Saturday, November 2, 2019

Was There Another Reason For Electricity Shutdowns In California?

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Was There Another Reason For Electricity Shutdowns In California?

Authored by Richard Trzupek via The Epoch Times,

According to the official, widely reported story, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) shut down substantial portions of its electric transmission system in northern California as a precautionary measure.

Citing high wind speeds they described as “historic,” the utility claims that if they didn’t turn off the grid, wind-caused damage to their infrastructure could start more wildfires in the area.

Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps. This tale presumes that the folks who designed and maintain PG&E’s transmission system are unaware of or ignored the need to design it to withstand severe weather events, and that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) allowed the utility to do so.

Ignorance and incompetence happens, to be sure, but there’s much about this story that doesn’t smell right—and it’s disappointing that most journalists and elected officials are apparently accepting it without question.

Take, for example, this statement from a Fox News story about the Kincade Fires: “A PG&E meteorologist said it’s ‘likely that many trees will fall, branches will break,’ which could damage utility infrastructure and start a fire.”

Did you ever notice how utilities cut wide swaths of trees away when transmission lines pass through forests? There’s a reason for that: When trees fall and branches break the grid can still function.

So, if badly designed and poorly maintained infrastructure is not the reason PG&E cut power to millions of Californians, what might have prompted them to do so? Could it be that PG&E’s heavy reliance on renewable energy means they don’t have the power to send when an “historic” weather event occurs?

Wind Speed Limits

The two most popular forms of renewable energy come with operating limitations. With solar power the constraint is obvious: the availability of sunlight. One does not generate solar power at night and energy generation drops off with increasing degrees of cloud cover during the day.

The main operating constraint of wind power is, of course, wind speed. At the low end of the scale, you need about a 6 or 7 mph wind to get a turbine moving. This is called the “cut-in speed.” To generate maximum power, about a 30 mph wind is typically required. But, if the wind speed is too high, the wind turbine will shut down. This is called the “cut-out speed,” and it’s about 55 mph for most modern wind turbines.

It may seem odd that wind turbines have a cut-out speed, but there’s a very good reason for it. Each wind turbine rotor is connected to an electric generator housed in the turbine nacelle. The connection is made through a gearbox that is sized to turn the generator at the precise speed required to produce 60 Hertz AC power.

The blades of the wind turbine are airfoils, just like the wings of an airplane. Adjusting the pitch (angle) of the blades allows the rotor to maintain constant speed, which in turn allows the generator to maintain the constant speed it needs to safely deliver power to the grid. However, there’s a limit to blade pitch adjustment. When the wind is blowing so hard that pitch adjustment is no longer possible, the turbine shuts down. That’s the cut-out speed.

Now consider how California’s power generation profile has changed. According to Energy Information Administration data, the state generated 74.3 percent of its electricity from traditional sources—fossil fuels and nuclear—in 2001. Hydroelectric, geothermal, and biomass-generated power accounted for most of the remaining 25.7 percent, with wind and solar providing only 1.98 percent of the total.

By 2018, the state’s renewable portfolio had jumped to 43.8 percent of total generation, with wind and solar now accounting for 17.9 percent of total generation. That’s a lot of power to depend on from inherently unreliable sources.

Thus, it would not be at all surprising to learn that PG&E didn’t stop delivering power out of fear of starting fires, but because it knew it wouldn’t have power to deliver once high winds shut down all those wind turbines.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/02/2019 - 22:30

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Time Is Growing Scarce

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Executive Summary

  • The debt bomb waiting to explode is truly staggering in size
  • Key warning signals we're approaching a late cycle market crash
  • The Fed's aggressive actions belie its fear that the system is extremely sick
  • How to use the time left to be on the right side of the coming wealth transfer
If you have not yet read Part 1: The End of Money , available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
The Fed is now flat-out lying to us. Jerome Powell insists that the Fed is not printing more money, is not engaging in QE, and is not directly intervening to make stocks go higher in price. But none of this is true. In addition, the Fed has reversed course and is steadily cutting rates.  This even as the employment and wage data (if you believe them) have been strong of late. So what gives? What could be causing this? Hundreds of billions of dollars, printed and injected at a faster pace than in the depths of the Great Financial Crisis is not exactly a comforting sign. I am quite certain that something very big is very broken in the background. Deutsche Bank might be failing.  That’s a distinct possibility here.  Or it could be massive funding flow reversals from... (Enroll now to continue reading)  
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In Defense of Tulsi Gabbard



“The trouble [with injustice] is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There is no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” —Arundhati Roy

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A partisan impeachment vote is exactly what the framers feared



The House vote to establish procedures for a possible impeachment of President Trump, along party lines with two Democrats opposing and no Republicans favoring, was exactly was Alexander Hamilton feared in discussing the impeachment provisions laid out in the Constitution.

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“Thank God For The Deep State”: Intel Traitors Admit They Want to ‘Take Out’ Trump



Mainstream media journalists completely freaked out and attempted to ‘fact check’ a meme after President Trump posted an obviously photoshopped image of himself awarding the ‘hero dog’ that helped hunt down Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi a medal.

