Tag: conspiracy

No pizza, only Russians

This article is practically dripping with Narrative:

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of multiple congressional panels examining Russia’s intervention, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that there was “circumstantial evidence of collusion.” There also is “direct evidence . . . of deception, and that’s where we begin the investigation,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

U.S. intelligence agencies charged in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the offensive, in which cyber operatives also hacked tens of thousands of emails from Democratic National Committee staff, Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and other Democrats.

A top priority of investigators is to determine who delivered those hacked emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency site that published them online, the sources said. News stories about the emails embarrassed Clinton at key points in the campaign. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that the Russian government was the source of the email dump.

As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.

Howard said that, as an example, bots had spread links to fictional stories that accused Clinton of involvement in running a child-sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. The posts inspired a North Carolina man to drive to Washington and fire an assault weapon in the restaurant, according to police reports.

I’m frankly astonished that they haven’t tried to claim that the Russians are responsible for putting the evil murder art in the Podestas’ houses yet.

Notice how all these stories do the same thing and exaggerate the actual accusations in order to try to make it look ridiculous and unworthy of investigation. I don’t recall anyone ever saying Clinton was actually running anything at Comet Pizza. Let’s face it, she’s so inept that if she’d ever tried to run a child-sex ring, the videos would have somehow ended up being broadcast live on Nickelodeon.

And it seems a little strange that no one ever seems to ask why someone would drive from North Carolina to Washington DC for the express purpose of not shooting anyone. Did the guy ever even get charged?

Amazon pulls THE CORRODING EMPIRE

Fascinating. We just received an email from Amazon informing us that the title, cover, and author of THE CORRODING EMPIRE were “misleading”. This is rather amusing, of course, considering that Tor Books and John Scalzi have devoted an entire career to ripping off everyone from Heinlein to Star Trek.

In any event, we will have CORROSION by Harry Seldon, complete with a new cover, back up soon. It’s not like we aren’t in the habit of anticipating enemy action, after all.

Sadly for Tor Books, there will be no similarly easy fix for the disaster that is THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE.

The funny thing is that McRapey is dumb enough to actually brag about it. He has NO idea how this makes him look to normal readers. Note that this is actually the second time he’s gone running to Amazon to ban a book.

John Scalzi‏ @scalzi
Also, a few minutes ago got confirmation of a very cool thing involving Empire that I can’t yet tell you about, he said, entirely unsubtly.

Yeah, so, about that…. this is now publishing.

Amusement intensifies.

Nick Siekierski‏ @ResearchTeacher
@scalzi Reading The Corroding Empire now, love it!

John Scalzi @scalzi
@ResearchTeacher Tell that to the actual author. I’m sure they would appreciate the feedback.

I have to admit, I prefer the replacement title and cover myself. Tor really just blows from A to Z. It’s really rather remarkable how they’ve gone from Ender’s Game to this.

Hence the finesse

This is why the non-denial denials of spying on Donald Trump have all been focused on whether Obama personally went to Trump Tower and spied on him. Because apparently, the God-Emperor was entirely right. He was being spied on by the NSA.

Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Investigator Zullo have identified dozens of entries at various addresses, including both Trump Tower in New York City and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, under which Donald Trump was apparently under NSA electronic surveillance from 2004, during President George W. Bush’s term of office, through 2009, the first year of President Obama’s presidency.

Electronic surveillance of Donald Trump was listed in the database for the following companies, locations, and dates:

Trump International
1 Central Park, NYC, NY
2008

Trump World Tower
845 United Nations Plaza, NYC, NY
No Date

Trump Tower SAL
108 Central Park, NYC, NY
2007

And it was obvious he was being spied on by the NSA and the FBI anyhow. These days, we’re all under surveillance 24-7.

Target: Bannon

The opposition media is desperate to take down Steve Bannon by any means necessary:

The issue of Bannon’s legal residency has been simmering since last summer, shortly after he became chief executive of Trump’s campaign. The Guardian reported in an Aug. 26 story that he was registered to vote at a then-vacant house and speculated that Bannon may have signed an oath that he was a Florida resident to take advantage of the state’s lack of state income taxes.

In California, where Bannon had lived and owned property for more than two decades, income tax can exceed 12 percent.

Bannon has not responded to repeated requests by The Washington Post to discuss the matter. Two Post reporters sought to independently verify his residency claims, using a wide array of publicly available information.

They obtained utility bills, court records, real estate transactions, state driver reports and the checks he wrote to pay municipal taxes in California. They interviewed neighbors, spoke with landlords and tracked his Breitbart-related activity.

In the digital age, when most Americans leave a clear footprint of their whereabouts, Bannon left a meandering trail filled with ambiguity, contradictions and questions. The Post found that Bannon left a negligible footprint in Florida. He did not get a Florida driver’s license or register a car in the state. He never voted in Florida, and neighbors near two homes he leased in Miami said they never saw him. His rent and utility bills were sent to his business manager in California.

Bannon’s former wife occupied the premises, according to a landlord and neighbors.

