Doctors are wondering why the new strain of bird flu is so mild. According to The Telegraph:

“Since bird flu began spreading in the US, one question has been puzzling scientists: why are the farm workers who are catching it only suffering mild illness?

Of the 66 people infected in America this year, the overwhelming majority – more than 98 per cent – have suffered only from conjunctivitis, tiredness, and a sore throat.”

Since 2003, bird flu had a 50% mortality rate but only one person with pre-existing conditions in the U.S. has died with bird flu, not from bird flu. A new study shows that Americans may be having a lower immune response to this strain and they don’t know why. You would think this is a good thing but they’re saying it’s not because “each infection gives the virus an opportunity to better adapt to create more dangerous strains.”

The post Bird Flu Smells Foul appeared first on Redacted.

The Telegraph reports that “Left-wing parties are more unpopular now than at any time since the end of the Cold War.” The newspaper analyzed 73 democracies and found that “leftist parties suffered a record low average vote share of just 45.4 per cent in each democracy’s latest election.”

They explain it with this quote by an analyst at The European Council on Foreign Relations: “The globalisation-driven decline of organised labour, rising identity politics harnessed more successfully by the Right than the Left, and a general tendency among Leftist forces to fragment rather than unite.”

That’s willfully ignorant gobbledygook so let us take a stab at it: The left has championed war and crushed economies to do so, racism for the sake of antiracism, divisive identity politics, government spending that has crushed the middle and lower class, unquestioned biopharmaceutical power, destroyed women’s rights to single-sex spaces, promoted the agenda of perverts over science, lowered the standards of education thereby keeping the most disadvantaged people disadvantaged, allowed crime to run rampant, opened borders, trafficked children and sex workers under the nose of law enforcement, and censored and slandered anyone who pointed out any of the above.

Is it really such a mystery that the parties that did that are losing influence? GOOD riddance!

The post The Unpopular Left appeared first on Redacted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that the ceasefire that was celebrated around the world yesterday is now on hold due to a “last-minute crisis.” The Prime Minister delayed voting on the deal and accused Hamas of “a last-minute blackmail attempt.” The Israeli government was scheduled to vote today. Al Jazeera reports that they may vote on Friday.

Netanyahu stalled the vote because Hamas reportedly objected to “a part of the agreement that gave Israel the right to refuse the release of certain Palestinian prisoners accused of murders.” Hamas denies this.

Israel did not slow up the attacks in Gaza in the wake of the ceasefire news. At least 82 Palestinians were reportedly killed on Wednesday, 30 of them killed after the ceasefire was announced.

The post Ceasefire in Gaza: On or Off? appeared first on Redacted.

President Biden released a farewell video from the Oval Office on Thursday. He warned of an oligarchy that is taking shape under the incoming Trump administration.

He said that the tech oligarchy the evolution of the “military industrial complex.”

“I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well,” said the person who used big tech to censor Americans over true information.

He also spoke about the dangers of free information exchange.

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”

Democrats are clearly afraid of a new era with less censorship and control. John Stuart Mill would disagree and so do we here at Redacted. Mill famously said that “in a free information exchange the truth will rise.”

The post Goodbye, Farewell, Adieu appeared first on Redacted.

Today, the world’s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world – the United States.

The ARPANET

Specifically, the internet began as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in 1958 within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in direct response to the U.S.’ greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (“time-sharing”), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.

In October 1962, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN, currently owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in August 1962 that birthed his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute a memo to his IPTO colleagues – addressed to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”– describing a “time-sharing network of computers” – building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his 1954 paper “Parallel Control” commissioned by defense contractor RAND – which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today’s Internet.

Prior to the technological innovations explored by Licklider and his ARPA colleagues, data communication – at this time, mainly voice via telephone lines – were based on circuit switching, in which each telephone call would be manually connected by a switch operator to establish a dedicated, end-to-end analog electrical connection between the two parties. The RAND Corporation’s Paul Baran, and later ARPA itself, would begin to work on methods to allow formidable data communication in the event of a partial disconnection, such as from a nuclear event or other act of war, leading to a distributed network of unmanned nodes that would compartmentalize the desired information into smaller blocks of data – today referred to as packets – before routing them separately, only to be rejoined once received at the desired destination.

While certainly unbeknownst to the technologists at the time, this achievement of both distributed routing and global information settlement via data packets created an entirely new commodity – digital data.

