#deep state

[rejectingrepublicans]

Steve Bannon admitted in his book that he invented the “deep state” to wind up Republican voters.

[the-orange-shit-stain-scam]

On July 18th, 2015, I realized that the Republican Party had left me behind. On this day, while seeking the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump had the following to say about an Annapolis graduate who was shot down, captured and tortured as a POW by the communist North Vietnam regime:

“He's not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

This verbal diarrhea came out of the mouth of a man who used his father’s wealth and privilege to dodge the draft five different times due to his “bone spurs”. Donald Trump is a traitor, a repeated draft dodger and the largest fraud in the history of our country.

[awesomecooperlove]

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

On this day 60 years ago JFK was assassinated. Why does it matter?

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/deep-state/revisiting-camelot-jfk-60-years-on

#JFK #JFKAssassination #TheFreeThoughtProject #TFTP

[dosesofcommonsense]

[kinialohaguy]

Loony Biden

Aloha kākou and Happy Aloha Friday. When President Trump was running the country like a well-oiled corporate machine, the Uniparty tried and failed to discredit Trump’s administration. Weasels within the Uniparty and Trump’s traitorous cabinet members discussed with urgency using the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office. Funny how these same vermin haven’t applied this same…

[reality-detective]

Former prominent Investment Banker George Green explaining from his knowledge from within the inside of how the global agenda would unfold.

👆 Hidden History 🤔

[mostlysignssomeportents]

At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy

This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.

Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.

Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/20/equifax-settles-with-ftc-cfpb-states-and-consumer-class-actions-for-700m/

Equifax's competitors are no better. Experian doxed the nation again, in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

More than 650,000 of these categories exist, allowing advertisers to target substance abusers, depressed teens, and people on the brink of bankruptcy:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

These companies follow you everywhere, including to abortion clinics, and sell the data to just about anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like Google and Meta, who are some of their best customers.

As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination – the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.

And now for some good news. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, has declared war on this alliance:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/16/cfpb-looks-to-restrict-the-sleazy-link-between-credit-reporting-agencies-and-data-brokers/

They've proposed new rules limiting the trade between brokers and bureaux, under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between the two:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/15/tech/privacy-rules-data-brokers/index.html

As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data – it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.

The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't – or shouldn't – use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

And it's true that privacy regulation faces stiff headwinds. Surveillance is a public-private partnership from hell. Cops and spies love to raid the surveillance industries' dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/ring-ring-lapd-calling/#ring

These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side. Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true "Deep State") and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.

Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?

But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[commonsensecommentary]

“Currently, fewer than two-in-ten Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (1%) or “most of the time” (15%). This is among the lowest trust measures in nearly seven decades of polling.”

(Not a surprise, is it?)

[coffeebirbsdarkacademia]

The problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence - Charles Bukowski

[awesomecooperlove]

MISSING CHILDREN ORGAN HARVESTING CORRUPTION

🤨🧐😳

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Barack Obama is Scum

If they did all of this to stop DJT from seeking a 2nd term, you can't tell me they didn't steal the 2020 election. If Biden & Kamala had actually won the 2020 election fair and square Obama would have no reason to keep the American people from voting for DJT. Why are they so afraid to let us exercise our constitutional rights to pick our own representatives?

I noticed a pattern during Trump's White House years. Anytime the Deep State would implement an attack on DJT or the Trump Administration the Obama's were conveniently out of the country. Notice they traveled to Australia for Trump's indictment. Coincidence?

If you haven't seen Jesse Waters Tuesday 4-4-2023 show I highly recommend you watch it. He discloses the smoking gun connection bw Biden, Obama and their political prosecution of Donald Trump. Let me warn you that you will either be infuriated, depressed, ill or all three. This Deep State plot against the Trump family and the American people should have these people tried for treason. I'm so angry right now that I can hardly type.

This guy is the smoking gun: Matt Colangelo. When Bragg couldn't find a way to as Dershowitz wrote "Get Trump" Obama transferred his ACTIVIST Matt Colangelo from DC to Manhattan, NY where they created a job for him to Get Trump. Colangelo is responsible for shutting down the Trump Foundation because the board didn't have "official" meetings (Trump & his kids), sending the 70 + year old accountant to Riker's Island, and today the ultimate harassment: putting "handcuffs" on a former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

From the Manhattan DA site:

"Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., today announced the appointment of Matthew Colangelo as new Senior Counsel to the District Attorney. Colangelo, who most recently served as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Justice, will focus on the Office’s cases, policies, and strategies in housing and tenant protection and labor and worker protection, as well as the Office’s most sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations."

These videos are incomplete.

Check out Jesse Watters Primetime on Fox Nation. https://nation.foxnews.com/jesse-watters-primetime

April 3rd A victimless crime

[dosesofcommonsense]

Tell me 9/11 was an inside job without telling me 9/11 was committed by parts of our government.

[nodynasty4us]

From the October 12, 2023 opinion piece:

Trump is the loudest but hardly the only Republican willing to sabotage the U.S. national security architecture. Other GOP presidential contenders have expressed an equally strident desire. Vivek Ramaswamy promised to “use executive authority to shut down the deep state.” His plans included firing 75 percent of the federal workforce and dismantling the FBI and Nuclear Regulatory Commission....

...

Imagine, for example, what a second Trump term would actually look like. If he only appoints toadies to cabinet-level positions, there would be no adults in the room. His planned jihad against the permanent bureaucracy would trigger an exodus of the best, most independent diplomats, general officers and intelligence analysts. The ability of Trump’s weakened administrative state to accurately assess or respond to any national security threat would be suspect at best and incompetent at worst. The likelihood of a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil, undeterred Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, or open war in the Pacific Rim would rise exponentially. The U.S. military would be too busy bombing Mexico or governing U.S. cities to respond. As chaotic as Trump’s first term was, his second term could set the world on fire.

[reality-detective]

What is going on with Kamala Harris? 🤔