Category Archives: Police State

Something wicked this way comes….

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I got this interesting response from a reader:

I like reading whatever you write. It is good to see your website up and working again. I don’t comment much as I have received threats in the past.

Interesting…

Another point.

Not too long ago, my website traffic (which has already fallen quite a bit, for various reasons – some intentional and some not), fell some 30%, almost overnight.

This seemed to follow on the debate about  brutalist versus humanitarian libertarianism.

That meme may have marked the opening of a campaign against certain kinds of political speech.

Militant gay rights and militant feminism are now very much government policy, indeed, foreign policy, and such campaigns, masquerading as grass-roots activism, are to be expected.

Meanwhile, perhaps related to this or perhaps not,  some  libertarians have been purged from FakeBook.…and complaints have been lodged against a few others.

My own modest page at FakeBook, set up by someone else, seems to have been stripped…

(Which is all to the good.  FB was always a trap).

In any case, I thank everyone who reads this blog.

And please ignore the threats. Comments are very valuable.

Also,  to the reader who wrote,

 Keep up the good
work.  Truth always finds a way!   Y
You are obviously a person of the light.  
Take good care.

Thanks very much.

Margaret Newsham: Echelon Whistle-blower, Hero

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I’ve blogged before about Margaret Newsham, who was dismissed in 1984 (30 years ago) from Lockheed Martin, where she was working on the Echelon global espionage system, a project kept secret even from the US government, since it was completely unconstitutional.  In other words, it was a project of the corporate overlords of the government and the intelligence services, a product of the “shadow state” as it were, not of the day-light government.

While Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Snowden and Mr. Napolitano hold forth with no mention of thirty years of whistle-blowers,  I would like to salute Margaret Newsham, for her enormous personal sacrifices for the sake of the truth and the common good. Here is an excerpt from a 1999 interview she gave to a Danish newspaper:

From “I sold my life to Big Brother”:

” The government didn’t really know what was happening or what the many billions were actually being used for. And I felt very loyal both to the government and to the American Constitution, which was constantly being infringed. The world of espionage was also called ‘The Black World’ because most of the operations were carried out in secrecy, beyond any control.”

Since her dismissal, Margaret Newsham has been under heavy pressure, because her case against Lockheed Martin could mean that an open court case would shed light on the NSA’s ‘black projects’. Among other things, the case deals with swindling for more than 10 billion DKK (ca. 1.4 billion USD), and for the time being, her lawyer has provided her with legal assistance that is the equivalent of 140 million DKK (ca. 20 million USD).

PREMATURE DEATHS The case has had a fatal effect on her health. Since ’84 she has had seizure that left her  totally paralyzed, survived a cardiac arrest, and on top of everything else is suffering from cancer. Today, she lives on borrowed time and suffers from high blood pressure.

“It didn’t help any when my husband asked for a divorce after I had survived my cardiac arrest. He is chief of security at Lockheed Martin and has also been under a lot of pressure. He was grossly harassed because of his affiliation with me,” Newsham says.

She lives alone now and has struggled to maintain contact with her three children and six grandchildren. Today, she lives in a quiet Las Vegas suburb. Not even her neighbors know about her past.

“NSA’s activities have not only affected me, but also my former espionage colleagues at Lockheed. Nearly half of the people I worked with on clandestine projects are either dead or mortally ill today. For example, my former boss on the Echelon project, Robert Looper, died prematurely of heart failure, and Kay Nickerson, who worked on developing the Stealth bomber, died of brain damage.”

Surveillance Psychosis Theater

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Yet another act in the ongoing theater of the International Surveillance State:  “Wikileaks names US cell-phone spy target as Afghanistan, claims Google”(h/t Wenzel@EPJ)

The protagonists are well-known by now:

Wikileaks, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden,  and Paul Watson (from Infowars, Alex Jones’ site).

They’ve already established their “street cred” (credibility at the grass-roots) with their activism, so their words are taken at face-value:

Earlier this week, Pierre Omidyar’s national security blog, The Intercept, reported that the US is recording all telephone calls made in and out of the Bahamas and one other unnamed country.

The story, co-bylined by Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, explained that the Intercept had decided not to name that second “country X” due to the risk of increased violence in response.

As I wrote at the time, this decision prompted a furious response from former allies Wikileaks, which “condemn[ed] Firstlook for following the Washington Post into censoring the mass interception of an entire nation.”

Upping the stakes, Wikileaks also promised to name the redacted country within 72 hours.

Late last night the organization made good on its promise, issuing a statement claiming that “country x” is Afghanistan…

“Country X”! I’m surprised Greenwald didn’t put on a V for Vendetta mask and hiss “Psssst” from the bowels of a seedy bar.

