Society's ChildS


Snakes in Suits

Former senior FBI agents blast politicization of the Bureau: 'It's time to clean house'

James Lynch
The Daily Caller
Sun, 07 May 2023 20:13 UTC
FBI logo capitol riots
© Becker News
Former senior FBI agents are sounding the alarm about the bureau's apparent politicization in a statement sent exclusively to The Daily Caller.

"We agree privately and uniformly that [the] FBI is heading in the wrong direction and has been too entrenched with partisan politics, starting from Director Comey and intensified under Director Christopher Wray," one agent said on behalf of the group.

The retired agents each served in the FBI for more than two decades and chose to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. The agents describe themselves as a group of FBI veterans who love the bureau and worry about its growing role in partisan politics.
"We identified with Nicole Parker's claim that 'The FBI became politically weaponized, starting from the top in Washington trickling down to the field offices,' illustrated by inflating domestic violent extremism statistics, directing big tech companies to censor Americans, conducting an unprecedented raid on President Trump's home while suppressing key details related to the Hunter Biden probe as 'disinformation' and so on. We have observed firsthand that too many FBI current agents are suffering low morale and too many Americans have lost trust in FBI."

Comment: Ex-FBI agent Nicole Parker: Bureau 'politically weaponized, starting from the top'

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Bullseye

SOTT Focus: Robert Kennedy Jr: America Needs a Revolution


UnHerd
Thu, 04 May 2023 19:59 UTC
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
© Evan Vucci /APRobert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The 2024 outsider on Biden, Ukraine and Covid misinformation

For decades, as a scion of the Kennedy family and environmental litigator, Robert F. Kennedy Jr was considered an establishment hero. In recent years, however, his rhetoric against Covid lockdowns and vaccines sealed his reputation among most commentators as irresponsible and potentially dangerous. So, since he announced that he was running for president two weeks ago, challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, he has presented the establishment media with something of a conundrum. He is already polling at 20% — should he be ignored or interrogated?

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers invited RFK Jr. to the studio to discuss his campaign promises and get behind the controversies.


Comment: Kennedy is far and away the best candidate the Democrats could field, so expect him to be frozen out the way Tulsi Gabbard was in 2020. The Kennedy name still holds some magic, so he may be able to bring issues to the fore that would otherwise be ignored. We shall see.

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People 2

US food insecurity worse than official reports estimate, study reveals

Jocelyn Solis-Moreira
Study Finds
Mon, 08 May 2023 12:00 UTC
empty shelves
© AP / Noah BergerFILE PHOTO:
More people are having trouble getting food on the table, according to a recent study. While food insecurity is a growing concern in the United States, the research suggests the number of people with limited access to food is actually higher than what official reports estimate.

Food insecurity is a term for not having access to enough food to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle for everyone living in a single household. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sends out an annual survey to collect data on food spending and access to food per household. The data helps to inform policies which address the causes and consequences of food insecurity. However, with the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the current study finds these reports underestimated recent food insecurity cases by as much as one-third.

The rate of national food insecurity did not change by much in 2019 (10.5%), 2020 (10.5%), and 2021 (10.2%). In California, food insecurity actually went down by one percent from 2019 to 2021.


Comment: One wonders why it went down during the period of lockdowns and government stimulus cheques.


Comment: Whilst accurate surveys are indeed important, there are a variety of other metrics by which one can deduce just how quickly life is deteriorating, across the board, for the average American. Further, food insecurity isn't just a crisis the US is facing, because even the UN has admitted that the planet faces looming 'hell on earth' food shortages:

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People 2

Majority of Americans oppose gender-affirming care for minors, trans women participating in sports: poll

Jared Gans
The Hill
Sat, 06 May 2023 09:20 UTC
trans flag
© Getty Images/Tommy Wu
A majority of Americans oppose allowing gender-affirming care for minors and transgender women participating in women's sports, a poll found.

A Washington Post-KFF poll found that 68 percent of adults oppose access to puberty-blocking medication for transgender children ages 10-14 and 58 percent oppose access to hormonal treatments for transgender kids ages 15 to 17.

More than 60 percent said transgender women and girls should not be allowed to compete with other women and girls in youth, high school, college and professional sports.

Comment: See also:

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Pistol

Texas massacre suspect charged with 5 counts of murder as investigators say his longtime partner gave him food and clothes while on the run

Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough, Holly Yan, Josh Campbell and Mark Morales
CNN
Wed, 03 May 2023 17:15 UTC
Francisco Oropesa
© Eva GutierrezFrancisco Oropesa, shown in a video screengrab taken by a witness, was taken into custody Tuesday evening.
The longtime partner of a man accused of gunning down five people, including a 9-year-old, in a neighboring Texas home seemed to be cooperating with authorities - but was actually helping the suspect evade them during a dayslong manhunt, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

The suspected gunman, Mexican national Francisco Oropesa, was caught Tuesday and has been charged with five counts of murder after the mass shooting Friday night, authorities said.

Oropesa, 38, said very little while the charges were read to him Wednesday in the San Jacinto County jail. Through an interpreter, "He basically said, 'I see, I see, I see,'" County Justice of the Peace Randy Ellisor said.

