Corrupt Assholes Covered Up Mango Mussolini's Crimes

Legal experts are now weighing in on Thursday’s bombshell, massive and months-long reporting from The New York Times that reveals, among several previously unknown allegations, that then-Attorney General Bill Barr and his special counsel, John Durham were handed apparent evidence of suspicious financial acts by Donald Trump, and proceeded to create a false public narrative that Durham’s investigation found evidence of “suspicious financial dealings” related to Trump, suggesting it was on the part of the FBI, not the president, in order to protect the president. 

“On one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe,” The Times reveals, “according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.” 

The Times adds that “Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump.” 

“Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.” 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/deliberately-deceived-the-nation-legal-experts-stunned-by-jaw-dropping-report-on-barr-durham-protecting-trump/ar-AA16OEjx 

 

These corrupt motherfuckers went to such extreme lengths to bow down to Mango Mussolini and cover up his treasonous crimes. This guy asks what I want to know! "“This stuff has my head spinning,” Mr. Luskin said. “When did these guys drink the Kool-Aid, and who served it to them?”'

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/us/politics/durham-trump-russia-barr.html

Ironically, America’s Gun Culture is Priming Us for More Authoritarianism

Ruth Ben-Ghiat:

What is driving democratic decline in America? 

Disinformation, election subversion, Donald Trump’s authoritarian leader cult and institutionalized racism leap out at you. 

But there’s another factor that is all the more dangerous because it’s part of our everyday reality: civilian access to lethal weapons, and the mass death that enables. 

The scale and scope of gun violence in America doesn’t just desensitize us to violence. It also cheapens the value of life. It fosters political, social and psychological conditions that are propitious for autocracy. The omission of gun law reform from discussions of democracy protection is symptomatic of our normalization of this tragic situation. The Jan. 6 insurrection shows us how dangerous that blind spot has become. 

For decades we have shot each other, with Americans causing fellow Americans more harm than any foreign enemy. More than 1.5 million died of gunshots in the past 50 years vs. 1.2 million in all the wars in the country’s history. This year alone, mass shootings have killed or injured more than 1,800. Yet no amount of loss seems enough to deter the supporters of a brutal gun rights culture that factors in harm to some so that the freedoms and privilege of others can continue, and accepts mass death and trauma in the name of “liberty.” 

Add in an uptick of activity by extremists that preach violence and extralegal action as a way of changing history, and you have a high potential for political destabilization. 

... “We have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow,” said President Biden at a memorial service for victims of coronavirus. The same could be said of the daily tragedy of gun violence. But going numb is also a survival strategy for those who have seen much violence or have lost multiple loved ones and don't dare admit their fear that they will be next. 

 Fear of violence can, paradoxically, create the conditions for more violence. Gun sales have risen dramatically due to a more polarized political climate. Some 40 percent of firearms purchases in 2020 were to first-time buyers, including to women and non-Whites who fear for their safety. This probably means more deaths of an accidental and intentional nature. More children who find an improperly stored weapon or take mommy’s handgun out of her purse. More adult and teen suicides, and more hate crimes. 

A September 2020 policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics on the effects of active shooter drills in schools summed up the dangers that can paradoxically arise from our attempts to buffer against danger: “High-intensity crisis preparedness efforts may contribute to a distorted sense of risk in children and perspective that adults and peers need to be viewed as potential killers.” 

Gun culture arises in part from collective distrust, but it also engenders that very distrust, a process that threatens to become a self-reinforcing loop. 

The terror-filled psychological climate created by mass death only encourages the embrace of fundamentalist and cult ideologies that promise to bring order to chaos by providing an explanation for everything that happens. 

A healthy democracy requires a strong civic culture and a public sphere conducive to social trust and altruism. 

Instead, we have generations raised with fear, suspicion of others and uncertainty — states of being perfect for authoritarian politics, which play on conspiracy theories and seek to rob populations of optimism and hope. 

Exploit the hurt, make others feel as debased as possible, then rouse them to anger: This is the strongman formula. Such leaders know that it can be easier to try to control the world through violence than to stay still and grieve, and easier to find a scapegoat than look within. 

That’s what happened a century ago, when fascism arose among veterans in Italy and Germany who had been ravaged by World War I and formed far-right militias rather than transition to civilian society. 

We have no recent comparable conflagration. Yet our ongoing experience of mass death primes us for a political order backed up by extrajudicial violence. Gun control is thus not only a public health, economic and social issue but an urgent matter of democracy protection. 

When violence is accorded a patriotic value; when mass death of your fellow citizens is considered an acceptable price to pay for possession of lethal weapons; when a leader has convinced people to follow his dogma even if it jeopardizes their own well-being; when the very thing that frightens is the thing primed to save you from your fear; when the value of life itself has been cheapened … then the conditions are right for authoritarian rule.

