Use Communist Control Act and Smith Act of 1940 on Joe Biden

 

Congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954 (CCA) as an amendment to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 “to outlaw the Communist Party, to prohibit members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes.”

Communist Control Act banned Communist Party of the United States

Whereas the Internal Security Act mandated that communist organizations register with the attorney general of the United States, the CCA banned outright the Communist Party of the United States to prevent communists from holding office in labor organizations.

The CCA was the brainchild of U.S. Sen. Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., who reportedly had tired of being labeled “soft toward communism” (Ybarra 2004: 743).

Following an investigation by the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) into the methods and goals of communist leadership in American labor organizations, Congress through the CCA designated a class of “Communist-infiltrated organizations.”

CCA gave 'infiltrated' labor unions a way to retain rights

Labor organizations determined to be communist-infiltrated by the SACB could reorganize and retain contractual rights gained through bargaining if 20 percent of the rank-and-file membership petitioned the National Labor Relations Board. In this regard, the CCA served as a means to protect rank-and-file union members from “Communist dictators who [were] using the unions and union funds to serve the ends of the Communist powers” (Tompkins 1955: 1397).

Although historically viewed as the moment liberal Democrats acquiesced to Red Scare politics, the CCA circumvented a proposed amendment to the Internal Security Act of 1950 that sought to declare unions “communist dominated” and strip them of all legal rights. Instead of declaring labor unions illegal, which would have deprived American laborers of their contractual protections, the CCA declared the Communist Party illegal.

Outlawing communists violated numerous constitutional rights

The means by which the CCA sought to provide protection to American laborers impinged upon a number of constitutional rights.

In outlawing the Communist Party, the CCA denied the party the right to have bank accounts, enter into leases, obtain judicial enforcement of contracts, sue or be sued in courts, appeal adverse court rulings, conduct business activity, or appear on any ballot (Haerle 1955). Congress repealed most provisions of the act, which has rarely been enforced.

 

too many 5 year plans in United States.

'6 Ways From Sunday' Alert: Yet ANOTHER NEW PROBE Into Trump's Declassified Docs

 

On Monday, the Department of Justice filed a notice that it — oopsie! — took confidential communications between former President Donald Trump and his attorneys when the Biden FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022. And then, in the next paragraph, the DOJ issued a pronouncement that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) would also be initiating an “assessment” of the other confiscated documents ripped from Trump’s home — documents Trump claims he’d declassified before he left office.

The Biden Administration U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida said about Trump’s privileged documents that they’d “identified a limited set of materials that potentially contain attorney-client privileged information, completed its review of those materials, and is in the process of following the procedures” that are in the affidavit for a search warrant “to address potential privilege disputes, if any.”

 

Former federal prosecutor and Trump’s representative to the National Archives Kash Patel addressed the possibility of Biden being allowed to retroactively pierce the executive privilege between a president and his attorney or advisers “with and about communications that President Trump had while he was the sitting president of the United States.” Patel said, “To me, that is — dangerous is putting it mildly…but the effect that has on the president’s and any future president’s ability to conduct the matters of state and national security in confidence has now just been thrown out the window by this, you know, knee jerk reaction because that’s what the radical, Left-wing media wanted from Joe Biden.” Furthermore, he believes it has a deeply corrosive effect on justice. “I think it’s a terrible day for due process,” he said on his podcast. “[This] is a political decision that continues to deteriorate America’s ability to stand on the global stage with any credibility.”

With Monday’s notice, the DOJ bypassed the judge now weighing a special master and announced that the DNI would go through all the documents in a “national assessment” to determine if they think it was okay for Trump to have the documents as a former president. That’s not their job.

So it’s an Intelligence Community Assessment — sounds familiar? Difference between now and December 2016 is that more than half the country knows the score. https://t.co/085ZNSB2mP

— Lee Smith (@LeeSmithDC) August 28, 2022

If you think that sounds like another investigation into Trump, you win a Joe Biden bicycle helmet.

It’s unclear if the DOJ can initiate an intelligence agency investigation into documents already declassified. The president has the sole authority to declassify. Second-guessing by the DNI seems a bit over the top, to say the least. These moves appear intended to mire the former president in yet another time-sucking, expensive legal goose chase to empty his bank accounts before the next two elections. It looks like a show of naked partisanship by the nation’s top law enforcement agency under Merrick Garland and his DNI counterpart.

The players are all former Obama Administration aparatchiks who may have an interest in recovering documents that are embarrassing or worse, regarding their time at the White House. Perhaps they’re concerned about green-lighting the spying on Trump, knowing that what they accused him of was a phony baloney Russia Collusion hoax made up by his presidential opponent?

America has been rendered impotent, not by our adversaries but by the actions of those who have enjoyed all the benefits the wealthiest nation on earth has to offer @LeeSmithDC pic.twitter.com/BNG1TwNIir

— Dave Katz (@davidka01580284) August 28, 2022

And now, Joe Biden, running for president in 2024,  is going after Trump, who is expected to run for president again. K.

We don’t need a backwards crystal ball to know that he’s using the force of his office to keep Trump out of the White House again with another made-up “scandal.”

As Sen. Chuck Schumer said a few years ago, “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” 

Related: That Mushroom Cloud You See Is Another Trump Media Narrative Exploding Before Your Eyes

Yeah, we noticed. That’s why a new poll from the Trafalgar group shows that 77% of Republicans and 54% of Independents don’t see upstanding G-men doing their jobs for God and country in the Trump raid; they see political hacks.

 

 

To obtain the raid on Trump’s mansion, Biden was asked to go to the Wayback Machine and remove Trump’s privilege to retain documents. This was after months of negotiations with the 45th president. Similar negotiations with President Obama were resolved after several years. Bill Clinton literally kept nuclear codes in his sock drawer, and guess what? There was no raid on his sock drawer. There was no piercing of his executive privilege by George W. Bush. But Biden allowed NARA’s acting archivist to big-foot Trump, saying “I have therefore decided not to honor the former President’s ‘protective’ claim of privilege.” 

Apparently the Left is now going after the very office of the presidency, having destroyed all of America’s other foundational institutions.

And there it is.

The Biden Administration took a National Archives dispute with the last president (which happens with all presidents), elevated it to the White House to blow up the previous president’s privileges (which have been enjoyed by all presidents), parlayed that to a grand jury, and got its subpoena ham sandwich. The Feds then waited until its hand-picked anti-Trump magistrate — not a federal judge — was on the bench and Trump wasn’t home and got the okay for a search warrant for presidential records. Then they dispatched the phalanx of 30 gunned-up FBI raiders, who rifled through the family’s personal items for nine hours to get every document Trump ever touched during his four years in office, trying to find something — anything — on the 45th president. With the documents in their possession, the Feds declined to wait for an actual Article III judge to weigh in on a federal special master to go through the items. They went right ahead and culled through them, lateraled them over to their buddy the DNI, and we now have the intelligence community — which is meant to go after terrorists — playing Monday-morning quarterback on the 45th President of the United States. 

There are no coincidences.

Ronald Reagan once said, “Don’t be afraid to see what you see.”