As I’ve written here and here and here and here, and even back in 2005  in “Language of Empire,”  the government has been spying on all our calls and emails, without a warrant for a while now.

Even the mainstream press has reported this a long time ago.

That fearless dissident voice, The New York Times, published the following only a decade ago:

“Bush lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,” James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, NY Times, December 16, 2005.

Let me call your attention to this line:

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said.

Except for the suspiciously low number of people the government admits to targeting,  what did this piece really hide?

Here is a leading establishment organ substantiating what activists and immigrants have known since 9-11:

Every call overseas, every email, is subject to government monitoring.

Now, I don’t know what other people take to be monitoring. But, by 2004 many immigrants like me were generally aware that the government was listening to all our calls and emails abroad.  We even joked about it.

It was in 2010, when I was browsing Cryptome’s archives, that I realized that calls and emails directed abroad were also being taped and archived.

That part, I admit, was a shock.

 

 

Blogger arrested for invasion of privacy

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A blogger was arrested for invading the privacy of a relative of a political candidate:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/17/politics/mississippi-gop-primary-arrest/

“The arrest of a man who allegedly obtained an image of a senator’s bedridden wife has shaken up an already intense Republican primary battle in Mississippi.

Political blogger Clayton Kelly was arrested Thursday, accused of exploiting a vulnerable adult and illegally and improperly obtaining a photo of her without her consent for his own benefit, according to the Madison Police Department.

Donald Clark, an attorney for Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, and his wife, Rose, told The Clarion-Ledger newspaper that the woman in question is Rose, saying the Cochrans’ “privacy and dignity have been violated.” Rose Cochran suffers from dementia and has lived at St. Catherine’s Village, the nursing home where Thursday’s incident took place, for 14 years, according to the newspaper.”

The usual suspects will cry foul.  Journalists – even bloggers –  should always be free to say anything they want to about the political class.

On its face, of course, the arrest is a prior restraint, since no one has established the blogger’s guilt in a court of law.

However, this is not the first case of this type. Last year, the Legal Schnauzer blog,  which admittedly published defamatory material, was shut down before a court could adjudicate:

It’s clear that Southern courts are taking an aggressive position on the issue.

Frankly, constitution or not, I can sympathize with the victims. If political bloggers cannot tell the difference between a public issue and a private, they might need a severe shaking-up to find out.

On the other hand, the whole business worries me a lot.

While the first use of the law to pre-emptively discard public speech might be exerted on an obviously unsympathetic figure, it doesn’t follow that every other use will be.

For instance, there was another recent case of an outspoken blogger with powerful enemies being arrested, without a search warrant, for having child-porn on his computer.

Here,  the charges do in fact look trumped up and motivated by resentment of the blogger’s political speech:

These days, with the government privy to every move you make on the Internet, how hard would it be for someone to get a friend in government or a former government employee or contractor to download something onto your computer?

Not very hard, said a counter-terrorism expert I spoke to, although an FBI agent told me the FBI could always determine how any material was downloaded.

Still, if you’re a political blogger, the chances are you don’t want to be relying on the good offices of the FBI to avert a long stay in jail.

Godfather of Abortion Inc. Converted to Pro-Life

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At Catholic Education.org, the godfather of American abortion, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, confesses he’s had a change of heart:

“I am personally responsible for 75,000 abortions. This legitimizes my credentials to speak to you with some authority on the issue. I was one of the founders of the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws in the U.S. in 1968.

A truthful poll of opinion then would have found that most Americans were against permissive abortion. Yet within five years we had convinced the Supreme Court to issue the decision which legalized abortion throughout America in 1973 and produced virtual abortion on demand up to birth.

How did we do this? It is important to understand the tactics involved because these tactics have been used throughout the western world with one permutation or another, in order to change abortion law

The First Key Tactic was to capture the media

We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favour of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public.

The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.

Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

[Lila: Again, concealed from the public is the fact that the US has an abortion policy far more radical than many socialist countries, like India, where late-term abortions would be considered murder. Here, they are perfectly legal, and, as the Kermit Gosnell story shows, they are far more prevalent than the media admits.

Moreover, the Emily Letts  abortion snuff video shows that abortion is used instead of contraception or responsible prevention.

Indeed, the video was most likely disseminated to normalize and promote the practice of abortion as contraception. There is no doubt in my mind that the intention is not to sever and destroy the “stigma of abortion,” as the media claimed, but to sear and cauterize the mother’s conscience, to cut the umbilical cord of maternal affection, to pervert the energetic bond between mother and child.

In that sense, and in many others, the video was filled with “occult” religious clues, but it was the religion of black witchcraft, not Christianity or Judaism.]

