Patrick's Notebook

by Darmi Msarko

President Trump has requested mail-in ballots for the upcoming Florida primaries despite his frequent criticism of mail-in ballot systems in the U.S., USA Today reported.

The president, who changed his permanent residence from New York to Florida during his first term in office, is casting a ballot to be counted Aug. 18 in the state’s congressional primary elections.

A request from the ballot was posted online by Palm Beach County election officials on Wednesday. A ballot will be picked up and delivered to the president’s Florida residence of Mar-a-Lago before it will travel to Washington, D.C.

It will then be mailed to Florida officials ahead of the state’s primary election Tuesday.

White House officials did not immediately return a request for comment from The Hill.

Trump has frequently claimed that the practice of voting by mail will lead to voter fraud. However, there is scant evidence to suggest that this is the case. » Read the rest of this entry «

written by John W. Whitehead

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.”—Ronald Reagan

There’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests.

Without fail, what should be an exercise in how to peacefully disagree turns ugly the moment looting, vandalism, violence, intimidation tactics and rioting are introduced into the equation. Instead of restoring order, local police stand down.

Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in.

Coincidence? I think not.

This was the blueprint used three years ago in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when the city regularly cited as being one of the happiest places in America, became ground zero for a heated war of words—and actions—over racism, “sanitizing history,” extremism (both right and left), political correctness, hate speech, partisan politics, and a growing fear that violent words will end in violent actions.

It was a setup: local police deliberately engineered a situation in which protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to call in the bigger guns. » Read the rest of this entry «

written by Jeffrey Tucker

Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the U.S. for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which is egregious, but I always thought something would stop it from happening. The courts. Public opinion. Bill of Rights. Tradition. The core rowdiness of American culture. Political squeamishness. The availability of information.

Something would prevent it. So I believed. So most of us believed.

Still it happened, all in a matter of days, March 12-16, 2020, and boom; it was over! We were locked down. Schools shut. Bars and restaurants closed. No international visitors. Theaters shuttered. Conferences forcibly ended. Sports stopped. We were told to stay home and watch movies…for two weeks to flatten the curve. Then two weeks stretched to five months. How lucky for those who lived in the states that resisted the pressure and stayed open, but even for them, they couldn’t visit relatives in other states due to quarantine restrictions and so on.

Lockdowns ended American life as we knew it just five months ago, for a virus that 99.4-6% of those who contract it shake off, for which the median age of death is 78-80 with comorbidities, for which there is not a single verified case of reinfection on the planet, for which international successes in managing this relied on herd immunity and openness. » Read the rest of this entry «

written by CJ Hopkins

They’re here! No, not the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We’re not being colonized by giant alien fruit. I’m afraid it is a little more serious than that. People’s minds are being taken over by a much more destructive and less otherworldly force … a force that transforms them overnight into aggressively paranoid, order-following, propaganda-parroting totalitarians.

You know the people I’m talking about. Some of them are probably your friends and family, people you have known for years, and who had always seemed completely rational, but who are now convinced that we need to radically alter the fabric of human society to protect ourselves from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms at all) in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99.6% survive, which, it goes without saying, is totally insane.

I’ve been calling them “corona-totalitarians,” but I’m going to call them the “New Normals” from now on, as that more accurately evokes the pathologized-totalitarian ideology they are systematically spreading. At this point, I think it is important to do that, because, clearly, their ideological program has nothing to do with any actual virus, or any other actual public health threat. As is glaringly obvious to anyone whose mind has not been taken over yet, the “apocalyptic coronavirus pandemic” was always just a Trojan horse, a means of introducing the “New Normal,” which they’ve been doing since the very beginning. » Read the rest of this entry «

written by Paul Joseph Watson

The impact of the global coronavirus lockdown is set to plunge 100 million people into extreme poverty, warns a new report by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The report appears to pin the blame on COVID-19 itself for the economic impact, yet the actual culprit is discovered to be the “restrictions” put in place by governments in response to the pandemic.

From the report;

“With the virus and its restrictions, up to 100 million more people globally could fall into the bitter existence of living on just $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank. That’s “well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty wrote this year. And it comes on top of the 736 million people already there, half of them in just five countries: Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Congo and Bangladesh.”

The report notes that the impact of the lockdown on the poor in countries like India was “so abrupt and punishing” that their Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, begged for forgiveness. » Read the rest of this entry «

from rt.com

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has voiced a protest over a proposed Russian rule that would require labeling of propaganda content, saying it would burden “independent” information work of outlets such as Voice of America.

“This decree will impose new burdensome requirements that will further inhibit RFE/RL’s and VOA’s ability to operate within Russia,” Pompeo said Monday, commenting on the draft rule published by the media regulator Roskomnadzor.

Pompeo called VOA and its sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty “vital sources of independent news and information for the people of Russia” for “more than 70 years.”

Far from independent, however, they were both established as US propaganda outlets at the dawn of the Cold War. They are fully funded by the government, and the charter of their parent organization – now known as US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – mandates they “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States” and “provide a surge capacity to support United States foreign policy objectives during crises abroad.”

The 1948 law that established these outlets outright prohibited their content from being broadcast in the US itself, until the Obama administration amended it in 2013. » Read the rest of this entry «

written by Jason Ditz

Chinese app TikTok remains under fire by President Trump, with allegations that their being Chinese means China could access their user data, making it a serious problem. President Trump is set to ban TikTok next month.

US officials see this as something China is bound to do with their apps, because Edward Snowden’s leaks showed this is exactly what the US did with its many apps and their user data. And yet did it happen?

The latest report out of the CIA says no. While they said it is possible for China to access such user data, because of course it is, they confirmed that there is no evidence that any such things ever happened with TikTok.

According to The New York Times on Friday:

But when the C.I.A. was asked recently to assess whether it was also a national security problem, the answer that came back was highly equivocal.

Yes, the agency’s analysts told the White House, it is possible that the Chinese intelligence authorities could intercept data or use the app to bore into smartphones. But there is no evidence they have done so, despite the calls from President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to neutralize a threat from the app’s presence on millions of American devices.

TikTok had already said they’d done nothing wrong, faulting Trump’s ban as denying them due process. They promise to “pursue all remedies available to us.” With US tensions toward China growing, it’s likely they’ll try to limit remedies.