Tag: conspiracy

That sounds convincing

The FBI resorts to an old police standby. “Gee, turns out that all the body cams and car cameras mysteriously failed simultaneously when our officers shot that unarmed little girl 37 times”:

The Justice Department has turned over to Congress additional text messages involving an FBI agent who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team following the discovery of derogatory comments about President Donald Trump.

But the department also said in a letter to lawmakers that its record of messages sent to and from the agent, Peter Strzok, was incomplete because the FBI, for technical reasons, had been unable to preserve and retrieve about five months’ worth of communications.

New text messages highlighted in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, are from the spring and summer of 2016 and involve discussion of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. They reference Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s decision to accept the FBI’s conclusion in that case and a draft statement that former FBI Director James Comey had prepared in anticipation of closing out the Clinton investigation without criminal charges.

The FBI declined to comment Sunday.

Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent who also worked the Clinton email case, was reassigned last summer from the team investigating ties between Russia and Trump’s Republican presidential campaign after Mueller learned he had exchanged politically charged text messages — many anti-Trump in nature — with an FBI lawyer also detailed to the group. The lawyer, Lisa Page, left Mueller’s team before the text messages were discovered.

The Justice Department last month produced for reporters and Congress hundreds of text messages that the two had traded before becoming part of the Mueller investigation. Many focused on their observations of the 2016 election and included discussions in often colorful language of their personal feelings about Trump, Clinton and other public figures. Some Republican lawmakers have contended the communication reveals the FBI and the Mueller team to be politically tainted and biased against Trump — assertions Wray has flatly rejected.

In addition to the communications already made public, the Justice Department on Friday provided Johnson’s committee with 384 pages of text messages, according to a letter from the Wisconsin lawmaker that was obtained by The Associated Press.

But, according to the letter, the FBI told the department that its system for retaining text messages sent and received on bureau phones had failed to preserve communications between Strzok and Page over a five-month period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. May 17 was the date that Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

The explanation for the gap was “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

I think I’m going to have to remember that excuse. Why don’t you have any receipts for that deduction? Well, it was misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades. Hey, Windows 10, what are you going to do?

Release the memo!

More sound and fury signifying nothing? Or is the government shutdown, combined with what appears to be the imminent release of the FISA court abuse memo, the first thunderclap of the much-anticipated Storm?

All hell is breaking loose in Washington D.C. after a four-page memo detailing extensive FISA court abuse was made available to the entire House of Representatives Thursday. The contents of the memo are so explosive, says Journalist Sara Carter, that it could lead to the removal of senior officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice and the end of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation.

These sources say the report is “explosive,” stating they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.

A source close to the matter tells Fox News that “the memo details the Intelligence Committee’s oversight work for the FBI and Justice, including the controversy over unmasking and FISA surveillance.” An educated guess by anyone who’s been paying attention for the last year leads to the obvious conclusion that the report reveals extensive abuse of power and highly illegal collusion between the Obama administration, the FBI, the DOJ and the Clinton Campaign against Donald Trump and his team during and after the 2016 presidential election.

Lawmakers who have seen the memo are calling for its immediate release, while the phrases “explosive,” “shocking,” “troubling,” and “alarming” have all been used in all sincerity. One congressman even likened the report’s details to KGB activity in Russia.

Now we know why the Democrats have been so stupidly intransigent in shutting down the government over a few illegal aliens. They’re just trying to shift the media narrative away from the expected fallout from the release of the memo.

It’s important to keep in mind that all of these things – all of them – are interconnected. It’s sometimes hard to remember that since the media covers every story as if it appeared ex nihilo even when the same people are involved from one story to the next, but there is absolutely no chance that the Democrats just happened to dig in their heels over nothing at this particular point in time.

After all, no one expected the Swamp not to resist its draining. And right now, the illegal collusion between the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the DOJ is its weakest and most vulnerable point.

They all knew

A woman’s expose of Brian Epstein in Vanity Fair was whitewashed back in 2003:

I got to work on all of it—and Epstein kept close tabs on me. He didn’t want to be seen to cooperate, but he’d do his best to control me. He phoned regularly. I wasn’t altogether surprised to be quickly summoned to the offices of the rich and powerful, sometimes before I’d even asked to meet with them.

