A number of pundits have long called it Saudi Barbaria for a reason…
“A Saudi court has sentenced a man to death over his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, and his activity on YouTube, the latest in a widening crackdown on dissent in the kingdom that has drawn international criticism,”The Associated Press reports Wednesday. It’s a first even for Saudi Arabia, long known for beheading people for engaging in street protests against the king and royal court.
The man who has now been sentenced to death, Mohammed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, merely expressed criticisms online of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), the king, and the Saudi royals. He is set to be executed for tweeting and comments on YouTube.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) was the first to highlight the case this week, stressing that the Saudi judiciary actually tried the speech case in a special counterterrorism court.
HRW details that “On July 10, 2023, the Specialized Criminal Court, Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism tribunal, convicted Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, a retired Saudi teacher, of several criminal offenses related solely to his peaceful expression online.
“The court sentenced him to death, using his tweets, retweets, and YouTube activity as the evidence against him,” the report says.
Indeed much of his online activity merely consisted of retweets of others’ criticisms of Saudi government leaders, and this was from a couple of anonymous accounts which each had merely ten or so followers.
This certainly sets legal precedent for aggressively going after others for online speech, given the tweets came under the umbrella of the kingdom’s draconian terrorism laws. The HRW report documents further:
Court documents Human Rights Watch reviewed show that the Specialized Criminal Court sentenced al-Ghamdi to death on July 10 under article 30 of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism law for “describing the King or the Crown Prince in a way that undermines religion or justice,” article 34 for “supporting a terrorist ideology,” article 43 for “communication with a terrorist entity,” and article 44 for publishing false news “with the intention of executing a terrorist crime.” Al-Ghamdi’s trial judgment states that he used his accounts on the X, formally Twitter, platform and YouTube to commit his “crimes.”
Though the Saudis do not own any part of X (as recent rumors have claimed), according to SEC filings, activists have been urging Elon Musk to speak out in condemnation of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism tribunal has “convicted Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, a retired Saudi teacher, of several criminal offenses related solely to his peaceful expression online”: https://t.co/iBsfAfKy8t
The White House confirmed on Tuesday a report that a smuggler with ties to ISIS helped migrants enter the United States from Mexico, setting off alarm bells throughout the government.
CNN earlier reported that the FBI is investigating more than a dozen Uzbek nationals who entered the country through the southern border earlier this year. The investigation was launched after U.S. intelligence officials discovered that the migrants traveled with the assistance of a smuggler with connections to ISIS, according to the CNN report, citing multiple U.S. officials.
The incident was so alarming that an urgent classified intelligence report was included in the morning briefing book for President Joe Biden’s top Cabinet members, the report said. It also prompted a flurry of emergency meetings between the top national security and administration officials.
“The intelligence alerted us to a human smuggling network. We moved fast and successfully to disrupt it,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday. “We are very grateful to law enforcement for their quick work and their vigilance on this.”
The smugglers had been detained overseas, according to the press secretary, with one having ties to ISIS. She did, however, note that there is no evidence linking the migrants to terrorism.
According to the report, officials were still working to “identify and assess” all individuals who entered the United States, but no specific ISIS plot has been identified.
“There’s no sign that anyone moved by the smuggling network has a terrorist connection,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Additionally, as a precaution, people brought here by the smuggling network are subject to extra vetting and are all in removal proceedings, she added.
Furthermore, anyone crossing the border outside of the network who matches the profile of those in the smuggling network is subject to additional scrutiny, detention, and expedited removal proceedings, she said.
While no specific ISIS plot has been identified, authorities have not yet located all of those who traveled as part of the network. And the FBI is still investigating more than 15 of the migrants as potential criminal threats.
“This is a White House that is committed to making sure that we are protecting our homeland and also protecting the American people. That is our commitment. We will continue to be vigilant on that,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Republicans were quick to express their reaction to the news on social media, criticizing President Biden’s response to the border crisis.
