Would you willingly live like a prisoner for a day or two – or four? Hundreds of people have jumped at just such a chance in the Swiss city of Zurich, volunteering to take part in an open house of sorts for a new jail before the facility accepts its first inmates.Details of the March 24-27 test run are still being worked out. But Zurich corrections authorities said Thursday they received 832 applications for an as-yet undecided number of spots.The selected volunteers, who must live locally and…

Prince Andrew has reached an agreement to settle claims that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl decades ago, his accuser’s lawyer said in a court filing.Virginia Giuffre had claimed the British royal was one of several men to whom Jeffrey Epstein “lent” her for abuse. Andrew has consistently denied her claims.The settlement was announced in a letter on Tuesday to the New York federal judge overseeing the case by Giuffre’s lawyer, David Boies, who said it was on behalf of both parties…

The Biden White House urged Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to use federal powers to quell the truck blockade that has halted flow of commerce on the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario.

The Associated Press reported that DHS Secretary Mayorkas and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg urged Canadian officials to help resolve the standoff.

A group of Michigan Moms and patriots raised $39,000 to support and help feed the protesting truckers on the international border with Canada.

The Daily Mail reported:

Ontario has brought in more draconian rules to crack down on Freedom Convoy truckers – including vehicle seizures and fines – just days after honking was banned and after the US told Canada to use federal powers to end the blockades.

US President Joe Biden on Thursday urged his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau to impose further rules as the bumper-to-bumper demonstration on the city’s Ambassador Bridge forced auto plants on both sides of the border to shut down or scale back production.

The bridge, which connects Windsor, Ontario with Detroit, Michigan, is North America’s busiest international land border and usually carries more than $327million of goods per day on over 8,000 trucks, accommodating 27 percent of the approximately $400 billion in annual trade between Canada and the US.

Truck drivers, who have been in the city since the Freedom Convoy traveled to the nation’s capitol on January 23, have since Monday blocked the bridge in a demonstration against Trudeau’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate.

Under the rules, truckers driving international routes must be fully vaccinated, and though 85 per cent of them are, many oppose the rules.

The White House on Thursday said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke with their Canadian counterparts and urged them to help resolve the standoff.

Federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said Royal Canadian Mounted Police reinforcements are being sent to Windsor, Ottawa and Coutts, Alberta where another border blockade is happening.

The post Michigan Moms Raise $39,000 to Feed Convoy Truckers in Detroit as Biden Regime Tells Justin Trudeau to Drive Out Convoy with an Even TOUGHER Clampdown appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Rapper, Snoop Dogg produced a rap video ‘BadBadNotGood’ back in 2017.

He depicts President Trump as a clown smoking a joint and ends up pointing a gun at his head.  When he shoots the gun, a flash fires at Trump’s head and a ‘BANG’ flag pops out.

Snoop Dogg has rapped about drugs and sexually abusing women for decades yet he depicts President Trump as a pot-smoking clown.

FYI, Donald Trump doesn’t even drink alcohol…

Imagine if an ‘entertainer’ made a video like this about Obama?  The outcry would be heard around the world and the Secret Service would have investigated.  This is in line with how degenerate Hollywood has become as they push an immoral agenda.

VIDEO: Not only is there a language warning for this video, you will also lose brain cells after listening to such vapid ‘lyrics’.

**  Snoop Dogg announced in 2013 that he’s love to show his kids how to smoke pot.

** Snoop Dogg called Mitt Romney a “white n***er” in 2012.

** Snoop Dogg on Imus in 2007, “Rappers’ hos are different.”

** Snoop Dogg outside the Trump White House with a blunt, “F**k Trump.”

** Snoop Dogg calls President Trump a n***er, says “F**k him” on government shutdown.

** Snoop Dogg calls black conservatives “the coon bunch” in 2020.

Tonight Snoop Dogg is singing at the Super Bowl halftime show — Expect a lot of cop bashing.

Super Bowl Sewer.

The post Super Bowl Sewer: Halftime Show Features Snoop Dogg – Who Fired Gun at Trump’s Head in Video, Called Black Conservatives “Coon Bunch,” Promoted Pot His Entire Career appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Justice Department arrests suspects, recovers $3.6 billion in stolen bitcoin

Ryan King

February 08, 02:00 PM February 08, 02:05 PM

The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it has recovered $3.6 billion in stolen bitcoin — the largest cryptocurrency seizure in U.S. history.

Authorities arrested Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, in New York City on Monday after they allegedly conspired to launder the stolen cryptocurrency they got from a hack of virtual currency exchange Bitfinex.