James “Jimmy” Cayne, then the cigar-chomping CEO of Bear Stearns, not only phoned me up, he found the time in his busy day to give me a tour of the office. He was on his best behavior, talking up Epstein’s alleged supposed great brain, his value to the bank—never mind the fact that Epstein had had to leave it quickly in 1981; this Cayne put down to Epstein’s ambition “outgrowing” the place.

I also met with respected real estate developer Marshall Rose; the former Bear Stearns chairman Alan “Ace” Greenberg called me; so too did Leslie Wexner, the founder and CEO of The Limited, who trusted Epstein so much he had given Epstein carte blanche to insert himself into both Wexner’s family and business affairs, according to people who saw Epstein’s contract; they all chattered on about Epstein’s brilliantly creative mind, his intellectual prowess—a mental agility that, to put it bluntly, was simply not evident in the many phone conversations he had with me….

I worked through December 2002 like a dog. I worked with three fact-checkers, the magazine’s lawyer; I sifted through everything Epstein threw at me and defused it. We were getting ready to go to press. And then the bullet came. “Graydon’s taking out the women from the piece,” Doug Stumpf, my editor, told me.

I began to cry. It was so wrong. The family had been so brave. I thought about the mother, her fear of the dark, of the harm she feared might come to her daughters. And then I thought of all the rich, powerful men in suits ready to talk about Epstein’s “great mind.”

“Why?” I asked Graydon. “He’s sensitive about the young women” was his answer. “And we still get to run most of the piece.”

And then the guy got his wrist slapped four years later for multiple sex offenses that should have been enough to put him away for a long time.

The thing is, if a man has a brilliantly creative mind, an intelligent woman is not merely going to notice it, she’s going to be drawn to it. So, whatever it was that those very rich men saw in Epstein, I very much doubt that it was his intellect that made him so valuable to them.

Plague for profit

All right, so this Blind Item at Crazy Days and Nights sounds way too far-fetched to be true; it’s more akin to a SF-horror novel plot than actual news, right?

Apparently The Church is finding it more difficult to bring in children the way they have in the past. That elusive head of the Church has donated tens of millions of dollars to research against diseases, many of which adversely affect third world countries. It was during this process of trying to eradicate a disease that one of the scientists created a pathogen which can kill swiftly and effectively. When the head of The Church heard about it, he agreed to test it on a village in a country that was friendly to bribes. It worked really well. It killed an astonishing number of people which were mainly adults. The children of the adults were 30-40 miles distant at a boarding school. Now, with no parents, they needed to be adopted. The Church, along with more bribes to the government had a great way to get large numbers of children quickly.

With that success, they decided to try it again, but this time, the villagers didn’t stay in place as they had before and some traveled to a neighboring village. The next thing you know, it has now started spreading to different countries and killing people faster than they can create cover stories. Look for them to spread the rumor it is an Ebola outbreak to give themselves a chance to destroy the evidence of what they did.

It wouldn’t shock me if they come forward with a cure and make hundreds of millions of dollars. That might bring too much publicity for them though. Even they would have tough time watching thousands of people die though wouldn’t they?

I mean, lethal artificial diseases that are being tested in third world countries is just crazy conspiracy theory, right? Right?

Fears are growing of a major health crisis in East Africa as a girl died of a suspected fever which could be more deadly than the Black Death. A nine-year-old girl died in central Uganda with the symptoms of an eye-bleeding disease which it is thought could kill up to 40 per cent of those infected by it.

The feared outbreak comes only months after hundreds of people were killed by the plague in Madagascar in what was described as the worst bout for 50 years. The symptoms of the new disease include headaches, bleeding, vomiting, diarrhoea and muscle pains.

This timeline just keeps getting weirder. If the Vikings win the Super Bowl, we’ll know all bets are officially off and literally anything can happen.

Hollywood values: the dam cracks

Eliza Dushku accuses Joel Kramer of sexually assaulting her at the age of 12:

Eliza Dushku has accused stunt coordinator Joel Kramer of molesting her when she was 12 years old. Kramer has denied the allegations. Her account, posted early Saturday morning, comes in the wake of the continuing #metoo movement and the launch of the Time’s Up campaign to combat sexual harassment and assault.

