Month: March 2017

John McCain Goes Off the Deep End – Accuses Rand Paul of Being Putin Agent

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Crazy John McCain is at it again. Not to be outdone by his conspiracy obsessed neoliberal Democratic friends, the increasingly unhinged Senator from Arizona just accused his colleague Rand Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.”

The Daily Beast reports:

The long-simmering war between Sens. John McCain and Rand Paul boiled over on Wednesday when the Arizona lawmaker directly accused his colleague of working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Preet Bharara Explains Why He Let Wall Street Bank Executives Avoid Prison

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Recently dismissed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, is suddenly being celebrated as an aggressive warrior in the fight against Wall Street corruption. Really? You could’ve fooled me. Perhaps I was in a coma when a string of big bank executives were arrested and sent to prison.

No, what actually happened is one of the most powerful attorneys in the nation came up with a mealy-mouthed, cowardly rationale for why he let these financial thieves off the hook.

Crain’s reports:

Bharara was nowhere to be found when it came to charging the top executives whose actions led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG, and who made all manner of misleading statements to cover up how sick their firms were. Goldman Sachs executives sold institutional investors a mortgage-backed security that sales staffers described as “one shitty deal.” Where was Bharara when it mattered most?

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Hackers Stole My Phone Number – A Personal Story

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On March 3rd, at approximately 9pm, hackers stole my phone number. I didn’t become aware of this until a little more than 24 hours later, but hacking attempts on my other accounts began right away. Prior to this nightmarish experience, I had never heard of this happening to anyone else; however, in the days that followed I quickly became aware of its rapidly growing popularity and frightening ease of execution. Pulling off this attack requires virtually no technical skills, rather it relies entirely on social engineering, persistence, and an incompetent telecom employee. If this can happen to me, it can happen to virtually anybody.

The 48 hour period beginning at around 5am on March 4th was one of the most trying, confusing and frightening of my life. At that point, my wife and I had been up pretty much all night due to our son being in the midst of a horrible sleep regression. In fact, his crying was so hysterical I ended up calling our pediatrician’s office to ensure he wasn’t suffering from something more serious. I was going on two hours of sleep, the sun was about to rise and I was dealing with an inconsolable child. I thought things couldn’t get much worse. Boy was I wrong.

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Liberty Links 3/11/17

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If you appreciate our work, and want to contribute to genuine, independent media, consider visiting our Support Page. New Interview: I have a little bonus this week, an interview entirely about Bitcoin with Adam Meister. Adam has a daily show covering the latest in the cryptocurrency world, and it was a very fun and different experience chatting with him. Enjoy: Bitcoin talk with Michael Krieger of … Read more

Trump Administration Moves to Approve New Arms Sales to Saudi Arabian War Criminals

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This week’s episode of “Empire Gone Wild” features our freshly inaugurated dear leader, Donald Trump, who appears determined to enthusiastically continue the Obama administration’s policy of recklessly arming Saudi war criminals.

First, here’s a little background from The Washington Post:

The State Department has approved a resumption of weapons sales that critics have linked to Saudi Arabia’s bombing of civilians in Yemen, a potential sign of reinvigorated U.S. support for the kingdom’s involvement in its neighbor’s ongoing civil war.

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Nobel Prize Winning Economist Blasts America’s ‘Rent-Seeking’ Economy

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I’m really grateful Angus Deaton was willing to come out and state the obvious. That is, the fact this economy isn’t what we’ve been told. In reality, it’s largely a rent-seeking based system, in which a meaningful percentage of the people who earn the most money are not only not adding value to society, they’re in fact parasites feeding off the general public.

Market Watch reports:

Income inequality is not killing capitalism in the United States, but rent-seekers like the banking and the health-care sectors just might, said Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton on Monday.

If an entrepreneur invents something on the order of another Facebook, Deaton said he has no problem with that person becoming wealthy.

“What is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich,” Deaton said in a luncheon speech to the National Association for Business Economics.

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Video of the Day – Woman Asks Amazon’s Alexa if It’s Connected to the CIA

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The following video is making the rounds…

As everyone knows, Alexa is a product of Amazon, and Amazon is most certainly connected to the CIA.

As was detailed in an Atlantic article published in 2014:

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Chart of the Day – Democrats Now Like the CIA More Than Republicans

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Never mind decades of coups, mind-control programs, media infiltration, faulty intelligence and overseas election meddling, all it took was an embarrassing loss from Hillary Clinton to spark a furious love affair between Democrats and the CIA. It appears unaccountable intelligence agency worship is suddenly a “liberal” position. Who knew!

The following poll was taken two months ago, but many of you probably missed it back then. The shift is simply mind-boggling.

NBC reports:

For the first time since the survey asked about the CIA back in 2002, Democrats now have a more positive view of the nation’s foreign intelligence agency than Republicans do.

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Video of the Day – Democratic Congressman Admits the Party Stands for Absolutely Nothing

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The problem very quickly became what Integral Metatheory calls a “legitimation crisis,” which it defines as a mismatch between Lower-Left (or cultural) beliefs and the Lower-Right systems (or actual background realities, such as the techno-economic base). The cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to others (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing unequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis— a culture that is lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long. And if a culture has “no truth,” it has no idea when it’s lying—and thus it naturally lies as many times as it accidentally tells the truth, and hence faster than you can say “deconstruction,” it’s in the midst of a legitimation crisis.

– From the post: How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 1

My primary theme thus far in 2017, has centered around the observation that no constructive opposition to Trump currently exists in America. All we have from “the resistance” (corporate Democrats, corporate media and the deep state) thus far are endless conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia. This clownish opposition doesn’t actually stand for anything, and remains fully committed to continuing down the disastrous path we’ve been on this entire century. Simply being opposed to something isn’t going to cut it any longer, and there’s increasing evidence that the public is starting to catch on to the total fraud that is the establishment Democratic Party.

Jimmy Dore does an excellent job exposing this sham in the following clip. Make sure to watch the entire thing, it gets better and better:

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CIA Hacking Tools Allow for an Unaccountable Intelligence Agency Dictatorship

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By now, most of you have heard about the largest ever release of confidential CIA documents published by Wikileaks, known as Vault7. Many of you have also read various summaries of what was released, but reading the take of others is not the same as analyzing it yourself. As such, I strongly suggest you check out the original Wikileaks summary. It’s mostly written for the layperson without much technical expertise (like myself), and I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

In this post, I’m going to republish the entire press release, as well as provide key excerpts from the larger summary along with some personal observations. Let’s get started…

From Wikileaks:

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