I have thought for many years, originally based on my own work as an investigative journalist back in the 1960s, that the office of sheriff should be eliminated. It is a holdover from medieval England, and the only law enforcement office filled by an election. In the United States it has become filled with fascists and White supremacists who feel they are the final arbiters as to which laws to enforce. They have organized into a movement calling itself Constitutional Sheriffs, and they have a very sorry record, particularly when it comes to gun control and this article, one of several I have seen, describes how out of bounds these people have become.
Credit: Trey Paul, FISM News
Close to 100 sheriffs from throughout Illinois are pledging, to various degrees, not to enforce a new prohibitive gun law.
FISM News reported last week on House Bill 5471, which bans the manufacture or possession of dozens of common rapid-fire rifles, pistols, and .50-caliber guns. The legislation also limits the size of magazines. Anyone who currently owns these types of guns will be required to register them with the Illinois State Police.
The Twitter account linked to “Chicago Armory” tweeted dozens of letters from sheriffs in Illinois who explain why they’re not complying with or enforcing that law, referred to by some as the “Protect Illinois Communities Act.”
One such letter is from Edwards County Sheriff Darby Boewe of southern Illinois who says he won’t be enforcing that law because it’s unconstitutional. He posted a letter on Facebook that reads in part:
Part of my duties that I accepted upon being sworn into office was to protect the rights to all of us in the Constitution. One of those rights enumerated is the right of the people to […]
Day after day we learn more about the criminality of Trump, and his minions, Barr and the others, and yet none of them are ever held accountable. That tells you a great deal about American society, and so does the fact that Trump is still the leading Republican in spite of all this. In my opinion, it is driven by the fact that we are inevitably becoming a nation with no racial majority and about a third of Whites simply cannot stand that reality and have become a christofascist white supremacy male dominant movement committed to violence and willing, even anxious, to create civil violence. Those of us who support, even cherish, equality, fairness, and wellbeing need to recognize that this is not about awakening the MAGAt world; they are willfully who they are. What we must do is stand together. We are the majority of Americans; it is up to us to save the nation we were bequeathed.
Four-and-a-half years later, Trump is now touting his trust of Putin over American intelligence agencies as a source of pride.
In a post on his Truth Social account, the former president attacked former officials at the FBI and CIA whom he accused of trying to undermine his presidency by investigating his campaign’s multiple contacts with Russian agents during the 2016 presidential race.
“Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our ‘Intelligence’ lowlifes,” he wrote. “My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillary while Crooked was under investigation!), […]
I get so tired of these stories. Once again we are shown that in the United States we have only one social priority, profit. These utility companies care not a whit about the wellbeing of their customer, What matters to the leadership of these corporations is greed and profit. Such a sorry picture, making the lives of so many people miserable.
Utilities cut service 1.5m times during the first 10 months of 2022, and an estimated 4.2m times nationwide in 30 states. Credit: Thomas Shea /AFP / Getty
Some of America’s largest utilities cut power to millions of struggling customers in recent years even as they spent billions of dollars on stock buybacks, dividend payments to shareholders and executive salaries, a new analysis of industry data has found.
The report also reveals that companies could use just a tiny fraction of their investor and executive spending to forgive debt at all households where power was cut.
The shutoffs disproportionately affect low income and customers from communities of color, and the “harrowing” situation is driven by corporate profiteering, said Selah Goodson Bell, a study co-author and energy justice campaigner with the Center For Biological Diversity.
Losing power has an often devastating impact on a household, including in terms of health and safety. “Shutoffs allow corporate utilities to punish customers’ economic precarity while guaranteeing record profits and massive payouts for themselves and their investors,” the authors wrote in the report. It was […]
Slowly science is beginning to accept the idea that Planck put forward in 1931, consciousness is causal and fundamental, spacetime arises from consciousness not consciousness from from spacetime, as materialism postulates. Einstein described what is usually meant by what is called reality as an "optical delusion." Here is my own view, which corresponds with this report:
An assessment of the objectively verifiable experimental nonlocal consciousness research, including fifty years of my own research and studying the best of the research of others tells me that reality, spacetime, is a construct of information, an informational architecture shaped by intentioned consciousness, not all of which is human, or conceptually even planetary. In this nonlocal domain, all consciousness is interconnected and interdependent, and this can be objectively measured in spacetime. This domain of consciousness is not physiologically based and seems to incorporate the infinity of information including a seemingly eternal aspect of consciousness, and the continuity of consciousness amongst humans, and possibly other beings in the matrix of consciousness. Space and time are informational enrichers, but not limits in the nonlocal domain. We may not know what consciousness is, or what information is, but we can objectively validate the existence of nonlocal consciousness by accessing information from the nonlocal domain that is not physiologically based and could not otherwise be known.
Credit: Erin O’Flynn / The Daily Beast / Getty
This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?
Coincidentally, just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, a different team of distinguished scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they had run a process on Google’s quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can work like a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this recent experiment exists only in a 2-dimensional toy universe, it could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.
Thanks to the work of the Supreme Court Historical Society, The Federalist Society, and the Republican Party the Supreme Court, which strangely has no absolute ethical standards for justices, unlike every other court in the nation, has become a cesspit of corruption with a carefully crafted christofascist majority. Once one of America's proudest institutions today, as Pew Research Center describes it, "Americans’ ratings of the Supreme Court are now as negative as – and more politically polarized than – at any point in more than three decades of polling. And nearly two-thirds of Democrats (64%) now say the Supreme Court has too much power, almost three times the share who said this in August 2020 (23%)." Vouchsafing this assessment the Gallup Organization reported their poll results on the same citizen evaluation: "Confidence in the Supreme Court is down by double digits among both Democrats (30% to 13%) and independents (40% to 25%) this year ... Republicans (37% to 39%)." It is hard to overstate how damaging this is to our democracy.
Credit: Malik Skydsgaard / Unsplash
If you think Republican politicians in Congress are corrupt, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Check out how little it costs to purchase access to a Supreme Court justice!
Conservatives on the Supreme Court famously legalized billionaires and corporations bribing politicians back in 1976 and 1978, respectively (Buckley v Valeo and First National Bank v Bellotti), doubling down on and expanding the doctrine in 2010 (Citizens United).
Back in the 1970s Democratic politicians’ campaigns were largely funded by unions: the movement was awash in cash as it represented nearly a third of American workers. So when the Court legalized political bribery, most Democratic politicians ignored the event.
Republicans, however, jumped at the chance to sell their souls to corporations and the morbidly rich.
In the 1980 election Reagan floated into office on a tidal wave of cash from the oil industry, which had recently been stung by President Jimmy Carter declaring in 1979 that the nation was going to limit its use of fossil fuels […]
