The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
The Trump administration plans to cut as much as half of federal agencies’ workforces, it was reported.
An internal White House memo obtained by The Washington Post showed federal officials are preparing for agencies to cut between 8% and 50% of their employees.
The cuts were compiled after 22 agencies submitted plans to President Donald Trump.
According to the memo, which was updated on Tuesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will reduce half of its roughly 8,300-person staff, the IRS would cut 33% of its employees, and the Interior Department would cut nearly 25%.
Other departments’ cuts included the Justice Department (8%), the National Science Foundation (28%), the Commerce Department (30%), and the Small Business Administration (43%), according to the Post.
Sources stressed to the outlet that planning remains fluid and that the final numbers could differ from what the memo says.
The federal bureaucracy currently relies on a 2.3-million-person workforce.
“It’s no secret the Trump Administration is dedicated to downsizing the federal bureaucracy and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. This document is a pre-deliberative draft and does not accurately reflect final reduction in force plans,” White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in an email to the Post.
“When President Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries are ready to announce reduction in force plans, they will make those announcements to their respective workforces at the appropriate time.”
Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been focused on streamlining government and reducing fraud, waste, and corruption in federal spending.
According to the memo, which was updated on Tuesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will reduce half of its roughly 8,300-person staff, the IRS would cut 33% of its employees, and the Interior Department would cut nearly 25%.
Other departments’ cuts included the Justice Department (8%), the National Science Foundation (28%), the Commerce Department (30%), and the Small Business Administration (43%), according to the Post.
Sources stressed to the outlet that planning remains fluid and that the final numbers could differ from what the memo says.
The federal bureaucracy currently relies on a 2.3-million-person workforce.
“It’s no secret the Trump Administration is dedicated to downsizing the federal bureaucracy and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. This document is a pre-deliberative draft and does not accurately reflect final reduction in force plans,” White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in an email to the Post.
“When President Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries are ready to announce reduction in force plans, they will make those announcements to their respective workforces at the appropriate time.”
Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been focused on streamlining government and reducing fraud, waste, and corruption in federal spending.
Reuters reported last week that White House officials were reviewing federal agencies’ downsizing plans, a move expected to result in the firing of thousands of government workers within the coming weeks.
The president had given the agencies until March 13 to draw up plans for a second wave of layoffs as part of his rapid-fire effort to reshape and reduce the size of the federal government, which he has called bloated and inefficient.
In a Feb. 11 executive order, Trump instructed the Office of Management and Budget and DOGE to shrink the workforce.
While opponents have gone to the courts to try and stop many of Trump’s orders, the reduction-in-force (RIF) process is more likely to survive legal challenges than the mass firings of probationary employees earlier this year.
“The RIF process is the one that is established in law and regulation about how to reduce workforces,” said Robert Shea, a Republican who served in senior political roles at the White House budget office. Shea predicted that attempted cuts would draw additional litigation but added: “Because this is a well-established path, it’s more likely to succeed than some of these other avenues.”
How long can a region project normalcy while its leadership writes policy in a fantasy dialect?
By any honest reckoning, the American Midwest has long stood as the republic’s last great firewall of common sense — where decency is currency and a handshake still means something. But lately, the region’s governors have sounded less like the voice of the plowman and more like the echo of a faculty lounge panel at Oberlin. In Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, the executive mansions seem to have been annexed by ideology, not elected by people.
Let’s begin with Minnesota governor Tim Walz. His administration mandated tampons in boys’ bathrooms — a sentence that would have been flagged as satire only a few years ago. Here’s a state where winters kill you, and potholes breed like rabbits, yet we’re told the urgent moral crisis is menstrual equity for high school males. Does anyone really believe Tim from Two Harbors, who works 10-hour days and hunts on the weekend, is pounding the table for tampon dispensers in the boys’ gym? It’s a cartoonish abstraction — policy driven not by reality but by performative progressivism. Even George Orwell would have rolled his eyes.