“Smuggler with ties to ISIS helped illegal aliens enter the US from Mexico,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter.
“Why doesn’t the Biden administration care about the disaster at the southern border?”
“The crisis at our border isn’t just a humanitarian crisis—it’s also a national security crisis,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) wrote on X.
“It’s way past time for the Biden Administration to work with us on border security. This is just the latest example of why we need to secure the border.”
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell recently vetoed a bill that would order the owners of an apartment building to rent out a city-owned unit. After the city council overrode her veto, Cantrell said it is “shameful” that the city will not lease a suite in Caesars Superdome, home of the New Orleans Saints. The city-owned apartment was supposed to be used by visiting elected officials, but the city discovered last year that Cantrell had been using the apartment without paying rent.
European Auto Sales Rose 17% In July, Marking 12th Consecutive Month Of Gains
European vehicle sales are going to be on watch heading into the back half of the week after automobile sales in Europe rose for the 12th consecutive month in July, Bloomberg reported this morning.
Germany, France and Spain all saw double digit growth for the month, the report says. In sum, registrations of new cars were up 17% to 1.02 million vehicles, the report says, citing data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.
Volkswagen sold the most passenger cars in the region with 280,294 registrations, up 19% from a year prior. Buyers in Germany saw the biggest YOY rise, with 48,682 cars sold in July, up 69% from 2022.
Battery electric cars led the charge across Europe, rising 62%, at the same time sales of diesel models fell 9%.
As we have reported, Tesla’s Model Y was the best selling vehicle in Europe in the first half of the year, but manufacturers like Volkswagen AG, Stellantis NV and BMW AG are setting up to challenge the EV maker’s dominance with new model releases in the second half of the year.
Several of these models are expected to debut at next week’s IAA car show in Munich, Bloomberg wrote.
After battling through endless supply chain challenges and dealing with a semiconductor shortage as a result of the pandemic, automakers are finally seeing operations resemble a return to normal in 2023.
However, new challenges for the industry include a worldwide rising cost of living and higher borrowing costs, with Central Banks hiking interest rates far higher than during the pandemic.
By Sagarika Jaisinghani, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist
As European stocks nurse their first monthly decline in three, there’s one risk that could cast a shadow over prospects for a year-end rebound: stagflation.
While investors have cheered signs of slowing inflation and a resilient economy in the US, the picture in Europe remains more challenging. Figures this week are expected to show core inflation in the euro area only dipped a touch in August, at a time when a contraction in private-sector activity has unexpectedly worsened.
Add in the downbeat recovery in China — a big market for sectors such as mining, luxury goods and autos — and there are few takers for regional stocks, even with valuations near a record low relative to US peers.
“Cheap is just one criterion for whether something is an attractive investment,” says Andrew Bell, chief executive officer of Witan Investment Trust, whose overweight on the region reflects the appeal of individual quality stocks. “European growth is going to remain in a longer-term declining trend compared with the US and emerging markets, and if a broad-based rally in Europe lifts valuations, that could see more investors shift to emerging markets.”
The impact of weaker growth is already showing up in the performance of sectors whose fortunes are most closely linked to the economy. After beating defensive stocks until early-August, the so-called cyclical sectors have fallen behind in the past few weeks. JPMorgan strategists expect the underperformance to worsen as they don’t see a “meaningful recovery” in business activity in the near term.
Autos, capital goods, retail, chemicals, banks, semiconductors and travel and leisure stocks are particularly at risk, the JPMorgan team led by Mislav Matejka says, as they also miss out on a boost from a recent surge in bond yields. Typically, higher yields correlate with a rally in cyclical sectors, but this time around the move has been driven by “the wrong reasons” — a downgrade of US government debt by Fitch Ratings and lower demand for bonds, rather than just receding calls for an American recession, according to Matejka.