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Friday, November 1, 2019

TV star Mike Rowe's take on college-admission scandal goes viral

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TV star Mike Rowe, who for years has waged a one-man campaign to promote roads to success that do not involve high-priced college degrees, said in a recent post he is "disgusted" with the recent scandal in which megabucks parents are accused of bribing their children's way into top colleges.

More than 40 people Tuesday, including high-profile actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, have been accused of participating in a scheme in which parents bribed coaches and testing center staff to get their children into elite colleges.

"The cheating is galling, as is the scope of the scandal," Rowe posted Friday on his Facebook page.

But Rowe said that the desperate attempts to buy success reveal something more fundamentally wrong in American society.

"I wish we were as outraged by the cost of college, as we are by the wealth of the cheaters," he said. For the 2019-2020 year, for example, the total cost of one year of undergraduate study at Yale University is $72,100, according to the college's website.

Rowe said the race to do whatever it takes is a symptom of the belief that only a four-year degree can buy happiness.

"You don’t have to be rich or famous to believe your kid is doomed to fail without a four-year degree. Millions of otherwise sensible parents in every tax-bracket share this misguided belief, and many will do whatever it takes to get their kids enrolled in a 'good school,'" he wrote.

Rowe suggested that the same impulses that led the rich and famous to cross the line exist in millions of Americans who believe it is college or bust.

"Obviously, those who resort to bribery are in a class by themselves, but what about parents who allow their kids to borrow vast sums of money to attend universities they can’t possibly afford? What about the guidance counselors and teachers who pressure kids to apply for college regardless of the cost? What about the politicians and lobbyists who so transparently favor one form of education at the expense of all the others? What about the employers who won’t even interview a candidate who doesn’t have a degree? Where’s the outrage?" he wrote.

Rowe said college is no longer about learning.

"The cost of college today has almost nothing to do with the cost of an education, and everything to do with the cost of buying a credential. That's all a diploma is," he said.

Rowe then turned to his core theme, saying diplomas are not documents worth the worship they are receiving.

"(N)one are necessary to live a happy and prosperous life, and none of them come with any guarantees. And yet, the pressure we put on kids to borrow whatever it takes is constant, and precisely why tuition is so costly. It's also why we have $1.6 trillion of student loans on the books along with a widening skills gap. That's a bigger scandal, in my opinion," he wrote.

Elsewhere on his Facebook page, Rowe battled the "persistent perception that I am 'anti-college.'"

"I'm not. I'm just convinced the best path for the most people is NOT the most expensive path. I'm therefore focused on more affordable ways to learn a useful skill, specifically trade schools and community colleges," he wrote.

SWEAT Pledge #5 - belief a 4 yr degree is not the best path for the most people. This doesn't make me anti-college/anti-education. It just makes me suspicious of the persistent belief that a college degree is a ticket to prosperity.
Pledge 5 https://t.co/aHHy7M5Brr via @YouTube

— The Real Mike Rowe (@mikeroweworks) February 19, 2019

In comments to The Washington Times, Rowe described the educational system as having lost its way.

"We’re lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to educate them for jobs that don’t exist anymore, and that’s crazy,” he said.

He said vocational education, downplayed in the modern curriculum, should be an integral part of high school.

“If you think about the impact of removing shop from high school, you can’t look at it simply as a budget thing. You have to look at it in terms of, ‘What better message could you possibly send to a kid who’s trying to figure out what’s important than by simply removing the entire discipline from consideration?’” he said.

“That’s what happened when vocational education got pulled out of high school. We made it crystal clear that all of the jobs that votech (vocational-technical school) presaged were not worth having. There’s just no other way to spin it. The jobs that are worth having are the jobs that require the things we’re teaching. And the things we’re teaching, therefore, become the things that are aspirational," he said.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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American Women Need to Shift Their Priorities If They Want to Be Happy



A similar version of this article was published at Washington Examiner. “We’ve created a culture based on lies.

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Halloween is Over and the Jig is Up

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Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

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And so Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff take the Republic into a dangerous defile on a dark day as they engineer a House resolution with rules for a medieval-style inquiry on the existence of phantoms. The phantom du jour, of course, is the fabled “whistleblower,” a CIA ectoplasm identified by everybody and his uncle in Swampland as one Eric Ciarmarella, 33, a former Joe Biden staffer, Obama White House low-level NSC holdover, and John Brennan “asset” deeply involved in Ukrainian pranks during the 2016 election and subsequent disinformation leakage to the media since the early days of the Trump administration.

     The “whistleblower’s” trail winds through every shadowy turn of RussiaGate to the current phantasmagoria of UkraineGate, and connects the principal misdeeds carried out along the way including Hillary Clinton’s devious operations with Fusion GPS, the Comey-led FBI’s illegal entanglement with CIA spying on US citizens (including occupants of the White House), and lately the mendacious maneuvers of House Intel Committee chair Mr. Schiff.

