blow, to name a few.
Trump himself, of course, is not shy about deploying the T-word. In his view, the administration officials who communicated their concerns about his July 25 telephone conversation with Zelenskiy thereby committed treason.
The argument that Trump obstructed justice when he tried to stop or limit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, Trump said, was an “illegal and treasonous attack on our Country.” The Mueller investigation itself was a “Phony & Treasonous Hoax” involving “treasonous acts,” according to the president.
When The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed piece by an administration official who was critical of the president, that was also “treason” in Trump’s mind. So was Democratic opposition to his immigration policies.
Even failing to applaud Trump during his State of the Union address might qualify as treason, he suggested last year. “Somebody said ‘treasonous,'” he said during a visit to Cincinnati. “I mean, yeah, I guess, why not?…They certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”
Needless to say (I hope), a lack of enthusiasm for the president is not the same as a lack of love for “our country.” Nor is criticizing U.S. policies the same as hating the United States, notwithstanding the president’s love-it-or-leave-it attitude.
Frederick Douglass, the classical liberal abolitionist whom Trump claims to admire, argued that “the best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy, who, under the specious and popular garb of patriotism, seeks to excuse, palliate, and defend them.” Nowadays both the president and his opponents routinely cloak their diametrically opposed agendas in that specious garb.
Over half a million Americans are facing the prospect of being homeless this holiday season.
As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, after a period of progress and decline, the U.S. homeless population has increased slightly for the second year in succession according to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It now stands at 553,000 with 65 percent of that total living in sheltered accommodation. 17 out of every 10,000 people in the U.S. has now experienced homelessness on a single night in 2018.
Half of all homeless people are in one of five states – California (129,972), New York (91,897), Florida (31,030), Texas (25,310) and Washington (22,304). It is primarily an urban issue and more than half of the homeless population are scattered across the country’s 50 biggest cities. Nearly a quarter of them live in just two cities – New York and Los Angeles. Despite its considerable homeless population, New York can at least claim that 65 percent of its rough sleepers are given sheltered accommodation. The same cannot be said of Los Angeles where 75 percent are out on the street.
The following infographic shows the top-10 worst cities for homelessness across the U.S. with New York in first place with 78,676.
It’s important to mention that in this comparison, the data is broken down by CoC – those are Continuums of Care that are local planning bodies coordinating responses to the issue. Los Angeles is in second place with nearly 50,000 while Seattle/King County comes third with 12,112.
It has been exactly two years since Stephen Paddock allegedly busted out the windows of his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Casino Hotel and opened fire on concert goers below. In total, 58 people would be slaughtered and hundreds of others injured. Sadly, in all the time and all the police state tactics and technology at their fingertips, investigators are still unable to even come close as to why Paddock did what he did. With questions unanswered and families and victims still seeking information, the FBI officially closed their investigation earlier this year.
“It wasn’t about MGM, Mandalay Bay or a specific casino or venue,”said Aaron Rouse, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas office when the FBI closed the case in January.
“It was all about doing the maximum amount of damage and him obtaining some form of infamy.”
Paddock, according to the FBI’s official story, acted alone and murdered dozens to simply go down in history.
Before the FBI closed their investigation, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo declared the case closed as well and vowed never to speak Paddock’s name in public again. Like the FBI, the LVMPD closed their investigation without ever finding a motive and leaving countless questions unanswered.
The Vegas massacre, which is now referred to as 1 October, has only gotten stranger as things progress. Following the tragedy, law enforcement engaged in a series of narrative changes, deliberate blocking of information, and appeared to be working directly with the casino to make sure Americans never know the entire truth.
For months after the shooting, the LVMPD refused to release any information. Only after they fought the release all the way to the state supreme court, and were handed down a ruling forcing them to release information, did they ever budge.
However, after the court forced them to release information on the October 1 massacre, the Las Vegas police department—in an insultingly futile attempt at transparency—randomly began dumping information related to the shooting. In what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters, much of the video released by the department had no time stamps and was provided without context.
Luckily, outlets like the Las Vegas Review-Journal were persistent in scrubbing the details of this case. However, because the mainstream media no longer reports on this information, it was essentially buried upon its release. The Free Thought Project has compiled a list of five major questions — all of which were swept under the rug by the MSM — that still remain in regards to what actually took place on 1 October.
1. Report suggests Paddock’s girlfriend worked for the FBI
In August 2018, a report surfaced suggesting that Stephan Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley could’ve been an FBI asset. According to a credit application, as reported by True Pundit, Danley listed the FBI as an employer.
