If you've never come across the post office scandal it's one of the most absurd stories of total state abuse and incompetence, that it feels surreal. Over decades this occurred and everyone was gaslit over their false guilt.

Quote:LONDON, Jan 10 (Reuters) - One of Britain's biggest miscarriages of justice, the wrongful conviction of hundreds of Post Office workers due to faulty software, has exploded into the public domain following a TV drama, triggering demands for justice.

In a more than 20-year scandal, some postal workers were sent to prison and others lost their livelihoods and homes.

An independent inquiry as well as a police investigation into the scandal are being carried out, and business executives and former ministers are under scrutiny.

Below is a detailed look at the case:

WHAT IS THE POST OFFICE SCANDAL?

Hundreds of self-employed workers at the state-owned Post Office were wrongly prosecuted or convicted between 1999 and 2015 for false accounting, theft and fraud, because of a glitches in a software system that incorrectly showed money missing from accounts.

Some spent time in jail while others went bankrupt, saw their marriages destroyed and some died before their names were cleared.

Managers at Post Office branches across Britain, called sub-postmasters, are often at the heart of their communities, trusted individuals who handle people's savings and pensions.

The Post Office maintained for years that data from the defective Horizon computer accounting system, developed by Japan's Fujitsu and rolled out in 1999, was reliable, while accusing sub-postmasters of theft.

HOW DID THE SCANDAL UNFOLD?

The issues with Horizon, where the system would incorrectly show shortfalls in the accounts of individual branches, began to be reported to the Post Office from the early 2000s.

Over the next decade, a number of sub-postmasters either found their Post Office contracts terminated, were made bankrupt or were jailed after being found guilty of stealing money.

In 2009, trade publication Computer Weekly reported the claims of flaws with Horizon, alongside the postmaster prosecutions.

Amid mounting pressure from the media and lawmakers, the Post Office began to investigate the issue, but in 2015, its boss Paula Vennells told a parliamentary committee that there had been no evidence of any miscarriage of justice.

WHAT COMPENSATION HAVE VICTIMS RECEIVED?

In late 2019, the Post Office agreed to settle claims made by 555 sub-postmasters. However, many of the victims found the amount paid in compensation was outweighed by legal fees.

The government says roughly 138 million pounds ($175 million) have so far been paid out to over 2,700 claimants across three separate Post Office compensation schemes.

Still, many postmasters are yet to receive compensation or have their convictions quashed.

WHAT IS THE GOVERNMENT DOING?

Spurred to act following a public outcry after the TV drama, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is seeking to use new legislation to overturn the wrongful convictions, calling it one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Britain's history.

Under the plan, sub-postmasters will be able to sign a document to have their convictions reversed and claim compensation.

But some legal experts have warned that the unprecedented step of legislating to quash convictions meant that politicians were meddling in the independent judicial process, potentially risking similar interference in the future on other issues.

The normal process for anyone to have their conviction overturned in Britain is for the convicted party to lodge an appeal.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

An independent public inquiry led by a former high court judge is gathering evidence from postal workers, the government, the Post Office, Fujitsu and others. The inquiry is expected to conclude later this year.
London's Metropolitan Police has also confirmed it is conducting its own investigation into the Post Office over potential fraud offences arising from the wrongful prosecutions.

HAS ANYONE BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE?

No senior Post Office staff have been punished to date.

Vennells, who received more than 4.5 million pounds in salary and bonuses during her seven-year tenure, stepped down in 2019 before the Post Office agreed to pay 58 million pounds in a settlement with 555 sub-postmasters.

In 2021 she resigned from the boards of two retailers after 39 sub-postmasters had their criminal convictions overturned, saying her past at the Post Office had become a distraction.

After a public outcry, Vennells returned her CBE, an honour bestowed in 2019 for services to the Post Office and charity, since the broadcast of "Mr Bates vs The Post Office", the ITV drama about the scandal.
Former postal affairs minister Ed Davey has also come under the spotlight. The now-leader of the small Liberal Democrats party refused to meet sub-postmaster Alan Bates in May 2010, saying in a letter that it would not serve any useful purpose.

Davey, who later met Bates but did not intervene in any of the cases, said he was "clearly misled" by Post Office executives.