     The notion that Mr. Ciamarella’s identity will remain officially hidden much longer is a joke, since his “complaint” lies at the center of the impeachment process underway, and sooner or later he will be compelled to make public testimony — unless Ms. Pelosi’s House majority votes to rename the USA the Haunted Forest of North America. And when this unmasked phantom finally faces legitimate cross examination his mischief will be plain for all to see. Do you also suppose that Mr. Ciamarella’s revealed adventures in perfidy have not been noticed by the attorney general, Mr. Barr, and his deputy John Durham?

     It seems obvious that the Democrats’ mad rush to this wholly irregular impeachment happened in direct, proportional response to the encroaching danger to them posed by the DOJ inspector general’s imminent report and the news a week ago that the AG upgraded his “review” of all things RussiaGate to a criminal inquiry, with grand juries assembled to process indictments. In the meantime, Rep. Schiff’s secret proceedings in the House basement seem to have produced little besides evidence that contradicts the premises of his wicked enterprise. One by one, his witnesses have been busted — Mr. Taylor, Col. Vindman, Mr. Morrison, and all the rest — in Mr. Schiff’s quixotic effort to demonstrate that the transcript of Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Zelensky says something other than what can be read plainly in its pages.

     It’s hard to feature how the House might convey their garbage barge of obvious falsehoods to the Senate — the risks are so perilous — but if they dare to, I hope it leads to an actual trial, where due process of law will obtain and, for the first time, a long list of malicious actors in this epic of treachery will actually have to answer for their treasonous activities. Much of what has been documented the past two years about the coup to oust Mr. Trump never made it to the pages of The New York Times, WashPo, and the cable news networks, and may come as a shock to people who read and watch nothing else. For instance, the reportage of Paul Sperry about Mr. Ciamarella at Real Clear Politics this past week, which ripped the mask off this fake pimpernel, has been utterly ignored by those news outlets.

     You could read the desperate anxiety on Speaker Pelosi’s fright-mask face in her various fleeting public statements since August. She might suspect that this long-running enterprise of sedition leads to a political fiasco more violent than anything seen in the USA since the Civil War. Or just perhaps she is foolishly oblivious, misinformed, and badly advised. If we are fortunate, the damage to come can be confined to the death of the Democratic Party. It’s hard to imagine how they will survive the emergence of the truth about exactly what has gone on at their bidding since the primary elections of 2016.

     The House of Representatives goes on hiatus now for about ten days. There’s a pretty good chance the DOJ IG Horowitz’s report will drop before they return. There’s also more than a fair chance that it will contain a load of damning information about matters connected one way or another to the impeachment inquiry. I doubt the mainstream media will be able to evade reporting on it. There are also indications that the long ordeal of General Michael Flynn’s prosecution is about to end in a debacle for Mr. Mueller’s gang of attorneys, who have been concealing their turpitudes from Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court since last December. When that case blows up, the reverberations will thunder through every cranny of Washington DC and everything on the battlefield will look changed to the people of this land.


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Ex-Cop Has 700 Epstein Blackmail Videos

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Sarah Westall is joined by John Mark Dougan, a Forrest Gump-like persona in our global corruption saga for this blockbuster interview. Dougan first appeared on our radar in connection with the murdered DNC staffer, Seth Rich.

Here, he claims to have in his possession more than a terrabyte’s worth of Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail videos!

JOHN MARK DOUGAN’S INVOLVEMENT WITH SETH RICH AND DCLEAKS

To recap the first part of this story, Dougan is a former police officer at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. As a hobby, he published websites about police corruption in departments all over the US.

It was in this capacity that Dougan says he was contacted by Seth Rich in February 2016 and that he set up the DCLeaks website on Rich’s behalf.

This contradicts the Mueller Report, which states that the GRU created the DCLeaks website to disseminate the DNC emails and other “hacked” content, prior to handing over this material to WikiLeaks.

By early 2016, Dougan’s anti-corruption websites had earned him some powerful enemies. After his home was raided by the FBI in February, Dougan became determined to flee the US. He had dated Russian women in the past, so he chose to move to Moscow. He arrived in Russia on April 7, 2016 and has since obtained political asylum.

Less than two weeks after his arrival in Moscow, Dougan set up the DCLeaks web domain on a Malaysian server and he uploaded the original dump of emails he’d received on Seth Rich’s thumb drive.

While monitoring the site’s other users, he noticed that one of Rich’s associates had forgotten to use his Tor proxy while logging in. Dougan was able to determine that this individual was working from NSA headquarters at USCYBERCOM.

HOW DID DOUGAN END UP WITH THE EPSTEIN VIDEOS?

In this interview, we learn that Dougan obtained the Epstein videos from his friend, Joe Recarey, a detective on the Epstein case at the Palm Beach Police Department (not to be confused with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, where Dougan worked).

Dougan received these videos for safekeeping, in addition to evidence from many other cases in his capacity as a publisher of anti-corruption websites. Dougan was surprised to learn that Recarey had died in May 2018 after a brief illness at the young age of 50.

Dougan would have let sleeping dogs lie if he hadn’t read in the London Times that MI6 claimed Dougan had given the Epstein videos to the Russian government.

Reading this was a complete shock. How would MI6 know about the videos? He then remembered the FBI raid of his house and deduced that the FBI had informed MI6 about the videos.