At the same time Bannon said he was living with his ex-wife, she was under investigation for involvement in a plot to smuggle drugs and a cellphone into a Miami jail, a law enforcement document obtained by The Post shows.

The Post learned that state prosecutors in Miami have an active investigation into Bannon’s assertions that he was a Florida resident and qualified to vote in the state from 2014 to 2016. In late August, investigators subpoenaed Bannon’s lease of a Coconut Grove home and other documents. They also contacted the landlords of that home and another that Bannon leased nearby, and sought information from a gardener and handyman who worked at one of the homes, according to documents and interviews.

Because state laws do not clearly define residency, making a false registration case can be difficult.

The danger, as I can personally testify, is that some state agents are willing to lie, ignore conclusive evidence, and make blatantly false residence claims. The Minnesota Department of Revenue eventually gave up and settled its absurd case against my father, two years after illegally seizing his house there for “unpaid taxes”, because it relied upon an agent pretending that two flights, one back to Florida and another one up to Minnesota, had not taken place even though my father provided the electronic and paper evidence that he had been on them. Erasing those flights added several nonexistent weeks to his time in Minnesota, just enough to permit them to make a false claim of his residence there and claim that he owed taxes that he manifestly did not.

Agencies love the nebulous “footprint” standard, which they prefer to the hard and fast residency laws that clearly enumerate the number of days one has to be physically present in a state in order to be a resident there. Some dirt, you see, is so magic that it sticks to you wherever you go.

In my father’s case, the entire family knew the MDR claim to be false, because we had all been with him at his house in Naples at one point or another during the time he was supposedly in Minnesota. But the agent ignored literally all the evidence, documentary and testimonial, in order to lay the foundation for a false residence claim. He’s dead now. Karma can be a bitch.

Anyhow, this would be an excellent time for the God-Emperor to return the favor and order investigations into the personal lives of the Post reporters who are so determined to dig up dirt on Bannon.

News is Conspiracy Theory +15

Spacebunny joked yesterday that she was old enough to remember when Echelon was conspiracy theory. It has now become readily apparent that what used to be derided as “conspiracy theory” is nothing more than the news, 15 years early. Consider a few historical references from this blog.

The Patriot Act and the IAO are constitutional abominations. The War on Terror is being used exactly in the same way that the War on Drugs has been used for decades – to provide the federal government with the ability to infringe upon the liberty of the American people. Your house can get stormed with a no-knock raid if an anonymous telephone call accuses you of the wrong sort of botany project, and soon the same thing will be the case if you happen to visit the wrong web sites or use dangerous terminology in your emails. Echelon is still out there transcribing American faxes, emails and telephone calls, after all.
– October 22, 2003

The US government sees fit to eavesdrop on everyone inside and outside the United States with its Echelon system, but unlike a parent trying to raise a child, that level of oversight is necessary. Terrorists, don’t you know. Why, without it, we wouldn’t have caught bin Laden and prevented the 9/11 attacks….
– December 10, 2004

Arrived too late, the act has been done.
The wind was against them, letters intercepted on their way.
The conspirators were nine of a party.
By Caesar the Younger shall these enterprises be undertaken.

Echelon and the Bush administration’s spying on Americans will be defended by the Supreme Court, should it ever get that far. Most likely, they’ll do so by refusing to hear a challenge against it.
– January 3, 2006

CIALeaks proves, once and for all, that Edward Snowden is one of the greatest heroes in American history. One hopes that the God-Emperor will recognize this and offer him a pardon; it is the CIA that is far more of an enemy to the President and the American people than the Russians these days.

Even better, President Trump should appoint Snowden to be the head of the NSA and charge him with turning it into a government agency that is entirely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and rule by the people. #SnowdenForNSA

Bureaucratic resistance

On March 6, 2017, the President signed a new Executive Order (E.O.) on Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States that contains provisions that impact visa adjudication and issuance procedures (NOTE: this E.O. does not yet have a number.  End Note).  This new E.O. has an effective date of March 16, 2017 and revokes its predecessor, E.O. 13769, as of that date.  We will not begin implementing the new E.O. until the Department of Justice confirms that pending litigation does not interfere with implementation of the new E.O.  Further guidance will follow. 

Towergate

There is a very good case to be made that Obama and/or someone on his team is now in serious legal jeopardy as a result of the reported wire-tappings of Trump Tower:

If the stories are correct, Obama or his officials might even face prosecution. But, we are still early in all of this and there are a lot of rumors flying around so the key is if the reports are accurate. We just don’t know at this time. The stories currently are three-fold: first, that Obama’s team tried to get a warrant from a regular, Article III federal court on Trump, and was told no by someone along the way (maybe the FBI), as the evidence was that weak or non-existent; second, Obama’s team then tried to circumvent the federal judiciary’s independent role by trying to mislabel the issue one of “foreign agents,” and tried to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “courts”, and were again turned down, when the court saw Trump named (an extremely rare act of FISA court refusal of the government, suggesting the evidence was truly non-existent against Trump); and so, third, Obama circumvented both the regular command of the FBI and the regularly appointed federal courts, by placing the entire case as a FISA case (and apparently under Sally Yates at DOJ) as a “foreign” case, and then omitted Trump’s name from a surveillance warrant submitted to the FISA court, which the FISA court unwittingly granted, which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump. Are these allegations true? We don’t know yet, but if any part of them are than Obama and/or his officials could face serious trouble.