The Second Key Tactic was to Play the Catholic Card

We systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its “socially backward ideas” and picked on the Catholic hierarchy as the villain in opposing abortion. This theme was played endlessly. We fed the media such lies as “we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics” and “Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform.”

And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favour of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions were (and still are) monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists’ opinions.

[Lila: A key element in this strategy was to infiltrate and subvert the Catholic church from within. Thus, the church was first demonized for excluding gays; then when the gays in the church contributed to the pedophilic abuse, the blame was shifted onto celibacy and Catholic teaching on celibacy, rather than onto the proclivities of the priests.

Celibacy was thus associated with a so-called pedophilic hierarchy of conservative males, thus discrediting it.]

The Third Key Tactic was the Denigration and Suppression of all Scientific Evidence that Life Begins at Conception

I am often asked what made me change my mind. How did I change from prominent abortionist to pro-life advocate? In 1973, I became director of obstetrics of a large hospital in New York City and had to set up a perinatal research unit, just at the start of a great new technology which we now use every day to study the fetus in the womb. A favorite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one. Fetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy.

Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of fetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions?

Simple arithmetic: at $300.00 a time 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion.

[Lila: Actually, because of the trade in organs and fetal tissue, abortion is probably far more lucrative than that.  Kermit Gosnell apparently made something like $1500, not $300, from each abortion performed. That means roughly five times the figure above, or over $2 billion. This is just an extrapolation from media figures, of course.

The largest advocate of family planning services and the biggest provider of them, Planned Parenthood, relies largely on providing abortion to the public, not “other family services”:

“According to Planned Parenthood’s own apologist, Media Matters, its “total revenue from abortion services was approximately $164,154,000,” a year. Accordingly, over 51 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinic income comes from abortion.

In addition to its $320.1 million in clinic income and $223.8 million in private donations, Planned Parenthood receives $487.4 million dollars a year from taxpayers.

Lila (continued): The liberal-left darling, Planned Parenthood, dispenses abortion pills in addition to abortion procedures, making the outfit the killer of over 300,000 children every year.

It is not coincidental that those children are mostly black, brown, and from the underclass, given that the mother of family-planning, Margaret Sanger, was a devoted eugenicist who wanted to control the birth-rate of the population and weed out “undesirables.”

Bernard Nathanson (cont):

It is clear that permissive abortion is purposeful destruction of what is undeniably human life. It is an impermissible act of deadly violence. One must concede that unplanned pregnancy is a wrenchingly difficult dilemma. But to look for its solution in a deliberate act of destruction is to trash the vast resourcefulness of human ingenuity, and to surrender the public weal to the classic utilitarian answer to social problems.”

As a scientist I know, not believe,  that human life begins at conception. Although I am not a formal religionist, I believe with all my heart that there is a divinity of existence which commands us to declare a final and irreversible halt to this infinitely sad and shameful crime against humanity.”

The insanity of public debate in America

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Consider the following,:

1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.

These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.

2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.

Leading “libertarian” activists  say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public.  This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.

No one thinks of simply ignoring and not linking the Sterling material. Instead, they all follow the media’s cue automatically, as though pulled by invisible strings. Then they call themselves “fiercely independent” and talk about “freedom,:” “free speech,” “free choice,” “self-ownership” and other flattering mythologies with a straight face.

Meanwhile, so-called “evil statists” are the only ones arguing that the the recordings are on their face illegal and should not be distributed in the public realm.

The parameters of debate in the much-vaunted “free press” are set by media barons who profit from cheap gossip and extortion (which lowers the cost of running a paper, since the public does the reporting for free or for small sums), pornographers, and paid operatives of the government posing as private actors.

No one considers this a gross conflict of interest. The media barons are presumed not to have political agendas and presumed not to manipulate in collusion.

Nor is this manipulation termed what it is – an extension of the state into the private sphere. It is all deemed “free market” unproblematically.

3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.

I actually agree with that argument, but those who deny a Donald Sterling his privacy can surely have no justification for giving a Belle Knox hers.

With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide)  is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).

4. The same people who attack Donald Sterling’s private speech and hold it to an arbitrarily decided public standard also denounce theocracy (with its logically entailed blasphemy laws) as an insupportable and “medieval” intrusion into free speech and thought. And they declare themselves the embodiment of “reason” against the “irrationality” of the religious.

5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate. They even object to any constraint placed on their right to disseminate for commercial profit the vilest images, even where they would be accessible by minors.

They defend their right to view violent child pornography, even though that right supplies the demand that drives a global market of child abuse and murder and though the act of viewing itself has been deemed criminal.

But while the act of viewing child-porn is criminal, the act of dismembering a child is deemed “private” and protected.