And then there’s Wisconsin’s governor Tony Evers, who referred to a pregnant woman as an “inseminated person.” That isn’t a typo. That’s a full-frontal assault on language and humanity in one breathless phrase. It’s as if someone replaced the Midwestern political lexicon with the instruction manual for artificial cattle breeding. Evers’s comment would be laughable if it weren’t such a naked attempt to erase the distinction — and the dignity — of womanhood. The same logic that births “birthing persons” and “chest feeders” now gives us “insemination people,” and the silence from the sane is growing louder.
Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has thrown her support behind what can only be called a crusade to scrub gendered language from the entire bureaucratic structure. Her administration pushed for new guidance in state-run documents and agencies that favor “gender-neutral terminology” over “mother” and “father.” A Michigan birth certificate might soon read like a sterile census report: “Parent A” and “Parent B.” One wonders: is this what the auto industry died for? Did Motown’s legacy of grit and soul give way to linguistic sanitation that could make a robot blush?
Cross south to the state line into Illinois; the fever only burns hotter. Governor J.B. Pritzker recently championed initiatives that ensure “menstruating individuals” — regardless of gender identity — receive free products in all public buildings, including men’s prisons and locker rooms. His office doubled down when challenged, citing the importance of inclusivity and access. It’s not just that the policy is unscientific — it insists everyone else suspend disbelief to prop up its illusion. This isn’t governance. It’s theater.
Now let’s pause and ask: what’s going on in the minds of these governors? These are not the raving radicals of either coast. These are executives from states once associated with straight talk, civic responsibility, and — dare we say it — reality. We’re living through an elite delusion — a cultural detour powered by privilege, not principle.
It would be one thing if these were isolated gaffes. But they aren’t. They are consistent signals from people in charge that their worldview no longer aligns with the citizens they govern. Whether it’s a transgender tampon policy, erasing womanhood with technocratic language, or redefining family into interchangeable parts, the governing class has divorced itself from the governed.
The one thread tying together governors Walz, Evers, Whitmer, and Pritzker — beyond their baffling policies and biologically incoherent declarations — is their shared allegiance to the Democratic Party. Each governs not as a steward of regional values but as a mouthpiece for a national progressive agenda, more at home in coastal think tanks than cornfields. Whether it’s putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms, redefining motherhood with sterile bureaucratic jargon, or scrubbing gender from birth certificates, these policies don’t emerge from the lived realities of Midwestern voters — they’re imports from an ideology-first playbook. The problem isn’t geography — it’s political orthodoxy.
The Midwest has always prided itself on being the sturdy middle beam of America’s cultural barn. But when the leaders of its largest states use that barn to host a masquerade ball of ideology — complete with costumes, new vocabulary, and rituals no one understands — you can’t help but ask: is it something in the air? The lakes? Is the corn fermenting wrong?
At the ground level, folks still believe in things everyday. They know what a woman is. They know boys don’t need tampons. They understand pregnancy involves mothers, not “insemination people.” And they’re not cruel or callous. They’re rooted in nature, tradition, and the common sense that built towns, not Twitter trends.
So here’s the question: How long can a region project normalcy while its leadership writes policy in a fantasy dialect?
The answer lies not in another speech or task force — but in the kitchen tables, church pews, and factory floors of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois. If there’s hope for the Midwest, it’s not coming from the top. It’s coming from the men and women — yes, women — who still know the difference between reality and roleplay. And they’re tired of pretending.
republished by Malone.News at the request of the author
On November 22nd, 1963, the actions and orders of the defendant in this matter, Lyndon B. Johnson, culminated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, ensuring Johnson would become the President of the United States.
We are confident you will return a guilty verdict at the conclusion of this historic case after you have heard all of the evidence.
Vice President Johnson’s motives could not be any more apparent. He had been sidelined by John Kennedy and humiliated by his brother and Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. About to be ejected from the administration because of previous nefarious activities, including larceny and murder, Johnson knew his presidential aspirations were about to be crushed. His political career was doomed as he faced probable jail time.