New Poll on Who Americans Want in 2024 Is Bad News for Biden

 

Americans surveyed in a new Quinnipiac poll were asked to look beyond the 2022 midterm general election now less than 10 weeks away and consider the 2024 presidential election — specifically who they want, or don't want, to see at the top of the ballot. 

When it comes to Donald Trump, 62 percent of respondents said they didn't want to see him run — down from 64 percent who held that view in July's Quinnipiac survey — compared to 33 percent of Americans who said they wanted Trump to run for president again in the next cycle. 

But on the other side of the aisle, President Biden is polling even worse as his job approval remains underwater at a negative 40 - 52 percent rating. When asked if the current incumbent should run again, 67 percent of Americans said "no" and just 26 percent said he should run for a second term. 

When it comes to the party bases for each prospective candidate, far more Republicans want Trump to run in 2024 than Democrats want Biden to run again. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans — 72 percent — want Trump to run at the next opportunity while less than half — 47 percent — of Democrats want to have Biden leading their party's ticket in 2024. 

Within their own parties, just 25 percent of Republicans say Trump shouldn't run again while 43 percent of Democrats want Biden to take a bow and step aside for the next term. 

The Quinnipiac poll also found that, back in midterm-land, Democrats hold a slight edge when it comes to which party Americans want to control the U.S. House and Senate. 

In the lower chamber, 47 percent said Democrats should have the majority while 43 percent prefer GOP-control in the House. For the more contentious battle over control of the Senate, 47 percent said Democrats should retain control while 45 percent want Republicans to retake the reins of power. 

Whatever the outcome, Quinnipiac found that Americans are motivated and enthusiastic to vote this November in what will prove to be a consequential election both for the future of the country and the success of Biden's presidency. Nearly half of American voters — 49 percent — say they're more motivated to vote this year than in previous midterm elections.  

The most important issue for voters, as polled by Quinnipiac, remains "inflation" — something the Biden administration has failed to address and only made worse throughout the president's less than two years in office. 

Quinnipiac's poll was conducted at the end of August among

No Worries: Feds Find 30K Mexican Passport Holders With Middle Eastern Names in Fraud Investigation

 

Federal law enforcement authorities have been tracking a disturbing recent trend that could be a significant security threat. The Department of Homeland Security believes that up to 30,000 individuals with Middle Eastern names are traveling on Mexican passports that they may have obtained fraudulently.

The 30,000 individuals are undergoing “additional investigation,” says DHS. The government is trying to determine if any of the 30,000 Mexican passport holders traveled to the United States and whether there were any patterns in their travel.

Given the porousness of our Southern border, even the usually quiescent DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas appears a little worried. He said that the United States risks losing its “first line of defense” because of the “unsustainable” amount of illegal immigration at the border.

Washington Free Beacon:

There are fears that terror groups such as al Qaeda could take advantage of the strained immigration system. Last April, for example, two Yemeni nationals on the terrorist watch list were apprehended at the southern border. Law enforcement officials appear concerned that bad actors could abuse the legal travel system to enter the country with passports obtained from Mexico, and enter the United States legally. Roughly 20 million Mexican citizens easily travel to the United States as tourists each year, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

“This investigation highlights that criminals often use legal travel to facilitate criminal activity,” the senior DHS official told the Free Beacon. “The nexus to Mexico should cause the public and lawmakers to reflect on how a porous border can be even more dangerous.”

Indeed, the bulk of the investigations is left to a little-known but vital piece of our first line of defense against attack. Since 2001, Custom and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center in Sterling, Va., has worked nonstop to catch travelers and detect cargo that threatens U.S. security.

The concerning passports were identified by the agency’s National Targeting Center, the memo states. The lesser known subagency, created shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, “works quickly and quietly to identify people and products that pose potential threats to our Nation’s security, and to stop them from entering the United States,” according to a 2014 public memo.

The National Targeting Center also assists Immigration and Customs Enforcement with deporting money launderers and child predators, the senior DHS official said. The National Targeting Center regularly partners with other agencies on investigations involving terrorism or global criminal networks.

Obviously, not all 30,000 fraudulent passports are from te

10 Facts Electric Vehicle Advocates Don't Want You to Know

 

There are a host of reasons why the Left is absolutely determined to force Americans out of their privately owned, gasoline-powered cars and trucks and into unreliable public transportation and costly Electric Vehicles (EVs), none of which have to do with “saving the environment.”

The central reason the Left loves EVs is that the process of forcing Americans to convert to electric-powered transportation will destroy forever the incredible freedom and prosperity associated with privately owned gas-powered vehicles. The future will instead be centrally controlled by rich elitists and their corrupt politicians, power-hungry bureaucrats, and ideologically driven “experts.”

When Ransom Olds in 1901 and Henry Ford in 1908 sold America’s first mass-produced automobiles (the Curved Dash Olds and the Model T, respectively), they launched America toward becoming the world’s first open road society.

It took a couple of decades, but by the 1930s car ownership was virtually a middle-class staple and that meant, for millions of Americans, the freedom to go wherever they wanted to go when they chose to do so, without getting prior permission from government.

It is no exaggeration to say one of the chief factors in America growing out of the Depression was the ability of millions of Americans to buy new and used cars and trucks. The St. Louis Federal Reserve put it this way in September 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression:

“During the first 6 months of 1935, companies and individuals purchased from motor-vehicle dealers 1,461,940 new passenger cars and 254,063 trucks, paying for these vehicles a sum estimated at approximately $1,460,000,000. The first half year registrations were 44 percent greater in 1935 than during the corresponding period of last year, while the increase over the same 6 months of 1933 was 121 percent.”

The rise of the privately owned, gas-powered automobile also generated booming industries that to this day provide millions of good jobs, financial stability, and personal income growth that are foundational to the American economy.

Just think of all the dealerships, repair shops, parts stores, road construction, energy production, distribution and retailing, insurance, and law enforcement jobs that exist because there are hundreds of millions of cars and trucks in this country.

Related: The USDA Approves $500K in Climate Change Money to Repair Parking Lots

But those good things will be lost if California’s plan to ban the sale of all gas-powered vehicles by 2035 becomes national policy. There is so much that is so incredibly wrong-headed, if not either outright dishonest or stupid, with the drive to force Americans into EVs.

For example, as the experts at powerthefuture.com point out, here are 10 facts about EVs the Left doesn’t want Americans to know:

1. EVs are powered by fossil fuels. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), fossil fuel-based power plants — coal, oil, or natural gas — create about 60% of the nation’s electrical grid, while nuclear power accounts for nearly 20%.

2. The batteries of EVs rely on cobalt. An estimated 70% of the global supply of cobalt emanates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country with deplorable working conditions, especially for children.

3. A study released earlier this year by an environmental group showed that nearly one-third of San Francisco’s electric charging stations were non-functioning. The population of San Francisco represents roughly two percent of California.

4. Supporters of the California law admit there will be a 40% increase in demand for electricity, adding further strain to the grid and requiring increased costs for power and infrastructure.

5. According to one researcher, the strain of adding an EV is similar to adding “1 or 2 air conditioners” to your home, except an EV requires power year-round.

