Poor Man Survival
Self Reliance tools for
independent minded people…
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2161-5543
A Digest of Urban
Survival Resources
DEMOCRATS HAVE ABANDONED CIVIL LIBERTIES
The Blue Party’s Trump-era Embrace of Authoritarianism
Isn’t Just Wrong, it’s a Fatal Political Mistake
Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s
Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more,
appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why
Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”
Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and
judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t
over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the
#Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment
of Judge John Gleeson as “BRILLIANT.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe
Sullivan a ”Debt of gratitude.”
One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal
analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind
of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University
professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move
could “could create a
threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”
Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for
Barr’s resignation signed by 2000
former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email
somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the
Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made
Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his
administration” (who instantly told Yahoo News) that there was no
precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law”
itself was at stake.
Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his
“Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or
anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that
prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy,
as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating
with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the
beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up
101 textbooks.
The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador
Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to
overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped,
but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the Kislyak calls
to leverage a case into existence.
In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney
playbook, some bright person first illegally leaked classified
details to David Ignatius at the Washington
Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”
“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had
become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put
it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand,
kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”
A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then
took three weeks to write
and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as
evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a
counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over
whether the FBI was trying to “get him to lie” or
“get him fired,” worrying that the White House was “playing games.” After
another leak in the Washington Post in early February,
2019, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about
sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never
released to either the defense or the public.
Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified
information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of
never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal
proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.
Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus
or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and
Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable
to register objections on either front.
Flynn’s case fit the pattern. We were told his plea was just the
“tip of the iceberg” that would “take
the trail of Russian collusion” to the “center of the plot,” i.e. Trump. It
turned out he had no deeper story to tell. In fact, none of the people
prosecutors tossed in jail to get at the Russian “plot” – some little more than
bystanders – had anything to share.
Remember George Papadopoulos, whose alleged conversation about
“dirt” on Hillary Clinton with an Australian diplomat created the pretext for
the FBI’s entire Trump-Russia investigation? We just found out in
newly-released testimony by McCabe that the FBI felt as early as the summer of
2016 that the evidence “didn’t particularly
indicate” that Papadopoulos was “interacting with the Russians.”
If you’re in the media and keeping score, that’s about six
months before our industry lost its mind and scrambled to make Watergate
comparisons over Jim Comey’s March, 2017 “bombshell” revelation of the
existence of an FBI Trump-Russia investigation. Nobody bothered to wonder if
they actually had any evidence. Similarly Chelsea Manning insisted she’d
already answered all pertinent questions about Julian Assange, but prosecutors
didn’t find that answer satisfactory, and threw her in jail for year anyway,
only releasing her when she tried to
kill herself. She still owes $256,000 in fines, not that her many supporters
from the Bush days seem to care much.
The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA
Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive
scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
After Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about mass data
collection, a series of internal investigations began showing
officials were breaking rules against spying on specific Americans via this NSA
program. Searches were conducted too often and without proper justification,
and the results were shared with too many people, including private
contractors. By October, 2016, the FISA court was declaring that systematic
overuse of so-called “702” searches were a “very serious fourth
Amendment issue.”
In later court documents it came out that the FBI
conducted 3.1 million such
searches in 2017 alone. As the Brennan Center put it, “almost
certainly… the total number of U.S. person queries run by the FBI each year is
well into the millions.”
Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints at how this
program might have been misused. In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall
Street Journal they’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American
groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to
more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with
Iran. This is a long way from using surveillance to defuse terror plots
or break up human trafficking rings.
I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn,
but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade
ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of
Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state. Politicians
and pundits across the last four years have rolled their eyes at attorney-client
privilege, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser,
the right to counsel and a host of other issues, regularly denouncing civil
rights worries as red-herring excuses for Trumpism.
Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for
abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry
are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process,
they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is
now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional
concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French
aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the
Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest
of lockdown measures is troglodyte death
wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are
seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government
overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily
gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems
some “dumb” Americans have had
accepting them.
On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump
the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures
of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of
propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term
for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie
Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class
hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.
The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties.
Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a
clamor for censorship and contract tracing
programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters
only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it
like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in
quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era
really damaged our thinking to this degree?
My family is in
quarantine, I worry about a premature return to work, and sure, I laughed at
that Shaun
of the Dead photo of Ohio protesters protesting state lockdown laws. But I
also recognize the crisis is also raising serious civil liberties issues, from
prisoners trapped in deadly
conditions to profound questions about speech and assembly, the
limits to surveillance and snitching, etc. If this disease is going to be in
our lives for the foreseeable future, that makes it more urgent that we talk
about what these rules will be, not less, yet the party I grew up supporting
seems to have lost the ability to do so, and I don’t understand why.