The death of his nemesis meant he would immediately attain the highest office in the land. Johnson knew that with his ascent to the presidency, all ongoing investigations revealing his corrupt activities would cease, both by Congress and the press. Indeed, the public execution of John F. Kennedy solved all of Johnson’s immediate problems.
We will make absolutely clear that Johnson not only had the motivation, means, and opportunity to organize this deadly crime but also demonstrate how he used his influence and immense power to ensure that no thorough investigation would ever reveal the truth. His insistence from the day of the murder that a lone crazed killer was responsible for shooting Kennedy, was the foundation for obfuscating his central role in the crime.
This fabricated cover story is far from the truth of what unfolded. You will see clearly that Johnson’s involvement was neither tangential nor theoretical. The prosecution will present a chronology demonstrating that Lyndon Johnson was the ringleader of a most despicable conspiracy.
The trial of Lyndon Johnson will uncover key relationships kept from scrutiny by most Americans for decades. When an initial attempt to eliminate the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, failed, Johnson called on his co-conspirators in organized crime to kill him while in custody. There is undeniable evidence that Johnson had close relationships with top mob figures and also that he knew Oswald’s murderer personally.
When former President Nixon saw the news that Jack Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, he immediately recognized Ruby as a man who Lyndon Johnson had identified as a reliable asset within organized crime. In startling defiance of the falsified narrative about a loner who killed Kennedy, other witnesses had seen Ruby and Oswald together in the days prior to the assassination.
The prosecution will reveal details of the plot that clarify the actual roles of these two men.
We will present incontrovertible proof that Johnson was in charge of every detail of the assassination and its cover-up. Oswald, after being shot by Ruby while in police custody, was bleeding internally and unconscious in a Dallas hospital. In a revelatory moment during the first days of his presidency, Johnson phoned the operating room demanding that the supervising physician extract a confession of guilt from the dying, alleged assassin. Within the context of his other actions, you must consider that the new President was relentless in his intervention, revealing a desperate effort to end any inquiry into the details of Kennedy’s murder.
Contradicting the facade erected by Johnson to distance himself and his collaborators from the assassination, the prosecution will shed a bright light on a cabal of disaffected U.S. government operatives and agencies, powerful members of organized crime, and corrupt businessmen who conspired along with him to kill the President and forever hide the truth.
The evidence of government collusion is overwhelming. Violations of Secret Service protocol on the day of the assassination are indicative of an omnipotent master manipulating events that allowed Kennedy to be killed.
Only one person was capable of initiating, leading, and stopping an investigation into the crime of the century.
Though he should be the most likely suspect, Lyndon Johnson ensured that a Presidential Panel he selected, dubbed the Warren Commission rather than the Johnson Commission, was the only body he allowed to investigate the crime. Compromised cronies were chosen and leveraged to create a massive cover-up, limiting the investigation within strict boundaries.
Most strikingly, the group included Allan Dulles, who Kennedy had fired as CIA director. Dulles considered Kennedy a despicable enemy and was Johnson’s most loyal ally in manipulating the outcome of the report which simply confirmed the guilt of a lone assassin. Dulles guaranteed the success of the true mandate of the commission — ensuring that the public never learned the truth.
The prosecution will demonstrate how anyone who might have provided first-hand observations or testimony leading to an uncontestable conclusion that a high-level conspiracy was responsible for Kennedy’s murder, was marginalized or defamed. A statistically impossible number of witnesses were eliminated under the pretense of a sudden deadly illness or suicide.
You will wonder how local or federal law enforcement could be compromised so deeply that they would tolerate the killing of a President and its consequences. We will expose how the Texas oil magnates and agricultural barons who supported Johnson had deep ties and control over the Dallas Police Department. The prosecution will also present details of the collaboration of Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in quashing any inquiries that defied the Warren Commission. Additionally, accounts of CIA officers confirm a segment of the agency was directly involved in the murder.
