Is criticizing Israel illegal terrorism?

This 1:54 video comes very close to the US DoJ publicly threatening everyone by saying that criticism of Israel is antisemitism, which it will be treated as criminal support for the terrorist group Hamas. 

MAGA DoJ thug Todd Blanche

PBS reported:

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking at the Justice Department, said it was all part of the president’s “mission to end antisemitism in this country.”

“Just last night, we worked with the Department of Homeland Security to execute search warrants from an investigation into Columbia University for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” Blanche said. “That investigation is ongoing, and we are also looking at whether Columbia’s handling of earlier incidents violated civil rights laws and included terrorism crimes.”

Blanche didn’t say what evidence agents had of wrongdoing by the university. It was unclear whether he was accusing the school itself of “terrorism crimes” or saying that people involved in the protests had committed such crimes.

As is now usual for authoritarian MAGA operations, there is no evidence of crimes and no specific laws were claimed to be broken.

Q: Does Blanche at least implicitly equate criticism of Israel or support for Palestinians with illegal support for Hamas?

Plutocracy update: Bringing back the company town

A 1939 company town, a perpetual poverty machine:

Cost to live there is slightly more than workers' wages,

the company owns and runs everything, 

including stores and the police force

Anarcho-capitalism: a political philosophy and economic theory that advocates for the abolition of centralized states in favor of stateless societies. It combines elements of anarchism and capitalism, emphasizing voluntary exchange, private property rights, and the non-aggression principle. Anarcho-capitalists argue that governments are coercive and unnecessary. They believe that all services currently provided by the state, such as law enforcement, education, and infrastructure, can be more efficiently provided by private companies in a free market

Gizmodo reports about plans those feisty billionaires are making to establish pockets of tyrannical corporate control, i.e., autonomous corporate mini-dictatorships:

Tech Execs Are Pushing Trump to Build ‘Freedom Cities’ Run by Corporations

A pro-corporate libertarian movement is attempting to take over the U.S., with Trump's help

A billionaire-backed push to develop libertarian enclaves in Central America is being imported back to the United States, where its proponents want to lay the groundwork for their own privately run, corporately governed cities.

A new lobbying group, dubbed the Freedom Cities Coalition, wants to convince President Trump and Congress to authorize the creation of new special development zones within the U.S. These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy. The new zones could also serve as a testbed for weird new technologies without the need for government oversight.

Wired recently reported that the Coalition was drafting congressional legislation that would allow it to establish a network of its new “cities.” One of the chief motivations for the creation of these communities is so that new “scientific” and technological development initiatives can be carried out without the need for regulatory oversight. The outlet writes:

According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Freedom Cities Coalition is a project of NeWay Capital, a company that has been centrally involved in the development of Prospera, a private, “free market,” crypto-friendly enclave in Honduras. Prospera was made possible by a special regulatory setup, dubbed a special economic zone (or ZEDE), that was established in the country in 2013 in the wake of a U.S.-backed coup. ZEDEs allow for private actors to essentially move into geographically partitioned areas and write their own regulatory and judicial rules.

Prospera is also part of something called the “Network State,” an anarcho-capitalist ideological movement, backed by tech-billionaires, that seeks to create privately run cities with native cryptocurrencies.

Where will America’s new “Freedom Cities” be built? It seems quite possible that the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks. On its website, the Freedom City Coalition notes that 28 percent of U.S. land is “federally owned and ready for innovative development.” It doesn’t specify what kind of federal land is “ready” for this “innovation,” but most of the government land that isn’t used for farming and energy development is used for wildlife conservation.

It’s also worth noting that, in a video released during the presidential campaign, Trump openly spoke about using protected federal lands to build “Freedom Cities.”

A 1924 Company town

physically isolated from nearby towns 

and from broader society

I owe my soul to the company store

Q: Apocalyptic hell or the road to utopia and universal prosperity and happiness?

Your mental health…

 

Admit it, you have them too… coping/escape mechanisms that help give you peace of mind in a world full of problems that you have no control over.

I thought of some things I’m calling “Medications of Choice.”  We could also call them “Therapies of Choice.” As I was thinking about them, they came to me randomly, but I’ll list them in alphabetical order so you don’t get caught up in my stream of thought:

• Alcohol

• Avoiding TMI (a.k.a. cognitive dissonance/denial)

• Blogging

• Exercise

• Food (junk, comfort, overeating)

• Friends

• Hobbies (crafts, gardening, arts)

• Illegal drugs

• Knowledge (is/gives power)

• Laughter

• Loved one(s)

• Meditation

• Money (and acquiring material things)

• Music

• Nature

• Pets

• Prescription drugs

• Professional counseling

• Reading

• Religion

• Sex

• Sleep

• Solitude

• Sports

• Stoicism

• Travel

• Video games

• Work

• Writing

• Other
• I ain't got no steenkeen' problems

There it is, my “Medications/Therapies of Choice” menu.  How many apply to you?  Or have you no need to cope?  In that case, I’m gonna need some ‘splainin’ here.