6. Today, 20 million American families, or one in six, have fallen behind on their electric bills, the highest amount ever.

7. Utility companies will need to add $5,800 in upgrades for every new EV for the next eight years in order to compensate for the demand for power. All customers will shoulder this cost.

8. The average price for an electric vehicle is currently $66,000, up more than 13% in just the last year, costing an average of $18,000 more than the average combustible engine. Meanwhile, the median household income is $67,521. For African American families, the average is $45,870, and for Hispanic households, $55,321.

9. A 2022 study found that the majority of EV charging occurs at home, leaving those who live in multi-family dwellings (apartments) at a real disadvantage for charging.

10. The same study also noted that many drivers charge their EVs overnight when solar power is less available on the grid.

There are many more facts about EVs you will never hear spoken by the Left’s politicians, including President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and the national and state leadership of the Democratic Party.

Neither will you hear any of these facts — except when they are being misrepresented and distorted by self-appointed “fact-checkers” — in college classrooms, the mainstream media, and even representatives of the “Big Three” automakers, who fear getting on the wrong side of government.

Oh, and by the way, guess who is laug

12 REASONS FOR EDM

Eight reasons EDM is over (and four reasons it isn't)

First of all, let's define 'EDM'. The Mixmag definition doesn't cover all 'electronic dance music'. It means the drop-heavy, stadium-filling, fist-pumping, chart-topping, massively commercial main stage sound that conquered America. It means dayglo vests, EDC, Ultra, Vegas pool parties and flying cakes. It's possibly somewhere between electro and progressive house, directed by Michael Bay, and like many music genres, trying to pin it down exactly is like trying to grab a fistful of water. Or should that be a fistpump of water? It's dominated the top end of the Beatport charts for years now, made millionaires out of several Swedes, rather more Dutchmen and Americans and at least one Scot. It's stopped Tiësto playing trance, sold a billion dollars worth of Champagne in Nevada and caused more arguments on the Mixmag Facebook page than any other subject.

On to the real question then: after several years of being the world's biggest sound… Is it over?

Eight reasons EDM is over

EDM events have peaked: Honestly, TomorrowLand, Ultra Europe, EDC Las Vegas; these are Glasto-sized festivals with more fireworks than a G8 country's air force, more glitz than a Hollywood event and more hype than, well, anything. The TomorrowLand stage has static cannons to control the weather and the aftervideo is 30-minutes long. It's inconceivable these events could get any more ridiculously huge.

The sound can't and won't evolve: For anyone that's heard the Watergate-scandal moment that is 'Epic Mashleg', EDM is basically scientifically proven to sound samey. You can't move out of that formula, and people are getting sick of it. Dubstep hit the skids (in the mainstream at least) because it became too formulaic and hard dance disappeared up its own echo chamber of indistinguishable remixes of the same tracks a decade ago.

EDM is over because the players say it is: Steve Aoki, Nicky Romero, Tiësto and others have all publicly stated that it's a dying thing. Artists like Porter Robinson are at great pains to point out how they've outgrown the 'big drop' template. Aoki's even making deep house in his spare time. Cue every other aspiring bedroom producer jumping ship. No new producers in that area = no more EDM.

EDM is over because there have been too many DJs 'faking it' scandals: The pyrotechnics, LED screens, distinct lack of vinyl (and often headphones) and emphasis on spectacle over musicianship means that seemingly on a weekly basis there is some EDM scandal involving pre-recorded sets and miming DJs. While some of these seem to be a case of DJs being tried and convicted without real proof, there's an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust that is starting to taint the genre, perhaps fatally. The habit of big names using (often uncredited) new talent to create their tunes adds to the sense of a lack of artistry. As the entry-level fans start to get more knowledgeable about DJing and dance music, these will eventually destroy its credibility.

EDM is over because Paris Hilton: Fair play to Ms Hilton for making an effort to broaden her remit beyond being famous for being rich, thin and blonde. Not many people helm their own night at Amnesia in Ibiza by the age of 34, and she certainly makes an effort to get to lots of clubs and meet lots of DJs. But the easy money involved in DJing the same predictable EDM setlist with a controller (or a real DJ actually playing the tunes) seems to attract a huge number of talentless bandwagon jumpers, from pop stars to models to TV idols, who trade on name recognition rather than ability. It's unsustainable.

EDM is over because it's too associated with bad fashion: We've written in support of kandi ravers before and no one can argue with the whole PLUR ethos. But while it might sound superficial (probably because it is) it's only a matter of time before the realisation kicks in that the emperor is wearing a mask made of beads or is a boggle-eyed bro in a dayglo vest. Once the mainstream press decides that it ain't fashionable any more, expect a lot of the hype around EDM to disappear. You don't see too many cyberkids kicking around these days, do you? No, because they nearly killed trance.

EDM is over because no dance music sub-genre survives that long: It's been massive for about three years now. That's the same length of time breaks, minimal, electro house, and big room dubstep ruled before they either mutated or retreated back underground. It's the circle of liiiiiife.

The EDM events are preparing for the genre's destruction: The big EDM festivals know that the genre won't last for ever. It may be accessible, fun and a great excuse to bounce about in a field or car park while off yer head, but so is Morris dancing. Lacking the emotion of trance, the soul of house or the cerebral appeal of techno, it's not the kind of music that hooks people for life. It's why EDC UK has an arena featuring Marco Carola and Art Department. It's why Ultra had two 'underground' stages this year, with the likes of Carl Cox, Dixon, Nic Fancuilli, Maceo Plex and Jamie Jones. As Fancuilli told us in last month's mag: "If we can convert five per cent of the kids who've come to see act like Tiësto of Guetta then it's job done." You suspect the promoters might be pushing for a bigger ratio very soon.

Four reasons EDM isn't over

There are new EDM events happening in completely new places: Russia, China, South Korea, eastern Europe and India all have dozens of new events, new money, new artists and a new, still-to-be-indoctrinated crowd. EDM is merely entering phase two of its adventure.

Genres don't change, their definitions do: Many major EDM artists are diving headlong into a yet-to-be-solidified New-Deep-House. If and when this becomes the go-to sound, then won't that be the new 'EDM'? Will the introduction to this piece have to be rewritten? Also the genre has at times proven surprisingly pliable: remember the shitstorm when Avicii started playing 'Country & Western' at Ultra in 2013? Cue 'Wake me Up' and a platinum album in eight countries.

The Grateful Dead: Commercially successful cultural phenomena in the US tend to have a 'long tail'. Just ask hippie jam band Grateful Dead, who will play their final concerts in front of over 200,000 people this year, 50 years after their first. And if you think that kandi ravers look daft now, wait 'til you see what they look like at 65….

The Tomorrowland after video: Not exactly getting a 'dinosaurs watching the meteor' vibe here, are you? EDM has seen people get together en masse to have a great time to electronic music in greater numbers than at any time in history. Hopefully that will never go out of style.

The Data Says Rock Music is Dying — But Can It Be Saved?