In subsequent investigations over the next decades, including a Congressional inquiry, the executive branch feigned cooperation while continuing to limit any information that might implicate Johnson’s complicity in the killing of the President. In the months leading up to the hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassination in 1977, witnesses disappeared or died under overtly suspicious circumstances, including several organized crime informants who knew of Jack Ruby’s relationships and true motives and six high-level FBI executives with knowledge of Hoover’s participation in Johnson’s tremendous efforts to hide the details of the Director’s criminality.
We will demonstrate and explain how Johnson was central to both the murder and its concealment and reveal the methods and criminals involved. You will see how the Kennedy assassination fits into a pattern of Johnson’s machinations over decades, supported by criminal activities since he entered politics.
In this trial, you will find out that the most important pieces of physical and circumstantial evidence linking Johnson to the events of November 22nd, 1963, have been lost, minimized, or intentionally kept from the public.
Yet even with the continuing effort to deter from discovering the truth, there is sufficient evidence to convict Lyndon Johnson without any reasonable doubt.
We will show how the rifle that was allegedly used to shoot Kennedy had doubtful accuracy and was handled with an inept chain of custody. The ability of anyone to fire a minimum of four shots from the weapon has always been in doubt. The insistence that a single shooter had fired only three shots from the Dallas Book Depository came directly from the Johnson White House.
We will prove that one Malcolm Wallace had been Johnson’s hatchet man in deaths that furthered the political career of the ruthless Texas politician. Wallace had received government positions at Johnson’s behest despite being a convicted murderer who was represented by Johnson’s attorney. Some homicides that benefitted or protected Johnson have been directly tied to Wallace.
In what should have been the most revealing clue for investigators, the only latent fingerprint found on the 6th floor of the Dallas book depository claimed to be the sniper’s nest, belonged to Malcolm Wallace. This critical information has been ignored until this trial.
A key piece of evidence you will evaluate is the handling of the corpse of President Kennedy. The body was rapidly and illegally taken from Dallas without a proper autopsy. With guns drawn, the Secret Service removed the casket, bringing it to Air Force One. Johnson, knowing the importance of controlling what was revealed about the president’s wounds, had insisted the body accompany him to Washington.
An autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital was staged to confirm that the shots that killed President Kennedy came from the book depository. Non-medical, military authorities, demanded that pathologists conclude that the bullets entered from behind. Visual inspection of photos, first-hand witnesses, and the reports of doctors who attended him in Dallas, all confirm that the shot that killed JFK came from in front of him. Despite testimony and facts to the contrary, Johnson and his co-conspirators in Washington ensured that only shots from behind were considered by his commission and any contradictory information was deemed conspiracy theory.
Each release of law enforcement documentation from before, during, or after the events of November 22, 1963, confirms that anything supporting the truth of what occurred in Dallas has been destroyed and certainly never existed on paper. Every dump of JFK assassination records is a testament to this continuing repression, with the release of an unprecedented amount of unrelated material and bureaucratic correspondence.
As you process the huge amount of material condemning Johnson as the benefactor and engineer of this heinous crime, it is important to consider the horrific damage initiated by the JFK assassination. After his cold-hearted ascent to power, Johnson continued to ruthlessly cause unnecessary deaths and life-altering injuries sustained by hundreds of thousands in the Vietnam War, an outcome that the Kennedy administration would not have tolerated.
To keep you from considering the broad devastation caused by Johnson, the defense will continue to repeat the unsubstantiated false allegation of a lone assassin’s responsibility for the death of President Kennedy.
Despite the mountain of information and testimony confirming that co-conspirators in organized crime and the intelligence community were involved in the assassination and cover-up, Lee Harvey Oswald’s independent guilt is the bedrock of Johnson’s defense. Yet Oswald’s background and demeanor are not that of a disgruntled loner, but rather a sophisticated government asset, who given a brief opportunity to speak in detention, declared himself a patsy.