Wondering why the FBI would have even bothered to inform MI6 of the videos, Dougan gleaned that the videos must contain compromising footage of Prince Andrew.

He doesn’t know this for certain, as he’s only watched 7 of the 700 videos (a total 1.5 terabytes of media data).

Out of the 7 videos he did watch, 6 were videos of older adults having sex with minors. The other video was surveillance footage of underage girls in a bathroom. He says he recognized one man in the videos as a powerful person in media who “controlled MSNBC”.

Dougan has encrypted his copy of the hard drive and stored it at a far distance from where he lives in Moscow. He’s also made ten additional copies and has distributed them to his friends in countries all over the world, as part of his deadman’s switch.

Should anyone threaten or harm him, all the videos will be made public.

Read the full transcript, linked beneath the video on the page below!

* * *

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

JMD: I received a call from a journalist from The Times [of London] about what two months ago I think and he started asking me about Epstein and of course, I didn’t really have a lot to tell him because I don’t know much about his investigation and I wasn’t sure what he was asking for.

So, a few days later, when I read the story in The Times, it said that MI6 had been informed that I had some of the Epstein files and that I had given them to the Russian government, which was a shock to me, because I didn’t think anybody actually knew that I was possibly in possession of his files.

SW: So, what happened? You are in possession of these files and we want to talk about what these files are. You had a journalist come and confirm that. Can you explain that? How did they know that? I mean what happened?

JMD: Apparently, somebody with MI6 leaked this to the media and the only way that they could have ever known that I had these files is from the American FBI.

You remember in 2016, the FBI raided my home and they took all my computers and my server. So the FBI was in a position to know what I had on my computers and I’m guessing that the FBI assumed that once they took all my computers, that once he took all my computers they had all the files.

But in January of 2019, they discovered that I had a backup of all my files smuggled to me here, in Russia and the backup would have been anything that I had in early 2016 on my other computers.

So here’s where it gets a little dicey. In 2010, I was friends with Joe Recarey who was a detective on the Epstein case and he had come to me – this was after I started my whistleblower websites – and he had come to me with a bunch of boxes and said, ‘Hey, I need you to store this stuff for me.’ So, I did.

I scanned everything and I burned a bunch of DVDs into an encrypted container and I stored everything for him. I never actually looked through the contents of everything…I worked for a different agency than Recarey. I worked for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and he worked down at Palm Beach. So, I didn’t actually have anything to do with this investigation. I didn’t know exactly what I was storing for him.

So the FBI, knowing that I had a backup of these files now, alerted MI6 and the only reason they would alert MI6 is because, 1) They knew what was in the files that I now possessed and 2) They know who was in the files, because if that Prince Andrew guy, he wasn’t in the video that I had, then the FBI would have never gone to MI6 and told them, ‘Hey, you need to be concerned, you know. He has a copy.’ ‘Cause why would they, right?

SW: Okay. This is a big deal! Because, essentially what you’re telling me is you could mess up their cover-up, because you have all this video evidence and now that’s why they care. They thought they had it and they could clean it up, keep it under the rug or do whatever. Now, oh my God, ‘There’s these videos that are out there that we don’t have control of,’ is that essentially what’s going on?

JMD: That’s correct.

SW: So, now after you realized, ‘Oh, this is a big deal,’ there was a journalist, was it from The Times that came or a different journalist?

JMD: No actually the journalist was here. He owns a crime radio program and he was here, interviewing me. We had been speaking for about a year and he made his plan about seven or eight months ago to come to Moscow, to meet with me about a project. So, he was here when The Times published that story and it was it was really a mess, because well number one it screwed up his schedule and number two, well he sitting in my kitchen when this story comes out and he says, ‘Hey do you do you really have these videos from Epstein?’

I walked into my closet and I grabbed the hard drive and I came back out and I gave it to him and he’s like, ‘What’s this?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s the Epstein file,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh!’ and he gave it back to me, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this!’

So, after a few days – because this is just dangerous stuff that I have, you know, it is very dangerous for me, cuz I don’t want to wind up Arkancided or Epstein-cided, so I went nine dispersed ten copies of this around the world. Actually, more now.

SW: Excellent! Excellent! So, you have a deadman’s switch.

JMD: I do.

SW: Good for you.

JMD: And it and it’s foolproof.

SW: Good for you.

JMD: We decided that we wanted to take a look. He didn’t want to identify anybody but he wanted to pick some videos at random and we could just kind of see what the contents are, like scroll to the middle and see what was happening and so we did. We decrypted my hard drive and we watched seven videos, seven out of over 700.

There’s a lot of material. It’s a 1.5 terabyte hard drive and it’s full.

SW: And what what are on these videos? What are you watching? Are you watching people being interviewed or you actually watching assaults?

JMD: Out of the seven videos, six of them were six people having sex with juveniles.

I mean, they don’t show their identification but I’m pretty sure they’re juveniles and…the seventh one was strange, because he had cameras set up in the rooms that the kids would use, like surveillance cameras and he would record them taking showers and getting dressed…

One of the seven that we watched was some girl coming out of shower, putting on lotion and getting ready for whatever.