 

I’ve been listening to rock for as long as I can remember. Pink Floyd, The Cure, and The Smiths were always on repeat in the car ride to school with my dad when I was younger, and they’re still some of my favorites today.

I’ve noticed, however, that whenever I want to find great, newer rock artists, I have to look, and I mean really, look. I’ve certainly found a few I love: Current Joys is one of my favorite artists, Ignant Benches is making incredibly fun rock, etc. Clearly, these bands and artists exist, but it seems to be that rock music is much less accessible today than it was a few decades ago. I mean, if you went to a record store in the 80s and picked out two or three records, I’m pretty certain one would have been a rock album. People have been saying rock is dying for decades now, so it didn’t come as a surprise to me that rock music is harder to come by now. Regardless, I wanted to really see if the data supports this widespread belief. How can a genre that dominated music so much just die out so quickly?

In search of answers, I turned to data provided by Spotify. Note: if you would like to skip the walkthrough of my process and go straight to the findings, scroll until you see a graph

Instead of using the Spotify API directly, I chose to use this dataset for my analysis as it provided a ton of relevant information and covered music from 1922 to 2021, allowing me to track the progression of rock’s popularity throughout the years. My first step — and a very important one at that — was to define what popularity meant.

In my first attempt, I went off Spotify’s popularity index, which I thought would represent how popular a song is/was. I soon realized, however, that the popularity index takes is determined by how many times a song has been played, with more recent plays being weighted more than older plays. This was a problem. The fact that Sonic Youth isn’t played so much anymore doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t popular when they were still active. So, I had to figure out a different way to measure popularity. I finally decided to do so by looking at what percentage of songs released in a given year were rock songs (I ignored songs with a Spotify popularity index of less than 10, as I decided that songs had to be at least somewhat relevant to be included in an analysis for popularity).

With popularity defined, I identified the main information I needed for each song in the dataset: the release year and the genre. Looking through the tracks dataset, I noticed that the information provided about each song didn’t include the song’s genre, meaning I couldn’t directly figure out which songs were rock songs. To work around this, I instead looked at the artists' dataset first, as it provided a list of genres each artist was associated with. Then, I wrote a program to go through each artist in the dataset, looking for any artists who made any form of rock music (Croatian Rock, Metal, Post-Punk, etc). I compiled all these rock-associated artists into a list. Given the diversity of genres I accepted, this list had artists ranging from La Cofradia De La Flor Solar (an Argentinian artist from the 70s I’d never heard of) to Snail Mail (a newer indie rock artist who I think is great) to The Beatles.

Now that I had a list of rock artists from the past nearly-100 years, I went back to the tracks dataset. Again, I wrote a program to look at each song. Since it wasn’t possible to filter for songs that listed its genre as rock, I instead looked at the song’s artists. If any of the artists who were credited with the song were part of my list of rock artists, I’d increment values in a dictionary that tracked, for each year, the number of rock songs and total songs released by 1.

On the other hand, if a song wasn’t written by any artists who were part of the list of rock artists, I’d only increment that year’s total song count by 1. After all this, I now had information about how many rock songs were released each year from 1922–2021 and also how many songs were released in total each year. Thus, I was able to calculate the percentage of rock songs in relation to total songs for each year. Here are the findings.

As seen in the graph, rock didn’t really exist pre-1950s, which makes sense since it wasn’t really invented until the 50s (at least, a song wouldn’t have been labeled as rock). For years pre-1950 that seem to have a non-trivial percentage of rock songs, it may just be that Spotify has gone back to label these older songs themselves for they deem the song to resemble rock (after all, the fact that rock was invented in the 50s doesn’t mean elements that characterize rock weren’t present in music pre-50s). It is clear that rock had its best years in the 70s-90s. This isn’t so surprising, as can be seen through the sheer number of quality rock bands during that period: Queen, Ramones, The Clash, Dire Straits, my favorites The Smiths and The Cure, and so many more.

We see, though, that rock’s popularity starts to decline past the 90s. It doesn’t decrease incredibly quickly, as a rock acts like Nirvana were still very much at the forefront of music. But, rock wasn’t as dominant as it used to be in the decades prior. It also didn’t do rock any favors that hip-hop was rapidly gaining in popularity in the 90s. With the “legendary rock bands” fading from the spotlight at the turn of the century, we start to really see a rapid decline. Perhaps The Strokes were able to slow that downfall in the early-2000s, but they couldn’t stop it completely. Since then, it’s clear rock has continued to fade from the mainstream, with under 5% of songs in 2020 and 2021 being classified as some form of rock.

Despite this, I have hope for rock music; I believe it can and will make a comeback soon. In fact, I think it’s happening now. Olivia Rodrigo, who has been all the talk in the music world recently, just released “good 4 u” and it sounds as though it was taken straight from a Paramore album. The Wallows continue to be loved by many teens and young adults. Beabadoobee has been releasing incredibly fun rock songs for the past few years now, and she’s only getting more popular by the day. Psych-rock acts like Mac DeMarco and Tame Impala have become adored by many, and in the case of Tame Impala, have become global superstars and are set to headline some of music’s biggest events.

Even older rock bands like Fleetwood Mac have been put back into the spotlight (thanks TikTok), and The Strokes seem to be making a big comeback with their latest album, The New Abnormal, winning “Best Rock Album of the Year” at the 2021 Grammys. They’re also set to headline Outside Lands 2021 and Primavera Sound 2022, so clearly they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

This isn’t to say rock is back. I think it’ll certainly take time to overthrow hip-hop and other more dominant genres, but I believe rock is on the right track to make a comeback. After all, great genres can’t just die.

California Democrats Really, Really Don't Like Texas Very Much

 

The state of California is one of the most beautiful states in the union — scenery-wise, anyway. Spectacular mountains, awe-inspiring shorelines, endless forests — it’s got every imaginable vista.

The state also has nearly 40 million people. What it doesn’t have is much of anything anyone from Texas would want. And that has given California politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed a massive inferiority complex. There is now a feud between Texas and California. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott may poke some fun at California, but the Californians aren’t laughing. In fact, they’ve become downright nasty.

Evidence for this is in a billboard spotted along California highways placed by an unknown source. But the message is clear.

Newsweek:

Nearly 250,000 residents have left California between 2020 and 2021, mostly because of lack of affordability. Almost one-third of those are moving to Texas, according to U.S. Census data.

But the billboards caution residents against moving to Texas, including messages like “Don’t move to Texas” and “The Texas miracle died in Uvalde,” referring to the deadly school shooting at Robb Elementary School in May. NBC reported that the billboards are leased to advertisers by Foxpoint Media, which is based in Chicago.

San Jose State University public relations professor Matt Cabot told NBC that referencing Uvalde in the billboard was bad judgment.

“This is the lowest of the low. It’s bizarre. It’s amateurish,” he said.

Billboards warn Californians not to move to Texas with grim message: ‘The Texas miracle died in Uvalde’ https://t.co/Yy6iihbIDo

— Shannon Staats (@congresssux) August 25, 2022

The billboard was probably not put up by a prominent politician like Newsom or Breed. But  Newsom’s criticisms of both Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis make one wonder just how low they would stoop to try and make Abbott look bad to California residents.