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CRYPTO EXCHANGE TO GIVE AWAY BITCOIN DURING SUPER BOWL AD CAMPAIGN

“Today, federal law enforcement demonstrates once again that we can follow money through the blockchain and that we will not allow cryptocurrency to be a safe haven for money laundering or a zone of lawlessness within our financial system,” said Kenneth Polite Jr., an assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “The arrests today show that we will take a firm stand against those who allegedly try to use virtual currencies for criminal purposes.”

Lichtenstein and Morgan are charged with a conspiracy to commit money laundering and a conspiracy to defraud the United States. If convicted on both charges, they could each face a maximum of 25 years in prison.

Prosecutors allege a 2016 hack of Bitfinex initiated over 2,000 unauthorized transactions that sent stolen bitcoin to a "digital wallet under Lichtenstein’s control." The hack stole about 119,754 bitcoin, worth an estimated $4.6 billion, according to prosecutors. Prosecutors did not elaborate on who they believed conducted the 2016 Bitfinex hack.

Officials from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the IRS participated in the investigation. Lichtenstein and Morgan are scheduled to make an appearance later on Tuesday in a federal district court.

Lichtenstein allegedly transferred about 25,000 worth of bitcoin into different accounts he and his wife controlled. The roughly 94,000 remaining bitcoin was seized by special authorities and is worth about $3.6 billion. Authorities recovered the bitcoin after executing a search warrant on online accounts Lichtenstein and Morgan controlled. Those accounts gave law enforcement the keys needed to access his wallet. The remaining 25,000 bitcoin has not been recovered yet.

Lichtenstein's allegedly stolen bitcoin was worth more than half of the entire GDP of Liechtenstein, a nation that has a similar name. The country has an estimated population of just under 40,000 people.

“In a methodical and calculated scheme, the defendants allegedly laundered and disguised their vast fortune,” said Jim Lee of IRS-Criminal Investigation. “IRS-CI Cyber Crimes Unit special agents have once again unraveled a sophisticated laundering technique, enabling them to trace, access, and seize the stolen funds, which has amounted to the largest cryptocurrency seizure to date, valued at more than $3.6 billion.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Last week, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic detected roughly 94,000 in stolen bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack being moved, Coin Desk reported. It is unclear if that was related to law enforcement activity. Bitcoin was once considered nearly impossible to trace, but law enforcement officers have been proving that wrong. Prosecutors said Tuesday's arrests show "that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals."

© 2022 Washington Examiner

At this point all I can say is: go and see it. 

Over the past two years, more than 1,360 people have died from drug overdoses in San Francisco. That is more than double the number who have died from Covid.

But you don’t need more stats. You don’t need more numbers about how the tent encampments are exploding. Or about the amount of money that the city is paying for each person doing drugs on the sidewalks. You need to see it.

I’m serious. Everyone in San Francisco should make a trip downtown. Walk around. And do not avert your eyes to the people dying slowly on the streets.

The politicians that run my hometown are relying on you not noticing what’s going on because it’s been bad for so long and who cares if it gets a little worse. Don’t let them. Go see it.

The city is using intimidation. They used it on me when I went to see what was going on at a new addict-services facility, which they’d set up in a public plaza. And they tried to intimidate my friend Michael Shellenberger, as you’ll read below. 

The people in charge of homelessness and addiction want to bully people into giving up public streets and parks. They want to take your tax money and let your suffering neighbors die gentle, stoned deaths while they watch and call it justice. They think the mothers who want to get their sons out of the jaws of death are suspect. (It’s conservative to want your kid to live, don’t you know?) The city would like a little privacy please. Fentanyl use is an intimate moment between our officials and our addicts.

Do not listen to the propaganda. Skip Golden Gate Park. Bring your friends downtown instead. Stand in UN Plaza and just watch. Use your eyes, those great weapons. 

— Nellie Bowles

When San Francisco Mayor London Breed promised last month that she would “put an end to all the bullshit destroying our city,” everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Over the past decade, the city had come to resemble “Night of the Living Dead,” with Covid accelerating its decline. At last, someone was promising to take charge. Finally we would see a crackdown on the open-air drug use and drug dealing that is fueling an epidemic of slow-motion death by the bay.

I praised Breed and defended her from skeptics who claimed hers was an empty promise. I was wrong to be so naive.

Right now, in the heart of downtown San Francisco, “the bullshit” the mayor spoke about is worsening by the day. The city is running a supervised drug consumption site in United Nations Plaza—just blocks away from city hall and the opera house—in flagrant violation of state and federal law. (Two weeks ago, my colleagues and I broke the story. The San Francisco Chronicle confirmed our reporting.) There, city-funded service providers supervise people smoking fentanyl and meth they buy from drug dealers across the street. 