Fujitsu, which has continued to win multiple British government contracts, says it is "fully committed" to supporting an ongoing independent public inquiry. It says it has apologised for its role in a scandal.

($1 = 0.7839 pounds)
Reuters

Quote:The Fujitsu boss who told Paula Vennells that the Horizon computer system was as secure as Fort Knox is a top UK chief executive who lives in a £4 million house in north London.

Duncan Tait, the chief executive of Fujitsu UK between 2011 and 2014, made the comment to Vennells, his Post Office counterpart, two sources have confirmed to The Times.

Tait, 57, who declined to apologise in a public statement released last week, is now on a multi-million pound pay deal at Inchcape, a FTSE 250 online car dealership.

Vennells, who led the Post Office between 2010 and 2019, claimed she was told branch accounts could not be changed without the knowledge of postmasters. The conversation with Tait was at the centre of the defence of her actions in the scandal to MPs four years ago.

“I remember being told by Fujitsu’s then CEO when I raised it with him that the system was ‘like Fort Knox’,” Vennells told the business select committee in 2020. “He had been a trusted outsource partner and had the reputation of a highly competent technology sector CEO. His word was important to me.”

Tait’s successor Michael Keegan, the husband of the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, has explicitly denied he made the Fort Knox comment, but Tait has remained silent. In a statement provided by the strategic advisory firm Dentons, he said: “I am appalled by the harsh treatment of the sub-postmasters and fully support the public inquiry. It would be inappropriate for me to comment ahead of this.”

Tait has since claimed he was telling Vennells about Horizon’s ability to resist cyber attacks and was not commenting on remote access, it is understood. The revelation that Tait made the comment sparked anger from MPs. Kevan Jones, a Labour MP and longtime campaigner for postmasters, said: “It was welcome on Friday that current management of Fujitsu were prepared to be open and honest about their role in this scandal. Those in charge at the time now need to come forward and explain exactly what their role was and what they knew, including Mr Tait.”

The comments by Vennells became the opening salvo in a boardroom blame game between bosses of the Post Office and Fujitsu. On Friday, Paul Patterson, the current chief executive of Fujitsu in Europe, accused the Post Office of editing out evidence of Horizon faults in witness statements filed to courts, labelling the withholding of crucial evidence “shameful” and “appalling”.
He said he was “truly sorry” on behalf of the company, but so far executives at the helm at key moments of the scandal, which saw close to 1,000 sub-postmasters convicted based on faulty data from Fujitsu’s IT system, have remained out of the spotlight.

Between 2011 and 2014 there was growing pressure on the Post Office to launch a full, independent investigation into Horizon and the hundreds of prosecutions that relied on its data. In 2013, the Post Office received a legal advice document stating the barrister Simon Clarke’s view that “several” court trials had been misled on Horizon’s reliability. The Detica report, also from 2013, found that the Post Office was unable to account for “significant values” of cash in its network.

Vennells has claimed her confidence in Horizon came from Fujitsu’s top team, saying in another part of her 2020 statement that “the message that the board and I were consistently given by Fujitsu, from the highest levels of the company, was that … it was fundamentally sound”.



In spite of the scandal Tate has remained in top jobs and amassed millions of pounds in pay and bonuses. In the four financial years he was chief executive of Fujitsu Service Limited, the highest-paid director, who is likely to have been Tait, took home £3.2 million in remuneration. When Tait stood down as chief executive, he became the first non-Japanese person to be appointed to the board of Fujitsu Global. He left the firm in 2019.

Accounts for 2020 show that a director — understood to be Tait — received £2.6 million in “compensation for loss of office”. Fujitsu would not confirm who received the money.

His appointment to chief executive of Inchcape, a FTSE 250 online car dealership, was announced in May 2020, and since then Tait has pocketed £4.3 million in pay and bonuses in two financial years.

He now lives with his partner in a four-bedroom terraced home, worth about £4 million, in north London. Inchcape, whose share price is subject to the tides of the stock market, is understood to be watching carefully as attention turns to Fujitsu’s role in the Horizon scandal.