The left also defends without any nuance or moderation the right to publish “art”  that inflames the public, even where major violence could result  as in the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which, as it turns out, were a deliberate provocation from a neo-con flack.

Mommy dearest makes snuff-movie, calls critics “haters”

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UPDATE:

Please note that this piece is not intended to bash or mock women who have undergone abortions. That is a matter between a woman and her conscience, at least under current law.

The post is intended to deride an abortion-activist who turns a  matter that at all other times she claims is private into a public spectacle, even while branding critics as pure evil, for simply telling her what they think about it.

ORIGINAL POST

Yet another gloriously “humanitarian” feminist, not content with aborting her child,  goes viral with the deed so she can blot out her guilt.….

The malign mommy didn’t really film her first trimester abortion in gory detail, because that would put a crimp in her “you-go-girl” story.

She just filmed herself – the heroine of the episode.

A genuine aborti-flick would have shown the unpleasant reality behind the flattering fiction.

And, of course, this brand of feminism is all about spinning flattering fiction…. and erasing unflattering reality.

Mommy dearest writes:

“A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes. It is safer than giving birth. There is no cutting, and risk of infertility is less than 1 percent. Yet women come into the clinic all the time terrified that they are going to be cut open, convinced that they won’t be able to have kids after the abortion. The misinformation is amazing, but think about it: They are still willing to sacrifice these things because they know that they can’t carry the child at this moment.

[Lila: To an objective observer, this “sacrifice” is nothing of the sort. It is sheer recklessness.]

“There are three options for a first-trimester abortion: medical abortion, which is the pill; a surgical abortion with IV sedation, where you’re asleep through the whole thing; and a surgical abortion with local anesthesia during which you’re awake. Women are most terrified of being awake.

[Lila: Indeed.]

“I could have taken the pill, but I wanted to do the one that women were most afraid of. I wanted to show it wasn’t scary — and that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story. It’s my story.

Everyone at the clinic was really supportive of filming it.”

[Lila:  Mass man is at his core a voyeur, a bored busy-body.  He seems never happier than when playing peeping- tom at your expense, or sharing more than you want to know, at his own.]

“At first they wanted to sit down and talk about the real consequences of this. There are a lot of politics involved. We knew we could have hundreds of protesters at our door; we could have bomb threats. Working at an abortion clinic, every once in awhile it feels like you’re working in a war zone.

[Lila:  Her self -dramatization takes away the focus from the real victims, her unborn baby.]

“But I said, “Bring it,” and they were on board.

I knew the cameras were in the room during the procedure, but I forgot about them almost immediately. I was focused on staying positive and feeling the love from everyone in the room. I am so lucky that I knew everyone involved, and I was so supported. I remember breathing and humming through it like I was giving birth. I know that sounds weird, but to me, this was as birth-like as it could be. It will always be a special memory for me. I still have my sonogram, and if my apartment were to catch fire, it would be the first thing I’d grab.

[Lila: If this were metaphysics, it would be excellent. As abortion documentary, it’s nothing more than delusion.]

“The first night I posted the video to my Facebook page, I couldn’t sleep. I went out with friends, and I was so paranoid people were looking at me a certain way because they saw my video. The intimacy of it made me nervous, even though I really wanted people to see it.

[Lila: Can anyone any more wonder why the population doesn’t object to its medical records being pawed through by the government? People simply have no sense of privacy. If the love of private life is the mark of the civilized man, then we must confront the truth that we are no longer civilized.]

“Then I looked at my Facebook wall. I was expecting this tsunami of hateful, scary things, but everyone was so breathtakingly supportive. People who I have never talked to started writing their own abortion stories.

[Lila: Bad taste, thy name is “sisterhood.”]

“I had one woman who messaged me saying she’d had an abortion that week and she was plagued with guilt. Her boyfriend called her a killer, but she said she was recovering well and appreciated the video. Another woman told me she’d had a miscarriage and that because of my video she felt like she could talk to me about it. Just all of these things started pouring out of women.

There were hateful responses, of course, which was the hardest part of this whole thing. When I put it up on YouTube, pro-lifers put it on their newscasts. And so I got, “You’re a Nazi,” “You deserve to die,” “You killed your baby.” Just so much blind hatred without knowing who I am or what I’m about.

[Lila: This so-called  “hatred” is far from blind. It’s the wide-awake anger of the sentient and the just, appalled by her self-absorption and indifference to what is, finally, a killing.

It is both natural and good to hate something hate-worthy, like  irresponsible killing.]

“Still, every time I watch the video, I love it. I love how positive it is. I think that there are just no positive abortion stories on video for everyone to see. But mine is.