The police do nothing. Indeed, the mayor, through the Department of Emergency Management and the Department of Public Health, is running the site. 

Tom Wolf, a recovering homeless addict who served on the city’s drug-dealing task force, compared the department to “the mafia.” Everyone sees that the situation is untenable, he added, but “nobody wants to go on record” because “everyone is afraid of the backlash.” 

Let me say off the bat that I am not a drug prude. I support the decriminalization of marijuana and psychedelics for medical and spiritual purposes. I have favored needle exchanges since the late 1990s, and I have always strongly supported using Narcan to reverse overdoses, and methadone or Suboxone as opioid replacement.

I am also not completely opposed to supervised drug consumption sites. In my new book, San Fransicko, I praise Portugal, which has decriminalized drug use, and the Netherlands, where there are 28 drug consumption rooms. (In some, addicts are even given heroin.)

But both of those countries condemn hard drug use and intervene when addicts break laws, including laws against public drug use and public camping. “There’s a clear sign of disapproval in our society to the use of drugs,” the head of Portugal’s drug program, João Goulão, told me. 

They are also not opposed to coercion. In Portugal, someone caught using heroin in public is arrested, brought to the police station, and either prosecuted for drug dealing or forced to appear before something called a Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction comprised of a combination of social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and family members who confront addicts in a formal intervention.  

Something very different is happening in San Francisco. The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment whereby addicts are given everything they need to maintain their addiction—cash, hot meals, shelter—in exchange for . . . almost nothing. Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth and crack use on public property. 

You can go and witness all of this if you simply walk down Market Street and peek your head over a newly erected fence in the southwest corner of United Nations Plaza. You will see that the city is permitting people to openly use and even deal drugs in a cordoned-off area of the public square.

The city denies that they are operating a supervised drug consumption site. “This site is about getting people connected with immediate support, as well as long-term services and treatment,” a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Emergency Management told the Chronicle. 

The official line is that they are running what they call a “Linkage Center” in a building next to the open drug market in the plaza. The idea is that the center is supposed to link addicts to services, including housing and rehab. When Mayor London Breed announced it, she promised it would get people into treatment so they could stop using drugs, not simply hide their use.

But city officials have told me that in the 19 days that the site has been open, just two people total went to detox so far. And they serve some 220 people per day. 

“In that tent on Market Street everyone is shooting dope,” complained a senior employee of a major city service provider, speaking of the scene at the plaza. “It’s insane. All the staff standing around watching them. It’s fucking ridiculous. I don’t know how anybody thinks that helping a drug addict use drugs is helping them.”

“What’s happening is that everyone that comes in gets a meal, can use the bathroom, gets drug supplies (needles, foil, pipes) and signs up for a ‘housing assessment,” a person with firsthand information about the operation told me over text message. “But there’s no housing. So nothing happens. They just get added to a list.” 

The parents whose children live on the streets are adamant that the status quo is broken. “I agree with the Linkage Center,” Gina McDonald told me. Her 24-year-old daughter Samantha is a heroin and fentanyl addict who has been on and off the streets for the last two years. “But allowing open drug use does not help. It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.”

Last Thursday I returned to the Linkage Center to find out what, if anything, had changed since I first visited. I saw (and video recorded) much more drug use within the supervised drug consumption site, and much more drug dealing around it, than I had two weeks ago.

I counted at least 30 drug users crowded together and sitting on a cement stoop or on outdoor tables. Many were gaunt, stooped over, and had open wounds consistent with substance use disorder, from meth, fentanyl, or a combination of the two, which has become increasingly common. There were also more employees on site than when I had first visited; they were watching as people smoked fentanyl and meth. 

The security guards at the site work for a new, fast-growing nonprofit contractor called Urban Alchemy. Urban Alchemy is composed of ex-cons and “lifers” released early, many of whom have gone through recovery from addiction themselves. Their first contract was to clean and police the public toilets that, without security guards, are used for drug consumption and prostitution.

I admire the organization’s ethos, which emphasizes self-control, discipline, and turning past mistakes into something positive. One morning in early December I shadowed Urban Alchemy employees, known as “practitioners,” as they told street addicts in the Tenderloin to pack up their tents and cleaned up after them. 

But the practitioners did not appreciate my presence in the consumption area and asked me to leave. After I pointed out that the site was public property, and therefore open to the public, they said I could stay if I registered at the front desk. Within seconds they changed their mind and threw me out of the site. 

