Year: 2016

Introducing the Military-Industrial-Elementary School Complex

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Today’s highlighted article was published last month, but I didn’t read it at the time and I’m guessing you didn’t either.

What’s so uniquely tragic about the the intrusion of the police state into America’s schools, is it appears the parents themselves are the ones demanding it. This is in contrast to an overbearing surveillance state implemented by government in secret, as well as by private corporations via lengthy terms of service agreements nobody actually reads.

What follows are excerpts from a very important article published at The Nation, The School-Security Industry Is Cashing In Big on Public Fears of Mass Shootings:

“Security was the number-one factor for me in choosing a school,” explained one of the mothers I met late last winter at a Montessori preschool in an affluent suburb of Salt Lake City. A quality-control expert at a dietary-supplement company, the woman said she vividly remembers the jolt of horror she felt when she first learned of the Columbine massacre in 1999. So when the time came to send her child to preschool, she selected one that markets itself not only as creative, caring, and nurturing, but also as particularly security-conscious.

To get the front door of the school to open, visitors had to be positively ID’d by a fingerprint-recognition system. In the foyer, a bank of monitors showed a live feed of the activity in every classroom. After drop-off, many parents would spend 15 minutes to half an hour staring at the screens, making sure their children were being treated well by their teachers and classmates. Many of the moms and dads had requested Internet access to the images, but the school had balked, fearing that online sexual predators would be able to hack into the video stream. All of the classroom doors had state-of-the-art lockdown features, and all of the teachers had access to long-distance bee spray—which, in the case of an emergency, they were instructed to fire off at the eyes of intruders. The playground was surrounded by a high concrete wall, which crimped the kids’ views of the majestic Wasatch Mountains. The imposing front walls, facing out onto a busy road, were similarly designed to stop predators from peering into the classrooms.

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Liberty Links 9/24/16

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Opinion/Must Reads “FBI Is Handing Out Immunity Deals Like Candy” (Total insanity, Zerohedge) WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source After Accepting Pulitzer (Epic shamelessness, The Intercept) In Wells Fargo’s Bogus Accounts, Echoes of Foreclosure Abuses (The New York Times) Academic Penury: Adjunct Faculty as the New Precariat (Naked Capitalism) The … Read more

America the Banana Republic – Most of Clinton’s Recovered Emails Will Be Released After Election Day

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America, this is how little your government thinks of you.

Gotta keep the public as ignorant and stupid as possible until election day.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

WASHINGTON—Most of Hillary Clinton’s emails recovered during a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into practices from her time as secretary of state won’t be made public until after Election Day, according to a new timetable set Friday by a federal judge.

Judge James Boasberg on Friday ordered the State Department to finish processing 1,050 pages of material for release by Nov. 4—just a fraction of what could be as much as 10,000 pages of material. 

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Lifelong Democrat and Former RFK Speechwriter Comes Out For Trump

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The 2016 election season has been revealing in all sorts of meaningful ways. We’ve seen countless mainstream Republicans, particularly neocons, come out and passionately endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. More interesting than the fact they did this, was that they actually thought this would damage Trump. In contrast, it has helped him more than they could have ever imagined.

Indeed, as I noted in last week’s post, The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump:

The incredible irony of the situation is that in its failed attempts to make him unacceptable, mainstream Republicans have made him palatable. Trump couldn’t convincingly turn himself into “outsider” on his own. He needed help, and he has received it in droves from the GOP establishment. Meanwhile, the most pathetic part of it all is the fact that these so-called “conservative thought leaders” and politicians still don’t understand how absolutely despised they are by the general public. They think their “stand against Trump” hurts him, when in reality it just makes him grow stronger and gives him the street cred he never had before.

This rallying around Hillary by establishment Republicans merely solidified what so many people already suspected. Frustrated that one of their puppets couldn’t get the nomination and provide Americans with another false choice between two bought and paid for stooges, much of the GOP establishment immediately rushed in to support their supposed enemy, Hillary Clinton.

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Video of the Day – Hillary Clinton Chats with Zach Galifianakis

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One of the best things in life is a really good laugh. This will definitely give you several. In Liberty, Michael Krieger Like this post? Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G Follow me on Twitter.

New Report Proves What We Already Knew – The U.S. Economy Sucks

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I’m surprised it took this long, but it’s finally become mainstream thinking to acknowledge that the official unemployment rate is little more than nonsensical propaganda. As the emergence of massive populist movements on both the “right” and the “left” have demonstrated, something ain’t right in the U.S. economy, and everyday people get it.