Consciousness, UFOs and the Universe

This Grant Cameron guy starts out pretty woo and sounds borderline nuts but he does have some fairly interesitng observations that he puts together here. Worth a listen.

 

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Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945 at the Trinity Nuclear Test Site? A US Defense Bill Seeks Answers.

In the NYTimes of all places --

For the casual student of U.F.O. history, the modern idea of life beyond our planet usually dates to 1947, when a top-secret U.S. military balloon crashed in the desert near Roswell, N.M. The wreckage prompted decades of conspiracy theories and gave rise to the idea that Roswell was the site of an alien crash landing. 

Now, thanks to a new congressional spending bill, U.F.O. enthusiasts may look to 1945 as the beginning of that era. An amendment tucked into this year’s $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the Defense Department’s annual operating budget, requires the department to review historical documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena — government lingo for U.F.O.s — dating to 1945. That is the year that, according to one account, a large, avocado-shaped object struck a communication tower in a patch of New Mexico desert now known as the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated that July. 

Experts said the bill, which President Biden signed into law in December, could be a game changer for studying unidentified phenomena. “The American public can reasonably expect to get some answers to questions that have been burning in the minds of millions of Americans for many years,” said Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. “If nothing else, this should either clear up something that’s been a cloud hanging over the Air Force and Department of Defense for decades or it might lead in another direction, which could be truly incredible. There’s a lot at stake.” 

Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who introduced the amendment to the Pentagon spending bill, said a “comprehensive timeline” of U.F.O. sightings in U.S. government records was needed.

The amendment was introduced by Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican and a member of the Armed Services Committee. Mr. Gallagher, who declined an interview request, said in a brief statement that a “comprehensive timeline” of unidentified aerial phenomena in U.S. government records was needed, and that the amendment would ensure a full review of “all U.S. government classified and unclassified information.” 

“This is an important step that will give us a more comprehensive understanding of what we know — and don’t know — about incidents impacting our military,” he said. The U.S. government has dabbled in public-facing programs that have explored the possibility of alien life. In 2021, the Pentagon announced it would form a task force to look at the issue after a congressionally mandated report found that the government had no explanation for 143 sightings of strange phenomena by military pilots and others since 2004. 

NASA said in June that it would finance a study to look at unexplained sightings. In 2022, the Defense Department established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which succeeded the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, after facing scrutiny from the public and lawmakers. 

Sean M. Kirkpatrick, a former chief scientist at the Missile and Space Intelligence Center, which is part of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was named director. The introduction of drones and other airborne clutter has led to an increase in sightings of unidentified objects in recent years. The government, which delivered its most recent update on Thursday, has found that weather balloons and surveillance operations by foreign powers accounted for most of the recent sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, though dozens remain officially unexplained. 

The defense funding bill requires the new office to work with the intelligence community to identify any nondisclosure agreements related to possible U.F.O. sightings. It also requires the office to create a process for people to share information, regardless of classification, and to share its findings with the highest levels of the Defense Department. It also mandates that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office be fully staffed. “This is an office now that has a voice and resources, and it has authority,” Mr. Mellon, the former Defense Department official, said. Susan Gough, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in an email that “the department is reviewing the enacted legislation.” 

Jacques Vallée, a longtime ufologist, astronomer and computer scientist, said the amendment’s inclusion in the defense bill was “an absolute turning point.” “This is what all scientists and my colleagues have always dreamed of,” said Dr. Vallée, who has helped study reports of U.F.O.s for the Centre National d’Études Spatiales, the French space agency. He said that the U.S. government’s agreement to dig into the past meant “the stigma has been removed.” 

Dr. Vallée began studying the Trinity incident several years ago alongside a journalist, Paola Harris, and interviewed people who claimed to have witnessed the crash. 

Dr. Vallée and Ms. Harris chronicled their research in a book, “Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret,” including the details of the avocado-shaped object. They also spoke to witnesses who said they came across the object as children and found what they described as “little creatures.” 

In the United States, Dr. Vallée said, “there has always been, on the part of the government, especially the Pentagon,” a sense that civilian sightings are unreliable. “The reason,” he said, “is that civilians don’t have the technology to really document what happens, and of course the Pentagon does.” 

But, Dr. Vallée said, there’s no reason that “a farmer in his field” isn’t qualified to give a quality observation of a possible U.F.O. “The civilian observations tend to be longer, they tend to be more detailed, they tend to leave a trace that we can analyze,” he said. 

He said he was working with a team at Stanford University to analyze samples of minerals and debris that were left after U.F.O. crashes or landings. “I would hope that the new project would continue to do that because I think we’ve shown the way to do that scientifically,” Dr. Vallée said. He added, “We don’t have proof that a biologist can look at, but we have considerable statistical and now observational evidence that there must be life out there, that the Earth is not unique.” 

At 83, Dr. Vallée still holds out hope for tangible evidence in his lifetime. “Science is a moving frontier,” he said. “I want to have the right answers, even if they are small answers, rather than more speculation.”