SW: And she looked like she was 14 or something?

JMD: …She wasn’t over 18, that’s for sure. One of them, in one of the videos, she was probably about 14, yeah…they all looked under 18.

SW: And what about the men?

JMD: Oh. They were old. Jesus. One one looked like he was probably 50.

SW: Did the girl look like she was distraught or did she just kind of sit there or what?

JMD: I feel weird saying this.

SW: I know it’s hard. I know it’s really hard. We’re talking about a sexual abuse and a rape, essentially but I’m trying to get to what’s on these videos. So I’m sorry, everybody that it’s so disgusting.

JMD: So I don’t want to minimize having sex with somebody under 18 but nothing looked to forced. Everything looked consensual, as much as somebody under 18 can consent…there was no violence.

SW: Of the six videos you saw – out of hundreds – there wasn’t violence and we know that he was prepping these girls and training them for this purpose. So, he was prepping them to not fight back and they got paid well for this. Are you assuming these – did they all look like powerful men, more than likely or men who had money? I mean, it’s hard to tell, I guess but is that the assumption?

JMD: It’s hard to tell. Out of the 6 videos, one I recognized and [another] looks familiar but I can’t place him.

SW: I’m assuming you don’t want to say the name of the person you recognized or are you willing to?

JMD: No, I don’t have to tell you why. Because once they start releasing names, there goes my insurance policy.

SW: Okay. Can you just give us a hint? Is he a powerful person in politics or business?

JMD: He’s a powerful person in media.

SW: In media. Okay, that’s good to know…why did your guy have all this evidence and videos? How did he get hold of them? Did you ever ask him that? How did he have all this?

JMD: I don’t know. It wasn’t my business to ask. He asked me to keep it safe and I did.

SW: Okay, so basically, if they decide they want to go after these people, they have to be pretty full proof, to be able to take down – even if Epstein’s dead – they should have proof, to be able to –

JMD: The FBI has everything that I have.

SW: The FBI –  they do not need Epstein. If Epstein was “suicided”, which a lot of people think that’s the farce and don’t believe it. But even if he was and he’s gone, they don’t need him, because they have all these videos.

JMD: They do. And I know they have the videos. I know they have access to the videos, because they told MI6.

SW: And you believe they told MI6 because Prince Andrew is likely in one of those 700 videos.

JMD: Yeah.

SW: But you haven’t seen it?

JMD: No.

SW: Okay. Is there anything else you want to tell us about the Epstein situation that we may not know? I mean, has anybody called called you? I mean…they haven’t called to talk to you about the Seth Rich case, which blows me away. People need to watch that original interview that I interviewed you. But they’re there’s so much information here they could get from you and they just aren’t talking to you but go ahead.

JMD: Oh, I have a lot more than the Epstein stuff –

SW: – and I want to ask you about that. Let’s dive into…a couple of topics…what else do you have that is important for our country to heal and to to bring to justice?

JMD: I don’t know…First of all, when I was asked to keep these files, Recarey was alive and kicking. He was in perfect health. And even in 2017, when I talked to him the last time, he was a good heath. So I was really shocked to learn that he was dead.

SW: They thought, once he was gone they thought they could bury it for good, until they realized you were there.

JMD: I don’t know…I don’t know the circumstances under which he died, other than a brief illness and I don’t know who the big players are but I suspect there’s some top-level people from the FBI that are probably on those tapes.

If I was Epstein, I would have made friends with high-ranking law enforcement officials from the local, state and federal governments. I would have enticed them into my little web, because then who’s going to arrest him?

SW: So, what else do you have besides Epstein, ’cause I know you had a whistleblower site. You have the Seth Rich tapes or files, you had the Epstein files. I’m just blown away by what you all have.

What else did you have on that that incredible useful computer of yours?

JMD: I’ve got hundreds of different cases from from all over the place. Hundreds…when the town of Palm Beach, when the State Attorney’s Office, the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office and they basically let him go in 2008 or ’07 or whatever, it happened to be, when they gave him carte blanche to come out of jail on work release and rape more girls, I mean, the Town of Palm Beach, they lost complete confidence in the State Attorney’s Office and in the Sheriff. You know, Sheriff Rick Bradshaw.

So…every month, they’d come over with boxes of stuff for me to scan, not just related to Epstein but for all sorts of different things they thought were important.

SW: So, you’re essentially a treasure trove of all the corruption that’s been going on in Florida over the last 15 years.

JMD: Not Florida but Palm Beach okay, Palm Beach is filled with really really powerful people.

SW: Palm Beach…is there a lot of the trafficking going on there? Is there – what would you say is –

JMD: I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it. I just know that I have it.

It’s like you going into a bank and getting a safety deposit box and the bank gives you the key and they say, ‘Okay, go ahead and stick this in your box, if you don’t want to know what’s in it. I was the same thing but on a digital level.

SW: But once you realize that you have the files, that’s when you’re going in and looking and saying, ‘Oh, Man.’ s

So, you could have a lot more. Haven’t you curiosity to go into some of these files to see what they are?