According to the publicly available intelligence obtained from a consumer credit reporting bureau, Danley claimed she previously worked at the FBI. While anyone can certainly claim anyone else as an employer, according to True Pundit, they contacted the FBI who said their “bosses are concerned” over this revelation.
When contacted, one FBI source said the Bureau “might have made payments to Danley but it is above my level,” the source said referring to access to the FBI’s confidential informant participant and payment records. The source said “bosses are concerned” with the new revelations about Danley’s financial relationship with the FBI.
In FBI speak, Danley could have been a paid asset. And ‘concerned’ means folks are getting ready to cover their own butts if payments were made to Danley either before or after the massacre.
Perhaps FBI Director Christopher Wray can shed light on the matter.
Or Danley. If you can find her. It took the FBI days to locate her and interview her after the Mandalay Bay massacre.
Danley is an Australian national. She is not a U.S. citizen.
Of course this bombshell Intel is coming from FBI sources in the beltway, not the corrupt Las Vegas FBI field office headed by Aaron Rouse. The same FBI field office that has not been able to pinpoint a motive for the Oct. 1, 2017 massacre that killed 57 people.
Little wonder why the narrative doesn’t fit the crime if the person whose fingerprints are on the ammunition also happens to be on your FBI payroll.
Why did the mainstream media never report this? In a case that has been shrouded in mystery and narrative changes, the idea that the person closest to the suspect in the deadliest mass shooting in modern history, could possibly be an asset to the FBI, is chilling.
2. Officers seen on body camera footage cowering in fear as Paddock murdered people one floor above them
When Nikolas Cruz opened fire on students in a Parkland, Florida high school, it would later be revealed that the school resource officer cowered in fear instead of trying to stop the massacre. When this was discovered, news media across the country reported on it and the officer subsequently became known as the “Coward of Broward.”
However, when similar footage showed Vegas police officers cowering in fear as Paddock mowed down concert goers, this barely registered as blip in the media.
The damning video puts officer Cordell Hendrex on location and only one floor below Paddock during the shooting. Hendrex and his rookie partner are seen on camera walking down the hall of the 31st floor as Paddock murders people on the ground below.
“Holy f**k,” Hendrex says when he hears the sound of shots above him. Hendrex could’ve run to the stairs, gone up a single floor and engaged Paddock and saved countless lives. Instead, he called everyone back and cowered in fear. Where were the calls for Hendrex to be fired? Where were the reports in the mainstream about him standing down?
3. Paddock Reportedly Warned His Brain was ‘Hacked’ and He Was Under Gov’t Control
Last year, shocking information surfaced that went largely ignored by the mainstream media. The report entails testimony from one of Paddock’s high-priced escorts who blew the whistle on how a prostitute who met with the deranged shooter just before the massacre went missing and noted how Paddock thought he was under the control of the government.
The escort was reported missing by her boyfriend just after the shooting and a former escort who once dated Paddock spoke out about the sheer insanity involved in this case.
“She was telling girls after work that she was scared something would happen to her,” claimed former escort Mikaela, whose full name was withheld to protect her identity according to Radar Online. “She was booked the day before or the day of the shooting before she disappeared.”
According to her testimony, Paddock claimed to be a government experiment.
“There’s messages where Stephen is telling her he’s a government experiment and that they are listening to everything he says and does, and they can hack into his brain and take over,” Mikaela said.
This information was simply ignored by the media and still is to this day, why is that?
4. Information suggesting Paddock was an arms dealer completely ignored by MSM
In August 2018, the arms dealer who admitted to selling Paddock his ammunition for the massacre was indicted. Douglas Haig was charged with a single count of “engaging in the business of manufacturing ammunition without a license.”
What makes his arrest so noteworthy is the fact that emails released by the FBI suggest Paddock may have been an arms dealer as well.
As The Free Thought Project reported in 2017, a series of unsealed court documents gave insight into Paddocks communications in the months leading up to the shooting, and revealed that he apparently referred to himself as some kind of arms dealer:
In the first message, Paddock claimed that the recipient would have the opportunity to try out the weapons before they purchased them. He then wrote “We have huge selection,” indicating that he was not working alone, and he said he was located “in the Las Vegas area.”
***
the email exchanges released by the FBI indicate that Paddock was presenting himself as some sort of arms dealer, sending an email that said, “for a thrill try out bumpfire ar’s with a 100 round magazine.”
Again, although the original emails made it into the mainstream briefly, the question remains as to who Paddock was selling arms to, and is that why he had so much ammunition in his hotel room?