I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

[Lila: Yes, guilt. That little voice from one’s conscience that says that abortion is not all fine-and-dandy.]

“Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about it.

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily, wake up! What are you doing? I was going against the advice I give to patients all the time. So I had them put an IUD in after the abortion. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.”

Lila: Translation:

As long as you can make yourself feel good about it, go ahead and do what you want. Ignore anyone who suggests that, if not garden-variety murder, this is something less and more at the same time.

Above all, feel good, because feeling good is all that matters.

For that, keep tight control of the language and the images.

Don’t let either get out of your control.

As long as you can make yourself look good, through subversion of the language  you can feel good.

As long as you feel good, you are good.

And anyone who fails to go along with that self-portrait, why, they’re nothing more than haters.

UK’s Cinderella Law: Jail for “Emotionally Abusive” Parents

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The United Kingdom, already one of the most heavily surveilled states on earth, has decided that spying on its citizens with street cameras, shop cameras, cell-phone software, GPS tracking, email snooping, financial audits, welfare agency monitoring, and neighborhood snitches is simply not enough.

It wants to poke its nose into family life.

As usual, the pretext is a humanitarian one – the protection of children from abuse at home.

But child protection laws already punish physical/sexual violence and neglect of any kind severely.

So what’s left?

Now, parents face jail-time for convictions for emotional abuse, which can be anything from fighting in front of their children, blaming their children, being cold to them, or not paying enough attention to them.

Emotional abuse is real. And it is damaging.

But it’s also dynamic, complex and definitely not something a government official should meddle in.

Imagine the thousands of decent, loving families that are going to be ripped apart and destroyed by this malign law, as The Independent rightly points out:

“These days, parents who smoke or drink alcohol in front of children risk being characterised as child-abusers. Opponents of the tradition of male circumcision condemn Jewish and Muslim parents as abusers of children. Health activists denounce parents of overweight children for the same offence. Mothers and fathers who educate their children to embrace the family’s religion have been characterised as child abusers by anti-faith campaigners.”

Educating people about family interaction is one thing.

But there’s  already plenty of that going on.

What this law does is empower yet another empire-building department to pile up parental scalps in its quest for budgets, clout, and public profile.

Meanwhile, kids who tattle on their parents are losers too. They face the trauma of losing their parents to jail; losing their family life to endless days in court; and losing their own selves to a web of foster homes and government offices.

This isn’t a Cinderella law.

It’s a Cruel Step-mother (government) Law.

Telegraph.co:

“Changes to the child neglect laws will make “emotional cruelty” a crime for the first time, alongside physical or sexual abuse.

The Government will introduce the change in the Queen’s Speech in early June to enforce the protection of children’s emotional, social and behavioural well-being.

Parents found guilty under the law change could face up to 10 years in prison, the maximum term in child neglect cases.

The change will update existing laws in England and Wales which only allow an adult responsible for a child to be prosecuted if they have deliberately assaulted, abandoned or exposed a child to suffering or injury to their health.”

Once again, this is not about protecting children.

It is about giving the government the tools to intervene on behalf of  the “politically correct” agenda, which is the mask under which censorship of potentially disruptive political speech takes place.

It’s not about protecting a child who has sexual identity (or other) problems from harassment and cruelty.

Laws against physical abuse already do that.

It’s about using the accusation of “bigot,” “homophobe,” or “sexist” to jail human beings who are otherwise law-abiding citizens.

It takes no great imagination to see how universal surveillance plays into this.

Surveillance allows the government to surreptitiously target the people it wants to harass through analysis of their online activity, cell phone conversations, purchases, and social networks.

The guidelines for what constitutes a public threat have already been drawn up.

Provocateurs, agents, and civilian snitches, embedded in schools and welfare agencies, will then monitor the child of the  targeted person for investigation, coercive interviews, and direct threats.  Few children can stand up to such tactics.

Whatever they admit under pressure  then becomes the platform for a full-scale intervention into the targeted family.  Then follows jail-time, shrink sessions, and re-education camp  for the unlucky parent/s, whose entire private life now becomes public criminal record.

Criminalizing ordinary behavior and intimidating law-abiding citizens with an amorphous and expansive law is as good a way as any of politically gelding a large chunk of the population, hitherto beyond the reach of the criminal justice system.

Vladimir Putin: The NWO’s man in Russia?

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UPDATE:

Zahir Ebrahim in the comments questions the figure $75 billion.  Well, I used the term “apparently” because there’s not much concrete to go by, but that is the figure (or $70b) given out by critics.