A Brief History of Weaponized Financial Intelligence

Long before the USSR spooked the United States into formalizing ARPA due to fears of militarized satellite applications post-Sputnik launch, data brokers have played a significant role in warfare and specifically the markets surrounding military conflict. One well-known yet early example occurred during the Napoleonic wars in the 19^th century, when the banking stalwart Rothschild family used carrier pigeons and horseback couriers to gain an information settlement edge related to battle outcomes, while speedily communicating with their traders back in London. These animal-driven technological exploits allowed Rothschild-affiliated brokers to place well-informed bets on the outcome of France’s warmongering to position themselves on the winning sides of large currency and commodity bets. This similar but modernized technique would later be employed by figures like commodity trader (and Mossad asset) Marc Rich in the 1980s, who used satellite phones and optical imagery techniques to track and relay oil tanker flows between nations, giving his trades an asymmetric advantage when dealing within the active petrodollar system. Similarly, Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital achieved 86% gains in its first year largely due to correctly anticipating Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait due to astute intelligence sharing from military sources, and correctly going long on oil prices while shorting stocks.

The Chain of Issuance: The People and Patents That Built The Financial Surveillance Network

The patent hoarding developers and investors associated with PayPal and Google who built the first iteration of e-commerce and digital advertising have turned to the blockchain to fulfill their vision of total financial surveillance and the circumnavigation of government-issued money.

As the front of modern warfare slowly evolved from direct military action into weaponized financial speculation, the market for data became just as valuable as the defense budget itself. It is for this reason that the necessity of sound data emerged as the foremost issue of national security, leading to a proliferation of advanced data brokers coming out of DARPA and the intelligence community, akin to the 21^st century’s Manhattan Project.

The San Jose Project: Google, Facebook, and PayPal

Exemplified by the creation of the CIA’s venture firm, In-Q-Tel, and the proliferation of Silicon Valley-based venture firms coalescing on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA, the financialization of a new crop of American data brokers was complete. The first firm to grace Sand Hill Road was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, better known as KPCB, which participated in funding internet pioneers Amazon, AOL, and Compaq, while also directly seeding Netscape and Google. KPCB partners have included such government stalwarts as former Vice President Al Gore, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Ted Schlein – the latter being a board member of In-Q-Tel and member of the NSA’s advisory board. KPCB also had an intimate connection with internet networking pioneer Sun Microsystems, best known for building out the majority of network switches and other infrastructure needed for a modern broadband economy.

Outside of the obvious need for network infrastructure for a data economy, an early Sun employee and eventual KPCB partner Bill Joy patented a widely-used distributed file system software known as NFS, or Network File System. Sun also established a public-sector focused subsidiary known as Sun Federal at the start of the 1990s. By 1991, Sun Federal was responsible for more than half of the workstations ordered by local, state and federal governments in the country. Perhaps the world’s most famous data broker, Google, whose founders both came out of Stanford University, was seeded by former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his partner at the Ethernet switching company Granite Systems (later acquired by Cisco), David Cheriton, with Google’s most iconic CEO, Eric Schmidt, being the former CTO of Sun Microsystems.

The emergence of Silicon Valley out of the academic circuit in Northern California was no accident, and in fact was directly influenced by an unclassified program known as the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project. The MDDS was created with direct participation from the CIA, NSA, and DARPA itself within the computer science programs at Stanford and CalTech, alongside MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon. According to reporting from Quartz, this research, with clear national security implications, would be largely “funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF (the National Science Foundation) allowing “the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector” in an attempt “to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.” The MDDS white paper was released in 1993, and over a few years, more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each were distributed via the NSF in order to capture the most promising efforts, ensuring that those efforts would become intellectual property controlled by the United States regulatory regime.

“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” reads the MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”

The first unclassified briefing for scientists was titled “birds of a feather briefing” and was formalized during a 1995 conference in San Jose, CA, which was titled the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems.” That same year, one of the first MDDS grants was awarded to Stanford University, which was already a decade deep in working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was to “query optimization of very complex queries,” with a closely-followed second grant that aimed to build a massive digital library on the internet. These two grants funded research by then-Stanford graduate students and future Google cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Two intelligence-community managers regularly met with Brin while he was still at Stanford and completing the research that would lead to the incorporation of Google, all paid for by grants provided by the NSA and CIA via MDDS.

While often not discussed when describing Google’s origin story, the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” wrote Jeffrey Ullman. Furthering this concept, Stanford’s Infolab website explains that “the development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford.”

Google would certainly set the standard for success during the first Dot Com bubble. Yet, shortly following their incorporation, two similar Silicon Valley companies with significant ties to the intelligence community would also emerge from colleges affiliated with the MDDS – PayPal and Facebook.