Newsom ran a series of full-page ads in Texas dailies earlier this year criticizing Abbott, while Abbott countered by inviting more California businesses to come to Texas.

Also read:  California Is Officially a S***hole Country

The bottom line is that California is bleeding population and businesses. To staunch the flow, there might be a surreptitious effort to drag Texas and Abbott through the mud.

It probably won’t work and may even backfire.

According to Texas Monthly, about 700,000 Californians have moved to Texas since 2010. Several reports show Texas is the state Californians are most likely to move to and often settle in cities like Dallas, Austin and Houston.

Lack of affordability is the biggest push behind Golden State residents’ desire to move. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that the living wage for an adult with a child in California is nearly $84,000. In Texas, it’s less than $60,000.

With both Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott contemplating presidential runs, it will be interesting to follow their progress with Newsom campaigning in Texas and Abbott in California.

Corporations Cut Benefits to New Parents as They Increase Abortion Benefits

 

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, which returned abortion policy back to the states, we saw a rash of corporations pledging to pay for abortion-related travel for employees. Some companies even offered to pay to relocate employees out of states that have pledged to restrict abortion.

While it’s easy to view the move toward adding abortion benefits as a way for these corporations to cater to woke employees and customers, some critics have pointed out that these companies are also signaling that they don’t want their employees to take time off to have children.

“Under the guise of expanding ‘health care’ policies to better accommodate women, big businesses all over the nation are going to great and murderous lengths to ensure they don’t have to deal with pregnant employees and maternity leave,” wrote Jordan Boyd at The Federalist in June. “The approach exposes how corporations evaluate women’s worth and working potential based on the state of their wombs.”

It’s not enough that companies are going out of their way to add abortion benefits to their packages, but many corporations are also cutting maternity and paternity leave. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that many of these same employers who have gone whole-hog on abortion care were cutting parental benefits even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In the two years leading up to 2020 when the pandemic hit, many companies were contending with hiring shortages and rolled out enriched perks, including more time off, as a way to lure new talent,” explain reporters Kathryn Dill and Angela Yang.

They go on to point out that “some employers are shrinking the amount of paid leave they offer new parents to the legally required minimums, which can range from nothing to eight or 12 weeks, depending on the region.”

While the vast majority of states — 39 in total — don’t require paid leave for new parents, federal law allows a new mother or father to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. And some corporations, including those who are crowing about their abortion benefits, are cutting their leave for new parents, some to the bare minimum.

Dill and Yang tell the story of Devon Richey, an employee at Hulu, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, one of the most notorious companies to tout its abortion travel benefits. Richey and his wife have talked about having children, but Hulu is cutting its paid parental leave from 20 weeks to eight.

The much shorter leave time means that Richey and his wife would have to begin paying for expensive childcare for their baby much sooner than they had planned under the old benefits package.

“If my job is cutting back on my parental leave, how am I going to afford child care if I don’t get paid more?” he told the Wall Street Journal.

These moves to cut parental leave while adding abortion travel benefits demonstrate that these corporations prioritize those who kill their babies over those who give birth to them. On top of that, these policies are sexist; a woman can opt for parental leave or abortion care, but a man can only get the leave if his wife has the baby — and he gets less than he did before, at that.

None of this should surprise us since large companies are growing increasingly woke and making left turn after left turn. Here’s hoping that some other companies, even smaller ones, will give these potential parents more opportunities by offering competitive benefits for new parents instead of incentivizing aborting babies. Would-be parents can make excellent and grateful would-be employees.

DHS Announces Update About Disinformation Governance Board

 

After intense backlash, the Department of Homeland Security officially ended plans for a Disinformation Governance Board on Wednesday.

“The Department welcomes the recommendations of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which has concluded that countering disinformation that threatens the homeland, and providing the public with accurate information in response, is critical to fulfilling the Department’s missions. We thank the Subcommittee for its work, which required extensive fact gathering and analysis over a short period of time,” the department said in a statement.
 
“In accordance with the HSAC’s prior recommendation, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas has terminated the Disinformation Governance Board and rescinded its charter effective today, August 24, 2022,” the statement continued. “With the HSAC recommendations as a guide, the Department will continue to address threat streams that undermine the security of our country consistent with the law, while upholding the privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties of the American people and promoting transparency in our work.”

Mayorkas announced plans for the Disinformation Governance Board in April, claiming its goal was "to bring the resources of (DHS) together to address this threat [of disinformation]." After three weeks of fierce public criticism, with many likening the board to a "ministry of truth," the department announced it would pause the board's work. Its head, Nina Jankowicz, also resigned. 

Critics welcomed the news but warned about future attempts to carry out a similar effort. 

"They only shut it down because they got caught," Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said on Twitter. "Sooner or later, Dems will try to bring back this Orwellian effort under a different name. We need to be ready to stop them."

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), meanwhile, said important questions about the board still need to be answered.

"The American public still deserves transparency and honest answers to important questions about the true nature and purpose of the Disinformation Governance Board & assurances that @DHSgov will not infringe on the rights of hard-working Americans," he said. "I will press Secretary Mayorkas for answers at the annual threats hearing this fall and insist that all records related to the Board be provided to the Committee prior to the hearing."

FBI Request to Facebook Pretty Much Shows They Interfered in the 2020 Election (Democrat Party is Marxist-Leninist while FBI is Stasi )

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has accrued a good faith and credit balance with the American people for generations. They’re our preeminent domestic law enforcement and intelligence agency. Decades of marked professionalism regarding investigating and apprehending some of the worst criminals and a near dogmatic adherence to being an apolitical agency. That all ended in 2016. The balance in their credibility account with the public went into the negative, and there’s no coming back given the top brass who occupy the top positions at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. 

As we await the release of parts of the affidavit that provided probable cause for the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago on August 8, the story is quickly evaporating regarding its significance. Right now, the only thing historical about it is that federal agents ransacked the home of a former president, part of a pattern of prolonged harassment and interference by the FBI based on political bias and animus. The mishandling of classified materials is a fake charge; no president can be charged with such a violation. Hillary Clinton can be charged concerning her unapproved and unauthorized email server from which she conducted all her official State Department business, transmitted classified materials, deleted 33,000 emails under subpoena, and smashed Blackberries. She was never president of the United States. 

The Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute. If something were damning, we would have heard about it by now. Instead, we’re getting shrug-worthy updates about how lawyers from the National Archives and Trump’s office engaged in a prolonged game of email tag regarding documents the agency felt were missing. This raid was a massive bombshell that even the media seem reticent about updating since it looks like nothing felonious occurred. It’s the same movie all over again. It’s also another time that the FBI interfered in an election. Granted, it’s two years away, but the sacking of Mar-a-Lago over some documents that were probably secured since all former presidents have staff to handle these items did nothing but make the FBI look like a political hit squad. Amid this drama, the underreported power of the presidency, being the office, is the ultimate authority concerning declassification. The FBI gave Trump the 2024 Republican nomination without a ballot cast potentially. 