Although Oswald’s service in the Marine Corps, relationships with high-level intelligence controllers, and activities before the assassination directly contradict his depiction as a lone nut, government files released to date reflect the continued attempt to minimize and cloud his status as a key covert operative for the CIA.
The prosecution will demonstrate that Oswald was a patriot who did not fire the rifle found on the 6th floor of the Dallas Book Depository, but rather that he was manipulated into believing he was honorably protecting the president.
Lyndon Johnson’s defenders will embrace and apply his bold deflective tactics, denying any consideration of the obvious and limiting the boundaries of inquiry. They will ignore the prima facie evidence that Johnson was at the epicenter of the Kennedy assassination and distract from the immensity of effort that he applied to cover his guilt.
We ask you to recognize and reject this blatant, tired ruse in considering the facts. The plot to kill President Kennedy becomes ever more transparent as the benefactors of an assassination culture continue to thrive in an environment where threats, blackmail, and murder to attain personal wealth and power, are standard operating procedures.
Only a jury of honest open-eyed Americans can find Lyndon Johnson guilty of murdering John F. Kennedy. This verdict will give impetus to an era where unchecked criminal enterprise in the guise of ultra-nationalism and political necessity in defiance of all ethical boundaries are no longer tolerated.
This editorial opinion is based in part on newly released documents combined with previously available information, and was recently published on David Marks’ substack titled “Report from Planet Earth”, which can be found below. This has been republished at the request of the author.
In the 1960’s Bob Dylan became a star as a singer of folk protest songs for change and against war and nuclear madness, but then reinvented Rock and Roll (lifting it to Nobel Prize standards) by putting personal truth ahead of the suffocating politically correct (PC) artistic coercion he met in folk circles.
In the past, decade Donald Trump has gone from being a television star famous for saying to individuals, “You’re fired.” to winning the White House twice by opposing PC crap to put his own forgotten people and nation first.
As I see it, Donald Trump is The New Bob Dylan
In 1963, Bob Dylan wrote: “Come gather ’round people/Wherever you roam/And admit that the waters/Around you have grown/And accept it that soon/You’ll be drenched to the bone/If your time to you is worth savin’/And you better start swimmin’/Or you’ll sink like a stone/For the times they are a-changin’”
On April 27 2016 Donald Trump said: “……. our resources are totally over extended ……. I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.”
In 1962 Bob Dylan wrote: “How many seas must a white dove sail/Before she sleeps in the sand?/Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly/Before they’re forever banned? …………. Yes, and how many ears must one man have/Before he can hear people cry?/Yes, and how many deaths will it take ’til he knows/That too many people have died?”
On April 27 2016 Donald Trump said: “……. we want to bring peace to the world. Too much destruction out there, too many destructive weapons. The power of weaponry is the single biggest problem that we have today in the world.”
Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir “Chronicles” about the rarity of being a genuinely individual voice and included Trump in that category: “I mean, who’s the last individual performer that you can think of – Elton John, maybe? I’m talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody’s reality but their own. Patsy Cline and Billy Lee Riley. Plato and Socrates, Whitman and Emerson. Slim Harpo and Donald Trump. It’s a lost art form.”
Donald Trump is The New Bob Dylan.
A horrible war started in Gaza in 2023 and Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump’s astonishinly creative theatricality carries with it hopes of peace in both wars.
If I could, I would nominate President Donald J Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Who agrees?
Geoff Fox, Australia, 27th March, 2025, Melbourne, Australia
Imagine a member of the National Socialist Party or Communist Party becoming a U.S. judge back in the 1940s or 1950s, and ruling to undermine the President so America would lose WW II or the Cold War. This Soros-Obama judge is going way, way outside the boundaries of our judicial system to wreck not just Trump’s presidency, but America. The man is acting like he’s the President so that he can inflict violent gang members and terrorists on American citizens. This is an act of war. In my view, he’s literally an enemy and a traitor, and should not merely be impeached.