In a Facebook post, Dushku wrote that she was assaulted while working with Kramer on the 1994 James Cameron film “True Lies.”  According to her post, Kramer molested her in a Miami hotel room, where he “laid me down on the bed, wrapped me with his gigantic writhing body, and rubbed all over me.” Kramer would have been 36 at the time.

Dushku alleges that he “methodically built my and my parents’ trust, for months grooming me,” and told her parent that he would take her for a swim in the hotel’s pool. Instead, her took her to his hotel room, where he “disappeared in the bathroom and emerged, naked, bearing nothing but a small hand towel held flimsy at his mid-section.”

Kramer told Variety Saturday morning that Dushku’s allegations were “absolutely not true.” According to Kramer, Dushku swam in the hotel pool with him and other members of the stunt crew, including Dushku’s stunt double. Afterwards, he took her to her first ever sushi meal, and then took her home.

Crazy Days and Nights has been hinting at this for a while. Reese Witherspoon has made similar allegations of an attack by a producer when she was underage, although she has not yet named the individual responsible. The Hollywood Values dam hasn’t crumbled yet, but the cracks are spreading.

I observe that Kramer’s suggestion that Dushku is making up the allegations because “she may have had a crush on him” is classic pedophile deflection. As I have personally witnessed in court, pedos frequently resort to the “she came on to me” defense.

Years ago, my friends and I nearly got kicked out of a courtroom when a clean-cut, harmless little defendant who looked like Michael J. Fox, right down to the feathered hair and the brown corduroy sports coat with leather elbow pads, was on the stand and was asked by the judge if he had any mitigating facts to offer for his behavior in what, as far as we understood, was a date rape case. (We were there for a traffic offense and had come in towards the end of the hearing.) The defendant pointed out that he had not been the aggressor, that the alleged victim had come on to him, and that in fact he had been asleep when she jumped into his bed and woke him up by tickling him.

To be honest, we felt that this was a pretty compelling defense until the judge said, “Mr. So-and-so, she was FIVE YEARS OLD!” This was so shocking and unexpected that we all burst out laughing, thereby causing the security guards to give us a stern warning. Needless to say, the “she came on to me” defense was not a success then, and I very much doubt it will be in Mr. Kramer’s case.

State employee screws up, Trump to blame

Americans are so not ready for actual war that involves them actually being attacked, as opposed to an accidental false warning. And remember, no matter who screws up, the God-Emperor is responsible.

Approx. 8.05am: A routine internal test during a shift change was initiated. This was a test that involved the Emergency Alert System, the Wireless Emergency Alert, but no warning sirens.

8.07am: A warning was erroneously triggered statewide by an employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA).

8.10am: State Adjutant Maj. Gen. Joe Logan validated with the US Pacific Command that there was no missile launch.

Honolulu Police Department notified of the false alarm by HI-EMA.

8.13am: State Warning Point issues a cancellation of the Civil Danger Warning Message. This would have prevented the initial alert from being rebroadcast to phones that may not have received it yet. For instance, if a phone was not on at 8.07am, it would not receive the alert later on.

8.20am: HI-EMA issues public notification of cancellation via their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

8.24am: Governor Ige retweets HI-EMA’s cancellation notice.

8.30am: Governor posts cancellation notification to his Facebook page.

8.45am: After getting authorization from FEMA Integral Public Alert and Warning System, HI-EMA issued a ‘Civil Emergency Message’ remotely, cancelling the false alert.

The Russians must be laughing so hard that vodka is coming out of their noses. So, this is what the great dumbing down looks like.

Allahpundit explains the two primary conspiracy theory explanations:

Minor: It was a hack but will be played off as an error by emergency warning services.
Major: There was a missile, we shot it down, and now it’s all being played off as a false alarm.

Given that the West Coast is clearly under the threat of imminent attack, I expect Michelle Malkin has already concluded that the only rational response is the immediate internment of all Koreans and Korean-Americans.

Storm pressure?

Interesting to observe how more and more of politicians are offing themselves of late.