 

 democrat party's statue in seattle

This raid follows the Russian collusion hoax in which the FBI spied on the Trump campaign and secured spy warrants on its officials. The NSA unmasked Trump campaign staff. The campaign against the Trump administration didn’t stop there. In 2020, the Hunter Biden laptop story dropped in October. The FBI not only threatened the repairman, who first came into possession of the device in April of 2019 when the crack-addicted screwball son of Biden dropped off the laptop and then forgot to pick it up, but requested Facebook censor the story on its platform. Who said this? Only Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan’s podcast. They tweaked the algorithm at the request of the bureau (via Fox News):

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI approached Facebook warning the platform about "Russian propaganda" ahead of the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story leading up to the 2020 presidential election. 

Appearing on Thursday's installment of "The Joe Rogan Experience," Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook's suppression of the New York Post's reporting that shed light on the shady foreign business dealings of the son of then-candidate Joe Biden.

Zuckerberg began by stressing how Facebook took a "different path" than Twitter, which completely censored the Post's reporting while Facebook limited its reach on the platform.

"Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us- some folks on our team and was like, 'Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert…  We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there's about to be some kind of dump ... that's similar to that. So just be vigilant,'" Zuckerberg told host Joe Rogan.  

[…]

When asked if there was any "regret" about suppressing a story that turned out be factual, Zuckerberg replied, "Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sucks." 

However, he went on to defend Facebook's practices, telling Rogan its process was "pretty reasonable" since his platform still allowed the New York Post articles to be distributed rather than the complete blackout that Twitter enforced. 

The FBI rigged the 2020 election. https://t.co/GjRjMVUY8T

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) August 25, 2022

The three most corrupt and destructive institutions in America today are the corporate media, Big Tech, and the FBI. They colluded to illegally ban American citizens from exercising their rights during the 2020 campaign so the regime could put the Biden crime family in the WH.

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 26, 2022

So, that’s three elections in a row that the FBI has interfered—all operations executed to benefit or protect Democrats. There are also rumblings that some officials at the FBI ordered agents to avoid investigating the Hunter Biden laptop story. In contrast, others ran interference on any report or allegation that painted Hunter Biden in a negative light. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice under the executive branch, so you do the math concerning who’s giving such orders. Potential criminal activity that arose from the hard drive was dismissed outright as Russian disinformation by the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community. We knew the laptop was authentic. It would take months for the FBI and the rest of the political class to catch up, but they probably knew it when we all did; they just did their job as good soldiers to shield Joe Biden from the bad press that could have cost him the election.

 

Ron DeSantis One-Ups Trump in Hypothetical Poll

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking the lead in a hypothetical election against President Joe Biden and former President Trump. 

According to a new YouGov poll, DeSantis fares better against Biden than the former president in a 2024 election matchup. 

If Biden decided to run for re-election at the same time Trump runs, the incumbent would come out on top with 39 percent compared to 36 percent. 

However, if the two political figures were up against DeSantis, the Florida governor would take the lead.  

The poll also found that 16 percent would rather have an election with Biden versus DeSantis compared to 15 percent wanting a Biden/Trump ticket. 

This comes as DeSantis’ growing popularity is taking the U.S. by storm. His strong leadership and courage to stand up against the left has Americans wanting the rest of the country to be like Florida. 

Meanwhile, former Attorney General Bill Barr is confident DeSantis will be elected the next president of the United States. 

“I don't know Ron DeSantis that well, but I've been impressed with his record down in Florida,” Barr said in a recent podcast interview, adding that if he had to bet, the Florida governor would be moving into the White House come 2024. 

The ex-Trump employee was vocal in his support for DeSantis, suggesting that he has done a good job combating the Biden administration. 

Despite strong support for the former president, the poll found that another Trump term may not be something the U.S. is pining for. 

A majority 54 percent think the former president should not run for re-election, while 28 percent want him to. 

This could because the media does not take well to Trump; and him in office seems to cause turmoil for America, despite having good policies. 

Other reasons for Americans not wanting Trump to run is because many may just want a change and to move on from the last four years of political embattlements against the two parties.

Kamala Harris Loses Another Aid, As Reports Claim She Runs a 'Soul-Destroying' Office

 

Vice President Kamala Harris lost another top staffer this week, as the exodus of her staffers continue. 

Herbie Ziskend, a senior communications adviser, announced that he is leaving Harris’s side for the West Wing, where he will be the new White House deputy communications director. 

Harris is teetering on the verge of having no staffers as many have walked away amid claims of turmoil and dysfunction. 

Ziskend joined the Vice President at the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term, one of the few who have made it this long before finding a new role. 

Kate Berner, who is currently in the role Ziskend is taking over, will be promoted to principal deputy communications director. 

This comes as the Biden White House attempts to restructure its communications department after former press secretary Jen Psaki left to take on a role at MSNBC.  

A few months ago when it seemed like every week a new Harris staffer was departing, then press secretary Jen Psaki claimed that the exodus was a “natural” and “very positive thing” to happen. 

“Working in the first year of a White House is exciting and rewarding but it’s also grueling and exhausting,” Psaki said at the time.

Despite this, there have been several reports of the atmosphere being tense within Harris’ office, calling her a “bully.” 

One report deemed her as a “common denominator,” claiming that she ran a “soul-destroying” management. 

According to the former staffer, Harris often fails to read briefing materials and then lashes out at staff members when she’s the one not prepared. 

“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work… with Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why,” the staffer claimed.

High ESG Scores Foreshadow Economic Decline

 

With the recent passage of the costly, yet deceptively named, Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate, the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement will be further emboldened. The IRA prioritizes funding for environmental justice, clean energy investments, and achieving net zero emissions, among its climate provisions. The bill’s passage, however, exposes the public to its shortcomings and harmful economic footprint.  

ESG’s most troubling aspect—its reporting regime—is facing immense scrutiny because rankings allow companies and governments to project a “good” social responsibility image. But do they hold water? Given their subjective nature and unaccountability stemming from self-reporting, ESG rankings are flawed.

Scores correspond to each of the three prongs—ESG—but the “E” prong measuring an individual country’s carbon and methane emissions doesn’t paint an accurate picture. The World Economics Index scores environmental impact from 0 (high environmental impact) to 100 (low environmental impact) scale. 

Unfortunately for ESG boosters, high “E” scores haven’t shielded three nations in the news—Ghana, the Netherlands, and Sri Lanka—from experiencing economic turmoil.  

The African nation of Ghana should first be examined. It currently scores a 97.7 out of 100 on the ESG Index. The Ghanaian government was the first in the continent to raise $5 billion from international capital through Green, Social and Sustainability (GSS) Bonds. GSS bonds fund projects with supposed environmental and social outcomes. In May 2022, the World Bank called GSS bonds a “new frontier for Africa that will help the continent build a deeper, resilient, and sustainable financing, according to policymakers, regulators, and peer sovereign issuers from across West Africa.”

But instead of the promised “new frontier,” Ghana experienced high consumer inflation and higher cost of living which prompted protests in the capital, Accra. Earlier this year, Moody’s warned global sustainable bond issuance would be “flat” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which is down 28% from Q1 2021. The Ghanaian government didn’t do itself any favors after imposing a tax on electronic payments at the same time. Now the nation, on the brink of economic collapse, is in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout.

