Indicting President Trump

 

Indicting President Trump

 This article is a scathing discussion (and condemnation) by Andy McCarthy, of President Trump’s complicity with classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and also Trump’s efforts to prove fraud during the 2020 election.

 Andy McCarthy backed President Trump through the first impeachment but not through the “big steal” claims and the second impeachment.  Whatever his views and commentary about Trump, one cannot fault McCarthy’s legal credentials and acumen.  A brief bio:

 Andrew C. McCarthy III is an American columnist for National Review. He served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A Republican, he led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and eleven others. The defendants were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning a series of attacks against New York City landmarks.  He also contributed to the prosecutions of terrorists who bombed United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He resigned from the Justice Department in 2003.

 During the presidency of Barack Obama, McCarthy characterized Obama as a radical and a socialist, and authored a book alleging that Obama was advancing a "Sharia Agenda". He authored another book calling for Obama's impeachment. He defended false claims that the Affordable Care Act would lead to "death panels", and promoted a conspiracy theory that Bill Ayers, co-founder of the militant radical left-wing organization Weather Underground, had authored Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father.

 During Donald Trump's presidency, McCarthy defended Trump before his first impeachment, but before his second impeachment, wrote that he had "committed an impeachable offense."

 This article is McCarthy’s view on what he posits are most likely valid legal reasons the DOJ has for indicting Trump about his mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.  McCarthy also elaborates on what he considers fraudulent claims by Trump about the stolen 2020 election.

 Missing from McCarthy’s discussion of the unsuccessful legal machinations by Trump lawyers to prove election fraud, is any mention of the anti-Trump media covering up and disparaging the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop and Joe Biden’s complicity, and the impact that this open knowledge would have had on key swing states.

 Let’s remember, if the news about Hunter’s laptop was not suppressed by the anti-Trump media just before the 2020 election, Joe Biden would never have been elected.  And all you have to do is look at the numbers.

 Biden won the electoral college in 2020 by 306 to 232, with 270 electoral votes necessary to win.  This included Arizona with 11 electoral votes with 10,457 winning popular votes; Georgia 10 electoral, 12,670 popular; Pennsylvania 20 electoral, 81,660 popular; Wisconsin 10 electoral, 20,682 popular.  These four states add up to 51 electoral votes, and would have given Trump a winning total of 283.  The total popular vote in the four states necessary to attain these 51 electoral votes would have been 125,469 out of the 18,360,000 total votes cast, or less than 7 tenths of one percent of the total votes cast in these states.

 It is pretty obvious that these small popular voter margins would have easily been overcome, and Trump would have been re-elected president, if the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop had not been suppressed by our dishonest politicians, mainstream media and big tech.  There’s no way of proving this, of course, - and no recourse in the courts at this point, and the FBI is still sitting on Hunter’s laptop, but the numbers don’t lie.  Perhaps the full extent of the 2020 election news suppression will be revealed once the Congress becomes honest again.

  https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/will-trump-be-indicted/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202022-09-24&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

 Ray Gruszecki

September 25, 2022

Religion in the U.S. – Pew Research

 

Religion in the U.S. – Pew Research

 In depth study by Pew Research on the future of religion in the U.S.

 It takes a few hours to absorb.

 “All the projections start from the current religious composition of the U.S. population, taking account of religious differences by age and sex. Then, they factor in birth rates and migration patterns. Most importantly, they incorporate varying rates of religious switching – movement into and out of broad categories of religious identity – to model what the U.S. religious landscape would look like if switching stayed at its recent pace, continued to speed up (as it has been doing since the 1990s), or suddenly halted.”

 “The decline of Christianity and the rise of the “nones” may have complex causes and far-reaching consequences for politics, family life and civil society. However, theories about the root causes of religious change and speculation about its societal impact are not the focus of this report. The main contribution of this study is to analyze recent trends and show how the U.S. religious landscape would shift if they continued.”

 “These projections indicate the U.S. might be following the path taken over the last 50 years by many countries in Western Europe that had overwhelming Christian majorities in the middle of the 20th century and no longer do. In Great Britain, for example, “nones” surpassed Christians to become the largest group in 2009, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey.5 In the Netherlands, disaffiliation accelerated in the 1970s, and 47% of adults now say they are Christian.”

 https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/#h-scenario-assumptions-and-projection-results

  Ray Gruszecki

September 17, 2022

Anonymity and Privacy on the Web

 

Anonymity and Privacy on the Web

 Most “normal” computer users these days default to whatever “free” web browsers and search engines they are guided to by Microsoft or Google when they first set up their computers and networks. (or have their 12 year old grandkids set their computers up for them.).  This “normally results in the use of the Google or Edge web browser, and Google as a search engine.