5. Vegas police seen on video being instructed to turn off their body cameras
In June of last year, in part of the random dumping of information by the LVMPD, video footage was discovered which showed officers being told to turn off their body cameras.
According to the chatter captured on the video, the strike team was prepping to enter the hotel.
“Officers are waiting. They’re waiting,” says a male voice off screen. “Officers are waiting to get in there.”
As police stand in line waiting to enter the hotel, multiple body cameras show a female officer walking down the rows, instructing the officers to turn off their cameras.
“Cameras are off? Cameras off? Cameras are off?” she says.
An officer repeats “Camera is off,” and each video ends.
The disabling of body cameras is against the LVMPD’s own regulations which is news enough. However, this was done on the night of the deadliest mass shooting in recent history and it was completely ignored. How can that be?
The more information that comes out on the horrific events of that fateful night, the more questions the public has. The uncooperative behavior by the Las Vegas Metropolitan police department was a kick in the teeth to the victims and their families. Sadly, now that all the authorities investigating the tragedy have ended their investigations, we may never know all the details that led to shooting.
China has celebrated 70 years of Communist Party rule by holding a massive military parade in Tiananmen Square in front of past and present leaders. Even though the event has been somewhat overshadowed by protests in Hong Kong, it still allowed China to showcase its technological achievements and newfound military prowess. 15,000 soldiers marched in the parade, accompanied by tanks, artillery pieces and nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, as well as a military flyover.
As Statista’s Nialll McCarthy notes, the push for modernization occurred at the same time the United States was mired in two bloody conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though no country comes close to matching U.S. military expenditure which came to $649 billion last year (China was second with $250 billion), Beijing had the highest increase of any country by far between 2009 and 2018,according to Sipri.
During that timeframe, China upped its expenditure by 83 percent and the results of that could be seen on the streets of Beijing during the parade. Even Saudi Arabia, which has been splurging on military equipment for years, “only” increased its military spending by 28 percent during the same period. Russia is also in the midst of a modernization drive and its spending increased 29 percent since 2009.
Meanwhile, U.S. military spending has fallen 17 percent over the past decade, a downward trend President Trump is keen to halt amid the push for modernization and expansion in both Beijing and Moscow.
Over at Legal Planet, Daniel Farber observes that the infamous “Lochner Court” issued several notable decisions upholding early environmental protection efforts. Professor Farber finds this surprising because “this was a Court that was famous, if not infamous, for its conservative activism.”
Yet if one looks at the cases Farber cites—and considers the whole of the Lochner Court’s jurisprudence (or consults the more nuanced account of the era in my co-blogger David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner—there is not much here that should surprise. The Court of that period was certainly more skeptical of government regulation than in later times, but its overall judicial philosophy was anything but pure laissez faire.
Although the Lochner Court struck down a New York law imposing maximum hour limits for bakery workers, the Court upheld other laws that were indisputably about the protection of public health or worker safety, such as a Massachusetts mandatory vaccination law (in Massachusetts v.Jacobson) or a Utah law setting maximum hours for miners and smelters (in Holden v. Hardy). And the same jurisprudential vision that led the Court to care about property rights naturally led the justices to understand the need to control nuisances, whether through local ordinances (Hadacheck v. Sebastian) or common law actions (Georgia v. Tennessee Copper).
It’s also worth noting that the sorts of environmental measures the Lochner Court considered fail to raise the significant and difficult constitutional issues we sometimes see in environmental law today. There was no effort by the federal government to regulate local land use or local, non-economic activity, nor was there was any effort to leverage federal largesse to coerce state cooperation in federal programs. There was no ambitious or innovative effort to expand the scope of Article III jurisdiction, nor were there administrative processes that raised significant due process concerns. In short, with a few exceptions (such as, perhaps, Missouri v. Holland), the Court was not confronted with cases in which one would have anticipated significant constitutional questions. Were that only still true today.
More broadly, I think it’s also worth pushing back on the implicit assumption in Professor Farber’s post that limiting governmental regulation necessarily undermines environmental protection. There are many areas in which greater protection of property rights actually encourages conservation, and in which loosening constraints on government expropriation can actually facilitate environmental harm. Thus we should not assume that a Supreme Court skeptical of muscular assertions of government power is a Court skeptical of—let alone hostile to—environmental conservation.
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Precisely one year ago today, the US federal government opened Fiscal Year 2019 with a total debt level of $21.6 trillion:
Specifically, the US federal debt on October 1st last year was $21,606,948,183,180.23
Today is the start of the government’s 2020 Fiscal Year. And the total debt is now $22,622,684,674,364.43
That means they accumulated more than $1 TRILLION in new debt over the course of the 2019 Fiscal Year.
