Judge Declares Federal Terror Watchlist Unconstitutional

by Steven Woskow | Sep 5, 2019 | Blog

Judge Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the government has unconstitutionally failed to provide watchlisted persons with notice and an opportunity for individuals to challenge their status. The judge granted CAIR’s motion for summary judgment in the case of 23 American Muslims who were unjustly labeled as suspected terrorists by their government, causing extensive harm to their families, careers, and ability to travel.

The judgement is here

Background information here

The reaction from Council On American-Islamic Relations

When Two Tribes Go To War

by Zooey Greif | Sep 5, 2019 | Blog

Year Zero: Collapse for Liberty

by Tommy Salmons | Sep 5, 2019 | Blog, Year Zero

In Episode 63 Tommy explores why the Status Quo Wins out over liberty. Is total financial collapse the only chance to have a possibility of liberty?

Listen to Year Zero

Wokus Group

by Arlo Pignotti | Sep 4, 2019 | Blog

I attended a focus group to give feedback about a series of commercials that will air nationally. I think I experienced “snowflakes” in the flesh for the first time. They were offended by something in every one of those commercials. Saying, “The female manager in the first commercial was too dominating. I’m sick and tired of seeing the stereotype that women are bossy.” “The woman in the second commercial was too wimpy. It’s a stereotype to portray women as weak.” “Only one of the three characters in this commercial was a black woman.” Another commercial was simply a man by himself, looking at the camera, describing a feature of the product and a participant referred to it as “mansplaining.”

Then they get around to two commercials portraying Italian-Americans as mobsters. I was probably the only Italian-American in the room, it certainly crossed my mind to complain, but I’m not going to play that game. I didn’t say a word. So if you see an uptick in Italian stereotypes in commercials in the near future, you can blame me for that.

There was also an ad showing two men doing yoga, and a woman was reading homoerotic innuendos that I swear were not there and saying instead of two men it should be a man and a woman so the LGBT community wouldn’t be offended. Everyone else in the room had quizzical looks on their faces for that one, it wasn’t just me. If she had really been up to date on her wokeness she would have said “LGBTQIA+” (and sometimes Y).

NYT Piece on the History of Barak and Netanyahu Trying to Get the US to Bomb Iran

by Scott Horton | Sep 4, 2019 | Blog

Here. Some good stuff in there if not the whole context.

(Also, Mazzetti knows that Iran has never attempted to create “highly enriched uranium, the fuel to build a nuclear bomb,” therefore they could not possibly begin to do so “once again.” [Technically, 20% U-235 can be called “highly enriched,” but that’s still far below the ~90% required to make a bomb, so it’s at best an invidious conflation.] I don’t know if his co-author knows that, but Mazzetti’s past reporting on this issue has been substantive, even if often Sanger-tainted. He must know better. So, is liar. Or he just has a terrible editor and has to take the lumps.)

The Militarization Of The American Mind

by Steven Woskow | Sep 4, 2019 | Blog

It’s become obvious the government (mainly the security state) wants to completely take over social media (they probably have already). Now ICE is going to use fake accounts to monitor the social media of foreigners seeking to enter the country. Eventually, this program will expand, they always do.

Homeland Security explained the change to the AP in a statement Friday, stating that fake accounts would make it easier for agents reviewing visa, green card and citizenship applications to search for fraud or security threats.

Even though this goes against Facebook and Twitter policy and Facebook has threatened to nuke their accounts, what do they care. Who is Facebook going to complain too – their government representative in congress?

Senator calls for Mark Zuckerberg (and other Facebook executives) to face possible prison.

“Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy. I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to — and let me underline this — the possibility of a prison term.

Now, we read that the US Military also wants to control “fake news and disinformation” on the internet.

“Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel ‘large-scale, automated disinformation attacks’ … the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society …”

They are watching us but why? They would have us believe it’s for our own security but they don’t want to just know what we are doing they want to know what we are thinking and how they can control and manipulate our thinking (without us knowing they are doing it). George Carlin has part of the answer when he states: They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting F****D. But I think their is something else going on and that Andrew Bacevich is closer to the truth when he writes in his book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War.

It is a marriage of militarism and utopian ideology, of unprecedented military might wed to a blind faith in the universality of American values. This mindset, Bacevich warns, invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy. It promises not to perfect but to pervert American ideals and to accelerate the hollowing out of American democracy.

What better way to make this reality than to use the power of social media.

Austin Independent School District: Stop Feeding Your Children Breakfast

by Scott Horton | Sep 4, 2019 | Blog

This morning on the 590 AM KLBJ radio news I heard them read a press release from the AISD asking parents to stop packing lunches for their kids, and — I swear I’m not making this up — asking them also to stop feeding their children breakfast, and to leave that up to the public schools instead, so they can ask for more money from the federal government to buy better food later.

They had no idea that this was shameful, horrible, cynical, corrupt, embarrassing. This is just how business is done in Nazi/Commie America in the 21st Century. What’s the problem?

Update: Here’s partial confirmation, a TV spot today about the first part about lunch at least.

Judaism, Zionism, and the Dual-Loyalty Charge

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 4, 2019 | Blog, Foreign Policy

Zionists, that is, Jewish nationalists, who hold that Jews qua Jews constitute something more than a religious community, open themselves up to the dual-loyalty charge. And that is exactly what the majority non-Zionist Jews warned against from the start.

As Joseph Levine writes:

It’s particularly ironic that Zionists should be making this charge [that dual-loyalty is an anti-Semitic trope]. When [Howard] Lovy (along with many others…) refers to the “ancient specter of Jewish disloyalty”, I take it he means in particular the standard anti-Semitic charge during the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe over the Emancipation of Jews from the ghettoes and their integration into civil European society as full citizens with full rights. Anti-Semites considered Jews a nationality, a people, a race, and as such they could never be truly assimilated into European society. The liberal democratic argument in response was to say that Jews can just as much be English, French, German, etc. as members of any other religious community. French Jews, on this view, are as legitimately considered full French citizens as French Catholics and Protestants. Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.

But of course Zionism was founded on the Romantic nationalist idea that Jews really are a people apart from other peoples, and so historically shared a general outlook on the question of the relations between collectives and individuals with the right-wing and anti-Semitic camps. Yes, we are a people apart, argued the Zionists, and that’s why we deserve to have a homeland and state of our own. That this position leads inexorably to worries about “dual loyalty” is evident from the response to Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from leaders of the Jewish community throughout Europe and the US that the doctrine of Jewish nationhood is extremely dangerous for the position of Jews in these countries. They flat out rejected the Zionist-nationalist framework largely because it did rationalize the charge of dual loyalty. So, for Zionists and their supporters to now trot out this charge of anti-Semitism in the guise of “dual loyalty” is hypocritical and cynical.

So let’s have no more of this hypocrisy, okay?