For cross-asset investors, bonds are proving to be more attractive than stocks as real yields rise given “investors’ impatience” for core inflation to cool as quickly as overall price pressures, Deutsche Bank strategists say. US Treasuries have now recorded inflows for 28 straight weeks — the longest streak since 2010, according to a note from Bank of America citing EPFR Global data. By contrast, money has exited European stock funds for 24 weeks in a row.
The Deutsche Bank team including Maximilian Uleer and Carolin Raab says the move in German bunds presents “an interesting entry point” as the current yield is already above their rates strategists’ target for 2023. “We expect bunds to be negatively correlated to equities and to offer a positive real yield,” they say.
That move could prompt European stocks to fall further behind their US peers into the year end. The Stoxx 600 has now underperformed the S&P 500 for four straight months in dollar terms — erasing a lead from earlier this year — and market strategists don’t expect any further gains in the European index for the rest of 2023.
Morgan Stanley’s Graham Secker also has a bearish view on the outlook for European stocks as he says optimism around a soft landing is overdone. He expects weak macro data to lead to earnings downgrades through the rest of 2023, while stocks suffer from the “unusual double whammy of (much) higher rates and (much) tighter credit conditions.”
AI Vs. Humans: Which Performs Certain Skills Better?
With ChatGPT’s explosive rise, AI has been making its presence felt for the masses, especially in traditional bastions of human capabilities – reading comprehension, speech recognition and image identification.
Using data from Contextual AI, we visualize how quickly AI models have started to beat database benchmarks, as well as whether or not they’ve yet reached human levels of skill.
Each database is devised around a certain skill, like handwriting recognition, language understanding, or reading comprehension, while each percentage score contrasts with the following benchmarks:
0% or “maximally performing baseline”
This is equal to the best-known performance by AI at the time of dataset creation.
100%
This mark is equal to human performance on the dataset.
By creating a scale between these two points, the progress of AI models on each dataset could be tracked. Each point on a line signifies a best result and as the line trends upwards, AI models get closer and closer to matching human performance.
Below is a table of when AI started matching human performance across all eight skills:
A key observation from the chart is how much progress has been made since 2010. In fact many of these databases—like SQuAD, GLUE, and HellaSwag—didn’t exist before 2015.
In response to benchmarks being rendered obsolete, some of the newer databases are constantly being updated with new and relevant data points. This is why AI models technically haven’t matched human performance in some areas (grade school math and code generation) yet—though they are well on their way.
What’s Led to AI Outperforming Humans?
But what has led to such speedy growth in AI’s abilities in the last few years?
Thanks to revolutions in computing power, data availability, and better algorithms, AI models are faster, have bigger datasets to learn from, and are optimized for efficiency compared to even a decade ago.
This is why headlines routinely talk about AI language models matching or beating human performance on standardized tests. In fact, a key problem for AI developers is that their models keep beating benchmark databases devised to test them, but still somehow fail real world tests.
Since further computing and algorithmic gains are expected in the next few years, this rapid progress is likely to continue. However, the next potential bottleneck to AI’s progress might not be AI itself, but a lack of data for models to train on.
“The expansion of BRICS has made it clear that the de-dollarization of the international finance system is inevitable.”
This view, from economist William Gumede—who’s also executive chairperson of the Democracy Works Foundation in South Africa—has been echoed around the world since BRICS leaders announced the expansion of the bloc on Aug. 24 at a summit in Johannesburg.
Current BRICS members are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
In January, BRICS—originally established in 2009 to represent the world’s strongest emerging market economies—will add Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to its ranks.
Mr. Gumede, one of South Africa’s leading academics and thought-leaders, has been researching the potential impacts of de-dollarization since 2014.
He told The Epoch Times the average per capita GDP of the G7 economies was currently six times that of BRICS economies. But, the unexpectedly swift expansion of BRICS would increase the trade bloc’s share of the global economy much faster than earlier predictions.
“These forecasts did not take into account that BRICS would expand its membership very quickly. A larger BRICS will mean the world will increasingly use U.S. dollars less,” he said.
