Month: January 2022

The U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s plan to roll out a sprawling network of speed and surveillance cameras across America’s highways raises troubling questions of mass surveillance, according to DailyMail. 

Buttigieg’s 42-page plan to improve highway safety will receive a whopping $17 billion from President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which would be used to install speed and surveillance cameras on highways. The plan says the use of automated speed cameras is a more “equitable” way to patrol highways than the police. 

Last Thursday, Buttigieg told the Associated Press that an alarming amount of highways deaths began after 2020, reversing a three-decade downtrend. 

“It doesn’t look good, and I continue to be extremely concerned about the trend,” he said in an interview.

“Somehow it has become over the years and decades as normal, sort of the cost of doing business,” Buttigieg continued. “Even though a pandemic that led to considerably less driving, we continue to see more danger on our roads.”

Speed cameras have drawn immense criticism from progressive lawmakers, who are furious that speeding fines will help fund police departments. On the other side of the political aisle, conservatives are troubled by mass surveillance. 

At the moment, eight states have prohibited speed cameras. But 18 states plus D.C. operate speed cameras, with other states having no laws authorizing their use.

The DailyMail spoke with New Jersey State Sen. Declan O’Scanlon, who is concerned about Buttigieg’s plan. He said speed cameras in New Jersey are illegal and said automated enforcement doesn’t make roads safer and “amounts to government-sanctioned theft.”

“These systems’ negative impact falls particularly hard on the poor,” O’Scanlon added. “The fines are a regressive tax. Any elected official that supports these systems is supporting screwing every one of his/her constituents that drives a car.”

Early last year, the ACLU of Iowa said the speeding cameras are an illusion of enhancing safety and have made some highways more dangerous. 

“In some places, for example, traffic cameras have led to an increase in rear-end accidents because they cause drivers to slam on the brakes to avoid an automatically generated ticket,” ACLU said. 

Besides speed and surveillance cameras, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a part of the Transportation Department, intends to make automatic emergency braking mandatory for all new cars. 

Buttigieg’s strategy is direct evidence that the government plans to scale up their surveillance network, and what’s to stop them from using facial recognition systems? 

Under the guise of safety, a Chinese-style surveillance state continues to expand. 

Authored by Jennifer Kabbany via The College Fix,

In an Orwellian turn of events, the University of Northampton has put a trigger warning on George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” citing “explicit material” that some students may find “offensive and upsetting,” the Daily Mail reports.

The Mail verified the existence of the trigger warning through a freedom of information request filed with the UK campus.

“There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Tory MP Andrew Bridgen told the Mail.

 “Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.”

The novel “1984” was published in 1949 “as a warning against totalitarianism,” according to Britannica.

“The chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers, and [Orwell’s] ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books.”

“The book’s title and many of its concepts, such as Big Brother and the Thought Police, are instantly recognized and understood, often as bywords for modern social and political abuses.”

A university spokesman said told the Mail that while “it is not university policy, we may warn students of content in relation to violence, sexual violence, domestic abuse and suicide. In these circumstances we explain to applicants as part of the recruitment process that their course will include some challenging texts.”

In addition to “1984” getting a trigger warning at the University of Northampton, the UK-based Salford University has put trigger warnings on Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” which are marked as “distressing,” the Daily Mail reports:

The warnings accompany a reading list given to students on Salford’s BA English literature course, and have been revealed in response to a Freedom of Information request.

The university warns undergraduates: “There are scenes and discussions of violence and sexual violence in several of the primary texts studied on this module. Some students may find the content of the following texts distressing.”

Not to be outdone, students in America recently took trigger warnings to a whole new level.

The student-staffed Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center at Brandeis University last year listed the term “trigger warning” itself as “oppressive” and among those the campus community should avoid.

“The word ‘trigger’ has connections to guns for many people,” the center’s website stated. “We can give the same heads-up using language less connected to violence.”

And in 2020, Baylor University put up a trigger warning for a swath of American flags planted in the grass as a Sept. 11 memorial.

On Monday we learn that “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” will extend to include formally designated “major” allies all the way in the Persian Gulf…

“US President Joe Biden said on Monday he plans to designate Qatar as a major non-Nato ally, granting a special status to the Middle East partner,” the UAE-based The National reports. The announcement was made while Biden hosted Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in the Oval Office. Biden stressed he’s soon to notify Congress of the designation “to reflect the importance of our relationship.” The State Department says the designation “provides foreign partners with certain benefits in the areas of defense trade and security cooperation.”

Crucially this special relationship was solidified in recent years, it should be recalled, during the Syrian proxy war in which intelligence services from both countries teamed up in an attempt to overthrow the Assad government. Qatar even hosted US training camps in the desert for fanatical jihadists “secular freedom fighters”. 