Boasberg should be arrested, imprisoned in a military facility as an enemy combatant, or deported. Why on earth is he still here, much less in power? Nobody will challenge him, except for President Trump, and he’s even worse than Trump claims.
*******
Enough with the group texting “scandal” with Department of Defense. People — like the Democratic Party, Atlantic magazine — who support drag queen commanders, arming terrorists & exterminating Jews don’t get to lecture us on national security.
Are we truly supposed to believe that these Communist fascists we still call “Democrats” and their media (like Atlantic) actually CARE about national security being threatened for any reason? These are the same people who applauded billions sent to savage Iran to build nuclear weapons, support of terrorist Hamas for its incineration of Israeli civilians, and handing over American weapons to Islamofanatics after Biden’s appalling withdrawal from Afghanistan. By what dew drop of credibility are WE to believe that these sneering pseudosophisticates know or care 1/1,000,000th of what President Trump and his Secretary of Defense grasp about national security?
*******
Consider how insane and depraved America has become, if a President must order states to require ID and citizenship to vote.
*******
The following is by David Harriman, physicist and philosopher:
The nature of the Left is revealed in their views on “due process” of law.
Those who hate Trump are outraged about his policy regarding the deportation of illegal aliens. If these people have done something wrong, they say, then it should be proven in a court of law. If they are not convicted of a crime, then they must be allowed to stay. (Of course, we are supposed to disregard the crime of being here illegally.) The Trump-haters claim that because these people are in the United States (forget about how they got in, where they came from, what their backgrounds are, etc.), they are entitled to full “due process” of the law.
This is nonsense. Our laws pertain to people who are here legally; others are not entitled to anything except deportation. The idea that taxpayers should be forced to pay for the trials and welfare benefits of illegal aliens is bizarre.
Notice that the Left is conspiculously silent when Trump-supporters are denied due process. These are American citizens, but they don’t deserve due process because of their political views. More than 1,000 people were arrested in connection with the protest on January 6, 2021. They were held at the “D.C. Gulag,” known as the worst prison in the country. They suffered from inadequate food and solitary confinement in rooms with mold on the walls and brown water.
Other prisons are vacation resorts compared to the D.C. Gulag. There was long pretrial detention of nonviolent defendants. One person was in the Gulag for two years without trial. Surveillance footage clearly showed that some defendants were innocent, but the footage was kept secret even from their lawyers. While this was happening, did anyone on the Left ever say a single word about due process?
*******
Democrats say it’s madness to eliminate FEMA. But FEMA only assists leftist districts. Let leftists pay for FEMA.
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The Trump administration has directed two intelligence agencies to train their satellite surveillance capabilities on the U.S.-Mexico border region as part of a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration and drug cartels.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which are part of the Department of Defense, oversee spy satellites and analyze imagery for the Pentagon and other intelligence organizations.
Their engagement, coupled with troop deployments, shows increasing militarization of the southern border, where President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.
Reuters could not determine whether the effort, which has not been previously reported, would gather imagery of U.S. territory.
Asked by Reuters about their roles in border surveillance, the NGA said it had created a task force to coordinate its “support to the U.S. border mission,” while the NRO said it was partnering with the intelligence community and Pentagon “to secure U.S. borders.”
Their participation is in response to sweeping executive actions by Trump aimed at stopping unauthorized border trafficking and crossings, as well as deporting those in the United States illegally – estimated to be up to 14 million people.
The White House and Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment. Trump made immigration enforcement a central part of his campaign that catapulted him to the presidency Jan. 20.
While the government has deployed artificial intelligence and drone surveillance at the border for years, the latest initiative seeks to expand the use of military capabilities generally built for conflict overseas.
The government could use AI to identify objects or persons of interest by sifting through satellite images and other data feeds, much like the Defense Department can do on the battlefield, said two sources familiar with the initiative.