Liam Byrne, the chairman of the business and trade select committee, asked who made the Fort Knox comment in an evidence session last week. “Paula Vennells said that there was a Fujitsu boss who told her that Horizon was ‘like Fort Knox’,” Byrne said. “Do you know who in Fujitsu made that comment?” Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office, said: “I don’t know who that was, no. I merely saw the quote in the newspapers.”

The UK Times

Hard to keep it low key with all the paperwork these days.

Quote:For instance, more than 2,200 companies have directors aged 123 years and above, despite the fact that the oldest known human lived to 122, said Richard Graham, a director at Moody’s Analytics, in research published Monday. One listed director — at 942 years old — would have been born in the 11th century.

Atypical directorship is just one of seven key behaviors highlighted in the research, including mass registration, dormancy and circular ownership. While new regulations across the world are looking to improve transparency at shell companies, there is still some way to go, with $1.6 trillion laundered annually, according to data from Moody’s Analytics.

“Organizations today face mounting complexity in understanding true ownership structures and detecting risky corporate relationships,” said Ted Datta, head of the financial crime compliance practice for Europe, Africa and Americas at Moody’s Analytics. “By detecting these discrepancies, we can equip investigators and analysts with the tools to better investigate fraud.”

Findings from its report included a China-based textile and clothing manufacturer that reported over $2 billion revenues in 2019, despite having only one employee. There’s also thousands of examples of directors below the age of five, and 22,000 entities with a registered address at Egypt’s pyramids. Meanwhile, one individual held 5,751 roles at 2,883 different entities.

The study looked at some 472 million companies in November. The country with the highest number of shell company risks was the UK, with almost 5 million flags. Companies registered in the US had the most flags related to financial anomalies, at over 1.25 million. Panama is also a hotspot, with 47% of companies in the jurisdiction raising alarm, though the number of anonymous registrations dropped by half following the Panama Papers investigations.

While shell companies might have legitimate purposes, their opaqueness is often use to hide criminal financial activity, Moody’s Analytics said. Other red governance flags included jurisdictional risk, outlier ultimate beneficial ownership and financial anomalies, it said.

He is right, there is no compromise with sick people.

MSNBC host Joy Reid has been branded an 'idiot'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...rsial.html

Quote:'This idiot actually wanted to know what "expertise" Tiffany Justice has to object to minors in school reading about strap-on dildos & incestual pedophilia.'

Oh this going to be fun to watch, the outcome that is. The video (with recordings) is good.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1748874563574792677

Dan Crenshaw says ‘unhinged’ United Airlines agent assaulted his dog

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/01/22/...g-1429860/

Quote:A Canadian man who posted conspiracy theories on social media claiming the government was deliberately starting wildfires has pleaded guilty to starting 14 blazes that forced hundreds of people from their homes.
Brian Paré, appearing in a Quebec court Monday, admitted to 13 counts of arson, and one count of arson with a disregard for human life, relating to events between May and September last year.

Prosecutor Marie-Philippe Charron said one of the fires Paré set forced the evacuation of around 400 people in the town of Chapais, Quebec. The largest fire Paré admitted to starting destroyed more than 870 hectares.

“Mr. Pare does not remember all of the fires he could have started, so we have currently 14 fires, we have 14 counts,” Charron told CNN. “It’s possible there are more but we do not have evidence of that,” she added.

Charron said police and first responders grew suspicious when a number of fires happened over a short period of time without a discernible cause.

Police officers became interested in Paré after he was spotted in the areas of several fires. They also found multiple social media posts by Paré accusing the Canadian government of purposefully igniting fires to persuade people to believe in climate change.

“According to police evidence, the accused posted a lot of conspiracy theories about the fires and the government’s involvement in possibly setting those fires,” Charron said.


After getting permission to attach a tracking device to his vehicle, police were able to trace it to the location of other fires.

He admitted to starting some of the fires when he was arrested in September.

Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was record-shattering, scorching around 18.4 million hectares (45.5 million acres) — an area roughly the size of North Dakota and more than double the previous record.

Smoke from the fires poured southward, choking cities in the United States and even making it as far east as Europe.

Wildfires have long been a focus for conspiracy theorists, with claims that they are started by governments, climate activists or even by laser beams from space.

Canada’s unprecedented fires triggered a wave of disinformation, according to a 2023 report by the global coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation. This included false claims the wildfires were set intentionally to scare people into supporting climate action.