Read the rest of it there. Robert Barnes goes into some detail concerning the legal minutia of the laws related to FISA and how the Obama administration almost certainly misbehaved if it even attempted to get a FISA warrant to spy on a presidential candidate.

I discussed some aspects of this at last night’s Darkstream. And as I stated, the Trump administration is already on top of it: “A senior White House official said that Donald F. McGahn II, the president’s chief counsel, was working on Saturday to secure access to what the official described as a document issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing surveillance of Mr. Trump and his associates.” 

It seems pretty clear now that a FISA warrant was secured and the subsequent wire-tapping took place. Reporter Cathy Aureu stated on Fox News that a female source, who worked in the Obama administration for nearly the whole of his two terms, confirmed that a FISA warrant was secured. However, she does not know who was responsible for securing it.

Fake News, Fake Views

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and other opposition media sites appear to be buying a significant percentage of their site traffic from China in order to preserve an appearance of relevance.

These dramatic increases in traffic have significantly bumped each site’s Alexa ranking by as much as 38%, a key metric used in website valuation. Of note, BBC.com experienced a similar boost, and others may have as well.

Not to overstate the obvious, but considering China’s ban on the New York Times, one might conclude that this massive increase which now accounts for nearly half of all website traffic is some type of high volume traffic generating bot server unimpeded by China’s restrictive firewall, synthetically inflating visitor counts for affected sites.

All three news outlets spent much of 2016 trying to influence the election in favor of Hillary Clinton with biased coverage and regular hit pieces against Donald Trump. Since winning the election, President Trump has declared war on much of the mainstream media – branding it the “opposition party,” while remaining under heavily biased attack. China is no fan of the US President either; between the threat of tariffs and Trump’s disregard for the long held “One China” policy over Taiwanese recognition, China has both economic and political reasons to try and mitigate the US President’s tough talk.

 Alexa is easily manipulated. Bot servers aren’t necessary. With the help of a handful of Dread Ilk, I goosed the US rank of VP 25,000 spots and put it into the top 5,000 back in 2014. It’s readily apparent that the Fake News is desperate to maintain the illusion of their importance, which is why they have now resorted to reporting Fake Views.

To put into perspective how obviously fake their increase in traffic has been, the New York Times‘s percentage of total site traffic from China has gone from 5.1 to 49.2 percent in just two months. That’s amazing, considering that the Carlos Slim blog has been blocked in China since 2012. In like manner, the Washington Post‘s Chinese traffic has risen from 2.9 to 58.7 percent, and the Guardian‘s from zero to 57 percent in the same two-month period.

The SJW Narrative is all lies, all the way down. Never, ever, accept anything they tell you at face value. As per the 3rd Law of SJW, when they said to “question everything”, they were projecting.

UPDATE: Busted! This is the New York Times’s Alexa rating over the last year. Apparently someone thought better of artificially inflating their traffic with fake views from China. The very same pattern can be seen with the other opposition media sites outed by Zerohedge.

Obama bugged Trump

No wonder the Attorney General recused himself from investigating the Trump campaign. He has much more pressing matters of concern.

Interesting juxtaposition from the same article:

  • Trump bizarrely alleges wiretapping by Obama; gives no evidence
  • During the summer last year, the Obama administration filed a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Trump and several advisers but the request was denied, according to Heat Street former editor, Louise Mensch. Just a day before the 2016 election, Mensch reported that ‘sources with links to the counter-intelligence community’ confirmed that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) had granted a FISA court warrant in October to monitor activities in Trump tower.   
What a bizarre allegation!

Republican traitors

At least we know who is worried about Sessions digging too deeply into the pizza:

“AG Sessions should clarify his testimony and recuse himself,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) tweeted early on Thursday.

“I think, the trust of the American people, you recuse yourself in these situations,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday morning. McCarthy, in a later appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” backtracked and said he wasn’t calling on Sessions to recuse himself. “I’m not calling on [Sessions] to recuse himself,” McCarthy said. “It’s amazing how people spin things so quickly.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) joined in during an appearance on NPR on Thursday morning. “It is potentially the case that there is going to be Justice Department recommendations or referrals based on anything regarding the campaign, he said. “Depending on what more we learn about these meetings, it could very well be that the attorney general, in the interest of fairness and in his best interest, should potentially ask someone else to step in and play that role.”

During a CNN town hall on Wednesday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sessions couldn’t be trusted to investigate the Trump administration.

I love McCarthy’s confused self-contradiction, in light of the way he’s criticizing Sessions out of context. So, we’ve got a tongue-tied Californian, a Mormon cuck, Lightshoes Lindsey, and Mr. Foam Party himself all eager to pile on Sessions over nothing. I wonder why?