Though Reuters could not determine the exact scope of this effort, the new focus on the border could force the administration to grapple with safeguards against collecting intelligence on Americans, three experts said.
While laws generally restrict U.S. spy agencies from surveilling citizens and other legal residents, they allow immigration authorities to conduct physical searches “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States.” Regulations have defined this as 100 air miles from the border – an area including cities such as San Diego and El Paso.
“If they follow the law, these agencies should only collect on the other side of the border in foreign territory,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a lawyer who specializes in national security and privacy law. “But how they implement that, and if they do, are legitimate oversight questions.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government’s lead unit for integrating spy efforts, told Reuters that all intelligence activities are “legal and authorized” and conducted “in a manner that protects the civil liberties and privacy of U.S. persons.”
The NGA and NRO declined to detail what they are collecting and whether such surveillance could include U.S. territory, citing the need to protect operational details. The NGA works on a wide array of efforts including mapping features of the Earth and informing commanders of the exact location of U.S. forces and adversaries.
Reuters could not ascertain whether any other U.S. intelligence agencies would be involved in the effort. The Central Intelligence Agency has no role in domestic immigration enforcement. “Once foreign criminals are inside the United States, they are not within the purview of the CIA,” a third source said.
Digital Wall’
The Trump administration has elevated border security in its ranking of national intelligence priorities, allowing the government to direct more resources to it, one of the sources said.
In a separate annual threat assessment released Tuesday, the U.S. intelligence community ranked transnational criminals such as drug-trafficking organizations among top national security threats – listed above those posed by North Korea, Iran and other foreign adversaries.
In addition, the National Security Council, an interagency group that advises the president on a range of defense and foreign policy matters, has received daily briefings on immigration detentions numbers, including the arrest of unaccompanied children, according to internal government documents reviewed by Reuters.
Multiple defense contractors – new and legacy ones alike – are in talks with various government agencies to aid the border-security work, building on existing deals they have, said the two sources aware of the initiative.
The contractors’ work would require navigating legal boundaries, including creating security policies to prevent unlawful checks on Americans, the sources said.
Industry software also could connect sensor towers to satellite and drone video feeds showing at-risk areas, and then AI could flag leads to authorities, these sources said.
A “digital wall” to augment the border’s physical one would be the goal, said one of the sources.
For instance, data analytics provider Palantir powers the so-called Maven Smart System for the Pentagon, via contracts it won last year valued at about $580 million. Maven pulls together data and uses AI to speed up target identification for intelligence analysts. Palantir has long worked with the Department of Homeland Security as well.
Anduril, a defense tech startup, designs sensor towers and related software. Last fall, the company announced it had deployed 300 autonomous versions of these towers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, detecting and tracking objects of interest through radar and other technology.
In recent months, Palantir, Anduril, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other newer contractors have discussed a consortium to jointly bid for U.S. defense deals and outcompete the Beltway’s legacy players, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Palantir and Anduril spokespeople declined to comment. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
There’s an awful lot of outrage on the news and social media from transgenders and transexuals. They’re claiming that President Trump’s support of a two-sexes description of humanity is putting them in danger. Some are calling for violence against anyone who tries to stop a man, dressed like a woman, from entering ladies’ rooms. Others are threatening to assault anyone who uses the “wrong” pronoun when addressing them. We’ve seen videos of confrontations between trans people and those who refer to them by their true sex. Tik Tok is replete with video warnings and death threats against people who dare to defy this new definition of reality.
All of the above is tantamount to using brute force to terminate common sense. Therefore, if a bearded man, wearing a dress, stockings, and high heels, walks up to you and introduces himself as Mary, you may be risking a punch in the face if you display shock or confusion. Moreover, if you address him as “Sir,” you could end up dodging bullets.
This is where liberal orthodoxy has taken us in just a few decades. During a saner time in our history, if we had heard that a man, wearing lipstick and a long blonde wig, had been caught frequenting a lady’s room, he’d soon be doing time in a place where men might appreciate his newfound feminine identity.