High-profile figures helped fuel these conspiracy theories. In June, Maxime Bernier, a former Canadian foreign minister, claimed in a post on X that a “good portion” of fires were likely started by “green terrorists who want to give their climate change campaign a little boost.”

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was also criticized for remarks on the fires. During a June conversation with talk show host Ryan Jespersen, she refused to respond directly to questions about the impact climate change had on the fires, instead focusing on the role of arsonists.

Human activity does play a role in starting wildfires, either deliberately or through accidental actions such as discarding a lit cigarette, but natural factors are also involved.

Lightning strikes played a huge role in last year’s fires, according to Quebec’s Forest Fire Protection Agency. “Nearly 53% of fires were caused by lightning causing more than 99% of the area burned this year,” a spokesperson for the fire agency told CNN.

Focusing on a single cause can also obscure the role of human-caused global warming, which is fueling the very hot and dry conditions that help fires spread faster, and burn longer and more intensely.

“Widespread drought combined with a devastating lightning line are responsible for this historic season,” Quebec’s fire agency spokesperson said.

A recent analysis by scientists from the World Weather Attribution initiative — which calculates the role of climate change in extreme weather events — found that climate change made the hot, dry and windy weather that drove last year’s fires in Quebec at least twice as likely and up to 50% more intense.

Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist at the University of British Columbia and the Bulkley Valley Research Centre, said there are many factors that contribute to extreme wildfire seasons, including logging and abandoning Indigenous fire stewardship techniques.

But all these factors interact with the climate crisis, Hoffman told CNN last year. “A rapidly changing climate is creating longer, drier and hotter wildfire seasons across Canada.”

Paré remains in custody. A pre-sentencing report was requested by his defense lawyer, and it is expected to be released in April.

Quote:A 54-year-old woman from Glendon, Alta., has been charged in connection with a series of wildfires in central and northern Alberta this spring.

In a news release issued Friday, the RCMP said Audrey Elaine Dunham has been charged with 32 counts of arson following an “in-depth investigation into a series of suspicious wildfires in the Bonnyville and Lac La Biche areas.”

On the night of April 24, officers from the Bonnyville RCMP detachment, Alberta Agriculture and Forestry and the Bonnyville Regional Fire Authority were called to several wildfires northwest of Bonnyville and east of Lac La Biche. An investigation determined the fires had been deliberately set and police identified a suspect.

A month later, on May 27, seven wildfires were reported near Highway 55 and Highway 881 in the M.D. of Bonnyville. Police said a total of 19 wildfires had been started in the area over the course of a few hours.

“This investigation is the result of a partnership between Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, Bonnyville Regional Fire Authority, (the RCMP) Forestry Crimes Unit and Bonnyville RCMP,” said Insp. Pamela Robinson of the RCMP Serious Crimes Branch.

“If the Forestry Crimes Unit can be instrumental in preventing wildfires and hold those who start the fires accountable, then this investigation is a success.”

Dunham has been released but must abide by a number of conditions. She is scheduled to appear in Bonnyville Provincial Court on Aug. 17.

RCMP charge Alberta woman with 32 counts of arson after spring wildfires

The Fed is in the process of changing its role from “lender of last resort” to dictatorial financial overlord. Powell & Co. plan to force banks to borrow from them - or else.

Quote:In the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, the Fed, the FDIC, and the Treasury are citing the collapse of several regional banks in March of last year as the impetus for transforming the discount window from an emergency measure into standard operating procedure.

What’s the discount window, you ask? It’s the primary way in which the Fed fulfills its role as the lender of last resort, giving loans to a bank when that bank can’t get a loan in the private market.



There are three types of discount window use, all of which require collateral: primary, secondary, and seasonal.

Primary is for banks in relatively good shape (aside from the fact that they’re insolvent and need a loan from the money printer). Loans can only be used for literally anything.

Secondary credit is more restricted, shorter term, available to institutions in worse shape, and can’t increase assets, meaning it has to be used for things that decrease liabilities, like paying depositors.

Seasonal is for small banks that have predictable liquidity crunches and want to rely on the Fed instead of using sound banking practices, purposely overleveraging themselves because they can charge higher loan rates to customers than they pay to the Fed.