Bloomberg reports:

Democrats typically cite the current unemployment rate of 4.9 percent as evidence of significant economic improvement since the last recession, but a report this week from the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research says otherwise.

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Wall Street Goes “All In” for Hillary Clinton

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Hordes of industry executives will descend on the city to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s nomination for president and renew close associations that vexed the Democratic standard-bearer throughout her primary battle with Bernie Sanders. 

Blackstone, one of the nation’s largest private equity firms, will hold an official reception in Philadelphia on Thursday featuring its president, Tony James, sometimes mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary in a Clinton administration. 

The financial contingent will be in an especially good mood following Clinton’s selection of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate. Kaine has shown a willingness to fight for regional bank relief from the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. But more than that, he’s not Elizabeth Warren, the potential VP pick that long had Wall Street terrified.

Republicans with ties to the financial industry will also be there, a sharp contrast to Donald Trump’s convention in Cleveland, which Wall Street largely shunned over fears of the GOP nominee’s populist agenda on trade, immigration and Wall Street reform.

– From July’s post: Hillary Clinton is in Deep Trouble – “Hordes of Wall Street Executives” Descend Upon Philly

Wall Street, America’s most despised industry, is putting all of its eggs in the Hillary Clinton basket. I must say, I’m actually pretty shocked at the extent to which the industry’s heavyweights are backing her. There’s really only one explanation — they know she’s a sure thing.

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More Troubling Evidence That Hillary Clinton Will Start WW3 – Part 2

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Back in June, I published a piece titled, More Troubling Evidence That Hillary Clinton Will Start WW3. In it, we learned the following:

Michele Flournoy, the former Defense Department official whom Defense One calls “the woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton,” this week advocated for “sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.” In an interview with that outlet, Flournoy “said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region.” She had previously “condemned the Obama administration’s ISIS policy as ineffectual,” denouncing it as “under-resourced.”

This week, Flournoy specifically advocated what she called “limited military coercion” to oust Assad. In August 2014, Obama announced what he called “limited airstrikes in Iraq” — and they’re still continuing almost two years later. Also note the clinical euphemism Flournoy created — “military coercion” — for creating a “no-bomb zone” that would entail “a declaratory policy backed up by the threat of force. ‘If you bomb the folks we support, we will retaliate using standoff means to destroy [Russian] proxy forces, or, in this case, Syrian assets,’” she said. Despite D.C. conventional wisdom that Obama is guilty of “inaction” in Syria, he has sent substantial aid, weapons, and training to Syrian rebels while repeatedly bombing ISIS targets in Syria.

Even U.S. military officials have said that these sorts of no-fly or no-bomb guarantees Flournoy is promising — which Hillary Clinton herself has previously advocated — would risk a military confrontation with Russia. Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, told a Senate hearing last December that the policy Clinton advocates “would require ‘substantial’ ground forces and would put the U.S. military at risk of a direct confrontation with the Syrian regime and Russian forces.” Nonetheless, the Pentagon official highly likely to be Clinton’s defense secretary is clearly signaling their intention to proceed with escalated military action. The carnage in Syria is horrifying, but no rational person should think that U.S. military action will be designed to “help Syrians.”

While that post focused on a likely massive escalation of U.S. militarism in the Middle East under a President Clinton, most Americans remain dangerously unaware of the extreme bad blood between her and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

For some insight on the topic, let’s examine a few excerpts from an article published earlier today at Reuters:

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Video of the Day – Exposing the ‘Superdelegate Lobbyist’

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Let’s take a break from all the serious and terrible news to have a laugh.

Great work here by Samantha Bee:

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Bloomberg Reporter Asks Clinton If She Thinks Recent Terror Attacks Could Be Russian Plot to Help Trump

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America’s worthless media caught once again asking Hillary Clinton all the really important questions.

Such as…(from Mediaite):

Bloomberg Politics reporter Jennifer Epstein asked Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during a press conference Monday whether she believed the previous weekend’s terrorist attacks in New York and Jersey were a plot– possibly carried out by the Russians— to get her Republican opponent Donald Trump more votes.

“Are you concerned that this weekend’s attacks or potential incidents in the coming weeks might be an attempt by ISIS or ISIS sympathizers, or really any other group, maybe the Russians, to influence the presidential race in some way and presumably try to drive votes to Donald Trump, who is, as you’ve said before, widely seen as perhaps being somebody who they would be more willing to– or see as an easier person to be against?” she asked.

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