And the tiny oil and gas rich monarchy had for years been widely accused of seeking to destabilize Syria while eyeing energy transit opportunities, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote in a 2016 lengthy Politico piece: 

While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Arabs see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.

In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000, when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometer pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

It should also be recalled that Qatar was among the first Arab gulf states to essentially confess that it supported al-Qaeda during the height of the Syria conflict. 

We detailed in our 2017 analysis of a rare “confession” by Qatar’s former top intelligence official…

In an interview with Qatari TV Wednesday, bin Jaber al-Thani revealed that his country, alongside Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States, began shipping weapons to jihadists from the very moment events “first started” (in 2011).

Al-Thani even likened the covert operation to “hunting prey” – the prey being President Assad and his supporters – “prey” which he admits got away (as Assad is still in power; he used a Gulf Arabic dialect word, “al-sayda”, which implies hunting animals or prey for sport). Though Thani denied credible allegations of support for ISIS, the former prime minister’s words implied direct Gulf and US support for al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra Front) from the earliest years of the war, and even said Qatar has “full documents” and records proving that the war was planned to effect regime change.

In large part al-Thani was at the time seeking to throw the Saudis under the bus for spearheading the whole sordid Syrian regime change saga on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council (during the years of the GCC schism and Saudi-Qatar diplomatic war).

More than this, Hillary’s emails would confirm the gulf allies funded and supported the rise of ISIS.

#Qatar‘s ex PM says that Qatari support for jihadists including Nusra in #Syria was in coordination w/ KSA, Turkey & the US via @BBassem7 pic.twitter.com/tu8IMRI7IP

— Ibn Walid (@walid970721) October 27, 2017

So congrats to Joe Biden’s newest declared major non-Nato ally of Qatar, with a confirmed history of supporting ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorists across the region… (though to be fair the same can be said of NATO member Turkey and the US itself)…

Citing Western intelligence, Clinton email acknowledges US-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar supported ISIS https://t.co/f7lNytahd2 pic.twitter.com/4BWV3Sti5v

— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 11, 2016

The Pentagon is optimistic about the opportunities presented with deeper security ties: “It opens up a whole new range of opportunities — essential relationships — not just with the United States bilaterally but with other allies,” spokesman John Kirby said Monday about Qatar’s impending status.

But Syria and so-called ‘Arab Spring’ conflicts aside, the new geopolitical standoff which appears to be driving the Biden administration’s deepening energy and security relationship with Qatar is seen in the following:

Now, with about 100,000 Russian troops massed at the Ukraine border, experts say Qatar — the world’s second-biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, or LNG — is eager to help Mr Biden again but might only be able to offer limited assistance if Russia further disrupts the flow of energy supplies to Europe.

Qatar is already producing at full capacity, with much of its supply under contract to Asia. Even if some Pacific allies of the US — including India, Japan and South Korea — are persuaded to divert some contracted LNG orders to Europe, it will only slightly soften the blow, energy analysts say.

The initiative appears part of broader attempts of team Biden to reach out to countries and energy firms in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa as the administration preps potential far-reaching sanctions against Moscow in the event of an offensive against Ukraine. 

The expectation is that Putin would use Russia’s ‘energy weapon’ and leverage over Europe – simply he’d “turn off the gas” – as a natural response to any hard-hitting Western sanctions. Washington is now scrambling to put in place plans to mitigate the inevitable extreme natural gas supply crunch that would result, hoping countries like Qatar could be part of contingency plans for assisting Europe in such a nightmare scenario.

Submitted by Charlotte Cuthbertson and Steve Lance of The Epoch Times

Mexican cartels are making billions of dollars from drug trafficking, human smuggling, and exploiting the U.S. border, said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).

Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 1.3 million illegal immigrants crossing into Texas from Mexico in 2021. Hundreds of thousands more weren’t captured. Seizures of the deadly synthetic opioid, fentanyl, have sharply increased, as have overdose deaths in the United States.

“We have 100,000 Americans die from opioid poisonings. They’re not really overdoses—they’re poisonings,” Roy told NTD’s Capitol Report on Jan. 28.

“China is moving it through Mexico, cartels are making money, China is getting empowered, America’s getting hammered—all because this administration refuses to do its job of securing the border.”

The chemicals to make fentanyl are produced in China and shipped to Mexico, where counterfeit pills are manufactured, heroin is spiked, and other products are laced before being sent across the southern border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a 1,066 percent increase in fentanyl seized at south Texas ports of entry during fiscal year 2021.

The cartels, which fight over the lucrative territory that abuts the United States, have expanded their reach, profits, and power through a massive increase in human smuggling and trafficking over the past year.

They often send large groups through in one area of the border to tie up Border Patrol resources, which leaves nearby areas unpatrolled and open for illicit transport, said Rodney Scott, former U.S. Border Patrol Chief.