 These “normal” users are now targets for big tech ads and tracking.  Every time a mouse is clicked using these “free” default programs, there is a “ka-ching” somewhere in the background, and with prolonged use, the big tech companies generate more information about these users than their parents ever knew, or that they knew about themselves.  All of this with the goal of selling them something.

 There are ways and alternatives of avoiding all of this intrusion of privacy.  Two quick and simple alternate means are to replace the Google web browser with the Brave browser, and to replace the Google search engine with Duck-Duck-Go, (I know, - strange name), both of which do not track users. These are easily downloaded and installed by regular users.  References are given below.

 If someone wants to go further and attain complete anonymity on the web, there are methods like Linux based TAILS, which accesses a computer from a flash drive and uses hacker techniques like the TOR browser to anonymously access the whole web, including the deep and dark web, and then leave the computer without a trace.  Again, references are given below for study and access to this methodology. CAUTION: THE DARK WEB CONTAINS SOME INFORATION OF DUBIOUS LEGALITY. 

 

 Two easily installed replacements which quickly and easily increase privacy on the web

 Brave Web Browser   https://brave.com/      (Instead of Google)

 Duck Duck Go Search Engine            https://duckduckgo.com/        (Instead of Google)

 

 All you ever wanted to know about really staying anonymous on the web, and accessing the whole web.

 TAILS – Great, easy to use system for staying anonymous on the web’

 Tails is an acronym for ” The Amnesic Incognito Live System”, you can run this OS from a DVD, USB memory stick or SD card.

 https://tails.boum.org/about/index.en.html

 https://www.techno360.in/tails-os/

 https://www.blackdown.org/linux-tails-review/

 https://cybersecurity.att.com/blogs/security-essentials/achieving-online-anonymity-using-tails-os

 https://www.level-up.cc/curriculum/safer-workspaces/tails/input/staying-anonymous-using-tails/

 

 TAILS includes the TOR browser, TOR search engine, TOR encryption and TOR Onion services. TOR in an acronym for The Onion Router

 https://torsearch.com/

 https://tor-browser.su/en/

 https://support.torproject.org/onionservices/

  

The Deep and Dark Web

 Please note: the Dark Web contains masses of information, and some information that you really do not want to know.  Nasty, illegal stuff that criminals use.  It’s there, and best left alone. 

 https://pixelprivacy.com/vpn/how-to-access-the-dark-web/

 You can’t access the Dark Web with a normal browser. Those who access the Dark Web do so via the TOR (The Onion Router) browser.  So, TAILS works just fine in accessing the Dark Web.

 Ray Gruszecki

September 8, 2022

Old Party Lines.

 

Old Party Lines.

I remember my childhood phone number in rural Savoy, Massachusetts as 2r3, or “two, ring three”. There were several other people on this party line who could listen in on our conversations, as could we, listen to their conversations. This is what Wikipedia says about it.

 “Although various systems were implemented, one that limited the number of coded rings but established a uniform and readily understood format, was to first give the subscriber number as individual digits, which could be from one to four digits long per exchangem separated by the instructional word "ring" followed by the two digits of the ring code where the first digit indicated the number of long rings, followed by the second digit indicating the number of short rings. Thus spoken, for example, as "nine, three; ring two, two" to mean subscriber No. 93 with ringing code 2 long and 2 short, and written as "93R22", (and if outside the given exchange, then the exchange would be asked for by name before the requested number and ringing code, e.g. "Rockridge nine, three; ring one, two" i.e. "(On the) Rockridge (exchange), (subscriber No.) nine, three; ring one long, and two short," and written as “Rockridge 93R12”. (The two examples cited in this paragraph are taken directly from usage in the 1935 American film Party Wire. Whilst this practice was common, it was not ubiquitous, since despite giving a standard configuration for terse, easily interpreted numbers with their respective ring codes, its chief functional drawback was with the first ring always being long and the second always being short, which limited the number of brief and thus practical ringing combinations that could be used on single multiparty subscriber numbers.”

 About telephone operators and switchboards:

 “Each of the phones in a particular locale would be connected by wire to a central exchange. The owner of a telephone would call the exchange, and a switchboard operator would answer. The caller would give the operator the name of the person he or she wanted to speak with, and the operator would plug a patch cord into that person’s socket on the switchboard, connecting the two. Long-distance calls would require the local exchange to patch the call through to more distant exchanges, again through a series of cables. Later, as the exchanges added more and more customers, phones were assigned numbers, and callers could request to be connected that way.

Some early telephone operators worked at small, rural exchanges, their switchboards located in the local railroad station or the back of a general store. In cities, massive switchboards could have long rows of operators packed elbow to elbow”.

 Our Bell Telephone operator and representative in Savoy, MA was “Kitty” Allen, an irascible old Yankee spinster, who routed calls using an old plug-in switchboard.  She also handled the phone bills.  You had better not try to make a call after about 9 PM if you didn’t want to be exposed to Kitty’s colorful language.