My last visit to the site had frightened me, so I was wearing a body camera clipped to my jacket. They grabbed my body camera and another camera from my hand and rushed me outside of the facility. Eventually the police came and returned my property to me.

Urban Alchemy is not just paid by the city to provide security for the Linkage Center. It also oversees a city-sponsored homeless tent village, which the city has dubbed a “Safe Sleeping Site,” just one block away. There, late-stage addicts living in tents spend their days smoking fentanyl and meth. Meantime, Urban Alchemy practitioners bring them three hot meals a day, provide them with clean clothes, and even clean their toilets. 

The Safe Sleeping Site, which was created in 2020, is one of six similar sites throughout the city with about 250 tents between them. The city’s taxpayers spend about $57,000 per tent per year—or twice the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.

Addiction experts—and I spoke to dozens for my book, including senior officials in Europe— are appalled by San Francisco’s radical drug experiment. 

“If you’re coming into a place that’s supposed to guide you toward the end of seeking treatment and recovery, and there are people using drugs around you, that becomes an incentive to keep going,” said Stanford University School of Medicine addiction expert, Keith Humphreys. “It’s like trying to have an AA meeting in a bar.”

Wolf, the recovering addict who is the founder of The Recovery Education Coalition, told me that “some service providers are refusing to go to the [supervised drug consumption] site because they don’t feel safe.” He added that “a lot of workers for these nonprofit service providers are in recovery and they don’t want to be around the drug use.”

In obeisance to woke ideology, the official position of the Department of Public Health and progressives on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is that police should not be involved except perhaps to revive people with Narcan after they overdose. Many on the Board of Supervisors and the District Attorney believe that drug dealers—who the latter refers to as victims—should not be prosecuted.

The result is that the city is spending roughly $100,000 per year per homeless person, or over $1 billion annually, to maintain a large, unemployed, and very sick addict population in San Francisco’s public squares at the cost of human life and the loss of peace, walkability and livability—the very qualities that have long attracted so many to San Francisco.

For decades, San Franciscans have been fed the line that people are not on the street primarily because they are addicts, but because of high rent and lack of housing. The most powerful proponent of this view is Jennifer Friedenbach of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. She blocks the closure of open drug scenes, calls people who disagree with her fascists and racists, and organizes protests at the homes of politicians. “They’re screaming for housing,” she has said of the city’s homeless population.

But that is not what addicts on the street tell me. On Saturday, I talked to a 37-year-old heroin addict originally from Alabama who has been living on San Francisco’s streets for seven years. He told me that for the majority of homeless people “addiction is the main driving force.”

It makes good sense. Homeless shelters have rules, like no drug use. The streets do not. 

And simply giving addicts and the mentally ill their own apartment units—the so-called “Housing First” approach pioneered in San Francisco—doesn’t even keep people housed long-term. In the spring of 2021, a team of Harvard medical experts found that after 10 years, just 12 percent of the previously homeless remained housed. 

In 2018, a National Academies of Sciences review of the scientific literature of Housing First concluded that there was “no substantial evidence” that the policy of Housing First “contributes to improved health outcomes.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that it doesn’t deal with addiction.

But in the name of Housing First, San Francisco’s elected leaders have deliberately chosen to leave a significant portion of the homeless unsheltered on the logic that anything short of a permanent apartment, no strings attached, for any addict who wants one is immoral.

It didn’t have to be this way. “New York has made the decision that everyone should have an exit from the street,” noted Rafael Mandelman, one of the city’s 11 supervisors. “San Francisco has consciously chosen not to make that commitment. And the conditions on New York’s streets versus San Francisco streets are somewhat reflective of what that means.”

It seems like it cannot get worse. But it can. 

In Canada, taxpayer-funded service providers have been delivering fentanyl directly to addicts living in homeless drug encampments. This is where many fear the San Francisco program is headed.

The backlash is building, though. It is made up of fed-up city residents, addiction experts, and the relatives of addicts. 

On Saturday morning, mothers of homeless addicts and mothers of kids killed by drugs gathered to protest the supervised drug site in front of the Linkage Center. They call themselves Mothers Against Drug Deaths, and they are part of the California Peace Coalition, which I co-founded last May.

Gina McDonald, Samantha’s mother, was there. She opened up to me about her own past addiction. She was an alcoholic, then turned to opioids, then to meth. “Within six months I was in a psychiatric ward with meth-induced psychosis.” In May, she will have been sober for 10 years.