So, what gets you through the day?

(by PrimalSoup)

MAGA bombs: Gutting more federal agencies; Invoking war powers

Mother Jones reports: 

Donald Trump Just Signed an Order 

Gutting Seven More Federal Agencies

The order targets the funding for Voice of America, which has been in the Trump administration’s crosshairs in recent weeks

In an executive order signed late Friday, !@#%^ effectively dismantled seven more federal agencies, this time with cuts that will impact work on homelessness, libraries, support for minority-owned businesses, and the US Agency for Global Media, which funds Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The cuts are expected to leave thousands more federal workers unemployed; in the case of VOA, it furthers a specific vendetta djt has had since his first term.

The order will affect the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the United States Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency. It instructs the head of each agency to submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget “explaining which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.” In practice, as has happened with other federal agencies in recent weeks, it’s expected to leave these agencies a shell of themselves and fundamentally nonexistent; in the case of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, it destroys the only federal agency solely focused on addressing the homelessness crisis.

Welp, I thought he was gonna convert the VOA to a MAGA lies & demagoguery agency. But maybe he will just get rid of as much of it as he can. I knew something like this was coming. I wonder about NPR and PBS, also on my list of predicted !@#%^ targets.

SF Gate reports about gutting of the US Forest Service: 'There is literally no one': The fallout coming to Lake Tahoe after forest service gutted -- The U.S. Forest Service manages 78% of the land in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Yet, a hiring freeze on seasonal workers and recent firings of key staff have gutted an already-stretched-thin agency, putting on hold critical work in water quality, environmental restoration and forest fuels reduction projects while also diminishing the forest service’s capacity to manage the millions of visitors who come to Lake Tahoe every year — especially on the Fourth of July.

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Thunder Box

Everybody is reporting that !@#%^ has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that gives a president authority to detain, restrain, secure, and remove non-citizens from countries deemed hostile during times of war or when there is an "invasion or predatory incursion" against the US. The alleged invasion is by a Venezuelan criminal gang called Tren De Aragua.

Although #!@*%'s EO claims to target members of TdA, we all know the blunderbuss ("Thunder Box") will sweep up all kinds of non-Venezuelans and non-TdA Venezuelans. Mexicans, Guatemalans, 4th generation Californians, etc., will all be captured, boxed up and mailed back to wherever blunderbuss thinks they might have come from, e.g., Africa, Siberia, Mars, Greenland, etc. Claims of TdA badness seem to be exaggerated.

I guess we're in the midst of an invasion or predatory incursion!  

MAGA patriot going after the TdA's

predatory incursion

Some insightful commentary from the peanut gallery:

Peanut 1: Oh man, Chuck Schumer is going to do so much approving of this!!

Peanut 2: Lovely fascism we’re having, care for a cup of tea?

Peanut 3: "Susan Collins’ brow is furrowed, 'Trump has learned his lesson', she says." And Chuck Schumer is opposed yet supportive. Though he would like to say first how bad of an idea it is!

Peanut 4: Not just noncitizens. Sure, it’s non-citiczens ON PAPER, but if you have no lawyer and no trial and no civil rights, how exactly do you even begin to prove you're a citizen after they arrest you? You don’t. You just get disappeared. In general, that’s why it's a good idea to defend everyone’s human rights, even if "it is the right thing to do as a decent member of the human race" isn’t a compelling enough argument to you. 

Peanut 5: It’s OK, democrats have our back. They’ve got their next set of paddleboard signs on standby!

Peanut 6: What is a Democrat? Isn’t that some kind of floor mat? Nah, can't be. That's offensive to floor mats that actually have a purpose.

Peanut 7: Wow, Schumer is truly a master politician outsmarting Trump at every turn.  /s

Peanut 8 (Wizzle Stick) Regarding Weimar Democrats and clueless Americans: I have so many stories of encountering people who had no basic knowledge. Someone I knew in school who when given an extra credit assignment on a country and she randomly was assigned Vietnam exclaimed, “wait! I thought Vietnam was a war, not a country?!?!”. .... Getting into a drawn out fight with a coworker at the time who said that the higher you go up a mountain, the warmer it gets because you get closer to the sun!!!! .... I once had a discussion with one of the managers in a company I used to work for. WW2 came up. She had no idea Italy was a belligerent in the war, and never heard of Benito Mussolini. So yeah, something like a reference to the Weimar Republic, they will not get it at all. No wonder it’s so easy to fool these people.

Peanut 9: Well, thank goodness he’s not shutting down the government or anything, right Schumer? 

Peanut 10: “At least I don’t have to cancel my book tour!” -- Chuck Schumer

Hm, seems that some folks are unhappy with Schumer.