Postscripts…
Considering the extreme restrictions being placed on
Americans across the country, it was likely only a matter of time until a mass of lawsuits
were filed against cities and states. Yet lawsuits are not the only thing that is turning
against some city and state leaders; several State Supreme Courts have
overturned overly restrictive orders made by Democratic administrations.
California, for example,
is facing over a dozen
lawsuits regarding the
unjust closing of religious organizations and gathering as well as gun shops.
More lawsuits still are in place regarding defying the Constitution's right to
free assembly because of the orders that individuals are not allowed to gather
in protest. One individual citizen is sueing with the argument that the stay at
home order is detention without due process.
In modern days, economic collapse is one of the most
likely disasters that people all over the world must contend with. Even in an
economic stronghold such as the United States, the possibility of economic
collapse looms large. In fact, many experts predict that the U.S. is due for an
economic downturn, the severity of which is yet to be seen. But considering
that the fundamental problems behind the last crash were never really fixed, it
will probably be pretty bad.
Aside from the financial consequences, though, there are
plenty of other scary things that follow in the wake of an economic collapse.
Below, we’ll cover some of these frightening possibilities in order to
highlight why it is so important to be prepared.
1. Kidnappings Increase - Countries that experience
an economic collapse typically see a spike in kidnappings as well. Kidnapping a
person of wealth and demanding a ransom is one way for desperate people to
acquire money when no other means of acquiring money are available...
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Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
USEFUL STUFF…
20 Things That Are
Actually Worth Stockpiling
You probably don't need a year's supply
of toilet paper to survive an outbreak, but you should consider stocking up on
these items.
What the
Coronavirus Can Teach Us About Building an Emergency Fund
Find your emergency fund is too skinny?
Here's how to stretch those dollars and fatten it up.
Stay Ahead of Shortages! What To Stock Up On For The Coming Year
As parents, we want to protect our children from harm. It’s in our DNA. So we diligently
prepare for possible emergencies, and we educate ourselves on how to survive
them.
Teaching your children to rely on you
is a good thing, but we can’t possibly be with them at all times. Would your
kids know what to do if they were on their own in a survival situation? If not,
it’s time to teach your children some basic survival skills.
Your kids learn best by doing, so this
spring and summer, make your camping and hiking excursions into opportunities
to learn survival techniques. Even a walk in the woods can become a teachable
moment as you share observations and information that could save their lives in
a survival scenario...
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Our phones are extremely important in a crisis.
They hold information and special functions that are essential for survival.
Essential information like important contacts, incoming public alerts, and they give us online access to survival strategies and life-saving techniques.
Your phone also has special functions like digital compasses, levels, and even the tiny flashlight that can be the difference between life or death in a crisis.
Your phone is that important, and should not be overlooked as an essential survival device.
THE MAJOR PROBLEM: Your phone’s power fails quicker than any survival tool you own.
THE SOLUTION: Fortunately, when you grab this "forever charger," your phone will always be charged…available at our storefront!
They hold information and special functions that are essential for survival.
Essential information like important contacts, incoming public alerts, and they give us online access to survival strategies and life-saving techniques.
Your phone also has special functions like digital compasses, levels, and even the tiny flashlight that can be the difference between life or death in a crisis.
Your phone is that important, and should not be overlooked as an essential survival device.
THE MAJOR PROBLEM: Your phone’s power fails quicker than any survival tool you own.
THE SOLUTION: Fortunately, when you grab this "forever charger," your phone will always be charged…available at our storefront!
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grid…invented in Germany
Free enterprise, limited
government, individual freedom!
Contributors and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays annually. It is for this reason they are Heroes and Heroines of New Media. Without your financial support, the free content would disappear for the simple reason that I cannot keep body and soul together on my meager book sales & ecommerce alone.
You Can’t Buy Life Insurance After You’re Dead
Not Prepared?
That's Bad News...
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3 comments:
The DNC are no longer comprised of democrats; a study last week said 57% of this party has been hijacked by socialists - fueled by communist oriented groups such as Justice Democrats...likely being funded by Soros.
Useful stuff/excellent resources...
Dems are hypocrites but let's not forget Pres. Bush screwed all of our rights w/ his un-Patriot Act.
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