Aside from the obvious vulnerability of women and little girls, when men feel free to invade those private areas, there’s also the danger of causing disruption to the psyche of impressionable children. If they were indoctrinated to believe that it’s safe to be alone with adult men in private rooms, cars, and other isolated areas, they might become easy targets for pedophiles and sex-traffickers. It seems to me that it’s more important to protect the lives of women and children than it is to defend the self-image of those with gender dysphoria. In the popular comedy television series M*A*S*H, there was a character named Corporal Klinger who dressed like a woman in an attempt to prove he was mentally ill so he could get a Section 8 discharge from the military. Of course, that was during an era of common sense.
Sadly, we’ve entered an era in which every form of behavior, regardless of how bizarre, is expected to be more than tolerated, to be warmly embraced.
The famous British author J.K. Rowling recently said, “It seems that, in order for a transgender-identified man to be comfortable and authentic, everyone in the vicinity must abandon their freedom of speech and belief to accommodate his identity.” As expected, Ms. Rowling is being pilloried by those left-wing radicals who formerly were stalwart advocates of free speech.
Furthermore, for trans people to label their critics with epithets like “transphobic” or “hater” is a transparently deceptive tactic to align themselves with racial or ethnic groups that have faced bigotry. The fact is that no one is forming gangs of thugs to hunt them down. No one is trying to force them to conform to societal standards. And no one is plotting to eradicate them. Most people mind their own business until someone threatens their safety or the safety of their family.
If a guy wants to wear a dress and take hormones to feminize the modulation of his voice, there’s no law to stop him. Nevertheless, just as this country is free enough to allow even the oddest of behaviors, it is also free enough to allow dissent from those who aren’t comfortable with same. Ultimately, we all enjoy the right to be who we are, but not the right to force others to embrace or applaud who we are.
To once again quote Ms. Rowling, “If a person’s happiness and self-esteem resides entirely on whether or not they can compel everyone around them to lie, whether out of fear or pity, I would respectfully suggest they are unlikely to have a very comfortable life and are about as far from being ‘authentic’ as it is possible to be.” The trans community should heed the wisdom of her advice.
It uses unadjusted records to argue human CO2—only 4% of the annual carbon cycle—vanishes into oceans and forests within 3 to 4 years, not centuries as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims. During the 2020 COVID lockdowns, a 7% emissions drop (2.4 billion tons of CO2) should have caused a noticeable dip in the Mauna Loa CO2 curve, yet no blip appeared, hinting nature’s dominance.
You have to respect that, the guy did win. It’s more than half the country… you can not like Trump, you can hate him, but you can’t hate everybody who voted for him… I don’t hate half the country and I don’t want to hate half the country,” Bill Maher said.
Maher’s attitude differs from most Democratic voters I have encountered. Most Democratic voters loathe people who voted for Trump. In my observation, anti-Trumpers vacillate between raw hatred of Trump voters and a childlike refusal to accept that anyone could have voted for him. Viewing themselves as enlightened, objective and well-informed, these poor bewildered saps are 100 percent the product of a media that entirely manufactures a false narrative about the characteristics of Trump positions and the wide variety of reasons people have voted for him three times, in some cases. Democratic voters are so unhinged about Trump, they seem not to have noticed how their own openly socialist and fascist candidates have taken on positions differing little from history’s greatest murdering sociopaths, like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
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Here’s another unhinged Democrat inciting violence: @RepJasmine Crockett says you should “punch” your opponents, then says Senator @tedcruz “has to be knocked over the head, like, hard.”
Of course this freak is violent. She’s a Communist and a fascist, and violence is what Communism and fascism are all about. My question is: Why are people who threaten violence even permitted to hold office?
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The media of the Democratic Party is excited about AOC becoming their new leader.
If AOC is the last hope of the Democratic Party, what does it say about the Democratic Party?
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THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 