Okay it is Saturday night in the USA and it is soon to be Sunday.

I am observing people walking about town where there is a relatively low incidence of COVID-19. Where else would I go to observe? Honestly. 

So, everyone actually are wearing masks. However, it is downtown on a Saturday night and many people are not walking well. Why one might ask? Because they have been drinking alcohol.

Interesting that they get this “mask-thing” but honestly social distancing is a tough one. No I am not drinking alcohol. People are drinking, not really walking well and somehow “eyeing” six feet is a challenge. 

Now I ask you, why would a state open up social venues while in the same breath they say, wear your mask and practice social distancing? There is something wrong with this picture.

Government leaders don’t know that? They don’t understand human nature? Then don’t be in government where people are counting on them to protect them. Opening social venues doesn’t mean they are going to the church Bingo to drink tea.

I never thought I would see the day...

...in the USA when civil rights means absolutely nothing. And where would that begin? With patients that are ill and the elderly. People that cannot stand up for themselves.

The State of Michigan Republicans passed a bill Governor Whitmer vetoed. The bill allows for the transfer of COVID-19 patients without consent, doctors’ approval or notification of the family.  

The Republicans want to override the veto. The Republican bill would be defeated in the courts.

There is also no funding proposed for these new facilities or regulations as to how they would be staffed. There won’t be professionals running to work in a COVID-19 only facility.

Governor Whitmer has a task force due to finish their report soon. It is suppose to help decide the best path forward for Michigan. The Republicans plan isn’t a plan. It only provides for “that feel good feeling.” To be completely honest the basis of the Republican plan is fear of the other rather than measured approaches that work.

Every nursing home in the country has to have plans in place to handle diagnosed COVID-19 patients. There must be methods in place by the nursing home administrators to isolate patients with highly contagious diseases.

The reason the virus spread like wildfire through nursing homes is because there was no warning such an illness was making the rounds until Oregon began seeing deaths in nursing homes. The death rate is more than 100 times that of the flu with seniors for which they always receive vaccines. 

I think specialty facilities are a wonderful idea so long as they are well established and regulated to insure patients actually do better. My understanding is that the Republican bill is more imagineering than actual plans.

The Republican bill puts the cart before the horse. Show the public the buildings around the state now at the ready for a bill needed to allow transfers of patients to isolation facilities. There aren’t even buildings and staff at the ready to begin this work. It is like saying, “Build it and they will come.” 

I am sure the Governor’s Task Force is extremely concerned and is preparing a plan that will be timely and effective. 

I wish the politics of fear would stop and bipartisan solutions found. This virus flourishes in chaos.

Trump's hate mongering drives his base to the polls.

The dynamic of heavy surveillance was allowed when terrorist cells were believed to exist everywhere after September 11, 2001. There were all sorts of change including the Patriot Act and preemption.

Now, when Trump wants to build a basis to undermine the entire Democratic Party to benefit his overthrow of the USA government there is intense creative writing in Portland, Oregon. Trump is worse than anything we have seen before.

November 13, 2019

By Niall McCarthy

The data shows (click here) that the majority of the reported hate crimes were motivated by race, ethnicity or ancestry bias (59.6 percent). Other motivating factors include religion (18.7 percent), sexual orientation (16.7 percent), gender identity (2.2 percent), disability (2.1 percent), and gender (0.7 percent). The statistics are a compilation of bias-motivated incidents sumitted to the FBI by 16,039 law enforcement agencies....

This trend was addressed early on under President Obama's administration. White Supremacists were known to become angry enough to attempt an assault against the government. We were winning the war against hate without heavy surveillance and false reporting. Under Trump in his first year hate crimes rose by 25 percent in his first year from the best year in 2014 under Obama.

...The president had shared a video (click here) on Twitter that included a Trump supporter shouting “white power” at counterprotesters during a demonstration at the Villages, a retirement community in central Florida, and had called his supporters there “great people.”...

The tweeting wasn't creating the profound unrest he was looking for to end democratic elections, so he was turning to an underground campaign at Homeland Security.

People will do and say anything...

...to find a foothold for political power. That is what happened when the Koch brothers brought the Tea Parties to the Republican Party. That is the origins of this entire mess with Trump.

Germany was fine. It had conquered the virus and then Bannon decided it was time to kill Germans and start a hooligans’ German Tea Party. The rates are going up. It isn’t good enough to be alive and safe from a deadly and maiming virus, to have the children okay and the future safe. No it wasn’t enough so Russia and Bannon went to town harnessing frustration and declared the march for anarchy was a far better core value.

The Bannon illness in Germany sounds EXACTLY like the Republican mess in the USA. Now, how is it that an entire country goes from sane to radical overnight?

There are far to many intelligence officers and contractors in the USA government.

“I don't want to live in a world where everything I say, (click here) everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity and love or friendship is recorded.”

Earth should not be spinning without investigative journalism. (click here) 

August 1, 2020

By Shane Harris

A senior Department of Homeland Security official (click here) whose office compiled “intelligence reports” about journalists and protesters in Portland, Ore., has been removed from his job, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Brian Murphy, the acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, was reassigned to a new position elsewhere in the department, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter.

Acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf made the decision on Friday, one person said.

Murphy’s removal follows revelations in The Washington Post that the Intelligence & Analysis Office (I & A) at DHS compiled Open Source Intelligence Reports about the work of two journalists who had published leaked department documents. In a separate intelligence report, the office also analyzed the communications of protesters in Portland....

I have no doubt this is all on Trump's insistence although he would never take responsibility for it.

It seems as though we are still spinning our wheels about how many intelligence officers we have in how many private agencies and the full accounting as to what work they are conducting and on what authority.

There was a report by the Washington Post some time ago that outlined the ridiculousness occurring in regard to private contractors. It seems to me this new abuse of power by the Trump administration is simply more of the same abuse the USA people have witnessed over and over again.

February 14, 2014

By Brian Fung

...In the wake of last year's NSA revelations, (click here) many agencies have been reviewing their contracting policies. But few people have a good grasp on just how many contractors the government employs. What's worse, the country's eight civilian intelligence agencies often can't sufficiently explain what they use those contractors for, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Every year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is supposed to count how many contractors serve the intelligence community (IC). Due to differences in the way intelligence agencies define and assess their workers, however, the data are inconsistent and in some places incomplete. Out of hundreds of agency records, for example, GAO found that almost a fifth lacked enough paperwork to prove how much a contractor was paid. Another fifth of the records were found to have either over-reported or under-reported the actual cost of the contract work.

But the GAO reserves its harshest judgment for the agencies that couldn't fully explain why they resorted to contractors in the first place.

"In preparing their inventory submissions, IC elements can select one of eight options for why they needed to use contract personnel, including the need to provide surge support for a particular IC mission area, insufficient staffing resources, or to provide unique technical, professional, managerial, or intellectual expertise to the IC element that is not otherwise available," the report says.

Out of 102 records that were filed under "unique expertise," 81 failed to convince investigators that an ordinary civil servant couldn't have handled the job.

"Overall," the report went on, "the civilian IC elements could not provide documentation for 40 percent of the 287 records we reviewed."...