How credible is it? No way to know for sure, but besides the Gazprom shares, Putin is said to secretly own shares in many other companies:

“While many previously state-owned industries were privatized, Putin allegedly has used his power to build large secret ownership stakes several multi-billion dollar commodity firms. His most vocal critics assert that Putin has leveraged his power to acquire a 4.5% ownership stake in natural gas producer Gazprom, a 37% stake in oil company Surgutneftegas and 50% stake in Swiss oil-trader Gunvor. Gazprom alone does over $150 billion in revenue annually, Guvnor does $80 billion and Surgutneftegas over $20 billion. Using their most recent market capitalizations, Putin’s combined ownership stakes would give him a personal net worth of $70 billion!So what evidence is there of Putin’s secret obscene fortune? Let’s start with the small stuff. Putin is known to sport a $150,000 Patek Philippe watch on most occasions and his total collection has been valued at $700,000. He also has full access to a $40 million ultra-luxury yacht that features a wine cellar, Jacuzzi, helipad and outdoor barbecue area. In terms of living accommodations, Putin has access to 20 mansions throughout the world including a lavish ski lodge and Medieval castle. The crown jewel of his property portfolio is a $1 billion palace overlooking the Black Sea that he allegedly owns through an anonymous trust. Furthermore, Putin makes frequent use of 15 Presidential helicopters and more than 40 private jets, many of which feature gold plated interiors.”

The reports are  based on an interview given by Stanislav Belkovsky to Die Welt, also described here.

Some other related links about Putin’s associations with the oligarchs:

Roman Abramovich once had close and privileged ties to Putin.

Abramovich fell out with one-time associate Berezovsky but stayed friendly with Putin.

Oligarchs like Abramovich, Fridman, and Miller are close to Putin.

The second plundering of Russia, according to Stanislav Belkovsky

More here about Putin’s business dealings.

Corruption alleged by Boris Nemtsov, Deputy PM under Yeltsin and an Opposition leader.

NOTE: I’m going to do another post about Putin because I think I might have swallowed some disinformation put out.  I didn’t realize that the $70-75b. figure only came from that interview, because I saw it repeated by another investigator, but I’m wondering now if there is some disinfo  in all this.

ORIGINAL POST

It’s been interesting to me to see the right regarding President Putin as some kind of Christian hero

Even Bill Lind has joined the chorus.

It’s certainly true that Putin says a lot of things that conservatives want to hear.

He’s outfoxed the Bolsheviks of the US State Dept.

But, as I’ve pointed out before, there’s plenty of  evidence that Putin himself is beholden to the right wing of the New World Order.

One can accept the secession of Crimea as a relatively peaceful process and an understandable reaction to the US’s own belligerent posturing and meddling in the region, but it doesn’t follow that one should then swallow the narrative of Patrick Buchanan that Putin stands for Christianity.

These are deep waters. Nothing is as it seems. Anyone who subscribes to black-and-white narratives can be easily manipulated by the powers-that-be.

A lengthy article on the Russian Orthodox church since the fall of communism argues that the Moscow Church was completely under the Soviets and acted as an agent of the KGB; that the transition to “democracy” in the 1990s was only a transition to criminality and a change in rhetoric not substance; that there is little real orthodoxy left under the Sovietized Orthodox Church; and that simony, occultism, paganism, and ecumenism reign in the present-day Russian church, not traditional belief.

The blog La Russophobe has a list of  what it calls “Putin murders” – assassinations of civil society figures – journalists and activists.

That list would be the Russian equivalent of the Clinton body count.

In India, The Hindustan Times points out that no world leader annoys America’s belligerent leadership more.

But the enemy of my enemy is…sometimes….just another enemy:

The red flags are there to see:

1. Vladimir Putin to revive Soviet Hero of Labor award (Daily Telegraph, Dec 11, 2012)

2. Vladimir Putin compares Lenin to holy Christian relics (Daily Telegraph, Dec 12, 2012)

3.  Vladimir Putin’s net worth

I am going to retract this assessment of Putin’s  net worth. The reason is that the origin of the figure comes from an interview by a Putin biographer, Stanislav Belkovsky, in Die  Welt, who claims Putin has never sued him. The estimate seems to be based on Belkovsky’s book on Putin’s finances and his research as head of a Moscow think-tank. It’s not improbable, given Putin’s career as a close associate of several oligarchs, himself a KGB chief, and allegedly involved in corrupt dealings following the death of Yeltsin, who passed on power to him.

However, I went back to look more closely and came across a retraction by the Economist of one of Belkovsky’s claims, on threat of suit.

($75 billion $40-70b, apparently from shares in companies including his 4.5% shares in Gazprom revenues). That makes him the richest man on earth

[Lila, added  on 4/8): He is said to own shares in several other companies, the total of which at market valuation in 2007 was $40b. I assume the $70-75 is accounted for by the valuation since then, but I didn’t calculate it myself.]