An Idaho Republican state lawmaker who was under investigation for possible sexual abuse, died in an apparent suicide, according to authorities on Tuesday. Canyon County Coroner Vicki DeGeus-Morris said Brandon Hixon was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in his Caldwell home early Tuesday morning. A family member discovered his remains.

Hixon, 36, was elected to the Idaho Legislature in 2012. At the time, Hixon was one of the youngest lawmakers elected to the Idaho House of Representatives.

He flew relatively under the radar during his time in the Statehouse until October, when he abruptly resigned from office after reports broke he was the subject of a criminal investigation for possible sexual abuse.

And there are still a lot of major figures who seem to have considerably lowered their media profile since the leadup into Christmas. I doubt this is a coincidence.

You can’t even hope to contain him

James Damore files his much-anticipated lawsuit against Google, and reveals a number of surprising facts about Google policy:

Google Provides Internal Tools to Facilitate Blacklisting

Google’s internal company systems allowed employees and managers to maintain a “block list” of other employees with whom they did not wish to interact. For example, if A adds B to her block list, B is not able to look A up in the company directory, communicate with A through the internal instant messaging system, view A’s contact information or management chain, or see A’s  posts on internal social media. A and B would not be able to work together constructively on an engineering project if either person blocked the other.

It is common knowledge within Google that employees were habitually added to block lists for expressing conservative political views. In these comments, employees and managers discussed using block lists to sabotage other Googlers’ job transfers onto their teams.

When an employee was blocked by a manager in another department in retaliation for reporting misconduct, Google HR defended the practice of blacklisting co-workers, stating: “Thanks for sharing this. Co-workers are allowed to control who can access their social media accounts (like G+ and hangouts). Unless your inability to access John’s social media accounts is negatively impacting your ability to do your job, we don’t find any information to suggest that John is retaliating against you in violation of policy.”

 On a separate occasion, another Googler posted: “Another day, another entry on a  blacklist I wish wasn’t necessary to keep.” This was reported to Google HR. Google HR responded that the employee “was just expressing his own personal opinion on who he likes working with, [therefore] we did not find his comments to violate Google policy.”

At a “TGIF” all-hands meeting on October 26, 2017, an employee directly asked executives about the appropriateness of employees keeping political blacklists. Kent Walker, the Senior Vice President of Legal, dodged the question rather than repudiating the practice of  blacklisting.

On September 8, 2017, a group of conservative employees met with Paul Manwell, Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Chief of Staff, to raise concerns about the ongoing problem of politically motivated blacklisting, bullying, and discrimination at Google. This meeting was a direct response to the company’s handling of the Damore situation.

The conservative employees shared their own experiences with discrimination and asked the management for three major reforms. First, they asked for clarity around communication  policies, recommending that Google publish a clearer statement on what is acceptable and unacceptable employee communication, and that any and all complaints about communication be adjudicated through “a documented, fair, transparent, and appealable process.” In the meeting, the employees pointed out that company leadership was sending mixed messages on whether it was even  permissible to criticize diversity policies. Second, the employees requested protection from retaliation, asking the leadership to make a public statement that conservatives and supporters of Damore would not be punished in any way for their political stances. Third, the conservative employees asked the company to make it clear that the hostile language and veiled threats directed at Damore and his supporters were unacceptable, and in the interest of making Google a healthier environment for employees of all political stripes, the managers and VPs who made such statements should retract them. On information and belief, none of these reforms ever took place.

In or around October 2017, a number of diversity activists at Google indicated that they had met with VPs Danielle Brown and Eileen Naughton in order to ensure that they would be able to continue blacklisting and targeting employees with whom they had political disagreements. On October 22, 2017, a conservative employee asked HR to help put him in contact with company leadership to discuss the issue of targeted political harassment. This request was acknowledged by Employee Relations on October 31, 2017. On December 22, 2017, Employee Relations indicated to the employee that they would not be following up on his concerns about the systemic problems he raised, and they considered the matter closed.

Google Maintains Secret Blacklists of Conservative Authors

On August 26, 2016, Curtis Yarvin, a well-known conservative blogger who has reportedly advised Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and other members of the Trump administration, visited the Google office to have lunch with an employee. This triggered a silent alarm, alerting security personnel to escort him off the premises.