“They simply overwhelm agents with those massive numbers, and that creates other areas where there’s no law enforcement at all,” Scott told Capitol Report on Dec. 16.

“That’s where they’re bringing the narcotics, the criminal aliens, the people that want to avoid arrest, for whatever reason, and they’re just pouring across at will. This is a crisis and it is real.”

Illegal immigrants have to pay a cartel to cross into the United States, and the amount varies on the country of origin and the destination in the United States. Often, the illegal immigrant doesn’t have the money and will enter the United States indebted to the cartel.

“These are human beings. They are put into the labor or sex trafficking trade and they’re basically held as slaves to enrich the worst elements of our society—cartels, but also just illegal illicit organizations that are perfectly happy to use the cartel network to get the people that they’re going to abuse. It’s absolutely horrific,” Roy said.

“One boy thought he was paying $4,000 to go pick grapes in California. Instead he was going to be held for ransom in a stash house in Houston.”

Recently, eight illegal immigrants were discovered in a vehicle in Boerne, Texas, just north of San Antonio.

“The driver of the car was an American citizen employee of one of those cartels, moving those eight people—two of whom were bound in the trunk—heading to a stash house in Houston,” Roy said.

“How is the most powerful nation in the history of the world allowing our borders to be operationally controlled by cartels, while Democrats pat themselves on the back for compassion, using asylum as an excuse for wide open borders that do nothing good for the American people?”

Roy has introduced a bill that seeks to designate two cartels as terrorist organizations in the last two congressional legislative sessions.

The bill directs the State Department to designate the Reynosa/Los Metros faction of the Gulf Cartel and the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas as foreign terrorist organizations. It also requires the state department to produce a report on those cartels, as well as any others that meet the criteria.

The bill has the support of 45 co-sponsors, all Republicans. But he’s not confident it will get passed during Biden’s administration.

“They don’t give a rat’s rear end about securing the border or trying to go after cartels,” Roy said. But the bill also faces opposition from some Republicans.

“You have some Republicans who hand-wring and go, ‘Well, you can’t call them cartels, because you elevate them to something that’s the same as the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda, or ISIS,” Roy said.

“But to me, they are terrorizing the United States, they’re terrorizing people in Mexico. They’re doing it purposely, they’re doing it for political power, they’re doing it to enrich themselves.

“They hang people, they bury people alive. They kill people and send videos to their families, so that they can terrorize people.”

Roy said the United States needs to go after the cartels and reclaim operational control of the southern border.

Meanwhile, he’s preparing to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for dereliction of duty.

U.S. natural gas futures have risen for the seventh day on prospects of another winter storm and colder weather for the U.S. There are emerging concerns Texas’ power grid could be tested again amid a cold snap. 

Futures for March delivery were up at 4.5%, or about .21 cents to $4.87/MMBtu (as of Monday morning). Prices have advanced for the seventh consecutive day, retracing 61.8% of the down move from early October high to the low in late December. The squeeze in natgas comes as weather models have recently shifted to colder outlooks.

Average temperatures across the U.S. have been hovering below a 30-year mean for the second half of January are expected to remain below normal through the first half of February. 

Cold weather for the U.S. has boosted heating demand, as shown in heating degree days well above a 30-year average. 

Shifting our attention to the south, average temperatures are expected to dive below freezing in Texas this week. In the Permian Basin, the largest shale-producing region in the U.S., temperatures will plunge to 15 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. The cold snap will spread across the eastern half of Texas, with temperatures diving well below 32 degrees in Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston this week. 

“There is going to be a pretty solid push of Arctic air into the southern high plains,” said Rich Otto, a forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center.

The problem we see is the primary grid operator for Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), could run into trouble as bitterly cold weather may disrupt natgas to power plants.  

BloombergNEF data based on pipeline flows show there have already been two instances where pipeline flows dipped due to cold weather this month. 

Gas wells are particularly susceptible to freeze-off, though Otto said this week’s cold spell wouldn’t be as severe as the one in February 2021 that nearly collapsed the state’s entire power grid. 

Stocks surged on the last trading day of the month, but it was still the worst January for the Nasdaq since 2008. According to Mark Ritchie, managing partner and chief investment officer of RTM Capital Advisors, we’re probably not going to see the type of V-shaped recovery that we saw in March 2020. Although last Monday marked a potential momentum low, “per my work,” notes Ritchie, “we are already in a cyclical bear market.” Earnings have been mixed so far, and investors are still focused on the Federal Reserve and other central banks as they prepare to fight inflation. Ritchie joins Maggie Lake to talk about financial markets and what’s changed early 2022. And Weston Nakamura joins to talk about the impact of China going silent ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Want to submit questions? Drop them right here on the Exchange: https://rvtv.io/3GtgoS5

Submitted By Terri Wu of The Epoch Times,

Refusal to wear a mask in school will result in immediate suspension, effective Feb. 2, a school principal in the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) district in Virginia told unmasked students last week.