4. Vladimir Putin’s Jewish embrace: Is it love or politics?

QUOTE: “Putin has carefully cultivated relationships with Russia’s many subgroups and regions as a means of projecting his government’s authority.”

QUOTE: “Under Putin, harsh laws have led to a crackdown on ultranationalist groups that once had flourished in Russia.”

QUOTE: “Putin may be good for Jews, but he’s bad for Russia,” said Michael Edelstein, a lecturer at Moscow State University and a journalist for the L’chaim Jewish newspaper.”

QUOTE: “Freedom of expression has been severely restricted and politically motivated prosecutions remain widespread under Putin, according to Amnesty International’s 2013 report on Russia.”

QUOTE: “The preferential treatment of Chabad by Putin’s government “is creating a monolithic Jewish institutional life and preventing grass-roots development, which is the real key for Jewish rejuvenation,” said Michael Oshtrakh, a leader of the Jewish community of Yekaterinburg.”

5. Putin targets foes with zombie guns, which attack victim’s central nervous system

‘Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons, but will be more acceptable in terms of political and military ideology.” (Exactly the same rationale used by the CIA to justify “torture-lite,” radiation weapons, microwave weapons, etc.)

7. Putin is alleged to have been a Royal Arch Mason who trained with MI6, according to The Big Breach, a memoir by a disgruntled MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson.

The relevant material is summarized at this blog.

8. 9/11 insider job “impossible to conceal” says Vladimir Putin (Russia Today, August 2, 2011)

Why does Putin deny that 9/11 could have been an intelligence coup?

Perhaps, because he himself came to power in just such a KGB/FSB coup and has too many skeletons in his own closet…

Perhaps, because one way to fight the opposition is to lead it….

SAC Case: Should Be About Racketeering, Not Insider-Trading

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Previous Mind-Body Politic posts related to Steve Cohen, in reverse chronological order (incomplete):

Rajat Gupta Trial: The other Goldman insider ring, MBP, June 10, 2012

More on Einhorn’s rumour-mongering about Lehman, MBP, April 15, 2010

Third-point, Goldman trading chiefs exist together, Madoff programmers indicted, March 18, 2010

Hedge-funds: top ten earners in 2007-2008, MBP,  January 13, 2010

Steven Cohen: third-biggest owner of Sotheby’s in 2009, MBP, Dec. 30, 2009

Secretive Steve Cohen on talk-show, discussing relationship with ex, MBP,  Dec. 27, 2009

SAC spin-offs fail, even when they succeed, MBP,  Dec. 26,2009

SAC subpoenas former SAC trader Grodin, MBP,  Dec. 25, 2009

Den of Thieves: Hedge-hogs go into SAC remote mode, MBP, Dec. 23., 2009

Sad SAC: Reuters spikes hedge story on complaints from Steven Cohen, MBP.com, December 22, 2009

Ex-Sith lady uses RICO on Sith lord? Mindbodypolitic, December 17, 2009

ORIGINAL POST

In his piece at Deep Capture, “SAC Capital (and Steve Cohen too) should be convicted”, researcher Mark Mitchell is far more sanguine than I am that Preet Bharara really means to go after the chief of the mega-hedge fund SAC,  Steven Cohen, after he puts away  various underlings, like Michael Steinberg and Indian-born Matthew Martoma.

“By fixating on the insider-trading angle in all his cases, Bharara, in my opinion, undermined the whole credibility of his prosecution and opened himself up for charges that he is merely targeting politically-viable low-hanging fruit.

Lila: As I’ve documented thoroughly at this blog, Bharara hasn’t had much credibility in his Wall Street prosecutions for at least a year now, regardless of how successful his other prosecutions might have been in some people’s eyes. I’m glad to see some main-stream voices coming around to my view.

I think I know a little about the Steven Cohen investigation, from my conversations with some of the principals at Deep Capture, where the investigation of Cohen began

Here’s a piece I wrote which they picked up, back in 2009:

Steve Cohen, the anti-Midas (Judd Bagley at Deep Capture):

Here are Lila’s observations on the matter:

1. The high number of SAC traders who seem to have gone off into their own businesses.

You’d think with all that money and the fund’s record as the most consistently successful in the business (only one bad year on record), their traders would stay forever. Quite the opposite.  People seem to have been leaving all the time to form their own businesses.

But SAC was also said to be a very tough environment. You produced, or you left.

So maybe that’s why Lee and Far, Grodin and Goodman, all left to found their own firms?
Could be. But I’m not convinced.

2. None of the spin-off firms seems to have been very successful.

Why not? Why couldn’t these hot-shot traders make money on their own?