It was later discovered that other influential conservative personalities, including Alex Jones and Theodore Beale, are also on the same blacklist.

On or about September 15, 2016, a Google employee asked HR if the writers could be removed from the blacklist. HR refused to help with the request, and instead, reconfigured the internal system so that it was no longer possible to see who was on the blacklist.

Google Allowed Employees to Intimidate Conservatives with Threats of Termination

In the midst of any heated political discussion at Google, it has become commonplace to see calls for conservatives to be fired or “encouraged to work elsewhere” for “cultural fit” reasons. Googlers are extremely proud of the fact that the company has created a “shared culture of shared  beliefs” and openly discriminates against job applicants who do not share the same political ideology.

I’m flattered, of course. Is it not better to be feared than respected? But it’s not as if it has done them any good, as Google leaks worse than the average White House.

Coincidence or The Storm?

Or perhaps a little of both? Chaos at JFK airport:

Thousands of passengers are stranded at John F Kennedy airport following more than 6,000 flight cancellations or delays stemming from the ‘bomb cyclone’ that rocked the Northeast on Thursday.

The airport had closed on Thursday afternoon due to the storm and was reopened on Friday morning.

But the reopening has been compounded by further disasters – such as a plane needing to turn back for an emergency landing after a false alarm and a collision on the tarmac.

Passenger Lily Crawford told Pix 11: ‘People are sleeping on the ground, people are sitting on the ground. People have taken over wheelchairs. There are no outlets, people are running out of power on their phone.’

She added: ‘It’s complete chaos.’

It’s easy to get impatient. But don’t. These things play out over time; Rome wasn’t corrupted in a day and she won’t be cleaned up in a day either.

A Super Bowl theory

Whiskey1Zulu has a theory:

Here is my theory about the superbowl: Since at least 2005 the NFL looks for the best storyline to finish the season, and maybe back to 2001, where after 9/11 Patriots = USA = winners. In 2005 the owner of the Steelers was in failing health and the superbowl was thrown to them so they could have the most rings before he passed away.

Patriots will win over the Vikings. Vikings make it because they will be the first home team to ever make it to the superbowl, with the side benefits that they are the best team in the NFC and they are the best franchise to never have won the game.  Patriots will win because if they don’t there will not be a dynasty for the 2010s, the Patriots would be the first double dynasty, and pundits can tout Brady & Belichick as the greatest of all time forever, continuing to gloss over the constant favorable calls, known cheating, and allegations.

This combination provides the best possible storyline going into the final game and would get more people to watch because of those factors, attempting to redeem the season in the eyes of people who are already sneaking back to the TV for better quality football and forgetting about the protests and various other reasons football has been declining.

I have to admit, going into the season, I had a feeling that if the Vikings finally made it back to the Super Bowl with such a questionable team, it would tend to confirm the Original Cyberpunk’s theory that the entire NFL season is scripted.

And his logic is compelling, especially with the media suddenly – out of nowhere – banging the drum for the end of the Patriots era. That being said, I think LAST YEAR was supposed to be the last hurrah for them, which may be setting the stage for them to suddenly lose all of the mysterious bounces that have consistently gone their way over the last decade and more.

Personally, I don’t think there is formal scripting so much as a little gentle manipulation at the edges, particularly in playoff games that start to look like blowouts. For example, I don’t think some of the questionable calls that went the Titans’ way when they were on the verge of being put away were meant to help them win, but merely to keep them in the game.

For example, as a longtime spectator, I knew that the Titans were going to get the important calls once they were down 14-0 and looking hapless on national TV. Sure enough, Mariota’s fumble on the big hit by Johnson was blown dead due to nonexistent “forward progress”, which if is to be regarded as a precedent going forward, will preclude virtually all sack-related fumbles in the future. My theory is that Jeff Triplett isn’t actually the terrible, clueless referee he appears to be, but serves as the NFL’s Tim Donaghy, a hit man in stripes working for the Commissioner.

If nothing else, that would explain why Triplett still not only has a job, but is assigned to work playoff games.