William Shipp, principal of Woodgrove High School, spoke at about 3:45 p.m. local time on Jan. 28 to unmasked students assembled in the school’s auxiliary gym.

“You have all chosen not to wear a mask this week. Essentially, that is just defiant of the rules Loudoun County Public Schools have put up,” Shipp said in a video reviewed by The Epoch Times.

He told the students that they would face immediate suspension starting from the next school day on Feb. 2 if they walked into the school without wearing a mask; the suspension wouldn’t end until the students started wearing masks, he added.

In response to a student’s question whether the suspension was legal, Shipp referred to Loudoun County school board policy and affirmed, “At this point, there is suspension.” He also said there was an appeal process to follow. During the suspension, students can still use Schoology, the virtual learning platform, to continue their studies, according to Shipp.

Caroline and Laura Thomas’s letters from Woodgrove High School were identical except for student ID and other personal information. Any students “who willfully continue to refuse to follow COVID mitigation measures as required by Loudoun County Public Schools will be suspended from school” for “disobedience” and “defiance,” according to the letters.

Clint Thomas, the students’ father, questioned the “double standard.” While the school district cited the Virginia Department of Health’s (VDH) interim Guidance for COVID-19 Prevention in Pre-K–12 Schools under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, it has declined to follow VDH’s updated guidance under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who was inaugurated on Jan. 15.

VDH’s updated guidance for Pre-K–12 schools states the roles and responsibilities among parents, schools, and public health institutions. The decision of masking and vaccinating lies with parents.

Clint Thomas told The Epoch Times that the reason for the suspension was “not masking” but “defiance.”

“[Principal Shipp] is pushing them to wear a mask so he doesn’t have to suspend them,” he said.

LCPS is one of the districts in the state that have decided to keep the mask mandate, despite Youngkin’s executive order that gave the masking decision to parents. Virginia has more than 130 school districts, with about 50 following the same course as Loudoun County.

‘Every Day Felt Like a Prison’

Madison Dunbar, a sophomore at Woodgrove who also was unmasked in school last week, told The Epoch Times that it’s ridiculous for LCPS to force students to choose between masking and in-person learning.

Her younger siblings Hailey and Zack attend Harmony Middle School. The letter from Harmony states: “A student who is suspended because of non-compliance with COVID-mitigation measures may return to school only when they agree to follow COVID-mitigation measures throughout the entire school day and at all indoor school-related events. Suspension will continue if COVID-mitigation measures are not followed.”

Kayla, an 11th-grader at Woodgrove, also didn’t wear a mask to school. During the week, she repeatedly asked teachers and administrators, “Where is my in-person learning?” She said the educators simply referred to Schoology, LCPS’s virtual learning platform.

Kayla, as well as Caroline and Laura Thomas, said that starting on Jan. 25, unmasked students had to use a back door to exit the school several minutes earlier than masked students. In addition, the unmasked students were made to enter the school through the main entrance and walk past masked students in the morning to go to their separate location.

She said that she felt that the unmasked students were being shamed. For example, the auxiliary gym they were sent to from Jan. 25 to Jan. 28 had an uncovered window.

“The masked kids would just sit there and take pictures of us, and laugh at us, every day,” she told The Epoch Times.

Caroline Thomas, who has compiled a daily journal of her experience, also wrote about the separate exit. She noted that she didn’t get an answer when asked why she had to leave the school from a different exit than masked students.

“I’m sure it’s because they didn’t want us to ‘infect’ the rest of the school,” she wrote.

“Every day felt like a prison. Each day gets crazier and crazier.”

Emma, Kayla’s younger sister and a 9th-grader at Woodgrove, told The Epoch Times: “Teachers really didn’t care about our education. They just brushed it under the rug like we didn’t need to learn.”

Kayla’s mother, Joy, who prefers not to disclose the family name, said: “Kayla was having trouble sleeping. She was having trouble eating. The entire week, [they were] more stressed out than I have ever seen either of my girls.

“They were trying to do the right thing but kind of caught in the middle. They want to follow what they’re told to do but want to hold their ground because they know their freedoms.”

All of the Woodgrove girls who were interviewed noted that on Jan. 28, the number of unmasked students was more than 50, the highest number for the week. According to Erin Dunbar, Hailey, and Zack’s mother, the number of unmasked students in Harmony Middle School topped 20 on the last day of the week.

LCPS spokesperson Wayde Byard said that he had no comment when contacted by The Epoch Times about the suspension plan and VDH’s updated guidance.