JMD:  Uh-uh, yeah. I have been curious but you know what they say about curiosity? Killed the cat.

SW: Well let me ask you, people are saying that Epstein was much more than a blackmail operation, although six out of the seven files that you saw sure looked like a blackmail operation, potentially. Did you have any evidence that he he might have been…a pilot for drug trafficking or anything? Arms trafficking or anything like that?

JMD: Not that I know of, no.

SW: Okay and what would you say is the most important thing, to go forward with these files? I mean, what what should the FBI do? What should law enforcement do? What should Bill Barr do? What should they do, to take care of our country? What’s the right thing to do?

JMD: The FBI should have done what they should have done in 2006 and they should have done what they should have done when he got the files from me in 2016 and go after these people and prosecute them.

But they won’t because I don’t think they can. Because, I think, really the people involved they’re so powerful, it would lead to crumbling the foundation of our country’s framework.

SW: That’s the argument I’ve heard. But people like that in power – it’s crumbled and destroyed, already.

JMD: I’m on that same page. I get it.

SW: When you have a psychopath who hurts little children in power, what are we doing? We’re gonna protect them? Yeah, it might crumble down our infrastructure but we need to figure out how to rebuild that infrastructure pretty quick, without those kinds of people.

JMD: But but nothing’s ever gonna happen because, well like, for instance the one person I recognize who…was controlling, at least several years ago, he was in control of NBC. I’m not gonna name names but this is a very powerful guy…

I never bothered to look to see if he’s still involved in NBC or the media – but this was a guy – I’m sorry, MSNBC – I don’t know if there’s a big difference –

SW: Who cares? He’s a media guy…he’s just a scum that has money, that runs a media company. He’s not relevant for the country. I’m sorry, Dude, whoever you are. You’re not that important. He thinks he’s important. Go ahead.

JMD: No, I agree. Well, the problem is, these media companies they control what’s let out. Have you ever noticed, that everything is being reported out of Europe and nothing’s being reported out of the US?

SW: Because we’re completely silenced and blacked-out, here and the censorship is incredible.

JMD: That’s because, I think that there are a lot more media people on the tapes and I think they’re controlling the narrative. If they want this quashed, it’s gonna be quashed. The people need to be shouting at the FBI to do something.

And I think the FBI is under a lot of pressure, if they know what I have. And I think they’re scared that I’m gonna leak it.

SW: Who cares? We already know the media is a bunch of fakes. We know that they’re lying. We know they’re making crap up. They’re not that important to our country, especially if they’re doing that. They’re actually a net negative to our country.

JMD: You’re right but they control the flow of information and that’s the problem.

SW: They do right now and it needs to stop, because if that’s what’s on top that needs to come down, I know my listeners agree with me, I know that most of the country agrees with me. Anybody with a brain or anybody with a brain who actually cares about our country agrees with me.

So you are a hero you are in the asylum in Russia you’re in exile, essentially you’re a hero to our to our country. No one’s reached out to you other than now you’re still afraid for your life.

JMD: Yeah, well I’ve had a weird week, a weird month. I’ve had my car sabotaged. I’ve been followed. Wait. I’ve been followed and then have my car sabotaged and then I wound up getting poisoned.

SW: That’s the point of a Deadman’s switch. It gets out there. You kill ’em and it gets released.

So, is there anything else that you want to tell our audience? And as the next big story comes out and I realize that Jon over there in Russia has the tape,s how are the files I’ll be doing another interview with you!

Is there anything else that you want to share with the audience and anything that you, with all your insight and everything you’ve gone through?

JMD: It’s interesting, because the files range from 1994 to 2005, I think is what I had. Who knows? Who knows what’s on ’em?

SW: Okay, well, you know what’s on seven of them, which is pretty good indication. Six out of that seven were the same thing, that you randomly picked. It’s a pretty good indication…what you don’t know, is there could be other random files of something else, which would be really interesting to see.

JMD: Well, seven out of 700, I’ve only touched 1%. So, the other 99%, probably…but I don’t have access now, you know?

SW: I’d say the majority, six out of the seven is probably the majority and the rest are random files. So, why don’t you have access now?

JMD: Because I don’t want access.

I mean, I have the drive but I changed the encryption key and the encryption key is being kept in South Russia for this particular drive.

SW: The encryption – that’s the Epstein files. Okay and the encryption key…each one has its own encryption key and it’s spread out around the world.

Who wants to watch a bunch of underage girls having sex, right? I mean, that’s probably part of why you don’t want to watch it.

JMD: There are some sick-ass people out there. Obviously, somebody wanted to watch them because they exist.

SW: Okay, so anything else you want to say to our listening audience? I think it’s important that you get your voice and say what you want to say to people before we end this?

JMD: That’s pretty much it. Take a look at my book. By the way, I get like 50 cents a book, so it’s not like I’m plugging it for money but if they want to see exactly why I’m in Russia, my book is called ‘Bad Volf’ and it’s on Amazon.