PayPal was launched in December 1998 as Confinity Inc. by founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, alongside Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. The company sought to provide financial institutions with the technological ability to make mobile and online economic transactions secure using cryptography – technology at the time heavily regulated by the United States. Thiel had graduated from Stanford Law School in 1992, and then had a brief stint at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell – a legal practice long known for its ties to the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Early on, Confinity Inc. operated out of 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA at, a building that had previously housed Google during their “formative years,” after previously sharing an office with Elon Musk’s X.com.

The Chain Of Command: How Facebook’s Libra, Bank Regulators, and PayPal Built A New World Currency

Two companies closely tied to Peter Thiel – PayPal and Facebook – have embarked on apparently unsuccessful efforts to create a “new world currency.” Yet, upon further examination, those efforts have actually been wildly successful and many recent events of significant in finance – including but not limited to the 2023 banking crisis – have arguably been orchestrated to facilitate the vision of Thiel and his early allies and the creation of a new paradigm for currency, one where privately issued money meets surveillance.

It was also during these formative years that the PayPal team worked closely with the intelligence community. Levchin later stated in an interview with Charlie Rose that: “I think the government working with a private sector is a great thing. When we were working on security and anti-fraud measures at PayPal, we collaborated with every imaginable three and four-letter agency and those were some of the best, most productive relationships I’ve had as a business person…I think if the private sector can help them, we should.” Due to an unprecedented viral growth of their user base, PayPal engineers spent much of the formation period of the company building software to help identify fraudulent transactions to mitigate the growing costs of rampant fraud in the ecosystem, eventually developing an adaptive algorithm named “Igor” after a Russian criminal that would frequently taunt PayPal’s fraud department.

In 2003, a year after PayPal was sold to eBay, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a fellow alumnus of Stanford with a new venture concept: “Why not use Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions?” Thiel took funds from the PayPal sale to seed the company, and after a few years of pitching investors, the newly-formed Palantir received an estimated $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir’s co-founders consulted with John Poindexter during his tenure as head of DARPA’s then-embattled Total Information Awareness in efforts to privatize the controversial surveillance program. In 2020, Intelligencer spoke with a former intelligence official who was involved in the investment who claimed the CIA had hoped that “tapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley” would allow it to “integrate widely disparate sources of data regardless of format.”

Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon

The controversial data mining firm, whose history and rise has long been inextricably linked with the CIA and the national security state, will now use its software to identify and prioritize the same minority groups that it has long oppressed on behalf of the US military and US intelligence.

As of 2013, Palantir’s client list included “the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS” with around “50% of its business” coming from public sector contracts. Palantir is closely connected to the U.S. government, but its financial spin-off, Palantir Metropolis, is focused on providing “analytical tools” for “hedge funds, banks and financial services firms” to outsmart each other. As The Guardian reports: “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too.”

Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9/11, having also been birthed out of one of the MDDS partners, Harvard University. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel became Facebook’s first significant investor at the behest of file-sharing pioneer Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at age 16. What Facebook became after the involvement of Thiel and Parker bore such an uncanny resemblance to another shuttered DARPA project of the same era, known as LifeLog, that LifeLog’s architect and project manager at DARPA has even noted the direct parallels. One of these parallels, though left unmentioned by former DARPA project managers, is the fact that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was shut down. Facebook’s long-standing ties to the military and intelligence communities go far beyond its origins, including revelations about its collaboration with spy agencies as part of the Snowden leaks and its role in influence operations – some have even directly involved Google and Palantir.

The Military Origins of Facebook

Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.

An unspoken outcome of the global proliferation of Facebook was the sly, roundabout creation of the first digital ID system – a necessity for the coming digital economy. Users would set up their profiles by feeding the social network with a plethora of personal information, with Facebook being able to use this data to generate large webs of connectivity between otherwise unknown social groups. There is even evidence that Facebook generated placeholder accounts for individuals that appeared in user data but did not have a profile of their own. Both Google and PayPal would also use similar digital identification methods to allow users to sign into other websites, creating interoperable identification systems that could permeate the internet.

A similar evolution is occurring in the financial sector, as data broker social networks – including Facebook and Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) – are posturing themselves as the future of financial service companies. This idea makes more sense when you consider that money itself is a communication technology, and can easily be built into existing communication platforms – especially ones driven by user data and identity systems. We are simultaneously seeing financial services, such as the largest dollar stablecoin issuer Tether – with excessive ties to PayPal – spending millions on investments in next generation data broker technology. Tether has recently funded the Earth observation/Satellite-as-a-service company Satellogic, the brain chip company Blackrock Neurotech, AI-computation firm Northern Data, and even Rumble, a Thiel-funded competitor to Google’s YouTube.