The Reuters piece suggests that perhaps the SAC experience didn’t foster business ability. And that perhaps SAC traders flounder without SAC’s huge supporting cast.

But those things are likely to be true of other firms as well, not solely SAC.

Still not convinced.

Furthermore, consider this.

3. A spin-off fund that didn’t get money from Cohen ended up quite successful:

“Healthcor, a healthcare industry focused fund, had raised $3.2 billion by June 2009 since launching four years ago. The fund returned 25 percent in 2006, 18 percent in 2007, and was up 4 percent last year, when the average hedge fund lost 19 percent. In the first 10 months of 2009, Healthcor was up 7 percent.

Healthcor, founded by Arthur Cohen and Joseph Healey, opened without any financial support from SAC. In fact, soon after Cohen and Healey struck out on their own, SAC sued the pair, accusing them of breaching their employment contracts. The matter ultimately was settled. (Healthcor’s Cohen is not related to SAC’s Cohen).”

4. Even spin-offs that were doing well were shut down.

When Stratix started in 2004, it had $60 million given to it by SAC. When it shut down, in 2007, it was up 17% and had $530 million under management. Yet it shut down. Why did it shut down? Those numbers sound pretty good.

Another spin-off, Fontana Capital, started out in 2005 with $50 million of SAC money. It grew to $325 million by 2006.  But sometime in 2007, Cohen pulled out all his money. And in 2009, Fontana was down to $16.1 million, despite being down only 7.69%, compared to the average S&P Financial index loss of 57%. Again, that sounds like it wasn’t doing all that bad.

Reuters quotes someone familiar with the record of ex-SAC traders:

“So many of the ex-SAC people seem to have this model where they attract you with fantastic returns in the first year but in year two or three or four you get annihilated,” said a person who is familiar with several former SAC employees’ records.

Shades of Bernie Madoff….

Someone need to look closely at what happened to the money at these firms…

Lila:

Unlike some, I don’t think the fact that Bharara has an agenda means that Martoma is necessarily innocent, either.

I just think that even guilty as charged, Martoma is small fry.

He’s Cohen’s employee and by every account I’ve read, Cohen kept notoriously tight control of his business and tolerated no dissent.

He was not the kind of hands-off employer who can plead ignorance after the fact, even though that’s just what he did.

So Martoma might be guilty as heck, but it’s beside the point.

Insider-trading, outside the  issue of racketeering, is an irrelevant and minor side-show.

Insider-trading as part of systemic racketeering is another thing.

But Bharara hasn’t shown that, nor does he even look like he’s trying to show that.

He looks like he’s polishing his resume for a move into politics.

Anyway, here’s Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture:

Deep Capture: SAC Capital (and Steve Cohen too) should be convicted….

“During the trial of Martoma, DOJ prosecutors confirmed that SAC Capital traded on inside information provided by a doctor at the University of Michigan, which was all well and good, but as I documented in my book, SAC Capital not only traded on inside information from another University of Michigan doctor, but also profited from short selling Dendreon’s stock after multiple doctors (some of whom had demonstrably corrupt relationships with Milken) conspired to undermine Dendreon’s treatment by convincing the FDA (also corrupted by Milken and his associates) to delay approval of the treatment (which had been proven effective).

Some journalists and their Wall Street sources have argued that insider trading is an essentially harmless offense and that SAC Capital deserves leniency, but their arguments obscure the fact that SAC Capital’s insider trading has involved the wholesale corruption of the FDA and some of the nation’s most prominent doctors, all of whom have (as my book documents in detail) shown themselves more than willing not only to provide Steve Cohen and his associates, including Milken, with inside information, but also to undermine pharmaceutical companies with effective treatments while promoting companies (i.e. companies that are financed by Milken and his associates) whose treatments are actually killing people.”

Lila: Exactly. But then, in that context, Matthew Martoma is actually the lesser offender.

He was after all a portfolio manager, a trader. His employment depended on his getting an edge.

When he stopped getting that edge (illegal, as it turned out), he was fired.  Since Martoma has been attested to be very knowledgeable in his field by the doctors with whom he interacted, it follows that his competitors in the field must also have been getting their “edge” in the same way.

Industry-wide corruption of that kind isn’t best addressed by throwing the book at some representative pawn/small fish in the game.  That only makes the prosecutors’ office look biased or politically motivated.

Which it usually is.

If the nation’s top doctors were engaged in corrupt activities, why aren’t some of them being prosecuted before Martoma?

And, if Steven (don’t call me Stevie) Cohen is a racketeer, prove that.

Then give yourself a gold medal. Not before.

Note: See John Cassidy’s piece at the New Yorker, “Has Steven A. Cohen bought off the US Government?” November, 4, 2013