“I don’t want to know what she has to do to survive out there,” McDonald said of her daughter. “I know because I was an addict. But I don’t want to hear it from her. Can you imagine what those girls have to do out there to not be dope sick?” 

I no longer believe that change in the city will come from Mayor Breed. If it comes, it will come from mothers like Gina McDonald. When she took the microphone on Saturday she didn’t hold back. “Mayor Breed,” she said, “I’m tired of the bullshit, too.”

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A May 2019 memo from the Wisconsin Elections Commission was unearthed showing  how the state charges entities for information within the ERIC voter roll maintenance system.  These fees however were not consistently assessed during the 2020 Election cycle. 

A document unearthed from 2019 in Wisconsin shows that the state had an agreement with the ERIC voter roll maintenance system and used this system to manage the state’s voter roll.

We reported on the ERIC system recently at The Gateway Pundit.

Since our first report, Louisiana has voted to stop using ERIC, Arizona has calls to end that state’s relationship with ERIC, and Florida patriots have raised concerns there as well.

Who’s “Cleaning” Our Voter Rolls? Soros Funded ERIC Is Now Used In 31 States

The 2019 document that we unearthed in Wisconsin related to ERIC is embedded below.  There are two points in the memo that we highlighted.

The first point is what is expected of the data housed in ERIC.

Under 2015 Act 261, the Elections Commission is required to enter into a membership agreement with ERIC. The agreement must: (a) safeguard the confidentiality of information or data in the registration list; (b) prohibit the sale or distribution of the information or data in the registration list to a third-party vendor and prohibit any other action not associated with administration of or compliance with the agreement; and (c) allow the state to make contact with electors by electronic mail, whenever possible.

The second point is the costs charged for sharing data from ERIC.

The Commission currently sells voter registration data to various individuals and organizations and, under state statute, is required to use fee revenue to “cover both the cost of reproduction and the cost of maintaining the list.” The Commission currently charges a $25 base fee plus $5 for up to 1,000 records, $5 for each additional 1,000 records, and a maximum of $12,500 for the sale of voter registration data.

These are noted in the document below.

WI 280 – Elections Commission_Electronic Registration Information Center by Jim Hoft on Scribd

Related to this are the stories we shared in 2021 about Wisconsin election officials providing up-to-the-minute access to groups outside of the government allowing them to obtain all sorts of information from Wisconsin’s voting systems.  We are unaware that any of this came at a cost and it went to left-leaning entities.

SMOKING GUN: Emails Show Facebook Connected Non-Profit Built Direct Connection to Wisconsin State Voter Database in 2020 Election Vote Harvesting Operation

This means that Wisconsin election officials provided access to all voter records during the 2020 Election to outside liberal-leaning entities for free but apparently, they charged Republicans up to $12,500 for each dataset requested during the election.

This appears to be against the law and is simply outrageous. Wisconsin never should have certified their results in the 2020 Election.

As President Trump said – The system was rigged.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Wisconsin Election Commission Charged Republicans Up to $12,500 for Each Voter Data Request in the 2020 Election But Gave Similar Data to Democrat Groups for Free appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Ron DeSantis: "It is a fraud for @gofundme to commandeer $9M in donations sent to support truckers and give it to causes of their own choosing."

The post GoFundMe Won’t Seize $9M Donations To Canadian Truckers After Elon Musk Calls GFM “Thieves” first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

Teachers barricaded the students in the lunchroom and turned down the thermostat.

The post Hundreds Of Students at CA High School Arrive Maskless to Protest Gov. Newsom Hyopcrisy first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

JANUARY 2022 – Now is the time to ensure that Arizona’s voter registration rolls are in optimal condition before the midterm elections. If voter turnout comes anywhere near 2020 levels, one can expect tight margins in statewide contests and even slimmer room for administrative errors.

Looking back at Election Day 2020, Arizona’s voter rolls had tens of thousands of duplicate and potentially unlawful registrations. This research brief outlines the vulnerabilities of the rolls with the hope of seeing them resolved in the coming months, before federal laws shut this window of opportunity.

Read the brief here.

First Video of Georgia Ballot Trafficker   AS CFP reported a few weeks ago, True the Vote has compiled evidence of organized ballot trafficking in six states. In Georgia, they allege there were 242 traffickers who made a total of 5,662 trips to ballot drop boxes between the early morning hours of 12AM and 5AM, […]

Film Trailer | 2000 Mules          

This is the second time GoFundMe paused the fundraiser.

The post GoFundMe Pauses Canadian Freedom Convoy After Hitting the $10 Million Mark first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

Songs sold as NFTs without musicians' permission

Christopher Hutton

February 02, 03:06 PM February 02, 03:10 PM

It's time for one website selling nonfungible tokens without the creators' permission to face the music, artists say.