 Some references:

 https://www.numberbarn.com/blog/phone-history-party-lines/

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)

 https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard-operators

 Ray Gruszecki

September 10, 2022

China Dirty Tricks

 

China Dirty Tricks

 If I were Machiavelli-Wu, an international planner deep in the bowels of Beijing Politburo’s Dirty Tricks Division, what could I do to bring China economically, materially and militarily equal to, or ahead of the West?  Secondarily, how could I ensure that modern China pays back the West for the humiliating defeats of the opium wars of the 19^th century, the colonization of parts of China by the West, and the addiction of many ancestors in China to opium?

 All under the cloak of absolute secrecy, what if we weaponized a killer virus, ruthlessly controlled it within China, and ensured its release to the outside world?  That would allow China to sprint ahead of most of the rest of the world, particularly using our “Belt and Road Initiative” to acquire infrastructure throughout the world.

 As another effort, and remembering our addicted ancestors in the 19^th century, suppose we develop a killer drug and export it to the world?  Illegal drug users would take it and die.  We can even make it look like candy for the western kids.

 Far fetched?  Maybe.  But anything is possible in this crazy world.

 A personal note.  While I was living South of Sidon, in Lebanon in 1966-67. Our refinery was next to the terminus of Trans Arabian Pipeline.  Saudi Arabian crude oil was being exported from this terminal on the Mediterranean to European refineries.

 Tug pilots were required to guide and berth the large oil tankers, and these tug pilots were sea captains who were old China hands.  They were mostly European of mixed nationalities who served as gunboat captains and crew in China during the Western occupation there in the early part of the 20^th century.  What wonderful stories they told over beers after a round of golf at the proximate country club.  Of course, this was at a time in history when the European powers, (and the U.S.), effectively colonized parts of China for commercial purposes.

 Is China doing a little pay back?

 Ray Gruszecki/

September 2, 2022

MAGA Republicans

 

MAGA Republicans

 Has Joe Biden, the “great pretender” president and his handlers taken leave of their senses?  They have invented the term “MAGA republicans” as a “threat to democracy”.

 The unfortunate demonstrations of January 6, 2021 by Trump supporters against a corrupt election has been fictionalized by the extreme left and their media backers, into a seditious “insurrection” against the U.S.  Presumably, this is the basis for the “MAGA republican” epithet.

 Are these idiots not aware that MAGA stands for “Make America Great Again”, and that 74.2 million Americans were guided by this slogan and voted for President Trump in 2016 and 2020?  The few demonstrators on January 6^th may have been misguided, but they certainly do not warrant razor wire fences in Washington DC, a totalitarian style show trial, and the characterization of an opposition party as a “threat to democracy”.

 Stupid, teleprompter-reading Biden and his writers are alienating most republicans and many independents by their ridiculous attacks, presumably against right-wing extremists, while ignoring the left-wing extremists that caused as many as 30 deaths and over $2 billion in damages during the summer of 2020 riots.

 It is truly difficult to believe the inequities and atrocities being perpetrated on our country by Biden and the current crop of democrats.  They are destroying the country while arrogantly lying to our faces and patting themselves on the back for doing a great job.  Hopefully, our constitution will protect us in the long term, but echoes of dictatorial regimes like those of Maduro’s Venezuela, Lenin-Stalin-Trotsky’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, sound in the background.

 Ray Gruszecki

September 2, 2022

Borgen

 

Borgen

 I’ve been watching the series “Borgen” about a fictional female Prime Minister of Denmark, and her local, EU and international involvements.  “Borgen” is short for Christiansborg Palace, the Danish parliament building in Copenhagen.

 Denmark is a small country, with s population is 5.8 million people. There are another 57 thousand people in Greenland, which is affiliated with, and is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

 When I watch some series, they bring me back to some of my own life memories and adventures, The scenes of Copenhagen in “Borgen” take me back to a trip to Denmark and the tip of Sweden that we took in 1963 while living in Rotterdam.  This was before driving into Berlin from Denmark during the Berlin crisis of 1963.

 We took a car ferry from Germany to Denmark, and later another shorter ferry from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden.  Now, the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel, the world’s longest tunnel, is being built between Denmark and Germany for 2029 completion, and the Øresund Bridge connects Copenhagen and Malmo, Sweden.

 I still remember the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, and seeing Eartha Kitt perform.

 Cars drove on the left in Sweden in 1963, (until 1967), but many cars, including my French Simca, had left hand controls.  This made it interesting when passing.  Also, it must have been really interesting in the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia, with Swedish cars driving on the left, and the others driving on the right.

 The next part of this trip was into East Germany and East Berlin, and U.S. and Soviet tanks facing each other at Check Point Charlie.

 Ray Gruszecki

September 1, 2022