Like most things related to the Fed, the name “discount window” makes no sense. There is no “discount” to the borrowing bank - they pay a premium instead.

Why would the Fed charge a premium, or higher interest rate, than the market rate? It’s because they don’t want you going to them first for a loan - this is supposed to be a last resort. At least, that was the idea - until now.

It’s not really a good look to be going to the discount window, at least not if you’re using it in large quantities. That signals the rest of the financial market that you’re in some kind of trouble since discount window use is publicly available information.



This makes perfect sense - you need a loan but can’t get one from the private market at anything close to the interest rates other banks are paying each other for short-term loans. There is rightly a stigma attached to a bank that’s perpetually in hoc to the lender of last resort.

Other banks and investors alike have a right to know who is taking these loans from the Fed. To hide that information would be the equivalent of countless types of fraud - like a firm hiding from investors that it has bad assets or outstanding loans that are kept off the books.

But this is essentially what the Fed wants to do: hide a valuable market signal from all participants in the financial community.

Now, you can’t do it directly because that would be too obvious. If, for example, the Fed just stopped reporting discount window use, we could just observe which businesses are getting unexplained cash infusions and know they’re still using the discount window.

So, the Fed and its cronies in government intend to muddy the waters, making everything so murky that it’ll be impossible to tell who is doing what.

If that sounds like a great backdrop from which to do illegal things and defraud investors and depositors alike, you’d be correct. Here’s the tentative plan for how the scheme will work.

The Fed, the Treasury, and the FDIC intend to force banks to use the discount window periodically, even if they can get a loan from another bank - or even if they don’t need a loan at all.

At first, this doesn’t sound like that big a deal and there’s an easy workaround: borrow the money and then immediately pay it back. It’d be like walking into a bank, withdrawing $100 from your savings account, and then, when the teller asks if you need anything else today, you make a deposit for $100.

So, get ready for pre-payment penalties and mandatory holds, along with preposterously high interest rates on reserves.

In other words, the Fed will make it so painful to repay your loan early that you essentially have no choice but to keep the money for the entire term. That makes it impossible to distinguish between banks using the discount window in times of distress vs. those compelled to do so.



Why would the Fed do this? Why don’t they want us aware of where the problems are in our financial system?

In short, because they’re everywhere. The Fed knows that they’ve created the mother of all ticking time bombs and there’s only two options: let it explode in the most violent deflationary event since the Panic of 1907 or diffuse this monstrously large bomb by throwing it in an equally large liquidity bath.

The former option is more painful initially, but healthier in the long run. Undoubtedly though, the Fed wants to do the latter because it’s what the Fed has done literally every time since 1921 when Ben Strong engineered a recession for the first time. (Unless you count Nicholas Biddle, but he contracted credit to spite Pres. Andrew Jackson, not cool off inflation. Anyway…)



One particularly insidious part of these discussions behind closed doors is that technocrats are claiming the regional bank crisis was due in part to many banks not being operationally configured to borrow from the discount window.

What a crock of $#!&.

Every depository institution is set up to borrow from the discount window by virtue of participation in the Federal Reserve System. Sure enough, discount window usage soared in March and April of last year to record highs as banks were collapsing.

Additionally, loans to the FDIC to pay depositors of failed banks also exploded. Both the discount window and the FDIC loans began their stratospheric rise a week before the Bank Term Funding Program was even created.



In that sense, the system worked as intended. The reason the BTFP bailout facility had to be opened was because the regional banks that were in trouble ran out of good assets to post as collateral at the discount window.

The BTFP (something we’ve explained in detail in an earlier newsletter) values assets at par, giving those insolvent banks an extra lifeline from the lender of last resort.



It’s not that the discount window didn’t function properly, but that banks were in such terrible shape that even the discount window couldn’t save them - the mark-to-market value of their liabilities exceeded their assets, pure and simple.

Mandating discount window use is like a permanent extension, in some sense, of the BTFP. It’s an attempt to prevent any financial institution from failing, no matter how insolvent it becomes.

Investors be damned. Depositors be damned. Truth be damned.