The Netherlands, the European Union’s largest meat exporter, has also fallen prey to ESG policies. Scoring a 90.7 rating, the Dutch government last year approved a 13-year $21 billion plan to cut ammonia and nitrogen emissions 50% by 2030. The proposal also mandated the number of livestock be reduced by 30% to achieve this goal. That would be a disaster for the country’s 54,000 agribusinesses. 

Dutch farmers rightfully perceived this as an attack on their industry and livelihoods by organizing countrywide protests. Unsurprisingly, the Dutch government dismissed their concerns and confessed their goal is to destroy industry jobs, noting, “The honest message … is that not all farmers can continue their business.” 

It gets worse for the Netherlands. Last March, Holland adopted a new continent-wide Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) to “improve transparency in the market for sustainable investment products, to prevent greenwashing and to increase transparency around sustainability claims made by financial market participants.” 

While the European nation hasn’t collapsed yet, the fertilizer reduction use plan may invite problems later since Dutch inflation rate now stands at 8.6%—one of the highest in Western Europe. 

Undoubtedly, Sri Lanka’s dalliance with ESG has been a clarion call to the world. Following its president’s resignation, the South Asian nation is basically on the verge of collapse. 

How did a country with a 98.1 out of 100 “E” score end up like this? Naturally, the nation rushed to become the first 100% organic farming nation in the world. In April 2021, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa proposed the country ban chemical fertilizer use in farming—a position he ran on during his 2019 presidential run. A group of 30 scientists warned him not to proceed, citing concerns from potential product yield drops. After the fertilizer ban was adopted, the price of rice reportedly surged 30%. By August, the country plunged into an economic crisis. When January rolled around, the country pulled the plug and announced one million rice farmers would be compensated a sum total of $200 million following the botched implementation of the program.  

Sri Lanka was praised as a model ESG candidate for committing to carbon neutrality by 2050 and halving its nitrogen use. Today, it’s experiencing 54.6% runaway inflation.

The aforementioned Ghana, the Netherlands, and Sri Lanka case studies prove ESG policies have ruinous effects on political stability, economic growth, and inflation rates. And these won’t be the last countries with high scores to experience turmoil.

Canada, our neighbor to the north and holder of a 79.5 “E” score, has similarly proposed gutting fertilizer use by 30%. Naturally, this isn’t sitting well with Canadian farmers. And it shouldn’t. 

Developing and developed nations need not rely on ESG metrics to measure success. Hinging economic performance on these subjective scores will incur harm and have no measurable positive impact on the environment.

Adam Schiff Connects the Dots Between the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid and J6 Committee

 

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff is once again laser focused on evidence “hiding in plain site” and will use the January 6 Committee to follow up on the FBI’s unprecedented raid of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. 

“As a committee like to see what documents that were marked top secret, SCI, were in the president’s possession at Mar-a-Lago. This is very serious business. When documents have those markings, it generally indicates that the source of information is very sensitive,” Schiff claimed during an interview with CNN Sunday. 

The week before, Schiff couldn’t answer basic questions about why the FBI took so long if the information Trump allegedly kept is so important and sensitive. 

Why did the DOJ wait 18 months to retrieve the sensitive documents Trump kept? “I don’t know, but if the Trump people represented that they provided all the classified or national security information and didn’t, that’s a serious problem,” Rep. Schiff tells @margbrennan pic.twitter.com/4ntVrqtaaR— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 14, 2022

For years Schiff has made outrageous and dubious claims about Trump’s actions. 

Meanwhile the Department of Justice and the FBI are expected to return a redacted affidavit — used to justify the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago — to a federal judge Thursday after being told the entire document cannot remain hidden from public view.

Trump Files New Motion in Mar-a-Lago Raid Saga

 

On Monday afternoon, attorneys for former President Donald Trump filed a motion in the ongoing saga of the FBI’s raid on his “Southern White House” Mar-a-Lago. 

Their request: appoint a special master to review what the FBI seized during their hours-long raid — that included a search of former First Lady Melania Trump’s closet — and an injunction to prevent federal investigators from reviewing contents of the seizure until a special master can be appointed.

The filing also moved for more detailed information to be provided about what was taken from the 45th president’s Palm Beach home and demands that any items taken from Mar-a-Lago that weren’t enumerated on the search warrant be returned to Trump.

“Politics cannot be allowed to impact the administration of justice,” the 27-page filing reads. “President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run,” it notes before further explaining the motion is based on a Fourth Amendment claim:

President Trump, like all citizens, is protected by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Property seized in violation of his constitutional rights must be returned forthwith.

Law enforcement is a shield that protections Americans. It cannot be used as a weapon for political purposes. Therefore, we seek judicial assistance in the aftermath of an unprecedented and unnecessary raid on President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida. 

From the moment that the Government informed Movant, though counsel, that a search was underway, he demanded transparency. Movant asked the government the questions that any American citizen would ask under the circumstances, namely:

• Why raid my home with a platoon of federal agents when I have voluntarily cooperated with your every request?
• What are you trying to hide from the public—given that you requested that I turn off all home security cameras, and even refused to allow my attorneys to observe what your agents were doing?
• Why have you refused to tell me what you took from my home?

The motion further lays out Trump’s desire to know more about what documents were seized after the receipt for property signed by a Trump lawyer from the August 8th raid was previously unsealed but didn’t provide significant detail. 

For instance, the Government has informed counsel for President Trump that privileged and/or potentially privileged documents were among the items taken from his home. But the Government has refused to provide any information regarding the nature of these documents…Protecting the integrity of these documents is important not only to Movant but also to the institution of the Presidency.

As Townhall previously reported, Trump’s passports were not listed on the receipt, but the Justice Department had taken them and subsequently returned them.

The full motion can be viewed here as filed, and continues explaining Trump’s case for why a special master is necessary to review the items seized from Mar-a-Lago, provide a detailed receipt of the items, and a swift return of any documents or property not germane to the search warrant. 

In another portion of the motion, Trump’s lawyers state that “the Government made no response at all to President Trump’s invitation to help reduce public consternation with the Government after the raid” before criticizing Attorney General Merrick Garland’s press conference about the Mar-a-Lago raid as “an ill-founded reaction to the public outcry that followed the raid on President Trump’s home.”

Among the other issues raised by Trump’s lawyers in the filing are concerns that the search warrant was “facially overbroad,” that Biden’s Justice Department has engaged in “extraordinarily unusual conduct,” and allegations that the DOJ has “sought to improperly evade limitations on enforcing the Presidential Records Act.”

“We have just filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida strongly asserting my rights, including under the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution, regarding the unnecessary, unwarranted, and unAmerican Break-In by dozens of FBI agents, and others, of my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida,” Trump said in a statement Monday evening:

They demanded that the security cameras be turned off, a request we rightfully denied. They prevented my attorneys from observing what was being taken in the raid, saying “absolutely not.” They took documents covered by attorney-client and executive privilege, which is not allowed. They took my passports. They even brought a “safe cracker” and successfully broke into my personal safe, which revealed…nothing!