Musicians discovered that HitPiece, an NFT marketplace that claims to sell "one of one NFTs of all your favorite songs," was selling their songs as NFTs without their permission. The website previously listed songs by well-known artists, including Disney music, K-pop sensation BTS, and Britney Spears, as NFTs.

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"This site 'hitpiece' is selling nft's of our band and MANY others without permission," tweeted 1990s rock band Eve 6. "if you're in a band, click the link you may be on here. cease and desist motherf***ers. nft's are fraud."

TRUMP'S NIECE IS LATEST TO PULL PODCAST FROM SPOTIFY OVER JOE ROGAN

Hip-hop group Clipping tweeted Tuesday it was "looking into what [it] can do to get it taken down."

The Mary Wallopers, an Irish folk band, tweeted out a link to an auction for one of its songs, asking, "How do you stop this?"

Several other artists have expressed their annoyance, vowing to take action against the organization.

HitPiece acknowledged it "struck a nerve" Tuesday evening.

"Clearly, we struck a nerve and are very eager to create the ideal experience for fans," HitPiece tweeted. "To be clear, artists get paid when digital goods are sold on HitPiece. Like all beta products, we are continuing to listen to all user feedback and are committed to evolving the product to fit the needs of the artists, labels, and fans alike."

The account did not provide any additional details about what changes it might implement.

HitPiece's social media has also responded to many of the artists by requesting that they send the company a direct message over Twitter. The account went as far as to clarify, "We are definitely not a scam."

The website has also been heavily modified since it got the media's attention. The home page is blank and reads, "We Started the Conversation, and We're Listening." All auctions for music NFTs appear to have been pulled down.

Nonfungible tokens, also known as NFTs, are similar to cryptocurrency in that they allow buyers to purchase images or digital objects that also provide proof through a blockchain that the purchaser does in fact own the item. The practice has become notably popular in 2021 due to a surge of interest in cryptocurrency and has made hundreds of millions of dollars in the last year.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

NFTs have even gotten the attention of the Trumps, who released their own series of NFTs to fundraise for Melania Trump's anti-bullying campaign.

A representative from HitPiece did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner.

© 2022 Washington Examiner

"...a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument."

The post Johns Hopkins Study Shows Pandemic Lockdowns Failed Spectacularly first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

The United States will send nearly 3,000 extra troops to Poland and Romania to reinforce Eastern European Nato allies in the face of what Washington describes as a Russian threat to invade Ukraine, US officials said on Wednesday.Russia, for its part, signalled it was in no mood for compromise by mocking Britain, calling Prime Minister Boris Johnson “utterly confused” and ridiculing what it said was the “stupidity and ignorance” of British politicians.Moscow has massed more than 100,000 troops…

$30,012,386,059,238.29 (+) #NationalDebt — National Debt Tweets (@NationalDebt) February 1, 2022   US Debt Clock Live…      

Welcome to the Crackpot Left, where:

1. Policies produce the opposite of their intended effect…
2. Which is then taken as proof that we should double down on them.

PS They did to me.

Graph: https://www.unz.com/isteve/black-lives-matters-bloody-toll-on-black-people/

Elon Musk tweets ominous warning about ‘path to tyranny’

Matthew Miller

January 28, 12:49 PM January 28, 12:50 PM

Tech billionaire Elon Musk tweeted a message to his social media followers, warning that fear is the "path to tyranny."

"If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny," Musk wrote Thursday.

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LISTEN: KID ROCK'S NEW SINGLE CHANTS 'LET'S GO BRANDON,' BLASTING FAUCI AND BIG TECH

Musk's tweet prompted a huge response from Twitter users, collecting 93,000 retweets in less than 24 hours. Some resonated with his message, while others took the opportunity to criticize the entrepreneur, who has emerged as a politically controversial figure.

"This is some HEAVY truth," Young Americans for Liberty wrote in response to Musk's tweet.

"When you’re behind on three models, you weren’t invited to the White House and the stock’s down by 1/3," wrote NBC reporter Carl Quintanilla.

Musk tweeted the broad warning on the same day he tweeted his support for the thousands of Canadian truckers who have formed a convoy headed to Ottawa to protest the country's vaccine mandates.

"Canadian truckers rule," Musk tweeted Thursday afternoon. "Freedom is being stripped away one piece at a time until it is gone," Musk said in a subsequent tweet.