In addition to hiding all of the problems that they created, this move by the Fed also helps consolidate power, slowly eliminating banks’ abilities to borrow from each other or not borrow at all, but instead keeping their own sufficient reserves.

The banking system’s power to expand and contract credit on its own through fractional reserve banking makes the Fed’s job of manipulating markets that much harder. Consolidating all bank lending into the central bank provides much more direct control over the creating and extinguishing of money.

The Fed wants to be not just the guiding hand but the sole arbiter of the money supply. Likewise, it wants not just to be the lender of last resort, but the sole lender. The end goal here is to be judge, jury, and executioner.

You can call us alarmists if you’d like or tell us we’re paranoid. But if the last several years have taught us anything, it’s that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

    RAPID CITY, S.D. -- In what's become an annual winter tradition, hundreds of people carrying torches set fire to a giant wooden beetle effigy in Custer, South Dakota, to raise awareness of the destructive impact of the mountain pine beetle on forest land in the Black Hills.
Custer firefighters prepared and lighted the torches for residents to carry in a march to the pyre Saturday night in the 11th Burning Beetle fest, the Rapid City Journal reported.
People set the tall beetle effigy on fire amid drum beats and chants of “Burn, beetle, burn." Firefighters kept watch, warning participants not to throw the torches, even as some people launched the burning sticks into pine trees piled at the base of the beetle.


https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/burn...-106551807

let's raise our awareness people.  beetles kill thousands of trees out west.  recent dry climate makes it harder on the trees.

Ok, which one of you has been playin games...Brotherman territory?

Quote:Neatly folded notes crammed with just about every conspiracy theory and internet buzzword imaginable keep popping up in rural Pennsylvania, some illegally tucked inside cereal boxes and others pinned to pine trees in state and local parks.

Unfolded, the notes are mostly indecipherable, containing a coded run-on sentence of secret societies, sci-fi movie mentions, and name drops like “Musk”, “Bill Gates,” and “Oprah.”

“It’s tied to Saturn, Lord o/t Rings/time,” one line reads.

The FBI, Food & Drug Administration, and elected officials in Pennsylvania are all aware of the notes, but no one’s been caught in the act of actually planting them.

Philly had its own strange “note” phenomenon with its Toynbee Tiles, which were found embedded into city streets and, eventually in other states, with messages about Stanley Kubrick and Jupiter, mostly in the 1990s and 2000s.

While the Toynbee Tiles had an art house vibe, the Schuylkill Notes feel a bit  darker. Some notes mention international conflicts and hate groups, and are often riddled with intentional misspellings and out-of-place apostrophes, making them all the more confusing.

“Secret society (SS) ties to terror’m, shoot’gs, staged confront’ns & other crises aren’t report’d but JFK/Lincoln warn’d of SS,” another reads.

Amateur web sleuths have taken up the case, mostly on Reddit, and they’ve dubbed the bizarre messages the “Schuylkill Notes” because so many, initially, were found in Schuylkill and surrounding counties.

“The content of the notes themselves, it’s clear they’re warnings, not threats,” one early member of the Reddit group r/schuylkillnotes said.

The notes, which often differ slightly in content, have also been found in Huntingdon and Lycoming Counties. One Reddit user mapped out dozens of specific locations where notes have been found, including Walmarts, Goodwills, and various locations on the Appalachian and other trails. The bulk of the discoveries appears to be situated between Allentown and State College.

Zachary Zimmerman, 23, was hiking in Lebanon County’s Swatara State Park while squirrel hunting last month when he discovered a handful of the notes attached to trees and wrapped around stones.

“I picked it up and read it and it really doesn’t make any sense to me,” Zimmerman, a Lebanon County native who lives in the Adirondacks, said.

Zimmerman said he thought about calling the Pennsylvania Game Commission or Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, but didn’t. He kept a few notes and left others in the woods.
“It’s just a bunch of crazy stuff,” he said.

It’s unclear exactly when the notes began appearing in Pennsylvania. Some posts say 2015 and at least one recalled something similar happening in the 1980s, in the Poconos. In December, a Luzerne County man named Joe Miller found a note in a sealed box of Lucky Charms.

“It’s the note that really bothers me,” Miller told WBRE/WYOU out of Scranton. “These notes are found inside food like kids’ food.”