Think about that for a moment:
FY2019 was, literally, the BEST year EVER measured by short-term US financial performance.
The stock market reached an all-time high.
Real estate prices reached an all-time high.
Corporate profits are at record highs.
Personal income is at a record high.
Unemployment is hovering near an all-time low.
And all of these factors drove US government tax revenue to an all-time high; Uncle Sam has never had more income in its entire history.
Plus, there were no major foreign wars or natural disasters.
No banking crises or economic panics.
No massive bailouts.
And if you recall, the US government was shut down for most of the month of January due to a budget conflict, so federal spending was at a minimum for a good chunk of the year.
Yet despite this bonanza of good news, the national debt STILL increased by more than a trillion dollars!
HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE??
Here’s an even more startling way of looking at it:
In Fiscal Year 2012, the government spent $359 billion paying interest on its debt.
In Fiscal Year 2015 they spent $402 billion.
In FY2017, $458 billion.
In the Fiscal Year 2019 that just closed yesterday, they spent more than $540 billion just paying INTEREST on the debt.
Do you see the pattern?
This problem becomes substantially worse every year. And FY2019 was a GOOD year!
What’s going to happen when the economic sun isn’t shining so brightly?
It would be foolish to expect every year to look like Fiscal Year 2019. Honestly, the combination of so much good news and so little bad news in FY19 was pretty rare.
There absolutely WILL be problems in the future. Recessions, panics, downturns, bear markets, natural disasters, trade wars, military conflicts, debt crises, pension crises, etc.
Many of these risks are already on the horizon.
Then you have to think about how quickly the Bolsheviks are storming to power.
These people want to dump trillions of dollars on the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Universal Basic Income, free university education, and pretty much everything else that Karl Marx wrote about in the Communist Manifesto.
How much additional debt are they going to pile up in the process?
The US government’s mountain of debt already exceeds 100% of GDP, and that number gets worse each year.
How much longer will everyone keep pretending that the world’s biggest debtor is simultaneously the world’s biggest superpower?
How much longer will financial markets and foreign governments continue loaning money to the US government at trivial interest rates?
5 years? 10 years? 13 months until the next election?
No one knows for sure. But you don’t need a PhD in economics to realize that this might not have a happy ending… or that you might want to think about a Plan B.
Over at Legal Planet, Daniel Farber observes that the infamous “Lochner Court” issued several notable decisions upholding early environmental protection efforts. Professor Farber finds this surprising because “this was a Court that was famous, if not infamous, for its conservative activism.”
Yet if one looks at the cases Farber cites—and considers the whole of the Lochner Court’s jurisprudence (or consults the more nuanced account of the era in my co-blogger David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner—there is not much here that should surprise. The Court of that period was certainly more skeptical of government regulation than in later times, but its overall judicial philosophy was anything but pure laissez faire.
Although the Lochner Court struck down a New York law imposing maximum hour limits for bakery workers, the Court upheld other laws that were indisputably about the protection of public health or worker safety, such as a Massachusetts mandatory vaccination law (in Massachusetts v.Jacobson) or a Utah law setting maximum hours for miners and smelters (in Holden v. Hardy). And the same jurisprudential vision that led the Court to care about property rights naturally led the justices to understand the need to control nuisances, whether through local ordinances (Hadacheck v. Sebastian) or common law actions (Georgia v. Tennessee Copper).
It’s also worth noting that the sorts of environmental measures the Lochner Court considered fail to raise the significant and difficult constitutional issues we sometimes see in environmental law today. There was no effort by the federal government to regulate local land use or local, non-economic activity, nor was there was any effort to leverage federal largesse to coerce state cooperation in federal programs. There was no ambitious or innovative effort to expand the scope of Article III jurisdiction, nor were there administrative processes that raised significant due process concerns. In short, with a few exceptions (such as, perhaps, Missouri v. Holland), the Court was not confronted with cases in which one would have anticipated significant constitutional questions. Were that only still true today.
More broadly, I think it’s also worth pushing back on the implicit assumption in Professor Farber’s post that limiting governmental regulation necessarily undermines environmental protection. There are many areas in which greater protection of property rights actually encourages conservation, and in which loosening constraints on government expropriation can actually facilitate environmental harm. Thus we should not assume that a Supreme Court skeptical of muscular assertions of government power is a Court skeptical of—let alone hostile to—environmental conservation.
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