It’s an interesting tale of what I faced when I was at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and the retaliation that I had to go through and and the antics that I had to pull to try to get some exposure to some of the stuff that was happening.

I guess they can look at that

SW: And we covered some of that in the first interview, so I really highly recommend people listen to that one. We also talked about how you came in contact with Seth Rich and how the FBI raided your place and how you skipped over to Russia and got asylum it’s a really very interesting case that deserves national attention, so I just thank you so much for joining the program.

JMD: Well, you’re welcome. Have a great day.

SW: You, too!

Alexandra Bruce

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

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Thursday, October 31, 2019

What we still don't know about Seth Rich

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The known facts of Seth Rich's murder were more or less established within hours by the local media.

"A 27-year-old man who worked for the Democratic National Committee was shot and killed as he walked home early Sunday in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C.," NBC Washington reported.

The shooting occurred after 4 a.m. on Sunday, July 10, 2016. Rich had been talking to his girlfriend on the phone before the shooting.

"There had been a struggle," said Seth's mother, Mary Rich. "His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything." She added, "They took his life for literally no reason."

Killers always have a reason. In the case of this young DNC programmer, the media did not want to know what that reason was.

Twelve days after Rich's death, WikiLeaks began releasing emails swiped from the DNC. Although mainstream journalists did their best to deny Rich was involved with those emails, WikiLeaks honcho Julian Assange kept making suppression difficult.

Four weeks after the shooting, Assange said on Dutch TV, "Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There's a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."

When the show host insisted it was a robbery, Assange corrected him, adding, "I'm suggesting that our sources take risks."

One insider who took Assange seriously was former DNC head Donna Brazile. In her 2017 book "Hacks," Brazile tells how Assange "dropped his smirk" when talking about the risks his sources took.

Rich's murder obsessed Brazile. "All I could think about was Seth Rich," she writes. She wonders whether Rich had been killed by "someone who had it out for Democrats" or whether the Russians had "played some part in his unsolved murder."

Another possibility Brazile considers is whether Rich "was murdered for being white on the wrong side of town." She mentions Rich on a dozen different occasions and dedicates the book to him.

In fact, Rich was not on the wrong side of town when killed. He was in a neighborhood where an average home price is about a million dollars. If he were providing Assange data, the Russians had no reason to kill him; and if someone "had it out for Democrats," there were a lot fatter targets than Rich.

The media, however, refused to investigate a case that alarmed even a DNC insider like Brazile because no likely result had useful political value, including Brazile's "being white" theory.

"What seems painfully obvious to his family is that Seth Rich was, instead, the victim of a botched holdup," the Washington Post insisted six months after the shooting. Yet, of course, the "robbers" took nothing.

The Metropolitan Police were still refusing to show a grainy video of the two assailants or to share Rich's comments in the two hours he lived after the shooting. As to why it took Rich nearly three hours for him to walk the 30 or so minutes from a local bar remains anyone's guess.

The police attributed their silence to fear of compromising "an ongoing investigation," but the Post editors had no excuse for failing to probe what the reporter called the "curiosities" of this case.

As an optimistic New York Times would admit in 2017, investigating Rich's death would provide "an alternative narrative to the cascade of damaging revelations about the Trump administration's ties to Russian officials who meddled in the presidential election." With the cascade selling newspapers, the Times was not about to get in the way.

Unlike the media, Robert Mueller thought Seth Rich worth discussing. The Mueller report quoted Assange at length about his insinuation that Rich was a source.

"According to media reports," Mueller's people wrote, "Assange told a U.S. congressman that the DNC hack was an 'inside job,' and purported to have 'physical proof' that Russians did not give materials to Assange."

Given his importance to the investigation, Mueller's crew should have interviewed Assange first. They did not interview him at all. Can't let that "alternative theory" go bouncing around when the fake ones do just fine.

wnd-donation-graphic-2-2019

The post What we still don't know about Seth Rich appeared first on WND.



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Yes, Virginia, There Is A Deep State And It's Feeding The Anti-POTUS Mob



The prepared statement of the latest UkraineGate whistle-blower is well worth the read. It tells you all you need to know about why the Deep State apparatchiks are coming out of the woodwork in a massive assault on America's duly elected president.

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The Militarization Of Everything



When Americans think of militarism, they may imagine jackbooted soldiers goose-stepping through the streets as flag-waving crowds exult; or, like our president, they may think of enormous parades featuring troops and missiles and tanks, with warplanes soaring overhead.

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A Conflicted Kimbal Musk Was Facing SolarCity Margin Calls Before Tesla's Bailout, Deposition Shows



More and more details to Tesla's bailout of SolarCity are becoming clear. And the more details we get, the uglier things look. 

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What In The World Is The Federal Reserve Thinking???

ORIGINAL LINK

What-Is-The-Federal-Reserve-Doing-Public

You don’t use up all of your ammunition before the battle even begins. The U.S. economy has not even officially entered recession territory yet, although many experts are definitely anticipating one in 2020. When that recession arrives, the Federal Reserve is going to want as much ammunition to fight it as possible. So I was […]

The post What In The World Is The Federal Reserve Thinking??? appeared first on The Most Important News.