[…]

This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given to them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.

The Justice Department issued a statement Monday night in response, saying “The Aug. 8 search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause.” Spokesman Anthony Coley said DOJ “is aware of this evening’s motion” and the “United States will file its response in court.”

The motion from Trump’s legal team follows federal Judge Bruce Reinhart’s ruling that denied the Justice Department’s request that the entire affidavit used to obtain the Mar-a-Lago search warrant remain under seal. 

Trust the Artificial Intelligence: Part Two

 

There’s genuine danger from AI, but not in the form that the public thinks. The idea of a single, sentient Skynet that will take over the world is probably not feasible. Facebook Meta’s new AI chatbot BlenderBot 3 made minor news when it called Mark Zuckerberg ‘creepy and manipulative.’ How could a product turn against its owner? Because it learns by observing others. The power of modern AI lies in its ability to find patterns in masses of data. If BlenderBot trained on human datasets, then it would reflect the fact that many people perceived Zuckerberg as ‘creepy’ rather than reaching that conclusion from logic built into it.

As many as there are different datasets, there will be different inferences. Turing machines that use deep learning feed off the new patterns it discovers in reality. It does not, it cannot, produce the full efflorescence of the universe from a set of limited axioms, but adds a new proposition from without, as expounded by Godel, or by resort to an Oracle, as explained in Part One.

AI, therefore, needs a constant and staggering intake of data to retain its superhuman competence. Without an outside source of surprise, the AI engine would soon become stale. It is this necessary connection to external phenomena that is the big limit to the world-dominant AI of dystopian sci-fi. As datasets become larger, they throttle the data exchange between AI processor and that which it is trying to observe/control. As its span expands and observational detail grows, the world becomes less and less real-time with respect to any would-be Skynet.

With signals limited by the speed of light — about nine inches per nanosecond — a Skynet’s ability to measure the instantaneous state of a densely sampled complex system at distance is progressively restricted. The farther out an AI reaches, the more it must delegate to autonomous subsidiaries to deal with events too many nanoseconds away. Like the British Admiralty in the Age of Sail, it must decide which events can be left to a subordinate initiative, and which must be reserved to itself.

Even if it tried to control everything from the center the required connections would soon exhaust all the bandwidth available. The proximity of AI inference to the dataset becomes a critical factor where instant action is required, most obviously in self-driving vehicles, where AI must be local, not dependent on some remote server. This would tend to create a world of multiple competing and cooperating AIs, with data domains describing the area of dominance of each.

The other factor militating against a unitary, planet-wide AI is power requirements. “As AI becomes more complex, expect some models to use even more data. That’s a problem because data centers use an incredible amount of energy,” says an article in TechTarget.

…the largest data centers require more than 100 megawatts of power capacity, which is enough to power some 80,000 U.S. households, according to energy and climate think tank Energy Innovation. With about 600 hyperscale data centers — data centers that exceed 5,000 servers and 10,000 square feet — in the world, it’s unclear how much energy is required to store all of our data, but the number is likely staggering.

Recently the media has discovered that AI has an enormous carbon footprint and is perplexed over how to deal with it. As George Gilder noted, when a supercomputer defeats man at Chess or Go, the man is only using 12 to 14 watts of biological power, while the computer and its networks are using rivers of electricity. If indeed a single AI managed to become sentient and rule the world it might well divert every available power source to the task of expanding its own intelligence, leaving obsolete meat-based humanity to fend for itself. (This nightmare scenario is called perverse instantiation: “a type of malignant AI failure mode involving the satisfaction of an AI’s goals in ways contrary to the intentions of those who programmed it.”)

Latency limits, network density, and power requirements may explain why nature opted for billions of intelligent beings whose individual brains needed only a flashlight bulb’s power instead of a planetary-sized superbrain requiring untold electricity. It’s not unreasonable that developments in machine intelligence will follow nature’s evolutionary path. Instead of a single Skynet, we are likely to see multiple artificial intelligences.

One can already empirically observe the rise of rival AI coalitions, most notably in America and China. Forbes recently noted, “Global surveillance is increasing, with governments requesting almost 40 per cent more user data from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft during 2020 than in the year before.” For its part, China famously has a social credit system, “so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness… The program is mainly focused on businesses, and is very fragmented, contrary to the popular misconceptions that it is focused on individuals and is a centralized system.” A single omniscient, all-wise controller is unlikely.

The futility of “trusting the machine” as a source of unimpeachable legitimacy is nowhere more obvious than in China, where the state openly tells the machine what to think, avoiding the BlenderBot 3 scenario. The BBC reports that Chinese internet giants were ordered to hand over their algorithm data to the government. “Each one of these algorithms has been given a registration number, so the CAC can focus enforcement efforts on a particular algorithm. The question is, what is the next step to seeing if an algorithm is up to code?”

Here all pretense of scientific wisdom from beyond human ken is abandoned. The Chinese Communist Party’s legal code is the Turing Oracle, the extra Godelian axiom, the external influence to which the machine must bend, the diktat from on high. Woke would probably be the corresponding code in the West. The World Economic Forum describes “a new credit card that monitors the carbon footprint of its customers – and cuts off their spending when they hit their carbon max.” The truth of global warming is a given, and woe unto the deniers. Machiavelli’s dictum, “it is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both” comes to mind.

In short, AI may not provide a solution to the problem of loss of institutional trust posed in Part One by supplying the slogan “trust the AI” in place of the shopworn “trust the experts”. Rather it will replace trust with fear. The phrase “fear the experts” bids fair to become the watchword of the mid-21st century.

Fortunately for the public, there will be multiple systems, some in conflict or competition with the others. No Skynet will rule the world in the immediate future. The landscape of AI and institutions may resemble this:

• Narrowly focused AI applications will become common in industry, research, consumer appliances, etc but general-purpose artificial intelligence will be largely confined to a few government-affiliated mega projects.
• AI-enhanced political coalitions will be formed, differentiated according to the foundational axioms of their creators. Debates among factions will become more philosophical, civilizational, and general in nature, as the machine can work out the details. These debates will be the new ideological fault lines of the world.
• Data, and the connectivity that collects and distributes it, will be among the most valuable things on earth as these are the raw material of new discoveries and innovation. Who controls data will be the primary determinant of the survival of individual privacy, liberty, and creativity.

In that technologically assisted human future, the eternal questions will be revisited with a vengeance. All the issues considered settled in the premature End of History following the conclusion of Cold War 1 will be reopened, not just about who the new victor in the second war will be but everything people have ever wondered about, with the boost of our augmented tool kit.

But likelier than not, human ambition will use the opacity of AI to create predictions to amass power.  “During the pandemic, public health rearranged society to control a single metric — covid cases — based on a lab test.” The capacity of technology to deduce the truth will be matched by its ability to foster self-deception. Impelled by the hidden hand of its masters the machine can be spectacularly wrong and generate coalitions against it. It will be my black box against your black box.  Thus in the coming years, albeit with new tools, the tale of history, far from ending in a singularity, will be renewed.