BC SOCIETY
Saved by @Jacobtldr

When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

1/

 These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

2/
These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

3/
The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

4/
PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

5/
Presidents through history have loved these. FDR invoked emergency powers granted to Wilson. Johnson relied on Truman's Korean War powers. LBJ invoked a Civil War measure (on horse forage!) to bypass Congress and fund the Vietnam War.

6/
All the great monsters of America have reveled in these powers, from Kissinger to Cheney ("It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the president from ordering an assassination" -Dick Cheney, 1975).

7/
Even when Congress has expressed alarm at this power, it has never gone beyond cosmetic gestures. As @andrewmcockburn writes in @Harpers, the Church Committee hearings were followed by 1977's "International Emergency Economic Powers Act."

8/
The act allows the president to declare an emergency "to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat [with] its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States." So, basically, when the president says it's an emergency...it's an emergency.

9/
Every president since Nixon has relied on - and expanded - these "emergency" powers: Reagan used them to launder cocaine money for arms to Iran. G Bush I used them to invade Panama (backstopped with a memo penned by Bill Barr).

10/
Clinton used them to bomb Serbia. GW Bush used them to invade Iraq and enact domestic mass surveillance. Obama used them to drone-assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield.

11/
Trump's access to known and secret emergency powers is a cause for real alarm. When (or if?) Trump leaves power, job one has to be dismantling these authorities and restoring the balance of power.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

1/


* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
INTERNET
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/


First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/
TRADING , STOCK MKT
Advertisement
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

1/


The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

2/

Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

3/

Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

4/

When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

5/
CULTURE
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.

1/


If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

2/

In a new essay on @NakedCapitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

4/

This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.

5/
ECON
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

1/


The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful apex example of the form: @ToastedShoes's video of Sanders incorporated into eight AAA

Toasted Shoes got @JoeMashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

3/

I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the commenters on the video.

4/

They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2:

5/
FUN

More from Society

Kate Julian
Kate Julian
@katejulian
1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi


2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.


4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.
SOCIETY
UN Watch
UN Watch
@UNWatch
The UN just voted to condemn Israel 9 times, and the rest of the world 0.

View the resolutions and voting results here:

The resolution titled "The occupied Syrian Golan," which condemns Israel for "repressive measures" against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, was adopted by a vote of 151 - 2 - 14.

Israel and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/HoO7oz0dwr


The resolution titled "Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people..." was adopted by a vote of 153 - 6 - 9.

Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/1Ntpi7Vqab


The resolution titled "Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan" was adopted by a vote of 153 – 5 – 10.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/REumYgyRuF


The resolution titled "Applicability of the Geneva Convention... to the
Occupied Palestinian Territory..." was adopted by a vote of 154 - 5 - 8.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/xDAeS9K1kW
SOCIETY
Advertisement
el gato malo
el gato malo
@boriquagato
global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
SOCIETY
Adedamola C. Adesina
Adedamola C. Adesina
@DamolaAdesina01
Faith Without Works is Dead!

Jam2:17 NLT - “So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.”

There is a growing message and doctrine in the church that seems to discountenance works and suggests that the only thing we need ...

... as Christians is just to ‘believe’ in Christ and that lack of good works does not affect one’s faith in Christ. My brother and sister, this is big lie from the pit of hell. It doesn’t matter who is saying it or how big their ministry is, it goes against the scriptures ...

... and is against the Truth.
Our opening scripture tells us that it is not enough to simply believe in Jesus; there must be accompanying works to prove it. In fact, Jam2:19 says even demons believe that there is one God and His only begotten Son is Jesus.

However, they don’t obey Him or submit to His will. In order words, submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the total will of God is the proof of faith. Jesus said “not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will ...

... of My Father in heaven.”(Matt7:21) and “for whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother.” (Matt12:50).

Rom3:28 NIV - “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”
SOCIETY
Paul Matzko
Paul Matzko
@PMatzko
Having spent 2020 telling covid denalists that they were overly optimistic about the pandemic, I now look forward to spending 2021 telling covid maximalists that they are overly pessimistic about the end of the pandemic.

Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.

Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this

And the 7 day average continues to rise; we're approach 2 million vaccine doses per day. Meaning that we'll double that ~13% much faster than the two months it took us to get there.


So it's entirely reasonable that absent any other intervention, we should expect to hit ~30% vaccinated by the end of March.
SOCIETY

You May Also Like

Ramblings of a Sikh
Ramblings of a Sikh
@RamblingSingh
1/ Jassa Singh Ahluwalia & his role in the history of Shri Harmandir Sahib (A Thread)


2/ Jassa Singh was born in 1720/21 at a village called Ahlu in the Lahore District of Punjab.


3/ Jassa Singh was educated in Delhi, in Persian, Arabic & more, under the care & supervision of Mata Sundari Ji.

Mata Sundari Gurdwara in Delhi.


4/ In 1733, Jassa Singh's mama, Thag Singh (ਤਾਗ ਸਿੰਘ), requested Mata Sundari Ji's permission to take Jassa Singh back to Punjab.