Mr. Gumede said the bigger BRICS alliance would eventually rival the Group of Seven (G7) large industrial economies of the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, France, Japan, Italy, and Canada, which together are home to 16 percent of the world’s population and account for 62 percent of the global economy.
Welcoming the new members in Johannesburg last week, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva said their addition would mean BRICS would represent 46 percent of the global population and 37 percent of the world GDP.
The expansion means BRICS now consists of some of the globe’s largest oil producers: Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt. Nigeria, another major oil exporter, is set to join when the bloc gets even bigger, probably at its next summit in Russia in 2024.
“BRICS is going to dominate the world’s energy supply,” said Mr. Gumede. “The strength of the U.S. dollar is also partially based on the currency as underpinning oil trade—the so-called petrodollar—and members of OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) settle their accounts in U.S. dollars.
“Therefore, enlarging BRICS to also include the oil producers and persuading them to use a new BRICS currency, rather than the U.S. dollar, to settle their accounts, will be a game-changer. It is likely to accelerate the de-dollarization of the world.”
Jakkie Cilliers, Head of the African Futures and Innovation program at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, attributed the unexpectedly rapid expansion of BRICS, and its moves towards de-dollarization, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its consequences.
“BRICS has seen the West hit Russia with all kinds of financial sanctions, and threaten sanctions against South Africa for supposedly supporting Russia, and as a result it wants to end, or at least ease, its dependence on the dollar,” he told The Epoch Times.
“De-dollarization, first mooted by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, is a potent symbol of a shift away from a Western-led global order towards a new era of more uncertain and fluid multipolar connections. Change is in the air, and the next three decades will see the steady unfolding of this trend.”
Mr. Cilliers said BRICS was “cloaking itself in resentment” against the West.
“It’s quite easy for Russia and China to take advantage of the ill-feeling that still exists across much of the developing world because of colonialism, imperialism and sanctions by leading Western countries.
“Never mind the fact that Russia and China show similar imperialistic tendencies,” he commented.
He said the Global South was “particularly unhappy” with international finance institutions, and with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank.
“When the Fed hikes interest rates, it sometimes sends smaller economies into turmoil. They’re subjected to shocks for no domestic reason. So they see the dollar as providing the United States with a very powerful weapon to use in its interests,” said Mr. Cilliers.
“This is what unites BRICS in its desire to move away from the dollar-backed international financial system.”
But, he added, de-dollarization was going to be a slow process.
“Trade among BRICS countries is too small to sustain a common currency, and it only makes sense to trade in national currencies if the trade balance between the countries is more or less equal, which it most definitely is not likely to be in the near future,” said Mr. Cilliers.
Mr. Gumede pointed to a recent example of Russia selling a lot of oil to India.
“They dealt in rupees. But because India exports much less to Russia than it imports, Moscow now sits with rupees it cannot spend or convert, except to buy goods from India.”
Mr. Cilliers said China’s renminbi also wasn’t sufficiently convertible and lacked deep capital markets, market transparency, independent central banks and supporting financial institutions of Western banks.
He said there were also “perceptions of risk” associated with China’s future.
“It is, after all, a repressive autocracy. It’ll battle to maintain stability in the face of slower economic growth. I’d also be very surprised if India supported a common BRICS currency, given its concerns about China as a regional and potential global competitor.”
Mr. Gumede added: “The euro, a common currency, is stable because it’s underpinned by stable political regimes in a stable part of the world. Wherever you look in BRICS, there’s instability, like in Russia because of the Ukraine war. What would happen to the BRICS currency if China invades Taiwan?”
Mr. Cilliers predicted that rather than a single alternative to the dollar, “new currency blocs” would emerge.
“These will be based on bilateral and multilateral trade among the Middle East and China, South America, West Africa and elsewhere. And so we’ll see the power of the dollar slowly wane,” he said.
Mr. Cilliers said the most important shift in the power of the greenback would happen once oil and gas prices were no longer set in U.S. dollars.
“This is probably the motivation behind the inclusion of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the expanded BRICS,” he postulated.