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Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Freedom Of Thought Is Under Attack... Here's How To Save Your Mind

ORIGINAL LINK
Freedom Of Thought Is Under Attack... Here's How To Save Your Mind

Authored by Simon McCarthy-Jones via TheConversation.com,

Freedom of thought stands at a critical crossroads. Technological and psychological advances could be used to promote free thought. They could shield our inner worlds, reduce our mental biases, and create new spaces for thought. Yet states and corporations are forging these advances into weapons that restrict what we think.

To lose freedom of thought would be to lose something uniquely human. We share our basic emotions with animals. But only we can step back and ask “do I want to be angry?”, “do I want to be that person?”, “couldn’t I be better?”.

We can reflect whether the thoughts, feelings and desires that bubble up within us are consistent with our own goals, values and ideals. If we agree they are, then this makes them more truly our own. We can then act authentically.

But we may also conclude that some thoughts that pop into our heads are a force other than our own. You sit down to do your work and “Check Facebook!” flashes through your mind. Did that thought come from you or from Mark Zuckerberg?

Freedom of thought demands dignity, enables democracy, and is part of what makes us a person. To safeguard it, we must first recognise its enemies.

Was that thought yours? Or Mark Zuckerberg’s?

 Frederic Legrand - COMEO/Shutterstock

Three threats to freedom of thought

The first threat comes from advances in psychology. Research has created new understandings of what influences our thoughts, behaviours, and decision making.

States and corporations use this knowledge to make us think and act in a way that serves their goals. These may differ to ours. They use this knowledge to make us gamble morebuy more, and spend more time on social media. It may even be used to swing elections.

The second threat comes from the application of machine learning algorithms to “big data”. When we provide data to companies we allow them to see deep inside us. This makes us more vulnerable to manipulation, and when we realise our privacy is being compromised, this chills our ability to think freely.

The third threat comes from a growing ability to decode our thoughts from our brain activity. FacebookMicrosoft, and Neuralink are developing brain-computer interfaces. This could create machines that will read our thoughts. But creating unprecedented access to our thoughts creates unprecedented threats to our freedom.

These advances in technology and psychology are opening the doors for states and corporations to violate, manipulate, and punish our thoughts. So, what can we do about it?

The law can save us

International human rights law gives the right to freedom of thought. Yet, this right has been almost completely neglected. It is hardly ever invoked in the courtroom. We need to work out what we want this right to mean so we can use it to protect ourselves.

We should use it to defend mental privacy. Otherwise conformity pressures will impede our free play of ideas and search for truth. We should use it to prevent our thoughts being manipulated, either through psychological tricks or through threatened punishment.

And we should use it to protect thought in all of its forms. Thought isn’t just what happens in our heads. Sometimes we think by writing or by doing a Google search. If we recognise these activities as “thought” then they should qualify for absolute privacy under the right to freedom of thought.

Finally, we should use this right to demand that governments create societies that allow us to think freely. This is where psychology can help.

We need to learn about how our minds work from an early age.

 Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Preventing manipulation

Better understanding our minds can help protect us from manipulation by others. For example, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between what we could call “rule-of-thumb” and “rule-of-reason” thinking.

Rule-of-thumb thinking involves effortless and ancient mental processes that allow us to make quick decisions. The price of this speed can be mistakes. In contrast, rule-of-reason thinking is a slow, consciously controlled process, often based in language. It takes longer, but can be more accurate.

This suggests that creating speed bumps in our thinking could help improve decision making. Clicking unthinkingly on content or adverts from corporations doesn’t allow us to exercise freedom of thought. We do not have time to work out if our desires are our own or those of a puppet master.

We must also change our environment into one that supports autonomy. Such an environment would allow us to create our own reasons for our actions, minimise external controls like rewards and punishments, and encourage choice, participation and shared decision making.

Technology can help create such an environment. But whose responsibility is it to implement this?

Taking action

Governments must help citizens learn from a young age about how the mind works. They must structure society to facilitate free thought. And they have a duty to stop those, including corporations, who would violate the right to freedom of thought.

Corporations must play their part. They should state freedom of thought as a policy commitment. They should perform due diligence on how their activities may harm freedom of thought. They could be required to declare the psychological tricks they are using to try and shape our behaviour.

And we the people must educate ourselves. We must promote and support free-thought values. We must condemn those turning one of our species’ greatest strengths, our sociality, into one of our greatest weaknesses by using it as a means of data extraction. We must vote with our feet and wallets against those who violate our freedom of thought.

All this assumes that we want freedom of thought. But do we? Many of us would literally rather electrocute ourselves than sit quietly with our thoughts.

Would many of us also prefer governments and corporations do our thinking for us, serving up predictions and nudges for us to simply follow? Would many of us be happy for freedom of thought to be limited if it led to increased security? How much do we want freedom of thought and what are we prepared to sacrifice for it?

Simply put, do we still want to be human? Or has the pain, effort and responsibility of one of our signature abilities, free thought, become too much for us to bear? If it has, it is neither clear what will become of us nor clear what we will become.

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/30/2019 - 21:10

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