5/ At first Mata Ji refused but eventually gave permission for Jassa Singh to go with his mama, giving Jassa Singh a blessing and weapons, informing him, it was now the right time to take up arms.
HISTORY
KrishnaLeela
KrishnaLeela
@Talesofkrishna
🌿𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 : 𝑫𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒗𝒂 & 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒖

Once upon a time there was a Raja named Uttānapāda born of Svayambhuva Manu,1st man on earth.He had 2 beautiful wives - Suniti & Suruchi & two sons were born of them Dhruva & Uttama respectively.
#talesofkrishna https://t.co/E85MTPkF9W


Now Suniti was the daughter of a tribal chief while Suruchi was the daughter of a rich king. Hence Suruchi was always favored the most by Raja while Suniti was ignored. But while Suniti was gentle & kind hearted by nature Suruchi was venomous inside.
#KrishnaLeela


The story is of a time when ideally the eldest son of the king becomes the heir to the throne. Hence the sinhasan of the Raja belonged to Dhruva.This is why Suruchi who was the 2nd wife nourished poison in her heart for Dhruva as she knew her son will never get the throne.


One day when Dhruva was just 5 years old he went on to sit on his father's lap. Suruchi, the jealous queen, got enraged and shoved him away from Raja as she never wanted Raja to shower Dhruva with his fatherly affection.


Dhruva protested questioning his step mother "why can't i sit on my own father's lap?" A furious Suruchi berated him saying "only God can allow him that privilege. Go ask him"
RELIGION
Advertisement
Pegasus of Dharma
Pegasus of Dharma
@HarduttSuhas
The BATTLE OF PAVAN KHIND (13 July 1660)

300 MARATHAS against 10000+ ADIL SHAHI TROOPS

A Sparta style last man stand at a mountain pass which ensured Shivaji Maharaj's safety.

Valour, loyalty and sacrifice!


Baji Prabhu Deshpande was one of the most able lieutenants of Shivaji. He sacrificed his life defending Shivaji in a heroic last stand known as the "Battle of Pavan Khind" in which his force was hugely outnumbered.(1)

In this battle he became a martyr, but managed to halt the enemy forces for several hours, which secured Shivaji’s safety and victory on another front. Without this heroic last stand Shivaji’s glorious career may have been cut short.(2)


Baji Prabhu was senior to Shivaji. In the beginning he opposed Shivaji being from a rival Maratha clan, but realised that Shivaji stood for national resurgence. Henceforth he became a friend and loyal supporter of Shivaji.(3)

In 1660, Shivaji was trapped in the fort of Panhala, under siege and vastly outnumbered by an Adilshahi army led by general Siddhi Jauhar.(4)
HISTORY
Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
BANASHANKARI AMMA, NEAR BADAMI (KAR)
#bharatmandir #navratri2021

Originally built by Chalukyas in 7th century. Devi Banashankari was their family deity. This image of Banashankari Amma was installed by Jagadekamalla I in 630 AD.

Later renovations were done by Marathas.


Once, a demon Durgamasur was troubling the people of this area. Answering the prayers of Devas, Ma Parvati emerged from the yajna fire as Banashankari and killed Durgamasur.
This area has rich forests of coconut, betel nut and other trees.
@GunduHuDuGa


It is said that during a severe famine, Devi provided vegetables and fruits to the people of this area.
Hence, she is also worshipped here as Shakambhari.
In the annual festival called Banashankari jatre, a Rath yatra takes place and Devi moves around the city in the chariot.
ALL
:Billy-Don :I-AM
:Billy-Don :I-AM
@ValiantThor12
1) 💜 THE EVENT 2020 - THE 1221 MULTIDIMENSIONAL STARGATE 💜
PLEIADIAN LIGHT FORCES TRANSMISSIONS - 12182020
CHANNELED BY MICHAEL LOVE
A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO THE STARSEEDS OF NEW EARTH, FOR IMMEDIATE PLANETARY BROADCAST…
PRELUDE:
THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS DERIVED FROM DIRECT,

2) DECODED ETHERIC TRANSMISSIONS FROM BENEVOLENT LIGHT FORCES DOCKED IN EARTH’S SOLAR SYSTEM AND SOME OF THE DATA COMES DIRECTLY FROM CERTAIN INSIDE EARTH ALLIANCE MEMBERS KNOWN AS THE WHITE HATS, AND THE GREAT WHITE BROTHERHOOD STRATEGICALLY PLACED IN KEY POSITIONS OF POWER BY

3) THE GALACTICS ON THE SURFACE OF PLANET EARTH!
THE DATA HEREIN IS RECEIVED AND TRANSMITTED FROM THE 5D LEVEL! THIS MESSAGE IS INTENDED ONLY FOR THE STARSEEDS OF EARTH!
GREAT ONES,
WE HAVE SPOKEN OF THE EVENT 2020 THIS ENTIRE EARTH YEAR AS ALL PLEIADIAN AND EARTH ALLIANCE INTEL

4) SHOWS INDEED THAT A MAJOR COSMIC EVENT IS GOING TO OCCUR IN ONLY 3 EARTH DAYS FROM NOW!
ON DECEMBER 21, 2020, A MAGNIFICENT CELESTIAL STARGATE WILL OPEN IN THE HEAVENS WHICH MARKS THE DAWN OF THE NEW GOLDEN AGE OF AQUARIUS AND THE 1ST DAY OF THE SATYUGA OF CENTRAL SUNLIGHT!

5) IN THE MORNING HOURS OF THE WINTER SOLSTICE, THE LONG-AWAITED NEW ERA OF LIGHT WILL FINALLY DAWN AND THE NEW 5D EARTH WILL BE BORN!
THE COSMIC GATES WILL BE FULLY OPENED ON 12/21/20 ALLOWING POWERFUL STREAMS OF COSMIC LIGHT TO ENTER EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE, UPGRADING ALL SENTIENT
ECONOMY