The massive demonstration has been dubbed the "Freedom Convoy" and has drawn support from all over Canada.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the protesting truckers a "fringe minority of people" that does not represent most of the country's residents.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

"The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa are holding unacceptable views that they're expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, rights, and values as a country," Trudeau said.

© 2022 Washington Examiner

There’s no need for faceless IRS technology to see our faces

Quin Hillyer

January 31, 08:38 PM February 01, 05:18 AM

Congress ought to introduce and pass stand-alone legislation blocking the IRS from requiring a face scan from people accessing the IRS.gov website.

This is not complicated. What the IRS is trying to do is a massive invasion of privacy and an open invitation to error and abuse of the sort that frustrated taxpayers may have an almost insurmountable challenge to rectify. At a time when the IRS already is woefully understaffed and incompetent, the new requirement is a prescription for disaster.

Beginning this summer, anyone wanting to log in to the IRS website will be required to submit to facial recognition scanning for just about all purposes other than filing their own returns. To access their own online tax accounts, or to check the Child Tax Credit Update Portal, the face scan will be needed. The scans will be managed by a private technology company called ID.me.

Critics worry that this is just one more way for personal information to be hacked — and also just one more way for technological glitches to create hellish experiences for innocent taxpayers.

“Anyone who hits a snag,” reports the Washington Post, “is funneled into the backup video-chat verification process … [in which] the average wait time in the second half of 2021 was less than eight minutes, and the busiest weeks saw average waits of about 50 minutes.”

Gee, is that all? After already wading through the confusing forms, red tape, and bureaucracy for which the IRS is infamous, taxpayers now must submit to a process which, if it hits a technological glitch, might subject them to a nearly hourlong wait in a “busy” week. And, reports the Post, “the security blogger Brian Krebs wrote last week that he faced a three-hour wait trying to confirm his IRS account, three months before the tax-filing deadline.”

And what if the private company still errs? What recourse would a taxpayer have? Where, within the IRS, can he go for help? This is the same IRS that in 2021 was unable even to take the calls of 88.6% of the people who used its phone helpline. And when it does take the calls, after an average wait of 23 minutes, it gives wrong answers about a third of the time. Yet if a taxpayer files his return incorrectly based on those wrong answers, it is the taxpayer, not the IRS agent, who is held at fault and perhaps subject to penalties.

This isn’t a merely fanciful fear or the complaint from cranky Luddites either. To quote the Post again, “The technological demands of an internet-connected video camera can unfairly burden the millions of Americans with spotty online access or old phones. ... Even the best systems, [critics say], can make mistakes when shown blurry, dim, or low-quality images,” and police have been known to use mistaken facial-recognition technology to make “wrongful arrests.”

Anyone who has had a scrape with an at-fault but unresponsive IRS knows there is potential not only for major hassles but for ruined lives. That’s why Congress should step in. It should pass a law, now, to put a long-term hold on this IRS requirement, pending thorough expert review. The IRS needs more money for customer support, not more ways to make taxpayers jump through hoops while trying to comply with confusing and confiscatory demands on the fruits of their labor.

© 2022 Washington Examiner

"It's better to burn out, than to fade away."

The post Neil Young Forces Spotify to Choose Between Him and Joe Rogan. Spotify Chooses Rogan first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

It sounds like teachers don't know how to do their job so it's easier to remove a book than discuss the themes and teach your students how to critically think.

The post Seattle School District Removes To Kill a Mockingbird From Required Reading List first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

First voyage of unmanned container ship completed in Japan, moored by drone

Zachary Halaschak

January 25, 03:02 PM January 25, 03:02 PM

A Japanese shipping company has announced that it successfully conducted the world’s first test of an unmanned container ship.

Mitsui O.S.K. Lines said on Tuesday that the vessel Mikage, an autonomous cargo ship, successfully traveled from Japan’s Tsuruga Port in Fukui Prefecture to Sakai Port in Tottori Prefecture — a voyage of more than 100 miles. The historic sea trial was part of the unmanned ship project MEGURI2040, being led by the Nippon Foundation.

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A wide array of technology was used to complete the voyage. The ship was able to follow a preformulated route using an autonomous ship operation control system that had to effectively handle several different elements of navigation, including wind, tides, and various navigation rules that ships must follow.

Mikage used an information integration system to gather and interpret data about other ships it came across and how to circumnavigate obstacles it encountered along the route. The system can measure the positions, speed, and types of nearby ships as well as the position of debris.

THE BIGGEST SUPPLY CHAIN STORIES OF 2021

Radar, an automatic identification system, and images captured by camera were used by the autonomous collision avoidance routing system in order to safely navigate the container ship from port to port.