While elected officials have notified the FBI, Carrie Adamowski, a spokesperson with the agency in Philadelphia, said she could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.

Wendy Wilson, a spokesperson for Rep. Matt Cartwright in northeastern Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, said an officer received an anonymous call reporting that 20 notes had been found on state game lands in Mainville, Columbia County.

“So far, there have been no reports of people getting sick from these notes, but we don’t want to take any chances and we want to find out who is doing this,” Wilson said.



The FDA, according to a spokesperson, is aware of the situation, and said the agency “evaluates product defects and other complaints that it receives.” Tampering with food products, the spokesperson said, is a federal crime.

On Reddit, at least one discussion asked whether the note’s original creator or copycats could be in the group. Zimmerman said it seemed like a lot of work for one person and he wondered whether people were copying them and putting them out for attention.

Anyone who finds a note, particularly in a food item, is asked to call Pennsylvania’s FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator at (877) 689-8073. Notes found in state parks can be reported to DCNR here.

Conspiracy-laden notes keep popping up in cereal boxes and Pennsylvania parks

So how can we do bad shit to them and their families if they are armed?

We need to preserve Democracy by suspending the rights of our citizens and implementing Tyranny? That is "Saving Democracy"?

Johns Hopkins: More Gun Control Needed to Prevent Second Civil War

https://www.ammoland.com/2024/01/johns-h...civil-war/

Quote:A recent report by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which is part of Johns Hopkins (Michael) Bloomberg School of Public Health, conflates private gun ownership with armed insurrection in order to advocate for expanded gun control.



The 32-page study, which is titled “Defending Democracy: Addressing the Danger of Armed Insurrection,” not only revisits and revises the Jan. 6th protest – even though no protesters were armed and the only casualty was 35-year-old Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by Capitol Police – it resurrects actual armed insurrections from American history, such as Shays’ Rebellion of 1786, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 and the American Civil War.


The three authors, who are all attorneys with a history of paid anti-gun activism, clumsily raise the insurrection boogeyman to push for additional regulations for carrying firearms, tactical training prohibitions, additional gun-free zones, expanded Red Flag laws, and the repeal of state preemption statutes, which has long been a major goal of the gun ban industry. Preemption laws prevent local jurisdictions from enacting their own gun-control regulations, which would result in a patchwork of gun-free zones.


Their authors’ warped message is to be expected, especially when you consider the biased nature of their backgrounds, their sponsors, their sources, and Michael Bloomberg’s school itself. (If you type “gun violence” into the school’s internal search engine, it will yield more than 1,000 results.)


The Center for Gun Violence Solutions admits it uses a “public health approach” to identify gun-control solutions, even though a gun is an inanimate object, not a disease, ailment or disorder. The school further claims it uses “rigorous scientific research to identify a range of innovative solutions to gun violence.” However, the authors’ [i]rigorous scientific research[/i] turned out to be nothing more than false claims gleaned from biased stories from the legacy media and other anti-gun organizations that masquerade as actual news websites.


The authors used stories from CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, PBS, NPR, VOX, [i]The Los Angeles Times[/i], [i]The Atlantic[/i], [i]The Guardian[/i], [i]The Washington Post,[/i] [i]USA Today[/i], the Associated Press, PolitiFact, Politico, Slate and the Southern Poverty Law Center. They even used stories from two dedicated anti-gun groups, Giffords and The Trace – the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control empire.


[b]Biased authors[/b]
The report was written by Tim Carey, Kelly Roskam, and Joshua Horwitz. Carey is the law and policy advisor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. According to his bio, he is responsible for “Drafting legislation, regulations, legal reports, legislative testimony, fact sheets, and other advocacy materials.” Before moving to Johns Hopkins, Carey was the law and policy staff attorney for the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.


Roskam is the director of law and policy at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, she was the general counsel and legal director for the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Roskam’s bio also states she interned at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.


Horwitz is the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he too worked at the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, serving as executive director.


[b]Biased report[/b]
The authors claim their report is both an examination and a warning about the threat that “armed insurrectionism poses to democracy in the United States.”


“The growing presence of firearms in political spaces in the United States endangers public health, safety, and the functioning of democracy,” the report states. “Far from being an outlier, the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol was part of a long line of events in which individuals have sought to use political losses to justify violence or threats of violence to disrupt our government and limit civic engagement.”