Mr. Gumede said demand for U.S. dollars would remain high as long as U.S. GDP was close to 25 percent of the global economy.
He said President Putin—supported by China’s leader Xi Jinping—was pushing so hard for de-dollarization “because it’s key to the economic survival of Russia” following Western sanctions.
The West froze $300 billion of Russia’s foreign trade reserves after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and its foreign trade transactions, including those with some emerging markets, have been blocked.
Seven of Russia’s banks have been excluded from the world’s leading international payment messaging system, SWIFT. The ban means Russian banks cannot do digital cross-border transactions.
However, Russian banks doing transactions connected to oil and gas are exempt from the SWIFT ban, and this is preventing the Russian economy from collapsing, said Mr. Gumede.
Russia is the world’s third-largest oil producer, but its the largest exporter of oil.
“BRICS countries have been buying oil and gas from Moscow, insulating Russia against isolation by the United States and the EU,” Mr. Gumede explained.
For example, Indian imports of Russian oil in May 2023 reached record levels of about 1.95 million barrels per day.
According to the International Energy Agency, China and India bought 80 percent of Russia’s oil in May 2023, with China buying 2.2 million barrels per day.
Leslie Maasdorp, Chief Financial Officer of the BRICS financial mechanism, the New Development Bank, told The Epoch Times BRICS countries were prepared to conduct business with one another in domestic currencies.
But, he added, they were not yet ready to issue a common currency that could challenge the dollar.
“The creation of a global alternative currency to the dollar is a medium-to-long-term ambition, rather than an immediate possibility,” said Maasdorp.
“Even the Chinese renminbi is very far from becoming a global reserve currency.”
Mr. Cilliers said it was also likely that intensifying rivalry between China and India would slow de-dollarization.
“India has already said it wants to focus on strengthening its own currency ahead of anything else,” he said.
Mr. Cilliers suggested that the expansion of BRICS, now and in the future, should not be seen as an “automatic sign” that developing countries were uniting behind a “simplistic, common vision” of overthrowing the West.
“Many people have this view that if Russia and China, in particular, snap their fingers and say, ‘de-dollarize now,’ that other BRICS countries are just going to listen to the master’s voice.
“Believe me, there is deep resentment within BRICS and within the wider Global South about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the harm it continues to sow in developing countries, causing inflation spikes, for example, and even grain shortages.
“Countries’ motivations for wanting to join BRICS differ but what stays the same is that few, if any, Global South nations will exchange one hegemon with another.”
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
– President Harry S. Truman
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
Money Is The Biggest Point Of Contention In Relationships, New Survey Shows
Today in “completely heathy relationship behavior”, it’s being reported that many Millennials and Gen Zers are now doing research on their dates to try and ascertain how much money they make while they’re dating them.
About 33% of people who responded to the survey said they had ended a relationship over money and more than 40% said they fight about finances on a monthly basis, the report said.
Money becomes a point of contention in relationships moreso than spending time together, chores or intimacy, the report says, noting that “red flags” around money including one person expecting the other to pay for everything and reckless spending.
Brittany Wolff, founder of Wolff Financial in South Carolina says arguments about money aren’t necessarily a bad thing and can lead to both people being more transparent about their financial situations and feelings. She says couples should have a “money date” regularly where they can sit together and talk about their financial goals.
Dan Slagle, founding partner of Fyooz Financial Planning, adds that the date should be in a “neutral location” and offers up the perfunctory advice that “Making it fun can help keep conversations light and productive”.
Right. And we guess how well you’ve been earning determines exactly how the end of the date goes…
Meanwhile, 35% of Gen Z and 25% of Millennials said they research the job of the person they are dating to estimate how much money they make, the report says.
Brandon Gregg, financial advisor at BBK Wealth Management in Indiana, concluded: “Problems around money are going to happen — it’s a part of life. When they do, make sure that lines of communication are open. Taking the steps to understand each other’s values and communicating regularly early on will lessen the issues.”