One of the most sensitive and difficult parts of operating a large ship is the berthing process, which is when a vessel is maneuvered into position to dock. Crewmembers typically play the crucial role in berthing. The Mikage, though, did so autonomously using “equipment that calculates and visually displays accurate relative distances and relative angles between the pier and hull,” according to the company.

To automate the process even more fully, the ship also undertook the feat of mooring itself without human crewmembers. Instead of a crewmember throwing the ship’s heaving line from the ship to the dock, an automatic flight drone carried the line from the vessel to the dock. The company said that as technology advances, drone-powered mooring is expected to become a viable alternative to human-powered docking.

The feat comes just days after the Nippon Foundation also succeeded in operating a large and fully autonomous high-speed coastal ferry. The group said that the 222-meter ferry was the first in the world to work using a fully autonomous navigation system. The ferry navigated a 150-mile journey from Shinmoji in Northern Kyushu to Iyonada, which took about seven hours.

The Nippon Foundation envisions autonomous ships being put into practical use by 2025. Human error accounts for the vast majority of marine accidents, something that the unmanned vessel project is trying to fix.

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“Using container ships and car ferries as experimental ships, autonomous operation will reduce the labor burden in order to eradicate marine accidents caused by human error, which is an urgent issue in the domestic shipping industry, and to cope with the normalization of seafarer shortages and the aging of seafarers,” the Nippon Foundation said on its website.

© 2022 Washington Examiner

Despite Joe Biden’s vaccine requirement for federal contractors being blocked by a federal judge, Ford Motor Company is still moving forward with requiring COVID vaccination for salaried employees after months of push back or will face unpaid leave.

Last December, a federal judge on Tuesday blocked Joe Biden’s vaccine requirement for federal contractors nationwide. And this month, the Supreme Court blocks Biden’s OSHA vax mandate for private businesses with 100+ employees in 6-3 votes.

An employee from Ford Co., who would like to stay anonymous, reached out to TGP and is asking for help to expose the unconstitutional vaccine mandate imposed by the company.

Here is an excerpt from the email:

I work at Ford Motor Company. Salary employees at the company have been required to comply with the OSHA vaccine mandate, federal contractor vaccine mandate, and now that both of those have failed, Ford Motor Company is now moving forward with their own mandate.

Ford has salary employees who have largely worked from home, which are all required to get the vaccine. They have salary employees that work in person at the plants that are not required to get the vaccine. They have hourly workers that work in person and are not required to get the vaccine. They have union workers who work in person but they are not required to get the vaccine. They have Ford credit salary employees which largely work from home and are not required to get the vaccine.

Attached is the latest email from the company and a Q&A document that Ford published to employees specifying the dates, the personnel that fall under the mandate, and their logic for mandating vaccination for salary employees only.

Ford announced its vaccination reporting status on September 27, 2021. All employees were required to report their vaccination status by October 8, 2021. Due to the stay placed on the Federal Contractor mandate and the OSHA mandate, Ford moved its vaccination date 3 times. First, it was December 8, 2021. Then it was January 18, 2022. Now it is February 11, 2022.

As outlined in the attached email from Ford, all employees that have not reported their status will be placed on indefinite unpaid leave starting February 11, 2022.

Others have submitted their Religious or Medical Accommodation Requests since September 2021 and they are still waiting for a response from the company more than 3 months later. We are not confident that our requests for accommodation will be approved as company leadership has stated that the only way they see moving forward is with everyone vaccinated.

I am requesting your help to get this story out to the public for support, for the Ford employees that are being forced to get the vaccine or lose their livelihood.

It does not make sense that Ford would mandate vaccines for workers that are remote but not for workers that are in person.

The post Ford Motor Company Bucks Supreme Court – Moves Forward with their Own Vaccine Mandate for Remote Workers appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Name a city that changed your life. — Delta (@Delta) January 20, 2022   Not sure who thought this was going to be a good idea.     Wuhan. https://t.co/Tgy0ppR6cm — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 23, 2022     Not just mine but everyone's pic.twitter.com/TCjIu047mQ — Shubham Dutt (@shubhamdutt13) January 22, 2022     Wuhan […]

One has to understand, as I’ve tried to describe, that nearly every mode of information has been co-opted, if it can be co-opted, by some group. Fact-checks are no different either. They’ve been co-opted in many instances, or created for the purpose of distributing narratives and propaganda. Your common sense is accurate when it tells you that the way they chose this fact-check and how they decided to word it so they could say this thing is not true. At its heart the fact is really true, but the message they’re trying to send is that you shouldn’t believe it. Your...