As stated, the policy recommendations presented by the authors are merely longstanding goals of the gun-ban industry, which would help propel them toward their ultimate goal of total civilian disarmament. The only difference is that now their policy recommendations are presented as necessary to “address the dangers of armed insurrectionism.”


[b]Biased sponsors[/b]
“We would like to thank the Joyce Foundation and the Morningstar Foundation for supplying core support for this report,” the authors wrote.
The Joyce Foundation is firmly committed to gun control. According to their website, the Joyce Foundation seeks to:

• Advance and implement federal, state, and local policies and practices that reduce easy accessibility of guns to those at risk of violence
  
• Support policies to reduce easy accessibility of guns to those at risk of violence
  
• Reduce the next generation’s exposure to gun violence through education on the risks of gun ownership
  
• Litigate to defend evidence-based gun policies and challenge extreme gun rights policies and practices
  

The Morningstar Foundation is a 501©(3) nonprofit founded in 1982. In fiscal year 2017, the Morningstar Foundation reported $16,533,591 in revenue and $14,476,618 in expenditures, which included grants to many left-of-center organizations.
Some of the recipients include:

• Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence
  
• The Southern Poverty Law Center
  
• States United to Prevent Gun Violence
  
• Violence Policy Center
  

In 2001, Johns Hopkins University renamed its School of Hygiene and Public Health to the Bloomberg School of Public Health. The change came after Michael Bloomberg donated more than $100 million to the university – the largest cash gift in the school’s 125-year history.


“I’m grateful and proud to have my name linked with the world’s greatest public health school,” Bloomberg said in 2001. “I’ve always supported Johns Hopkins just because it gives me great personal pleasure to be associated with faculty, researchers. and students who do such tremendous work on issues that really matter. This honor is really icing on that cake for me.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/...hool-utah/

Quote:PHOTO – ‘They Memed Themselves’: First Lady Jill Biden Speaks at ‘Hunter High’ School in Utah
[/url] [url=https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/20/photo-they-memed-themselves-first-lady-jill-biden-speaks-hunter-high-school-utah/#] @AngelaLMorabito X
Amy Furr
20 Jan 2024153
2:24
Advisers for First Lady Jill Biden have gotten tons of flak for scheduling her to give a speech at a school campus with an awkward name.
The event happened Tuesday at Hunter High School in West Valley City, Utah, where the First Lady spoke to students and educators about celebrating teachers’ roles and the importance of their well-being, the Daily Mail reported Friday.
But the name of the school, Hunter High, stole the show.
“Jill Biden trying to distract from her comments about Hunter’s drug abuse, and ending up under a giant banner reading ‘Hunter High,’ is straight out of a VEEP episode,” Defense of Freedom Institute Policy spokeswoman Angela Morabito wrote in a social media post along with a photo of the First Lady at the event.
The image Morabito posted shows Jill Biden standing behind a podium with a sign on the front of it that reads “Hunter High.” Above her and the students gathered on the stage is a banner with the same name:

“Hunter High, Home of the Wolves. You cannot make this up. They memed themselves….” one social media user wrote of the display.
“The only time I’ve seen honesty from this administration is through a sign above Jill’s head,” another person replied, while someone else said, “That’s funny. With all the HSs here in Utah, how did Hunter High get approved?”

Officials found cocaine residue on a gun pouch belonging to Hunter Biden, who is Jill Biden’s stepson and the son of President Joe Biden (D), in 2018, Breitbart News reported Wednesday. The information was revealed in a recent Department of Justice (DOJ) filing and hindered his legal defense against several gun charges.
“Hunter previously acknowledged he used crack cocaine and smoked parmesan cheese. His legal defense claims the president’s son did not break the law,” Breitbart noted. “Lawyers also contend the president’s son was ‘selectively charged’ for political reasons.”
It is also interesting to note that the Secret Service reportedly found DNA on a cocaine baggie found at the White House over the summer after the agency claimed it could not identify who smuggled the substance into the building, according to Breitbart News.
Breitbart’s Wendell Husebø highlighted the fact that the White House is “one of the most secure buildings in the world.”