From Public-Private, to Private-Public

As outlined above, it is clear that the public sector’s intelligence community used the veil of the private sector to establish financial incentives and commercial applications to build out the modern data economy. A simple glance at the seven largest stocks in the American economy demonstrate this concept, with Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), and Amazon – with founder Jeff Bezos being the grandson of ARPA founder Lawrence Preston Gise – leading the software side, and Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA and Tesla leading the hardware component. While many of these companies have egregious ties to the intelligence community and the public sector during their incubation, now these private sector companies are driving the globalization and national security interests of the public sector.

The future of the American data economy is firmly situated between two pillars – artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. With the incoming Trump administration’s close advisory ties to PayPal, Tether, Facebook, Palantir, Tesla and SpaceX, it is clear that the data brokers have returned to roost at Pennsylvania Avenue. AI requires massive amounts of sound data to be of any use for the technologists, and the data provided by these private sector stalwarts is poised to feed their learning modules – surely after securing hefty government contracts. Private companies using public blockchains to issue their tokens generates not only significant opportunities for the United States to address its debt problem, but simultaneously serves as a “boon in surveillance”, as stated by a former CIA director.

Trump Embraces the “Bitcoin-Dollar”, Stablecoins to Entrench US Financial Hegemony

Trump’s recent speech on bitcoin and crypto embraced policies that will seek to mold bitcoin into an enabler of irresponsible fiscal policy and will employ programmable, surveillable stablecoins to expand and entrench dollar dominance.

Within the Trump administration’s embracing of the blockchain – itself the final iteration of the public-private commercialization of data, despite its libertarian posturing – reveals the culmination of a decades-long technocratic dialectic trojan horse. Nearly all of the foundational technology needed to push the world into this new financial system was cultivated in the shadows by the military and intelligence community of the world’s largest empire. While technology can surely offer solutions for greater efficiency and economic prosperity, the very same tools can also be used to further enslave the citizens of the world.

What once appeared as a guiding light beckoning us towards free speech and financial freedom has revealed itself to be nothing but the shine of Uncle Sam’s boot making its next step.

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker.

The Food and Drug Administration has banned Red No. 3, a food dye that is commonly used in candy, sports drinks, gum and cookies. It has been banned in cosmetics and topical drugs for 35 years but for whatever reason, it has been allowed to be in our foods.

The ban won’t take effect until 2027 so food makers have some time to reformulate their products. The FDA says that it is doing this because “two studies… showed cancer in laboratory male rats exposed to high levels of FD&C Red No. 3 due to a rat specific hormonal mechanism.” But, they say, that “the way that FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans.” Still, the Delaney Clause prohibits the FDA from authorizing any food or color additive that has been found to cause cancer in either humans or animals so they are using this as a reasoning to ban the product.

It is interesting timing. This dye has long been known to be harmful but the FDA has decided to do it in advance of the next Trump administration and the MAHA movement which has demanded a safer food supply. Is this a harbinger of what is to come and a willingness by the FDA to do its job now?

The post Red Dye Ban appeared first on Redacted.

A new report shows that the U.S. has abandoned many Afghan citizens in third countries since it’s “chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.” These are people that the U.S. helped leave Afghanistan when the Taliban took over but then proceeded to drop them off in third countries, “some at prison-like facilities and many with no clarity about their prospects for resettlement.”

This comes from a report called “Challenging U.S. Expansion of Detention Practices.” The report claims that “at least 36 countries [are] arbitrarily [holding] tens of thousands of evacuated Afghans.” It says that “contrary to its public assertions, the Biden administration retains significant control over these sites and has allowed the inhumane conditions to persist and deteriorate.”

Does President Biden know this? On Monday, he bragged about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Today, I can also report to the American people [as] the first president in decades who’s not leaving a war in Afghanistan to his successor,” he said.

How can the U.S. court allies abroad if it allows them to language in prisons with “abysmal conditions”? The records describe “family separations, deteriorating mental health conditions, inadequate facilities and fears of forcible repatriation.”

The post Afghanistan Bombshell appeared first on Redacted.

President-elect Trump says that he is going to focus on revenue from abroad instead of taxing U.S. citizens! This is bigly!

He calls it the External Revenue Service, as opposed to the Internal Revenue Service. Instead of, as he puts it, relying “on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),” he wants to build the U.S. economy by collecting “our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share. January 20, 2025, will be the birth date of the External Revenue Service. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The average American pays the federal and state government the equivalent of the money they make between January and May of every year. That’s a depressing but true statistic. Even the IRS admits it on their own website! They call it Tax Freedom Day. It is the number of days an American has to work to earn enough to pay federal, state and local taxes. In most states, Americans have to work through mid-April but in high-tax states like New York, they have to work until mid-May just to earn enough to keep for themselves.