Comment: Also from CNN:
The man wanted by law enforcement for the killings of five Texas neighbors - including a 9-year-old boy - had entered the US illegally and been deported by immigration officials at least four times, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement source said.

The suspect, identified by ICE as Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres, was first removed by an immigration judge in March 2009, the ICE source told CNN on Monday.

"At an unknown time and location, Perez-Torres unlawfully reentered the United States, and was apprehended and removed several more times by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in September 2009, January 2012, and July 2016," the source said.

Oropesa's current immigration status is unclear, and it is not known how long he had been in the US since he was last deported.
...

About 10 to 20 minutes before Friday's massacre, Wilson Garcia and two other men had walked over to Oropesa's yard to ask him to stop shooting so close to their home because their baby was sleeping, Garcia told CNN. They'd asked Oropesa to shoot on the other side of his property, he said.

The suspect refused, and Garcia said he would call police.

"We walked inside and my wife was talking to the police, and we called five times because he was being more threatening," Garcia recalled.

"We saw him, he was leaving his property and cocked his gun," the father said. "I told my wife to get inside because he cocked his gun and he might come threaten us. So my wife said, 'You go inside, I don't think he will fire at me because I'm a woman, I'll stay here at the door.'"

The gunman later came to Garcia's home, shooting his wife, Sonia Argentina Guzman, in the doorway before killing three other adults and Garcia's son, Daniel Enrique Laso-Guzman, the grieving father said.
See also: Texas fugitive accused of killing 5 was illegally in US; deported 5 times

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Stock Down

Collapse of social & economic order is not a problem but a strategy

Patricia Anthone
America Out Loud
Fri, 05 May 2023 00:01 UTC
nordstrom
© AP
Nordstrom announced this week that it would be closing its San Francisco stores due to deteriorating conditions in the city, vacating 300,000 square feet of retail space in the formerly upscale Westfield San Francisco Centre. They are not alone. Fellow clothier, Anthropologie, Office Depot, and grocer Whole Foods have also closed or announced plans to close shortly due to safety concerns amid an unchecked crime wave brought about by a refusal to prosecute crime. San Francisco is just one city in which social and economic order is collapsing.

Most blue states have enacted laws that treat theft of amounts below a given threshold - $700-$900 - as misdemeanors, meaning that even if a thief is caught stealing merchandise whose value falls below the threshold (a big if), he or she will be issued a summons but not arrested. The threshold amount, by the way, is per incident, not per person. So even if the same person is caught red-handed on multiple occasions, he or she will not be arrested unless the value of the goods with which he or she is caught exceeds the threshold amount.

Comment: See also:

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Stock Down

Half of America's banks are potentially insolvent - this is how a credit crunch begins

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph
Tue, 02 May 2023 14:30 UTC
jerome powell
The twin crashes in US commercial real estate and the US bond market have collided with $9 trillion uninsured deposits in the American banking system. Such deposits can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age.

The second and third biggest bank failures in US history have followed in quick succession. The US Treasury and Federal Reserve would like us to believe that they are "idiosyncratic". That is a dangerous evasion.

Almost half of America's 4,800 banks are already burning through their capital buffers. They may not have to mark all losses to market under US accounting rules but that does not make them solvent. Somebody will take those losses.

Comment: See also:

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X

Free press? White House bans New York Post from Biden event as Hunter indictment looms

Steven Nelson
New York Post
Mon, 08 May 2023 14:52 UTC
empty seats press conference
© Diana GlebovaThere were about 20 empty press seats at Biden’s Monday event.
The White House press office barred The Post from attending President Biden's only daytime public event Monday as federal prosecutors near a decision on criminally charging first son Hunter Biden for tax fraud and other crimes.

The Post has closely covered the president's ties to his relatives' foreign dealings and first reported in October 2020 on files from Hunter's abandoned laptop that link Joe Biden to ventures in China and Ukraine.

Biden, who falsely characterized The Post's reporting as Russian disinformation, appeared with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to talk about airline policies in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Comment: See also:

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Stock Down

Investors flock to gold as US banking crisis rages - JPMorgan


RT
Sat, 06 May 2023 13:24 UTC
gold australia
© Facebook/Perth MintDemand for the precious metal, which is considered a safe haven in times of financial or political turmoil, has been growing
Gold prices have been hovering near record highs this week on renewed investor concerns of a deepening US financial crisis and the possibility of a recession this year.

According to JPMorgan strategists, cited by Bloomberg on Friday, the so-called 'long duration' trade, which is expressed by being overweight on gold and growth stocks, "seems to have become a consensus" in recent months.

"The US banking crisis has increased the demand for gold as a proxy for lower real rates as well as a hedge against a 'catastrophic scenario,'" the strategists wrote in a note seen by the outlet.
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Bullseye

Warren Buffet slams executives of failed US banks


RT
Sun, 07 May 2023 18:27 UTC
Warren Buffett
© Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesWarren Buffett
Billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett believes that the executives in charge of failed US lenders should be held accountable for the mismanagement that resulted in their collapse, Bloomberg reported on Saturday.

Speaking at an annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffet said First Republic was offering "crazy" non-government-backed mortgages at fixed rates, and in some cases for ten years.

Buffet's longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, previously said that US banks are full of bad commercial property loans, and warned of a brewing storm in America's real estate market.
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