What if that were not the case? What if we could pay less because our government collects money by doing business with the world!? Who amongst us could possibly be against that!?

The post Trump Tax Plan appeared first on Redacted.

Israel and Hamas have agreed “in principle” to terms of a ceasefire. According to CBS News, “a draft deal for a ceasefire in Gaza and hostage release has been agreed to in principle and, if all goes well, will be finalized by Israel and Hamas this week.”

The deal would call for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, which Israel has said repeatedly it does not want to do. As CBS News points out, the “implementation and enforcement would be left to the Trump administration. Privately, U.S. officials acknowledge this plan for governance is aspirational.” Meaning, Israel could say that they will withdraw but not actually do it. They have reportedly not held up their ceasefire deal in Lebanon.

Then again, it could be the very idea of President Trump that forces Israel to comply. As Gaza reporter Muhammad Shehada put it: “the deal Netanyahu is about to accept now is the SAME deal Biden offered 8 MONTHS ago in May (& Hamas accepted on July 2). The only thing that changed is that Biden never pressured Netanyahu to accept. Trump now did & it worked instantly!”

Glenn Greenwald points out that the media is saying this without saying this with headlines like this.

The post Ceasefire Reached? appeared first on Redacted.

Starbucks does not want you loafing around if you don’t buy anything. This is a reversal of their old “open door policy” which welcomed people to hang out in their stores and use their bathrooms whether or not they made a purchase.

Why would they do this? Because non-customers were making Starbucks extremely unpleasant for customers. Walk into any busy Starbucks bathroom and you’ll ask no further questions.

A Starbucks statement called this a “practical step that helps us prioritize our paying customers who want to sit and enjoy our cafes or need to use the restroom during their visit. By setting clear expectations for behavior and use of our spaces, we can create a better environment for everyone.”

The open door policy was announced in 2018 when a video went viral of two Black men sitting in Starbucks without making a purchase. The blowback caused the company to close stores to talk to their employees about race.

Starbucks is also trying to get paying customers to stay longer by offering one free refill for iced or hot coffee for in-store orders.

The post Starbucks Kicks Out Loafers appeared first on Redacted.

As fires continue to ravage Southern California, Governor Gavin Newsom has committed $50 billion to “Trump-proof” the state. This is the first of its kind law that marks money for potential legal battles with the incoming Trump administration.

Governor Newsom plans to fight the Trump administration’s deportation policies, even though it was recently discovered that an illegal immigrant was starting fires in Los Angeles. Newsom wants to protect that guy from any path to deportation. The new plan will fund grants for legal nonprofits and immigration centers.

“This funding agreement cements California’s readiness to serve as a bulwark against Trump’s extremist agenda,” said Senate Budget Chair Scott Wiener in a statement.

This comes as the state is accused of thwarting wildfire prevention projects near the Pacific Palisades “to protect an endangered shrub.”

The post California Dreamin appeared first on Redacted.

Hamas has reportedly accepted a draft agreement for a ceasefire and now it is down to Israel to approve it. The deal would allow for the release of dozens of Israeli and Palestinian hostages.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says that he opposes this because he does not want Israel to release “terrorist hostages,” nor does he want to stop the war and “[dissolve] its achievements.” He calls this a “a catastrophe for the national security of the State of Israel.”

U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a “rare rebuke” of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. He said that Israel must acknowledge that Palestinians will never accept “being a non-people without national rights”. He continued: “Israelis must abandon the myth that they can carry out de facto annexation without cost and consequence to Israel’s democracy, to its standing, to its security.”

Blinken will present a plan for Gaza in a speech to the Atlantic Council on Tuesday morning. It includes a path forward for the Palestinians after the war. Will permanent Israeli presence be a part of that plan? This has been Israel’s number one demand for peace.

The post Hamas Truce appeared first on Redacted.

On Monday, the FBI said that there are no threats to President Trump’s safety for his upcoming inauguration. And then it turned around and released a Special Counsel report saying that he was involved in criminal activity. Does anyone else see this contradiction?

How can they simultaneously impugn and protect the same person?

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who a court has ruled was inappropriately appointed, wrote in the report that the President should have been held accountable for “an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power” but he would not be further prosecuted due to his presidential immunity. He makes it clear that he would move forward with prosecution if not for Trump’s win.

President Trump unleashed a fury on his social media calling Smith a “lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

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